City of Devils

by Paul French

  * * *

  Jack had liked Manila on his two Navy tours. First he stays at the Seamen’s Mission, but then gets wise to where things are really happening. He hangs out at Ed Mitchell’s Rhonda Grill, swings by a hole-in-the-wall called Tom’s Dixie Kitchen that cooks tender steaks and sells imported Scotch for nine pesos a shot. He laps up the scene at the Metro Garden and Grill Ballroom, watching the Navy boys of the United States Asiatic Fleet drinking iced Pabst. On Christmas Day, the joints round Manila Bay and the Metro are a sea of white hats. It seems those boys can’t spend their wages fast enough—booze, girls, dope.

  Jack trades up to a room at the Manila Hotel. He gets himself into some craps games and wins himself a stake with those magic Oklahoma State Pen dice. He attends the afternoon tea dances at the genteel Bayview Hotel to tickle the ears of the Navy wives and buys himself some Saigon linen suits to smarten up his act. Early afternoon he takes in the movies at the theatres near the Malacanyan Palace until he realises the seat cushions are teeming with lice; he has to wash his hair with kerosene to kill the bastards. He likes walking the wealthy streets where the rich mestizos and the expat Americans live: the quiet, wide, tree-lined thoroughfares by the Bay or Dewey Boulevard with high-end American compounds, a LaSalle convertible in every driveway.

  Down at the Metro, Jack hooks up with a local called Paco who shows him the sights. Paco has a British gal called Evelyn who’s got a Russian surname, Oleaga, on account of having been married to a Russian some time back. Paco and Evelyn spot Jack for a bucko-mate-on-the-lam right off the bat. They hang out nightly at Ed Mitchell’s before hitting the Metro: determinedly teetotaling Jack on the seltzer, Evelyn on the house Dubonnet cocktails. Paco invariably gets shit-faced with his Manilamen brothers, leaving Jack and Evelyn to talk. Jack breathes in her chypre perfume and digs her fancy cut-glass accent. He tells her he wants out. Manila is a steamy version of Tulsa, but Shanghai is the real deal. She confesses she hates this swamp and wants to go to Shanghai too. Jack tells her to look him up.

  A couple of weeks later Paco pulls a bank heist with his brothers on Evelyn’s tip-off and walks away with forty thousand pesos. Evelyn had her claws into the manager and sweet-talked everything out of him that Paco needed to know to rob the place right when the teller’s drawers were full to bursting. Evelyn asks for her share, and Paco laughs, spits in her face, and slaps her across the room before throwing her out on the street and calling her evil. Evelyn, black-eyed, finds Jack drinking coffee in the Rhonda Grill and tells him the sorry story. Jack takes umbrage on her behalf and walks her back to her Chinatown apartment, where he finds Paco liquored up and smooching a Japanese whore. Jack beats the living crap out of Paco and hands Evelyn her cut, only to watch while she kicks Paco repeatedly in the cojones. Paco was right, Jack thinks, you are evil, Evil Evelyn. She stays the night in his hotel room, leaving the scent of chypre on Jack’s sheets. The next morning he takes her to the harbour and watches her board a steamer for Shanghai, Paco already forgotten. Evil Evelyn pecks him on the cheek and says she owes him one.

  In Manila Jack sees his first real industrial-size slot-machine operation and the gawk-eyed leatherneck marines lining up to lose their coin on payday. He’d seen slots in Tulsa, but only one at a time in a speakeasy or a blind pig. Nobody had much coin to spare back there. But in Manila, they cover whole floors. He watches the coins go in, the wheels spin, and a fuck of a lot fewer coins come out. Later, a thick-necked guy comes over and empties the back of the machine into a bucket, right up to the brim. Sweet business. Jack gets friendly with the lanky overseer, some ex-army Canadian called Penfold, or Pinfold. He explains the slots business to Jack. Easiest money on God’s green earth, no wages wasted on croupiers, machines don’t thieve the take, the dumbest hick could figure it out: just pop a peso in the slot, pull the lever, and wave it goodbye. Then do it again … and again … and again. It’s rigged to the house and pays out ten per cent max on a good day.

  It’s time to move on. Jack buddies up with the Navy boys and jumps a U.S. Army transport heading for Shanghai. The U.S.S. Chaumont does the run regular and the crew are always willing to do a favour for a Yang Pat vet. Maybe they could carry the odd cargo from Manila for an old U.S. Navy man trying to make a go of it on the China Coast? Maybe they could at that.

