Shanghai (70 page)

This time Mai Bao sensed Silas in the back of the theatre, although she could not see him. She took her arhu from its silken case and positioned it on her lap.

Silence entered the large room like a welcomed guest at last arrived.

Mai Bao closed her eyes and began.

Silas shifted his weight and leaned forward, unwilling to miss a single sound from either Mai Bao or the arhu. Then they came, as one welling thing, voice and strings entwined about one another as they stirred the still air of the theatre with a new song of a ship's captain who in his travels loses an eye for love.

The meeting hall was hot. The open windows did little to alleviate the situation, although they did allow in thousands of mosquitoes, midges, moths, and various other night-fliers attracted to the newly installed electric lighting in the cavernous room.

Silas was not surprised to see the large turnout, or the clear division between the tiny group of European Shanghainese like himself (although he was technically Persian, he was considered part of the European contingent at the Bend in the River), who considered Shanghai their home, and the much larger group of Europeans who called themselves Shanghailanders. These people were simply expatriates out to make as much money from China as quickly as they could and then escape to
the sanctuary of wherever they came from. This even though some had lived in Shanghai for years.

The assembled represented the few thousand families who ruled Shanghai, and they were very picky about who they included in their ranks. The Europeans were principally British, French, and German, although almost every other European country had some representatives in this grouping. Americans, Canadians, Brazilians, Argentinians, and Cubans were also counted as Europeans, since the designation really meant “White.” Interestingly, Portuguese and Polish families were not considered to be Europeans but rather were segregated into a lesser grouping called Polyglots, along with Filipinos, Egyptians, and Afghans. Perhaps the strangest bit of categorization was for Russians, who were not included in either group and hence always tried to pass as Poles.

One of those who had been counted as a European, a puffy-faced Englishman, had the floor and was gesticulating with his arms as if he were a flywheel that had come lose of its moorings.

“I say no to this,” he repeated for the third time, as if somehow repetition increased meaning. “I didn't come here to buy sewers and electric street lights for Slants.” The crowd stirred. Silas did his best to keep his anger from his face. “I am a businessman, plain and simple. I'm not a charity for heathens. I leave that to the churchmen. I'm here, like most of the rest of you, to make money. There's no law against that. And the money I make is for my expenditure, not to be given away willy-nilly. I work hard for my money, and my money is
my money
—not the damned Chinks'.” Silas had heard the pejoratives for Chinese people all his life but he still found himself deeply angered by the inherent disrespect of the
terms—all the terms. “So I cast my ballot against. Against! They can shit in their pots in the dark for all I care.”

There were hardy cheers from much of the room, led by Meyer Vrassoon and the newly arrived leader of Britain's Dent and Company, William Dent.

William Dent was the tallest man in all of Shanghai—perhaps in all of Asia. Settling in at just a nick short of six feet and ten inches, he had a unique view of the world—and of the opium traders' position in Shanghai. He was of the belief that the traders were to be wary of any of their kind who “went native.” He believed in the glory of King and Country and was pleased to be a stalwart part of the British Empire, upon which the sun never set. His mother had died at an early age and his father was a wastrel, and it had been left to him to care for his brothers and sisters and to reinvigorate the family fortune—which was what had brought him to Shanghai, and to this meeting.

Silas wasn't surprised by the Shanghailander's speech, although he was interested to see that Heyward Matheson, the leader of the Scottish trading house Jardine Matheson, assiduously sat on his hands. Well before the meeting Silas's spies had briefed him on this unusual man—and potential ally. Silas knew that Heyward Matheson had been born and raised in China, and that he was the grandson of the famous Hercules MacCallum. Matheson both knew and loved China, and in some ways the Chinese, but he was a careful man when it came to politics. He had been brought up as a strict Scottish Catholic, and he looked on an early case of gonorrhea as a justifiable punishment for his sexual misdeeds. For years he had put up with the torture of what were euphemistically called mercury baths, but
they'd only barely kept the disease in check. Finally he'd appealed to the company's Chinese doctor, and within a week of the doctor's treatments Heyward had gained a kind of relief that he had not experienced for years. As he'd memorably said one morning, “The glory of pissing without pain cannot be overstated.”

