by Nicole Mones
“Thomas Greene,” he answered, looking at her through a daze. “Would you call me Thomas?”
She stared at him on the sidewalk, while people streamed around them, gamblers, office workers, painted-up prostitutes with their stout old amahs hurrying behind them, bald Buddhist nuns in ash-colored robes. “All right. And I am Song.”
“May I ask where you learned such good English?”
“Tutors, at home.” She could not unlock from his eyes, which were round and fringed and very dark in his milk-tea-colored face.
“All families in China do that?”
“Only wealthy people,” she said, and in this unexpected moment, face-to-face with the American, she felt the protective shell of forgetting she usually kept around herself dissolve, and she saw her old life, the existence she had taken apart in her mind and stored away. There it was again, her home, the cistern quickening with its fantailed goldfish, the wall of fragrant wisteria, the plum tree court with rattan recliners. In the warm weather her mother used to lie back in her silk pajamas beneath the branches, and recite Tang dynasty poems. That was the last time she had felt truly understood by another, during those soft nights, answering those great classic lines with quick smiles of understanding; after that, her mother had died. And her father had started to gamble.
Thomas Greene held her gaze in his, as if he wanted to see all the way through, straight into her. “You’re far away,” he said. “Back home?”
“Yes.” Her eyes lifted in surprise.
“I lost my home too. My mother passed away, and I had to strike out on my own.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be,” he said. “I wish you’d tell me how you came to be here, in Shanghai.”
She noticed he was rocking from foot to foot, unsettled, forgetting himself. Maybe he felt something too.
But she was not free to feel anything. Du had thousands of men in Shanghai who would kill anyone who crossed him, including her, at his slightest signal. We call this growing water lilies. She was not even free to stand here with this American, two rocks in the human stream, face-to-face, visible to all. Even that was dangerous. “It is bad for us to be speaking like this, on the street.”
“Somewhere else, then,” he said. “I’ll meet you.”
“No,” she answered. “Impossible. I am sorry.” And she turned away quickly, so he would not see how much it hurt her to do it.
Thomas found himself endlessly checking the archway into the lobby that night, hoping she might appear behind Du Yuesheng. But the box remained dark. He had no idea when he might see her again, if ever. He told himself when he kept his eyes on the door that he was watching for the Japanese Admiral Lin had warned him about, but that was untrue.
On the third night he finally caught a movement of skirts in the lobby, and his heart almost jumped up his throat. He lost his way in the music, recovered. Errol and Lester sent him looks, always the first to notice his mistakes. He looked up again: Anya. It was Anya.
It had been more than a week since their dinner. She had not returned to the club, and though he had gone by her rooming house once and left his visiting card beneath her door, he had heard nothing. After his brief meeting with Song, Anya had frankly drifted from his mind, but Song was someone he might never see again, and Anya was here, beautiful in a floor-length white silk dress, smiling. Quickly he motioned to one of the waiters, a skinny fellow named Wing Bean, and in the toe-tapping space between two songs, he slipped him some money to go out for a gardenia.
When the band took a break, she came right over. “A joy to see you,” he said, tenderly fastening the flower in her hair. “Our evening together was unforgettable.”
Her face clouded. “Oh, dear. I don’t remember anything—did I disgrace myself?”
“That would not be possible,” he said.
“Why?” Her cashmere brows drew together.
“Because anything you did would be all right.”
She smiled at this and said, “I received your card. I was out of town.”
“Then welcome back.” He caught her arm. “Stay,” he said tenderly. “Stay until we finish.”
She did, and as soon as the last set ended, they left the theater and rode a rickshaw directly to her lodging.
The place was smaller than he had imagined, only one room, cramped by a bed, dresser, and chair, with one tiny gabled window. It also lay at the top of four long flights, but that he barely noticed; he would have climbed mountains to get to her, to have love in his arms for a night.
