French Concession

by Xiao Bai

  Nanking was expanding the Greater Shanghai Plan. He had heard that the authorities were exploring the idea of a large-scale patriotic education movement. The investigation reports had been made available to the functionaries in charge of planning this movement. When their plan was put into action, it would make the Communists’ lives even harder. Tseng was certain that Ku and his so-called People’s Strength had nothing whatsoever to do with the Communists—they weren’t even a fringe organization. On this point, he agreed with Cheng Yün-tuan, the secretary posted to their investigative commission by the Investigative Unit for Party Affairs. This man was supposed to be his deputy, but he was really there to keep an eye on him. Tseng had argued his case to both the French Concession Police and the Shanghai Municipal Police, but no one had believed him.

  After tossing out those two grenades, he ended the interrogation abruptly. He wanted to give the young man time to think. He had his subordinates give Lin a meal.

  Arresting Lin had been an unexpected piece of luck. The gangs had heard that the cell responsible for the attack on 181 Avenue Foch might have rented an apartment near Boulevard des Deux Républiques. Someone had spotted one of them on the street. He sent an undercover team to investigate the claim and found its source, a gardener at 181 Avenue Foch. On the night of the attack, he had been crouching by the wall, shitting in the shadows behind the trees. He had been so petrified he could barely move, and the faces he had seen in the half-light had made an indelible impression. One of them had come to ask him something about the casino a few days before, and he had recognized the man immediately. Later he had seen that man use a public telephone booth on Boulevard de Montigny before walking in the direction of Boulevard des Deux Républiques, but he hadn’t had the guts to follow him. When the news got out, gang leaders sent their foot soldiers to sniff out the area, and they discovered more traces of Ku’s cell. The errand boy at a tobacco store on Rue Buissonnet said that an unfamiliar face had started coming in to buy cigarettes, and that he would always buy half a dozen packs of several different brands at once. Someone overheard a suspicious conversation in an adjacent cubicle at Pu-chüan Bathhouse on Rue Voisin. So Tseng had some of his people take the gardener for a drive around Boulevard des Deux Républiques. As luck would have it, they actually ran into the young man, whose identification documents listed him as a student.

  He was extremely interested in this case. He thought he liked this man, this Ku Fu-kuang. After comparing a number of different reports, he was convinced that this was the man’s real name. People who knew him back when he was a union organizer said that he was a chi kung master who could punch through a door or break a brick with his bare hands. He was said to be audacious and extremely intelligent, good at making quick decisions and acting on them even in chaos. Tseng Nan-p’u picked out one incident that seemed to shed light on his character. Apparently Ku had once emptied a sack of night soil over the head of a factory foreman with ties to the Green Gang. The man lost face in front of hundreds of workers, and Ku himself became a union leader overnight. Then he had worked briefly as a guard at the Soviet consulate before gradually disappearing from public view.

  There was some evidence that he had gone on to receive training at Khabarovsk. The Political Section of the British Police had acquired a photograph of a graduation ceremony from somewhere in India, and the Investigative Unit for Party Affairs got hold of a copy via an agreement to exchange intelligence. Someone looked at the photo and recognized a prisoner in the Nanking Military Court Model Prison. The man was immediately questioned, and he testified that Ku had been active in Southeast Asia as a businessman until he was caught up in the Soviet purges. As far as he knew, Ku had already been executed.

  Tseng Nan-p’u couldn’t tell how Ku had made it back to Shanghai, but he was certain that Ku, like him, had completely abandoned his former beliefs (or perhaps he shouldn’t say that of himself, since he had never really had strong beliefs).

  The door opened slowly, and Cheng came into the room with a half-eaten apple. He had been standing behind the subject during the interrogation, and had slipped out halfway through. Tseng didn’t stop him. He guessed that he was phoning in a report to Nanking.

  “Did you read the interrogation notes?”

  “I just did. We were right—they’re all in the dark about Ku.”

