French Concession (6 page)

Therese did not mind being called Lady Holly by the Chinese. At least Holly was shorter than Irxmayer. Besides, even Irxmayer wasn't really her name. A blond Austrian man had given it to her in Talien. She preferred this name because she preferred to forget the past. She often said to her assistant, Yindee Zung: if you can't forget the past, how can you keep going? Yindee Zung was Zung Ts-mih's sister, and he once wrote his Yindee's name in Chinese and showed it to Therese—Ch'en Ying-ti. He told her
Yindee
was Siamese for
happiness
. Zung himself was Yindee's “fifth brother” in a large clan that seemed to span Hong Kong, Hanoi, and Saigon. Yindee had tried time and again to explain the complex web of family relationships to her, but Therese never seemed to get it.

In Hong Kong, Zung could find a buyer for just about anything, and he could source anything you wanted. Immaculately dressed, he would go into any dark walk-up, push the door open, climb the narrow wooden stairs, and extend his soft, delicate hand. He could cut deals with smugglers, the gangs, or even with Communists.

As soon as she had left the Viennese sausage shop on Route Dollfus, Therese could sense that something was not quite right. She kept glancing at the opposite sidewalk, or looking surreptitiously over her shoulder by pretending to rearrange her hair, but she could not see anything. She did feel a pair of eyes on her.

She had spent the morning at a tailor's on Yates Road. Gold Tooth
P'an was an old friend of hers, and Therese had recommended him to Margot. The man can make a perfect copy of any dress from a faded movie poster, she had said. Margot had brought a light blue piece of taffeta that reminded Therese of her childhood—her tenth birthday, in fact, when she had worn a dress with a thick hemline and silver bells under the hem. Or was that a scene in a movie? She had told so many stories about her past that she could no longer remember which ones were true.

The dress was not ready yet, but they would try out the fit.

“Look-See, Missie?”

P'an spat pidgin English in a hoarse voice that sounded like fingernails scraping across taffeta. He stitched a dress together loosely and handed it to Margot, who came out of the dressing room looking like a blue daisy
.
Brenen would love this open-back dress. It would allow his hand to slide down the small of her back all the way to its natural resting place. Margot always reported exactly what went on between herself and Mr. Blair, so Therese had heard all about that afternoon when they had gotten lost by Rubicon Creek, under the Great War memorial. She could picture them there, Margot in her English equestrian outfit, leaning against the wobbly branch of a tree, Brenen's hand, and Margot flushing the whole time as if the branch were still brushing against her cheek.

This made her think of Hsueh, whom she had not seen in a week. That young half-Chinese man. She figured she could be ten years older than he, probably more like five or six. But he was a Chinese man with smooth skin, and she had to admit she liked him—she even liked that clean baking-soda smell he had.

Therese had slept with singers, illustrators, tipsy men from Lily Bar. She was used to intimacy with strangers. One of them was a Czech Jew who did cartoons of naked men and women on the Astor's notepads, in which the men's dicks stuck out as sharply as the black chimneys on English battleships on the Whampoa. But as far as Therese was concerned, not even the artist's pencil was a match for Hsueh's camera.

Hsueh, the amateur photographer, the sham dilettante. He loved
fumbling around in the dark in her room at the Astor—the Chinese half of him refused to switch the light on, open the windows, or draw the curtains. He did not like the breeze off the Whampoa at night. Like all Chinese people, he was wary of catching cold. Even in the dark, Hsueh's fingers were perfectly accurate, as if he were measuring out chemicals in the darkroom. When he photographed her in the darkness, Therese would glimpse his pale face for a split second when the magnesium powder flared.

Route Dollfus was short and curved slightly. A network of narrow alleyways, the
longtangs
, crisscrossed the French Concession, real estate developers claimed tracts of land at will, and even the Municipal Office's urban planning was in disarray. The Concession was perfect if you had something to hide.

At the fork in the road, Therese changed her mind and turned onto Route Vallon. She stubbed her cigarette out on the iron grille outside a Russian bookstore, and threw the cigarette end into the semibasement window just below the display. Without turning around, she walked up to the adjacent Russian-owned art studio and stopped in front of its display window.

A sign in the window said
ART DECORATION STUDIO, ORDERS TAKEN
in ugly cursive print. It contained shelves full of multicolored boxes, and framed oil paintings hung above them. One of them was of a large black bird staring obliquely out the window from its only eye. The bird's beak looked like a sickle. It was pointing at a sculpture of a naked woman, who was entirely white except for a helmetlike shock of black hair.

