by Nicole Mones
“It is my honor to serve the people,” she said automatically, thinking with a pang of Plum Blossom, who was expecting her this weekend, and would wait for her all day.
“All right,” he said, and signed the form. “Two weeks.”
The next day she was in Xi’an, and this time she went straight to the temple near the Eighth Route Army Liaison Office.
From the outside, it looked the same as when she had first seen it four years before, but anything could have happened. Maybe someone had found the diamonds. If so, it was fate. She entered the main chamber and meditated for a time to calm herself. If the diamonds are there or if they are not, I accept it. Plum Blossom, I’m sorry to abandon you. The monk came by, nodded to her, neutral, his face empty of recognition. He had forgotten her. She waited until he left, then walked into the empty courtyard and moved close to the wall, heart jumping, until she found the spot and felt the moss intact, grown over the stone she had prised out and replaced so long ago.
Using a small knife, her fingers freezing, she worked the rock loose. There: the pouch, still waiting. The Goddess of Mercy had smiled on her, a fellow woman. She took it and fixed the wall.
Back inside the shadows of the temple, she sat again, heart racing. She was committed now. She had the diamonds and she was going.
She had always had a vision of the moment when she would place the little black pouch in his hands. Maybe she would do it on the ship, or maybe when they docked in the Beautiful Country. She loved the scene no matter where she set it, and she lived it again and again like a moving picture, or a favorite dream. It was her portal, and she followed it now to the Xi’an train station and the steaming, belching Number Twenty-one to Shanghai.
Morioka was irritated by the intrusion of his secretary, who clicked his heels and bowed abjectly. “So sorry, Admiral. We pleaded with him to meet with an assistant, but he insists on seeing you. It is the German, Gestapo Colonel Meisinger. He is here, in the outer office.”
“What! Here in Shanghai?” It was Monday morning and he was only halfway through the stack of cables from Tokyo, some of which mentioned this Josef Meisinger wanting to discuss the Jews here in Shanghai. But to arrive here, uninvited . . .
Now he was trapped. “Show him to the downstairs east parlor,” he said tightly, “and interrupt us after five minutes.”
He pushed back from his desk and saw the calendar—the first of December, 1941. He took a deep breath, steadying himself by imagining the opening bars of the Mozart violin sonata as he had heard it in the lobby of Le Cercle Sportif a few days before. He had to appear normal, smooth, no more agitated than any Admiral in charge of naval operations at the mouth of the Yangtze ought to be. Meisinger must suspect nothing.
Morioka strode into the unfurnished east parlor. If Meisinger found it uncomfortable to stand in the frigid, unheated room, he did not let on. He was blond and solidly built, almost heavy; his features were even and would have been handsome, except for his dissolute mouth.
“Admiral,” said the Colonel jovially, as if they were equals.
Morioka hardened. But his voice was neutral as he spoke in simple English instead of calling a German interpreter, which would raise the risk of whatever they said being repeated. “What I can do for you?”
“I have come on a private mission, my government to yours.”
“Be brief.”
Meisinger blinked, surprised, Morioka’s coolness finally penetrating his blond wall of self-assurance. “It concerns our Jews,” Meisinger said. “Germany’s Jews. The ones in Shanghai.”
“Your Jews? Germany’s Jews?”
“You have twenty-five thousand of them here.”
“They are stateless people. You took away their German citizenship, is it not?”
“We did. But they are still our enemies, and we have a new plan for them now. It won’t be finalized until our Conference at Wannsee next month, but we are ready to build camps. We’ll take care of all the Jews in Europe. We need your help with only one little group—the ones you have here.”
Meisinger leaned forward, and his milky European smell wafted over the Admiral. Batakusai, Morioka thought with distaste, stinks of butter. “What is it you want?”
“For you to kill them,” Meisinger said.
Morioka stared. “All those people?”
The overweight blond man returned his gaze insolently. “Not difficult. They all go to their temples on Rosh Hashanah, and that is when you gather them up. Load them into boats without food and water and send them out to sea, or set up a camp on an island downriver and let them starve.”
