City of Devils

by Paul French

  Jack’s few days in Ward Road saw him get the shakes till Mickey greased some palms and Doc Borovika gets in some bennies via a pliable guard. Friends sent in packs of Craven A so Jack could trade; Babe sent in fried chicken and corned beef hash; Evelyn sent a note saying she was sorry it hadn’t worked out. Jack cursed ever meeting her. He should have walked away and let old Paco kill her all those years back in Manila.

  Now on board the ship, here’s Jack Riley, lying on his bunk in first class (the only rooms with secure doors and metal beds), freshly delivered to the docks in John Crighton’s armoured Nash—the Cleveland’s celebrity passenger. Cuffs off, but steel hoops around his ankles, chained to the bed, and he’s watched over by an SMP detective sergeant. This time he’s registered on board as Fahnie Albert Becker, returning home courtesy of the United States Department of Justice. After stopping to pick up two hundred repatriated American missionaries from Kobe, it’s straight to the port of San Francisco. Been a long time, Jack; a long time since that lodging house on the Embarcadero.

  This is the twentieth evacuation ship for American citizens in China to leave, with the last dregs now—only the die-hard evangelist missionaries, managers of American factories, old China hands finally wrenching themselves away from the Middle Kingdom after decades. Stalwart missionaries who steadfastly refuse to leave are lined up dockside singing ‘God Be with You Till We Meet Again’. It’s the Cleveland’s last passenger voyage, as she’s been commandeered by the U.S. Navy. Trouble is brewing in the Pacific.

  The boat docks stateside on April 24, with a welcoming party of state troopers. Jack’s ready for the press—hair slicked down, shaved, and in a shirt, tie, and suit. He’s ready to do his time. The long arm of the law has finally caught up with him—and he wonders who else might it catch up with too. Back there, dockside in Shanghai, John Crighton and Jack Riley had taken a minute together—old adversaries with a mutual grudging respect for each other. Crighton told Jack he’d had a good run; those Fourth Marines and Badlands highrollers were going to miss him. Jack told him some would and some wouldn’t. One of them in particular, he knew, wouldn’t be sorry to see him sail. And then Jack Riley told John Crighton one last Shanghai tale, one for the road, for old times’ sake. Crighton was skeptical, but Jack looked him straight in the eye and told him to ask Albert Rosenbaum if he didn’t believe him, that Rosenbaum knew it all. And, while you’re at it, why not talk to Joe too, and tell him no hard feelings from me. Jack handed John Crighton a little black book and gave him a pat on the shoulder before walking down the gangplank. Sayonara from Jack Riley to Shanghai.

  * * *

  As the summer heat of 1941 engulfs the city, alligators come to Shanghai for the first time in a hundred years. They ease down the river at night and settle in the mudbanks as the Whangpoo has silted up, undredged. It is said that their black, slow-blinking eyes are Japanese-like. People claim that they snatch the rats and abandoned babies left on the shoreline at low tide, the bloated corpses of dogs, cats, and washed-up suicides, before slipping back into the mudbanks and waiting for nightfall. Only bubbles from their snouts and a reflective shine from their reptilian eyes break the surface. Nobody has actually seen one of these Alligator sinensis, but stories of them spread throughout the city, among Chinese and Shanghailanders. They are blamed for missing pets, suspected of snatching away the mudlark children who sift the shoreline for treasure; they supposedly upturn nightsoil sampans and beggar boats, and devour the occupants whole.

  It is said that if you go down to the waterfront along the Bund in the early hours of the morning, you can hear their rasping bellows as they mate and give birth to fully formed offspring. You can hear their claws scratching along the edge of the Bund’s stone embankment, trying to come ashore to roam the city streets. They are said to be a portent of death in Shanghai, that they swarm towards the city, knowing it will be a profitable hunting ground.

  This, people believed …

  * * *

  45

  Joe’s business is down, but not quite out. Farren’s is humid in the July heat of 1941: the air conditioning has packed it in and shorts the fuse box when they try to crank it up. During storms the roof leaks—the timbers are rotten. Coolies climb up on the roof and nail tarp over the holes. Tonight’s a stinking hot Shanghai night, finally broken by a typhoon storm rolling in from across the East China Sea. Ferocious cloudbursts pelt the Badlands, and the sewers back up; the stink of human shit pervades. Typhoon rains bring mosquitoes—arms, legs, ankles, necks are bitten and scratched red raw. Joe and the remaining boychiks huddle at tables between strategically placed buckets to catch the rainwater until they finally open and see who turns up, who’s left in Shanghai. It’s a long curfew till four a.m. The barricades into the Western Roads District mean nobody can get in or out without laissez passer; rickshaws and pedicabs no longer work after dark—it’s just too dangerous.

