by Xiao Bai
The teahouse began to fill with people, and he sat at a window facing north. Hsueh sat opposite him, while his camera lay on the small table.
“Where were you that day? I spent all night looking for you. I even came here to catch you in the morning, but you weren’t anywhere to be found!”
Li Pao-i was telling the truth now. He had not told the truth to Sergeant Ch’eng.
Hsueh seemed to regret missing out on the scoop. Of course, Li then had simply sold the tip to someone else. Hsueh flipped through the photos again. Several of them had already appeared in the newspaper, but there were a few others that Hsueh hadn’t seen. These were the ones by the China Times, and the photographer had developed a set for Li to keep.
Hsueh’s favorite subject of photography was the crime scene. Here, the gunman’s corpse took up the right-hand diagonal half of one photo, lying beneath the spare tire that hung at the back of the car. There were black pools of liquid and a gun on the ground. Shun Pao identified it as the semiautomatic Mauser C96 rifle, while other papers used its nickname, the box cannon gun, to make it sound scarier. Another photo was a close-up of a cop’s face. Beyond the rim of his cap and his raised tin whistle, which was so near the lens it looked like a wilted black flower, you could see the door swung open and the body on the backseat. The corner of a black coat peeked out beneath the door. It belonged to the woman, the victim’s wife. One photo captured her vacant expression as she lay there, propping herself up with her hand and struggling to lift her head, with vomit on the corner of her mouth. Li had seen another photo in Millard’s Review, an old photo from the newspaper announcements of Mr. Ts’ao’s wedding. Word was that Ts’ao’s death had had something to do with his wife, who was now wanted by the police department.
“I saw this woman on the ship. I’ve got a photo of her that’s much better than this one. That guy did a shoddy job. His camera won’t do, and his technique is terrible,” Hsueh said critically. In the chaos, the China Times’s photographer had clearly been unable to keep his subject in focus.
“Show it to me.”
“No, I don’t think I will.” Hsueh sounded a little distracted. “You’d have to pay me. Fifty yuan.”
Li promptly lost interest. The assassination was old news. A whole week had passed, the Concession newspapers had devoted pages and pages to the story, and now everyone was getting tired of it. Only Hsueh was still enthusiastic about it.
“So, this woman. Was she really a Communist?” Hsueh said. “How did they find you anyway?”
“They stopped me on the road and asked me to get into a car with them.” Li was lying again. He had been walking down the street when a woman had slapped him in the face and started hurling abuse at him. Then someone had stopped to break up the fight and shoved him into a car. He had been kidnapped. But he didn’t want to admit that—it was a little embarrassing.
“What did they look like?”
“What do you think, they all had red hair and green eyes? Haven’t you seen a Communist before? Only a few years ago they were on every street corner.”
Just thinking about that man made his skin creep. The man had been forty or so. He always had his top hat on, even indoors. His eyes pierced through you from beneath the rim of his hat, and he smoked one cigarette after another. Li wouldn’t dare mess with him—he could see that this man was much more dangerous than the police. He didn’t have to ask what you were thinking because he knew. And the more polite he was, the more terrified Li became, as if he could be shot for one wrong word. The man put the gun on the table.
He warned Li not to go getting any ideas, not to even think about tipping the police off quietly. Li was to comply fully with his demands. At nine in the morning he was to show up at the Kin Lee Yuen Wharf, watch carefully, and write a good story. The next time we visit, we’ll bring you something, he said. But instead of visiting, they merely sent him a brown paper envelope containing a manifesto announcing the execution of the counterrevolutionary element Ts’ao Chen-wu, signed by the Special Operations Unit of the Chinese Communist Party in Shanghai and Their Comrades of People’s Strength. A bullet lay in the envelope, proof that his correspondent meant business. He could have sent two bullets, but would two bullets say anything that one didn’t?
He dared not simply print the manifesto in the brown paper envelope, so he pulled an old trick and sold it to several of the more reputable newspapers, reasoning that he had more than complied with his visitor’s request. Of course he made a tidy profit—that was his job. He even managed to sell the tip to a foreign newspaper. The Communists couldn’t object to getting some international attention. The wealthy Chinese in the Concession only read foreign newspapers, paid for monthly by check. They all had servants who would retrieve the paper from the letterbox and bring it to the living room in the morning. If they came after him, he could reasonably claim that having the Concession’s foreign newspapers print their manifesto was the equivalent of loosening a screw on the Press Censorship Bureau’s gates. The next day, it would be in all the Chinese papers. Wasn’t that exactly what these men wanted?
