Night in Shanghai (13 page)

That night, Song returned to the Royal.

At once his anxiety ignited, for Anya was here, languid and lovely at her usual table. Song came in with her eyes downcast, walking a few paces behind Du and his bodyguards, as she always did. Thomas willed his eyes away from her and kept them on the keys, barely breathing. He looked up at her two or three times while they were playing, but fleetingly, and in a way no one could possibly have noticed.

But Anya saw. That night, on their way back to her place from the theater, she brought it up. “Who is she?”

“I don’t know who you mean.”

“The woman up in the box.”

“The box belongs to the gang boss,” he said.

“I know. I’m asking about her.”

“She comes in with him. That is all I know.”

Anya still studied him, speculating as the rickshaw bumped and swayed along, but he went quiet, and so did she. Then when they reached her place, they flew at each other, joining on the bed in a frenzy.

Later, when they had quieted, she turned to him to speak. He thought she might return to the subject of Song Yuhua, but instead she surprised him by saying he could no longer come to her room at night; a “no visitors” rule had been imposed by her landlord. “He meant you,” she apologized. “You have come so often. There is nothing I can do—”

“It’s not your fault,” he said, wondering where they would meet now.

“Perhaps where you live?” she said.

“I don’t think that would do. I’ve taken in two young brothers from the band. They’re just teenagers.”

She gave him a look, because anyone could see they were far from innocent. “Well, then. Perhaps you should rent a room for us. We can meet there. Something small would not be more than seven or eight dollars a month. You can afford it.”

True, he could, and why not? So starting that week, he secured a small ground-floor studio on the Huangpu, at the end of Peking Road, across from the docks, with cooling wood shutters to filter the river air. They went there together after hours, and slept in the predawn coolness, and when the sounds of the day started to rise outside, he got up and went home. It was his last period of routine quietude before the world fell apart.

Song debated long and hard about giving one of the diamonds to the Party. If Du caught her, of course, she was dead, but if Du were to discover her secret affiliations in any one of a hundred ways, she was equally dead, so one more risk hardly mattered. What frightened her was something different, that the gift was so ostentatious for a leftist. A
diamond
. It would have been safer to convert it to cash first, except that then she would be exposed to even greater danger, for gossip from a gem dealer could easily get back to Du.

Still, to hand over the diamond would cement her commitment. This was wealth she found by chance, and it belonged not to her but to China.

One diamond, anyway. The other three would stay well hidden.

The midday rain had cleared, and she saw shopkeepers on both sides of the street reopening their lattices to the wet sidewalks, while sellers of books and magazines and curios moved their racks back out to the street. Men in light, sun-shielding fedoras and cotton gowns stopped to peruse string-bound volumes and old prints. The letter writers came back, small-town scholars who had failed the examinations and now waited for customers behind flimsy folding tables.

She felt for these men, since she too had received an education she could not use, except when she translated for Du. Before his gambling losses, her father had been set on making her a modern woman. He had engaged the best tutors for her older brother, and always insisted she sit in on his lessons. When her brother died of consumption, all the father’s ambition transferred to little Yuhua, Jade Flower, an old-fashioned and ornamental name she had never liked. Nevertheless she wore the name he gave her, and studied hard to please him. Though only eight or nine, she could feel the family’s future resting on her, and excelled, especially at English. Her younger sisters were but babies then, and she spent all her time with tutors.

But then, after her mother died, her father started going out at night, and reeling back, white-faced, in the mornings. Artworks were sold off: a pair of Yongzheng
mille-fleurs
bowls, a Qianlong white jade censer, a blue and white dragon dish from the reign of Chenghua, her late mother’s green jade bracelets. Then other mornings he would come home with money in his pockets, and meaningless gifts. She saw what was happening, but she was only a girl with no more power than a grain of millet afloat in a vast sea. All she could do was watch. At last there came a day when he drew an unlucky hand, and forfeited the ancestral compound and all the land surrounding it.

That was when he begged her, crumbling inelegantly to his knees.

