by Mingmei Yip
King Wu won the first battle, and so King Yue sent him ten carts of priceless treasures as tribute. But cleverly he also included eight of the most beautiful women in his state as peace offerings. As intended, King Wu and his ministers became so immersed in dalliance that they neglected state affairs. Tipped off by his spies, King Yue sent his army and easily defeated King Wu. Though Wu offered Yue his country and all its treasures, the victor was merciless. Wu was ordered to commit suicide in front of the very women who had brought about his ruin.
Even the most cunning man becomes a fool for a beautiful woman. Friends’ warnings fall on deaf ears. Men blind themselves to the schemes behind the pretty face and the poisons in the beloved heart. When clothes come off, thinking stops.
My job was simple in principle, though not in operation. It was to win Lung’s complete love and trust, then lure him to a place where the Red Demons gang could assassinate him. Of course I’d been told to do the murdering myself should the right situation arise. But this was really chiren shuomeng, crazy dreaming – pure wishful thinking on their part.
Because before every time I was allowed inside Lung’s bedroom or hotel room, I’d be stripped naked and searched thoroughly by Gao, his head bodyguard. I was even asked to jump up and down in case a weapon – small knife, razor, poisonous pill – had been hidden inside my vagina. Of course he’d also scrape my mouth for possible pills wedged between my teeth. Was I humiliated? No, because acquiring a thick skin was part of my training. I had learned not to be distracted by pointless feelings such as humiliation or embarrassment. These things were just part of the job, along with the singing and dancing, except that this part was in private, with only one admirer instead of a hall filled with them. But it was boring, not to mention tedious.
Whenever I came out of Lung’s room, Gao would look flushed and embarrassed. His eyes would be filled with bitterness or sadness, depending on what he’d heard – cow-slaughtering cries or puppy-beating whimpers – from my fake orgasm. Like the young master, the head bodyguard seemed to have stepped onto a dangerous path by falling for a woman he’d be better off pretending not to notice.
Anyway, even a beggar on the street in Shanghai would know that to assassinate Lung would be as difficult as to get a virgin pregnant. Lung, Zhu and all the bodyguards were extremely cautious. Gao, though, might be different, because of his crush on me. Sometimes I wondered, if I became his lover, would he kill Lung for me? But to imagine this was pointless; to seduce the bodyguard under Zhu’s sharp eyes was as likely as a baby crawling out from a virgin’s narrow gate.
Warlords, though powerful, were not invulnerable, since many ended up being assassinated. Some, however, managed to live to die in bed. But survival required constant vigilance. It was rumoured that Lung had a double who would travel in his limousine, while the boss himself went by another route. So to eliminate Lung was no simple matter. It was also rumoured that Lung wouldn’t trust any Chinese tailor for fear that he might be an assassin in disguise. Scissors in the back during a fitting were not unknown in Shanghai.
I was Wang’s means to discover his rival’s defense tactics, his daily routine, where he entered and exited, his secret hiding places, who of his guards were the most formidable. And the grand prize: Lung’s bank account.
Most of spying is not exciting but tedious, though still very dangerous. I was supposed to put together a complete list of Lung’s contacts: his close friends, relatives and all who worked for him or did business with him. Not only those in the underworld but those supposedly above it. This also included a list of the spies who worked for Lung and who, ironically, might turn out to be my boss, Big Brother Wang’s, most trusted men!
Like Lung, Wang always had an ominous feeling that he was marked for assassination. Of course the most likely source would be the Flying Dragons. So I was to try to find out who was on up Lung’s assassination list and how high up Wang was. Eliminating Lung had been Wang’s goal from the moment he became a gang head. He just hadn’t yet figured out a good plan – until his underling Mr Ho had discovered me in the orphanage.
