“It was his fate,” Lin told him, when they finally picked their way back down the stairs to the hot, noisy street.
Before their departure, Thomas had seen him repeat his condolences and then insist she accept all the cash he had on him. Now, it appeared that Hua’s unfortunate ending was not his burden anymore. But it’s mine. Just like Wing Bean.
“I asked about your money,” Lin said. “She has no idea where it is, if there is any. Hua was down right before he disappeared, almost three thousand.”
“Figures,” said Thomas. Was this the first of his many punishments? Because that was his savings, vanished. Everything had happened so quickly-the turn, the discord, the unexpected ninth-and now he was broke, and could not leave. And yet Song had come to him too, which in its own way made it right, all of it.
They went on playing every night, and the crowds kept coming in, even while smoke still drifted from the rubble outside. One of their own was missing, Wing Bean, and Floor Manager Zhou prodded everyone about him. “You see Wing Bean, yes-no?” he asked Thomas, the other musicians, the hat-and-coat-check girls, even the men who worked in the kitchen. It went on for days. Thomas froze every time he had to answer, and barely managed to get out the word no before he collected himself and made a promise to keep an eye out for the young man. The way it happened kept coming back to him, like small explosions in his mind. He remembered how, after Song had hurried off down the chaotic street toward Rue Wagner, he threw the film into the carcass of a burning car and watched it shrink and shrivel, ignoring the pleas and screams all around him. Before he turned toward Rue Lafayette, where he knew the brothers would be worried about him, the crowd had thinned for a second, and he had seen for the last time the spreading stain that had been Wing Bean. And now Zhou would not stop asking.
By the next Friday night, the storm water that had flooded the low-lying streets had receded, and huge fires broke out in the Pudong and Wayside districts, big enough to light the sky. On Sunday, heavy shelling could still be heard from Hongkou when the Kings finished their last set at two A.M. A couple of nights after that, huge guns and mortars sounded from Jiangwan. And yet the house kept filling every night, and the six of them performed.
He longed for her, wondered day and night when he would see her again, but when he really felt close to Song was when he was playing. Even simple, affectionate standards like their signature, “Exactly Like You,” were now anthems to her. At the piano, he imagined a life with her that could never have been, staying in the studio, remaining in that room forever.
When they grew hungry, he would tip a beggar boy who lived across the Bund in a space underneath the pilings to fetch hot food. “German or Cantonese?” he would ask her.
“Cantonese,” she would say with a laugh, and move closer to him.
It was all they would do, love each other. He would play the piano, make tea. Dressed or not dressed, speaking or silent, their togetherness would express itself in thought and laughter, music, the day’s routines. “Shall I send the boy for dim sum?” he would say as he held out her cup.
Before, he had mastered his repertoire through practice. Now he closed his eyes, found melodies, and followed them until they grew through their own turns and variations, always as he dreamed of her. He realized this was the same feeling the other fellows had when they soloed, and with only six of them now, everyone except Thomas took long solo flights.
Tonight he might do it, full as he was of love and loss and troubled notes-so that when he signaled a solo for himself, and all the other instruments fell back in surprise, he took straight off into the sky with a rhapsodic ladder of joyfully tinkling dance steps that brought shouts and applause from the ballroom floor, and grins and nods from the bandstand, even Lester and Errol. Beautiful, said the voice in his head, and he understood that it was Song’s. She was with him.
Applause washed over him in waves. To keep it going, he led a quick chord change into “In a Sentimental Mood” in D minor, and then, in a subtle show of virtuosity, modulated to F major after managing to toy with D-flat major for a moment-but tickling it perfectly, lightly, his beat exactly square. He was true and he was a liar; he had dealt both love and death.
From his end of the stage, Alonzo heard Thomas’s playing soaring on its own, and kept his eyes on the piano as his own left hand ranged up and down his fretboard and his right plucked, slapped, and hammered down the percussion and the bass, as one. He wondered about it as his fingers danced the beat up and down, pulling it, popping it, until the truth swam into view: the young man was in love. That’s it, son. Right there. He caught Thomas’s eye and added his own smile to the roar of approval that was washing up from the dance floor. The boy had been to the mountaintop.
On the thirteenth of September, a month after the fighting started, Song met Chen Xing at Café Louis on Bubbling Well Road. Here, the city’s most elegant cakes and chocolates were created by chefs plucked from the tide of skilled Jewish refugees pouring into the city. To Song they were an oppressed people, and as Shanghai ren she was proud of her city for welcoming them in, while she also enjoyed the fruits of their talents with candid pleasure, such as the signature ganache here at Café Louis. Like most places in the French and International Concessions, the restaurant had reopened after the first few days of the battle, even though shelling, bombing, and small-arms fire could be heard almost every day and night, and intermittent food shortages played havoc with the menus.
This time Chen Xing came alone, and they talked in voices pillowed almost to a whisper, since Shanghai was filled with spies. The Communists themselves had moles in the Nationalist government, the French police, the Bank of China, and many other places.
He appeared pessimistic. “We will not hold out for long. The Japanese have been landing reinforcements at Wusong and up and down the Huangpu for days. Thousands of dwarf soldiers have put ashore.”
“But the Italians?” she said hopefully. The wireless had been reporting that the Savoy Grenadiers were on their way from Addis Ababa.
“No. Unless one of the big Western powers joins the fight, the city will fall.” He looked at her with sympathy. “What will you do?”
“I am a bonded servant,” she reminded him.
“If that changes?” He watched her face. “Many people are leaving. You know the government has already abandoned Nanjing and moved to Chongqing,” the new wartime capital. “Some people are going to Hong Kong. If they are staying in China, they go either to Chongqing-”
“-if they are with the Nationalists.”
“Correct. Or Yan’an.”
She nodded. That was the Communists’ wartime capital, a dusty, wind-whistling town on the Yan River which was where every true pilgrim of the movement wished to go-including her. Securely behind Red lines, in a part of north China controlled by the CCP, it was that mythic place where she would be able to live openly in her beliefs. Glorious.
She put her gaze back on Chen Xing. “What about you?” she said, for he could either come out now with the Communists, or continue to hide among the Nationalists.
“I’ll go to Chongqing,” he said.
“So you will stay belowground.”
“It suits me.”
She nodded. He was the scion of a well-off family; no doubt he wanted to hold on to his wealth and privilege a little longer, too. Living as a double agent would make it possible.