The Nine Fold Heaven (22 page)

“Camilla, slow down, I’m not awake yet.”

“Well, then wake up. You know that as a skeleton woman, I’m not going to take no for an answer,” I said matter-of-factly, beginning to pull down his pajama pants.

“Camilla, you don’t want to wake up our neighbors!”

“Don’t you realize, time is
always
running out, for you, for me, for everyone?”

My lover’s eyelids kept drooping as he said groggily, “Of course . . .”

It was surprisingly urgent, despite our exhaustion. Afterward, Jinying and I cuddled with each other, savoring the lingering warmth—and love.

He planted a kiss on my forehead. “Camilla, I’m worried about you, you look a bit—”

“A bit what?”

“Hmm . . . out of sorts. Please tell me what’s on your mind?”

I really didn’t think he’d understand my relationship with Shadow, so I simply said, “Shadow checked out early this morning. She left me a letter but refuses to say where she is going. She doesn’t want us to see each other ever again.”

Jinying’s reply surprised me. “Good.”

“Why good?” I was annoyed, for Shadow was no longer an enemy or just a partner, but a friend.

“I never liked the woman, so I’m glad she’s finally out of our way.”

“But she did us a big favor and I miss her.”

“You do, why? She’s never been nice to you.”

I sighed. “
Hai,
Jinying, I don’t think you’ll understand. Ever.”

“Then explain to me.”

“You shouldn’t hate her. Understand that she’s just like I was, struggling all alone to survive in the boiling cauldron of Shanghai.”

He didn’t respond, so I went on, my tone definite. “I’ll find her.”

Jinying looked horrified. “No, Camilla!”

“Why not?”

“You should respect her wish to be left alone. Let go! I’m sure you two can do very well without each other.”

I didn’t respond to this. I was thinking how ironic that once I lamented that heaven had thrust Shadow onto my path to compete with me, yet now wished she’d stay and be my friend!

I sighed inside. No matter how I missed my friend and would like to look for her, maybe I should listen to Jinying.

Yes, I’d let go of Shadow, but there was another person even harder to let go of. I wanted to see Gao one last time before we vanished from each other’s lives forever. But, of course, this was not something to discuss with Jinying. Anyway, with Wang on his way out, we could at last focus completely on what was most important—finding our baby, Jinjin.

PART SEVEN

28

Sacred Heart

E
very day, Jinying and I eagerly opened the newspapers to see if there was anything about Lung or Wang. It seemed that no one knew Lung was dead, as his burial was secret. Or perhaps it was simply that no one cared, as he’d already been missing from the Shanghai scene for months. While there were brief mentions of Wang every day, they gave no specific details. No reporter wanted to be caught seeming to back the wrong side.

Wang’s hospitalization must have created great excitement among the other warlords, who had long been vying to replace him. However, they were stepping cautiously as, unlike me, they could not be certain his condition was fatal. Should he come back from near death, he would not be kindly disposed to anyone who had tried to usurp his place. But I knew that it would be only a few more days until he would set out upon the immortal’s journey. Indeed, he was already as dead as the pig chosen for his birthday banquet.

It was now inevitable that the Shanghai underworld would undergo a huge transformation. As the Chinese saying goes, all the gangsters were “rubbing their fists and flexing their arms,” ready for the fight of the century to slash throat and grab the throne. Master Lung of the Flying Dragons, of course, was not in the running, and I suspected that his men were nervously trying to decide which of the competing gangsters to seek employment with, their former boss already as forgotten as the last emperor. But not Gao. Not only did he not seek employment elsewhere, he’d even risked his life trying to revenge Master Lung. Was he still alive somewhere?

 

As men of the underworld were preoccupied with seeking gold, Jinying and I were busy planning how to find our son. Jinying and I had taken to going to a dingy eatery nearby for breakfast of soy milk and long, straight Chinese doughnuts. In this crowded, modest place I could feel secure that no one was paying any attention to us. After seeking notice as an entertainer for so long, I felt strange now having to struggle to avoid it.

We endlessly discussed what to do next.

I suggested, “I can go back to the Sacred Heart Convent and beg the nuns to tell me who has adopted Jinjin. I’ll start by telling them we want to be sure he is raised as Catholic.”

Jinying took a meditative sip of his tea, then looked around and lowered his voice. “What about if they won’t tell you? Besides, you have no proof.”

