French Concession

by Xiao Bai

  “This lot aren’t Communists. That’s what the gangs are saying. They work differently. They’re acting more like a new gang trying to establish itself,” Maron said thoughtfully. Although the weather was humid, he wore his police uniform buttoned up all the way. He ignored the fly buzzing about his ear. Hsueh remembered how solemn Leng looked when she was telling him about her ideals.

  “They’ve got to be Communists,” Sarly said. Maron shook his head and yawned.

  “Their activity is linked to the Comintern’s newest networks in Asia and to the Communist cells threatening colonial authority in Indochina. Consul Baudez told me that once we’ve cracked this case, we’ll have to send copies of all the files to Paris. This information could influence the French government’s attitude toward Shanghai.”

  “They’ll be easier to crack if they aren’t Communists. The Communists are hard to beat, and we’re short-staffed. We should leave the Communists to Nanking.”

  “We can cooperate with Nanking. But before we do anything, we’ll need more information. To protect the interests of the Concession, we have to stay one step ahead of our friends in Nanking.” Lieutenant Sarly chose his words carefully. He seemed to be keeping something back from them.

  “I heard that the Kin Lee Yuen assassination had to do with financial speculation,” Hsueh began, seizing his chance to make a good impression. “In the weeks after the assassination, the price of public debt rose steeply. Before then it had been declining steadily for a month. When I looked up the papers around then, I found a rumor that an influential man in Nanking was threatening to split off from the Kuomintang and set up a new government in the south. The warlords there supported him, and when the new government had been set up, he said it would take over the Cantonese customs. But public debt is backed by customs receipts in Canton. The victim, Ts’ao, worked for this man. He’d been sent to Canton to test the waters. But, of course, his assassination scared everyone off, and no one has the nerve to do anything now—they won’t even set foot in Shanghai, never mind going to Canton. There were rumors that the assassin was a Nanking special agent, but if that was the case, why would the government’s own people spend so much time investigating it?”

  Hsueh hardly ever made speeches like this or used this many long words. The jargon made him sound more eloquent. Leng’s earnestness had rubbed off on him—she was always bringing up her ideals while they were flirting.

  Lieutenant Sarly looked at him approvingly. This young man could be observant when he put his mind to it.

  “Excellent work,” he said. “But you can’t draw any conclusions yet, although the Nanking investigators may think they can. Their so-called experts are all ex-Communists, so you have to take what they say with a grain of salt. There were good financiers among the Communists. Marx himself was one of them.”

  CHAPTER 26

  JUNE 24, YEAR 20 OF THE REPUBLIC.

  10:15 A.M.

  Inspector Maron was annoyed that Hsueh was getting all the attention. Imagine bringing a stray cat home, feeding it, kicking it, training it to catch mice, and then discovering that the cat has become your boss’s pet. Hsueh could tell that Maron was annoyed. To begin with, Maron had never thought of Hsueh as being French anyway, and Hsueh would have to agree with him there. Nor did Maron want the entire detective force supporting Hsueh’s operation, although that was clearly what Sarly wanted.

  So Hsueh felt a little uncomfortable when Lieutenant Sarly asked Hsueh to stay for a moment at the end of their meeting, as though he had something private to say to him. As Maron was walking away, he happened to glance over his shoulder; Hsueh met his gaze.

  Sarly took a photograph from his drawer and showed it to Hsueh. It was an ordinary group photograph of people standing in two rows in front of a building, the architectural style of which was indecipherable because the photograph was overexposed.

  “The British Secret Intelligence Service got hold of this photograph, and Martin swapped it for an entire case of my documents.”

  The dome in the background looked like an Orthodox church, an Easter egg, or perhaps a Russian onion? A few of the subjects wore forced smiles; the rest were unsmiling. Perhaps it was the cold or the food, or perhaps their faces were too numb to smile.

  “Look at the third man on the left,” Sarly said, directing Hsueh’s attention away from the artistic merit of the photograph. “I’m afraid his features aren’t very clear. The hat gets in the way.”

