The Fools in Town Are on Our Side

by Ross Thomas

  And it wasn’t until my seventh birthday that they stopped dressing me in rich brocades and silk. Until then I wore a series of long Mandarin gowns with high collars. My trousers were made of contrasting raw silk and red felt slippers covered my feet. The girls took turns painting my cheeks and plucking my eyebrows and powdering my face until it was chalk white except for two round spots of rouge on either cheek. I was a hell of a sight.

  I’ve never been quite sure why Tante Katerine took me home with her or even kept me around after she did. It may have been some latent maternal instinct, but that’s doubtful. More likely, she made one of her usually accurate snap judgments and decided that having an American towel boy in her whorehouse would provide a novelty well worth the cost of my room and board.

  Three years later, when I was nearly seven, she told me that the officials at the U.S. Consulate, as well as the Texaco management, as sumed that both my father and I had been blown to bits in 1937 by the Nanking Road explosions. A few days after she brought me home with her she had coached one of her American girls—the one from San Diego, Doris, I recall—for an hour or so and then had had her telephone both the Consulate and Texaco.

  Posing as an old friend of the Dye family, Doris inquired if the doctor’s relatives in the States had been informed of his death and that of his son. She was told that the doctor had no living relatives. She then asked if there were any personal effects and the Texaco man said that there was nothing other than the doctor’s medical bag, his clothes and those of his son, and four five-year diaries that the doctor had faithfully kept since he was fourteen years old. Doris somehow talked the Texaco man into sending her the diaries to some poste restante or other under the unlikely pretext that they would be of immense value to the Montana State Historical Society, of whose board of directors she claimed to be chairman. After the diaries arrived, Doris occasionally read me some of the juicier passages. I’m still not sure how Doris knew about the Montana State Historical Society, but it may have been that she had once whored in Helena for a while.

  Tante Katerine must have been close to forty in 1939. Her full name, so she said, was Katerine Obrenovitch, and she claimed to be a distant cousin of ex-King Alexander of Serbia, who took over the throne when his father, King Milan, abdicated in 1889. She also said that she had been born in St. Petersburg (she could never bring herself to say Leningrad) and had fled the revolution to Manchuria along with a sizeable bunch of other White Russians. I heard the tale dozens of times. It always had a lot of snow in it and even some wolves chasing a sleigh. Although still a very small child, I knew that most of it was a lie, but it was one that I never grew tired of hearing.

  When the Japanese took control of Shanghai on November 8, 1937—except for the International Settlement and the French Concession—Katerine employed every guile she had learned during twenty years of varied experience to determine who was what she, in her cosmopolitan patois, called, “Señor Number One Garçon.”

  Mr. Number One Boy turned out to be a Japanese major who had been too long in grade, at least in his opinion, and was not at all averse to being bribed with both money and free samples. I remember the major, although I can’t recall his real name. The girls referred to him as Major Dogshit. That was close enough and since he didn’t understand English, he didn’t mind. His preferences in money ran to English pounds and American dollars, which commanded an exorbitant rate of exchange on the black market. He liked his girls in matched sets of twos and threes and when that was over, he liked his opium pipe. If I’d been a little older, he might even have liked me.

  Tante Katerine’s cultivation of Major Dogshit paid off. Hers was the last foreign-staffed whorehouse in Nantao to close its doors, on Christmas Day, 1941. There were about twenty of them running wide open in 1937, offering not only whores and opium, but also gambling. After 6 P.M., my task was to greet the procession of Chinese quislings, Japanese big shots, and foreign dignitaries who often clogged the narrow street in the cool of the evening, borne by their Pierce-Arrows, Chryslers, Humbers, and the occasional Lincoln-Zephyr V-12, a car that I passionately admired.

