French Concession (4 page)

As Hsueh walked along, he could not stop thinking about that woman. She looked like someone he knew, but he still didn't know who she was. All the movies he had seen starred Western actresses. Maybe it was a certain expression, a scene, a line of dialogue she reminded him of. He hadn't even spoken to her. Now that her photo had been in all the papers, he could barely tell whether the face he imagined was the one he had seen by the railing.

On Mohawk Road, someone thumped him on the shoulder. His shoulder strap slipped, and he quickly hooked his arm to catch his camera. It was Barker.

Barker was American. He had fat fingers covered with layers of skin that made them look like Cantonese sausages, and his fingernails were dull.

“Acetic acid,” Barker had told him one day in the bar.

He had spread his hands, palms facing downward, on the little round table in the bar. The tablecloth was stained with tea, as if he had just rubbed his hands on it. You could invent an alias or grow a beard, but you could not swap out your fingertips. The police had a new way of dipping your fingers in ink and pressing them on a piece of paper, which would go in a big book in a filing cabinet. Then you would never be able to get in trouble again—the cops would find you wherever you went. It's not as though you could cut off your
fingers. Soaking them in vinegar worked and didn't hurt, but it took a couple of weeks. When Barker was telling him all this in the bar, they had known each other for only about a month.

Hsueh had met him at the roulette table in the saloon. When gambling was outlawed in the International Settlement, all the dice joints and gambling dens had migrated to the narrow alleyways of the French Concession, but foreigners hardly ever came to this kind of place. Barker hovered by the tables, tall and lanky with long arms like a mantis. He stuck out. Hsueh made a point of being inquisitive in the Concession, which he considered his territory. He kept tabs on anyone who stuck out.

A wanted man in America who had fled across the Pacific, Barker now stood in the saloon with the air of a diplomat fresh off the ships. His right elbow was cupped in his left hand, and he was ostentatiously tapping his forehead with his right index finger, like a British public school boy.

Barker pulled Hsueh into the Race Course. Word was that the final steeplechase had been fixed, said Barker, and the horse owner himself was said to be betting against the Cossack jockeys. The jockeys had decided to trap Chinese Warrior between two other horses to prevent it from reaching full speed, and Black Cacique, a literal dark horse, would win. The crowds crammed between the iron gates and the viewing deck were hysterical, as if the Lord himself had decided not to wait for Judgment Day and was judging the saved from the damned on the basis of their betting slips.

A whistle blasted, and the loudspeakers on either side of the viewing deck began to crackle. Someone was making an announcement in English followed by Shanghainese dialect: “The Race Club Committee hereby announces the hosting of an additional steeplechase race this afternoon.”

Cheering, the crowd rushed toward the viewing deck. In the frenzy, a single cry could create a maelstrom that would suck the whole crowd in.

Hsueh changed his mind abruptly. He did not want to join them after all. He bid farewell to Barker, and walked toward Avenue
Édouard VII. He would lunch at the Manor Inn, and later that afternoon, Therese would be waiting for him at the Astor Hotel, in a fourth-floor luxury suite that cost twelve yuan a day.

Hsueh was the illegitimate son of a Frenchman who had boarded a boat in Marseille with a suitcase full of tattered clothes. The Frenchman had loitered in bars in Saigon and Canton, bragging about his exploits, until he found a job in Shanghai. It was the best time of his life. Hsueh's Cantonese mother had a dull complexion. She wore a traditional jacket with dull patterns, her curls jabbing into its stiff collar. She had never worn clothes like that before meeting Hsueh's father, and she then refused to wear anything else. She rattled constantly around Hsueh's pale collarbone, in an egg-shaped cloisonné box that he wore on a heavy silver chain around his neck. The chain had long been stained black with his sweat. Even when he was at his least self-conscious, whispering dirty phrases in Therese's ear in Chinese she didn't understand, his mother was still rattling between their bodies.

