Shanghai (80 page)

Chiang leaped out of his chair.

“I would suggest you sit, Mr. Chiang, if you want to be able to sit ever again.” Chiang slowly sank back in his chair. “Good. That's a good boy.”

Chiang's face turned a bright red.

“No!” Tu shouted at him. “No anger when I tell you what to do. No resistance. No desire to strike out—or your life will be ended shortly—very shortly. Is that clear, Mr. Chiang?”

Slowly Chiang Kai Shek nodded.

“Good. We will try that again. All right?”

Chiang nodded slowly once more.

“Good. That's a good boy.” He crossed to the man and patted him with an open hand on the cheek. Then hit him, hard. “Good boy.”

Tu saw the flush on the man's cheek begin and then retreat.
Okay
, he thought,
the beginnings of a dog brought to heel
. But he knew that this was a mad dog, and mad dogs were never really brought to heel—they just came to
heel periodically when they saw no other way to get what they wanted. “Fine. Now, why are you here?” Tu asked.

“You requested my presence.”

“Try again. I requested your presence but you agreed to come. So why are you here?”

Chiang Kai Shek drew himself up to his full diminutive height in the chair and said, “I think we have much with which we can help each other.”

“Really?” Tu asked innocently.

“Yes!” Chiang replied, clearly having trouble keeping his temper in check. “We both want change.”

Tu nodded but did not deign to offer words of agreement.

“We both want the Manchu—”

“I have no concern with the Manchu government in Beijing,” Tu interrupted. “As long as they stay north of the river I have no quarrel with them. I leave them be, and they leave me be.” It wasn't completely true, but true enough for this preening fool.

“Fine,” Chiang said, rallying his forces and trying for another means of access. “We both hate the
Fan Kuei.
”

Tu thought,
Who amongst the Black-Haired people does not hate the Fan Kuei?
He wondered how well this imp of a man understood the depth of his hatred of the Round Eyes. Whether he knew about his pledge to his grandmother to rid the country of the hated occupiers. Likely he knew some of that, since there was every probability that this man received reports from his no doubt well-placed spies. Spies were unavoidable in the city at the Bend in the River. Just stuff within stuff.

Tu stared at the man, an act of open disrespect among Han Chinese men. Was there a way to use this peacock of a man? Was it possible that this man had the Tusk? No. If he did, he would have boasted about it.

Even this idiot would have been able to see the value of owning the First Emperor's Narwhal Tusk. But the man was talking again—this time about Dr. Sun Yat-sen, and the man's incompetence. Slowly Tu began to understand that this popinjay was here to enlist his support against the good doctor. Tu wanted to laugh. He didn't care who led the revolt against the Manchus, just as long as they waited until the Dowager unleashed whatever attacks she had planned against the
Fan Kuei
. After that, they could war all they wanted. He needed the
Fan Kuei
weakened if he was ever to really control Shanghai.

Tu allowed the man to talk for a few more minutes but didn't hear a word. He just watched the man's lizard lips open and shut. For a moment he allowed himself to be astonished by the foolhardiness of the man, then he quickly bemoaned the time he had already wasted in this moron's company. Abruptly he said, “Enough,” and before the Generalissimo could get a word in he continued, “I have had more than enough of you.” And he was out of the room, Loa Wei Fen covering his back.

—

As the years passed, Silas watched his adopted children grow in the Garden. He brought both Buddhist and Jewish scholars to look after their religious education, although he made it clear that he wanted his children to “understand religious thought, not think like religious people.” On a whim he set up a department store right across from the Vrassoons' largest emporium on Bubbling Spring Road. It pleased him to continue his father's antagonism toward their ancient enemy.

And—oh, yes—he bought a motorcar, the very first horseless carriage in Shanghai.

1902

From the moment Silas had first read his father's journal entry documenting the opium voyage that brought him to Bubbling Spring Road, he had begun to search for the horseless carriage that had almost run over his father in that dream. His search quickly yielded answers. And although Silas hated horses, he had an instant love affair with the horseless carriage.

