Night in Shanghai

by Nicole Mones

  Thomas played through the sweat, bending over the keyboard and the slow prance-rhythm of “Blue Ramble,” propelled by the paddling, naughty-sounding circles blown by Charles and Ernest on their layered saxophones. Luckily the song was simple melodically—until that one moment in the twelve-bar B section when they came to the sudden sustained chord, six voices with a growling ninth on the bottom from the valve trombone, played by Errol Mutter. It was the key to the song, the unexpected ninth, the twist of fate, the turn, the dissonance. It was the misstep, the instant that changes the course of a life, and it came just at the moment Morioka walked in. They played to the end, and he called a break. Quickly the ballroom floor and stage emptied as dancers returned to their tables and musicians went off to refresh themselves.

  The lights flickered up and Morioka rose and walked through the tables, Zhou and Wing Bean hovering as close as possible behind him. But once Morioka reached the empty dance floor, they could not stay so close behind, so they hurried around to the side of the stage where they could idle near a table and, from ten meters away, hear fairly well.

  Morioka obliged them by talking loudly. “Mr. Greene, I give compliments.”

  “Thank you.”

  “I very like the jazz.”

  “Thank you for listening.” Thomas felt himself shaking, as his voice pitched up a notch to match the Admiral’s.

  “Jazz records, I get from diplomatic pouch.” Suddenly Morioka lowered his voice and spoke in a whisper, imperceptible from the distance at which Zhou and Wing Bean stood, his lips barely moving: “According my spies, some Chinese are watching you. They want to use you to kill me.”

  “Diplomatic pouch? Lucky man,” Thomas said, in the same loud voice they had been using. Then, in the same thread of a whisper, he answered, “I know.”

  “Yes. So I bring you this.” Admiral Morioka said at high volume, and held out a heavy, shellacked seventy-eight in a paper sleeve. “I present you.” In a whisper he said, “I will invite you somewhere. Say you will go. Do not go. Understand? Do not go.”

  “You’re too kind. A new record?” Thomas peered at the label, and whispered, “I understand.” When he raised his face, he said, “Count Basie Orchestra! Several of my men came from his band.”

  “Is it so?” Zhou and Wing Bean had edged closer, putting an end to the whispering. Morioka went on, “Now they have a new saxophone player, the name is Lester Young. I never hear any sound like this before! Please. Take this. Listen this musician.”

  “All right,” said Thomas. He turned the disc over: “One O’ Clock Jump.” Count Basie Orchestra. “Lester Young. I will listen to him. Thank you.”

  Morioka made a slight, crisp bow, and turned away.

  Zhou and Wing Bean bore down on Thomas instantly. His insides were shrieking, but he managed to speak calmly. “You heard him. He complimented my playing, and gave me a new record.” He held it up. “Told me to listen to this saxophone player, Lester Young.”

  They appeared to accept this, and he finished out the night in a state of controlled panic. What really shocked him was that this plot, this ultra-secret plan Lin Ming had warned him about, had already been penetrated by Japan. He knew that until he had it sorted out, he should tell no one of the words he and Morioka had just exchanged, not even Lin.

  But he did hurry straight home after closing, so he could crank up the parlor gramophone.

  The first half minute of the twelve-bar blues was a long, frisky piano intro, building atop a light, sibilant drum line. But then the whole orchestra came in, and on top of it the most fully expressive saxophone solo he had ever heard, touched with pleasure and regret. He rocked back on his heels in awe, and cried out for more when it ended far too soon.

  This Admiral was a music lover, the real thing. As soon as the song was over, Thomas set the needle back to the beginning, exhilarated, certain this moment would always stand as a before-and-after mark in his understanding of music.

