French Concession (5 page)

In fact, Irxmayer and Co. traded across Asia in ammunition and firearms. Beneath the hay and durable oilcloth in its wooden crates lay deadly weapons that could be used to assassinate a man, intimidate him, play Russian roulette, or even to start a war.

Margot ran toward Therese's Ford car as soon as it had driven past the fence.

They were at the home base of the Shanghai Paper Hunt Club, north of a stream called Rubicon Creek on maps. The rules of the hunt were as follows: the club nominated a master who laid a paper trail by scattering scraps of colored paper from a large bag he carried across country, and the riders would have to follow the route he laid out to the finishing point. For thirty years now, the master had been Ah Pau, who had an endlessly inventive Chinese sense of humor. He scattered scraps of paper in the crannies between rocks, under tufts of grass, hid them in ditches and under bridges. Once he strung them across the river on a piece of fishing line, causing several contestants to fall in. No one could guess what Ah Pau had up his sleeve, which was why Brenen had Margot study the map closely.

The map had been drawn by early pathfinders in the club, who invented names such as Three Virgins' Jump and Sparkes Water Wade. Margot once asked Brenen out of curiosity: “But what do the Chinese call these places? They must have Chinese names—they aren't even inside the concessions.”

Brenen had given her an answer in the true colonial spirit: “Who cares what they call it? Once we give it a name, it's ours.”

The Shanghai Paper Hunt Club's race at Rubicon Creek

Her husband, Baron Franz Pidol, would have approved of that answer. The Luxembourg United Steel Company's chief representative in Shanghai, he spent most of his energies speculating on land, and he currently had his sights on a field near Rubicon Creek. “Even that old cripple, Sir Victor Sassoon, has his eyes on the creek,” said Franz.

The Board of Works had been planning to build roads west of the concessions toward the creek. Their timing was perfect. After years of flooding along Lake T'ai's river system, to which the creek belonged, all the fields were now barren.

Here in Shanghai, Franz was in his element. Others might think the muggy nights and mosquitoes a nuisance, but all it seemed to do to Franz was prevent him from ever visiting Margot's bedroom. It was unlikely that he never slept with anyone else. The talkative Mrs. Liddell told Margot that all the men took Chinese lovers. They all fell in love with the place, with the social scene, with smoking Luzon cigars and playing cards, and with the superior goods on offer at the brothel on Avenue Haig, where the women did not sit naked in the sitting room the way they did elsewhere. Subtlety was more to the taste of the worldly businessmen whose circle Franz was about to join.

Margot was lonely. Until Franz declared that he was in love with Shanghai, Margot had been counting on going home when his three-year contract ended. Was it really so easy to fall in love with a place? Wasn't it much easier to fall in love with a person, like Brenen?

Brenen Blair had fallen in love with Margot the moment he saw her. Margot only had two friends in Shanghai, and apart from Therese, Brenen was the only person in whom she could confide. In the tearoom at Arnhold & Co., Brenen had suggested she buy parchment lamp shades bordered with dark gold, as she was looking to change the lamp shades in her bedroom. It was the first time they had met. Only much later would he have a chance to admire the lit lamp shades, when Franz had begun to travel inland frequently by train.

Mrs. Liddell said that although Mr. Blair was young, he was a veteran
diplomat, who had proved himself capable of handling tricky situations during postings to Australia and India. He was currently a political adviser to the Nanking government. As the go-between for the colonial British government and the Nanking government, he had the right to convey his views directly to the Foreign Office in London without going through the British consul in Shanghai, Mr. Ingram, or through the British temporary representative office in Beijing.

Brenen suggested that Margot join the Shanghai Women's Equestrian Club, and Franz supported the idea. The two of them accompanied her to the stables of the riding school on Mohawk Road, and picked out a gray mare flecked with white. Franz could not understand why Margot wanted to name the horse Dusty Answer. The odd name was actually Brenen's idea. Franz had been cordial to Brenen until they had summered together in Mo-kan-shan, the mountains near Shanghai, where Franz had just bought a plot of land and built a summer resort. When they got back, he began assiduously to avoid all social occasions at which Mr. Blair might appear.

Margot showed Therese into the club grounds. The grass had been freshly mowed. The Chinese servant at the club had been busy since dawn, carrying bamboo chairs out of storage and wiping them down, filling silver buckets with a cocktail made from rock sugar and gin. The grass was dotted with wildflowers that attracted bees and butterflies to buzz about your ankles. A water buffalo burned black by the sun lazed on the southern shore of Rubicon Creek. The club used to wait until the end of November to put on its official competition. By then, the beans and cotton would have been harvested, the winter crop of wheat planted, and the weather would be at its mildest. But since the arable land had all turned to wasteland after the flooding, the committee had been happy to arrange a few more contests. After all, the Depression meant the men had more free time, and they needed the exercise.

