Shanghai (79 page)

The Boxer Rebellion died as quickly as it had started. Business returned to the Middle Kingdom, and the city at the Bend in the River continued to prosper—but not before the victors punished the vanquished.

Victors and Vanquished: Mai Bao and Her Revolutionary

“Why are you here? Why is Mai Bao, the famous courtesan and
Fan Kuei
whore, in my cell? Are you a guest of the Shanghai police as well?” The Revolutionary's voice whistled slightly as his breath moved through his shattered teeth. His left arm hung useless at his side, and the swelling of his left cheek, which oddly stretched his wine stain, had almost closed his left eye. “Damn it, I asked why you were here.”

“To try and remember,” Mai Bao said without inflection.

“Remember what?” the Revolutionary demanded.

“If I loved you.” Again Mai Bao's response was simple and to the point.

“Oh, you thought you loved me,” the Revolutionary said with a coarse laugh.

Mai Bao allowed herself to look at the dank cell. The hard walls were covered with thin lines, many she feared made by the scraping of human fingernails. Only Silas's vast power had enabled her to get access to her former lover.

“What are you thinking, whore?” he demanded.

Mai Bao allowed his curse to enter her, then dissipate in her heart. “I'm thinking that you think I only thought I loved you.”

He shifted on the hard bench and clenched his broken teeth to stifle the pain. “You loved the image of what I represented. The lowly scholar and the courtesan—it's as old as our entire race.”

“But it's just an image?”

“Just a foolish old image. Did they tell you it was me who was murdering the Chinese who were
Fan Kuei
collaborators?”

She nodded.

“Good,” he said.

“The lead investigator left notes about you.”

“You mean your other lover?” he spat out.

“Yes,” she said, not bothering to mention that he was also the father of her twin girls.

“And how did he know it was me?”

“Something about barbers. You mumbled something about barbers in your sleep—and I told him.”

“And he found them, and they betrayed me?”

She shrugged.

“And where is this genius of yours now?” the Revolutionary asked with a twisted grin.

“He died in the Warrens.”

“That's good. Very, very good.” He shifted again, and this time couldn't stop the cry of pain. “You wouldn't have a cigarette, would you?”

She had brought a pack of Snake Charmers, which she knew were his favourites. She handed one to him. He took it in his right hand, but it fell through his fingers to the floor. She bent over and picked it up. She put it in her mouth and lit it. Then she placed it between the Revolutionary's scarred lips. He dragged deeply.

“I suppose I should say thank you,” he said between the layers of smoke.

“Only if you mean it,” she said.

“Bourgeois nonsense.”

“Fine,” she said. For a moment she wanted just to get out of that awful place, then she gathered her courage and said, “And you never loved me?”

He smirked through the smoke. “I loved hurting you. Loved pulling down your image of what we were doing. Pulling it through the dust and scraping it off the heel of my shoe like dog shit from the street.”

She momentarily wavered under his attack, then allowed herself to hear the feelings between the words, just as she heard the notes between the notes on her arhu—and there it was—longing, desperate longing.

“You are going to die,” she said.

“Better death than this hateful life.”

“Perhaps,” she said, but she didn't believe him. She put a hand on his arm and his face softened. The cigarette drooped in his mouth. She took it from his lips and breathed in the harsh smoke. Then she said, “Open your mouth.”

He did.

She blew the smoke from her mouth into his mouth and down into his lungs.

Tears filled his eyes.

“Are you frightened of dying?”

He didn't answer. He didn't have to.

She took a deep breath and put the cigarette aside. “Do you still want me?”

He couldn't find his words.

So, wordlessly, she brought on the clouds and rain only hours before he left this earthly plane.

—

That night, when she returned to the safety of her home inside the high walls of the Garden, she walked straight into Silas's private study and took him by the hand and pulled him to their bedroom. She undressed him quickly and then herself. Then she said, “Love me, and make me forget.”

And he did.

