Authors: Nicole Mones
At that moment, Song noticed an exceptionally beautiful dance hostess seated against the wall, her
qipao
slit to the lower thigh, showing off silk stockings and high heels. “That is Miss Zhang,” said the man next to her. They had been introduced when she first sat down; his name was Chen Xing, and he was head of the League of Left-Wing Theater People. “She has become pregnant by Ziliang Soong,” Chen said. “Do you know the name? He is the younger brother of Mei-ling Soong, Chiang Kai-shek’s wife.”
Song drew a sharp breath. She had heard about this in the halls of Rue Wagner, through which rumors always expanded like fog. Normally such a pregnancy would not be a problem, as the girl would be paid to get rid of the baby, but gossip had it that Miss Zhang had refused.
Look at her, she has nothing but a Soong baby inside her, and she fights
. “What is she asking for?”
“Why, Miss Zhang wants ten thousand,” Chen Xing told her in mild surprise. “She says if she doesn’t get it, she’ll put the story in the papers.”
“Unwise!” Song cried. It was reckless to demand so much money. The Soong family was much too powerful.
“You want to tell her?” Chen Xing said, his mouth a rueful pucker. “Really, you should not become involved.”
His words were barely out when Du Yuesheng’s bodyguards reappeared in the corridor.
Song dropped her eyes before her master came into view and caught her speaking to the man next to her.
These are Communists, and I know, and you do not
. She could barely contain the thrill that swelled inside her, for she had found a source of power, a way to live. And years later, it had led her here, to wait alone in a secret room behind the herb master’s place.
A half-bald man in a rumpled gown whom she knew well stepped in—her guide. She hid her disappointment as he addressed her, using one of her false names. “Mrs. Ma, how are you? All is well?”
“Yes, Mr. Guo, thank you.” She did not know his real name either.
“Do you have any news?” he said.
“I know Du gave two hundred thousand Chinese dollars to the Nationalists for the war effort. Even if Chiang did just agree to fight side by side with our army!”
They traded smiles. A deal had been struck and Chiang Kai-shek released; now the Nationalists and Communists would form a united front against Japan. “How are your relatives up north?” she said, code for the Communist stronghold and the frontline struggle to push back Japan.
He shook his head. “They can eat bitterness and endure fatigue to the end, but they are overwhelmed. They are starving. They have no—” He abandoned all pretense of talking about his relatives. “They have no ammunition. We need money.”
She blanched. She had never been asked for money before, only information. It was impossible of course, she had no access to money. “I cannot imagine how I could help, Mr. Guo, but the cause is everything. I will go to the temple and pray to the gods to send a solution to your dilemma.” A light knock sounded on the door, and she rose, her moves well studied. “My prescription is ready. Good day.”
Out on the street, she tucked the packet of herbs away in a silk pouch she carried. How could she get money? Du’s money was out of reach, for he knew the whereabouts of his every copper cash. He also had his hands in all the city’s banks, holding a seat on their boards or simply controlling their directors as if by so many puppet strings.
Curse all lords and bosses like him, all the masters who steal and extort and drown the city in opium
. She may have willingly offered her life in trade for her father’s debt to be canceled, so her clan could avoid poverty and her little sisters could be educated, but she was still a piece of property—on the outside. Inside, she had this, her life, her pledge to her country.
If they catch me, let them kill me
.
This was real power, and it lifted her lips in a smile as she crossed the street.
“You gave the house steward your salary?” said Lin Ming. He and Thomas stood outside the Cathay Cinema, on Avenue Joffre, waiting to see
Pennies from Heaven
with Bing Crosby and Louis Armstrong.
“He’s done well, so far. Eight and a half percent.”
Lin grinned at this proof that his bandleader was doing more than playing his role, he was thinking. He had deduced from the beginning there was something more to this one than met the eye. “That’s higher than the bank.”
“It was for that reason we reached a deal.”
With a blink, Lin Ming realized Thomas was staring at the
shuoming shu
Lin had been perusing, the bastardized and unfailingly entertaining English-Chinese plot summary that was passed out at most Shanghai movie houses. No, he was mistaken, the American had to be looking at something else. The
shuoming shu
, with its sophisticated cult following, was strictly the province of Shanghai’s cognoscenti.
