by Xiao Bai
Count Ciano, the Italian consul in Shanghai, had the captain of the Libia speak to the diplomatic community about their investigation. The bombs had made deep holes in the deck, but fortunately none of them had exploded. Most of the soldiers on deck at the time had been asleep.
They soon discovered markings on the unexploded bombshells that showed they had been made in China, and ballistics experts demonstrated that they had been fired from the direction of the Chinese camp. Baron Harada couldn’t help feeling pleased. He had been sent to Shanghai to liaise with foreign powers as the secretary to an important Japanese prince.
The mayor of Shanghai, Wu Tiecheng, expressed sincere regret that the hostilities had affected a neutral country. He promised that the Chinese army would do its best to avoid similar incidents in the future. But Mayor Wu also pointed out that this incident could not be entirely separated from the fact that the Japanese were allowed to move freely within the concessions. Japanese ground forces landed at piers in the concessions, their frontline command headquarters were located in the concessions, retreating Japanese forces could regroup safely inside the concessions, and a Japanese cruiser was moored right next to the Libia. We can’t very well prevent the Chinese troops from defending themselves, he pointed out.
If this accident had happened at any other time, the Shanghailanders would not have let it slide. But although there were thousands of foreign troops in Shanghai and dozens of cruisers moored in the Whampoa, not to mention the fact that the American naval fleet in Manila could arrive in Shanghai within forty-eight hours, the representatives of the neutral foreign countries said nothing and let the furor die down. Never before had they shown such restraint. But over the past few days, they had all been impressed by the surge of patriotism in Shanghai and the unexpected fearlessness of the Chinese troops.
Lieutenant Sarly was standing at the door to the police headquarters together with the chief of police, getting ready to welcome their guests in the senior officer uniform that he reserved for special occasions. All the foreign police officers were standing to one side of the door in three rows awaiting inspection, carrying rifles and wearing black helmets edged in white. Japanese planes had taken to hovering over Concession airspace, and a number of “accidental” bombing incidents had been reported in commercial areas. Nonetheless, curious spectators had gathered on Route Stanislas Chevalier outside the iron fences enclosing the gardens on the western side of the building. The winter sun gave the porcelain-tiled roof of the octagonal pagoda in the corner of the garden a tranquil, almost lazy glow. Under the sign of Heng Tai and Co., the corner store across the road, several children stopped playing and stood there, as though the mere sight of the policemen had rooted them to the ground. The police were welcoming the commander in chief of the Japanese Army stationed in the International Settlement, and the first secretary of the Japanese consulate, Sawada-san. They had arranged to discuss public security in the concessions.
Sarly was feeling dejected. Since the events of January 28, when the Japanese Navy and ground forces had begun to attack Chapei, Jiangwan, and other places in Chinese-administered Shanghai, Shanghailanders had grown increasingly pessimistic. But Sarly’s pessimism predated the attack. Since the incident the previous July that had rocked the Concession and even piqued the interest of observers in Paris, he had begun to feel that the Shanghailanders’ days of colonial leisure were numbered. He used to be very optimistic about the future of the concessions, but he no longer was. Even though no one would blame him for this state of affairs, he blamed himself and people like him, men in positions of responsibility, who had insisted on sticking to old colonial ways. They had thought they could control the concessions and keep millions of Chinese in line with power politics. All these men intent on milking the concessions of their riches had caused its downfall.
The secretary on duty rushed down the steps and into the main door of the police headquarters, to give a memorandum of a phone conversation to the chief of police. The chief glanced at the memo and handed it to Sarly. It was a phone call from the Japanese consulate, informing them that Sawada-san’s visit to the Concession Police headquarters that morning would regrettably have to be canceled. Two grenades had landed inside the northeastern walls of the consulate at eight thirty that morning. Although no one had been hurt, the Japanese considered it unsafe for Sawada-san to leave the building. As soon as he received the report, the secretary had made enquiries about the incident, and Commander Martin in the International Settlement had told him that the grenades had been hurled into the consulate from the rooftop of a nearby warehouse on Whangpoo Road.