He investigated the first automobiles that Karl Benz made in Germany. He even drove a Benz Velo in Frankfurt in 1895, but he didn't buy one. Later he read with great interest about Horatio Nelson Jackson's transcontinental drive across the United States, and assuming this was quite a feat, although he had no idea
how big the United States really was, he put in a bid for the car—but his bid was refused. So when he was sent material on a new, as yet unproduced automobile from Italy, a Bugatti, he bought the thing, sight unseen, several years before the first Bugatti hit the streets of Rome. And so it was that on the morning of June 2, 1902, Silas Hordoon amazed the fine citizenry of Shanghai by driving his newly polished Bugatti out of what had been his father's stables and then down Bubbling Spring Road all the way to the Bund.

People stopped whatever they were doing and stared, mouths agape, fencepost teeth on clear display. A few women fainted. Some peasants screamed. Silas couldn't recall a more gratifying series of responses in his life. He reached for the large, round rubber bulb of the horn and gave it a good squeeze. A blaring honk came from the brass enunciator. Silas smiled even more broadly and honked the honker a second time. In fact, Silas's behaviour on this, the very first automobile ride in Shanghai, set a pattern for all subsequent automobile rides in the city at the Bend in the River: turn on your automobile, honk your horn loudly, then honk it again whenever possible in the course of your journey.

The fifth or sixth horn blast brought Gangster Tu to his feet and then to his warehouse window. From his vantage point he could see Silas Hordoon, whom he thought of as a frog of a
Fan Kuei,
sitting on his shiny red leather seat in the open carriage of the Bugatti like an emperor returning after having conquered the vast itself. The horn sounded again just as Tu was about to speak. He closed his mouth, then opened it again and said quickly, before another blast could drown out his words, “I want one.”

Immediately six men leaped to his side and began to jot down notes on the automobile.

“The same one, or different, sir?”

“The same but bigger, with more brass and more …” Not knowing the word for the automobile equivalent of house gewgaws he stuttered his hands through the air alternately pointing at the automobile, the sky, the road, and then in frustration at the men themselves.

Knowing their Mountain Master as they did, the men immediately sprang into action. They tapped their contacts, especially in the press, and within the month Shanghai's second automobile had arrived—another custom-made Bugatti, but this one a full foot longer than Silas's, and much redder, and more chrome-encrusted. Tu Yueh-sen loved it like a glutton loves a mound of peanut noodles. It made him happy just to look at all the chrome and polished leather. The very smell of the thing made him happy. Everything about it sent jolts of real pleasure through him. Like the first time he'd put a blade into a living thing.

“Get in,” Tu said to Loa Wei Fen one day as he folded back the leather roof and then hopped up onto the red-leather–upholstered bench seat. He gripped the polished wooden steering wheel in both hands, then stuck his right hand out and squeezed the horn. The blaring honk made him smile again. It always did, and it was just as well, because the way he drove he had need of the horn quite often.

He was thrilled that his automobile had an electric ignition system so he could start it with the flick of a switch, while the
Fan Kuei
had to insert a metal turning device into the engine block and crank his engine into life. Tu remarked to himself that it was the first time he
had ever seen Silas Hordoon do any manual labour whatsoever.

Tu's only complaint about his new automobile was that it had only three speeds: very slow, pretty slow, and not so fast. He set his men to work on that, and within ten days his Bugatti could go fast enough to scatter peasants in the streets, outrace a trotting horse, and, if he so desired, smash into and through carts that were in his way on the road.

Gangster Tu was a happy man.

Meyer Vrassoon, not to be outdone, but being of conservative tastes, ignored the fancy Italian cars and purchased four Meredith tonneau cars from the Abingdon Automotive Works of Birmingham, England.

Charles Soong shortly followed suit, buying two cars built in France under licence from Armand Peugeot. Soong's vehicles used a Daimler engine with a pedal-operated clutch, a chain transmission leading to a change-speed gearbox, and, perhaps most astonishing, an engine mounted in the front. And they could really gain speed, especially if started in a downhill position.

