French Concession (27 page)

When she put the phone down, Leng didn't know what to do next. She had been waiting all morning for a chance to sneak out, and she did so as soon as Ku left, telling the others that she wanted to go for a walk in the gardens.

She stood by the flower beds, gazing at a white camellia that had bloomed too late and was shriveling up in the July sun. She thought she saw a shadow at an upstairs window, and froze, terrified. She was stalling.

The guard was stationed at the gate on West Avenue Joffre, at the other end of the path, so there was no one by the door. The only words she could make out on the bronze plate next to it were 1230 G
RESHAM
A
PARTMENTS
. She walked casually along the concrete edge of the flower bed, as if she were following a butterfly. She could feel someone looking at her. Standing at the window, you could see the whole garden without even craning your neck.

But soon she was standing inside Kovsk, a Russian-owned luxury women's fashion store just outside the apartment building. She felt guilty about stalling, but also about what she was going to do, which was a form of betrayal. Then again, not doing anything would also be a betrayal. The previous afternoon, she had been there while Ku was giving Park his orders. Park was to drive to T'ung-jen Pier, where Hsueh would be waiting at the ticket office.

“The day after tomorrow, we strike,” Ku said. “No margin for
error. Once we get hold of the grenade launchers, Hsueh mustn't be allowed to leave, as a security measure.”

He didn't try to hide this from Leng. She should understand that it was a necessary precaution.

“What about this White Russian woman? She knows a lot,” Park pointed out.

“We'll have to kidnap her too.”

“There just aren't enough of us. It takes two men to watch one prisoner. We'd have to assign three comrades to watch the two of them, and even that would be a stretch.”

Ku was thinking. He struck a match, lit his cigarette, and glanced at Leng.

“Hsueh is important to our cell, so we have to protect him. We must treat him as one of our own. But as for that White Russian woman, she knows too much. Even after the operation is over, it'll still be too much.”

She couldn't hide the fact that she understood what he was hinting at. Her eyes grew wide.

When a comrade is in danger and the question of whether it is worth attempting a rescue arises, the revolutionary should put aside his own private affection for this comrade, and consider only what would be best for the revolutionary cause. He should carefully weigh the usefulness of this comrade to the revolutionary cause against the revolutionary forces that would be expended in rescuing him. . . . When the question arises as to which individuals are to be executed, and in what order, neither the crimes of those individuals nor even the anger of the revolutionary masses should be taken into account, but only the usefulness of the executions to the revolutionary cause. Those who are most dangerous to the cause are always to be executed first. . . .

The words she had learned by heart came to mind, like intertitles appearing in black in a silent film. There was a ringing in
her ears, and she heard their words distantly, as if she were underwater.

“We'll have to execute her then?” That was Park.

Women can be divided into three categories: first, the frivolous, empty-headed, slow-witted kind, who can be used like the third and fourth category of men. Second, those who are passionate, loyal, and capable, but who do not belong to our cause because they have not achieved a truly pragmatic, rigorous level of revolutionary dedication; these can be used like the fifth category of men. Third and final, those who belong wholly to our cause, who can be completely trusted, who fully accept the revolutionary program. These should be treated as priceless treasures, for we cannot operate without their help.

The lines appeared in her mind, one after another. This was the group's manifesto, which Ku himself had written, an oath that all new members of People's Strength had to learn by heart.

“We won't be able to find her,” Park said.

“Give this check to Hsueh. It's an enormous sum of money, and he will want her to have it as soon as possible.” Leng's ears were ringing again. “Wherever he goes, you must insist on taking him by car. He must be watched from tonight onward, at all times, until the operation is over.”

It wasn't like her to speak up at a time like this, but she found herself saying: “If you kill her in front of Hsueh, you'll give him such a fright. She is his friend, his former . . . lover.” She paused.

“You'll terrify him,” she said softly. “He's always been willing to help us. How will you ever get him to accept her death?”