  The man’s hat cast a shadow that stretched past his nose, such that only his chin was visible, and the rest of his face lay in shadow. His eye sockets were dark pools.

  “Think what question you’d like to ask.” Sarly sounded pleased.

  “Who is he?” Hsueh knew how to play along.

  “Exactly! Who is he? Who on earth could he be?”

  Lieutenant Sarly unfolded the note in his hands, and began to read aloud in a resonant voice, as if he had good news he couldn’t wait to deliver, and his listener had been anticipating this moment. He might have been eulogizing a philanthropist or announcing the benefactors to a good cause:

  “He emerged in 1925 in the Shanghai union movement. Some of the workers thought him intelligent and resolute, while others called him ruthless. It didn’t matter either way, because he soon disappeared from their circles. Half a year later, someone saw him driving a car for the Soviet consulate on 10 Whangpoo Road, wearing a driver’s uniform, with a military official in his car. He was a good driver, and the consul himself sometimes took his car. That was no surprise—everyone said he could do anything he put his mind to. But no one knew why his career as a driver was so short, or what he got up to after that. In November of 1927, when a White Russian loyalist was caught throwing stones at the Soviet consulate, he was spotted in the crowds. He claimed to be a passerby who had been beaten up by drunken Cossacks, and insisted on filing a police report with the International Settlement authorities. Then he disappeared again. Some said he was in Khabarovsk, while others claimed he had gone to Canton.

  “Eventually, his face appeared in this photograph. The people in the photograph weren’t classmates. Some of them had been sent to Moscow to study Communist theory, while others were studying electronic communications. Yet others learned how to mix gasoline, rubber, and magnesium powder in a vodka bottle—apparently the trick there is not to put too much gasoline in the bottle, because it can extinguish the detonator. The group disbanded before long, and no one knew where he ended up. Then the British raided a local press in Burma and arrested a few men, one of whom had hidden this photo in the secret compartment of his suitcase, together with his spare fake passports. In fact, if it hadn’t been so carefully hidden, no one would have noticed it. As it was, it inspired the police to play a cruel game of identification with their prisoners, rewarding them for correct names and punishing them for wrong ones. Eventually, all the correct answers were printed up and disseminated. Some of these men were arrested, some disappeared, and one was found dead in a prison in Hankow a couple of years ago. Only recently did we become very interested in the man whose face lies in shadow, in part because of the work of several experts in Nanking. I can tell he’s a megalomaniac. He kept changing his name: Ku San, Ku Yanlong, Ku Fu-kuang, but he’s always refused to change his surname. That’s how you can tell he’s a megalomaniac.”

  Sarly exhaled contentedly and leaned back in his chair. His hand wavered over the row of cigars.

  “He must be the forty-year-old man, then?” Wait a minute, he thought, this man is Leng’s boss? The one who wants to meet me? Hsueh was growing flustered. You’re giving yourself away.

  “Congratulations, right again!” Sarly still sounded pleased.

  He was interrupted by the flurry of policemen assembling on the lawn outside, getting ready to begin their shifts. Drill commands echoed through the dank air, along with the ragged thud of men jogging and a few sharp blasts of the whistle. The man driving the armored police vehicle tested the wail of its siren. Before long, t
he place was quiet again.

  “I don’t just want to find him, capture him, and make him give us the names of everyone else in his cell. No, that’s not what we want at all. I want you to get to know him, understand what makes him tick, and wait for him to plan something massive.”

  Sarly stopped speaking abruptly, as though that long speech had exhausted him.

  “We need to catch a big fish,” he murmured.

  Hsueh thought he knew what Lieutenant Sarly meant. He must be thinking it was time he showed he had the patience to crack a big case, and he might as well give Hsueh, the poor son of his old friend, a chance to prove himself as well.

