French Concession

by Xiao Bai

  The men standing on the street corner must be enemies of the cell too. They certainly were not ordinary passersby. They lounged about, one pretending to study the physicians’ ads on the wall, while another was smoking with his arms crossed and looking toward her side of the road.

  She turned around and decided to hail a rickshaw on the other end of the street.

  But then she saw a man she knew. On the opposite sidewalk, turning east. He glanced over his shoulder, and she saw that he had a camera. She recognized him, but she could not tell if he had seen her. She quickly turned and left.

  CHAPTER 12

  JUNE 8, YEAR 20 OF THE REPUBLIC.

  9:30 A.M.

  Don’t look right at her, Hsueh reminded himself. He had become a self-taught private detective. His target kept shifting, and it was currently the woman he had seen standing by the ship’s railing. He still could not remember which movie he had seen her in.

  Don’t stay on the same side of the street as your target or follow them from behind. You’re more likely to lose them that way. Walk on the opposite sidewalk, parallel to your target, even though that doesn’t guarantee you won’t be caught. You’ll find yourself sneaking around as if everyone on the street despises you, as if casually lighting a cigarette might attract your target’s attention.

  He could always just leave on the next train to Nanking, or the little steamboat to Soochow. Nanking might be better. He could get a job there. But he quickly dismissed the idea. Where could he go? He was half French, half Cantonese, and a bastard. The half-breed cities of Asia were the real homes of bastards: Hong Kong, Saigon, Shanghai. And even in Hong Kong or Saigon, he would be well within their reach. Maybe he was staying put simply because he didn’t want to move. He was used to this city. He was the parasite, and it was the host.

  Sergeant Maron, who smelled of curry, said he liked him. Inspector Maron, rather. He told Hsueh he had been appointed the head of a newly established detective squad within the Political Section of the Concession Police. He confided that he had worked at the Concession Police for seven years without ever winning the esteem of his superiors and peers. As a result, he became the least corrupt foreign detective in the entire police force. He looked down on the policemen who were buddies with all the gangsters and spent their days in gambling dens and brothels, and they had looked down on him—until Lieutenant Sarly became head of the Political Section. Lieutenant Sarly is a good man, he told Hsueh. If you do a good job for him, he will look after you.

  But Hsueh was petrified. His targets sold guns for a living—that was what Inspector Maron had said. In fact, Hsueh wished he could bring himself to run away. He quickly turned the corner into another longtang, and as he was hurrying into the alley at the end of the longtang, he realized why he was still here: he belonged here. Born a Concession man, he would die a Concession ghost. That was a good line. He could have it engraved on his tombstone. Actually, he should write it on a piece of paper and keep it in his wallet, so that if he were ever found dead on the streets, they would bury those words with him.

  When they left the Astor the previous afternoon, Therese had driven to the door of the YMCA. They parted there, and she went inside while he crossed the road.

  Thirty seconds later, he remembered what he had to do. He turned and followed her surreptitiously into the YMCA building. Luckily for him, it had been open to Chinese since the previous year.

  She went into the changing room, while he went through a different corridor to the side door of the swimming pool. It was the beginning of June, a little too cold for swimming, so the pool was almost empty. He saw Therese’s body shimmer in the water like a white-green fish, the hem of her swim skirt floating just beneath the surface like an aquatic plant. Her legs thrashed about in the water as though they were in bed in the Astor. At this moment, he could not imagine how she could possibly be a dangerous woman. She was happily swimming around and getting drunk.

  But then that man appeared. Just seeing him made Hsueh’s blood boil.

  He was definitely one of Therese’s wicked friends. The whole thing must have been his idea. Hsueh knew these characters when he saw them. If the man hadn’t tricked Therese into getting involved, she would still be running her jewelry business. First he had tempted her into a dangerous business, and then he had seduced her. He must have slept with her. Therese climbed out of the pool, dripping wet, and the man began to towel her off. She put her feet up on a chair, nonchalantly, and the man actually dried her thighs with his towel, like a lover making a point of being attentive.

