by Paul French
36
On February 15 Farren’s is packed to the rafters—there are six hundred punters, mostly Americans and Brits who’ve decided not to evacuate. It’s the only foreign-run casino in the Badlands to have a full house despite the Japanese wire, despite the curfew, despite the war, stagflation, gunmen at large, kidnappers rampant, the junkies and dealers on the street outside. Gentleman Joe remains the dapper host of the Shanghai night.
There’s no plan but to get to Joe’s safe, relieve him of the night’s take, escape the city, wait till things calm down—and then Evil Evelyn’s new casino. Mickey stays loyal, Schmidt too. To make up the numbers Jack pulls in gun-for-hire ronin from Hongkew and AWOL Fourth Marine mercenaries. Jack would like more reliable men, but Mickey says nobody wants to be part of it; Joe is too connected, his security is loyal, Rosenbaum knows everyone, and Carlos Garcia will cast you out and feed you to the wolves for this.
Jack is jagged on his usual strong coffee and Benzedrine. There’s an itch under his skin that won’t go away, his current predicament sitting heavy. If tonight goes well, he’s got a way out, but one that will cost more than just cash. He’ll be forever outside the syndicate afterwards. He figures, so what? He’s been on his own since that shitty orphanage, Tulsa, McAlester, and the early days of Shanghai. It’s nothing new.
Jack and his hastily assembled crew cross the Avenue Haig and cut through the rookeries and laneways onto the Great Western Road. Farren’s neon is bright as they storm the door with canister bombs, split into two groups—blue flames spit up into the air from their Red 9s like wisps of opium smoke; Jack, Mickey, Schmidt, followed by men carrying baseball bats, black leather coshes, and pickaxe handles. It goes bad right from the start.
Schmidt knows Lunzer’s reputation and makes a decision to up the odds. No delay at the door to warn those inside. The two men are eye-to-eye: Schmidt’s pupils are dilated like a rabid dog’s; Lunzer squints to stare him down—trying to communicate that this is not the way. Wally Lunzer reaches for his shoulder holster, and Schmidt raises his Red 9, aims, and pulls the trigger. Schmidt’s calculation: men like Lunzer don’t give second chances—hit fast, hit hard; always outnumbered, never outgunned. A correct assessment, but one that burns all possible bridges for Jack. Lunzer goes down with a bullet through the left eye, dead in an instant on the pavement of the Great Western Road. The noise of the shot registers faintly over the jazz and hubbub inside Farren’s. The raid is on, the point of no return passed. Jack screams at Schmidt. There’ll be no asking Joe nicely now.
Jack, Mickey, and Schmidt head upstairs, to the gambling floors, to the office where the safe is. BOOM—ceiling plaster falls, screams upstairs in the club’s casino rooms. BOOM—the mirror behind the bandstand shatters, raining jagged glass blades on the heads of the Manilamen band, blood seeping through their white silk suits. BOOM—woodwork splinters off the bar. The raiders move through, smashing bottles, upending tables, kicking over music stands. Punters flee, crushed at the door aiming for the Great Western Road, tripping over Lunzer’s body, kicking shards of skull and brain across the cobbles of the Badlands outside. Farren’s staff gets clubbed with rifle butts, ronin knuckledusters land on boychik skulls, and best-quality Pyongyang leather coshes on exposed knees, elbows, necks. Jack and Schmidt hit the gaming floors, watch the punters and croupiers huddle under the roulette tables. Only Alice Daisy Simmons, Farren’s regular and rich-girl daughter of one of the city’s top Brit bullion sharks, stands there looking surprised to see him. She smiles slightly, and Jack involuntarily smiles back. Both Jack and Schmidt raise their Red 9s and fire towards the ceiling. More plaster falls. Then Jack looks back to Alice and sees her staring straight at him, but unseeing. Alice takes a ricocheting bullet to the back; it severs her spine, and she drops dead by the roulette table she’s been playing at. Jack walks towards her lifeless body—it wasn’t meant to go like this—but Schmidt grabs him by the arm and motions upwards. To the top floor; to Joe’s office.
And the office is where it finally plays out. The office where Joe and Jack once tallied the night’s total and laughed out loud at their good fortune—taxes plus five; taxes plus ten; night after night while the going was good. The office where the dapper Ziegfeld of Shanghai and the Slots King buried the hatchet, forgot past enmities, and came together to become Solitary Island millionaires. Now Jack wants what’s his.
