Yet it was hard to go out on the town when he got off work at two A.M., so most nights he went home and spent an hour shedding his life completely, no posing, no passing, just paging through the sheets of concertos and sonatas he used to play, and wearing his soft old union suits instead of the silk dressing gowns the tailor had provided. It was ninety days now, and he still did not miss America. He did miss the feel of Creel Street though, and one thing that took him back there was to sit in the concentrated, benevolent light of an oil lamp late at night. In their leanest years, after the War, his widowed mother had used a single hurricane lamp every evening when the power was off, carrying it with them from room to room. Thomas had used it in the last days in the apartment as well, after the electricity went off, and left it behind in the cupboard when he departed. Here in Shanghai, to his joy, he found one like it in a used-goods shop over by Suzhou Creek. Uncle Hua disapproved of the thing, calling it a fire hazard, but Thomas used it in the dead of night anyway, and was comforted by its glow.
He took stock of himself, those nights, and realized he could court a respectable girl, if he could find one. He had money to spend on a woman. Even with all he had dropped on ladies of the night in his first months, he still made more than he could spend, and he kept the excess neatly folded in his wardrobe, underneath his shirts, which were laundered, pressed, and folded to knife creases by Chen Ma. One March day when he was taking some cash out, Uncle Hua materialized in the doorway.
Hua watched for a moment, and said, “Pay my look see, Master.”
“I think you already had a look see,” Thomas answered. It had not taken long for him to understand that he had no privacy at all, a fact to which he was already resigned as he put the little money package back in its not-so-secret spot.
“Master. You give one hundred, bye-bye make pay one oh seven.”
Seven percent? This caught Thomas’s attention. “How?”
Hua’s creased face went stubborn. “That b’long my pidgin.”
“It belong my pidgin if my money’s in it,” Thomas retorted. “How?”
Hua’s eyes narrowed. “Gamble place, my house.”
“Is that so! You must do well, to offer seven.”
“Can do.”
“I see.” Thomas thought, and pulled another hundred from the pouch. “We’ll start small,” he said, holding it out. “One ten, in a month.”
“One month no can do. Three months. One seven five.”
“Two months. One eight five.”
“One eight.”
Thomas considered.
“One eight five?” Hua repeated, and Thomas nodded. “Can puttee book?” he said, barely able to contain his glee.
“Puttee book,” said Greene. “It’s a deal.” He handed him the money and closed the cupboard. “And you stay out of my things, Uncle Hua.” He faked sternness and his majordomo pretended to quail in response, but Thomas understood by now that this was theater, that people were playing their roles, just as he played his. He was getting the hang of it.
Or so he thought.
Every Saturday, Song Yuhua went downtown to collect Du Taitai’s medicine. Seeing to the health needs of the supreme wife and matriarch was a task of importance, even if the old lady was an opium addict who had not left her room in years. The task fell to Song partly because no one else wanted to do it, but she always looked forward to her weekly afternoon abroad in the city, stretching an errand that could be done fairly quickly into several hours of doing what she wanted. She was in no way imprisoned in Du’s mansion on Rue Wagner, for though always on call, she was able to come and go more or less as she wanted. But on Saturdays, Teacher knew she took care of his first wife’s medicines, and so on that day, he never requested her services before evening fell.
On the sidewalks she heard two fur-clad Russian women quarreling, several groups of men speaking English, and bubbles of French and German. Polyglot vitality was one of the things she loved about Shanghai, even though it was the foreign capitalists who had turned Shanghai into a warren of occupied Concessions, enriched themselves, and then looked the other way, refusing to help, when Japan started to press its invasion. It had been one of her only real disagreements with the Communists, the fact that they, like the Nationalists, were so anti-foreign, but this divergence she kept to herself. To think of it was unwise, and to speak of it would be dangerous; one did not disagree with the movement. So she never spoke of liking Western music, or even of any fondness for the language in which she was proficient. Privately, she credited English with having given her a separate and entirely different engine of thought. And there was no getting around the fact that her English was exactly what made her valuable to Du, and therefore to the left, as a spy. It was her weak point, her vulnerability, and at the same time her greatest strength. Thinking about it was like sorting silk threads in a way that only entangled them further.
She pushed open the door to the dark apothecary shop, a room with floor-to-ceiling drawers and a wood counter trimmed in brass. The herb master, stout and fusty with a sparse white beard, bobbed his head when she came in. “Has Young Mistress eaten?”
“Yes, thank you. And you?”
“Yes.” He smiled happily, and she knew he had. Though a loyal Party member-he took no small risk, hosting meetings in his shop between her and others-the old man did not believe in denying himself. He had not read Marx. He told her once that he was going to go see Marx when he died, and the great man could tell him all about it then. Right now, what mattered was resisting Japan.
He took her prescription and studied the flowing characters in the old doctor’s elegant hand. “This is a complex formula. I suggest you take a moment’s rest, Mistress, in the parlor. I will call for tea.”
She nodded. “Thank you.” They were always careful to say only the right things, even when they were alone.
He reached beneath the counter and pulled a lever so that a section of the wall sprang loose. He swung it back to show a windowless inner room of black wood chairs and side tables, lit by yellow pools of electric light.
When he said he would call for tea, it meant someone wanted to see her, so after he had closed the wall-door behind her, she sat in a warm haze of anticipation, watching the little coals glowing in the brazier. It was always exciting, being told she was wanted for a meeting, and then waiting to see if someone new would walk through the door. At a minimum, that would mean a fresh face to put into the puzzle, for the Party operated in secret. Most enlistees knew only the other members of their cell. Song’s position in Du’s household being too sensitive for a cell, though, she knew only her guide, and the others who came to her in these meetings. Someone new was always of interest.
And if heaven smiled, one day she might meet her comparable other, a man who lived his life as she lived hers, with a mind and will equal to her own. She had always believed in such a man’s existence, even as a small child. Perhaps it was her training in Western languages and stories, this being a Western fantasy-but why should she not find him here, in just this way? The movement was the center of her life. There was never a time when she was called to a meeting that she did not flutter a little, inside.
She remembered the thrill of those early months in ’thirty-two and ’thirty-three when she first joined, going to many secret meetings at the so-called Foreign Language School at number 6 New Yuyang Lu, off Avenue Joffre. The school advertised its French and Russian courses constantly in Minguo Ribao, the Republic Daily, but there were no such courses, even though the place was always full of young people; it was a center for training Communists. She still went there occasionally for high-level meetings.