by Nicole Mones
“No. Chiang has ordered a withdrawal.” It was like a blow to her chest. So Peking would be handed over to Japan without a fight.
“We must comply,” Chen said sadly. “We are a united front with the Nationalists now—and also, Chiang is right. We could never hold them off.”
The injustice of it flamed up, burning her, parching her. “Will they give Shanghai to Japan the same way?”
“No! Here we will kill them one by one, starting with that foul swine Morioka. I heard he showed up at the Royal again, to see that piano player.”
“Yes, I have details.” Though the story terrified her, she kept her voice even as she repeated what she had heard from Lin Ming. “He gave the American a new record, with a saxophone player called Lester Young. He gets them by diplomatic pouch. The American loves the song; I am told he listens to it over and over, and his own saxophone players, two skinny brothers, a couple of drainpipes, they listen to it even more.”
Chen Xing sat back in his chair, momentarily silenced. “A song,” he said, and paused again. “You know, Gao Taitai, you have learned more than the West-ocean language; you understand how they think.”
She was taken aback. “I do my best to serve the cause.”
“I know. You do a good job. Your skills are high. You have been noticed.” She felt her insides chill, for he meant the diamond, as well as her English.
“I will serve in any way. Never speak English again if they want.”
He raised a hand. “Just be careful. Now, the next thing we want you to do is support Du’s plan to kill Morioka. Do anything you can to help it work.”
“But they are our enemies. If they want to use an American as bait, we should work against them and—”
“Miss Song,” he said, so surprised at her that he used her real name, “your opinion was not requested.”
She blinked back.
“You will help this plan.”
“Yes,” she said, resistance hammering inside her.
“And also,” Chen continued, “we still need money. So if there is any way that you can—”
The door opened, and Miss Wu sauntered through. “Food is coming,” she said, proud of her competence in arranging this.
Chen Xing slid smoothly into his other self. “What do you mean, you think Hu Die is pretty? She’s a great actress—did you see her in Twin Sisters?—but she’s too noble to be pretty, almost like a carving, a face made of stone.” He drew Miss Wu to him. “I prefer a real girl!”
Song sipped her tea, watching them laugh and trade banter, understanding that the meeting was over. Chen Xing wore his public face now, puffy-eyed, weary, brined in a thousand shallow nights—a complete change.
He looked up. “As I was saying, Mrs. Gao, if there is any way that you can again attend the weekly salon, we would all be so grateful. What you contributed was valued by all, last time. We hope you will return again.”
She smiled neutrally. “I will try. Mr. Gao keeps me busy.” She rose, aware that her dress was frumpy and out of date and that she herself was old. “Please give my best to your family. Good day. Good day, Miss Wu.”
The girl looked up as if surprised she was still there.
She swept out, her final turn as the regal matron, and did not let her mask drop until she was outside, her heels tapping on the sidewalk, her profile echoing her in the shop windows she strode past. What was she going to do? She could not support a plot with Thomas as its bait. And what would she do with the diamonds, three in the wall behind her night table and at least twenty-five more in the pouch on the back of Du Taitai’s picture frame? Du Taitai had forgotten them once again, and no one else knew of their existence.
Maybe, she thought, boarding the clanging trolley, she should take them and emigrate. And this strange, exotic thought stayed with her all the way home, to Rue Wagner.
The assassin Du hired, Zhao Funian, came highly recommended by the Nationalists’ paramilitary force as a cold killer, though his background was ordinary in every way.
Zhao had been raised south of the Yangtze, in the painted beauty of Zhejiang, where his father owned five mu of land—and also had five sons, prompting Zhao Funian to leave home at an early age. This was the modern world, and men no longer had to spend their lives serving their clans, especially fifth sons with no land and no wives of their own. So he went to Hangzhou, where he managed a numbers game and collected monthly bribe envelopes from merchants, eventually becoming bodyguard to the city’s Beggar Boss. From there it was only a matter of time until the Nationalist Secret Police tapped him to eliminate collaborators. Competitive, clever, secretive, charming when he needed to be, he was perfect for the work.