He didn’t tell Hsueh all this. It was time they forgot about this story. It was stale news by now, and he was quite sure his visitors would leave him alone. Apart from Hsueh, no one else had come over to ask him about it all morning—and Hsueh was clearly more interested in the woman than the story. When he left, he asked Li Pao-i to give him the photos of this woman, even though he thought little of the China Times’s cameraman. Sure you can have them, it’s old news. Have them all if you want. I’ve already made more than eighty yuan off this story. Care to know the woman’s name?
“I know, she’s called Leng Hsiao-man.”
Hsueh turned and walked quickly down the stairs.
CHAPTER 2
MAY 25, YEAR 20 OF THE REPUBLIC.
10:50 A.M.
As Hsueh walked along, he could not stop thinking about that woman. She looked like someone he knew, but he still didn’t know who she was. All the movies he had seen starred Western actresses. Maybe it was a certain expression, a scene, a line of dialogue she reminded him of. He hadn’t even spoken to her. Now that her photo had been in all the papers, he could barely tell whether the face he imagined was the one he had seen by the railing.
On Mohawk Road, someone thumped him on the shoulder. His shoulder strap slipped, and he quickly hooked his arm to catch his camera. It was Barker.
Barker was American. He had fat fingers covered with layers of skin that made them look like Cantonese sausages, and his fingernails were dull.
“Acetic acid,” Barker had told him one day in the bar.
He had spread his hands, palms facing downward, on the little round table in the bar. The tablecloth was stained with tea, as if he had just rubbed his hands on it. You could invent an alias or grow a beard, but you could not swap out your fingertips. The police had a new way of dipping your fingers in ink and pressing them on a piece of paper, which would go in a big book in a filing cabinet. Then you would never be able to get in trouble again—the cops would find you wherever you went. It’s not as though you could cut off your fingers. Soaking them in vinegar worked and didn’t hurt, but it took a couple of weeks. When Barker was telling him all this in the bar, they had known each other for only about a month.
Hsueh had met him at the roulette table in the saloon. When gambling was outlawed in the International Settlement, all the dice joints and gambling dens had migrated to the narrow alleyways of the French Concession, but foreigners hardly ever came to this kind of place. Barker hovered by the tables, tall and lanky with long arms like a mantis. He stuck out. Hsueh made a point of being inquisitive in the Concession, which he considered his territory. He kept tabs on anyone who stuck out.
A wanted man in America who had fled across the Pacific, Barker now stood in the saloon with the air of a diplomat fresh off the ships. His right elbow was cupped in his left hand, and he was ostentatiously tapping his forehead with his right index finger, li
ke a British public school boy.
Barker pulled Hsueh into the Race Course. Word was that the final steeplechase had been fixed, said Barker, and the horse owner himself was said to be betting against the Cossack jockeys. The jockeys had decided to trap Chinese Warrior between two other horses to prevent it from reaching full speed, and Black Cacique, a literal dark horse, would win. The crowds crammed between the iron gates and the viewing deck were hysterical, as if the Lord himself had decided not to wait for Judgment Day and was judging the saved from the damned on the basis of their betting slips.
A whistle blasted, and the loudspeakers on either side of the viewing deck began to crackle. Someone was making an announcement in English followed by Shanghainese dialect: “The Race Club Committee hereby announces the hosting of an additional steeplechase race this afternoon.”
Cheering, the crowd rushed toward the viewing deck. In the frenzy, a single cry could create a maelstrom that would suck the whole crowd in.
Hsueh changed his mind abruptly. He did not want to join them after all. He bid farewell to Barker, and walked toward Avenue Édouard VII. He would lunch at the Manor Inn, and later that afternoon, Therese would be waiting for him at the Astor Hotel, in a fourth-floor luxury suite that cost twelve yuan a day.
