City of Devils

by Paul French

  * * *

  The news from Pearl Harbor is bad. On December 8, 1941, it’s ‘WAR’ in bold black headlines on the front page of the North-China Daily News. The Japanese invade the Settlement hours after their sneak attack on Hawaii. They find it undefended except by the part-time Volunteer Corps, who are disarmed without a shot being fired. After ninety-nine years as an international treaty port, Shanghai has finally fallen—so close and yet so far from the planned centenary. The Japanese Special Naval Landing Force seizes the U.S.S. Wake, moored on the Whangpoo, before the captain can scuttle her. The British gunboat H.M.S. Peterel, pride of the Royal Navy’s China Squadron, is scuttled successfully before the Japs can commandeer her. The Badlands is deserted; what to do now? Open the club, sit, smoke, wait. Joe Farren sits, smokes, waits. Everything will change now—the Solitary Island is no more. The Kempeitai control the town, the SMP are disarmed, and all grudges, bad debts, and scores are to be settled now in Tokyo’s favour.

  Joe knows they’ll come for him. They won’t forgive his defiance—not the Kempeitai nor number 76. He knows exactly where they’ll take him: east into the Settlement and out of the Badlands, along the now deserted Bund back across the Soochow Creek, back to Hongkew and the innocuous cream-coloured building on the North Szechuen Road the Kempeitai turned into their own private torture chamber—Bridge House. A former apartment building, subdivided since 1937 into a myriad of filthy holding pens, cells, and interrogation rooms—torture chambers for those who transgress the law of the Japanese Special Higher Police, the Tokkō. People try to ignore the rumours, the screams; ignore the truth of what goes on inside.

  And finally, on December 12, they come for him.

  48

  It’s impossible in the half-light from the low-watt bulbs to tell if it’s day or night. The windows are boarded up, so Joe doesn’t even know if he’s on the ground floor or upstairs. Upstairs, he thinks. Second, third floor? He remembers being dragged up, past a portrait of the emperor on horseback—a slight man wearing glasses. Joe lost his spectacles under a Kempeitai goon’s boot after they beat him in the back of the truck en route.

  They grab him coming out of his nightclub; his boychik security held back at bayonet point by a squad of bluejackets. He lies on the floor of the open-backed truck looking up at the stars, speeding down the Great Western Road. From the Badlands into Frenchtown, along Avenue Foch, watching the plane trees flash past, pruned for the winter and resembling ageing prizefighters’ swollen and distended knuckles. Onto the Avenue Eddy; the streets have an almost metallic sheen, the tarmac glistening, shops with iron grilles locked down tight for the night, the weak halos from the streetlights on reduced power, the icy wind chilling the blood on his face, the vomit around his chin from when they’d kicked him hard in the testicles.

  The pungent smells of the old town: peanut oil, camphor, brackish water. Shanghainese shouting as peddlers scatter to let the military truck pass. Onto the Bund and he’s enveloped in the smell of the river, the plaintive honk of a ship’s Klaxon horn, the rumble of the metallic grille as the truck crosses the Garden Bridge, greenish sparks flying. Left onto North Soochow Road, past Broadway Mansions, the building now Japanese Army Liaison Office HQ, all foreigners expelled. Along the creek, past the small red lights of the beggar boats moored by the Szechuen Road Bridge and, if he didn’t know it already, right onto North Szechuen Road and towards the large, modern, cream-coloured building called Bridge House. As Joe Farren is bundled from the truck, half blind, bloody, and bound, he sucks in the night air of Shanghai, his last fresh breath of oxygen in the city he’s called home since 1929.

  They strip him of his belongings—his gold pinky ring, the platinum lighter Nellie gave him the night they opened the Canidrome Ballroom, his silver tie pin, the roulette-ball cufflinks the boychiks got him for his birthday after Farren’s opened. His shoes are taken, along with his socks, jacket, tie, overcoat—they leave him in his suit trousers torn at one knee, a cotton shirt and vest. They confiscate his belt. They rifle through his pockets and empty them. They don’t bother to fingerprint him.

