by Lois Ruby
That night after we found out about Pearl Harbor, Erich didn’t come home. Mother and Father were frantic, and I was no help. I pictured him pierced through by a Japanese bayonet or drowned in the Whangpoo. Then something clicked for me. Those men at the Little Vienna Café who’d recognized Erich and turned away—maybe they were some of the Resistance fighters Erich had hinted about. And my brother was working with them.
They were the ones who’d given Erich the bicycle. I was sure of it now. What had only been talk—talk among Erich’s friends in Vienna—was turning into dangerous action in Shanghai. Who they all were, where they headquartered, I didn’t know, but that night I vowed to find out.
CHAPTER SIX
1941–1942
“Where were you the whole night?” Mother patted Erich’s face, his arms, his chest, to make sure he was all in one piece. “We were worried sick, your father and I.”
“With friends,” Erich said, slipping out from under Mother’s probing hands and eyes.
Father was practicing. The Violin was one string short, and he was making do. The music vibrated a filling in my back tooth.
“Who are these friends?” Mother asked, closing Father’s studio door.
“You don’t know them.”
“You spend too much time with them,” Mother said sternly.
“They use the time well,” he retorted. He’d gotten very sassy with Mother in that new deep voice he so eagerly showcased for us.
Her back was to Erich as she stirred a pot of soup. “Where do you go every day with these people?”
“Here, there.”
“Where?”
Ilse to the rescue: “He plays soccer, Mother.”
Mother’s spoon scraped lazily across the pot. “You play soccer all night? And the bicycle—”
“Why are you interrogating me?”
“So many hours, and I don’t know where you are?” She turned around and offered Erich a spoonful of the potato-and-leek soup—a peace offering.
He shook his head. “I go to meetings.”
“Meetings, Erich?”
“What do you think, everyone sits around like you do waiting for the Japanese to take over every corner of the city?” He paced the room, drumming his fingers on his thigh. “Some people act, Mother. Action.”
Mother pulled her shoulders together in resolution. She handed me a Thermos and some bamboo chips, which we used as currency at the hot-water shop. “Go down and get us boiled water for tea.”
She was getting rid of me so they could talk, as if I was a child and Erich wasn’t. I looked at my brother closely. His shoulders were broader, his waist narrower. There were rusty shadows on his cheeks. A wave of fear scuttled through me as Erich tore out of the apartment, slamming the door behind him.
I snapped up the Thermos and bamboo chips, followed him and sensed somebody following me. I looked over my shoulder, and there was Liu, a half block behind. What did he want from me? He knew I had no food to share with him, no money.
Three boys I’d never seen before waited for Erich at the corner of Kinchow Road and Baikal. He must have known they were waiting; that was why he’d picked the fight with Mother—so he could bolt from the house.
He fell right into step with the boys, all of them walking so fast that I needed three steps to each of theirs just to keep them in sight.
At the gate of the Baikal Cemetery, one of the boys gave a lit smoke to Erich. The tallest one snuffed his out with his bare fingers and tossed the stub of it over the fence into the cemetery. Then, as if on a signal, all four of them turned around and walked back down Baikal Road, laughing and punching each other and generally acting like obnoxious boys. I ducked into Ah Ching’s Bird Shop, where it was dark and jammed with cages and fluttering wings.
“You don’t buy a bird, you don’t stay in my shop,” Ah Ching growled, and his mynahs and canaries cackled in agreement.
Finally the boys passed the store, and I raced up the street to keep a respectable distance between us.
At Yangtzepoo Road the tall boy dangled a key around his neck and bent toward the lock of a godown, one of the decrepit warehouses along the docks of the Whangpoo. The four of them disappeared into the building. The door slammed shut; all the windows were boarded up. I listened at the door, but not a sound escaped the building. Was this one of the meetings Erich talked about? Just what were they discussing so quietly in there? I held my breath and listened more closely. Nothing.
Straddling a wide stone bench next to the godown, I waited. For what?
