Quin’s Shanghai Circus

by Edward Whittemore

  All the peasants in the neighborhood had been ordered to line the road the next day at first light, to show their respect for their landowner who was expected to drive past sometime during the morning. The policeman’s father was found with a large part of his face gone. He was carried home and treated, but his wife and son were told to wait beside the road until the aristocrat drove by. Thereafter the policeman’s father wore a cotton surgical mask and stopped beating his family.

  The dreaded Tohoku district was forever given to gray skies and winds and blizzards from Siberia. Half of the family’s crop of mulberry leaves had to be turned over as payment for use of the land. With the other half they paid their taxes and tried to subsist.

  Their plot of mulberry trees was an hour’s walk from the hut where they lived. Centuries ago the hills had been terraced, which gave the Tohoku the look of a land of giants. But for a peasant family such as the policeman’s the giant steps went nowhere.

  When he was eight years old the silk market in America collapsed once again. As before, his father blamed the catastrophe on his wife because she was an Ainu and had Caucasian blood. Unable to bear the hatred in his eyes any longer, she finally broke the ice in a rice paddy and drowned herself in three inches of water.

  The policeman’s father died of stomach cancer, arthritis, and advanced tuberculosis in 1931, the year the Japanese seized Manchuria after one of their railroads was blown up there, apparently by Chinese patriots. In retaliation the international city of Shanghai boycotted all goods of Japanese manufacture, an act that many Japanese army officers found outrageously insolent. That same year the policeman enlisted in the army to escape the misery of the Tohoku.

  From the very beginning he liked his new life. The routine was easy enough, he worked hard and did what he was told. At the end of training he was rewarded with an assignment to a Kempeitai unit in Korea.

  The country was as poor as the Tohoku, but now the Koreans were the tenant farmers and he was one of the landlords and tax-collectors. The main work of his unit was the interrogation of peasants suspected of withholding rice. While trying to break the peasants, beating them when necessary, he experienced a sense of accomplishment that was new to him. For the first time in his life he learned to smile.

  An inexplicable event occurred soon after he was promoted to corporal. He and some other corporals got drunk one night and the talk turned to women. There were no whores in the village where they had arrived that day, but the policeman boasted he could find one anyway. He went away laughing, leaving his friends laughing behind him.

  The next day an officer called them in. A village elder had been clubbed while protecting his daughter. It was not the way for a member of the Imperial Army to act with monkeys of an inferior race. The guilty one was ordered to admit his breach of discipline.

  The policeman stood stonily at attention, expecting the other corporals to do the same. But to his astonishment he saw them stepping forward one by one to denounce him.

  It was spring. Tiny green shoots were just reaching above the water in the rice paddies. The three months of latrine duty meant nothing to him but the betrayal by his fellow corporals, the men he had thought were his comrades, influenced him so profoundly he was never able to trust anyone again, even to the point where the only sexual act of which he was capable thereafter was one involving a dead person, performed with an instrument so that his own body would have no contact with the corpse.

  From Korea he was transferred to Manchuria, to the unit of a captain in Mukden who always wore civilian clothes. Although the Captain could read, he was also a peasant from the Tohoku and didn’t despise the policeman just because he was illiterate. It was from the Captain he learned that the bombing of the railroad in Manchuria the year before, the incident that led to the Japanese seizure of Manchuria, had not been the work of Chinese patriots but of the Kempeitai itself.

  The Captain was the protege of a Kempeitai general then stationed in Tokyo. To provide the General with information he wanted on various factions in the army, thereby increasing the General’s maneuvering power over his fellow officers, the policeman was asked to steal documents from certain units near Mukden. The policeman was so successful in his assignments the Captain took him with him when he flew to Shanghai on a secret mission in January 1932.

  For a week the policeman was locked in an apartment memorizing various Chinese patriotic slogans. The Captain came and went and at the end of the week gave him his instructions.

  The two of them, dressed as Chinese students, were driven in a closed van to an alley behind Bubbling Well Road. They entered a hallway guarded by Kempeitai agents disguised as shoemakers and took up their places in an abandoned storefront that faced the thoroughfare. Some twenty minutes later when the crowds were thickest, an elderly Japanese monk came into view.

  The monk belonged to one of the most famous Japanese families living in China. His great-grandfather had emigrated to Canton at the beginning of the nineteenth century, studied acupuncture, and founded a hospital.

  In 1840 the acupuncturist’s son joined the Chinese forces that were fighting the British to try to end the opium trade in that city. Two years later he was killed, one of the last patriots to fall before Britain annexed Hong Kong as a base for expanding its opium interests.

  The patriot’s son became a Buddhist scholar in Nanking. The scholar’s son became a monk in Shanghai. On that winter afternoon in 1932 he was walking from his temple to his residence, following the route he had taken every day for fifty years.

  When the elderly monk was abreast of them they burst out of the storefront shouting their slogans and firing their revolvers. A few minutes later they had raced back down the alley and were speeding away in their van.