  He’s cold. He can sense—his eyes too swollen from the beating to see properly—other men in the cell. He can hear their groans, hear English, garbled Shanghainese, Japanese shouting. From below he can hear women screaming in the basement. Soon after, they come for him, and it begins. They strip him to his underwear and beat him. He’s punched, slapped, kicked. They stub their cigarettes out on his bare chest and thighs. He hears the hairs on his legs sizzle. They light more cigarettes and shove them up his nostrils, lit end first. He screams—he doesn’t care if they know he’s in pain, he knows it won’t stop anything.

  It gets worse. They rig up some kind of metal plate and wire it to a battery. They place the plate on his thighs, arms, and chest. They shove it against his balls, and he screams louder than he thought possible. He blacks out. They throw him back in his cell, and he joins the other groaning men. Others are taken periodically. He hears their moans, pleas. Each time he thanks God it isn’t him they’ve taken, but he knows they’ll come back.

  And so they do. He’s beaten again, with more cigarettes sizzled painfully on his body. They concentrate on his genitals this time. It hurts worse than the clap, worse than one of Doc Borovika’s quack cures. They fire up the metal plate again, poking it in his kidneys, his spleen, his testicles. He blacks out. They throw stinking water in his face and slap him back to sense. More prods, more lit cigarettes. He thanks God he blacks out yet again.

  They never take him to an actual interrogation room. The Tokkō have no questions to ask Joe Farren; he holds no secrets they want to know. He has simply defied them, refused to cooperate with them, pay them what they demanded, and they hate him for it. It’s all just revenge.

  Then, finally, he is forced to lie along a wooden bench on his back with his head hanging over the end, straining his neck backwards. One fat Japanese sits astride him to stop him moving, another binds his legs at the ankles to stop him kicking. They thrust a gun barrel into his mouth, cracking his teeth. They push it down his throat, causing him to gag. They put some sort of log under his neck, forcing his head backwards even further. Then they pull the gun out and place a wet towel over his face, covering his mouth and his nose. Now he gags from the pain in his throat and the sour taste of gunmetal oil. With no warning, a soldier pours water onto the towel so that it floods up his nostrils and into his mouth, drowning him into the dirty towel. He feels his heart bursting, his head pounding. He swallows as much of the water as he can. They laugh and keep on pouring. He passes out eventually, and they roll him on his side and leave him.

  Back in the cell, his stomach bloated and hurting, he is unable to crawl even to the small bucket left as a toilet. The guards insist the prisoners sit cross-legged—every muscle burns like hell. He’s unable to clean himself and sits in his own filth, although he can’t smell anything, his nose burnt out by the scorching cigarettes. Rice comes sometimes, once with a rotting fish head. He manages to swallow some tepid congee, Chinese rice porridge. He stares at the walls, a Union Jack scratched into the chalk. He isn’t sure how long he’s been here—a day? Two?

  Again they come, again the bench, the towel, the water, beatings with bamboo poles and rifle butts. They mix the water with kerosene that stops him from swallowing it, forcing him to retch. They mix in pepper, which burns like holy fire. They keep on pouring, pouring, pouring …

  The filthy conditions take one of his cellmates in the night—malaria, scurvy, or dysentery? He can no longer feel his extremities—beaten and freezing, starving and in pain. He goes inside his mind, as far away as he can from the pain, the groans, the rats, the screams. His eyes squeezed tight, he travels until he no longer feels the cramps in his gut, the burns on his genitals, the sores on his legs. He no longer feels the unfamiliar stubble on his chin—Joe Farren, a man who shaved every day of his life since he was fifteen. His fingers hurt where his fingernails have been pulled out—Joe Farren, a man who w
ent once a week without fail, for a decade, to a manicurist in Little Russia. He is so distant he can no longer smell the sweat and the shit. He goes to another place.

  He recaptures his past, retraces his journey. He goes to the streets of Leopoldstadt, the cheap stalls of the Raimund Theater, the Prater cafés. He sees that long voyage from Trieste to Singapore, to the Adelphi, and dancing in custom-made tails from Tomes the tailor at sixty bucks a suit in front of the Majestic crowd. The spotlight tracks him and old Whitey Smith conducting. Woo Foo Lane. Now it’s the Astoria, the Oost Java, Manila, Yokohama, and always back to Shanghai. The Follies, the Peaches, the Paramount, Frenchtown, the Canidrome, the spinning roulette wheels of Farren’s, a thousand showgirls in his bed … and Nellie. Nellie’s smile, her laugh, her anger, her tantrums, the sounds she made in bed, the times they’d shared afterwards, the faint scent of Mitsouko. His life was entangled with hers from Singapore to Shanghai, entangled on the dance floor and in bed in their old cold-water flat and their better days in modern apartments. Nellie: dancing, gliding. Nellie … gone now, who knows where.