Between the beak and the naked woman's breast hung a mirror with a gaudy frame. Just what she wanted. She studied the mirror carefully. Sunlight streamed onto the wall. The rickshaw man had left his rickshaw on the curb while he squatted in the corner, smoking a cigarette. There was no one else under the parasol tree.

Back at her apartment, Therese turned the key in the copper Eveready lock. Yindee stood in the middle of her living room while Zung was sprawled on the sofa. Ah Kwai put a cape jasmine on the round side table by the window, filling the room with its dank scent.

Zung had just arrived from Hong Kong. He was examining a book of movie posters with his chin pressed to it, peering at the photographs from different angles. He had a sharp chin that reminded Therese of pictures of Chinese concubines.

Running in to serve them tea, Ah Kwai laughed and dashed out again. She had come to Shanghai with Therese from Hong Kong, and Zung sometimes brought her Cantonese sweets. The room was heavy with the scent of Chinese jasmine tea, which Therese loved. Zung was always teasing her, claiming that Russian tea stank of camel piss. Apparently the Russians had complained that tea tasted different when it was shipped in by train, having gotten used to tea saturated with the sweat of camels carrying merchants across the Gobi Desert from Shan-hsi. Wily Chinese merchants consequently began soaking their sacks of tea leaves in camel urine for a few days before delivering it.

Zung typed out invoices on a stack of light-blue paper with his Underwood typewriter. Each month he brought large sums of cash from Hong Kong and deposited it in her personal account. She never asked him how much he kept for himself. For the past hundred years, foreign businessmen who prospered in China had refrained from asking such questions of the
compradors
, their middlemen, and everyone had done well out of the bargain.

Therese herself sourced the goods. Recently a man called Heinz Markus had written to her on behalf of Carlowitz and Co. from Berlin. He reported that Carlowitz was prospering, especially now that it was officially sponsoring the National Socialist Party. As long as Therese's firm brought in the orders, Carlowitz could fill them. The Germans had lost a large share of the Asian market during the Great War, and they were anxious to make up lost ground. It was rumored that the National Socialists didn't much like Jewish people, but Therese ignored them. This was Asia. If you made money, no one could touch you.

At least she no longer had to sleep with the skippers in exchange for lower shipping rates. They all came ashore horny and exhausted from steering their run-down freighters all through the Indian
Ocean and South China Sea. Once her shipping lines had been set up, the money started flowing in, and she now had a steady stream of business. In Hong Kong, Shanghai, and even in Hanoi, Zung had friends he could count on. He and his family had collaborated with foreigners for a century. As long as the Europeans were willing to contribute their cash and connections, they could cut a deal with anyone: the government, warlords, the police, the gangs, and an assortment of big-time and small-time crooks.

In Hong Kong, Zung ran a wholesale hardware store on Chatham Road that also dabbled in retail. His light-blue records listed a curious transaction.

“Why did it have to be customized? And did it have to cost that much?” she asked.

“It was a birthday present for the mistress of an eccentric Indian businessman,” he explained.

The pistol had been set with precious stones and covered with gold leaf. The businessman specially requested that a piece of ancient Chinese jade with an etching of a belly dancer be set in the stock of the gun. The man smelled of curry. He wanted a thin line etched into the jade inside the folds of her dress—he apparently believed that his mistress had been a virgin until they met, which was what her mother had told him.

Zung told Therese that he had to arrange a delivery to a Korean client in Shanghai. He drew another invoice from his pocket, a white piece of paper with three lines typed on it:

Mauser 7.63 Auto Pistol

Spanish type .32 Auto pistol

Chinese (Browning) .32 Auto pistol

“Five thousand seven hundred and thirty-two yuan altogether,” Zung said. “And of course, there's Sir Morholt.”

Sir Morholt was Therese's private nickname for the Prussian businessman, because he had a scar on his right wrist, a memento of fencing in his youth, which he liked showing to people. It reminded
Therese of a certain picture book for children to read on sunny afternoons, which contained an illustration of Tristan cutting off Sir Morholt's right hand. She had once mentioned this picture to Zung.

