Night in Shanghai (14 page)

“I don’t know. She had that room—she sang a little in clubs, she performed.”

“That is not enough.”

“So you’re saying she got money from men?”

“As all women do, even wives. In my view, this is unimportant. What matters is, what kind of woman is she?”

“A good woman.”

“I agree, and lovely too,” said Lin. “By the way, what man did she see before you?”

He bristled faintly. “I wouldn’t have any idea.”

“But I would,” Lin said. “It was an Italian, an embassy man.”

“How do you know that?”

Lin raised his palms. “I have eyes. I live in Shanghai. You should not be so hard on her, you know—how else do you expect her to live?”

“I am starting to see your point,” said Thomas, thinking that now it made sense—her wildly divergent social circles, the instant recognition she commanded from people, club patrons, doormen, waiters. She was just trying to get by.

The
bai jiu
had made Lin Ming professorial. “Actually, Little Greene, this type of woman is as precious as jade. She is not like a wife. Anya is there when you want her, not there when you do not. Who would not desire her, in Shanghai, especially in times like these?”

“What about your woman?” said Thomas. “You told me about her once—but not much.”

Lin thought of trying to describe Pearl, but decided Thomas could never understand a Chinese woman. “Well water and river water do not mix,” he said.

Thomas left their lunch and walked up Dong Men to Ming Guo Road, which circled the Chinese City and led him to the beginning of Avenue Joffre. The long avenue lined with shops and impressive buildings would eventually take him back to his part of Frenchtown. As he walked, every beautiful woman he passed made him think of Anya, and wonder what he ought to do. He had spent quite a few nights in the greatest intimacy with her, doing everything men and women could do, yet they were not really close. He was to blame, clearly, for he had kept her in a small, circumscribed part of his life. He had always gone home to sleep in his own bed. But that was because he did not love her.

So he would not go on like this.

The awareness was like a weight floating off of him, as he understood that their time together would end. He would make sure she was secure, and he would leave her happy.

He would miss her forthright hungers and her bliss in their joinings. He would miss the way she took him into Shanghai’s back rooms and secret salons, even though through her, he still had not met a Communist. Maybe they did not exist.

He approached the corner of New Yuyang Street, and Anya’s words came back to him:
Communists? The Foreign Languages School on New Yuyang
. He turned down the narrow road, lined with Shanghai’s usual three- and four-story brick apartment buildings, dotted with groups of somnolent old men and gossipy grandmas, the only people out on this hot June afternoon, except for the rickshaw coolies who had no place to go, and were stopped here and there along the cobbled sidewalk, napping beneath their awnings.

Ahead, he saw a sizable building with a white sign out front, English words that made his midsection flutter in excitement:
Foreign Languages School
. He withdrew to the shade beneath some plane trees across the street and willed himself to blend in, straining to disappear against the green backdrop as he studied the doors.

The strange thing was that almost no one passed through the doors, at least no one he could see clearly; they all seemed to hunch over and get away as quickly as possible. He picked out a middle-aged, scholarly-looking Chinese gentleman, two threadbare office clerk types, and a young woman who looked like a student, and held a scarf over her face.

And then another woman stepped out, and he sank backwards. Her form and her elegantly controlled walk were familiar to him; even though her face was half-shielded by the hand she held up, he knew it was her, Song Yuhua.

He pressed against the ivy-thick wall behind him as she checked up and down the street, her shoulders pulled forward around her.

She’s one of them
. In a blazing instant, he understood the oddities, like the manic light in her eyes when she ripped Morioka’s card from his hands, so at odds with who she was in the company of Du. She had another life, he saw it—in the trenches where the Communists fought Japan, and the Nationalists fought the Communists.
And she does it right under Du’s nose
. He pressed back into the waxy leaves, breathless at her bravery, as he watched her hurry away down the street.

F
RIDAY AFTERNOON, STILL
reeling from his discovery, Thomas attended a lawn party at a Tudor-style estate in the western suburbs of the International Settlement, a wealthy area favored by Shanghailanders, as the white foreigners who had settled in Shanghai generations before liked to call themselves. Their guests were a Caucasian mix of business people, teachers, missionaries, and the interlopers of every stripe who were everywhere, seeking to explain East to West and vice versa. There were also a few dozen Chinese in gowns or business suits, and one or two oddities like himself. Everyone appeared prosperous, from the women in silk stockings and heels to the men in handmade suits with spectacles and timepieces of solid gold. Too successful-looking to be Communists, in his opinion, but then of course he remembered Song, encased in brocade with huge jewels clipped to her ears; she had fooled him.

