“Errol Mutter.”
“Pleasure to meet you. Why don’t I count you off, and you play just a few bars of your version so I can hear it?” And before anyone could protest, he ticked backwards until they started. Within two bars he heard how his accent had been on the wrong beat, and he came back in on piano, this time more or less correctly, if without the proper swing. He saw Errol exchange a look with the other horn player, and felt the drops track down his spine as he bent his face closer to the keys. It was not until the end of the song that he realized Lin Ming had come in, and gone up to the balcony to watch.
Lin was not alone in his box above the stage; he had come to observe with his sister-by-affection, Song Yuhua. She sat very straight beside him in her closely fitted qipao of stiff blue brocade, her hair bound at the neck with flowers, the way Du Yuesheng liked it. He wanted the women in his entourage to look sweet and old-fashioned.
Song was not one of Du’s wives, only an indentured servant, if an educated one. She was versed in the classics, at home with literature, fluent in English, and passable in French. She could play a simple Bach invention. For Du Yuesheng, who was illiterate, she was not only a translator but an accessory of incalculable value; for her he had paid a considerable price.
Lin Ming was the boss’s illegitimate son, so to him Song was family, and also the only person in Du Yuesheng’s inner circle he could really trust. “What news of Chiang Kai-shek?” he asked, for as soon as the ship docked, he had heard how the Nationalist leader had been kidnapped by his own allies in the north.
“He refuses to even talk to the Communists,” said Song. “He keeps insisting he will fight them until they submit to him, and only then will he resist the Japanese. His kidnappers are threatening to execute Chiang if he won’t stop fighting the Communists!”
“And what does Chiang say?”
“He says no! He just repeats that the Communists have to submit to him. Then he goes in his room and sits on his bed and reads his Bible.”
“Speak reasonably!”
“I do! Every word is true. They are at an impasse. Maybe they will kill him,” she said, her voice faintly hopeful.
He shot her a look.
“Someone has to do something,” she protested. “Look how close Japan’s army is to Peking and Tianjin. If those cities fall, we have no hope. We are fish swimming in a cooking pot.”
“If,” Lin repeated. “For now, they are still far away, and as long as that lasts, as long as the city crowds into our ballrooms to dance to mi mi zhi yin,” decadent and sentimental music, “we will be here. And so will my American jueshi jia.” He nodded toward the stage below, where Thomas Greene had just come to the end of a song and risen from the piano bench to address the others.
“Now, with Augustus,” they heard Thomas say, “which did you-all follow? Scores or charts?”
“Scores?” said Cecil Pratt, the trumpet player. “Charts? We just followed Augustus.”
Snorts of laughter rose. “Hell to pay if you weren’t there by the second measure, too!”
“Do you like it that way?” Thomas said, sensing an opening. “Because I’ll tell you, I cannot play without either a score or a chart, for the life of me. So if there’s anyone who would like written music…”
A wondering quiet spread. “Man,” came the voice of the violin player. “You’d do that?”
Watching from above, Lin and Song exchanged worried looks.
“You’d write out all that stuff?” said the drummer.
“I would,” Thomas said.
Up in the box, Song said to Lin, “You have to get him a copyist.”
“Immediately,” Lin agreed. Thomas needed someone who could shadow the band at rehearsals, and write scores and charts all night. As was generally the case with servants in Shanghai, the cost would be insignificant, chicken feathers and garlic skins.
“How many want scores?” Thomas was saying, on the stage below, and hands went up. These were the ones who could read music. “Charts?” The rest of the hands rose. He made a note and then sat down to play the opening chords of the next tune, and the musicians, mollified for a moment, moved with him. Reeds were moistened, brass lifted to the ready, and they set the pace for him to follow.
By the time rehearsal ended at six, the box where Lin Ming and Song Yuhua had sat was empty, a fact Thomas could not help but notice as he went out to the lobby to say good-bye to each man, repeat his thanks, and stress again his sympathy for the loss of Augustus. He was deliberately warm to the horn players. And he was surprised by how, up close, the two brothers who played reeds looked even younger than he had thought. He wondered how they had gotten themselves over here with the Kings in the first place.
“Don’t you worry,” said Alonzo, beside him. “Those boys cause more trouble than six men, you’ll see.”
“I will, eh? By the way-did you see Lin Ming in the box up above stage left?”
“’Course I did,” said Alonzo. “That’s the big boss’s box. Once in a while he’ll show up late at night. You’ll know who he is when you see him.”
“Boss of what?” Thomas said, confused. “The company?”
“Company?” Alonzo gave him a long look, speculation drifting to amusement. “Is that what Mr. Lin told you?”
“He said his father was head of the Tung Vong Company, and that they owned a controlling stake in the Royal.” Thomas was pretty sure that was what his new friend had said.
Alonzo was laughing, in his gentle way. “Well, that’s probably true. And about the Green Gang holding some big old part of the Tung Vong Company, you can forget I ever told you, if you like-”
“No, of course not.” Thomas was embarrassed. He had to adjust, take in everything, or he would fail. Probably he would fail anyway. “Tell me.”
“The Green Gang is who Mr. Lin works for, make no mistake. It’s the biggest Triad in China, and his father runs it.”
“His father?”
“He didn’t tell you that?”
“No.” Thomas tried to stay composed. “And a Triad is-”
“A gang, but bigger, and more like a secret society. These fellows swear their lives, forever.”
Thomas felt his eyes blind over as these new facets of his world turned before him. You don’t know anything yet. Still he had to play the boss right now, the bandleader, and so he turned a calm expression to Alonzo, who was twenty years his senior, and clearly knew all about Shanghai, and said, “Thank you for telling me.” He reached up to switch off the lobby lights. “But to my mind, that’s Lin Ming’s affair. Like you said about the rickshaw coolie, man’s got a right to choose his master. Right? See you in the morning, then. And thanks for today. I mean it.” And they buttoned their coats up high and walked briskly in opposite directions, fedoras pulled down low against the cold.
Thomas was freezing, and all he wanted was to get home to that big, lonely house so he could practice for the next day. This time he would not hesitate, not even look twice at the coolie; he would leap right up on the seat, and tell the boy chop-chop.
2
BEFORE THE REHEARSAL ended, Lin Ming left with Song, and after putting her in a rickshaw, he crossed Frenchtown to see his father, who was at the Canidrome. Lin loved this part of the evening in Shanghai, the first hour of true dark, for night was when the city’s enchantments beckoned, from the genteel to the most depraved, anything, so long as you could pay. Shanghai at night was not a place, exactly, but a dream-state of fantasy and permission, and to Lin Ming, no place embodied it quite like the Canidrome.
The entertainment complex was by far the biggest place of its kind in which the Green Gang had a stake, though its profits were dwarfed by income from the Gang’s much larger criminal empire. Still, with its ballrooms, restaurants, gambling parlors, mah-jongg dens, and a full-sized covered dog track, it was Shanghai’s grandest and greatest palace of nightlife.