  A wry trumpet line came in, and by the second or third listening, Thomas felt sure he recognized Buck Clayton’s sound. It could be Clayton; he had finally left Shanghai after many months of saving while playing Yellow Music in an all-Chinese club. They are fixing to have a war here, he had said to Thomas over tea and blintzes at Rosie’s on Rue de L’Observatoire, two days before he left, and I want no part of it. He had sat across the table as urbane and perfectly dressed as ever, but gray from worry. “I put it to the rest of the Harlem Gentlemen, those who are still here playing the tea dances at the Canidrome, and they all agreed with me, all except one,” said Clayton. “They’re all leaving.”

  “Who’s staying?” Greene had asked, curious.

  “Stoffer, my pianist. He’s got himself hired on with Earl Whaley’s Syncopators at the Saint Anna. Earl says he’s staying in Shanghai, no matter what. Well, I wish him the best. You too.” And they drank to their futures, about to diverge. Buck left, and now here was his trumpet on “One O’ Clock Jump,” like a clarion call. Fixing to have a war here.

  It was almost four o’clock when the teenaged brothers rattled their keys at the front door. They came in rubber-limbed and slurry from drink, but stood at attention the instant they heard the new saxophone solo. “Who’s that?” said Charles, and that was it, sweet land of liberty. They refused to go to bed that night until they had played the record at least fifteen times, hovering next to the sound box, its volume doors swung all the way open. Watching them, he could see a glimmer of the furious journey they were going to take with their reeds as they aged, and the music grew and changed with them. Their form was a young one, his was old. He envied them that.

  And it was his job to see that they were safe.

  In the third week of July, Du Yuesheng met H. H. Kung and Sun Fo for dinner at Lu Bo Lang, a venerable restaurant next to the Yu Garden in the Chinese City, to talk about the Jewish question. Du brought Lin Ming with him, for the same reason he often brought Song to these events, because men who had been educated abroad sometimes made references to that world, and used foreign phrases, and Du wished to miss nothing.

  Over shark’s fin and water shield soup, sautéed abalone, and tofu-skin pastries of minced quail and wild mountain mushrooms brought from Yunnan, only pleasantries about health and family were exchanged, as custom demanded, while the gentle net of guanxi, relationship, was sewn into place. Finally, when the dishes had been cleared, a crock of warm Shaoxing wine brought out, and Kung’s first cigar lit, Sun Fo delivered a passionate denunciation of the Germans’ mistreatment of their Jewish citizens, now streaming into Shanghai by the thousands. Du listened and said nothing.

  “These people are under your protection,” said Kung.

  But still Du had no response.

  “If I may, Teacher,” said Lin Ming, and all eyes went to him. Du nodded permission. “Were you to succeed at this, you would be remembered as a great benefactor. Not just now. Throughout history.”

  As he had guessed it might, this kindled the glow of interest. Kung and Sun sensed it, and notched forward.

  “What did Hitler say, when you raised this matter with him?” asked Du, since they all knew Kung had just returned from an audience with the Führer.

  “He said, ‘You don’t know Jews.’ It’s strange, because he was an impressive man otherwise, quite smart.” Kung’s habitually calm expression was punctuated, as always, by the steady brilliance of his small eyes, which took in everything from behind his tortoiseshells. “But Chiang Kai-shek is his equal, his peer, he is the leader of China, so perhaps if he approached him . . .”

  “What did Hitler say about helping us against Japan?” Du asked then, which was what they all burned to know.

  Kung removed his round glasses, and rubbed his eyes. He was rich and powerful, but no longer young, and now he sagged with disappointment. “He refused,” he said, and pushed his frames resolutely back into place. “His advice was, give up and join Japan’s East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere immediately.”

  “Hand ourselves ove
r to Japan?” said Sun Fo incredulously.

  “As if we would do that,” said Kung.

  “Never,” Du agreed. To Sun Fo he said, “We’ll do our part. Tokyo has placed a new chief officer here, an Admiral, and we are about to kill him. I have brought an assassin in from outside, a man with no ties or temptations.” He turned to Lin, and indulged his shallow crescent of a smile. “And he is watching your piano player day and night.”

