City of Devils

by Paul French

  From Frenchtown it’s across to the Settlement, where he drops into the Elite Bar. He’s got a floor show running there that warms up for Viennese chanteuse Lily Flohr, and it still needs tinkering. Then the Paramount—a long, long chorus line where the turnover is rapid. Nellie kicks the girls to the curb for the slightest infraction and then expects the new ones to know the moves swiftly. The Paramount has a couple of dozen girls, and Joe needs to spruce and spice up the routines regularly. Then it’s back to Frenchtown and the Canidrome for the second set. The late-night crowd is in and Dapper Joe Farren has to cruise the booths and the front tables, acknowledge the taipans, schmooze the big-shot Chinese. Finally, Joe returns to the Paramount for the end of the show to make sure Nellie’s okay and not throwing a tantrum at the girls. He has to get the taxi dancing right for the after-show crowd, and make sure the Natashas are sticking to ginger ale and apple juice and not hitting the booze and the powders. Maybe later, past three a.m., he might head out to Jukong Alley and the clubs to gab with the boys and cruise the joints before ham and eggs at the Venus Café with Sam Levy. There’s always the possibility of a little liaison with a chorus girl. Those girls haven’t really ever meant anything to Joe, just distractions and conquests, at least until Larissa.

  She walks into the Paramount with a friend. It’s summertime, and the girls are wearing last year’s fashions, with home-stitched blouses and moth-eaten stoles from a wardrobe in St. Petersburg. She’s young, twenty-one tops. She gets a job as a coat-check girl. Joe catches a look at her behind the counter, and he’s smitten. He can’t help himself. He tells her she should be a dancer, she should be spotlit; she says she’s been taking tap classes. He tells her to work at it and he’ll give her a tryout for the Peaches, put her in the chorus line, the best one in town. She wants that; it’s better money, and the after-show dinners and the dance hostessing beat the cloakroom tip jar hands down. Joe auditions her one afternoon after rehearsals, when Nellie’s not around. She dances barefoot on the stage, her red polka-dot dress swirling. She’s amateur, with no training to speak of, but she’s got that thing Joe likes, that innate sexiness that draws the punter’s eye along the chorus line to one girl and fixes it, keeping them hooked. It’s how he met Nellie, after all. Joe spins a chair round on the stage and straddles it, shirtsleeves rolled up, as the girl catches her breath. What’s her story?

  Larissa Andersen is the Khabarovsk-born, Harbin-raised daughter of a Tsarist Army father who couldn’t stay when the Reds took over. Joe says Andersen doesn’t sound Russian, and she says there’s some Swedish ancestry back there somewhere. She’s a deep, dark brunette—hair parted down the middle schoolgirl-style. Big, dark eyes, full lips, pert nose—Joe has fallen hard and doesn’t even stop to realise she’s Nellie with a decade shaved off.

  Nellie finds out she’s got a new chorus girl who’s not up to scratch, and she’s mad as hell. She sees Joe eyeballing her. She puts up with it, whips the girl into shape—she never blames the girls. She knows the type. Larissa’s pretty enough, but her manicure’s home done, her shoes cheap leather, and her clothes are threadbare, lace added to detract from the moth holes. Still, Joe is all over her like a cheap serge suit, making a fool of himself. One day Nellie casts her eye over the trays of the postcard sellers on Yu Yuen Road, the driftwood who hawk cheap penny postcards of the acts on the Paramount bill. Top of the pile is Larissa, the newest girl in the show, in black-and-white, lit well. It’s a decent studio shot of the girl looking sultry in a lush black sable fur with obviously not much on underneath.

  Nellie knows that coat—Joe bought it for her at the Siberian Fur Store, down in Little Russia on the Avenue Joffre. They were in love the day he bought it; they didn’t eat anything but rice and pickled vegetables for several months afterwards as that coat cleaned them out. But they hadn’t cared back then. The tears roll, her kohl runs; she grabs the postcards and tears them up, flinging the pieces in the gutter. While Joe is on his nightly run she fires Larissa and tells her to never come back.

  Joe finds out, and now he’s mad as hell. But Nellie’s madder. She screams and shouts in their uptown apartment, breaks the china, overturns the furniture, throws the framed photographs around. Joe pleads innocence. But it’s not that he probably screwed her. He’d screwed plenty before. Those postcards shame her, make her look like a fool, and she’s had it—had it with the Paramount, the Peaches, the Blondes, the Canidrome, had it with Gentleman Fucking Joe, with the dapper Ziegfeld schtick, had it with Shanghai. He moves to console her, but she slaps him, breaks his glasses, and leaves him scrambling for them on the carpet in a myopic rage. He storms out.

