Night in Shanghai

by Nicole Mones

  He did not mention the future, and he did not ask her what she did all day, either, for when they arose at midday, she always left, and did not rejoin him until she arrived at the Royal sometime that night. He understood her commitment, so he kept quiet, afraid to ask her to choose.

  Outside their door, the city was sliding. The Green Gang was rudderless without Du, causing all the areas of Shanghai life it had once controlled to tip into disorder. The guilds of beggars and undertakers, peddlers, touts, and night soil collectors all ceased to function. Somehow the trains ran, though the station itself was a shell, and every train leaving Shanghai seemed to be full of residents streaming out of the city.

  Yet those who remained kept coming to the Royal, frantic, determined, wading through hillocks of rubble in their silks and flashing jewels, crossing into the blessedly unoccupied areas of the French Concession and the International Settlement, now dubbed the Gudao, or Lonely Island. The drinks flowed, the restaurants served, The Good Earth played at the Grand Theater, and when darkness fell and the Kings stepped out on the stage to a full house, it felt almost like it had felt before.

  But soon Japanese men started showing up, peering into things, checking the kitchens, counting the staff. This was the real Shanghai, Thomas understood, not the free-roaming symphony of opportunity and respect he had first glimpsed, but a hard-grinding machine of money and power, the kind you see and the kind you don’t, with no music to it at all.

  The person he needed to help sort this out was Lin, but he had been in Hong Kong doing a job for H. H. Kung to raise the money to buy out his girlfriend. It was almost New Year’s before Thomas finally saw his friend’s spindly form in the archway to the lobby. “Call the men over,” Lin said. “I have come back to chaos.”

  “Did you at least make enough to meet your goal?” said Thomas. Lin had revealed how much it would cost him to buy Pearl out, a daunting amount, five thousand.

  “Far from it. But I am closer. And you? And Song?”

  “We’re well.” They had gone to Lin, to tell him everything, before he left for Hong Kong.

  “Have you been taking care of her?”

  “I would take care of her forever, if she would have me.”

  “She has her own ideas.”

  “I know,” Thomas said, his face pinched by so much yearning that Lin laid a hand on his arm in sympathy.

  The men were gathering around. Lin said, “The Tung Vong Company has been dissolved. The Green Gang has fallen apart. Three of you live in housing provided by the Gang.” He looked at Thomas, Charles, and Ernest. “That’s over. You must be out by the first of next month, by January first, nineteen thirty-eight. I’m sorry.”

  The murmur went around the group that it was not his fault.

  “Charles,” he said, “Ernest. You have some place to go?”

  “They can stay with me and Keiko,” Alonzo volunteered. “We’ve got the spare room.” This brought a murmur of thanks.

  “Lester and Errol, you live with your girlfriends—right? Thomas?”

  “I’ll stay in my studio. But what about the club?” As bandleader, he was responsible for the others and their livelihood. “Japanese have been in here, looking around. And if there’s no Tung Vong Company—”

  “I know,” said Lin. “The ballroom has been running on its own steam, making money. But I have no control over what our new masters do—none.”

  “Are we safe?” said Charles.

  Lin smiled patiently at the same old question. “Yes and no. Anything is possible, and we all know about the massacre in Nanjing that began while I was gone.” They all nodded gravely; though none had a personal connection to it, the Rape of Nanjing sounded almost too horrible to believe.

  “But here,” Lin continued, “the battle is over. Your country is neutral. As long as America is not Japan’s enemy, you should be safe here. No promising. But if America enters the war against Japan, that is the difference. You cannot be here. You must be gone before that. Everyone understand?”

  Several protested that America would never enter the war, and so there was no chance they could ever be anything but neutral, but they all agreed to the risks anyway.

  Thomas had been told this before. Who was it, Avshalomov? Or Anya? He had seen Anya when he was walking up Tianjin Road the week before; she was entering the Grand Shanghai Hotel. He had drawn back, silent, to watch her, thinking it felt as if years had passed since they were together, not months, so different was he now. No, he thought as the lobby doors closed behind her, it is Shanghai itself that has changed.