Liu darted in and out between the godowns, clearly hunting for something—dropped coins, maybe, or food. Each time he appeared, he studied me and once got close enough that I snapped, “Why are you always following me?”
“Whistle, I come to you, missy,” he replied.
“I didn’t whistle.”
“I come anyway!”
I groaned, and he got the hint, disappearing into an alleyway just as the door of the godown opened. My first instinct: hide. In wartime Shanghai the impulse was always to sneak, to lie, to make yourself invisible. I jumped off the bench and crouched under it, hidden by the great lion’s claw legs.
The men were in their twenties, blond hair cropped short, smooth-cheeked, and crisply turned out in pressed khaki shirts and trousers. Whispering in German and shifting from foot to foot with their trousers tucked into their high boots, they looked so much like Nazi soldiers that for a moment my heart stopped. I tightened myself into a smaller target and studied them.
They weren’t Nazis at all! They were two of the men we’d seen at the café. Before I could scuttle out from under the bench, the short, stocky one spotted me.
“Look here, there’s a rat in the sewer,” he said to the other man, who yanked me out from under the bench.
I struggled up from the dirt and landed on the stone seat.
“Why are you spying on us?” he growled
“I’m not spying, I’m …”
“Just hiding under a bench. And you speak the mother tongue? Who sent you?”
“Nobody. I was just following someone, no one you know, really, just a friend, just exploring,” I stammered.
“What do you want me to do with her, Gerhardt?” the shorter man asked, his beefy hands pressing on my shoulders.
I looked up at the one he’d called Gerhardt, whose eyes narrowed into tight slits, but there was a hint of a smile around his lips. “Get rid of her. I don’t care, Rolf. Throw her in the river, feed her to the pelicans. Just make sure she remembers not to come sniffing around here ever again.” He disappeared inside the warehouse, slamming the door.
So, Rolf was left with me. Get rid of her; Gerhardt’s words echoed in my head, but I sensed that this man had no idea what to do with me.
“On your feet, girl,” he commanded, not too convincingly.
I jumped up, hoping I could dart around him, but he was a wall between me and fresh air. My feet couldn’t get me anywhere. Would words? “I’m Ilse, Erich Shpann’s sister.”
“You’re what?” He shoved me back down on the stone bench with a punishing thud. “The idiot brought you here?”
“No, not really. I followed him. That is, I sort of guessed where he was going.” There was no way he’d buy this lie, but I forged on. “My mother sent me to find him. She’s feverish, burning up, and she needs him to come home right away.”
He seemed to consider this. Maybe he had a heart after all, or a mother.
“Our mother will be so upset if I don’t bring him before she dies.” I sounded whiney, even to my own ears, so I swallowed and boldly asked, “What does my brother do inside that warehouse? What’s so top secret here?”
“None of your business,” he growled, “and if you have half as much sense as your brother, you’ll forget where here is.”
Did I dare take a chance? I stared right into his cold, blue eyes and said, “I know you’re all in the Underground resistance.”
The color drained from his ch
eeks. He hoisted me up by my elbows; my feet swung off the ground in front of him. Now my heart thudded; what business did I have nosing around in this mess?
He shook me. “I can haul you over to the river in about three giant steps. You a good swimmer?” Suddenly he was pulling me across the road to the river bank, my legs flying behind me. I looked down at rushing water that was deep and clogged and stinking with garbage and the morning’s chamber pots. I really didn’t expect that he’d throw me in, but I kept thinking, Mother will kill me if I drown in this filthy water.
He still gripped me by my elbows. My shoulders ached; every muscle in my middle stretched into tight ropes. If I relaxed my body I could maybe drop, shimmy down and roll away from him on the grassy bank—or maybe I’d plunge right into the brackish water. My bones jiggly with fear, I closed my eyes to the rushing water below. And whistled. Beethoven’s Fifth.
Rolf seemed startled. Then out of nowhere Liu appeared and shouted at the man’s back, “I have a knife, boss!”
