Shanghai (91 page)

As Mai Bao listened, other voices intruded—curious voices, hurtful voices—from the large crowd. Why was she walking alone? Why was her number-one son not by her side to hold her arm? Were the rumours true about the adopted twin girls? Were they really her natural daughters? How could she bear to sleep with the
Fa Kuei
? Didn't they stink? And on and on, as she marched her own Via Dolorosa toward the big turn in the road where she would briefly slip away from the procession.

She passed a delegation of high-ranking Japanese diplomats and felt their searing eyes penetrate her white robe and yank at her old breasts, pulling hard, trying to hurt her. She took a quick look and found herself falling into one of their young, handsome faces. Abruptly, something icy stopped her fall. The man's cruel, dark eyes gave the lie to his soft cheeks and bowed mouth. Then he spat at her.

The man's spittle hit the pavement just to her left.

She stopped for a moment and composed a curse, then stomped on the spit, to send the curse deep into the earth. She looked at the man a second time, and his almost lipless mouth creased into a smile—his dark eyes twinkled, and she saw his lips form the word
whore.

The funeral procession passed the imposing facade of Dent and Company; then, farther down the Bund, passed the portico, guarded by stone lions, of the Scottish trading giant Jardine Matheson; then, after a hitch in the famous avenue, passed the marble steps leading to the kingdom of the Vrassoons. The steps of every Bund building were crowded with men in their Sunday best. All raised their top hats as the cortège approached. And Shanghai quieted, not to silence, but to a kind of reverent murmur seldom heard before at that hour on its teeming streets.

In that murmur, memories of the deceased filtered through the crush of humanity as incoming tidewater does through a pebbled beach—leaving no trace but filling the air with echoes. One high-pitched, many-voiced echo cheered at seeing Silas driving the lead car with the Laughing Buddha around the racecourse before the Great Shanghai Road Race. Another echo, this one old and feminine, whispered of the sheer gall (in Mandarin always a comparison to the size of a man's testicles) it took for Silas to marry his Chinese mistress—and then take in twenty street children. “Cantaloupes, he must have had cantaloupes down there.” “No, he had watermelons—three of them—I saw them.” Another echo, this one male and stern, asked the question, “Where did he go?” Yes, Silas Hordoon's extended absence from Shanghai had not gone unnoticed. Although rumours had raced through the city, no one except the Chosen Three and the Carver had
any idea where the Jewish
Fan Kuei
had gone for all that time. Other dark, sibilant echoes whispered of perversion and human sacrifice behind the high walls of the Garden—especially after the arrival of the fifty odd-looking men in dark suits with side curls. A chorus of women's echoes asked the question, “What man would allow his wife to run a brothel?” This echo was immediately answered by a chorus of young men saying, “I'd marry a courtesan if she would have me—and Mai Bao is not any old courtesan. She is Jiang!” But beneath the tenor and soprano echoes there was a deep bass undercurrent insisting that Silas was a murderer—that somehow he had murdered his brother, Milo.

But these were the murmurings of the people on the street—the Han Chinese.

The trading community standing on their elevated perches murmured as well, but their murmurs were not echoes—they were open sighs of relief. A pro-Chinese voice—no,
the
pro-Chinese voice in their midst—had been silenced. Some even spoke of it being God's will that “the heathen leave this earth.” No one bothered to mention that if that were God's will, He had certainly taken His sweet time, since Silas had expired as one of the oldest men in Shanghai. “Aye, but God's will is God's will nonetheless,” countered the voice from Oliphant and Company out of Philadelphia. Neither time nor experience in the Celestial Kingdom had altered the opinions of the House of Zion one jot—their beliefs were their beliefs. They brooked no questioning. Neither their failures nor their successes with the people of the Middle Kingdom had altered an article of their faith—or enticed them into any form of rational thought.

But these Christian musings were cut short by the howls of Taoist monks, accompanied by the banging
of drums and the clash of cymbals. The ear-shattering noise was designed to pull thoughts from the specific deceased person to the general, all-encompassing truth that death awaits us all. The clatter said in no uncertain terms:
It is time to think of your own death before you are where this man is.
The horns, drums, and howls were as subtle as a slap in the face. As they were intended to be.

