Shanghai (106 page)

“Not well, I'm afraid.”

“Ah. I am sorry to hear such.” In truth, the old whore got sick, then got better. Got sick and got better, over and over again. She had the constitution of a—well, of an old whore. Now the Confucian needed her death as a final excuse for the Soong sisters to come together—and usher in a Confucian-friendly future for the Middle Kingdom.

“I fear that she will not live out this year.”

He touched her hand again and muttered a standard Confucian platitude about the necessity for the old to step aside to make way for the young. Not something he personally believed.

She nodded. And before she knew it, she found herself buried against his chest and anxious for the Confucian's arms around her. The Confucian smiled inwardly and guided Soong's youngest daughter to a brocade sofa, the coffee table in front of which had the most detailed topographic maps of the Middle Kingdom he'd ever seen.

“These are lovely,” he said.

“My husband's,” she said softly.

“Ah.”

“They are one of a kind—the only truly accurate mapping of the topography of the Middle Kingdom.”

The Confucian knew a thing of value when he saw it. He said, “They are exquisite.”

“As the Minister of Railways, my husband commissioned them. I am ashamed to say that commissioning the maps was the only wise thing he did while heading that Ministry.” She pointed at a series of straight lines drawn roughly on the top map and said, “Then he seemed to ignore the precision of the topographic information that they presented.”

The Confucian had heard tell of unrealistic railway plans, and perhaps that was what she was indicating. “But they are beautifully done,” he ventured.

She seemed to brighten. “You like them?”

“Indeed,” he said, doing his best to keep any hint of excitement out of his voice.

“Then have them, please. Keep them for the people of China—keep them for the people for when they are finally free.”

* * *

YIN BAO'S EXTRAORDINARY SPIRIT—her voracious consuming of life and living—came to a sudden halt
amidst a banquet she was throwing for her three sons. Her eldest son, T.V. Soong, Chiang Kai Shek's Finance Minister, looked at his mother and actually giggled as he said, “Such a funny face, Mama.”

But his mother, the famous Yin Bao, wasn't making a funny face, she was sensing a paralysis enter the muscles of her cheeks. She stared at T.V. and then reached for him. Her hand missed and knocked over a porcelain bowl that fell to the floor and shattered. She stared at the jagged pieces—then keeled over and struck the floor, her beautiful head making a loud clunk, her bound feet, obscenely loose from their tiny slippers, exposed to the air.

* * *

LIKE CHARLES SOONG'S FUNERAL, Yin Bao's was lavish and private—and Christian. And from the point of view of the Confucian, the long-awaited reason for all three Soong sisters to finally find themselves in Shanghai—at the youngest sister's house.

The Confucian had offered his services as minute-taker of the sisters' conversation. He was pretty sure that he knew which camp he was going to back, but, with the whole future of Confucianism in his hands, he wanted to be sure. As he paced his balcony, awaiting notification of the first meeting of the sisters, he reminded himself that the Communists controlled only a small section of the north, and Chiang Kai Shek an insignificant part of the south. All of central, essential, China was in Japanese hands.

But perhaps not for long. From hidden short-wave radios he'd accumulated news of the outside world. It was becoming clear that Japan was losing the greater war
beyond the borders of the Middle Kingdom. This seemed to be confirmed when, a few months back, in early 1943, many of the younger Japanese soldiers in Shanghai had been replaced by older men, sometimes disabled men, who could not control the city at the Bend in the River.

Chinese patriots began to slip back into Shanghai. One such patriot had a snake carved on his back and was accompanied by a red-haired
Fan Kuei
who had a young Chinese boy in his care.

Many a morning now brought to light the body of a Chinese collaborator hung from a lamppost, or a Japanese soldier slumped against a wall, his head sitting on his shoulders, not his neck.

* * *

THE MEETING OF THE CHOSEN THREE and the Carver, the first since the Assassin had left for Nanking over six years ago, was an exercise in steely silence. The Assassin had clearly aged, and the deep lines of war had etched their way across his face. Jiang had grown into a truly beautiful woman who carried her own scars of the war with a surprising grace.

The Confucian had trouble taking his eyes from her.

