by Nicole Mones
“Ah,” said Morioka, his eyes widening in understanding. “You are Jew. Many your people live Hongkou.”
This hung somewhat frighteningly in the air, until he bowed and walked away. “Ready?” Thomas whispered urgently, with a glance to the music stand. David nodded, raised his violin, and followed him when he counted down.
Lin Ming arrived in Shanghai with five thousand in his money belt, riding high on having reached his threshold at last. But he did not go to the Osmanthus Pavilion right away, where Pearl would be waiting; first he had an important meeting with the Jewish leaders in Hongkou, about the Resettlement Plan.
He hastened out of the train station, still an empty shell. Only the tracks had been repaired, along with the necessary walkways, and trains and passengers came and went as before. Much had been cleaned up and even rebuilt in the two years since the battle, but the city was still missing its spark; it looked to Lin like a prison of sad, huddled brown buildings. Nobody referred to it by Ye Shanghai anymore, Night in Shanghai. Now Hei’an Shijie was the term people used. The Dark World. Walking to the trolley, he felt the darkness all around.
But even the gloom could not dampen his excitement about the meeting. The Resettlement Plan was no longer a secret, having been passed in open legislative session, and retaliation from the Japanese could come at any time, so he was careful. He changed routes twice, and several times entered shops only to exit through a back door onto some other street. By the time he met David Epstein at the alley door to his building, as planned, he knew no one had seen him.
“Thank you for bringing these men together,” he said, when they were inside.
David guided him through long interior corridors past dozens of doors, each marked with a tiny scroll case, each little room housing a family. Most rooms lacked windows, so their doors sat open, and he nodded in polite acknowledgment to the families inside, as they passed. He knew that the Japanese authorities had labeled the Jews “stateless persons” and otherwise left them alone, but this was the first time he had actually seen how they were living. “Thank you for bringing me,” he said, but David brushed it off. “You are the friend of Thomas,” he said, in a tone which said that settled everything.
Inside, he found three men waiting beside David’s wife and son, an older European man with a tonsure-shaped fringe of white hair, a dark-haired European in his prime, and an Asian man, also young and strong-looking.
David introduced Lin Ming, and the older man spoke. “I am Herr Ackerman. This is Amleto Vespa and An Gong Geun. Mr. An is the younger brother of An Jung Geun, the Korean revolutionary martyr. As for Mr. Vespa, he is from Rome, and I from Vienna, and we represent the Sword of David Society. We fought for you here in Hongkou in ’thirty-seven, did you know that? We sabotaged Japanese positions and equipment constantly, and planted bombs in their trucks.”
Lin inclined his head. “It is known. No other foreign groups fought with us, and we thank you and respect you for that.”
Now that it was recognized, Ackerman waved it away. “We are in your debt for what your government has proposed.”
“I am only the messenger,” Lin said. “And do not thank me yet, for we need your help. We need money, U.S. dollars and gold bars, at least fifty thousand worth, as fast as possible. Plans are already drawn up for barracks and kitchens and food delivery along the Burma Road.”
Lin watched as they looked at one another, nodding, and saw that this huge sum was no problem for them. “There are dangers,” he cautioned. “We need this money delivered in Chongqing—and the Japanese will do anything to stop us bringing one hundred thousand Jews to China. They know it will earn us sympathy from the West. They will put a high price on your heads. They are very smart.”
An and Vespa exchanged hard, needle-sharp looks. “Not smart like we are,” An said, speaking for the first time.
Vespa nodded. He was medium height, dark-haired, wiry, and looked like he had steel cables under his skin when he moved his jaw to speak. “Just tell us where you want that first package delivered.”
Before Lin left, Margit took him aside. “Thomas said I could ask you this. Please—I hope it’s all right. My cousin Hannah Rosen, in Vienna? She has two children? I am afraid they will die there—the Chinese Consul in Vienna is giving visas, but somehow she could not get one. If you can ask Dr. Kung—if there is anything he can do—”
“I will ask,” he promised. Her eyes were brimming, and he took a clean lawn handkerchief from his pocket and gave it to her for a moment.
