An and Vespa exchanged hard, needle-sharp looks. “Not smart like we are,” An said, speaking for the first time.
Vespa nodded. He was medium height, dark-haired, wiry, and looked like he had steel cables under his skin when he moved his jaw to speak. “Just tell us where you want that first package delivered.”
Before Lin left, Margit took him aside. “Thomas said I could ask you this. Please-I hope it’s all right. My cousin Hannah Rosen, in Vienna? She has two children? I am afraid they will die there-the Chinese Consul in Vienna is giving visas, but somehow she could not get one. If you can ask Dr. Kung-if there is anything he can do-”
“I will ask,” he promised. Her eyes were brimming, and he took a clean lawn handkerchief from his pocket and gave it to her for a moment.
He left the meeting, still cautious, yet feeling grand too, because they were going to save lives, right under the noses of the Japanese and the Germans. Not a few lives. Many.
And now, Pearl. Life was on his side again.
He boarded a trolley, and found a seat near the rear door, the safest position since one could melt off the car and escape in case of trouble.
But he rode in ease, clacking along the streets, watching people step on and step off, his chest bursting with delight. I am coming, Pearl. I am almost there. He dismounted through the back door and walked to Stone Lion Lane.
He arrived to find the Pavilion closed, its gate locked, not entirely surprising at this hour of the morning. He knocked until the old gatekeeper opened a small metal window within the gate.
“Old Feng! Let me in.”
“Mister Lin-is it you?”
“Who else? Open up. I want to see Pearl.”
“No Pearl here.”
“Of course she’s here.” Lin ignored the frightened pounding in his head. “Top of the stairs, third room on the right.”
But Old Feng looked not too clear. Was his mind going dim?
“She wore that red satin jacket in the winter.”
Feng’s eyes came into focus. “With the fur trim, that one! Oh yes, Zhuli. Sweet girl. But she is gone now. More than two weeks.”
The earth seemed to drop out from under Lin’s feet, and the old man opened the metal door for him. Lin pushed past the madam, and the girls, who suddenly all looked strange to him, and took the stairs three at a leap to her room.
He opened the door, and everything had changed, the clothes, the smell. A woman lay in the bed beneath a man who turned his head and snarled, “Ei? Sha jiba!” Stupid dick!
Lin backed out, running. A minute later he was out the gate with an address in his hand, given him by the madam: the place to which Pearl had been sent. He did not even hear Old Feng’s farewell.
The first part of his hope started to shrivel when he realized the address was in Zhabei, a Japanese area. As soon as he crossed Suzhou Creek on the bridge at the end of Carter Road, passing out of the Lonely Island and into enemy territory, he could feel the change. The Japanese were all around, women, children, families, elders, and men in uniform, everywhere. It no longer looked like a Chinese place.
He came almost to the green edge of the Cantonese cemetery before he found the address: a long, low, white featureless building, with a line of Japanese soldiers snaking out the front door and down the road as far as he could see.
It’s where they keep women.
A roaring in his ears seemed to drown everything else out, as he pushed his way past the line, up to the desk. “Zhang Zhuli?” he said, over and over, and wrote out the characters, which were the same in Japanese kanji.
The man called someone else from the back, who took the name and checked it against a ledger. “Not here,” he said, handing the card back.
“Please! She was sent here!”
The first man pulled out another, older book from beneath the desk, and the second man opened it and flipped through it grudgingly.
Just as he was reaching to close it, he saw her. “Here,” he said, and turned the ledger to show her name. It had a line through it.
“Where is she now?” Lin croaked.
“Gone away,” said the man, and closed the book.
Lin stepped back, reeling. That means dead. “Are you sure?” he said, his voice remote, as if it came from somewhere outside himself.
“Sure,” the man barked back, glaring. Shanghai was a vassal city, and its whores, living or dead, were not his concern.
A ringing in Lin Ming’s ears blocked everything as he pushed out, past the line of men waiting to get in. He walked blindly. But then a shout made him stop short, and he saw he had been about to walk into a cart being hauled by two men. In it were eight or ten girls’ bodies stacked like so much cordwood. They had been stripped naked, since their clothes at least still had some value, and their bodies heaped up with a sheet of burlap over them. Their bare white feet stuck out, jouncing with every bump in the road. It was that pitiful sight, the jiggling pile of feet, that cracked his shell and brought out his first long howl of pain.
Thomas had come to know all the voices in his building. He followed the lives of its tenants, their anger and laughter, conversations, the hours at which they came and went. When they had visitors, he knew whether it was someone new or a person who had come to the door before.
So he was surprised one morning to hear a familiar voice outside. It was a man’s voice, someone he knew, and he spoke Chinese in clear, bell-like tones that even Thomas, who still understood only a few words of the language, recognized as cultured. He jumped up and threw on his clothes, unable to place the voice. All he knew was that he never expected to hear it in this Frenchtown alley.
Downstairs, he was startled to discover H. H. Kung attracting a fast-growing circle of onlookers to his front door. The Premier was instantly recognizable.
“Dr. Kung,” Thomas said. He had met the man several times at the Royal, in what felt like another lifetime. “Please come in.”
“Thank you.” Kung touched the rim of his bowler in the American style he had acquired in college and never lost. “But if you don’t mind-” He sent a glance to the lane-mouth, thirty or forty meters down, where Thomas saw his car and driver waited. He understood.
In the car, Kung explained. “It is Lin Ming. He has been working for the Jewish Resettlement Plan, as you know. He arrived in Shanghai four days ago, conducted a very important secret meeting for the Plan, and then vanished.”
“Here? In Shanghai?” the words shook as they came out, for people were getting killed all the time. And it made no sense that Lin would come to the city and not contact him.
Kung raised a hand. “He is alive, but not well. My people found him today. That’s why I came to you.”
“Where is he?”
“In the Daitu.”
The Badlands. That was one word Thomas knew. “Was he kidnapped?”
“No.” Kung sighed heavily. “Pearl is dead. His intended. It seems he has been out of his senses ever since he learned. I have sent three of my men in to talk to him, but no one can make him leave.”
“Drinking?”
“No. Heroin. It’s worse than opium.” The car pulled up outside the iron gates to the Hollywood, its lights blinking even in the daytime, its grassy front lot already packed with dark, square-topped motorcars.
“He’s in there?” Thomas said, dismayed at the sprawl of the complex, where it was rumored customers died every night of some excess or other.
“I cannot go in and reason with him,” Kung said, his voice pinched with frustration. “You saw what happened when I stood outside your door for a few minutes. Please. Go and bring him out. He will listen to you.”