Morioka stopped trying to conceal his revulsion. “Why?”
“Because they must be eliminated,” said Meisinger calmly. “So we cannot leave your twenty-five thousand here.” With his words came another gust of sour breath. “You understand.”
Morioka’s eyes shot to the door. He had seven thousand new troops arriving on warships in the next twenty-four hours alone; teams of assistants awaited him.
Why should he kill them when he had a war to fight?
“So you will give me your decision?” said Meisinger.
“In time,” Morioka said, though he had made his decision already, days before, listening to Mozart. You will not harm my Jews. If you want them, you will have to take Shanghai from me to get them.
He had less than a week left until the attack.
Song made it to Shanghai on Saturday the sixth. The dark-skinned Ceylonese gem trader she visited in a small side street off the Bund did not even blink at the mismatch between her bedraggled rural clothes and the fantastic value of the single gem she presented, used as he was to the eccentric habits of the rich. A specialist in anonymous cash transactions, he counted out her money with studied disinterest.
She melted back into the crowd. No one looked twice at her in her plain padded jacket, another war-battered refugee fleeing destruction and starvation in the countryside, and this served her well until she tried to ask the doorman at the Palace Hotel where Greene and Epstein were playing, and he barked her right off the steps. The doorman at the Cathay across the street was kind enough to tell her they would be at the Astor House the next day.
There, the British doorman took one look at her on Sunday afternoon and held up his hand, barring her from entry, but he stepped back quickly enough when she slipped a roll of bills into his hand. She could hear them, playing on the other side of the lobby, and just as it had been since the very first time, she felt everything about her lift at his sound, ordered yet unexpected, opening a higher vista of what life could be, if she had the will to see it and hear it.
And then the song stopped, abruptly—they had seen her. They were staring, and so was everyone else in the lobby.
Thomas was across the floor to her in an instant, David behind. “Are you all right?” he said, touching her filthy face, as if two years of separation were gone in an instant.
She covered his hand with hers. “I am well. It is safer to travel like this.” She looked around the columned lobby, filled with expensively dressed white people. All of you have no idea what is about to happen. “Let’s go someplace to talk.”
The three of them stepped into a small side room where David and Thomas left their hats and overcoats. “Japan is preparing a major assault on Shanghai.”
David and Thomas exchanged glances. “We’ve seen the soldiers,” said Thomas. “And also, I’ve heard things.” He thought of what Anya had told him.
“There are many more soldiers than you can see,” she said. “At least five thousand in a ring around the city, waiting to pounce. I came down here because the opinion of our leaders is that they are preparing to attack the International Settlement. The Gudao. Any day.”
Thomas and David were silent.
“That means British and Americans,” she said. “You cannot be taken prisoner by the Japanese. Do you understand? You must leave. Now.”
“What about David and his family? All the Jews?”
> “This attack is not against them. They are already under the control of Japan, and Japan leaves them alone, as they do the French. The only armed forces here are the British and American soldiers protecting the Gudao. If the Imperial Army is sending ten thousand men, it is for them.” She paused. “You must go.”
“I can’t,” Thomas said. “Don’t have the money.”
“But I do. A boat sails at nine thirty tonight for San Francisco. I’ll get the tickets.”
“Stop joking. How could you have enough to buy them?”
“I do,” she said stubbornly. “And I will. You too, if you want,” she turned to David. “And your family. Though I believe you are safe.”
“You are kind, but”—he raised his hands, still holding his violin—“if we sail to the United States, they will send us back to Germany. No, we stay here.” He turned to Thomas, his arms open, and they held each other for a long, speechless minute. “Thank you,” said Thomas, and David refused to hear it, just as Thomas had refused to hear it from Lin Ming.
He turned to Song. “You’re going with me.” It was not a question.
She took a deep breath. “Yes.” She had the diamonds, they were in her pocket, so why did the words seem to catch in her throat and not want to come out?
