French Concession

by Xiao Bai

  He went out every day. When he was out, she always phoned Ku, receiving a constant stream of news from the cell and fresh orders. Since Hsueh’s meeting with Ku, they had gone from speaking every day to speaking twice a day. That was how she kept reminding herself that this was a mission, not a love affair. Whenever he left the apartment, she would start wondering whether he was off to see that White Russian woman. That always made her upset, until she reminded herself that she had never been all that into him, that she was just using him. That made her feel better.

  But when he got home at night, or sometimes in the afternoon, all her resolve would melt away. At some point they had started going for walks through the cobblestone alleys, down to Chao-chia Creek and back via a more roundabout route. On those walks, it often seemed to her that everything she thought of as mere playacting was real, and all the harsh truths that were so clear to her during the day were a sham. She felt as if she lived in two different worlds, night and day, and she was reluctant to admit that she liked the nights more.

  Once they got home, they would change out of their day clothes. She didn’t want to change in front of him, but he didn’t seem to care. She was slowly filling up his space with her clothes, her habits of arranging things, her flowers, food, the books she fished out of his dusty piles of stuff and arranged on the bedside table. Despite not having brought anything with her, she was gradually making the place hers.

  At night they talked before falling asleep, and sometimes they made love. Usually she didn’t really want to, because it thrust her back into her playacting mode. But when they fell silent and she knew his mind was elsewhere, she would try to get his attention by cuddling or kissing him. That was always how they ended up having sex. Whenever he seemed either too wired or too relaxed, she would get into character and allow herself to seduce him.

  Afterward, she often had the strange feeling that Hsueh enjoyed himself most when her exaggerated playacting became ridiculous. Almost as though genuine emotions and playacting were two sides of the same coin, and exaggerating her feelings would make them real.

  Hsueh finished writing, folded the piece of paper up, and handed it to her. Tomorrow she would call Ku, who would have her send him the report. It should really be written in code, in chemical ink, and slipped into the pages of a book or inside an inconspicuous parcel. But Hsueh would find that all laughable. He wouldn’t understand.

  He got up suddenly, and grabbed her by the shoulders. “This is too dangerous! You’ve got to leave. You can’t keep doing this.”

  She looked silently at him.

  “You’re not like them! You should leave the cell. They’re full of hatred, and that’s not for you. Let them do what they do.”

  Of course his concerns were entirely bourgeois, but she was touched that he cared about her. Maybe he was only trying to obtain information for Ku in order to help her complete her mission and whisk her away. She should really be grateful to him.

  “I can’t leave. I can’t just walk away. This is my job—it’s a calling. I’m not like you. I believe in the class struggle.”

  She was too flustered to know what to say, and her brain was full of abstract phrases that didn’t help.

  “You know I can’t just leave. I’m the prime suspect in an assassination case. I’m wanted by the police.”

  She was trying to put it in a way he would understand, without realizing that she had already conceded ground.

  “I’ll come up with something. I can talk to my friends in the Concession Police. I have a good friend in the Political Section, a very senior French officer. We’ll find a way to get you out of this crowd.”

  “It wouldn’t work. You couldn’t do it. Even your friend couldn’t.” She could tell she had lost the argument. She should have been talking to him about the evils of imperialism, about class struggle. She was supposed to say that the very idea of running away repulsed her, and she certainly didn’t need the help or faux sympathy of a couple of imperialist policemen. But she didn’t want to go on about something Hsueh wouldn’t understand. Hadn’t she spent all this time trying to learn how his mind worked, so she could explain things in a way that would make sense to him?

  “Of course it can be done. If that’s what you want. We could leave Shanghai together.” Hsueh cut himself off abruptly, because he realized he had lied about being able to just pick up and leave. But Leng didn’t know that. She had momentarily been tempted by his offer, and she despised herself for it. She thought back to the choice she had made in prison.

  She was angry with herself and trying to make up for it by yelling at him.

