Jack of Spies

by David Downing

  “I have a signal for London,” McColl said as the young man swallowed. “Who are you?”

  “Tompkins, Neil. First secretary. Only one, come to that. Nanking’s not exactly on the map these days.”

  “My name’s McColl. I work for a man called Cumming in London. Connected to the Admiralty,” he added, with appropriate imprecision. He passed across the encrypted report. “It’s important this gets home as soon as possible.”

  “Ah,” Tompkins said, staring blankly at the apparently meaningless jumble.

  “It’s in code,” McColl pointed out.

  “Ah,” he said again.

  McColl had visions of the young man taking it down to the Chinese post office. “You can send it from here, I presume?”

  “Of course. We have our own connection to Shanghai. But what is it?” he asked. “Or shouldn’t I know?”

  “It’s naval intelligence. From Tsingtau.”

  “Ah.”

  “The sooner it’s sent, the better.”

  “Our operator will be here at nine.”

  “Chinese?”

  “Yes, but utterly loyal.”

  “Good,” McColl said. A pity, was what he thought—the sooner the Germans knew the information had been sent, the safer he would be. “I don’t suppose you know what time the morning train to Shanghai leaves?”

  “Ten o’clock.” Tompkins consulted his pocketwatch. “You’ve still got time.”

  It had been dark for an hour when McColl’s train pulled in to Shanghai’s main station. He walked out across the wide forecourt to the tram stop on Boundary Road, where a huge crowd of Chinese people were willing a tram to appear around the corner of Cunningham Road. Three or four trams would be required to carry so many, and even then oxygen would be in short supply. And he felt impatient after so much sitting on trains. Deciding to cut his losses, he checked the change in his pocket. The meal on the train had cost him his taxi fare, but a rickshaw was still within reach. He hailed one of the hovering coolies and called out “the Palace Hotel” as he stepped up into the seat.

  They set off, the coolie jogging along beside the new tram tracks for a few hundred yards before veering south onto North Honan Road. The smell of horse dung was strong in the air, the piles of manure awaiting collection by the night-soil teams. All the shops and cafés were still open, lit by the yellow glow of their paraffin lamps, and despite the evening chill many owners were sitting outside, blankly watching the world go by.

  The coolie turned off the main road and hurried down an alley, the rickshaw bumping on the uneven surface, causing McColl to grip the sides. They were still in the International Settlement, but these back streets were Chinese territory in all but name, lined with vegetable and fruit sellers, cobblers and barbers and letter writers, fortune-tellers and tea traders. A succession of aromas teased McColl’s appetite—clove-scented rice, roasting chestnuts, egg foo yong. Every now and then, a beggar’s arm reached hopefully out and just as swiftly disappeared.

  There were people everywhere, and at first sight all of them seemed to be arguing, haranguing one another in that barking tone some Europeans found so offensive. But look a little closer and there were smiles on many faces, especially the children’s. Family life often seemed a happier affair here than it did in London or Glasgow, and even the dogs seemed less aggressive.

  The rickshaw emerged from the maze of allies, turning onto North Szechuan Road just up from the General Hospital and crossing the Soochow Creek with its myriad sampans and dreadful smell. The coolie was panting a little now, sending yellow gusts of breath out into the cold air, but his pace showed no sign of slackening, and soon they were passing the Chinese post office. Another two blocks and they took the last turn onto Nanking Road. Here, outside the big stores, the faces on the sidewalk were mostly European, and the Chinese people packed in the passing trams looked like tourists in a foreign town.

  The coolie stopped as close to the hotel’s front door as the line of automobiles would let him and carefully counted the coins McColl handed over. “Cumshaw,” he demanded, holding out an upturned palm.

  McColl had included a tip but added another. Why argue over a farthing?

