City of Devils

by Paul French

  As the ship steams away from the Bund, Nellie Farren doesn’t even look out her porthole to watch the city pass by for the last time. She pulls the curtain and shuts out Shanghai for good.

  33

  Christmas Eve 1940. Snow is still whipping round the city, slushy in the Settlement, settling on the red-tiled rooftops of Frenchtown, leaking in through the jerry-built ceilings of the Badlands. Cast-iron buckets on the dance floor of Farren’s catch the seepage during the day. On any previous Christmas Eve, from the roof of the Park Hotel on Bubbling Well Road, say, or the top of the Observatory at Siccawei, you’d see a skyline full of thin smoke trails from five thousand chimneys. Now the telltale wisps are few and far between. Little Tokyo is still warm thanks to preferential treatment, but even the take-what-it-wants Badlands is cold. The night sky shows nothing but stars.

  It’s the fourth winter since the Japanese invasion. The residents of Nantao old town shiver in their drafty shacks as Imperial Navy bluejackets tour the new comfort houses and hastily erected gambling sheds of the quarter. Council carts collect the frozen dead in the Settlement; the trucks of the Chinese Buddhist Benevolent Society pick up those of the Badlands. Six hundred fifty corpses are collected on one bitter December night; 450 of them are babies or small children. The public transport system is suspended as the electricity cuts out: trolley cars stall, and passengers get out and walk or slip up the Nanking Road. The few cars still with gasoline inch along Canton Road and down the Bund. The streets are uneasily empty as folks stay indoors and contemplate 1941, evacuation ships, and routes to Free China. It’s Europe’s second Christmas of war, and while the Luftwaffe set Piccadilly ablaze, Shanghai shivers on.

  The syndicate is still holding, but without Jack to negotiate with his contacts, the Kempeitai are demanding higher taxes. There’s been no sign of the SMP in the Badlands. You’d be forgiven for thinking Commissioner Bourne and the SMP were never going to act. Yet finally it begins, that Christmas Eve, but it’s anticlimactic. The SMP Reserve Unit, aka the Riot Squad, backed up by armed Sikhs and Chinese constables, hits the Avenue Haig. They raid the Pai Loh, a number 76–controlled gambling joint. DSI John Crighton leads the charge into the large, square ballroom. The pit floor is covered with tables, around which mostly Chinese gamblers play fan-tan and roulette. The cops scatter the teacups and liquor glasses and crunch over the floor, which is covered in discarded melon seed shells spat out by those hunched around the tables. The Pai Loh isn’t Farren’s or the Arizona or the Ali-Baba; it’s a Chinese joint that does things the Chinese way. SMP constables storm the balconies where Chinese businessmen sit with their mistresses—off-duty taxi dancers in cheongsams, Eurasian Macanese women in tight-fitting Western suits. Those up high usually place bets by lowering silver dollars in small baskets on strings to the pit bosses below, a veritable stream of baskets constantly moving up and down, an elaborate pulley system across the ceiling. To the side of each table a cashier makes the bet, biting each piece of silver to verify its authenticity. A shroff notes the bet in a ledger next to scales that can weigh jewellery or ingots to value them. The Crime Squad makes ninety-four arrests, confiscates the roulette wheels, fan-tan tables, and a sizeable quantity of opium and somewhat less of cocaine, heroin, and morphine. The Chinese cry foul, why just them raided, why not the foreign devil–run casinos too? Most assume this is just a test run, and more raids will follow.

  Early hours of Christmas morning, snow falling still, the party rolls on, the raids don’t come. Farren’s, Eventail, the Argentina, Elly Widler’s Six Nations, Perpetuo’s 37427, the St. George’s Garden, Bothelo’s Silver Palace … the Badlands stays open, even though Jack’s not haggling about the taxes anymore and they’re screeching skywards. The man in question spends Christmas unknown to everyone but the closest of close Friends in a back room at the Six Nations. Elly Widler sends a turkey; Mickey brings bennies from the doc; Babe carves; Jack swears he’ll get revenge on Joe for freezing him out.

