by S. J. Rozan
“I don’t know.”
“Okay, we’ll be there.”
“So will we.”
“No.”
“Yes! Mary, she’ll be casing it, you know she will. She won’t show unless she sees us.”
“I’ll have someone there who looks like you.”
“Both of us? Even if you did, she might not buy it. Besides, we don’t know what she wants to tell me. Don’t you want to know?”
“Maybe she doesn’t want to tell you anything. Maybe she wants to shoot you.”
“Then why call? Why not just stalk me? Come on, Mary, she may give up something you can use. Or something Inspector Wei can use. Just let us talk to her. Then you can pick her up.”
“It’s dangerous.”
“Danger’s my middle name.”
“Lydia’s your middle name.” I could feel the friend wanting to protect me and the cop wanting to close her case. I tried to help out the cop.
“Remember, she doesn’t know I’m onto her.”
“How do you know?”
“She didn’t have to make contact. She could have stayed disappeared.”
Mary didn’t answer. I was right and she knew it. “And you don’t know where she is now?”
“If I did, wouldn’t I have told you?” Again, no answer. “Okay, okay, but probably I would have. Anyway, she hung up as soon as the magic words—‘Shanghai Moon’—were out of her mouth. And don’t I get a Good Citizen Award for calling you now?”
“With a gold star. And if you hear from her again before eleven, you’d better go for another one.”
“Yeah, and when you make First Grade based on my inside info, you’d better remember whose inside info it was.”
“And you remember this: if you feel at any time tonight, at any instant, that you’re in danger, you send me a signal.”
“I’ll scratch my head, how’s that? But come on, Bill will be with me.”
“Not the same Bill I called the other day, to suggest he call you? No, it couldn’t be that one, you were mad about that.”
Between Mary’s needling and the grin that popped up on Bill’s face when he heard me use him to reassure her, I felt like the ham in the sandwich.
“And,” Mary said, “of course you’ll be wearing your Kevlar?”
“Yes, Mom. Though if Alice wanted to do me in, I still don’t see why she’d have bothered to call and arrange a meeting.”
“To make sure you were in a dark park in the middle of the night?”
“Oh. Well, besides that.”
Closing the phone, I asked Bill, “Are you hungry?”
He toed out his cigarette. “You’re saying that after watching your cousin and that pizza, you’d ever consider food again?”
“You drank his Coke. From the same can his lips had touched.”
“That was line-of-duty. Trying to impress my boss with my dedication.”
“What, you want a raise?”
“No,” he said. “I just want to keep the job.”
I met his eyes, then turned away, not sure at all how to answer that.
We picked up vegetable dumplings, Mongolian beef, and stir-fried water spinach to take out. The place we went to is a hole-in-the-wall with three tables. Two were empty, so we could have stayed, but I had a strong urge to eat in my office, feet on the desk, takeout containers everywhere.
“Reclaiming your territory,” Bill said, hefting the bag off the counter. “If you were a dog you’d be peeing in the corners.”
“Thank you, Dr. Freud. It’s more like I just don’t want to have to deal with other people.” That’s what I said, and that’s what I thought. So when we opened my office door and everything was just as I’d left it, the relief that washed over me was a surprise. I tore off yesterday’s page from the Far Pagoda Tofu Factory calendar while Bill extracted containers from the bag. “You know what I’m thinking?”
“I never do.”
“That I’d like to pee in the corners. No, seriously. It’s . . .” I tried to frame my thoughts. “I don’t care much about stuff, you know?”
“I know.”
“And this stuff”—I waved my chopsticks around—“it’s strictly Salvation Army. But it’s mine. Whoever the White Eagles let in here didn’t break anything and didn’t steal anything, but I’m furious anyway. Does that make sense?”
“Absolutely.”
I dipped a dumpling in sauce and made quick work of it. “You know what else?”
“What else?”
