Sullivan checked his watch and spoke to the air like he was talking to himself. “Must be handy to just walk through the fence and avoid all those checkpoints.”
“Yes. It is. It also helps to not be a giant. I am a tall man in this country. You are a sideshow exhibit. It should come as no surprise you are being followed by some Japanese secret police.”
“Great.” Sullivan didn’t turn to look. Odds were he wouldn’t be able to pick them out anyway. He could usually make a tail, but that was when he was operating in familiar territory, and there was nothing familiar about Shanghai. “Right on time.”
“Turn right at the noodle stand.”
It wasn’t like he could read the advertising. “Narrow it down for me.”
A sigh emanated from beneath the great straw hat. “The green and yellow stand just ahead with the noodles.” And then Heinrich kept on walking, disappearing into the crowd within seconds.
Sullivan had to admit he was a little jealous. Sticking out like a sore thumb got a little old, but he’d gotten used to it over the years and had learned to work around it. In Asia, he was an extra-sore thumb. In America he was several inches taller than average. In China he was a giant.
However, sticking out wasn’t necessarily a bad thing when you were trying to send a message. He turned left at the noodle stand where hungry customers were slurping from bowls. It smelled remarkably good. Southunder had warned him that it wasn’t considered odd to eat cats and dogs here, but he’d grown up poor and had eaten worse. It was all meat. Cat couldn’t be any worse than opossum or squirrel, and it sure as hell had to be better than Rockville’s mess.
Shanghai was supposed to be one of the most populated cities in the world, and after seeing it firsthand, he didn’t doubt that one bit. It wasn’t as tall as New York or Detroit, but there were a lot of high rises, and many more under construction. He’d already passed through the ultra-modern, spotlessly clean new district. It was the place for the Imperium to keep up the masquerade that Shanghai was a free city and not just a conquered place that was handy for conducting business and laundering money. This side road was even older, rougher, and seedier, built for working folks and not for show, so despite not speaking the lingo, he already felt more at home. The locals were giving him suspicious looks, but it wasn’t too odd to have a Westerner in the market.
He passed a meat shop. A butcher was hacking up a quarter of a pig on a big wooden chopping block with a meat cleaver. Behind him were cages filled live chickens. One of the chickens spoke to Sullivan with Lance’s voice. “There’s a tailor at the end of this row. Go in there. Hurry.”
The butcher turned and looked at his chickens suspiciously. The birds just sat there, stupidly clucking away, but certainly not speaking English. Perplexed, he scratched his head with one bloody hand, and then went back to cutting up his pig, mumbling something that Sullivan couldn’t understand, but that he was fairly sure would translate into something about how he was working too damn hard and could really use a drink.
Crowds parted around him. He didn’t need to manipulate gravity to push his way through people half his size. There was a sudden commotion back in the market. He didn’t know what it was, but had no doubt the knights had just caused some sort of ruckus to distract the Imperium goons for a second. Most of the people stopped to look, but Sullivan just put his head down and pushed on. There were suits hanging in the window of the shop to the side, so that had to be the place. A bell rang as he opened the door. A Chinese shopkeeper was waiting inside. He didn’t say a thing, but walked right to the door, locked it, and then turned the sign in the window. He took Sullivan by the sleeve and pulled him around a corner and out of sight of the window.
The little old man looked up, way up. Sullivan tipped his hat in greeting. “Got anything my size?” The shopkeeper reached under his long silk shirt and removed a revolver. For a second Sullivan wasn’t sure if he was going to point it at him or hand it over, but luckily it was a present. The piece was a bulldog version of a British Webley with a snub barrel and a cut-down grip. Sullivan took the gun. “Better than harsh language.” He broke it open, confirmed the cylinder was loaded, and then placed it inside his coat. The shopkeeper gave him a handful of loose .455 rounds and Sullivan stowed those in other pockets. Magic was nice in a fight, especially his, but it never hurt to back it up with bullets. He missed his enchanted Browning automatic and its fat magazines packed with lots of extra firepower, but he couldn’t risk getting patted down at one of the checkpoints on the way in. “Thanks.”
The old man gestured toward the back, waving him on. There was a wooden door partially hidden behind a bunch of hanging shirts. Sullivan opened it a crack and saw that it led to an alley. The old man took off his tailor’s coat, tossed it on the counter, and walked out a different side door without so much as waving goodbye. Odds were it wasn’t even his shop, and whoever owned the place would never even know it had been temporarily borrowed.
With no other directions, Sullivan set out down the dark alley. “Alley” was a bit of an overstatement, since it was really more of a garbage-strewn rut between two rotting, slightly leaning tenement buildings. He looked up, almost expecting to catch a loose brick in the face. He couldn’t even see the Sun through all of the many clotheslines and dangling laundry. It never ceased to amaze him just how oddly quiet a place like this could be only a tiny distance from so much noise. Half a block later he found Heinrich, Lance, and a third man waiting for him next to some stinking trash cans.
Unlike Heinrich, Lance wasn’t even trying to be in disguise. Though shorter, their Beastie was so thick through the chest and arms that it would’ve been impossible to try to hide among the local populace, and that was before taking the lumberjack beard, which he refused to shave off, into consideration. Lance was dressed normally and had probably been smuggled in like Sullivan had. Pirate Bob had so many connections that getting forty Grimnoir into the city was a piece of cake. Lance was looking distracted, surely watching their tail through the eyes of some convenient animal. “They’ve lost Jake and they look mad.” His eyes seemed to refocus as he came back one hundred percent. “They’re searching and I think one went for help.”
“Killing them now would simplify matters,” Heinrich suggested.
“Only briefly,” said the stranger. He was a young Chinese man, dressed in one of those big silk shirts with the extra buttons that reminded Sullivan of pajamas. “If they sound the general alarm, the secret police will turn over this entire district looking for the perpetrators.”
“Of course. Save the alarms for later. We will need to snatch a few of them for questioning eventually.” Heinrich’s smile was the only thing visible beneath the shadows of the hat. “Forgive me… Sullivan, this is Zhao, one of the few Grimnoir still in Shanghai.”
The young man had a warm, friendly smile, but he possessed the hard eyes of someone who’d seen a lot. “I will serve as your guide while you are in Shanghai. It is a very dangerous place.”
“That’s Joe?”
“Zhao,” he corrected. The top of his head was barely even with Sullivan’s chest. He was either still a teenager or one of those baby-faced fellows who would look like a kid forever. “My name is Zhao.”
“Sorry. Good pronunciation ain’t exactly my strong suit.”
“My apologies, Mr. Sullivan. I struggle with it as well.”
“You seem to do okay.”
“In a city such as Shanghai, it is vital for the knights to be able to understand many languages. No one expects an errand boy to be able to listen in to their private conversations. I also speak Japanese, French, and a bit of Russian and German.”