As soon as he entered the lobby, Thomas felt he was inside some giant machine full of noise and flashing lights. The din of a mediocre orchestra came from behind one set of doors, and the strains of a competing cover band floated from another. Following Kung’s instructions, he made his way to a small drug room at the end of the easternmost corridor, where he found Lin Ming on a narrow rattan daybed, one of four occupied by men who were similarly reclining, eyes half-lidded, apparently unaware of each other.
“Lin.” He jostled his shoulder. “Time to go.”
His friend’s head turned so slowly he seemed to trail phosphorescence with his chin. He gazed out through pinpoint pupils, from a far distance. “Little Greene.”
“Come on. Car’s waiting.”
Lin let Thomas lift him by the shoulders until he was sitting up, but when Thomas took hold of both his wrists and tried to pull him to his feet, he crumpled. “Can’t go out there.”
“Outside?”
“There.” Lin’s glass eyes went to the door, and Thomas understood. Lin was seeing the place where Pearl had been taken, the place Shanghai whispered about, where Chinese girls were used by a different Japanese soldier every fifteen minutes until they died.
“I know,” he said, and gathered his friend into his arms. “But you’re not going alone.” And he maneuvered him to his feet.
In the car, they quickly realized the best thing to do was to take him to Thomas’s room, where Thomas could stay by him as he came out of it. “He’s going to be sick,” Kung warned. “It lasts three days when they stop.”
Once they got him up the ladder and on the bed, Kung tried to give Thomas a small roll of cash, for Lin’s expenses, but Thomas refused. “I’m working.”
“Please.” Kung pushed the cash into his shirt pocket. “He is my friend too. At least you should have cash for his needs.” He looked around the small, low-ceilinged room. “And, if I may.” He pulled off another bill and stuck it in the same pocket. “Buy a night stool. He is going to need it.”
“All right.”
“When he comes out of it, tell him I am very, very sorry about Pearl-but also, tell him he did well. The package is on its way to Chongqing. Many people will live because of him-women and children.”
“I’ll tell him.”
“Thank you, Little Greene. May I call you that? That’s how he always refers to you.”
“Sure. And you’re welcome.”
Dr. Kung picked up his bowler and turned nimbly, like a large cat, to retreat feet first down the ladder into the Huang family’s room as if he did such a thing every day.
Thomas sat through the first night with Lin, and for the next few days traded off with Alonzo, who worked evenings. There was nothing they could do, really, except sponge him down and tell him it would end, calm him when he grew agitated, and cajole him into taking soup, even when it came back up again. By the fourth day he was sweaty and pale, but himself again.
“You’ve been sleeping on the floor?” Lin’s exhausted eyes traveled to the stack of folded quilts and pillows against the wall. “I’m sorry. How many days?”
“Three. Feeling better?”
“No. You should have left me.”
“Sure, pal. You think we’re letting you go that easy?”
“Who’s we?”
“Alonzo. Me. And Keiko, she made soup for you. Charles and Ernest wanted to come, but I didn’t want them to see you like you were.”
Lin turned his face to the wall. “I wish you had left me.”
Thomas argued with him no more that day, but kept him there in his tingzijian, and made sure he spent time with Alonzo, too, so that he would never be alone. On many days, Alonzo brought Lin along to hear Thomas’s performances with David, and so it was natural that he eventually brought his bass, too, and started sitting in. Alonzo did not read, so he just listened to a few bars and then joined in, creating bottom lines of surprising complexity and even a hint of swing.
When they came to sections that were naturally repetitive, like the call-and-response sequence between the violin and piano in the first movement of one of the Mozart violin sonatas, they would pause on the pattern, and run back and forth over it; once in a while, Thomas and Alonzo flatted the seventh or third, or hesitated extra long to give more syncopation than the composer intended. The audience always cheered at these digressions, but it was the smile from Lin Ming that they were looking for.
One night Thomas was invited to David and Margit’s for dinner, and Lin did not want to go. Congested with a summer cold, he said he would stay in, and go to sleep early on the floor, where he insisted on making his bed these days, claiming beds were too soft for him anyway. “Go,” he said. “I am all right.”
So Thomas took a trolley downtown and walked north along the Bund and across the Garden Bridge-bowing to Japan-to Hongkou, the dense, ramshackle district that was now the refuge of the Jews. David had written out long, baroque instructions with arrows and diagrams, because his apartment did not have an address of its own, tucked as it was into a labyrinth of rooms subdivided from some larger building.
David saw him coming down the long, dim tunnel, and let out a cry of welcome, drawing him into a room with one tiny window, high up in the wall. It had been made cheerful with a checkered cloth on the table, and the good smell of stew rising from the stove.
Thomas hugged Margit and reached down to shake hands with Leo. “Aren’t you two brave to bring a youngster so far,” he said.
“Brave?” said David. “No, so lucky! You cannot imagine how hard it was to get out, how dangerous. But we are the lucky ones, yes. Mark the words. They mean to kill us, all of us.”
“That’s awful,” said Thomas. “There are millions of you in Europe.”
This brought Margit decisively to her feet. “Shall we eat?” she said, and soon was ladling hot stew into bowls, and cutting a freshly baked loaf into thick slices to pair with a crock of butter.
Before they ate, David lowered his eyes and intoned a prayer in Hebrew, of which Thomas understood only one word, Yisroel. Then he said, “That was a prayer to give thanks to God, that we are here, alive and free; that so many of us got out of Germany and Austria, and that here we have made new lives-thanks to friends like you.”
Margit buttered a piece of bread for Leo. “To see us now, you cannot imagine how impossible it was to get out of Vienna. We were desperate. The Nazis would let us leave only if we had a visa for someplace else.”
“And no country would give us one,” said David.
“Then how did you get out?”
“God led us out,” said David. “God sent us the Chinese Consul General in Vienna, a righteous man named Ho Feng-Shan.”
More than a year earlier, on a brisk Saturday morning in March 1938, Ho Feng-Shan had left his home in Vienna on foot after breakfast, thinking he would walk to the consulate and check on the news about Germany. He had watched with concern as calls and demands flew back and forth between Germany and Austria, everything stalled, nothing certain, lines forming at the banks because everyone wanted their money out. Dr. Kung had cabled him the day before, through back channels to be safe, advising him that a Nazi takeover of Austria appeared imminent, but was expected to be peaceful. At the office, he could find out more, and as it was a fine late winter day, he needed no more than his overcoat and fedora for the walk.
As he came close to the wide, tree-lined boulevard, he heard truck engines, a crowd, marching feet. He thought he had misheard until he turned a corner and saw that the boulevard was thick with lines of marching troops. No mistake-the Germans were entering Vienna.
He stopped among the crowds who had gathered eight or ten deep behind the barricades, some of them cheering and extending their arms in the Nazi salute. Fools, he thought. He craned this way and that, and saw only the soldiers, six abreast, hundreds beyond count. His heart sank.