French Concession

by Xiao Bai

  From there it was a short step to discovering that the post office box belonged to a businessman in his early thirties, one Zung Ts-Mih. The Hong Kong police realized immediately that this man had long been a subject of interest. Further investigations revealed that the respectable-looking Mr. Zung had a complicated background and obscure ancestry. In the sailors’ taverns it was rumored that despite his Chinese name, Zung was at most half Chinese. Even his father was said to have been a British subject “of mixed blood.” These words had been circled in red in the report, and a big bent arrow, like a circus clown’s tilted hat, pointed to a rectangle containing the word Siamese.

  At least three of Mr. Zung’s close contacts were under surveillance by the Hanoi Police. And yet the British insisted that their policy permitted them to investigate the suspects and photograph them but not arrest them. Lieutenant Sarly considered this so-called policy an instance of British arrogance, appeasement, and sheer neglect. The real subject of their investigation was one Alimin, a roaming wolf whose travels had taken him all over East Asia, to Bangkok, Johore, Amoy, and Hankow, and reportedly even to Vladivostok and Chita, where he was said to have received some form of technical training. The photograph was indistinct, but in it he was wearing a shirt with a jacket and black bow tie, together with a pair of those baggy knee-length shorts worn over a sarong of the kind the natives wore. He had a thick brow and huge nose.

  Someone had written across the top of the first page of the document:

  —selon la décision de la IIIème Internationale, le quartier général du mouvement communiste vietnamien déménagera dans le sud de la Chine. Ses dirigeants arriveront bientôt dans notre ville (Shanghai), leurs noms sont Moesso et Alimin.

  It turned out that Mr. Zung was the Chinese agent for a foreign trading company registered in Hong Kong and run by a German woman whom the police later determined to be White Russian. She lived in an apartment in the French Concession, on the third floor of the Beam Apartments on the corner of Avenue Joffre and Avenue Dubail. A detective from Marseille, who fancied himself a poet, had described the building as an “ornate box with the scent of cape jasmine and osmanthus.” Lieutenant Sarly ordered an investigation into the occupants of the Beam Apartments, which turned up a report entitled “Personnalités de Shanghai,” a sixteen-page document that the secretariat nicknamed the VIP file. So it turned out the police did have information on this woman after all, buried in a list of Concession dignitaries. No one had taken the time to link her to the inconspicuous woman noted in the port customs files. The VIP file did not contain much information beyond an address, occupation, and phone number. But the detectives in the Political Section immediately began a preliminary investigation, and started writing their reports, a stack of which now lay at Sarly’s fingertips. On his table, rather, in his sunlit document tray.

  The red brick building at 22 Route Stanislas Chevalier was the police headquarters. Sarly’s Political Section was on the northern side of the second and third floors. The building reeked of rosin and paraffin wax. Lieutenant Sarly dealt with the unbearable smell by endlessly smoking pipes. On humid spring days, this made the air in his office even more rancid. But in the afternoon, sunlight streamed into the room. The shade of the mulberry trees inside the walls extended onto the street, and two children in tatters stood on Route Albert Jupin, staring up at the tree. Afternoons in the South Concession were usually quiet apart from a couple of dogs barking from inside the jails on Rue Massenet.

  The woman who lived in the Beam Apartments was a thirty-eight-year-old White Russian woman whom the Chinese referred to respectfully as Lady Holly. She apparently ran a jewelry store opposite the apartments on the corner of Avenue Dubail, under the sign ECLAT. The door faced Avenue Dubail, whereas the side facing Avenue Joffre was a storefront window shaded by curtains. The store occupied the ground floor of a two-story building, and when the family living upstairs hung their gray Chinese gowns out to dry without wringing them out, water would drip onto the ECLAT sign, said the report. Sarly recognized the hand of the poet from Marseille in this writing. Sarly himself was always encouraging his subordinates to write official reports with more flair. Details, he always said, stick closely to the details.

  The jewelry store did mediocre business. Ever since the Russians flocked to Shanghai, the market had been flooded with large quantities of precious stones all said to be from the mines of the Urals, and it was hard to tell which ones were genuine. The Russian jewelry stores had Jewish storekeepers who all sported a scraggly beard full of crumbs and spit, like large furry animals with an air of Central Asia about them. The locals were skeptical of claims that distant offshoots of the tsar’s family had come to Shanghai with their wedding jewels tucked carefully away in trunks. Sergeant Maron, a man who sank his free time in Sherlock Holmes novels, pointed out that the jewelry shop could not possibly be making enough money to cover rent, much less subsidize Lady Holly’s lavish lifestyle.

  Someone later put a list of names on his desk, with a note identifying it as a list of passengers on that French ship involved in the Kin Lee Yuen incident. He tossed the list onto the sofa, and did not look at it until the poet started screaming at the top of his lungs. Yes, that’s her, the White Russian princess of the Beam Apartments—that’s her beautiful ass! Only a poet could look at a name list and think of ass.

  Of course, it could be a simple coincidence. But Sarly’s Corsican imagination told him that if one woman kept turning up everywhere you looked, and you persisted in thinking there was nothing to it, you must have some nerve to be denying the existence of God, of the great hands that arrange all earthly affairs.