  Cheng Yün-tuan was the man posted to their group by the Investigative Unit for Party Affairs, but the two of them got on very well. That was because he, Tseng, was very open. He used to be a university professor, and he knew how to talk to young people.

  “It was a heavy blow for him,” Cheng said, commenting as if he were a narrator in a student play. “He’s questioning his deepest beliefs. If he is disoriented, we should strike now instead of allowing him to reestablish his defenses.”

  “Let’s wait a while longer. Give him time to weigh the evidence and have him look at a few newspapers.”

  “We’re running out of time. Tomorrow we have to notify the French Concession Police, and the day after tomorrow we’ll have to hand him over.”

  “We’ll keep him here for now. I’d like for us to crack this case.” Tseng still couldn’t work out why the Concession Police kept insisting Ku’s group was a Communist cell. He suspected they had their motives for refusing to believe otherwise.

  “Why are they so sure that these people are Communists?” he asked softly, not because he thought Cheng would have an answer.

  Cheng’s apple squeaked as he bit into it. He threw it, half-eaten, into the wastepaper basket. Tseng thought wasting food like that reflected poorly on how a young man had been brought up. But maybe the bad habit made people feel comfortable around him.

  “Easy,” Cheng said. “It merely confirms what they have thought all along, that the fight between the Kuomintang and the Communists is the source of all trouble in the foreign concessions. Maybe Lieutenant Sarly wants to take credit for a major case, or maybe he wants the case to stay within the remit of Political Section. Maybe arresting a Communist cell will look better on his record of colonial service. Relations between France and the Soviet Union have been deteriorating. There’ve been trade delegations withdrawn and diplomats expelled. The Soviet Union’s biggest enemy is Paris rather than London now, or so they say.”

  “That sounds reasonable. You could write a report on it. That’s all the more reason why we shouldn’t hand him over to the Concession Police. It’s a conspiracy.”

  “An imperialist conspiracy.” Cheng added an adjective that would make their imagined report sound self-evidently true to the typical Nanking politician.

  “Maybe you should talk to him. You’re young people, you’ll get along. The truth is that he’s been taken in. As long as he’s willing to talk, we can speak up for him, rig things so that other people get the blame. We can teach him how to talk so that the Concession Police will dismiss him as being harmless. If he is truly willing to work for us, we may not even have to turn him over to the police. We’d send him straight to a training program instead of juvenile detention. These young socialists can be very promising. After all, if a man can’t see the injustice in society at twenty, he has no heart.”

  Tseng wasn’t worried that Cheng Yün-tuan would report him to Nanking. The Party Affairs people were all specialists in communism, from the head of the department down to the typists. You could bet their document archives in Nanking were chock full of Communist pamphlets, whereas the Central Bureau had burned most of theirs in case they were surprised by a search.

  CHAPTER 40

  JULY 1, YEAR 20 OF THE REPUBLIC.

  8:15 P.M.

  Hsueh had no idea how to clean up this mess. It was a mess that he had created, chiefly by being unable to say no and not wanting to disappoint anyone. But there were two people involved whom he really didn’t want to get hurt. He couldn’t even warn them of the danger they were in. He walked along the narrow path by the wall of the police headquarters, toward the stairs.

  He had had lun
ch at Therese’s apartment before leaving. He could tell that she was falling in love with him just as quickly as Leng was. Paradoxically, to make a cheeky observation, she was less focused on making love to him, and wanted to talk instead. But Hsueh was aware that he had gotten himself into this mess by talking too much. This morning, for instance, they had barely done anything. She had only allowed him to put his dick in halfway, and while she ran her fingers around the other half, she wanted him to promise to take her to his family home in Canton. He talked about the bamboo mattresses they had there, which printed lines on your face that made you wake up looking like a rice cake cut into squares. She told him about the farm she remembered: the cows, donkeys, barns full of hay, and the swamp of a pond that turned to ice for half the year.

