Shanghai Shadows (11 page)

Saturday morning. I needed courage for the REACT mission ahead, or so I told myself as I slid into the chair at the table I'd shared with Dovid. I hoped he wasn't religious, that he wasn't at the synagogue this Sabbath morning.

Saturday or not, maybe he was as eager to see me as I was him because a minute later he arrived, as if he'd been watching for me from the corner.

“Good morning, Dovid!” I got up to bring him a cup of hot water, transferred my tea leaves to his cup, and we continued right where we'd left off. That's how anxious we refugees in China were to tell our stories of home.

“So, it is nineteen forty. As I said, I take the money to buy an exit visa and a ticket for the train to Vladivostok. But this I can do only
if
I have an end visa. Somewhere to go.”

“Our problem, too. I wanted to go to America.” I clunked my elbow on the table. “But here we are.”

He was impatient with the interruption. I promised myself that I'd be quiet and let him pour his whole story out.

“Yes, yes, everybody's problem. So we cannot get an exit visa unless we have an end visa. This is where Chiune Sugihara comes into the story. He is with the Japanese consulate in Lithuania.” A smile spread across Dovid's lovely face. I wanted to jump up and touch the half-moons of his cheeks and his chin, which quivered ever so slightly.

“This man Sugihara,” Dovid continued, “he sees what is ahead for the Jews of Europe, and he begins issuing Japanese exit visas. I am already on the train, doomed. I cannot stay, but I have nowhere to go. Ilse, I tell you, a miracle. The angel stamps my visa through the window just as the train is pulling out of the station.”

“Oh, Dovid.” I felt everything—the despair, the hope, the train clacking along the tracks. Then the little bell on Mr. Bauman's door jingled, and there stood Erich—again.

“Have a seat,” I said with a sigh. Erich took my cup to slurp the last of my tea. I heard Mother's scolding voice ringing in my head:
You were raised without manners
?

“Dovid is telling me how he came to be in Shanghai. We were just getting to the good part.”

A hint of a smile softened Dovid's face, and then it clouded again. I suppose he was thinking of being the big brother to his own sisters—dead, no doubt.

Erich asked brusquely, “So, how'd you escape Hitler?” That was our Erich—right to the point.

“Chiune Sugihara,” I said importantly.

“Who?”

Dovid explained and set the scene all over again for Erich.

The excitement in Dovid's voice made my heart swim in a pool of warmth. “It is chaos that day, my friends. Picture it. People swarming the train to get on. Arms waving visas out the window to catch Sugihara's eye. The whistle howls. Then the train slowly builds into a
chug-a-chug-a-chug
, and there is Sugihara, running and stamping visas waving out the window until he can no longer keep up with the train.”

“But visas to where?” Erich asked.

Dovid's smile fell behind his eyes like a setting sun. “Well, that is the problem.”

“Ach, everybody's problem,” Erich muttered.

“We are luckier than some. We grasp in our hands exit visas to Curaçao.”

Even Erich, who knew everything, didn't know where Curaçao was.

“An island in the Caribbean Sea, south,” Dovid explained. “Near the tip of Venezuela. Sea breezes all year around.”

Here, it was May, and summer was already roaring toward us. It had rained all night, all morning, and the rain had turned the air to sludge. Dovid and I had sweat beading on our faces. Waving palms and sea breezes sounded glorious.

“I never get to Curaçao. It is only a trick to get us out of Lithuania.”

Erich caught on. “So, that diplomat—”

“Sugihara,” I supplied.

“Yes, so that guy could issue your exit visas. Clever scheme,” Erich said, admiration clear in his voice. “How many got out this way, twenty? Thirty?”

“Two thousand,” Dovid boasted.

“Impressive. Where did you go if not to Curaçao?”

Dovid was enjoying this parceling out of information a tiny bite at a time. “We had Japanese visas, you see. We went to Kobe, Japan. Where else?”

“You took a boat from Lithuania to Kobe?” I asked.

Dovid and Erich both laughed, at my expense. Erich said, “My sister has no head for geography. She thinks America's around the corner from Brazil.”

“Do not!” I pouted. “Don't stop telling the story just because my brother's so rude.”