  Sarly knew that nearly everyone in the building called him “bow legs” behind his back. Like a retired jockey who had stopped caring about his weight, he pounded the black floorboards of the police station and made them creak. Not long after Sarly was posted to the Political Section, the atmosphere there changed. His predecessor had been on good terms with the local gangs and secret societies until someone had circumvented the colonial authorities and ratted him out to the Paris newspapers, after which the man had to be posted to Hanoi.

  Sarly had two habits that distinguished him from his predecessor. To begin with, he liked tobacco pipes. From the document tray on his desk to the two telephones, a row of briar, agate, coral, and jade pipes adorned the room. This was a private hobby and had no impact on the rest of the Political Section. Rather, it was his predilection for paperwork that drove his subordinates crazy. Sarly liked to circulate documents in the office, as though he could only comprehend something when it had been written down with a name and rank attached to it.

  Sarly sat placidly in his office, smoking and reading documents. The new leadership of the Political Section had ramifications beyond its walls. In the summer, the mulberry trees that shaded Route Albert Jupin attracted a crowd of urchins who often scaled the walls surrounding the police headquarters to reach the mulberries. The junior officers on duty had gotten in the habit of slipping out of the back door and catching a few boys, boxing their ears, and putting them to work polishing shoes, washing cars, sweeping floors, and scrubbing windows. That afternoon, they were hiding in the alleyway and ready to pounce when Sarly poked his head out of a third-floor window and stopped them.

  The various subdivisions of the Political Section were further divided into smaller units. The Chinese men all worked for the Chinese police inspector, who also had two Chinese detective sergeants under his command. Foreigners were foreigners, whether Vietnamese or French, and Chinese were Chinese. So if a Frenchman wanted something from a Chinese detective, he would first have to speak to the Chinese inspector, who would then give the appropriate orders. Sarly cut through all the bureaucracy. His powerful bow legs kicked open the doors to every office in the building. He would assign work to anyone he saw fit, and he selected detectives from every division for a newly created detective squad that met every morning in a room on the end of the third-floor corridor. Everyone else
called this meeting “morning prayers for the lieutenant’s bastards.” The French were infuriated by the fact that half the bastards were Chinese. Sarly’s theory was that the Political Section could not only be an elite force. To protect French colonial interests, it must be in touch with the local community.

  Something occurred to Sarly, and he looked more closely at the list. He noticed that the White Russian woman had not been traveling alone. She had a companion, Hsueh Wei-shih, Weiss Hsueh. The discovery irritated him. At morning prayers the next day, he would chew his detectives out for not having done a thorough job.

  The evidence suggested that Irxmayer and Co. were doing some alarming deals. Official documents listed the company as trading “household metal tools” and “commercial machine equipment,” which sounded less like a pretext than a rueful excuse: times are hard, so we had to specialize to stay afloat.

  In fact, Irxmayer and Co. traded across Asia in ammunition and firearms. Beneath the hay and durable oilcloth in its wooden crates lay deadly weapons that could be used to assassinate a man, intimidate him, play Russian roulette, or even to start a war.

  CHAPTER 4

  JUNE 2, YEAR 20 OF THE REPUBLIC.

  9:50 A.M.

  Margot ran toward Therese’s Ford car as soon as it had driven past the fence.

  They were at the home base of the Shanghai Paper Hunt Club, north of a stream called Rubicon Creek on maps. The rules of the hunt were as follows: the club nominated a master who laid a paper trail by scattering scraps of colored paper from a large bag he carried across country, and the riders would have to follow the route he laid out to the finishing point. For thirty years now, the master had been Ah Pau, who had an endlessly inventive Chinese sense of humor. He scattered scraps of paper in the crannies between rocks, under tufts of grass, hid them in ditches and under bridges. Once he strung them across the river on a piece of fishing line, causing several contestants to fall in. No one could guess what Ah Pau had up his sleeve, which was why Brenen had Margot study the map closely.

  The map had been drawn by early pathfinders in the club, who invented names such as Three Virgins’ Jump and Sparkes Water Wade. Margot once asked Brenen out of curiosity: “But what do the Chinese call these places? They must have Chinese names—they aren’t even inside the concessions.”

  Brenen had given her an answer in the true colonial spirit: “Who cares what they call it? Once we give it a name, it’s ours.”

  The Shanghai Paper Hunt Club’s race at Rubicon Creek

  Her husband, Baron Franz Pidol, would have approved of that answer. The Luxembourg United Steel Company’s chief representative in Shanghai, he spent most of his energies speculating on land, and he currently had his sights on a field near Rubicon Creek. “Even that old cripple, Sir Victor Sassoon, has his eyes on the creek,” said Franz.

  The Board of Works had been planning to build roads west of the concessions toward the creek. Their timing was perfect. After years of flooding along Lake T’ai’s river system, to which the creek belonged, all the fields were now barren.

