Shanghai (54 page)

Then she heard the fat Mountain Master's wild cry from the far corridor.

Moments later, the man, his head bodyguard, and both of his sycophants, known as the White Paper Fan and the Straw Sandal, came running out of the back rooms and stumbled to a stop in the centre of the large reception room. All were completely naked.

Jiang noted with a start that the “knife man” wasn't by her side—and then the chubby Tong boss screamed and the crowd parted, everyone doing their best to get as far away from the naked howling man as they could.

Tu's first knife had gone easily through the Tong boss's hand and buried itself almost four inches deep in the ornate table upon which it rested. Then Tu's second
knife went through the Mountain Master's left foot and sank almost three inches into the mahogany boards of the brothel's floor.

“Don't even think of touching those knives or I'll put knives through your other hand and foot,” the young man said. He calmly crossed to the Tong's head bodyguard and said, loudly enough for everyone in the room to hear, “Put your hands on your head.”

Slowly the bodyguard moved his large hands from his grey pubic hair, exposing his smallish member. Without taking his eyes from Tu he put his hands on his bald scalp.

“Don't scowl, old man,” Tu commanded. “You wouldn't want to lose a hand as well as your dick.”

“My …”

But he got out no more words before his crotch blossomed red and a hunk of aged flesh fell to the floor.

Immediately there was a charge to the exit, but the young man's voice cut through the uproar. “Death awaits anyone who makes it through that door.”

The crowd stopped.

“Now turn, all of you, and watch.” Then he added, ominously, “It is important that you see what is going to happen here.”

Slowly, as one confused thing, the crowd turned to the young man with the blooded knife.

“Good,” he said. And he wheeled on the remaining Tong members.

—

Outside the brothel, Tu's carefully positioned men and vehicles encircled the majority of the Tong's foot soldiers and some of the lieutenants, while the rest of
Tu's men, by the light of the fireworks, attacked the remaining lieutenants, disarming some, killing others.

—

Inside Jiang's the operation was nearing its climax. The head bodyguard had blacked out from loss of blood. The Mountain Master was pinned to the floor and table with Tu's knives, too frightened to move or call out. The lieutenants left outside the brothel were frogmarched into the reception chamber by Tu's men. The wealthy clients of Jiang's prestigious establishment, most importantly, were wide-eyed and attentive.

Tu leaped on a table and called out, “Incense Master!” The tall, thin man who had given the signal belches on the steps of the Old Shanghai Restaurant not forty-five minutes before now made his way through the crowd and stood before Tu. The young man nodded. The Incense Master smiled broadly, bowed, and began the first of the nine prostrations of the formal kowtow.

Tu's blade slid into the back of his neck exactly where the spinal cord entered the skull. The Incense Master jerked spasmodically for ten seconds, then stilled. Tu turned the knife. The man's arms and legs all shot out at once, like a puppet whose master had yanked on the wrong strings. Tu pulled up on the knife and held the man several inches off the floor, watching him twitch. Then he yanked the knife out of the man's dead body and it dropped to the floor like so many potatoes in a sack.

“Traitors are like virgins. They can only claim the title once.”

The Incense Master's body lay on the floor, limbs in all directions, knees and elbows at angles not inherent in the evolutionary plan for the human body.

Then Tu said, “Bring me the Tong's sycophants.” The two men were shoved forward, whimpering. Tu showed them absolutely no mercy.

When the second was dispatched, Tu looked to the six remaining lieutenants of the Tong of the Righteous Hand. “I offer you six Red Poles the opportunity to swear loyalty to me as the new head of the Tong of the Righteous Hand. You!” Tu said pointing at the eldest of the men.

The man's face darkened, but before he could move, Tu was on him and had his chest open with a single slash of his knife. With his hands inside the man's chest cavity, Tu turned to the others and said, “Does anyone else have a problem with the new order?”

No one did.