  Nellie calls up Joe’s chauffeur, packs her bags, takes her jewellery and her savings, some mementoes and four trunks of clothes, loading them into the Buick. She gets to the docks with no particular destination in mind, but the boats are all full, there’s not a bunk to spare—not first class or steerage; Europe via Suez or America via Kobe; no amount of squeeze will get you a cabin tonight. Peking and Tientsin have already fallen to the Japanese army and they’re approaching south, towards the Yangtze. Those who can read the writing on the wall are pulling up sticks and lighting out before the hurricane hits, and Nellie Farren is stuck on the dock. There’s nothing to do but go home.

  17

  Looking back, it all turned to shit on August 14, 1937. Tokyo had eyed China possessively, taken Manchuria in ’32, edged down towards Peking, across to Mongolia. The Japanese had then engineered an excuse to take Peking and the international treaty port of Tientsin before rolling south towards the Yangtze. If they were to cut off the Nationalist government and take China, they had to capture Shanghai—the country’s major money centre and entrepôt. The Japanese repeated their trick in Shanghai—they engineered an excuse, invented a supposed provocation, to justify attacks on the Chinese portions of Shanghai to the north of Soochow Creek—Chapei, Paoshan, and Kiangwan. They established a command centre in Hongkew Park, close by the district’s Little Tokyo section that was home to the majority of Japanese in Shanghai, and began shelling into the packed streets. The Chinese Army mobilized and rushed reinforcements to Shanghai, including the elite Eighty-Seventh Division from Nanking, to join the supposedly crack Eighty-Eighth already in the city—the two best-trained divisions Chiang Kai-shek had at his disposal. The Chinese hunkered down at the North Railway Station and faced the Imperial Japanese Army. The barrage of shelling set fires raging in Chapei and Paoshan, their ferocity increased by the strong winds hitting the city as a typhoon passed close by. All Shanghailanders were ordered to leave the Chinese portions of the city by order of their consulates. Chinese refugees from Hongkew crowded the Garden Bridge trying desperately to reach the safety of the Bund and the central portions of the Settlement; snipers faced off against each other across the rookery rooftops. The Chinese administration imposed a curfew in the areas it controlled and enforced a blackout.

  The Shanghai Volunteer Corps was called up to protect the Settlement, all SMP and Garde Municipal leave was cancelled, while French troops guarded the borders of Frenchtown. British soldiers set up anti-aircraft batteries on the racecourse while the U.S. Fourth Marines patrolled the length of the southern bank of the Soochow Creek. August in Shanghai—you could fry eggs on the sidewalks. At the Manhattan on Blood Alley, Jack and Mickey lined up beers on the counter for any Marine that wanted one—gratis. As the Japanese shelled Chinese Shanghai, wild fires raged across the Soochow Creek. Shanghailanders crowded onto rooftops, held war parties, drank ‘explosive’ cocktails, and watched the show. It didn’t feel real; it didn’t seem as if the skirmishing over in the Chinese quarters could actually cross the creek and impact on the lives of the 400 and Shanghai’s nonstop party. But it did—dramatically and horrifically.

  Saturday, August 14 was the day the bombs fell on Shanghai, a day the newspapers soon dubbed ‘Bloody Saturday’. The Japanese fleet was moored provocatively in the Whangpoo opposite the Japanese consulate in Hongkew. The mighty guns of its flag
ship, Idzumo, repeatedly pounded shells into Chapei and Paoshan. In the capital, 190 miles away from Shanghai in Nanking, Chiang Kai-shek called a council of war. It was decided to use the Chinese Air Force to attack the Idzumo. The job of sinking the Japanese flagship was delegated to a square-jawed Texan who had recently retired from the United States Air Force and gone to China: Claire Lee Chennault. He knew it was an almost impossible mission: the pilots were not vastly experienced, the typhoon passing Shanghai meant cloud cover was low and visibility poor, and the Idzumo was a large target, but dangerously close to the packed streets of the foreign concessions.