The Carver said, “Curfew is soon, we should start.”

But no one knew where to begin. Only the Confucian knew of the upcoming meeting with the Soong sisters—and it was not a bit of information he was willing to share. And of course the Tusk was in far-off Baghdad, so there was no way to re-examine it.

“The war will end soon,” Jiang said finally.

The Assassin nodded. Both he and Jiang looked to the Confucian.

The man kept his eyes carefully lowered as he said, “Perhaps.”

For twenty more minutes the Chosen Three spoke, but said nothing of importance. They were strangers to each other. Finally the Confucian said, “Well, if we have nothing else, I have pressing business.”

The Carver left shortly after the Confucian.

Jiang put a gentle hand to the Assassin's face. “You have seen horrors.”

“Be careful with the Confucian. He looks at you with hunger.”

Jiang nodded.

“He's secretive,” the Assassin added, although he didn't mention that he and his father had set a secret plan in motion too. The Guild was, even now, growing in Lower Manhattan—growing and waiting—to retrieve the Tusk. The Assassin turned to Jiang. “He's been in Shanghai all this time, while I wasted away in Nanking.”

“You didn't waste away, you saved many lives.”

The Assassin stared at Jiang. Something was wrong. “What is it?” he asked.

“Excuse me?”

“Tell me!”

She looked away from him and said, “We have all paid for our country's failure. Each in his own way.” She took a deep breath. “I bore a rapist's baby—and bear the scars of his beating.”

“Where is the child?”

“It is not necessary for you to know that.”

“Was it a girl?”

She nodded.

“She must not be named Jiang upon your passing.”

She withdrew her eyes from him. She understood the standing orders of succession to the Ivory Compact as well as he did, but she was not sure that they were immutable—and her sweet, mixed-race baby, the outcome of a vicious rape, might indeed, she felt, play an important part in bringing on the Age of the Seventy Pagodas.

She turned from the Assassin, then turned back to him. “Is it true you have the red-haired
Fan Kuei?
”

The Assassin nodded. “He is being kept safe.”

“And is it true he has a baby?”

“Yes, but that baby is almost six and is being trained in the Assassin's art.”

“Was this the child of the fire?”

“It was.”

“And what race is this boy?”

“Han Chinese, but English is his first language—and when the light strikes him in a certain way I could swear he has red hair.”

* * *

IT WAS TIME for the Confucian to act, to pick a side and back it. So as he laid out his brushes and paper on Madame Sun's surprisingly simple dinner table between the two beautifully carved jade figures, he listened closely to the words of the Soong sisters. He had never witnessed so much open hatred between siblings. Madame Chiang Kai Shek tried to dominate the proceedings using her seniority and her marriage to the Generalissimo as reason enough for her pride of place. But the other two were not having it. The middle sister, fresh from the beds of both Mao and the young Confucian, had the wind of power in her sails, and she clearly felt its urgings.

“You and your Republicans are loathed by the people of the south,” she said bluntly. Before her elder sister could respond, she added, “While we are growing daily. We can now field an army of over two million men—men willing to fight to keep a quarter acre of land, access to a communal field and newly dug well, a piece of the Middle Kingdom to call their own.”

“Stolen land.”

“No. Land they deserve. Your Kuomintang army is led by senior military men but populated by conscripts, many of whom are just waiting for a chance to desert to our side.”

The first day ended in an out-and-out screaming match reminiscent of the best mud-slinging episodes of their courtesan mother—which had, in fact, been the genesis of their father's great fortune.

As the two great armies of her sisters massed, Madame Sun Yat-sen's concern for the “greater good of all the people” seemed simplistic, if not just foolish.

—

On the second day, as the Confucian was laying out his brushes and paper again, he noticed that one of the jade figures was missing from the table, and then, just before lunch, he saw Madame Chiang Kai Shek slip the second one into her Parisian handbag.

The conversations—or, more accurately, the acrimony—went on for three days.

It was clear to the Confucian that the Kuomintang and the Communists would eventually unite to force the Japanese out of the Middle Kingdom, but once the external enemy was gone the two Chinese armies would
be at each other's throats. So he still had to choose whom to back.