  Hsueh never let himself think too hard about ethics, consequences, the meaning of life, things like that. He lived in the moment. The future, to him, was tomorrow, or at most next Wednesday. He often thought of himself as a gambler playing an all-or-nothing game, and in games like that, you can’t afford to be distracted by anything besides the game itself. The trickier things got, the more Hsueh tended to resign himself to his fate. That said, he usually erred on the side of going ahead with something and worrying about its consequences later. He didn’t know how to stop, to think about whether he had an out. He generally looked ahead and pressed on.

  He went along the sidewalk beneath the balconies on Rue du Consulat, and stopped at the door of the National Industrial Bank. At least the job at the police station meant he was suddenly rolling in cash. Sarly had told him to see the poet from Marseille in the Political Section’s office before he left. The poet handed Hsueh a check. Hsueh wouldn’t be drawing a salary from the police department, so the check was issued in the name of an entertainment company based on Avenue Foch. It was tenable for any amount of money within a specified range, in support of Inspector Maron’s special investigations. “Consider it a gift from the Green Gang,” the poet had said. Hsueh cashed the check right away. He bought a basket of tangerines at the fruit stall, and went into a stairwell up the creaky stairs past a shoe store and a record company.

  The stairs led to the Singapore Hotel, which was advertised by a sign that hung from its second-floor window. The receptionist sat in the stairwell. When he opened the door, Leng was standing right there. He reached out his hand to touch the stretch of bare skin on her arms below her cheongsam, but she ducked. When he drew his hand back and rubbed his nose with it, grinning, she pounced at him and hugged him.

  She had been drinking. A wine glass and bottle stood on the table. Her mouth tasted of wine, which she didn’t even like all that much—at restaurants she barely touched it. He pretended not to understand what that meant, and passively allowed her to kiss him enthusiastically and too deliberately. He let his hand slide from the nape of her neck down to her waist.

  Luckily he was pretending to be unaware of what was happening and didn’t take advantage of her right away, or she wouldn’t have told him her story. Luckily he hadn’t been hugging her tightly—she soon slipped out of his grasp.

  Through the window they could hear actors bantering on the radio, with the occasional clang of a zither or thump of castanets, which melted into the endless clatter of dominoes. Hsueh had walked a long way, and after their brief and passionate embrace, his shirt was now soaked. Leng’s cheongsam was also stained with sweat.

  She told him her story. He used to think that characters and reversals like that could only be found in novels. She had been fated to make such weighty decisions, including a choice about love that had life-or-death consequences. He might have seen parallels to his own life, if it had occurred to him to look. This is your last chance to stop listening and walk away, he thought. One more step and you’ll have fallen into the trap.

  CHAPTER 27

  JUNE 24, YEAR 20 OF THE REPUBLIC.

  12:15 P.M.

  There was nothing for it—she would have to convince Hsueh to meet with Ku, because it was what the Party wanted. “We must persuade him to become one of us.” They would also have to find a safe location for the meeting, because Hsueh’s identity had yet to be verified.

  She was worried about having lied to Ku about their being old acquaintances, when they had actually met for the first time on the Paul Lecat. She had lied to the Party. Of course she couldn’t ask Hsueh to cover up her lie, but maybe she could hint at what he could say instead.

  She had started by playing the part of a victim, second-guessing her own emotions, and striving to win her audience over. Now she was surprised to find herself getting into character, drawn into an endless debate with herself. While trying to sway him, she herself had been swayed; in attempting to persuade him, she had persuaded herself of her feelings.

  She told Hsueh how much she used to admire Wang for being sharp, passionate, making brilliant speeches. He could be arrogant, but he had also been brave in prison. Did she love him? She asked herself the question out loud, while stealing a glance at her audience, and answered, yes. But choosing her words carefully, since this was difficult to admit and she had never even told her cell, she told him that Wang’s work was so important to him that everything else was a mere extension of his work. He was uniformly kind to everyone, including all the women, simply because his work trumped all human relationships.

  Had she been disappointed? She had asked herself that question, as if Hsueh’s silence were a way of probing her for more. And she had to admit that there had been no time for disappointment. She and Wang had been arrested in the same series of mass arrests, when their entire cell had been arrested. She didn’t say too much about how she had suffered in jail, which had been such an ugly place that even talking about it felt demeaning.