He took her in his arms. “But there’s a problem,” he said, and she pulled back to see him. “I can’t leave my men here.”
“Get them! What time is it?”
“Around quarter to eight.”
“Get them.”
“Song! How many tickets can you buy?”
“How many men do you have?”
“Three. And they play with five others. So you see—”
“Bring them all,” she said.
“Are you sure you—”
“Hurry! Meet me at the Old Dock off Broadway Road. The anchor goes up at nine thirty—go! Make them believe you.” And she gave him a push, away from her.
At the front door of Ladow’s, he talked his way quickly past Senhor Tamaral, the Macanese floor manager whose suit hung loose from his whippet frame. The cavernous ballroom was full, and he sidestepped waiters, and silk-clad dance hostesses. Once, this place had seemed grand to him, with its two-story box-beam ceiling, its balcony mezzanines running the length of the room on each side. Now it was all finished.
He waited until the song ended, then whispered to Earl Whaley. “Call a break. Please. Emergency.”
Earl’s brows drew together. “Who do you think you are? We are thirty minutes from a break.”
“Something’s happened.” He motioned with his eyes toward the door and the outside. “We have to talk.” At last Whaley relented, and the men pulled in around F. C. Stoffer’s piano, to hear Thomas’s explanation.
“Bullshit” was Earl’s reaction, when he finished.
“It’s true. Tickets for everyone who wants to go. Tonight.”
“You know how much money that is?” said Stoffer.
“Who’s this friend?” said Alonzo. “Mister Lin?”
“No. Lin’s in Hong Kong.”
“I know,” said Ernest. “His sister. That fine woman.” His guess was confirmed by Thomas’s face.
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” said Alonzo. “She coming too?”
But Earl cut back in. “Now listen! This is all nothing, empty as a gin bottle Sunday morning. You don’t believe him.” His eyes circled his men. “Do you?”
Uncertainty skipped from one to the other. All had seen the buildup of soldiers, and each had found his own explanation to rationalize it, until tonight.
“I been paying you for years,” said Earl, “and you’re gonna listen to him? Look at all that yellow on him. And he plays their music, too, every day of the week. Classical! With a damn German!”
“A Jew,” said Thomas. “From Austria.”
This Earl waved away. “Don’t believe what he says. He’s not one of us.”
“He is,” said Ernest.
Thomas raised his hands. “It doesn’t matter what I play, or who I am. We all came here for the same reason, and I never wanted to leave either. But if they invade the Lonely Island, it’s going to vanish beneath the water. You won’t be playing anymore. And tonight we can go, all of us, before it happens.”
“Bullshit,” Earl repeated.
A silence fell as the line deepened in the sand. Finally Alonzo spoke, slowly. “You keep talkin’ like that. You go on. You just go right ahead on.” He rose, relaxed, flaunting the accumulation of years behind him. “I’m getting my bass.”
Thomas almost collapsed in thanks.
“Us too,” said Ernest, and he and Charles laid their horns in their cases.
“Listen to me!” Earl thundered. “Any one of you goes down to the dock to try to get on this imaginary boat, don’t bother coming back. You won’t have a job here tomorrow!”
“Earl,” said Thomas. “Come with us.”
“You’re out of your mind,” Whaley retorted. “Well? Earl?” he said to his guitar player, Earl West.
“Not going,” said West.
He fixed his eyes on the bassist, Reginald Jones. “You?”
Jones shook his head. “Take more than that to make me leave my Filipina sweetie.”
“Stoffer?” Earl said to his pianist. “You going?”
Stoffer said, “No. Staying with you.”
Thomas sank inside, his eyes searching the five of them one last time. “You sure?”
No one spoke. The minute hand was advancing. Thomas seemed to hear Lin Ming’s voice, as clear as if his friend were not in Hong Kong but still standing next to him. An inch of gold can’t buy an inch of time. They’d had their inch. Time to go.
