Midnight in Peking: How the Murder of a Young Englishwoman Haunted the Last Days of Old China (25 page)

Rosie Gerbert had fled Newchwang quickly after one of the girls in her brothel was found dead. Eight thousand silver dollars worth of jewellery and $7,000 in cash, believed to be the victim’s, were found stashed under Gerbert’s house. The authorities had given her twenty-four hours to leave town, and she had reappeared in Peking in the same old business, this time at 28 Chuanpan Hutong.

Dolbetchef, who knew that Brana Shazker had been uncooperative with Werner, thought Gerbert might be more helpful. He set up a meeting between the Werner and Rosie Gerbert in his office. But Gerbert, while she agreed to the meeting, was anything but helpful.

‘You heard of the murder of Pamela Werner?’ Werner began.

‘Murder? I heard of no murder.’

She claimed not to have been in Peking in January 1937. Dolbetchef said he knew for a fact that she’d been in the city, whereupon the woman flew into a rage, attacking Dolbetchef and claiming that she wasn’t Russian anyway, but Polish. She cursed Werner, insisting she wasn’t the madam of number 28.

Werner appealed to her, tried to reassure her. ‘I only wanted to ask you if you could help me,’ he pleaded, but she made no reply, swearing at Dolbetchef in Russian before storming out of his office.

It seemed that Brana Shazker had got to Rosie Gerbert before Werner had.

So he looked elsewhere, for people who had been at number 28 on the night of the 1937 Russian Christmas. His agents had established that several of the staff working there that night—houseboys Wang Chen-yu and Liu Pao-chung, and the cook Chen Ching-chun—were still living in Peking. But they were being uncooperative, despite cash inducements.

Then Werner found an unlikely ally in the Japanese. Hisanga Shimadzu, the Japanese Legation’s first secretary, offered to help. Exactly why wasn’t clear, though discrediting former British consul Nicholas Fitzmaurice might have been high on the list. In 1936 a Japanese man had been killed in Peking by a drunken British soldier, and the incident, to Tokyo’s eyes, had been hushed up by Fitzmaurice. The affair still rankled with the Japanese, who were keen to have British justice and British officials revealed as corrupt and incompetent.

For his part, Werner was prepared to take help wherever he could get it. He met with Shimadzu several times at the Japanese Legation on rue Meu, where another man, who refused to shake hands or exchange cards, noted everything that was discussed. He appeared to be influential but said little, and simply called himself Mr Matsuo.

Shimadzu appealed to the Japanese-controlled North China Political Affairs Commission, now the ruling council of Peking. The commission ordered the Japanese Military Police in Peking, the much-feared Kempeitai, who had commandeered a building close to the Forbidden City, to find and hand over to Werner the houseboys and cook from number 28. Displaying their legendary efficiency and reach, the Kempeitai had the houseboy Wang Chen-yu delivered to Werner within days.

With money on the table and the Kempeitai commanding him to cooperate, Wang brought in Liu Pao-chung, the second houseboy. Liu told Werner that on the night of the murder he’d heard two or more screams and the sound of furniture being smashed at number 28. Though his title was houseboy, Liu’s job at the brothel had been more like the head of the Chinese staff, overseeing and controlling them, and telling them to shut up when necessary. He’d provided the muscle on the entry gate, and had been with Madam Leschinsky when she beckoned Sun Te-hsing and his rickshaw over. Clearly he knew secrets, but Werner was wary of people saying anything just to please him and take his money. He tested the man.

‘Did the stout Russian woman Leschinsky kill the girl?’ he asked.

‘Pu shih ta sha ti,’
replied the boy instantly, which translated as ‘It was not she who killed her.’

Then who? But Liu was afraid to say. He felt he’d said enough already, though he did mention that he believed Madam Leschinsky had kept a piece of the bloodstained cloth used to cover Pamela’s face, in case she was ever made to give evidence at a trial. She would produce the cloth in the hope of clearing herself and incriminating others.

Werner asked Liu where the murder had occurred.

‘In the Korean house,’ said Liu, perhaps referring to the other half of Madam Leschinsky’s ancestry.

Werner asked for the names of the men who had been there with Pamela that night, but Liu claimed he didn’t know. One had gone regularly to number 28 before, but all Liu would say was that he was an ‘American tooth doctor.’