  The Badlands has shifted from exotic and tempting to just plain scary and dangerous. There have been constant SMP raids since March on the edge of the Badlands, coming ever closer, and Joe has no choice. He decides to pack up the roulette wheels and the baccarat shoes, the cards and the dice. Now he’s left with just the band and the floor show; the takings are way, way down, though he’s legit in the eyes of the SMP, even if the Kempeitai and number 76 still demand their taxes.

  The Kempeitai and number 76 created the Badlands; the Kempeitai and number 76 are killing it. The Avenue Haig Hwa-Wei parlours don’t pay out; the dope is cut and cut again and then further adulterated with strychnine and baking powder. Only the most impoverished now frequent the back-alley whores off Avenue Haig—they’ve been untreated by doctors too scared to enter the district for months now. The Badlands is to be avoided: it’s just one big nightlife slum. It’s too dangerous to go west of the Settlement now—an SMP deputy commissioner gets gunned down on Tifeng Road.

  It’s not just cops who are targets. Joe’s paranoia heightens when a rival casino operator gets shot in the back of the head walking down Canton Road near the supposedly respectable Bund; another gets snatched off the street, and his severed finger is sent to his family with a ransom note. Ciro’s nightclub gets bombed with a phosphorous and gasoline incendiary. A taxi dancer from the Paramount disappears and is found in the Soochow Creek, in a blue satin dress with a knife between her shoulder blades. Farren’s security is stretched to the maximum.

  Joe and the boys are finding it tougher to keep it together, and Joe’s starting to look rough. His hacking cough is exacerbated by the homemade Russian émigré papyruski cigarettes, rolled ever more loosely. He’s ageing, soft around the jowls, getting a paunch. He’s not the man he was back in the Majestic in ’29, no longer the man who danced through Batavia, Yokohama, Singapore, and back to Shanghai. Not the man who once guided Mary Pickford round the floor or held Nellie close. His teeth are hurting, but you can’t find a decent dentist for love nor money in Shanghai now. It’s been a summer of eye and ear infections, as the water that flows from the taps is contaminated. He can’t sleep, it burns to piss, and Doc Borovika’s got nothing to ease the pain.

  There was a time he was a man whom everyone knew. He was the boss—with a driver, maids, cooks, tailors, security, bootmakers, printers, butchers. Across town barmen knew his drink—the stengah was on the bar the moment he walked in; waiters knew his order—schnitzel, no rich sauces, or straight-up ham and eggs; barbers knew his style—high on the back. They shaved him with cutthroat razors and applied Bay Rum cologne; his fingernails were manicured in Little Russia.

  The hard water makes the boychiks’ hair stands straight up, as though they’ve been subjected to electric shocks. It takes masses of pomade, buckets of brilliantine now, to smooth it down. They’ve got red eyes, Hong Kong foot, itchy fucking everything, snot the consistency of coal dust, phlegm like tar. Suits and shirts start to fray as the tailors close down for lack of cloth. Shoes go unsoled, the heels worn down. They gather round a shortwave radio to hear news of the war,
but there’s nothing much but pro-Axis bullshit on the local stations now—the Allied XHMA is off the air for good; the BBC Far Eastern service repeatedly jammed. Moy and Chisholm rant victorious and unchallenged.

  The Farren’s neon light fizzes and clicks with the erratic electricity supply. Inside, the lights dim, the power cuts and then surges, the fuses blow. You eat now in Farren’s on a reduced menu and by candlelight—five- and ten-watt bulbs only, due to the electricity restrictions. Joe’s remains the one venue that has solidly refused to pay the spiralling taxes. Now the vultures want their carrion from the Badland’s ‘number one Jew man’. But now, even if he submitted to their demands, he’s not pulling in enough cash to pay; they’re feasting on a body with only a thin trickle of lifeblood still flowing through it. It’s just a matter of time.

  They’d go—they’d all go if they could … but where? No passports, no exit visas, nowhere to depart, nowhere to arrive. Vienna is a Nazi town; Austria, under the Anschluss, part of the Reich and no place for Jews. This is it: Shanghai is all there is. Joe’s run out of all options but one—to stay put.