He led the way, and the four of them strode past a dance floor full of stilled, silent patrons. As they stepped out into the street, Thomas said only one word to Alonzo, maybe the bluest word he knew at that moment, “Keiko.”
“A hell of a thing,” said the older man, and turned toward their apartment, which was close.
Thomas waited outside while the three of them ran upstairs, the brothers to grab a few belongings, and Alonzo to say good-bye.
“You don’t have your things,” said Ernest when they came back down.
“I have my music.” Thomas raised his briefcase.
Alonzo came down last, sick with sorrow, and they took off together at a run, back up Rue Vincent Mathieu toward Avenue Édouard VII.
Thomas kept asking people the time on the trolley, until the car clanged to a stop on the Bund and they jumped off, instruments swinging; it was nine fifteen. “It’s faster to cross the Garden Bridge on foot. But we can’t run,” he said. “Walk.” And so in an agony of slow, absurd steps they covered the long stretch past Jardine Matheson, Canadian Pacific, and the British Consulate, casual American musicians out with their instruments on Sunday night. Then they came to the bridge.
“Tomette!” shouted one of the sentries.
They halted.
“Ogigi oshite!” another screamed, and they all understood this too, since no one in Shanghai crossed this bridge without bowing to Japan. Alonzo managed it as best he could with one hand balancing his instrument case.
It was not enough. One of the soldiers raised the butt of his rifle and knocked Alonzo to the ground. He fell awkwardly, and his bass hit with a dissonance of wood and strings.
“Nanda?” the soldier demanded, taking a swing at the case to make the sound again.
“No!” Alonzo pleaded. “Please, no, it’s an instrument—” And he got to his knees beside the case. “Look. Look. I’ll show you. All right?” Slowly, cautiously, because seven bayonet-tipped rifles were now aimed at his head, he eased his long-fingered hands toward the brass latches, unsnapped them, and lifted the lid.
The soldiers leaned forward. Excited spatters of Japanese were exchanged. “Now listen, fellows.” Alonzo had somehow regained his paternal calm. “Lemme just show you.” And he lifted the instrument, set it on its end pin, and gave it a practiced twirl u
ntil it landed light and exact against his hand. The soldiers rumbled, their weapons still poised, and he plucked off a quick, rippling run.
“Jūbun!” cried one of the soldiers with a wave of his arm, and Alonzo grabbed the case with one hand and the neck of the bass with the other as the three of them sprinted across, laughing through their fear, flying. They could see the German and Soviet consulates at the other end, and the huddled brown stone walls of Broadway Mansions.
Church bells pealed the time: nine thirty.
Too late too late too late. They ran gasping, heaving, turned right at the Astor House to reach the Old Dock faster. “There it is,” Thomas said, and suddenly in front of them was the liner, the sheer black vertical hull of it. Sailors were just working loose the ropes.
Song stood watching them from up above a wooden piling, saw as they came running, and then stopped short at the ship in front of them. The river was deep here, and the liners nestled up to their berths instead of using lighters.
The men looked all around, frantic to find her. She counted four of them, including Thomas. She checked, and counted again. Four.
Life, or love?
She fanned the tickets out in her hands. She always had to choose. Why did fate always force her? When she was young, it was her happiness or her family’s survival, not both. Now she could be a patriot, or a woman. But not both.
Four men waited for her below.
Just then she heard a long, low boat horn calling from downriver, and because of where she stood, she could see far. She strained into the night, watching the form of something in the river come closer, something large, until she saw it was a battleship, and behind it steamed another, and another behind that, a whole line of warships coming up the river.
So the attack was starting tonight.
Anger ignited within her, rage she had felt at her father, and at Du, and at those who would keep down girls like Plum Blossom, like herself. Watching the line of ships, she understood that without this feeling, she would wither and die. She would go cold. And then he will go cold to me too.
She fanned out four of the tickets, and let the rest drop from her hands to the dark river below, where they vanished. “Thomas!” she called.