Carnival of Spies

by Robert Moss

  On her side, too, Helene was reticent. Johnny became certain that they shared a common contact in the Shanghai underground, the shadowy Latvian who posed as a music teacher and represented the OMS. This was the man to whom Johnny delivered his money from the Hong Kong Bank. But Helene never mentioned him. And though she talked about Steinitz’s courage and conditions of life at the front, she did not share his reports. Once, though, she asked him to deliver a coded message to the radio man who operated from a room above a sewing shop on Sad Donkey Road. The text was incomprehensible to him, but he made a copy and passed it on to Colin Bailey’s man.

  Helene was available; she made that plain enough. She changed her clothes in front of him in a matter-of-fact way that said, take it or leave it. He left it. They carried too much baggage.

  He slept with May when the mood took him but stopped frequenting the Cockatoo Club. He arranged to meet her at her own studio, a few blocks from the Quai. May liked the new arrangement, because it meant she could pocket the money she would normally have to pay out to the pimps. She forgot that in Frenchtown the pimps were scrupulous about collecting their dues.

  On a night of fireworks and whirling dragons — a festival for red-faced Kuan Ti, god of war and peace — Johnny went to the apartment near the Quai. The left pocket of his jacket sagged with silver dollars, the bonus he intended to give May. With her information, he had arranged the hijacking of a cargo of silver bound for San Francisco and the American commodity markets.

  The success of this operation was not the only reason for his high spirits. Emil and his dour Polish wife had finally been recalled to Moscow. This followed a blazing session at the Far Eastern bureau at which Emil was outvoted seven to two and Otto Braun came close to calling him a traitor. The Kiangsi soviet was finished. The Red Army had suffered a bloody defeat. The population under Communist control had shrunk to one third the original number. Cut off from the outside world, denied even salt, the peasants were turning against their commissars. All of Emil’s creative bookkeeping could no longer disguise the real state of affairs. Without salt the Red Republic of Kiangsi would go under. The remnants of Mao’s guerrilla army would have to flee for their lives or be ground under the treads of the generalissimo’s tanks. Though the official version had it that Emil was returning to help organize the next world congress of the Communist International, Johnny was certain that in Moscow he would be presented with the bill for one of Moscow’s most costly failures. Best of all, he had confirmation that his own departure from China was imminent. Emil had suggested that they leave on the same boat. The poor dreamer apparently saw Johnny as a witness for the defence.

  He climbed to May’s landing and rapped twice on the door. There was no answer. He tried his key but found that the door was already unlocked. When he threw it open, he was assailed by a stench so overpowering that he took a step backward involuntarily. The ceiling light was on. The bulb was weak, but it showed him more than he wanted to see.

  May was sprawled on the bed, the knuckles of her left hand grazing the floor. From her nostrils and mouth, thick rivulets of slime oozed down, fouling the bright satin of her dress. It might have been vomit, but the smell was a compound of shit and gasoline. He knew what it meant. In China a favourite method of interrogation was to force a mixture of petrol and excrement through a hose into the suspect’s nostrils, until his belly swelled up. The next step was to jump on the victim’s stomach so the filth erupted from his nose and face. He was unlikely to hold much back after that — if he could still talk.

  May had nothing to add to whatever she had told her questioners. From her navel to her vagina, her stomach had been laid open. The butchery was precise: the gash was deep but almost perfectly straight. It must have been made in one or two strokes from an axe or a cleaver. The flies had begun their work. Her spilled intestines were black with them.

  May was wearing red, the colour that brought good luck.

  Johnny supported himself against the door frame, trying not to gag. He could not help himself. The waves of nausea reached his gorge, and he spat bile.

  People were moving about on the floor above. He wiped his mouth clean and half ran, half fell down the steps into the cascading lights of the festival.

  He tried to stop the singing terror behind his eyes, to force his thoughts into order. An ordinary pimp, angry that May was making money on the side, would have contented himself with giving her a beating and threatening to cut her face; no pimp lightly discarded a source of income. Interrogation with liquid shit was a favourite method of the generalissimo’s secret police. Murder with an axe was a specialty of the Greens. They worked hand in glove anyway. Perhaps they had connected May to the theft of the silver consignment. What had she told them under torture? Were they out looking for him?