Victors and Vanquished: Charles Soong and His Writer

Charles had never been inside a prison—or close to a gallows, like the one that he could see outside the barred window of the tiny cell. Snow was drifting on the cross-arm of the gibbet and piling up on the platform of the scaffold.
Snow in Shanghai?
he thought.
Not unheard of, but unusual. Appropriate weather for a hanging.
Charles pulled his coat tightly about himself and stamped his feet on the stone floor.

He heard the sound of chains rattling and turned to the metal door. It swung open, revealing a beaten figure that used to be Tzu Rong Zi, the writer who wrote the very first story for his very first publication. The man who started him on the road to wealth, marriage, and three children—a fourth on the way. He owed this man
something—but what? And how could this old friend have been working with the Boxers? How?

Tzu Rong Zi shuffled toward the table in the centre of the small cell, then stopped. He looked at Charles and said, “Help me sit, will ya?”

Charles quickly stepped forward and offered the man his arm. The writer winced as he bent his knees to sit down. Then he looked up. “You look sad, boss.”

Charles sidestepped his knee-jerk reaction to the term “boss” and forced a smile to his face. “How's that? I look sad?”

“Looks like you need a drink, boss, which I could really use. You have any on you?”

Charles shook his head.

“Too bad. A man needs a drink before they put a rope around his neck and yank hard.”

There was a lengthy silence. Finally Charles asked, “How could you be part of that? A rioter? A murderer?”

“Or a patriot, boss. Scratch that. I don't give a shit about patriotism.”

“Then why were you part of that?”

“Why weren't
you
part of that? That's a better question. Did all your money make you a
Fan Kuei?
Is that it? How does that work?”

Charles stood and looked toward the cell door. Then he turned back. Outside, over Tzu Rong Zi's shoulder, a man was being walked up the steps of the gallows. No, not walked, dragged, pleading.

“A charming way to go, don't you think, boss?”

“An earned way, if he was a murderer.”

“Still believe that Protestant eye-for-an-eye crap?”

“Don't you?”

“Not really. If I did, I would have demanded long ago that the
Fan Kuei
kill one of their intellectuals, because
they killed that in me.” Then he snapped, “Listen to me! I was something before they came. I could sense the long line of scholars going all the way back to the First Emperor. I walked in their footsteps, breathed the air they breathed, and added to the knowledge they had added to. Then the
Fan Kuei
came …”

“And you became another kind of writer. That's all.”

“No. I became a commoner. A pornographer. The lowest form of writer there is. They stole what I was from me.”

“Maybe I stole that from you,” Charles said.

“Nonsense. It was the
Fan Kuei,
so when …” There was another long silence in the room. “So do you hate me, boss?”

Charles didn't hate him. He understood him. In his own way he had been working for change too. But not through violence. The old Manchu Dynasty was tottering. It would fall of its own idiocy. He said as much to the writer.

The man shook his head, causing himself to wince. But he managed to speak through the pain. “No. No, boss. You don't understand. The Manchus are too stupid to be real enemies. It's the
Fan Kuei.
The Taipingers had it right. We were just the children of the Taipingers, and our children will carry on their fight. There can be no peace when so many are excluded. None.”

“So you are not sorry for what you have done?” Charles asked.

The writer was about to respond when the jarring sound of the trap door in the scaffold slamming open stopped him.

Both men looked out at the man hanging from the thick rope. His neck had not snapped, and he fought against the rope. His legs jerked and kicked. His face
turned blue, eyes bulged, blood came from his ears and nose—then finally, blessedly, he stopped struggling—and stood still in the air as snow gathered on his shoulders.

“You sure you didn't bring a drink, boss? A man about to be hanged can really use a drink.”

And life returned, with startling speed, to what people who lived at the Bend in the River thought of as normal.

After the hangings came a brief but severe crackdown by the authorities. Some newspapers considered to be subversive were closed down—none of Charles Soong's publications missed a single edition—public gatherings were limited, and law and order became the watchword. A thousand police officers were hired to replace the four hundred who had been dismissed as rebel sympathizers.

