French Concession

by Xiao Bai

  The poet and his companion couldn’t hear the people gossiping about them. The former was too busy grumbling about the music. The band was playing last year’s hottest jazz standard, “Body and Soul,” a perfect song for a slow dance with an arm around your partner’s waist. They always played new songs for this crowd, just to prove they were au fait with the latest musical trends. But would the poor dead musicians on the Titanic in 1913 have been playing jazz back then? The poet didn’t stop to think that if this had been 1913, people wouldn’t have been content to whisper about him and his companion—some busybody might have hauled them into court.

  Shanghailanders were like that. While they might be fooling around, they despised and gossiped about anyone else who did. If things ever got so far that they made the newspapers, the whole Concession would enjoy a few evenings of Schadenfreude at the dinner table. Shanghai prided itself on setting trends, but it was also a stickler for conventional values. Someone said out loud that the woman singing in the band should be expelled from the concessions for being a disgrace to the British Empire. Apparently she had jumped up on the table at a businessman’s private bar and danced naked in the style of the Tiller Girls, kicking her feet up so high that they almost reached the chandeliers. The inebriated young men who were present all got an excellent view. They said even a prostitute wouldn’t do what she did after getting drunk: lie on the table, kick her legs up in the air, and even piss into a wineglass. Her husband, a failed speculator, had jumped off a building. He hadn’t been able to keep her under control, but couldn’t the Concession Police do anything about her?

  Someone said loudly that his second cousin had written to him saying London had no plans to withdraw its troops. Since 1927, every time the Nanking government had made anti-imperialist noises, London had sent a company or two to Shanghai from India. The Concession would flourish for the next hundred years! The land west of Shanghai would be worth a hundred times as much in five years, and everyone should snap it up. His listeners cheered.

  Baron Pidol was drunk, while Margot occasionally swept into view among the dancers. She couldn’t resist spiking the foxtrot with a few kick steps from the Charleston, the latest dance craze to hit Shanghai, even though her long dress was ill suited to dancing it.

  “I don’t like the Charleston,” Baron Pidol told Therese. “A well-bred lady shouldn’t be dancing the Charleston. Crossing her hands over her knees like a monkey from Szechuan.”

  His own dance steps were a little ragged, so Therese steered him off the dance floor. Chinese servants in lemon-colored silk shirts with short sleeves made their way through the crowd. The baron reached for another glass of gin and tonic.

  “I could have another twenty glasses of this. In twenty glasses’ time I’ll be sober again, twenty times soberer than when I’m sober. Soberer than that Mr. Blair.”

  “You don’t look soberer than Mr. Blair right now.”

  “Oh yes, Mr. Blair is sober. Sir Blair. He’s sober. He could cross his hands over his knees and he’d still be a sober gentleman. She, on the other hand, is a whore.”

  “She’s your wife.”

  “That’s true. She is my wife. Margot, will you take Franz to be your lawful wedded husband? That’s my wife all right, sleeping with another man.”

  “That’s a lie.”

  “I’m not lying. She thought I didn’t see what they were getting up to in Mo-kan-shan, but even if I hadn’t, wouldn’t it be written all over her face? She hadn’t showered, and she still smelled of him. Did she think I couldn’t tell? Did she think I couldn’t smell the sperm on her? Women have all kinds of smells, but semen only has one smell, like almond milk tea left out overnight.”

  “You didn’t see a thing. You’re just guessing.”

  “I saw everything. They didn’t even shut the door. They couldn’t hear me race up the stairs. I had taken my gun but forgotten my hat, and what kind of gentleman forgets his hat when he goes hunting? Anyhow I tiptoed downstairs and gave them another five minutes. Then I shouted for my hat in the yard, as though I hadn’t seen a thing, when of course I’d seen it all. She came rushing down the stairs, her face flushed, her eyes watery.”