  In late January, the conquerors got the Royal. Manager Zhou called them together to tell them the theater was being taken over, and he distributed their last pay. Alonzo just stood smiling as if amused by fate. The brothers looked outraged, even though they had already played long past their original contract.

  “It is not my say-so,” Zhou assured them. “I want to stay. But everything at noontime tomorrow is locked up for good, so take your instruments.” And he walked away, muttering to himself, down the hall.

  That night, everyone said, the Kansas City Kings put on their greatest show ever. People shrieked and applauded, and one or two men twirled dance partners above their heads. At the close of the last set, Thomas played his usual encore, the Rhapsody, and then another encore that put things over the top, the piece he wrote, the piece he had started playing when he was alone with Song on that magical first afternoon, which he had continued to write later, all through the months of battle.

  He started it with the undulating, cascading left hand and the cantabile melody in the right, the song of his wanderings. He played his way across the country on freight trains, and he could feel Song listening out in the audience, just as she had listened in the studio on their first day together. He crossed the ocean to the city with its rabid, unruly buildings and its clotted streets, its vigor and its free ricochet of possibilities.

  He came to the last part and played it with his eyes closed, barely aware, following the melody and the rhythm out the door and all through Frenchtown, past the waltzing, strutting dancers, the pirouetting waiters, the looping walk of the man who’s drunk too much, and the confident toss of the gambler, once, twice, again. The music rose on a crescendo of success and then sank with loss. When he came to the end, he returned as if by jazz magic to the lovely turning phrase on which everything had begun, his home, the place he had loved and left behind. He had improvised, joined their orchestra at last. Too late, maybe, but it was real, and he knew it from the screaming and stamping of the crowd.

  Then it was over, and time to pack up. Thomas could make only one final run of his hand over the eighty-eight keys while the others closed their instrument cases. Now the scuffs on the dance floor were obvious, as were the stains and cigarette burns on the velvet curtains. Nothing was sadder than a nightclub when the lights went up, and the magic of darkness was gone—even this one, in which Song now stood quietly, waiting for him.

  Lester and Errol had saved their fare; they said good-bye outside the theater. Alonzo took Charles and Ernest home to Keiko’s. Above their heads, the lights blinked out for the last time spelling the tall vertical word ROYAL.

  That night as they lay in bed, he said, “What shall we do? We can stay here if you like, I can find work. Or we could go to America, if you would do me the honor of marrying me.” He said it lightly, so as not to scare her, but still saw the pinch of hesitation in her eyes.

  For a moment, she did not speak.

  “What?”

  “Just—it is too soon. I can’t talk about this yet, first I need to go north. It’s just for a while,” she added, when she saw his face. “My dream for so long, the center of the movement, all the leaders are there, all the thinkers . . .” She pressed closer to him, willing him to understand.

  “What do you mean? How long?”

  “I don’t know, a few months,” she said. “After five years in hiding—”

  “I understand.” She neede
d the same thing he had needed when he left home and came to Shanghai, but freedom was different for him than for her. Seeing this, he wrapped her in tenderness, and gave his blessing, even though the last thing he wanted was to let her go. “Just promise you’ll come back,” he said, and she did.

  Then she was gone, and he had no work. After giving Keiko enough to cover the first month of the boys’ board, he had 430 Shanghai dollars left, not quite enough for a single tourist-class ticket even if he had wanted to go.

  The city had gone quiet, no explosions, no war planes, no rattle-pops of gunfire. Even the cold air off the river, the scent of coal smoke, had a new silence to it. There was little boat traffic. Outside, the Idzumo still sat there, its flag stiff in the winter wind, and around it were Japanese merchant ships, but for the first time, he saw no Chinese vessels, no lorchas and junks, no sampans. They had fled to other waters.

