French Concession (18 page)

When he arrived in Therese's living room, Hsueh saw the man he had been following. Now Hsueh knew his name, Zung Ts-mih, because Lieutenant Sarly had let him read a few of his prized files in the secretariat of the police headquarters. He had rushed to Therese's apartment first thing in the morning because he was worried that Therese would come barging into his own rooms on Route J. Frelupt. Needless to say, Therese could be venomous, and she would have little patience for a man who told her that he loved her while he kept another woman at home.

Things weren't going much better with Leng. These two women had such complicated backgrounds that he felt as though he had been caught between the cogwheels of two sophisticated killing machines, and would answer for his first mistake with his life. Hsueh's life had turned into a terrifying game of mahjong, and he had no idea when he had been dealt this hand or how he had been duped into staking everything he had on it. He had always thought of himself as a gambler, but this time he really was playing for his life.

There was another woman in the apartment, Yindee Zung. The file said that she was related to Mr. Zung. The Zung siblings were staring at him. I should have phoned first, he thought. Therese had Ah Kwai show him into the sunlit sitting room attached to her bedroom. She had sent him to the bedroom, in front of her guests! He might as well be her gigolo.

It was rarely this sunny during the rainy season, and the little room was warm. The steam from the bathroom made him dizzy. He listened uneasily to the voices in the next room. Were they talking about him? It would only take one question from Therese: Have you seen this man at Mr. Ku's? Then Zung would mention him casually some other time to some other people, and the game would be up for him, he would lose everything.

It had never occurred to him that a sunny day could make him this miserable. He let his thoughts wander.

The next thing he knew, Therese's hand was pressing down on his head. Her silk nightgown gleamed silver in the sunlight, like the cape of a heroine in the legends. The sunlight hurt his eyes when he opened them. Therese's guests had left, and it seemed as though only moments ago the nightgown was still lying on the bed. There was a distant rumble.

Almost as if he was thinking out loud, continuing the line of thought with which he had fallen asleep, he heard himself saying, “I saw him.”

“Saw whom?”

“Your Mr. Zung. I saw him again a couple of nights ago.”

He was making things up, as if his voice was not under his control. What he read in the police files had gotten all mixed up with what he had glimpsed in dark corners, in crowds, on unlit streets, and with his own inventions. He thrust the whole pile in front of Therese, like a gambler plunking a bundle of notes down to bluff his opponent.

Her eyes grew wide. She drew her hand back from his warm hair, and retreated to the recliner between the windows.

“So you say he is still doing business with your boss?”

He had said too much. Anything he said could entrap him, and he barely knew anything. He scoured his mind for any wisp of memory that would help him to answer Therese's next question.

“The night before last, Mr. Ku arranged a meeting.”

“The night before last?”

Hsueh lit a cigarette while Ah Kwai sent a pot lid crashing to the
floor in the kitchen. Therese frowned. Her hair looked brown in the sunlight.

Hsueh had not meant to disparage his rival. Now he would need to come up with a nebulous story that would buy him time and allow him to cover his tracks. Eventually, Therese asked him a question:

“What was the deal they were talking about?”

He instantly realized his mistake. Mr. Ku, Leng's superior, the star of those police files, did not have a deal on with Therese. Their last deal had closed: it's a pleasure doing business with you, sir, see you next time. Now he had to open the door, bring Zung in again, and have him sit and talk to the famous Mr. Ku about an entirely new deal. His alarming imagination had already created the scene in his mind. He could picture the dim chandeliers, the small table and steaming teacups, and a man sitting in an unlit corner—Hsueh himself, perhaps. Two people sat facing each other at a table beneath the electric light while others lurked in the dark alley downstairs.

But although he had been sitting so near them, just a couple of feet away, he hadn't heard what they were saying. He needed evidence, even if it was tenuous, like a piece of paper he could have seen. In fact, he did recall a piece of paper with a few unfamiliar words on it. He began explaining it to Therese, gesturing with his hands:

“I saw a piece of paper with a cross-section of something that looked like a rifle, but had a mount like a machine gun. It's the newest thing, they were saying, it's extremely powerful.” He could barely recall the diagram, and his memory of it was all entwined with images of the Astor, a smell of moldy camphor, seagulls shrieking on the Whampoa. What could Therese be thinking about? What was she searching her memory for?

She appeared to be deep in thought. “Is it real? Does it really exist?” she murmured, as if repeating an ancient nursery rhyme.

“It's apparently quite expensive.” Hsueh was regaining his confidence. “Very expensive, actually. Mr. Ku looked a little concerned.”

“Why does he have to have it? What would he do with it?”

He didn't have to answer this question. As the architect of this story, his job was to invent the plot, not to explain his characters' motivations to the audience. But the architect also needed answers to questions like this, if only for himself, even if he would never allude to them directly. And Hsueh didn't have a clue what the weapon was for.

He realized that he had just unknowingly launched a side attack on Therese's closest assistant, the
comprador
who liaised with all these dangerous men for her. He had hinted that Zung might be two-timing her by cutting deals behind her back, possibly even with her money. This was not a question of ethics—in the Concession, everyone had to play by the rules.