  “Get lost! Don’t you try to tempt me! Don’t mock me. I’m not in love with you. I’m using you, don’t you see?”

  She enjoyed seeing the startled look in his eyes. She knew she could conquer him. Oh, she liked knowing that her words hurt him. She went on and on.

  She hurled herself at him and started punching him (the hurling was largely imaginary, since they were standing only inches apart). She wanted to slap his face, but they were standing too near each other and he had his arm around her waist, so all she could do was slap him on the back.

  He started kissing her, and she realized that her anger was melting away. That’s the end of it, she thought, he wants me in bed. She despised herself for not even resisting him.

  CHAPTER 42

  JULY 2, YEAR 20 OF THE REPUBLIC.

  3:35 P.M.

  Ku’s greatest worry was that the cell was losing focus. He could tell it was happening. Three days had passed since Lin disappeared. At first Ku thought he might have been arrested, but Leng told him that Lin wasn’t being held by the police. He asked about the gangs, and heard nothing. He posted lookouts near the safe house on Boulevard des Deux Républiques, but there were no arrests, nothing out of the ordinary. He began to think that Lin might simply have left of his own accord. He told no one else about this suspicion. To the cell he maintained that Lin had been arrested.

  If one member of the cell was arrested, they usually assumed that all the locations that person knew about had been exposed. Lin was the leader of his unit, and he knew about all the safe houses. The unit asked Ku whether they should evacuate the apartment on Boulevard des Deux Républiques, but with another operation imminent, they couldn’t afford the time. He told them Lin was being held by the Concession Police, and that he was being very brave and he hadn’t said a word, so the apartment was still safe. But he did station a few more guards around the candle store on Rue Palikao.

  Lin’s dropping out was the worst thing that could have happened, and Ku was always expecting the worst—it helped him to make good decisions quickly in times of danger. Leng’s lie had also shaken him. On the deepest level of the cell’s workings, in terms of maintaining its focus and planning its next attack, he was alone and no one could help him. When loneliness engulfed him, turning to the concrete details of the next operation usually made him feel better. But he used to deal with despair and lethargy by visiting Ch’i.

  He had been left without a woman when she died, and he was not about to get himself another. When he had Ch’i, he had always reminded himself that the woman was his weakness, his vulnerability, but he had found it hard to stop thinking about her. Even now, he found it hard to take his mind off her. How could he? He used to say self-deprecatingly that a woman would be his downfall, but now the words just made him sad.

  He could not even remember what Ch’i looked like. He knew she had a round face with long bangs that parted in the center and covered her eyes, a face the shape of a melon seed or an egg. But try as he might, he couldn’t picture her eyes or eyebrows or mouth or nose.

  Perhaps because of his memory of her death, when he thought of her late at night, it was always her ass that came to mind. If he was happy, he pictured it smiling, and if he was sad, he pictured it crying. The most beautiful part of Ch’i’s body was her ass. He imagined it as being larger than life, able to protect him from actual and metaphorical bullets,
from his own successes and failures.

  Wearing a gray woolen suit, off-white pants with the cuffs turned up, and a dark gray velvet hat, Ku turned the corner from the Bund onto Nanking Road, dressed like a respectable banker who was squinting in the sunlight because he had just come out of an office. He looked as if he was strolling aimlessly about, but he was actually scrutinizing the buildings with a city planner’s eye for detail, mentally calculating distances and travel times, and noting where the police were posted: at traffic posts twice a man’s height at the crossroads, at guard posts on either side of important buildings, and at the barricades between districts. He also took note of their uniforms and whether they were armed.

  He walked past plenty of banks, moneychangers, and bond issuers. He didn’t like the look of the foreign banks along the Bund, which were all heavily guarded and housed in buildings too big to properly control. But too small a target wouldn’t do either. His wrestling classes in Khabarovsk had taught him that you have to hit your opponent where it hurts. That way you’re in control and he’s too busy defending himself to go on the offensive.

