Lin Ming’s mother was nothing like them. But Du was hardly more than a boy himself when he met her, and little better than she. He never paid for her; they were friends. That was another reason why, years later, when he heard about the tall, thin boy who looked so much like him, being raised in the Suzhou brothel to which Lin’s mother returned after giving birth, Du decided to have himself driven to that peaceful garden town so he could see the child up close.
Lin Ming’s whole world then was the brothel, with its successive courtyards, its butterfly flock of aunties, its vermilion Gate of Coming and Going. Beyond the gate, cobbled streets unwound beneath overhanging willows, soft in summer with green-dappled light. Canals were crossed by stone bridges whose half-moon arches made circles in the water. From the ponds and fields and wooded hills came peddlers with live flapping fish, caged ducks, bundles of freshwater greens, and tender shoots of baby green bamboo. All around were the lilting strands of Suzhou dialect. If it was Third Month, he would use the coins in his pocket to buy green dumplings stuffed with lotus root. In the autumn, at the festival of the weaver and the cowherd, he would eat the special coiled, sugary cakes. The world was his, and it passed in front of him in the stream of faces, the scudding clouds above the roofs, the crisp flapping banners of merchants. Back then he never thought about the future.
That changed the day his father came.
He remembered the way his mother entered his tiny room at dawn to awaken him. Normally she herself never arose before noon. “Get up, Sprout,” she said; he remembered because she used his milk name. He yanked away from her.
“Bathe,” she told him. “Put on your new blue gown.”
“It’s scratchy. I bathed last night.”
“Put it on.”
“Why?”
“Your father is coming.”
He went still. She might as well have said the sun and the moon had changed places, for he had no father.
“Get on the horse,” she said, smoothing the bedclothes as if she could take away all the bumps in the road ahead. “Time to be a man.”
A clamor rose in the lane, the squawks of chickens, cries of children, rumble of a motorcar. He pulled on his clothes and ran to stand in the courtyard between Jiang Ma, the proprietress, and his mother.
The big square automobile puttered in and crunched to a long and extravagant stop. A knot of bodyguards climbed out, followed by a tall man with a shiny shaved head and a long loose gown that swung with his steps. He had crossbow cheekbones and big ears. Ears like mine. A hot knife of panic slid into Lin’s middle.
The man looked at him for a long time without expression and then turned to talk to his mother. They had not seen each other since she left Shanghai during her pregnancy, but a wisp of affection was still evident between them as they turned away from Lin without a glance and walked toward the reception hall, already negotiating. A few days later he was sent to Hankou.
Much later Lin Ming understood that it was an investment. Du had enrolled him in Hankou’s Lamb of God Missionary School so that someone in his sphere might understand the language and thoughts of the foreigners. That Lin had repaid the Gang’s investment through profit was undeniable, for the jazz he arranged brought people into the clubs to dance and drink and dine, and many of them went on to spend even more money in the brothels and opium dens just outside, from which profits also flowed straight to the Qing Bang’s coffers.
Yet this success was due less to his parentage than to the fact that he had grown up in a foreign boarding school, with Western music. Every day there had started in chapel with the other pupils, singing hymns and learning their tempered twelve-note scale with its chords and intervals. Their music became another of his languages, and later his ticket to the night-world. Some rival agents around Frenchtown sniped that his success was due only to his proximity to the throne. A waterfront pavilion gets moonlight first, they liked to whisper. They were wrong. It was all because he and his jueshi jia listened to the same songs as children, hymns, the bedrock of the church. His ear was like theirs. They were brothers beneath the skin.
In his world, there had never been room for a wife. That was why Zhuli was the perfect girl for him, Beautiful Pearl, all his in the moment and yet after, not his responsibility. They understood each other. And walking through the brass-studded gate of the Osmanthus Pavilion in Stone Lion Lane, he felt the familiar flutter of anticipation.
Inside, high ceilings and flickering gas lamps might have signaled any fussy, old-fashioned city mansion, except for the fact that it was full of girls lounging in loose robes with free, unbound breasts moving for anyone to see. “Lin Xiansheng lai le!” they trilled when he came in, at ease, childish, for they knew he would never choose one of them. He came here for Zhuli, and her alone. When she was busy, he waited.
Tonight she signaled her presence at the top of the steps with a delicate cough, her hair freshened, her lips moist, her gray silk skirts rustling beneath a close-fitting vest of red brocade.
In her room they fell together, struggling from their clothes. He knew how many men she had here, and he did not mind. She was like him, a fellow traveler, able to give her heart freely to no one. He knew she would never ask any more of him than what they had together, never ask for his money or his protection; knowing this freed him. War was in the air, and it was all he could do to keep himself and his men safe.
They joined happiness and afterward lay back in the sheets. He always paid for the night, which meant he could sleep until noon.
She turned him over and began a soft kneading of the muscles in his back with a touch that was expert, professional, but also intimate. She understood where he hid his anger and his fear, surrounded it with gentle fingers and drew it out until all under heaven was peaceful. Was this love? he wondered, deep in the profound state of rest he always felt under her hands. Was this the feeling? She finished and lay beside him.
He had been conceived just like this, in a room not far from here, in a brothel. Lin always made a prideful point of insisting that he was nothing like his father, but here he was the same, and he knew it. He felt for Pearl just as his father had felt for his mother, though unlike his father, he knew he would feel that way always. With her, all his cares, even the fact that he had just broken ranks to warn Little Greene, melted away.
“What is it?” she said, turning.
“Nothing.” He put her head back down, loving her. “Sleep a while.”
That night, while Lin Ming lay twined with Zhuli, Admiral Morioka crisscrossed Frenchtown in the back seat of his curtained chauffeured car, looking for music. In his previous China postings, Peking and Tianjin, he had always been able to find some club where a jazz group, Japanese, Chinese, sometimes even American, was playing. And neither of those cities could compare to Shanghai.
Yet in his short time here, it already seemed to Morioka that the Chinese government tolerated Shanghai like a man tolerates a boil on his skin. Night in Shanghai made money, and so was allowed to exist, but what the Chinese government really wanted was to ban foreign music, not just jazz but all of it. Hopeless. A more useless goal for China’s future Morioka could hardly imagine. It proved once again that the Chinese were not mature, strategic thinkers. Ban music? What next, forbid moving pictures? Yet this notion, of the toxicity of foreign culture, was promoted by both Nationalists and Communists alike. Amazing.