He loaded his plate at the buffet, choosing from plump pink prawns and roast beef and rack of lamb, cucumber salads, and strawberries with clotted cream. He loved the food at these parties, which was why he often took advantage of the invitations pressed into his hand at the informal receiving line with which he ended every show. He also enjoyed being a guest in rich people’s homes, just as he liked getting the same wage a white player earned.

But here in Shanghai, he did miss Western food. Chen Ma cooked only two things, Chinese food and Southern food. The first had wearied him, and the second he had never liked to begin with. With Anya, he had visited restaurants often, of every nationality and type, usually late at night, when he got off work. They had been faithful about eating at restaurants, because it was the only time when she ate.

It had not been easy to end things. Thomas took her to dinner after the show, as he always did, and by the time they were in a rickshaw, being pulled by a straining coolie back to his studio on Peking Road, it was 3:30
A.M
. She rode pressed against him as she always did, unsuspecting; he had planned to say nothing until they were alone together, in bed.

He might as well have poured ice water on her. She was out from the sheets in a second, pulling down her scarves and dumping her fake jewels into a bag.

“Anya,” he said, trying to pull her back.

“Stop it.”

“Don’t do that.”

“If that is all I am,” she swore, “even one wink I will not sleep here!” It took him more than an hour just to convince her she did not have to move right then, before dawn. He made it clear he would rent another place and pay for eight months, but this, of course, she quickly refused.

After that came apologies and accusations, tears, humiliations, and declarations of good intentions, until at last she accepted his offer of eight months’ rent. An agreement reached, they fell into an exhausted sleep. The next day he helped her make arrangements, gave her the money, and she was gone. What surprised him was that he did not miss her, beyond the pleasures of sleeping with her, and the trips to restaurants.

He finished his food, and handed off his empty plate to a Chinese servant with an easy, absent smile.

Strolling the lawn as a
digestif
, he found himself talking with a trio of foreigners, British, German, and American. When he walked up, the American, a businessman from Pennsylvania, was holding forth about China and Japan. “You see how sloppy everything is here? How much everything has to be greased?” the man said. “It’ll be cleaned up spit-spot if the Japanese win. Now
they
know what they’re doing. Ed Rollins, Cleveland. Pleasure.” He extended his hand jovially to the white fellow standing on Thomas’s left, who turned out to be British, then to the other fellow, the German, and finally, almost as an afterthought, to Thomas himself.

Once acknowledged, Thomas responded to what he had said. “Do you really think it’s all right for Japan to invade China just because they seem more organized?”

“Works better for us,” Rollins quipped.

“I’ve heard Germany’s pretty organized,” Thomas shot back, keeping it serious. “Think they should take over the U.S.?”

“Now, wait a minute—”

“We would do very well,” the German cut in, a grin stretching his blustery Hanoverian whiskers. “But all of you are missing the point. The danger to the world is not Japan. It is the Jews. And you here in Shanghai, you are letting them in! No other country in the world is so stupid to do that.”

“My good man,” said the Brit, pouring on the plumminess, “Shanghai is an open port. Everyone is welcome here. And so it will remain.”

“Jews are good for work and labor,” said the German. “No more.”

Thomas stared, amazed he was hearing this.

“They breed,” the German added.

Thomas closed his eyes, and back to him came one of those powerful, long-ago memories, dreadfully important but glossed over by scarring until now. He was nine but runty for his age, on account of his father having fallen in France and them running chronically short of food, so he probably appeared too young to be out on the stoop by himself, although he was not. What he was doing that day was sulking; his mother wanted him to play the first ten Bach inventions in sequence, and he wanted to be out with his friends. As he hunched on the steps, two white ladies walked by, which already made him cringe back in fear, because they had steel-colored eyes and wore dead foxes around their necks. They looked at him as if he were a strange animal, revolting but interesting, and one said to the other, “They breed,” utterly careless of whether he could hear her or not. He remembered his sharp intake of breath, and his almost instantaneous decision not to tell his mother, who already suffered with so much.