  Now he stood at the side of the pool, chatting with Therese as if they were old friends. For the first time, he began to think that Inspector Maron’s orders might not be such a bad idea—this man was a shady character. Forget Therese, he would follow this man instead.

  The man came out of Peter Poon Tailors and went into De Luxe Shoes, and then into a White Russian tobacco and alcohol store that sold Luzon cigars. Hsueh could deduce this man’s tastes, and it infuriated him that they were nearly identical to his own.

  Finally, the man went into a restaurant. Hsueh had to roll a newspaper up, stuff it in his pocket, and duck into a shop selling magical props on Rue Bourgeat, feigning a sudden interest in its stacks of empty boxes. Apparently, you could make all kinds of things appear from the boxes: a bunch of fake flowers, a toy car, a porcelain bird, anything at all.

  He should have folded earlier when he’d been playing poker that night. He should have known that the Japanese guy—Barker had said he was a Hawaiian—was up to something funny. That odd Japanese name came to mind, Zenko. Zenko should have folded, and so should the Portuguese player, in which case Barker would not have gotten the ace. Barker was definitely a cheat. Maybe all three of them had been playing him. He sometimes thought of that card game as the root of all his troubles. If they had not won hundreds of yuan off him in that one card game, he would not have vowed not to touch a playing card for three months. Had he not vowed not to touch cards for three months, he would not have agreed to go with Therese to Hanoi—except that the logic did not work, because he immediately had to admit that he would have gone anyway.

  These were dangerous men, Maron had warned him. Gun dealers. Hsueh had watched many people die from gunshot wounds. He could picture their legs twitching like the legs of dying insects. He didn’t understand himself. He was terrified of death, but that didn’t stop him from being quite reckless. Yet come to think of it, the world was full of people like him—the Concession was full of people like him. He once read in a magazine that some people had a tendency to self-destruct. These people couldn’t seem to just settle down and live perfectly good lives. They were earnest young students who had to go and become revolutionaries, diligent shopkeepers who couldn’t stay away from a roulette wheel, prim society wives who spent their days reading women’s magazines full of quack articles about painless delivery, who had to go and have affairs.

  A bespectacled Frenchman from Marseille who worked for Maron had told Hsueh: don’t worry, we’ve got your back. You matter to us more than the other hired snoops—you have French blood in your veins.

  At the door to Bendigo Restaurant, he was almost discovered. In retrospect he realized that the man in a black leather coat must have seen him. Although the man’s mouth was obscured by a huge beard, you could tell he was quite young.

  They were having dinner at an expensive restaurant while he shivered in the night breeze. That irritated him, and he stood at the vestibule of the theater staring at them, almost daring them to spot him. He wanted to know whom his man was meeting for dinner. He guessed they would be keeping an eye out for him. The man in a black leather coat stood in the shadows with his back to the wall for a long time, scanning the street corners.

  Yes, they must have seen him. Now they would be careful. He dared not follow their car, and he could not keep up with a cab on foot. As for hiring another car to follow them, that was for the movies. No, Hsueh had another plan.

  H
e ran up the steps of the Lyceum Theater, and watched the road from its vestibule. He waited for their cab to drive by and memorized its license plate. When it returned to the garage, he ran up to the counter to hire the same cab. He sat in the passenger seat next to the driver, and by paying only double the standard price, two yuan, he got the driver to take him to Rue Amiral Bayle, where his previous passengers had alighted. The driver even remembered which longtang the men had gone into.

  The previous night, Hsueh had hidden at the end of the longtang until they all left. He went back the following morning.

  At just past nine, he was standing outside the hardware store on Rue Amiral Bayle opposite the entrance to the longtang, pretending to make a phone call, when he looked up and something unbelievable happened.

  Unbelievable! Much later, when Hsueh thought back to it, it still seemed incredible. Above the curved beam that stretched across the alleyway and the peeling red paint of the walls, a second-floor apartment had been built directly across the alleyway, bridging the two buildings on either side. The flowery curtains at its window opened, and a face appeared in the darkness. It was a woman, poking her head out of the window. She withdrew hastily, slammed the wooden shutters, and drew the curtains. Hsueh recognized her!

