Shanghai (48 page)

The Assassin touched down with his left hand, then somersaulted and began a tumbling run across the stage.

The audience cheered wildly.

At the end of his tumbling run he snatched the red-haired
Fan Kuei
's little girl from the stage floor and then, holding the girl in one hand, cartwheeled off the other. When he once again stood erect, the swalto was magically back in his hand.

He turned to the audience and struck a pose, the girl in one hand and the knife in the other.

The musicians awoke from their stunned silence and cymbals smashed and horns blared.

The audience shrieked its approval.

Then Loa Wei Fen stuck his knife deep into the chest of the girl.

And time stopped.

—

Maxi threw himself at the Monkey King. The wig covering his red hair fell to the stage floor as he smashed into the blood-covered Assassin.

—

The History Teller leapt onto the front of the stage and ran toward the Monkey King. Maxi saw her and shouted, “No!” But the Monkey King spun and his swalto sliced cleanly across the History Teller's neck.

Words flew into her head:

Crimson line,

Across my soul

Invites flights of angels.

 

For an instant she saw the Monkey King's face and, through the miracle of Peking Opera makeup, finally saw, saw so clearly, the boy's longing for her—and she at last knew the title of her new opera:

The Tears of Time.

 

Then she heard whistling—from beneath her nose, beneath her chin—air, whistling out of her.

—

Maxi saw the History Teller's face take on a strange expression, as if something were suddenly clear to her. Then her
head fell from her neck, hit once on her shoulder, and landed on the stage and stayed there, staring at him.

—

The Monkey King spun to face Maxi, his love gone. All that was left was his
chi
screaming to be set loose upon this
Fan Kuei
.

—

Maxi did not move. He'd seen a lot of death in his life. He'd caused much of it. But his own death was something that he'd not prepared himself for. He looked at his dead little girl, then at his dead love. He was partially aware that people were screaming, that the audience was running—but it didn't matter. He saw the terrifying keenness of the swalto blade.

The boy-man turned from him and slowly removed his silk costume. The cobra on his back, its hood gorged with blood and its eyes a flat black, spoke of endings. All Maxi remembered was thinking,
Such anger. So much rage
. Then he was back in India, the gentle opium farmer's hand on his, guiding the knife across the casement of the opium plant.

“See, it oozes, it's life.”

“Like me, Father,” Maxi said.

“Indeed,” the opium farmer said, “indeed, like you, my son.”

—

The cobra leapt from him and his swalto cut deep into the
Fan Kuei
's chest, but the man's eyes were strangely
calm. The Assassin jerked the knife up and heard the breastbone crack beneath its pressure. Then he cut down and ripped the man's ribcage open.

He turned. He knew that the audience must be screaming, but he couldn't hear them as he cut the red-haired
Fan Kuei
's heart from his chest, slit it in two, and bit deeply into one half. And then he heard it. Faintly at first but then stronger, the voice of his friend, his cousin:
Don't kill me, Loa Wei Fen, don't kill me
.

The Assassin turned toward the stunned audience and raised his hands—he made no attempt to catch the objects hurled at him and felt only relief when the bullets thudded into his body and threw him to the stage floor like a discarded child's toy.

Virginia, U.S.A., and Shanghai 1864–65

On the same day that Richard was told about Maxi's death, in a small church several thousand miles away, in a place called Virginia, an ostracized but unbowed woman named Rachel Oliphant walked beside her white-skinned, red-haired boy up the aisle of a small Episcopal church to receive his First Communion. Later that day Rachel sat down with her son, Malachi, and told him of his father, a wild, red-haired Jew named Maxi.

“My father's name is Maxi,” Malachi said without a hint of comment. “Maxi,” he repeated, “is a fine name—a fine name for a man.”

Rachel smiled at her red-haired son, whose rugged Hordoon features were clearly underlying her own, more delicate looks.

“Yes, he was a very fine man.”

“Is he dead, Mother?”