  The singing in his head grew louder, drowning out the fireworks and the bands. May knew Helene’s address, and that he had gone to see her.

  The mounted Sikhs along the Bund cradled their short carbines, indifferent to all the Chinese exuberance. They showed mild interest in the white man who was hurrying along on foot, deaf to the entreaties of the rickshaw drivers. Privileged servants of the Raj whose attitudes were faithfully mirrored in the Shanghai Municipal Council — the Sikhs had an exquisite sense of protocol. Only orientals and Russians walked in Shanghai, and weren’t the Russians half-Asiatic anyway?

  6

  Helene wasn’t at home. He jimmied the lock and found that her flat had been ransacked. In the bedroom, even the pillow and the mattress had been ripped open, leaving duck feathers all over the floor.

  He decided to go to the radio man in the huddled quarter of Chapai, outside the settlement. But the huge wrought-iron gates of the settlement were closed, and the police were checking identity papers. It was a bad omen. On the night of his festival, Kuan Li, the spirit of a mighty general of the Three Kingdoms, had decreed war.

  Johnny took a rickshaw to the Metropole and telephoned James Killen.

  “I was starting to worry about you,” the Englishman said. “I’m afraid the balloon’s gone up.”

  “What balloon?” Johnny’s English was serviceable but far from idiomatic.

  “The natives are restless.” Killen sounded much too relaxed. Too many whiskeys at the Shanghai Club? “The Greens found out one of their people has been doing favours for your lot. Or he decided to sell you out. Things are a bit muddled, I’m afraid.”

  “Who are you talking about?”

  “The name is Tu Hsiao-lin, or some noise like that. They call him Little Tu, because he’s related to the other one, or One-Leg Tu, because he’s got a gimpy leg. The family sounds like a collection of missing parts, what? The fellow seems to know rather a lot. The police are trying to take things in hand, but the Greens have a way of settling their own affairs.”

  So Johnny’s instinct had been right. Helene’s contact in the Green Gang had sold her out. And God knew who else. He thought of May, and the singing in his ears deadened him to Killen’s languid voice on the end of the line.

  “Hello? Are you there?”

  “You’d better make yourself scarce. You can come here if you like.”

  “No. I’ll call you later.”

  He went to Frenchtown, to the Latvian with a little card on his door that announced that he was a graduate of the Paris Conservatoire and offered lessons in violin. There were sentries in the street — a boy with a shoebox, a rickshaw-puller who wasn’t begging for customers. Johnny made a sign to them as he turned to enter the building, and they signalled “all clear.”

  The Latvian received him with an outsize revolver in open view on top of his piano. The man was skin and bone; his round Polish wife carried enough weight for both of them. She was busy packing.

  “As you see, we’re leaving tonight,” the Latvian announced. “The Greens are running amok with the right addresses. They have killed a hundred Chinese, maybe more. That’s not the worst of it. The municipal police have got Slavein.”

  Jo
hnny was stunned by this new information.

  Jui Tsien-pa, code-named “Slavein,” was the top Chinese Communist organizer in Shanghai and the vital link between the Comintern team and the local networks. He was in a position to identify every member of Emil’s group — except, perhaps, for the music teacher.

  The music teacher continued: “There is a ship in the harbour, out beyond Hongkew. The Chungking. The captain and the crew are party members. It is on charter to Sovexport. It will sail for Vladivostok at first light, or whenever we say. Emil and his wife will be on it. So will we.” He glanced at his wife. “You knew Slavein as well as anyone. You’d better come too.”

  “Did the police get anyone else? Any of our own people?”

  The Latvian squinted at him through glasses as thick as Coke bottles.

  “Nothing is certain. At least one person is missing.”

  “Who?”

  “The one you know best.”

  “Helene?”

  The Latvian nodded. “She told me you had met. You know it was a breach of security.”

  “It wasn’t intentional.”