  Inside the barbed-wire encirclement, it’s the Gardenia’s last night. Vertinsky’s debts are huge; he can’t support his and Boobee’s cocaine habits. He jokes in his last floor show that cocaine keeps out the freezing night—look at Boobee still in a backless chiffon dress; she doesn’t feel the cold. But then, Russians don’t, though God grant us Stalin freezes in the Kremlin tonight and his khuy drops off—Vertinsky cracking wise all night, eyeballs wide, the master MC, high as a fucking kite. He’ll be reduced to performing in the few remaining Russian clubs for tips and then hugging the bar at Farren’s till dawn, drinking on Joe’s tab. He’ll eventually manage to kick the white powder. But Boobee will continue to trawl the Badlands in search of a score, until one time she won’t come back.

  Across the Badlands, barmen huddle by the radiogram listening to the BBC’s Eastern Service that crackles and intermittently cuts out thanks to Jap blockers. Still Herbert Moy squawks on XGRS that all of China will soon be ‘liberated’, under a ‘new order for a new Asia’. Don Chisholm rants that England will fall by next Chinese New Year, ‘a new Europe united under the undefeatable Third Reich’. Sam Titlebaum is putting out feelers looking for Jack, but his rounds involve plenty of libations and Christmas merriment too. Little Nicky tells him to focus on Jack; they had him, and his absconding under their noses was a massive loss of face. At Farrens’s Joe takes his meals in his office; the boychiks remain wary of an unscheduled Riley visitation that everyone knows could never end well. But he never shows.

  Joe keeps things going, just about. He pays through the nose for coal from Hongay’s on the North Szechuen Road. Hongay has stockpiles it pays Shantung strongarm guards to protect at night. Joe starts to feel that things are getting back to some kind of normality, even with Nellie gone. He never got to ask the chauffeur which boat she took—the Buick and the driver never showed again after dropping Nellie off dockside. He prays Jack has done the sensible thing for once, hopped a tramp steamer and is halfway to Batavia or Pago Pago by now. Nothing to do but keep on keeping on. Joe ensures his boilers are stoked and the joint warm, pushes the acts on stage and orders the band to keep playing. The Farren’s chips are still swept up across the green felt of the gaming tables with Albert Rosenbaum now as pit boss, signing the markers in Jack’s absence. The Filipino croupiers shiver in the cold; the swells keep gambling undaunted.

  As dawn approaches the band continues to play—the Manilamen musicians figure it’s better to stay on the stage in the warmth than head home through the cold to their garret flops. Joe insists on festive jolliness: Wally Lunzer roams the joint as a rock-solid Father Christmas, red suit covering his Red 9, fake beard and a suspiciously German-sounding ‘Ho ho, meine leibchen’. The waitresses are dressed as elves with mistletoe pinned to their caps, cheek-pecking the swells. Joe Farren passes the punch bowl, as much the host as ever. He eyes the chorus girls dancing to jazzed-up carols and the Hartnells spinning to a high-speed ‘Jingle Bells’ as the aerialist soars over the diners in a Jack Frost costume. Whatever the season, however raucous the party, some keep to their chosen vices. Upstairs, Al makes sure Alice Daisy Simmons and the other hard-core gamblers are comped drinks, get cold plates of turkey and lights for their cigarettes. Those roulette wheels just keep on spinning.

  34

  Firecrackers and explosions across the Badlands welcome the Chinese New Year of 1941. It’s the year of the snake—how very fitting. The dragon has departed but breathes fire till the last. Now the snake slides out of the ashes, through the muck of northern Shanghai, across the fetid, silted Soochow Creek into the Settlement and makes its way westwards down into the Badlands. Across the city, the January Spring Festival turns into a bloody month.

  Chinese New Year is traditionally when all debts come due and Shanghai crime rates go sky high. This year does not disappoint. On the first day of the lunar new year, seven armed robberies are reported before noon, shots fired at every heist; a European Shanghailander is forced into a public toilet at gunpoint by thugs and relieved of his money,
clothes, shoes, and watch. A bus is boarded by ten ‘juveniles’ on the Avenue Eddy, who rampage through the bus snatching necklaces and pulling rings from the passengers before jumping off and disappearing. Japanese police engage in a shootout with four ronin on the Bubbling Well Road, subdue them, and find them in possession of sixty packets of high-grade heroin, heading towards the Badlands.