Rolf dropped me right at the edge of the riverbank and put his hands up. I scrambled away. Liu waved the knife, motioning for Rolf to run.
“Don’t ever come around here again,” the coward shouted from a safe distance, as Liu slipped the knife back into his belt.
“I don’t know what he would have done if you hadn’t shown up,” I said breathlessly. Liu grinned and put his hand out. “I have nothing to give you.” I tapped his grubby palm.
“You owe me next time you whistle and I come.”
He walked me as far as the Garden Bridge, guarded by a Japanese soldier, but he went no farther. Chinese people crossing the bridge usually felt the blow of a boot, or spittle on the back of their necks, or worse, if they didn’t bow to the guards, and Liu didn’t seem like the bowing sort.
We westerners were virtually invisible to the soldiers. Of course, running could attract the guard’s attention, and as I sprinted across the bridge, waving to Liu on the other side, I thought, I didn’t survive nearly floating in a putrid river just to be shot in the back by a Japanese guard.
CHAPTER SEVEN
1942
I was terrified that something would happen to Erich hanging around with men like that. All through January and February I followed him to the warehouse, watching him tie Peaches to a post outside and tap a sort of Morse code on the metal door. Three knocks, pause, two knocks, pause, four quick taps. Usually the door opened a crack, and Erich slid in like a shadow.
Boldly creeping closer one day, I heard voices inside. They were arguing, shouting, but because of the street noise, I couldn’t make out the words. I barreled an empty paint drum over to one of the boarded-up windows.
What if they caught me again? Had to take the risk. I glanced over at the rushing river across the road, took a deep, fortifying breath, and climbed onto the paint drum to peek between the window slats.
Gerhardt and Rolf were there. Erich sprawled on an overstuffed chair in the corner, surrounded by two of his cigarette-smoking friends.
Gerhardt seemed to be in charge. He passed a bowl of something around. Each of the others reached into the bowl and drew out a piece of paper, read it, and tore it into confetti, tossing the scraps into a blue-speckled tub. I watched the leader’s eyes move from one person to the next; each one nodded as the leader tossed a lit match into the tub.
Suddenly something caught my eye outside the warehouse. Liu was cutting the rope that tied Peaches to the post! I tore over to him and leaped on his back. “Get away from that bike!” I shouted in German, in English, and I don’t even know what I said in Chinese.
Surprised to find a girl nearly choking him, Liu dropped his knife. I let go of him and snatched it up. His eyes blazed. He seemed paralyzed, expecting me to slice him in two. But I just passed him the knife, handle first, the way Mother had taught me to hand scissors.
With the hilt of the knife firmly in his palm, he shook a head full of filthy hair and said, “Whiskey? Schnapps? Dollar for shoeshine, missy?”
“Go away, I’m just as poor as you are,” I grumbled, slapping his hand with my palm rather than a coin.
He flashed me his grin again and flexed his muscles. What muscles? He was all bones, no meat. “I know tap-tap code,” he said.
I shook my head. “Not a good idea.”
“Okay, missy.” Liu tugged at my sleeve again and led me around the building. The window I’d peeked in only moments before was now covered with Chinese newspapers. Had they heard me? Seen me?
Liu scaled the side of the building. Clinging to a rotted windowsill, he wedged his knife in a slot where the window didn’t quite meet the sash. The window slid up, and Liu disappeared inside the warehouse.
I circled the building again. By the time I’d worked my way around to the front, Liu was standing at the open door grinning. A slight jerk of his head instructed me to follow silently.
Voices. I followed Liu up metal steps to a dark mezzanine overlooking the main open space of the warehouse. We hid in shadows, behind a couple of the beams. I had a clear view of Erich and the others below.
They had a huge map spread across several crates. The leader tapped a spot on the map. “The pharmaceutical plant, right here.”
“Not impressed,” the other man said.
“I say we go for a military plant—ammunition, explosives, blast ’em all to hell and gone,” one of the boys said.
The second man said, “You crazy? Whatta we know about explosives? We’d be dead before we blew the hide off the first Jap.”
