French Concession

by Xiao Bai

  Sarly himself had an active imagination, and he prided himself on knowing the city well. How many of the goings-on in the Concession’s maze of longtangs really escaped his gaze? People thought of the French as being idle and free-spirited, but there was more to them than that, he thought. They could govern just as competently as the English could, or better, and their colonies would be more interesting places for it.

  All the detectives in the Political Section had their own team of informers, and every informer had his eyes and ears on the ground. They penetrated every tissue of the city like a network of veins. They each had to file a report every day, even if it was scribbled on the foil from a cigarette packet. If they were illiterate, they could also give an oral report to be recorded by their superiors. All those bits of paper in dubious handwriting would end up on the secretarial division’s desk, to be sorted through and translated, and the juiciest stories found their way to Lieutenant Sarly’s desk.

  That was how the assortment of handwritten notes that Hsueh wrote on scraps of paper—several, in fact, on Astor letterhead printed for the hotel’s guests—wound up on Lieutenant Sarly’s desk an hour later, in a fat file delivered by Inspector Maron. Not only did Lieutenant Sarly notice that this amateur photographer could write entire reports in French, he also found a familiar name in the records of Avenue Joffre Police Station: Weiss, Pierre Weiss. Weiss had been a Frenchman doing business in the Concession when war broke out. He had returned to France to enlist and had never come back to Shanghai. He and his Chinese mistress had had a son, one Weiss “Wei-shih” Hsueh, who was now an informant for the detectives of the Political Section, taking part in an important investigation.

  Inspector Maron told Lieutenant Sarly that he had ordered a search of Hsueh’s rooms on Route J. Frelupt. Lieutenant Sarly looked up from his papers. Cancel it, he said. But Maron replied that Ta-p’u-chiao’s Chinese policemen were already on their way.

  CHAPTER 14

  JUNE 11, YEAR 20 OF THE REPUBLIC.

  6:15 P.M.

  Hsueh was outraged. He wanted to get even with Maron. He was glad he hadn’t told him everything he knew that morning at the police station. When he got home, he was startled by the sight of his wardrobes flung open and drawers tipped onto the floor. His clothes lay scattered everywhere, but bundles of newspapers and letters, and—yes, photographs, were all stacked on his bed. A picture of the French executing a spy at the corner of a trench was propped up on the toaster rack, the rifle pointing toward a pot of jam. His father had leaped out of the trench to take this photograph, standing on the edge of the trench just above the head of the man who was about to be executed.

  Upon inspecting his possessions, he found that all of his important letters and photographs had disappeared, including his father’s photographs, and pictures of his mother and Therese. He was mortified. Those were his most private possessions. He was enraged by the thought of how Maron would sneer when he saw those photos.

  An observer might be forgiven for thinking that Therese didn’t look all that sexy in his pictures. In some, she was leering so widely that her nostrils flared. In others, the perspective made her thighs look fat, and her ass looked flabby. But he thought they were beautiful shots and true to reality. He remembered one overexposed photograph in which Therese’s legs were curled up, and she looked like a white sapote fruit cut open to reveal its pulp. She was aroused, and her pubic hair was visibly wet, though Hsueh would have to admit that the wetness was partly his saliva.

  He could not imagine what someone who saw those photographs would think of him. They recorded moments of pure abandon. He had given Therese the photographs that portrayed her accurately and not as a strange creature. The rest, the ones he’d kept, were the ones the police had taken. It had to have been the police. Maron was behind this.

  All afternoon he seethed with rage and humiliation. He had spent days making up stories to satisfy Maron’s appetite. That man slurped Hsueh’s stories down like spaghetti, and kept shoveling more in. Strung together like cheese, Hsueh’s stories all ended up in Maron’s insatiable stomach. He wrote about what Therese liked in bed. He invented an entire daily schedule for her: where she ate, where she had her dresses tailored, whom she met and where. To please Maron, he was forced to lie about some things. He said he was Therese’s closest business associate, that there was no one she trusted more. He accompanied her everywhere, and when she was not able to attend a meeting in person, he would attend it on her behalf. He even wrote his reports in French, afraid that a careless translator might leave something out. He scoured the Concession’s bookstores for detective novels that would contain the firearms terminology he needed.

