Quin?s Shanghai Circus

by Edward Whittemore

  How’s the ear, Gobes?

  The ear’s fine.

  Bandage too tight?

  The bandage’s fine.

  Look, I’m sorry I spoke to you that way, I didn’t mean it. I just got angry that something like that had to happen in Mama’s place.

  Anger’s fine. That Mama’s fine. What happened’s fine.

  Quin nodded to himself and went into the kitchen, or outside to walk, or back into the bedroom to stare at the floor. Somehow he knew he had to get through to Big Gobi, he had to break his trance. In the end, not knowing how it might help, he decided to take him along to the meeting with the gangster Kikuchi-Lotmann.

  Later that evening on the houseboat with Kikuchi-Lotmann would remind him of another meeting on a houseboat, the one Mama had failed to mention in her first conversation with him, the episode that had taken place in Shanghai eight years before she arrived there, the evening when Baron Kikuchi had embraced his convictions and agreed to supply the plans of the General Staff of the Imperial Army to the engaging husband of his former mistress, a man named Quin.

  One recollection, a small one.

  Soon there would be many more since Quin was unknowingly nearing the center of the espionage ring that had received its code name from an event in the life of the mysterious Adzhar, a clandestine network that had connected his father and the General and Father Lamereaux, and Maeve and Miya and Mama, and through them others as well, in a performance of love and desperation so powerful it could reach out thirty years later to claim both murders and suicides, create a new Kannon Buddha, and bring on the most magnificent funeral in Asia since the death of Kublai Khan.

  And all because Quin wanted to help Big Gobi, and in so doing introduced him to his murderer.

  Just before midnight they were walking down the canal behind the sushi restaurant when a young Japanese stepped out of the shadows with a submachine gun. He was wearing a dark business suit and his hair was cut short, but Quin wouldn’t have recognized him anyway without his false moustache and false sideburns. The young Japanese pointed the submachine gun at an alley and moved behind them. There was nothing to do but march ahead.

  They came to a blank wall at the end of the alley. A buzzer sounded. The wall rolled away to reveal an enormous hall, a brightly lit area where hundreds of young women in white overalls and white surgical masks sat at benches studying banks of miniature television sets. Behind the sets were computers. The television screens showed scenes from all over the world, shipyards and oil refineries, camera factories, massage parlors, motorcycle assembly lines, bars and restaurants, transistor radio plants, every manner of enterprise and industry.

  The guard waved them through a door into another large hall, less well lit, where young men in white overalls and white surgical masks supervised machines that stacked and packaged currencies.

  The next door led into darkness. They were outside again facing the canal. A narrow gangplank ran down to a small houseboat.

  When they stepped on the gangplank a light went on. A speaker began to play circus music. They passed through a tiny room with a bare canvas cot and one empty coat hanger on the wall beside a whip and megaphone. They walked through another door onto the deck.

  The water was black and still. On the far side of the canal the windowless wall of a warehouse stretched for hundreds of yards. A charcoal brazier burned near the edge of the deck, which was covered with sawdust. Folding canvas chairs were scattered here and there. From one of them rose a short, rotund man who wore steel-rimmed glasses and a lavender frock coat. He smiled as he put out his hand.

  Just in time, he said. I’m serving Mongolian mixed grill tonight. Your name please?

  Quin.

  The short, rotund man shook his hand warmly.

  Kikuchi-Lotmann, Mr. Quin, a pleasure. I was beginning to wonder what had happened to you. I expected to see you soon after you made your inquiries. Were you delayed?

  Quin pointed at the bandage over Big Gobi’s ear. Kikuchi-Lotmann shook his head with concern.

  An accident? How unfortunate. But in any case you’re here and now we can have our chat. Who was it that sent you to me?

  Father Lamereaux.

  Ah, such a good man, so gentle and so kind. I haven’t seen him since I was a child. Excuse me, please.

  The young man with the submachine gun clicked his heels and handed a report to Kikuchi-Lotmann, who glanced through it with no expression on his face. The guard stood at order arms. Kikuchi-Lotmann lit a long cigar and puffed briefly.