After winning the title of Heavenly Songbird last year, I was given a luxury apartment inside the French Concession. This included a maid and a driver, but I knew full well that their real jobs were to keep track of me for Wang. I made good money, but unfortunately Wang took his half and most of the rest for ‘safekeeping.’ He knew that if I had my own money, his hold on me would be weakened. Though I was free to go places within Shanghai, I couldn’t just disappear. Wang repeatedly warned me that his gang men were everywhere, so he would know everywhere I went and everything I did.
Yet life as a nightclub singer was incomparably better than in the orphanage. I now had a comfortable apartment, which was decorated in a mixture of Chinese and Western styles. The Chinese elements – calligraphy, landscape paintings, antique furniture and vases – were there to impress on people, especially the refined ones, that I was not just a singer but one steeped in traditional culture and taste, perhaps from a prominent family. The Western decor – velvet curtains, soft sofas with silky coverings, a gilded and latticework clock and oil paintings showing classical scenes – was to show that I was also cosmopolitan.
To others I was the beautiful, sophisticated woman who had it all. But I was well aware that Big Brother Wang didn’t pay my rent because he liked my singing, but to keep me under his control. My amah and cook, Ah Fong, and driver, Ah Wen, who did almost everything for me, were also his spies. The best I could do about this was, from day one, to tip them generously, hoping they would avert their eyes or keep mum when I needed them to.
Unlike most gangsters, Lung favoured talented women. With me it was singing; before it might have been speaking a foreign language, horseback-riding or even flying a plane. For him, women like us were like a rare Ming vase, while others were but ordinary kitchenware. No doubt this was Lung’s way to compensate for starting out as a shoe-shine boy.
Now that Lung had finally fallen for me, I had to work steadily to complete my mission, because the boss of the Flying Dragons gang would not stay long with any woman. No flower blooms all year long. No matter how enamoured he was with her, Lung believed that any woman who’d warm his bed for too long would bring bad luck, polluting his bedchamber and harming his business. That was why the sudden appearance of Shadow worried me. I did not want him to be thinking of her as my successor.
But with or without Shadow, my situation would likely be lose-lose. Mission successfully completed, I’d have served my purpose. And as in the Chinese saying, ‘After the rabbits are caught, the hounds will be cooked.’
That was the inevitable fate of spies. I had read that, in China’s Harbin province, one time the Japanese sent a prostitute-spy to seduce a Russian general so as to steal his map. On this map were marked the soldiers’ positions, their planned route of attack, and their supply lines. Succeeding in stealing the map, she was able to send it to the Japanese embassy. But the Japanese never sent anyone to rescue her. Instead, they referred to her as ‘the sakura blossom without root’ and abandoned her to die alone in a prison in Siberia.
If I did not begin to plan for my escape, I was sure to end up being another sakura blossom without root, if not in Siberia, then in my own homeland. Not in a prison but sprawled in a back alley, bobbing in the Huangpu River or rotting in a well. Or, as the story was told of one of Lung’s former mistresses, fed to tigers …
Someday, probably soon, I would need to escape. I would need a plan, and I would need money. So I tried my best to save. Although I didn’t get to keep much from the nightclub, I got expensive gifts from admirers, most generously from Master Lung, who had been pampering me with American gold pieces, fur coats and lavish jewellery. Of course my boss, Wang, knew about the gifts, but he could not take away those from Lung, who might notice that they were missing. Meanwhile, I tried to waste as little as possible on frivolities like the theatre, movies, high tea or amusement parks.
However, even if I
had the money to escape, where would I go? I had neither relatives nor real friends. I knew great danger was approaching, but all I could do was wait for the right moment to act. As the sages tell us in the three-thousand-year-old Yijing, or Book of Changes, ‘If you step on the tail of a tiger but use extreme caution, you will be fortunate in the end.’
When you first glimpsed him, Lung looked quite ordinary. This was in fact a gift from heaven that enabled him to conceal his astute mind and scheming heart. But, despite his small stature, Lung could inspire fear. His dealings were of extreme complexity, but, unfortunately for me, he seemed to keep everything in his head. No one had any idea of his many business dealings. His routes were untraceable, his hiding places unfindable and even his facial expressions gave away nothing.
