French Concession

by Xiao Bai

  Li got up and hurried down the stairs. The waiter waved to him, and he waved back irritably—why not wave at someone else, like the man who terrified him, and detain him to give Li time to escape? He didn’t look around. He had neither the time nor the nerve. He rushed out of the teahouse and toward a narrow street on his left. The streets were almost empty. The gamblers who’d gotten there early would be on the northern end of Race Course Road, near the stables on Mohawk Road. There were several men clustered outside the public toilets in the middle of the road, so he raced into the toilets. At the door he turned to look back, and saw Ku standing outside the teahouse, looking toward the northern end of the road. He hid inside the toilets, and thought: I’m safe. His stomach ached. He opened the door to a cubicle, undid his pants, and squatted down. His heart was racing. He couldn’t shit. He kept farting. His blood ran cold.

  He didn’t hear the footsteps. But suddenly someone opened the door to the cubicle, and he was blinded by light. He looked up and wanted to smile at him, but he couldn’t force a smile. He saw the knife flash, and felt something cold on his neck, as if a gust of wind were blowing straight into his lungs. He couldn’t say a thing. He saw his own blood drip onto his clothes, and onto the pants that hung around his knees. His hands relaxed, his legs crumbled, and his pants dropped all the way to his ankles. He could hear the coins jingle in them, and he only had one thought: the coins are there and I haven’t used them, so it’s still my lucky day.

  The moment before he died, he recognized a familiar smell, the smell on those coins, Peach Girl’s smell. He saw a streak of gray glide past him, and thought, that’s my horse.

  CHAPTER 55

  JULY 14, YEAR 20 OF THE REPUBLIC.

  10:35 A.M.

  Ku’s greatest fear had come true. He didn’t like what they were saying about him. Whatever he was, he was not an imposter. He was especially irritated by a passage in which he was said to have been caught in bed with a whore and leaped out of bed naked, when he knew he had been wearing briefs. It was Hsueh who infuriated him. He had played fair, hadn’t had him killed, and the next thing he knew, that sneak was writing about him in the papers and conniving with Lin to lure all his best people away. Those young people were the boldest operatives he had; they never left a job unfinished. Hsueh must be an undercover detective. As soon as this operation was over, he would have to be executed as an enemy of the revolution.

  Ku had deliberately left the diagram on the table at the candle store. As soon as he had gotten back to the store, he had realized something was up. The three people scheduled to meet there hadn’t arrived, and they were all members of Lin’s unit. He didn’t know what the threat to them was, but the candle store was no longer safe. He ordered them all to leave. He made a sign to Park to strangle Leng, so that the neighbors wouldn’t hear a struggle. Leng had already betrayed the cell, and her presence would only endanger them. It would be best for Hsueh to think that Therese had killed her. He had originally spared Hsueh because he thought the bastard might come in useful in the future. But Hsueh too could no longer be trusted, and anyone who wasn’t going to be useful to the cell and could even harm it would have to be eliminated.

  He sat in Morris Teahouse, reading the newspaper article. It made him so mad he almost lost it right there. He pressed his hands into his thighs and thought, take a deep breath. But no sooner had he calmed down than he saw that accursed reporter. He could tell the man had recognized him. What a day, one damn thing after another. He could feel anger welling up in him as he saw the idiot try to slink away.

  He couldn’t just let him go. An operation was about to take place, and nothing could be allowed to disrupt it.

  He finished the man off in the toilet. No one noticed. He shut the low cubicle door gently, and reached over the top of the door to lock it. His clothes were spotless—it had been a clean death. He decided not to go back to the teahouse.

  Mohawk Road was crowded. The first pack of racehorses had already been led across the road and into the Race Course via a special entrance. Long lines had formed in front of the ticket offices, and Sikh policemen were patrolling the road nervously. The crowd parted narrowly to let the mounted police through. It was hot, and everywhere there were thinly clad men clutching their wallets to their bellies, to forestall pickpockets.

  He went into Te-fu Alley. There was a large field with stables at the end of the alley. He had arranged to rent a stable there months ago, claiming to be a horse dealer from Chang-chia-k’o. The stables were on the first floor of the building, and there were offices upstairs. The whole place was walled off.