  Now that she was completely in character, she hoped Hsueh would respond by asking questions that gave her another chance to examine herself and defend her actions. She told him about Ts’ao’s offer. “He said that given the way things were and the position he was in, he could only get them to release me if we were family, if I married him.” She wanted Hsueh to either affirm her decision or argue with her and taunt her for being weak, but he said nothing, playing the part of the admiring audience.

  She had been asking and answering all the questions, but this time she wanted Hsueh to ask a question: When Ts’ao first made this offer to you, or rather, when you first rejected it, what did that have to do with Wang’s death? That way she could tell him that Ts’ao wouldn’t have killed Wang—he wasn’t that kind of man. She hadn’t dared to say that to the cell. Of course, she had had her doubts, and she had thought hard about Ko Ya-min’s question about timing. She had asked about the exact date of Wang’s execution, and tried to reconstruct the time of year from the clouds and wind, the uniform the soldiers were wearing. She had counted the days to work out whether Wang was killed in between the time when she rejected and when she accepted Ts’ao’s offer. It would be a relief to know for sure. She hazily remembered accepting Ts’ao’s offer of marriage after he told her that Wang had already been killed, but she suspected her memories might be warped by guilt. As if in a daze, she imagined sitting in that office in the Military Justice Unit, and relived the flood of immense relief that made her despise herself.

  It would be like Hsueh to tell her it wasn’t her fault, reassure her that she couldn’t have known what was happening, that Wang’s death had nothing to do with her. She would probably hate him for sounding so objective, but she wanted him to do that anyway.

  Instead, he sighed and exhaled a puff of white smoke that clouded his face. He’ll never learn to be serious, she thought. He was silent for a long time, as if searching for the right words, afraid of being a bad listener. Then he said: “It’s like a movie with you as the main actress.”

  She thought she knew what he meant. He was moved that she had been fated to experience such tragic conflict, as though no matter what choices she made, things would come out wrong.

  That wasn’t what she had expected, and she teared up because he understood her, which made her think she understood him. They both tended to let other people make the
decisions and go along with them. She had often tried to explain her own life to herself as she sat at the window of the apartment on Rue Amiral Bayle, but Hsueh had explained it better.

  They were sympathetic words—a little ironic, although Hsueh may not have meant them that way. But the more she thought about it, the more they made sense. Something about her life felt unreal to her, like a movie. She couldn’t really say what the problem was, whether this was because she had lost the passion for what she did, or because her mission forced her to pretend all the time.

  Her cheongsam was stiff with the sweat dripping from her armpits. She felt as though she were drowning in an illusion. Everything sounded indistinct and far away, except the dominoes clicking somewhere in someone’s hands.

  The sound of the police siren escalated gradually and inexorably, as though it were bubbling up through water. Tires screeched on the road. Then they heard footsteps, and someone rapped at the door.

  When they opened it, the steward was standing outside with a few policemen.

  “What’s happening?” Hsueh drew the wooden blinds and looked down onto the street.

  “North Gate police! Don’t leave your room. Have your identity papers ready for inspection.”

  The clatter of dominoes ceased. Someone moved the table, and the teacup fell to the floor, spinning to a halt instead of shattering. Next door, children were crying, and a man was scolding his wife in front of the policeman. The steward tried shrilly to stay in control, like a hapless choir conductor:

  “Send word to all the rooms. No one is to leave. Police orders.”

  Detective 198 came into the room while his French superior stood at the door. He had switched to his summer uniform early, probably because he wasn’t used to Shanghai’s humid weather. The sweat ran down his calves from his knees. Soaked in sweat, his calves were as white as rotting flesh, and the hairs stuck to his skin. He kept fidgeting to avoid the mosquitoes. He wasn’t wearing gaiters—who would, given the weather in this blasted place? Shanghailanders often wrapped medical bandages around their long socks as a precaution against malaria, but surely an officer on duty couldn’t be seen in such a ridiculous outfit.