He left the meeting, still cautious, yet feeling grand too, because they were going to save lives, right under the noses of the Japanese and the Germans. Not a few lives. Many.
And now, Pearl. Life was on his side again.
He boarded a trolley, and found a seat near the rear door, the safest position since one could melt off the car and escape in case of trouble.
But he rode in ease, clacking along the streets, watching people step on and step off, his chest bursting with delight. I am coming, Pearl. I am almost there. He dismounted through the back door and walked to Stone Lion Lane.
He arrived to find the Pavilion closed, its gate locked, not entirely surprising at this hour of the morning. He knocked until the old gatekeeper opened a small metal window within the gate.
“Old Feng! Let me in.”
“Mister Lin—is it you?”
“Who else? Open up. I want to see Pearl.”
“No Pearl here.”
“Of course she’s here.” Lin ignored the frightened pounding in his head. “Top of the stairs, third room on the right.”
But Old Feng looked not too clear. Was his mind going dim?
“She wore that red satin jacket in the winter.”
Feng’s eyes came into focus. “With the fur trim, that one! Oh yes, Zhuli. Sweet girl. But she is gone now. More than two weeks.”
The earth seemed to drop out from under Lin’s feet, and the old man opened the metal door for him. Lin pushed past the madam, and the girls, who suddenly all looked strange to him, and took the stairs three at a leap to her room.
He opened the door, and everything had changed, the clothes, the smell. A woman lay in the bed beneath a man who turned his head and snarled, “Ei? Sha jiba!” Stupid dick!
Lin backed out, running. A minute later he was out the gate with an address in his hand, given him by the madam: the place to which Pearl had been sent. He did not even hear Old Feng’s farewell.
The first part of his hope started to shrivel when he realized the address was in Zhabei, a Japanese area. As soon as he crossed Suzhou Creek on the bridge at the end of Carter Road, passing out of the Lonely Island and into enemy territory, he could feel the change. The Japanese were all around, women, children, families, elders, and men in uniform, everywhere. It no longer looked like a Chinese place.
He came almost to the green edge of the Cantonese cemetery before he found the address: a long, low, white featureless building, with a line of Japanese soldiers snaking out the front door and down the road as far as he could see.
It’s where they keep women.
A roaring in his ears seemed to drown everything else out, as he pushed his way past the line, up to the desk. “Zhang Zhuli?” he said, over and over, and wrote out the characters, which were the same in Japanese kanji.
The man called someone else from the back, who took the name and checked it against a ledger. “Not here,” he said, handing the card back.
“Please! She was sent here!”
The first man pulled out another, older book from beneath the desk, and the second man opened it and flipped through it grudgingly.
Just as he was reaching to close it, he saw her. “Here,” he said, and turned the ledger to show her name. It had a line through it.
“Where is she now?” Lin croaked.
“Gone away,” said the man, and closed the book.
Lin stepped back, reeling. That means dead. “Are you sure?” he said, his voice remote, as if it
came from somewhere outside himself.
“Sure,” the man barked back, glaring. Shanghai was a vassal city, and its whores, living or dead, were not his concern.
A ringing in Lin Ming’s ears blocked everything as he pushed out, past the line of men waiting to get in. He walked blindly. But then a shout made him stop short, and he saw he had been about to walk into a cart being hauled by two men. In it were eight or ten girls’ bodies stacked like so much cordwood. They had been stripped naked, since their clothes at least still had some value, and their bodies heaped up with a sheet of burlap over them. Their bare white feet stuck out, jouncing with every bump in the road. It was that pitiful sight, the jiggling pile of feet, that cracked his shell and brought out his first long howl of pain.
Thomas had come to know all the voices in his building. He followed the lives of its tenants, their anger and laughter, conversations, the hours at which they came and went. When they had visitors, he knew whether it was someone new or a person who had come to the door before.
