Lin Ming nodded, silent, thinking there was nothing left for him now except bao tou shu cuan, to cover his head and slink away like a rat.
That week, Avshalomov’s boy came to the door of the house with a note inviting Thomas to a rehearsal of the composer’s tone poem Hutungs of Peking. Thomas had the boy tipped and fed, as was proper, and a few days later sent back his own most junior servant with a reply that he would be honored. He greatly enjoyed his nights out with Anya, trawling the underside of Shanghai, but this was an outing of another sort; Avshalomov was a composer of stature.
They had seen each other six months earlier, when Avshalomov’s piano concerto had premiered at the Lyceum, the concert hall where Shanghai gathered on Sunday afternoons to hear music before going out to dinner. The concerto was performed by Gregory Singer, Avshalomov’s customary pianist, as the second half of a program that began with Beethoven’s Fifth. Greene attended the concert and afterward sent Little Kong over with a warm note of congratulations. Now Avshalomov had responded with this invitation.
Thomas had seen that there was music all over Shanghai, from pit orchestras for the film and recording studios to the Shanghai Symphony. The city teemed with classically trained players. Some musicians were Chinese, some were older Russian Jews who had come years before, and now younger, immensely talented European Jews were arriving too, players who had fled persecution and found their way to the city’s orchestras.
Avshalomov was different; he had been in China most of his life. “I am trying to capture everything you hear in the lanes of Peking,” he explained. “The chants of the vendors, the buzz of the barber’s fork, the temple bells, everything.”
“I loved your piano concerto, by the way.”
“Ah, thank you, I received your kind note. Did you notice the boy on the celesta? My son, Jack!”
Just then a loud buzzing tone filled the stage. “That is the huan tou, the barber’s tuning fork,” Avshalomov said. “That was how the barber announced his arrival in the neighborhood, and everyone who needed a trim or a shave would come outside. You could hear it from quite far away. Ah, we will begin now.” And with a small Old World bow, he excused himself.
Thomas watched him in front of the orchestra, pressing the trombones and tuba for bigger sound, directing the temple blocks and bells and Chinese drums, asking the violins to come in softly and crest in waves like insects on a summer night. He led the musicians through, explaining, correcting, singing. “Here,” he called out. “This is the operatic tune. I want that feel. Violins, play with one finger on the E string; accentuate your trills. Again.”
At the end of the run-through Thomas complimented him, and they talked for a bit. “It is clear what your training is,” Avshalomov said. “When you play, ça se voit. But this group you are in now-these Kansas City Kings-I feel this is the future. I hear jazz arrangements everywhere-do you not as well? Brass, more than anything else-in movies, on the radio, even in advertisements. I hear it but I do not always find beauty in it. In your playing, there is always beauty.”
“Thank you,” said Thomas. “But if I may ask, do you think it’s safe for us to continue playing here if the Japanese invade?”
Avshalomov looked sadly at him, only in his forties but older from the weight of all he had seen, his expression grave beneath the light hair that floated in an untamed aureole around his head. “No,” he said. “But if they take over, you will not want to play here anyway. I know. I am from the north.”
That night, Song returned to the Royal.
At once his anxiety ignited, for Anya was here, languid and lovely at her usual table. Song came in with her eyes downcast, walking a few paces behind Du and his bodyguards, as she always did. Thomas willed his eyes away from her and kept them on the keys, barely breathing. He looked up at her two or three times while they were playing, but fleetingly, and in a way no one could possibly have noticed.
But Anya saw. That night, on their way back to her place from the theater, she brought it up. “Who is she?”
“I don’t know who you mean.”
“The woman up in the box.”
“The box belongs to the gang boss,” he said.
“I know. I’m asking about her.”
“She comes in with him. That is all I know.”
Anya still studied him, speculating as the rickshaw bumped and swayed along, but he went quiet, and so did she. Then when they reached her place, they flew at each other, joining on the bed in a frenzy.
Later, when they had quieted, she turned to him to speak. He thought she might return to the subject of Song Yuhua, but instead she surprised him by saying he could no longer come to her room at night; a “no visitors” rule had been imposed by her landlord. “He meant you,” she apologized. “You have come so often. There is nothing I can do-”
“It’s not your fault,” he said, wondering where they would meet now.
“Perhaps where you live?” she said.
“I don’t think that would do. I’ve taken in two young brothers from the band. They’re just teenagers.”
She gave him a look, because anyone could see they were far from innocent. “Well, then. Perhaps you should rent a room for us. We can meet there. Something small would not be more than seven or eight dollars a month. You can afford it.”
True, he could, and why not? So starting that week, he secured a small ground-floor studio on the Huangpu, at the end of Peking Road, across from the docks, with cooling wood shutters to filter the river air. They went there together after hours, and slept in the predawn coolness, and when the sounds of the day started to rise outside, he got up and went home. It was his last period of routine quietude before the world fell apart.
Song debated long and hard about giving one of the diamonds to the Party. If Du caught her, of course, she was dead, but if Du were to discover her secret affiliations in any one of a hundred ways, she was equally dead, so one more risk hardly mattered. What frightened her was something different, that the gift was so ostentatious for a leftist. A diamond. It would have been safer to convert it to cash first, except that then she would be exposed to even greater danger, for gossip from a gem dealer could easily get back to Du.
Still, to hand over the diamond would cement her commitment. This was wealth she found by chance, and it belonged not to her but to China.
One diamond, anyway. The other three would stay well hidden.
The midday rain had cleared, and she saw shopkeepers on both sides of the street reopening their lattices to the wet sidewalks, while sellers of books and magazines and curios moved their racks back out to the street. Men in light, sun-shielding fedoras and cotton gowns stopped to peruse string-bound volumes and old prints. The letter writers came back, small-town scholars who had failed the examinations and now waited for customers behind flimsy folding tables.
She felt for these men, since she too had received an education she could not use, except when she translated for Du. Before his gambling losses, her father had been set on making her a modern woman. He had engaged the best tutors for her older brother, and always insisted she sit in on his lessons. When her brother died of consumption, all the father’s ambition transferred to little Yuhua, Jade Flower, an old-fashioned and ornamental name she had never liked. Nevertheless she wore the name he gave her, and studied hard to please him. Though only eight or nine, she could feel the family’s future resting on her, and excelled, especially at English. Her younger sisters were but babies then, and she spent all her time with tutors.