French Concession

by Xiao Bai

  Lin smiled at him. “Don’t worry, we know exactly what you’ve been up to. We would like to stay in contact with you. If you trust us, and trust that we’re working for a just cause, you can consider us your friends.”

  CHAPTER 53

  JULY 14, YEAR 20 OF THE REPUBLIC.

  9:10 A.M.

  The bigger newspapers, like Shun Pao and Ta Kung Pao, mentioned the press statement briefly on their local pages. But some of the smaller tabloid-format newspapers that relied on press releases for most of their news printed it in full. The New Citizen, for instance, printed the full text on the bottom right-hand corner of the front page. The previous year, it had been temporarily shut down by the Shanghai Committee to Purify the Party for printing a photo of Chiang Kai-shek in full armor in an ad for a libido-boosting drug. Ads poking fun at the commander in chief were everywhere toward the end of the Kuomintang military campaign against regional warlords, but gradually they had been purged. The New Citizen’s editor on night duty was cautious, but Hsueh pointed out that the Shun News Agency would almost certainly circulate the statement via their wire service, so the editor could attribute it to Shun and let them take responsibility for it. Sure enough, the New Citizen printed their convoluted story in a two-page article that consisted more or less of Lin’s words, with a few minor changes.

  If Hsueh had run into Li Pao-i, he would have given him a copy of the press statement too. Even the Arsène Lupin had its regular readers. After seeing Leng safely onto a tram, he bought a copy of the New Citizen from the newsstand at the station. Lin was busy making sure that the comrades he had called to that meeting had somewhere safe to go. As for Leng, it would be simplest for her to stay in Hsueh’s rooms and rest.

  But Hsueh couldn’t go home with her—there was something else he had to do. He found a public telephone booth on Boulevard de Montigny, and called Lieutenant Sarly’s office at the police headquarters.

  Sarly answered the phone on the first ring. He must have been waiting for this phone call since he woke up and read the newspapers. He exploded before Hsueh could say anything.

  “What’s this in the papers? Is there anything left for you to report to me? It’s all over the news! Ku’s gang aren’t Communists, but there’s a conspiracy to blame the Communists? Why didn’t you come to me first with this? What is this attack they’re planning? Why didn’t you report it to the police? What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

  Afterward he went into the bakery on Rue du Consulat and ordered a coffee. He was pleased to hear the radio broadcast coming from the other side of the house. This was definitely a good idea, he thought.

  And when Hsueh told him where Ku was planning to attack, Sarly had to forgive him. If Hsueh hadn’t done what these people wanted, he would never have been able to get away, and he wouldn’t have been able to give the police the details of Ku’s operation. Hsueh sometimes thought that Sarly was playing a game of cat and mouse with him, that he could see exactly what Hsueh was up to from his lofty vantage point, and would tolerate Hsueh’s tricks as long as he wanted to keep playing.

  At eleven o’clock, he arrived punctually at Mallet Police Station. The poet was waiting for him at the entrance, and Maron’s detective squad had assembled in a large conference room.

  Sarly was in a smaller, adjacent room. He took the news with extraordinary calm. He had dealt with an indigenous uprising in French-occupied Côte d’Ivoire in 1912, and after the Great War he had searched houses in Hanoi for homemade bomb factories run by the independence activists. When he was in a good mood, he would boast to Hsueh about the highlights of his career serving overseas. Right now he was fascinated by the Communists, and he was disappointed by Hsueh’s news. He was especially disappointed that Hsueh had gone to the newspapers and radio stations with it. Hsueh realized that he had let Sarly down. He attributed Sarly’s reaction to wounded pride, to having been mistaken about Ku.

  Sarly was pleased with the diagram that Hsueh had drawn from memory, and had Inspector Maron take it into the conference room. Successfully thwarting Ku’s next operation would help Hsueh to save face with Sarly, but it would also allow Sarly himself to save face. Hsueh sincerely hoped Ku’s operation would fail. In fact, he hoped the police would shoot Ku dead on the spot. Lin, his new friend, would want that too—after all, Ku was an imposter misrepresenting the Communist Party. The trouble was that no one knew when the attack would take place.