Joe is standing by his desk, and there’s no exit from the office but out into the club and the melee. Schmidt steps forward and cracks Joe’s skull with the stock of his Mauser. He crumples on the floor, and Albert Rosenbaum, who’s been dragged in too, raises his arms high in surrender, recognising Jack. Schmidt points his Mauser straight at the man’s forehead.
Jack kneels and spins the wheel of the safe—he knows the combination, he’d been the one to set it—1-5-3-8-0; the telephone number for the Gordon Road Police Station, home of the SMP Anti-Gambling Squad. His little joke. The door swings open—bupkis; a couple of thousand Chinese bucks and some jewellery. He stares hard at Rosenbaum. Hands still high, Rosenbaum tells Jack he’s picked a bad night—Joe cleaned out the safe a half hour earlier to pay the local Kempeitai who are taking pretty much everything as tax now, thanks to you, Jack. The rest is on the tables. No time to stop and scoop it up; the call will have already gone out to the Riot Squad. Schmidt gun-butts the side of Rosenbaum’s head and watches the man fall to the floor next to his boss. They turn and leave.
What Jack wanted, what he desperately needed, is gone. Jack, Mickey, Schmidt, and the new Friends head back downstairs and exit the club, over Lunzer’s corpse. They step out onto the Great Western Road, now a crazy freakshow of hopped-up, terrified punters and Badlands trash in a state of total confusion. They separate, merge into the crowd, get lost among the mendicants, hustlers, whores, and Japs. In the lawless Badlands there’s not even a siren—even the Riot Squad now to have negotiate their way through the Japanese barricades, and there’s nothing the bluejackets like more than watching the squad fume while they check their paperwork. They slip into the zigzag lanes and alleyways of the Badlands; some head into Fah Wah village, up towards Yu Yuen Road and the Settlement beyond, others go across the Avenue Haig and past the French Garde Municipal barricades into Frenchtown. They melt into the rues and avenues, away from the Badlands, leaving behind their chaos.
The November 1940 truce between the foreign gangs that ruled Shanghai is over; it hadn’t even lasted six months. The unprecedented syndicate of Shanghai’s casino bosses and nightlife kings is laid waste in one night, courtesy of Jack T. Riley.
* * *
Scaremongers say the Japanese Imperial Army’s biological warfare Unit 731 has released a million fleas infected with bubonic plague in the nearby port of Ningpo, tested in Manchukuo, perfected in Chekiang. Shanghai is next—the International Settlement will be targeted. The citizens of the Solitary Island avoid public transport and eye each other warily on the trams and the trolley-buses. Taxis do record business and hike their fares accordingly. Children are kept from school, food carts are deserted, gas masks sell out, windows are sealed and doors locked. A plague is coming. Thousands, hundreds of thousands, maybe, are dead in Ningpo. The rumour in Shanghai says the dead lie in the streets, that corpses are heaved into the canals and creeks, that ships are avoiding the port. Every fly, flea, nit—insect of any kind—is feared. The Japanese, of course, are immune. Everyone knows they take special pills flown in from Tokyo; they inject their soldiers with serums that protect them.
Every plane arching over the Shanghai skies is suspected. The stone houses of Shanghai’s laneways and alleys reek of burnt Shanshi vinegar; the Chinese believe the fumes are an antidote. Unscrupulous black-marketeers sell jars of fake vinegar, promising that it will keep the fleas at bay, sending them to another house, another family, another body to infect. Soon the shops and markets of Shanghai sell out of vinegar, real or fake. There’s a riot in Hongkew when supplies are rumoured to have arrived. The rumour mill continues t
o churn—America has ordered all of its nationals to evacuate Ningpo, and other foreigners are escaping too; even the missionaries are fleeing. The countryside is destroyed, and food shortages will accelerate. A Japanese plague will engulf Shanghai; the Japanese will march into the Settlement, crunching the bones of the dead beneath their boots. Resistance is futile.
This, people believed …
* * *
37
The Kempeitai and the thugs from number 76 are swaggering taller than ever after the Farren’s raid—the syndicate looks to be in tatters. They up the daily taxes again, and the previously agreed ten grand daily limit is history now. Joe is furious and stubborn. He refuses to pay any more to the Kempeitai and the puppets—fuck the ronin; fuck the Kempeitai, they’re just yakuza in khaki. The Badlands is now too bad to make money in. People stay away from Farren’s, away from the Badlands; the take is seriously down.
