French Concession

by Xiao Bai

  The bell rang for breakfast. Leng Hsiao-man wiped her cheek with the back of her hand. She glanced at the irate stranger, and as she was about to leave, she noticed a camera hanging from his long shoulder strap. The lens cover sprang open, and a finger pressed down on the shutter button. She hurried away.

  The pilot boarded at 8:30 A.M. from a ladder mounted on the port side of the ship. He was responsible for navigating the ship into the narrow mouth of the Whampoa through Ch’iang-k’ou Channel. The ship would sail a little farther along the Whampoa to its destination, Kung-ho-hsiang Pier, just east of Lokatse on the northern shore of the Whampoa. He was not the only man getting ready to board the ship. At the floating pier just outside the port commissioner’s office, four men in short sleeves were boarding a speedboat bound for the Paul Lecat—most likely gangsters, as they were carrying guns.

  When the men sent by the Green Gang arrived at his cabin, Ts’ao had breakfasted and was fully dressed. Two of the bodyguards lugged his trunks out onto the deck. He reclined on the sofa in the cabin while Leng stood by the railing outside. He had no idea why Leng didn’t just stay home. She insisted on traveling with him, but when she came she always had that mournful look. She shivered, went up to the trunk, opened it, and retrieved a red scarf, which she tied around her head.

  The garde municipale, the police force of the French Concession, had been notified of Ts’ao’s secret mission, but he would also need the Green Gang’s protection. So instead of disembarking at Kung-ho-hsiang Pier in the International Settlement, he took a speedboat to Kin Lee Yuen Wharf, south of Lokatse. That was in the French Concession, within Green Gang territory.

  Two boats were let down from the ship at the same time. One carried a Frenchman, a messenger who regularly traveled from Hanoi by train and sea via Haiphong to Shanghai, with documents that had to be personally signed for by the head of the Political Section of the French Concession Police. The other boat carried an important member of the Nanking government, his wife, his own bodyguards, and four bodyguards sent by the Green Gang. Before long, his wife started complaining of seasickness and insisted on sitting at the cabin window to get some air.

  The sky was bright. Lin P’ei-wen was sitting on a rusty ladder that dipped below the waterline. The waves foamed around the pier, while bits of wood and leaves floated downstream. From where he was on Fishermen’s Pier, he could see the porters on Kin Lee Yuen Wharf wearing their copper badges—only registered workers were allowed onto piers permitting overside delivery. He looked out to Lokatse, a bit of land on the eastern shore of the river that jutted out where the river took a sharp turn south. Someone said that it was called Lokatse because there used to be six families living there—lok meant six. But there were far more than six families there now. All the foreign trading houses were claiming land along the waterfront and building warehouses there. The few remaining rapeseed fields between dirty black walls looked like gaps in a mouth full of rotten teeth. There’s no way I can keep track of all the boats rounding the corner past Lokatse, Lin thought. The papers said that the authorities were planning large-scale works to fill in deep fissures in the riverbed there.

  Lin had collected a telegram in the early hours of the morning using forged identity papers. He had reported the contents of the telegram to Ku: their target, the hero of the day, would be arriving as planned. In a sense, Lin and his associates were merely the supporting cast.

  In the early morning, Ku Fu-kuang had been at Mud Crossing in Pu-tung, waiting to cross the river with two other men. The Concession authorities prohibited boats other than the licensed Chinese and Western-run ferries from taking passengers across the river, but there were always boatmen willing to risk the passage across the narrow, winding river for a fee.

  Now they were sitting in a chestnut-colored Peugeot sedan parked at the entrance to Kin Lee Yuen Wharf.

  Lin saw two boats round the corner, one after another. A woman stood at the entrance to the cabin of the speedboat, the chrome-plated railing glinting in the sunlight, her red head scarf flapping in the wind. Slipping out of Fishermen’s Pier from a hole in the wire-mesh fence, he went up to the Peugeot and waved.

  Ko Ya-min jumped out of the car and melted into the crowd. The entrance of the wharf led out onto the crowded Quai de France. Lin immediately picked out the reporter Li Pao-i, whose shifty air gave him away.