“And the jazz man, is he to die too?” he had asked Du Yuesheng.
“Spare him, but only if you can.” Du’s eyes narrowed; they were dead eyes, Zhao noted, unencumbered by emotion. “The Admiral’s life is worth any price, Chinese or foreign never mind.”
Zhao knew this was the most important thing he would ever do. He spent excited hours in the little room he had rented in a house behind the Royal, smoking, stubbing out cigarettes on the windowsill, watching the back door and the musicians and the comings and goings of cooks and maids and waiters. He picked out the pianist easily, for he walked like a man in charge, and passed in and out without an instrument.
Still, Zhao Funian needed someone inside the theater to tell him what went on, especially any words that might be exchanged between Thomas Greene and that whore Admiral Morioka, and soon his crosshairs settled on a waiter named Cheng Guiyang. A few nights before, he had overheard him at a noodle stall near the theater after closing, speaking in the soft, sibilant accent of Wu, as familiar to Zhao Funian as his own voice. The man was from Zhao’s part of northern Zhejiang, maybe even from Pingyao County itself. Zhao had paused nearby, pretending to study the turnip-shred-stuffed cakes in the opposite stall, listening until he was sure and even, in a stroke of the gods’ favor, hearing the man’s name when another waiter walked past and addressed him: Cheng Guiyang. Thus blessed by fate, he had been able to learn enough things about the fellow to create a spiderweb of guanxi between them from the first hello. Cheng was a perfect target: he slept in a room of stacked bunks with seven other men, who called him Wing Bean; ate but twice a day; and sent every other copper cash back to his family.
Zhao made the opening move at two thirty A.M., after following the waiter to a food stall. Cheng was tearing into a plate of xiao long bao, soup dumplings filled with hot broth and ginger-scented pork. As he was passing, Zhao contrived to drop a handful of copper cash so that some would roll under Cheng’s stool, forcing him to stop eating as Zhao picked them up. “You should be more careful,” Cheng admonished him.
Zhao said, “Your accent—I know the speech of Wu. You are from Zhejiang?”
“Yes,” said Cheng, annoyance evaporating into curiosity.
“The northern part, near the Yangtze?”
“Yes—”
“Wait! My friend, this is not possible!” Now Zhao had assumed the opposite stool, moving as lightly as a shadow. “I believe I recognize you. Could you be from Cheng Family Village on the Li River?”
“I am!” Cheng stared.
“Your father brewed vinegar, isn’t it? The Tai Yang Company, that one? He was brew master there?”
Wing Bean’s eyes widened. “You knew my father?”
“Yes. Such a good man.”
“I don’t remember you.”
“I was from Guo Family Village.”
He saw Cheng studying him, raking his mind for a memory. Time to play his high card. “About your father,” he said, tilting his head in sympathy. “It’s too pitiable about him passing over.”
The younger man froze, stricken, and looked down at his half-eaten dumpling, the pork fragrance steaming up. He blinked, and closed his eyes for a second.
“There, my friend,” said Zhao, and settled a warm hand briefly on the younger fellow’s shoulder. “All will be well. The gods
have watched out for you if they have brought you to Shanghai.”
“No. They have not.” Cheng lowered his head, and for a moment he looked no older than a child. “I work hard but I earn nothing. At home they need my help, but I can barely feed myself.”
“Ei,” said Zhao. “It’s like that, is it? Put yourself at ease.” He too was speaking in their home accent, pouring it on nice and thick. “Persons from the same native place should stick together, isn’t it so?” He held up some coins and called to the vendor for more dumplings. “Now, my friend—what is your name again? Your given name?”
“Guiyang. Cheng Guiyang. Everyone calls me Wing Bean.”
“Guo Liwei,” Zhao lied, indicating himself. “Now listen, Wing Bean.” He moved closer. “I’d like to lay a proposition before you.”