The elderly leader of Oliphant and Company out of Philadelphia spoke next. Silas didn't listen as the man rattled on about electric light bringing on God's light, or maybe God's light
was
electric light, or perhaps who needs electric light with God's light …? It was one of those; Silas neither knew nor cared which. He found the Oliphants and their like so stupid that every time one of them spoke his teeth hurt.

The debate continued. Tea was served. Hard liquor was consumed in ever-escalating quantities. Flies were shooed away. Sweaty necks were bitten by various forms of Asian bugs, and the Europeans and the Polyglots kept their wallets firmly in their pockets. Without money, the large and densely populated Chinese areas of the Foreign Settlement would go without electricity and indoor plumbing. In the absence of electric street lights, the resulting nightly violence would no doubt continue, and without proper sanitation, diseases like malaria and typhoid and leprosy would persist in taking their devastating toll in human lives. And it was totally up to the assembled
Fan Kuei
as to whether the situation would be changed or simply allowed to go on as is.

Silas knew that the Shanghailanders—those who would never think of Shanghai as their home—lived lives more privileged than many a king in his castle. They seldom rose before the sun, often in one of the Vrassoon luxury apartments that could run to twenty
or thirty rooms. Number-one boy would bring the master tea in bed while number-two boy organized the servants for the day's chores. There were, at the very least, two cooks (always males), a house coolie, an
amah
for the lady of the house, a wash and sew-sew
amah
, a carriage man, and a foreign governess for the children. Breakfast was strictly national in origin: cornflakes, eggs, and coffee for Americans; cold toast, bitter marmalade, and overcooked tomatoes for the English; chicory and croissants for the French. As they ate, they read the English-language
North China Daily News
or the American
Shanghai Evening Post and Mercury,
which included such relevant items to daily life in Shanghai as a crossword puzzle, Dorothy Dix, and Ripley's Believe It or Not. No Shanghailander read any of Charles Soong's publications, or any of the other Chinese newspapers. Few of the Shanghailanders spoke enough Mandarin to even order a meal in a restaurant. Almost none could read the character writing of the Black-Haired people.

With breakfast done, the portly Shanghailander would descend to street level only to hop immediately into his private carriage, in which he would be driven through streets thick with peasants carrying the world on their shoulders. The streets were filled with thousands of different sorts of man-pushed or -pulled conveyances, running the gamut from simple wheelbarrows to elaborate wagons designed for up to twenty people, thousands of water-spider–like rickshaws, hundreds of thousands of pedestrians, the odd other private carriage belonging to another Shanghailander Taipan, trolley cars on tracks, and a few Sikh police officers trying in vain to control traffic. Horns honked, peasants shouted—the whole city was one great cacophony of squealing and blaring.

Above the roads, colourful Chinese banners announced the opening of new shops and not-to-be-missed sales. They competed for the sky with the infinitely proper signage advertising such European niceties as “Postal Savings.”

After the adventure of the road, the Shanghailander would arrive at his completely westernized office and be greeted by his overly good-looking secretary, who was probably American or British—or at the very least a Portuguese who had come over to work in Macao and then moved on to the richer fields of Shanghai. The Portuguese were the city's bookkeepers, clerks, typists, cashiers, and secretaries. They were paid less than “White” people, but far more than the Chinese.

