Quin’s Shanghai Circus

by Edward Whittemore

  Geraty spread his greatcoat over the stool and lowered himself into place.

  • • •

  Quin was then about thirty. He had grown up in the Bronx, played stickball and fought in the streets as a boy, spent two years in the navy and one in prison as a man. A short time ago his only relative had died, the woman who had raised him, his father’s older sister. The aunt had left him a small amount of money, and he was trying to decide what to do with it the night a fat staggering giant, old and drunk and ragged, wheezing and muttering, lurched into his stool and nearly knocked him to the floor.

  A dozen years ago, perhaps even two or three, Quin might have broken a bottle over the old man’s head. But at the moment he was paralyzed. A hideous stench had enveloped him, a mixture of rotting wool and rotting cheese, sour wax and decaying skin, all of it overwhelmed and held together by a pervasive smell of mustard.

  The fat giant had breathed on him as he settled down on the next stool.

  • • •

  Blow it the ether way, said Quin.

  Double gin, nephew, the fat man called down the bar. Quin swung his elbow and the fat man hiccuped.

  You stink, buffalo.

  How’s that?

  You bumped into me just now.

  Not me, nephew.

  You. Twice.

  The fat man rubbed the red flannel around his neck while sneaking a hand under his greatcoat. Quin saw him unscrew the top of a jar. A finger came out with a dab of green paste, the cap was rescrewed, the finger flickered under his nose. It was all done in one quick movement, but Quin recognized the smell.

  Hooked on horseradish, buffalo?

  A Japanese blend. By far the most effective.

  For what?

  For the thirty years I’ve used it which is little enough in the game the Almighty plays. He looks for longer scores and every point is as hard as a dragon’s hemorrhoids. I know what I’m talking about, nephew, I’ve spent most of my life there.

  Where?

  The other side, the dark side, our own foreign shore. A place so different, saints preserve us, it’s whatever you want it to be. Where are the dice? It’s time to drink to what we were and are becoming.

  Money?

  The fat man grumbled and put his eight single dollar bills on the bar. Quin nodded. No one in Geraty’s had ever been able to beat him at liar’s dice. The fat man rolled and passed the cup. On Quin’s second roll the fat man called him.

  You win, buffalo. Where did you say that place was?

  Where? The old Tokyo and the old Shanghai, cities that don’t exist anymore. Cities where people went around in disguises passing themselves off as emperors and Buddhas and dwarfs and precision masturbators. So afraid, some of them, they hid in unlocked cages waiting for the hinges to rust. The Orient, that’s where. This is the first time I’ve been back here in forty years. I’ve been to Massachusetts and I’ve seen the Bronx and now I’m leaving.

  I spent a year in Massachusetts, said Quin.

  Doing what?

  Time.

  What kind of time?

  Mailboxes.

  An unworthy cause, nephew. Your mother wouldn’t have liked that.

  Never knew her.

  Your father wouldn’t have liked it either.

  Never knew him.

  I know, muttered the fat man.

  What do you know?

  The fat man’s face suddenly darkened. The scars and pits opened as he fumbled for his gin glass. He emptied the glass and his eyes receded, the hat settled back on his head. He pointed at the cup of dice.

  Roll. We need a drink.

  Quin lost. The fat man massaged his enormous belly and licked the new glass of gin with a long yellow tongue. Quin’s question had turned him into a huge jungle beast crouching beside a path.

  What I know is that over there, before the war, everybody was plotting. One day a hundred conspiracies, the next day a hundred new ones. Agents everywhere and all of them changing sides yesterday or tomorrow. From what to what? Why? International networks spent millions of dollars while others were so clandestine they consisted of only one individual, existed in only one man’s head. His private fantasy? No. The Almighty had dumped His creatures in a secret bag and put the bag on His back and was dancing over the earth. The thirties, nephew, the Orient. This overcoat I’m wearing belonged to a sergeant who murdered the general responsible for the rape of Nanking. An overcoat? For He hath put down the mighty from their seat. Or the beach just south of Tokyo where four people once sat down to a picnic that only one of them ate. Why? Because the other three were wearing gas masks. The beach was near the estate owned by Baron Kikuchi, the most feared man in the Japanese secret police, and at the end of the afternoon those picnickers had arrived at a decision that kept the Germans from capturing Moscow ten years later. A picnic? Impossible? For He that is mighty hath done great things to me. Let’s have another game.

