Shanghai (57 page)

Yin Bao acted appropriately shocked as she bent her knees so that her clothing covered the nakedness of her exposed foot. Then, with a sly grin, she snuck her hands beneath her skirts and pulled out the second shoe and swung it by its ribbon laces around her head as she dead-eyed the men—just as she did when she was on her knees before a wealthy customer. She stood and put the slipper in a large glass bowl set conveniently by her side. Then she allowed an openly lascivious leer to cross her slightly parted lips.

“So, you would like to play Raft, would you?”

The men couldn't take their eyes off her exposed feet. Yin Bao allowed them a quick peek, then bent her knees again to cover the object of their desires. The girl's control was impressive. Her effortless shift from embarrassed virgin, shocked that she even had Golden Lotuses, to practised courtesan, openly teasing the men with the nakedness of her sensual feet, was part of the reason for her growing fame in Shanghai's Flower World.

The rest of the fame that Jiang's youngest daughter had garnered came from the extraordinary dexterity of her toes when her two Golden Lotuses enwrapped a man's jade spear.

“So, we are ready to begin our game?” she asked innocently as she stood … exposing both of her tiny feet. The men's intake of breath was gratifying.
Power is always gratifying,
she thought as she minced around the table, carrying the second shoe in the large glass bowl at arm's length.

The men bent over to gawk at her feet. For two of the more powerful guests she stopped and lifted a foot into their laps. The men then fondled it as she allowed her mouth to go slack with supposed pleasure. Each of the men took his eyes off the girl's delicious feet just long
enough to toss lotus seeds at the shoe in the bowl—the raft. If the lotus seed missed the shoe, Yin Bao would, to the ecstatic howls of the men, assign punishments. Drinking between one and five glasses of wine from the glass in her other shoe in the centre of the table was the usual penalty.

The men gladly drank their “punishments” since it gave them an opportunity to stroke the tiny silk slipper and sniff the heady aroma of the courtesan's perfumed foot that still lingered there.

For most men in Shanghai, courtesans were the only women with whom they felt comfortable enough to joke and play. Only in the presence of a courtesan were the traditional separations between men and women ignored. Men relaxed and gave themselves over to the charm, and more importantly the power, of women.

The winner of the gangsters' Raft game was, as always, Tu Yueh-sen, the
Shan Chu
, the Mountain Master of the Tong of the Righteous Hand. But Gangster Tu was not interested in Yin Bao. His affection, or what he had that approximated affection, was for another family member. He chose one of his Red Poles to have the young courtesan. The Red Pole grinned widely and then took Yin Bao into a room just off the dining hall, where the girl's tortured, deformed feet—her Golden Lotuses—would be his to do with as he pleased.

Moments after the game of Raft ended, the Carver knocked on the private dining room door and presented Tu with a carving he had commissioned—an exquisite jade sculpture depicting a warrior on a rearing horse. Beneath the horse's left front hoof was a large snake that was rising up, mouth open and fangs exposed. The warrior was leaning over to cut the snake in half to save both himself and his glorious mount.

Tu held the small thing in one hand and turned it around on his palm. “Magnificent. And all from one piece of stone?”

“As you requested,” the Carver said.

“Superb.”

“I am pleased that you are pleased, Tu Yueh-sen.”

“I am.”

The Carver took a breath, then said, as if it were a natural part of their conversation, “I have done lesser works for the
Fan Kuei
. They can't tell the difference between good and bad, so they buy anything.”

“And you, no doubt, charge them appropriately?”

“About three times what I would charge a Black-Haired person.” Then he added nonchalantly, “Four times when I sell to the Vrassoons.”

Tu put the sculpture down and asked, “You know the Vrassoons?”

Then, as he had planned with the Confucian, the Carver said, “Know? No. I do business with them.” Then, again as if it were nothing, he asked, “Would you like an introduction to them?”