  Inside, the Chinese desk clerk informed him that Jed and Mac had taken Room 501 but were currently out. Despite a careful perusal of McColl’s passport, he refused to relinquish the room key until the English night manager had been summoned from wherever it was he lurked. The latter accompanied McColl up in the brand-new elevator and opened the door on what turned out to be a suite—the others had somewhat exceeded their instructions. It was at the back of the hotel, which McColl hoped had lowered the cost.

  Once the manager had left, he took a look around. A Chinese variant on the British army’s camp bed had been erected in the lounge, and Mac’s belongings were neatly stacked alongside it. Jed’s were liberally scattered on either side of the double bed in the adjoining room, which the two of them would presumably be sharing. Well, it wouldn’t be the first time.

  The bathroom contained a large iron bath, and the hot-water tap was actually that. For Shanghai this was luxury. He started the water running in earnest, and by the time he’d come up with a fresh towel and a change of clothes, the bath was almost full. Stretched out in the water, he watched two tjiktjak lizards chasing each other across the steam-blurred ceiling and thought about Caitlin Hanley.

  Toweled and dressed, he went back down to the bar for a drink. They had Tsingtao Tsingtau beer, for which he had acquired a definite taste and which seemed the appropriate brew for toasting his recent escape. He took it over to an empty table, where someone had abandoned a copy of the North China Daily News. The local news was uninteresting, but one short piece caught his eye. Mohandas Gandhi had been arrested in South Africa.

  McColl had met Gandhi, and under somewhat unusual circumstances. Their paths had crossed more than fourteen years earlier, when he himself was a nineteen-year-old soldier in the British Army. During the Battle of Spion Kop, his regiment had been one of those ordered to a supposed summit only to find itself surrounded by higher-placed Boers and subject to a withering crossfire. McColl had been badly wounded early on, then trapped underneath a dying comrade’s body for the rest of the night. The first face he’d seen when the corpse was lifted off him belonged to a smiling Indian medic.

  They had talked a lot on the long stretcher trip down. The Indian was sure that McColl would recover—his faith in the body’s self-healing properties was matched only by a parallel faith in humanity’s. McColl hadn’t recognized his savior’s name at the time but had later discovered that Mohandas Gandhi was already a national celebrity. He had followed the Indian’s political exploits in the British press ever since and knew he’d recently been leading a series of nonviolent protests in Transvaal against the forced registration and fingerprinting of his fellow Asians. His arrest suggested he’d been too successful for his own good.

  McColl sat back with his beer, remembering their walk down the mountain. It felt strange, even to him, but ever since that day he had drawn comfort from knowing that the Indian was out there somewhere, offering up his beatific smile and bringing hope to those without it. The only person McColl had ever told this to was his mother, and her only reply had been a tearful hug.

  “Fancy meeting you here,” a familiar voice said, interrupting his reverie. His younger brother was two inches taller than he was but not much more than half his age. He bore a striking physical resemblance to their father but lacked the latter’s less forgivable traits. Jed might be willful, obstinate, and full of himself, but he had inherited his mother’s kindness.

  Although she had wondered out loud if the boy was old enough to go gallivanting around the world, she had made no real objection to the trip, provided his older brother promised to take care of him. And so far there’d been no cause to worry.

  Mac was with Jed. “It’s good to see you, too,” McColl said, smiling up at the pair of them. Was he imagining it, or was Jed looking a little sham
efaced? And Mac a little nervous?

  “I’ll get the beers,” his younger brother said with a conspiratorial glance at Mac.

  “So how was Tsingtau?” Mac asked as he took a seat.

  “Cold. But useful.” Mac and his brother knew that he’d been making inquiries for someone back in London but had probably assumed it was all about commercial matters. McColl had done nothing to disabuse them of the notion. “Is the Maia in one piece?”

  “It’s fine. The railway did us proud—there was even a special boat waiting to take it across the Yangtze. It’s in the hotel basement for now, but we have to drive it over to Woosun on the twenty-eighth. The freighter doesn’t come upriver.”