Carlowitz and Co. had put Therese in touch with Sir Morholt, and they arranged to meet in a bar on Chatham Road. He told her he worked for a German metals firm. As he spoke, he sketched out a diagram of a weapon she had never heard of, noting its name in German in a corner of the notepad. Before getting up to leave, she slipped the piece of paper into her handbag. He had talked incessantly about the gray mist on the Rhine.

Now Zung was handing her a real blueprint that was not a hasty sketch on a bar-table notepad. It had been cut carefully from a larger roll of drafting paper, like a child's geometry homework or a sample diagram in a furniture catalog. There were three parts to the diagram.

“Looks dangerous all right. Who would buy it?”

“Yeah it's dangerous.” Zung wasn't really paying attention. He drew out his silver cigarette case.

“Everyone knows everyone in this business, and this will make us too conspicuous. It will get us in trouble.”

Since she got back from Hong Kong, Therese had been unable to shake the feeling that someone was following her.

Therese had a green eight-cylinder Ford Model B.

The car was usually parked in the backyard of the jewelry shop. A spare tire hung on the rear of the car, draped in white canvas. Dusk was settling on the longtang, someone had put a vinyl record on, and the sound wafted down the street from a second-floor window. It was a girl singing in a southern Chinese accent. Her shrill voice sounded syrupy—someone might have put too much wax on the Victrola needle.

Therese herself was driving, and she had not brought her bodyguards with her. She was going to the Astor House Hotel. It was a Friday, and she would be spending the weekend there. If she and Hsueh got hungry, they could simply take the car and drive along North Szechuen Road to find a restaurant near Lily Bar.

She drove north along Rue Paul Beau. The rusty gates to the longtangs along the road had been left ajar, and the scent of canola oil wafted out. Therese rolled up the windows. She soon turned onto a wider road. The light reflected illusory movie posters onto the windows of the car: the RKO Pictures musical
Tanned Legs
and
His Glorious Night
with John Gilbert in a mustache. In a lit shop window, a polar bear held a sign in his mouth that said
SIBERIAN FUR
.

Then the road grew narrower and the dark shadows of buildings loomed ahead. At night, the walls of flint and marble looked as though they had been hewn directly from the hillside. She drove across
Garden Bridge, passing the Soviet consulate to her right, its tall tower resembling a gigantic helmet with the Soviet flag for a crest.

A few years before, the Cossacks who arrived in Shanghai with Captain Stark's navy troops had attacked the consulate. Their wild revelry had ended feebly with a few old drunkards gathered outside the Astor, singing Orthodox hymns, and throwing rocks at the windows to revenge themselves against their class enemies. They had been reduced to drinking vodka that was crummier than the stuff workers swigged from their enamel mugs. The women crowded round to watch, but Therese could not be bothered to join them. She watched from her window in the Astor, sipping on half a glass of vodka with kvass while the Czech painter lay naked on the bed.

The consul himself had led the charge to protect Soviet sovereign territory. He shot and killed the Cossack captain who was trying to tear down the hammer and sickle flag at the gate. Therese would have loved to fit out and arm the Cossacks, but they were penniless. That was the day she first saw Hsueh, who was still taking photos when the Concession Police burst through to the consulate gates and the crowds had scattered. As soon as she saw him, she got dressed and rushed downstairs to ask for a copy of the prints.

Two days later, Hsueh gave her the photos in Lily Bar. She didn't look closely at them until they were in bed at the Astor. Just leafing through them made her horny.

From then on she saw Hsueh occasionally and made love to him. Their trysts grew more frequent. She loved looking at the photos he took. She had never seen herself that way, watched her body dissolve into countless shifting parts, as though she were suddenly not one woman but many, all strangers to her. Some of the pictures made her look uglier, and some more beautiful than she really was. She was not even embarrassed by photographs of her ass sticking up in the darkness, like the ass of a spirited white mare.

She often asked Hsueh to meet her at the Astor, which resembled a ship with its maroon-paneled maze of corridors leading to hundreds of rooms, and delicate wrought iron flowers inlaid with frosted glass set in the doors. Her usual rooms were in what the steward
called the forehold, which faced the waves and humid breeze of the Whampoa. When mist rose from the river at night, you could feel as if you were floating. A curved beam arched across the living room, which was furnished with solid teak furniture. There were rattan armchairs, a coffee table, and a mahogany floor lamp. Behind these living room furnishings, a set of double doors led to the bedroom.

