Night in Shanghai (7 page)

“You’re right, I did.” He ruffled the young head, grinning at the fact that all the doors seemed wide open to him, for the first time ever; he could drink, dance, and sample women, for he had money, and here, where all men were at last created equal, that was the only thing that mattered. “Let’s go.”

B
Y EARLY SPRING
, Thomas was keeping up on piano, though hardly delivering the irresistibly danceable keyboard lines the Kings required. This was overlooked partly because he was skilled at arranging and leading, and partly because the classical flights of fancy he delivered onstage brought such responses from the audience that even the brass section dared not raise a voice.

But he could feel things simmering, and one day in March, at the weekly rehearsal, brass player Lester Cole let it out. “When are you going to take a solo, Tails?”

“Well—”

“’Cause we’re getting tired of the Uncle Tom business.”

Thomas heard nothing for an instant save the buzzing in his head and his own sharp intake of breath, but then Charles filled the emptiness by speaking up. “That’s not fair,” he said.

“I agree,” his brother Ernest put in. “I like the new sound.”

Cole bristled. “What do you two know?”

“They know what we all know,” Alonzo said, his sonorous voice drawing everyone’s attention. “You got no call to say that. Whatever you think of the sound, I think we all know we have never had so many people on the dance floor. Not even close. Am I right?”

This brought a mumble of assent, and the logjam loosened enough for Thomas to push ahead, but the vibrato of anxiety stayed in his gut through the whole rehearsal. He called out the changes in the new arrangements, and played a minimally credible piano line beneath the Kings’ bluesy surge, but everything was teetering. He was bringing too much of himself to the role. Back in America, he could never be light enough, never fully pass for European. He had always had to work extra hard on his precision and the subtlety of his touch to compensate, just as he had chosen his clothes and cultivated his manners in the same fashion. He had formed himself prophylactically, creating almost an exact shadow of his obstacles in the persona he presented. But to pass as a jazz musician, he was going to have to drop that, and be someone different.

To start, he had to offer something that sounded like solos, so using scores his new copyist Mr. Hsu had written out, he devised a series of elegant and unexpected elaborations. These impressed the crowd readily enough, but not his musicians.

He envied the way the other Kings could just take off and play, as if inspired to sing a line or two. It was the Kansas City sound, to have solos riffing above a driving, danceable bedrock in flat-four time. All of them could solo, except him. Even after he understood that it was part of the Kansas City sound itself, the way it allowed each man to stand up and stretch out and tell a story, horizontally, melodically, with the steady beat behind him, he remained jealous of what they could do.

And most of his bandmates had something else he was lacking—a girlfriend. Not that he was chaste; girls of every nationality were available, and some of those he sampled had pleased him. He took delight at first in being offered lovely bodies of every shade, in kissing mouths that spoke Russian and French and Hindi and Tonkinese and three or four different Chinese dialects, but in the end, he found it a lonely business, paying for a woman. On the other hand, he was always treated like a gentleman, which he loved, for respect was headier to him than sex, even the sex they had here—more affirming, more restorative, the root note that had been missing from his chord all his life. He made sense in Shanghai.

He had grown to envy the other Kings their women. Some of them were Chinese, two were Russian, one was Malaysian, and Alonzo even lived with Keiko, a Japanese woman he’d met through one of the guys in Buck Clayton’s Harlem Gentlemen. He wanted a special someone too.

Yet it was hard to go out on the town when he got off work at two
A.M
., so most nights he went home and spent an hour shedding his life completely, no posing, no passing, just paging through the sheets of concertos and sonatas he used to play, and wearing his soft old union suits instead of the silk dressing gowns the tailor had provided. It was ninety days now, and he still did not miss America. He did miss the feel of Creel Street though, and one thing that took him back there was to sit in the concentrated, benevolent light of an oil lamp late at night. In their leanest years, after the War, his widowed mother had used a single hurricane lamp every evening when the power was off, carrying it with them from room to room. Thomas had used it in the last days in the apartment as well, after the electricity went off, and left it behind in the cupboard when he departed. Here in Shanghai, to his joy, he found one like it in a used-goods shop over by Suzhou Creek. Uncle Hua disapproved of the thing, calling it a fire hazard, but Thomas used it in the dead of night anyway, and was comforted by its glow.

