Shanghai (51 page)

Richard patted the side of the mat and Silas knelt down. Suddenly the old man's hands were on his lapels, pulling him in close enough that the sour smell of opium, which always nauseated Silas, now filled his nostrils.

“Don't do the Devil's work son, don't …” Richard's once powerful grip slipped from Silas and his lips muttered, “don't don't don't—do the Devil's work.” Then he lay very still, the pipe resting at his side.

Silas reached over and touched his father's chest. His breath was shallow but present.

“Not gone yet, Silas,” Richard said, as a smile creased his now thin lips. “The time has come, the Walrus said, to talk of many things.”

Silas recognized the quotation as coming from the strange book of children's stories that his father so treasured. “Such as, Father?”

“Something something and ceiling wax and something something and kings, I believe. Although such things don't interest you, Silas.”

“Not much, sir.”

Richard sighed. “Ah,
sir
. You were always the one who called me sir. Your brother …” Richard's voice retreated to a whisper. Lily lifted the pipe to his lips. He breathed deeply, and when he exhaled, the sour smoke wrapped around Silas, in a constrictor's embrace, before it fled to the safety of the far corners of the ceiling.

“Your mother was a fine woman, Silas.”

Silas was shocked. He'd never heard his father speak of his mother before.

“A good woman. But so angry at the end. I held the both of you in my arms and leaned over her to show the two of you to her. ‘Boys, Sarah, boys,' I said, but all she did was grab at me and scream, ‘What have you done, Richard?' Oh, how a single question can follow you your entire life. ‘What have you done?' I often wondered how she knew, but in truth I never spent much time on that, just got on with it. With living.” He
laughed hoarsely. “How did she know that old man Vrassoon came into my room, do you think?”

Silas sat very still. He'd never heard any of this before. “Into your room, Papa?”

“In Baghdad.”

Silas knew that his father and Uncle Maxi had left Baghdad with their parents before they were teenagers. “In Baghdad … when?”

“I was scared.” Silas had never heard that word come from his father's lips before. And now his father's voice was so thin, like morning mist on the Yangtze.

“What were you afraid of, Papa?”

“I pointed … pointed to her door.” Then his father did the strangest thing—he giggled.

“Her door? Whose door?” Silas demanded.

Richard's eyes danced, but he kept his mouth shut. Then he began to cry. Silas looked at the remains of what had been his powerful father. He reached over and put his hand on his father's forehead.

“Keep your hands to yourself, boy!” His father's voice was remarkably strong, and his message direct and unmistakable. “Make yourself useful for once in your life and hand me my pipe.”

Silas reached for the ancient, carved ivory thing and handed it to his father. Richard grabbed the pipe from him and inhaled the dregs of the opium in the pipe's bowl, then grinned as he said, “Don't listen to an old man's carpings.” And he swung his head violently away from his son and muttered something. Silas leaned forward and thought he heard his father say, “It matters not, as it's all one. All one.”

Suddenly his father turned on him and grabbed the sides of his face, his jagged nails cutting into his cheeks. “Haul your arse out of here. Nice boys don't belong in
places like this.” He threw Silas back with surprising strength as he pointed to a stack of journals. “Take them, lad. I bequeath them to you. No. Please take them. I promised your mother I'd write them. At least that promise I kept.” Then Richard held out a formal-looking document covered with flowing Farsi script and said, “Take this too.”

Silas quickly scanned the words. It was a deed of ownership for property in Baghdad. “And this would be?”

“The Vrassoons' Baghdad home. I came into possession of it.” A sly smile pursed his cracked lips. “I own it. Now you own it.” Then his father laughed a throaty chortle before he drew deeply on his pipe yet again. The spittle in the stem gurgled.

Silas took his father's precious journals and the deed and left the opium den. He never spoke to his father again.

—

That was exactly ten years ago, on the evening of December 31, 1880. And now, on the eve of the turn of the decade, Silas Hordoon left the same subterranean establishment and was greeted by the very first of the fireworks exploding across the river, over the Bund.
In a few hours it will be a new year,
he thought,
the beginning of the last decade of this century
.