  Here in Shanghai, Franz was in his element. Others might think the muggy nights and mosquitoes a nuisance, but all it seemed to do to Franz was prevent him from ever visiting Margot’s bedroom. It was unlikely that he never slept with anyone else. The talkative Mrs. Liddell told Margot that all the men took Chinese lovers. They all fell in love with the place, with the social scene, with smoking Luzon cigars and playing cards, and with the superior goods on offer at the brothel on Avenue Haig, where the women did not sit naked in the sitting room the way they did elsewhere. Subtlety was more to the taste of the worldly businessmen whose circle Franz was about to join.

  Margot was lonely. Until Franz declared that he was in love with Shanghai, Margot had been counting on going home when his three-year contract ended. Was it really so easy to fall in love with a place? Wasn’t it much easier to fall in love with a person, like Brenen?

  Brenen Blair had fallen in love with Margot the moment he saw her. Margot only had two friends in Shanghai, and apart from Therese, Brenen was the only person in whom she could confide. In the tearoom at Arnhold & Co., Brenen had suggested she buy parchment lamp shades bordered with dark gold, as she was looking to change the lamp shades in her bedroom. It was the first time they had met. Only much later would he have a chance to admire the lit lamp shades, when Franz had begun to travel inland frequently by train.

  Mrs. Liddell said that although Mr. Blair was young, he was a veteran diplomat, who had proved himself capable of handling tricky situations during postings to Australia and India. He was currently a political adviser to the Nanking government. As the go-between for the colonial British government and the Nanking government, he had the right to convey his views directly to the Foreign Office in London without going through the British consul in Shanghai, Mr. Ingram, or through the British temporary representative office in Beijing.

  Brenen suggested that Margot join the Shanghai Women’s Equestrian Club, and Franz supported the idea. The two of them accompanied her to the stables of the riding school on Mohawk Road, and picked out a gray mare flecked with white. Franz could not understand why Margot wanted to name the horse Dusty Answer. The odd name was actually Brenen’s idea. Franz had been cordial to Brenen until they had summered together in Mo-kan-shan, the mountains near Shanghai, where Franz had just bought a plot of land and built a summer resort. When they got back, he began assiduously to avoid all social occasions at which Mr. Blair might appear.

  Margot showed Therese into the club grounds. The grass had been freshly mowed. The Chinese servant at the club had been busy since dawn, carrying bamboo chairs out of storage and wiping them down, filling silver buckets with a cocktail made from rock sugar and gin. The grass was dotted with wildflowers that attracted bees and butterflies to buzz about your ankles. A water buffalo burned black by the sun lazed on the southern shore of Rubicon Creek. The club used to wait until the end of November to put on its official competition. By then, the beans and cotton would have been harvested, the winter crop of wheat planted, and the weather would be at its mildest. But since the arable land had all turned to wasteland after the flooding, the committee had been happy to arrange a few more contests. After all, the Depression meant the men had more free time, and they needed the exercise.

  They found a bamboo table beneath the oleander tree. The men were arguing by the stables. Mario, the man with the loudest voice, was an Italian illustrator who drew cartoons for the foreign newspapers in the Concession. They said he had been beaten up in a bar in Hongkew by a band of Japanese rōnin. The illustrator was arguing with people, among them the British businessman whom Margot knew to be in Franz’s set. “It’s time we taught Nanking a lesson,” the British man cried. “We should have the Japs do it. They could even start a little war. We’d get new treaties and new boundaries for the concessions, maybe even fifty kilometers on either side of the Yangtze!”

  “Wouldn’t that be a windfall for you,” Mario replied frostily. “With all that land you’ve bought, a war would keep you out of bankruptcy court!” His voice grew louder. “You idiots, wake up. There’s no more striking it rich out here. The Great War was the end of that. If the Japanese get here, they’ll ruin us all.”

  Compared to the rest of the crowd, Brenen was tall and thin. He came over to keep them company while they examined the horse.

  The crown of the chinquapin tree hung over the fence. The gray mare stood beneath it while the stable hand in his blue jacket stroked her neck, tightened the girth, and lifted the saddle to reveal her mane, which had been neatly braided. The scent of bay leaves wafted toward them, and the mare grew fidgety, snorting and pawing vigorously at the ground. To join the club, Margot had had to buy a horse, because competing horses had to be the bona fide property of club members. They had to be Chinese horses, though strictly speaking, that meant they were small Mongolian horses, crossbred from English purebreds and Mongolian horses, as Brenen had once explained to her. Her mar
e was a crossbreed too. Look at her hips, he explained, smacking the horse’s ass in front of the Cossack horse dealer on Mohawk Road. Purebred Mongolian horses have sloping hips, while English horses have arched hips. This horse is descended from the herd of English stallions that the tsar bought, because he was convinced that his Cossack cavalrymen would defeat Napoleon as long as they were mounted on horses with the wide hips of English purebreds.

  “In fact, Dame Juliana Berners of Sopwell Nunnery said as long ago as the fifteenth century that a good horse possesses the back of a donkey, the tail of a fox, the eyes of a rabbit, the bones of a man, and the chest and hair of a woman. A good racing horse is proud and holds its head high, like a beautiful woman.”

  Brenen repeated this speech, looking at Therese.

  A bay horse came galloping in from the north side of the field.

  “Ah Pau! Ah Pau!” the onlookers cried.