  That settles it, he said. Sell our Korean textiles, our Kuwait crude, and our Kabul goats. Buy Surabaja brothels and bring down the government in Syria. I’ll see the delegation from Bolivia next week. Tell the families in Belgium and Bali to stop feuding or I’ll put out contracts. Corner the unrefined sugar market in Burma, via Beirut. Put a hold on South African diamonds until the Venezuelans agree to our pineapple terms. Bring gin, ice, and bitters.

  The guard clicked his heels and left. Kikuchi-Lotmann removed a necktie from his pocket and tied it in the place of the one he was wearing.

  Not since I was a child, he repeated, in Kamakura before the war. He often used to visit the man who took me in when I was a nameless orphan, Rabbi Lotmann, the former Baron Kikuchi. Lotmann always admired Lamereaux’s knowledge of the No theater. Are you also interested in No?

  Quin shook his head.

  Nor am I. Performances yes, but of a different kind.

  He paused, smiling, as if Quin were supposed to understand something by that. But when Quin said nothing he nodded quickly.

  I see, he told you nothing about me. Well what might the name of your friend be?

  Gobi.

  Gobi? The desert in China? A curious name. In Chinese he would be called Shamo. That’s their word for it, it means sandy wastes. Men known as dune-dwellers lived there in prehistoric times. Artifacts have been found along with dinosaur eggs. Would you like a drink before dinner?

  They sat down at a folding camp table and Kikuchi-Lotmann mixed pink gins. A servant, a short man with gray hair, appeared with a platter of kidneys and liver, heart, spleen, a section of the large intestine, tongue and hocks and throat. Something about the man reminded Quin of Mama, perhaps his height or the resignation in his eyes. But the servant was thickset whereas Mama was frail, and the compassion in her face was replaced by hardness in his.

  Kikuchi-Lotmann inspected the platter and gave instructions for cooking the meat. At the same time he chopped up leeks and watercress and made a salad dressing.

  I wonder if I haven’t seen him before, said Quin, nodding in the direction of the servant who was now bent over the charcoal brazier.

  Unlikely, answered Kikuchi-Lotmann. He’s one of my two personal bodyguards and is always with me. The other is the young man who escorted you in. The young one I call the student and the old one the policeman, because that’s what they were when I hired them. The student is good at remembering things and the policeman is good at grilling meat. And now, Mr. Quin, let’s have our chat. Why are you here?

  To try to find out about my father, although I don’t see how you could have known him. He died before the war.

  I was a child before the war, Mr. Quin, and the only foreigners I knew as a child were two friends of Rabbi Lotmann. One was Father Lamereaux, the other was an elderly Russian linguist by the name of Adzhar who also lived in Kamakura. Adzhar was in his late seventies then, about the time you were being born. Is it possible you later changed your name to something more American?

  Kikuchi-Lotmann grinned. Quin smiled and shook his head.

  I’m afraid not. It would make a good story, but Adzhar’s not the man I’m looking for.

  Looking for? You said he was dead. What do you mean?

  I mean I know very little about my father or mother, other than that they lived out here. I came to Japan to find out what I could.

  But how am I to help if I never knew a Quin and never heard of one?

  I don’
t know. All I know is that Father Lamereaux told me to come to see you and here I am.

  Quin smiled. Kikuchi-Lotmann laughed.

  I have a feeling, said Kikuchi-Lotmann, that the old Jesuit’s up to something. Well he’s clever, we know that. I assume he knew your father?

  Not well, only in one special way. He saw him occasionally but never for more than a minute or two at a time. He can’t tell me much really.

  But he did know him, just as he knew Rabbi Lotmann. He knew your father and he knew my guardian, and obviously there’s some reason why he wanted us to meet. Do you know what that might be?

  No.

  Kikuchi-Lotmann removed his glasses to polish them, his eyes shrinking to two solemn dots. The glasses went on again and Quin was faced with two large smiling eyes.

  I think I might, said Kikuchi-Lotmann. I think it might have to do with No plays. They’re stylizations, aren’t they? The actors wear masks so there can be no doubt of that, then too the number of roles is quite limited no matter what the play. Only a handful really. The witch, the princess, the old man, the brother, and so forth. Now it happens there’s only one thing I know about my parents, and Rabbi Lotmann might have told Father Lamereaux about it just as he told me.

