Night in Shanghai (21 page)

“Give me that,” said Thomas.

“No. So many picture, touch and kiss. How much you give me?”

Thomas saw that the side of Wing Bean’s head was caved in, his skull broken. How was he standing up?

“What you give me?” Wing Bean repeated, and started to cough. A second later, bloody foam bubbled from his mouth and into his cupped hand, which distracted him for a second as he stared at it in surprise. One hard lunge, a fast grab, and Thomas had the camera. In an instant he had ripped out the film, unspooling it in the light.

“Doesn’t matter!” Wing Bean cried, and tumbled to his knees, gasping, gurgling. Behind him, the crowd stumbling away from the bomb site surged closer. “I saw you! Zhao saw you too, but he is dead—I saw! I am going to tell Du everything.”

Thomas took Song’s arm and pulled her back a step, out of the way of the human wall barreling up Boulevard de Montigny behind Wing Bean. The waiter did not see them; he was still shrieking at Thomas, his words bubbling in blood.

Neither answered, because at that moment another huge bomb exploded from the northeast, and a smoke-and-debris cloud tufted up from the area around the Bund—where Thomas’s studio lay. Wing Bean turned too, and saw the crowd running straight into him, knocking him over. In a short time he was flattened, barely visible but for the rumple of clothes and the blood running out under people’s feet. They must have been able to feel the squish and bump beneath their shoes, they must have known, but it was madness, death all around, and no one stopped even to look. Her hand crept into his.

They stood a long minute, and neither needed to speak. “Go home,” he said finally, into her ear, and she turned away.

The next day he and Ernest and Charles gathered around the radio to hear the news: three thousand dead from the bombs that fell in the International Settlement. This was followed by an official announcement made for foreign residents.

“Here we go.” Thomas turned it up, and they huddled close.

The consulates of Great Britain and the United States hereby advise all citizens to book immediate passage out. Shanghai is in a state of war and these governments cannot guarantee the safety of their citizens who choose to remain behind
.

“Book passage?” Thomas said. “How?” The brothers had only a few hundred saved between them, and all the cash he had was with Uncle Hua, more than two thousand Chinese dollars, another reason they needed to find the old man, because that would be enough to get all three of them out, and Alonzo too, if he was finally ready to go.

But Uncle Hua had not come back. Thomas guessed he had gone home to his family, but he knew it could be worse. Thousands were dead. And what had happened with Wing Bean had shown him that it took only one bolt out of the blue to snatch one’s life, or warp one’s fortunes. It was like the unexpected ninth in Duke Ellington’s “Blue Ramble,” the ninth in the bottom of the stacked chord that changed the song, changed everything. The turn. Wing Bean was dead, and they were safe.

That night, at the Royal, he brought up Hua’s absence with Lin Ming, who puckered in concern, and said, “Tomorrow morning we go see his family in the Chinese City.”

On the way there, Lin scolded him for feigning acceptance of Morioka’s invitation in the first place.

“I had no intention of going,” Thomas protested. “You warned me. But his boy was standing there. My servants used to handle these things for me, and I did not know what to say.” Weak though this was, he was keeping the truth to himself.

“That’s stupid,” Lin snapped. “Wooden head! I was so worried, I had to send my sister. And then everything happened and she barely made it back!”

“But she’s all right?” said Thomas, barely able to breathe now that she had been mentioned.

“Song? Yes. She’s fine,” Lin said, his brows lifting quizzically at Thomas’s interest. Good, he did not know.

They disembarked on Zizhong Road, where Hua’s family lived in a third-floor room so crowded Thomas wondered how Uncle Hua could run a gambling operation in it. Lin and Hua’s wife talked in light, percussive Shanghainese—
bird talk
, Thomas always thought when he heard it—while the children, two boys and a girl, watched in silence. Thomas relaxed a little, looking around, for Hua’s wife sounded normal, which to him meant that she knew her husband’s whereabouts.

Ah, there was the gaming table, behind a curtain. The small space also contained beds, a shelf of books, a single charcoal burner for cooking and heating, and a yellow-painted night stool in one corner half-hidden behind another curtain, merely a bucket with a simple lid and a seat on top.

The place was small, but the family benefited in all ways from the city outside. Lin Ming broke off from his chat with Hua’s wife for a moment to show Thomas the basket and rope the family lowered to the street to exchange coins with vendors when they heard the cries of their favorite snacks:
Steamed rice cakes made of rugosa rose and white sugar! Shrimp-dumpling and noodle soup!
And—
From the east side of the Huangpu River
—
beans of five-fold flavor!
The basket went down with a few coins, and came up with food.

And then there was the gambling business, the gaming table. Thomas certainly hoped his savings were safe.

At that moment Hua’s wife suddenly released a long, high-pitched wail of grief, shaking her hands in the air as if they burned. It was ice-cold clear that until that moment, she had thought her husband safe at the house off Rue Lafayette.