Baron Pidol was sitting at the bar in the French Club, reading a newspaper. The windows had been shut tight, the lawn was parched, and the parasol tree was bare. Indoors it was warm as spring.
A political cartoon in the newspaper caught his eye. Signed by Mario, the Italian man, it was of a plane hovering over a map of Shanghai, dropping bombs on the city. It had already burned a large hole in the northeast corner of the map, and a gust of wind was blowing the bombs in the center of the map toward the southwest, toward the land that he and his partners had bought for huge sums of money.
Not until the third day after hostilities began did Baron Pidol realize the gravity of the situation. Before then he had secretly been pleased by the turn of events. He and the other speculators privately believed that it wouldn’t be a bad thing for the Japanese Army to teach Nanking a lesson. At cocktails at the Japanese consulate, he had even suggested to Sawada-san that many foreign businessmen like himself felt that a civilized Asian country such as Japan could play a greater role in the concessions. In fact, if all the Japanese wanted to do was bomb the newly built northeast of the city, which the government had begun to develop in the name of the Greater Shanghai Plan, everyone would profit.
But three days ago, he had watched Japanese soldiers in civilian clothes toss bombs out of a car into the crowd. He had seen shrapnel slit the throat of a passerby and intestines spill out of a man’s belly, a dusty mass of what looked like spaghetti-shaped cream and bread crumbs with jam. He had clutched the hand of a friend of his, a worldly speculator type, who died as blood bubbled out of his throat.
Lin P’ei-wen and Ch’in Ch’i-ch’üan had waited for a break in the bombing before crossing Garden Bay in a sampan boat. The bay was where Soochow Creek flowed into the Whampoa. They moored the boat at a pier in the Chinese-administered Old Town and walked through its streets until they got to Boulevard des Deux Républiques. The French Concession had already been sealed off by military police. Electrified fences had been erected all along the French side of Chao-chia Creek and other canals, and there were armored cars parked behind them.
The gates had also been closed, to stop refugees from flooding into the Concession. But Lin and Ch’in kept slipping in and out of the Concession as they pleased, all because of the unusual location of their safe house, an advantage that no one had anticipated when they first rented it. The shih-k’u-men building itself was in the French Concession, but its east wing looked out onto Chinese-administered territory, and the Concession Police hadn’t bothered to barricade the full length of Boulevard des Deux Républiques—all they did was block off the major intersections. Lin and Ch’in were able to get into the Concession by climbing up a rope ladder that hung from the window of the apartment. In the early hours of the morning, they wormed their way onto the roof of a warehouse on Whangpoo Road, and lobbed a few grenades into the Japanese consulate as retaliation for the Japanese attacks on civilians.
A few days ago, it had been rumored that the Japanese Army was about to attack the Old Town. Its residents flooded toward the neutral Concession, but the police stopped them with their rifles and armored cars. Lin immediately decided he would help as many ordinary civilians as possible flee the war zone. A few hundred refugees fled into the Concession via his rope ladder.
Hsueh had just come out of Therese’s apartment. Via her connections in the White Russian gangs, he
had discovered where a certain White Russian businessman was hiding. The man had been renting his trading firm’s trucks out to plainclothes Japanese officers who were murdering civilians in the Concession. Someone had made a note of his license plate number, 1359, and reported it to the police. Hsueh passed the intelligence on to the Nanking observers in Shanghai, as well as his old friend Lin. But neither of them was able to find the man, who had long since gone into hiding. Only a tightly knit circle of Russians knew where he was.