  The Arsène Lupin had never employed more than three people at a time. It was printed once every three days, and each paper consisted of a single broadsheet folded up into a tabloid paper, so calling Li Pao-i a newspaper reporter was a stretch. But he had somehow gotten a tip and arrived early to get a piece of the action. This was a big scoop, and he didn’t have the nerve to hog it, so he had also sold the tip to a handful of more reputable newspapers whose reporters he saw regularly at the teahouse. Now they were standing next to him, while men with cameras waited about ten meters away.

  Sergeant Ch’eng Yu-t’ao strode through the entrance to the wharf with several of his men from North Gate Police Station. Someone important was disembarking today. The Green Gang had undertaken to protect him, and the sergeant’s job was to shoo busybodies away and seal off the floating dock connected to the jetty, so that the motorcade could drive directly up the jetty onto the dock. When the cops arrived, the Peugeot drove slowly away from the entrance to the wharf.

  Ku was now standing on the southern end of Rue Takoo with a Browning No. 2 pistol tucked under his shirt, in the left pocket of his gray serge trousers. The pocket had been specially sewn on, and it was extra deep so his gun would fit snugly inside. The strange windowless building behind him was a cold storage warehouse belonging to Shun-ch’ang Fish Traders. Ku was frantic. He realized the flaw in his plan. The jetty had been sealed off and no one was allowed to enter the floating dock. If the party had a motorcade, or if the blinds on the cars were drawn, then all was lost.

  Lin P’ei-wen was standing at the opposite corner and looking toward him. Behind Ku, a narrow street called Rue de la Porte de l’Est ran south along the Quai de France, two blocks from Rue Takoo and parallel to it. On the side that intersected with the Quai de France, there was an iron gate with a police guard post. Farther south, where the French Concession ended and Chinese territory began, the road was called Waima Road, and the building on the intersection where the Quai de France became Waima Road was the headquarters of the Shanghai Special Marine Police Branch. Lin’s job was to watch those two buildings closely. Ku himself was standing at the spot with the best view, and he had a clear view of the entrance to Kin Lee Yuen Wharf. The Peugeot was parked on the other end of Rue Takoo, near Rue du Whampoo.

  Leng had already disembarked. She too realized that things had not gone according to plan. There were three eight-cylinder Ford sedans waiting for them, and they got into the middle one, with Ts’ao sitting next to her. She did not know whether anyone could tell which car they were in, and the blinds were drawn.

  She made a decision without thinking twice.

  Sergeant Ch’eng Yu-t’ao was standing on the floating dock to welcome his guests. He had Ts’ao’s personal bodyguards hand over their Mauser rifles. Civilians were not allowed to carry unregistered firearms in the Concession, and what mattered was that they had the Green Gang’s protection.

  The car drove slowly up the jetty, turning past a building toward the entrance to the wharf.

  It was just past ten. Li Pao-i would claim that he had heard the clock at the Customs House chime, or at least that was what he later told Hsueh at the teahouse.

  The assassination at Kin Lee Yuen Wharf

  Just then, a string of firecrackers exploded with a deafening boom behind the rickshaws lined up on the northern side of the entrance. Later, the police confirmed that a string of firecrackers had indeed been hanging on the iron fences surrounding the wharf. The ground along the wall was strewn with tiny bits of paper, and the place stank of nitrates and sulfates. The Concession Police had developed a conditioned response to firecrackers—alth
ough harmless, they had often been used in recent protests and riots to sow chaos at the scene.

  A rickshaw broke out of the lineup, cutting off Leng’s sedan. Its window was open. Leng rolled her window down and stuck her head out. She poked her finger down her throat, and began to throw up the milk she had had for breakfast on the ship. The car stopped abruptly, her head jerked, and vomit spattered onto the body of the car. She did not see Ko Ya-min waiting behind the rickshaw. The door to the car was yanked open, and she fell out onto the ground. The gunfire pierced her eardrums like a screwdriver.