Moved by a passion he had never experienced until then, Hsueh's father rushed to the trenches at Verdun during the Great War, leaving behind in Shanghai all his possessions, his Chinese lover, and Hsueh. He never returned. Hsueh was only twelve years old. But it could not be said of Hsueh's father that he did not love his family. He wrote to them from the battlefield, and the letters that reached them from across the oceans often contained a small package of photographs. In one of them, a Zulu regiment was performing a religious ceremony. Hsueh's father had never seen that many black men in his life. Wearing nothing but a piece of cloth around their waists, they waved their sticks, dancing with rapt expressions. Hsueh's favorite one was of his father smoking a pipe in the trenches in summertime, his chin covered with stubble, shirtsleeves torn short at the shoulders. In another photo, a man posed stark naked at the entrance to the shower cubicles while his uniform hung on the wall. It was his father, grinning at the camera with one hand covering his pubic hair. His mother had stashed this photo away, so he did not see it until after her death. There was a line in French on the back:
Poux—Je n'ai
pas de poux!
Lice—I have no lice! He suspected this photo was partly responsible for the fact that his mother never remarried.

That winter, his father posed for a photo next to a row of corpses. He wore his jacket and a water canteen slung over his shoulder. There were so many corpses that it looked like a slaughterhouse. Some were laid out side by side, while others were piled on trucks like garbage. In fact, the injured looked even more horrific than the dead. One man was wrapped from head to toe in bandages, excepting three holes for his eyes and nose.

Not only had his father's amateur photography influenced Hsueh's choice of career, but the very photos that he sent them from the trenches were also an artistic inheritance that had shaped Hsueh's tastes. Hsueh's penchant for snapping photos of dead men, crime scenes, maimed, stabbed, and bullet-ridden bodies, frenzied gamblers, drunkards, and all forms of human perversity could likely be traced to the photos his father sent home.

When she died, Hsueh's mother had left him a small sum of money, most of which he spent within a month. He had an American firm on the Bund order a camera from New York for him, a 4x5 Speed Graphic with a 1/1000s Compur shutter, the best press camera to be had. It could capture the instant before a bullet pierced a human skull.

Before he met Therese, photography had been his greatest love, with gambling only a distant second. Then Therese had nearly replaced photography in his affections until he tried combining his two loves and found that they were both the better for it.

He had fallen for her right away, that night in Lily Bar.

“Half a glass of kvass topped off with vodka. Hey you, Duke! You know what I want.” She had been a little tipsy. Duke, the waiter she was shouting for, was the White Russian owner of the bar.

Her voice was husky and tender, a voice made for old songs. While the Victrola turned slowly on the bar table, she sat at a table by the window. The black of the wrought iron grilles stood out against the blue diamond-shaped glass, and a naked woman was engraved
in yellow on the glass. It was raining, and the pavement had an oily red sheen. When the song ended, she would clap hysterically.

He had thought he was seducing her, so he was startled to find that she had turned their relationship on its head, conquering both him and his camera in the space of a week. His own passive tendency to go along with what other people wanted was to blame.

This afternoon, Therese would be waiting for him in her suite on the fourth floor of the Astor. She might even be in bed, if she had already spent enough time soaking in the bath, warm like a mug of cream swirled with pink fruit juice. Like a filly clambering out of a pond, she would climb out of the bath and skip right into bed. She had an aristocratic air that the White Russian men who claimed to have been dukes or navy admirals rarely possessed. Their huge bodies cowered in the dark corners of the Concession's bars, members of a defeated northern tribe. Therese, on the other hand, pushed Hsueh onto the bed, had him lie straight, and sat astride him, swaying and waving one arm, as though she were waving a Cossack dagger.

If he didn't love her, he wouldn't be losing his temper or interrogating her. He imagined the sultry Southeast Asian breeze whetting her appetite. One day she would decide he couldn't satisfy her. She would slip out of the hotel room and into someone else's room. He pictured the man in the other room as an old friend, whereas he himself was only a fling. He imagined her lifting her legs under someone else's body. The very idea tormented him.