  As a result of handing over the diamond, Song was bumped up a notch, and assigned a new guide. Most Party members in the city belonged to cells, kept small, so that if one person was caught, the others could scatter and start over. Song had no cell, since she lived as a spy. Thanks to her, they had periodic reports on the money flow from the Green Gang to the Nationalist armies, and twice had learned of a Green Gang plot against them in time to avert disaster. When she was a new recruit in 1933 and Du maneuvered a hostile takeover of the Da Da Steam Navigation Company to gain a fleet of merchant and passenger ships, the Party knew about it even before the public did. She had always seen her contact one-on-one.

  All she had been told about the man she was meeting today, her new guide, was that he was a person of some import in Shanghai’s theater circles. She already knew she would be deferential, for the relationship was always vertical, never a meeting of equals. In this way the Party was like Confucianism, which unsettled her, because Confucianism was so traditional.

  When she stepped off the trolley, she saw by the clock tower atop the Wing On Department Store that she was early; her destination, Cyrano’s on Peking Road, was nearby. So she wandered into the store, past gleaming counters of merchandise and smiling attendants, and rode the elevator to the fourth floor. There, a dim, slow-churning dance floor of tightly pressed couples swayed to a Filipino band. These were not prostitutes; those were on the highest floor. These were dance hostesses, and couples who came looking for a dark place to embrace. She stood on the side, her arms crossed in front of her waist, watching them clutch each other, seeing love the only way she could, as a spectator.

  Thomas Greene had broken it off with his Russian girlfriend; she had read about it in the xiao bao, the mosquito press, which, in addition to its cheap scandals and gossip, also ran some of the city’s bravest anti-Japanese editorials.

  So he and the gray-eyed Russian had parted company; she had set up a separate kitchen, as the Chinese would put it, and he had kept the studio by the river. And here, watching the anonymous couples press together in the false daytime darkness, she thought of him, and of dancing, something she had never done. She did not know how, just like she did not know how to do the house thing. Obviously she had done it wrong, because even Du did not come back for more, after he had bought her. She watched the dancers rock on their feet, embracing in public.

  She thought of the meeting coming up, and moved her hand to her thigh. Her new guide was someone of known sophistication—there would be a conversation, reflections, thoughts. She missed those early years of talking with theater people in cafés while Du pursued his amours. She missed the companionship of people who thought and debated and visualized the future.

  She remembered the day she was sworn in. Her directions took her up Henan Road, past the Mei Feng Bank of Sichuan, past Peking Road, and almost to Suzhou Creek before a young man she had never seen before fell into step beside her. She smiled as if she knew him, and they continued along the creek past the Shanghai Waterworks. Her sponsor, Huang Weimin, the editor and writer, had told her they were to look like any couple.

  The man took her hand and led her into a narrow alley that ran between the Capitol Theater and Taylor Garage, where he knocked twice on a door that was quickly opened to a dim hallway. Down a corridor, up a narrow staircase, they came to an office where a man who looked like an ordinary clerk, the sleeves of his gown protected by cotton over-cuffs, looked up at them. “Yes?” he said, and put down his fountain pen. “Who is this? Eh, Huang Weimin’s candidate.” His eyes stayed on her as he picked up a memo with a few lines of flowing characters on thin, translucent paper. “He told us about you. Stand right there.” And in just a few minutes, with no fanfare, no ceremony, and certainly no acknowledgment of the danger to her life, she was sworn in and registered to the Shanghai branch of the Communist Party of China. She had joined.

  Magic pulsed from the orchestra in looping, sinuous waves as dancers pressed together in the dark, and she wondered why she kept coming back to places like this. To torture herself? She would be Du’s for another ten years. She turned her back on the music and hurried out into the street.

  At the café, she gave her name as Mrs. Gao, Gao Taitai, according to her instructions. She was always Taitai something or other, since women of her age were almost never unmarried. They seated her in a private room, where she ordered a pot of tea and two cups. When the tea had gone cool, she poured herself a cup and drank it, and after that, another. It was a full half hour past the allotted time when she finally heard footsteps in the corridor and the door rattled for a fraction of a second in its frame before opening.