So he was surprised one morning to hear a familiar voice outside. It was a man’s voice, someone he knew, and he spoke Chinese in clear, bell-like tones that even Thomas, who still understood only a few words of the language, recognized as cultured. He jumped up and threw on his clothes, unable to place the voice. All he knew was that he never expected to hear it in this Frenchtown alley.
Downstairs, he was startled to discover H. H. Kung attracting a fast-growing circle of onlookers to his front door. The Premier was instantly recognizable.
“Dr. Kung,” Thomas said. He had met the man several times at the Royal, in what felt like another lifetime. “Please come in.”
“Thank you.” Kung touched the rim of his bowler in the American style he had acquired in college and never lost. “But if you don’t mind—” He sent a glance to the lane-mouth, thirty or forty meters down, where Thomas saw his car and driver waited. He understood.
In the car, Kung explained. “It is Lin Ming. He has been working for the Jewish Resettlement Plan, as you know. He arrived in Shanghai four days ago, conducted a very important secret meeting for the Plan, and then vanished.”
“Here? In Shanghai?” the words shook as they came out, for people were getting killed all the time. And it made no sense that Lin would come to the city and not contact him.
Kung raised a hand. “He is alive, but not well. My people found him today. That’s why I came to you.”
“Where is he?”
“In the Daitu.”
The Badlands. That was one word Thomas knew. “Was he kidnapped?”
“No.” Kung sighed heavily. “Pearl is dead. His intended. It seems he has been out of his senses ever since he learned. I have sent three of my men in to talk to him, but no one can make him leave.”
“Drinking?”
“No. Heroin. It’s worse than opium.” The car pulled up outside the iron gates to the Hollywood, its lights blinking even in the daytime, its grassy front lot already packed with dark, square-topped motorcars.
“He’s in there?” Thomas said, dismayed at the sprawl of the complex, where it was rumored customers died every night of some excess or other.
“I cannot go in and reason with him,” Kung said, his voice pinched with frustration. “You saw what happened when I stood outside your door for a few minutes. Please. Go and bring him out. He will listen to you.”
As soon as he entered the lobby, Thomas felt he was inside some giant machine full of noise and flashing lights. The din of a mediocre orchestra came from behind one set of doors, and the strains of a competing cover band floated from another. Following Kung’s instructions, he made his way to a small drug room at the end of the easternmost corridor, where he found Lin Ming on a narrow rattan daybed, one of four occupied by men who were similarly reclining, eyes half-lidded, apparently unaware of each other.
“Lin.” He jostled his shoulder. “Time to go.”
His friend’s head turned so slowly he seemed to trail phosphorescence with his chin. He gazed out through pinpoint pupils, from a far distance. “Little Greene.”
“Come on. Car’s waiting.”
Lin let Thomas lift him by the shoulders until he was sitting up, but when Thomas took hold of both his wrists and tried to pull him to his feet, he crumpled. “Can’t go out there.”
“Outside?”
“There.” Lin’s glass eyes went to the door, and Thomas understood. Lin was seeing the place where Pearl had been taken, the place Shanghai whispered about, where Chinese girls were used by a different Japanese soldier every fifteen minutes until they died.
“I know,” he said, and gathered his friend into his arms. “But you’re not going alone.” And he maneuvered him to his feet.
In the car, they quickly realized the best thing to do was to take him to Thomas’s room, where Thomas could stay by him as he came out of it. “He’s going to be sick,” Kung warned. “It lasts three days when they stop.”
Once they got him up the ladder and on the bed, Kung tried to give Thomas a small roll of cash, for Lin’s expenses, but Thomas refused. “I’m working.”
“Please.” Kung pushed the cash into his shirt pocket. “He is my friend too. At least you should have cash for his needs.” He looked around the small, low-ceilinged room. “And, if I may.” He pulled off another bill and stuck it in the same pocket. “Buy a night stool. He is going to need it.”
“All right.”
“When he comes out of it, tell him I am very, very sorry about Pearl—but also, tell him he did well. The package is on its way to Chongqing. Many people will live because of him—women and children.”