Hsueh was the illegitimate son of a Frenchman who had boarded a boat in Marseille with a suitcase full of tattered clothes. The Frenchman had loitered in bars in Saigon and Canton, bragging about his exploits, until he found a job in Shanghai. It was the best time of his life. Hsueh’s Cantonese mother had a dull complexion. She wore a traditional jacket with dull patterns, her curls jabbing into its stiff collar. She had never worn clothes like that before meeting Hsueh’s father, and she then refused to wear anything else. She rattled constantly around Hsueh’s pale collarbone, in an egg-shaped cloisonné box that he wore on a heavy silver chain around his neck. The chain had long been stained black with his sweat. Even when he was at his least self-conscious, whispering dirty phrases in Therese’s ear in Chinese she didn’t understand, his mother was still rattling between their bodies.
Moved by a passion he had never experienced until then, Hsueh’s father rushed to the trenches at Verdun during the Great War, leaving behind in Shanghai all his possessions, his Chinese lover, and Hsueh. He never returned. Hsueh was only twelve years old. But it could not be said of Hsueh’s father that he did not love his family. He wrote to them from the battlefield, and the letters that reached them from across the oceans often contained a small package of photographs. In one of them, a Zulu regiment was performing a religious ceremony. Hsueh’s father had never seen that many black men in his life. Wearing nothing but a piece of cloth around their waists, they waved their sticks, dancing with rapt expressions. Hsueh’s favorite one was of his father smoking a pipe in the trenches in summertime, his chin covered with stubble, shirtsleeves torn short at the shoulders. In another photo, a man posed stark naked at the entrance to the shower cubicles while his uniform hung on the wall. It was his father, grinning at the camera with one hand covering his pubic hair. His mother had stashed this photo away, so he did not see it until after her death. There was a line in French on the back: Poux—Je n’ai pas de poux! Lice—I have no lice! He suspected this photo was partly responsible for the fact that his mother never remarried.
That winter, his father posed for a photo next to a row of corpses. He wore his jacket and a water canteen slung over his shoulder. There were so many corpses that it looked like a slaughterhouse. Some were laid out side by side, while others were piled on trucks like garbage. In fact, the injured looked even more horrific than the dead. One man was wrapped from head to toe in bandages, excepting three holes for his eyes and nose.
Not only had his father’s amateur photography influenced Hsueh’s choice of career, but the very photos that he sent them from the trenches were also an artistic inheritance that had shaped Hsueh’s tastes. Hsueh’s penchant for snapping photos of dead men, crime scenes, maimed, stabbed, and bullet-ridden bodies, frenzied gamblers, drunkards, and all forms of human perversity could likely be traced to the photos his father sent home.
When she died, Hsueh’s mother had left him a small sum of money, most of which he spent within a month. He had an American firm on the Bund order a camera from New York for him, a 4x5 Speed Graphic with a 1/1000s Compur shutter, the best press camera to be had. It could capture the instant before a bullet pierced a human skull.
Before he met Therese, photography had been his greatest love, with gambling only a distant second. Then Therese had nearly replaced photography in his affections until he tried combining his two loves and found that they were both the better for it.
He had fallen for her right away, that night in Lily Bar.
“Half a glass of kvass topped off with vodka. Hey you, Duke! You know what I want.” She had been a little tipsy. Duke, the waiter she was shouting for, was the White Russian owner of the bar.
Her voice was husky and tender, a voice made for old songs. While the Victrola turned slowly on the bar table, she sat at a table by the window. The black of the wrought iron grilles stood out against the blue diamond-shaped glass, and a naked woman was engraved in yellow on the glass. It was raining, and the pavement had an oily red sheen. When the song ended, she would clap hysterically.
He had thought he was seducing her, so he was startled to find that she had turned their relationship on its head, conquering both him and his camera in the space of a week. His own passive tendency to go along with what other people wanted was to blame.
This afternoon, Therese would be waiting for him in her suite on the fourth floor of the Astor. She might even be in bed, if she had already spent enough time soaking in the bath, warm like a mug of cream swirled with pink fruit juice. Like a filly clambering out of a pond, she would climb out of the bath and skip right into bed. She had an aristocratic air that the White Russian men who claimed to have been dukes or navy admirals rarely possessed. Their huge bodies cowered in the dark corners of the Concession’s bars, members of a defeated northern tribe. Therese, on the other hand, pushed Hsueh onto the bed, had him lie straight, and sat astride him, swaying and waving one arm, as though she were waving a Cossack dagger.