  * * *

  When friends of Joe’s approach Bridge House, the Japanese name a price. His friends pay it. On December 15, 1941, a large black car emerges through the blacked-out streets and pulls up outside Bridge House. Two European men in heavy overcoats get out and hastily enter the building, leaving a third in the driver’s seat with the engine running. Inside they make themselves known, hand over a bag of cash, and wait. After some time a naked body is thrown at their feet with an old blanket alongside. The body is barely recognisable as the man who once ran the biggest nightclub in the Badlands, the largest casino the city has ever seen. Bruised, cut, covered in dried blood and sores, glasses long gone, those immaculate fingernails all pulled out, stomach distended. The men tenderly wrap the body in the blanket and carry it out the door to the waiting car.

  It’s unclear whether he died in Bridge House or shortly afterwards on the back seat of the car. What is clear is that by the time the car has driven off down North Szechuen Road to cross the bridge back into the Settlement’s central district, Joe Farren is dead.

  EPILOGUE

  The Fallen City

  The city is conquered. The Japanese Imperial Army rolls along the Bund, up the Nanking and Bubbling Well Roads to the Great Western Road and out into the occupied Chinese hinterland. The Kempeitai burn the shacks of the Badlands and warm themselves on the blaze. In place of casinos, nightclubs, dope dens, and lottery shacks they construct barracks for the Imperial Japanese Army, which is pouring into the city before heading inland to suppress the last remnants of Free China.

  Wang Ching-wei and his thugs in number 76 believe that Nationalist guerillas are hiding in Fah Wah village. The puppet corps raid the rookery; Free China gunmen shoot three of them dead. The puppets are backed up by ceremonial sword–wielding Kempeitai. They take the dope shacks and brothel sheds for themselves and heave Cabbage Moh’s murdered corpse into the creek, but not before they sever his head and stick it on a pole as a reminder that nobody gets to play both sides in their Shanghai.

  Over the Garden Bridge in Hongkew, Wayside Road and Broadway are incorporated into an expanded Little Tokyo, and whores and backroom-brewed arrack shamshoo joints for the victorious bluejackets proliferate. The statues of once-esteemed Europeans on the Bund are torn down for scrap metal; the Quai de France becomes a mooring for Japanese river patrol craft; the Pootung wharves disembark yet more Imperial Army troops to police the conquered city.

  The Settlement is now a strategic point in Tokyo’s Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. Japanese officers cut down the legs on the billiards tables at the once-elite Shanghai Club on the Bund to suit their diminutive height; they corral Jewish refugees in Hongkew and create a ghetto for the luckless and the stateless. Allied nationals are interned in similar camps—Ash Camp on the Great Western Road holds more than five hundred, Chapei over fifteen hundred; hundreds are at the old Columbia Country Club, yet more on Haiphong Road; Pootung holds two thousand, the same again in Yangtzsepoo; a thousand on Yu Yuen Road, and a further two thousand out by the old aerodrome at Lunghwa. The lucky few scramble ingloriously for places on the last evacuation ships organized by the Red Cross; the less lucky are put on trucks and taken to Bridge House.

  Pearl Harbor is the ignition for the volatile gas tank of the Pacific, and total war is declared. There will be fighting from Hokkaido to Darwin in the coming years. The killing fields of Batan and Guam, the body pits of Manila, the jungle slaughter of Malaya, are all still to come. Hong Kong sees street-by-street fighting until finally, on Christmas Day, surrender, defeat, and internment. The lowering of the Union Jack; the raising of the Rising Sun. The wreckage of the once-invincible Royal Navy in Singapore harbour will match that of the Seventh Fleet at Pearl Harbor; an army defeated. Years of battle and slaughter will follow until the firestorms across Tokyo, and then Little Boy and Fat Man. It is only the devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that finally ends Tokyo’s dreams. By then the old Shanghai of a century is gone, as quickly as a puff of blue smoke from an opium pipe, that same pernicious substance that drove the very creation of the International Settlement of Shanghai. Nothing will ever be as it was in the City of Devils.

