Night in Shanghai (22 page)

So was planning. If Du left, or if he set her free—who knew what this war might bring about?—she would have to be ready to act.

She could go with Thomas to America. The thought brought an onrush of love shot through with the darkness of their last moment together, watching Wing Bean die. He would protect her, she knew that. Even though he had not asked her, and she had not said yes, she knew the door to him lay open.

To go with him, though, meant giving up her cause completely. “I have often thought of going north,” she said, this being of course the only version of her future she would present to Chen Xing.

“To Yan’an?” His eyebrows rose. “You’re the sort of modern woman I’d expect to run to Hong Kong or America the minute the manacles were off you.”

She bristled. “You doubt my commitment?”

“Not at all.” His eyes registered her response. “I am impressed by the risks you take. But I warn you, be careful. You will always have the taint of foreignness.”

“What about you?” she shot back. “You are ‘leaning down’ from a well-off family. Your family’s wealth is as dangerous as my English. It is a risk for both of us. But if you run from a risk, then how do you call that commitment?”

“Touché.”
He pronounced the French with a burnish of irony, and she wondered with a jolt if he had been testing her.

But she could pass any test. “If I were free, I might go north. And if I do—”

“You will need introductions. When the time comes, send word here”—and he wrote a few characters on the back of his card for her—“to my brother’s house in Chongqing. I will write to them about you.”

She took the card, grateful. Everything was a political process. “Thank you.”

“Not at all. Are we not the same purpose?” On her way out, she savored this new term he had used,
tongzhi
, same purpose. Comrade. She liked it. She wondered if it would catch on in the movement.

Fighting continued through September, mostly sparing the French Concession and International Settlement, but leaving parts of Hongkou and Zhabei so bombed out that only a few hardy souls were left holed up in the damaged buildings. Thomas crept back and forth to the theater every day, and even the Higgins brothers returned straight home after work. They spent hours on stage trying not to wince at the intermittent bursts of shooting and shelling, and by the time the clock hit two and the lights finally winked up, everyone wanted to shake hands at the door and hurry home. Late at night, when they were all in and safe, and Thomas was alone in his room with his oil lamp, he worried. All of them were saving as much as they could, but inflation was driving things up, and getting enough cash to go home seemed far out of reach.

And there was Song. He ached every day for her, and wondered how he had gotten through all those years before he met her. It did not matter, because they knew each other now, in every possible way, and he had no doubt they would be together every minute if it were not for Du. She would be with him if she could.

By the end of the month, there were signs around the city that a climactic offensive was coming. Fresh soldiers and supplies moved through the streets by the truckload, in vehicles painted with the Rising Sun. The radio reported that separate Japanese divisions were marching simultaneously toward Nanjing. The Americans had doubled the number of Marines in Shanghai to three thousand, hoping to protect American property. Trouble was ahead, and everyone could feel it.

October kicked off the offensive, shooting and explosions from all directions, and the bass thunder of big guns. By late in the month, Thomas had to acknowledge that China was losing. Wave after wave of Chinese recruits had come in, looking pathetically young, fifteen, sixteen—even Charles and Ernest were older. And then Chiang Kai-shek ordered a retreat to defend the rural suburbs, and in a blink, those last soldiers were gone altogether. Japanese flags sprouted at intersections and post offices, and the streets outside the neutral Concessions were littered with eerily abandoned firing nests, sandbags still piled protectively, shell casings on the ground.

A single Chinese battalion stayed behind to cover the retreat. In what was surely a suicide mission, eight hundred men withdrew to the
Sihang
, or Four-Bank Warehouse on Suzhou Creek at the corner of North Tibet Road. Because the warehouse was directly across from the neutral International Settlement, the Japanese were afraid to attack it. By the second day, British soldiers were brazenly crossing the bridge to deliver food, cigarettes, ammunition, and first aid supplies to the warehouse.

When the onslaught against the eight hundred finally began, everyone in Shanghai was glued to the saga of the brave soldiers dubbed the
Gu Jun
, the Lonely Battalion.