* * *

TU DISMISSED THE CARVER, as if meeting with the Vrassoons were a ridiculous idea, but later he considered the possibilities such a meeting might offer. The one thing he knew from heading the Tong of the Righteous Hand's opium business was that the Tong was just a bit player. Surprisingly small. They didn't have enough basic product to leverage anything from the
Fan Kuei
traders. What he had thought would be a point of entry to the lucrative opium trade had proven to be little more than a taste of the riches—a limited taste at
that. And supply was the problem.
Chandra
, smokable opium, came only from India—British India—a fact that was reinforced once again that night in conversation with his bedmate, when Jiang pointed out, “No opium supply—no opium trade, dear.”

The next day he made a decision and set a plan into motion. Then he waited for reports. Waited longer than he was used to waiting.

Finally, just past the end of the month, three bespectacled scholars whom he had hired on Jiang's advice stood in his warehouse office in front of his desk with folios of paper and scrolls in their hands. They had just completed a summary of their report—and Tu was not pleased.

Tu tried to control his fury as the rain pelted down on the corrugated tin roof of the old building that had once been the Hordoons' warehouse—the very one that their Hong merchant, Chen, had run for them all those years ago. The men's reports outlined all the reasons why Tu could not—why no Chinese person could, for that matter—possibly become part of the great Shanghai opium trade. The crux of the matter was supply—the lack of access to supply, to be exact.

Tu shoved the reports aside and grunted, “India?” A slash of lightning lit the large windows facing the Suzu Creek.

The three men in front of Gangster Tu nodded, as if someone had pulled a string and all of them were attached to the same strand.

“Why can't opium be grown here in the Delta?” Tu's voice arced dangerously as the wind picked up, slapping the large late-autumn raindrops against the windowpanes.

The eldest of the three men produced a long, beautifully penned scroll from his sleeve and put it down in front of Tu.

Tu shoved it aside and leaped to his feet. “More and more documents. Always documents! Just tell me!”

“Poppies could be grown here, sir, but the infrastructure necessary to make opium could take several years to put into place.”

“Several years!”

The man spoke quickly, running different ideas together. “The plants can take as many as three years to mature, and many of the fields presently devoted to rice or soya would have to be switched over to poppy production, which would cause food shortages and hence would be opposed by many powers in the city, and then the opium would have to be cured and our hot humid weather is not appropriate.” He was going to re-emphasize the probably violent resistance there would be to taking fields that fed people out of production and putting them into a product that only fed their dreams, then thought better of it as Gangster Tu turned almost beet red with anger.

“So what you're saying, after all your study and all your intelligence and all your documents and all this time wasted, is that we can't grow our own poppies?”

“Or manufacture—”

“I understand.” Tu's voice cut through the chilly fall air as he stepped to the window of the office and looked toward the docks. Ships of several nations were loading and unloading cargo. Although he couldn't see the mango-wood chests stuffed with Indian opium, he knew they were there. He also knew that if the opium were not there, none of the other trade would be there either. The whole thing—the whole city—floated on a river of
opium, and the money it generated made the White men in the tall towers on the Bund wealthy and powerful.

Although over the past years he had secured his place in the Chinese underworld, he had made precious few inroads into the real source of wealth all around him. True, he'd recently “convinced” the French administration to leave the brothel-protection business to him—a move that, unbeknownst to Tu, had been engineered by Jiang. But Tu knew that losing the protection money from the brothels wouldn't really hurt the
Fan Kuei
. He allowed his eyes to glance over at the harbour and that idea dawned again—or had it been suggested by Jiang? He couldn't remember.

“So we can't make opium of our own?” he finally said, as if to the air.

“Not at least for—”

“But there is opium in India, and opium onboard all the fine sailing vessels in our harbour—just sitting in our harbour.”

“Yes …”

“Has anyone ever robbed an Indiaman sailing ship?”

The men looked at each other. The Indiaman sailing ships were the largest ocean-going vessels in the world, and they were defended by British mariners and large numbers of their own guns. They loaded in the safety of India's ports under the guard of armed British and Sikh regiments and didn't stop, except to pick up fresh water, until they arrived in Shanghai, where once again they were protected by the Queen's troops. It was one thing to steal from Chinese, but quite another to steal from the
Fan Kuei
—especially from a
Fan Kuei
Indiaman sailing ship!