  * * *

  The cold weather lingers late in Shanghai the spring of 1930. Jack Riley’s fingers feel the cold bad. He’s got a one-room flop with a shared can up in Hongkew that’s a pay-by-the-day establishment. It’s run by an old Swedish seaman’s widow who’s soft on sailors and doesn’t hassle him for the rent. He keeps warm in his single divan with a leaky old kerosene heater and stashes his clothes in a mothball-smelling closet pushed against the mouldy blue walls. By night Jack’s got a gig bouncing the door of the Venus Café, a late-late-night cabaret up on the North Szechuen Road, close by the dive bars of Jukong Alley. Babylonian Jewish Sam Levy runs the joint with his sister-in-law, Girgee, and they take a liking to Jack. Sam schmoozes the patrons while Girgee keeps the business side of things ticking over—ten cents a dance with the White Russian hostesses. Sam’s happy to have Jack take care of the door, pay him some, and have his company for the Venus’s traditional four a.m. ham and eggs, when the riffraff is sent on its way.

  The Venus is a quiet joint till about midnight, when it becomes a bad-news mix of off-duty marines, British squaddies, Shanghai’s foreign lowlife, and slumming swells. Jack is packing knuckledusters and a leather cosh, and there’s a cutthroat Bengal razor in his breast pocket if things go truly south. Feet and fists will deal with ninety-nine per cent of the trouble at the Venus, and Jack’s rep as a tasty amateur Navy boxer helps some. He’s partnered with another ex-Navy tough guy called Mickey O’Brien, who’s solid backup. The two hit it off from day one.

  He’s taken up with a regular at the Venus, Babe Sadlir, who’s been in Shanghai ‘since Christ only knows when’. Brown-eyed Babe is originally from Nevada via some dark times in San Francisco after stabbing a girl who took her man. She ditched the man, dodged the police, and lit out for Shanghai. Babe is one of the legion of ‘White Flowers’ of the China Coast, semi-high-class tramps who drift the Settlement, grifting the newly arrived British ‘griffins’, those young businessmen with money to spend who work at the great corporations, or hongs, as they’re known, or the soldiers with pay to waste and the sojourners looking for company while they’re in port.

  By day you’ll find Babe topping up her tan by the pool at the Columbia Country Club, scandalising the taipan wives with her Mei Li Bah cigarettes and short shorts that don’t leave much to the imagination. By night you’ll find her drinking champagne and snaffling free caviar in her tight-fitting linen dresses—all on some British or French officer’s tab at the Cercle Sportif Français. She stays out all night a lot and lets Jack crash at her place in the Young Allen apartments on Chapoo Road. They even get it together occasionally. Jack likes Babe: the jagged scar on her neck from some ancient catfight, how she can’t speak without cursing, her blonde ringlets. She teaches him the funny-sounding China Coast pidgin English and a smattering of Shanghainese patter. But she’s got an awful bad dope habit and disappears for days, getting glassy-eyed on the divans in Leong’s opium den out back of the Moon Palace dance hall, a ballroom with a mostly Chinese clientele, on the Hongkew Broadway. Leong’s sweet on her blonde hair, calls her a ‘fox spirit girl’ and lets her have dope gratis till she can find another sucker to sub her.

  Jack finds Sam’s four a.m. crew are mostly Jewish. There’s Al Israel, who runs the Del Monte Café out in the Western External Roads on Avenue Haig; the Wiengarten brothers, Sammy and Al, who front the Red Rose Cabaret and a bunch of hooch shacks north of the Soochow Creek; Albert Rosenbaum, who’d come to Shanghai from Mexico City via New York; a Swiss heist merchant called Elly Widler, who has you counting your fingers after you’ve shaken hands with him; and the exhibition dancers Joe and Nellie Farren. Babe knows Nellie from the Majestic; Joe’s in tight wi
th the Israelites, being of that persuasion himself.

  One night after the ham and eggs Joe tells Jack there’s a long-standing craps game close by, out back of the Isis Cinema, organised by the White Russian band that accompanies the silent flicks. There’s an old army blanket rather than felt for a shooting surface. Get low down against the wall and roll them dice. The suckers fresh out of California or just off the boat from England let Jack Riley use his very own special rolling bones, his sole souvenir of the Oklahoma State Pen. Six the hard way, easy eight, hard ten. Jack rolls a four, ‘Little Joe from Kokomo’; a snake-eyes, comes up with three on each dice and calls it ‘Jimmie Hicks from the sticks’. He keeps up the patter to keep the dice flying, the money moving, and nobody looking too closely. The sailor boys and the griffins are in awe of Jack, and they lap up his schtick.