  What is it?

  Their last circus performance. How they died. Do you know the story of Emperor Taisho opening parliament?

  No.

  I’ll tell it to you, but just excuse me a minute, please.

  The bodyguard with the submachine gun came to order arms, clicked his heels, and handed Kikuchi-Lotmann a second report. He lit a new long cigar and glanced over the single sheet of paper.

  Just as I expected, he said. Say no to the automobile franchise in Thailand, offer Icelandic fishing grounds instead. Acquire a controlling interest in Ceylonese tea and let it be known that no ships will be unloaded in Malaysia and no opium allowed out of Turkey unless we get all of Bombay’s male brothels. Send a letter of condolence to the head of the Burundi family. Also agree to finance the airport in the Sulawesi but not the steel mill in Sikkim. Fix the horse races in Buenos Aires and send the proceeds to our London insurance firm. Switch our arms shipments from the sultans in Sabah to the terrorists. In Somalia do the opposite, withdraw support from the terrorists and send tanks to the sheiks. Buy Austrian skiing, sell Libyan electronics. Take control of the trans-Siberian pipeline.

  Oil or natural gas? asked the bodyguard.

  Natural gas, said Kikuchi-Lotmann. Use our Geneva and Zurich banks. Liquidate our off-shore rights in Africa, take an option on the Brazilian jungle. Levy an eight percent surcharge on all vessels anchored in the Mediterranean. Build a tourist industry on the Caspian in Iran, emphasis on speed boats and snack bars and fast service. Schedule a coal miners’ strike in Finland the day after tomorrow. End the Honduran boycott of Nicaraguan bananas. Put out the order that I want everyone in the organization to get a haircut before the weekend. Don’t bring me any more reports tonight.

  The bodyguard backed away. Kikuchi-Lotmann took a new necktie from his pocket.

  The Emperor Taisho, he said, was on the throne in the 1920s when Father Lamereaux first came to Japan. There was an event then that made a great sensation although nothing was ever printed about it, naturally. Being god in those days, the Emperor didn’t have much to do. One of his few duties was to open parliament. The chamberlains were always worried how Taisho would handle himself at the opening because he had never been quite right in the head. Well this time he stood at the podium and didn’t seem to be doing anything at all, not even reading his document. He just stood there looking down at the bowed heads, rather a blank expression on his face. After about ten minutes of this had gone by, he smiled suddenly as if an idea had just come to him. All at once he rolled up the document he was supposed to be reading, rolled it up in the shape of a spy glass. He put it to his eye and swept the chamber with it, peeking at one man after another. The chamberlains were rushing to get ahold of him when he yelled out in a high squeaky voice: Hello down there. I am the Emperor. Who are you?

  Kikuchi-Lotmann laughed.

  He wouldn’t give up his spy glass, so they had to lead him away and open parliament without the document being read. Well the point is, perhaps that’s what Father Lamereaux is doing. Perhaps he’s saying, I am the Emperor and it’s up to you to answer for yourself. He knew my guardian, he knew your father, he knew the way my parents died. There’s a connection somewhere, and it must have to do with that last circus. With that vast unreal warehouse on the outskirts of Shanghai.

  Shanghai?

  Of course. Where else in Asia could such a circus have been performed?

  After they finished the meal Kikuchi-Lotmann poured brandy. Big Gobi stared at the fire and dozed. A full moon had risen above the canal. It was well after midnight and the city was quiet. Facing the still water from the houseboat, they seemed far from Tokyo.

  Kikuchi-Lotmann removed his necktie and tied in its place one of deep crimson.

  The circus, he announced, taking off his glasses. His eyes shrank to dots as he recited the poem.

  To know its sawdust,

  Its smells and rings and highbars,

  Is to remember.

  A haiku, he said. Not a very good one, but at least of my own making. Now let us recall that other circus, the circus we knew as children. The sweep of the trapeze acts, the grace of the dangerous cats, the ridiculous clowns, the lumbering elephants, the confusing jugglers, the flying bareback riders. A magical show without end because of the magic in a child’s heart.

