by Xiao Bai
Early that morning, he paced back and forth from one end of Rue Amiral Bayle to the other. Even the ordinarily composed Inspector Maron grew impatient. He had a few of his men set up a roadblock and frisk pedestrians. This was an old police trick: turn up the heat and flush out anyone who looks nervous.
He saw the woman stop in her tracks. A young man in a white linen suit was waiting by the police roadblock. Hsueh recognized him immediately as his old friend from Bendigo.
When chaos broke out, the woman did not stop to find out what was happening like other people on the street. She turned and began to walk away quickly, slipping past the police blockade. She tried to follow the young man, and he watched her lose her mark.
Lieutenant Sarly’s comment about using your imagination came to mind. Hsueh thought the woman in the second-floor window might have something to do with the firearms deals, in which case the meeting the other night could have taken place in her rooms. He was pleased with himself for coming up with that. He had originally been forced to spy on Therese, and all the other people he came across were only characters he resorted to when he needed to make something up. But when he saw this woman, all the other figures began to find their proper place in the story taking shape in his mind.
He imagined how she must feel right then—frightened and bewildered.
While the police were falling over themselves chasing the shooter, he began to follow her. She walked briskly through dark alleyways lined with red brick walls half coated with rust-stained, mossy cement. In the sunlight, he could see wisps of cotton drifting onto her short, permed hair. On the ship, she had pinned her hair up in a braided bun. Her light wool coat was just a little shorter than her checkered yellow-and-green cheongsam. When she turned the corner, she would tip her head forward and sway slightly, as if she had caught sight of someone she knew and wanted to surprise them. When her arm swung and disappeared around the corner, her beige coat rippled as if a carp were squirming under it.
When he returned to Rue Amiral Bayle that morning and saw her standing at the window, he could already guess most of the story. But for reasons even he himself did not fully grasp, he had not told Maron the truth.
Hsueh caught sight of the Vietnamese policeman who was always grumpy, but even he didn’t scare Hsueh anymore thanks to Lieutenant Sarly. He stretched out his hand, grasped her wrist, and cheerily yelled something in French in the direction of the policeman, but no one understood him, or cared.
She glared at him but allowed him to lead her along a pebbly path lined with knee-high fences, which cut through the field toward the lotus pond.
He barely knew why he was doing this, perhaps because he had seen her weeping on the boat, or perhaps because he did not believe that a beautiful woman could also be dangerous, because he always observed danger through the lens of a camera. Even though Lieutenant Sarly had told him that a Communist cell was behind the Kin Lee Yuen assassination.
“Why didn’t you bring your camera?” she turned and asked abruptly. She seemed not to have noticed that this was tantamount to admitting that she recognized him.
Then she stared down at a magpie, at the rushes growing by the pond.
“I see you’ve been thinking of me?” He himself had thought back to that moment on the ship, shoals of fish gleaming in the sunlight, lifeboats draped in gray-green canvas, the walnut tables on the deck. She had been unhappy, his camera had surprised her, and then she had left angrily.
She looked just as angry now. She said nothing, giving him an icy look, and walked away.
“That’s my job, I’m a photographer, a photojournalist,” Hsueh called behind her.
He was telling the truth, of course. He had always sold his photographs to newspapers and news agencies, and now he even had a newspaper job. You’ll need another job, Lieutenant Sarly had said. I could give you a police badge, but then you’d have to work your way up from being a lowly junior detective, and earn your promotions based on years of service. Since this is the Political Section, I have discretion in hiring intelligence operatives. If I add a few words to your personnel file at the right time, the Concession Police could hire you directly as a sergeant, perhaps even as an inspector. So the best way to go about this would be for you to have an unrelated profession in public and work privately for me.
Lieutenant Sarly made a couple of phone calls and had drinks with his friends at the French Club. The next day, the editor of the French newspaper Le Journal Shanghai sent word inviting Hsueh to visit their offices. As soon as he arrived, he was handed a contract to sign and a box of gold-edged name cards, printed in French on one side and Chinese on the other.