Lung’s gang, the Flying Dragons, took its name from the Book of Changes. The name was appropriate because Lung himself was like a dragon, whose body is always half revealed and half hidden by clouds. Lung heeded well the advice of The Art of War, ‘See all, but stay hidden.’ According to the Book of Changes, there are three kinds of dragons. One soars to heaven and leads the world; one hides in the field and waits for the auspicious moment to act; one becomes arrogant and ends up in bitter failure. The first one is the leader, the second the sage, the third the loser.
Master Lung was already a leader, would never be a sage and was certainly arrogant. So he was ripe for being overthrown. The moment would come when he would relax his vigilance, but I would not relax mine. The Chinese say, congming yishi, benzai yishi, ‘Smart for your whole life, stupid for a moment.’ All I needed was for Lung to be careless for one moment.
And that would be the moment when I would act. Because no matter how brilliantly cunning Lung was, he did have a weakness – his infatuation with beautiful, classy women. But most mistresses are enjoyed for a brief time, then cast away. Infatuation by itself is not enough. Most women did not understand that to bewitch a man, sex is only the beginning. After you have captured his heart, you must also capture his mind.
If Lung really had a heart – or even if I had one. But we both had minds – scheming ones.
7
Temple Celebration
One evening, in my living room, I was sipping tea and savouring its warmth slowly soothing my Heavenly Songbird throat. I enjoyed the warmth that I never received from human beings, except maybe Madame Lewinsky. My gaze wandered out the window at night-time Shanghai glittering like an enormous multifaceted diamond. People must be enjoying their youth, beauty and wealth out there, I mused. I knew I was getting sentimental, something I could not allow myself. Then, for no reason at all, the face of Jinying, Lung’s son, flashed into my mind. As if on cue, the telephone beside me rang like a barking dog who’d just lost sight of its master.
I picked up the receiver. ‘Hello?’
‘Camilla?’
I immediately recognised the voice that had sung ‘Looking for You’ to me at the Bund. ‘Yes, Young Master?’
‘Please, I beg you, Camilla, call me Jinying. I really don’t like to be addressed as Young Master.’
My voice switched to the teasing mode. ‘Do you have a choice?’
As the father was imprisoned by his own suspicion and superstition, the son was confined by his father’s wealth and power.
‘I … really don’t want to go into this.’
‘Why don’t you like the title of young master?’
‘Because I don’t like to be thought of as superior to you or other people.’
I almost chuckled out loud. Of course. He had been educated in America, a country that supposedly advocated liberty and equality. So his mind was liberated, or poisoned, depending on how you looked at it, by this ridiculously unrealistic concept.
‘But you are,’ I cooed into the receiver.
‘Please, Camilla.’
‘All right, Jinying, what do you want?’ Of course I knew exactly what he wanted, the same thing as his father – me. Did he think his father would share with him?
‘May I come to visit you now?’ The tone was plaintive, like that of an orphan desperate to be adopted.
That was an unexpected and daring request. But of course he was, after all, the indulged, privileged son of the most powerful gangster in Shanghai. At least he was courteous enough to ask before coming.
I inhaled deeply. ‘But why would you want to come here?’
‘Camilla, since I heard you sing at Bright Moon and at the Bund, I just can’t shake you from my mind. You sing like an angel.’
If only I were one. ‘Don’t you know that I am your father’s woman?’
An uncomfortable silence passed before he spoke hesitantly. ‘Yes, of course.’
‘You’re not afraid?’
‘No.’
‘Maybe you’re not, but I am.’
‘My father won’t hurt you.’
This time I laughed out loud. Was he that naive?
‘Please don’t make fun of me.’
‘I’m sorry. But do you know who your father is and what he is capable of?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then what makes you think he won’t harm me – or you?’
‘Because he loves me the most, and he’s superstitious.’