The Cathedral of St. Ignatius was washed clean of its scorch markings and there were plans for a brand-new interior. New stained-glass windows were commissioned, and the high altar upon which Father Pierre died was roped off and viewed as a martyr's site.

Hong merchants mended fences with their
Fan Kuei
overlords and recommenced the business of doing business. The Manchu legions returned to safe barracks upriver or went back to Beijing.

And the Tusk remained in its box bench in the reception room of Jiang's in the French Concession south of Fang Bang Lu in the Old City.

Yin Bao popped out two boys to add to her three girls in, once again, record time. Charles was very pleased with his new sons, and continued to publish his papers during the day and take meetings in private with Dr. Sun Yat-sen and Generalissimo Chiang Kai Shek at night.

Gangster Tu re-emerged and could often be seen dining at the Old Shanghai Restaurant in the company of several young courtesans and his omnipresent bodyguard, Loa Wei Fen. He was constantly on the watch for assassins sent from the Manchu court, as he had never satisfied the Dowager Empress with his explanation that “the Tusk must have been moved from its hiding place in the Warrens before we could get to it.” He continued to offer a huge reward to anyone who led him to the Sacred Relic, but there were no takers. He considered his position and decided there might be other ways to attack the
Fan Kuei
than through Beijing. He began to court the Generalissimo, Chiang Kai Shek.

The Generalissimo had a background as cloaked in mystery as any man in China. His family had historic Triad ties, and he'd grown up the pampered son of the wealthy. He'd bought his commission on his twenty-first birthday and found his way to the “good doctor” shortly thereafter. Quickly he'd made himself indispensable to Sun Yat-sen, since he was the only one of the conspirators who had legitimate military training.

Their first meeting at Tu's office did not go well.

As the tiny Generalissimo (Tu thought only a tiny man would need such a long title) ranted on, Tu recalled a cook who, in an effort to please him, had stuffed a shrimp dumpling inside a delicately spiced slice of eggplant that was then stuffed inside a cured duck breast that was in turn stuffed inside a flattened and rolled chicken—all, naturally, lightly breaded and deep fried and then covered with a thin, brown tamarind sauce. Unfortunately for the cook, a small piece of the duck's wishbone had got into his concoction, and Tu had momentarily choked on the bone, which resulted in the cook being thrown down a well. But the cook's death wasn't what was on Tu's mind as he stared at the wasp-waisted, almost bald little man across the table from him. It was the idea of one thing stuffed inside another that was then stuffed inside another and so on and so on—like Shanghai, he thought. Spies embedded by one group inside another, then leaders of one faction going inside another and forming alliances that were unknown to their supposed allies—things stuffed within other things. In such circumstances there was always the chance of serious error, a wishbone to choke on.

Chiang Kai Shek was still talking. The man clearly liked to hear himself speak. Tu knew that this poncey man had family connections with a powerful Triad from the south, and that he was now Dr. Sun Yat-sen's right-hand man. But what really interested him was a piece of information that his spies had told him: the fact that Charles Soong did not allow this man to handle any of the money that he forwarded to “the cause.” Interesting. Very interesting.

Tu knew of the man's prodigious sexual appetites from his business connections in the Flower World. He
also knew of the man's willingness to hurt the women with whom he brought on the clouds and rain. Cruelty against women struck Tu as the action of a coward, and for a moment he had the impulse to reach into his desk and throw the dagger hidden there into the man's heart—or perhaps into his eye.

But Tu also knew that cowards can be useful, sometimes more useful than brave men. Brave men simply fight—cowards plot.
So what are you plotting?
he thought, as the Generalissimo was completing some complicated idea or other.

Tu stood. Chiang Kai Shek stopped mid-sentence, a look of open anger crossing his hard features. “Did I interrupt something important,” Gangster Tu asked, “or just more of your self-congratulatory yapping?”