by Nicole Mones
The false sense of welcome evaporated when Lin cut into his thoughts. “There is one thing you must know about the International Settlement, the district we just left behind—there are race laws.”
“What did you say?”
“It is shared by England and America, but they have the American race laws. Like your South.”
“Like the South?” Thomas felt his head squeezed. Here? On the other side of the world?
“Now, now,” said Lin, “do not react so. You are seeing a serpent’s image in a wine cup. It is only in that one district, and they will love you everyplace else, especially here, in Frenchtown, where they are crazy for musicians like you. Everyone will think you are exotic.”
Thomas sank back into the seat. Only one district? There was no way he was going to avoid the International Settlement, for it included the center of the city, the downtown, the docks, the Bund. He mulled this new worry as they rolled through Frenchtown.
“Look,” said Lin, “here we are.” They had stopped before a wrought-iron gate leading to a small front courtyard and a large house. Its European-style stone façade and tall windows were topped by upturned Chinese eaves; four or five bedrooms at least, Thomas thought, nothing like the small apartment in which he had been brought up. We are gentlefolk, his mother had always said, but that had been more a philosophy than a reality. The longing stabbed through him to have his own room; that would be a fine thing, after all the cramped and crowded places he had rested his head since his mother had passed. “How many of the fellows live here?”
Lin was already up the front steps. “Just you,” he said over his shoulder.
Impossible, he thought, stepping up just as the door opened to a middle-aged Chinese man in a white tunic. Two other men and an older woman formed a hasty line behind him.
“Who are these people?” said Thomas. Through the door he glimpsed rosewood wainscoting and an expensive-looking porcelain bowl on the hall table.
“Your servants,” said Lin Ming. “This is Uncle Hua, your steward.”
“Servants?” The first word Thomas attempted to speak in his new household was so thick with disbelief it stuck in his mouth.
Uncle Hua joined his fists before his chest, and lowered his eyes deferentially. “Yes, Master,” he said.
Jesus, was it only yesterday? was his amazed thought as he and Alonzo dismounted from the rickshaw in front of the Royal. The older man unlocked the lobby door, and dropped the brass key in Thomas’s hand. “This was Augustus’s key.”
It felt heavy and cold to Thomas. The bandleader he was replacing had died of a heart attack, in a brothel, and as he slipped the key into his pocket, he understood with a lurch that the house, the servants, the piano in the parlor, even the bed with its silk quilts must have belonged to Augustus too. Now their footsteps were shushing across the empty marble floors of the lobby, through the arch. Across the ballroom, on the stage, ten other men waited in a pearly circle of light, their legs crossed, loose-trousered, instruments on their laps.
Thomas got up beside the piano, one hand on the lid to cover his tremble. He knew he was a liar, and soon they would know too. “First, before anything else, my sympathy to every one of you for the loss of Augustus Jones. It was a shock, and I’m sorry. But now we have ten days before the theater reopens on New Year’s Eve. I know fourteen of your songs. That’s not enough, and I aim to learn the rest just as fast as I can. Hope you’ll bear with me.”
A resentful mumble circled the room.
A squat, short-legged man with a French horn cradled in his lap said, “How come you don’t know the songs? Where’d you play before?”
Sweat trickled as Thomas tried to deliver the answer he had worked out earlier. “Various places. Pittsburgh, Richmond, Wilmington.” In fact, with the exception of Wilmington, Thomas had never even visited those places. He was hoping none of the band members had either. “Let’s start with your signature tune—‘Exactly Like You.’” The 1930 song, perennially popular on the radio, was sweet and simple, easy to play. He had practiced it. But as soon as he started it, instead of falling in with him, the others stayed in for only a phrase or two, and dropped off. He stopped. “What?”
“You gotta be kidding,” said the other horn player, whose jowls seemed to hang straight from the point of his chin to his collar.
“All right, sir,” said Thomas. “You are?”
“Errol Mutter.”