But the blitz was over, and he decided to clear the battlefield and tend to the wounded before his rival got even with him.

“Why do you keep asking me these questions? You make me feel like a traitor.”

He tried his best to sound nonchalant, pouting like the rich young men he saw in movies. Her silk nightgown was bunched up above her knees. She had kicked off her silk slippers, and she was barefoot. Her toenails were painted the same color as her lips. Only now did he notice that the white shape in the center of the colorful canvas, the curves of a huge body that expanded outward, depicted Therese herself in a state of excitement. The lines delineating the distinction between the top and bottom half of her body seemed to curve infinitely inward. But whereas the body in the painting had a black helmet of hair that tapered neatly on either side of her face, the real Therese had a shock of unruly hair. He noticed the calluses around her ankles and thought, there's something the artist left out.

He felt sorry, especially when he remembered that Leng was still waiting for him at home. But then he thought—if it weren't for the two of you, you and everyone else forcing my hand, would I be in this mess? You both wanted me to join your camp, and if I hadn't agreed, chances are you would have had me killed. Come to think of it, that was exactly how he was most likely to have gotten himself killed.

He saw the surprised look on Therese's face as she was distracted from her thoughts. She opened her mouth, and a puff of smoke escaped from the corner of her lips. He could sense Leng watching him from behind, her figure nearly transparent in the sunlight. He felt guilty, but the thought also turned him on.

Her calluses were rubbing up against his ears, and her clothes had been rolled all the way up to her shoulders, like a froth of silver bubbles engulfing her shoulders and arms. Both her hands were twisted awkwardly, cupped around her ass, as if she were a half-painted colored egg that could roll away any moment. And her head was rolling along the pillow like the head of a goddess on a pendulum.

“I feel like a hot water bag that's been burst from the inside.”

“A hot water bottle,” Hsueh corrected her gently. Therese learned a new word in Chinese.

They both started daydreaming. He was still stroking her wetness. The trams jingling along Avenue Joffre made him shiver. His ears had become very sensitive to noises. Therese's pubic hair was tougher and crisper than the rest of her hair. It rustled like the sugar curls on a pastry.

“Yes. Yes. Just two fingers. Pinch it from both sides. Tell me, if I let you do this deal, if . . . yeah, that's good. I'll put you in charge of this deal. Could you do that for me?”

Therese did believe Hsueh, but not because he mentioned the diagram, though that certainly helped. She believed him because he said he had seen Zung and Ku meet the night before. Zung had previously sent her a telegram from Hong Kong saying he would be back in Shanghai, and he was supposed to have arrived two days ago. But he did not appear until that morning, when he had turned up at her apartment with some absurd story about how his ship had sailed into the first typhoon of the year near Chou-shan and run aground on the muddy banks of Wu-sung-k'ou. Only early this morning at high tide did the pilot manage to steer us back on course, he said.

This, along with the fact that Zung was frequently unable to account for discrepancies in the books (though Yindee could sometimes explain them) made her realize that Zung must be doing deals of his own behind her back. She could not just get rid of him. She had to have a
comprador
. And Chinese
compradors
always did deals behind their bosses' backs. But she would have to warn him. Wresting this piece of business from him might be a good way of doing that without having to confront him directly. All she would have to do was get him to hand over the invoice.

On a deeper level, Therese might have been more willing to believe Hsueh because she was still reeling from a shock she had had two days ago, when Zung claimed to have been violently seasick at Chou-shan or Wu-sung-k'ou. The postman had delivered a note
from Baron Pidol with distressing news: Therese's friend Margot, the Baroness Pidol, was in intensive care at Ste-Marie Hospital on Route Père Robert. A gastroenterologist was doing all he could to save her life. Before going into a coma, she had begged to be allowed to see Therese. Therese didn't even wait to call a cab. She dashed out of the lobby, hailed the first rickshaw she saw, and made straight for the hospital.

But by the time she got there, Margot's pupils had dilated, and she had stopped breathing. The cause of death was acute barbiturate poisoning. Margot's face was covered with cold sweat, and Therese couldn't help wondering why she would have been sweating. Her skin had turned a greenish color, her face had shrunk, and the cleft between her nose and mouth looked sunken in.

Baron Pidol drew a bundle of letters tied up with a ribbon from under the sheet covering Margot's body.

“These letters are addressed to you. I didn't read them. She once said she couldn't write her diaries to the empty window she sat at, so she kept it in the form of letters to you. She said if she were alive, she would be too embarrassed to let you read them.” The baron's voice was tired, but not terribly sad. Now that the contest had ended with one of them dead and another wounded, the survivor barely had the strength to stumble out of the wrestling ring.

She spent all evening reading those letters, and went on reading the following morning. Margot's letters read like an elementary school student's composition exercises. She used all the forms of the past tense, including the ones peculiar to written French. She must have written them long after the fact, carefully using the verb tenses to distinguish events of the previous day and of an hour ago.

The first few letters were oblique. They were full of phrases like “I am sure Mr. Blair will handle these matters admirably,” or “He certainly is a noble and generous (a sympathetic) friend.” But then the writer grew more impassioned, more absorbed, more direct.