  The party was in full swing. The drunken bachelors had formed a long line, each with their hands on the shoulders of the man in front of them, hopping through the hall with their knees bent like frogs. They skipped around the pool in the lawn, came back through the hall, and hopped up to the second floor and back. More and more people joined them. Therese took the crestfallen baron out to the lawn. It was windy, and moonlight played on the servants’ silk sleeves. Baron Pidol was still pouring his heart out.

  “I’m going to buy a ticket and go home. I hate this place,” he whimpered.

  “Surely a gentleman wouldn’t just run away.”

  “Oh, I’ll be back. I want to go home and tell the board that there’s money to be made here. Then I’ll come back with cash and buy and buy.”

  Someone rang an alarm bell they had borrowed from the Board of Works’ fire department, and someone else was making an announcement in the hall. Therese could only just make out the words. “The ship has hit an iceberg and it’s about to sink,” he said. The crowd began to scream.

  CHAPTER 21

  JUNE 14, YEAR 20 OF THE REPUBLIC.

  9:15 P.M.

  Inspector Maron must have complained to Sarly that Hsueh had disappeared at the most crucial moment. The scene of the shooting was a mess, and the plan to search the apartment had to be abandoned. But when Hsueh eventually turned up, he did lead the policemen to the correct apartment. Unsurprisingly, they found no one there, but they did find some valuable evidence. The Chinese detectives discovered a forged Concession residency document under a pile of drawers, and as soon as the poet from Marseille saw the photos, he cried: “Isn’t this the woman who disappeared from the Paul Lecat?”

  They also found a Browning pistol and five rounds of ammunition. “If Hsueh had not run off on his own and we’d gone in right away, we would have nabbed that woman,” Maron told Lieutenant Sarly in front of Hsueh.

  When Sarly asked just what Hsueh had been doing, he said he had been searching all the longtangs on Rue Amiral Bayle for the right apartment. And when Sarly lost his temper, Hsueh only rubbed his nose and said that he would find her again.

  Sarly didn’t ask how. Which was not to say that he had perfect faith in Hsueh. But he did know that the concessions were governed by a set of rules to which the police had no access. For instance, both the French Concession and the International Settlement contained a handful of places—an alleyway, a yard surrounded by black picket fences, or a maze of old wooden huts—that were miniature fiefdoms, concessions within concessions, controlled by the gangs or the Communists, and defended by their own armed guards. All the Chinese knew where these places were, and none of the French detectives did. Unless he absolutely had to, no Chinese detective would reveal this information to his superiors. There was a wealth of information to which only the Chinese had access, and even a Shanghailander who had spent thirty years here might never figure it out. That was why Sarly was willing to invest in Hsueh. He believed that Hsueh’s Chinese face would give him access to what Sarly thought of as Shanghai street savvy, and that his French heart would prompt him to report it to Sarly.

  When Hsueh later thought back to that day, he realized he had been feeling vaguely confident that he held a pretty good hand. Like any keen gambler, he prided himself on his intuition. He refused to admit that he was affected by anything like being attracted to a woman he felt as if he’d always known. He thought of the information he had as something like an inside tip that an unknown contender would be allowed to jump the gun. Now he was waiting for the odds to rise before placing a bet.

  Despite knowing that Therese often lunched at that White Russian restaurant, and that the waiter knew her so well that it had almost become her second home, he took the woman there. It was either showing off or a gesture of protest—actually, he wasn’t sure
which. But running into Therese there would certainly have been something.

  That night, he put half a tin of Garrick cigarettes in his cigarette case, and went out to look for Li Pao-i. He took him to Moon Palace, a cheap dancing hall where one yuan bought you five dances with a girl. He wanted to ask Li about the Kin Lee Yuen incident.

  Li Pao-i’s take on recent events shocked him. It wasn’t an isolated incident, said Li. The whole underground intelligence network of the Concession was chattering about this new assassination squad. No one knew where it came from, but at least three assassinations had already been linked to it.

  “Didn’t your paper say they were Communists? There was that manifesto too.”