  The Chinese always arrived with four or five hard-faced bodyguards standing on the running boards. The bodyguards wore big Colt .45 automatics strapped to their bellies and they liked to wave them around a lot. All decked out in my silk and brocade finery, which was topped off by a round hat copied from the one that Johnny used to wear in the old Philip Morris ads, my eyebrows plucked, my face powdered and painted, but unlipsticked (I drew the line there), I greeted the guests, each in his own language, with florid phrases of welcome. The scripts had been written by Tante Katerine and I’d learned them by rote. One of the Chinese girls taught me what she considered to be the proper bows and flourishes.

  I can still remember that the English paean went something like this in my best Australian twang: “May it please your lordship (even a merchant seaman arriving in a rickshaw was a lordship if he had the cash) to accept the poor hospitality of this humble house (flourish and bow and up). Your presence brings great honor to this wretched establishment and we humbly seek to satisfy your every need (leer and flourish and bow and up). We pray that time spent with us will help to banish the great cares that surely accompany your exalted position (flourish and bow and up). This way, sir, if you please.”

  I could rattle that off by the time I was five and a half in English, French, Chinese, Russian (not much call), Japanese, and German, even if I didn’t understand a tenth of what I was saying.

  That chore kept me busy from nine until eleven P.M. After that I sometimes prepared a few opium pipes and by midnight I usually had prepared enough so that I fell into my own dopey stupor and had to be undressed and put to bed, where I discovered what pleasant dreams really are. I still don’t know why I didn’t get hooked.

  Occasionally, I accompanied Tante Katerine on shopping sprees in the International Settlement and the French Concession. She liked to show off her figure and her looks, which she kept through rigid dieting, chin straps, massage, and carefully applied makeup. It usually took her two hours at the mirror before she felt she was ready to greet customers. Her hair was still blond in 1939, although she had discarded Deanna Durbin in favor of the ringlets of Jeanette MacDonald. To me she remained the most beautiful person in the world and I remember clutching her hand as we sometimes strolled along the Bund, her silk parasol in her right hand and mine in her left, the devoted amah, Yen Chi, trotting along behind us. Tante Katerine nodded and smiled at regular customers if they were alone or with other men and ignored them if they were with their wives or mistresses. She kept up a running commentary to me on the sexual prowess and eccentricities of each which I found educational as well as interesting.

  By 1939 the Japanese had taken control of the maritime customs and in the months that followed they absorbed the postal system, the Chinese-run radio stations, the railroads, the telephones, and the telegraph lines. They also clamped down on the press, except for those newspapers that were located in the sacrosanct French Concession and International Settlement. But if the Japanese couldn’t influence editorial policy, they could influence the editors themselves and they proceeded to do so in a forthright, graphic manner.

  I think it was near the busy junction of the French Concession and the International Settlement. Tante Katerine had taken me shopping with her. I was wearing my Buster Brown suit (the brocades and silks were my working uniform) and was minus the powder and paint. I think she got the idea for the Buster Brown suit from an ancient issue of The Woman*s Home Companion that had happened to come her way. I’d have preferred corduroy knickers, although I’m still not sure how I knew that they even existed, but I didn’t want to hurt her feelings because she thought that my tailored Buster Brown suit would please me immensely.

  There was a crowd gathered at the junction, I recall, and Tante Katerine, always curious, used her elbows and parasol to snake us through it until we were on the front row with the rest of the professional gawkers.
There were an even dozen objects to admire and I remember she said, “Oh, my dear Mary Mother of God!” grabbed my hand, and plowed our way back through the crowd with Yen Chi following as best she could.

  “Who were they?” I asked.

  “Men,” she said in French. “Very good men.”

  “What did they do?”

  She was grim now. “They wrote the truth, Lucifer. Always remember that. They wrote the truth.” Tante Katerine was much given to dramatics.

  “Then why,” I said, speaking French, which I often did when I had a logical question to ask, “are their heads on poles?” They were really pikes, but I didn’t know the difference.

  “Because—” she began and then changed the subject. “How would you like a sherbet?”