  In the days and weeks following, it continues. A Chinese sanitation worker is gunned down in broad daylight on the Nanking Road—the shooters hop the barricades and disappear into the Badlands as the SMP are left gawking. The pro–Free China Shun Pao newspaper is bombed for the third time in six months—a Fah Wah village gang pulls up in hijacked rickshaws and lobs four hand grenades into the lobby. Number 76 pays them a measly fifty Chinese bucks for it. More lieu-maung hold up the Brenan Road Post Office and relieve a White Russian woman of a diamond ring. When a British customer intervenes, they shoot him in the back with an Imperial Army–issue pistol. The ambulance takes more than an hour to arrive, though the Country Hospital on Great Western Road and St Luke’s on the corner of Yu Yuen are both only minutes away. The man dies in the ambulance, and the Japanese police make no arrests.

  The newspapers don’t have enough hacks to cover the crime wave. A pro-puppet Chinese lawyer is gunned down on a Frenchtown street by assassins from a passing black Citroën. A Little Tokyo businessman is shot in the head at point-blank range on Nanking Road. The owner of the Sung Chi Egg Company is shot repeatedly while sitting at his desk on Kweichow Road—even eggs are a racket now as the price triples, quadruples. A number 76 officer kidnaps and then kills a Yu Yuen Road businessman; a Chinese SMP constable goes rogue and shoots a fellow officer before being disarmed. A young Chinese man, loaded down with gambling debts from the Badlands, drugs and murders his aunt, steals her money and jewellery, and gets caught trying to fence the trinkets to pay his bad debts; six lieu-maung raid a house on Sinza Road, shoot the owners and steal jewellery; a gun battle breaks out in broad daylight on a Frenchtown street as yet another gang attempts to rob the home of the manager of the Great World Amusement Palace; three pedestrians are robbed at gunpoint on Shantung Road in the heart of the Settlement in one day.

  Even in the midst of this, the SMP are still on the hunt for Shanghai’s public enemy number one. Jack Riley is thought to be residing in the Badlands under Japanese protection, crashing at the Six Nations. Sam Titlebaum gets over there with Little Nicky close behind, but Jack has moved on by the time they arrive. John Crighton strongarms Joe, but Farren says he has no idea where Jack is—that partnership is finished.

  The snake slithers on—politics, thievery, war, and gangsterism intermixed and unstoppable. Bodies that fall in disputed territory, gunned down on a Saturday, are still lying there on Monday. And still the SMP raids on the foreign-run Badlands casinos haven’t come. The Municipal Council is demanding action on the escalating crime rate; the foreign consuls in the city want something done about the murders; the Settlement’s Ratepayers’ Association is threatening a tax strike if the crime wave on their doorstep isn’t tackled. Commissioner Bourne can’t let the situation stand much longer.

  * * *

  SHOPPING NEWS —‘BREVITIES’—

  MONDAY, JANUARY 27, 1941

  Shopping News has gotta call it like it is. Our ruling Municipal Council is failing to deal adequately with Shanghai’s trade. Given the current shortages of everything, one would imagine our Settlement’s trade to be booming, but no—just the opposite. The Council has failed to negotiate import and export terms with the Japanese and consequently the Settlement’s access to raw materials is nearly non-existent. Cotton mills have reduced their output 30 per cent; the tea trade and the silk filatures are at a standstill; American oil companies are faced with a Japanese monopoly. And yet the Council allows the Gas Tycoons to raise prices and the phone company to charge more. Just whose side are the Council on?

  Shopping News got a ‘for our eyes only’ peek at a new SMP memorandum that notes that 90 per cent of armed crimes in the Settlement in which pistols were seized or bullets recovered were committed with ‘hot’ weapons stolen from Chinese or Sikh Constables while they were on duty in the Badlands. Can this be purely accidental? We think not, as all patrols are now four-men strong by order of Commissioner Bourne for protection. Could it be, as has been whispered to us, that the traffic in SMP armaments is now brisk with foreign constables profiteering greatly, middle men amassing fortunes, desperadoes arming themselves easily, and constables claiming to have ‘lost’ their weapons before being issued with new weapons at the ratepayers’ expense? Where do all these ‘lost’ firearms go? Surely a full and searching enquiry is required immediately.

