Jack of Spies

by David Downing

  “Half inch maybe,” Li Ch’ün decided. “Look fabrics,” he ordered.

  McColl chose two and saw no point in haggling over a few pennies. He arranged to pick up the suits in a couple of days and told Li Ch’ün to expect a visit from his younger brother, Jed.

  “I give good deal,” the Chinese man promised, helping McColl into his coat.

  A tram clanged to a halt as he reached the stop, and he climbed aboard, running the usual gauntlet of Chinese stares. The racing grounds slipped past on the right, and soon they were passing the town hall and back among the European shops on Nanking Road, where a posse of businessmen’s wives were window-shopping for jewelry. Where would she be staying? In one of the better Chinese hotels, as she had in Peking? There were so many more of them in Shanghai.

  He decided he would try the European establishments first, if only because their number was limited. The Kalee, the Burlington, and Bickerton’s were all within an easy walk, and then there was Astor House, the city’s most exclusive hotel, on the other side of Soochow Creek. Surely no self-respecting suffragette would stay there?

  There was also the Hotel des Colonies in the French concession, and probably others he hadn’t heard of. It might make more sense to hang around the Shanghai Club and ask any fellow Americans that he ran into.

  Four hotels and two hours later, he passed between the two Sikh doormen and entered the club, intent on lunch. The food was disappointing, and expensive by Shanghai standards; more to the point, no one had news of his quarry. Two of the Americans he approached were certain she was still in Peking, while one was convinced she’d already gone home.

  He left, walked south down the Bund, then turned inland along the canal that marked the border between the French and International concessions. The Hotel des Colonies was on the Rue du Consulat, but she wasn’t staying there either. He was back on the pavement, wondering where to start with the Chinese hotels, when he saw her across the street, in animated discussion with a rickshaw coolie.

  Though “discussion,” as McColl soon discovered, was something of a misnomer. She wanted a ride to an authentic Chinese teahouse, and either the man couldn’t understand her or he was simply refusing to comply, on the not-unreasonable grounds that single European women did not visit such places.

  It turned out to be the former.

  “I didn’t know you spoke Chinese,” she said, almost indignantly.

  He seized his chance. “I know a teahouse not far from here. Will you let me buy you tea?”

  “A real one? One that the Chinese use?”

  “I promise,” he said. “If there are any other Europeans, we’ll leave immediately.”

  She smiled at that and allowed him to help her into the rickshaw. She was wearing a long, black coat over a crimson blouse and an ankle-length gray skirt, but no hat. Her hair was tied back in a loose bun, stray wisps hanging over her ears.

  McColl told the bemused coolie where they were going—a teahouse he knew just inside the nearest Chinese city gate—and climbed up beside her.

  “Thank you,” she said, giving him another smile.

  Like most of the buildings that surrounded it, the teahouse looked shabby from the outside, but the carved wooden screen beyond the door was truly beautiful. “To keep out the bad spirits,” she murmured to herself, as if she were remembering a line of homework.

  Inside, numerous round tables were scattered across a huge room, and upwards of a hundred people were talking, shouting, laughing, eating, or playing mah-jongg. None of the faces were white, and if the stares the two of them received were anything to go by, European patronage was far from a common occurrence. Once they were seated, she showed no hesitation in staring back, her eyes aglow with excitement. When McColl asked her what tea she wanted, she just waved an arm and told him to order for both of them.

  He did so.

  “There’s no deference,” she noted with satisfaction. “They’re just being who they are.”

  He had never thought of it that way, but she was right. “This is their city,” was all he said.

  “Yes,” she murmured.

  “I hear you’re a journalist,” he said.

  “Yes, yes I am.”

  “On which paper?”

  She reluctantly turned her face to his. “It varies. I’m here for the New York Tribune. Supposedly to report on the revolution.” She smiled wryly. “But it seems to have been postponed.”

  “Yes.”

  Their tea arrived, a green brew with floating jasmine blossoms.

  She sipped at her cup and grimaced slightly. “You must know China well?”