  But Sarly didn’t seem troubled. He smoked his pipe and waited.

  Inspector Maron burst in. “We’ll have to seal the streets off with armored police vehicles,” he barked, the boorish ex-wrestler in him coming to the fore. “There are too many pedestrians on the road, and if we don’t scare them off, we’ll lose control of the situation.”

  “But they could put the attack off to tomorrow or the day after tomorrow,” Sarly said irresolutely.

  “Today isn’t just any day. All policemen are reporting to duty, and half of them are at the Koukaza Gardens because Consul Baudez and the directors of the Municipal Office are reviewing the troops. The commanding officer of the Indo-Chinese troops will be up on the platform as well.”

  Only now did Hsueh realize that it was the fourteenth of July; not for nothing had Ku chosen to strike on Bastille Day.

  “I’ll go myself as soon as we wrap up here. Remember that we want to wait until the robbery is under way before striking. Tell me about your plan of attack.” Lieutenant Sarly had put Inspector Maron in charge of coordinating the operation.

  “We’ve stationed snipers at the guard post on Rue des Pères, and the bank is swarming with plainclothes Chinese policemen. It only takes two minutes for a car to get from here to the location of the attack. The police stations on Avenue Joffre and Avenue Foch are both on standby alert, and all police cars are circling the streets near Rue du Consulat. As soon as the alarm is sounded, the entire district will be sealed off.”

  “Very good. What’s there to worry about?”

  Sarly drew out the small brown bag that contained his private possessions. He undid the string, took out a copper pick, and started to clean his pipe. But as he was about to pack the pipe, they heard an explosion in the distance, to their west. It was two in the afternoon. Many days later, after things had died down, Sarly said to Hsueh: “It hadn’t occurred to me that he would start with an explosion. If he wanted to rob a bank, why start by tossing a grenade? No one does that. I thought he was insane—anyone else would have crept into the bank, quietly taken control, and told everyone to get down on the floor. They would need time to put all that cash in bags or crates. Most of it would be in silver, so the crates would be extremely heavy, and they would have to be lugged into a car. I knew he was armed and could break through a barricade. We were extremely well prepared. We had policemen lying in wait inside and outside the bank with rifles, and as soon as they came out, we were going to open fire from all sides. I told our men that they would have at least ten minutes to take up their positions outside the bank. But they didn’t want to give us any time. In fact, they didn’t even want to give themselves any time.”

  The explosions were followed by a barrage of shots as well as single shots that rang out one at a time, as if to avoid being drowned out by the rest of the gunfire. If Hsueh didn’t know what they were, he would think these were firecrackers at a wedding banquet. People might assume there was a big banquet at a fancy restaurant like the Hung-yün, or a store opening on Rue du Consulat.

  Inspector Maron rushed out with his detectives. They had gotten the tip, and they were ready. The explosions didn’t faze them, and police cars awaited them at the gate. Sarly had Hsueh go with himself.

  The two of them got into an armored Rolls-Royce. With terrified pedestrians thronging the roads, it took them seven or eight minutes rather than two minutes to reach the bank, although it was less than a kilometer away. By the time they got there, the shootout was almost over.

  Hsueh recognized the officer in charge at the scene, Sergeant Ch
’eng of North Gate Police Station. Sergeant Ch’eng glanced at Hsueh before giving Lieutenant Sarly an account of the gunfight. Even though his men had been ready, they had been bewildered when the operation started. It couldn’t be said that they were unprepared. Yes, when they saw that car pull up to the door of the bank, they had “tensed up,” in the words of one of the snipers. Yes, they had seen three bicycles screech to a halt by the colonnades, one on the same side of the street as the bank, and two on the opposite side, exactly where the diagram had them. But no one would have guessed that the men who jumped out of the Peugeot would each throw a grenade at the door of the bank. At the same time, a loud explosion could be heard coming from each of the bicycles: firecrackers, quantities of them, rerigged so that a single match would make them all go off at once.