  Of course he was selective in what he told Maron. He heaped most of the blame on Therese’s wicked friends. She herself might not be aware of what was happening, he wrote. Her real expertise was in jewelry, and she allowed Zung to take care of other business. (Inspector Maron had told him that the man’s name was Zung.) But sometimes he told the truth, like that morning. Inspector Maron had been grumbling that Hsueh was all talk and no action, so Hsueh told him about following Zung and the other two men to Rue Amiral Bayle. He even mentioned the woman who had disappeared in the Kin Lee Yuen assassination case. But although he could easily have said more, he did not. He did not mention that the woman lived in the apartment overlooking the longtang. He even concealed the location of the apartment—it was late, he claimed, he could not remember which longtang it was in, and she had only appeared briefly at the entrance to the longtang. But he had seen her picture in the newspaper, and he had a photographer’s memory for faces.

  When he left the police building, he had still been feeling indecisive. He had been afraid. He hadn’t had the nerve to do what he had to do. By the time he turned the corner of Route Stanislas Chevalier, he had begun to regret the whole thing. He knew his reports could hurt Therese. He considered telling her everything, but he was afraid of Inspector Maron, afraid of the darkness and smell inside that bucket.

  Now he was no longer afraid. He walked downstairs to his landlady’s rooms to borrow a phone. She looked concerned. What were those policemen after when they barged in this afternoon? she asked. He was unafraid.

  But when the call went through, he suddenly found himself tongue-tied. All he could think to say to Therese was that he missed her. His landlady was listening through the living room door. Therese laughed. He heard something clatter onto the floor on the other end of the line, and guessed that she must be pulling on the long telephone cord.

  The Vietnamese traffic cop wearing a red-tasseled hat looked like a puppet. Hsueh stood at the crossroad, waiting for the man to pull his card and turn the wooden sign mounted on a revolving pole. When the side painted red faced a particular street, the people and cars on that street would have to stop and give other traffic the right of way. But before the sign turned, a car pulled up, the window was rolled down, and Therese waved at him from the passenger seat.

  “So, you’re alive then?” she asked huskily once they were alone in the Astor. The mahogany four-poster bed was hung with a gray mosquito net that smelled moldy in the breeze. The sun had set, but the floor next to the bed was still warm with the sunlight.

  Therese was lying on her side on the edge of the bed near the window, with two pillows tucked under her arm. She curled up comfortably, stuck her ass in the air, and began to stroke his groin. A British warship sailed past, its steam whistle sounding a long blast. Therese cocked her head as the dying rays of the sun played on the edges of the cloud and shone into the room so that the tiny hairs on the skin of her hips grew bright.

  He wanted to tell her right away, but he didn’t get a chance. She tore his clothes off and started playing with his dick until it sprang up like a punching bag assailed by blows.

  His ribs were still sore, and he was so tightly wedged between Therese’s legs that he could barely breathe. Her knees were hooked around his waist like clamshells. Her muscles became visible when her legs stiff
ened. Hsueh had just watched them tighten around his cheekbone. He thought he was screaming, but he only produced a moan.

  She took his fingers and brushed them along her crotch. He had to make up another story. He had to come up with something he could get away with. Nothing convincing came to mind. Instead, he found himself chasing her to a climax. . . . Afterward he stayed hunched over, to avoid looking directly at her.

  As he fell onto his back, a bold idea occurred to him.

  “Zung has to leave Shanghai immediately.”

  The panting stopped. He had to go on.

  “He’s in danger, and you’ll be implicated. He thinks he’s doing business with the gangs, dealing in firearms,” he said, staring bravely at her shoulders. “But his customer is actually an ambitious assassination squad active in the Concession.”