Anya filled a small cup with water from the old-fashioned basin and pitcher atop the dresser, detached the flower from her hair, and with thrifty care settled it in the cup. He had a strange sense of being back in Baltimore, in a narrow row house where vents were closed off to save all the heat for one room, and a child’s clothing, when torn, was always taken apart to be stitched into something else. He had seen his mother linger for long minutes at the strawberry man’s mule-drawn cart, finding what was bruised and crushed and talking the man into letting her have it for a few cents less.
He watched as Anya placed the flower by the bed and then peeled her dress from her milky shoulders. She turned her back with a natural ease for him to unhook her. He put his hands on her skin, different, satin to his velvet, and the pale feel of it was exciting to him. As he picked her up and laid her on the bed and undressed her, the greatest difficulty was holding himself back, and their first time was over all too soon.
But he awoke before dawn the next morning and they did it again, slowly now, and at leisure, until both were still and content.
He thought she might protest when he said he had to go, but she was sweet, acquiescent. “There’s a clean washcloth on the dresser, and a towel. Beside the basin.”
He washed and stepped into his clothes before he kissed her. “Thank you.”
“No, no, all thanks is for you.” She wound her arms around him and kissed him back, stopping just before she drew him down again.
It was getting light when he came to the house. He let himself in quietly, slipped up to his room, and stretched out between his sheets. Now he had what he wanted, a real woman. He folded a pillow behind his head and closed his eyes to enjoy the first early voices from the lane, the tinkle of cart bells, the crank-up cough of an automobile. He was replete with love, so every sound was music to him, every noise an echo of beauty, doors opening and closing, wheels creaking, the burbled cooing of the spotted dove outside his window. But just before he surrendered to sleep, when the real world started to clank apart and disassociate itself into the other, it was Song’s face he saw, not Anya’s.
4
ANYA WAS HIS girl through that spring of 1937, and she came to the club most weekends. He loved having her sit up tall and lovely at his table, his for all to see. Song and Du still had not come in, and while at first he had watched in hopes of seeing her, now he was glad they had not returned. Anya was a lovely bird whose plumage was always on display.
She lifted his spirits, which he needed, because the war was chipping away at his Kings. Now Eddie Riordan, the drummer, had stopped going out and was eating at noodle stalls in order to finish saving his passage home. The trumpet player, Cecil Pratt, was starting to talk about the same thing. Cecil had a Japanese girlfriend, and he went up to Zhabei most nights to stay with her, in a sector that had become almost entirely filled with soldiers and civilians from Japan. Much as he hated to leave her, Cecil said the sight of so many men in uniform unnerved him.
On the nights Anya came to the club, Thomas went back to her room with her, always leaving before dawn so he could sleep at home. He liked it that way, separate. When Alonzo and Keiko invited them all over for lunch, he never mentioned it to Anya. Keiko was different, part of their lives, almost Alonzo’s wife, though they all knew he had a real wife back home and children in college, to whom he sent most of his money. But here in Shanghai, Keiko was his woman and everyone’s older sister, cooking Japanese food, homey in h
er scuff slippers and apron, shiny black hair tufting from her neck-knot. While Alonzo sat back in his chair like a potentate, she plied Thomas and Charles and Ernest with grilled fish, vegetables cooked in soy and wine and vinegar, and steaming mounds of rice. Those were happy afternoons, which he enjoyed without Anya.
But on his nights off, the two of them went out together, and he let her take him into other worlds, to be with dancers and drug addicts and gamblers, philosophers and utopians, and assorted secret plotters who hoped to take over China. In her company he met actors, artists, and poets, drinkers and pleasure seekers.
“And yet none of them are Communists,” he said to her one night.
“Of course some of them are,” she retorted. “We’ve discussed this. One third of Shanghai is—”
“I know,” he said, “but who? I never seem to meet any.”
“No one wants to admit it,” she said. “They kill Communists.”
“It’s a conundrum. I cannot be sure they really exist.”
“Listen.” She leaned in and dropped her voice. “I know all kinds of people—people who know Shanghai’s secrets. And you know what they told me? Very hush-hush? That the Foreign Language School at number six New Yuyang Lu is a Communist front.”