  Yet when we go back years later we see a different performance. The costumes are shoddy, the smells cheap, the clowns not quite so funny, the aerialists not quite so daring. The dream is gone and what we see is crude, even grotesque. Sadness? Yes. Because we know the circus hasn’t changed.

  So much for the wonders of childhood. Now for the setting of this particular circus, Shanghai in those last days before the war.

  Enormous wealth, enormous poverty. Thousands of entrepreneurs and tens of thousands of slaves. The opium rights to a province lost at a game of cards. Women given fortunes in exchange for an evening of pleasure, or thrown into the baggage train of a warlord as a different kind of payment. Peasant boys reigning as queens one day and tortured to death the next. Hundreds of people slaughtered because a Chinese or Japanese general wakes up in the morning with painful hemorrhoids.

  In food the favored delicacy is shrimp fed on human flesh. In alcohol and drugs the preferred mixture is laudanum, which combines the two.

  These are the simple facts and figures of Shanghai, a city crowded with White Russians and exiles and adventurers of every kind, the halfway point on the east coast of Asia, a terminal for victims of all breeds and races.

  Facts and figures. Are they enough, or is it possible that Shanghai was more than this? Not just a city but a state of mind, or to be more precise, an actual part of the mind? A vision we all carry somewhere within us?

  It is here that my father finds himself with his circus one winter late in the 1930s. He is the circus master and my mother, in order to be near him, has taught herself to be an aerialist. A group of wealthy degenerates approaches him for a special performance, a private showing, acts to match the times and mock them. He listens to them and agrees, implying a performance unlike any ever staged. He moves his circus to an abandoned warehouse on the outskirts of the city and goes to work alone rigging the high wires, preparing the props and costumes himself.

  The night of the circus comes. It is to begin exactly at midnight. The spectators arrive in evening dress and take their places while the band plays ruffles and flourishes. It is cold in the gloomy warehouse, but the excitement is too great for anyone to bother with that.

  Trumpets. A drooping clown holds a sign for silence.

  The drum rolls. A juggler spins a shadowy web of balls in the air.

  Now we see him stepping into the ring dressed in boots and frock coat, carrying a whip and megaphone, th
e shaman and arbiter of marvels. He raises the megaphone and we hear the acts he will present.

  The one-eyed tomb of Semarang.

  The sure-footed vine of Mindanao.

  The prancing Brunei horse.

  The untamed leopard of Irrawaddy.

  The Malacca cane.

  The one and only Johore jerkin in captivity.

  The spectators refuse to acknowledge this list of preposterous acts. Some are stupefied, others angry, a few fearful. They have brought bags of shrimp with them to eat during the performance, and now they begin noisily cracking the tails of the shrimp, peeling them, stuffing the rich meat into their mouths. There is hissing and shouting, stamping, catcalls.

  The snare drum rolls again, the juggler plays out his shadowy game. My father continues announcing acts that have never been acted, animals that have never lived. It’s nonsense, of course, yet all of it is serious as well as meaningless.

  At last he lowers the megaphone. He walks across the sawdust to the side of the ring looking up at my mother who is poised on the highbar, waiting for her trapeze act, a hundred feet above the ground.

  Does she understand at the moment what he is doing? What is about to happen?

  Perhaps. But it is too late for her or anyone to stop a performance that began long ago. Long ago, yes, and now it is here.

  Tuneless, masterless

  Come the acts of memory,

  A Shanghai circus.

  Kikuchi-Lotmann untied his necktie. He took a black one from his pocket and knotted it in place.

  Poetry is a sauce, he said, and like all good sauces it should be both sweet and sour. The performance he had prepared that night, you see, was for a very small audience. The wealthy patrons in the stands, the animals and acts and clowns, the band and the jugglers were all props for a private performance he was about to stage for one person and one person alone, the woman on the highbar. To each of us love is a different mixture. To him it meant a ring and a bed.

  But before I complicate the tale, let me say that it is really very simple. A man is enamored with the dash and excitement of the circus. He gives his life to it and discovers too late that the love of one woman is more important. Now wasting one’s life is commonplace. This man’s madness came because he had knowingly refused the gift.