“But what more could he want? Sure, he'll be frightened, but what is he going to do about it? He's already working for us and he can't stop now. He'll have you, and he'll have all this money. We'll explain things to him—in fact, maybe you could explain things to him. Maybe
you
are a good enough reason for him,” Ku said, speaking impassively, as though the thoughts weren't his own.

That night, Ku didn't leave the apartment. He sat there smoking, deep in thought. She went in to bring him some tea, wanting to talk him out of the idea, but when she saw him sitting motionless in the shadows of the desk lamp, she said nothing. Park had already left to execute Ku's orders. The wheels were in motion and no one could stop them now.

Leng couldn't sleep. It wasn't as if she knew the White Russian woman—she couldn't even remember what she looked like. She had only seen her in a photograph in which her face had appeared distorted, and her eyes were staring off to one side. Maybe she was lying down in the picture, which would explain the seventy-degree angle of the smoke rising from her cigarette. Therese was a stranger to her—she only knew that name from Hsueh, and she could barely bring herself to call that woman, of all people, by her first name.

She had first learned of that woman's existence via a pair of stained, musty silk drawers under Hsueh's bed. At the time they had repulsed her. But now she was reminded of them. They proved what the lipstick and photograph could not prove—that their owner was a living, breathing human being.

Her old nightmare was back and crowding in on her. She felt trapped between two choices. She was pacing through an inescapable maze.

I'll go with the first instinct I have when I wake up, she decided. But she barely slept. She couldn't tell when she had woken up because she felt as though she had never fallen asleep. She did try going back to sleep, but her first thought upon opening her eyes again was the complete opposite.

When she finally made a decision, she told herself it was because she wanted Hsueh to feel he was being treated fairly. He mustn't have any doubts about working for the cell.

But when she left the apartment, she was at a loss for where to find Hsueh or the White Russian woman. Finally, she thought of the phone number on the back of that photograph.

She waited outside Yong'an, the greengrocer, for the first cab
to come out of the Shell gas station. The driver said he wasn't allowed to pick up a fare on the street, and told her to order a cab at the counters of the cab company. She didn't know what to say, but she gazed sadly at him until he agreed to take her.

Now she was standing in Hsueh's rooms. She knew exactly where the photograph was because she had put it there—in that newspaper package, together with the silk drawers. Together, those two things formed the face of a woman she had never actually met, but whose life she was about to save. She had to warn the White Russian woman not to go to her meeting with Hsueh. I've always wanted them to stop seeing each other, she thought. I've always wanted to wrap her in paper and stuff her in the gap between the closet and the wall. As soon as she picked up the phone, she felt like the jealous wife in the tales, telling the fox demon to stop seducing her husband, telling Therese not to go to meet Hsueh.

When she put down the phone, she didn't know what to do or where to go. By now someone would have told Ku that she had disappeared in the crucial final hours before the operation. They would guess what she had gone off to do, and treat it as a betrayal, but she had nowhere to go. She couldn't find Hsueh, and she was still wanted by the police. It was too dangerous to go out alone. She could be recognized by a policeman, or by an inquisitive but unfriendly journalist.

She eventually decided to return to the apartment on West Avenue Joffre. She had no home or friends. The cell was her home, and her comrades were her friends.

The visitor Lin had brought with him was sitting in a teahouse opposite them on Boulevard des Deux Républiques and looking across to the east-facing windows of their house. Their rooms were in the eastern wing, and that rascal Hsueh was lying on the bed by the window.

It was the beginning of summer, and at nearly seven in the evening it was still bright outside. Lin sat in the living room. How could he even begin to explain what was going on? Things were happening so quickly he could barely catch his breath.

Not in his wildest dreams had he imagined that Cheng Yün-tuan might be a Communist mole who had infiltrated the Kuomintang's Investigative Unit for Party Affairs. A real Communist! He couldn't stop thinking about it on the way back, replaying everything that Cheng had said to him. He realized Cheng had given him plenty of hints. Believe me, one of these days we'll be comrades, Cheng had said. Why hadn't he realized what was happening? Why hadn't he caught the hint of warmth in Cheng's voice?