  The fat man scratched his gallbladder with the dice. Once more Quin lost and had to pay for the drinks.

  I knew them, the fat man announced abruptly.

  Who?

  Your parents. Over there of course, before you were born. Your father had a limp, shrapnel in his leg, some kind of hero in the First World War. Left New York in the early 1920s, worked his way to Paris, ended up in Asia. Where? Shanghai? Tokyo? A postcard to your aunt once in a while, the last news from south China in the late 1920s. Canton? In any case nothing after that for eight years. Eight years? Not until 1935 when a missionary couple brought a baby to your aunt. War was coming, China was unsafe. The Quins were to follow in a few months but of course they never did, of course they were never heard from again. Eight years without any news? In those days, out there, a long time.

  Quin’s glass was in the air. He stared at the fat man.

  Or rather I should say I knew of them. About them. We were in the same places but at different times. A friend mentioned that to me. He knew them.

  What else did he mention? said Quin, having just heard repeated everything his aunt had ever been able to tell him about his father after he disappeared from New York. About his mother she could tell him nothing, not even having been aware that her younger brother had married. The missionary couple had only been able to add that the woman who came to their ship in Shanghai asking for help was an American about thirty years old, that her papers were genuine and proved both her own and the baby’s identity.

  The fat man scratched his liver.

  What else. What else? Nothing else. He’s still alive though, that friend, his name is Father Lamereaux. Lived in Tokyo before the war and still lives there although he never sees anyone, no one at all except a dead cat. Rather a strange man. Too bad you can’t write to him but he never touches mail, something to do with a vow he made during the war. A vow? Of course if you were to talk to him that would be different.

  Talk to him?

  Not that expensive by freighter, nephew, and once you get there you’ll be able to taste the finest horseradish in the world. The finest and the best.

  The fat man groped behind his back trying to find a kidney to scratch. Quin nodded to himself.

  Buffalo. What did you say your name was?

  Didn’t say. Right? It’s the same as that wooden sign in the window.

  What? Geraty?

  When addressing St. Edward the Confessor I use none other.

  All right, Geraty, that’s just fine. Now tell me how you knew who I was when you walked in here. And better than that, tell me why you walked in here in the first place.

  Geraty’s head rolled sideways. He seemed exhausted by the weight he was carrying in flesh and memories. He licked his gin and began reciting in a monotonous voice.

  He said Father Lamereaux must have also mentioned the neighborhood in the Bronx where the aunt lived. Tonight he was in the same neighborhood visiting friends.

  Who? said Quin.

  Geraty ignored the question. He left his friends and passed a bar with his name on it. Th
at intrigued him so he stopped in for a drink. Someone used Quin’s name and when he heard it, he didn’t know why, Father Lamer-eaux’s long-ago story came back to him. The recollection made him wonder. The neighborhoods were the same, his own name was on the bar, thirty years had passed.

  A coincidence?

  Or perhaps thirty years didn’t matter. He was curious and decided to find out. He picked Quin’s pocket to see how he spelled his name, to see if the two Quins were the same.

  Quin nodded. The tale was so outrageous and told so matter-of-factly he might have believed it if Geraty had left out the pickpocketing episode. But with the exception of opening and closing his horseradish jar, Geraty seemed too clumsy to do anything covertly.

  Quin watched the giant sink closer to the counter.

  Come to think of it, nephew, the old man’s become such a recluse he might not want to talk to you even if you did go to see him. He wasn’t just another priest, Lamereaux, he was quite a rake in his time. He might not want to recall that era at all, I mean not at all. Still there could be a way.