The House of Zion, ever patriotic, bought their automobile from America, a Curved Dash Oldsmobile built by Ransome Eli Olds.

William Dent bought the actual automobile that won the Peking to Paris automobile race, an Italia. While Heyward Matheson, in prudent Scottish style, awaited the more reasonably priced machine that eventually came off the world's very first assembly line, the Ford Model T.

And these Taipans drove their horseless carriages on the streets of Shanghai with a conceit that matched the cocksure buildings they had erected on the Bund, and
an indifference to the safety and well-being of their fellow citizens that, with the exception of Silas and Heyward Matheson, mirrored their basic attitude toward the unfortunate need for other people to inhabit their town, prepare their meals, be converted to their faith, and, most importantly, pay for their opium.

The Chosen Three and the Carver scanned the front room of Jiang's carefully. The dawn was moments away. They'd had to wait for hours until the room was finally clear of its clientele. An hour earlier Jiang had woken the old Go player and helped him to a rickshaw that would take him home. One of Tu's men had gotten so drunk that he'd had trouble finding his way out, and one of Jiang's girls had found that she was pregnant and needed to talk with Jiang about her future.

During all this, Loa Wei Fen had been forced to wait in a small anteroom lest Tu's man see him.

And now the sun was about to rise.

Mai Bao took her mother's arm as she painfully moved toward the velvet-covered box bench. The Confucian closed the front door, and Loa Wei Fen
carefully shut and locked the door leading to the interior rooms. The Carver loosed the curtains from their sashes and pulled the shutters to. Then Jiang turned on a single light and said, “Open the box.”

The Confucian and Loa Wei Fen lifted the heavy thing onto a couch, then unfastened the hidden latch on the back. It flopped open, revealing the Tusk.

“Take it out and hold it by the light,” Jiang ordered. The men did as she requested. When the Tusk was near her, Jiang tilted the light toward the relic and said, “Look, it's talking to us again.”

Mai Bao turned to her mother. Using fanciful phrases like “talking to us” were not like her. Mai Bao smelled the gentle sweetness of rot about her mother and noted the deep yellow of her eyes. She was about to say something when her mother ordered, in a surprisingly strong voice, “Look!”

And they did—and what they saw shocked them. The relic was deteriorating at a much quicker pace. Several open cracks were now evident in the upper surface, and in each of the three windows new figures were emerging as the “roofs” of the tableaux rotted away.

“Change is coming,” Jiang said. “Can't you smell it?”

And the dance that was Shanghai continued at the Bend in the River, but not without missteps—dangerous missteps.

In 1905 the Japanese defeated the Russian army, marking the first time in modern history that an Asian army had bested a European army. Victory celebrations broke out all over Asia, especially in the Middle Kingdom. But before the celebrations ended, the American Congress extended the Chinese Exclusion Acts, which forbade any person of Chinese origin from entering the United States. Immediately the victory celebrations turned into riots on the streets of Nanking and Canton. Denying access to the Golden Mountain to the Chinese fuelled a hatred that had not ended with the failure of the Boxer or Taiping rebellions.

Then, in the middle of a moonless night, a massive typhoon slammed into the island of Hong Kong.

It smashed into the coast with such ferocity and speed that the shoreline districts were instantly swamped, and thousands of poor Chinese who lived there were dragged out to sea in an icy embrace that would be the last thing they felt on this earth. In the darkness, women lost children and old people were left abandoned as they slept. Only the fortunate found a strong enough boulder behind which to escape the ocean's surge, although many of them were crushed between the water's pull and the adamantine rocks.

Cries of pain and fear filled the darkness as the living and the dying begged for the light of dawn to come quickly.

The typhoon headed out to sea without swooping up the mountain to the homes of the
Fan Kuei
.

When the dawn finally came, thousands of sodden, terrified Chinese made their way up the mountainside to ask for help from the wealthy
Fan Kuei
. They were met with rifle fire and Sikh police officers who beat them unmercifully.