She stopped in her tracks, hesitated, and spun around with a gleam in her eyes. Hsueh’s flippant words had gotten him in a dangerous situation.
The Concession tabloids had spent a whole week rehashing the Kin Lee Yuen assassination for scandal-hungry Shanghai residents. This woman was said to be an accomplice to murder, or perhaps even its mastermind. The editors produced photographic evidence that she was both beautiful and wicked.
A few of the foreign papers and the more serious Chinese papers speculated that the killing might be connected to Communist assassination squads. They also printed a statement provided anonymously by one such group claiming responsibility for the assassination.
He knew they were Communists. Lieutenant Sarly had told him so.
At this point, they were both standing by the lake, or rather, the pond. He took a few steps toward the pavilion in the center of the pond, which was supported by wooden planks planted in the mud at the bottom. On summer nights, the pavilion often hosted concerts featuring Debussy, Rachmaninoff, and the debonair composer Satie. Butterflies and other insects darted about in the sunshine.
He was not very afraid of the Communists. They belonged to another world altogether. For all he knew, they were hiding in a remote province somewhere outside the Concession. They were reckless students who had caused a great stir and terrified all the foreigners in Shanghai a few years back. The commotion had been amusing to watch, but it had soon died down. Their schemes had nothing to do with his. If anything, the Concession was his territory, and he should receive them like guests.
“You must know that I sympathize with your cause.” Hsueh regretted these generous words as soon as they left his mouth. The wind blew, and his shadow began to shudder on the face of the pond, as though it were an informant, listening.
“I can see where you’re coming from.” He tried a different way of putting it.
“I don’t know what you mean.” That’s right, don’t admit to anything. He looked at her mischievously. The longer they were silent, the more flirtatious the silence became.
He liked imagining he was an incorrigible Don Juan. It gave him more confidence.
She arranged her hair with a gesture like a Boy Scout salute, four fingers pressed together and the thumb bent.
“What do you want?” She looked dispirited, and her question sounded not threatening but resigned.
“I’ve been following you all this way.”
“What do you want with following me?”
“I want to help,” he said earnestly. “I don’t know what you are doing, you obviously don’t want me to know, and I guess I don’t want to know. But I know a few things you don’t, which I would like to tell you. In any case, you can’t go back to the apartment now.”
“Why should I trust you?”
“Well, why haven’t I already turned you over to the police? Why do you think they were searching people on Rue Amiral Bayle? And why do you think they haven’t found out where you live yet? How do I know you are a Communist? Why shouldn’t you trust me?”
His series of rapid-fire questions sounded like part of a monologue, and he felt as though he had pulled off a successful performance and deserved a round of applause.
“What I know will be useful to you. You must let me talk to you. Wait for me here. Today is a Sunday, and you can pretend you came here t
o read. I’ll go find out what’s happening on Rue Amiral Bayle.”
He turned to leave, but after a few steps he turned around, pointed at the pavilion, and cried, “Don’t go anywhere. Wait for me here.”
He felt like a protective lover telling her to be careful. But she still looked worried.
CHAPTER 18
JUNE 14, YEAR 20 OF THE REPUBLIC.
1:05 P.M.
Ta-sheng-yu Candle Store was the second storefront on Rue Palikao, just after Rue de Weikwé. An-le Bathhouse took up the whole street corner and the first storefront. Between the bathhouse and the candle store there was a longtang called Yu-i Alley, and coal for the baths lay piled at the entrance to the longtang. Rainy days were the worst, but even on a sunny day like this, Lin had unwittingly tracked black footprints onto the candle store’s green tile floors.
“Are you sure they don’t know about this place?”
“I never told them about it.”
