Shanghai (90 page)

He went to the door of the Garden—and locked it.

He never left the Garden again.

Silas Hordoon was adrift in the currents of the world. Even Mai Bao's delicate touch could not bring him back to life. He awoke the next morning well before the sun and installed an extra lock on each gate to the Garden.

That first morning he summoned MacMillan. “I am glad to see you are well,” he said.

“Aye, Captain. Quite well.”

“Good,” Silas said, and then he arranged to have his entire business operation moved to a small house on the north side of his estate. And there he began the process of cashing in all his assets.

“And doing what with them, Captain?” MacMillan asked.

“Use them for my bank,” Silas replied.

“The Shanghai Macao Bank?”

Silas laughed.

“What?” MacMillan demanded.

“It's an awful name,” Silas said, “rename it. The Shanghai part stays, but use some other Chinese city with it.”

“You want me to pick the other city, Captain?”

Silas thought about that for a moment, then said, “Sure. Pick another Asian city to go along with Shanghai for the bank's name.”

He spent most mornings with his children and grandchildren and tried as best he could to love them. But he was fading and he knew it. The old curse of not feeling was returning with a startling urgency.

He awoke every morning drenched in sweat. He often missed meals simply because he forgot to eat, no longer taking any pleasure from the delicacies his master chef created.

It wasn't until three years after his return, while he was tending the hydrangeas blooming over the spot where his brother had fallen to his death, that he looked up and saw Mai Bao standing, watching him. He asked, “Who won?”

“Won what, husband?”

“The car race.”

“You mean the Great Shanghai Road Race?”

“Is that what they called it?”

“It is.”

“So who won the Great Shanghai Road Race?”

“The Vrassoons' Rolls Royce Silver Ghost came in first, and the Jardine Matheson Simplex Racing Car second.”

Silas nodded and returned to the hydrangeas.

Mai Bao watched him for a long while. Finally she said, “Does it bother you that the Vrassoons won the race and the prize money you supplied?”

Silas didn't lift his eyes from his labours but shook his head slowly and said, “No. Why should it? It's all one, Mai Bao. I see that now. It's all one.”

Late 1911 to February 22, 1934

And time passed quickly, as it did sometimes in the vast history of the Middle Kingdom.

The Manchu Dynasty fell, or, to be more precise, simply crumpled. Dr. Sun Yat-sen momentarily became president of the Republic of China, but that was short-lived as he found himself beholden to local warlords wherever he went—one of whom eventually assumed the presidency and promptly attempted to start a new dynasty. Eventually the foolish Doctor accepted a post as Minister of Railways in the new government.

An American journalist who travelled with the good Doctor shortly after his Cabinet appointment was appalled to see the foolish man take a map of China and
simply draw straight lines on it from east to west and

north to south.

“And what would those be?” the journalist asked.

“Railways. This is my plan for a new railway system for China.”

The journalist stared at the lines on the map. They crossed mountains and rivers and deserts without a hint of understanding the difficulty presented by the topographical realities. When the journalist pointed these out, the good doctor replied, “Yes, but they are the most direct routes.”

The good doctor managed to alienate his financial backer, Charles Soong, by first taking on Charles's youngest daughter as a secretary and then, without asking Charles's permission, marrying the girl, who was young enough to be his daughter. Not to be outdone by his nominal commander, Generalissimo Chiang Kai Shek married Charles's eldest daughter, once again without asking permission. As these events were causing havoc in the Soong household, the middle Soong daughter was secretly spending time in the company of student revolutionaries in the growing Chinese Communist Party.

These three western-dressed Chinese women, as predicted by the Narwhal Tusk, had much to do with the unfolding history of their country. Eventually they became known as the Three Sisters—“She Who Loves Money,” “She Who Loves Power,” and “She Who Loves China.”

Charles himself, by the mid-1920s, had handed over much of his personal power to his sons and, not unlike Silas, retreated from the fray.