  “No, not all …”

  “But you speak the language.”

  “I speak quite a few. They just come easily, I’m afraid.”

  She looked at him with what he hoped was interest. “How lucky. I wish they came easily to me.”

  “I suspect you have other talents.”

  “Perhaps, but not speaking the local language is such a handicap. I feel more than a little lost here, to be honest. I came to stay with a college friend—her name’s Soong Ch’ing-ling—but when Yuan Shih-kai attacked Sun Yat-sen, her family all fled to Japan. Ch’ing-ling made sure I had somewhere to stay, but it’s not the same as having a friend who knows her way around.” A thought occurred to her. “How long are you here for?”

  “Oh, quite a while.” He felt absurdly reluctant to put any limit on his availability.

  “Well, if you have any spare time for chaperoning, I’d love to see the Chinese city—the rest of it, I mean. And eat some real Chinese food. And maybe see some of the countryside …”

  “I’d be delighted.”

  “Oh, that’s wonderful. Thank you.” She pulled a watch from her purse and consulted it. “I’m afraid I have to go in the next few minutes—there’s someone else I’m meeting. And I have an engagement tomorrow. But can we do something on Friday? I could come to your hotel if that’s easiest.”

  McColl felt faintly shocked by the suggestion. “No, I can pick you up. Just tell me where and when.”

  She gave him the address. “It’s just off Bubbling Well Road.”

  “Ten o’clock?” he suggested.

  “I’ll be waiting.”

  He called for the bill, which arrived almost immediately.

  She leaned across to look at it, and he felt the warmth of her breath. “Look,” she said, “I almost dragged you here. Let me pay my half.”

  “No, of course not,” he said, again feeling slightly shocked.

  “All right, but on Friday we must share. Or I won’t come.”

  He couldn’t help smiling. “If you insist.”

  Thursday passed slowly. McColl wandered idly around the European city in the morning, in the vain hope that he might run into her. He was behaving like a schoolboy with a crush, he realized, and reminded himself that he knew next to nothing about the woman. Merely that she had modern ideas—and lips he dearly wanted to kiss.

  Passing a shop with postcards on display, he went in and bought two—a photograph of a rickshaw and coolie for his mother and one of the Bund for Tim Athelbury, his boss back in London. The nearby British post office supplied him with the necessary stamps, and he walked down Peking Road to the public gardens overlooking the confluence of Soochow Creek and the Whangpo River.

  It was another sparkling winter day, and he found himself remembering the house in Morar with its view of the sea, where he’d spent his early childhood. They’d moved to Fort William when he was seven and then to Glasgow five years later, as his father worked his way up the union hierarchy. He wondered how his mother was coping now that there was no child at home to act as a buffer.

  He could picture her picking the postcard up off the hall carpet and carrying it through to her chair in the parlor, but he couldn’t think of much to say. He told her he and Jed were safe and well, that the food was interesting but not a patch on hers, that all Chinese porridge was made with rice. Which was probably untrue, he realize
d—the best Shanghai hotels probably imported oats for their homesick Western guests. “Love to you and Dad,” he concluded, preserving the form for her sake. He would have to go and see them when he returned—it had been almost two years since his last visit.

  After scribbling a few trite lines to his boss—Tim was already receiving cabled reports of their sales—McColl walked back up the riverbank to their hotel, where he dropped off the cards in the guests’ mailbox.

  He spent the afternoon sightseeing with Jed, Mac having excused himself to write some letters of his own. As they traipsed around the Chinese city, McColl twice caught glimpses of the same Chinese man some twenty yards behind them. He could think of no reason anyone would be following him—the Germans would certainly know by now that he had unburdened himself of his Tsingtau observations—so it was probably a coincidence. Either that or a thief hoping to catch one of them alone in some dark alley. If so, he was out of luck.

  But then, out on the Bund a couple of hours later, he thought he saw the man again. He and Jed were standing at the parapet across from their hotel, watching the never-ending show that was the river, when McColl caught a glimpse of the familiar silhouette only to have it instantly obscured by a tram grinding its way around the bend into Nanking Road.