  * * *

  The mission was a disaster. The Chinese pilots aiming for the Idzumo pounded the International Settlement by mistake. The first bomb, all two thousand pounds of it, sailed down towards the Settlement, the Nanking Road, and the Palace and Cathay Hotels, which stood opposite each other at the junction with the Bund. The initial bomb ripped through the roof of the Palace Hotel. The hotel’s tea lounge, restaurant, lobby, and bar were all destroyed. Many of the dead and injured were only found later, still in their rooms. Part of the Palace’s façade had been blown away and had begun to collapse. One man, blown out of his room on the fourth floor, clung perilously to the edge of the building. Nobody could reach him, and he eventually plummeted to the ground, smashing through the glass awning of the hotel entranceway and onto the pavement.

  Seconds later another bomb glanced off the side of the Cathay Hotel’s ferroconcrete structure, cracked the canopy covering the entranceway, and exploded into the tarmac. Shrapnel hit the clock on the front of the Cathay, which stopped at 4:27 p.m. exactly. The bomb left a gaping crater right outside the front doors. Always a busy intersection, the street instantly became a mass of burnt-out cars. Flames licked from a gutted Lincoln Zephyr parked near the hotel’s entrance. The Bund end of Nanking Road was carnage. Dead and dismembered bodies littered the street. Charred corpses had been flung by the blast as far as the waterfront, landing on the dead who moments before had been clustered together watching the skies above. Seven hundred overwhelmingly Chinese refugees had been crowded around the waterfront junction, seeking shelter from the rain and winds. Many died instantly; others were horribly injured. Nanking Road became a corridor of mismatched limbs with blood on the shop windows, burnt-out taxis, and screaming amahs looking for lost babies.

  Fifteen minutes later, two more bombs fell close by, this time just over the border and in Frenchtown, on the crowd milling around the Great World Amusement Palace, where acrobats, kinescopes, streetwalkers, and opera singers attracted passersby. It was the French Concession’s busiest junction, and that day it was even busier than usual as the first floor of the Great World had been turned into a refugee reception centre for those escaping the Japanese shelling north of the Soochow Creek. The first bomb detonated shortly before hitting the ground, sending out a spray of deadly eviscerating shrapnel that killed people more than seven hundred yards away. The second bomb hit the asphalt street and created a huge crater, ten feet by six, adjacent to a traffic control tower. Dozens, perhaps hundreds, of Chinese refugees queuing for soup at the base of the building were killed on impact. Many injuries were rendered fatal by the intense gas pressure from the explosions; some bodies simply evaporated. At both blast sites perhaps as many as five thousand died, with thousands more wounded, Shanghailanders as well as Chinese. Bloody Saturday was the worst aerial bombing of a civilian city in history.

  But the worst of it was reserved for Chinese Shanghai: Paoshan was flattened, northern Hongkew firebombed, Chapei set aflame. Japanese marines poured ashore from the Idzumo, which, remarkably, managed to avoid taking a single hit the whole day. They set up camp in Hongkew Park and patrolled the district in Midget tanks. From there they started moving street by street through Little Tokyo and then towards Shanghai’s strategic North Railway Station. China fought back, in hand-to-hand combat on the northern edges of the Settlement; Hongkew and Chapei streets became sniper alleys.

  Eventually only the devasting firepower of the Japanese Navy cannons from the Idzumo on the Whangpoo saved the Japanese lines and routed the Chinese Nationalist Army, ordered to advance into the northern districts by Generalíssimo Chiang Kai-shek. Shanghailanders, protected by reinforcements rushed from Hong Kong and landed ashore by the United States Asiatic Fleet, watched from rooftops, looking to the north and east. That Saturday evening the rose-tinted sky across the Soochow Creek was like a second sunset, the filthy water refracted into a tepid piss-yellow, the sky alive with sparks and cinders. You could feel the heat from the raging fires two, three miles away in the heart of the Settlement; you could smell the stench of the unburied dead wafting over the creek.

  The firestorms raged up north of Hongkew’s Little Tokyo, and crowds of flag-waving Japanese civilians stopped the fire engines getting through to douse the flames eviscerating Chinese homes. Seventeen Japanese Imperial Navy battle cruisers, stuffed to the gills with bluejacket reinforcements, docked to defend the thirty thousand Japanese in Little Tokyo. Mitsubishi ‘Claude’ fighter planes and Nakajimas dive-bombed northern Shanghai, and dog-fought Chinese Nationalist fighters. The Rokusan Restaurant burned; Hongkew High School burned; the Shanghai South Railway Station burned; and a photograph of a filthy, crying baby in the rubble made the front page of every newspaper in America and Europe.