  The next day, in retaliation for the murder, a Japanese squadron bombed the Chinese slums in the city, the first time in history that bombing planes had been used against civilians. A Japanese naval garrison clashed with the Nineteenth Chinese Route Army and thus began what became known in Japan as the Shanghai Incident, one more reason for the Japanese invasion of north China a year later.

  Just before they left Shanghai an older man in civilian clothes visited them in their apartment. He was furious with the Captain because the monk had been killed rather than wounded in the arm, which was what he had ordered them to do. The terrified Captain replied that it had been impossible to aim carefully. They had been running across the sidewalk and had only a few seconds in which to act.

  The claim was true on the Captain’s part. Only one of his bullets had struck the monk, and that one in the arm. As for the policeman, he said nothing. He had purposely emptied his revolver into the monk’s chest, partly thinking the Captain would be blamed for it, his revenge for the time his comrades had betrayed him in Korea, partly because he was so excited to be on a crowded street with a loaded revolver he had to empty it into someone.

  The policeman had expected the captain to be sentenced to three months of latrine duty, but the old man in civilian clothes simply turned away, tears in his eyes, and left.

  The episode in the Shanghai apartment was one of three times the policeman was to see the older man over the next five years. The older man was unaware of the second encounter, for despite the precautions he took it was perhaps inevitable that at least once during his eight years of clandestine work he would be observed servicing a dead drop.

  The third time, however, they came face to face and that was when the policeman killed him.

  After the adventure in Shanghai the policeman’s duties in Mukden seemed routine and uninteresting. He still stole files for the Captain and occasionally served as an undercover agent in one of the restaurants where Japanese officers gathered, but most of the time he worked in the icy cellars beneath Kempeitai headquarters.

  The Chinese and Japanese and Korean prisoners were always stripped naked before being sent to the cellars. The Manchurian winters were harsh, and often there was no need to beat a man for more than a day or
two before he confessed to anything. Those already condemned to die wore the traditional straw hat covering the eyes that was also worn by mendicant Buddhist monks.

  The suspects were chained to the wall with their arms and legs spread, hung high enough so that their toes just touched the floor. The policeman’s job was to keep the prisoner awake when the interrogating officer grew tired and went upstairs to perform the tea ceremony or practice flower arranging for an hour or two. Because the policeman had always been humiliated by the body hair inherited from his Ainu mother, he particularly enjoyed the nakedness of the prisoners.

  He tried slaps, kicks, punches. He squeezed the eyeballs and stuffed oily rags into the mouth, pinching first one nostril and then the other. He used his blackjack to rap the kneecaps, the elbows, the teeth.

  Many methods worked but by far the best was holding the prisoner’s testicles in his hand and tapping them with his blackjack. The dull sounds that came out of the man then were unlike any he had ever heard. Only once did he imagine he heard them elsewhere, during an unbearably hot Manchurian summer when he was sitting alone on the plains, bareheaded, dizzily pulling a cricket apart.

  The second time he saw the older man from Shanghai was in the autumn of 1937, a few days before he was transferred to an infantry unit in central China. He was on duty in civilian clothes in a restaurant listening to conversations when the older man came in and sat down alone in a corner. Something in the way he moved his head confused the policeman. Curious, he got to his feet and went off to the toilet.

  Ever since the months in the Korean latrines the policeman had been able to think more clearly when immersed in an atmosphere of dung and urine. They were not only the smells that reminded him to beware of betrayal, they also brought back an older memory, one of his earliest, the times as a boy when he had carried heavy buckets of nightsoil up the giant steps of the Tohoku toward the mulberry trees.

  There were only two stalls, the policeman sat down in one. He was just beginning to feel comfortable with himself when someone entered the other stall and locked the door.

  The policeman always had to have privacy in the toilet, otherwise he couldn’t concentrate and make the smells that pleased him. He climbed up on the seat to peek over the partition, thinking he might use his blackjack on the intruder, when he saw a hand go up under the lid of the water tank and place something there. The hand withdrew, the door was unlocked, the older man from the Shanghai apartment left the room. What did it mean?

  He went into the other stall and found a small length of bamboo, sealed at both ends, wedged into a niche under the lid of the water tank. He opened the bamboo tube and took out a tiny film. What was it?

  He replaced the device and wandered over beside the urinals. He knew he had discovered something but he didn’t know what it was. He bent to tie his shoelace. His hand strayed into the urinal and picked up the hard cake of deodorant lying there. The cake was green and looked like candy. Absentmindedly he bit into the crunchy nugget and chewed.

  What had he witnessed just now?

  Angered that he could not understand what had happened, angered as well by the indistinct passions aroused in him by the older man from Shanghai, the policeman took a long walk that night to the outskirts of the city. The next day an elderly woman was found beaten to death with a blunt instrument, probably made of leather, and sexually violated with an inhuman object, either the same instrument that had caused the death or one similar to it.

  Rape with the instrument had occurred after death. The body had then been stripped and the head scalped. Small patches of hair from the head had been crudely attached to the chest and forearms and thighs, a larger amount to the nearly hairless pubic region.

