by Xiao Bai
“Avenue Foch,” Lin said.
Lin wanted revenge, Ku thought. He pictured vengefulness as a liquid that could be poured out into measuring cups. It would certainly be a justifiable target, as the owner of 181 Avenue Foch had been directly involved in the 1927 massacre of Communists. But he would have to consider it carefully, as the guards at Avenue Foch were far better armed.
That meant there would be a gunfight, a significant challenge for his squad. They could handle guns all right, and they would sometimes go to deserted beaches in Pu-tung to practice on scarecrows as they chewed and spat sorghum. Or they might rent a boat and take it out to sea, to use a few of the unlucky seagulls circling around Wu-sung-k’ou as target practice. But real fighting was about fear and conquering fear: could his people do that? By contrast, an assassination was a mere performance, like a mischievous practical joke. You strode up to the unlucky victim, took your gun out, pulled the trigger, and watched him collapse to the floor. Years ago, when he was involved in union activity, he had made his way through the outhouse to the factory yard, and dumped a sack of night soil on the foreman’s head. The foreman had been standing complacently at the factory gates with the protesting workers shut outside, fiddling with walnuts in his hand until night soil suddenly rained down on him, and he was humiliated. No one was afraid of him from that day onward, and all the stories of his cruelty evaporated.
In principle, an assassination, or even the grander operation he was planning, worked the same way as that sack of night soil. They toppled an old authority or source of fear, establishing a new one in its place. In the labor camps in Azerbaijan, he had spent days going back to these memories. The more he thought about this moment, the more significant it became for him. It proved that fear can unseat existing powers and install new ones. And by the time he escaped and made his way back to China across the Dzungarian Gate, he knew exactly what he would do.
CHAPTER 19
JUNE 14, YEAR 20 OF THE REPUBLIC.
6:18 P.M.
Leng nearly ran headlong into a rickshaw, and stopped to catch her breath. She had altogether forgotten about calling Ku. If it weren’t for that man, she would already have made the call. In fact, this morning she had already been standing inside the telephone booth when he—
She finally remembered about making the phone call when it was growing dark.
She got to the candle store on Rue Palikao based on the directions Ku had given her over the phone. She hurried up the stairs, and as soon as he saw her, Ku asked: “Why didn’t you call?”
She had to admit she had panicked. It hadn’t occurred to her that in a city of a million people she would run into this man, the photojournalist. There was no way to explain it. And she had to tell Ku what she had learned.
What could she say in her defense? She should have called Ku right away and told him about the incident on Rue Amiral Bayle. Instead she had waited for the man at a pavilion in the Koukaza Gardens for hours, like a nervous lover, and gone with him to the White Russian restaurant. He was the journalist who had tried to take a photograph of her on the ship. He was enormously curious and remembered every face he saw. He liked pretending to be nonchalant. She trusted him instinctively, but she couldn’t explain why.
All those days alone in the apartment built across the alleyway had enervated her, as if she’d spent days lying in the afternoon sun. No one knew she existed, she thought, no one knew the part she had played in that assassination. Both her comrades and her enemies had abandoned her, almost as if they had plotted together to forget about her.
She told herself it was her duty to banter with him, to have dinner and flirt boldly with him. She had to find out who he was and what he wanted. For some reason, instead of telling Ku about their first encounter on the ship, she found herself telling him that Hsueh was an old acquaintance working as a photojournalist, a trustworthy and sympathetic man who only wanted to help.
But none of that mattered in comparison to what this Hsueh Wei-shih knew. He said he had close friends in the Concession Police, and he warned her not to return to the apartment on Rue Amiral Bayle. He had insider knowledge that the police suspected it of being a safe house for Communists, and once they knew the precise location, they would start making arrests there. His newspaper had been tipped off, and he had gone to Rue Amiral Bayle this morning together with the police, in pursuit of a scoop. He had recognized her right away, and wanted to warn her, but there was no time. The frisking on Rue Conty was an old police trick to draw out malefactors.
