by Nicole Mones
They went on playing every night, and the crowds kept coming in, even while smoke still drifted from the rubble outside. One of their own was missing, Wing Bean, and Floor Manager Zhou prodded everyone about him. “You see Wing Bean, yes-no?” he asked Thomas, the other musicians, the hat-and-coat-check girls, even the men who worked in the kitchen. It went on for days. Thomas froze every time he had to answer, and barely managed to get out the word no before he collected himself and made a promise to keep an eye out for the young man. The way it happened kept coming back to him, like small explosions in his mind. He remembered how, after Song had hurried off down the chaotic street toward Rue Wagner, he threw the film into the carcass of a burning car and watched it shrink and shrivel, ignoring the pleas and screams all around him. Before he turned toward Rue Lafayette, where he knew the brothers would be worried about him, the crowd had thinned for a second, and he had seen for the last time the spreading stain that had been Wing Bean. And now Zhou would not stop asking.
By the next Friday night, the storm water that had flooded the low-lying streets had receded, and huge fires broke out in the Pudong and Wayside districts, big enough to light the sky. On Sunday, heavy shelling could still be heard from Hongkou when the Kings finished their last set at two A.M. A couple of nights after that, huge guns and mortars sounded from Jiangwan. And yet the house kept filling every night, and the six of them performed.
He longed for her, wondered day and night when he would see her again, but when he really felt close to Song was when he was playing. Even simple, affectionate standards like their signature, “Exactly Like You,” were now anthems to her. At the piano, he imagined a life with her that could never have been, staying in the studio, remaining in that room forever.
When they grew hungry, he would tip a beggar boy who lived across the Bund in a space underneath the pilings to fetch hot food. “German or Cantonese?” he would ask her.
“Cantonese,” she would say with a laugh, and move closer to him.
It was all they would do, love each other. He would play the piano, make tea. Dressed or not dressed, speaking or silent, their togetherness would express itself in thought and laughter, music, the day’s routines. “Shall I send the boy for dim sum?” he would say as he held out her cup.
Before, he had mastered his repertoire through practice. Now he closed his eyes, found melodies, and followed them until they grew through their own turns and variations, always as he dreamed of her. He realized this was the same feeling the other fellows had when they soloed, and with only six of them now, everyone except Thomas took long solo flights.
Tonight he might do it, full as he was of love and loss and troubled notes—so that when he signaled a solo for himself, and all the other instruments fell back in surprise, he took straight off into the sky with a rhapsodic ladder of joyfully tinkling dance steps that brought shouts and applause from the ballroom floor, and grins and nods from the bandstand, even Lester and Errol. Beautiful, said the voice in his head, and he understood that it was Song’s. She was with him.
Applause washed over him in waves. To keep it going, he led a quick chord change into “In a Sentimental Mood” in D minor, and then, in a subtle show of virtuosity, modulated to F major after managing to toy with D-flat major for a moment—but tickling it perfectly, lightly, his beat exactly square. He was true and he was a liar; he had dealt both love and death.
From his end of the stage, Alonzo heard Thomas’s playing soaring on its own, and kept his eyes on the piano as his own left hand ranged up and down his fretboard and his right plucked, slapped, and hammered down the percussion and the bass, as one. He wondered about it as his fingers danced the beat up and down, pulling it, popping it, until the truth swam into view: the young man was in love. That’s it, son. Right there. He caught Thomas’s eye and added his own smile to the roar of approval that was washing up from the dance floor. The boy had been to the mountaintop.
On the thirteenth of September, a month after the fighting started, Song met Chen Xing at Café Louis on Bubbling Well Road. Here, the city’s most elegant cakes and chocolates were created by chefs plucked from the tide of skilled Jewish refugees pouring into the city. To Song they were an oppressed people, and as Shanghai ren she was proud of her city for welcoming them in, while she also enjoyed the fruits of their talents with candid pleasure, such as the signature ganache here at Café Louis. Like most places in the French and International Concessions, the restaurant had reopened after the first few days of the battle, even though shelling, bombing, and small-arms fire could be heard almost every day and night, and intermittent food shortages played havoc with the menus.