“Truly?”
“Yes. It was whispered to me that they don’t teach languages at all. Go there one day, and you will see, they look like everybody else.”
He drank more than usual that night, and barely remembered going to Anya’s room and finally arriving home at dawn. When he awoke at midday, it was to a thudding headache and a mouth that was swollen and parched. And something else, voices. He washed and hurried into his clothes.
Downstairs he found Charles and Ernest in his dining room, tucking into a lavish breakfast prepared by Chen Ma, grits and thick slices of ham and big creamy curds of scrambled egg.
“Oliver and Frank are leaving!” Ernest blurted through a mouthful of egg.
“What?” He sat heavily. “Those two? I thought they never saved anything.” A bottom-class ticket cost 150 U.S., but that was 450 Shanghai, a lot to save when you made 50 a week, and Shanghai lay before you, arms wide, every night. Few had done it. “Where’d they get the money?”
“Dog track,” said Charles. “Soon as they won, they got them two tickets. Say there is going to be a war here, we all got to get out.”
“Well,” said Thomas, leaning back for Chen Ma to serve his own breakfast, “there could very well be a war here, they are right. But I’m not sure we’ve all got to get out.”
“You’re not scared?” said Charles.
“Sure I’m scared. But I was scared back where I grew up, too, and I like it here better.”
They exchanged a look. “Us too,” Ernest said.
“If they invade Shanghai, we’re going to have to lay low. It could be bad. But we’re not in this war. And another thing—both sides love jazz. Whoever wins, however it comes out, we should still be able to play.”
The boys exchanged looks. “We’ll stay,” said Ernest.
“Never going back,” Charles agreed.
“Tails,” Ernest put in, “where were you last night?”
“How do you know I was anywhere?”
“Because Uncle Hua told me you came in at seven.”
“He did, did he? You’re a rascal, Ernest.” Thomas admired the boy; in a year and a half he had become agile enough at pidgin to rattle along endlessly with the locals, while Thomas had not learned more than a phrase or two of pidgin, and even less of Shanghainese or Mandarin, which were much harder. In fact, Thomas had not run into any American players in Shanghai who had more than a few words of Shanghainese or any of the other Chinese dialects.
Bright and enterprising though they were, the Higgins boys were too young to be alone. “Fellows, you can’t live in that house by yourselves. I think you should move in here with me.” As soon as he saw the relief on their faces, Thomas knew he was right. And he needed company, too. The house had too many empty bedrooms, and was oppressive now that the hot summer had set in. Zhu, the quiet man who in winter was the house’s master of heat, now opened windows and positioned fans to make the house comfortable.
“I’ll square it with Lin Ming,” he told the two brothers. “Get your things. Sleep here tonight.”
It was two nights after that, the third Wednesday in June 1937, when Morioka walked into the Royal for the first time.
Du Yuesheng was in the balcony box, along with Song, Lin Ming, and his bodyguards, but none of them noticed when he entered in plain, nondescript clothes, slid into a corner table, and ordered a whiskey. Their first inkling of his presence was a racket of footsteps, followed by Floor Manager Zhou yanking their curtain aside. “He’s here,” he said, panting, “the Admiral.”
“Is it so! Where?” said Du, and followed Zhou’s finger. “Ah! I see. Puffed-up plug!”
They all strained to see the dim figure under the balcony overhang opposite. “Motherless fornicator,” said Fiery.
“Is it true he is going around the city opening field offices?” Flowery asked.
“Yes,” Lin Ming answered. “Like Shanghai is already his.”
They all stared together, hating him, united for once in ill will.
“Damn that scar of his mother’s she calls a cunt,” Du said, to murmured assent. “Damn her crack to all the hells.”
“Let me take him,” Flowery Flag said impulsively. “Tonight.”
“Patience,” Du said abruptly, and Flowery fell silent.