Now Erich was deeply engrossed. He straddled his chair, facing Dovid. He looked so comfortable with his arms hugging the chairback. A girl would
never
be allowed to sit that way, and then I became aware of my elbows on the table—which Mother never allowed—and I pulled my arms down to my lap. “Go on, Dovid, please, we're dying to hear the rest.”

By then even Mr. Bauman and three free-loading patrons were hanging on every word as well.

“All of us pile into the Trans-Siberian train. Through the Ural Mountains and across Russia. Until you spend eleven days on a train, you do not understand how big Russia is.” He stretched his arms as wide as they'd go. “The first long stop is Manchuria. Happy surprise to find Yiddish-speaking Russian Jews there.”

“So far north? In Manchuria?” Erich asked.

“Twenty-five years already. So, finally we reach Vladivostok, and we are loaded onto open cargo barges. Forty hours we travel this way. Don't tell anybody, but I am seasick all the way down the coast of Korea, into the port of Kobe.”

“Japan,” Erich said with contempt. “I wouldn't have gotten off the boat.”

“No? In Kobe we are treated very well, but we are a—curious—to the gentle Japanese people.”

“Gentle?” I asked.
Gentle
certainly didn't fit the Japanese who occupied Shanghai. We'd heard shocking rumors of the tortures in the Bridge House Prison, where the Kempetai, the Japanese secret police, ruled supreme, and of the massacre of thousands of Chinese in Nanking. “Gentle?” I asked again.

Dovid said, “No matter what you see, remember, the Japanese people—not the soldiers, not the secret police, but the people—they are kind, gentle souls.”

“I've seen no evidence of that,” Erich said, tapping a spoon furiously on the table.

“Then I hope you will soon, my friends. Our days in Kobe stretch into peaceful months. Gladly we would stay there. I draw a hundred sketches of the beautiful Japanese countryside. Very … mystery. On large pieces of paper, not on these foolish scraps.”

Dovid's look was dreamy, far-off, but he snapped back to the present. “We cannot stay in Japan. Nowhere to go. Summer ends, nineteen forty-one, we come here. Thank God for Shanghai.” At that, he looked right into my face. Thanking God for
me
? I'm quite sure I turned purple.

A stranger came into the café. We stopped talking to eye the well-dressed man. By
well-dressed
, I mean no holes or mismatched socks or plaids with stripes, and shoes that still faintly remembered a shine. Wordlessly, he bumped Erich, who shot out of his seat and left the café. The man followed. I watched them talking outside, the stranger waving his hands in anger, and Erich pulling at the skin around his thumb. Obviously, this wasn't a warm, friendly meeting. The man darted across the street between rickshaws and bicycles, even leaping over the front fender of a car. Erich, visibly shaken, came back into the café and said, “My sister and I have a job to do. Come, Ilse, we have a date with a cranky old dowager.”

Outside, he hurriedly told me, “Beehive. It's all moved up, ten o'clock instead of eleven. Be careful, Ilse.” Erich jerked his shoulder in the direction the stranger had gone. “He thinks Beehive might be on to us, and her friends are not known for mercy.”

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

1943

This was a job for an expert, which I wasn't yet, so once on the street I looked for Liu. Wouldn't you know it—just when I needed him most, he wasn't in sight. I did something I swore I'd never do. I whistled Liu's toneless tune, and he appeared out of nowhere with something green and wiggly hanging from wooden chopsticks. I couldn't tell whether it was animal or vegetable, edible or fish bait. He popped the foul thing in his mouth and gulped it down.

I said, “We have to go to Foochow Road to find a lady called Beehive, okay?” He nodded eagerly and pulled out his knife to show me he was ready for serious business. The sun glinted off the knife as our busybody downstairs-neighbor passed by.

“He's a fishmonger,” I quickly told Mr. Shulweiss. “Guts fish for his father.” I motioned for him to hide the knife, which went into his belt along with the blackened chopsticks. As soon as Mr. Shulweiss was out of earshot, Liu said, “No father. No mother.”

“Well, you must have had one of each at some point.” He cocked his head, processing my words. For a second I thought he didn't understand my English, but then I realized he'd caught the words, all right. He just couldn't capture any memory of a mother or father. “Who do you belong to, Liu?” No recognition. “Who are your people?”