This time Chen Xing came alone, and they talked in voices pillowed almost to a whisper, since Shanghai was filled with spies. The Communists themselves had moles in the Nationalist government, the French police, the Bank of China, and many other places.
He appeared pessimistic. “We will not hold out for long. The Japanese have been landing reinforcements at Wusong and up and down the Huangpu for days. Thousands of dwarf soldiers have put ashore.”
“But the Italians?” she said hopefully. The wireless had been reporting that the Savoy Grenadiers were on their way from Addis Ababa.
“No. Unless one of the big Western powers joins the fight, the city will fall.” He looked at her with sympathy. “What will you do?”
“I am a bonded servant,” she reminded him.
“If that changes?” He watched her face. “Many people are leaving. You know the government has already abandoned Nanjing and moved to Chongqing,” the new wartime capital. “Some people are going to Hong Kong. If they are staying in China, they go either to Chongqing—”
“—if they are with the Nationalists.”
“Correct. Or Yan’an.”
She nodded. That was the Communists’ wartime capital, a dusty, wind-whistling town on the Yan River which was where every true pilgrim of the movement wished to go—including her. Securely behind Red lines, in a part of north China controlled by the CCP, it was that mythic place where she would be able to live openly in her beliefs. Glorious.
She put her gaze back on Chen Xing. “What about you?” she said, for he could either come out now with the Communists, or continue to hide among the Nationalists.
“I’ll go to Chongqing,” he said.
“So you will stay belowground.”
“It suits me.”
She nodded. He was the scion of a well-off family; no doubt he wanted to hold on to his wealth and privilege a little longer, too. Living as a double agent would make it possible.
“Your new contact will get in touch with you through a business you already patronize,” Chen told her.
Song understood. The Party owned many businesses, everything from furniture stores to tea shops to real estate agencies. Their premises were used for meetings and handoffs, sometimes without managers or employees even knowing. Song loved seeing the pieces fit together behind the surface scrim of reality; she had come to understand that perception itself was power.
So was planning. If Du left, or if he set her free—who knew what this war might bring about?—she would have to be ready to act.
She could go with Thomas to America. The thought brought an onrush of love shot through with the darkness of their last moment together, watching Wing Bean die. He would protect her, she knew that. Even though he had not asked her, and she had not said yes, she knew the door to him lay open.
To go with him, though, meant giving up her cause completely. “I have often thought of going north,” she said, this being of course the only version of her future she would present to Chen Xing.
“To Yan’an?” His eyebrows rose. “You’re the sort of modern woman I’d expect to run to Hong Kong or America the minute the manacles were off you.”
She bristled. “You doubt my commitment?”
“Not at all.” His eyes registered her response. “I am impressed by the risks you take. But I warn you, be careful. You wil
l always have the taint of foreignness.”
“What about you?” she shot back. “You are ‘leaning down’ from a well-off family. Your family’s wealth is as dangerous as my English. It is a risk for both of us. But if you run from a risk, then how do you call that commitment?”
“Touché.” He pronounced the French with a burnish of irony, and she wondered with a jolt if he had been testing her.
But she could pass any test. “If I were free, I might go north. And if I do—”
“You will need introductions. When the time comes, send word here”—and he wrote a few characters on the back of his card for her—“to my brother’s house in Chongqing. I will write to them about you.”
She took the card, grateful. Everything was a political process. “Thank you.”
“Not at all. Are we not the same purpose?” On her way out, she savored this new term he had used, tongzhi, same purpose. Comrade. She liked it. She wondered if it would catch on in the movement.
