French Concession (23 page)

Hsueh had no idea how to clean up this mess. It was a mess that he had created, chiefly by being unable to say no and not wanting to disappoint anyone. But there were two people involved whom he really didn't want to get hurt. He couldn't even warn them of the danger they were in. He walked along the narrow path by the wall of the police headquarters, toward the stairs.

He had had lunch at Therese's apartment before leaving. He could tell that she was falling in love with him just as quickly as Leng was. Paradoxically, to make a cheeky observation, she was less focused on making love to him, and wanted to talk instead. But Hsueh was aware that he had gotten himself into this mess by talking too much. This morning, for instance, they had barely done anything. She had only allowed him to put his dick in halfway, and while she ran her fingers around the other half, she wanted him to promise to take her to his family home in Canton. He talked about the bamboo mattresses they had there, which printed lines on your face that made you wake up looking like a rice cake cut into squares. She told him about the farm she remembered: the cows, donkeys, barns full of hay, and the swamp of a pond that turned to ice for half the year.

He was lost in thought for a long time. The sun shone into his armpits and on Therese's shoulders. Hsueh didn't have a care in the world until Therese brought up the deal again, over lunch. He was forced to say that Mr. Ku was very keen. It was exactly what he
wanted, and money was no object, so he would go through with the deal. All he wanted to know was whether the weapon was as powerful as advertised.

“Is it?”

Ah Kwai was in the kitchen. Therese reached her hand beneath the flowery tablecloth and into his underpants. She gripped him:

“Of course, just like you.”

Therese said he wasn't acting quickly enough. Since Ku was sure he wanted the goods, they should settle on a time and place for delivery. There was no need for her to meet him. Hsueh could take care of everything, but he had to give her a clear date and order size, so that she could arrange for someone to deliver the goods.

He already knew it was a weapon called the
Schiessbecher
, manufactured by the German company Rheinmetall. But he couldn't describe it in Chinese or give it a Chinese name. He knew it was extremely dangerous, and powerful enough to penetrate the steel plates on an armored vehicle. He felt that just knowing it existed put him in danger. He intuitively thought he should hide what he knew, so he didn't tell Sarly what he had just learned and only half understood. But now he had a diagram of the weapon and an information sheet about it. He decided to give Sarly the diagram.

As he walked along the corridor toward Sarly's office, he noticed that the door to the detective squad's office was open. Inspector Maron was not in, and the poet from Marseille was sitting at a desk by the door. An idea occurred to Hsueh. He rapped on the door and opened it before the poet even answered. But he could not convince himself to ask his questions, especially now that he knew about this powerful weapon. He sat on a folding chair across from the poet for a few minutes, and decided not to ask. He would just make something up for the report he was going to write this evening under Leng's supervision and hand in to Ku the next day. After all, you could see police vehicles with rifles on their turrets everywhere. He would invent an even number of vehicles, twenty-two armored vehicles belonging to the Concession Police. He liked even numbers as long as they weren't round numbers, which looked fake.

He reached into his jacket pocket for the diagram, and gave it to Lieutenant Sarly. It made his own diagram look like the work of a drunkard, or a child's assignment scribbled at the last minute.

Lieutenant Sarly wanted to know exactly when the delivery would take place. Of course Hsueh didn't have a clue. He was just a go-between, a flighty lover given a task far beyond his abilities. He had only ended up in this mess by sheer coincidence, and Sarly was well aware of that fact.

All the vigilance and tiptoeing around sometimes got the better of him and drove him to start prattling recklessly away. It was happening again.

“Why not just arrest them on charges of conspiring to commit a crime?” Hsueh asked. “They're perfectly capable of shooting people and planting bombs. I've met this Mr. Ku, and he looks dangerous. He should be locked up. He's inciting people to give their lives to his cause, and some of them must be decent people. He should be arrested now before he does anything else. He's planning to rob a bank.”

Hsueh suddenly realized he had told a terrible lie, and also revealed something he had meant to keep to himself. It was true he had met Mr. Ku. It was not true that they were planning to rob a bank.

“You've met him?” It was the true statement that first caught Lieutenant Sarly's attention. Without waiting for Hsueh to answer, he asked: “And you say he means to rob a bank?” He paused for a few seconds between the two questions, as though the information was only just sinking in.