* * *

LI TIAN IGNORED the other master fireworks makers' stares and taunts. They didn't believe in the stories of his artistry and were annoyed that his work had been given pride of place—at the very end of the evening's
“explosive” entertainment. Li Tian didn't care what they thought or said—or did, for that matter. His fireworks would be the last because they would be the very best. And this night would literally bring his artistry to light in a brand new way. He had been the first to create a circle of fire in the sky. The first to make the “stars” burst in a clockwise sequence.
Tonight will dwarf that achievement,
he thought as he carefully removed his charcoal mixture from a wooden case and arranged sixteen star clusters on the sand.

Then he began.

December 31, 1889

Wang Jun stood naked astride the grave of the man he thought of as his noble ancestor—the First Assassin, Loa Wei Fen—and grimaced as his aged father carved the first line of the cobra on his back. He watched the shadow of the moonset as it crept along the Bend in the River, casting deep shadows on the elaborate gargoyles and gewgaws on the facades of the European buildings across the river on the Bund.

The second cut was longer and wider than the first, demarcating the outer line of the fully spread hood of the serpent. He knew the third and fourth cuts would be small but very deep—the eyes of the cobra's hood were the heart of its fury.

His blood ran in narrow, viscous streams down his back and pooled momentarily on the rise of his backside before it sought the eternity of the earth whence it came.

His father picked up dirt from Loa Wei Fen's grave and worked it deep into the cuts on his son's back. He had taught his son well, as his father, the Fisherman, had taught him after his gentle brother was put to death in the bamboo canes. He forced more dirt into the cuts. The dirt would cause the wounds to welt upon healing—or cause infection and death—either way, his son would fulfill his destiny. But he knew in his heart that his son would not die from the wounds. And his son would outshine even the First Assassin. His son would revive the ancient Guild of Assassins and help his people to the Seventy Pagodas. He was proud to have such a son. A son who did not cry out at the pain he caused as he dug deep into his flesh to carve out the first eye on the cobra's hood.

The left eye,
Wang Jun thought as he resisted the impulse to pull away from the knife in the flesh of his back. He watched a trail of blood curl around his hip and proceed down the front of his left leg, then around the knob of his ankle, and finally between his toes onto the sacred ground of the grave of Loa Wei Fen. It was for this ceremony that he'd had the First Assassin's remains brought from Chinkiang to this side of the Bend in the River—the wild side—the Pudong.

The first of the new year's fireworks lit the newly darkened sky and shadows seemed to leap briefly from the dense forest.

The final cuts were quick and shallow, following the ancient design first seen on the wrist of Q'in She Huang's Body Guard on the sacred mountain, the Hua Shan.

He heard his father sigh deeply and sensed the last of the older man's
chi
enter him as the knife fell to the ground of Loa Wei Fen's grave.

“It is done,” his father said in a hoarse whisper.

“As it is decreed,” Wang Jun replied. He hugged his father, surprised by the man's sudden frailty. It was as if he had aged twenty years in a day.

As he walked his father to the small boat that would take him back to the Shanghai side of the Huangpo River, he wondered if he'd ever see him again. This stern, strong, righteous man who had taught him the art of the assassin.

“Do you know the sign …?”

“For the Chosen to meet? Yes, Father, we meet this very night. It was all arranged before we came to the Pudong. Now, Father, forget me—as you have taught.”

“Will I never see you again?” the man asked, his voice cracking.

“No. Wang Jun is no more. But you will hear of me. You will hear of your son, Loa Wei Fen.”

His father looked at him closely. Suddenly a brightness came back into his eyes. “You have taken his name, the First Assassin's name?”

“Yes, Father, as befits one who will revive the ancient Guild of Assassins.”

* * *

LI TIAN IGNORED THE FIREWORKS going off overhead and concentrated on his own creation. He carefully sealed the four-foot-long paper tubing and attached it to a six-foot bamboo stake that he had sunk deep into the hard ground. He gingerly placed two measures of his potassium nitrate, sulfur, and charcoal
mixture into the base of the tube. “That will gain us the height we need,” he said aloud.