News of Tu's savagery quickly took on the air of legend in the teeming streets of the city at the Bend in the River. And later, as Jiang took him to her bed, Tu heard his grandmother's pleading words over and over again in his head: “
Yueh-sen, give me my revenge. My revenge against the
Fan Kuei
, the Foreign Devils
.”

* * *

THE FINALE OF THE FIREWORKS momentarily turned night to bright day—then darkness and silence, that rarest of entities in Shanghai, followed. Silas Hordoon stood, almost alone, on the Bund Promenade, staring at the still wild Pudong across the Huangpo River. The rest of Shanghai had grown, prospered, matured. Shanghai had already expanded rapidly to the west and south, but there was no footprint of Shanghai on the Pudong. The other side of the Bend in the River was still true to its nature, a challenge to the
Fan Kuei
and their
compradors and their nightclubs and department stores on Bubbling Spring Road. Silas shivered involuntarily. The Huangpo was not a wide river—that untamed land so close to his home made his heart race—and the word
danger
crept up from the bottom of his consciousness and fell from his mouth in the cold dawn of the first day of the last decade of the nineteenth century.

* * *

THEN LI TIAN LIT his firework.

It whistled loudly as it ascended in an arc of flame that drew every eye. An enormous bang assaulted every ear, followed quickly by an elegant ring of eight shimmering stars in a perfect circle. Then a second bang threw out a second ring of eight stars in a circle within the larger first circle. To the amazement of every watcher, the outside ring exploded one star at a time in a clockwise circle while the inner ring, in exact synchronization, exploded counter-clockwise. Finally, as if on some godly cue, the exploding stars began to change colour and shape. Red began to dominate and the sparks falling earthward formed tears. Red tears filled the night sky, then plunged from the heavens to the earth below—and Li Tian smiled. He could smell the change in the air. And the tears this time would not be Chinese tears.

The blood tears were the last that anyone saw or heard of Li Tian. He simply packed his materials into his plain wooden box, affixed the box to his bamboo shoulder carrier, and disappeared into the dense forest of the Pudong. He ignored the applause all around him and the looks of awe and wonder; he ignored the questions and the requests to learn from him. He simply disappeared and was never seen again in or around Shanghai.

But he didn't disappear from history. He was a muse to many a Chinese dreamer. Here was a Chinese man of real genius. A unique Chinese genius. One of the many inspirational figures that would, almost sixty years later, be foremost in the mind of a seasoned revolutionary leader as he entered Shanghai at the head of a great army.

On that same night in another port city, but this one far from the Bend in the River, a twelve-year-old Chinese boy ducked just in time to avoid the beer tankard that had been thrown at his head. The heavy thing thudded against the wall of the basement tavern and splattered its liquid in a fireworks pattern. It was hardly the first projectile that the boy, Charles Soon, had avoided in his three years of working at the Ploughman's Pune in the Southey section of Boston, Massachusetts. At least he didn't have to service these Irish pigs, like the two young girls did. All he had to do was take their abuse and clean up their mess. Then try to get the smell of their urine and their foul beer out of his hair before he returned home to his sick father, who had brought him,
shortly after his mother died, to the Golden Mountain. That was almost nine years ago.

The two young Negro boys who also worked at the Ploughman had befriended him early on and shown him how to stay out of trouble. They were the closest thing to friends he had in that cold place. One had taught him how to read English, while the other had a truly wicked sense of humour that made many a hard night's work bearable for Charles. “Catholics live to get drunk,” he had said, “and they get drunk to live.” Charles remembered that as he swept the floor with his hand and came up with the dented tankard. He knew he'd have to fix it before the end of his shift or he would have the cost of a new tankard taken out of his paltry wages. The Irishmen were singing again. They were always singing. He looked to his Black friends, and their eyes were smiling.
There they go, singing again,
their eyes seemed to be saying.

Charles recalled one terrific night when another group of Irishmen, this time wearing orange-coloured clothing, had come in singing something that enflamed these particular Irishmen, and the vicious fight that had ensued was the best thing that had happened in the Ploughman's Pune, as far as Charles Soon was concerned. He'd even joined his two Black co-workers in cheering on the pugilists.