  He himself had only his piano, and fourteen handmade suits. He had chalk stripe, gabardine, seersucker, linen, basket weave, wool tropical, and winter-weight flannel, from three-piece suits to casual single-button sport coats with complementary trousers, suits for every occasion. They hung in a row along one wall, as useless as he was. You are special, his mother had told him when he was small. Opportunities come to those special enough to deserve them. Not anymore.

  Most of the clubs had closed. Only one American orchestra was still playing, and that was Earl Whaley and his Red Hot Syncopators; they had left Saint Anna’s and moved to Ladow’s Casanova, a cavernous ballroom at 545 Avenue Édouard VII. The place was owned by the Eurasian son of Louis Ladow, an American ex-con and octoroon who, before his death, had run the Carleton Hotel and Astor House ballrooms.

  There would be no spot for Thomas, since Whaley had signed on piano F. C. Stoffer, but he thought Alonzo and the two brothers might get positions. Unfortunately Charles, like Earl, played alto, but Charles was good on clarinet, too. Thomas invited the bandleader to lunch.

  “The son may be half-Chinese, but he’s still an American,” Earl Whaley said as they cut into their veal chops at the Park Hotel Grill. “So as long as America stays neutral, the Japs’ll let him keep operating. That’s the beauty, right there. Because everybody else has been shut down.”

  Thomas nodded, at the same time mentally quivering as he counted up the bill, five dollars at least, but where else were his band members going to get work? The invaders had taken everything. “I hear Japan is setting up a vice district here in Frenchtown.”

  Earl lined English peas up along his knife, precise, effortless, a sax man. “I heard about that too. It’s going to be rock bottom. Every kind of low-down operation. You stick your arm in a slot with a few dollars in it, they inject you with morphine.”

  “Music clubs?”

  Earl snorted. “If you call ’em that. Nobody’s going to play there, ’cept Filipinos.” Filipino bands worked the lowest rung of Shanghai’s club-world, always with passable renditions of the season’s hit songs.

  “And everyplace else is closed down?”

  “’Cept Ladow’s,” said Earl comfortably. “We’re changing our name, what with the new lineup—Earl Whaley and His Coloured Boys. What do you think?”

  “Good,” said Thomas, his mind churning. There was no place else. A year ago he would have dismissed Ladow’s as a second-tier establishment, since they employed dance hostesses. But that world was gone, Earl’s was going to be the only black orchestra still playing, and Ladow’s the one jazz place that had not gone Japanese, thanks to its American owner. It was his only shot.

  His mouth felt dry as paper. He reached for his tea.

  “How about some pie?” said Earl.

  “They have lemon meringue,” said Thomas, wanting to scream. Two pieces of pie was a dollar. He signaled the waiter anyway, and two wedges were slid in front of them.

  Now. They were two dark men in a white-tablecloth restaurant that was deserted save for them, waiters standing idle, in a city of dreams that had crashed into ruins. “Earl,” he said. “I need a favor.”

  Part II

  黑暗世界

  THE DARK WORLD

  After the Japanese took over, the Green Gang split apart. Some worked for the resistance, but most crossed the line to serve the enemy. They were dog’s legs, the sort of men who had to serve some master, so when the great jazz ballrooms were no more, they turned to enforcing the casinos, dance halls, opium dens, and pleasure houses of the new Japanese vice zone, the Badlands. Our era had been permissive, but the Badlands was vile. Any service could be bought, any form of sex, any wager, any drug, even murder, some said, if the price was paid. It was a cruel parody of what had been.

  Yet when it came to what I wanted for my country, which was to stand up to Japan, Shanghai had not let me down. She had fought to the end, laying down a quarter-million lives to the enemy’s seventy thousand, putting the lie to their boast that they could conquer Shanghai in three days. Nevertheless, our time was finished, and an exodus of souls had begun, a migration away from what now was a prison everyone called Hei’an Shijie, the Dark World. Some went abroad, to Hong Kong, or to the interior—west into the White areas if they followed Chiang or north into the Red if they followed Mao.