The bedroom had an Oriental smell of fog on the Whampoa, moldy mosquito nets, and camphor wood, sandalwood, or cinnamon wood. The bottoms of the heavy teak drawers were made of scented wood, and whenever she opened one to retrieve a bathrobe and towel, its scent would fill the room. She opened the windows to let in the cry of gulls and whistle of ships.

The bathtub stood in the middle of the bathroom, surrounded by soft chairs, a ceramic basin, and a toilet bowl in the corner. The bars of the radiator had been polished by the hotel's servants until they gleamed. A retractable chandelier hung so low that its arms almost touched her head. She dozed off.

Then the phone rang, waking her abruptly. Dripping wet, she stepped into the bedroom to answer it. It was Hsueh, calling to say he would be late. He sounded nervous and his voice was hoarse. But before she could ask why, he had hung up.

She didn't hear from him again until after ten at night when he knocked at the door.

Therese looked at him in astonishment. She was sitting cross-legged on the bed while Hsueh lay fast asleep with his back to her. Bruises covered his face, legs, and waist, and there was a cut on his lip. It was not the bruises that surprised her. The type of man she could have for the price of a couple of drinks in a bar often appeared in her room battered and bruised.

No, she was surprised by how aggressive he was. He seemed to be angry about something.

He pushed her to the edge of the bed, lifted her legs roughly, and squashed her, ramming her face into the pillow. He wanted to turn her over, to expose her crotch to the light of the hanging chandeliers, as if she were a dancing insect that would freeze when in the
light. She lifted her taut legs high in the air, and the light played on the sleep marks on her knees. Pleasure swept across her abdomen like a wave as she grasped at his arms and ass.

When he turned, his dick flopped over like a worm. She reached out to touch it, and it became hard before he even awoke.

His voice came from near her feet, sputtering as though it was bubbling up from somewhere near the muddy bottom of the Whampoa.

“Tell me, tell me, do those wicked friends of yours do this to you?” She caught his head between her knees, as if she could capture that brain of his that constantly distracted her. She wanted to rub the wet sponge of her body against the bridge of his nose. She refused to stop and listen to him. If he was jealous—well, let him be.

Half an hour later, she thought about the “wicked friends” he had mentioned. Did he think she was having sex with Zung? Then he was mistaken. All this time she had resisted Hsueh. He wanted to unsettle her, and the more she resisted, the more deeply he seemed to penetrate her. She could not force herself to like him any less, but she was afraid of leading him on. She did not want to disappoint him. Recently she had found herself mellowing with age, becoming reluctant to let go of things that made her happy. She was afraid of loss, and happiness no longer seemed to lie within easy reach. She had come to see that happiness for her consisted of a certain inward thrill.

“He's not a wicked man. He's just my business partner,” she explained.

“What kind of business?” As he leaped off the bed, his spinal dimple was visible and bruised all over.

“It's not important,” she said angrily. “It's none of your business. It wouldn't do you any good.”

“I want to know all about you! I have drinks with you, sleep with you, and travel with you. But you make me feel like a gigolo—I don't know what you're doing or where you're going, and you always slip out of the room when I'm asleep.”

He had started shouting. “I don't even know where you live or the line of business you're in. What's the gun for, buying emeralds?”

“I told you, that isn't an emerald, it's a garnet stone from the Urals.”

He reached into her handbag for her cigarette case and tipped out its contents. The cigarette case, a pistol, and a pale blue sheet of paper fell onto the wet sheets—a blueprint for a machine gun that looked not unlike an elaborate clotheshorse. A present from Sir Morholt, who had cut it out carefully and entrusted it to her in a bar in Hong Kong.

She snatched it up along with her gun and stuffed it back in her handbag. Glaring at him, she thought of the kick she had given him on the ship. She thought about how much she liked everything about him.

“Okay, a garnet stone. That doesn't call for a gun.” Lighting a cigarette, he handed it to her.

“Maybe one day you can come with me to see him, but not now. I'll tell you more about my business some other time. But you'll have to behave. Don't ask questions. Don't talk too much.”

She had reached her hand between her legs and was playing with his dick, kissing his nose and ears. Her mouth tasted of smoke. Now his body smelled of her body. Defeated, he collapsed onto the pillow, and the bruise on his shoulders made him gasp in pain. She stroked his bruises and the scars on his neck.

It was past midnight, which meant it was Saturday, and they were about to spend the whole day in that room.

“Now, tell me who did this to you?”