“Rosalie. Elke. All those people having to leave their stuff behind, or watching the Nazis take it or smash it and they couldn’t do anything. And people’s whole families being killed. People you loved, cousins you didn’t even know you had. It makes me think about what Joel said about Holocaust asset recovery being a religious calling. It’s not about the stuff, is it?”
“No.” Bill sat with his legs extended, just fitting alongside my desk. It was, I realized, his usual spot; years ago I’d moved the desk over to give him more room. “But it generally isn’t about the stuff. Even when it is. Even when the motivator is greed. It’s about having. Staking out your territory, making it bigger and bigger and giving yourself more corners to pee in as though more and bigger will protect you.”
“From?”
“The fact that really, you can’t control anything.”
I thought about that as I speared some water spinach. “And Mr. Chen.”
“What about him?”
“The Shanghai Moon. It was his mother’s. He lost her, and he’s spent his life looking for it. I get that, now.”
We ate in silence for a while, until finally we ran out of things to eat.
“I’m still hungry,” I said.
“I know.”
“What do you mean, you know?”
“You always eat a lot when your adrenaline’s pumping. Like when you’ve been in a fight. Or now.”
“We should have gotten roast pork,” I said.
“Uh-huh. And a baak chit gai.”
“You know that term?”
“I’m not as white as I look.”
Luckily, I didn’t need to answer that. A cell phone rang, but when I grabbed mine up, it nestled in my hand in innocent silence. “Smith,” Bill said into the one that was actually ringing. Glancing at me, he said, “That’s great. Can’t wait to hear it, but can you call back? We’re at Lydia’s office. We’ll put you on speaker.” He gave my office number, and in the ten seconds between one call and the other, he told me, “Professor Edwards.”
“Oh, good. But you know, your cell phone has a speaker function.” He looked at it blankly as my desk phone rang. I hit the button. “Hi, Professor. How are you?”
“Just jim-dandy,” Professor Edwards’s voice boomed. “My researcher found you some stuff. I might have to give her an A.”
“It’s that good?”
“From where I sit. No idea whether it’s useful to you, though. Come to think of it, it was pretty much all in the same place—German war records, China division—so maybe it’ll just be an A minus. Ready?”
“Shoot,” said Bill.
“Your boy Ulrich, Gunther. Rank: Major. Sent to Shanghai 1938. Want to know why?”
“Why?”
“He was a pain in the Führer’s ass, that’s why. Now, I could have told you that without wasting this young woman’s time looking anything up. The only officers the Reich shipped to Shanghai to help out their very close allies and personal friends the Japanese were the ones they didn’t want screwing up the home front.”
“You mean incompetents?” Bill asked.
“Not necessarily. Sometimes, if a guy was a moron but well connected, yes. But they sent Robert Neumann there. The Butcher of Buchenwald, you’ve heard of him. He was good at his job, which was gruesome experiments and murder. But someone decided he was out of control, which by the way he was. So good-bye Dr. Neumann. With Ulrich, it was his mouth got him in trouble. He thought Hitler was misguided on some issu
es, imagine that. Particularly he suggested they might be focusing a tad too obsessively on Jews, gays, and Gypsies and ought to consider putting resources into defeating other countries’ militaries instead of rounding up civilians—their own and everyone else’s—and spending good German marks, which were less good every day, building places to put them and paying people to guard and kill them.”
“A champion of human rights.”
“A practical soldier. That Master Race thing drained off a lot of Nazi resources. Brought them down, in the end. But no one wanted to hear it. So they ship Ulrich to Shanghai with his wife and kid. For work, he’s supposed to sniff around the Chinese puppet military, make sure no one’s thinking of overthrowing the Germans’ very close allies and personal friends the Japanese. So he does, and before you can say Jackie Robinson he’s running around with General Zhang. The brother-in-law-to-be of your boy, Chen Kai-rong.”
“Yes,” I said. “We remember who he is.”
“Good, you might pass after all. Ulrich and Zhang get to be bunghole buddies, and Ulrich, that flower of Aryan manhood, flourishes in the rich Shanghai soil. Fertilized, it seems, by the dung at the bottom: gambling dens, bars, establishments of ill repute.”