“Pleasure to meet you. Why don’t I count you off, and you play just a few bars of your version so I can hear it?” And before anyone could protest, he ticked backwards until they started. Within two bars he heard how his accent had been on the wrong beat, and he came back in on piano, this time more or less correctly, if without the proper swing. He saw Errol exchange a look with the other horn player, and felt the drops track down his spine as he bent his face closer to the keys. It was not until the end of the song that he realized Lin Ming had come in, and gone up to the balcony to watch.
Lin was not alone in his box above the stage; he had come to observe with his sister-by-affection, Song Yuhua. She sat very straight beside him in her closely fitted qipao of stiff blue brocade, her hair bound at the neck with flowers, the way Du Yuesheng liked it. He wanted the women in his entourage to look sweet and old-fashioned.
Song was not one of Du’s wives, only an indentured servant, if an educated one. She was versed in the classics, at home with literature, fluent in English, and passable in French. She could play a simple Bach invention. For Du Yuesheng, who was illiterate, she was not only a translator but an accessory of incalculable value; for her he had paid a considerable price.
Lin Ming was the boss’s illegitimate son, so to him Song was family, and also the only person in Du Yuesheng’s inner circle he could really trust. “What news of Chiang Kai-shek?” he asked, for as soon as the ship docked, he had heard how the Nationalist leader had been kidnapped by his own allies in the north.
“He refuses to even talk to the Communists,” said Song. “He keeps insisting he will fight them until they submit to him, and only then will he resist the Japanese. His kidnappers are threatening to execute Chiang if he won’t stop fighting the Communists!”
“And what does Chiang say?”
“He says no! He just repeats that the Communists have to submit to him. Then he goes in his room and sits on his bed and reads his Bible.”
“Speak reasonably!”
“I do! Every word is true. They are at an impasse. Maybe they will kill him,” she said, her voice faintly hopeful.
He shot her a look.
“Someone has to do something,” she protested. “Look how close Japan’s army is to Peking and Tianjin. If those cities fall, we have no hope. We are fish swimming in a cooking pot.”
“If,” Lin repeated. “For now, they are still far away, and as long as that lasts, as long as the city crowds into our ballrooms to dance to mi mi zhi yin,” decadent and sentimental music, “we will be here. And so will my American jueshi jia.” He nodded toward the stage below, where Thomas Greene had just come to the end of a song and risen from the piano bench to address the others.
“Now, with Augustus,” they heard Thomas say, “which did you-all follow? Scores or charts?”
“Scores?” said Cecil Pratt, the trumpet player. “Charts? We just followed Augustus.”
Snorts of laughter rose. “Hell to pay if you weren’t there by the second measure, too!”
“Do you like it that way?” Thomas said, sensing an opening. “Because I’ll tell you, I cannot play without either a score or a chart, for the life of me. So if there’s anyone who would like written music . . .”
A wondering quiet spread. “Man,” came the voice of the violin player. “You’d do that?”
Watching from above, Lin and Song exchanged worried looks.
“You’d write out all that stuff?” said the drummer.
“I would,” Thomas said.
Up in the box, Song said to Lin, “You have to ge
t him a copyist.”
“Immediately,” Lin agreed. Thomas needed someone who could shadow the band at rehearsals, and write scores and charts all night. As was generally the case with servants in Shanghai, the cost would be insignificant, chicken feathers and garlic skins.
“How many want scores?” Thomas was saying, on the stage below, and hands went up. These were the ones who could read music. “Charts?” The rest of the hands rose. He made a note and then sat down to play the opening chords of the next tune, and the musicians, mollified for a moment, moved with him. Reeds were moistened, brass lifted to the ready, and they set the pace for him to follow.
By the time rehearsal ended at six, the box where Lin Ming and Song Yuhua had sat was empty, a fact Thomas could not help but notice as he went out to the lobby to say good-bye to each man, repeat his thanks, and stress again his sympathy for the loss of Augustus. He was deliberately warm to the horn players. And he was surprised by how, up close, the two brothers who played reeds looked even younger than he had thought. He wondered how they had gotten themselves over here with the Kings in the first place.
“Don’t you worry,” said Alonzo, beside him. “Those boys cause more trouble than six men, you’ll see.”