“I’ll tell him.”
“Thank you, Little Greene. May I call you that? That’s how he always refers to you.”
“Sure. And you’re welcome.”
Dr. Kung picked up his bowler and turned nimbly, like a large cat, to retreat feet first down the ladder into the Huang family’s room as if he did such a thing every day.
Thomas sat through the first night with Lin, and for the next few days traded off with Alonzo, who worked evenings. There was nothing they could do, really, except sponge him down and tell him it would end, calm him when he grew agitated, and cajole him into taking soup, even when it came back up again. By the fourth day he was sweaty and pale, but himself again.
“You’ve been sleeping on the floor?” Lin’s exhausted eyes traveled to the stack of folded quilts and pillows against the wall. “I’m sorry. How many days?”
“Three. Feeling better?”
“No. You should have left me.”
“Sure, pal. You think we’re letting you go that easy?”
“Who’s we?”
“Alonzo. Me. And Keiko, she made soup for you. Charles and Ernest wanted to come, but I didn’t want them to see you like you were.”
Lin turned his face to the wall. “I wish you had left me.”
Thomas argued with him no more that day, but kept him there in his tingzijian, and made sure he spent time with Alonzo, too, so that he would never be alone. On many days, Alonzo brought Lin along to hear Thomas’s performances with David, and so it was natural that he eventually brought his bass, too, and started sitting in. Alonzo did not read, so he just listened to a few bars and then joined in, creating bottom lines of surprising complexity and even a hint of swing.
When they came to sections that were naturally repetitive, like the call-and-response sequence between the violin and piano in the first movement of one of the Mozart violin sonatas, they would pause on the pattern, and run back and forth over it; once in a while, Thomas and Alonzo flatted the seventh or third, or hesitated extra long to give more syncopation than the composer intended. The audience always cheered at these digressions, but it was the smile from Lin Ming that they were looking for.
One night Thomas was invited to David and Margit’s for dinner, and Lin did not want to go. Congested with a summer cold, he said he would stay in, and go to sleep early on the floor, wher
e he insisted on making his bed these days, claiming beds were too soft for him anyway. “Go,” he said. “I am all right.”
So Thomas took a trolley downtown and walked north along the Bund and across the Garden Bridge—bowing to Japan—to Hongkou, the dense, ramshackle district that was now the refuge of the Jews. David had written out long, baroque instructions with arrows and diagrams, because his apartment did not have an address of its own, tucked as it was into a labyrinth of rooms subdivided from some larger building.
David saw him coming down the long, dim tunnel, and let out a cry of welcome, drawing him into a room with one tiny window, high up in the wall. It had been made cheerful with a checkered cloth on the table, and the good smell of stew rising from the stove.
Thomas hugged Margit and reached down to shake hands with Leo. “Aren’t you two brave to bring a youngster so far,” he said.
“Brave?” said David. “No, so lucky! You cannot imagine how hard it was to get out, how dangerous. But we are the lucky ones, yes. Mark the words. They mean to kill us, all of us.”
“That’s awful,” said Thomas. “There are millions of you in Europe.”
This brought Margit decisively to her feet. “Shall we eat?” she said, and soon was ladling hot stew into bowls, and cutting a freshly baked loaf into thick slices to pair with a crock of butter.
Before they ate, David lowered his eyes and intoned a prayer in Hebrew, of which Thomas understood only one word, Yisroel. Then he said, “That was a prayer to give thanks to God, that we are here, alive and free; that so many of us got out of Germany and Austria, and that here we have made new lives—thanks to friends like you.”
Margit buttered a piece of bread for Leo. “To see us now, you cannot imagine how impossible it was to get out of Vienna. We were desperate. The Nazis would let us leave only if we had a visa for someplace else.”
“And no country would give us one,” said David.
“Then how did you get out?”
“God led us out,” said David. “God sent us the Chinese Consul General in Vienna, a righteous man named Ho Feng-Shan.”