Was this the time to warn Little Greene? The question teased itself into knots as they took their seats and spoke of small things, waiting for the lights to dim. Unquestionably, Lin would have to tell him, despite the danger to himself in subverting any plan of Du’s. But he had to choose the right moment, and so far, there was no immediate threat. Lin’s paid informants had assured him that Morioka listened to jazz only in his apartments, on his gramophone; he had not gone out. Not a single club had seen him cross the doorstep. Lin pondered until the lights fell and the velvet curtains cranked apart, and then it was too late. To bring it up now would only create fear, just as speaking of a tiger makes one pale.
“Are you coming to the theater?” Thomas asked him after the picture, when they poured out with the rest of the audience onto the rounded corner sidewalk, under the tall, narrow modern-style stacked letters CATHAY. The street down which they watched for a conveyance was lined with Gallic-style four-story conjoined buildings, three ornate brick floors above for apartments, and the first floor a twinkling line of shops, restaurants, and teahouses fronted by plate glass windows all lit up for the evening.
“Not tonight,” Lin answered him, raising his hand to a rickshaw. “I have others to see to.” It was his habit to excuse himself in this way, and on this night he had reason to be vague, since he was meeting H. H. Kung for dinner. Despite all his wealth and power, Kung remained at Du Yuesheng’s mercy in many ways, and periodic ultra-private conversations with Lin Ming helped him keep up with the master’s leanings.
“Has he talked about moving his assets yet?” Kung said from across the table at the Sun Ya. They were dining on bird’s nest soup with pigeon eggs, whelk with chicken liver slices, frogs’ legs braised with thin broccoli stalks for bones, and shad steamed in caul fat with a crystal sauce.
The question startled Lin Ming. Moving assets would mean he accepted that the Japanese would take Shanghai. It was true that it was now impossible to turn on the radio without hearing how close their army was to Peking and Tianjin in the north. And here in Shanghai, there were suddenly Japanese everywhere in the streets, not just soldiers but families, civilians, including many who came into his cabarets and ballrooms at night. But a Japanese invasion? “On that, he has said nothing.”
“His money and bullion can be moved quickly,” Kung said, “but our situation is different. We are disassembling whole factories and moving them to the interior, trying to keep China on her feet through industry. We cannot wait until they are at our gates.” Kung shrugged as he reached for choice morsels, his hands precise and balletic as he loaded Lin Ming’s plate before his own, like any good friend.
Lin felt his stomach turn. Duke Kung was twice his age and ten thousand times more powerful, so if he sensed the invasion was near, it probably was. “Is there nothing that can turn them back?”
“Possibly,” Kung said. “Moscow has floated the idea, tentatively, very entre nous, of organizing a group of countries to oppose Japanese aggression. Maybe even the Americans, though no one has approached them yet.” He signaled for more wine. “I leave next week for Moscow, from there to Germany, to discuss it.”
“Germany?”
“I went to graduate school in Berlin, did you know that? After Yale. I know people there, I can get things done, arrange meetings at the highest levels. I will meet with Hitler. But I am also going to check on my friends, Schwartz and Shengold, two men I went to school with. Jews. Very powerful bankers. They have not answered my letters. Have you heard anything of the situation of the Jews in Germany?”
“Nothing clear,” said Lin.
“My friend Dr. Ho Feng-Shan, the First Secretary of the legation in Vienna, has been updating me. They have passed anti-Jewish laws and seized Jewish property. I plan to find my friends, and if this is true, I will bring it up with Hitler. But above all, I will persuade him to join us in opposing Japan. That’s my commitment.”
They raised their glasses to it, and drank. “And you?” said Kung. “What is yours? You have no clan, no place to sweep the graveyard-you’re just the sort who could commit to something.”
“Never,” Lin said.
“Isn’t that ‘forgetting the war, forgetting the motherland’?”
Lin shook his head. “Of course I oppose Japan without question. I am Chinese. But I serve Du, remember.”
“You’re not a member of the Gang, are you?”
“No.” The Qing Bang initiates were sworn for life. “I am his son. That’s enough.”
“And I suppose you’ll never inherit.”
“No.” Lin was not a real son, born neither of a nei ren, an inside person, a wife, nor of a concubine, nor even of a mistress-but in the lowest possible way, of a whore. And his salary was stingy, just enough to keep his small flat in Frenchtown.
Regarding Dr. Kung across the stacked, fragrant platters, Lin remembered why Kung was under Du Yuesheng’s power too: the Green Gang and the top Nationalist leaders were bound by a blood debt. It was Du Yuesheng who had carried out the 1927 Shanghai massacre that wiped out many high-level Communist leaders, lured to Shanghai by the Nationalists through the promise of peaceful talks. The bloodbath had cemented the power of the Nationalist clique and ended the Communists’ long-term status as a legitimate wing of the Nationalist Party. Everything changed for the Communists then as they were driven underground, at least in the cities. In the countryside, they pulled back to Jiangxi, where Chiang’s armies encircled them and drove them out. From there they set out on a long march to Shaanxi Province in north China, where they consolidated their new headquarters and continued to fight the Japanese.
It was thanks to Du Yuesheng that the Communists had been driven out of the true government, and the highest Nationalist officials would always be in his pocket because of it. Moreover, they were all a family, the Nationalist leaders, related by marriage to the Soong sisters. Soong Mei-ling was the wife of Chiang Kai-shek, Soong Ai-ling was Kung’s wife, and Soong Qing-ling the widow of Sun Yat-sen. Their brother T. V. Soong was a former top Finance official. They brought the sense of a dynasty to the leadership of the Nationalist Party, and it seemed to cement their absolute power despite the fact that the Imperial system had fallen back in 1911. Whatever the case, they held China’s reins, and as a family had grown fabulously rich-yet still they had to appease Du.
They also did not seem to be able to stop Japan. The fact that they had relocated their Nationalist government south to Nanjing and also prudently moved 640,000 priceless art treasures out of the Forbidden City seemed to signal that they expected Peking and Tianjin to fall to Japan. Would the enemy be allowed to occupy these cities, unopposed? If so, Shanghai would be next.
“If they take us,” Lin said, “the night-world will wither and die faster than you can turn a head. The clubs, the money, the jazz-it will all be finished.”
“Along with everything else,” said Kung. “On that day there will be gloom in heaven and darkness below. That is why I must go to Moscow and Berlin and London, and you, my friend”-Kung’s eyes ticked up, and Lin could see, behind his round glasses, the flicker of Christian compassion-“you must not interfere if they have a clear shot at Morioka. Do you understand? Even if he happens to be standing next to one of your men.”
Lin’s face hardened into a mask to cover the roiling sea of his awareness. This was the end of his fragile equilibrium.
“Agreed?”
Lin lowered his eyes. “Agreed,” he lied.
That Friday was Du Taitai’s regular visit from Dr. Feng. Song sat beside the physician at the bedside as he took the pulses of Du’s revered first wife, and examined the whites of her eyes and her tongue. He wrote out a new list of herbs, and counseled rest in a darkened room-as if the Supreme One could do anything else in her opium-addicted state. Song thanked him respectfully and shook the last few silver dollars from Taitai’s private purse to pay him.