  “She told me that, too. All the same, you should have reported it.”

  “Do you know where she is?”

  “The Greens have her. They are going to make a present of her to the generalissimo and the German mission.”

  “Can’t we stop it?”

  The Latvian unhooked his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose.

  “I don’t think you know chess,” he said wearily. “You must learn to give up a pawn to capture a knight. You give up a bishop to save your own queen. Helene is gone. It’s not your fault, so accept it. And be on the Chungking before first light.”

  Perhaps the madness that took possession of him had to do with the gunpowder quality of the night. The popping of rockets and the clamour of noisemakers were interspersed with the rattle of automatic fire, mostly from the far side of Soochow Creek; it all seemed part of the celebration. Or perhaps what spurred him was Killen’s languor and the Latvian’s checkerboard abstraction, and the frustration of leaving only another set of cicatrices on the suffering body of China. Or May, the taxi girl who had come so close to the oriental ideal of detachment in life, only to lose it in her unspeakable death. Or perhaps it was that Helene was not merely Sigrid’s sister but a part of his life, something he could love or hate, resent or revere, but not cut out without major surgery. Whatever the reason — though he did not doubt that Helene would kill him with her own hands if she ever discovered what he was — he had no intention of leaving her in the hands of the men who had butchered May.

  He went to Teng, a cell leader he had trained to blow up ships, and found the quickest and most independent of his Chinese recruits. Teng had led one of the combat squads that had taken part in the seizure of the silver ship. Johnny also knew that he had risked his life in Frenchtown in an attempt to assassinate the finance minister, the brother-in-law of the generalissimo.

  Teng undertook to find out where Helene was being held. It took him more than two hours to return with the answer. Johnny passed the time swatting mosquitoes in a fetid room in the Old City. The street lamp was directly opposite the window. Each time someone passed by, a shadow was thrown against the wall behind him—a shadow with pointed ears when an alleycat jumped up on the sill.

  “She’s in Frenchtown,” Teng reported. “Not at Tu’s house, but nearby. The place is a fortress. We would have to use bombs or grenades. Even if we got through, we would probably find her dead. It would be safer to try an ambush. They are taking her to Nanking in the morning.”

  Johnny pictured the route their cars would take to the North Station. They would have to pass through the Inter-national Settlement. That gave him an idea. Perhaps he could make use of the languid Mr. Killen after all.

  McIvor, of the municipal police, dealt with the Greens at arm’s length. He regarded them as hoodlums who would be put away in any civilized country but were much too powerful to be broken — or ignored — in Shanghai. They virtually ran the police in Frenchtown. Even in the settlement, his own domain, he knew that many of his Chinese agents had taken the vows of the society. He turned a blind eye to this, as long as the Greens did not attempt to prey on the European community. It was not his job to reform native customs. But a report that the Greens were abducting a respectable white woman to put her in a warlord’s harem that was enough to make his blood boil. The Frenchies might turn a blind eye to that sort of thing, but not the settlement, not so long as McIvor had any say in the matter.

  The tip came from an unlikely source: James Killen. They had met a number of times on business matters, never socially. Despite his lowly official position at the British Cigarette Company, Killen gave himself the airs of a nabob, playing polo, running a racehorse, dining out with members of the Municipal Council. Mclvor, of course, was aware of Killen’s sub rosa functions but had found him generally unhelpful in responding to inquiries about Comintern activities in Shanghai. However, Killen had done him a singularly good turn within the last forty-eight hours by providing a lead to the top Communist organizer in the city. The fellow’s arrest was a feather in Mclvor’s cap. So the Inspector was more receptive than he might otherwise have been to Killen’s rather unorthodox plan of action.

  Little Tu rode in person with his prize in the second of the three black limousines. He was sure that when he arrived with her in Nanking and presented Chiang and General von Seeckt with the head of a German spy, rich rewards would be heaped on him and the rest of his clan.