  “How do you know all this?”

  “I’m one of them,” he said, figuring that she would fall for that—after all, wasn’t everyone in Shanghai connected to the gangs in some way? He was proud of his invention. “I happen to know the head of this gang, and—well, actually, we’re old friends.”

  This was absurd, he thought, no way would she believe him. He felt discouraged, but he went on: “You know I’m a photographer. They sometimes engage photographers, and that’s how we met—he used to hire me to do investigations. That’s why I investigated Mr. Zung. I followed him.”

  She reached toward the bedside table, rummaging about in her handbag, as if she wanted the lighter, and produced an exquisite pistol. It happened so quickly he had no time to be frightened. The next thing he knew, the barrel was digging into the soft space between his chinbone and Adam’s apple. He was about to vomit.

  Petrified, he opened his eyes wide and raised his arms in a gesture of surrender. His fingers were shaking.

  “Tell me the truth.”

  There was a long silence. The clock ticked, and seagulls could be heard foraging for rotten food along the river. Time passed so slowly he could barely stand it, as it does when you’ve got to piss. He was so terrified that he was about to piss right then. He had seen what a bullet could do when it pierced a man’s chin and tore off his lower chinbone, as if it was simply opening a box. He dared not answer, afraid that if his chin moved, it would trigger the gun. Strangely, his brain began to go through the terms he had been learning. Trigger? Or was it hammer? He wanted to remove himself from the situation by recalling those terms, as if remembering them would make what was happening to him seem far away, like a scene in a novel.

  Therese began to laugh again. She looked at his face, and plucked a crooked piece of hair from his nose. It was her pubic hair, and he could still smell its scent, like cheese with a little apple vinegar. Sometimes a gun can get you out of a tight spot, but sometimes all it takes is a single damp pubic hair.

  “Why did you follow him, and where to? I want the time and place. Why is he in danger?”

  “It was Sunday evening. I followed him from the YMCA to a restaurant, and then to an apartment on Rue Amiral Bayle. It was a safe house for the assassination squad. The gang leader already knows something’s up. This lot is disgruntled. They’ve turned to contract killing, and they’ve been pocketing the bounty. He’s decided to have the police deal with it—you know the gangs always work with the police. So the police have been watching this apartment, and since Mr. Zung went there, they’ll be watching him too. They’ll start making arrests any day now. I was going to tell you right when I got here.”

  This is ridiculous, he thought. This story is full of holes. Boy, am I an idiot. He watched Therese lift the mosquito net and open the cigarette case lying on the bedside table. He was in deep trouble. A single phone call would reveal his lies.

  “Was it the gang leader who wanted you to spy on me and follow Zung?”

  “Yes.”

  “Tell me his name.”

  Hsueh’s mind raced. He tried to remember the names he had seen in the newspapers. After the Kin Lee Yuen assassination, a small paper with links to the gangs had suggested that the leader might be named—Ku. Yes, that was it.

  “Ku. We all call him Mr. Ku.”

  “And was it Mr. Ku who had you follow Zung?” Therese’s voice had grown cold. It was the first time Hsueh had mentally connected this name to the people he had seen the other night. He pictured their faces. It had been dark, but the middle-aged man could have been Mr. Ku. He realized he had made an irretrievable mistake—if Ku was doing business with Therese, why would he have Hsueh follow Zung? Then he thought, if you believe me, it follows that Zung must be deceiving you.

  “How dare you spy on me for someone else! How dare you follow Zung!”

  The barrel jabbed upward again. He thought about the ridiculous mess he was in. His eyes watered with self-pity. The barrel jabbing into his skin sharpened all his senses. His tear glands began to itch, and his vision blurred. His voice came out as a whimper and he found himself speaking French, as though a softer, less forceful language would help him avoid triggering the hammer on the other end of the barrel. Even he himself could not hear what he was saying, but Therese seemed to understand him anyway:

  “I followed him because he is a wicked influence on you, because I like you. I . . . I love you.”