  Park was sitting at the entrance to the first stall, with a Mauser rifle in his hands.

  They were short a few people, but he decided to go ahead anyway. A roar to the east meant the first race had started. A sudden hush followed, as though the earth itself was holding its breath, and the crowd was leaning forward so that their voices became a thin stream of air that melted into the quiet. Then another wave of cheers broke. The winning horse must be making its final dash.

  It’s now or never, he thought. From now on, he would be notorious and everyone would be afraid of him. Not only did the Race Course swallow huge sums of cash, it was an image of the concessions in its power, wealth, and thirst for money. It was at the heart of the concessions—it was the heart of the concessions. Today he was going to explode this heart and send the concessions into shock. The weapons he had bought from the White Russian woman were crucial to this plan. The way they penetrated their targets was a perfect metaphor for how he planned to penetrate his target and blow it to pieces.

  He checked the stables to make sure that there wasn’t a single copy of that day’s paper lying around. Finding a radio in a corner, he opened the back and pulled out the thickest vacuum tube. The photographer was sitting on the sofa, with his camera and tripod lying on the floor. He nodded at the guard.

  He breathed deeply and waited.

  By three o’clock, it was scorching hot. Ku had asked Park to leave the truck on the corner of Rue Wagner and Rue Vouillemont. At two in the afternoon, he had heard the blast of explosions and gunfire coming from the direction of Boulevard de Montigny, to the east. The planned sham attack was already under way. He had a few people making a stir at the National Industrial Bank on Rue du Consulat. All the policemen in the French Concession would rush there, and Boulevard de Montigny would be completely barricaded. But the gunfire soon stopped. He cursed Hsueh and Lin for taking his best people—the ones he had left were worthless.

  At a quarter to three, he saw a motorcade drive past. The two trucks on the end of the motorcade carried French soldiers in wide-brimmed helmets and short-sleeved military uniforms with leggings, bugles of all kinds in their hands. These soldiers were on their way to the Koukaza Gardens for the review of troops. The motorcade would be full of prominent Concession figures. They were heading to the Race Course to see the final and most important race, which would begin at three thirty. The consul, the directors of the Municipal Office, and the commanding officer of the Indo-Chinese troops would all be there for the Champagne Stakes, in the VIP box. At least he hoped they would all be there, so that his message would be unmistakable to them all: he, Ku Fu-kuang, was in Shanghai!

  A quarter past three. He rapped on the rear window of the truck cab, signaling to Park to start the engine. The truck edged slowly toward the northern end of Rue Vouillemont. A 35 mm camera peeked out from under the tarp covering the cargo bed, near the front of the truck.

  A moment later, their target emerged from Avenue Édouard VII.

  The first car was an armored police vehicle equipped with a cannon. The second was a small truck, another armored vehicle that had been newly reinforced with steel plates. It carried the takings from that day’s races in cash. According to the papers, the Race Club could make 100,000 silver yuan in a single day. On a day like this, for the Champagne Stakes, there must be at least 500,000 yuan circulating in the Race Course, and Ku was certain that at
least 100,000 would be in this armored truck. This was the first cash transport of the day, and it was leaving the Race Course quietly, before the last race ended. It would send most of the Race Club’s takings for the day directly to its coffers. This was the truck he would attack.

  Marksmen were waiting on the roof of a two-story building on the left-hand side of Rue Vouillemont. They were armed with the grenade launchers that the White Russian woman had sold him. He had recognized them from a glance at the diagram, having seen photos of many different weapons in the Soviet ammunition course he took. They looked like rifles mounted on a two-legged tripod, but they fired grenades, not bullets. He didn’t know the precise Chinese name for these weapons, but then they probably weren’t available on the Chinese market. The most exciting thing about these launchers, and the reason why he had planned this particular operation, was that they could fire grenades that penetrated armor, straight into the heart of a target, where they would explode.