Fighting continued through September, mostly sparing the French Concession and International Settlement, but leaving parts of Hongkou and Zhabei so bombed out that only a few hardy souls were left holed up in the damaged buildings. Thomas crept back and forth to the theater every day, and even the Higgins brothers returned straight home after work. They spent hours on stage trying not to wince at the intermittent bursts of shooting and shelling, and by the time the clock hit two and the lights finally winked up, everyone wanted to shake hands at the door and hurry home. Late at night, when they were all in and safe, and Thomas was alone in his room with his oil lamp, he worried. All of them were saving as much as they could, but inflation was driving things up, and getting enough cash to go home seemed far out of reach.
And there was Song. He ached every day for her, and wondered how he had gotten through all those years before he met her. It did not matter, because they knew each other now, in every possible way, and he had no doubt they would be together every minute if it were not for Du. She would be with him if she could.
By the end of the month, there were signs around the city that a climactic offensive was coming. Fresh soldiers and supplies moved through the streets by the truckload, in vehicles painted with the Rising Sun. The radio reported that separate Japanese divisions were marching simultaneously toward Nanjing. The Americans had doubled the number of Marines in Shanghai to three thousand, hoping to protect American property. Trouble was ahead, and everyone could feel it.
October kicked off the offensive, shooting and explosions from all directions, and the bass thunder of big guns. By late in the month, Thomas had to acknowledge that China was losing. Wave after wave of Chinese recruits had come in, looking pathetically young, fifteen, sixteen—even Charles and Ernest were older. And then Chiang Kai-shek ordered a retreat to defend the rural suburbs, and in a blink, those last soldiers were gone altogether. Japanese flags sprouted at intersections and post offices, and the streets outside the neutral Concessions were littered with eerily abandoned firing nests, sandbags still piled protectively, shell casings on the ground.
A single Chinese battalion stayed behind to cover the retreat. In what was surely a suicide mission, eight hundred men withdrew to the Sihang, or Four-Bank Warehouse on Suzhou Creek at the corner of North Tibet Road. Because the warehouse was directly across from the neutral International Settlement, the Japanese were afraid to attack it. By the second day, British soldiers were brazenly crossing the bridge to deliver food, cigarettes, ammunition, and first aid supplies to the warehouse.
When the onslaught against the eight hundred finally began, everyone in Shanghai was glued to the saga of the brave soldiers dubbed the Gu Jun, the Lonely Battalion.
On October twenty-ninth the sun came up over the Chinese flag, smuggled in by a twenty-two-year-old girl and miraculously hoisted high above the warehouse roof. Thomas and Charles and Ernest hurried to see it, and found thirty thousand people lining the banks of the creek that bordered the International Settlement, chanting and waving Chinese flags.
They stayed until it was time to go home and dress for work, but then a messenger arrived with a note from Floor Manager Zhou. “The Royal is closed tonight!” Thomas cried, scanning it. “We are to play on the roof of the Gas Works building, right across the creek from the warehouse. They will roll a grand piano out there and put down a dance floor.”
They arrived to find the roof transformed into a chilly autumn fairyland of hanging Chinese lanterns and potted chrysanthemums, already filling up with guests in evening wear, both Western and Chinese. Waiters circulated with champagne, and as soon as the Kings swung into “Exactly Like You,” couples stepped into each other’s arms and onto the dance floor. Pops and spatters of gunfire sounded down below, adding grit and hesitations to their rhythm. Every time there was a large explosion, the air would fill with screams and cries as all the men and women rushed to the roof’s edge, to look over and cheer with the crowds below, and on the rooftops all around.
Between sets they took a break, and he saw a familiar elongated shape emerge from the elevator inside the propped-open doors: Du Yuesheng. Thomas barely breathed as he counted out the entourage—until there she was, Song. And then as quickly as they had appeared, they were gone, vanished to a lower floor, it was rumored, to watch the battle from a private room. Thomas steeled himself and focused on playing.