“Flower houses,” I said.
“Show-off,” he replied.
“I’m not the one who laid out the extended metaphor. Do you do that all the time?”
“If you spent your life trying to wake up stoned snoring slackers—hey, look, I can do alliteration, too. Now, shall I fast-forward to Ulrich’s demise?”
My sense was that any conversation with Professor Edwards was already on fast-forward, but I said, “Yes, please do.”
“February 23, 1943. Recognize the date?”
“Yes, I do, but I’m not sure why.”
“You flunk. That’s the day the Shanghai Municipal Police arrested your boy, Chen Kai-rong. It was the beginning of the end for Major Ulrich here.”
“Why? What did he do?”
“Well, now, that’s an interesting question. Seems he called his very close et cetera the Japanese, asked them to suggest to the SMP that they treat Chen Kai-rong with kid gloves. Chen was his buddy Zhang’s brother-in-law, after all. Zhang must have called him.”
“No. There was no love lost between the general and Kairong. Mei-lin asked the general to help, and he said Kai-rong was a traitor and should rot in jail. She called Ulrich herself.”
“How do you know that?”
“It’s in Mei-lin’s diary. But we didn’t know who Ulrich was.”
“That’s the diary that you’re going to let me read any minute now.”
“Yes, that one.”
“As soon as we’re sure people aren’t being killed because of it,” Bill said. “We wouldn’t want to lose you.”
“Obviously I’m not on your thesis committee. They all want to lose me. So. Ulrich calls the SMP. The SMP, eager to oblige, send Chen back to his cell. Actually we covered that in yesterday’s lecture, working from a different source.”
The professor paused, and though I couldn’t see him I knew he was peering over his glasses.
“Yes,” I said. “I remember.”
“You, too, Smith?”
“Yessir, sir.”
“Good, you might pass, too. Okay, so maybe you remember what happens next. The sister says the Commie ain’t her brother, it’s her husband. She hands over what she says is the general’s list of agents, which U.S. naval intelligence tells us was really her brother’s all along. But first she calls everyone on it and tells them to make themselves scarce. And they do. And the brother escapes. And she and Zhang escape.”
“She escaped?” I said, hope springing. “I thought you said the navy said the general killed her.”
“I did, they did, and he did, for sure. But the SMP doesn’t know that, do they? Our historical perspective eludes them. All they know is, they’ve got zilch. Zero. Goose eggs. So now they’re really mad. If they’d applied the usual pressure to Chen Kai-rong, the thinking goes, he might have cracked. The Japanese say, but he wasn’t the spy. The SMP says, then how come he ran away? Along with, they point out, everybody else.
“The Japanese are embarrassed. They didn’t just lose the police some crook. These were Commies! Oh, no! And the only guy they can put their mitts on is Ulrich. So they do. They haul him to Bridge House, which was a lower circle of the same hell as Number 76, run by the Japanese themselves. To make sure he comes clean, they scoop up his wife and kid and slap them in an internment camp. This was almost unheard of, interning their very dear friends the Germans, except for being Allied spies. Then the Germans straightened it out if they weren’t, or the Japanese shot them if they were.”
“And in this case?”
“Unfortunately for the wife and kid, this turned out to be a special case. Ulrich, in the middle of being persuaded to spill the beans, up and died.”
“The Japanese killed him?”
“Seems to have been an accident. Had a seizure, bingo, the end. Whether the electrodes or the baling wire or the big tub of ice water had anything to do with it, I couldn’t tell you. But it was damned inconvenient. The Japanese couldn’t prove he was a Commie rat. The Germans couldn’t prove he wasn’t, either. So they did the only sensible thing. They forgot all about it.”
“Just like that?”
