And he knew her secret.
It was not until he was going home in the back of a rickshaw, his privacy assured by the open night air, that he unfolded the note, and felt himself soar:
Hua Lian Teahouse
Avenue Hing and Route Alfred Magy
29 July, Thursday, 3:00
When the day came, he found that the address was a considerable trolley ride away, almost to the western edge of the French Concession. As he watched the city stretch out and grow leafier from the clanking, rocking car, he ran through all the possible reasons she might have for summoning him. He disembarked early and covered the last stretch to Avenue Hing on foot, just to calm his pizzicato nerves.
The half darkness of the teahouse was cool after the blazing street, and no one was in sight, no staff, no patrons. He walked through a series of empty lattice-screened dining rooms until he came to a circular tower room, in which an old-fashioned octagonal window looked down through meshed trolley lines to the street below. He barely saw the rose-patterned wallpaper, the white damask set with a steaming teapot and two cups, because there she was, rising from her chair to greet him, face opening in a smile. “You came,” she said, and reached across the table to clasp his hand in greeting. She wore a plain cotton qipao, the two-inch spool heels favored by Shanghai women, and no jewels except tiny pearls in her pierced ears.
The door clicked behind him and he was jolted to see they were alone together, for the first time. “Miss Song,” he said.
“Call me Song.”
“Isn’t your name Yuhua?”
“That’s a feudal name, Jade Flower. I have never liked it. My friends call me Song.”
“All right, I will too.” His big dark eyes clouded with concern. “Say, is everything all right?”
“Not really.” She poured tea and pushed a cup across to him. “I asked you to come because there is danger to you, very grave. It concerns that Admiral Morioka who has several times come into your ballroom.”
“That!” he cried. “Believe me, I know.”
“You know?”
“Yes. It’s not hard to figure out. They want to kill him, and here he is coming into my orchestra and sitting through set after set like a man in a trance! I get it.”
She relaxed a little. “I know Du is planning something-I suspect Lin knows too. I didn’t know if he had dared to warn you.”
“It would be very dangerous for him to do that,” Thomas said pointedly, as a way of explaining why he would not say any more. Neither would he reveal that Morioka also knew.
“I need not have come.”
“Not at all.” His eyes, fringed with curly lashes, were warm. “I’m glad you called me here. I want everything straight between us, everything honest. So-I know, okay? I know about you. But I won’t tell a soul.”
All her alarms screamed and she fought to keep her voice calm. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, I know. You are a Communist.”
“What?”
“It’s all right.” He covered her hand with his. “No one will ever hear it from me.”
She felt her mouth opening and closing, and no sound came out. He knew. Her life was ruined if someone knew. She had to change everything. “I must leave Shanghai immediately,” she blurted.
“No! Don’t do anything. I told you, it’s all right. You are safe. I will protect this as carefully as you do.”
She looked at him for a long time, desperately calculating. If he kept her secret, what would she have to give him in return? The instant the question bloomed in her mind, she saw herself, in an involuntary dreamlike instant, in his arms, an image she pushed away. Would that be his price? If it was, she would pay it. She looked at the gentle slope of his shoulders beneath his suit. “Can I trust you?” she said quietly.
“One hundred percent.”
“Who else knows?”
“No one.”
“Lin?”
“No one.”
She was trapped, and she knew it. Tears stung behind her eyes and wobbled her vision.
He said, “Believe me. Even if we never see each other again after today, no one will know. I swear it.”
She rose, deciding, and he rose with her, and they exchanged the brief embrace of a promise.
“Please be careful,” she said into his ear. “My life depends on it.”
“I will.” They sat down again, Thomas electrified from that moment of holding her. “May I ask about this contract with Du? Lin Ming told me you have a contract related to your debt.”
“My family’s debt.”
“Under that, you cannot-”
“No,” she said miserably. “I cannot. Even though that is not what I am to him. He has other women.”
His look was patient. “And how much longer does this contract last?”
She felt sadness spring up to prick behind her eyes, and she hated the answer she had to give, since it would extinguish all his desire. And she badly wanted his desire to stay alive. “Ten more years,” she said.
She saw how he paled. Ah, there, she had him: deflated. He would have no further interest in her after this. Why should he? He would have better things to do for the next decade than wait around for a broken shoe such as she was. She corrected herself; the phrase was harsh, she was no prostitute, but there was no denying that she had sold herself, long ago, and now he knew. She half expected him to make excuses and leave.
Instead he said, “Ten years is a long time.” His words sounded sticky, as if his mouth was dry. “Would there be any exceptions?”
“No,” she said, smiling a little, in spite of herself, at his sweet persistence. This was a foreign thing she liked, the way he showed himself, and strangely, she felt safe with him, safer than she felt in the Party. She wished she could stay with him forever. The Japanese were coming, everyone said they were surrounding Peking at that very moment, waiting to enter, uncontested-the Chinese army had withdrawn. Tianjin had fought for only three days, and now Peking was not going to fight at all. Next was Shanghai. She wished she could be with him when it happened, instead of in her little room on the top floor of Rue Wagner, with her maid, Ah Pan. The words of an essay by Wang Tongzhao came back to her-In both action and spirit, will you continue to resist or surrender to the enemy? She would resist, she wanted to be part of it. If only Thomas were part of it too.
But it was not even his war. “If we see each other at the theater, you must look right through me,” she told him. “We cannot talk, or meet… whatever you want to tell me, tell me now.”
He smiled. There were no words really for his world, the marble steps of West Baltimore, the ringing sound of a piano in a conservatory practice room, his mother, his grandmother. It could be told in music; one day, if he played for her, he could make her understand. He could spin out the bent-note melody of poverty, the feeling of always being an outsider, an actor, of the turning road that had brought him across the United States and here to China. It was a kind of walking blues; he felt that if they were alone, and there was a piano, he would play it, and she would know everything about him. “We may not be able to even acknowledge each other. But I’m staying.”
“You are staying in Shanghai?”
“Until they throw me out. And if you ever hear me play, it’s for you. Remember that. And if anything changes, or you need help, come to me. I’m going to be here.”
Her face seemed to crumple. “Why are you so kind to me?”
He picked up the pot and refreshed her tea. Because she had wrested freedom from servitude. Because she had brains to match her beauty, and no man had ever yet had the chance to make her happy. “I just want to be part of your life,” he said.
Lin Ming surprised Pearl by arriving at the Osmanthus Pavilion in the late afternoon of August eighth, when the mansion was just stirring and the girls in their bright flimsy silks were sitting together in the public rooms to play cards, and listen to Yellow Music on the wireless. As he opened the front door, Zhou Xuan’s song “Ye Shanghai” was playing, and he felt a stab of fear for the fragility of his city’s fabled nightlife.