The first repercussions of Joe’s decision to refuse to pay taxes to the Japanese make themselves felt fast: the Kempeitai hassle his Chinese staff not to work for the ‘number one Jew man’, jostle the punters pulling up outside, cut his electricity, and try to send in troublemaking lieu-maung to start fights in the joint. Others pay the escalating taxes, which means the puppets only hate Joe more for holding out. John Crighton sits Joe down and says that the SMP might be able to help, if only they knew where Jack was. Joe stays schtum. Truth is he doesn’t know and doesn’t care where Jack is, and he doesn’t believe John Crighton, senior and respected as he is in the SMP, can do anything about the Japs or number 76 now anyway.
As times get tough, the dope gets cut and then cut again, invariably with strychnine, leaving junkies and hopheads dying by the score. Cabbage Moh and the Cantonese Shumchun triads come north to carpetbag in Fah Wah village, boost their dope prices anyway despite the deteriorating quality and maintain their profit margins to kick back and fund Wang Ching-wei’s crony regime. Illicit hooch becomes a lethal blend of eighty per cent ethanol, an old Prohibition trick, and drunks stagger and collapse on the Avenue Haig. Mike and his Music Masters dust off the old ‘Jake Walk Blues’ and lampoon the poor lushes outside, but nobody’s laughing much now. A backfiring car has the remaining punters and the bar staff ducking involuntarily; a slamming kitchen door gets everyone tense. Number 76 thugs walk in and brazenly demand payment; WASP patrols cross the road and let it be known they’re not going to get involved. The boychiks are plenty tough and face down the number 76 goons and their demands, but it can’t happen indefinitely. The Badlands is awash with guns—.32s, .45s, Mauser Red 9s … they seep in, changing hands for just a few dollars, with ammo for cents; where they all come from is a mystery. A gun now costs the same as a catty of rice. Food inflation; firearms deflation—that’s the Badlands’ law of supply and demand.
In the wake of Jack’s raid, the unofficial leader of Shanghai’s foreign hack pack, J. B. Powell, declares ‘GANG WARFARE OPENS’ on the front page of his anti–number 76 China Weekly Review; before, it was just the usual Chinese gangs fighting for turf, but white men blasting each other away on the Great Western Road is something altogether different for Shanghailander society to cope with. Chicago has come to the Whangpoo. What happened at Farren’s shows up the SMP’s paltry attempts to control the gambling joints, their lack of effective raids and closures. Commissioner Bourne must be shamefaced—two foreign racketeers just went head-to-head and left a dead body on the Great Western Road in sight of numerous Settlement swells. When any Badlands holdup man can rent a gun for two bucks fifty, where do you even start looking for the culprits? The WASPs, never much to start with, have degenerated into a force of bogus cops who turn the other cheek for a few shillings and put cotton wool in their ears when the shooting starts. They’ll gladly kick a beggar into the shadows or run a freelancing doper off the strip, but they’re not detectives. The papers reveal that phone calls from Farren’s to the SMP station, a stone’s throw away on Great Western Road, had gone unheeded; the SMP had only turned up after the fact because an armoured car, passing nearby, was stopped in the street by fleeing customers. There’s an outcry in the North-China Daily News letters page, excoriating editorials in the China Weekly Review.
Bourne reacts by ordering John Crighton’s Crime Squad into the Badlands in force—it’s finally, at long last, time to send in the heavies. It’s gone beyond Chinese and foreign ne’er-do-wells. Alice Daisy Simmons, just turned twenty-eight, lifeless on a gurney, determines his decision. Old man Simmons is creating merry hell, demanding action and reminding all and sundry that his bullion profits have served the Settlement nicely over the years. He calls Bourne personally to demand that his daughter’s killers be brought to book.
The SMP print boys have been all over Farren’s and lifted a million dabs—punters, employees, gunmen, boychiks. It’s almost useless, as there’s no way to print those who fled the scene, whether customers or raiders. But one set keeps coming up again and again … smudged, unreadable, corroded, and deformed. Crighton thinks back to the FBI and their nifty detective work. He gets the scenario almost right: Jack and Joe fall out; Jack tries to take out Joe and claim the business for himself—from Slots King to Badlands King? Crighton’s got Joe and his boys in his interrogation room on constant rotation, and it’s always the same question: where’s Jack? They stay defiantly silent. He brings U.S. marshal Sam Titlebaum on board, who’s been part of the search since Jack skipped bail. Titlebaum and Crighton take the prints they figure must be Riley’s to Little Nicky, who cables them to his fed contacts in D.C. Can they work their magic again?