Therese had been recuperating for half a year now. She felt stronger on the inside, as if she had died and come back to life. She had been tested before, long ago, both in Talien and in the Japanese marine police prison at Hoshigaura. She had become cold as ice, and hard as iron. Her past hadn’t just molded her character, it had also reshaped her memory. From that time onward, all her memories, whether she was recounting them to someone or talking to herself in the dead of night, sounded to her as though they had been made up. They could be beautiful illusions or ghastly nightmares. She didn’t hate the Japanese police, even though they had tortured her to make her tell them where Hugo had kept his money. She didn’t hate the German either—when she was forced to tell the police something, she described him as a blond Austrian, Hugo Irxmayer, the man who had given her his name. The whole time they were together, he had never told her he was a pirate who commandeered freight ships in the Bohai Sea, and sold their silks and coal on to Japanese businessmen at the piers of the South Manchuria Railway. She had been a happy White Russian woman until the day that the Japanese police barged into her rooms in Talien and found a Lee-Enfield rifle in her trunk—not that she knew the name of the rifle until much later. Only after she was released did someone come to tell her that Hugo, the redhead, had been killed in a gunfight, and left her some money and a pile of jewels.
Hsueh’s footsteps faded in the lobby.
For half a year now, she had been wondering about something. A vast sum of money had disappeared, and Hsueh had never told her what happened to it. Ku’s assassination squad had bought some expensive German firearms from her, and they had agreed that Hsueh would not hand over the goods until he got the check. He was to make contact via a series of flashlight signals that she had revealed to no one but him. And he was not to send the signals until he had the check in his hands.
But she was very fond of his Chinese ribs, of how they pressed tightly against her body, against the scar throbbing on her abdomen.
Cannons thundered outside the window, to the northeast. She felt the return of an old thrill.
POSTSCRIPT
On a sunny August morning during the gestation of this story, which was then populated only by a few dim shadows, a sentence appeared on the page in front of me. Even I didn’t realize its significance at the time. It came like a ray of sunlight piercing the fog on the Whampoa and falling on a desk on the eastern end of the reading room at the Shanghai Municipal Archives:
It was the White Russian woman who first attracted Lieutenant Sarly’s attention.
That is how it all started. In 1931, Lieutenant Sarly of the Political Section was attempting to make sense of the chaos in the French Concession in order to crack an unsolved case. He was poring over old files when he found this White Russian woman. Almost eighty years later, I was sitting in the reading room trying to piece together a chain of events that happened at the beginning of the 1930s in the French Concession. As I was reading the same files Sarly would have read, the same woman leaped out at me right away.
The colonial authorities often kept slipshod records, and the Political Section’s file on this woman was no exception. After the Japanese invaded Shanghai, the file would have remained within the possession of the Vichy Concession government until Wang Ching-wei’s puppet government claimed jurisdiction over the concessions, at which point all the important documents at the Concession Police would have been handed over to “No. 76,” Wang’s secret police nicknamed after its headquarters at No. 76 Jessfield Road. Either they or the Tokkô, the Japanese secret police, may have removed some of the key documents in that file for an ultimately unsuccessful investigation into the White Russian woman. It is also possible—many things are possible—that Hsueh, who continued to be influential in the Political Section, destroyed part of the file, whether for reasons of national security or for his own private ends. Even if he had attempted to preserve them, they would probably be irrecoverable today.
At the end of the war in 1945, these files were transferred to the recently established police branch in Lokawei, and then, in 1949, to the new Communist government’s police branch there. The brand-new country was so pressed for resources that police officers were forced to write on the reverse sides of prewar documents deemed irrelevant by an Intelligence Advisory Committee composed primarily of Kuomintang defectors. Today’s historians must understand that dealing with present difficulties was more important to them than preserving the past. Many prewar documents have been destroyed. Some were pasted together out of sequence on the reverse sides of unrelated files, making them difficult to recover. I once found an important document on the reverse side of a report concerning a certain counterrevolutionary industrialist. The pages had been turned inside out and glued together with inferior glue. They came unstuck with time, allowing me to pry apart the page in accordance with the Archives’ strict reading rules, without having to damage the binding, so that I could copy out the contents of this page using the brighter light at the seat near the window.