Three Men with a Book—Gangster Tu, Silas Hordoon, and Charles Soon(g)—had played their part in the expanding tapestry of Shanghai. But a fourth Man with a Book was ascending, and he would eventually enter Shanghai at the head of a great army—and change
everything at the Bend in the River. Although first he would have to march far to the north to avoid slaughter at the hands of Chiang Kai Shek's Kuomintang army, avoid the duplicity of the Russian Communist Party officials, and build an army to rival the Taipingers' before taking on the Japanese invaders.

Wherein the invasion and expulsion of the Japanese forms the background against which the end of the story of the Hordoons is played out. It also presents the final challenge for the Chosen Three and the Carver. As well, the New History Teller and the boy, Zhong Fong, are introduced before the Age of Dry Water descends upon the city at the Bend in the River.

Silas saw them only as shadows in the far corners of his bedroom. At first he assumed they were his victims, Milo and Miranda—but he was wrong. As the sands of his life escaped in swifter and swifter flushes, the light in his darkened room seemed to intensify, and the shadow he'd thought was Milo awaiting his chance for revenge turned out to be, in fact, the stooped and aged figure of Charles Soong. Silas had been even more wrong in thinking that the other figure was his first wife, Miranda. Not only was the figure revealed by the growing light not Caucasian, it was also male. The man turned and approached the foot of his bed—it was the bloodied, sneering Gangster Tu.

The old thief broke the silence in the room. “‘Bout time y'er joinin' us,” he mumbled in a language that
should have been Mandarin or perhaps Cantonese but oddly sounded more like Yiddish than any other language that Silas knew.

Then the palsied figure of Charles Soong turned toward Gangster Tu and said, “What d'ya mean, join
us
? I'm not dead, yet.”

Silas nodded his agreement, although he was astonished that Charles Soong had replied to Gangster Tu in what was now most certainly Yiddish.

“I'm dying, then?” Silas asked, also in Yiddish.

“Did ya' think you'd be the first person to live forever?” Gangster Tu asked.

“I admit I'd considered that possibility,” Silas acquiesced, astonished that he knew the Yiddish words for “admit,” “considered,” and “possibility.” Not exactly words that come up in everyday speech, he consoled himself, then wondered why he was consoling himself, and what the Yiddish word for “console” was.

“Well, be that as it may,” Charles said, “the truth remains that we were irrelevant—all three of us—a tease, a distraction from the real show. Nothing more.”

“How do you mean?” Gangster Tu asked.

Silas sighed deeply. “We were just the catalyst,” he said, amazed that his Yiddish vocabulary contained that arcane word.

“Explain it to him, old Jew,” Charles said, without the least hint of rancour.

Silas opened his mouth but no words came, so Charles supplied the vital explanation. “A catalyst is an element that must be present to allow a process of change to occur. If the catalyst is not there, then no change can take place. But the catalyst itself never changes, it is always the same. With the exception of allowing the change to take place, the catalyst has no other purpose in nature,
and is always left behind in the process. The catalyst is the necessary uselessness needed for change and growth to happen, but is itself of no value and is ultimately discarded by both man and nature once the process of change is complete.”

“So,” Tu snarled, “we, the three of us, were just …”

“… catalysts to allow change and growth at the Bend in the River.”

Tu harrumphed. “Now we are as useless as nipples on men.”

Silas thought about that. Then about the grizzled junk Captain who must have put the Bible in with his father's journals, then about the ancient lion that had whispered in his ear in the blue desert night. He thought about the rumours of a search for a Man with a Book. He looked at the other two men. He hadn't noticed before that Gangster Tu was carrying his much-thumbed copy of the
I Ching
in his right hand and Charles was holding a copy of his newest publication in his left. To Silas's surprise he felt something in his own hands. He looked down and saw that he was holding his father's journals.

“Do you want me to read to you again, husband?” Mai Bao asked gently as she took the weight of the journals from his hands.