  The Trenches bar strip was now the frontline of sorts—Jukong Alley mostly rubble, the Venus gutted by flames, Riley’s Bamboo Hut bombed out, the Scott Road Trenches brothel shacks ignited as their dry planking walls and roofs sparked. A steady stream of silent Chinese refugees continually poured over the Garden Bridge into the safety of the International Settlement; uncounted thousands more poured into Frenchown. The prostitutes, pimps, and ne’er-do-wells of the Trenches crossed the Settlement and found their way to the Western Roads, just outside the Settlement’s jurisdiction, left largely unpoliced and a no-man’s-land. It became their new home; the newspapers soon dubbed it ‘the Badlands’.

  The Chinese refugees who flooded the Settlement and Frenchtown slept on floors, in corridors, empty godowns, the municipal parks, the grounds of the city’s temples. They brought with them cholera and disease; British and American troops were inoculated, and Shanghailanders flocked to hospitals to get their shots too. The Settlement’s population shot up from one and a half million to four million in a matter of weeks. The city gates clanged shut by Municipal Council order: the Settlement, Frenchtown, Nantao Old Town, and all surrounding Chinese areas were within the now termed Gudao, the Solitary Island. All rice shops and food stores closed and were under heavy guard; rice supplies were now controlled exclusively by the Japanese. Food prices spiralled upwards, canned milk stocks sold out, strict fuel rationing was imposed, and the queues started early. The Avenue Eddy, the border between the Settlement and Frenchtown, was reduced from seven to two lanes, and barricaded with barbed wire. Long traffic jams ensued; Shanghailander tempers flared.

  The following week, the heat broke, and more rain fell from dirt-black skies than in any previous year on record. The ash, dust, and debris created by the bombing of Chinese Shanghai fell from the clouds in black globules onto the heads of Settlement and Frenchtown residents. Cholera, typhoid, and smallpox moved through the city, taking the weakest. The dead were overwhelmingly Chinese. They died on the edges of the Settlement, beyond the Western Roads, in semi-rural Hungjao. They were thrown into the fields and buried in mass graves close by mansions where taipans had once lived in splendour on the edges of the Settlement.

  In the farthest Northern Roads and on the pavements of the Trenches, Chinese and vagabond foreigners alike were deposited on the curbside for collection. Across the Whangpoo, in Pootung, the authorities built a fenced-in camp for the sick, surrounded by barbed wire to prevent contamination. They were corralled, penned in at bayonet point, not given medicine. They were buried by masked prisoners in mass pits in the marshes, filled with coal tar and pitch to prevent the germs spreading. The Mun
icipal Council recorded that by year’s end their carts had collected more than a hundred thousand corpses from the streets, lanes, and alleyways of the Settlement.

  To the north of the Settlement, Chapei and Paoshan continued to burn bright for weeks while Zero fighters and the Yank-crewed Flying Tigers dogfought over the skies. Shanghailanders watched the free show from the roof of the Cathay Hotel with binoculars—white dames in sheer satin and pearls sipping black market champagne as hell raged overhead and planes spiralled down into the Pootung marshes. It was a mixed bunch reflecting Shanghailander society—the China Weekly Review’s editor J. B. Powell sucked hard on one cigarette after another, pausing only to scrupulously tally the number of planes shot down; Alice Daisy Simmons stopped by to catch the aerial show after visiting her father’s bullion dealing office on the Bund; sojourners in town from the still-arriving steamships; taipans after a days dealmaking watched the dogfights with stengahs brought to their tables. They raucously cheered the brave Nationalist fighters and booed the Japs; they carried on dancing while burnt ash from Hongkew wafted gently into their punch bowls.

  The Japanese stopped short of invading the International Settlement; they stayed out of Frenchtown to appease Paris. Invasion would have meant war with the British and French Empires as well as the United States of America; Japanese Marine bluejackets against the U.S. Fourth Marines and Scottish Seaforth Highlanders, Welsh Fusiliers, and the Royal Ulsters stationed in the Settlement. Tokyo’s fight, for now, was with China and Chiang Kai-shek in what was now dubbed ‘Free China’. That would change, but until then, life, of a sort, went on in the Solitary Island.