“That's right,” Hsueh continued, without letting the pause linger too long. “The weapons will be delivered soon, so he had someone contact me to fix a time and place. Of course I couldn't make that decision—I'm just the middleman. Leng sounded frightened. Things aren't going the way she'd imagined them. She said their main goal right now is to rob a bank.”

“Why a bank? Since when have Communists gone in for bank robbery?”

“Oh, it's quite possible. You did say once that there were financiers
among them.” He should sound firm, he thought, and tried again. “It's only natural. Banks are the heart of the capitalist world, circulating the blood of the capitalist system. A bank is like a fortress.”

Hsueh wondered whether he was using all that jargon correctly. Jargon is invented to name the inconceivable, to pin down something that's hard to explain. The force of the word itself makes the speaker more convincing, so that he can influence you to do what he wants you to do and think what he wants you to think.

Lieutenant Sarly didn't recognize the weapon in the diagram either. Hsueh guessed that Sarly had never even heard of it. He didn't pay much attention to the diagram: he simply glanced at it while cleaning out his pipe, and tried to smooth out a small crease on the page. Then he stuffed it into his document folder, along with all those photographs, forms, and neatly printed reports.

Hsueh had sprinkled his speech with details that might later come in useful. He did so subconsciously; he simply had a knack for mashing everything together, and he was always trying to be helpful to someone. For instance, he had mentioned that Leng was afraid. This was a reasonable thing to say, he thought, and it would come in useful some day. He thought of Sarly as his talisman, and you can make demands of your talisman. One day, he thought, he would be able to plead with Sarly to let Leng and Therese go. Hsueh was optimistic by nature. He saw them as good people caught up in complicated circumstances, like himself.

He would still be in an optimistic mood when he wrote his report for Mr. Ku that night. Influenced by Sarly's hints, Hsueh imagined that Ku was plotting something that would petrify everyone. He embellished the report, exaggerated somewhat, writing that Ku was the Political Section's most important suspect, and that nearly all their resources were devoted to investigating him. Based on his vague impressions and the dubious snippets of information floating around in his brain, he concocted a story that even he thought sounded crazy. The French Concession Police and the Shanghai Municipal Police were jointly ordering a new fleet of police vehicles from Rolls-Royce, he wrote, not only to patrol the streets, but also
equipped with sufficient personnel and firepower to be rented out to private and public entities, such as banks. Then he thought of a way to incorporate his newly acquired knowledge into the report. Current models can withstand ordinary bullets, but not the newest antitank grenades projected from rifle-mounted launchers, he wrote. The new, reinforced fleet of police vehicles will rectify this vulnerability.

For a moment, he was terrified by his own imagination. He felt as though he himself was planning a violent crime, not Ku. Leng stood there holding his hand, puzzled by how much it was sweating.

Leng wished she hadn't told Ku about Hsueh and his gun-peddling woman. It had slipped out when Ku was telling her off for lying to the cell about her and Hsueh being old acquaintances. Maybe she had only told Ku about the Russian jeweler to make herself feel less guilty. But she had to admit that she was jealous. Maybe she had told Ku because it would help her find out who this woman really was. Of course, if she was an arms dealer, that could actually be useful, and Ku might decide to buy something from her.

But right now she regretted it as she clutched Hsueh's clammy hand. She could tell he was nervous, and she shouldn't have gotten him involved to begin with. She stood behind him and gazed at his curly hair, choking up with a sudden feeling of tenderness.

Taking her left foot out of her slipper, she brushed her toe up against her other ankle, leaning closer to Hsueh. The way she was standing wasn't all that sexy, but she still wished he could see her now. She tried picking the slipper up with her toes, but that made her falter.

She had to beat the other woman. That was how this game worked. She had to seduce Hsueh and become his woman, replace all those other women, in order to make him take up his part in the class struggle. That was her mission, and when she didn't know there were other women, she had been certain she would succeed. Now she was less certain.

She had tried all the sexy moves she could imagine, the ones she thought a Russian woman might know. Sometimes she would turn over in bed and crawl onto him. But as soon as she was sitting across his belly, she would realize she didn't know what to do next. That was embarrassing, just sitting there, as if she were perched on an altar surrounded by a waiting crowd. She didn't know whether to prop herself up with her hands—she didn't even know where to look. She avoided meeting his gaze, which seemed to taunt her.

It was her duty to seduce him. Everyone knew that sophisticated men like him only fell for those other women. Her only weapon was psychological, and if she couldn't keep his attention, he would soon find someone else. How else could someone like him be compelled to risk working for the cell?