He mimicked a common American expression: “Me, myself, and I. We all three.” He hurried along on feet of tanned hide, and I could barely keep up with him. I tapped him on the shoulder, and he spun around with enough force to knock me off balance. His eyes blazed until he realized it was only me.

“I didn't mean to scare you. Just curious about you, that's all.”

He grinned—his customary expression when he was satisfied with himself. He poked two fingers at his eyes. “Open in sunshine one day long time ago.” He turned a stained hand up, with a ropy scar healed across the palm. One finger looked like someone had bitten the tip off years earlier. Thumping each finger on his chest, he said, “Five.”

“Five o'clock? Five days, what? Oh, you mean you have no memory before you were five years old?”

He didn't quite understand, but he nodded and pointed to the dark hole of the sewer on the street corner. “Water whoosh past me down there. I climb up to the street by the Bund.” He spread his hands and shrugged his shoulders in a
that's all
gesture. “No ma, no pa, no whiskey, no soda.” Yes, the standard cry of Shanghai street boys. “Okay, missy, now we do business.”

He quickened his pace, with me nearly trotting behind him, and somehow led me right to the Foochow Road address. We waited and watched, though his feet were tapping and dancing every second. For a rest, he waved his toes, with their yellow nails curled over the tips.

Eventually, Beehive backed out of her door. I pointed to the prey, since I'd seen her photo, and Liu, the pro, caught on right away.

Beehive was tall, even for a westerner, with legs about twice as long as Liu's. She took giant steps up Foochow to the Bund, at the corner of the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank. The wretched Japanese had taken away the elegant lions I loved that used to guard the bank, and I wished I could once again rub their smooth brass feet for good luck because I had no idea what I was doing tailing this woman. And what if she got on a tram? There was no money in my pocket, and only holes in Liu's.

She kept walking, leading us on a forced march north toward Nanking Road, where weekend browsers were already three-deep in front of shopwindows loaded with Japanese goods no one had any money to buy.

Beehive stepped into Fah Choi's House of Ebony. I pointed for Liu to follow her into the store, which I didn't dare enter, since the shop was deserted and she'd certainly notice me and identify me if we ever met again. I thought of Erich's words: “
Her friends are not known for mercy
.”

Not to worry. Liu had the situation under control. He rolled his eyes up into his head as though he had no pupils, and suddenly he was blind. Patting his way to Fah Choi's door, he made the bell over the door jingle, then put on a big show of stumbling around inside the shop with his grubby palm out like a beggar.

He'd left the door wide open so I could hear what was going on inside, including his own heartrending beggar's chant. Fah Choi nearly leapfrogged over the counter to shoo the poor blind urchin out of his shop as Beehive disappeared behind a curtain separating the showroom from the back. Shoving Liu out into the street, Fah Choi slammed the door so hard that the windows shimmered. One of Beehive's merciless friends?

Liu grinned at me, flashed me a pair of ebony chopsticks he'd filched, brought his eyes back to normal, and said, “Lady-called-Beehive is gone.” He pulled me around to the back alley, where we hid behind a trash bin swarming with jumbo flies. A few feral cats hissed and growled at us. In a minute Beehive slipped out the back door, clutching a flat bundle wrapped in brown butcher paper and tied with jute.

Was Fah Choi part of the Chinese Underground connected to Free China? Or a counteragent? Had he passed her something for REACT or for the enemy? Where was she taking it? What was inside?

She hurried down Nanking Road. We trailed her as far as the race course, where the street took a little jog to become Bubbling Well Road. Lots of people were enjoying a Saturday morning outing in the park, the only luxury left to us.

The Race Course was also a handy place for the Underground to exchange information, since sometimes the safest place to hide is in plain view. I hoped.

Beehive fell in with the moving crowd and didn't seem to have any purpose for about ten minutes. My eyes wandered to a man in a well-cut gray suit, wearing a hat pitched on his head at a jaunty angle. What westerner could dress so well this long into the occupation? I was almost on the man's heels when he turned and deliberately collided with Beehive. Liu yanked me back a few inches. Beehive handed over the package, which the man nimbly slipped into his suit coat.

He whispered in English, probably thinking no one could understand, “Eleven. Southbound tram on the Bund. Get on at the Cathay. Under the seat. Last row.” Then louder, for the benefit of others in the park: “Are you hurt, madame? Forgive me, I must have been in another world.”