The grand buildings of the Country Hospital on the Great Western Road represent the Badlands’ only still-functioning medical facility—cautious nurses and doctors refused to work at the others; even the missionaries have moved out and seemingly given up on the district. Sam Titlebaum and John Crighton come to see the dead. In the morgue, reeking of formaldehyde, the pair from the Farren’s raid lie side by side: Alice Daisy Simmons and Walter Lunzer, both on slabs, naked and pale, their identical regulation SMP rubber body bags dumped in a corner. They hadn’t known each other in life; their trajectories to Shanghai and their relative positions on the Settlement’s social totem pole were distant, but they are now close in death. John Crighton is shocked to see Alice’s body isn’t covered; he finds a sheet and throws it over her to at least provide some dignity. Both have nicotine-stained fingers and dyed black hair. Lunzer is missing his top plate, making his face look like it has fallen in, the left side of his head bloody still, the back of his skull completely missing. Alice looks almost as if she’s sleeping. The pathologist had extracted a Mauser slug from her spine.
It’s not only Commissioner Bourne who’s in a permanent rage; the Honourable Judge Helmick’s about fit to have a stroke. Forget Farren’s; forget a Badlands casino getting turned over. Alice represents the 400, the families who had built the treaty port of Shanghai from a fishing village to a great metropolis of staggering wealth in a single century. She was not one of Helmick’s ‘vice merchants, sharks, or bucaneers’ and her death is like a call to arms. The Settlement is the bastion that must be protected. Helmick is fuming, spitting across the table, veins popping—with immediate effect, every effort of the U.S. marshal’s office and the Shanghai Municipal Police is to be directed towards finding, capturing, imprisoning, and extraditing bail jumper and crime kingpin Jack T. Riley.
38
By order of the police commissioner, all leave is cancelled. The plan of attack takes shape at a late-night meeting of the SMP’s top brass, the elite of the Settlement’s forces of law and order—Commisioner Bourne, of course, with John Crighton beside him. The other men are all Brits, all Shanghai cops of long standing, all proven thief-takers, rackets busters, and known to be incorruptible. They’re joined by Martin Nicholson of the U.S. Treasury and Sam Titlebaum, recently appointed U.S. marshal, along to represent the U.S. Department of Justice in Shanghai.
It’s Crighton’s office, but Bourne is in charge.
Crighton is trying to open a window as Titlebaum lights a cigarette, blowing smoke up into the fluorescent lighting, passing around his hip flask. Crighton takes a swig and gags on the sweet-sour mash bourbon, but it keeps the February cold out. It’s no joke—SMP HQ is a cooler for real, as the Japs work hard to ensure there are no coal deliveries. The main subject for discussion this evening: the indictment, apprehension, and prosecution of Shanghai’s most notorious fugitive from justice, officially still referred to—for the moment—as Jack T. Riley.
Little Nicky lays out the story of the prints at Farren’s, and Crighton and Titlebaum get the irony—a thousand prints tell no story, but one indistinct set might reveal a clear and concise narrative. By seeking to obliterate his past, Jack Riley has reinforced his current predicament and screwed his future.
The feds in D.C. have cabled back a no-go, though—the prints are too partial, too smeared, and they can’t make a match with Becker/Riley’s prints on file. It’s a judicial dead end, but the cops know Jack is desperate. By opting not to offer him sanctuary, the Japanese have disowned Riley and ended all negotiations with the syndicate; for breaking their rules, the syndicate has cast him out and will also offer no protection. If he’s behind the raid, then that only further proves his desperation. The Kempeitai let the SMP know they will not get in the way of their apprehension of one Edward T. Riley. Jack’s pretty much alone now. With the countryside around Shanghai under Japanese occupation and all civilian non-Japanese shipping on the Whangpoo at a standstill, that means he’s still in the city … somewhere. They will seek him out; the Riot Squad’s Red Maria armoured truck is at their disposal, and there’s no time like the present to shake up Shanghai’s underbelly. In capturing Riley, the SMP can shut down everyone else too.