He began to think he didn't love her after all. He preferred thinking of himself as a dandy taking advantage of the fact that Therese was both wealthy and generous. That made him feel better.

But he still wanted to know whom she had met in the hotel. She would not tell him. If he began to ask, she would get mad, or pounce on him, or even pretend not to hear him and ignore him altogether. He began to daydream about investigating her, but he wouldn't know how to start. He had no wiles. Li Pao-i might, but Hsueh did not.

It was the White Russian woman who first attracted Lieutenant Sarly's attention. The French Concession Police had a file on every foreigner in Shanghai, and it recorded that she was known as Lady Holly, but the name had nothing to do with her real name or provenance. Only the Chinese used that name, and she had often dealt with Chinese.

She had come to Talien by boat, and before then she had probably lived in Vladivostok. As a southerner, Lieutenant Sarly had never been that far north. He was Corsican; Corsicans controlled all the important posts in the police force.

There were a few documents in her police file, among them a report signed by Foreign Agent 119, which gave her real name as
Irxmayer, Therese
and noted that Irxmayer was her late husband's name. The German name concealed the fact that she was a Russian Jew. There were some faded notes, the earliest records of this woman. Most of them dated from the two months after she first arrived in Shanghai. After that, she seemed to have slipped out of sight. No one in the police's network of agents and investigators mentioned her.

A month ago, on the lawn adjacent to the police headquarters on Route Stanislas Chevalier, thirty meters or so from the women's rattan tea tables, Commissioner Martin had told him something interesting. Martin was his English counterpart at the International Settlement's Municipal Police. The other officers had been playing a game of
pétanque à la lyonnaise
on the lawn. The lower ranked
officers never tired of playing this game. That day, the prize was a trophy and a three-star bottle of brandy. Gripping the iron boule with his palm facing down, Inspector Maron threw the final boule. A man ran into the playing area and traced out a circle with a piece of string to count out the number of points scored by the winner, and all the families got up from their bamboo chairs. When they counted to the fifth boule, the onlookers cheered.

The colonial police and administrators formed their own social circle that congregated at tea parties and various joint conferences. At these events, Sarly often received veiled hints of local vested interests, and it was as important to satisfy them as it was to placate London or Paris, thousands of miles away. Business in the colonies was conducted informally, as it had always been. So you couldn't always take what Hong Kong's British colonial police force said on paper seriously—even they might not be taking themselves seriously. And what was anyone to make of their ambiguous choice of words?
You may have noticed
, or,
It would appear from subsequent investigations. . . .

Martin was dressed in full hunting gear that day, but the paper he drew from his pocket was not a map of some unknown country. It was the last page of a long letter about the suspicious activities of one Zung, a businessman from Hong Kong who had been spotted at deserted villages around the bay. Since no opium, alcohol, or the usual smuggled goods appeared to be involved, the case was passed on to the Special Branch of the Hong Kong Police. The letter closed by making casual reference to a German woman and the firm she ran, Irxmayer & Co. She lived in the French Concession, the Hong Kong police learned. Not long thereafter, one of the letters that the colonial police force in Hanoi sent each week by sea was found to contain a detailed description of a botched police sweep. Careless Indo-Chinese terrorists (all the plotting could wear these people out) had left a note under a pillow in their hotel room. Solid information, the Hanoi police concluded—
assez généreux, nous voudrions dire
. They sent the original note to their English colleagues in Hong Kong without opaque formalities or polite equivocations. It simply contained a post office box number: P.O. Box No. 639.