They found a bamboo table beneath the oleander tree. The men were arguing by the stables. Mario, the man with the loudest voice, was an Italian illustrator who drew cartoons for the foreign
newspapers in the Concession. They said he had been beaten up in a bar in Hongkew by a band of Japanese
rōnin
. The illustrator was arguing with people, among them the British businessman whom Margot knew to be in Franz's set. “It's time we taught Nanking a lesson,” the British man cried. “We should have the Japs do it. They could even start a little war. We'd get new treaties and new boundaries for the concessions, maybe even fifty kilometers on either side of the Yangtze!”

“Wouldn't that be a windfall for you,” Mario replied frostily. “With all that land you've bought, a war would keep you out of bankruptcy court!” His voice grew louder. “You idiots, wake up. There's no more striking it rich out here. The Great War was the end of that. If the Japanese get here, they'll ruin us all.”

Compared to the rest of the crowd, Brenen was tall and thin. He came over to keep them company while they examined the horse.

The crown of the chinquapin tree hung over the fence. The gray mare stood beneath it while the stable hand in his blue jacket stroked her neck, tightened the girth, and lifted the saddle to reveal her mane, which had been neatly braided. The scent of bay leaves wafted toward them, and the mare grew fidgety, snorting and pawing vigorously at the ground. To join the club, Margot had had to buy a horse, because competing horses had to be the bona fide property of club members. They had to be Chinese horses, though strictly speaking, that meant they were small Mongolian horses, crossbred from English purebreds and Mongolian horses, as Brenen had once explained to her. Her mare was a crossbreed too. Look at her hips, he explained, smacking the horse's ass in front of the Cossack horse dealer on Mohawk Road. Purebred Mongolian horses have sloping hips, while English horses have arched hips. This horse is descended from the herd of English stallions that the tsar bought, because he was convinced that his Cossack cavalrymen would defeat Napoleon as long as they were mounted on horses with the wide hips of English purebreds.

“In fact, Dame Juliana Berners of Sopwell Nunnery said as long ago as the fifteenth century that a good horse possesses the back of
a donkey, the tail of a fox, the eyes of a rabbit, the bones of a man, and the chest and hair of a woman. A good racing horse is proud and holds its head high, like a beautiful woman.”

Brenen repeated this speech, looking at Therese.

A bay horse came galloping in from the north side of the field.

“Ah Pau! Ah Pau!” the onlookers cried.

Ah Pau was indeed galloping down the hillside on the bay horse. The Chinese servant was the central figure of the Paper Hunt Club. Several of the club officers had retired and returned home, while others had lost their lives in the Great War, making Ah Pau the only constant: now in his fifties, he had served the club faithfully for thirty years.

The jittery racehorses crowded along the fences on the northern edge of the field, and the gates were finally opened. Margot climbed into the saddle and waved at Therese, who was standing in the field. A gust of wind lifted her hat, and as she dropped the reins to catch her hat, the gray mare suddenly started forward.

Margot lurched in the saddle, but Brenen steadied it for her, picked the reins up nimbly from the ground and placed them in her hands.

“Ladies and gentlemen, on your mark, get set, go!”

The horses rushed out the gate. One of them crashed into the fence and knocked the post askew so that it ripped out of the ground, tearing up clods of mud. Hundreds of hooves thundered down the hill. The grass glinted in the breeze, and someone called out: “Tally-ho!”

Previously, when he was explaining the rules of the game, Brenen had told her that the expression was borrowed from the cry the Indians used for their hunting hounds. In the paper hunt, riders who found the strips of paper hidden in the hedges or under pebbles cried tally
-
ho to alert the official observers.

They raced down the hill into a cabbage patch. Margot tugged at the reins, steering her horse into the cabbages. Suddenly, a Chinese man appeared from the bushes, stamping his feet and shouting at her. Startled, her horse took a step back and began pawing at the
ground, flinging up mud. Brenen caught up with her and flung a silver coin on the ground. The shouting stopped.

They had lost the group, and there were no scraps of paper in sight. They were standing on a small plateau hemmed in by a stream. Margot got the map out, and Brenen pointed to a Z-shaped stream called Zigzag Jump.

They steered their horses east along the stream, past a wooden bridge, and stopped in front of a mound of yellow earth next to a copse. On top of the mound lay an obelisk built of rubble, the club's war memorial plaque.

It was almost noon, the sun was shining on the bottle green stream, and insects darted among the poisonous leaves of the oleander. Margot felt that she could not allow Brenen to touch her. She melted a little whenever he came close. It was she who had fallen in love with him. She felt like a bee with its wings caught in nectar.