  Quin waited, expecting there would turn out to be a way.

  Yes, just possibly. Do you know whose feast day you are honoring this evening with your beer? By chance, that of St. Brigid, known for her miraculous powers and particularly for her charity. Charity I said, that may be the clue we’re looking for. It so happens that Father Lamereaux was the guardian of a boy, an orphan who was brought to America not long after you were. Father Lamereaux loved that boy dearly but he’s never been able to see him because the boy can’t make the crossing alone, he’s a little simple in the head, and Lamereaux’s lumbago is so bad he can’t make the crossing either. Lumbago. As I remember a lot of his friends had it before the war. Well it seems to me that if you took the boy with you for a visit the old hermit would be so delighted he’d tell you everything.

  Geraty ordered another round. They rolled the dice, Quin lost. The giant’s bleary eyes roamed the bar completely out of focus.

  Boy isn’t right, he’s only a few years younger than you are. I only call him that the way I’d call you a boy. Most of the time he’s just like anybody else only more so. More so, anybody. Now and then you have to tell him what to do but he’s obliging and friendly and kind, kinder than anyone you’ll ever meet, saints preserve us. I know because I’ve just been to see him.

  In that case, buffalo, why aren’t you taking him to Japan?

  Because it wouldn’t be for a visit, that’s why. My bowels haven’t moved since I left the East, haven’t and won’t until I get back where I belong and stay there. I came to this country to sell a magnificent set of documents on the sources of Japanese culture, my life’s work, intending to retire on the proceeds in some pine grove and what happens?

  What?

  The rich He hath sent empty away.

  What happened to the collection?

  What do you think happened to it in this hell of stupidity and violence? They confiscated it.

  Why?

  Pornography, hard-core pornography, no redeeming social value. Value? Manuscripts written by the monks who invented rock gardens and tea ceremony and made Zen famous and made No and Go famous and everything else anybody has ever heard of? No value in them? Does that make sense? Does it? Now does it?

  Geraty was raving, yelling, waving his arms. He lost his balance and fell into the counter, his face coming to rest in a pool of spilled gin.

  He was muttering to himself, Manchurian telephone numbers and Chinese addresses, the name of a bar in Mukden where he had gone to get drunk after buying a supply of films before the war, a description of Bubbling Well Road early one winter morning when he was on his way to a warehouse on the outskirts of Shanghai. He returned to Tokyo, still in the thirties, to make a train connection to a beach just south of the city. He changed buses three or four times in the international quarter of Shanghai before approaching the locked, shuttered room where he went nightly to set up his movie projector, to take off his clothes, to whisper silently to himself the words with which he secretly greeted the wealthy degenerates and drug addicts he was there to entertain, magnificat anima mea Dominum, my soul doth magnify the Lord. He sneaked through the black-market district of Mukden late in 1934, and again in 1935, noting discrepancies.

  Smiling affably during the early months of the Occupation in Japan, having just stolen a secret intelligence report marked with the code name Gobi, he ordered drinks for everyone at his favorite Tokyo bar and shouted out yet again the verses from St. Luke that obsessed him.

  He hiccuped. Someone was poking him in the ribs.

  Wake up, buffalo. What’s the boy’s name and where do I find him?

  Geraty blinked up from the bar. He sneezed, raising a spray.

  You were born there and lived here, I was born here and lived there. See the difference? Don’t bother, there is none. The truth is I don’t know who you are or what you’re talking about. Nothing you’ve told me makes any sense, nothing I’ve heard in years makes any sense. The truth? The truth is that everything they said about my leprosy drugs before the war was a lie, but then and now and forever He hath scattered the proud in the conceit of their heart. Are you satisfied now? Is that what you wanted to hear?

  The boy’s address, buffalo. And Lamereaux’s address in Tokyo. And yours.

  Geraty emptied the gin glass into his mouth without taking his head off the bar. He scribbled the address of the orphanage in Massachusetts, an address in Tokyo, the name of a bar in Tokyo.