As Mai Bao's section of the procession neared the great turn from Nanking Lu (Bubbling Spring Road, still, to the
Fan Kuei
) she stumbled. Immediately, people stepped forward from the crowd and surrounded her. Under their cover, she slipped out of her white mourning garment, revealing a simple water-seller's tunic. She pulled her long, long hair into a bun and pinned it on the top of her head and slid out of the crowd around her, her place taken by a faithful maid, about her height, now dressed in white, with her long hair obscuring her face.

Mai Bao, in her disguise, pushed through the crowd. She passed a street doctor and two beggar men, who stepped aside and then assisted her into the basement of a tailor's shop. She had not used this entrance to the Warrens before and for a moment had trouble orienting herself. Then she heard the river to her right and knew which way she needed to travel.

Quickly she found the statue of Chesu Hoi in its niche and entered the once-secret chamber. The middle-aged Confucian and Loa Wei Fen's young, powerful son awaited her coming, with anxious looks on their faces. All knew that it was dangerous for Jiang to leave the funeral procession, but over and over again in their past it had proved valuable to meet at times of change. Delaying meetings could cause
them to miss crucial opportunities to complete their task and bring on the Age of the Seventy Pagodas. So the Confucian had devised the plan, and Jiang had executed it to perfection.

“What does this do to our position, now that the second Man with a Book has died?” asked the Assassin as soon as Jiang had caught her breath.

“I don't know,” she replied, thinking that the third Man with a Book, Charles Soong, was not long for this earth. “The next moves may not be ours to make,” she said.

“The Japanese,” the Confucian stated. The others agreed. The strange creep of racial distrust entered the chamber, and a profound silence followed. The Confucian allowed his eyes to move about the subterranean hall that had at one time housed the Narwhal Tusk. But the dank chamber held no answers. The silence elongated. The Carver, who often led meetings of the Chosen Three, was not in attendance as he was gravely ill and had yet to pick which of his sons was to carry on the obligation of the Ivory Compact.

“The Japanese must be seen as an opportunity. An opportunity to find the Man with a Book,” the Confucian said, then quickly added, with an odd smile, “as the Taipingers were an opportunity to build up the population here. Don't you agree?” His smile stayed on his face for an instant, then disappeared into his traditional solemnity.

Jiang nodded, although she was not sure what kind of opportunity the Japanese offered the Ivory Compact. She was more troubled by the partially hidden look on the Confucian's face. As a business person, she had often had to deal with people who were not completely sincere. She had found that insincerity revealed itself
most often in a person's not knowing whether he had spoken too little or too much—a confusion that was now evident on the Confucian's face.

Jiang turned to Loa Wei Fen's son, the Assassin. “Is the Guild preparing?”

The young man nodded but didn't bother to add that the preparations of the Guild of Assassins were, as he and his father had planned, not only underway in the Middle Kingdom but also moving quickly on the “island nation” of Manhattan, as people from that part of the world considered it.

Again silence descended upon them. Finally Jiang said, “This was dangerous and foolhardy.”

“Perhaps,” the Confucian said, his true expression once again hidden beneath his scholarly demeanor.

Jiang stared at the man for a long moment. The Confucian stared back at her, a wry smile coming to his face.

“I must return to the procession,” she said, and then she moved quickly out of the Warrens, exiting the underground world into the south end of the Bird and Fish Market.

She could hear the sharp clashes of the Taoists' horns and cymbals over the screech of parrots, the songs of nightingales, and the trills of thousands upon thousands of other birds awaiting sale in their delicate cages.

Mai Bao stood very still in the midst of the calls of the birds and allowed a simple prayer to fall from her lips. “May these birds sing you to Heaven, dear husband.”

A wren landed on her shoulder and shrilled in her ear.

Alone in the Bird and Fish Market she said his name aloud—“Silas!” It seemed to her that the birds all around her picked up the sound of the word and cawed and cooed and shrilled it until the cacophony
seemed about to lift her off the ground. Then they abruptly stopped.

Silence.

Unheard of in the Bird and Fish Market—silence.

She felt time collapse again and turned slowly and there he was.