“
Ba
, don’t,” she said, shocked. “Get up.” She disliked this memory. She preferred to think of the shady gardens, the round gates through which respectful servants passed with trays or basins or folded linens, leaving behind the slip-slop of their cotton shoes against the flagstones. That was the memory she allowed.

She had no desire to go back to her family. They had sold her and never made contact again—out of shame, no doubt, for the Songs were a locally illustrious family and their daughters had to marry respectably. Indeed, that was the story they put about, when she disappeared, that she had gone away to be married, and people believed it.

She was born and bred to be used, as surely as any peasant or worker. Communism had saved her, to her way of thinking, opposing as it did the feudal ways that had landed her in this servitude to begin with. Her beliefs elevated her; they connected her to the city.

She had heard it said that every block in Shanghai held a thousand souls, when you added up mothers, fathers, children, shop workers, and servants, and when she was out, moving through the lanes like this, she could feel the rhythm of their breathing like a single organism, hear the hum of their thoughts. This was
ren min
to her, the people, this pulsing urban honeycomb, and they were her real cause.

As she entered the apothecary shop, she brushed her fingers past the hidden pocket inside her dress to confirm for the hundredth time that the pouch was still there.

“Young mistress.”

“Special prescription today,” she said, and handed the old herbalist a blank sheet of paper, a prearranged signal that meant she needed a meeting. “Also the usual one.”

“Mistress is tired,” said the herbalist. “Take your ease in the parlor and I will send for tea. I regret that at this moment there is none here, I will have to send out, but it will only be a moment. Please.” He gave one more careful look around the shop to make sure no one was watching, and pulled the lever to release the hidden door in the wall.

“Thank you.” She entered and sat down with the impatient distraction of the young matron abroad in the city, until the wall of drawers shut again and she could relax from her role and dab the nervousness from her forehead. It was dim but for the small lamp, and cool, no brazier needed now to provide its halo of warmth. She knew it would take time for someone to fetch her current guide, the primary contact through which she reported any information she gleaned as a result of the evenings she spent by Du’s side. For a long time it had been Mr. Guo, aboveground identity and occupation unknown.

Presently the inner door opened and he came in, out of breath.
He works nearby
, she realized.
He ran here in the heat from his place of work.
“Mrs. Ma,” he said, with complete neutrality despite the urgency of his gasping. “How are you? Have you eaten?”

“Yes, thank you. You?”

“Yes.” He mopped his face as he sat.

“Do you remember our conversation when we last met?”

He was lost. “No.”

“You told me of your cousins in the north, their need. I said I would pray for a solution.”

“Ah,” he said. “The need.” As they both knew, the situation in the north was even worse now. Japan’s armies had been massed near Peking for weeks.

“The gods listened to me,” she said, extending the tiny package she had removed from within her dress.

He took it, confused.

“Careful,” she said, when he fumbled with the wrapper. The edge in her voice made him open the last square of silk attentively, after which his eyes all but fell from his head. A silence cloaked the little pool of lamplight between them.

“Your spittle is three feet long,” she said gently, when he could not stop staring.

He looked up. “Sorry.” The jewel vanished inside the silk, which he knotted over and over inside his handkerchief. “They will be most pleased in the north.”

“It was luck,” she said, hiding her elation. The north was the nerve center of the Party, their base. “Only one thing—enough must be set aside from this for the herbalist to provide for my mistress’s medicines, permanently. No matter what happens. That should only be a small part.”

“Agreed,” he said, giddy at the stone’s obvious value.

A tap sounded on the wall, and the hidden door released, with a wooden sigh. She rose. “My prescription is ready. So nice to see you. Please give my regards to your family.”

On her way out, the herb master handed her a packet of the usual tonics and restoratives. She nodded toward the inner room, now sealed off again, and said, “Talk to him about payment.” She walked out with a firm stride, pleased with what she had done. The
mo shou
, the “evil hand” of the aggressor, was bearing down on Shanghai, but she had done her part, today, to push it back.

