“What are they looking for?”
“Resistance music. Hurry!” She dragged him through a short rear hall, and into the fresh cool air of the alley. “They will kill you.”
“Resistance? I thought we were playing love songs.”
She had already hitched her sari partway up her waistband, freeing her slender brown legs to the knees, and now took off running. He plunged after her, darting through the shadows along the back walls of houses. From behind came shouts and cries from the club, and pops of gunfire.
A block away, they slowed down to a walk, breathing hard.
“You must never go back there,” she said.
“They owe me half a week’s pay! And what do you mean, resistance?”
“The songs are Chinese to you, you just play them. But some of them are leftist, and they say China must fight. ‘March of the Volunteers’? It’s from a moving picture, Sons and Daughters of the Storm. Nie Er wrote that song-people think of him as a martyr. Yet you play it every night. That’s why the raid.”
“I never knew what it was about.”
“Now you do. Never go back.” As she spoke, she twined her hand in his.
His heart rose inside him, right out of the humiliation and loss that had become like a dark cave to him, a place where he was used to living, and hiding from the world. Song was his angel, but she had fled. Abeya was strong and dark and long-limbed; when they ran, it was she who had set the pace. Now she was radiant from exertion, and the warm spicy smell of her enveloped him. Even if she only pitied him, he didn’t care. He stepped closer, his heart thumping in her direction. “Do you have a place we can go?” It was blunt, but there was a war raging, and manners seemed to belong to a different time.
She took him to a small room in the Chinese City, up two narrow flights, beneath a dormer. An intricately carved wood-lattice screen covered the single window, but let in the cool night and the predawn sounds from the twisting lane outside. She shivered, and shook a soft, long-used blue blanket out over the bed.
“I want to sleep,” she said, and he said he did too, but when he unbuttoned his pants and slid them down and climbed in beside her she turned to him, and opened the strings to her nightdress. He let out a sob of joy, and she laughed as she wrapped her strong legs around him. She was so physically frank, not like Song, whose every touch had carried a world of feeling. But now Abeya was pulling her nightdress over her head, and he was grateful, giving thanks even for the raid that sent him here, though it meant the end of the job at Summer Lotus. When they were done, he turned his head slightly against her neck, and saw that her eyes were open, staring vacantly at the ceiling.
It was early afternoon when he woke up, the light and shadows filigreed on the wall through the wood screen. She was gone; nothing remained of her but a sweet depression where her body had been. He smoothed it with his hand.
He found a note: I regret there is nothing in the cupboard for you but a few biscuits. Please take what you like. I am never going back to Summer Lotus and you should not either. You can come back here, though. Knock and see if I answer. This time was between us. Next time, bring a gift.
He studied her childish looped handwriting, convent handwriting. For the first time he thought about where she had come from, and what she had done to get here. Trying to find her freedom, as he was. Thank you for saving my life, he wrote underneath her message, meaning it in every possible way. She was not Song, but she had extended her hand, and every inch of him appreciated it. Because of her he stepped out into the daylight safe, rested, satisfied by a woman, ready for the long walk home.
Lin Ming managed to save 900 dollars more in the first nine months of 1938, bringing his total to 3,200-still not enough to buy Pearl. Disappointment burned through the scalding cups of tea he downed on the train back to Shanghai, trying to sort out what to tell her. What he really wanted was to take her arm and walk her out of there, watch her give back the furs and silk brocade jackets and dangling earrings of jade and gold filigree; they would leave side by side in their plain cotton clothes. Then he would buy her a set of simple silver wedding bracelets, which he would have incised with their names alongside the dragon and phoenix, entwined in eternal dance.
They could not live in Shanghai; her past would be known to certain people. Instead he would take her to Hong Kong. In doing short jobs for Kung throughout 1938-the fastest way to get money for Pearl-he had seen the vibrant thrum of life in the streets. He loved looking across the bay from Kowloon at Central’s skyline of graduated modern-style buildings in pale stone. He and Pearl could live there, have children, and start a new dynasty, with the name Lin, which had been his mother’s name. Take that, Teacher.
But when he was with her, as he was the first night he arrived in Shanghai, he did not tell her all this as she lay in his arms. Surprising her was part of his plan. For now, he just told her to leave everything to him, that he would make it happen. He told her he did not want to die with his eyes open-regretting work undone and promises not kept-and so she could depend upon him. Her eyes shone at these words.
At noon the next day, the time he had paid for came to an end. They embraced long and hard, and he made haste to the address in Frenchtown where he was to meet H. H. Kung.
Since January first Kung had been serving as Premier of the Nationalist government of Chiang Kai-shek, which was now located in Chongqing; as such he had been obliged to slip into Shanghai very discreetly, and seek lodgings in a back lane. Lin arrived to find a shikumen house, which literally meant stone-wrapped gate because of the stone lintel that was common in Frenchtown doorways. He would never have suspected this place sheltered anyone special or important. He knocked.
The door was opened by Kung’s secretary, a purse-lipped and overly fastidious man who always wore an old-fashioned gown and vest. “Dr. Kung is upstairs,” he said, and led the way.
“Duke Kung,” Lin said with pleasure, when he saw the older man behind his fog of cigar smoke.
“Young Lin.”
“Thank you for seeing me.”
“Of course. You said you needed some help?”
“Well”-Lin knew Kung was a busy man-“it’s like this. We have known each other a long time, and I am asking if you have any additional work for me. I need money, you see. It’s for the girl I want to marry.”
“Ah!” Kung’s face lit along with the lighter he flicked open to get his cigar going again. “I approve.”
“Thank you.”
“Let me look around. You were in Hankou, too, recently, doing work for Du, I heard.”
“Yes. At the end of April I translated for his interview with two writers from England, W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood. He told them he worked full-time for the Red Cross.”
“And they believed it?”
“Utterly.” They laughed at this, and then sat in companionable silence, built on years of unspoken alliance and a shared understanding of the world. “Any news from Germany?”
“It’s bad. Jews had to turn in their passports at the beginning of this year. There are new laws-Jews can no longer be in real estate or banking, they cannot be doctors. Cannot teach or study.”
“What about your friends?”
“Dead.”
“Dead! How?”
“One was shot, on the street in Geneva, where he had fled. The other was doused with petrol on the street in Hamburg, and set alight.”
Lin placed an involuntary hand over his midsection. “How awful.”
“Yes.”
“It must have shattered you.”
“Yes. And they were powerful. They ran banks, they were rich, prominent men. If they could not escape it, no one can.”