The file itself survived. It was handed over to the Shanghai Municipal Archives and cataloged by staff there. But no more than fragments of the original documents remain, and there is no way to ascertain how they relate to one another. (See appendices for some of these fragments.)
This book must hence be read as a work of fiction. Imagine that a certain kidnapping that took place on a movie set was invented by the author on a windy summer night, with certain familiar rotting smells in the air. Nor can the author hope to reconstruct the plans and hopes brewing in the minds of historical characters. Instead, he employs a shifting narrative perspective, lending his imagined motives a degree of ambiguity, coaxing the reader to believe his fabrications where evidence is scarce. Emotions are the trickiest. How much genuine affection was there between Hsueh and Therese, and how much were they taking advantage of each other? How much of what took place between Hsueh and the innocent Leng can be attributed to passion rather than premeditated calculation?
If an impartial Court of History were to exist, this author would be accused of misleading the jury with a tale spun from incomplete evidence. There are only a handful of documents, and the connections between them are inferred—they would not stand up in court. In fact, the story of what eventually happened to Hsueh and his White Russian lover is instructive. As mentioned, some of the relevant documents had been deliberately mislaid, which led to a postwar investigation into Hsueh’s wartime actions by the Kuomintang authorities, focusing on the period between 1937 and 1941 when the isolated concessions had found themselves under increasing pressure from the rest of Japanese-occupied Shanghai. But the investigation itself had to be abandoned because of a lack of evidence, and a dubious statement from Lieutenant Sarly in Hsueh’s favor was used as an excuse to wrap it up summarily.
We don’t live in the enchanted world of certain movies, in which the sorcerer has a book of infinite pages that writes the never-ending story of everything he does and all his most intimate feelings as they are taking place. If that book were to exist, not only would historians be out of a job, so would novelists.
APPENDICES
Extracts from the archives. (The full documents are not displayed here for reasons of space.)
I. NOS. U731—2727—2922—7620:
Description and extract:
An investigation by the Political Section of the imperialist French Concession Police into an assassination and related firearms deal. Contains a report on the investigation, newspaper cuttings, photographs, a
nd an extract from a wanted list, as well as records of fingerprints, customs searches, and house searches.
Principal suspect: IRXMAYER THERESE. (Italics quoted directly from source material.)
The name “Weiss Hsueh” appears on the back of a photograph. This must be our Hsueh. On closer inspection, the image is revealed to contain a figure in the bottom right corner who is mostly outside the frame. He has his back to the camera and his left hand is reaching for his face. Is he in the habit of rubbing his nose? He is depicted in profile, and he has a nice square jaw. The shot is focused on the White Russian woman, so his figure is blurred, and you can’t even see if he is fat or thin. This is the only photograph we have of Hsueh.
II. DOCUMENT FRAGMENT.
Description: These papers may have been removed from the file after 1949 when paper was rationed, or they may never have been added to the file in the first place, which would not be surprising, given the colonial police’s halfhearted work ethic. This is a report presented to the Concession Police by the British secret service, concerning European pirates arrested by the Japanese marine police in Talien, in which Therese’s name appears. In the margins, someone has drawn a huge question mark in black ballpoint, pointing to Hugo Irxmayer’s name, which appears in parentheses.
III.
There are no other documents concerning Hsueh apart from that photograph. Given his position within the Political Section, he would certainly have been able to expunge any record of his own illegal activities. But traces thereof can be found in the collection of personal essays published during the 1980s by retired special agents who escaped to Taiwan with the Kuomintang government. They would have been censored by the Taiwanese authorities, and the deleted portions must exist in an archive somewhere. The clues they contained led me to the records kept by the Tokkô, the Japanese secret police. In them, I found an affidavit written in French and signed with a flourish by our friend Lieutenant Sarly, testifying that he gave Hsueh permission to make contact with the White Russian woman. The rapid progress of Hsueh’s career and increases in his salary can be deduced from police salary records. He received many awards, including a medal from a visiting admiral of the French Navy, and his signature appears on many search warrants and police reports.