  She was the woman who had been standing by the railing. He had developed that photograph of her, but even staring at it he still could not remember where he had seen her. It dawned on him that this was the place he had been looking for: this second-floor window. Despite being an amateur, he could tell it was no coincidence that a firearms dealer and the chief suspect in an unsolved murder could be found haunting the same longtang.

  That was when he decided to follow this woman instead. She came out of the longtang, and he followed her along Rue Amiral Bayle, walking nearly parallel to her. Then he watched her walk west along Rue Conty and stop at the street corner, forcing him to turn east instead.

  Therese’s wicked friend was interfering with everything good in his life, and yet he did not even know where and when the man would turn up next.

  CHAPTER 13

  JUNE 11, YEAR 20 OF THE REPUBLIC.

  10:15 A.M.

  Many years later, Sarly would come back to visit Shanghai. He had since become like a father to Hsueh. The Concession had been devastated by war, and because Hsueh was in contact with an assortment of people, as usual, the Nanking authorities began to investigate him. At one point, they even had him secretly imprisoned. Hsueh’s many friends stood up for him, producing evidence that Hsueh was innocent of their charges. Lieutenant Sarly even drew on old files from the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs to advocate for Mr. Weiss Hsueh’s acquittal.

  When Hsueh was released from prison, Sarly organized an elaborate celebratory dinner. He pressed Hsueh to visit him in France; indeed, the French government would welcome Hsueh to relocate to Paris if he wished, in recognition of his long years of service to French colonial affairs. Hsueh could also come to the south of France, where Sarly had bought a plot of land with the money he had saved from working in Shanghai. He had been paid well for his colonial postings.

  As the night wore on and the wine began to have its effect, they started reminiscing about the past. Sarly said that he wouldn’t have noticed Hsueh if it weren’t for the White Russian woman who had caught his eye. By chance, or perhaps because she was beautiful, he said self-mockingly, he had ordered an investigation into her. And then, in an intriguing turn of events—as though some higher power had planned it—the investigation had led directly to the assassination at Kin Lee Yuen Wharf.

  One morning after Hsueh’s trip to Rue Amiral Bayle, Inspector Maron found Lieutenant Sarly clutching a half-eaten croissant in his left hand and a cup of coffee in his right, while attempting to open the door to the meeting room with his knee. He leaned over and pushed the door open for Sarly. Our man has found a lead! Maron said.

  The detectives were waiting for them. Inspector Maron did not announce the breakthrough at morning prayers. Instead, he passed a note to Lieutenant Sarly, who glanced at it and tucked it into his file. When he left the meeting room, he asked Inspector Maron to collate all the files that had anything to do with this Hsueh character—interrogation records, the reports he had been filing, and the police department’s files on Hsueh himself—and bring them to his office.

  The note Inspector Maron gave him was a tip written in nearly flawless French by this amateur photographer, and containing startling news. The man had followed a friend of the White Russian firearms dealer to a house on Rue Amiral Bayle. (Maron had penciled a note in the margins explaining that this was Zung, the middleman.) The following day, when he returned to the house, he had discovered its unlikely occupant, whom he recognized from her photograph in the papers. She was the wife of Ts’ao Chen-wu, that man who had been killed on Kin Lee Yuen Wharf, and she had disappeared right after the assassination.

  When investigating that assassination, Lieutenant Sarly had been intrigued by the killers’ interest in media coverage. Police information suggested they were dealing with a rigorously organized assassination squad, which had leaked the news to reporters ahead of time, and given them a manifesto calculated to cause panic as well as an outline of events, to make sure the story remained in line with their message. Sarly was impressed that they had not only planned the assassination but also intended to shape its media coverage.