  The robbers were complete amateurs, Sergeant Ch’eng sniffed. They were terrified out of their wits before they’d even gotten started. And it hadn’t occurred to them that there could be an ambush. The police had begun to fire seconds later, and it looked as though they hadn’t anticipated that at all. The three men who had burst into the bank through the smoke of the explosion were trapped. They were under fire from behind the bank counters as well as from the steps of the bank.

  Then things took a farcical turn. The three men on bikes had been ready to back up their comrades inside the bank from behind the cover of the columns, but as soon as they pulled out their guns, they could tell that things had gone very wrong. They ran out from the colonnades, jumped into the car, and rushed off before the police could take aim, abandoning the men inside.

  “They went in the direction of Boulevard de Montigny,” Sergeant Ch’eng said. As though to confirm his words, gunfire rang out from the direction of Rue Passejo, to their west.

  “They won’t get away. They won’t be able to get past Boulevard de Montigny,” Lieutenant Sarly said, looking at the scene of the explosion. The three corpses lay in a pile of broken glass in the lobby, and who knew how many other casualties there were.

  CHAPTER 54

  JULY 14, YEAR 20 OF THE REPUBLIC.

  9:25 A.M.

  Li Pao-i stopped at Hsieh-t’ai Money Exchange, a small money changer and tobacco shop run on Rue Vouillemont by a man from Ningpo. His takings from the night before were in his pocket, in the form of a ten-yuan note issued by the Chinese Agricultural Bank and printed by Waterloo and Sons. It was covered with foreign writing and had the bank general manager’s ornate signature on the back, an anticounterfeiting device. An entire batch of banknotes had once been stolen from a bank before signatures could be printed onto them, and as a result, banknotes with faded counterfeit signatures still turned up every now and again.

  He pushed his banknote through the iron railing to the man behind the counter.

  “Nine silver coins, and change the last yuan into cents, please.” He liked hearing them jingle in his pocket.

  Then he bought a bag of fried dumplings at the steamed bun shop next door. He knew it was a fake Ta-hu-ch’un, not a real branch of the well-known dumpling restaurant, but who cared?

  He put the small change in his other pocket. He was about to go over to the Morris Teahouse to catch up on the gossip. It was Bastille Day, and the Race Club had organized an extra Champagne Stakes race in honor of the occasion. Last night had been a good night for him at poker, thanks to his new strategy. So he decided not to keep playing that morning. Instead, he would stop by Peach Girl’s place to take a nap on her bed around noon, and then continue with his winning streak.

  While he was waiting for his dumplings, he could hear the radio playing at the money changer’s next door. He heard a name that caught his attention: People’s Strength. He’d never forgotten the last time he’d heard those words.

  He went along Avenue Édouard VII. It was early, the road was empty, and there were no cars. He was walking right in the middle of the road. Race Course Road arced toward Avenue Édouard VII, which just touched the top of the arc. The two swathes of houses where the roads met spread toward the Race Course like a woman’s thighs. A narrow alley between the houses led toward the Race Course, about twenty yards away. To the left of the alley lay a kidney clinic that dispensed traditional Chinese medicine, and a public toilet stood awkwardly in the middle of the road. Li had heard tell that the Race Course’s longtime gamblers would all come here to touch the doorframe leading to the female toilets because its feng shui gave it especially powerful yin luck.

  At the tip of that promontory of houses was Morris Teahouse. Li Pao-i went straight up to a window seat on the second floor, and sat on a drum-shaped little stool. He had the waiter make him a pot of jasmine tea, and tore open the oil-drenched wax paper in which his dumplings were wrapped. Then he asked the waiter for a small plate of vinegar.

  He was a regular customer here, and even had a tab. But today he wouldn’t need his tab. He could even pay it off—in silver yuan coins, no less, playing the high roller. He took out his silver yuan and inspected the bill that the waiter had brought him. He was about to pay with a coin when he realized that he had almost forgotten about his lucky coin, which was jumbled up with all the others. He couldn’t just get rid of the coin that had helped him to make good on his losses this morning. He stacked up the coins and sniffed them one by one until he caught a whiff of the familiar smell.

