French Concession

by Xiao Bai

  Ah Pau was indeed galloping down the hillside on the bay horse. The Chinese servant was the central figure of the Paper Hunt Club. Several of the club officers had retired and returned home, while others had lost their lives in the Great War, making Ah Pau the only constant: now in his fifties, he had served the club faithfully for thirty years.

  The jittery racehorses crowded along the fences on the northern edge of the field, and the gates were finally opened. Margot climbed into the saddle and waved at Therese, who was standing in the field. A gust of wind lifted her hat, and as she dropped the reins to catch her hat, the gray mare suddenly started forward.

  Margot lurched in the saddle, but Brenen steadied it for her, picked the reins up nimbly from the ground and placed them in her hands.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, on your mark, get set, go!”

  The horses rushed out the gate. One of them crashed into the fence and knocked the post askew so that it ripped out of the ground, tearing up clods of mud. Hundreds of hooves thundered down the hill. The grass glinted in the breeze, and someone called out: “Tally-ho!”

  Previously, when he was explaining the rules of the game, Brenen had told her that the expression was borrowed from the cry the Indians used for their hunting hounds. In the paper hunt, riders who found the strips of paper hidden in the hedges or under pebbles cried tally-ho to alert the official observers.

  They raced down the hill into a cabbage patch. Margot tugged at the reins, steering her horse into the cabbages. Suddenly, a Chinese man appeared from the bushes, stamping his feet and shouting at her. Startled, her horse took a step back and began pawing at the ground, flinging up mud. Brenen caught up with her and flung a silver coin on the ground. The shouting stopped.

  They had lost the group, and there were no scraps of paper in sight. They were standing on a small plateau hemmed in by a stream. Margot got the map out, and Brenen pointed to a Z-shaped stream called Zigzag Jump.

  They steered their horses east along the stream, past a wooden bridge, and stopped in front of a mound of yellow earth next to a copse. On top of the mound lay an obelisk built of rubble, the club’s war memorial plaque.

  It was almost noon, the sun was shining on the bottle green stream, and insects darted among the poisonous leaves of the oleander. Margot felt that she could not allow Brenen to touch her. She melted a little whenever he came close. It was she who had fallen in love with him. She felt like a bee with its wings caught in nectar.

  CHAPTER 5

  JUNE 5, YEAR 20 OF THE REPUBLIC.

  9:50 A.M.

  Hsueh thought of Therese. He pictured her hair, which was curly like a shock of cornflower petals. Curiously, the darker the room was and the more pain he was in, the more clearly he could picture Therese. But that was only to be expected, since he had taken dozens of photographs of her.

  He did not know what they wanted with him or why they had brought him here. From where he lived on Route J. Frelupt, the car had only made two turns, which meant they must be at the police headquarters on Route Stanislas Chevalier. They drove through the iron gates and into a passageway on the north side of the building, between the red brick wall and a high fence lined with glass shards, where they dragged him out of the car. It was cold and there was no sunlight.

  They pushed him into the building. The walls of the corridor were dark green with black paneling, and the floors were painted black. He was brought into what looked like an interrogation room and forced onto a chair fitted with high boards. As soon as he sat down, the boards were rotated so that they were positioned right under his arms.

  The Chinese sergeant sat behind the desk, asking questions and filling out the printed form he had in front of him. When he had finished with each page, he handed it to the secretary who sat beside him, a Chinese man who knew French and who was busy translating and typing up the document.

  The questions slowly began to focus on his trip with Therese. The sergeant stopped filling out forms and began to write down Hsueh’s answers on a piece of grid paper.

  Where did you go in Hong Kong? What about Hanoi? Haiphong? Can you only remember the hotels? Did you go to the pier? To bars? Restaurants? Did you meet anyone?

  But he had little to say. No, he was not lying. I’ll give you ten minutes to think about it, said the sergeant, and walked off, probably because he needed to piss. He came back, his clothes smelling of Lysol. Hsueh still had nothing to say.

  “Ah yes, she did go to see a man in another room in Hanoi,” Hsueh said. Of course the thought had been in the back of his mind all this time. A Chinese man. I don’t know him, I know nothing about him, but he looked a little shady, said Hsueh, glad of the chance to disparage his rival.

