The Shadow Knows

by Kenneth Rosen

  ***

  Bonnie had given me a single letter to deliver to a Miss Cai Fu-ning at the Peace Hotel in Shanghai. It was in a blank envelope I had sealed myself and when I folded the envelope in half I could just fit it into one of the two breast pockets of my recently purchased tan Mao jacket. Before we had left Peking I had taken the precaution of reinforcing the button on each of those pockets with a needle and some thread borrowed from Talya’s sewing kit and now, as we were asked by the attendant to make our way to the dining car for our dinner, I checked on my handiwork by tugging vigorously once or twice on each button as the four of us walked single-file back through the other soft-sleeper coaches.

  The dining car was almost empty when we got there; a few overweight army officers sat at a table at one end of the car and two foreigners, a man and a woman who looked to be in their late fifties or early sixties, were engaged in earnest conversation in English at a smaller table on the opposite side of the car and near the other end. We chose a table for four in the middle and an attendant came up to half-heartedly swipe at the crumbs and small pieces of leftover food on the stained white tablecloth before he looked at Ma and then rattled off a question so rapidly that the rest of us had to make a concerted effort not to laugh out loud. I hadn’t understood a single word and it was obvious that neither had they. Ma answered slowly and the man went away with a scowl; I hadn’t understood a word that Ma had said either and he noticed our bewilderment.

  “Do not be disturbed at what you think is your linguistic ignorance after all the hard work you have put into studying our language. That comrade is obviously not happy that we have been called to eat our meal at such a late hour and he chose to speak his own dialect, Shanghaiese, rather than putungwa, the people’s language – it was called Mandarin before Liberation – in hopes of confusing us and perhaps causing us to leave. I apologize for his rudeness. I answered him in his own dialect and told him to bring our foreign guests the regular dinner and not that which is specially priced for foreigners. It will be a large bowl of tung-mein, noodles and some vegetables in a broth, and a plate of fried noodles on the side. It is filling and very tasty; you would find the other meal fancier but not as palatable and at least three times as expensive. Shall we order some beer as well?”

  The meal was delicious and although, as with most non-banquet meals in China, it was served and eaten in less than twenty minutes, we lingered for a few minutes as we finished our beer. The older couple was slowly finishing a bottle of wine.

  “Isn’t it unusual for foreigners to be allowed to travel alone, Ma?” Noah asked in a lowered voice, nodding in their direction.

  “If they are long-term foreign guests, as you are, they may travel without a guide if they can speak Chinese. This does not apply to those who come to our country on tours for two or three weeks. I would say that those two people at the end of the carriage have lived here for some time and probably speak Shanghaiese; I see that they are wearing old Chinese shoes and I believe I heard the lady respond with some anger to the waiter in his own dialect when he tried to remove their unfinished bottle of wine. I would guess that those two people have very little difficulty traveling without a guide in China.” He smiled as if he approved of their obvious resilience.

  The beer and the silence from the loudspeaker in our compartment helped me sleep soundly through the night and after breakfast the next morning I spent several hours just watching the countryside roll by our window, taking an occasional break to walk up and down the corridor to avoid getting too stiff from all the enforced inactivity. It was an interesting ride and Ma’s good humor and vast knowledge of the places we passed made it that much more enjoyable, but I was glad to reach Shanghai and get settled in our rooms at the Jing Jiang Hotel. Ma was in a section of one of the buildings reserved for Chinese, Larry and Noah were in a double on the second floor of the main building, and I was given a single on the third floor. Noah said an ex-classmate of his had recommended a restaurant directly across from the hotel’s main entrance so that first night we ate there. We insisted that Ma come along as our guest because Noah remembered that his friend had said the place was pretty fancy, and we knew how little Ma earned, but even we were surprised to find such a place in China.

  The French Club was, before the communists started their long march from the south in 1948, the elegant nightspot in the old French Quarter. Now it was a bit tarnished, but it still had an indoor swimming pool, a mahogany-paneled billiard room, an old-fashioned two-lane bowling alley with its own bar and a Chinese pin boy to reset the pins, and a formal restaurant with leather armchairs and a crystal chandelier. Ma explained that it was now one of the places kept open to attract the much-needed hard currency of foreigners and those overseas Chinese who had become wealthy in their adopted lands and who came back for a visit. The head waiter wasn’t too happy to see Ma in his Mao jacket and obviously mainland slacks, but he reserved his longest stare for me and my own Mao jacket; foreigners dressed like your average comrade couldn’t be expected to spend as freely as your average tourist. If Noah and Larry hadn’t decided to put on Western ties and jackets for the evening we probably would have gotten a table near the kitchen instead of the one we were given close to the three musicians who played Western classical music as we ate. The violist was superb -- a young woman who wore the kind of skin-tight Susie Wong dress I never saw worn in Peking -- and the food was good French food, but we could see that Ma wasn’t all that comfortable in that kind of place and when the bill came the rest of us weren’t all that enthusiastic either.

  After the others had gone up to their rooms I took a long walk to try to get a feel for the city. It seemed much more crowded than Peking and the people appeared to be more sophisticated and aggressive; many were well-dressed, the women as often in dresses as in the usual trousers, and I saw a few groups of liu-mang, young toughs, hanging out on one of the busiest corners, each man wearing a pair of black plastic sunglasses even though the sun had gone down hours ago. The Jing Jiang is in a relatively residential area and fairly quiet, but as I got close to Nanking Road, the city’s major shopping street, the noise increased and the crowds spilled out over the narrow sidewalks and took up a good portion of the road on either side, forcing the constantly honking taxis to swerve and brake and accelerate in an urban ritual that reminded me of rush-hour in midtown Manhattan. It was after nine o’clock at night and most of the stores were closed and I couldn’t help wondering what the street was like when they were all open.