He went out every day. When he was out, she always phoned Ku, receiving a constant stream of news from the cell and fresh orders. Since Hsueh's meeting with Ku, they had gone from speaking every day to speaking twice a day. That was how she kept reminding herself that this was a mission, not a love affair. Whenever he left the apartment, she would start wondering whether he was off to see that White Russian woman. That always made her upset, until she reminded herself that she had never been all that into him, that she was just using him. That made her feel better.

But when he got home at night, or sometimes in the afternoon, all her resolve would melt away. At some point they had started going for walks through the cobblestone alleys, down to Chao-chia Creek and back via a more roundabout route. On those walks, it often seemed to her that everything she thought of as mere playacting was real, and all the harsh truths that were so clear to her during the day were a sham. She felt as if she lived in two different worlds, night and day, and she was reluctant to admit that she liked the nights more.

Once they got home, they would change out of their day clothes. She didn't want to change in front of him, but he didn't seem to care. She was slowly filling up his space with her clothes, her habits of arranging things, her flowers, food, the books she fished out of his
dusty piles of stuff and arranged on the bedside table. Despite not having brought anything with her, she was gradually making the place hers.

At night they talked before falling asleep, and sometimes they made love. Usually she didn't really want to, because it thrust her back into her playacting mode. But when they fell silent and she knew his mind was elsewhere, she would try to get his attention by cuddling or kissing him. That was always how they ended up having sex. Whenever he seemed either too wired or too relaxed, she would get into character and allow herself to seduce him.

Afterward, she often had the strange feeling that Hsueh enjoyed himself most when her exaggerated playacting became ridiculous. Almost as though genuine emotions and playacting were two sides of the same coin, and exaggerating her feelings would make them real.

Hsueh finished writing, folded the piece of paper up, and handed it to her. Tomorrow she would call Ku, who would have her send him the report. It should really be written in code, in chemical ink, and slipped into the pages of a book or inside an inconspicuous parcel. But Hsueh would find that all laughable. He wouldn't understand.

He got up suddenly, and grabbed her by the shoulders. “This is too dangerous! You've got to leave. You can't keep doing this.”

She looked silently at him.

“You're not like them! You should leave the cell. They're full of hatred, and that's not for you. Let them do what they do.”

Of course his concerns were entirely bourgeois, but she was touched that he cared about her. Maybe he was only trying to obtain information for Ku in order to help her complete her mission and whisk her away. She should really be grateful to him.

“I can't leave. I can't just walk away. This is my job—it's a calling. I'm not like you. I believe in the class struggle.”

She was too flustered to know what to say, and her brain was full of abstract phrases that didn't help.

“You know I can't just leave. I'm the prime suspect in an assassination case. I'm wanted by the police.”

She was trying to put it in a way he would understand, without realizing that she had already conceded ground.

“I'll come up with something. I can talk to my friends in the Concession Police. I have a good friend in the Political Section, a very senior French officer. We'll find a way to get you out of this crowd.”

“It wouldn't work. You couldn't do it. Even your friend couldn't.” She could tell she had lost the argument. She should have been talking to him about the evils of imperialism, about class struggle. She was supposed to say that the very idea of running away repulsed her, and she certainly didn't need the help or faux sympathy of a couple of imperialist policemen. But she didn't want to go on about something Hsueh wouldn't understand. Hadn't she spent all this time trying to learn how his mind worked, so she could explain things in a way that would make sense to him?

“Of course it can be done. If that's what you want. We could leave Shanghai together.” Hsueh cut himself off abruptly, because he realized he had lied about being able to just pick up and leave. But Leng didn't know that. She had momentarily been tempted by his offer, and she despised herself for it. She thought back to the choice she had made in prison.

She was angry with herself and trying to make up for it by yelling at him.

“Get lost! Don't you try to tempt me! Don't mock me. I'm not in love with you. I'm using you, don't you see?”

She enjoyed seeing the startled look in his eyes. She knew she could conquer him. Oh, she liked knowing that her words hurt him. She went on and on.

She hurled herself at him and started punching him (the hurling was largely imaginary, since they were standing only inches apart). She wanted to slap his face, but they were standing too near each other and he had his arm around her waist, so all she could do was slap him on the back.

He started kissing her, and she realized that her anger was melting away. That's the end of it, she thought, he wants me in bed. She despised herself for not even resisting him.