“Hey, you fuckin' Celestial, clean the puke from my table before I make you lick it up.” This supposed witticism drew raucous laughter from the other louts in the man's company, and Charles rushed over to the table. He didn't take such threats lightly. Drunken Irishmen were not to be contradicted or reasoned with. That had been the other Chinese boy's advice to him on his first day working in the bar. Charles didn't know
where the boy was now. He simply hadn't shown up one night. And no one in the bar, or in Boston's small Chinese community, talked about it. He had just vanished. Charles hoped he hadn't ended up stuffed in a hole in the ground—or worse. He prayed that the boy had somehow just disappeared. He prayed that the boy was happy and had escaped. Like he was going to do this very evening, once this shift was over.

He also prayed that his father had been sincere when he'd said, “There is no future for you here, son. This place hates us. Go, escape if you can, and I will see you in the next life.”

This New Year's Eve the whole city was drunk. Hopefully he could sneak onboard a ship that would take him—at the beginning of this final decade of the nineteenth century—to a new life.

—

The smell of the Irishman's vomit was on his hands. The bits of smoked bacon and other undercooked meats he had eaten added a kind of acid to the bile in the man's stomach, the odour of which had moved from Charles's rag to his hands. So he stuffed them deep into his pockets as he looked up at the brutally cold Boston night sky. The sounds of drunken revelry were all around him as he carefully made his way down Blackstone Street. He ducked into a darkened storefront as a horse-drawn police wagon turned onto the street. It made its way slowly down the roadway, swinging its lantern, from one side of the street to the other. The edge of the light crossed Charles's shoes, but the wagon didn't stop. Shortly it picked up speed and moved farther down the street.

Charles let out a slow breath, then turned, startled. He wasn't alone. There was someone else in the safety of the darkness. He looked but couldn't see anything. Then he saw the whites of eyes in blue-black skin. He staggered back and fell. When he scrambled to his feet again those large white eyes were close to his face. Charles could see that the eyes were milky, frightened.

“You have some food for Edward?”

It was the voice of a child like himself. Charles stepped out into the street and was surprised when a tall, large African man stepped out of the darkness and approached him. This was a grown Black man, not like his two friends in the bar who had helped him survive at the Ploughman.

“You understand English?” the man demanded.

Charles reached inside his thin cloth jacket and pulled out some of the food he'd taken from the Ploughman's Pune. He cracked a loaf of stale bread and gave half of it to the African, who ate it greedily, stuffing the thing into his mouth so fast that he choked on it and almost vomited it up on the street cobbles. Charles was happy he hadn't—he'd seen enough barf for one day.

Then the Black man looked at Charles. “Where are you going?”

Charles noted the slow speech, the broad, flat forehead, and the wide space between the man's nose and upper lip. This African was an idiot.

“Take Edward with you.”

“I'm not going anywhere.”

“Then I'll not go anywhere too.”

Across the street, men were pouring out of a saloon. Charles took the African by the arm and guided him back into the darkness of the doorway. No need
attracting attention. Then he gave him more of his bread and said, “You can't come with me, where I'm going.”

“Why Edward can't …?”

Exasperated, Charles shouted, “Because you're a fool.” Then he grabbed his small satchel, darted across the street, and ran down the alley as fast as his short legs would take him, his breath a mist before his face. He turned north and headed toward the cargo port.

Not twenty minutes later the road dead-ended into a large square with a private park surrounded by a high metal fence. Four cobbled streets entered the square from four different directions. He was shaking from the cold and was confused as to which way was north.

Then he heard them. The kind of racial taunts he had lived with his whole life. But it was dark here and he was alone in a part of the city dangerous for a Chinese boy. He heard the snowball smack into the wall just over his shoulder before he spotted the boys gathered by the gated park. He smiled—just boys. Then he turned and looked at the snowball one of them had thrown at him. It had hit the brick wall full force and not broken apart. He picked it up. It was a large stone covered with just a sprinkling of snow.