“I will, eh? By the way—did you see Lin Ming in the box up above stage left?”
“’Course I did,” said Alonzo. “That’s the big boss’s box. Once in a while he’ll show up late at night. You’ll know who he is when you see him.”
“Boss of what?” Thomas said, confused. “The company?”
“Company?” Alonzo gave him a long look, speculation drifting to amusement. “Is that what Mr. Lin told you?”
“He said his father was head of the Tung Vong Company, and that they owned a controlling stake in the Royal.” Thomas was pretty sure that was what his new friend had said.
Alonzo was laughing, in his gentle way. “Well, that’s probably true. And about the Green Gang holding some big old part of the Tung Vong Company, you can forget I ever told you, if you like—”
“No, of course not.” Thomas was embarrassed. He had to adjust, take in everything, or he would fail. Probably he would fail anyway. “Tell me.”
“The Green Gang is who Mr. Lin works for, make no mistake. It’s the biggest Triad in China, and his father runs it.”
“His father?”
“He didn’t tell you that?”
“No.” Thomas tried to stay composed. “And a Triad is—”
“A gang, but bigger, and more like a secret society. These fellows swear their lives, forever.”
Thomas felt his eyes blind over as these new facets of his world turned before him. You don’t know anything yet. Still he had to play the boss right now, the bandleader, and so he turned a calm expression to Alonzo, who was twenty years his senior, and clearly knew all about Shanghai, and said, “Thank you for telling me.” He reached up to switch off the lobby lights. “But to my mind, that’s Lin Ming’s affair. Like you said about the rickshaw coolie, man’s got a right to choose his master. Right? See you in the morning, then. And thanks for today. I mean it.” And they buttoned their coats up high and walked briskly in opposite directions, fedoras pulled down low against the cold.
Thomas was freezing, and all he wanted was to get home to that big, lonely house so he could practice for the next day. This time he would not hesitate, not even look twice at the coolie; he would leap right up on the seat, and tell the boy chop-chop.
2
BEFORE THE REHEARSAL ended, Lin Ming left with Song, and after putting her in a rickshaw, he crossed Frenchtown to see his father, who was at the Canidrome. Lin loved this part of the evening in Shanghai, the first hour of true dark, for night was when the city’s enchantments beckoned, from the genteel to the most depraved, anything, so long as you could pay. Shanghai at night was not a place, exactly, but a dream-state of fantasy and permission, and to Lin Ming, no place embodied it quite like the Canidrome.
The entertainment complex was by far the biggest place of its kind in which the Green Gang had a stake, though its profits were dwarfed by income from the Gang’s much larger criminal empire. Still, with its ballrooms, restaurants, gambling parlors, mah-jongg dens, and a full-sized covered dog track, it was Shanghai’s grandest and greatest palace of nightlife.
Lin Ming approached the grounds by the Rue Lafayette gate. “Who goes?” came the gruff voice of Iron Arms, one of the guards.
“Your mother’s crack,” Lin shot back genially. “I just came from her place.”
“My mother’s? Someone as puny as you would get lost in there. Ma gan,” Iron sniffed, sesame stalk, a nod to the long skinny frame Lin had in common with his father, Du Yuesheng.
Lin took the remark placidly. He knew he looked startlingly like Du; no one who saw the two of them together ever doubted their relationship.
“Pass,” Iron Arms said, gruff but indulgent, and Lin vanished into the dark path that led under bare-branched trees to the rear of the dog track. The air was cold, and he was well inside the walls, but still he could smell Shanghai—rotting waste, temple incense, diesel oil, perfume, flowers. He may have had no real home, owing to the fact that he had no clan behind him, but the smell of Shanghai was his anchor, festering, sweetly fecund, always drawing him back. He crossed the dog-track arena, an oblong bowl above which banks of louvered windows rose to a high, steel-trussed ceiling. Rimming the track were the tiered observation stands, finished with iron rails and matching light posts in old gas lamp style, every row jammed with gamblers talking and jostling.