Once the Shanghailander's coat had been helped off by the secretary, he would head for his private office and pick up the cables from his home office that were laid out on his desk. They would all be in code, so their instructions would have to be first decoded and then followed—to the letter. Home office directives were the word of God to Shanghailanders. Once the cables were dealt with, the Shanghailander would turn his attention to the stock quotations, especially silver quotes. Then it would be time to trade: Pelfrees of London traded anything and everything, from cotton to toilet seats; Butterfield and Swire, sugar and shipping; British-American Tobacco Co., buying and selling of their nasty product; Gibb, Livingstone and Company, silk, tea, and piece goods; Standard-Vacuum Oil Company imported and distributed oil before its Chinese competitor, Kwang Wha Petroleum, could beat them to the punch. But these were really just merchants. The real traders—Dents of London, Jardine Matheson of Scotland, Russell and Company of Delaware, Oliphant and Company of
Philadelphia, the Vrassoons late of London and Baghdad, and of course the Hordoons—quietly went about their business, the opium trade.

Before noon the bulk of a Shanghailander's work would be done and he would make his way—once again by private carriage—to his private club for a lunch that began with at least two cocktails. The most exclusive of these clubs was the gloomy Shanghai Club, which was exclusively British. There, over lunch, the economic geniuses of Shanghai—most of whom lost their shirts on rubber speculation—pontificated on their own business brilliance. After a heavy lunch the Shanghailander would retreat to the second-floor library, where he would plop his expansive rear end onto one of the large leather chairs and take a well-deserved nap.

The American Club, with its brick facade, was not much different, except that every person was greeted with a hearty handshake, even by men they had never met before. The furniture was maple colonial and the bar always filled to overflowing.

There were, of course, other famous clubs: the Shanghai Bowling Club, the Race Club, the Husi Country Club, the Yacht Club, and the Cercle Sportif Français.

Eventually these masters of the universe rose from their torpor and returned to their offices, but by four o'clock at the latest they would book out for the day and head toward the Shanghai Golf Club or the Hungjao Golf Club for a round. The experience was not much different from playing eighteen holes at the Winchester Country Club outside Manhattan, except that the attendants in Shanghai all wore white robes.

Their wives had equally untaxing days. With servants to do any and all work around the home, they attended ladies' clubs, drama clubs, and endless tea
parties. Sometimes there was an attractive young man from one of the consulates to bring news of home … and the possibility of lurid moments in darkened halls. Correct wines were served by white-gloved servants, month-old magazines read as clouds of gossip filled the air, and the afternoon somehow whiled itself away.

Then it was dinnertime.

After a full five-course dinner, liqueurs and cigars were served. Then the master and mistress of the house headed out for dancing at one of the many private dance halls, or the grand ballroom of one of the hotels. The frivolity paused only momentarily at eleven o'clock when the stockbrokers had to race to their offices to get the opening quotes from the New York Stock Exchange. But after half an hour (or at most forty-five minutes) they had placed their trades and returned to their Shanghailander social life—often after a very quick visit to a Russian émigré whore.

Silas knew many of these men and counted none of them as friends. He stood up.

The tension in the room increased exponentially when Shanghai's richest bachelor and, more importantly, Shanghai's wealthiest European Shanghainese made his way to the speaker's podium.

The Shanghailanders braced themselves.

“Gentlemen,” he began, “and I use the term loosely.” A small pocket of laughter greeted the comment. Silas noticed Heyward Matheson smile. “My father and uncle first set foot in the Middle Kingdom almost eighty years ago. They were traders, not unlike many of you assembled here. And they came here to make their fortunes, like all of us here. My father made a great deal of money, but he died alone—a foreigner in the land he should have called home.”

A moment of silence greeted that statement.

From somewhere in the back a voice called out, “And your uncle?”

Silas took a deep breath, then said simply, “My uncle died fighting for what he believed in, something that surely most of you in this room understand. My Uncle Maxi was no different than most of you. Just braver, and more convinced that there are different ways to live one's life than simply making money.”

Again a moment of silence. Respect amongst the Europeans was rare, but Silas held a special place. He was of them, but a foreigner—a Jew. And his business success was the envy of every person in the room.

The same voice in the back of the room called out, “And your brother, how did he die?”

The silence that followed this question was different. This one was filled with anticipation—and fear. Rumours of the cause of Milo's death had been rife at the time of his demise and had continued to be a source of gossip in this most gossip-filled of towns.