Then he wedged in a paper divider, through which he inserted a two-foot-long fuse, and adhered it to the side of the tube using a small brush to spread the egg yolk paste.

December 31, 1889

Silas continued his walk in his city, the sixth-largest port in the world. He allowed the rhythm of the place and the irregular shocks of light from the fireworks to lead him. It guided him past its luxurious nightclubs, past the exclusive four-storey Shanghai Club, where at this very moment men were proving their worth by buying whole cases of champagne “for the bar”; its race course, where his brother died; its fabulous shops on Bubbling Spring Road, which many now called Nanking Road; its world-famous homosexual bars; its twenty-one cock-proud European buildings on the Bund, its wide avenues running perpendicular to the Bund named after great Chinese cities, and those running parallel to the
Bund named after the provinces; its selective brothels for boys, girls … and others; its vast network of opium dens. It took him past Good Food Street, with its all-night outdoor food stalls; its rickshaws and carriages and traps and carts pulled by swift Mongolian ponies; its quick-trotting coolies loading and unloading goods from the greasy piers; its brokers rushing, even on this night, in sedan chairs with the latest rates for cotton or silk from New York or London; its warlords, known as Tuchons, carried in high style by silk-dressed servants; its lesser Caucasians in Norwich cars or broughams; its emporiums stocked with edible delicacies from every part of the world—no trouble finding jams or scones from Fortnum and Mason or peanut butter or Saratoga Mineral Water from Crosse and Blackwell—its liquor shops stacked tall with the world's finest wines; its florid-complexioned fat Taipans demanding attention for their mercantile success. He passed an elegant Tudor-style house deep in the French Concession and heard the sounds of an orchestra playing the latest dances. No doubt phalanxes of houseboys, cooks, laundresses, stable hands,
amahs
, gardeners, table boys, and porters were in constant attendance to “Missy” to allow the ball to proceed smoothly. On Beijing Lu, Silas passed the modest storefront of a sensationally wealthy comprador and recalled Commodore Perry's confusion, then anger, at the financial success of these “blue-robed Slants.” Turning onto Julu Lu, Silas saw the central offices of the American Evangelical Society. It was rumoured that Shanghai had the biggest evangelical army in Christendom.
But they don't seem to have put a stop to the joy-hunting in our modern-day Sodom and Gomorrah,
he thought.

With the song of a street hawker and a sudden profusion of overhead booms, the city tilted Silas away from the bright lights. Turning into a
shikumen
alley, Huile Li, he spotted a pear syrup candy seller whose song—“
Wuya wuli kuangya, liya ligaotang ya
—Grandpa eats my pear syrup”—had drawn him. He bought a dollop of the sweet confection that he had so loved as a child. As it dissolved on his tongue, an exhausted peasant woman shambled into the alley, two rattan buckets dangling from her shoulder pole. In each basket sat a wide-eyed, oddly silent child, dressed in rags. Behind her Silas saw a street food seller, his portable kitchen carried on his shoulder pole. Silas ordered fried bean curd, which the man expertly produced, flipping the bean curd over and over in the hot oil until it was an even golden brown. Then the street food seller plucked the deep-fried treat from the oil and strung it on two clean, fresh stalks of straw. Silas paid the man, then gave the bean curd to the peasant woman with the two children, saying, “Be careful that they don't burn their tongues.” The woman grunted a thanks in a language that even the multi-tongued Silas Hordoon didn't recognize. As he contemplated the origin of the peasant's dialect, the city spun him again and sent him through one of the newer shantytowns, then through the east gate of the Old City and along Fang Bang Lu. Outside each doorway the circular, red-painted night-soil bucket awaited the dawn arrival of the night-soil collector, the least respected but best paid labour in Shanghai.

The hour approached midnight. Fireworks cascaded overhead, and the people of Shanghai—yellow, white, red, black, and brown—surged out into the streets. Silas stood very still and marvelled—people, people,
everywhere people.
His
people—a people and a city that he knew could not have come into existence without his father's willingness to “do the Devil's work.”