  Unfortunately, he hadn’t had much time to train the marksmen. They took their boats beyond Wu-sung-k’ou, where he had them float buoys in the water and sail about fifty meters away. Then his men would lie prostrate on the roof of the boat’s cabin, in the exact positions they would be taking up during the operation, and shoot at the buoys. He didn’t care about wasting ammunition; he wanted to make sure they would get it right. When the waters were calm, they always hit their targets—he had handpicked the best marksmen. But whenever it was windy, and the buoys began to drift, their hit rates plummeted. They weren’t used to these launchers, or to the trajectory of the grenades as they traveled toward their targets.

  But he had planned for all that. That was precisely why they were attacking from Rue Vouillemont. He knew the armored vehicle’s route inside out. It had to drive along Avenue Édouard VII, the boundary between the French Concession and the International Settlement, and turn onto Rue Vouillemont from there. Those arrogant bastards, he thought. They hadn’t even thought to change the route occasionally in case they might be attacked.

  The rules of the road differed between the French Concession and the International Settlement. In the latter, cars drove on the left according to the British system, but the Municipal Office stipulated that cars in the Concession had to drive on the right, and it wouldn’t budge.

  (Ku had no way of knowing that the Board of Works and the Municipal Office were in talks to standardize traffic rules in Shanghai, and that from the end of that year onward, all cars in Shanghai would have to drive on the left. Shortly thereafter, the Kuomintang government would turn that into national law.)

  The armored motorcade drove out of the road to the left of the public toilets, and made a U-turn around the opening in the median on Avenue Édouard VII. As it turned into Rue Vouillemont, it would have to stop briefly on the left-hand side of the road.

  Shanghailanders had long thought that the traffic rules in the two concessions should really be standardized. At this intersection, for instance, cars making a left turn out of Rue Vouillemont would have to turn onto the far left lane of Avenue Édouard VII. Drivers often began to turn the steering wheel before they even reached the street corner, to avoid the traffic on Avenue Édouard VII and cut directly into the queue. But this also meant that they were driving straight into southbound traffic on the left-hand side of Rue Vouillemont. Ku discovered that the armored truck always made this turn very carefully. It would stop for about ten seconds, to avoid running into those impatient drivers. After all, it was carrying a truckload of cash.

  The sun beat down on the red armored trucks. Snipers hid inside the police vehicle, which had machine guns on the turrets. Ku peered out at the truck from behind the tarp. The camera slid to one side, beneath his chin, to give him room. Once he started shooting, the cameraman appeared to forget how frightened and exhausted he was. There were two parallel rows of rivets along the edge of the armored truck’s rectangular body. Ku waited.

  The road was white with the sunshine, and he couldn’t make out the glow of the launchers. But in the split second before his eardrums vibrated with the explosion, he saw the grenades tear open the armor of the police vehicle and explode its turret, the top of which lifted off altogether and lodged in the branches of a nearby tree.

  All the way along Avenue Édouard VII, Race Course Road, and Mohawk Road, firecrackers rang out. He had arranged for them to explode along the route to the Race Course, like a string of those ancient beacon towers used to warn against invasion. Finally, the Race Course itself would be rocked by explosions. The deadliest bombs he had were hidden in the toilets beneath the VIP box.

  He saw Park jump out of his own truck and run toward the armored truck. According to the plan, he would kill everyone on that truck, and drive it away to the film studio on Rue Gaston Kahn, where he would hide until it was dark. Then he would drive quietly to the banks of Chao-chia Creek, where a small boat would be waiting for him.

  The Race Course and environs

  With the finish line in sight, he turned to look at the cameraman. He wanted to watch the film of his own masterpiece as soon as he had time. But just then, he saw the steel plate on the right-hand side of the armored truck shift just a crack, and he realized that he had overlooked the rivets. A pale face shimmered behind the dark holes, he saw the glow of a machine gun, and the two men running behind Park fell dead to the ground. Park pulled out his Mauser, and waved his arms, as though he was about to leap into the river. Then his arm was torn off at the shoulder by a barrage of bullets, and it fell to the ground before he did.