  I forgot about the Chinese newspapermen whose heads the Japanese had chopped off and stuck on pikes for all to see. “Oh, that would be sehr schön,” the multilingual little bastard said.

  I can thank Tante Katerine that by the time I was eight I was a streetwise, cynical little snot, much given to gossip and slander, a toady when it suited my purpose, which it often did, and enough of a ham so that I fully enjoyed my role as whorehouse doorman. The tips that I got from the arriving guests, along with what I rolled the pipe smokers and the drunks for, never taking more than five percent of what they had in their pockets, gave me an income that was equivalent to around fifty to sixty American dollars a week which, at first, I dutifully turned over to Tante Katerine, who said that she was investing it for me. I didn’t understand what investing meant, but I did know that I never had a dime, so I started squirreling away about a third of my weekly take. I must have been about seven then and on my eighth birthday, three days before Pearl Harbor, I had stashed away a little more than a thousand dollars in American and British currency. I didn’t trust anything else. If Tante Katerine suspected that I was skimming a third of my tips, she never said anything. If she had, I would have denied it. Hotly. I was already an accomplished liar. I think she approved of my rolling the drunks and the pipe smokers as long as I didn’t get too greedy, but she never said anything about that either.

  Another of my daily tasks after school was to provide an audience for Tante Katerine during the two hours that she took to make up her face. She regaled me with tales of her social life in St. Petersburg before the Bolshevik swine took over and it wasn’t until years later that I discovered that most of her plots had been borrowed from some of the more impossible Viennese operettas. As I’ve said, I didn’t believe the stories even then, but I was fascinated by the intrigue, the duels (always over her), the romance, and the vivid descriptions of balls, parties, and court receptions. All in all, it was far better than Mother Goose and quite on a par with the Brothers Grimm.

  It was also during these daily two-hour sessions that Tante Katerine tried to provide me with a philosophical approach to life that would steer me around a long list of pitfalls, provide comfort and solace in moments of stress, and possibly keep me out of jail. It was a curious mixture of copybook maxims, borrowed and invented proverbs, and what I later came to regard as pure Katerinisms.

  “Never trust a redheaded Mexican,” she once said. That one was lost on me because I didn’t even know what a Mexican was. My geography had been so neglected that I was quite sure that Berlin was just on the other side of the International Settlement and that San Diego lay a couple of miles farther on. One of the girls had once told me that the world was round like a ball, but that, I reasoned, was obviously a complete fabrication.

  Tante Katerine, sitting before her vanity, slapping on creams and unguents, plucking an eyebrow or affixing an earring, would break off one of her more fanciful tales in which all the men were handsome and all the women beautiful, turn those dark green eyes of hers on me, lower her voice until it was almost a high baritone, and say: “Get this straight, my little Kuppler, free advice is the worst kind you can buy.” Or, “Listen well, petit ami, nobody’s ever as sad or as happy as they think they are. They’re more so.” But the one I liked best, because I was never sure that I really had it figured out, was one that she always said at the end of the two-hour operation when she was staring at herself in the mirror and perhaps patting a stray wisp of blond hair into place: “My known vices are my hidden virtues, did you know that, Lucifer?” and I would always say yes, I knew that.

  CHAPTER 9

  After Victor Orcutt got through telling me what he wanted done and how much he was willing to pay me to do it everyone sat there without speaking while I digested the information, much as if it were a half-dozen oysters that could have been a trifle long from the sea. Homer Necessary cleared his throat once. The fretful cable-car bells clanged and railed against the afternoon traffic. A foghorn moaned twice, as if seeking commiseration, or at least sympathy. I got up and mixed a drink and on the way back to the couch stopped to look at Orcutt, who seemed fascinated by the tip of his left shoe.

  “How’d you get on to me?”

  He looked up and smiled that meaningless smile of his “Do you mean how or why?”

  “Both.”

  “Very well,” he said. “I think you should know. First how. It was through Gerald Vicker. You know him, I believe.”