  And as the city falls, Jack Riley throws dice on the cellblock at McNeil while Sam Titlebaum shoots his bogus nostalgia shit two tiers down. Joe Farren lies in an unmarked mass grave in Hungjao. The International Settlement is gone; Frenchtown is gone; honky-tonk Hongkew is gone; the Badlands is gone; Old Shanghai is gone, gone, gone …

  The devils have won the city, the wolves come to feast on the weak, the alligators to snap up the dead, the opium ghosts to roam, the phosphorescent kuei huo to dance on the city’s fallen ramparts.

  Nellie Farren performing the Aztec Shimmy, 1929 (Courtesy of Peter Hibbard)

  Joe Farren—‘The Dapper Ziegfeld of Shanghai’ (North-China Daily News)

  Jack Riley—‘The Slots King of Shanghai’ (North-China Daily News)

  The boys of the Follies and the girls of the Follies with Joe and Nellie (to Joe’s left with hat) in Japan, 1937 (Courtesy of Vera Loewer)

  Farren’s Follies on tour in Tokyo, 1937 (Courtesy of Vera Loewer)

  Shanghai Crime Squad chief John Crighton with unidentified man, 1939 (Courtesy of Robert Bickers & Visualising China)

  Sam Titlebaum, 1941 (China Weekly Review)

  Alice Daisy Simmons, 1941 (China Weekly Review)

  Walter ‘Wally’ Lunzer, 1941 (China Weekly Review)

  Boobee & Vertinsky at the Gardenia (North-China Daily News)

  The Gardenia on Shanghai’s Great Western Road (Courtesy of Katya Kynazeva)

  ABOVE AND BELOW: Paramount Peach chorus line, 1937, with Nellie Farren centre-stage (Photographs courtesy of Vera Loewer)

  ABOVE, RIGHT, AND BELOW: Farren’s ads, 1940/1941 (The China Press)

  DD’s Bubbling Well Road illustration (from the DD’s Cocktail Guide, 1939)

  An advert for Jack Riley’s slot machines in Walla Walla (the newspaper of the 4th Marines in Shanghai), 1940

  DD’s Avenue Joffre Chinese New Year flyer, 1941 (The China Press)

  Slot machine at the Astoria Confectionary and Tea-Rooms at No.7 Broadway (opposite the Astor House Hotel) (Courtesy of Daphne Skillen)

  Slot machines in the Russian restaurant and nightclub Arcadia (291 Route Amiral Courbet), 1940 (Courtesy of Katya Knyazeva)

  ABOVE AND BELOW: Larissa Andersen promotional photographs, 1940 (Issued by the Tower Club)

  ABOVE AND BELOW: Godfrey Phillips’s gunshot-damaged car, 1940. A bullet hole in the seat shows how close Phillips came to being hit. (North-China Daily News)

  Riley Arrest, 1941 (left to right: Marshal Sam Titlebaum, Jack Riley [face obscured] and DSI John Crighton) (North-China Daily News)

  Ward Road Gaol, 1940—‘The Shanghai Bastille’ (Shanghai Municipal Council Yearbook)

  ABOVE, RIGHT, BELOW: Buck Clayton, Derby and the Harlem Gentlemen
at the Canidrome (Courtesy of University of Missouri–Kansas City, Miller Nicholls Library, LaBudde Special Collections)

  Old Shanghai postcards (Courtesy of author’s collection)

  The Bund

  Nanking Road

  Broadway Mansions and the Garden Bridge

  LEFT AND RIGHT: The China Weekly Review reports on the Badlands policing fiasco and gang warfare (China Weekly Review)

  Badlands gangster cartoon, 1941 (North-China Daily News)

  Cartoon by the famous White Russian artist Sapajou, 1941 (North-China Daily News)

  AFTERWORD

  Joe Farren was buried in Shanghai in an unmarked grave. Farren’s nightclub was shuttered, closed, looted, and then eventually pulled down. Not a trace of its existence remains. After the war someone did look for Joe—an advert appeared in Aufbau, a New York–based journal for German-speaking Jews around the world. Aufbau printed lists of Holocaust survivors and ran countless advertisements for Jewish families looking to reunite or discover the fate of their loved ones in the aftermath of the war. The advertisement ran on October 26, 1945: