“Shanghainese and English, you know-also Russian, French, Latin, and Greek.”
“You went to good schools.”
“Yes. It seems so far away now. And you? I hear a good musical education.”
“Actually, I would not have been allowed to attend most music schools in America. In addition, I grew up in a very poor part of the city. My mother was a domestic.”
Anya drew her brows together.
“A maid.” Thomas hauled up his own reins and reminded himself to pay attention, since this was not the story he had told the other men in the orchestra. As far as they knew, he was a farm boy from Easton, on the Chesapeake’s remote far shore. That had suited him well enough, since it put a believable framework around the naïveté of his playing relative to theirs. With Anya, he wanted to be a different kind of man, and he felt his way slowly with his story. “Though she cleaned rich people’s houses for a living, she knew the piano, and she was my first teacher. She taught me to read the staff at the same time I learned the alphabet. And she showed me if you play well, people will appear along the way to help you.” As he spoke, he realized he had learned this from America, not just his mother, and it was the first genuinely nostalgic thought he’d had about his country since coming to China.
“Were your family slaves?”
“All that ended seventy years ago,” he answered, deliberately vague, because actually his ancestors had been free people of color, as far as he knew. But that was not a good story for Shanghai, where he was a jazz man; he should be from the crossroads, someplace cruel, preferably in the Deep South. The longer he was away from the U.S., the more detached he became from the actual facts of his life there, gaining the freedom to unfold himself anew in this city. Everyone in Shanghai had a story. It was that kind of place.
But Anya was eyeing him shrewdly. “I see why they love your music, the Chinese. To them you are marvelous, and also pitiable. They themselves are slaves-to the foreign powers in the Concessions, and now to the Japanese. When they see you, they feel better, because you were the same.”
“Not exactly.”
“In their eyes, yes. The Communists might feel something similar.”
“Anya, really-”
But she held her hand up. “I predict it! Has one approached you yet, a Communist?”
“No.” On this Thomas was emphatic, because he had not met even one. “People say one third of Shanghai is Communist-but I don’t know where they are, any of them.”
She snorted with laughter. “Don’t be silly, you have met them, they are right in front of you. They lie, they pass as law-abiding people, they are everywhere.”
“Really.” He sat back, unwilling to believe that he, the master of appearances, could be so completely fooled. “What are they like?”
“They are bandits,” she shot back, “crude and evil. They killed my parents and my little sister.”
“Where was that?” he said gently. He reached for her hands, but she pulled them away.
“Russia.”
“And then where did you go?”
“Mukden, in north China.” She let a tremor go through her, and then pushed the whole thing away, refashioning her face until it was bright and gay again.
She changed the subject to music, and would say no more of her family. She told him it was true, she sang in clubs sometimes, and she loved jazz, though when he asked her whom she enjoyed, she could not name a single group. He saw what she was doing, but it didn’t matter to him, he loved it, loved her, or at least loved spending time with her. It was a joy to be with a beautiful, educated woman who was here because she liked him, not because he was paying her.
The two of them talked and laughed until they seemed to be the only ones left in the restaurant, which had grown quiet around them as the night deepened. By the time they rose to leave, she had drunk so much she could barely stand, and was in need of a steadying arm. He bundled her into a rickshaw and climbed up beside her and together they swayed down Route Gustave de Boissezon beneath rows of trees, in a night-world washed of color. When they came to her front door, he bowed over her hand to say good night. She responded by rising on her toes to kiss his cheek, then took an uneven step and vanished inside, clicking the door behind her.
The light of infatuation was lit, but what Alonzo had said back at the theater about Lin needing to see him was still tugging at him as well. He decided to go by Lin’s place on the way home, this being the time when Thomas knew his friend usually came home from his nightly circuit.
He threw a few small pebbles at Lin Ming’s window, and sure enough, it opened up, the room’s occupant still fully dressed and wearing a scowl which fell away as soon as he recognized Thomas down below.
“I’m glad you’re here,” he said when he got to the front door.
“Is something wrong?” Thomas followed him inside and up the stairs.
“Come inside,” Lin said, latching the door of his tiny two-room apartment behind them. “Sit.”
Thomas sank down on the couch and let his face sag into his hands. “I’ve been worried too. Solomon’s leaving. I’ve got ten men still, and all of them are anxious for me to tell them if it’s okay to stay here.”
Lin nodded his understanding, and for the first time Thomas could remember, he shrugged and gave no answer.
“So what’s going to happen?”
“As to that, no one knows, but-”
“Come on,” said Thomas.
“-but powerful people expect Japan to invade Shanghai.”
“What! When?”
“Who knows. Not immediately, but they are taking factories apart and moving them to the interior.”
Thomas felt the blood drain from his head. “And what does that mean for us? The Americans?”
Lin shrugged. “I would think, if they tried to avoid hurting anyone, it would be the Americans. The last thing they want is a war with you.”
“Would we be able to keep playing?”
Lin took a long, hesitant breath. “It is not a question of whether you and the Kansas City Kings can play. It is a question of whether Ye Shanghai will continue to exist at all. But Little Greene, right now we have a more immediate danger, concerning the new Japanese Admiral, Morioka. That’s why I was looking for you. To warn you.”
Thomas felt his eyes grow wide.
“First-swear to secrecy.” Lin swallowed nervously. “If anyone knows I warned you, my life will be forfeit. Do you understand? They will kill me. Swear to tell no one.”
“I swear,” he said softly.
Lin tightened his mouth. A perceptible shiver ran the length of his body. “Listen carefully.”
Through the next few days, Lin Ming could not shake the apprehension that he had crossed the line, and that retribution might come swiftly, at any time, and out of nowhere. He had disobeyed orders.
Lin was not so naïve as to think his physical parentage would be enough to protect him if he were caught; he was a son, but not a real one. Not that Du had ever denied having fathered him. Indeed he had acknowledged the boy as soon as he laid eyes on him, since he was childless then, his first wife, Du Taitai, having proved barren. Acknowledging Lin Ming was insurance, but the policy was never cashed, for Du was later to add wives who had more sons, sons of his line, born within his house and thus his legal heirs. But Lin Ming was conceived before all that, when Du himself was only fifteen and practically living in Lin’s mother’s room.
In her day it was the fashion for girls such as herself in the houses behind Avenue Édouard VII to claim to be from Suzhou, since that charming town of canals and gardens was known for its lovely and sweet-voiced girls-yet Lin’s mother truly had been born and raised there. In Shanghai she was called a “one-two” because a man could drink with her for one dollar and pierce her for two. One-twos were not the lowest-those were the Cantonese saltwater sisters, who worked the docks, and the alley girls who let themselves be had against a wall for thirty cents-but they were far from the highest. A step up from them were the two-threes, and many tiers above them were the city’s premier courtesans, perfectly formed, gorgeously dressed, able to sing, play, and hold their own in games of poetry and calligraphy with the very rich.