  They’re long games; they go on till way past dawn. Jack ups the stakes, lures the mugs in, stares down anyone who would like to suggest Jack Riley’s dice ain’t straight. He prowls the Trenches bar strip after the Venus closes, hearing the Chinese touts crying ‘Poluski girls, Poluski girls’, taking the punters in the craps games out back of the shacks that run the length of the Scott Road and always building his stake a little higher. The next step is to gain some real estate of his own, put down some Shanghai roots.

  In the shadow of the North Station train lines, the filth and driftwood of Shanghai pile into bug-infested lodgings along Jukong Alley, a ghetto no decent resident of foreign Shanghai—that’s a Shanghailander to you—would stand for. It’s a million miles from the top joints like the Majestic Ballroom with smoothly mixed whisky sodas—stengahs, as everyone calls them—and a cloakroom stacked with Siberian furs. Or about a mile and a half in reality. The rows of tenements with shacks out back and passages between like veins on a doper’s arm are a disgrace to the good name of Shanghai, says the uptight Municipal Council; a festering dunghill of sin and vice, say the two-faced Shanghai Municipal Police; a rookery no honest white man should enter and expect to leave alive, says the pompous North-China Daily News. Yet it stays because it pays—the SMP takes the squeeze and lets it run.

  The Alley’s pretty much sewn up. The boys from the back room of the Venus own it all, with the Wiengarten brothers, originally from Romania, ruling the roost. Hard for a newcomer to get any of the action there, but just over the Soochow Creek and then across the Avenue Eddy, across the Settlement lines and into Frenchtown, there’s Rue Chao Pao San—that’s Blood Alley to you, sailor boy—and Jack knows that sordid strip of old from his Yang Pat days.

  Opportunity knocks. Jack chows nightly with Sam, Girgee, and Joe at the Venus. While Nellie and Babe swap gossip, Joe tells Jack there’s a lush on Blood Alley for the taking: a dipsomaniac ex-Navy cook discharged in Shanghai who’s bought himself a bar. He’s got a taste for the dice and the bourbon but a firm belief that Lady Luck is with him. Joe makes the introductions and swears Jack’s kosher; Jack drops tales of his Yang Pat past, acts like a hopeful naïve civilian and he’s in the game. Jack plays the lush nightly for two weeks, losing, winning some back, always coming out slightly worse off than the heel. Then he ups the stakes until he gets the guy into debt, bad debt, and now the only way the sucker can get out of the hole is to play some more and hope for the best. But soon he gets so deep all he’s got left is his bar—and then he doesn’t even have that. Jack subs him the price of the Dollar Line steamer ticket back to San Fran and waves him off with a genuine au revoir.

  And just like that, Jack Riley becomes the owner of one of Blood Alley’s lowest and most knock-down-and-drag-out shebeens—the Manhattan Bar, proprietor Jack T. Riley, Esq. He invites Joe, Nellie, Sam, and the after-hours Venus crew for a drink. Mickey changes the locks while Babe sets them all up at the cigarette-burned mahogany bar. Sam tells Jack that it’s a shithole sailor bar on Blood Alley … and Joe finishes his sentence: ‘You’ll make a fortune—mazeltov!’ They all toast to that.

  2

  Josef Pollak, a Viennese Jewish boy, lives in the cramped quarter of the city’s Leopoldstadt Yiddish ghetto. It’s home to the Ostjuden pogrom refugees, those forced to be pickers of rags, peddlars of tat, roasters of chestnuts or brothel pianists, all coming home to watery broth and poverty. Twelve to a tenement room; fifty, sixty, or more packed into flea-ridden pensions, families huddled tight above small workshops … but at least it’s Vienna and not the Jew-hating lands of Bessarabia or Galicia.

  Josef moved from boyhood to manhood as the post–Great War depression destroyed the city’s economy. Suicide cults hit the headlines—young people, all hope gone, all money lost, ordered coffee, added potassium cyanide, drank it and died writhing on the floor minutes later. The Pollaks are a large family—brothers, sisters; never enough money, never enough work. Vienna and the Pollaks shiver through the long winters amid shortages of coal and firewood; influenza takes the young and the elderly; the zitterer, literally ‘those that shake’, the shell-shocked of a lost war and a destroyed empire, live in doorways begging for spare krone.