The next night, when Du’s retinue walked out of the Royal at two A.M., Song slipped a scrap of paper into Thomas’s hand at the door. Neither acknowledged the other or made eye contact; to all who observed, each gave the appearance of not even noticing the other. She walked right past him in her gossamer-silk qipao of ivory white, embroidered all over with pale pink butterflies, while he continued his conversation with a British man in black tie. Yet their hands touched, and when he took the paper, he touched her fingers quickly, reassuringly, in return. She vanished, and he moved the slip discreetly to his pocket as he went right on greeting people, burning inside. She had something to say to him.
And he knew her secret.
It was not until he was going home in the back of a rickshaw, his privacy assured by the open night air, that he unfolded the note, and felt himself soar:
Hua Lian Teahouse
Avenue Hing and Route Alfred Magy
29 July, Thursday, 3:00
When the day came, he found that the address was a considerable trolley ride away, almost to the western edge of the French Concession. As he watched the city stretch out and grow leafier from the clanking, rocking car, he ran through all the possible reasons she might have for summoning him. He disembarked early and covered the last stretch to Avenue Hing on foot, just to calm his pizzicato nerves.
The half darkness of the teahouse was cool after the blazing street, and no one was in sight, no staff, no patrons. He walked through a series of empty lattice-screened dining rooms until he came to a circular tower room, in which an old-fashioned octagonal window looked down through meshed trolley lines to the street below. He barely saw the rose-patterned wallpaper, the white damask set with a steaming teapot and two cups, because there she was, rising from her chair to greet him, face opening in a smile. “You came,” she said, and reached across the table to clasp his hand in greeting. She wore a plain cotton qipao, the two-inch spool heels favored by Shanghai women, and no jewels except tiny pearls in her pierced ears.
The door clicked behind him and he was jolted to see they were alone together, for the first time. “Miss Song,” he said.
“Call me Song.”
“Isn’t your name Yuhua?”
“That’s a feudal name, Jade Flower. I have never liked it. My friends call me Song.”
“All right, I will too.” His big dark eyes clouded with concern. “Say, is everything all right?”
“Not really.” She poured tea and pushed a cup across to him. “I asked you to come because there is danger to you, very grave. It concerns that Admiral Morioka who has several times come into your ballroom.”
“That!” he cried. “Believe me, I know.”
“You know?”
“Yes. It’s not hard to figure out. They want to kill him, and here he is coming into my orchestra and sitting through set after set like a man in a trance! I get it.”
She relaxed a little. “I know Du is planning something—I suspect Lin knows too. I didn’t know if he had dared to warn you.”
“It would be very dangerous for him to do that,” Thomas said pointedly, as a way of explaining why he would not say any more. Neither would he reveal that Morioka also knew.
“I need not have come.”
“Not at all.” His eyes, fringed with curly lashes, were warm. “I’m glad you called me here. I want everything straight between us, everything honest. So—I know, okay? I know about you. But I won’t tell a soul.”
All her alarms screamed and she fought to keep her voice calm. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, I know. You are a Communist.”
“What?”
“It’s all right.” He covered her hand with his. “No one will ever hear it from me.”
She felt her mouth opening and closing, and no sound came out. He knew. Her life was ruined if someone knew. She had to change everything. “I must leave Shanghai immediately,” she blurted.
“No! Don’t do anything. I told you, it’s all right. You are safe. I will protect this as carefully as you do.”
She looked at him for a long time, desperately calculating. If he kept her secret, what would she have to give him in return? The instant the question bloomed in her mind, she saw herself, in an involuntary dreamlike instant, in his arms, an image she pushed away. Would that be his price? If it was, she would pay it. She looked at the gentle slope of his shoulders beneath his suit. “Can I trust you?” she said quietly.
“One hundred percent.”
“Who else knows?”
“No one.”
“Lin?”
“No one.”
She was trapped, and she knew it. Tears stung behind her eyes and wobbled her vision.