  “It makes me feel like an old hand,” Jed was saying, and McColl followed his gaze to where a party of Europeans was disembarking from a steam tender and taking what for many was a first wide-eyed look at the Orient. Seeing the expression on his brother’s face, he felt really glad he had persuaded their parents to let the boy tag along.

  When he glanced back across the street, his shadow was nowhere to be seen. A phantom, most likely. He remembered being told on his first visit that Europeans often imagined they were being followed—all empires, it seemed, were haunted by their subjects.

  Friday morning he was up with the light. The carriage and ponies he had hired for the day would be at the hotel entrance by nine-thirty, which gave him time to attend to some business. After strolling down the Bund to the telegraph office, he had a five-minute wait for the doors to open, but the replies he was expecting had indeed arrived and the three automobiles ordered earlier that month were awaiting shipment at the London Docks. Another two days and he could inform the Shanghai buyers that their vehicles were at sea.

  He walked back to the hotel, pleased that the weather hadn’t deteriorated overnight. It was certainly cold, but the sun was out, the sky mostly blue. The countryside around Shanghai could be depressing at the best of times, particularly for those with a social conscience. And that, he suspected, was something Caitlin Hanley had in abundance.

  The carriage was already outside the hotel, the smartly liveried Chinese handler chatting to one of the uniformed Sikh doormen, the ponies idly pawing the ground. McColl introduced himself to the handler and received the usual graduated reaction to his fluency in Shanghainese, the surprise shifting into annoyance—this foreign devil would be harder to bamboozle. After he had taken a quick trip back inside to check his appearance and collect a bottle of Hirano drinking water, they started down Nanking Road, where both ponies chose to empty their bowels.

  They found the house without difficulty, a suburban villa that wouldn’t have looked out of place in Hampstead. A Chinese amah opened the door, but Caitlin was right behind her, ready to go. She looked approvingly at the ponies and carriage and allowed him to help her up. “So where are we going?” she asked.

  He joined her. “I thought we could drive out into the country for a few miles, turn south, and visit the Longhua Pagoda—I’m told it’s quite something. We can have lunch there and then head back along the river to explore the Chinese city on foot. How does that sound?”

  “Wonderful,” she said with a smile.

  The handler jerked the Mongolian ponies into motion and directed them back to Bubbling Well Road. The road wound its way west for a couple of miles through European-style housing, passed the sentry box marking the border of the International concession, and headed out into increasingly open country. The land was flat, crisscrossed by irrigation ditches and larger channels, and there seemed to be a lot of people working the fields for the time of year. McColl would have liked to explain what they were doing, but he didn’t have a clue. When was rice planted? And were those mulberry trees?

  Fortunately for him, she appeared happy just to drink it all in. They sat in companionable silence for what seemed a long time—long enough, he decided eventually. “Where’s home?” he asked her. “Where in the States, I mean.”

  “New York City. Brooklyn, if you know where that is.”

  “I do. Did you grow up there?”

  “Yes.” She smiled, apparently at the memory, and hitched her riding skirt up an inch or so. “In a brownstone near Prospect Park.”

  “Brothers and sisters?”

  “Two brothers, one sister.”

  “And what does your father do?”

  “He’s sort of retired,” she said vaguely.

  “And did you always want to be a journalist?”

  “No. But I always wanted to be something. I went to Wesleyan College,” she added, as if that explained something.

  “That’s in Connecticut, isn’t it?”

  “No, that’s Wesleyan University. Wesleyan College is in Georgia. It’s the oldest college for women in America. That’s where I met my Chinese friend Ch’ing-ling. She’s Sun Yat-sen’s secretary now—that’s why she’s in Japan.”

  “You do move in exalted circles.”