From there it was a short step to discovering that the post office box belonged to a businessman in his early thirties, one Zung Ts-Mih. The Hong Kong police realized immediately that this man had long been a subject of interest. Further investigations revealed that the respectable-looking Mr. Zung had a complicated background and obscure ancestry. In the sailors' taverns it was rumored that despite his Chinese name, Zung was at most half Chinese. Even his father was said to have been a British subject “of mixed blood.” These words had been circled in red in the report, and a big bent arrow, like a circus clown's tilted hat, pointed to a rectangle containing the word
Siamese
.

At least three of Mr. Zung's close contacts were under surveillance by the Hanoi Police. And yet the British insisted that their policy permitted them to investigate the suspects and photograph them but not arrest them. Lieutenant Sarly considered this so-called policy an instance of British arrogance, appeasement, and sheer neglect. The real subject of their investigation was one Alimin, a roaming wolf whose travels had taken him all over East Asia, to Bangkok, Johore, Amoy, and Hankow, and reportedly even to Vladivostok and Chita, where he was said to have received some form of technical training. The photograph was indistinct, but in it he was wearing a shirt with a jacket and black bow tie, together with a pair of those baggy knee-length shorts worn over a
sarong
of the kind the natives wore. He had a thick brow and huge nose.

Someone had written across the top of the first page of the document:

—selon la décision de la IIIème Internationale, le quartier général du mouvement communiste vietnamien déménagera dans le sud de la Chine. Ses dirigeants arriveront bientôt dans notre ville (Shanghai), leurs noms sont Moesso et Alimin.

It turned out that Mr. Zung was the Chinese agent for a foreign trading company registered in Hong Kong and run by a German woman whom the police later determined to be White Russian.
She lived in an apartment in the French Concession, on the third floor of the Beam Apartments on the corner of Avenue Joffre and Avenue Dubail. A detective from Marseille, who fancied himself a poet, had described the building as an “ornate box with the scent of cape jasmine and osmanthus.” Lieutenant Sarly ordered an investigation into the occupants of the Beam Apartments, which turned up a report entitled “Personnalités de Shanghai,” a sixteen-page document that the secretariat nicknamed the VIP file. So it turned out the police did have information on this woman after all, buried in a list of Concession dignitaries. No one had taken the time to link her to the inconspicuous woman noted in the port customs files. The VIP file did not contain much information beyond an address, occupation, and phone number. But the detectives in the Political Section immediately began a preliminary investigation, and started writing their reports, a stack of which now lay at Sarly's fingertips. On his table, rather, in his sunlit document tray.

The red brick building at 22 Route Stanislas Chevalier was the police headquarters. Sarly's Political Section was on the northern side of the second and third floors. The building reeked of rosin and paraffin wax. Lieutenant Sarly dealt with the unbearable smell by endlessly smoking pipes. On humid spring days, this made the air in his office even more rancid. But in the afternoon, sunlight streamed into the room. The shade of the mulberry trees inside the walls extended onto the street, and two children in tatters stood on Route Albert Jupin, staring up at the tree. Afternoons in the South Concession were usually quiet apart from a couple of dogs barking from inside the jails on Rue Massenet.

The woman who lived in the Beam Apartments was a thirty-eight-year-old White Russian woman whom the Chinese referred to respectfully as Lady Holly. She apparently ran a jewelry store opposite the apartments on the corner of Avenue Dubail, under the sign
ECLAT
.
The door faced Avenue Dubail, whereas the side facing Avenue Joffre was a storefront window shaded by curtains. The store occupied the ground floor of a two-story building, and when the family living upstairs hung their gray Chinese gowns out to dry without
wringing them out, water would drip onto the
ECLAT
sign, said the report. Sarly recognized the hand of the poet from Marseille in this writing. Sarly himself was always encouraging his subordinates to write official reports with more flair. Details, he always said, stick closely to the details.