  This necrophiliac crime was similar in every respect to others that had gone unsolved in remote areas near Mukden over the last five years, or since the policeman had completed his tour of duty in the Korean latrines. The victims, always of advanced age, included both men and women. Sexual assault was limited to the anus.

  Normally the policeman or one of the other corporals in his unit would have been sent to investigate the murder of the elderly woman, but this time everyone on duty at Kempeitai headquarters had been placed on special alert. A Japanese soldier was being held on suspicion of espionage. A crippling backache had led to a doctor’s examination, in the course of which the doctor had discovered a microfilm bearing highly sensitive military and political information.

  The soldier, also a corporal, tried to commit suicide by jumping out of a window, but a tree broke his fall and he only suffered a broken arm. Now he was being held in a ground-floor room empty save for the cushion on which the interrogating officer sat. Even the glass from the barred window had been removed.

  The policeman’s Captain questioned the prisoner a full day and night. At the end of that time he retired for a few hours of sleep after learning only two minor facts, the code name for the espionage network and the unknown disease that had caused the corporal’s backache. The policeman was told to stay in the room and not take his eyes off the corporal.

  The corporal, little more than a boy, had the delicate features and delicate body of a young girl. Dead leaves blew in through the window along with the cool autumn air. The boy asked if he could use the policeman’s overcoat, and the policeman gave it to him after first emptying out the pockets.

  There was a secret in that overcoat that had tormented the policeman ever since it was issued to him in the winter of 1935, a secret that had to do with size. In the supply shipment received by his unit that year there had been included a monstrous mistake by the manufacturer, an overcoat so large it could have gone around three or four large men.

  The policeman, who was small, was given the coat as a joke and told not to cut it but to take it in, a project that had lasted just over a week. During that time he went about in the cold weather unprotected while the other men ridiculed him.

  The young corporal now turned the overcoat over before putting it on. He saw where it had been roughly stitched. Suddenly he held it up and laughed.

  What’s so funny? said the policeman.

  This is, said the boy.

  Why?

  Because I made it. That coat got me fired from the factory. I was thinking about my mother and the coat came out all wrong, so they fired me. I had to do something, so I went into the army. If it weren’t for that coat I wouldn’t be here today.

  The boy stopped laughing. He moaned the name Miya and began to cry.

  The policeman didn’t hear the name or see the tears, he saw only the jeering faces that had insulted him two years before when he was cold. The Captain came back an hour later to find the prisoner crumpled up in the corner, his head battered out of shape, his face unrecognizable. The policeman was sitting on the cushion by the window watching the dead leaves fall in the yard.

  The Captain flipped the safety on his revolver, but at the last moment kept himself from shooting his subordinate in the head.

  Soon afterward the Captain was standing in front of the desk of his commanding officer, a General, the man from the apartment in Shanghai who had once been his patron and protector. There was no need for the Captain to be told that the death of so important a prisoner was unpardonable. At the same time as he turned in his report he made a formal request that both he and the policeman be transferred to a front-line infantry unit.

  A month later the Captain was killed in a reckless assault on a Chinese machine gun emplacement. The policeman, however, was still carrying his favorite blackjack the December night his regiment broke ranks outside the gates of Nanking.

  Fires were everywhere. For a thousand years the policeman stabbed and shot and clubbed Chinese, for ten thousand years he beat victims and mutilated them and burned them. Then all at once he turned a corner and found himself facing the man from the apartment in Shanghai, from the toilet in Mukden, a man he knew from the winter morning when his father had been found with his face gone and he had had to wait beside the ro
ad with a bowed head until an automobile passed bearing the powerful Baron who owned his family’s land and all the land for miles around.

  He had been only eight years old, but he had peeked up and caught a glimpse of the passing face. The man had held his head differently then, not in that stiff, rigid way, and that was what had confused the policeman in the Shanghai apartment and the Mukden toilet. But now in the screams and shadowy firelight of Nanking the policeman was no longer confused, his head cleared, and he knew exactly whom the face belonged to.

  He struck him with his blackjack, the General went down. He dragged him out of the alley into a deserted courtyard, stripped off his uniform, rapped his testicles to hear the sounds from the icy Manchurian cellars.

  A low moan. A quiet dying moan.

  The fires burned and the policeman tapped out the rhythms in his head, the footsteps on the terraced hills of his childhood, the giant steps to nowhere. He tapped and gently tapped until he felt the sack in his hand growing cold. He severed the sack, shredded the testicles, knotted them around the General’s neck and squeezed.

  One eye was still wide open staring at him. He ripped it out and threw it away.

  Screams.

  A collapsing burning wall, flames leaping into the air, the General’s epaulets shining in the gloom.

  He dropped his trousers, squatted over them before loping out of the courtyard and down the alley.

  • • •

  After a month of arson, torture, and murder along the banks of the Yangtze the policeman was given a summary court martial. While racing a truck through a group of children in a village a machine gun mount had fallen from the truck to the ground. Due to the cries of the children he had failed to hear it. He was found guilty of negligent loss of property. The cost of the mount was deducted from his pay and he was transferred out of the war zone back to his old Kempeitai unit in Manchuria.