“When you’re finished with that, can I keep it?” Thomas said, dispelling all doubts.
“You
read
them?”
“I collect them.” And they laughed together as the line started to move. Good. Lin needed something light to take his mind off the new danger posed by this Japanese Admiral.
Was this the time to warn Little Greene? The question teased itself into knots as they took their seats and spoke of small things, waiting for the lights to dim. Unquestionably, Lin would have to tell him, despite the danger to himself in subverting any plan of Du’s. But he had to choose the right moment, and so far, there was no immediate threat. Lin’s paid informants had assured him that Morioka listened to jazz only in his apartments, on his gramophone; he had not gone out. Not a single club had seen him cross the doorstep. Lin pondered until the lights fell and the velvet curtains cranked apart, and then it was too late. To bring it up now would only create fear, just as speaking of a tiger makes one pale.
“Are you coming to the theater?” Thomas asked him after the picture, when they poured out with the rest of the audience onto the rounded corner sidewalk, under the tall, narrow modern-style stacked letters
CATHAY
. The street down which they watched for a conveyance was lined with Gallic-style four-story conjoined buildings, three ornate brick floors above for apartments, and the first floor a twinkling line of shops, restaurants, and teahouses fronted by plate glass windows all lit up for the evening.
“Not tonight,” Lin answered him, raising his hand to a rickshaw. “I have others to see to.” It was his habit to excuse himself in this way, and on this night he had reason to be vague, since he was meeting H. H. Kung for dinner. Despite all his wealth and power, Kung remained at Du Yuesheng’s mercy in many ways, and periodic ultra-private conversations with Lin Ming helped him keep up with the master’s leanings.
“Has he talked about moving his assets yet?” Kung said from across the table at the Sun Ya. They were dining on bird’s nest soup with pigeon eggs, whelk with chicken liver slices, frogs’ legs braised with thin broccoli stalks for bones, and shad steamed in caul fat with a crystal sauce.
The question startled Lin Ming. Moving assets would mean he accepted that the Japanese would take Shanghai. It was true that it was now impossible to turn on the radio without hearing how close their army was to Peking and Tianjin in the north. And here in Shanghai, there were suddenly Japanese everywhere in the streets, not just soldiers but families, civilians, including many who came into his cabarets and ballrooms at night. But a Japanese invasion? “On that, he has said nothing.”
“His money and bullion can be moved quickly,” Kung said, “but our situation is different. We are disassembling whole factories and moving them to the interior, trying to keep China on her feet through industry. We cannot wait until they are at our gates.” Kung shrugged as he reached for choice morsels, his hands precise and balletic as he loaded Lin Ming’s plate before his own, like any good friend.
Lin felt his stomach turn. Duke Kung was twice his age and ten thousand times more powerful, so if he sensed the invasion was near, it probably was. “Is there nothing that can turn them back?”
“Possibly,” Kung said. “Moscow has floated the idea, tentatively, very
entre nous
, of organizing a group of countries to oppose Japanese aggression. Maybe even the Americans, though no one has approached them yet.” He signaled for more wine. “I leave next week for Moscow, from there to Germany, to discuss it.”
“Germany?”
“I went to graduate school in Berlin, did you know that? After Yale. I know people there, I can get things done, arrange meetings at the highest levels. I will meet with Hitler. But I am also going to check on my friends, Schwartz and Shengold, two men I went to school with. Jews. Very powerful bankers. They have not answered my letters. Have you heard anything of the situation of the Jews in Germany?”
“Nothing clear,” said Lin.
“My friend Dr. Ho Feng-Shan, the First Secretary of the legation in Vienna, has been updating me. They have passed anti-Jewish laws and seized Jewish property. I plan to find my friends, and if this is true, I will bring it up with Hitler. But above all, I will persuade him to join us in opposing Japan. That’s my commitment.”
They raised their glasses to it, and drank. “And you?” said Kung. “What is yours? You have no clan, no place to sweep the graveyard—you’re just the sort who could commit to something.”
“Never,” Lin said.
“Isn’t that ‘forgetting the war, forgetting the motherland’?”
Lin shook his head. “Of course I oppose Japan without question. I am Chinese. But I serve Du, remember.”