  Everybody knows the place. They can tell you where to find me.

  And the boy’s name?

  An odd one, I’ve always thought so. Gobi’s his name. Gobi. The same as the desert in western China.

  Gobi what?

  Nothing. Big Gobi maybe. He seems to like that.

  Geraty was struggling to gather up his arms and legs. His face was purple again, his head swollen. With a groan he lurched off the stool and pocketed his eight single dollar bills that had been left untouched on the bar. His hand rummaged inside his greatcoat and made the flickering motion under his nose. He sneezed, coughed once. Quin watched him heave himself out the door.

  Quin ordered another beer and looked down at the three passports he had stolen from the giant’s pocket. He had taken them thinking the fat man would have to come back for them, but now he realized they were worthless, the props of a clown.

  The nationalities were different, the names were different, the combinations of false eyeglasses and false beards and false moustaches were different in each of them. But there was no mistaking Geraty’s huge scarred face in the three disguises.

  Three costumes. There might be dozens more. Dozens of hidden pockets in the greatcoat stuffed with forged papers. For the bowler and the greatcoat, the army boots from the Second World War, the layers of sweaters and the red flannel tied with string were the props of an impostor as well as a clown.

  Quin nodded to himself. A giant, an impostor, a clown. Yet he knew things, and in the end Quin decided a few facts were reasonably certain.

  For one, a recluse named Father Lamereaux must have known his father and mother.

  For another, the priest wanted him to bring to Japan a retarded boy who was probably his bastard son.

  And third and most intriguing of all, the best player of liar’s dice he had ever met bore the name, real or assumed, of the neighborhood bar where he had spent a good part of his life.

  Big Gobi

  Jade, Quin. Geraty brought it all the way from Japan. It comes from palaces where princesses live. And there are dragons there and people who speak a funny language no one can understand.

  But they’ll probably understand me sometimes because I look a little like them. Geraty said so.

  • • •

  There was only one other passenger on the Japanese freighter sailing from Brooklyn, a solitary young student who had just completed two years of graduate work in New York. The student was plump and carelessly dressed. His straight black
hair, parted in the middle, hung down to his shoulders. He also wore false sideburns and a false moustache, being unable to grow them himself.

  The student’s name was Hato. Quin and Big Gobi talked with him only once during the Pacific crossing, on the evening the ship sailed when he invited them to his cabin to share a bottle of beer before dinner. The lower berth in Hato’s cabin, the only one made up for use, was strewn with a thick layer of well-handled movie magazines pressed down as if someone had been lying on them. The magazines dated from the 1930s and were stamped with the name of a student film society from which Hato had evidently stolen them.

  There was also an amazing array of shoeboxes in the room, neatly piled and arranged, some of the stacks reaching as high as the porthole. The shoeboxes were numbered and marked with Japanese characters. When Quin asked about them the nervous student broke into a short but violent diatribe on the cruelty of Americans to foreigners. He refused to discuss the shoeboxes and a few minutes later they left the cabin in silence, Hato choosing to sit with the Japanese officers rather than with his fellow passengers.

  During the next few days Hato spent all his time in the lounge coaxing one or another of the off-duty officers into a game of checkers. On the third day he was caught cheating at checkers, and thereafter no one would play with him. Hato took to his cabin and locked the door, staying there the rest of the voyage. He had his meals brought to him and visited the bathroom only after midnight.

  A few months after the freighter docked in Japan, Quin was to spend a long night in the company of Hato. And although Hato subsequently strangled himself while playing a drum in an apartment rented by Quin, having first caused a murder that led to the largest funeral celebration in Asia since the thirteenth century, an anonymous event in which only Quin and three or four other people knew the true identity of the deceased, he was never to connect the strangled Tokyo gangster with the retiring student who had guarded the secret of his shoeboxes across the Pacific. For as soon as Hato set foot in his homeland he abandoned his hairpieces and shaved his head, put on an immaculate dark business suit, and stopped speaking English.