With a surprising certainty she said softly, “Of that, Malachi, I'm sure.”

—

Silas felt a cold breeze move across his face, and he thought someone had called his name. He looked up into the high ceiling of the sixth floor of the Hordoons' massive new department store on Bubbling Spring Road, which his father had built directly across from the Vrassoons' newest emporium.

“Did you say something?” Silas asked the accountant with whom he was setting up the store's books.

“No, young sir,” the man said.

“It's cold in here, isn't it?”

“I don't think it's cold, sir. Perhaps you have a chill.”

Then Silas saw Milo at the far end of the aisle, his face a mask of pain, tears streaming down his cheeks—and Silas knew, just as surely as Rachel had known, that the force of nature that had condescended to take the human form of Maxi Hordoon was no more.

Silas looked out the window and for a moment thought he saw the silhouette of a man dancing on the roof of the Vrassoons' department store, a silhouette of a man that somehow wore a red kerchief around its neck.

—

Richard rejected all offers of sympathy and was especially harsh when the Vrassoons offered to sit shiva for Maxi. Although he had the body brought from Chinkiang to Shanghai he refused any religious rituals, Jewish or otherwise, and had Maxi's body buried in a simple pine box, beside the graves of the two White men who had been strangled to death by the Manchus all those years ago when the traders needed a sacrifice to force them into a united front.

The day of his burial was clear and cool. All anyone said that day was, “Maxi would have approved of the weather.”

That night Richard sat alone in his office and stared out the window at the Huangpo River and remembered. Remembered the boy who had allowed Teacher to sodomize him so as to save Richard; the boy who had danced and laughed around the bonfire at the opium farm; the young man who had donned the red kerchief and led his irregulars into battle after battle; the grown man who had saved him with a trick of guns attached somehow by silk threads; and finally the man who had tried to convince him to stay with the Taipingers, saying, “This is the kind of place that could rid you of the opium addiction that rules you. I could help you. We could all help you here—and love you, brother mine.”

Richard reached out and pulled the drapes together. In the darkness of the room only one thought offered Richard any solace: at least he had not been the cause of Maxi's death. The old Indian's prophecy that brother would kill brother had not come to pass.

* * *

WHILE THE HORDOONS went into mourning, Shanghai celebrated the end of the dreaded Taipingers. The country was open for business once again, and opium began to flow upriver as it had never flowed before.

Stores opened, and new streets were built. The city expanded south and west. People from the four corners of China, and then from the four corners of the world, flocked to the economic miracle that was Shanghai.

The Confucian's eldest son now joined his father at the meetings of the Chosen Three. It was clear he would soon take over his ailing father's place in the Compact. Jiang knew him by sight but had never conversed with him before.
The Fisherman is not long for this world either
, Jiang thought.

The Carver flipped the latches on the cabinet that protected the Narwhal Tusk, and they leaned down to look at the image of the Seventy Pagodas in the third “pane.”

“We prosper,” said the Fisherman.

“Indeed,” replied the Carver, enigmatically.

“But are we near the Age of the Seventy Pagodas?” asked the young Confucian.

Jiang couldn't tell if the young man was being sarcastic or not. Finally she said, “We have all given up much to bring and then intensify the darkness of the Age of White Birds on Water—much,” she added, thinking of the last time she'd seen her beloved daughter, the History Teller. She'd been offered her daughter's body, but she had declined to have it transported to Shanghai. She'd simply instructed them to follow the rituals, then scatter her ashes. “I'll see her soon enough,” she'd said.

The Fisherman was deep in thought about his lost son and worried who, now that his nephew was gone, would lead the Guild of Assassins. He had another son,
and perhaps he had the years left in him to complete the boy's training.

The Confucian thought of his father's bent frame and the book of ancient writings he'd been given. All the weight of the family's addiction to opium had been carried on his father's back as surely as a coolie carries water on his carrying poles. Heavy, painful—always there.

“I doubt it is so simple,” the Carver said.