  Action is needed NOW—1940’s deadly tally? Nine SMP officers killed in the line of duty including a foreign probationary sergeant, a Sikh, and seven Chinese, of whom two were superintendents. Last year’s medals tally was the highest ever—two Class I and 51 Class II medals awarded.

  Regular readers will no doubt be delighted to hear that, with Carroll Alcott’s departure from Station XHMA, you can still tune over to XGRS and hear, ‘The Call of the Orient’—nightly at 8 p.m.—with your host Shopping News Editor D. Chisholm. Just in case you’re not on the airwaves we’ve arranged a 30% discount on all Zenith radios, including the newly arrived 1940 model, through our friends and partners at the Radio Service Company, 142 Museum Street. But hurry, the show’s about to start and supplies are limited—call 12997 NOW, tell them you’re a Shopping News subscriber and reserve your discounted Zenith Model 5-S-313.

  Just dying to tell someone? Editorial: Rm 540, 233 Nanking Rd. Tel: Shanghai—10695

  * * *

  35

  Six weeks after the SMP raid the Pai Loh, they finally start to try and get serious with the Badlands at last. On February 3, the edict goes out:

  WASP FORCE ORDERS ALL GAMBLING ESTABLISHMENTS AND OPIUM DENS TO CEASE ACTIVITY AND CLOSE FORTHWITH BY OFFICIAL ORDER.

  But it’s one thing to order something, another to make it happen. Most of the Chinese joints close, but those joints that pay the big taxes, and those patronised by number 76 chiefs, stay open. Chinese cops look the other way for squeeze or if a Mauser is waved in their faces. Bulletproof-vested SMP cops figure it’s not their beat anyway and back away from confrontation.

  The big earners keep their neon switched on: the Eventail, the Welcome Café, the Argentina, and Farren’s. Word gets out from a belligerent and determined Joe: Farren’s is staying open, come hell or high water. Inside, the lucky few, those still in Shanghai with cash to spend, sip champagne and snatch the caviar being passed round the tables on silver salvers. They’re still willing to fight through the crowds and the music of the Badlands pavements to get there, past a Jewish refugee violin player, an old Russian in tattered tsarist costume from the last war, singing mournful songs of a homeland long gone, a blind Chinese scraping a sad melody from a homemade huqin fiddle. All of Shanghai’s street music is sorrowful, all songs of the lost, the refugee, the dead, and the forgotten. But inside Farren’s it’s the music of America, black America, played by Manilamen and Macanese Eurasians for those left to listen.

  * * *

  How did Jack come to this? The money has run out; the slots aren’t paying. With the Marines shipped out of town, the take at the few Mickey’s got back in action is way, way down. The Velvet Sweet Shop dope cash is long gone. Jack’s staring into the abyss. He needs more stake to get out of Shanghai … and Farren’s is where he’ll get it. Joe has done nothing to help him; Jack considers that partnership null and void. Farren is running the wheels and banking the take. His sources tell him the Kempeitai are letting Joe keep the lights on and the doors open in return for heightened daily taxes, while Jack Riley can’t even walk in the door. He hears the tables are still raking it in, that Joe’s got Al Rosenbaum running the roulette wheels and acting like he doesn’t need and didn’t ever need Jack. Joe needs to pay.

  Slowly, a plan forms. At three a.
m., wide-awake on his crash cot, he knows it’s a shit one, but it’s all he’s got. He can set up a joint with Evelyn Oleaga fronting it—Badlands-protected, corner of Great Western and Edinburgh Roads. Evil Evelyn is in tight with the Japanese Naval High Command through her Axis connections, an Italian commander who’s stupid sweet on her. She has the kind of connections that can ring-fence the operation, pay off the Kempeitai, get number 76 to back off and scare away the WASPs. But he’ll need twenty-five thousand American dollars to make it happen. There’s only one place Jack knows of with that kind of cash inside: Farren’s. Joe owes him that and more besides.