  She laughed at that. “We were both outsiders at Wesleyan—which is probably why we became so close. She for being Chinese, me for … well, I didn’t come from a wealthy Protestant family like all the others. My aunt paid for me—she wanted me to have chances in life that she never had. She would have paid for my sister Finola as well, but Finola wasn’t the slightest bit interested in going to college. I love her dearly, but green eyes are about the only thing we two girls have in common.”

  They were entering a cluster of houses that, with their attendant trees, felt like a small island in the sea of paddies. There were men sitting outside most of the doorways, their eyes firmly fixed on the intruders, even when talking to one another.

  “I’d love to see inside one of the houses,” Caitlin said hopefully.

  McColl told the handler to stop and tried to think up an acceptable reason to snoop around in someone else’s home. There wasn’t one. “I’ll give you a mace for a look inside your house,” he told the nearest resident. A mace was worth about threepence, probably quite a sum in a place like this.

  The man quickly conquered his surprise and extended a hand toward his door. McColl took the lead, holding the door open to let in light. There was not much to see, just a few pots, a makeshift bed, and a stub of candle. It would be cold in winter, wet and mosquito-infested in summer. And they were less than ten miles from the Shanghai Club.

  Caitlin was trying, and failing, to say thank you in Mandarin. McColl handed the man the coin he had promised, helped her back aboard, and gave the driver the nod to proceed.

  “Did you notice?” she said. “They were all men. The women are in the fields.”

  “It’s the same the world over. In poor countries the women work the land.”

  “I know. But why is that? And how do you square that with the situation back home, where women who want a career are frowned upon? Talk about having your cake and eating it!”

  He knew better than to smile at her outrage. “Did you find it hard getting into journalism? There can’t be that many women writing for newspapers.”

  She looked slightly sheepish. “I had help. A friend of the family. But once I was in, I had no trouble proving I could do the job. And well. I’ve been doing it for six years now.”

  “What area are you in?” he asked. He found it hard to imagine her writing about fashion or cooking recipes.

  “Politics, mostly. I was on the city desk for the first three years, and then I persuaded the
editor to send me to England to do pieces on the suffragettes and the situation in Ireland. Two years ago I covered the strike in Lawrence—did you hear about that?”

  “I did.” Twenty thousand textile workers in the New England town—most of them poorly paid recent immigrants—had come out in protest when their pay was inexcusably cut and eventually won a famous victory. “Being there in the thick of it must have been something.”

  “It was at the time, but go there now and it’s hard to believe they won. When last year’s strike in Paterson was lost, it all felt very depressing, as if nothing would ever really change.”

  “You were there as well?”

  “Oh, yes. And I met some wonderful people.”

  “You love your work, don’t you?”

  She glanced across at him, as if to check that he wasn’t pulling her leg. “I do,” she said simply.

  They traveled for several minutes in renewed silence, the ponies picking their way down the rutted road. In the fields on either side, rows of plantings stretched toward the flat horizon. Winter wheat, he thought, but he wouldn’t have put money on it.

  She asked what sort of business he was in.

  “Automobiles.”

  “Oh. There can’t be much of a market in China.”

  “Just a few rich Europeans, a few rich Chinese. But my boss in England likes the idea of having our cars on every continent, even if it’s only a handful of them. He says it’s an investment, but I think it just makes him feel important.”

  “He might be right about this country. Ch’ing-ling thinks that once things really begin to change, there’ll be no stopping China.”

  “But she’s had to flee to Japan.”

  She grimaced. “True.”

  “The world never changes as fast as we want it to.”

  She turned her face to his, challenge in her eyes. “Yes, but do you want it to? Do you want women to have the vote? Your empire to end? Everyone to get a fair share of the wealth?”

  He held her gaze. “Yes,” he said, “I do. And what’s more, I’m pretty sure all those things will happen, whether I want them to or not. Women should have the vote, and they will—it’s just a matter of time. And all empires come to a sticky end sooner or later, even those that do some good. As to sharing out the wealth … well, I can’t see it happening anytime soon. But state pensions and unemployment benefits have been introduced in the last few years, at least in England and Germany. Things are changing …”