  “Well, then let us help jog your memory,” the sergeant cried.

  They dragged him into an empty room. Pushing him onto the ground, they tied him up and held his head down. Huddling on the cold cement floor, he watched apprehensively as the men brought a tin bucket. Then they jerked his head upward and pushed it into the bucket. It felt as if there was something clenching his heart. He heard loud voices, footsteps, and before he had time to process all this, his head was smashed first one way and then the other. He could feel the force of the blows through the bucket.

  The pain was concentrated at one point to begin with—his nose, which happened to have been bashed into a ridge on the inside of the bucket. That was just a dull pain, like walking into a pole in winter. But then his entire face started burning, and someone was clubbing the back of his skull, making it swell up. His shoulders ached. His head was being kicked this way and that, he was nauseated, and all his joints hurt. His throat felt as though it had a dried pepper stuck down it.

  Eventually his joints were pushed to their extremes and began to give out. A pleasant numbness replaced his exhaustion, and there was a roaring in his ears, as if a crowd of people were shouting and talking into the bucket.

  After what felt like ages, the bucket was shaken hard, and his nose hurt sharply. He could taste and smell the rust. The bucket clanged to the ground behind him, and sunlight glinted on the windows, blinding Hsueh momentarily. Then the stench of rust went away. The setting sun played on the edges of clouds and reflected on the glass. Hsueh thought he could almost smell the sunshine.

  He was taken to another room, where his linen jacket, tailored at Wei Lee, had been hung carefully on the coatrack. He had quite forgotten when he had been stripped down to his shorts, and as he was putting on his pants, he examined the bruises on his bony knees with self-pity. He couldn’t tell whether he had gotten them from being kicked around or from kneeling on the ground.

  Someone lifted him up and put him on a chair, as if he were a photograph being fished out of developer and hung up to dry. Things became unblurred, took on straight lines, and came right side up. The man smiling at him was not the Chinese sergeant who had been grinning and screaming at him before his head was stuffed into the tin bucket, but a Frenchman.

  The burly Frenchman introduced himself as Sergeant Maron. Maron’s love of Indian food was evident from the scent of curry about him and the yellow-black stain on his lapel. His laughter echoed in the little third-floor room facing north on Route Stanislas Chevalier. Hsueh was brought a stack of documents to sign, and asked to sit on the chair.

  No one asked if he wanted a cigarette, but they forced one between his teeth. His ears were still ringing.

  Let’s start over again, said Sergeant Maron. Let’s say we’re just chatting like old friends, and it turns out I have a few questions that you might be able to help answer. Remember to give me as much detail as possible.

  He started with the journey. When Hsueh admitted that Therese had paid for the whole trip from Shanghai to Hong Kong, Haiphong, and Hanoi, that she had booked their passage and paid for hotels as well as restaurants, Sergeant Maron clapped him on the shoulder. Good for you! he said.

  But why did she pay your way? Surely not just because she’s rich—why wouldn’t she pay me, Sergeant Maro
n, to accompany her instead? Are you saying you’re a better man than I am?

  Or did she pay for you because you are her lover? What did you do when you weren’t in bed? Did you take her for walks, or go to the beach in bathing suits? If you spent all day indoors, does that mean you were in bed all day? Let’s talk about something more interesting. What is she like in bed? Tell me—you’d like to help me, wouldn’t you?

  Hsueh remembered the warm subtropical wind, the humid bedsheets, and the way the overhead fan turned slowly. You bastard, you know I have to keep you happy because of that tin bucket of yours. He called his photographs to mind.

  “Sometimes we’d smoke in bed and have the servants bring us meals. She could never have enough sex. If I got tired, she would get on top of me. She loved to lie on the edge of the bed and stretch her feet upward.”

  Like official newsreels of soldiers in the trenches, putting up their arms to surrender. His gaze would travel upward from her red knees and painted toenails toward her face, on which shadows of the ceiling fan flickered.

  “Go on,” said Sergeant Maron. He lit a match and began tapping lightly on the surface of the table. He seemed to believe Hsueh. He looked as if he were trying to picture the scene.