I took a big gulp of my own tea, burned my lips, and blurted out, “All right, then I’ll go to the abbess’s office at night to steal the file. I have the special Open-One-Hundred-Doors key that Big Brother Wang gave me.”

Jinying thought for a while, then said, “Camilla, our son’s name is Jinjin. But you don’t know what Lewinsky named him?”

“I believe she named him Anton Lewinsky—it was on Madame Lewinsky’s gravestone.”

I went on. “But I still need to get ahold of Lewinsky’s file to see who adopted Jinjin.”

“All right, let’s give it a try. We’ll go together.”

Alarmed by his statement, I quickly said, “No, Jinying, they are very suspicious of men. I’ll go by myself. I’ve been a spy, so I know how to navigate such things, but you don’t.”

He didn’t like this suggestion. So I added, “Jinying, if you come along and something happens, it’s much harder for two people to get away than one. If we get caught, I don’t want to imagine the consequences.”

He looked at me anxiously. “All right, Camilla. But remember, Jinjin is
our
son.”

Thus decided, on the next Wednesday, which I assumed would be a quiet time in the convent, I set out in the deep womb of the night, expecting everyone to be sound asleep. When I arrived at the Sacred Heart Convent, the sky was inky black and there were no other pedestrians, nor any sounds other than the distant rumble of traffic. I wore dark peasant’s clothes to be as close to invisible as possible.

I’d come yesterday to survey the yard and the building, and so was able to find my way easily to the back entrance. With a few twists and turns of my master key, the wooden door emitted a soft, celebratory click and swung open to reveal a long, dark staircase. Entry had been surprisingly easy, perhaps the nuns counted on God to protect them, or just assumed that no one would dare to intrude upon their sacred space—let alone steal from it.

I sneaked inside and, wearing my cloth slippers, walked noiselessly. Under my torch’s dancing light, I carefully made my way to the abbess Sister Mary Stone’s office on the ground floor. Once again, I took out my master key and slipped it into the keyhole. This one, like a virgin, showed some reluctance to yield, even to my special key.

Perhaps this lock had been specially made to safeguard what was inside. Or maybe it was just like its boss, the sixtyish Sister Mary Stone, who also yielded her secrets with great reluctance. But my training had taught me determination and patience. So after seemingly endless gentle twisting in all the auspicious and inauspicious directions and angles, with the application of just a little strength, the lock finally surrendered with a long-awaited sigh of release. I couldn’t help but feel satisfaction at the culmination of my courtship of the lock.

But I didn’t swing open the door and strut in like a regular customer into his favorite prostitute’s gate. Instead, I softly pushed the door inch by inch until the crack was large enough for me to peek. After making sure there was no one inside, I slipped in.

I relied on the narrow beam of my flashlight, aided by my memory, to make my way to the metal cabinet that I knew held all the documents. I opened the drawers with my key and took a quick look. I noticed there were several drawers with labels such as “Sisters,” “Staff,” “Guests . . .”

As I flipped through the folders in this nearly dark room, the rustling of papers sounded eerily like ghosts whispering, perhaps trying to tell me secrets forgotten for decades, or even for centuries. I was saddened to read of the misfortunes that brought people here—consolation for loss, refuge from creditors, destitution, even care of terminal illness for those with no living families.

There seemed to be two main reasons that women came here. Some wanted to marry Jesus and live with him happily ever after. But in his gloomy, lifeless, grand building? I wondered could those who were so eager to share Jesus with his many wives under the same roof be happy with only a prayer in their “marital” bed? Or were they simply too wounded by a failed romance to continue to live in the world. Did they find peace, or only quiet desperation?

Others hoped that by confessing a few sins and doing some easy penances, they could spend the rest of their lives in this sacred place—for free.

I let out a soft sigh. If I had known about Sacred Heart, could I have come here to escape the gangster world? But this would be an unlikely fate for me. Few escape the underworld completely. Rather than seek God’s protection, they would offer expensive gifts to induce another gangster head to take them in.

How would one go about entering the convent? Would God also require a bribe? And if so, with what? Chinese burn paper money at funerals to bribe the King of Hell to let the deceased pass easily through the Ghosts’ Gate. But I could not imagine that the Christian God would accept such an offering. What about the bishop?

I worked my way down to the bottom drawer, which was labeled only with a simple cross. I guessed that this was the place of repose for the files of the dead. Thumbing through the alphabet it took me only a few minutes to find the file of Julie Lewinsky.