  “Good.” It sounded as if Mac had been his usual efficient self. He had worked for Athelbury’s firm for almost six years now, after answering an advertisement for a mechanic. Fifteen men had come to interview, but the skinny, shock-haired seventeen-year-old with the pleasant, puglike face had known more about automobiles and their engines than the rest of them put together.

  Jed returned with three beers. He seemed to be growing by the day, McColl thought—their mother would hardly recognize him when they got home. “So where have you been this evening?” he asked them.

  They exchanged glances, almost involuntarily, McColl thought. He knew where they’d been.

  “Don’t blame Mac,” Jed said. “I would have gone on my own if he hadn’t come with me.”

  “I hope you went somewhere decent. Somewhere clean?”

  “We went to the Lotus Flower—it’s in the French Concession. It’s famous—the navy goes there.”

  “So diseases from all seven seas. I—”

  “Come on, Jack. Don’t tell me you’ve never been to a place like that.”

  No, he couldn’t. And “Not for a while” would hardly help.

  “So how old were you the first time?” Jed demanded.

  McColl laughed. “The same age you are now. Satisfied?”

  Jed laughed, too. “Yes, I think so.”

  “Just don’t let Mum find out.”

  “I wasn’t planning to!”

  “All right. So did you enjoy it?”

  “Yeah. It was kind of quick, though.”

  “It gets slower.”

  “I was thinking—we only have a few days left …”

  “And you’d like another go?”

  “No, no. Mac and I were talking about trying some opium—”

  “Christ, first a sex fiend, then a drug addict. I’m supposed to be looking after you.”

  “You’re supposed to be showing me the world. And everyone says you can’t get addicted on one pipe. I’d just like to try it, see what it’s like. What harm could it do?”

  “You, too?” McColl asked Mac.

  “I’ve always been curious,” Mac confessed.

  “You’ve had it, haven’t you?” Jed challenged his brother.

  “Only once, when I was here before. But I met a lot of Europeans who liked to indulge, and some of them were addicted.” He caught their expressions. “Oh, all right—I don’t suppose one visit will do us any harm. But I’ll be busy for the next few days. How about celebrating the Chinese New Year in a stupor?”

  “Sounds good to me,” Jed said.

  “What are you busy with?” Mac asked.

  “This and that. Somebody I said I’d look up for a friend. I don’t suppose either of you has run into Caitlin Hanley?”

  “Who?”

  “The American journalist from Peking. You thought she was too clever for her own good.”

  “Oh, her. No, I haven’t.”

  Mac shook his head. “Nor me.”

  “I think he’s smitten,” Jed suggested to Mac.

  “She is a looker,” Mac responded, like the dimmer half of a comedy team.

  McColl drained his glass. “Let’s get some fresh air.”

  They walked out onto the pavement, zigzagged their way through the traffic still filling the Bund, and leaned in a line against the parapet above the river. The moon was rising downstream, the sampans shifting in the dark waters below. Some firecrackers exploded somewhere behind them, outriders of the coming New Year, and what looked like a giant firefly was rising up above the opposite bank. “It’s a burning kite,” McColl explained. “Someone just died, and a relation is sending their goods on behind them.”

  They watched it climb and disappear.

  “I like it here,” Jed said.

  McColl smiled to himself and cast a glance at his brother. He could smell the Chinese perfume on him, sense the liberation that his evening had been. And then a darker thought, how young and full of life Jed looked and how coldly that group of German businessmen had discussed the prospect of war on that afternoon in Tsingtau.

  Jed and Mac seemed reluctant to rise the following morning, and McColl breakfasted alone in the huge Victorian dining room before venturing out into the cold, crisp air. Cumming had asked him to look into the recent visit of an Indian revolutionary named Mathra Singh while he was in Shanghai, and there seemed no time like the present.

  The Central Police Station was only a five-minute walk away, on the corner of Foochow and Honan, and he was soon presenting himself at the duty desk. Superintendent Brabrook was the contact name McColl had been given in London, but he was on compassionate leave. His deputy was a Chief Inspector Johnston.