The shot popped, the fake rabbit screeched off, and the dogs bounded after it. The noise of the crowd rose to a long roar, deafening, a wall of prayer and hope that fell away as fast as it started when the finish was crossed and the dogs fell back, slavering. The winners’ numbers were called off in a string of languages.
In the next building a long hallway led to the back of the ballroom stages. He had two bands at the Canidrome, the Teddy Weatherford Orchestra, which played from seven thirty to two in the large ballroom, and what remained of Buck Clayton’s Harlem Gentlemen after Clayton himself had been let go as a result of a brawl. In the matter of his dismissal, Lin’s hands had been tied, though fortunately the man had been able to find other work in the city to start earning his fare home. When it came to the rest of the Harlem Gentlemen, Lin simply waited a decent amount of time and hired them back, and they played the tea dances in the afternoon and early evening. Tonight, since he was here to see his father, he skirted the ballrooms and went directly upstairs.
He found Du behind a polished desk, chatting with H. H. Kung, who lounged in an armchair opposite him. Kung was the Minister of Finance, the Governor of the Central Bank of China, and an indecently rich man. For the moment, while Chiang Kai-shek was being held prisoner in the north, he was also the acting head of the Chinese government.
“Young Lin,” he said warmly, and grasped Lin’s hands, temporarily parking his cigar in his mouth to do so.
“Pleasure to see you,” Lin said. They understood each other well. Dr. Kung had studied at Oberlin and Yale, Lin Ming at boarding school; both were at home with the English language and the West-ocean mind.
Next he turned to his father, sitting straight and gaunt in his Chinese gown, skull clean-shaven as always. “Teacher,” he said politely. Du had founded a conservative school for Chinese boys, and he liked to be addressed this way.
Du accepted his obeisance without remark, and turned directly to the news Kung had brought. “The Generalissimo’s wife, and her brother T. V. Soong, will fly to Xi’an tomorrow with a large amount of money to purchase Chiang Kai-shek’s release. They will get him out.”
“Your in-laws,” Lin said to Kung respectfully, since he knew the man was married to the eldest Soong sister, Ai-ling. “I hope they are safe.”
“Oh, they’re safe enough,” said Kung. “The problem is getting old Chiang to listen to the demands of his kidnappers. He has to give up on beating the Communists now
, and fight Japan.”
Du did not conceal his shock. “Give up fighting the Communists?”
“For now,” said Kung, puffing on his cigar.
“But I shall continue to execute them.”
Kung smiled, because Du Yuesheng would execute whomever he chose, and there was nothing anyone could do about it. “As you will,” he said amiably. “But your attentions are needed against our Japanese invaders, old friend. This is another reason I came to see you tonight—to tell you that a new, high-ranking officer has arrived from Japan. An Admiral.”
Lin strained forward with interest—an Admiral would automatically, at this moment, be the top-ranking Japanese officer in Shanghai.
“Morioka is his name,” said Kung.
“Our new Viceroy,” Du said sarcastically. “Yes, I know.”
“You do?” said Kung, drawing and relighting. “Regrettably, I have heard nothing personal about him yet.”
“Wait a moment.” Du knocked three times on the side of the desk, and one of his many secretaries came in, a senior Cantonese named Pok. “Sir,” he said to Du respectfully, and then again to Kung, “Sir.” Lin Ming he ignored. His fluent Shanghainese was stretched by the drawling tones of his home dialect as he spoke. “One of my men has an informant who works in the officers’ section of the new Japanese Naval Headquarters.”
Kung drew his brows together in thought. “The old Gong Da Textile Mill they took over and reinforced, that one?”
“Yes. The new Admiral has his apartments there. Here is what your servant has learned: Morioka goes out at night and drinks, but is never drunk. He is married, but his wife and children did not accompany him, nor does he have their pictures.”
“There will be something he cares for,” Du insisted.
Kung nodded. “His weak spot.”
“Yes, Teacher,” said Pok. “You are correct. There is indeed a thing he loves—music. His quarters are filled with gramophone records.”
“Really.” Du’s cold, serpentine gaze lit with interest, flicked to Lin, and then back to Pok. “What kind of music?”