My heart beat fast as I held the flashlight closer so I could better read. The first page gave Lewinsky’s name, age, nationality, place of birth, date of birth, and death. The second page was a report on her entering the convent:

Just then I was startled to hear the telephone ring, jolting me back to the present. It kept ringing, but before I had a chance to decide what to do, footsteps were approaching. I quickly slipped the file back into the drawer, then hid myself inside the storage room next to the cabinet.

Just after I turned off my flashlight and pulled the door closed, I heard someone enter and switch on the light. Through a small crack in the door panel, I saw that it was the abbess. She was wearing a loose white gown with her sullen-looking hair imprisoned under a mesh. My heart beat fast like Lewinsky’s metronome set at presto pace.

Who would call in the middle of the night to wake up the virginal, formidable, and now sleep-deprived abbess?

She sat down regally, picked up the phone, and spoke in a groggy yet authoritative alto voice. “Hello? Yes?”

Suddenly her tone lost its clam and turned theatrical. “What? Oh, how terrible! Who is he? You mean you called me about a gangster? So he’s injured, someone stabbed him or shot him? Just take him to the hospital! Sacred Heart is a convent, and we sisters care for God-fearing folk. But you have been generous with us so we will pray to our Almighty Lord for his recovery. Remember, we are sisters, not doctors.... Don’t worry, I ‘ll pray.”

The abbess hung up, then exclaimed, “Tough luck for him! But better not wake me up again in the middle of the night because of some common criminal! Doesn’t everyone know that I need all the sleep I can get to run this place?!”

She abruptly stood up, walked past me, flicked off the light, and closed the door with a bang. A hot nun—at least her temper. I waited till the sound of her slippers had vanished down the hall before I stepped out from the closet.

I snatched back Lewinsky’s file from the cabinet drawer and pulled out as many of the pages as I could grasp. Then I heard another sound. Was the hot nun coming back for something to cool her down? But this time I knew not to overstay my non-welcome. I quickly stuffed what was left of the file back in the drawer, left the room, dashed down the stairs, and hurried out the back door into the cool air of Joffre Avenue.

On my way back to the hotel, I kept trying to figure out the phone call. It seemed to be that the injured person was a gangster of some sort. But Mary Stone never said his name. Of course, there were hundreds of gangsters in Shanghai, but I couldn’t help but fear that it was my lover Gao. I still had no idea if the gunshots I’d heard at Wang’s banquet were fired by him or at him. Whoever it was, the abbess would not allow him to come to the convent where he could heal, safe from attacks by his fellow criminals.

 

Back to the safety of the hotel room, I exclaimed, “Damn!” “What’s wrong?” Jinying came up to kiss me as he cast me a worried look.

I told him about the phone call and that I lost the chance to finish reading Lewinsky’s entire file.

I muttered, “I’m thinking if I should go back . . .”

“Why didn’t you just take the whole thing?”

“Because then they know it’s missing.”

“So what? You think they’ll look at those files after a person is dead?”

I bit my lip. Jinying was right. How stupid of me!

With a heavy heart and troubled mind, I picked up the pages I had managed to extract from Lewinsky’s file. Though completely exhausted, I stayed up with Jinying to study them.

As soon as I started to read, tears filled my eyes. Someone else had our baby but had moved to no one knew where. For the first time, I began to think that our search was truly hopeless. For some time my little Jinjin had not even come to me in my dream to ask after me and to scold me.

Silently—I had never told Jinying about these dreams—I thought,
Jinjin, can you come to your mama one more time to tell her that you’re all right?

Jinying pulled me to his arms and kissed me. “Camilla, I don’t know what to say to comfort you, but I’m sure little Jinjin is fine somewhere.”

I looked up at his tired, sunken face. “But where?”

He said, “Camilla, don’t feel too sad. We try our best to find Jinjin; if we still fail, maybe it’s heaven’s will that we should leave things as they are. I believe his adoptive American parents are now raising him in the US and will give him the best Western education.”

Did Jinying think this would comfort me? Maybe deep down he was not sure the baby was his.

 

After taking a day to recover from my night of breaking and entering, I decided it was time for one last visit to the Compassionate Grace Orphanage where I grew up. I told Jinying of my plan and he was eager to come with me. I told him that if he did, the staff would just bother him for a big donation, so it would be easier if I went by myself.