No one had to ask to what he was referring—the city at the Bend of the River was becoming large and powerful. But it was a large and powerful European creation. Europeans built cock-proud buildings on the Bund, but not pagodas—pagodas were light and tall, they were Chinese buildings. The Age of the Seventy Pagodas was not yet upon them.

“No doubt we need to discover how to open the second window before any pagodas can be built.”

No one argued with the Carver's statement.

* * *

FOR JUST UNDER A YEAR Richard saw almost no one. He handled his business dealings almost exclusively through Patterson.

Silas threw himself into his Chinese language studies, and Milo threw himself at as many women as he could find—and being a handsome young man, as well as the wealthiest potential husband in all of Shanghai, he had many takers.

A year after Maxi's death, Richard called his sons to have dinner with him in the big house. Lily sat to one side—she was the only other person in a room that was designed to sit forty comfortably for dinner.

“It's been a year, now,” Richard began.

“It was a year yesterday, Father,” Silas corrected him.

“What does that matter?” Milo asked.

“If it's a year or a year and a day—it's enough. It's time for the House of Hordoon to re-emerge. To come back to life.”

“I agree,” said Milo.

“I didn't notice that you had particularly retreated from life's delectations, Milo,” Richard said.

“Well, one of us has to continue to fly the flag.”

“Enough. What have you got in mind, Father?” asked Silas.

Richard reached beneath the table and withdrew a large set of blueprints and spread them out on the table, then said simply, “The Shanghai Racetrack.”

“So that's why you never built on …”

“I don't know why I did it, Milo, but it seems to make sense to me.”

“A way to honour Uncle Maxi that Uncle Maxi would approve of,” said Silas.

“Are we agreed, then?” Richard asked.

They mulled over the blueprints well into the night. Only as the light began to dawn through the windows did the three settled upon the last details, and Milo said, “How shall we open Uncle Maxi's race course?”

“With the biggest, richest horse race in all of Asia, naturally.”

“A single race. One horse from each of the great houses. Each house puts up fifty thousand pounds sterling and one horse. Winning horse takes all.”

Only in Shanghai, with its access to literally thousands upon thousands of workers, could a racetrack have gone up with such astonishing speed, and the talk
around the town grew from excited to ecstatic as the date of the opening race approached.

A month before the scheduled opening, Silas waited for his father at breakfast.

“Silas? To what do I owe the …?”

“I have to speak to you, Father.”

“Speak, but pass me the porridge first.”

Silas ladled some into a fine crystal bowl for his father and handed it over. “I have an idea, Father, but I don't think you'll like it.”

“About the race?”

“Yes.”

“You don't want us to race?”

“No, Father, I want the race to go on as much as you do.”

“So what is it?”

“We are Shanghainese.”

“Absolutely, we are. This is our home.”

“Right, not rotting Shanghailanders who just come here to rape—”

“Your point, Silas? The day's upon us.”

“Make the race open to everyone.”

Richard looked at his son for a moment, then said, “But it is. The French, the British, the Americans, the Germans …”

“The Chinese?”

“Now you know better than that, Silas,” he said, throwing aside his serviette and rising.

“Better than what, sir?” Silas stood to meet his father's wrath.

“Listen to me, Silas. You can spend as much of your time as you like with them. I've never said a word about that.”

“Do you not approve, Father, of me spending time with—?”

“It's not for me to approve or not. That's not that point! We cannot allow ourselves to socialize with …”

“Monkeys. The word you're looking for, Father, is monkeys.”

“Aye, monkeys, damned monkeys I say, lad!”

Silas whirled around and stared into the florid face of Patterson, who had somehow gotten into the room without Silas noticing. “I'll not ride in front of monkeys and neither will any of the other riders. If you want a race, your damned monkeys had better not be there.”

Richard put a hand on Silas's shoulder. “See, son, even if I wanted to, my hands are tied on this matter. What kind of race would it be without riders?”