  The irritation she had been nursing died inside her as she looked into the face of Chen Xing. She had met him at the Vienna Garden during her early exposure to Communism; he was the one who had told her about Miss Zhang, the lovely and pregnant dance hostess who had been planted like a water lily, keening and begging Song with her eyes to save her life. Did he know what had happened to the girl?

  Since that time she had seen Chen Xing’s name in the press, and knew that he held various civic posts and served as director of some of Shanghai’s biggest banks. He was also a producer of plays, a leader of the League of Left-Wing Theater People, and the host of a radical salon. He was famous for his scandalous affairs with women. But though he was left-leaning, no one knew he was a Party member.

  She could see by the flutter in his eyes that he was just as surprised to see her. No doubt he had been told only that he was meeting a member who had come up with not just information but also a diamond. He certainly had not expected it to be someone he knew, and above all not her, someone connected to Du. She caught the note of admiration in his appraisal, and saw him assume she had stolen the diamond from her master. Fool. No one steals from Du.

  “Gao Taitai.” His smile was effortlessly smooth and vacant. “So nice to see you.”

  She answered politely, “How is the family?”

  Steps sounded outside the door. “Ah,” he said, “here is Miss Wu now.” And a girl came in, a child less than eighteen, cheeks firm and round like a honey peach. Who was she? His daughter? But a third person had never attended one of these meetings before.

  In the next instant Song saw she was not his daughter, for she sat on his lap and curved her body against him, despite the fact that he was twenty-five years her senior. “Pleased to meet you,” Song said.

  “Gao Taitai,” the girl replied, and went right back to simpering in Chen Xing’s ear.

  He whispered back to her and fondled her through her clothes as if Song were not even there. She found it shocking. He was not even trying to attend to the business they had come to conduct.

  Then abruptly, he pushed the girl off his lap. “Be a good child and go get an extra teacup and a basket of soup dumplings. No, two baskets. Wait for them and bring them back. You have raised my appetite.” And he squeezed the firm round of her behind as she turned away.

  Song endured bolts of humiliation as she forced herself to review how much time and care she had expended in dressing before she left the house today. Nervous as a bed of pins, she had tried on a dozen dresses, eventually settling on a plain qipao of gray cotton which made her look left-wing and serious, but still pretty. She wore her hair as usual, sweetly knotted with flowers at the nape, because to have left Rue Wagner any other way would have been to invite notice. In the end the look suited her, and when she walked out the gravel driveway and through the iron gates, she knew she was beautiful, ready for anything. And now she had to stare painfully at Chen
Xing nuzzling this child-bauble. Serene. Face of glass. She watched Miss Wu walk to the door with the excessive, untrained switching of a young girl.

  By the time the door clicked shut, Song was in control again. “Lovely,” she said neutrally, hoping that now they could talk.

  But what happened went beyond her expectations: he changed completely. The sophisticated ennui drained from his face. His spine lifted, his eyes clicked to a different and infinitely more focused shade of black. In one turn of the head she saw the theatrical producer, the salon host, the man of ideas. “She is spoiled and simple,” he said dismissively. His voice had changed too, become level and grainy; gone was the oil-slick politeness she had heard before. “Easy to deceive. I always bring someone who is pretty and wooden-headed, so they can see the places I go and the things I do as I want them to. Forgive the intrusion. It is actually safer this way, and now we have a few minutes alone.”

  She stared. Which was the real Chen Xing, the rich, bored man of the theater, or this concentrated, severe figure who now sat across from her? “Any news from the north?” she said. By this she meant the advance of the Japanese, but also Party headquarters, where all major decisions were made. For the past two years, the top leaders had been operating out of caves in Yan’an. The brain trust was there, the future. One day, when she was free, she too would go there.

  He leaned closer. “I do have news. Peking is silent as a tomb, everyone just waiting. Japanese troops are massed outside the city. They have taken Tianjin, and Tanggu, the port that serves both those cities.”

  “And will our troops protect Peking?”