He took stock of himself, those nights, and realized he could court a respectable girl, if he could find one. He had money to spend on a woman. Even with all he had dropped on ladies of the night in his first months, he still made more than he could spend, and he kept the excess neatly folded in his wardrobe, underneath his shirts, which were laundered, pressed, and folded to knife creases by Chen Ma. One March day when he was taking some cash out, Uncle Hua materialized in the doorway.

Hua watched for a moment, and said, “Pay my look see, Master.”

“I think you already had a look see,” Thomas answered. It had not taken long for him to understand that he had no privacy at all, a fact to which he was already resigned as he put the little money package back in its not-so-secret spot.

“Master. You give one hundred, bye-bye make pay one oh seven.”

Seven percent? This caught Thomas’s attention. “How?”

Hua’s creased face went stubborn. “That b’long my pidgin.”

“It belong my pidgin if my money’s in it,” Thomas retorted. “How?”

Hua’s eyes narrowed. “Gamble place, my house.”

“Is that so! You must do well, to offer seven.”

“Can do.”

“I see.” Thomas thought, and pulled another hundred from the pouch. “We’ll start small,” he said, holding it out. “One ten, in a month.”

“One month no can do. Three months. One seven five.”

“Two months. One eight five.”

“One eight.”

Thomas considered.

“One eight five?” Hua repeated, and Thomas nodded. “Can puttee book?” he said, barely able to contain his glee.

“Puttee book,” said Greene. “It’s a deal.” He handed him the money and closed the cupboard. “And you stay out of my things, Uncle Hua.” He faked sternness and his majordomo pretended to quail in response, but Thomas understood by now that this was theater, that people were playing their roles, just as he played his. He was getting the hang of it.

Or so he thought.

Every Saturday, Song Yuhua went downtown to collect Du Taitai’s medicine. Seeing to the health needs of the supreme wife and matriarch was a task of importance, even if the old lady was an opium addict who had not left her room in years. The task fell to Song partly because no one else wanted to do it, but she always looked forward to her weekly afternoon abroad in the city, stretching an errand that could be done fairly quickly into several hours of doing what she wanted. She was in no way imprisoned in Du’s mansion on Rue Wagner, for though always on call, she was able to come and go more or less as she wanted. But on Saturdays, Teacher knew she took care of his first wife’s medicines, and so on that day, he never requested her services before evening fell.

On the sidewalks she heard two fur-clad Russian women quarreling, several groups of men speaking English, and bubbles of French and German. Polyglot vitality was one of the things she loved about Shanghai, even though it was the foreign capitalists who had turned Shanghai into a warren of occupied Concessions, enriched themselves, and then looked the other way, refusing to help, when Japan started to press its invasion. It had been one of her only real disagreements with the Communists, the fact that they, like the Nationalists, were so anti-foreign, but this divergence she kept to herself. To think of it was unwise, and to speak of it would be dangerous; one did not disagree with the movement. So she never spoke of liking Western music, or even of any fondness for the language in which she was proficient. Privately, she credited English with having given her a separate and entirely different engine of thought. And there was no getting around the fact that her English was exactly what made her valuable to Du, and therefore to the left, as a spy. It was her weak point, her vulnerability, and at the same time her greatest strength. Thinking about it was like sorting silk threads in a way that only entangled them further.

She pushed open the door to the dark apothecary shop, a room with floor-to-ceiling drawers and a wood counter trimmed in brass. The herb master, stout and fusty with a sparse white beard, bobbed his head when she came in. “Has Young Mistress eaten?”

“Yes, thank you. And you?”