“And why would he share this intelligence with you?”
“He knew the police were looking for a woman. The minute he saw me, he put two and two together. He knew me, and he could guess from the newspapers that I had to have been involved in the Kin Lee Yuen operation.”
“And you admitted to it?”
“He didn’t believe that I could kill anyone—that I could really have been involved in the assassination of a counterrevolutionary army officer.” Strangely, she almost believed her own words. She had prevaricated to make her story simpler, but it was only getting more complicated. And she was surprised at herself for hiding their meeting on the ship from Ku. Was it because it sounded too unlikely, like a chance encounter invented by a romance novelist?
“But he must have suspected you had something to do with it, or why would he have told you about the police?”
“Yes. He thought I had to be involved, but he couldn’t accept it. I told him that things were not as simple as he thought they were, but that I didn’t want to talk about it. He said that if talking about it stirred up painful memories, he would rather not ask.”
“As an old friend, did he give you any advice?”
“He said I should leave Shanghai right away, as quickly as possible. But he did not know whether I was at liberty to just leave, so he did not want to impose his opinion. He said he would make further inquiries at the police station.”
“At liberty?”
“If there was some reason why I could not leave, was what he meant.”
“And you couldn’t call because he was right there?”
“Yes.”
“So you spent the whole afternoon with him.”
“I did.”
“Where?”
“In a Russian restaurant with a name I didn’t recognize. On Rue Lafayette.”
It had been on the intersection with Avenue du Roi Albert. The restaurant had a sign on the corner that said ODESSA, after the port city on the Black Sea. Steps led down to the door, which he opened for her. The Russian waiter seemed to know him well, and they discussed the menu brightly, as if it were an important ritual.
“Whom does he know at the police station? What are their titles?”
“He didn’t say.”
“You must find out. That could prove to be important to us.”
Despite being exhausted, she was aware that Ku’s words constituted a mission with which the cell was officially entrusting her.
“You did well to stay calm. Keep in touch with him. His contacts at the Concession Police could be useful to us.”
“He isn’t one of us.”
He had been in high spirits, showing off his knowledge of cameras and Russian food. He had ordered barjark, fried beef, and shashlyk, lamb chop cut into round pieces and grilled. She had always been with ambitious, idealistic young men; even Ts’ao had fit that description. This man was good-looking—almost handsome—and impertinent, though he could also be gentle.
“What do you think he thinks of you?” Ku blew out the matchstick in his hand.
He had stared at her all that time. He ordered wine but did not drink it. She could tell he wanted to ask her questions but didn’t dare to. He pretended to rummage in his pocket for something, but all he pulled out was an expired betting slip. You must give me a way of contacting you, like a phone number. That way if something happens I can let you know right away. Then he produced a pen, as if he had a bottomless pocket, but he was too clum
sy to be a magician. The pen was out of ink and drew nothing but white lines on the old betting slip. When she refused, he argued with her.
“He thought the police must have evidence against me, or they wouldn’t be coming after me. But to him I am only a frail woman, and he never did ask whether I had anything to do with the Kin Lee Yuen case.” She tried to make her reply sound objective.
“So did you figure out how to stay in contact?”
“He gave me his phone number at the editorial offices, but he’s hardly there. He’s a photojournalist, so he’s always out and about. He told me he would have some news for me tomorrow. We’re meeting at noon at the gate of the Koukaza Gardens.”
When they parted ways, she was careful to avoid being followed. Using the techniques she had learned, she would sometimes stop abruptly, or duck into a shoe shop and scan the passing crowd through the glass window. The trickiest thing was managing to shake off three operatives triangulating to pursue you. The man walking parallel to you across the road was the easiest to spot, and likely to be the most careless of the three. Because he had to keep his eyes fixed on you, even his stride would often fall into rhythm with yours.
Not until she was certain of not being followed did she make the phone call.