  He could see them all retreating, rushing out of the longtang, jumping off the truck. Those losers. He could feel his anger welling up through the veins in his neck and going straight to his head. The skin behind his ears pulsed, nearly exploding with rage. He picked up the launcher in the corner of the cargo bed and took a deep breath while his hands calmly loaded another round. Without even bothering to take aim, he fired. The grenade tore off the entire back of the armored truck, which began to smoke. Ku pulled out his gun, jumped out, and made for the other truck. Its driver was unconscious from the impact of the grenade. He opened the door, fired his remaining bullets into the body, and then shoved it aside with his knees. He started the engine. He had no time to wait for anyone else, for his own truck, or even to get the film inside the camera. He sped southward in the armored truck.

  For a moment, he mourned for Park. He had lost his most loyal follower, the one who was almost a brother to him. He sometimes wondered whether he had made the anonymous phone call betraying Park’s older brother to the police in order to take his place.

  He couldn’t see behind him, so he didn’t know that the chassis of the truck had been completely torn open, spilling a trail of silver onto the road. The inhabitants of the French Concession would celebrate. Three whole days later, the municipal street cleaners would still be digging silver yuan coins from crevices in the drains.

  CHAPTER 56

  JULY 19, YEAR 20 OF THE REPUBLIC.

  3:20 P.M.

  Days later, Yan Feng couldn’t stop thinking about that afternoon. He had slipped away from Rue Vouillemont in the chaos, with his camera and tripod in tow. He had run all the way to the imposing gate of the Foreigners’ Cemetery, which towered over it like a city wall. There he flagged down a rickshaw, and had the rickshaw man take him back to the studio on Rue Gaston Kahn.

  Dozens of cars were crowded at the entrance to T’ing-yüan Lane. Policemen swarmed in and out, and he didn’t dare go in. The actress Pearl Yeh was rushed out in the bathrobe she had been wearing on set. She jumped in her car and hurried away.

  What could he possibly say to the police? What would the others say? There was no way they would believe his story that he had been forced at gunpoint into accepting a side gig from a Communist.

  A few years ago, he had been a war zone reporter for the National Revolutionary Army, shooting footage that was cut into newsreels and shown alongside Hollywood flicks in the concessions’ movie theate
rs. He even got an award from the Artistic Editing Group of the Central Propaganda Department’s Shanghai office. But all those newsreels had been faked. He was never asked to shoot a real battle. As a matter of fact, he wouldn’t have been able to follow the soldiers up steep hills or wade through rivers with that 35 mm camera of his. The newsreels all had scripted, predetermined storylines. Soldiers would lie on the ground dressed as rebels, with uniforms stripped from real corpses on the battlefield, which came ragged with bullet holes.

  But in the reel he had shot that afternoon, all the bodies were real. As he hid behind his camera, he thought about how the scene didn’t look all that different from a movie set. Bullets crumbled the brick walls as though centuries of weathering had been compressed into seconds. The injured lay convulsing on the ground. Blood didn’t spurt from their wounds—it leaked like ketchup from a spilt bottle. The explosions deafened him, and it felt like listening to bombs echo from a distance. The turret on the armored police vehicle looked like an exploding eggshell. In fact, the sheets of metal that tore off and curled up looked softer than eggshells. In the blinding sunlight, he could see bullets spark against the metal sides of the truck from behind his viewfinder.

  Only later did he realize that these men were Communists. On Mohawk Road, before setting out, they had sworn an oath and made a statement on camera, declaring war on imperialists and counterrevolutionaries. He even got their hammer-and-sickle flag into the shot.

  Not long ago, a few of the ghost movies he had shot for Hua Sisters Motion Picture Studio had been sent to the Shanghai Movie Inspection Committee, which had forced them to cut the movie. It had to be resubmitted a few times, and was only passed after his bosses had put in a few words with the right people, but his best scenes had all been cut. He started feeling that the Communists had a point. The motion picture world had had its own run-in with imperialism just that past year, over Welcome Danger, an imported film with a demeaning view of the Chinese. Protesters showed up at the cinema, making speeches during screenings and staging protests outside. Yan went along to chant slogans and wave his flag. He was tagging along at the very end of the procession, but the police arrested him and locked him up for half a day anyway. The film turned Yan into an enemy of imperialism.