  “The Communists don’t work that way,” Li said. He had smoked half of Hsueh’s cigarettes in no time at all.

  Tao Lili came to their table. She loved journalists, and it was said that her stage name, Peach Girl, had been Li’s suggestion. “Why a peach?” she was said to have asked him. He drew his hand back and sniffed at it. “What do you think?” he said. Upon which she was said to have pounced on him: “Eat me out, then!” Not all the dancing girls offered extra services on the side, but Tao was well known not just for her willingness, but also for her indiscretion. All of Shanghai knew which of her clients cut it, and which didn’t. A tabloid journalist had apparently uncovered one young dandy’s embarrassing secrets by hiding in an adjacent cubicle. She looked at Hsueh, and whispered something in Li’s ear.

  “You idiot!” Li muttered.

  “The Communists don’t do assassinations,” he said to Hsueh. “They take care of their own traitors, sure. And they might kill someone who poses a serious threat. But they wouldn’t have to hound a small-time journalist like me when they can use their own publications. They wouldn’t shift gears like that overnight.”

  “What’s your stake in this anyway?” Li asked, gesturing with his wineglass. The deep glasses were said to have been invented by the captain of a Scottish pirate ship, to make sure that the wine wouldn’t spill even if the seas were rough. Nowadays, of course, the pirates had all become bigwigs in Asia.

  Hsueh produced one of the official name cards he had gotten from the newspaper, and handed it to Li.

  “The French are keen on it. They think there’s a story here. They think it could be a big deal.”

  “It could be a pretty big deal, that’s true . . .” Li stopped midsentence and looked at Hsueh, as though he had just realized something.

  The table was low, and Hsueh could see Li stroking Tao’s thigh from across the table. Tao glanced at Hsueh, adjusted her posture slightly, and smoothed out the slit in her cheongsam. The line of white flesh that had been visible just above her stockings vanished.

  “What I’m about to tell you, now that’s a big deal,” Li said mysteriously.

  “You cunning old fox. Stop pretending you know anything,” Hsueh said, deliberately refusing to give Li any face in front of Tao.

  Li was provoked. He got up, shrugged his shoulders, rubbed his nose, lit a cigarette, and let slip a piece of information that could have been worth a hundred-yuan check:

  “You’re not the only person who’s been coming to me asking about this. And it’s not just the police. You wouldn’t believe it. At the teahouse by the Race Course, even Morris Jr. came to me. Not on his own steam—you guessed it, the Boss himself sent for me.”

  “Wait, the Green Gang cares about this?”

  “Word is that someone paid the Green Gang a lot of money to find the killer, so yes, the Boss does care. Of the three killings so far, one isn’t important. One has to do with the coup in Fukien. Three days after the assassination, the commander of the fort at Safuchou was arrested and sent to Nanking. The most important of the three is the assassination at Kin Lee Yuen Wharf. Ts’ao Chen-wu was in Shanghai making arrangements for the arrival of an important figure, and he was killed to stop that man from going to Canton. It had something to do with public debt, but even I don’t know the whole story.”

  He said “even I” as though it should all have been reported to him as a matter of course. Then he put his hand complacently around Tao’s waist, and pinched her.

  It was Li’s own fault he didn’t know the whole story—he’d never done an honest day’s work in his life. To find out whether public debt had played a role, all you’d have to do was read the papers for the week of the assassination. Once they were done talking, Hsueh resolved to go straight to the editorial office’s reading room and read all the foreign newspapers from the past month.

  The dance hall didn’t seem to be doing well that night. Even Peach Girl, their most popular dancer, wasn’t hauled off to join any other tables. A singer shrieked the song “Drizzling Rain” at the top of her voice, while a fire-eating acrobat performed in between songs, juggling three flaming beer bottles that rose and fell in the air. Li was groping Tao; Tao’s deep eyes were fixed on Hsueh; Hsueh couldn’t stop thinking about Leng.

