Most of the young people like her in Shanghai who joined the Communist underground felt as she did; they were struggling writers, actors, journalists, and musicians, living for the future. Whether they were of humble origins, or were the children of well-fed families who were leaning down to the workers’ cause, they were idealistic, typical of young “urban path” Communists, as opposed to those who found their way to the movement along the “rural path,” in the provinces. They were smart and passionate and sophisticated; they believed. That Song was one of them, secretly, made every day of her life worth living.
Du stood to go, and she rose with him, her lies contained and her surfaces flawless.
Two floors below, Thomas Greene stood by the brass-trimmed door. His head was spinning with relief as he thanked people and wished them well. The whole theater seemed to be surging toward him with compliments and congratulations.
“Happy New Year! Yes, thank you,” he said. “So kind of you. Don’t forget the rest of the Kansas City Kings, fine musicians, every one. Yes, thank you. The best for nineteen thirty-seven. Come again.” Lin stood next to him saying the same things in Chinese, and everyone in the theater had to squeeze past them.
Atop the sea of heads Thomas saw one man taller than the others, tall as Lin Ming, but older, and he knew at once it was the father, the crime lord, Du Yuesheng. Should he greet him? But people said he spoke no English.
Du did not give him the chance. Refusing to look at him, he stared straight ahead as he passed.
But behind him, trailing in the wake of his bodyguards, floated a woman with the most brilliantly intelligent eyes, and gardenias fixed at the back of her neck.
Thomas watched as she was carried toward him on the tide, forced ahead, laughing. When she came abreast, he held her eyes, just for a second, and then the crowd bore her away. After one last moment of clinging to her with his gaze, he turned back to the line of people.
Lin saw him staring. “Don’t look at her.”
“Why not?”
“You deaf in your dog’s ears? She belongs to him.” And he slid back into Chinese with the next man in line.
“Is she his wife?”
“Nothing like that,” said Lin.
Then like what? Thomas wanted to know, but he said no more, because playing his part properly meant giving in sometimes, as he had been taught from the beginning of his life. But that had always been irrelevant to what he thought, felt, and planned inside-and now he had noticed her, and he would be watching for her in the future. In his own time.
When at last the crowd thinned, he stepped outside, where musicians and well-wishers were still gathered. Among them he noticed a man Alonzo had pointed out across the ballroom, a slight, blue-eyed Russian Jew in a Chinese gown. Greene crossed to him and extended a hand. “Happy New Year. Thomas Greene.”
They grasped warmly. “Delighted, and the same to you.” The older man’s accent was a mash of European tones. “Aaron Avshalomov. The evening was most wonderful. I always say one should go to the classics first. Your Rhapsody was resplendent! The essence of America, with all its brashness. I conducted it in Tianjin a few years ago with a Russian cabaret pianist, but to you he did not compare! You were marvelous. We should meet again. We must, I insist. May we please? Let us agree to it for the new year.”
“I’d like that,” Thomas said, riding the sudden swell of acceptance, wanting the same thing he had always wanted, the respect of serious musicians like Avshalomov, who, after a quick good night, was borne away in a rickshaw, his light, unruly cloud of hair bouncing above the folded-back awning.
Thomas turned to see the two reed players beside him, Charles and Ernest. “Come on, Tails,” said Ernest-the nickname having arisen earlier that night on account of the cutaway coat he wore as bandleader-“You promised us on the night we opened, you’d go celebrate.”
“You’re right, I did.” He ruffled the young head, grinning at the fact that all the doors seemed wide open to him, for the first time ever; he could drink, dance, and sample women, for he had money, and here, where all men were at last created equal, that was the only thing that mattered. “Let’s go.”
3
BY EARLY SPRING, Thomas was keeping up on piano, though hardly delivering the irresistibly danceable keyboard lines the Kings required. This was overlooked partly because he was skilled at arranging and leading, and partly because the classical flights of fancy he delivered onstage brought such responses from the audience that even the brass section dared not raise a voice.
But he could feel things simmering, and one day in March, at the weekly rehearsal, brass player Lester Cole let it out. “When are you going to take a solo, Tails?”
“Well-”
“’Cause we’re getting tired of the Uncle Tom business.”
Thomas heard nothing for an instant save the buzzing in his head and his own sharp intake of breath, but then Charles filled the emptiness by speaking up. “That’s not fair,” he said.
“I agree,” his brother Ernest put in. “I like the new sound.”
Cole bristled. “What do you two know?”
“They know what we all know,” Alonzo said, his sonorous voice drawing everyone’s attention. “You got no call to say that. Whatever you think of the sound, I think we all know we have never had so many people on the dance floor. Not even close. Am I right?”
This brought a mumble of assent, and the logjam loosened enough for Thomas to push ahead, but the vibrato of anxiety stayed in his gut through the whole rehearsal. He called out the changes in the new arrangements, and played a minimally credible piano line beneath the Kings’ bluesy surge, but everything was teetering. He was bringing too much of himself to the role. Back in America, he could never be light enough, never fully pass for European. He had always had to work extra hard on his precision and the subtlety of his touch to compensate, just as he had chosen his clothes and cultivated his manners in the same fashion. He had formed himself prophylactically, creating almost an exact shadow of his obstacles in the persona he presented. But to pass as a jazz musician, he was going to have to drop that, and be someone different.
To start, he had to offer something that sounded like solos, so using scores his new copyist Mr. Hsu had written out, he devised a series of elegant and unexpected elaborations. These impressed the crowd readily enough, but not his musicians.
He envied the way the other Kings could just take off and play, as if inspired to sing a line or two. It was the Kansas City sound, to have solos riffing above a driving, danceable bedrock in flat-four time. All of them could solo, except him. Even after he understood that it was part of the Kansas City sound itself, the way it allowed each man to stand up and stretch out and tell a story, horizontally, melodically, with the steady beat behind him, he remained jealous of what they could do.
And most of his bandmates had something else he was lacking-a girlfriend. Not that he was chaste; girls of every nationality were available, and some of those he sampled had pleased him. He took delight at first in being offered lovely bodies of every shade, in kissing mouths that spoke Russian and French and Hindi and Tonkinese and three or four different Chinese dialects, but in the end, he found it a lonely business, paying for a woman. On the other hand, he was always treated like a gentleman, which he loved, for respect was headier to him than sex, even the sex they had here-more affirming, more restorative, the root note that had been missing from his chord all his life. He made sense in Shanghai.
He had grown to envy the other Kings their women. Some of them were Chinese, two were Russian, one was Malaysian, and Alonzo even lived with Keiko, a Japanese woman he’d met through one of the guys in Buck Clayton’s Harlem Gentlemen. He wanted a special someone too.