“It was my proudest hour, Mai Bao, my very proudest, and I am so glad you were there to play a part.”

She nodded, and a smile came to her lips. She remembered, and treasured the memory as one does the details of an early love affair.

—

It was August, just over two years earlier.

“You don't like me,” Vrassoon had begun that day.

“That's not true,” Silas had responded

Mai Bao, sitting quietly to one side, knew that it was not true simply because Silas had as yet had no dealings with this whelp. She knew Silas did feel a natural antipathy to the young man's dark, well-deep eyes, which were startlingly like those of his grandfather, the old Patriarch, Eliazar Vrassoon. The young Vrassoon began laying out ghastly photographs on the study's rather large desktop: a horror gallery of starved and whipped and shot and mutilated and enslaved European Jewry.

Mai Bao watched as Silas scanned the images slowly. Finally he said, “It's true, then?” He let out a long sigh—an ancient sound from slaves long ago—a moment of breath asking,
Will it never end?

Vrassoon said, “It's true, Mr. Hordoon.” He indicated a large envelope in his pocket. “I have more, and far worse than those.”

Silas nodded and turned away.

Mai Bao understood that these were European Jews, and her husband did not consider himself a European anything.

“Are they trapped, these Jews?” he finally asked.

“Not completely, not yet.”

“They must be streaming toward the ports.”

“They were.”

“‘Were'? Why past tense? Why ‘were'?”

“Because boatloads of them have been turned back by the English, the Americans, the Canadians, the Australians, and the New Zealanders.”

“Don't want their ‘whiteness' tainted, do they?” Silas said in a whisper.

“Not the way I'd put it, Mr. Hordoon, but the idea is basically correct.”

A long silence followed.

“We have power here, Mr. Hordoon. We could take in many of our kind.”

Part of this Silas agreed with. He looked at the hawk-nosed young man across from him, then turned to Mai Bao. He smiled. She returned his smile. In rapid Shanghainese he said, “Serve tea, Mai Bao, and look this young man right in the face.”

Mai Bao was now in her late middle age but had lost none of her elegance. Her walk across the room was an exercise in grace itself.

She pushed a beautiful teacart with delicate oolong tea brewing in a fine porcelain teapot that was so translucent that the dancing strands of tea leaves left slender, intertwining shadows on the surface as they slowly yielded their flavour to the heated water.

She held out a cup to Vrassoon, who promptly turned his head from her.

“I am not a serving girl, Mr. Vrassoon,” Mai Bao said in a voice that, although soft, was full of fury.

“You are not my wife or sister or daughter,” he began, but Silas interrupted him.

“Absolutely right—she's my wife, and she offers you the finest tea in the Middle Kingdom served with grace in the most delicate onyx cups available anywhere in the world—and you avert your eyes, Mr. Vrassoon, as if she were a leper. Is this the behaviour we are to expect if I help you extend hospitality to ‘our fellows' and bring them to the Bend in the River?” Silas turned his eyes to the horrid images on his desktop. “If I helped you bring these people to our home here—to Shanghai—would they treat my wife as foully as you do? And would they deny that if Mai Bao and I had children they would be Jews? Would they do that, Mr. Vrassoon?”

Vrassoon sighed deeply, then spat out, “Don't do this! Your children would not be Jews because your wife is not a Jew. Is that not simple?”

“Extremely simple and extremely stupid. Everything in nature says intermix. Look at the health and beauty that the mixing of the races brings. Are you blind?”

“I am not blind, Mr. Hordoon, I am a believing Jew. I do not look at women who are not of my family, and I do not question the rules and wisdom of the Bible.”

“Even if it leads you to exclude people of value? People who could renew your world? Perhaps even bring it into the twentieth century?”

Vrassoon reached forward and collected his photographs. As he did, Silas's face darkened. Mai Bao knew that another set of photographs—doctored images
showing this man's uncle brutalizing a young Chinese girl—had once crossed this very desk. Those photographs had cost the Vrassoon family their monopoly on direct trade with China, and this man's uncle his life. Silas had spoken to her of this, of his doubts about the morality of that action of his father's—and now here was, perhaps, a chance for him to repent for that sin, to lessen the load of souls on his back.