He said, “Believe me. Even if we never see each other again after today, no one will know. I swear it.”
She rose, deciding, and he rose with her, and they exchanged the brief embrace of a promise.
“Please be careful,” she said into his ear. “My life depends on it.”
“I will.” They sat down again, Thomas electrified from that moment of holding her. “May I ask about this contract with Du? Lin Ming told me you have a contract related to your debt.”
“My family’s debt.”
“Under that, you cannot—”
“No,” she said miserably. “I cannot. Even though that is not what I am to him. He has other women.”
His look was patient. “And how much longer does this contract last?”
She felt sadness spring up to prick behind her eyes, and she hated the answer she had to give, since it would extinguish all his desire. And she badly wanted his desire to stay alive. “Ten more years,” she said.
She saw how he paled. Ah, there, she had him: deflated. He would have no further interest in her after this. Why should he? He would have better things to do for the next decade than wait around for a broken shoe such as she was. She corrected herself; the phrase was harsh, she was no prostitute, but there was no denying that she had sold herself, long ago, and now he knew. She half expected him to make excuses and leave.
Instead he said, “Ten years is a long time.” His words sounded sticky, as if his mouth was dry. “Would there be any exceptions?”
“No,” she said, smiling a little, in spite of herself, at his sweet persistence. This was a foreign thing she liked, the way he showed himself, and strangely, she felt safe with him, safer than she felt in the Party. She wished she could stay with him forever. The Japanese were coming, everyone said they were surrounding Peking at that very moment, waiting to enter, uncontested—the Chinese army had withdrawn. Tianjin had fought for only three days, and now Peking was not going to fight at all. Next was Shanghai. She wished she could be with him when it happened, instead of in her little room on the top floor of Rue Wagner, with her maid, Ah Pan. The words of an essay by Wang Tongzhao came back to her—In both action and spirit, will you continue to resist or surrender to the enemy? She would resist, she wanted to be part of it. If only Thomas were part of it too.
But it was not even his war. “If we see each other at the theater, you must look right through me,” she told him. “We cannot talk, or meet . . . whatever you want to tell me, tell me now.”
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He smiled. There were no words really for his world, the marble steps of West Baltimore, the ringing sound of a piano in a conservatory practice room, his mother, his grandmother. It could be told in music; one day, if he played for her, he could make her understand. He could spin out the bent-note melody of poverty, the feeling of always being an outsider, an actor, of the turning road that had brought him across the United States and here to China. It was a kind of walking blues; he felt that if they were alone, and there was a piano, he would play it, and she would know everything about him. “We may not be able to even acknowledge each other. But I’m staying.”
“You are staying in Shanghai?”
“Until they throw me out. And if you ever hear me play, it’s for you. Remember that. And if anything changes, or you need help, come to me. I’m going to be here.”
Her face seemed to crumple. “Why are you so kind to me?”
He picked up the pot and refreshed her tea. Because she had wrested freedom from servitude. Because she had brains to match her beauty, and no man had ever yet had the chance to make her happy. “I just want to be part of your life,” he said.
Lin Ming surprised Pearl by arriving at the Osmanthus Pavilion in the late afternoon of August eighth, when the mansion was just stirring and the girls in their bright flimsy silks were sitting together in the public rooms to play cards, and listen to Yellow Music on the wireless. As he opened the front door, Zhou Xuan’s song “Ye Shanghai” was playing, and he felt a stab of fear for the fragility of his city’s fabled nightlife.
“Lin Ming,” he heard softly, behind him, and he turned to see his qin’ai de Zhuli, his dearest Pearl, waiting. He felt all the trouble and worry ease out on his breath as he moved toward her and took her in his arms, not even caring that they stood in the foyer, in full view. “Shall we go upstairs?” she said.
He nodded. “Yes. Order some wine, and an early dinner.” She clapped for the maid, and he hastened up the stairs, anxious to escape to her room.
In the upstairs hallway, the madam intervened. “You will be buying out Pearl for the night?”