On October twenty-ninth the sun came up over the Chinese flag, smuggled in by a twenty-two-year-old girl and miraculously hoisted high above the warehouse roof. Thomas and Charles and Ernest hurried to see it, and found thirty thousand people lining the banks of the creek that bordered the International Settlement, chanting and waving Chinese flags.

They stayed until it was time to go home and dress for work, but then a messenger arrived with a note from Floor Manager Zhou. “The Royal is closed tonight!” Thomas cried, scanning it. “We are to play on the roof of the Gas Works building, right across the creek from the warehouse. They will roll a grand piano out there and put down a dance floor.”

They arrived to find the roof transformed into a chilly autumn fairyland of hanging Chinese lanterns and potted chrysanthemums, already filling up with guests in evening wear, both Western and Chinese. Waiters circulated with champagne, and as soon as the Kings swung into “Exactly Like You,” couples stepped into each other’s arms and onto the dance floor. Pops and spatters of gunfire sounded down below, adding grit and hesitations to their rhythm. Every time there was a large explosion, the air would fill with screams and cries as all the men and women rushed to the roof’s edge, to look over and cheer with the crowds below, and on the rooftops all around.

Between sets they took a break, and he saw a familiar elongated shape emerge from the elevator inside the propped-open doors: Du Yuesheng. Thomas barely breathed as he counted out the entourage—until there she was, Song. And then as quickly as they had appeared, they were gone, vanished to a lower floor, it was rumored, to watch the battle from a private room. Thomas steeled himself and focused on playing.

Suddenly, after midnight, the cries of astonishment from the crowd became so urgent that the musicians ran to the parapet to see. Three Japanese soldiers had managed to sneak a ladder over to one side of the building and climb up to a bombed-out opening. Just as they reached it, a man appeared in the opening, the battalion’s commander, Xie Jinyuan. Everyone on the roof held their breath as he shot the first Japanese, strangled the second with his hands, and threw the third off the ladder before knocking it away altogether. The rooftop went mad with joy, and for a few precious minutes, chaos reigned. Thomas used this time to move quickly through the crowd, and look for her. But she was absent, along with Du and his bodyguards.

They played out the last set and then kept going, responding to the crowd, pushing further. Everyone sensed this was the end.

It was not until dawn was near that they shut off the lights. Lester and Errol went home, and Alonzo took Charles and Ernest out to help them find a rickshaw, which left almost no one on the rooftop except Thomas and the workmen, cleaning up. So he took some music from his briefcase and played Brahms, because it calmed him.

Then he heard a woman clear her throat, a gentle but specific sound already as close and natural to him as middle C. It was Song, just inside the door, half-hidden in the darkness. “I thought you left,” he whispered.

“Careful,” she said.

He looked. The only other people on the roof were men folding tables and taking up the dance floor. Not one of them was looking in Thomas’s direction.

Six steps, and he was with her, in the shadows. “Where is Du?”

“In a meeting, downstairs. They think I am gone to the restroom.”

That meant she had only a minute. “Song—”

“No,” she said quietly, putting two cool fingers on his mouth, “Don’t.” Her other hand sought his, and their fingers linked quickly and naturally. She brought her face so close to his that their cheeks grazed. “I know,” she whispered, and they stood for a long moment, until a fresh burst of gunfire startled them, followed by a grenade blast and the rumble of falling masonry.

“All of them will either die or surrender,” she said bitterly. “Then it’s finished. We will belong to Japan.”

“Not Frenchtown. Not the International Settlement.”

“Congratulations—a lonely island in an occupied city. And now my time is run out,” she said miserably, holding his eyes. “Stay alive for me.” And after a brief, desperate squeeze of his hand, she vanished.

Over the next few days, the dominoes fell. The Lonely Battalion was down to 376 men, and Commander Xie Jinyuan had them make a run out of the building and across the bridge into the International Settlement, protected by their gravely wounded compatriots who were dying anyway and had volunteered to cover them from the machine gun nests. British troops cheered them into the Settlement, arrested them, confiscated their weapons to prevent anything falling into the hands of the Japanese, and put them up in a building on Singapore Road they dubbed the Lost Battalion Barracks.