“You know, get some closure, put it behind you, move on! Come on, everybody’s doin’ it! The Ulrich affair was forgotten and everyone lived happily ever after. Except the wife and kid. The Germans started tentative negotiations to get them out, but the Japanese were of the opinion the wife might know something. Or said they were. They were probably just saving face. But the Germans backed off. Some dame, some brat, what did they care? Keep ’em, they said. So the Japanese did.”
“What happened to them?”
“They died.” He sounded wistful. I suddenly wondered what it was like to be a historian, involved with people who’d lived and died long before you came across them. “Those camps weren’t nice places. Not much to eat, and a lot to get sick on. The mother went first, not long after they got there, late ’forty-three, cholera. The kid died July ’forty-four.”
“Dr. Edwards? How many of those internment camps did the Japanese have?”
“In Shanghai, eight. In other parts of China there were a few more, but generally they didn’t ship prisoners up the river.”
“Which one were Ulrich’s wife and child in?”
“Chapei. Why?”
“Just wanted to know.”
“Pure intellectual curiosity! Refreshing as a Tsingtao ale. Chapei wasn’t any nicer than any of the others, I can tell you that.”
“Are there records from the camps?”
“What kinds of records?”
“Lists of internees, I was thinking.”
“It’s hard to say how accurate they are. How would we know who’s missing? But they exist.”
“Can you find out if an American missionary family named Fairchild was also in the Chapei camp?”
“Might do. That would require my researcher to ferret out another set of documents in another language, so she might get her A after all. But you’re not about to tell me why, are you?”
“Not yet, no. I’m sorry. But you’ve been a big help.”
“I’m tickled. And now I have a question for you.”
“Go ahead.”
“If Ulrich’s buddy General Zhang wanted his brother-in-law Chen to rot, and if Ulrich’s mission was to cozy up to guys like Zhang, why did Ulrich bite when Chen’s sister called? Was she Ulrich’s bit on the side?”
“No. She couldn’t stand him.”
“Well, if it wasn’t sex it must have been money.”
“In a way. She promised him the moon.”
Professor Edwards said he’d call us with information on the Fairchilds if he found it, and we said we’d let him know what it was all about as soon as we could. After we hung up, Bill lit a cigarette. “You said that about prom
ising Ulrich the moon to show you’re as clever as the professor.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. That would imply I’m the competitive type.”
“Oh, right, and that’s nuts, isn’t it? Listen, when we get a minute we’d better copy that diary for him. I think he deserves it.”
I nodded vaguely, distracted by something I couldn’t quite place.
“Now, in the spirit of intellectual inquiry, I have a question, too,” Bill went on. “What if it turns out Alice was in the same camp as Ulrich’s wife and child? She was a kid herself. You think she learned something then that would tell her now where to find the Shanghai Moon? Why would it have taken all these years? And how does it tie into what’s been going on? And what are you scowling about?”
“This isn’t a scowl, it’s a contemplative frown. I’m trying to remember something.”
“What?”
“How do I know? I don’t remember it. Ah! Aha! Mr. Friedman!”
“Aha Mr. Friedman what?”
“I knew this sounded familiar! His book. Didn’t it say something about a rumor, a German officer’s widow in an internment camp having the Shanghai Moon?”
Bill, also being contemplative, drew on his cigarette. “I think you’re right. But that doesn’t make it true.”
“But it makes it an old rumor. Look: Mei-lin gives it to Ulrich, he slips it to his wife when they come for him.”
“Difficult to imagine how she could have kept it hidden in the camp, though I guess she might have. But if she had it, why didn’t she use it to bribe their way out? And what happened to it when she died?”
“Maybe she didn’t have it, but she knew where it was.”
“Same questions.”
“Okay, I admit that’s all a little fuzzy. But I really, really want to know whether Alice was in that same camp.”
Bill got to his feet. “Let’s go ask her.”
32
Twenty minutes later Bill and I were sitting in the sticky heat of Sara Roosevelt Park. If I’d had a watch, I’d have been checking it every five seconds. I did check Bill’s a few times, until, with a sideways look, he pocketed it.
“She won’t get here any faster if you do that.”