The jewelry store did mediocre business. Ever since the Russians flocked to Shanghai, the market had been flooded with large quantities of precious stones all said to be from the mines of the Urals, and it was hard to tell which ones were genuine. The Russian jewelry stores had Jewish storekeepers who all sported a scraggly beard full of crumbs and spit, like large furry animals with an air of Central Asia about them. The locals were skeptical of claims that distant offshoots of the tsar's family had come to Shanghai with their wedding jewels tucked carefully away in trunks. Sergeant Maron, a man who sank his free time in Sherlock Holmes novels, pointed out that the jewelry shop could not possibly be making enough money to cover rent, much less subsidize Lady Holly's lavish lifestyle.

Someone later put a list of names on his desk, with a note identifying it as a list of passengers on that French ship involved in the Kin Lee Yuen incident. He tossed the list onto the sofa, and did not look at it until the poet started screaming at the top of his lungs. Yes, that's her, the White Russian princess of the Beam Apartments—that's her beautiful ass! Only a poet could look at a name list and think of ass.

Of course, it could be a simple coincidence. But Sarly's Corsican imagination told him that if one woman kept turning up everywhere you looked, and you persisted in thinking there was nothing to it, you must have some nerve to be denying the existence of God, of the great hands that arrange all earthly affairs.

Sarly knew that nearly everyone in the building called him “bow legs” behind his back. Like a retired jockey who had stopped caring about his weight, he pounded the black floorboards of the police station and made them creak. Not long after Sarly was posted to the Political Section, the atmosphere there changed. His predecessor had been on good terms with the local gangs and secret societies until
someone had circumvented the colonial authorities and ratted him out to the Paris newspapers, after which the man had to be posted to Hanoi.

Sarly had two habits that distinguished him from his predecessor. To begin with, he liked tobacco pipes. From the document tray on his desk to the two telephones, a row of briar, agate, coral, and jade pipes adorned the room. This was a private hobby and had no impact on the rest of the Political Section. Rather, it was his predilection for paperwork that drove his subordinates crazy. Sarly liked to circulate documents in the office, as though he could only comprehend something when it had been written down with a name and rank attached to it.

Sarly sat placidly in his office, smoking and reading documents. The new leadership of the Political Section had ramifications beyond its walls. In the summer, the mulberry trees that shaded Route Albert Jupin attracted a crowd of urchins who often scaled the walls surrounding the police headquarters to reach the mulberries. The junior officers on duty had gotten in the habit of slipping out of the back door and catching a few boys, boxing their ears, and putting them to work polishing shoes, washing cars, sweeping floors, and scrubbing windows. That afternoon, they were hiding in the alleyway and ready to pounce when Sarly poked his head out of a third-floor window and stopped them.

The various subdivisions of the Political Section were further divided into smaller units. The Chinese men all worked for the Chinese police inspector, who also had two Chinese detective sergeants under his command. Foreigners were foreigners, whether Vietnamese or French, and Chinese were Chinese. So if a Frenchman wanted something from a Chinese detective, he would first have to speak to the Chinese inspector, who would then give the appropriate orders. Sarly cut through all the bureaucracy. His powerful bow legs kicked open the doors to every office in the building. He would assign work to anyone he saw fit, and he selected detectives from every division for a newly created detective squad that met every morning in a room on the end of the third-floor corridor. Everyone else called this
meeting “morning prayers for the lieutenant's bastards.” The French were infuriated by the fact that half the bastards were Chinese. Sarly's theory was that the Political Section could not only be an elite force. To protect French colonial interests, it must be in touch with the local community.

Something occurred to Sarly, and he looked more closely at the list. He noticed that the White Russian woman had not been traveling alone. She had a companion, Hsueh Wei-shih, Weiss Hsueh. The discovery irritated him. At morning prayers the next day, he would chew his detectives out for not having done a thorough job.

The evidence suggested that Irxmayer and Co. were doing some alarming deals. Official documents listed the company as trading “household metal tools” and “commercial machine equipment,” which sounded less like a pretext than a rueful excuse: times are hard, so we had to specialize to stay afloat.