Werner went back to the Kempeitai and requested they find and formally question Wang and Liu as witnesses, and continue to look for the cook, Chen Ching-chun. Wary of creating yet more bad feeling in a city they occupied, the Kempeitai suggested that Chief Chen at Ch’ienmen headquarters should be the man to do the questioning.

Werner thought they were prevaricating. He knew his timing was bad: it was June 1939, six weeks after the manager of the Japanese-owned Federal Reserve Bank of North China had been assassinated by Chinese Nationalists at Tientsin’s Grand Theatre, in the British Concession. The killers were known to be hiding out in the concession, and when the British authorities refused to hand them over, the Japanese had blockaded the area, in what would become known as the Tientsin Incident.

Anglo-Japanese relations, already strained, were now decidedly sour. And the man in Tientsin who was resisting Japanese pressure to hand over the accused killers was the city’s head of the British Municipal Police—DCI Richard Dennis.

As long as the British refused to cooperate in Tientsin, Werner was no longer welcome on rue Meu. The Japanese Legation turned its back on him just as the British Legation had. Werner established that the mysterious, publicity-shy Mr Matsuo was in fact the head of Japanese intelligence at the legation, and a high-ranking member of the ultranationalist Kokuryukai
,
the Black Dragon Society, which was based right inside the Japanese Legation.

Eventually, in August, Britain’s ambassador in Tokyo, Sir Robert Craigie, ordered DCI Dennis to hand over the Chinese men wanted by the Japanese. Dennis had no choice, and the men were all executed the same day.

For a brief moment it seemed that the Peking police were going to help Werner. Perhaps in response to the British defying Japanese demands to hand over Chinese citizens to certain death in Tientsin, or perhaps as a last gesture of independence from Tokyo’s occupation of Peking, Chief Chen detailed two of his deputy commissioners to work with Werner, who was told that his daughter’s case would be reopened. The shadowy Cheng Chi Tui, known in English as the Spy and Investigations Department, was brought in. Werner was assured that Wang and Liu would be arrested and questioned, as would the former cook at number 28, once he’d been located.

But none of it ever happened. The Peking police suddenly broke off all relations with Werner. He was unable to discover exactly who had given the order, although he guessed at the mysterious Mr Matsuo.

In the meantime, Wang Chen-yu and Liu Pao-chung had vanished from Peking, doubtless spooked by the thought of being hauled in once more by the dreaded Kempeitai. With no way of finding them again, Werner grew increasingly desperate. His feeling of hopelessness reached such a depth that he appealed yet again to Archer and the British Legation. Part of his letter declared, ‘This is surely a crime of the underworld. Its solution is to be sought in the haunts of the sadist sexualists of the Peking foreign underworld clique.’

Again his plea for help was rebuffed.

Despondent, he pressed on. He heard repeatedly that Madam Leschinsky and Michael Consiglio were lying low in a brothel in Shanghai’s Frenchtown, living under assumed names. Madam Leschinsky was now calling herself Shura, he was told, but he got conflicting reports of possible Shuras that seemed to fit the profile. There were different incarnations: a White Russian hermaphrodite in Peking, a beautiful White Russian dance hostess in one or more of the Badlands cabarets, a man who worked as the cashier at the White Russian Kavkaz Bar and sold wine on the side to supplement his income, a Korean woman who had nearly married a Chinese warlord.

Werner gathered all the information and put in a request to the French consul in Shanghai, Marcel Baudez, for the detention and arrest of Shura. Baudez, who knew Werner of old, was sympathetic, but protocol demanded that such a request come from the British authorities, rather than an individual. He assured Werner that if the British ambassador in Shanghai were to make a formal request, Baudez would instruct the French Concession Police to search out anyone matching the description and make an arrest.

Werner passed on to the Shanghai Municipal Police a description of the Shura, possibly spelt ‘Shira,’ that he was seeking: between five-eight and five-ten in height, rather heavily built but not stout, with light-coloured hair but not blond, and a pallid complexion. This person was probably in his or her forties, was of Korean descent but had rather indiscriminate racial features, and was said to be a hermaphrodite.