With this last act, Shanghai’s War of Resistance shuddered to a close. Through November, Thomas saw brown-uniformed soldiers rolling in by the truckloads, placid, complacent, bouncing along. He saw them down by the river on their time off, walking with a bottle of sake jammed in one pocket and two bottles of Asahi in the other, eating fruits out of hand, taking what they wanted from stores as they passed.

They set up checkpoints at intersections and bridges. At the steel-truss Garden Bridge, which connected the unoccupied Bund to the occupied Hongkou district, everyone had to bow from the waist to Japan, with no exceptions—cars had to stop, the tram down the middle of the bridge halted and disgorged its passengers; everyone had to do it. Thomas adapted with relative ease to this new regime, for all his life, around white people, it had almost always been necessary to defer. And since he was a foreigner, the Japanese went easy on him, letting him pass with the kind of perfunctory bow that would have gotten a Chinese slammed with a rifle butt. Suddenly his race was the right card to hold in the game of fear and death. Sickening. The new slang word for the occupiers, which even Thomas, with his nonexistent Chinese, learned to recognize, was
mo shou
, the evil hand.

One day at the end of November, Lin Ming received a message that he was to be at Rue Wagner, at the hour of the rooster. His first fear was that the conquerors were taking over one of his ballrooms, because the night-world continued to roar, with the drugs, gambling, and liquor flowing so fast that all over town, the abacuses chattered until dawn. Backstage office safes bulged with profits, and he was dreading the day the Japanese decided to take the money for themselves. He had been sensing doom; was tonight the night?

Or maybe there was trouble with the Germans again. The Nazi organization in Shanghai was small but well established, with its own network of spies and agitators, and they were furious about the numbers of Jewish refugees arriving in the city. They also hated the fact that the city’s very wealthy Jews, like Sir Victor Sassoon, and Horace Kadoorie, had stepped up to care for penniless arrivals in dormitories and soup kitchens. Small loans were arranged for individuals wishing to open the same businesses they had run in Germany, and soon the Jews had started their own schools and clinics, and even built a synagogue. He and Kung had passed several evenings with Du, urging him to resist the Nazis’ demands to restrict the refugees, whose numbers were currently swelling by a thousand a month as they stepped off the Lloyd Triestino ships from Genoa. Fortunately for them, Du was not hard to convince; he had hated the Nazis ever since Hitler told Kung they should surrender to Japan.

Lin Ming arrived at the tightly shuttered second-floor meeting room first, and realized that all these identical red-tufted rooms were another of the old man’s superstitions, like the lucky mummified monkey’s head that he wore hanging from his back collar inside his gown. Like the ancestral temple he paid to have built in his home village, where the air was clouded by incense and the lights of candles danced along the wall, even though his forebears were nothing but dirt-poor alley dwellers. And like this room, with its dark wood paneling and softly glowing silk lotus-bud lamps, which brought back his brothel boyhood. Of course his father kept his rooms like this. One day Lin probably would too, if he made it through this war.

And he had his own beliefs, his superstitions; one of them was Pearl, and the weeks of battle had shown him that he cared about her, and her safety, too much to leave her in the brothel. He had to save to get her out.

He had been with her the night before, and all her goodness was still there, her sweetness, even though she had passed her twenty-eighth birthday and he had not talked about buying her out. It was over, forgiven, and she loved him just the same, which opened him enough to tell her he had started to save. He did not know how long it would take—there was the war, years maybe—and it embarrassed him to hear himself saying these things, which were still weak and evasive, but she burst into tears beneath him, holding his shoulders, her legs going limp around him in her rush of love and gratitude, forgetting entirely that they had been in the middle of the house thing. He held her, and knew that he was committed; he would raise her buyout, no matter what it took, or how long. The war had made it all clear.

The secret door clicked, and Du entered in a gray silk gown.

“Teacher,” Lin said respectfully.

Du responded with a nod of his bald head. “I need you to translate.”

“Of course.” In some situations, only a male translator would do.