  When I reached the Bund I watched the lights of the junks and sampans and large freighters on the river for a while and then I walked upriver, checking the small street map I’d gotten from the desk at our hotel, and turned off the Bund and into the main building of the Peace Hotel. I walked around the lobby for ten or fifteen minutes, getting my bearings and making sure I knew where the elevators and stairs were, and then I went into the hotel bar where three Chinese musicians were playing American pop tunes from the 1940’s and several Japanese businessmen were drinking scotch and giving the waiter a hard time. The saxophone wasn’t bad but the piano sounded as if it were being played under water so I had one beer and left. Back at the Jing Jiang the clerk on duty gave me my key and a telephone message. I was to call the Peace Hotel the following evening and ask for room 514. The caller had not left a name.

  Larry gave his lecture at Fudan the next day and that night after dinner I placed the call and a man with a slight Boston accent answered the phone and when I identified myself he asked if I would be kind enough to hang up and allow him to call me right back. It was almost eleven minutes later when he did and this time there was a definite undercurrent of tension, almost a panic being barely held in check, in his voice.

  “The person you were to meet has had a sudden accident – a serious accident -- she will be unable to see you and – and it will be best for all concerned if you destroy your item at once. Will there be any problem in your doing that?”

  “No, none
at all. May I ask the nature of the accident?”

  There was a short silence in which even the sound of his breathing was absent, as if a hand had been placed over the mouthpiece of his phone for a few seconds, and then he was back.

  “Unfortunately, such questions are now irrelevant. I’m sorry, but I must go now.” He hung up with what sounded like a sigh.

  I thought about taking a taxi to the Peace Hotel and trying to find out for myself just what had happened, if anything, to Miss Cai Fu-ning, but I rejected the idea. The man on the phone had made it sound final and in spite of his being upset he had sounded as if he knew what he was talking about.

  I sat on the edge of the bed and took the letter from my jacket pocket, crumpling the envelope and throwing it into the small wastepaper basket by the night table as I spread the letter on the bed and stared at it. I’d been told to destroy it and I fully intended to, but what was really in it? I’d read it once in Peking and it had appeared to be just a complicated explanation of various money transactions in several currencies and the projected rates of exchange on specific dates during the next twelve months. Given the sudden turn of events, however – and the unexpected American voice on the phone – I now wasn’t so sure.

  As I looked down at the flattened letter, neatly typed and single spaced and almost completely covered with words and numbers, I reached for the box of matches on the table and slowly removed one, closing the box and holding it lightly in my left hand as I positioned the match in my right. I was about to light the match and carry the letter the few steps into the bathroom to burn it when I remembered something I’d been told by a rumpled old instructor at the ASA headquarters in Massachusetts almost eighteen years earlier. The man had impressed me because I had been reading something by Poe at the time and at the end of a basic decoding class he had said that the best cryptographers he knew all had minds like that of Monsieur Dupin, the character in Poe’s story “The Purloined Letter” who finally figures out that the missing letter must have been put in the most obvious place.

  I put aside the match and matchbox and took the letter over to the desk and switched on the green-shaded desk lamp. Assuming what I thought was the most obvious, that if there was a hidden meaning in the paper then it would somehow be implanted in the words themselves, I used a pencil to underline and rearrange and even lightly put a line through words that might have any significance. After almost an hour I realized I was hopelessly out of my depth; the possible combinations and transpositions seemed endless. I put down the pencil and rubbed my eye with the knuckles of my hands and as I looked back at the paper I noticed something I’d missed before; almost all the words now had some kind of pencil mark associated with them, but the many Arabic numbers remained as neat and precise as ever. What if the meaning was in the numbers?

  I tried to control any excitement, tried to listen to that rumpled old guy and think only of the most obvious; if numbers were to have any message to give they would each have to have a letter equivalent, but if there were variable equivalents it would require a computer to figure out all the numbers in this document. Think obvious. The best I could come up with was to assign each of the numbers a letter with 1 being an ‘A’ and 26 being ‘Z’. When I looked at the paper again I couldn’t help shouting with joy – there were no numbers on the typed page that were larger than 26! I knew it was absurd, but felt like I’d just figured out the Rosetta Stone.

  Taking the numbers line by line from the typed page was easy:

  1351919175

  5144

  181521205

  11220518141205

  185161225

  19201516

  21182113179

  1612135

  914

  1651516125

  14113519

  5243811475

  491911618152254

  61992420551419

  When I first gave them their letter equivalents, however, my excitement diminished rapidly; the resulting words made little sense. It took me a few minutes to realize the most obvious thing of all – the words I had created from the numbers simply had to be read in reverse order, from the bottom line upwards. I wrote out the result in capital letters and studied it until I had it memorized: FSIXTEENS DISAPPROVED EXCHANGE NAMES PEOPLE IN PLACE URUMQI STOP REPLY ALTERNATE ROUTE END MESSAGE. Before I climbed into bed I burned the original letter and my own scribblings and even the envelope I retrieved from the wastepaper basket, and I flushed the ashes from the whole lot down the toilet. It took me a long time to fall asleep now that I was sure that I was doing favors for someone other than Bonnie Low and her bank.