Thomas awakened a half hour before dawn, curled up to Anya and her warm smell. Soon he would get up and go home, where, a little after midday, he would have breakfast with Charles and Ernest. Right now, though, he liked it here by the river, the fresh air and splashing waves and the hollow bass bumping of the hulls. Dawn would bring the soft slap of river water, then slowly the city would awaken to its human music, the thousands of conversations bubbling up as people rose from their beds throughout the streets and alleys and even on the water, on the bobbing brown sampans. The first minutes of every day were always a genial simmer of voices, before the din of commerce, traffic, and engines took over.

He lay listening against lace pillows, hands behind his head. He could see her scarves spilled over the mirror, her clothing in the small closet, her shoes. In a wash of clarity, he understood that she was living here.

Suddenly, things clicked together: the way she had him take her out to dinner every night, the half-starved manner in which she ate. The way she never wanted to meet anymore in the neighborhood where her room used to be, because she no longer had it, and no money either.

When she woke he said, “You let go of your room.”

“I cannot pay all that. Why go between two rooms? I have nothing.” Her voice became sweet, appealing. “Can you not give me some cash every month? Not much. Just so I have something in my pocket. I haven’t a
sou
, not a
centavo
, not a Chinese dollar. Look what you spent on dinner last night, just for one night . . . can you not help me?”

“Of course,” he said, gathering her close. He felt ungentlemanly for not having noticed things sooner, and resolved to give her money regularly, starting with the clump of bills he left on the dresser that morning.

Yet as the days slid by, he started to wonder about it. Being a gentleman was important, but he did not love Anya, and had never thought of making it permanent. She brought him great pleasure and incalculable comfort, and obviously he should support her in return, but for how long?

“For as long as it pleases you to share her bed,” Lin said to him at lunch a week later, as he paged through the menu at De Xing Guan, a second-floor restaurant overlooking the river. They sat next to metal-crank windows, which were open to the summer humidity and the bobbing thatch-fabric of sampans, lorchas, and junks. Large vessels passing in the channel traded groans from their horns—the bottom note to Shanghai’s chord, a sound special to downtown Shanghai that Thomas had come to love.

Lin ordered the dish the restaurant was famous for, a rich, milky-white seafood chowder brimming with fish, shrimp, scallops, tofu, thin-sliced sea cucumber, and tangy mustard greens, touched by white pepper. To accompany this they had cold plates of pungent steeped cucumbers, gluten puffs with winter mushrooms and bamboo shoots, and
ma lan tou
, a minced salad of a local freshwater weed and savory dry tofu. Sensing his friend’s inner disturbance, Lin ordered rice spirits for both of them,
bai jiu
, powerfully alcoholic, served warm in a small crock. “You look like you have a fishbone stuck in your throat. Out with it,” he said, pouring.

“First of all, my men. We are down to a skeleton.”

“I already told you, we can’t replace any of them.”

“But the ballroom is full every night! The money’s got to be as good as ever.”

“Money is unrelated. Would you have me bring new musicians over here now, in conditions like this?”

“Now we are getting to it. Should the rest of us leave?”

“How can I know? Each has his own decision. But you and I,” Lin said, “and the others you have left, we are here. All of us know the risks. A new man, in America? No.”

Thomas was silenced by this.

“Was there something else?” said Lin. “Anya?”

“How did you know?”

Lin smiled. “It shows. You foreigners are so sensitive when it comes to the house thing.”

“Well . . . first she told me we could not be together any longer in her room, and that I would have to rent a room for us to meet. I did that.”

Lin nodded; the strategy was well known to him, and he saw little wrong with it. “Why should two rooms be paid for?”

“That’s what she said. Except that now I am responsible for her rent. And she wants me to give her money, too, every week.”

“And how else do you expect her to get money?”

Thomas stared.

“You want her to go with another man?” Lin asked, serving his friend more soup. “Let me ask you: What work did Anya do when you met her?”