by Nicole Mones
Standing behind him, Song sensed it too; she had never heard him play quite like this. She felt the charge, almost saw it in the air between them.
Everything seemed possible. He was open to her. But she also felt the chill of fear. She was no maiden, yet no man had seen her naked body, and she had little sense of what men and women actually did together. She knew how it ended, of course, because Du had done that, stabbing her distractedly as if relieving an itch. But there was more, surely. Certainly.
Part of her still believed, had never stopped, and from that private place she reached down and slid his suspenders off his bare shoulders. He turned, joy and surprise in his face, searching her eyes, seeking a yes, a sure yes, and then catching her hands in his and drawing her down to his lap.
The wind had dropped back slightly and the rain settled to a steady spit by the time they were quiet atop the sheets, arms and legs tangled in a way that Thomas knew would somehow link them forever, no matter where they went after today.
“Do you know,” she said, her hand moving through his hair, “this is the first time I did this of my own desire. If you had rejected me, I don’t know what I would have done.”
“Never. I dreamed of this.” It was true in more ways than he knew how to count. Every girl he had known, even the nice girls back in Baltimore who had been out of reach for him on account of his poverty, had been imperfect. There was always something off, some qualifying streak to mar their appeal. Not her. She was all his hopes, idealized.
So it was a surprise when she continued, her voice tentative. “He did it quickly, and never even looked at me. For all these years I have thought I did the thing wrong. Or that maybe something was not right inside, though I bled the first time—”
“Song.” He looked at her exquisite body, yellowed-ivory skin, the strong, frank hips that had urged him higher and higher. “You were wonderful. It was wonderful. Couldn’t you tell?”
“Yes!” She pressed against him. “But I didn’t know. He never even saw me naked.” She touched his chest. “You know all my secrets.”
“All of them?” He parted her legs. “Did he do this to you?”
Her mouth opened, surprised. “No.”
He felt more love, as she arched up to meet him, than he had ever felt before, for anyone. He steadied her hip with his hand, and his voice went down to a whisper. “Let me show you.”
Much later he got up and moved to the piano, and once again started to improvise. He played full of happiness, even though bombs kept sending their shuddering blasts up, just a few miles away. No love without death. And then just as a sob can escape a man’s throat before he is quite aware of it, a melody came up from nowhere through his hands and made a lovely, melancholy little turn.
He left it, played on, and came back to it again. He was riding it more than creating it, and for the first time in his life, he felt the difference. It was a kind of ecstasy, something like being with her. Then he heard something new, a voice—it was her, singing along with him, high and clear and true to pitch. All that, and this too?
She sang the line back when he was finished, replicating it perfectly, and asked him what it was.
“Just a melody,” he said, unable to stop grinning at her singing. “You pick a name for it.”
“My name,” she said. “Song.”
“No, no, everything is a song. All of America is in a song. Pick another name.”
“Tell me the style of the piece.”
“The way I was playing it, with that arpeggiated left hand and the melodic, singing right hand—that would be a nocturne. A piece for the night.”
“Like Ye Shanghai,” she said.
“Yes, Night in Shanghai.”
“Call it that. It belongs to this city.”
“All right.” He pulled her naked body to him. “Song, I want to stay here with you forever, but it’s bad outside. Don’t you hear it? I need to take you back to Rue Wagner.”
“I know.” She wrapped herself around him. “I was going to say it too.”
“Then say we’ll see each other again.”
“We’ll see each other again,” she answered, but the sudden dullness in her voice made him bite back what he wanted to say, which was Tell me when. Tell me how. Instead, he closed the mahogany lid over the keys and they got dressed.
As Thomas and Song were leaving the Peking Road studio, Zhao Funian, Du’s hired assassin, was peering out into the rain from his rented room on the corner of Avenue Édouard VII and Tibet Road. The restaurant where that brown dwarf whore Morioka and the foreign piano player were supposed to meet, right next to the Great World Amusement Center, was ideally located across the street from his window. The only problem was that the Great World had decided to hand out free tea and rice, and thousands of refugees, who had been filling the French Concession for days, were now squeezed into a clotted bottleneck directly in front of his target. He would never get a clear shot without killing a few others, but what did that matter now? One had to be thorough in crushing dry weeds and smashing rotten wood. His rifle was poised, and he scanned through the rain, while Wing Bean, who stood next to him, studied the crowd through binoculars.
“Ei, is that leper turd really going to show up here? Today?” The radio was chattering about the fighting in the northern districts, and the bomb concussions could be heard and felt underneath the rain, while the street below roiled with people fleeing for their lives. Morioka seemed unlikely to keep a tea date. It was five minutes to the appointed time.
“The rain is slowing,” Wing Bean said, continuing to sweep his binoculars back and forth across the packed sidewalk in front of the restaurant.
Zhao shook his head at the futility of it. “That whore’s not coming.”
But then Wing Bean staggered, so suddenly Zhao thought he had been hit by some stray bullet, shot, and felt a stab of sadness, such a young man—
But the younger man was only shocked. “Gods bear witness! I see him. It’s him. The piano player.”
“What!” Zhao snatched the field glasses from him and trained them down on the dense mass of refugees, dialing the focus, frantic. “Are you blind in your dog’s eyes?”
“No. I work at the Royal! That’s him.”
“Where?”
“On the corner. See? He’s with a woman.”
“A woman—” Now Zhao had him at last in his sights, and his stomach turned over: oh yes. He was with a woman all right.
Song Yuhua.
“Get the camera,” he whispered. She was pressed close to the American as they moved together, her dress wet and clinging, her hips sinuous, talking to him, pressed up to him, touching him, by all his ancestors. Touching him. “Hurry!” he cried to Wing Bean, who saw the same thing and stood with his mouth hanging slack.
“But that whore Morioka could arrive any second. He’s the one we—”
“Stupid melon! Get the camera!”
Wing Bean pawed through his canvas bag.
“Give it to me. Is there film in it? Hurry!”
But Wing Bean held it back from him. Something profitable was about to occur, without him. “Why?”
“Never you mind!”
“Why?” Wing Bean repeated, which caused Zhao to swing at him—and miss.
Zhao glanced out across the street. Her clothes were wet and everything of her body was visible. He swallowed back excitement. “The girl?” he said. “Take another look.”
Wing Bean’s mouth dropped as he recognized her.
Zhao kept his palm open, his eyes hard as steel. “Give.”
“Reward. I want half.”
“Dog bone! There will be nothing if I don’t take a picture!”
“Forty parts of a hundred.”
“Twenty-five. And that’s generous!”
“Thirty-five.”
“Twenty-eight.”
“Done,” said Wing Bean, pleased, and allowed him to snatch the camera.
“Curse you and that scar of your mother’s you slid
out from.” Zhao yanked off the lens cap, raised it to his eye, and twisted the focus, no, too far. Back again. Now he had lost them in the tide of people. There. Shameless! She was holding his arm. His face would be huge when Big-Eared Du saw these photographs, along with a bonus big enough to take back to Zhejiang and show his brothers how a real man lived. He was the best of the five of them. He had climbed the mountain. There: he snapped. Perfect. Then another. A third. All gods! Now he was pointing down the block, toward the café where he was supposed to meet Morioka, and they were talking—now turning away from the café, hurrying south on Boulevard de Montigny instead. She was whoring with him! He clicked off pictures until they turned again at the first corner, away from the boulevard, and passed out of sight. Zhao’s guts went to jelly as he imagined what Du was going to do to her when he saw these photographs. “Any sign of the Admiral?”
Wing Bean did not answer. He wore a strange look.
“Speak! What is it?” said Zhao.
Wing Bean said only, “Look,” his voice slow, his finger rising to point. There, against the rumbling bank of storm clouds, a Chinese fighter plane was lit up, one of its engines exploding into flame and hemorrhaging smoke, making it roll and pitch wildly.
Zhao shot a rapid, involuntary glance back to the street. Du’s woman and the American were gone. But the pictures were safe in his hands.
Then he heard a word from Wing Bean, soft, barely audible, “Amithaba.”
Why does he invoke the Buddha? he wondered. Only then, above the avenue, did he see the stepwise line of bombs falling from the plane like pellets, gusting with the rain, drifting sideways, directly toward them. It was the last thing he saw.
Thomas and Song were halfway down the next block when the blast that was to kill a thousand people at the corner of Édouard VII and Tibet Road shattered the air around them, muffling their ears into silence for long pressurized seconds until their drums popped, and a wall of screams rose up from one block over. Plumes of smoke and dust billowed over the rooftops.
“Look,” she said. The plane, clearly marked with the Nationalist flag, was wheeling away into the clouds.
“It’s Chinese.”
“How can that be?” She looked like she might cry.
“A mistake,” he said, arms around her. “Listen. You sure you’re all right? Yes? Then we have to get you home, now.”
“But if the bombs fell right in that crowd—” Cries for help and mercy were carried to them on the wind.
“Song.” He took her face in his hands and turned it toward him, because she could not tear her gaze from the corner, where people stumbling away from the blast were already filling the street. “You’ve got to go inside the compound. Everyone will be focused on this. You can get in.”
She slipped her arms around his neck.
“Not here,” he cautioned, but before either could move, they heard the click of a shutter. He turned in shock and horror to see Wing Bean, from the Royal.
“Big-Ear Du will very like that one,” he said, winding the film on to the next shot.
“Wing Bean,” Thomas said, strong. “What are you doing?”
“Taking picture.” Wing Bean, still clicking, was clearly hurt, bleeding from a wound to his head, as he stood in the middle of the road, snapping photos.
“Give me that,” said Thomas.
“No. So many picture, touch and kiss. How much you give me?”
Thomas saw that the side of Wing Bean’s head was caved in, his skull broken. How was he standing up?
“What you give me?” Wing Bean repeated, and started to cough. A second later, bloody foam bubbled from his mouth and into his cupped hand, which distracted him for a second as he stared at it in surprise. One hard lunge, a fast grab, and Thomas had the camera. In an instant he had ripped out the film, unspooling it in the light.
“Doesn’t matter!” Wing Bean cried, and tumbled to his knees, gasping, gurgling. Behind him, the crowd stumbling away from the bomb site surged closer. “I saw you! Zhao saw you too, but he is dead—I saw! I am going to tell Du everything.”
Thomas took Song’s arm and pulled her back a step, out of the way of the human wall barreling up Boulevard de Montigny behind Wing Bean. The waiter did not see them; he was still shrieking at Thomas, his words bubbling in blood.
Neither answered, because at that moment another huge bomb exploded from the northeast, and a smoke-and-debris cloud tufted up from the area around the Bund—where Thomas’s studio lay. Wing Bean turned too, and saw the crowd running straight into him, knocking him over. In a short time he was flattened, barely visible but for the rumple of clothes and the blood running out under people’s feet. They must have been able to feel the squish and bump beneath their shoes, they must have known, but it was madness, death all around, and no one stopped even to look. Her hand crept into his.
They stood a long minute, and neither needed to speak. “Go home,” he said finally, into her ear, and she turned away.
The next day he and Ernest and Charles gathered around the radio to hear the news: three thousand dead from the bombs that fell in the International Settlement. This was followed by an official announcement made for foreign residents.
“Here we go.” Thomas turned it up, and they huddled close.
The consulates of Great Britain and the United States hereby advise all citizens to book immediate passage out. Shanghai is in a state of war and these governments cannot guarantee the safety of their citizens who choose to remain behind.
“Book passage?” Thomas said. “How?” The brothers had only a few hundred saved between them, and all the cash he had was with Uncle Hua, more than two thousand Chinese dollars, another reason they needed to find the old man, because that would be enough to get all three of them out, and Alonzo too, if he was finally ready to go.
But Uncle Hua had not come back. Thomas guessed he had gone home to his family, but he knew it could be worse. Thousands were dead. And what had happened with Wing Bean had shown him that it took only one bolt out of the blue to snatch one’s life, or warp one’s fortunes. It was like the unexpected ninth in Duke Ellington’s “Blue Ramble,” the ninth in the bottom of the stacked chord that changed the song, changed everything. The turn. Wing Bean was dead, and they were safe.
That night, at the Royal, he brought up Hua’s absence with Lin Ming, who puckered in concern, and said, “Tomorrow morning we go see his family in the Chinese City.”
On the way there, Lin scolded him for feigning acceptance of Morioka’s invitation in the first place.
“I had no intention of going,” Thomas protested. “You warned me. But his boy was standing there. My servants used to handle these things for me, and I did not know what to say.” Weak though this was, he was keeping the truth to himself.
“That’s stupid,” Lin snapped. “Wooden head! I was so worried, I had to send my sister. And then everything happened and she barely made it back!”
“But she’s all right?” said Thomas, barely able to breathe now that she had been mentioned.
“Song? Yes. She’s fine,” Lin said, his brows lifting quizzically at Thomas’s interest. Good, he did not know.
They disembarked on Zizhong Road, where Hua’s family lived in a third-floor room so crowded Thomas wondered how Uncle Hua could run a gambling operation in it. Lin and Hua’s wife talked in light, percussive Shanghainese—bird talk, Thomas always thought when he heard it—while the children, two boys and a girl, watched in silence. Thomas relaxed a little, looking around, for Hua’s wife sounded normal, which to him meant that she knew her husband’s whereabouts.
Ah, there was the gaming table, behind a curtain. The small space also contained beds, a shelf of books, a single charcoal burner for cooking and heating, and a yellow-painted night stool in one corner half-hidden behind another curtain, merely a bucket with a simple lid and a seat on top.
The place was small, but the family benefited in all ways from the city outside. Lin Ming broke off from his chat with Hua�
�s wife for a moment to show Thomas the basket and rope the family lowered to the street to exchange coins with vendors when they heard the cries of their favorite snacks: Steamed rice cakes made of rugosa rose and white sugar! Shrimp-dumpling and noodle soup! And—From the east side of the Huangpu River—beans of five-fold flavor! The basket went down with a few coins, and came up with food.
And then there was the gambling business, the gaming table. Thomas certainly hoped his savings were safe.
At that moment Hua’s wife suddenly released a long, high-pitched wail of grief, shaking her hands in the air as if they burned. It was ice-cold clear that until that moment, she had thought her husband safe at the house off Rue Lafayette.
There were so many dead that most of them had been piled quickly into common graves while the tapering rain washed the gutters clean of blood. Thomas and Lin exchanged a look of pure pain as they realized where Hua must have ended up and, each man holding an arm, they helped Hua’s suddenly weak wife to a chair. For a long time that day they sat with her, while she alternated between keening sobs and tearful conversation, none of which Thomas understood as it poured out of her. He felt awful; Hua had gone out looking for him.
“It was his fate,” Lin told him, when they finally picked their way back down the stairs to the hot, noisy street.
Before their departure, Thomas had seen him repeat his condolences and then insist she accept all the cash he had on him. Now, it appeared that Hua’s unfortunate ending was not his burden anymore. But it’s mine. Just like Wing Bean.
“I asked about your money,” Lin said. “She has no idea where it is, if there is any. Hua was down right before he disappeared, almost three thousand.”
“Figures,” said Thomas. Was this the first of his many punishments? Because that was his savings, vanished. Everything had happened so quickly—the turn, the discord, the unexpected ninth—and now he was broke, and could not leave. And yet Song had come to him too, which in its own way made it right, all of it.