There were voices downstairs, but she could tell Lin’s laughter from all the other voices. Rue Palikao was noisier at night than during the day. She heard the crackle of vegetables being fried, the whirr of the stovetop fan, and a curious sound of running water that came from somewhere else.
Ku smiled the artificial smile of a humorless man who finds himself having to force a smile: “He’s in love with you, isn’t he?”
“We’ve known each other for a long time.”
“If he would risk giving you intelligence, he must have feelings for you.”
Her reflexes were always slower in the evening. She stared blankly at Ku.
The photojournalist had been wearing two-tone shoes stitched together from white and brown leather, and she could tell that he took pride in dressing well. He bent over, lifted the hem of his trousers, and retied the elastic band on his socks in a single knot, folding the top of the sock over so it would cover the purple flannel band and leave only a single strand hanging down. He was really quite handsome, much more attractive than she had noticed on the ship, and he knew it. To him, she must seem gawky and subdued. He sprang down the steps, turned to hold the door open with his elbow, and backed into the restaurant while beckoning at her.
“If your comrades are all this beautiful, I’ll have to join the revolution,” he had said loudly, appearing to have forgotten that they were in a small restaurant. She instinctively reached out and caught hold of his gesticulating hands to stop him from going on.
“You must think about how he can be useful to us,” Ku said soberly. “Of course, it all depends on whether he really does have connections inside the Concession Police. But if he does, they could be helpful to our cause.”
Before they left the restaurant, the man had warned her again not to return to Rue Amiral Bayle. If you don’t have anywhere to go, I’ll come up with something, he had said. “But of course, your people will have somewhere safer in mind.”
Just then there were noises downstairs, chairs being moved and boxes turned over. Lin’s steps squeaked up the bamboo ladder and his face appeared.
“What is it?” Ku asked sternly.
“A rat.” He grinned.
Leng felt numb to everything around her. She sat there, blankly, clutching a cup of tea that had gone cold, that feeling of bleakness spreading like a chill across her body.
CHAPTER 20
JUNE 14, YEAR 20 OF THE REPUBLIC.
9:00 P.M.
As a matter of fact, Therese did not think Hsueh was lying. She believed him. After all these years living in Shanghai, she still hadn’t got a handle on the gangs, who really were everywhere. But she could tell he had lied about being friends with the gangsters. She remembered the night when Hsueh had arrived at the Astor covered with bruises. Clearly, they’d had him beaten up and forced him to spy on her. She relented.
She had always liked Hsueh, that half-Chinese bastard who smelled of jasmine. She loved his photographs. They were pictures of blood-covered corpses, vomit reeking of alcohol, female bodies. They exhibited an obsessive love of cleanliness, a sort of harmless irreverence, a bizarre sense of invulnerability.
The relationship also felt more real to her since Hsueh had intruded on the other half of her life. The bastard now stood out from all the other men whose pale naked bodies she had seen in the darkness. He wasn’t just a certain position, a scent that made her horny, a cock with a birthmark on it. She had handled many different cocks, some crooked like eagle beaks, some with foreskins that could be stretched endlessly like a nylon sock.
If you make this one exception, you’ll never be ruthless again, she told herself. She could have simply killed him. She could have had him killed. She had loyal bodyguards and good friends in the White Russian gangs.
That day, as she threatened him with a gun and pushed the barrel into his chin, she had watched the tears well up in his eyes. She jabbed the barrel in farther behind his chinbone. He had to be punished. As she pushed harder, she could hear him moan and try to swallow, and she felt sorry for him. She knelt on the bed, naked, still sweating, but the torturer’s cruel smile played across her face. As she stroked his dick with her other hand, she could tell how petrified he was, how frustrated and vulnerable. He wouldn’t give in. But he couldn’t help getting aroused, and for Therese, that signified a form of surrender.