“Get my Red Poles. I want all ten of my lieutenants here.” Then he looked at the three scholars. He'd almost
forgotten they were still in the room. “Your services are no longer required. Change is brought by action, not reports.” He swept the documents from his desk and they fluttered to the floor.

Tu turned from the men and walked to the windows. Fork lightning lit up the darkened sky, silhouetting their Mountain Master in the windowpane. The scholars got out of the office as quickly as they could.

Two of the three made the wise choice of leaving Shanghai that very night, as Jiang had suggested, never to be seen in the city at the Bend in the River again. The third one's body was found later that night when the storm had finally blown out its fury, plugging up a newly laid section of sewers that emptied into the Suzu Creek.

* * *

EARLY THE NEXT MORNING Jiang extricated herself from Tu's arms and legs.
The man seems to be all arms and legs,
Jiang thought as she looked at herself in the mirror. She'd listened to his rant about the impossibility of growing opium and suggested, yet again, that there was lots of opium just sitting in the harbour. And as the evening had progressed she'd noted that he got quieter and quieter.
Good,
she thought,
my seed has taken root.

During the night she'd noted several times that he had left her bed, and she'd heard through the door hushed discussions between Tu and his Red Poles. Around three in the morning she'd heard the sound of many men running, and she'd known that Tu was ready to move.

She finished her toilette and soundlessly let herself out of the room. But before she shut the door she looked
back at the sleeping gangster—he had his thumb in his mouth.

She passed by Tu's bodyguards and noted that four Red Poles sat, wide-eyed, to one side. Lounging in the anteroom were forty or fifty other Tong soldiers.

Jiang signalled to her head bouncer that she wanted a rickshaw.

As she stepped outside she saw a dark figure huddled in a doorway and nodded subtly in his direction. The dark figure didn't move—although the hood of the cobra carved onto his back filled with blood and his swalto blade felt hot in his hand.

A boy pulling a leather-upholstered rickshaw came running up. The bouncer offered her a hand but she ignored it and hopped into the seat. Curtly she told the boy where she was going, then sat back to watch the sun take the day.

It is a whore's time of peace,
she thought. She liked these hours.

They passed by the Cathedral of St. Ignatius. Chinese women were already out cleaning the steps with straw brooms and wet rags. Jiang hoped the Black Robes paid the women well for their hard labours, although she doubted the poor women were paid enough to buy a five-spice egg.

“Here!” she shouted. “Left.”

The rickshaw boy came to a stop, backed up a pace or two, then turned into the alley. Two hundred paces down the lane was an innocuous red door to a
lilong
. She told the boy to stop the rickshaw.

She tipped the boy handsomely. The reward for her generosity was a leer. She immediately reached into his still-open palm and took back half of the tip.

“What …?”

“To teach you to respect your betters.”

“You're …” But the boy swallowed the rest of the thought and said, “Want me to wait for you, ma'am?”

“No. Scat!”

Jiang waited until the rickshaw had left the alley, then tapped lightly on the red door. A truly beautiful White man, dressed and coiffed immaculately, opened it. He stared at Jiang but made no motion to step aside.

From behind him Jiang heard a female voice say, “
Qui est là, Julien
?”

“It is I, Mademoiselle Colombe,” Jiang said.

Anais Colombe, Suzanne's only granddaughter, stepped forward and tapped the handsome man on his shoulder. “It's early, Jiang,” she said.

“It's a whore's time of rest,” Jiang replied.

Anais laughed softly, then said, “My grandmother used to say that.”

“So my grandmother told me, Anais.”

“Coffee, Jiang?”

Jiang hesitated for a moment, but she resisted looking back over her shoulder. She had no reason to doubt that Tu had successfully followed her.

Jiang sat at the table, the hot coffee cup between her hands, and informed Anais Colombe that the French administration was no longer willing to provide protection for their brothels, and that Gangster Tu would now provide that “service.”