  He lit up a fat, stubby Havana, the type they called a Rothschild. The woman wore a veil, as if she were in mourning. It partly camouflaged the marks his men had left on her face the previous night, when she had been repeatedly beaten and raped. There was a swelling the size of a pigeon’s egg next to her right eye. A bodyguard sat on the other side of her with his Thompson on his lap.

  There was a traffic jam at the bridge over the Soochow Creek, some altercation between a chauffeur in a sedan and some pushcart owners whose load had been spilled in the road. Tu leaned out his window, yelling for them to clear the way. This part of the riverbank, next to the bridge, smelled of raw sewage.

  There were more Sikh policemen in evidence than usual. One of them came over to the other side of the car and peered through the window at the Thompson and the girl.

  Tu told his driver to honk the horn. Soon all three cars were blaring in unison. The crush of pedestrians — workers in blue denims, women in black pants and blue tunics, half-naked beggars — pressed in on the cars. A British officer in tropical kit strolled up with a swagger stick in the crook of his arm. His ginger moustache extended the narrow line of his upper lip.

  “Good morning,” McIvor addressed Little Tu, leaning into the car. “It’s Mr. Tu, if I’m not mistaken.”

  The bodyguard made no effort to conceal his Thompson. Little Tu was not perturbed. Perhaps this Englishman, like the French, wanted his squeeze.

  “What is the delay?” he asked McIvor.

  “Too many people in a hurry, that’s all. We’ll have it cleared for you in a moment. Excuse me—” he looked at Helene’s face “—is the lady feeling quite well?”

  “Quite well,” Little Tu chorused.

  “She looks to me as if she might be suffering from heatstroke.”

  “We’re on our way to the family doctor now.”

  How long must this fool go on? Tu asked himself.

  As it happened, McIvor did not have the opportunity to pursue his questioning, because another, larger European with a lock of fair hair falling over his forehead came shoving through the crowd and yelled, “Stop them! They’ve got my wife!”

  “Will you please step this way, Madam?” McIvor said to Helene as he opened the car door, though it was Tu who had to get out first.

  “Would you please be so kind, Mr. Tu?”

  There was the rattle of safety catches being released. Tu looked at his bodyguards, and they at him. Were even
the Greens bold enough to risk a shoot-out with the settlement police in broad daylight? Since nobody was quite sure, the Sikhs had their carbines ready. Looming over the cars, they looked as if they were out to shoot rabbits.

  Reluctantly Tu moved his bulk. Helene sat still for a long moment, so that McIvor started to wonder if she had been drugged.

  Johnny came forward and took her arm, half guiding, half lifting her out of the car. She seemed to need his support as they moved to the pavement. McIvor had the odd impression that part of the crowd opened to receive them and wrapped itself round them like a blanket. Or a shield.

  Little Tu’s eyes looked ready to burst from their sockets. He screamed and pulled out a heavy pistol, taking aim at the heads of the Europeans, which bobbed up above the crowd.

  McIvor cracked him smartly on the funny bone with his baton. Tu yelped and dropped the gun. His bodyguard was less fortunate. Seeing his boss in trouble, he brought up his Thompson. The bearded Sikh by his window shot him just above the ear. The bullet tore through his cranium and settled in the rich leather of the back seat.

  McIvor watched the woman in the veil and the unexplained man go down the embankment. Among the thou-sands of sampans in the mud, there was one that seemed to be waiting just for them.

  When Colin Bailey received Killen’s report on Johnny’s last days in Shanghai, he fired back a very chilly reprimand. Killen might very well have blown Johnny’s cover, and for what? To smuggle out a dedicated Communist agent whom Johnny had every reason to fear! Poor McIvor would have a thrombosis if he ever learned who he had helped to safety. And how would Johnny explain himself in Moscow?

  The episode had quite conceivably ruined an otherwise highly successful monitoring job. Johnny’s predictions had all been on target: the Communist rebellion in south China was growing fainter day by day. Bailey had seen no harm in delivering up the most effective Chinese Communist in the Shanghai underground, fingered by Johnny months before, at this stage of the game. He only wished he could have laid hands on Mao. By Johnny’s account, he was one of the few men in China who actually knew how to win a revolutionary war.