  Firecrackers were echoing all along the tall buildings on either side of the wharf. But Ku had no time to enjoy the spectacle—he was focused only on witnessing its effect. As he watched Leng fall out of the car, he thought he could imagine how she must feel.

  When it was eventually decided that Ko Ya-min would be the assassin instead of Leng, no one breathed a sigh of relief for her. Leng had argued that she was every bit as brave as Ko Ya-min, and the cell believed this man, Ts’ao Chen-wu, had in all likelihood ordered the murder of her ex-husband in prison. Ts’ao had been an officer in the Kwangsi Army, and he was now head of the Military Justice Unit for the forces occupying Shanghai. But Ku chose Ko as the assassin. His priority was to make sure that Ts’ao’s execution took place in public, in a highly visible location. Luckily he had not planned to have Ts’ao shot on the floating dock itself, or the police blockade of the jetty would have thwarted his plan. Ku knew why Ko Ya-min had fought so hard for this task. Wang Yang, the man who had been shot in prison on Ts’ao’s orders, was not only his half-brother and mentor, but also the person who had definitively conquered Leng’s heart, especially now that he was dead.

  Ko reached his hand into the backseat of the car to fire. All three bullets hit Ts’ao, and the last one penetrated his temple.

  For Ts’ao, that bullet was the final blow. But for Ku, it was only the first blow, the first of a series of powerful signals he planned to send to the Concession and to Shanghai.

  The Concession Police stood by. Later, at a meeting to discuss the incident, they would say that everything happened too quickly for them to react.

  The eight bodyguards sent by the Green Gang were also caught by surprise. They had just gotten into the other two cars in the motorcade. Just as an audience relaxes for a moment when the curtain falls and before the applause begins, they let their guard down as they settled into the car, and the assassin had seized his chance.

  An investigative commission representing the Nanking government in Shanghai also began to look into the incident. In one of their internal meetings, someone suggested that there was something fishy about the fact that the police had demanded Ts’ao’s bodyguards hand over their rifles. Others suggested an investigation into the Green Gang bodyguards—who else could have known when Ts’ao was due to disembark, and how was this information leaked to the assassin? But all these speculations petered out when they discovered that Ts’ao’s wife had sent a telegram from Wu-sung-k’ou when the liner was anchored there. Investigations into her quickly revealed one startling piece of evidence after another: her unusual background, the telegrams she had sent to Shanghai from Hong Kong, her red head scarf, and the vomiting. The woman herself had disappeared. Her photograph appeared in all the newspapers, and the Concession tabloids made a big show of using many question marks to suggest something scurrilous had happened.

  Someone brought in the form that the man who collected Leng’s telegram had filled out at the Telegraph Office, but they could not identify him, and the trail went cold. The tabloid reporter called Li Pao-i was a more promising lead, but there was little Nanking could do about that. As a resident of the French Concession, the man lay within the jurisdiction of the Concession Police, and the interrogation reports they sent to Nanking had clearly been doctored. One Sergeant Ch’eng from North Gate Police Station had written a report stating that Li had nothing to do with the assassins, and that Li had simply received an anonymous phone call at the newspaper’s editorial offices, as well as a brown paper envelope that afternoon after the incident took place. But Li had connections to the Green Gang and was known for his cunning. He had tipped off several other newspapers, and sold his story and the contents of the envelope to several of the most reputable newspapers in the Concession instead of printing them in his own small paper, so he wasn’t technically in breach of press regulations. No one in Nanking gave much thought to this setback, as they were already in the process of making plans to cooperate with the Concession Police.

  And neither Nanking, nor the Concession Police, nor even the Green Gang could get anything out of the assassin, because after firing three shots at Ts’ao, he aimed the gun at his own temple and fired. The police coroner later found that the man had also bitten through a wax cyanide pill under his tongue. The bullet was just a safety measure.

  CHAPTER 1

  MAY 25, YEAR 20 OF THE REPUBLIC.

  9:10 A.M.