  “Leng is your real name, isn’t it?” he had once asked her. She had ignored the question.

  Hsueh didn’t really trust Li. You had to take all the tips horse-traded in the Concession with a grain of salt. He could have sworn Leng belonged to a Communist cell because she was so focused, and he felt she must be ideologically motivated. Mere flirting seemed not to distract her at all.

  But the next day, he felt less sure. He had stayed up all night reading old newspapers in the editorial offices until the early hours of the morning. Even the editor had praised his diligence:

  “Whatever the big scoop is that you’re looking for, after you go to the police, you’re coming to me. Whatever you’ve got, you’re publishing it with me.”

  He went to the Jih-hsin-ch’ih Bathhouse for a bath and a full-body massage, and took a nap. He also kept an ear out for the latest news of the Green Gang.

  “There’s that new assassination squad, of course. People something?” The bathhouse was the best place for gangland news—even the boys who gave foot massages were sworn gangsters. They knew exactly what tips to leak and what to bury. The Boss had it all under control.

  So when he met Leng at noon, the first thing he did was to try and worm more information out of her.

  “I didn’t think financiers could be Communists.”

  “What do you mean?” Leng was puzzled.

  “Nothing.” Leng was getting used to Hsueh’s random questions. If she ever thought back to these conversations days later, she would realize that things would have turned out quite differently, had she told Ku about every exchange between her and Hsueh.

  Hsueh’s chief talent was being creatively untruthful. Last night I went straight to Moon Palace Dancing Hall on North Szechuen Road, he said. I was looking for my police friend. This barely counts as a lie. I pretended I didn’t really care, and I was only asking questions to make the dancing girl think I was in the know. This isn’t too far-fetched either.

  “Your friend, is he a Frenchman?” Leng asked.

  “Yes, but he’s lived here for years and he speaks Shanghainese.” Hsueh blushed at having been caught out.

  “It’s funny you speak French and know so many French people.”

  “My father was French,” he said without trying to boast, although being French had its advantages in the Concession.

  “I see.”

  Hsueh was surprised that Leng was in such a lively mood. She had been silent and nervous the previous day, like a hedgehog curling up when prodded.

  Yesterday afternoon the Concession Police ransacked the apartment. They found identity papers with your photo and a fake name, unless that’s your real name and Leng isn’t.

  Leng grew irritated. Those sons of bitches, she muttered.

  He had nothing left to say. That’s all for today. Dismissed. Hsueh touched his brow in what he imagined to be the international Communist salute.

  He was even more surprised when Leng suggested watching a movie. A movie? Sure, why not. Let me buy you a steak dinner too.
r />   CHAPTER 22

  JUNE 15, YEAR 20 OF THE REPUBLIC.

  3:55 A.M.

  Before Ku could make his next move, they made a move on him. That was his own fault. Under the circumstances, he shouldn’t have gone to Ch’i’s place. If they hadn’t yet decided to buy him off, there was a chance they might be sizing him up, and he should have guessed they would use Ch’i to get at him. When he first negotiated with them, Ch’i had been their go-between.

  He got home in the early hours of the morning and rapped on the door. Still shaken, he told Ch’in to go to sleep. He wanted to think.

  On the way to Ch’i’s apartment the previous night, he had had a funny feeling. The apartment was on Rue Eugène Bard, and getting there from Rue Palikao usually took about fifteen minutes, but today it took more than half an hour. He could have taken Rue du Consulat toward Boulevard de Montigny, which would have allowed him to stay within the bounds of the French Concession and not go through the iron gates. But for some reason he ventured into Chinese territory via the gates on Rue Palikao. He was always telling the cell that they had to breathe deeply and stay calm, and maybe he had been jittery. But that meant he had to cross the northwest corner of Chinese-administered territory and enter the Concession at the gate between Ming Koo Road on the Chinese side and Rue Voisin on the French side, where two policemen stopped him and frisked him.