  CHAPTER 15

  JUNE 11, YEAR 20 OF THE REPUBLIC.

  6:35 P.M.

  All that time, Lieutenant Sarly was homesick for France. He did not really belong in Shanghai. There were Europeans in the city who had long since forgotten where they were from. Not long ago, they had gotten on ships somewhere else and acquired new identities upon landing in Shanghai. These men had come to Shanghai with nothing, made their fortunes here, bought houses, married their wives, and started families in Shanghai—people called them Shanghailanders, and it was no wonder they considered Shanghai their home.

  Lieutenant Sarly wanted to bring his family to Shanghai, but his Corsican wife could not stand the humid Asian weather, so she took their children back to Marseille on a ship via Saigon. He did not keep a Chinese mistress, preferring to travel home once a year on vacation. By contrast, M. Baudez, the French consul, had brought his entire family to Shanghai, even though diplomats were posted to new locations more frequently than were the police.

  That evening, Lieutenant Sarly was sitting in the study in the consul’s villa. Huge balconies lay outside the French windows, and behind the railings you could see the great lawns. A sharp cry came from the direction of the parasol trees. Consul Baudez stood up and looked outside. A boy was lying on the path between the lawn and the trees planted along the wall, entangled in his bike. But it was the girl standing on one of the lawn chairs who had been screaming. She was rocking the chair back and forth, her leg straddling the back of the chair, with its peeling black paint. Meanwhile, the boy on the ground struggled to free himself from the rubber tires and bike frame.

  “They gave us all the testimony they collected,” Lieutenant Sarly continued. He was giving the consul his customary briefing on intelligence received by the Political Section.

  A Nanking intellectual who claimed to be a professor had come to him with the report, which consisted of testimony followed by an analysis of intelligence collated from various sources. Sarly flipped to the signatures on the last page, which appeared to indicate a sort of investigative research group, probably staffed by a handful of young intellectuals culled from the thousands who were fleeing inland towns for the large coastal cities, ambitious types willing to submit to the direction of a middle-aged professor. Nanking attracted scores of young people like that with its proliferation of study groups, associations, and societies of learning. The card they had given him carried one of those curious names. What was it again? A research society, or was it an investigative institute? Lieutenant Sarly glanced at the report on the table.

  “We were eventually able to persuade that man to talk,” the man had said. He had been wearing a Chinese suit, his eyes gleaming behind his spectacles. He did resemble a diffident university p
rofessor. “It’s better for Chinese matters to be taken into Chinese hands. You are guests here, and guests will always be too courteous. Besides, according to the terms of the lease, one day you will leave.” The shy professor began to laugh, as though the laughter would prove he believed in Sun Yat-sen’s nationalist principles.

  The Nanking investigators concluded that Mr. Petroff Alexis Alexeievitch, who was registered in the Political Section’s fingerprint records as Mr. Brandt, File No. 2578, was not, as he had claimed, a thirty-nine-year-old German businessman. He refused to answer any questions when he was being interrogated at police headquarters. Nanking insisted on having him transferred first to Lunghwa Garrison Command, and then to the Nanking military prison. Sarly decided that the consul probably did not want to know what had happened to Mr. Brandt in prison. He himself did not want to know. He had heard that a prisoner there would be made to kneel in front of a large iron clamp and have his head placed inside it. For every three notches the screw was turned, the clamp would grow one centimeter tighter.

  Mr. Brandt’s testimony was recorded four times. He handled the situation admirably. Each testimony was flawless and internally consistent, and each time it completely contradicted the testimony he had previously given. The interrogators had easily been fooled into thinking that each of those testimonies was a real breakthrough. Sarly doubted that even the last of them exhausted what Mr. Brandt knew. He could not even be sure that Alexis Alexeievitch was his real name. Not that that mattered, since Mr. Brandt probably did not know his real name either.