  “As soon as we stopped, we would light a cigarette. Just one, and we’d take turns taking puffs. She likes Garricks, and you can get a whole tin of them for one yuan. They have no filters and are thicker and shorter than 555s. She would take the cigarettes out of the tin and keep them in a silver cigarette case. I always lit the cigarettes because she said she had better things to do with her hands. If the case wasn’t right there, she’d have me hunt everywhere for it. Some days I could turn the room upside down and not find the cigarette case. She probably hid it on purpose because she liked watching me walk about the room naked. My ‘Chinese ribs’ turned her on, she said. That was her private nickname for me. Later I would discover the cigarette case bundled up in the bedsheets with her sitting on it. She’d laugh and say, it was wrapped in black sheepskin and I was numb all over, that must be why I didn’t notice it was there.”

  Hsueh kept inventing things he thought Sergeant Maron wanted to hear. Desperation can be the mother of invention, he thought. He and the sergeant were beginning to share the conspiratorial pleasure of the interrogator and the interrogated. Words came flooding to him as if he were an author whose writer’s block had evaporated at the end of a sleepless night.

  “So you’d been through her bedroom and never came across anything suspicious?”

  “You mean a gun?” Hsueh didn’t mean to say that, but the words slipped out.

  “Does she own a gun?”

  Sergeant Maron looked at him with a curious expression. He seemed to be momentarily fascinated by the buttonhole of Hsueh’s thin linen jacket, from which a withered cape jasmine sprouted. Then, as though awakening from a daydream, he began to ask Hsueh more questions.

  “How much do you know about her? They say she’s German.”

  “No, she’s Russian.”

  Sergeant Maron waved his hand dismissively. He disliked being interrupted. “Have you seen her documents? Does she have a Nansen passport or travel papers signed by the tsar? How dare you call yourself her lover when you know nothing about her?”

  He paused, as if he were about to announce something important, to rebuke Hsueh for his ignorance.

  “The woman the Chinese call Lady Holly, your Therese, is Therese Irxmayer, an extremely capable woman who owns a company based in Hong Kong. She is far more dangerous than you think, and the Concession Police is presently investigating her undesirable activities. We believe she has crooked friends running a shady business. We would like you to help us by getting involved, and give us news of her friends. It would be in your interest to cooperate—the police department will not forget your assistance, and I will personally be grateful.”

  Two policemen took him to the hotel. The Frenchman drove, and Hsueh sat in the back with the Chinese man. The car stopped outside the Astor in the rain. When the engine started up again, the Frenchman saluted him playfully with two fingers of his left hand held crooked. He was wearing a raincoat with a matching hat at an angle.

  “Mes couilles,” Hsueh muttered under his breath, tossing his cigarette end into a puddle.

  The gate was closed, and the elevator shaft rumbled. He walked across the lobby to the stairs, to stretch his legs. He was tired and hungry. At nine o’clock they had gone to the Cantonese eatery on Pa-hsian-ch’iao. Eat, Maron had said, but Hsueh had barely eaten. It was the break between shifts, and the place was full of cops.

  The men had stared at him while he was making a phone call to Therese. One was standing inside the phone booth, about three feet behind him. The other stood outside the phone booth, facing him from behind the glass. Then they dropped him off and politely said good-bye.

  Hsueh’s muddy shoes made squelching sounds on the patterned wood floor.

  All day long, those voices had mocked him, menaced him, and tempted him. He almost thought he could hear them coming from the paneled walls in the hotel. It was those voices that convinced him he would do it, not the terror he had felt that morning when he was tied up in an empty room, lying on the floor with his head in a tin bucket.

  CHAPTER 6

  JUNE 5, YEAR 20 OF THE REPUBLIC.

  1:15 P.M.

  Therese did not mind being called Lady Holly by the Chinese. At least Holly was shorter than Irxmayer. Besides, even Irxmayer wasn’t really her name. A blond Austrian man had given it to her in Talien. She preferred this name because she preferred to forget the past. She often said to her assistant, Yindee Zung: if you can’t forget the past, how can you keep going? Yindee Zung was Zung Ts-mih’s sister, and he once wrote his Yindee’s name in Chinese and showed it to Therese—Ch’en Ying-ti. He told her Yindee was Siamese for happiness. Zung himself was Yindee’s “fifth brother” in a large clan that seemed to span Hong Kong, Hanoi, and Saigon. Yindee had tried time and again to explain the complex web of family relationships to her, but Therese never seemed to get it.