The previous night after dinner, when the other operatives were getting sleepy, Cheng had opened the louver door to the storeroom. He didn't shout at Lin as he had previously done. Instead he gave him a friendly look, a look that said we are comrades, though at the time Lin took it for fake chumminess. Cheng even bent over to lean into the dusty storeroom and extend his hand to Lin.

Lin had no idea what was going on. He figured the operative
had a new trick up his sleeve. Only later, when he had come to trust Cheng and grasp that he was being rescued, did he see how difficult it must have been to plant a mole in the enemy's most secret operations. Cheng had run the considerable risk of exposing his own identity. Liberating even a few misguided young revolutionaries was a tricky business.

He refused Cheng's hand and looked coldly at him, but he did come out of the storeroom.

Comrade Cheng didn't waste a single moment. “First thing tomorrow morning we're sending you to the French Concession Police,” he breathed into Lin's ear.

“Why? You don't have my testimony yet,” Lin said tartly.

“A comrade at the Concession Police let slip the news that you had been arrested by Nanking. Just this morning, the police called to demand that we turn you over.”

“A comrade?”

“There's no time to explain. You'll understand soon enough. But be prepared. The Party is going to rescue you.”

Lin felt faint.

“Be careful. Don't be nervous, but don't let yourself relax. There will be another interrogation tonight. Tseng Nan-p'u is in Nanking and won't be able to get back in time, so I'll be interrogating you. Just do what you usually do. The Concession Police will send a car to pick you up tomorrow morning. Our inside man there has bribed someone to make sure the car will spend an extra half hour on the road. Another black car will come and take you away, and it will be a rescue squad sent by the Party. But if the enemy discovers this and there is a fight—whatever happens, you must tell them that the rescuers were sent by Ku Fu-kuang.”

That interrogation may have seemed even more brutal than the previous ones had been. Cheng actually came up to him and slapped him on the face. But the questions themselves were run-of-the-mill, and he had been asked them all before. Growing impatient, Lin became brusque with his interrogators, which only made his questioning look more violent.

He barely slept that night. He kept thinking through the conversations of the previous day, trying to absorb them. The storeroom seemed sultrier and the corner he was leaning against narrower than it had been.

Early the next morning, a black Ford did come to pick him up. He didn't see Comrade Cheng again. (Comrade Cheng—that was how he had taken to thinking of Cheng, ten hours later.) Two young operatives handed him over to the armed policemen, one of whom was, surprisingly, a foreigner. Lin had taken two years of English classes in college, but when he asked the foreigner a question in English, the man smiled and didn't answer. Producing a pencil stub, he wrote a few words on the back of a piece of cigarette foil and handed it to Lin:

                     
For we went,

                     
Changing our country

                     
More often than our shoes,

                     
Through the class war.

Unbeknownst to Lin, this was a poem by Brecht. The policeman told him it was a poem by a German poet who supported the Comintern, and that he had just translated it into English.

The car took him to a
shih-k'u-men
house on Rue Wantz. Lin immediately recognized the man standing beneath the ceiling fan in the living room. “Secretary Ch'en!” Many years ago, Lin had sat in the audience when Ch'en had been speaking on the podium as the leader of the Student Communists.

Several hours later, as he was leaving the house, he had to make himself calm down and not get too worked up. His world had been turned upside down.
This is a conspiracy, a threat to the Party! If Ku pulls this off, it will be a blow to the Revolution. We must expose and defeat him—this is the mission with which the Party is entrusting you.