Silas stared at her. When had she come into the room, and where were Charles and Gangster Tu?

She repeated her question.

He shook his head.

“Then what, Silas? Tell me.”

When he opened his mouth no words came at first, then they tumbled out. “Am I speaking Yiddish?” he asked.

“If you were I wouldn't be able to answer you, Silas.”

“Then I am speaking Shanghainese?”

“And very beautifully, as you always have done, husband.”

“I am dying, Mai Bao.”

“Yes, Silas, as we all must.”

Then he asked her, “Was it all for nothing? Was I just a catalyst?”

But this question she couldn't answer, as it was asked in ancient Farsi.

Silas grabbed her arm and, with surprising strength, pulled her close to his lips. “Find the Man with the Book, Mai Bao, find him! The Man with the Book is what we have led to all along.”

But as much as Mai Bao tried to understand Silas's growingly agitated pleas she was at a loss as to what to say, since she didn't even recognize the language he was now speaking, let alone what it was he wanted from her. In fact, she knew only one word from the language Silas was speaking—a very good word—a word that at times provided a relief denied even to prayer:
Oy
.

And she said the word—and Silas smiled, then was no more.

1936

The city at the Bend in the River had never seen anything quite like the solemn procession fronted by the horse-drawn trundle cart upon which sat the black-draped coffin of one Mr. Silas Hordoon—multi-millionaire, builder of the Garden, cotton baron, opium baron, real estate baron, banker, Jew, lover of Shanghai—murderer of his brother, Milo. The cortège made its stately way down Bubbling Spring Road toward the right turn onto the Bund, where Silas had once ordered a large, concave wall built to protect the citizenry before the Great Shanghai Road Race. The wall had succeeded in its assigned task. Not a single Shanghainese was hurt when the Hordoon racing car flipped over at that precise point
of the race course. Even the driver, MacMillan, had escaped harm, despite the fact that he had not worn his seat harness. Only an African cook had died. An African cook who was later buried with honour and tears by another man of power and wealth in the city at the Bend in the River, one Mr. Charles Soong. And in a city that had no secrets—whose vast spy networks quickly converted the hidden into the exposed—no one had yet been able to bring to light the reason for Charles Soong's extraordinary reaction to the death of a simple African kitchen worker.

The horse-drawn cart carrying Silas's unadorned coffin slowed for a moment to allow the long line of mourners to catch up. First in the procession behind the cart were Silas's twenty adopted children, their spouses, and their children. Three had grandchildren in arms. All were dressed in the traditional white worn by Chinese mourners but none cried out or wept—all maintained vigilant control of their emotions.

Next in the procession, unaccompanied and several paces behind the children, Mai Bao, now known to most Shanghainese as Jiang, walked slowly, head bowed.

She had not slept for days and time was collapsing on her. The past and the present were intermingling, and she was periodically lost in the shifting images of what was and what is. But she didn't mind. It helped her remember. And as she looked at the pavement moving beneath her feet she was remembering. Remembering how shy this man had been. How he had begged her to show him how to please her. How he had reddened when she'd turned on the light in his bedroom and insisted that he watch her disrobe. Then how she had undressed him and taken him in hand. How gently he'd tried to love her. How disappointed he had been
that she did not become pregnant, how it hurt her to have to fool him. There had never been a member of the Ivory Compact who was not a full-blooded Han Chinese. Although it was true that the Compact could not have continued without Silas's extraordinary journey to Baghdad, that still did not qualify him as a member of the Ivory Compact—and that hurt him too. He had so many successes—and failures. She remembered how his beard had tickled her thighs.
But why all these pillow thoughts now?
she wondered.
Because the pillow is the opposite of the place where your gentle husband now lies—and will continue to lie until he is fully returned to the earth
, she answered herself, in a voice that she knew belonged to her and to her mother and to her grandmother and to all the Jiangs before her.