Then he heard a woman clear her throat, a gentle but specific sound already as close and natural to him as middle C. It was Song, just inside the door, half-hidden in the darkness. “I thought you left,” he whispered.
“Careful,” she said.
He looked. The only other people on the roof were men folding tables and taking up the dance floor. Not one of them was looking in Thomas’s direction.
Six steps, and he was with her, in the shadows. “Where is Du?”
“In a meeting, downstairs. They think I am gone to the restroom.”
That meant she had only a minute. “Song-”
“No,” she said quietly, putting two cool fingers on his mouth, “Don’t.” Her other hand sought his, and their fingers linked quickly and naturally. She brought her face so close to his that their cheeks grazed. “I know,” she whispered, and they stood for a long moment, until a fresh burst of gunfire startled them, followed by a grenade blast and the rumble of falling masonry.
“All of them will either die or surrender,” she said bitterly. “Then it’s finished. We will belong to Japan.”
“Not Frenchtown. Not the International Settlement.”
“Congratulations-a lonely island in an occupied city. And now my time is run out,” she said miserably, holding his eyes. “Stay alive for me.” And after a brief, desperate squeeze of his hand, she vanished.
Over the next few days, the dominoes fell. The Lonely Battalion was down to 376 men, and Commander Xie Jinyuan had them make a run out of the building and across the bridge into the International Settlement, protected by their gravely wounded compatriots who were dying anyway and had volunteered to cover them from the machine gun nests. British troops cheered them into the Settlement, arrested them, confiscated their weapons to prevent anything falling into the hands of the Japanese, and put them up in a building on Singapore Road they dubbed the Lost Battalion Barracks.
With this last act, Shanghai’s War of Resistance shuddered to a close. Through November, Thomas saw brown-uniformed soldiers rolling in by the truckloads, placid, complacent, bouncing along. He saw them down by the river on their time off, walking with a bottle of sake jammed in one pocket and two bottles of Asahi in the other, eating fruits out of hand, taking what they wanted from stores as they passed.
They set up checkpoints at intersections and bridges. At the steel-truss Garden Bridge, which connected the unoccupied Bund to the occupied Hongkou district, everyone had to bow from the waist to Japan, with no exceptions-cars had to stop, the tram down the middle of the bridge halted and disgorged its passengers; everyone had to do it. Thomas adapted with relative ease to this new regime, for all his life, around white people, it had almost always been necessary to defer. And since he was a foreigner, the Japanese went easy on him, letting him pass with the kind of perfunctory bow that would have gotten a Chinese slammed with a rifle butt. Suddenly his race was the right card to hold in the game of fear and death. Sickening. The new slang word for the occupiers, which even Thomas, with his nonexistent Chinese, learned to recognize, was mo shou, the evil hand.
One day at the end of November, Lin Ming received a message that he was to be at Rue Wagner, at the hour of the rooster. His first fear was that the conquerors were taking over one of his ballrooms, because the night-world continued to roar, with the drugs, gambling, and liquor flowing so fast that all over town, the abacuses chattered until dawn. Backstage office safes bulged with profits, and he was dreading the day the Japanese decided to take the money for themselves. He had been sensing doom; was tonight the night?
Or maybe there was trouble with the Germans again. The Nazi organization in Shanghai was small but well established, with its own network of spies and agitators, and they were furious about the numbers of Jewish refugees arriving in the city. They also hated the fact that the city’s very wealthy Jews, like Sir Victor Sassoon, and Horace Kadoorie, had stepped up to care for penniless arrivals in dormitories and soup kitchens. Small loans were arranged for individuals wishing to open the same businesses they had run in Germany, and soon the Jews had started their own schools and clinics, and even built a synagogue. He and Kung had passed several evenings with Du, urging him to resist the Nazis’ demands to restrict the refugees, whose numbers were currently swelling by a thousand a month as they stepped off the Lloyd Triestino ships from Genoa. Fortunately for them, Du was not hard to convince; he had hated the Nazis ever since Hitler told Kung they should surrender to Japan.
Lin Ming arrived at the tightly shuttered second-floor meeting room first, and realized that all these identical red-tufted rooms were another of the old man’s superstitions, like the lucky mummified monkey’s head that he wore hanging from his back collar inside his gown. Like the ancestral temple he paid to have built in his home village, where the air was clouded by incense and the lights of candles danced along the wall, even though his forebears were nothing but dirt-poor alley dwellers. And like this room, with its dark wood paneling and softly glowing silk lotus-bud lamps, which brought back his brothel boyhood. Of course his father kept his rooms like this. One day Lin probably would too, if he made it through this war.
And he had his own beliefs, his superstitions; one of them was Pearl, and the weeks of battle had shown him that he cared about her, and her safety, too much to leave her in the brothel. He had to save to get her out.
He had been with her the night before, and all her goodness was still there, her sweetness, even though she had passed her twenty-eighth birthday and he had not talked about buying her out. It was over, forgiven, and she loved him just the same, which opened him enough to tell her he had started to save. He did not know how long it would take-there was the war, years maybe-and it embarrassed him to hear himself saying these things, which were still weak and evasive, but she burst into tears beneath him, holding his shoulders, her legs going limp around him in her rush of love and gratitude, forgetting entirely that they had been in the middle of the house thing. He held her, and knew that he was committed; he would raise her buyout, no matter what it took, or how long. The war had made it all clear.
The secret door clicked, and Du entered in a gray silk gown.
“Teacher,” Lin said respectfully.
Du responded with a nod of his bald head. “I need you to translate.”
“Of course.” In some situations, only a male translator would do.
“A Japanese officer has arrived in Shanghai and insists on seeing me now, tonight. Just a few minutes, he says. Doihara is his name.”
“General Doihara? Head of the Japanese First Army in north China? The one who calls himself Lawrence of Manchuria?”
“The very one.”
“But you need no translation. He speaks Mandarin. And, they say, some Shanghainese.”
“I know. I have had him informed that I speak neither language. You and I will speak tonight in Suzhou dialect.”
Lin suppressed a smile; Suzhou hua, the language of his mother. Du was always a step ahead. “Isn’t Doihara the one who set up Pu Yi as puppet emperor in Manchuria?”
“That’s right. He has a lot of brass between his legs, coming here. Does he think I am corruptible? Perhaps he does not know that in Shanghai, thieves and police work together. The cat and mouse sleep entwined. We already are the government! It is an outrage-as if I would turn against my city.”
“When is he coming?”
“He is here now, the dog’s fart. I suppose we have kept him waiting long enough.” Du opened the room’s main door and stepped out into the corridor, at the other end of which was one of the larger studies, with a desk at one end and soft, antimacassared chairs squared around a low table in Chinese style at the other. The room had been deliberately overheated on Du’s orders, made stifling, and in the center of it, a compact sweat-beaded Japanese in full dress uniform, heavy with medals, waited uncomfortably on the Tianjin carpet.