Hsueh thought of Therese. He pictured her hair, which was curly like a shock of cornflower petals. Curiously, the darker the room was and the more pain he was in, the more clearly he could picture Therese. But that was only to be expected, since he had taken dozens of photographs of her.

He did not know what they wanted with him or why they had brought him here. From where he lived on Route J. Frelupt, the car had only made two turns, which meant they must be at the police headquarters on Route Stanislas Chevalier. They drove through the iron gates and into a passageway on the north side of the building, between the red brick wall and a high fence lined with glass shards, where they dragged him out of the car. It was cold and there was no sunlight.

They pushed him into the building. The walls of the corridor were dark green with black paneling, and the floors were painted black. He was brought into what looked like an interrogation room and forced onto a chair fitted with high boards. As soon as he sat down, the boards were rotated so that they were positioned right under his arms.

The Chinese sergeant sat behind the desk, asking questions and filling out the printed form he had in front of him. When he had finished with each page, he handed it to the secretary who sat beside him, a Chinese man who knew French and who was busy translating and typing up the document.

The questions slowly began to focus on his trip with Therese. The sergeant stopped filling out forms and began to write down Hsueh's answers on a piece of grid paper.

Where did you go in Hong Kong? What about Hanoi? Haiphong? Can you only remember the hotels? Did you go to the pier? To bars? Restaurants? Did you meet anyone?

But he had little to say. No, he was not lying. I'll give you ten minutes to think about it, said the sergeant, and walked off, probably because he needed to piss. He came back, his clothes smelling of Lysol. Hsueh still had nothing to say.

“Ah yes, she did go to see a man in another room in Hanoi,” Hsueh said. Of course the thought had been in the back of his mind all this time. A Chinese man. I don't know him, I know nothing about him, but he looked a little shady, said Hsueh, glad of the chance to disparage his rival.

“Well, then let us help jog your memory,” the sergeant cried.

They dragged him into an empty room. Pushing him onto the ground, they tied him up and held his head down. Huddling on the cold cement floor, he watched apprehensively as the men brought a tin bucket. Then they jerked his head upward and pushed it into the bucket. It felt as if there was something clenching his heart. He heard loud voices, footsteps, and before he had time to process all this, his head was smashed first one way and then the other. He could feel the force of the blows through the bucket.

The pain was concentrated at one point to begin with—his nose, which happened to have been bashed into a ridge on the inside of the bucket. That was just a dull pain, like walking into a pole in winter. But then his entire face started burning, and someone was clubbing the back of his skull, making it swell up. His shoulders ached. His head was being kicked this way and that, he was nauseated, and all his joints hurt. His throat felt as though it had a dried pepper stuck down it.

Eventually his joints were pushed to their extremes and began to give out. A pleasant numbness replaced his exhaustion, and there was a roaring in his ears, as if a crowd of people were shouting and
talking into the bucket.

After what felt like ages, the bucket was shaken hard, and his nose hurt sharply. He could taste and smell the rust. The bucket clanged to the ground behind him, and sunlight glinted on the windows, blinding Hsueh momentarily. Then the stench of rust went away. The setting sun played on the edges of clouds and reflected on the glass. Hsueh thought he could almost smell the sunshine.

He was taken to another room, where his linen jacket, tailored at Wei Lee, had been hung carefully on the coatrack. He had quite forgotten when he had been stripped down to his shorts, and as he was putting on his pants, he examined the bruises on his bony knees with self-pity. He couldn't tell whether he had gotten them from being kicked around or from kneeling on the ground.

Someone lifted him up and put him on a chair, as if he were a photograph being fished out of developer and hung up to dry. Things became unblurred, took on straight lines, and came right side up. The man smiling at him was not the Chinese sergeant who had been grinning and screaming at him before his head was stuffed into the tin bucket, but a Frenchman.

The burly Frenchman introduced himself as Sergeant Maron. Maron's love of Indian food was evident from the scent of curry about him and the yellow-black stain on his lapel. His laughter echoed in the little third-floor room facing north on Route Stanislas Chevalier. Hsueh was brought a stack of documents to sign, and asked to sit on the chair.

No one asked if he wanted a cigarette, but they forced one between his teeth. His ears were still ringing.

Let's start over again, said Sergeant Maron. Let's say we're just chatting like old friends, and it turns out I have a few questions that you might be able to help answer. Remember to give me as much detail as possible.

He started with the journey. When Hsueh admitted that Therese had paid for the whole trip from Shanghai to Hong Kong, Haiphong, and Hanoi, that she had booked their passage and paid for hotels as well as restaurants, Sergeant Maron clapped him on the shoulder. Good for you! he said.