The leader took a pen from his pocket and circled a spot on the map. “This is it, Red Poppy Pharmaceuticals up here in Chaipei. You think they’re really making medicines out of those little red posies? Morphine? Before the occupation, maybe, but now it’s all chemical warfare. We blow the plant sky-high!”
“And release poison gas into Shanghai?” Erich said. “That’ll help Hitler along. It’ll kill ten thousand Europeans and countless Chinese, too, along with the Japs. Smart.”
The leader shrugged. “Chance we take. No war without risks. You in, mates?”
“That’s way out of our range,” the second man said, wiping his forehead with a red handkerchief. “Lunatics, the lot of you. Especially you, Gerhardt.”
The leader, Gerhardt, lifted the map and held it like a shield in front of him, jabbing at the circle he’d drawn. “I say we wipe out the whole installation. We’re men, and this is war. I’m right, Rolf, admit it.”
“Right game, wrong playing field,” Rolf said.
One of the boys thumped the map. “I still say hit the explosives. Light up the sky at midnight so the Japs can’t miss the show.”
Erich’s voice was calm and measured, the way he got when his fuse was about to blow. “You said we’d be doing things like crossing wires, jamming radios, smuggling messages in and out, planting false intelligence. That’s how we were going to help the Allied war effort. You never said anything about explosives and poisonous chemicals.”
Gerhardt glared coldly at Erich. “This is war, Shpann, not a Boy Scout field trip. Last chance. In, or not?”
Just then a brown rat scurried across my feet, lashing my leg with its rubbery tail. I released a tiny whimper of revulsion—just enough to cause Gerhardt to look up.
“Who’s there?”
Silence. Could they hear us breathing?
“Shpann, go up and look.”
Liu and I plastered ourselves to the back of the beams. I willed my heart rate to slow with shallow breaths. Erich clambered up the steps, the noise resounding off the metal walls. His flashlight painted the corrugated walls with a hard yellow light that darted into every dark corner. Rats raced to get out of the glare.
I was blinded by the light when it finally found my hiding place.
“Ilse? My God,” Erich whispered, clicking off the flashlight.
Liu silently crept up behind Erich with his knife drawn. He recognized Erich, but his eyes asked, Right now, enemy or friend?
“Liu, no!” I whispered frantically, and he lowered the knife—a hair’s width away from Erich’s shirt.
My outburst brought Rolf tearing up the stairs. “You again?” he snarled.
“My sister,” Erich said miserably.
“Yeah, we’ve had the pleasure. Is your shadow around here, that Chinese kid?”
I shook my head, watching Liu move in the dark behind Rolf.
Rolf said, “Give me some light, Shpann. I should have drowned your sister when I had the chance. Okay, spill it. What’d you hear?”
You’d expect to panic, but instead, I took a deep breath and went absolutely calm. No sudden moves. “I heard everything.” Erich spun on his heel, furious, but there was no stopping me now. “I heard enough to know that you’re soldiers in the war against the Japanese.”
“Yeah? What else?” He stepped on my foot to lock me in place, and I forced myself not to respond, no matter what. I kept my eye on Liu, hovering in the shadows, waiting for a signal from me.
Erich’s flashlight darted around the dark space we occupied.
From below, someone called, “What’s up there?”
“Under control.” Rolf assured them.
Whose control?
A thousand emotions flooded Erich’s face—horror, rage, regret. I feared he’d try to wrestle Rolf to the ground so I could run. Erich was outsized, and what good would it do anyway? I’d be caught in a flash. I signaled in the silent language of brothers and sisters: I’m okay. And I was, really. My fear had burned off.
Erich tried to coach me with his whole face. His eyes flamed. “Just let my sister go. She doesn’t know what she’s doing. She’ll keep her mouth shut. I can handle her.”
“Well! When have you been able to do that?”
“Shut up, Ilse.”
I looked Rolf right in the face. “I guess you’ll just have to drown me in the Whangpoo after all because I know too much, huh?”