It was a simple choice.

Now it was a matter of how to get Mao to see how badly he needed a head Confucian, and getting the voracious Republicans to more quickly follow the road to ruin upon which they had been marching for years.

The latter was relatively simple. Put food in front of a glutton and he will gorge himself. Put wine within reach of a drunk and he will drink until he pees his pants and vomits down his shirtfront. Put gold in front of a covetous woman and she will follow it to her folly.

But how to ingratiate himself, first, then make himself important to Mao was far more complicated. He had been watching the second Soong daughter closely. He saw shocks of sexuality in her that were missing from the other two. Something close to her mother's thrusting, lunging approach to life. Yes, there was much of Yin Bao in this middle child.

How could he use that?

The plan slowly formulated as he completed his notes for the Soong sisters. When they were done, he gave them to his younger son to make two copies, so that each sister could have a record of what was said—or at least what the Confucian had written down that each had said.

All three were surprised when they read that they had agreed that the Confucian should deliver a copy of this text personally to both Chiang Kai Shek and Mao Tze-tung.

“But you all agreed to this,” he said, when one of the daughters questioned the statement.

The animosity between the sisters was so great that they could not agree that they had not agreed on
anything, so they acquiesced, and three days later the Confucian got off the train and onto a mule that two days after that deposited him outside the headquarters of the Chairman of the Communist Party, Mao Tze-tung.

Mao was deep in conversation with a half-drunken
Fan Kuei
who was introduced as a Doctor Bai T'une—or something like that—and the ever-present Deng Xiao Ping. The men were discussing something over an old set of maps.

The Confucian congratulated himself on his foresight in taking the maps upon which Dr. Sun Yat-sen had made his silly railroad markings. The markings were ludicrous, but the topographic maps were the finest to be had in the Middle Kingdom. The Confucian had studied them carefully and understood the strategic bind in which the Communists found themselves—between mountains and rivers, they seemed to be trapped. But Sun Yat-sen's topographic maps clearly showed that if Mao were to lead his men farther north there was an open plain that would lead him out of the trap.

After being quickly introduced by the middle Soong daughter, the Confucian offered his set of maps as “perhaps a way of clarifying the discussion before us.”

The Doctor, who came from some place called Gravenhurst, Ontario, protested, but the Soong sister silenced him with a withering stare.

Within weeks the Confucian's gift of the maps and his clear organizational skills had allowed him access to Mao.

Access that, at the next full moon, he used to awaken the great man and show him his mistress and her young scholar, locked in the coils of lovemaking.

It secured the Confucian a place at the side of the most powerful man in China. Now all he had to do was
wait—and he would stride into Shanghai at the head of the largest army the world had ever seen.

He was content. He had fulfilled the expectation of his ancestors and brought the Compact back to its logical goal: the restoration of full Confucian power.

* * *

FOR THREE DAYS the Assassin had been trying the usual means of contacting the Confucian, but he had not received a reply of any sort. On the second evening he and two of his Guild members soundlessly broke into the Confucian's fine house overlooking the far reach of the Huangpo River—and found only the Confucian's wife and two sons asleep in their respective beds. No Confucian.

The next morning he contacted the Carver, who had not seen the Confucian for ten days.

On the third night he re-entered the Confucian's house and silently closed the door to the boys' room, then stepped into the Confucian's bedroom. The man's wife snored gently, her head tilted toward the balcony window. A soft cooing came from the window. The Assassin stepped out onto the balcony and was surprised to see an extensive pigeon coop. He turned toward the window and stared at the Confucian's wife. Then he saw it, as if buried deep in the thick glass of the window—a carrier pigeon heading directly toward him. He turned just in time to see the exhausted bird alight on the balcony railing. The small tin cylinder attached to its hind leg glinted in the moonlight. He reached over and gently scooped up the bird—much as his ancestor the Fisherman had lifted his birds from the water—then plucked out the message. As he read it,
his hand trembled. “Dearest, it is just a matter of time until the Communists take Shanghai—then we Confucians will resume our rightful place. Prepare yourself and our house—for history's sake.”