But why did she pay your way? Surely not just because she's rich—why wouldn't she pay me, Sergeant Maron, to accompany her instead? Are you saying you're a better man than I am?

Or did she pay for you because you are her lover? What did you do when you weren't in bed? Did you take her for walks, or go to the beach in bathing suits? If you spent all day indoors, does that mean you were in bed all day? Let's talk about something more interesting. What is she like in bed? Tell me—you'd like to help me, wouldn't you?

Hsueh remembered the warm subtropical wind, the humid bedsheets, and the way the overhead fan turned slowly. You bastard, you know I have to keep you happy because of that tin bucket of yours. He called his photographs to mind.

“Sometimes we'd smoke in bed and have the servants bring us meals. She could never have enough sex. If I got tired, she would get on top of me. She loved to lie on the edge of the bed and stretch her feet upward.”

Like official newsreels of soldiers in the trenches, putting up their arms to surrender. His gaze would travel upward from her red knees and painted toenails toward her face, on which shadows of the ceiling fan flickered.

“Go on,” said Sergeant Maron. He lit a match and began tapping lightly on the surface of the table. He seemed to believe Hsueh. He looked as if he were trying to picture the scene.

“As soon as we stopped, we would light a cigarette. Just one, and we'd take turns taking puffs. She likes Garricks, and you can get a whole tin of them for one yuan. They have no filters and are thicker and shorter than 555s. She would take the cigarettes out of the tin and keep them in a silver cigarette case. I always lit the cigarettes because she said she had better things to do with her hands. If the case wasn't right there, she'd have me hunt everywhere for it. Some days I could turn the room upside down and not find the cigarette case. She probably hid it on purpose because she liked watching me walk about the room naked. My ‘Chinese ribs' turned her on, she said. That was her private nickname for me. Later I would discover the
cigarette case bundled up in the bedsheets with her sitting on it. She'd laugh and say, it was wrapped in black sheepskin and I was numb all over, that must be why I didn't notice it was there.”

Hsueh kept inventing things he thought Sergeant Maron wanted to hear. Desperation can be the mother of invention, he thought. He and the sergeant were beginning to share the conspiratorial pleasure of the interrogator and the interrogated. Words came flooding to him as if he were an author whose writer's block had evaporated at the end of a sleepless night.

“So you'd been through her bedroom and never came across anything suspicious?”

“You mean a gun?” Hsueh didn't mean to say that, but the words slipped out.

“Does she own a gun?”

Sergeant Maron looked at him with a curious expression. He seemed to be momentarily fascinated by the buttonhole of Hsueh's thin linen jacket, from which a withered cape jasmine sprouted. Then, as though awakening from a daydream, he began to ask Hsueh more questions.

“How much do you know about her? They say she's German.”

“No, she's Russian.”

Sergeant Maron waved his hand dismissively. He disliked being interrupted. “Have you seen her documents? Does she have a Nansen passport or travel papers signed by the tsar? How dare you call yourself her lover when you know nothing about her?”

He paused, as if he were about to announce something important, to rebuke Hsueh for his ignorance.

“The woman the Chinese call Lady Holly, your Therese, is Therese Irxmayer, an extremely capable woman who owns a company based in Hong Kong. She is far more dangerous than you think, and the Concession Police is presently investigating her undesirable activities. We believe she has crooked friends running a shady business. We would like you to help us by getting involved, and give us news of her friends. It would be in your interest to cooperate—the
police department will not forget your assistance, and I will personally be grateful.”

Two policemen took him to the hotel. The Frenchman drove, and Hsueh sat in the back with the Chinese man. The car stopped outside the Astor in the rain. When the engine started up again, the Frenchman saluted him playfully with two fingers of his left hand held crooked. He was wearing a raincoat with a matching hat at an angle.

“
Mes couilles
,” Hsueh muttered under his breath, tossing his cigarette end into a puddle.

The gate was closed, and the elevator shaft rumbled. He walked across the lobby to the stairs, to stretch his legs. He was tired and hungry. At nine o'clock they had gone to the Cantonese eatery on Pa-hsian-ch'iao. Eat, Maron had said, but Hsueh had barely eaten. It was the break between shifts, and the place was full of cops.

The men had stared at him while he was making a phone call to Therese. One was standing inside the phone booth, about three feet behind him. The other stood outside the phone booth, facing him from behind the glass. Then they dropped him off and politely said good-bye.

Hsueh's muddy shoes made squelching sounds on the patterned wood floor.

All day long, those voices had mocked him, menaced him, and tempted him. He almost thought he could hear them coming from the paneled walls in the hotel. It was those voices that convinced him he would do it, not the terror he had felt that morning when he was tied up in an empty room, lying on the floor with his head in a tin bucket.