  Perhaps a medium-size bank on the border between the two concessions would be best. He was walking along Yuyaching Road, which was full of people all day long, especially near the Race Course. A few men sat on benches under the trees reading the racing paper. One of them flipped through the whole paper, screwed up his face in thought, and started tapping the edge of the newspaper with a pencil sharpened on both ends to calm himself down. Walking south along the wall of the Race Course, he could hear the crowds clamoring in the grandstands. This is utter madness, he thought. But then he had his own form of insanity, and he was playing for far higher stakes than they were.

  Of course, there was nothing special about that. Everyone in Shanghai was always betting on something. One of these days I’ll lose everything—but not this time, he thought. Wondering when he would lose gave him a rush of excitement. He realized it was an insane gamble, but then he had been driven insane when the Soviets locked him in the pitch-black room where the Purge Commission imprisoned its victims. Not that he knew that at the time; all he remembered was an oak door as thick as a cliff face. He was lucky they hadn’t just taken him out and shot him, probably only because he was a foreigner. And he was twice lucky that they had sent him to a gulag in Azerbaijan, where his insanity turned out to be useful—it allowed him to escape.

  To win big, you have to be insane. A madman is terrifying, an insane gambler more so, but if an insane gambler judges risks accurately and thinks clearly, he can terrorize everyone. Power comes from terror, which means, conversely, that terror can alter the present power structure and force existing powers to give up part of their territory. Being weak and complacent, they would rather appease a terrifying new power than risk losing what they already have. Oh yes, they would beg for mercy. They would buy him off.

  The Race Club would one day offer to buy him off, as the Green Gang had. But he wasn’t so easily bought. He wanted more than just money. That was what made him different from all those people, and why he thought of himself as a different kind of revolutionary.

  He cut across the road and stopped in front of I-pin-hsiang Hotel. Department stores and silk stores lined one side of the street. He went past Sheng-t’ai Dance Hall and the Great World Arcade. He turned from Boulevard de Montigny onto Rue du Consulat, and thought about how much he preferred the Concession to the International Settlement. In the Concession, the streets went every which way, traffic was chaotic, and the crowds sometimes took over half the street. He tried to work out a route that would allow him to speed through the tangle and out of the concessions’ jurisdiction. Standing at the entrance to Hsieh-ta-hsiang Silk Store, he found himself looking at the banks on Rue du Weikwé, which were neither too small nor too big. Just what he wanted. It was true that banks are the heart of the capitalist system, but that was why they were always heavily guarded. He imagined himself watching that heart beat inside a rib cage.

  He stopped by the butcher’s, drawing back its cotton curtains to go inside, and had the shop assistant weigh out a pound of meat for him. Although he had called a meeting of the unit leaders, he didn’t want to go back to the candle store just yet. First, he had to find somewhere quiet to think. As he was going into An-le Bathhouse, he decided that Rue du Weikwé wouldn’t be a good spot either. It was too near Rue Palikao, and the street was too short. To think that after going all that way, he had realized the bank opposite the candle store was their best bet, he thought ruefully.

  As he relaxed into the hot bathwater, sweat and dirty water ran down his head and face. He inhaled the steam, which made him feel faint. Gray bodies floated along like ghosts. Someone stepped on his toe underwater but it didn’t hurt. An arm’s length in front of him, he could see a dark mass of testicles bobbing near the surface of the water, surrounded by filth the way dirt might collect around a floating corpse on the river. Suddenly, he felt a glimmer of unease, like a flicker in one of the dim lightbulbs on the domed ceiling.

  Whenever he felt a chill in his bones like this, he knew it was a sign of danger. It was the same thing he had felt that day on the way to Ch’i’s. He could feel it even now, as he lay soaking in hot water, but he didn’t know why.