Suddenly, after midnight, the cries of astonishment from the crowd became so urgent that the musicians ran to the parapet to see. Three Japanese soldiers had managed to sneak a ladder over to one side of the building and climb up to a bombed-out opening. Just as they reached it, a man appeared in the opening, the battalion’s commander, Xie Jinyuan. Everyone on the roof held their breath as he shot the first Japanese, strangled the second with his hands, and threw the third off the ladder before knocking it away altogether. The rooftop went mad with joy, and for a few precious minutes, chaos reigned. Thomas used this time to move quickly through the crowd, and look for her. But she was absent, along with Du and his bodyguards.
They played out the last set and then kept going, responding to the crowd, pushing further. Everyone sensed this was the end.
It was not until dawn was near that they shut off the lights. Lester and Errol went home, and Alonzo took Charles and Ernest out to help them find a rickshaw, which left almost no one on the rooftop except Thomas and the workmen, cleaning up. So he took some music from his briefcase and played Brahms, because it calmed him.
Then he heard a woman clear her throat, a gentle but specific sound already as close and natural to him as middle C. It was Song, just inside the door, half-hidden in the darkness. “I thought you left,” he whispered.
“Careful,” she said.
He looked. The only other people on the roof were men folding tables and taking up the dance floor. Not one of them was looking in Thomas’s direction.
Six steps, and he was with her, in the shadows. “Where is Du?”
“In a meeting, downstairs. They think I am gone to the restroom.”
That meant she had only a minute. “Song—”
“No,” she said quietly, putting two cool fingers on his mouth, “Don’t.” Her other hand sought his, and their fingers linked quickly and naturally. She brought her face so close to his that their cheeks grazed. “I know,” she whispered, and they stood for a long moment, until a fresh burst of gunfire startled them, followed by a grenade blast and the rumble of falling masonry.
“All of them will either die or surrender,” she said bitterly. “Then it’s finished. We will belong to Japan.”
“Not Frenchtown. Not the International Settlement.”
“Congratulations—a lonely island in an occupied city. And now my time is run out,” she said miserably, holding his eyes. “Stay alive for me.” And after a brief, desperate squeeze of his hand, she vanished.
Over the next few days, the dominoes fell. The Lonely Battalion was down to 376 men, and Commander Xie Jinyuan had them make a run out of the building
and across the bridge into the International Settlement, protected by their gravely wounded compatriots who were dying anyway and had volunteered to cover them from the machine gun nests. British troops cheered them into the Settlement, arrested them, confiscated their weapons to prevent anything falling into the hands of the Japanese, and put them up in a building on Singapore Road they dubbed the Lost Battalion Barracks.
With this last act, Shanghai’s War of Resistance shuddered to a close. Through November, Thomas saw brown-uniformed soldiers rolling in by the truckloads, placid, complacent, bouncing along. He saw them down by the river on their time off, walking with a bottle of sake jammed in one pocket and two bottles of Asahi in the other, eating fruits out of hand, taking what they wanted from stores as they passed.
They set up checkpoints at intersections and bridges. At the steel-truss Garden Bridge, which connected the unoccupied Bund to the occupied Hongkou district, everyone had to bow from the waist to Japan, with no exceptions—cars had to stop, the tram down the middle of the bridge halted and disgorged its passengers; everyone had to do it. Thomas adapted with relative ease to this new regime, for all his life, around white people, it had almost always been necessary to defer. And since he was a foreigner, the Japanese went easy on him, letting him pass with the kind of perfunctory bow that would have gotten a Chinese slammed with a rifle butt. Suddenly his race was the right card to hold in the game of fear and death. Sickening. The new slang word for the occupiers, which even Thomas, with his nonexistent Chinese, learned to recognize, was mo shou, the evil hand.
One day at the end of November, Lin Ming received a message that he was to be at Rue Wagner, at the hour of the rooster. His first fear was that the conquerors were taking over one of his ballrooms, because the night-world continued to roar, with the drugs, gambling, and liquor flowing so fast that all over town, the abacuses chattered until dawn. Backstage office safes bulged with profits, and he was dreading the day the Japanese decided to take the money for themselves. He had been sensing doom; was tonight the night?