  * * *

  John Crighton’s been busy since March. There’s always a final twist in any Shanghai story; there’s always unfinished business. It takes a while to line it all up and work it out. It takes time to put the sting together. Jack’s little black book is an incredible repository—a little black leather-covered marvel filled with the names, dates, and details of every marker ever issued by Jack at Farren’s. Here’s every loan, credit, and advance; every debt, unpaid chit, and absconded defaulter. The single largest bad debt at Farren’s? U.S. marshal Sam Titlebaum. The icing on the cake? He’d offered to pay one time with confiscated guns and ammo; guns and ammo that should have gone to the marshal’s lockup for decommissioning by the SMP eventually; those same guns and ammo that tied Shanghai criminals to murdered SMP officers and were in the hands of every thug in the Badlands.

  46

  Crighton, black book in hand, confronts Joe Farren. Joe, happy to stick it to Titlebaum, confirms the debts, then calls Albert Rosenbaum and tells him to talk to Crighton. Okay, Jack went rogue and now he’s gone, but Titlebaum’s a fakakta mamzer who owes. More important, putting him in the shit doesn’t open any other cans of worms for Joe or the boys of the syndicate that was; in fact, it’ll create the mother of all shitstorms for the U.S. Department of Justice in Shanghai.

  Rosenbaum advises Crighton to ask around. Titlebaum owes large all over town—a grand at the American Club poker tables; four grand at the Palace Hotel on meals and rooms alone. He owes plenty of Badlands gambling joints too—the Arizona, the Argentina, and the Ali-Baba, before they got shuttered, Tony Perpetuo’s 37427 and Bothelo’s Silver Palace. Bar bills were racked large and left unpaid at Vertinsky’s Gardenia before it closed; there are more unpaid chits at the Handy Randy, Ma Jackson’s Tavern—hell, all over town. Carlos Garcia, off the record, confirms Titlebaum has been losing bad at the pari-mutuel at the Canidrome. Half of the joints have been offered illicit weapons as partial payment of debts—weapons confiscated from criminals and in raids by the U.S. marshal’s office and supposedly decommissioned and destroyed. According to Rosenbaum, the schmuck even loves the Hwa-Wei lotteries and is maxed out at the grind shops down Paramount Alley.

  It’s not until August that the sting is set up. Rosenbaum tells Titlebaum his Farren’s debts are still owed, and Joe wants them paid or he’ll talk to Crighton. Titlebaum offers once again to pay in guns and ammunition; Rosenbaum says he’ll broker a meet at his Route Remi stash house in Frenchtown to introduce Titlebaum to one of the local captains from number 76. Titlebaum sells the number 76 man guns for forty-four hundred American dollars and the ammunition for another thirty-five hundred, paid in Yankee hundred-dollar bills. Rosenbaum tells him to bank it and settle his debts with Joe with more illicit guns. Rosenbaum calls in a favour, and number 76 send a tame lieu-maung along to SMP HQ to register a couple of the guns, an unheard-of thing—a number 76 thug registering weapons! Crighton is waiting. He watches the armourer check the serial numbers against the files and … bingo. The guns are registered to the U.S. marshal’s office in Shanghai and supposedly decommissioned.

  The swaggering marshal and big-mouth-about-town Titlebaum was as crooked as one of Jack Riley’s slots. Surprised, he is arrested, printed, and handed over to the U.S. court. The court demands five thousand American dollars as bail, and nobody will stand it for him. Sam finds himself in the SMP Red Maria heading east down to Y’Poo and the Ward Road Gaol for processing. Titlebaum is weighed, measured, examined, printed, searched, and photographed before being assigned Jack Riley’s recently vacated cell where the ignominious marshal will await trial. But it gets weirder.

  * * *

  Two months later, on October 11, 1941, Detective Sub-Inspector John Crighton lays out the evidence against former U.S. Marshal Samuel Titlebaum to the U.S. court. The debts, the missing guns and ammo from the U.S. marshal’s safe box, the Rosenbaum-brokered deal to sell the guns to agents of number 76, the amount paid turning up to the exact cent in Titlebaum’s National City Bank account. Sam realises he’d been played by Rosenbaum and Joe. They never wanted guns; they just wanted the paper trail to lead all the way to Titlebaum’s account. Even the Chinese kid who works at the marshal’s office, whom Titlebaum sent to pay the money in for him, stands in the witness box. It’s bad news and a major public embarassment. The man who took down Jack Riley is as crooked as his nemesis.