Now, though, he spoke to the German. “Such claims have no place in Christian company, sir.”

“But I am right,” said the German.

“See here,” the Brit interrupted forcefully, “I must insist you stop. I agree with my friend here, Mr. Greene”—the man nodded his distinguished white head at Thomas, and in a rushing instant, Thomas realized he was the host of this party, it was he who had slipped the invitation card into Thomas’s hand a week before—“your comments are insupportable. This is my house, and my party. I insist you cease such talk.”

“And I insist that you know nothing of Jews,” said the German.

“There you are wrong,” said the Briton, as he pointed across the crowd to a man with a cane. “That is my friend of twenty years, Sir Victor Sassoon. He is a welcome guest here, as he is everywhere in Shanghai.” Now the silver-haired gentleman turned to Thomas. “Just like my friend here, Mr. Greene.”

“Actually,” Thomas replied, “I am not welcome everywhere in the International Settlement. I can’t walk in the front door of a hotel or restaurant.”

The Brit looked sad. “Ah, that is your American policy, not ours.”

“The Jews are your problem too,” the German said. “They are filth, not like us.” With a generous gesture he included Thomas in the circle. “We are gentlemen.”

“You are wrong about me,” said Thomas firmly. “They are filth?” He steadied his gaze right in the German’s eyes. “Then I am exactly like them.”

That night Kung’s ship docked at the Bund, bringing him back from Europe, and Lin Ming went downtown to meet him. He wanted to hear about his trip over brandy and a few cigars.

The shock was Kung’s deflated appearance, unexpected because sea journeys by their nature were restful. “Duke Kung, what’s happened? Are you ill?”

“My pride and my hope are wounded,” the older man said, “not my body, this time. Shall we go have a drink?”

“Precisely why I came,” said Lin, and they scrambled into a rickshaw and swayed comfortably down Avenue Édouard VII, on their way to a coffee shop Kung favored on a small street off Boulevard de Montigny. There they took a private back room, and ordered an expensive bottle of Armagnac, and also a steaming pot of Iron Goddess of Mercy with two tiny teacups.

Kung clipped a cigar and lit it. “Unfortunately, though it was the Soviets who asked me to set out in the first place, their plan had been abandoned by the time I reached Moscow. Nevertheless, I continued on to Berlin—you know I hoped I could get the Nazis to help us.”

“And?” said Lin.

“They will not.”

“I see,” said Lin heavily. “That is very bad.”

“It is,” said Kung, exhaling a tufting cloud of smoke. “But that is not the only reason for my fear. It’s because of what is happening to the Jews! They are seizing their property, their fortunes. My friends lost their banks. They are passing laws against them.”

“Are they all right, your friends?”

“Schwartz and Shengold? I still could not locate them. Their houses were locked up; I pray to God and Jesus they are safe. Young Lin, we must do something. This is a grave international crime. China has to take a stand against it.”

“Other countries have not.”

“All the more reason.”

“Why do you say ‘we’? What has this to do with me?”

“Your father is what it has to do with you. We have to help him see the importance of pressuring Chiang on this.”

“I don’t help Papa Du see anything,” Lin said, using his father’s popular local nickname. “He does what he wants.”

“He wants to beat Japan, doesn’t he?”

“No question.” Du had donated millions to Chiang for the war effort.

“If we take a stand against Germany on the Jews, the West might come to our aid against Japan.”

“Maybe,” Lin said, and also thought,
but
maybe not
.

“There is no reason for the Jews to be persecuted,” said Kung.

Lin nodded; he himself had always had high regard for Jews, starting with Hiram Grant, one of his first recruits, a saxophone player long gone back to America. Hiram wore a gold Star of David around his neck which he never took off, and insisted that he was Jewish, though he was not. Hiram’s grandmother had been taken in during Reconstruction by a Jewish family in Ohio, who sent her to college and financed her education. She educated her son in turn, and he educated Hiram, who was conservatory-trained. All of them considered themselves members of the tribe of Israelites, and wore its golden symbol around their necks. Hiram revered Jews. They had given the priceless gift of an education to his grandmother, the same gift Du had given to Lin Ming; the difference was that his father used it to control him, while the Jews in Ohio set the Grants free.