  Josef wants more. His eyesight is too poor for the sweatshops; he’s too slight to be of interest to the Leopoldstadt gangs. He sneaks in the side door of the Wien Raimund Theatre, gazes at the chorus lines on stage, hears this new thing called ‘ragtime’ and dreams of a life in the spotlight. He learns to dance, slicks down his hair with pomade, keeps his fingernails clean. Josef grifts the city’s teeming dance halls as a taxi dancer for hire to solo ladies and maybe, if he needs the money and the mood is all right, a tchotchke, a gigolo. The frauenzimmer like his charm, his style; he entertains them, they tip big. He becomes an exhibition dancer, with different partners each night, showing the dance-hall crowds how it should be done, with effortless grace, feet that slide.

  He gets noticed. In 1924 he’s recruited to join a troupe of continental entertainers called the Midnight Frolics, heading for a tour of the Far Eastern ports. It’s a mixed bag—tap dancers, Russian ballerinas, a mouth organist, a singing violinist, a magician, and an Italian tenor. Among the recruited Frolics are two White Russian sisters, Nellie and Eva, trained in the ballet and performing mild comic numbers. He’s paired with Nellie, the older sister; she’s a beauty with jet-black hair, rouged cheeks, and eyes ringed with kohl. Black tails for Josef, silk chiffon for Nellie, and a mutually beneficial partnership. Josef Pollak changes his name to Joe Farren and escapes Leopoldstadt for a new life away from the poverty of the ghetto. They bill themselves as Joe and Nellie Farren. That they should fall in love was really no surprise.

  The Frolics, billed as the best of Mitteleuropa, turned out to be a hit across the Orient, but they were a temperamental troupe—the ballerinas fought, the tenor drank, the magician doped. They dance in Kobe and Yokohama, Batavia and Singapore; they move on to Manila, across to Tientsin, Peking, and then Shanghai—the top spot on the Far East circuit.

  * * *

  It’s 1926: two years later, a lot of steamers between humid Far Eastern ports and cross-country trains, bug-ridden hotels, and claustrophobic dressing rooms later. In the Plaza Hotel on Shanghai’s Hankow Road, behind the imposing Bund and in the heart of the International Settlement, the troupe sees a crowd that spends silver dollars like pennies. They see ‘Slick’ Jack Carter and his Serenaders, an all-Negro band, pack the dance floor. They hear scat singer Bo Diddley improvise nonsense songs and wow fashionable Shanghai. They hear Black Broadway hoofer turned trumpet player and singer Valaida Snow, backed by the demon piano player Teddy Weatherford. Here in the sumptuous Plaza Hotel, Shanghai’s wealthiest foreign taipans in evening dress, sipping stengahs and smoking fat cigars, their wives in satins and jewels, make whoopee among the modern youth of Shanghai’s Chinese elite. Valaida finishes her set on a still-warm September Shanghai evening with ‘Someone to Watch Over Me’, while the ultra-modern Chinese mopu boys, their handkerchiefs folded in the jacket pockets of their tight-fitting pongee suits, smooch with their slightly diffident moge girls in slimline flapper dresses. That night, breathing in the camph
or scents and street smells of Shanghai, Joe knows where his future lies. But he and Nellie are committed to the Frolics for two more years.

  * * *

  By December 1929, times are challenging for Shanghai; the fallout from the Wall Street crash has reached the Settlement. Still, for the most part, the rich stay rich and the Majestic Hotel Ballroom on the Bubbling Well Road is now the place to be, and it’s packed. Joe and Nellie bag a gig as the hotel’s exhibition dancers, thanks to the house bandleader Whitey Smith. Whitey has been based in Shanghai since ’22, after skipping out on Prohibition-wracked San Fran. He’d caught the Farren act down in Singapore as part of the Frolics, and told Joe there’d be a job for him and Nellie at the Majestic, if they ever wanted it. Joe definitely does want it. Shanghai had been his Mecca—the best clubs, the best opportunities, and the best pay packets. They finally ditch the Frolics and take one more cramped steamer voyage to Shanghai and the Majestic.

  Joe, with Nellie in his arms smelling sweetly of Guerlain Mitsouko, glides across the floor of the Majestic’s clover-leaf–shaped ballroom in white top and tails, shoes polished like mirrors. Their dancing was meant to be sensuous; they were an example of how to do it right. He pulled her close; she fell into his arms. It was a trick, an illusion, a set of rehearsed and performed motions to persuade the watching crowd of amateurs that they too could glide and swoon across the dance floor as effortlessly and with such passion, looking as good as Joe and Nellie Farren. They couldn’t know that Joe and Nellie still surprised themselves by how easily they came together. His thin, tallish frame felt perfect to Nellie. He noticed none of her hard angles and boniness—they fitted each other, joined perfectly for at least those moments on the dance floor, under the spotlight, thrilling the crowd.