  But who the hell is Sam Titlebaum anyway? The prints Crighton takes at Ward Road Gaol are different to those on file for Titlebaum with the U.S. court. Crighton goes to the feds in D.C. again, via Little Nicky, and discovers there is no Samuel Titlebaum—at least there never was in the Chicago police, or ever on the staff of any big Chicago or Seattle newspaper like he claimed. Titlebaum has apparently substituted another man’s prints for his own on his Department of Justice application form. Crighton checks the Ward Road medical examination files from when Sam was booked in and learns that Titlebaum is recorded as having a seven-inch scar on his torso, a bullet wound in his hip, and another in his foot, none of which he’d declared when appointed marshal.

  It’s a packed Saturday in the court, and this time Sam Titlebaum is in the dock. He’s up on twelve counts of embezzlement, including taking six .38 Colt revolvers and fifteen hundred rounds of .38 pistol ammunition. Judge Helmick is out of town and President Roosevelt himself appoints the U.S. commissioner, Nelson Lurton, to be a special judge of the court. The DA’s special assistant, Charlie Richardson Jr., who’d fast-tracked Titlebaum’s application and championed him, makes himself scarce as the press excoriates him daily.

  Lurton is unsparing—he declares that the man who calls himself Sam Titlebaum is indeed a U.S. citizen and therefore subject to the court’s verdict even though they cannot verify his identity. He sentences Titlebaum to two years’ imprisonment on all of the embezzlement counts, plus five years on the false identity counts. He looks the former U.S. marshal square in the eye: ‘You have brought shame upon yourself and imposed on the dignity of your country, betrayed men who have recommended you, and heaped humiliation on yourself.’ The man in the dock stays silent and makes no effort to defend himself. But the best is saved for last: Titlebaum is mandated to serve his sentences concurrently at McNeil Island Penitentiary, the same jail in Puget Sound now home to a certain Fahnie Albert Becker.

  John Crighton takes Sam Titlebaum, who’s said nothing, not one single word, during the whole trial, downstairs to the Red Maria and back to Ward Road Gaol. The press scrum on the street outside is rivalled only by that of the Riley trial back in March, when Titlebaum had still been badged and smiling for the cameras. In the van the two men share a cigarette. As they smoke, heading east to Ward Road, John Crighton asks, ‘Who the hell are you, Sam?’

  The convicted prisoner flicks the smoked-down butt onto the floor of the Red Maria, stubs it out, sits back, looks at the roof of the vehicle and doesn’t say
a damn thing.

  47

  By November, Farren’s is the only major joint in the Badlands left open: an outpost of the desperate, the needy, and the lonely. The music is as shrill as ever, the jazz as frenetic, but the acts are all gone—the Hartnells leave on an evacuation ship after snagging a tour of the American Midwest, Mike and his Music Masters light out on the last U.S. evac ship to head to San Francisco. The Filipino band is willing to stay, but only for hiked fees. The only others staying are the stateless Natashas, their fiercely powdered and painted faces still as common as blackberries in a good season. The place is also full of equally hopeful young men—stateless White Russian émigrés, Jewish refugees from Nazi Europe—lean in smart beige suits that are now only smart at a distance, only in muted light, only at night. They sleep by day, stick to the shadows after nightfall, cluster around the dance floor, gather on the edge of tables, drowning their miseries in dancing and sex, pretending not to be hungry. All are eager for someone to take them home before the lights go up. There’s nobody left in town but the legion of holdup and standover men, petty gangsters, AWOL marines and small-time thieves and hustlers. No money for roulette now, the last spin spun in the Badlands, the final bets placed.

  Yet perhaps those inside Farren’s were among the lucky. In the winter of 1941, the Shanghai Municipal Council collected twenty-nine thousand dead bodies from the streets of the International Settlement, Chinese and foreign. They died of hypothermia, starvation, tuberculosis, overdoses. Suicide rates shot up—old people not wanting to be a burden simply lay down in frozen alleyways and went to sleep and never woke up; young women, seeing no future, leapt into the Whangpoo; families unable to cope left newborn babies on the steps of churches, but they died before being rescued. They were all buried in unmarked mass paupers’ graves outside the city limits and forgotten. But even before the year is out, the end comes for the old Shanghai of treaty port settlements and concessions.