Have you ever read a detailed account of a secret extramarital affair by a friend after her death?

“Sometimes I think a woman is like a lock, and a man like a key.
There's only one that fits every gear and groove of your lock. It's not just a question of common interests or strong emotions. It's like you've always known each other. Even your bodies fit together. His is the right key, and it fits my lock exactly. We're so happy together. You know that afternoon at the Paper Hunt Club? That was our first time, and he was standing, or rather, we were both standing, so he didn't get that far in, but it was the best sex I'd had.”

Therese cringed at some of these passages, even though their writer was already dead and her body cold.

“We're trying out something new. I think all women want to be a man's slave, to kneel at his feet, to beg him for happiness. That's what we all secretly want. Semen (forgive me—isn't that what doctors call it?) smells heavenly, like freshly milled wheat or almond flour. Maybe it depends on whose semen it is.

“Nagasaki is a beautiful port city, just as he said it would be. The waitress brought us a poisonous fish called
fugu
, which means the fish of happiness. After eating it I felt faint, as if I myself were a fish floating in water. Wooden clogs click in an unnerving way outside the windows at night, but they are only
geisha
. You wouldn't have thought it, but Nagasaki is paved with long slabs of limestone like a seventeenth-century Dutch city.”

Therese could not believe that her friend had gotten so carried away in three short months. Maybe it had started long before that trip to Nagasaki. The letters alluded vaguely to a psychiatrist, but she hardly talked about her husband. Once, she mentioned him when they were together at a holiday resort at Mo-kan-shan, one of the baron's investments. On another occasion, she wrote about sitting in the living room with her husband and several other guests, all longtime Shanghailanders, smoking Luzon cigars and talking about roads to be built beyond the boundaries of the Concession. They were discussing two possible scenarios, the Greater Shanghai Plan and the Free City Scheme, as if they were configurations on a chessboard. Something to do with speculation. Does money equal freedom? she wondered in her letter. Surely only love can set you free.

But Margot's lover was an ambitious young man, and running away to Nagasaki for half a month with her while the baron was away in Europe was the most imprudent thing Mr. Blair had ever done. The local columns of the Concession newspapers followed their trip, and someone even managed to find the hotel where they had stayed. When they got back to Shanghai, Mr. Blair had to start behaving properly again—after all, he was a man with responsibilities. Baron Pidol's new circle disapproved of such goings-on. A young man like Mr. Blair could easily forget his place, they said. All the men who had made their fortunes in Shanghai had a say in the colonial matters of their own countries, especially when it came to Shanghai. That meant the affair couldn't go on, which left Margot stuck like a ship run aground without a skipper.

It looked as though Margot might have died of a nervous breakdown. Therese was astonished by the euphoria of those letters. Her friend seemed to have been living in an endless carnival. Therese could imagine Margot writing those letters in the lulls between those euphoric moments, on rainy mornings, or on evenings when her husband was attending a ball. Claiming a headache, she would stay home and sit at her dressing table calling her happiest memories to mind, with the mysterious Oriental scent of cinnamon trees on the evening breeze.

Therese gave no thought to the parallels between Hsueh and Mr. Blair. It was Margot's euphoria that fascinated her. She wondered how anyone could just decide to die like that, like throwing a tantrum: if you make me mad I'll pretend to ignore you and go to sleep.

She looked at the face in the mirror. Its contours were a little too sharp and her cheekbones jutted out. She would need to find a darker blush. She did not like the color of her nipples, so she brushed some blush onto them too, making them a translucent pink. Next she tried applying some lipstick to her labia, which gave her chills. Women love exploring their own bodies, she thought. We express ourselves in color like tribal warriors.

Therese was the kind of woman who was capable of making decisions and acting on them instantly. The previous afternoon, as
soon as Hsueh had left, she had phoned the Zung siblings and summoned them to her apartment to tell them that someone from Ku's gang had contacted her to order the new weapon, and that Zung should return to Hong Kong to prepare the shipment. She didn't look directly at him, and she let the cigarette smoke obscure her eyes. She was proud of having chosen Zung as her
comprador
: his surprise barely registered on his face. She could also tell that Yindee knew nothing of all this. Therese warned Zung not to get in touch with the customer again. She would take charge, so as not to confuse their counterparty.

“Get moving and buy your tickets at Kung-ho-hsiang Pier tonight,” she said.

“Are you going to deal directly with them?” Zung asked her.

“Someone here will take care of that. I want to train a couple of new people. We'll need them as we expand,” she said gleefully.

“All right then.” He sounded a little disappointed, but resigned.

This morning she had gotten up early. It was another humid, sunless day. She had been sitting at home for almost two whole hours. It was a Friday, and by now she would usually have called the Astor to reserve a room. She stared into space for a while, and felt an urge to reopen the bundle of letters, but decided against it. She did not want to have to remove her makeup, and she decided that it was, in a way, appropriate for her friend's funeral. Here I am again, alone and friendless, she thought. In all these years in Shanghai, Margot had been her only friend. Therese was immensely lonely, and she considered asking Hsueh to move in with her. But she eventually decided against the idea.