  He was lost in thought for a long time. The sun shone into his armpits and on Therese’s shoulders. Hsueh didn’t have a care in the world until Therese brought up the deal again, over lunch. He was forced to say that Mr. Ku was very keen. It was exactly what he wanted, and money was no object, so he would go through with the deal. All he wanted to know was whether the weapon was as powerful as advertised.

  “Is it?”

  Ah Kwai was in the kitchen. Therese reached her hand beneath the flowery tablecloth and into his underpants. She gripped him:

  “Of course, just like you.”

  Therese said he wasn’t acting quickly enough. Since Ku was sure he wanted the goods, they should settle on a time and place for delivery. There was no need for her to meet him. Hsueh could take care of everything, but he had to give her a clear date and order size, so that she could arrange for someone to deliver the goods.

  He already knew it was a weapon called the Schiessbecher, manufactured by the German company Rheinmetall. But he couldn’t describe it in Chinese or give it a Chinese name. He knew it was extremely dangerous, and powerful enough to penetrate the steel plates on an armored vehicle. He felt that just knowing it existed put him in danger. He intuitively thought he should hide what he knew, so he didn’t tell Sarly what he had just learned and only half understood. But now he had a diagram of the weapon and an information sheet about it. He decided to give Sarly the diagram.

  As he walked along the corridor toward Sarly’s office, he noticed that the door to the detective squad’s office was open. Inspector Maron was not in, and the poet from Marseille was sitting at a desk by the door. An idea occurred to Hsueh. He rapped on the door and opened it before the poet even answered. But he could not convince himself to ask his questions, especially now that he knew about this powerful weapon. He sat on a folding chair across from the poet for a few minutes, and decided not to ask. He would just make something up for the report he was going to write this evening under Leng’s supervision and hand in to Ku the next day. After all, you could see police vehicles with rifles on their turrets everywhere. He would invent an even number of vehicles, twenty-two armored vehicles belonging to the Concession Police. He liked even numbers as long as they weren’t round numbers, which looked fake.

  He reached into his jacket pocket for the diagram, and gave it to Lieutenant Sarly. It made his own diagram look like the work of a drunkard, or a child’s assignment scribbled at the last minute.

  Lieutenant Sarly wanted to know exactly when the delivery would take place. Of course Hsueh didn’t have a clue. He was just a go-between, a flighty lover given a task far beyond his abilities. He had only ended up in this mess by sheer coincidence, and Sarly was well aware of that fact.

  All the vigilance and tiptoeing around sometimes got the better of him and drove him to start prattling recklessly away. It was happening again.

  “Why not just arrest them on charges of conspiring to commit a crime?” Hsueh asked. “They’re perfectly capable of shooting people and planting bombs. I’ve met this Mr. Ku, and he looks dangerous. He should be locked up. He’s inciting people to give their lives to his cause, and some of them must be decent people. He should be arrested now before he does anything else. He’s planning to rob a bank.”

  Hsueh suddenly realized he had told a terrible lie, and also revealed something he had meant to keep to himself. It was true he had met Mr. Ku. It was not true that they were planning to rob a bank.

  “You’ve met him?” It was the true statement that first caught Lieutenant Sarly’s attention. Without waiting for Hsueh to answer, he asked: “And you say he means to rob a bank?” He paused for a few seconds between the two questions, as though the information was only just sinking in.

  “That’s right,” Hsueh continued, without letting the pause linger too long. “The weapons will be delivered soon, so he had someone contact me to fix a time and place. Of course I couldn’t make that decision—I’m just the middleman. Leng sounded frightened. Things aren’t going the way she’d imagined them. She said their main goal right now is to rob a bank.”

  “Why a bank? Since when have Communists gone in for bank robbery?”

  “Oh, it’s quite possible. You did say once that there were financiers among them.” He should sound firm, he thought, and tried again. “It’s only natural. Banks are the heart of the capitalist world, circulating the blood of the capitalist system. A bank is like a fortress.”

  Hsueh wondered whether he was using all that jargon correctly. Jargon is invented to name the inconceivable, to pin down something that’s hard to explain. The force of the word itself makes the speaker more convincing, so that he can influence you to do what he wants you to do and think what he wants you to think.