“You’re not a member of the Gang, are you?”
“No.” The
Qing Bang
initiates were sworn for life. “I am his son. That’s enough.”
“And I suppose you’ll never inherit.”
“No.” Lin was not a real son, born neither of a
nei ren
, an inside person, a wife, nor of a concubine, nor even of a mistress—but in the lowest possible way, of a whore. And his salary was stingy, just enough to keep his small flat in Frenchtown.
Regarding Dr. Kung across the stacked, fragrant platters, Lin remembered why Kung was under Du Yuesheng’s power too: the Green Gang and the top Nationalist leaders were bound by a blood debt. It was Du Yuesheng who had carried out the 1927 Shanghai massacre that wiped out many high-level Communist leaders, lured to Shanghai by the Nationalists through the promise of peaceful talks. The bloodbath had cemented the power of the Nationalist clique and ended the Communists’ long-term status as a legitimate wing of the Nationalist Party. Everything changed for the Communists then as they were driven underground, at least in the cities. In the countryside, they pulled back to Jiangxi, where Chiang’s armies encircled them and drove them out. From there they set out on a long march to Shaanxi Province in north China, where they consolidated their new headquarters and continued to fight the Japanese.
It was thanks to Du Yuesheng that the Communists had been driven out of the true government, and the highest Nationalist officials would always be in his pocket because of it. Moreover, they were all a family, the Nationalist leaders, related by marriage to the Soong sisters. Soong Mei-ling was the wife of Chiang Kai-shek, Soong Ai-ling was Kung’s wife, and Soong Qing-ling the widow of Sun Yat-sen. Their brother T. V. Soong was a former top Finance official. They brought the sense of a dynasty to the leadership of the Nationalist Party, and it seemed to cement their absolute power despite the fact that the Imperial system had fallen back in 1911. Whatever the case, they held China’s reins, and as a family had grown fabulously rich—yet still they had to appease Du.
They also did not seem to be able to stop Japan. The fact that they had relocated their Nationalist government south to Nanjing and also prudently moved 640,000 priceless art treasures out of the Forbidden City seemed to signal that they expected Peking and Tianjin to fall to Japan. Would the enemy be allowed to occupy these cities, unopposed? If so, Shanghai would be next.
“If they take us,” Lin said, “the night-world will wither and die faster than you can turn a head. The clubs, the money, the jazz—it will all be finished.”
“Along with everything else,” said Kung. “On that day there will be gloom in heaven and darkness below. That is why I must go to Moscow and Berlin and London, and you, my friend”—Kung’s eyes ticked up, and Lin could see, behind his round glasses, the flicker of Christian compassion—“you must not interfere if they have a clear shot at Morioka. Do you understand? Even if he happens to be standing next to one of your men.”
Lin’s face hardened into a mask to cover the roiling sea of his awareness. This was the end of his fragile equilibrium.
“Agreed?”
Lin lowered his eyes. “Agreed,” he lied.
That Friday was Du Taitai’s regular visit from Dr. Feng. Song sat beside the physician at the bedside as he took the pulses of Du’s revered first wife, and examined the whites of her eyes and her tongue. He wrote out a new list of herbs, and counseled rest in a darkened room—as if the Supreme One could do anything else in her opium-addicted state. Song thanked him respectfully and shook the last few silver dollars from Taitai’s private purse to pay him.
When he was gone she showed Taitai the empty purse. It had never been empty before, and there was still the medicine to buy.
A white, clawlike hand came out to brush at Song’s wrist. “There.” The old lady pointed to the wall.
What? The painting in its frame? The striped wallpaper? Song leaned closer.
“Behind the painting.”
Song was amazed; the old lady had never before said anything so coherent. In the frame was a cheap copy of a minor fan painting by the Ming artist Chen Hongshou, the sort of piece favored by middle-class Chinese aspiring to display good art.
“Behind,” Taitai repeated, and Song pulled the edge of the frame away from the wall. Behind it she saw only the yellow rose wallpaper.
But the Supreme Wife continued to gesture with her curled fingers, and Song peered at the back of the frame itself, where she saw a small velvet pouch webbed to the frame with an ancient, dust-covered crisscross of thread.