Ku was silent for a while. The attic was filled with boxes that smelled of dry dust and gunpowder. An arrhythmic sound of hammering came from the direction of Yung-he-hsiang-pai, the blacksmith. Deep in the alleyway, a girl training to be a Chinese opera singer accompanied a hu-ch’in in a raspy voice.
“Why were you carrying guns? I know they don’t have any brains, but don’t you use yours?”
Ku spoke in a low voice. He had lost his temper, but in the dead of the afternoon, against the backdrop of the singer’s shrill voice, his anger sounded unreal.
He was waiting for Park to call. He knew something like this was bound to happen with this lot. They were little more than children. Most of their peers were still in school, fetching water for their teachers, scampering through the streets, and getting into fights. There was an upside and a downside to working with young people. The downside was unexpected misadventures like this one. The upside was that they were naïve, bold, energetic, and treated danger like a game. In some respects, they blew trained operatives out of the water.
He took the phone from the storeroom up to the attic, and told a young member of the cell named Ch’in to mind the store. The attic was stocked not only with candles and foil, but also with matches, firecrackers, and fireworks. Sitting among the boxes was like sitting on a heap of explosives. But Ku was perfectly at ease lighting his cigarette with a match. He knew all about explosives. He had learned to make them from scratch in Khabarovsk.
No. 10 Yu-i Alley was visible through the tall wooden windows, over the back wall of the candle shop. Scallions grew in a battered aluminum basin on the wall of the rooftop patio south of them.
Whenever he was in a new place, Ku would take note of all the doorways and passages, mentally working out escape routes. This was part instinct and part rigorous training. Instructor Berzin had said that a good undercover agent must be as wary as a victim of claustrophobia, but more assertive and aggressive.
Here, for instance, the south-facing window had been boarded up against thieves, but Ku took the boards down so that the window now opened directly onto Yu-i Alley. In a corner of the alley piled high with An-le Bathhouse’s coal, there was a single brick in the wall which could be removed to reveal a loaded German-made Luger pistol wrapped in wax paper. The storeroom also had a back door leading into the courtyard of a shih house, one of the gray brick town houses with interior courtyards that lined all the alleyways. If you went through the courtyard you could come out of the entrance to No. 10 Yu-i Alley, take a left, go through the longtang leading to Rue de Weikwé, and turn onto Boulevard de Montigny. Once you were inside the Great World Arcade, you could melt safely into the crowds. In a pinch, you could always open the window facing west, climb onto the balcony and out onto the roof, and then look for your chance to escape.
Boulevard des Deux Républiques and environs
There’s always one threat or another, but you can cope. You are a trained marksman and were taught how to fight with your bare hands, to disguise yourself. You have been involved in dangerous business all your life. So you’ll take a deep breath and suppress your anger. Even if that man does get caught by the police, he won’t know where the Rue Palikao safe house is. And if he breaks under interrogation and gives them the address on Rue Amiral Bayle, the most they can do is arrest Leng, which would be a heavy but not a fatal blow. Leng only knows one phone number, which would take a full day to trace, and the Concession Police are slowpokes.
At almost two, the phone finally rang. It was Park, calling from a public phone. He spoke in a low voice and the line was crackly. His voice hissed into Ku’s ear like an echo carried by the wind, or rather, an echo shattered by impurities in the copper telephone lines.
When he put the receiver down, Ku lit another cigarette.
Lin shifted uneasily, watching the match burn out into a crooked stick of white ash in his hand. As it melted in the wind, he finally asked:
“Well?”
“Park confirmed that Comrade Chou Li-min has given his life for the cause as a result of this morning’s altercation.” Ku screwed his eyes up, and the corner of his eye twitched, as though irritated by smoke. “He wasn’t sure of the rumor, so he went to Chao-chia Creek, where he found the police dragging the creek for Chou’s body. It looks like he was pursued there, leaped in, hoping to swim to the other side, and the police opened fire.”
Silence.