She was overcome by affection for him, and later she thought that might have been when she had fallen in love with him, perhaps because she had never had to think about whether she loved Hsueh until she was forced to decide whether to kill him. For more than three years, they had met every weekend at the Astor, and if she hadn’t had enough sex, all she had to do was give him a call. He was always there, and the thought of never being able to see him again had not crossed her mind. Never before had she thought of Hsueh as an actual human being, rather than a male body who gave her pleasure. He was jealous that she had other men, and had even stooped to spying on her. For the first time, she had learned of something that had happened to him outside their relationship: someone had beaten him up and forced him to report on her.
She started thinking of him as her lover, and the thought filled her with tenderness. When her gun was jabbing into his chin, hadn’t he almost wet himself from fright? Didn’t he tell her that later on, when she was fondling him? But he had said he loved her anyway.
She ruefully admitted that she was a woman just like the rest of them, like her friend Margot—love was the bane of their lives. She had survived war, famine, and revolution. She liked to think she wasn’t easily duped, and she knew insincerity when she saw it. But she also knew that everything in the Concession had a price. So she was choosing to overlook Hsueh’s lies because she could tell he was for sale, and she could afford to buy him. She thought her lover far superior to Margot’s. Equality couldn’t exist in any relationship that took place in this city full of adventure seekers, gold mines, and traps. One person was always in control of the relationship, and if it wasn’t him, it was you.
She directed Zung to leave Shanghai immediately, telling him she had reliable information that the gangs and even the police were aware of his latest deal. But she did not tell him about Hsueh. Zung was her business partner and trusted employee, but even so, how could she broach the subject of her private life, never mind reveal that she had been sleeping with a man sent to spy on them?
Earlier that evening, nouveau-riche Shanghailanders had arrived at an Edwardian villa in the west of Shanghai for an elaborate party. They had all been nobodies when they first came to Shanghai, but they had at least been ambitious. And now that they had made their fortunes and become the masters of this place, they had all bought worthless titles of nobility from their home countries back in E
urope. They ate three-course meals. With the money they had made speculating on land, they hired tutors and nannies for their children. They spent huge sums of money on Russian jewels for their wives, and smaller sums of money on Asian mistresses whose lips revived their dicks. They permitted their half-Chinese sons to work in their friends’ companies, and abandoned them when their own speculating failed.
It was just past seven, and the dew on the grass had not yet softened the ground. The swimming pool was still sparkling in the dusk. Since it was a fancy dress ball, the villa and grounds were teeming with all kinds of odd characters. A group of Arab nobles leaned on the second-floor railing, the men wearing scimitars and the women wearing head scarves. The theme for the day was the sinking of the Titanic.
The captain—the founder of the American company the Raven Group, the evening’s host—announced that the ball had begun. The Arabs howled as though they were standing at the edge of the desert. Margot was wearing an elaborate fin-de-siècle pleated dress that trailed on the floor. Even her drawers had been specially stitched by Chinese tailors according to the fashion of the period, she whispered to Therese. They were long silk drawers with the type of open seat pants that nowadays only toddlers wore.
“You’d better find somewhere quiet and let Mr. Blair get under that dress,” Therese mocked gently. Margot’s husband was dressed as a general. He had managed to procure a number of medals and a gold-embroidered red sash with a large stain that looked for all the world like an old borscht stain. Baron Pidol was clearly fitting right in. He was acquiring the Shanghailanders’ leisure habits, and he already had a genuine antique sash.
An up-and-coming young poet from London tied a purple shawl around his head that covered his chin and was draped over his shoulders, in an impression of a Berber chieftain. Shanghai was his first stop on a journey through China, and he hadn’t yet traveled farther inland. The men who were learning how to be rich—or their wives, rather—all ordered literary magazines from London and knew of him from there. They invited him to banquets, keen to see the young prodigy from Cambridge. His companion was even younger and skinnier than he was, and had smeared his face black with paste. To avoid having to paint his shoulders black, he had drawn his tartan wool shawl higher around his neck to hide his pale skin. A man called Madier commented in what he meant to be a worldly tone: “I suppose the Moroccan gigolo costume suits him. The poets, Gide, I mean, didn’t they all use to go off to Morocco for this sort of thing?”