The boss sat for a long time, staring at the Japanese officer below with the reptilian flicker of possibility that passed for engagement in his expression. Then before he spoke, he glanced with favor at the bodyguard, indulging him as one would a favorite pet. “First we find his weakness, his opening. Then we look for the moment when his assassination will most throw them off. Then we kill him—not before. Teacher will see to it.”
Lin’s knees shook as he listened. Morioka’s rapt focus on Thomas Greene was obvious; they could all see it.
His intestines chilled at the scene on the stage below, where Thomas, unaware of what was happening, was signaling a solo. Charles and Ernest took off on their reeds a major third apart, a bit of showmanship that, though well rehearsed, never failed to please the crowd with its sense of spontaneous intimacy and the simple optimism the major third interval always seemed to ignite. He was a good arranger, Little Greene, able to keep the band sounding polished even though he was down to nine, piano included. He was also popular, a moneymaker, and the first real friend Lin had found among his musicians in a long time. So why couldn’t this whore of a Japanese Admiral turn his attention someplace else? The question sounded plaintively in his mind as he watched.
Song, seated in front of Lin Ming, was equally horrified, and she also saw what Lin could not—the look of icy calculation hardening in Du’s eye as his gaze traveled from Morioka to Thomas and back again.
Down in the lobby, after the show, she followed her master’s gliding form through the crush of people toward the door. Ahead, Fiery and Flowery formed a wedge to clear a way through the crowd.
None of them noticed Morioka bearing down from the other side of the lobby. Song did not catch sight of him until she had almost reached the door, where Thomas stood, thanking well-wishers.
Morioka stepped into the crush just a meter or so in front of her, and she jolted back, her entire being on fire. She saw the way the hair grew down in two points on the back of his neck, where his skin was brown from the Japanese sun. She caught his aroma. It was unbearably tense to be so close to him.
And then he started talking to Thomas in English.
“How do you find China?” she heard him say. “Really? But so dirty, so primitive. No? That is why they need us, the Chinese, to keep order. Here—take my card. If you need help. Here.” And he pressed his calling card into Thomas’s hand before bowing and being carried by the crowd out the door.
Song glared after him. Kee
p order? How dare he? She let the crowd bear her to Thomas, averting her eyes from him while she checked the crowd in all directions, and then, in one quick, low, economical slice through the air that no one could see, she plucked the card from his hand and threw it on the floor. It disappeared beneath the crush of feet.
She kept her eyes straight ahead, but could feel the heat of his awareness as she passed.
Du felt it too, for at that instant, he turned to look back. “Yuhua,” he commanded.
“Wo lai,” she answered, coming, and lowered her gaze once more, fully concealed, the good girl, bu gou yan xiao, no careless word or smile.
“What did he say to you?” Lin Ming asked Thomas the next day.
“That he thinks China is primitive.”
“Fornicator. Piece of turtle dung. And you threw the card on the floor?”
“The second he moved on.” Thomas said nothing about Song being there. He was thrilled to have had her cross his path, even just for that moment. No one had noticed her rip the card from his hand in the packed lobby, but he had been inches from her, and he caught his breath at the burn in her eyes, the glow that came from inside her. He seemed to be able to see straight into her in that loud, pushing crowd of people.
“You did well,” Lin said. “But back to Morioka. If he approaches you again, say as little as possible. Do not ever agree to meet him anywhere.”
“You’ve made that clear already,” Thomas said gently, though he failed to see what a Japanese officer would want with him anyway. He thought it unlikely that he and Morioka would ever have another conversation.
But that little scrim of security evaporated less than a week later, when Morioka returned to the Royal. This time he did not stay long, only one set, but before he left, he ventured up to the stage. Thomas was frozen, only half-risen from the piano bench, watching Floor Manager Zhou and Wing Bean scuttle into position to eavesdrop.
“Very beautiful playing,” Morioka said, somewhat formally, and Thomas answered, “Yassir, thank you, sir,” vamping up the plantation accent for the benefit of Zhou and Wing Bean. Morioka said no more, bowed to him, and left. Zhou and Wing Bean seemed satisfied.