  Paying the bill made him feel great. He had the waiter bring him a newspaper. One headline caught his attention, and he read the article carefully, noticing the familiar name it alluded to as its source: an experienced journalist at a French newspaper in the Concession, Mr. Weiss Hsueh. Li spat tea leaves into his cup, irritated that Hsueh hadn’t told him about such a big scoop. Ordinary crooks indeed, he spat. He’d known all along that those people weren’t Communists. He remembered the questions Hsueh had asked him that night in Moon Palace Dancing Hall.

  When he flipped to the racing post, he forgot about the article. Today was the day of the Champagne Stakes, a big race, and all the most famous racehorses would be there. Unusually, bets could be placed up to a week in advance. But Li was in no hurry to place his bet.

  For the race with Aussie horses, he had already settled on Bullet, a horse belonging to the British businessman Gordon. It was the kind of horse that always shot to the front of the pack. Horses like that sometimes lost steam and lagged behind, but Bullet wasn’t like them. Even in a long one-and-a-quarter-mile race, he knew it would come out ahead. The jockey was well chosen too. Captain Sokoloff was the Concession’s only real master of riding with short stirrups, where you had to almost be squatting on the saddle. For Mongolian horses, jockeys usually used longer stirrups, and kicked the horse in the belly to make it go faster. But Aussie horses were taller, and a jockey would need the aid of his reins and whip. Riding with short stirrups would give him more flexibility.

  Li decided that he would simply buy a win ticket for the race with Aussie horses. Any fool could guess what would happen in that race, and the betting odds were low. Easy money. But he was going to win big in the race with Mongolian horses by placing a triple bet, going all in. There, an upset would allow him to win dozens of times his wager. In fact, if he was lucky and the horse racing dailies spent a few more inches raving about Mahler’s white mare, he stood to win hundreds of times his wager. For a week now, he had inspected the horses at Mohawk Road every day. The gray horse, Illusion, was sure to surprise everyone. It was no longer as timid as it used to be. They said it was startled by hurdles as they sprang up, and that it sweated too much. But he had seen the stable hands wave a net in its face without making it flinch. He’d even seen a groom splash water on its belly before leading it out to the practice track, so that the gamblers clustered by the railing would think it was sweating.

  Today would be Illusion’s day. Old Mahler had slyly arranged for his own son to ride that mare. Mahler Jr. was fat and too heavy, and with him for a jockey, even the renowned horse could only come second. Illusion would come first, and Mahler’s “White Rose” would come
second. No one else would have worked this out, and the triple bet only made his bet even riskier and the payoff bigger. He would win hundreds of times his wager because the odds were so long.

  He had to go back to Peach Girl’s around lunchtime. The previous night he had had the idea of stuffing two silver coins into her drawers. She was fast asleep, and even the two hard coins he wedged right into that sticky cleft didn’t wake her. They had absorbed all her female yin energy and brought him good luck. He was going to do it again—but with more than ten yuan this time, so that he’d be sure to make a killing.

  He gazed confidently around the teahouse, at all the sorry gamblers who were about to lose their shirts, and at the Race Club journalists who thought they knew their stuff. Then he saw a pair of eyes, and panicked.

  Yes, he’d seen this man before. His name was—Li racked his brains for the name. He’d only just read it in the papers. The man had sent a bullet in a brown paper envelope to his newspaper office. He’d kidnapped Li, and forced him at gunpoint to print a certain manifesto. His name was Ku Fu-kuang. It was all coming back to him, the name in the news report, the Green Gang gossip, the leak attributed to Hsueh. He thought he could see the man looking at him, and he didn’t dare meet his gaze. He lowered his eyes, as though he couldn’t be seen by Ku if he couldn’t see him.

  He didn’t dare to kick up a fuss. He knew Ku had a gun. He couldn’t see Ku’s hands, which were under the table. But he thought he could see his right arm moving, reaching under his linen shirt for something. He felt bloated—the dumplings had been far too oily—and there was something stuck in his throat. He tried to burp but couldn’t. He picked up his teacup, and put it down again. He had better pretend he didn’t recognize the man, he thought. But he knew he looked flustered, and he was no good at pretending. Ku would have seen him by now.