The French Consulate in Shanghai thought that locating such a person would be easy enough, given the close watch the French police kept on the underworld in Shanghai. But Baudez never issued an order for the arrest of Shura, because Ambassador Clark Kerr never made a formal request. Werner was persona non grata in Shanghai now too.

So he sent his agents to Shanghai’s Frenchtown to see if they could find Leschinsky and Consiglio, the latter of whom was perhaps now calling himself Giraldi and/or Sodnitsky. But it seemed the couple had got wind of his search and moved on. The Shanghai underworld gossip said they had gone to Tsingtao, a Japanese-controlled city where Werner had no influence and where his agents could not easily follow them.

As it turned out, there was more than one Shura in the Russian community, and Werner had been on the trail of the wrong one. The Shura who’d reportedly been a manager of number 28 was not the White Russian hermaphrodite Werner had been told about and had described to the French. That Shura had not fled to Shanghai but was still in Peking.

This Shura knew everyone and everything about the Badlands. He was a local legend, and most importantly, he knew who had been at number 28 on the night of 7 January 1937. It was ultimately a most serendipitous case of mistaken identity.

Alexander Mikhailovitch Sosnitsky, aka Ivan, Vania, Vanushka or, to the habitués of the Peking Badlands, usually just Shura (a common short form of Alexander in Russia), sometimes also confusingly called himself Giraldi. Born in Tomsk, Siberia, the child of a tsarist official who was murdered by the Bolsheviks, Shura had fled with a party of refugees who wandered northern China before eventually settling in Peking.

Shura was of indeterminate sex, and while no one was sure, the story had it that he had been raised as a girl. Due to a mixed heritage, he could pass as a man or a woman, as European or Asian. Depending on mood, Shura was one day a humble wine dealer, another the male cashier of the Kavkaz (though most assumed he was in reality the owner of the bar), and the next a cabaret star for whose attentions wealthy Chinese male patrons vied. He was well known at many cabarets and private parties of the rich across Peking, where he would appear to introduce his dancing troupe, six beautiful White Russian girls in elaborate costumes, accompanied by a Russian guitarist. For those who needed seclusion and a discreet hideaway, Shura ran a “resort” in the Patachu Hills outside Peking.

And Shura the woman was beautiful—jet-black hair, pert breasts, almond-shaped eyes, perfectly formed and brilliantly white teeth. Rumour had it that a Chinese warlord had once begged Shura to marry him, and on discovering Shura’s twin sex had fled to another city to avoid the shame.

When passing as a man, Shura bound his small breasts tightly and wore a sharp tailored suit; when she was a woman, she wore startlingly coloured robes, both Chinese-style cheongsams and Western dresses, and let her raven hair flow loose.

Werner first went looking for Shura at the Kavkaz, which had once been the centre of Russian émigré nightlife but was now, with so many White Russians having headed to Shanghai, rather down-at-heel. The place was barely half full, and it was depressing, with its overweight and overpainted Russian prostitutes and a clientele slowly drowning their sorrows in cheap Crimean brandy, able only to leer at the girls, they were so broke.

Werner left a note for Shura, saying he wanted to meet. He got a reply with an address, a Japanese-owned boardinghouse in the White Russian and Jewish enclave of Yang I Hutong, in the Tartar City.

Shura was dressed as a man that day. Werner found him pleasant enough, and sympathetic. Shura knew of the Korean-Russian Madam Leschinsky who sometimes called herself Shura. He also knew about Prentice and his gang; he’d seen them around the Badlands and had heard about their activities. He knew that Prentice and Joe Knauf hunted together, and that both men regularly carried knives. He knew they propositioned young foreign women. He knew all about the parties they organised, the nude dances, and the nudist colony in the Western Hills.

Shura told Werner that Prentice was a man who liked to threaten women with his knife, to manipulate them, scare them. He kept Pinfold as a sidekick, a bit of muscle, and threw him scraps so he remained just shy of destitute. As Werner already knew, Prentice was also friends with Joe Knauf, who’d been a brothel keeper in partnership with the Oparinas before becoming the manager of the Olympia Cabaret. Apparently Knauf and Madam Oparina had fallen out badly over something and now hated each other. According to Shura, Knauf was these days mostly involved with heroin dealing in the Badlands.