  He found the killers’ approach thought provoking. At a morning prayer meeting several days after, he admitted to a few of his subordinates that there might not be a truth to be discovered about these events. Maybe the truth was a heap of documents, newspaper cuttings, and interrogation notes. Maybe it was what people whispered to each other in the alleyways, what the plainclothes investigators wrote in their daily reports. Maybe the truth existed only in their files.

  Years later, Lieutenant Sarly would remember the storm clouds hanging over Shanghai that year. He didn’t just mean that metaphorically. The heavy rains had flooded neighboring provinces, and only in early April did the skies clear. Then the Political Section of the Concession Police unexpectedly became the center of attention. As Sarly remembered it, he had never been quite so popular in his life. Even the British confided in him. His counterpart, Commander Martin from the International Settlement, invited him to his country club for lunch. They ate medium-rare steak and lamb kidneys heaped on a plate. The young British diplomat who dined with them was very quiet. Whenever Commander Martin brought up something important, such as the suggestion that they should set up a system for exchanging intelligence, he grew even shyer, staring down at his wineglass and cigar. Sarly had been the best-informed man in Shanghai in his time. Years later, he still remembered that this man was eventually embroiled in a sex scandal, and forced by public opinion to slink off and leave Shanghai quietly.

  Martin said he hoped they could “reach a private agreement” to cooperate since, as Sarly knew, London was being run by a bunch of thugs led by Ramsay MacDonald. The prime minister had previously been a Foreign Office man, and here Martin glanced apologetically at the young man—there were rumors from London that Soviet spies had infiltrated the Labor Party cabinet, which was simply outrageous. In any case, the British government had resumed foreign relations with the Soviet Union and was withdrawing troops from the colonies. This was evident even in Shanghai, where the British seemed to be passing the buck to the Japanese Army. So Molotov had been right, said Martin: France was the great enemy of socialism and the Soviet Union.

  The steak was two inches thick, grilled over a gas stove and garnished with a cream sauce and Lea & Perrins Worcestershire sauce. Sarly had had a formidable appetite back then, but strangely, his appetite had shrunk as soon as he left Shanghai. Back then, everyone in Shanghai seemed to have a huge appetite.

  “And that, Lieutenant, is why some of the more sophisticated set in London would like us to work more closely with the French Concession Police.”

  Which was how it all started. Of course, Hsueh knew nothing
of this. How would he? He was an idle young man who had gotten himself caught up in a firearms investigation, like an insect struggling in a spiderweb.

  Earlier that year, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs had sent Sarly a message via private channels, advising him to run a couple of high-profile operations targeting Communists, to dovetail with their trade embargo policies against the Soviet Union. Unlike Martin’s lot, the Political Section of the Concession Police had previously taken the view that doing less was more. The police’s job was to protect commercial interests, collect their share of the profits, and keep everyone happy. Lieutenant Sarly was sometimes tempted to think that they should all learn to get along with the Communists. These radical groups kept the French colonies from getting too dull. Whereas the International Settlement wanted to curb the power of the gangs, and stamp out the brothels and gambling dens, the French embraced them, scoffing at the Brits. And while the International Settlement cooperated with the Nanking government in arresting Communists, the French Concession deliberately turned a blind eye. The French were slow to act, and word of their police raids always leaked ahead of time, giving the Communists time to retreat and transfer their bank accounts. As long as they did not cause too much trouble, the Concession Police would tolerate them. Crafting a colonial policy that distinguished them from the British would serve to demonstrate how liberal the French were. This had always been the French way of doing things.

  But then everything changed. Officially this was because the French intelligence agency had received reliable information that Comintern and Moscow were sponsoring subversive radical groups in Indo-China, via Shanghai-based organizations that offered financial and practical assistance. The mail from Haiphong brought all kinds of news in documents from heavy bound reports to scattered notes discovered in raids. Lieutenant Sarly decided he would have to do something about it, if only to placate Paris. Perhaps he wanted to beef up the line on his résumé about supervising a colonial police force. In any case, he began to read the files. The biggest problems will resolve themselves if you look away, Lieutenant Sarly liked telling his men. But even a trace of something fishy can turn into a case if you look hard enough. All it takes is imagination.