  In Hong Kong, Zung could find a buyer for just about anything, and he could source anything you wanted. Immaculately dressed, he would go into any dark walk-up, push the door open, climb the narrow wooden stairs, and extend his soft, delicate hand. He could cut deals with smugglers, the gangs, or even with Communists.

  As soon as she had left the Viennese sausage shop on Route Dollfus, Therese could sense that something was not quite right. She kept glancing at the opposite sidewalk, or looking surreptitiously over her shoulder by pretending to rearrange her hair, but she could not see anything. She did feel a pair of eyes on her.

  She had spent the morning at a tailor’s on Yates Road. Gold Tooth P’an was an old friend of hers, and Therese had recommended him to Margot. The man can make a perfect copy of any dress from a faded movie poster, she had said. Margot had brought a light blue piece of taffeta that reminded Therese of her childhood—her tenth birthday, in fact, when she had worn a dress with a thick hemline and silver bells under the hem. Or was that a scene in a movie? She had told so many stories about her past that she could no longer remember which ones were true.

  The dress was not ready yet, but they would try out the fit.

  “Look-See, Missie?”

  P’an spat pidgin English in a hoarse voice that sounded like fingernails scraping across taffeta. He stitched a dress together loosely and handed it to Margot, who came out of the dressing room looking like a blue daisy. Brenen would love this open-back dress. It would allow his hand to slide down the small of her back all the way to its natural resting place. Margot always reported exactly what went on between herself and Mr. Blair, so Therese had heard all about that afternoon when they had gotten lost by Rubicon Creek, under the Great War memorial. She could picture them there, Margot in her English equestrian outfit, leaning against the wobbly branch of a tree, Brenen’s hand, and Margot flushing the whole time as if the branch were still brushing against
her cheek.

  This made her think of Hsueh, whom she had not seen in a week. That young half-Chinese man. She figured she could be ten years older than he, probably more like five or six. But he was a Chinese man with smooth skin, and she had to admit she liked him—she even liked that clean baking-soda smell he had.

  Therese had slept with singers, illustrators, tipsy men from Lily Bar. She was used to intimacy with strangers. One of them was a Czech Jew who did cartoons of naked men and women on the Astor’s notepads, in which the men’s dicks stuck out as sharply as the black chimneys on English battleships on the Whampoa. But as far as Therese was concerned, not even the artist’s pencil was a match for Hsueh’s camera.

  Hsueh, the amateur photographer, the sham dilettante. He loved fumbling around in the dark in her room at the Astor—the Chinese half of him refused to switch the light on, open the windows, or draw the curtains. He did not like the breeze off the Whampoa at night. Like all Chinese people, he was wary of catching cold. Even in the dark, Hsueh’s fingers were perfectly accurate, as if he were measuring out chemicals in the darkroom. When he photographed her in the darkness, Therese would glimpse his pale face for a split second when the magnesium powder flared.

  Route Dollfus was short and curved slightly. A network of narrow alleyways, the longtangs, crisscrossed the French Concession, real estate developers claimed tracts of land at will, and even the Municipal Office’s urban planning was in disarray. The Concession was perfect if you had something to hide.

  At the fork in the road, Therese changed her mind and turned onto Route Vallon. She stubbed her cigarette out on the iron grille outside a Russian bookstore, and threw the cigarette end into the semibasement window just below the display. Without turning around, she walked up to the adjacent Russian-owned art studio and stopped in front of its display window.

  A sign in the window said ART DECORATION STUDIO, ORDERS TAKEN in ugly cursive print. It contained shelves full of multicolored boxes, and framed oil paintings hung above them. One of them was of a large black bird staring obliquely out the window from its only eye. The bird’s beak looked like a sickle. It was pointing at a sculpture of a naked woman, who was entirely white except for a helmetlike shock of black hair.