“Yes.” He smiled happily, and she knew he had. Though a loyal Party member—he took no small risk, hosting meetings in his shop between her and others—the old man did not believe in denying himself. He had not read Marx. He told her once that he was going to go see Marx when he died, and the great man could tell him all about it then. Right now, what mattered was resisting Japan.

He took her prescription and studied the flowing characters in the old doctor’s elegant hand. “This is a complex formula. I suggest you take a moment’s rest, Mistress, in the parlor. I will call for tea.”

She nodded. “Thank you.” They were always careful to say only the right things, even when they were alone.

He reached beneath the counter and pulled a lever so that a section of the wall sprang loose. He swung it back to show a windowless inner room of black wood chairs and side tables, lit by yellow pools of electric light.

When he said he would call for tea, it meant someone wanted to see her, so after he had closed the wall-door behind her, she sat in a warm haze of anticipation, watching the little coals glowing in the brazier. It was always exciting, being told she was wanted for a meeting, and then waiting to see if someone new would walk through the door. At a minimum, that would mean a fresh face to put into the puzzle, for the Party operated in secret. Most enlistees knew only the other members of their cell. Song’s position in Du’s household being too sensitive for a cell, though, she knew only her guide, and the others who came to her in these meetings. Someone new was always of interest.

And if heaven smiled, one day she might meet her comparable other, a man who lived his life as she lived hers, with a mind and will equal to her own. She had always believed in such a man’s existence, even as a small child. Perhaps it was her training in Western languages and stories, this being a Western fantasy—but why should she not find him here, in just this way? The movement was the center of her life. There was never a time when she was called to a meeting that she did not flutter a little, inside.

She remembered the thrill of those early months in ’thirty-two and ’thirty-three when she first joined, going to many secret meetings at the so-called Foreign Language School at number 6 New Yuyang Lu, off Avenue Joffre. The school advertised its French and Russian courses constantly in
Minguo Ribao
, the
Republic Daily
, but there were no such courses, even though the place was always full of young people; it was a center for training Communists. She still went there occasionally for high-level meetings.

The strange thing was that it was Du who led her to the Party in the first place. He had been having an affair with an actress, and to keep that fact from his newest wife, he began taking Song out with him in the evening for cover. In the fashion of the season, he invited the actress for coffee before dinner, and she chose the Vienna Garden, which in its late-night hours happened to be one of Du’s favorite clubs.

Yet in the early evening, the Vienna was a meeting place for leftists, something Song discovered as soon as Du and his lady friend disappeared to their private room upstairs, bodyguards surrounding them. Alone with the actress’s friends, she found the conversation instantly exciting, a plunge through white-water rapids. Never before had she been face-to-face with admitted Communists, people who in their aboveground lives were playwrights and musicians. Their sympathies were no secret, for the left-leaning playwrights created stage works that demonized foreign imperialists, just as the musicians wrote songs and motion picture scores with choral singing and stirring martial melodies. They eschewed the “you and me” lyrics of love songs for “we and us” lyrics of nationhood and progress. She had met such people before, but as to who was actually a secret Party member, usually no one was willing to say. Yet that evening, at the Vienna Garden, every one of those around the table said straight out that they were members. Her thrill was made even sharper by her awareness that Du, if he found out, would want to kill several of them—except that he could not, since they were people of reputation.

Ideas flew, not only from men but from women, which excited Song even more. They were all part of a theater world undergoing complete revolution, in which stage forms such as opera, stylized with male-only performers for centuries, were giving way at last to contemporary plays in which women could participate, and through which all the issues of the day could be aired. Theater could spread ideas not only quickly, but in metaphors the Japanese invaders did not grasp, which was why playwrights and producers took risks, and occasionally were assassinated. All theater people lived with danger, just by staging their work, and Song saw how for them, the leap to Communism was almost natural.

The real point was money, said a smart young woman from Nanyang University. Was it not true that the foreign powers used Shanghai for profit, with no concern for whether Shanghai people were free or were slaves? Had they not rammed through the 1932 treaty that prevented China from having her own troops in Shanghai, just so they could make more profit? Money, always money.