Four whole years, he had spent four years under the leadership of a mere charlatan whom he had taken to be a representative of the Party, his only connection to the Party, his mentor. He had lost
touch with the Party after the massacres in the spring of 1927. All his comrades were arrested or had dropped out of the Party, and the most important person in his life—not that he had ever had a chance to express his feelings to her—was killed by a blow to the head by a Green Gang thug wielding a baton. When he returned to Shanghai from Wuxi in November of 1927, Year 16 of the Republic, his friends' revolutionary fervor had died down. In March, a classmate from his hometown had come to see him, and spent half an hour talking about the struggle against imperialism and the warlords before saying: my uncle used to be a teacher in Wuxi, but he's unemployed. You couldn't get him a job somewhere, could you? With your position as a Communist on the Kuomintang's Student District Committee? At the time, all schools were governed by a Kuomintang department consisting of representatives from both parties.

But now that classmate ignored Lin and pretended not to know him when they ran into each other on the street. Lin had thought of going to Wuhan to meet up with Party members there, but the persecution of Communists soon spread to Wuhan. He was not angry at the enemy. No, he hated the enemy—he was angry at all his former comrades who had betrayed the cause.

That was when he had met Ku Fu-kuang. He had been coming out of a lonely bookstore which, only months ago, had been full of socialist books and magazines in several languages. The Shanghai Kuomintang hadn't yet been able to shut it down because it was in the International Settlement, and the owner was a German. At the time, he could tell that he was in danger, though in retrospect he could see that the true danger was not what he had feared. Someone was looking at him. He went into the longtang, and as he turned the corner, he glanced over and met the gaze of two men looking at him. Tensing up, he walked faster, and he thought he could hear footsteps behind him. Ku was hiding in the alley. He said in a low voice: “This way!” Lin followed him into a
shih-k'u-men
house, through the courtyard, and out another door.

Now that he thought about it, after hearing Comrade Cheng's
anecdote, he realized that the entire incident could have been a crude trap.

He was ashamed of having been so gullible. He had fallen for it because he had been full of hatred, anxious to exact revenge on the counterrevolutionaries. But his enemy was the system, the class, and hatred is a dangerous emotion for a revolutionary. He had to outdo the enemy in staying power. Just thinking about Secretary Ch'en's words filled him with shame.

When Lin requested formal readmission to the Party, Secretary Ch'en told him that the Party had learned its lesson from the violence of the oppression. Its ranks had to be more disciplined, and Party members would have stricter requirements to fulfill. That meant that procedures for rejoining the Party would also be tightened. Most importantly, Lin had a mission to complete and no time to lose. He had to tell the truth to his comrades who had been duped by Ku, and tell them that the Party would welcome their return.

Lin stood at the window and waved at the man in the teahouse on the other side of the road, who was carrying a classified document that would explain the Party's latest strategy to his misled comrades. But first he had to talk to them all and expose Ku's fraudulent schemes.

He looked at Hsueh, who was fast asleep on the bed. There was one more thing he had to know: what happened at North Gate Police Station. When Secretary Ch'en had asked him about Hsueh, Lin had been amazed that the Party seemed to know everything about everything. Their mole in the Political Section said that Hsueh had an unusual position there because of his ties to Inspector Maron's new detective squad. The Party had arranged for a sum of money to be deposited in an account at the National Industrial Bank, and earmarked for dealing with corrupt policemen in the Concession. Party leaders were taking an interest in the new detective squad. Another undercover comrade, a clerk at the National Industrial Bank counter on Rue du Consulat, discovered by chance that this Hsueh had withdrawn some money from the account. The Party investigated Hsueh, and decided that he was not a counterrevolutionary. He had
rescued Leng because of their relationship, and Leng's deceitfulness didn't mean that she had betrayed the Party or gone over to the police's side.

Lin had Ch'in wake Hsueh up for dinner. As he was serving Hsueh a piece of smoked fish, Lin asked: “So what happened this morning at the Astor? And tell us about the delivery last night. What is the mysterious weapon?”

“How is she? Therese?”

“We don't know yet. Our man stationed at the scene says she was rushed to Shanghai General Hospital by hotel staff. You have to tell us everything. Ku might well be sending someone to the hospital to kill her.”

“I don't know anything. You should talk to Leng.”