My ear perked up at the word superstitious. Though it was not news to me that the gangster head was a believer in feng shui, Yijing divination, physiognomy, palmistry – the whole gamut of Chinese ways to attain good luck – his son could be a source of other useful information about his father.
So I immediately curtailed my sarcasm and replaced it with a warm, tender tone. ‘Jinying, yes, please do come up to my place so we can chat over a glass of wine.’
In a mere five minutes, Jinying was on my doorstep.
I opened the door and asked, ‘Were you downstairs?’
He nodded, looking anxious.
‘Please take a seat on the sofa, and I’ll ask Ah Fong to fix you tea and snacks.’
He looked around, his expression disappointed. ‘You have someone else living here with you?’
‘She’s my amah.’
Moments later Ah Fong came out with a tray of tea, coffee and sandwiches.
After she had laid it on the table, I smiled. ‘You can leave now, Ah Fong.’ And I took some coins from my purse and pushed them into her hand.
She looked at me appreciatively. ‘Thank you so much, Miss Camilla.’ Then she cast the young master the same look and left.
Delicately sipping my fragrant tea, I asked the fine-featured, intense face across from me, ‘Jinying, what is the purpose of your visit?’
He looked surprised and pained. ‘Camilla, I … wanted to see you. I am hoping you will sing for me again.’
I studied his eager eyes and their two brows. Unlike his father’s, they were smooth and unscarred, like two distant mountains shrouded in the mist. ‘Jinying, you have the money for casinos, nightclubs, anything you want. So why are you so interested in music?’
His smile showed a trace of bitterness. ‘That’s exactly what displeases my father about me. That I would waste my time on something so decadent and worthless.’
This seemed ironic. Wasn’t music the reason the old man came to Bright Moon?
Lung’s son’s face softened under the gentle light of my chandelier. ‘My passion began when I visited New York and a friend took me to see Madame Butterfly at the Metropolitan Opera. Since then I’ve been hooked. I used some of the money Father sent me for singing and piano lessons. At Harvard I even performed a few roles in musicals.’
‘When you were in America, you must have heard the most famous singers of the world.’ My curiosity was piqued.
‘I did, but I like your voice the best. I’ve heard all the famous singers, and of course they’re all first-rate, but in my opinion, they all have one basic flaw …’
‘What’s that?’
‘Too much training and not enough being.’
‘What do you mean?’
Maybe he thought I feigned no
t understanding, but it was true that I didn’t. For ‘too much training, not enough being’ was exactly what Madame Lewinsky seemed to criticise in my singing. But of course neither she nor the young master had any way to know that I’d been trained not to have feelings.
‘They are so conscious of their fame and status that they gradually lose contact with their heart. In my opinion, they should strip away their mannerisms and let the audience in.’ He picked up his cup and took a long sip as he studied me intensely. ‘Camilla, I’m amazed that you don’t need to use technique or posture to hide your vulnerability. You just let your goodness shine through.’
I suppressed a smile of relief. He was completely fooled by me, or, to be exact, by my training! This showed that he was the one who was naive. Wonderful.
On the surface I stayed calm. ‘But you have only heard me twice. How do you—’
‘I go to hear you sing almost every night. I sit in a corner seat in the back so if my father’s there, he won’t see me.’
He shook his head, then downed more coffee. ‘My father is getting old and wants me to start in his business so I can take over someday. But so far I’ve stayed away. I’m just not interested. Also, well, his business is just … not right. I wish I were someone else’s son.’ He put down his coffee cup with a loud clink.
As I studied his anxious expression, I felt a perverse relief rising inside me. ‘I’m sorry that’s how you feel, Jinying. Can’t you explain to Master Lung how you feel?’
‘That would not matter. He loves me, but I am his only son, and so there is no one else to take over. And he considers me his good-luck son.’
‘Oh, yes? How is that?’
‘Because since the day I was born, his business has boomed, and it has lasted until today. The Red Demons have tried but failed to kill him many times. So he believes my lucky star shines on him to protect him.’