  Lieutenant Sarly didn’t recognize the weapon in the diagram either. Hsueh guessed that Sarly had never even heard of it. He didn’t pay much attention to the diagram: he simply glanced at it while cleaning out his pipe, and tried to smooth out a small crease on the page. Then he stuffed it into his document folder, along with all those photographs, forms, and neatly printed reports.

  Hsueh had sprinkled his speech with details that might later come in useful. He did so subconsciously; he simply had a knack for mashing everything together, and he was always trying to be helpful to someone. For instance, he had mentioned that Leng was afraid. This was a reasonable thing to say, he thought, and it would come in useful some day. He thought of Sarly as his talisman, and you can make demands of your talisman. One day, he thought, he would be able to plead with Sarly to let Leng and Therese go. Hsueh was optimistic by nature. He saw them as good people caught up in complicated circumstances, like himself.

  He would still be in an optimistic mood when he wrote his report for Mr. Ku that night. Influenced by Sarly’s hints, Hsueh imagined that Ku was plotting something that would petrify everyone. He embellished the report, exaggerated somewhat, writing that Ku was the Political Section’s most important suspect, and that nearly all their resources were devoted to investigating him. Based on his vague impressions and the dubious snippets of information floating around in his brain, he concocted a story that even he thought sounded crazy. The French Concession Police and the Shanghai Municipal Police were jointly ordering a new fleet of police vehicles from Rolls-Royce, he wrote, not only to patrol the streets, but also equipped with sufficient personnel and firepower to be rented out to private and public entities, such as banks. Then he thought of a way to incorporate his newly acquired knowledge into the report. Current models can withstand ordinary bullets, but not the newest antitank grenades projected from rifle-mounted launchers, he wrote. The new, reinforced fleet of police vehicles will rectify this vulnerability.

  For a moment, he was terrified by his own imagination. He felt as though he himself was planning a violent crime, not Ku. Leng stood there holding his hand, puzzled by how much it was sweating.

  CHAPTER 41

  JULY 1, YEAR 20 OF THE REPUBLIC.

  9:35 P.M.

  Leng wished she hadn’t told Ku about Hsueh and his gun-peddling woman. It had slipped out when Ku was telling her off for lying to the cell about her and Hsueh being old acquaintances. Maybe she had only told Ku about the Russian jeweler to make hers
elf feel less guilty. But she had to admit that she was jealous. Maybe she had told Ku because it would help her find out who this woman really was. Of course, if she was an arms dealer, that could actually be useful, and Ku might decide to buy something from her.

  But right now she regretted it as she clutched Hsueh’s clammy hand. She could tell he was nervous, and she shouldn’t have gotten him involved to begin with. She stood behind him and gazed at his curly hair, choking up with a sudden feeling of tenderness.

  Taking her left foot out of her slipper, she brushed her toe up against her other ankle, leaning closer to Hsueh. The way she was standing wasn’t all that sexy, but she still wished he could see her now. She tried picking the slipper up with her toes, but that made her falter.

  She had to beat the other woman. That was how this game worked. She had to seduce Hsueh and become his woman, replace all those other women, in order to make him take up his part in the class struggle. That was her mission, and when she didn’t know there were other women, she had been certain she would succeed. Now she was less certain.

  She had tried all the sexy moves she could imagine, the ones she thought a Russian woman might know. Sometimes she would turn over in bed and crawl onto him. But as soon as she was sitting across his belly, she would realize she didn’t know what to do next. That was embarrassing, just sitting there, as if she were perched on an altar surrounded by a waiting crowd. She didn’t know whether to prop herself up with her hands—she didn’t even know where to look. She avoided meeting his gaze, which seemed to taunt her.

  It was her duty to seduce him. Everyone knew that sophisticated men like him only fell for those other women. Her only weapon was psychological, and if she couldn’t keep his attention, he would soon find someone else. How else could someone like him be compelled to risk working for the cell?