If he didn’t love her, he wouldn’t be losing his temper or interrogating her. He imagined the sultry Southeast Asian breeze whetting her appetite. One day she would decide he couldn’t satisfy her. She would slip out of the hotel room and into someone else’s room. He pictured the man in the other room as an old friend, whereas he himself was only a fling. He imagined her lifting her legs under someone else’s body. The very idea tormented him.
He began to think he didn’t love her after all. He preferred thinking of himself as a dandy taking advantage of the fact that Therese was both wealthy and generous. That made him feel better.
But he still wanted to know whom she had met in the hotel. She would not tell him. If he began to ask, she would get mad, or pounce on him, or even pretend not to hear him and ignore him altogether. He began to daydream about investigating her, but he wouldn’t know how to start. He had no wiles. Li Pao-i might, but Hsueh did not.
CHAPTER 3
MAY 27, YEAR 20 OF THE REPUBLIC.
1:20 P.M.
It was the White Russian woman who first attracted Lieutenant Sarly’s attention. The French Concession Police had a file on every foreigner in Shanghai, and it recorded that she was known as Lady Holly, but the name had nothing to do with her real name or provenance. Only the Chinese used that name, and she had often dealt with Chinese.
She had come to Talien by boat, and before then she had probably lived in Vladivostok. As a southerner, Lieutenant Sarly had never been that far north. He was Corsican; Corsicans controlled all the important posts in the police force.
There were a few documents in her police file, among them a report signed by Foreign Agent 119, which gave her real name as Irxmayer, Therese and noted that Irxmayer was her late husband’s name. The German name concealed the
fact that she was a Russian Jew. There were some faded notes, the earliest records of this woman. Most of them dated from the two months after she first arrived in Shanghai. After that, she seemed to have slipped out of sight. No one in the police’s network of agents and investigators mentioned her.
A month ago, on the lawn adjacent to the police headquarters on Route Stanislas Chevalier, thirty meters or so from the women’s rattan tea tables, Commissioner Martin had told him something interesting. Martin was his English counterpart at the International Settlement’s Municipal Police. The other officers had been playing a game of pétanque à la lyonnaise on the lawn. The lower ranked officers never tired of playing this game. That day, the prize was a trophy and a three-star bottle of brandy. Gripping the iron boule with his palm facing down, Inspector Maron threw the final boule. A man ran into the playing area and traced out a circle with a piece of string to count out the number of points scored by the winner, and all the families got up from their bamboo chairs. When they counted to the fifth boule, the onlookers cheered.
The colonial police and administrators formed their own social circle that congregated at tea parties and various joint conferences. At these events, Sarly often received veiled hints of local vested interests, and it was as important to satisfy them as it was to placate London or Paris, thousands of miles away. Business in the colonies was conducted informally, as it had always been. So you couldn’t always take what Hong Kong’s British colonial police force said on paper seriously—even they might not be taking themselves seriously. And what was anyone to make of their ambiguous choice of words? You may have noticed, or, It would appear from subsequent investigations. . . .
Martin was dressed in full hunting gear that day, but the paper he drew from his pocket was not a map of some unknown country. It was the last page of a long letter about the suspicious activities of one Zung, a businessman from Hong Kong who had been spotted at deserted villages around the bay. Since no opium, alcohol, or the usual smuggled goods appeared to be involved, the case was passed on to the Special Branch of the Hong Kong Police. The letter closed by making casual reference to a German woman and the firm she ran, Irxmayer & Co. She lived in the French Concession, the Hong Kong police learned. Not long thereafter, one of the letters that the colonial police force in Hanoi sent each week by sea was found to contain a detailed description of a botched police sweep. Careless Indo-Chinese terrorists (all the plotting could wear these people out) had left a note under a pillow in their hotel room. Solid information, the Hanoi police concluded—assez généreux, nous voudrions dire. They sent the original note to their English colleagues in Hong Kong without opaque formalities or polite equivocations. It simply contained a post office box number: P.O. Box No. 639.