Lin said nothing. Ku watched him carefully. Was he afraid? A lighthearted morning excursion had ended in death. Or was he angry? Anger could be useful if it was channeled into courage. They would need it—they were about to make another move.
“Comrade Chou had the courage to sacrifice his own life to protect his comrades. After mourning him, we must press on and avenge him.” He suspected his words were not forceful enough. He swallowed the cigarette smoke into his throat, allowing it to seep out from the corners of his mouth. His hoarse voice became smokier.
“The problem now is that Leng has disappeared. She is not in the apartment on Rue Amiral Bayle. You agreed she would wait for you there, and I’m afraid she may have run away because the gunfire frightened her. It’s too dangerous for her to be wandering around alone during the day.”
Lin started, as though waking from a dream, and got up abruptly. “I’ll go and find her.” He bent over to pick up the rope ladder.
“Where do you think she might be?” Ku mused. Then he said out loud: “She will call. If she does not call by five o’clock, we should evacuate this place.”
Lin couldn’t just sit down. He wanted to do something to avoid being overcome by grief. He didn’t stop to ask himself whether Chou’s death had frightened him. He was young. As a student, he had been just in time for the tail end of the revolutionary times. Before he knew what he was doing, he had been swept up by an unthinking frenzy and gone along with it. Then the violence of the struggle had surprised him like a sudden rainstorm. One of his comrades was shot dead by the army in a demonstration—the man had been his point of contact with the Party, and just like that, he had lost touch with his cell. Sometimes he thought to himself that if he had managed to stay in touch, he would have been killed. The thousands of young people swept up by the revolution hadn’t had time to organize themselves, and when the counterrevolutionaries retaliated, many of them simply lost touch with their cells and hence with the Party. Some of them resisted, and were killed. But he was not afraid. He was angry. He had actually been contemplating a suicide mission of some sort when he met Ku. Ku was a prudent, experienced revolutionary with meticulous offensive and defensive plans. He and his comrades were pinning their hopes on Ku because they thought he could win.
Now Lin was looking at Ku expectantly, trustfully. All his muscles were tense, as if he were a hunting hound awaiting a command, or a coil spring that would bounce back as soon as Ku loosened his grip.
Ku screwed up his eyes and took a draw of his cigarette. He was fascinated by the restless passion of the young man in front of him. Strangely, he was not even discouraged by the threat of dea
th.
It was time to announce the next operation. If this energy wasn’t channeled into an operation, it would explode. Allowing these young people to wait idly would be a recipe for disaster. They couldn’t be suppressed—they must be allowed to take action.
He had already been plotting his next operation, which would be even more visible than the last. It would be a defining moment for the cell and earn them lasting recognition and respect. People would remember it not as a headline in a few two-cent tabloid newspapers, immediately overshadowed by the next day’s news, but as a legend.
He began to spread the word via various channels. He allowed versions of the story to intersect, appear, and disappear. He did contact a few journalists, but his message was chiefly directed at the various powers operating in the Concession, and the armies of part-time informers who worked for them. He used the network to send a simple message: Ku is here.
Ku is here and to be reckoned with. Whatever your job is, even if it’s starting revolutions, people have to know who you are. He did not think of himself as having tricked these young people into joining him. They had a goal, and he could achieve it.
He had long wanted to give the gangs a fright, if for no other reason than that they had helped to massacre the Communists. Now that he was back, they were ignoring him. He would have preferred not to communicate with them via a woman if he didn’t have to, and at first he had thought Ch’i could not possibly know anyone in the gangs, but eventually he used her to send them a message: they were underestimating him and People’s Strength.
He had not yet settled on his next target, but he was considering either 181 Avenue Foch or 65 Gordon Road. Both were Western-style mansions with a lawn, a fence, a garage, guards, a complicated network of corridors, and police stations not a hundred meters away. The only difference was that Avenue Foch was near a French Concession police station, whereas Gordon Road was near an International Settlement police station.