  “I know him.”

  “But you don’t like him?”

  “It runs a little deeper than that. A mile or so.”

  “He has quite an organization,” Orcutt said. “Expensive, but reliable.”

  “Then he’s changed,” I said.

  “Really? He came well recommended and he did produce on extremely short notice.”

  “He recommended me?”

  “Highly. But you weren’t our only candidate. There were three others who were put forth by organizations similar to Mr. Vicker’s.”

  “Who?” I said.

  “The candidates?”

  “No. The organizations.”

  “I don’t really believe that concerns you, Mr. Dye.”

  “You don’t?”

  “No.”

  I put my drink down on the coffee table and leaned forward, resting my arms on my knees. I stared at Orcutt, who stared back, not in the least perturbed but only curious about what came next, if anything.

  “I don’t know you,” I said. “I only know what you’ve told me about yourself and that’s not much of a recommendation.”

  “You can check him out,” Necessary said.

  “I plan to. Maybe I’ll be surprised and find that it was just a run of bad luck that got you tied in with Vicker. That could be. But you claim Vicker put my name up for membership in the club. That doesn’t flatter me; it scares the hell out of me because I know the only thing that Vicker would recommend me for is something that he could send flowers to.”

  “Mr. Dye, I assure you—”

  “I’m not finished. Assurances aren’t any good, not if Vicker’s tied into them. I learned long ago to stay away from people who deal with Vicker. They’re usually thieves or even worse, fools. So I’ll stay away from you unless you tell me the names of the other three firms that you dealt with. Then I might believe it was just bad luck that got you in with Vicker. But if you don’t come up with their names, then we’ve just run out of things to talk about.”

  Orcutt was quick. If he hesitated, it wasn’t for more than a second. “Chance Tubio. Singapore. Do you know him?”

  “He’s okay,” I said. “Some of his people are a little slimy, but he’s okay.”

  “Eugene Elmelder. Tokyo.”

  “The biggest,” I said, “but stuffy, slow, and very, very proper.”

  “My impression, too,” Orcutt said. “Max von Krapp. Manila.”

  “The best of the lot. He combines Teutonic thoroughness with a vivid imagination. The von is phoney.”

  “He was the most expensive,” Orcutt said.

  “Then he’s gone up. How did you get involved with Vicker?”

  “He was one of four names suggested by a completely disinterested party.”

  “Wh
y take Vicker’s recommendation—why choose me?”

  “There is a time factor, Mr. Dye. None of the other three could recommend satisfactory candidates who were immediately available. Vicker could. He named you. It’s as simple as that—except for the frightfully large retainers that the other three organizations demanded.”

  I lit a cigarette that I didn’t really need and leaned back on the couch. “If you want another drink help yourself,” I said to Necessary. He nodded, rose, and crossed over to the bottle.

  “Why go looking in the East?” I said to Orcutt. “Local talent must be plentiful. I’ve heard that Europe’s swarming with it.”

  “I needed someone who could command a certain degree of anonymity in the States. It seemed to me that a person who has lived in the Far East for an extended period of time might well have achieved this. More so than if he’d lived in Europe. But I also listed a number of other qualifications.”

  “Such as?”

  Orcutt waved a hand, his left one. He did it gracefully, I thought. “We were terribly frank with all of them,” he said. “Naturally, we didn’t tell them exactly what the candidate would do. Rather, we told them what he should be.”

  “How much checking did you do on the people that you dealt with—Tubio, von Krapp, and the other two?”

  “They came highly recommended.”

  “By whom?”

  “I simply cannot reveal that,” Orcutt said and I thought for a moment that he was going to pout.

  “Hint.”

  “All right,” he said. “He was a United States Senator. There’re a hundred or so of them, so you can take your choice.”

  “Simple the Wise,” I said. “From Idaho.”

  Necessary snorted, received a glare from Orcutt, and I knew I was right but it hadn’t been hard to guess.