  McColl was escorted up several flights of stairs and along a corridor whose only concession to Chinese culture was a series of cuspidors. Johnston’s room was similarly English, with just an electric ceiling fan to distinguish it from a Scotland Yard office. The man himself was bald, red-faced, and seemed less than pleased by McColl’s arrival. “Yes, we heard you might drop in,” he said after offering a moist hand. “But what Mathra Singh has to do with London, I’ve no idea. Anything related to the Indian community here, we report to the DCI. In Delhi,” he added, in case McColl had forgotten where the Department of Criminal Intelligence had its headquarters.

  “London is keeping a close eye on Singh’s allies in San Francisco,” McColl explained calmly. “So they’re naturally keen to know what messages Singh brought across the Pacific.”

  “The usual gibberish, I suppose,” Johnston said contemptuously. “But one of our own Sikhs, Constable Singh, has the details. Mathra Singh was his assignment.”

  “Was?”

  “Oh, yes. He’s gone. Back to India, I think. Singh will know. I’ll find out if he’s in the building.”

  McColl was left to examine the paintings on the walls—all of hunting expeditions—and the photograph on the desk of an angry-looking wife and bored-looking children. “The usual gibberish,” he murmured to himself.

  Perhaps. Indian would-be revolutionaries had been giving the British some considerable headaches over the last decade. Groups of exiles, first in London and then in New York City, had talked, published pamphlets, sought support, and raised money in pursuit of liberation from British rule. They had been continually monitored, arrested, and deported whenever sufficient cause could be found, and sometimes when not. But they kept popping up. The latest manifestations were in Berlin and San Francisco, where anti-English feelings were strong enough to grant the Indians significant political latitude. A young man named Har Dayal had arrived on the American West Coast in the summer of 1911 and over the last two years had managed to imbue Indian students and migrant workers with his brand of revolutionary fervor. The previous November he had launched a party and a newspaper, both called Ghadar, the Punjabi word for “revolt.” Neither was likely to topple the empire, but rather more worryingly for Cumming and company, Har Dayal had cultivated links with other enemies of the Crown resident in San Francisco, most notably the Irish and the Germans. If a European war did come, it wouldn’t be confined to Europe.

  Johnston returned with a uniformed man in a turban. “This is Constable Singh,” he told McColl.

  They shook hands.

  “Tell him about your namesake,” Johnston instructed the
young man.

  “There’s not much to tell, sahib,” he began. “Mathra Singh arrived on September thirteenth and left on the Monday of last week. He stayed at a hostel in the Chinese city and attended several meetings of the Indian community here. He was very outspoken, as you would expect. His views are not commonly held in my homeland, but they are not without supporters. Those who expressed agreement at the meetings here were noted, and an eye has been kept on their activities. The Ghadar newspapers that Mathra said were on their way from the United States have been intercepted and burned, and I forwarded a full report of his visit to Delhi. I think that is all, sahib. Unless you have questions?”

  McColl couldn’t think of any. “No. Thank you, Constable.”

  Singh bowed slightly, exchanged glances with Johnston, and left.

  “And thank you, Chief Inspector,” McColl added, shaking the moist hand again. “Your cooperation is appreciated.”

  So that was that, he thought once back outside—there was no need to think about Ghadar again until he reached San Francisco. He wasn’t sure whether he felt relieved at ducking a chore or annoyed that a possible payday had eluded him. A bit of both probably. At least he could concentrate on looking after his brother and finding Caitlin Hanley.

  But first there was the matter of his wardrobe. He walked back up past Trinity Cathedral to Nanking Road and took a tram heading west. The tailor’s shop he’d used on his last visit was at the eastern end of Bubbling Well Road, across from the Race Club, and seemed unchanged from five years earlier. Li Ch’ün was still standing over his cutting table, scissors in hand, pins lined up between his lips. He not only recognized McColl but even remembered his name.

  “I don’t think I’m any fatter,” McColl said as Li took his measurements with a tape labeled MADE IN BIRMINGHAM.