  The Morris Teahouse was decorated like the interior of a ship’s cabin. This was not unusual in the foreign concessions, where middle-aged European businessmen liked to install portholes and ship wheels in their houses, and style themselves captains. To be more precise, the teahouse looked like a floating hexagonal pagoda with its narrow stairs and copper-plated railings. The third floor had large windows on three of its walls, through which the Race Course could be seen, northeast of the teahouse.

  The teahouse was as raucous as a stable. In fact, the building had housed a stable before being converted to a teahouse. Two large pieces of iron shaped like horses’ hooves hung on the door, and Li Pao-i touched them every time he went inside.

  The Morris Teahouse was where all the smalltime journalists in the concessions met to trade tips because it was so near the Race Course. On a clear day, if you stood at one of the windows facing north, you could see all the way to the ticket booth and even make out the colorful numbers announcing a raffle or listing betting odds. The crowds waited by the entrance, milling about in threes or fives. Li looked out onto the racecourse. On the inner dirt track where the horses warmed up in the morning, a stable hand was taking a small black mare for a lazy walk. When nuggets of horse shit dropped from her round ass, the stable hand would snatch them up as though they were worth something and put them in his bamboo basket.

  Pppft! Li spat tea leaves out of the corner of his mouth. Even the tea here tasted like horse piss. The previous Saturday, the North Gate police had barged into his room early in the morning. Li lived in a tiny room above the shared kitchen, which meant his room always stank of fried salted fish. He was still half asleep when they dragged him outside and shoved him into the dingy backseat of a car. And then they dragged him out of the car and threw him into a room with white walls. It was true he could lock the door at night. But why should he? It wasn’t as though he owned anything valuable. And how had they burst into the courtyard and marched straight through the kitchen and up the squeaky wooden stairs, all without waking meddlesome Mrs. Yang downstairs? Granted, they were cops, unstoppable in their uniforms, with whistles and batons, and police badges on their lapels.

  That was why he had slept soundly right up until the moment when his visitors pulled the covers off and asked him politely to get dressed. The car made several sharp turns and pulled up in front of a red brick building. Only when he was pushed roughly out of the car did he think to ask: who are you anyway?

  And then they stopped being polite. One man punched him on the back of the head. He recognized the man waiting inside as Sergeant Ch’eng of the North Gate police. He knew old Pock-faced Ch’eng. Like Li, Ch’eng was a Green Gang man from a wealthy Shanghai family. Unlike Li, the sergeant was a big shot. Li tried playing the gang card, mentioning his capo, but they kept kicking and punching him. He was forced to tell Ch’eng everything he knew. Except that he didn’t know anything. He certainly did not know ahead of time that a man would be killed or he would have told the police—he was a good citizen. Ow! All right
, he wasn’t a good citizen, but he still wouldn’t have had the nerve to keep that secret. He’d gone to the Kin Lee Yuen Wharf because an anonymous caller had told him at seven in the morning that something big was going to happen there. But what was he doing in the newsroom so early? Li said he hadn’t gone home in the first place—he had spent the night playing mahjong. And why would he believe a single anonymous caller? What made the other reporters believe him? Here Li hesitated, and his interrogators pinned him down by the shoulders. Maybe it was the other man’s tone of voice, which had sounded deadly serious, like cold air emanating from the phone receiver. But then how had he convinced the others? Oh, that was a piece of cake—he got another punch in the head, apparently Sergeant Ch’eng’s men didn’t like it if you sounded too casual—aren’t reporters ready to believe anything in case there’s a scoop in it for them?

  Sergeant Ch’eng let him go. He did warn Li that if it weren’t for his capo, and if it weren’t for the fact that Li had been clever enough to sell the manifesto to other newspapers instead of printing it in the Arsène Lupin, he would be spending the next couple of years in jail at Lunghwa Garrison Command. The media had had a field day covering the Kin Lee Yuen shooting, and many newspapers had printed a manifesto addressed to Shanghai residents by the assassins, without the slightest regard for the authority of the Shanghai Party-Government-Army Press Censorship Bureau, which was housed in the East Asia Hotel.