  I was reborn first through the movement, and then again, through him. After our time together I knew, no matter where the two of us were, that while he lived, I would never be alone. I knew I would return to him. But just as much, I knew I needed to go north.

  7

  IN THE WINTER of 1938, north China was split between areas controlled by Japan, the Whites, the Reds, and independent warlords loyal to one Chinese side or the other. The Communist hub was Yan’an, a backward settlement in upper Shaanxi Province. It was carved into dusty loess hills along a sluggish, silt-brown river, but to Song it was a city of gold.

  Even as a Party member, she could not just travel to Yan’an and present herself. First she had to go to Xi’an, which was in the White area, Chiang’s area, yet functioned as a neutral portal for anyone who wished to pass into Communist territory as a partisan. Song was coming on her own, without written introductions; she knew she would be expected to remain in the hostel of the Eighth Route Army Liaison Office for a few weeks while they considered her. Operations were tighter in the north, it being a military center, while the Party in Shanghai was really a propaganda organization. Maybe she should have written to Chen Xing for his help after all.

  The taxi came within sight of the rambling complex of buildings, and she told the driver not to stop, since ahead she could see a Buddhist pagoda, rising above the low-slung courtyard buildings. “There,” she said. One hand strayed to the tiny sewn-in pouch she had carried all the way from Shanghai; it would not do to take twenty-seven diamonds into the Eighth Route Army Office.

  She had told no one, and she felt especially bad about keeping the secret from Thomas, but it was only for now. She would pull out the little pouch someday and show him. Right now, though, it had to be put someplace safe.

  She walked a while with her travel-bundle, scanning the featureless stone walls. There was no hiding place, not even a small park where she could knock loose enough earth to make a hole under a rock.

  She walked back to the pagoda to pray at the temple, and think. After dropping some coins into the earthen pot, which earned an approving gaze from the bald saffron-robed monk at the altar, she lit a clutch of incense sticks and bowed and then sank low, arms outstretched, hoping for an answer. After a minute she stood, and added her incense sticks to the others burning in the dish of sand.

  “Sister,” said the monk, “you look tired. I must leave for a dot of time, but remain here if you like. See? There is a small meditation chamber. You may rest there.” And with the serene purpose of his kind, he left.

  The temple was unheated, but it was positioned to give shelter from the winds, so she passed gratefully through the door, and found herself in a smaller room, a sort of side chapel, with a tiny window giving onto a grassy back court. Lo
oking out, she saw the court was crowded with a miniature forest of steles, all erected and inscribed over the centuries in honor of the Buddha; she counted twelve of them along with a gnarled tree, limbs naked now in the February cold. The walls were high, no one could see into the courtyard. Was this the open door, the key, the escape hatch? She did not want to cross the threshold of the Eighth Route Army Office unless she had a way to get back to Thomas. She slipped out and began a search of the walls for a loose tile or stone.

  Half an hour later she was back on the street, unencumbered. The package that had seemed to burn a hole in her chemise was gone, she was free, light. She walked into the liaison office like any other believer, shoulders square and purposeful.

  When she stepped in, she felt she was slipping back in time. The windows were paned in rice paper instead of glass, filling the room with a milky light, and the only telephone was the old cup-and-cord type. Everyone wore loose trousers and a pajama-style tunic, belted at the waist.

  Her plain, long skirt, low boots, and layers of padding against the cold had been carefully chosen to look neutral and proletarian, but suddenly seemed carelessly rich, and attracted stares.

  From behind the main desk, a heavyset older woman with a close-cut cap of graying hair gave her a form to fill out. Song reached for the cheap bamboo pen and dipped it in the ink as she scanned the onionskin page. It was easy enough to write her name, and give the details of having been sworn in and commissioned as a member of the Shanghai branch, but there was no space to list anything else. She added a neat, modest note about her language abilities at the bottom and handed it back. The woman stamped it with no expression, and waved her on.