  He relaxed and leaned back against the porcelain walls, letting the steaming water come up to his neck. It’s just your nerves, he told himself, forcing himself to focus on something positive instead. The best thing he had going for him was that new grenade launcher they were going to buy. In his military technology class in Khabarovsk, he had had to learn about all kinds of weapons, even the ones being developed in Red Army factories, and he had recognized the diagram as soon as he saw it. These grenade launchers would be invaluable to the imminent battle against imperialism. No matter what husk of a vehicle the imperialists were hiding in, the grenade would penetrate it like a poisoned dart and explode in its heart.

  He had already instructed Hsueh to have that White Russian woman deliver the goods. Money was no object. He needed to come up with something new, turn a one-man grenade launcher designed for defensive use against armored vehicles into a powerful weapon of urban guerilla warfare. Next he had to figure out how to train his people to use the new launcher. The best thing to do would be to hire boats and sail out to Wu-sung-k’ou. A few of the Pu-tung unit knew how to sail a boat, and others were familiar with the treacherous waterways of the Yangtze. He would also have to hire a car with an eight-cylinder engine that could outrace the police cars.

  CHAPTER 43

  JULY 12, YEAR 20 OF THE REPUBLIC.

  1:35 P.M.

  It was already July. The air near the ground appeared to ripple in the heat. There were people playing tennis on the lawn outside on the terrace, straining to swing their rackets in the scorching sun. Lieutenant Sarly had the driver stop directly in front of the door. The pillars in the corridor looked grainier than usual, as though the last drops of sweat had been wrung from them, leaving a knobby bark.

  The glass doors were like lines of latitude separating two climate zones. Indoors it was quiet and cool. The Chinese servants wore long-sleeved livery. Sarly went through the golden vestibule, where dozens of naked women cast bashful sidelong glances at him, the mons pubis swelling above their smooth white thighs. He reflected that French people only kept sculptures in order to perpetuate other people’s stereotypes of the French.

  His hands brushed against the carved brass railings as he went up the stairs. The crimson rose patterns of the porcelain flooring were smooth as glass, and the doors to all the halls were open. A servant sprawled on the floor, rubbing it vigorously, his knees knocking against the pomelo wood flooring mounted on springs. Another servant stood on a ladder, carefully scrubbing the golden mosaic walls as if the tiles were gemstones. If he had the time, he would have breathed on each tile before scrubbing it, so that impurities in the bucket of water he was carrying would not damage it. The day after next was Bastille Day, or the Fête Nationale, and
the French Club would be hosting a large ball.

  The corridor echoed with the sound of bowling balls rumbling down their lanes. The men had congregated on the balcony of the bar. A bunch of tuberoses nodded sleepily in a vase, and cigar smoke dissolved in the breeze. He sat on a chair beneath the Ionic columns.

  “I heard the two companies arriving from Haiphong get in tomorrow?” That was the younger M. Madier of Madier Frères. The elder M. Madier, his brother, had founded a company in Paris to import the raw silk that his brother sourced in inland China and shipped to Lyon. The two brothers had been running their business for nearly fifteen years. They were among Shanghai’s most prominent businessmen.

  “That’s right, they’ll be just in time for the review of troops on Bastille Day!” Colonel Bichat roared. The heat appeared to have no effect on him.

  It was too early for dinner. The English, Americans, French, and Japanese were all well represented in the select inner circle that had invited Sarly to this weekend banquet, but as a result of the Great War, Germans were never invited. Baron Pidol was new to the group and now very much sought after. He had made a few risky bets that had paid off extremely well, and his eye for deals had quickly earned him the respect of the China veterans.

  Lieutenant Sarly knew that all these men cared about was money. When they said they wanted to protect the concessions, what they meant was that they wanted to protect their own privilege. They despised newcomers and thought of themselves as the only true heirs of nineteenth-century imperialist explorers, who would survive in tiny foreign concessions that remained lone bastions of capitalism even if the capitalist world order was swept away. To preserve their territory, they were even willing to countenance a Japanese attack, especially if Nanking insisted on stationing the Nineteenth Route Army in Shanghai. Lieutenant Sarly considered that a suicidal idea.