There were so many dead that most of them had been piled quickly into common graves while the tapering rain washed the gutters clean of blood. Thomas and Lin exchanged a look of pure pain as they realized where Hua must have ended up and, each man holding an arm, they helped Hua’s suddenly weak wife to a chair. For a long time that day they sat with her, while she alternated between keening sobs and tearful conversation, none of which Thomas understood as it poured out of her. He felt awful; Hua had gone out looking for him.

“It was his fate,” Lin told him, when they finally picked their way back down the stairs to the hot, noisy street.

Before their departure, Thomas had seen him repeat his condolences and then insist she accept all the cash he had on him. Now, it appeared that Hua’s unfortunate ending was not his burden anymore.
But it’s mine. Just like Wing Bean
.

“I asked about your money,” Lin said. “She has no idea where it is, if there is any. Hua was down right before he disappeared, almost three thousand.”

“Figures,” said Thomas. Was this the first of his many punishments? Because that was his savings, vanished. Everything had happened so quickly—the turn, the discord, the unexpected ninth—and now he was broke, and could not leave. And yet Song had come to him too, which in its own way made it right, all of it.

They went on playing every night, and the crowds kept coming in, even while smoke still drifted from the rubble outside. One of their own was missing, Wing Bean, and Floor Manager Zhou prodded everyone about him. “You see Wing Bean, yes-no?” he asked Thomas, the other musicians, the hat-and-coat-check girls, even the men who worked in the kitchen. It went on for days. Thomas froze every time he had to answer, and barely managed to get out the word
no
before he collected himself and made a promise to keep an eye out for the young man. The way it happened kept coming back to him, like small explosions in his mind. He remembered how, after Song had hurried off down the chaotic street toward Rue Wagner, he threw the film into the carcass of a burning car and watched it shrink and shrivel, ignoring the pleas and screams all around him. Before he turned toward Rue Lafayette, where he knew the brothers would be worried about him, the crowd had thinned for a second, and he had seen for the last time the spreading stain that had been Wing Bean. And now Zhou would not stop asking.

By the next Friday night, the storm water that had flooded the low-lying streets had receded, and huge fires broke out in the Pudong and Wayside districts, big enough to light the sky. On Sunday, heavy shelling could still be heard from Hongkou when the Kings finished their last set at two
A.M
. A couple of nights after that, huge guns and mortars sounded from Jiangwan. And yet the house kept filling every night, and the six of them performed.

He longed for her, wondered day and night when he would see her again, but when he really felt close to Song was when he was playing. Even simple, affectionate standards like their signature, “Exactly Like You,” were now anthems to her. At the piano, he imagined a life with her that could never have been, staying in the studio, remaining in that room forever.

When they grew hungry, he would tip a beggar boy who lived across the Bund in a space underneath the pilings to fetch hot food. “German or Cantonese?” he would ask her.

“Cantonese,” she would say with a laugh, and move closer to him.

It was all they would do, love each other. He would play the piano, make tea. Dressed or not dressed, speaking or silent, their togetherness would express itself in thought and laughter, music, the day’s routines. “Shall I send the boy for dim sum?” he would say as he held out her cup.

Before, he had mastered his repertoire through practice. Now he closed his eyes, found melodies, and followed them until they grew through their own turns and variations, always as he dreamed of her. He realized this was the same feeling the other fellows had when they soloed, and with only six of them now, everyone except Thomas took long solo flights.

Tonight he might do it, full as he was of love and loss and troubled notes—so that when he signaled a solo for himself, and all the other instruments fell back in surprise, he took straight off into the sky with a rhapsodic ladder of joyfully tinkling dance steps that brought shouts and applause from the ballroom floor, and grins and nods from the bandstand, even Lester and Errol.
Beautiful
, said the voice in his head, and he understood that it was Song’s. She was with him.

Applause washed over him in waves. To keep it going, he led a quick chord change into “In a Sentimental Mood” in D minor, and then, in a subtle show of virtuosity, modulated to F major after managing to toy with D-flat major for a moment—but tickling it perfectly, lightly, his beat exactly square. He was true and he was a liar; he had dealt both love and death.

From his end of the stage, Alonzo heard Thomas’s playing soaring on its own, and kept his eyes on the piano as his own left hand ranged up and down his fretboard and his right plucked, slapped, and hammered down the percussion and the bass, as one. He wondered about it as his fingers danced the beat up and down, pulling it, popping it, until the truth swam into view: the young man was in love.
That’s it, son. Right there
. He caught Thomas’s eye and added his own smile to the roar of approval that was washing up from the dance floor. The boy had been to the mountaintop.

On the thirteenth of September, a month after the fighting started, Song met Chen Xing at Café Louis on Bubbling Well Road. Here, the city’s most elegant cakes and chocolates were created by chefs plucked from the tide of skilled Jewish refugees pouring into the city. To Song they were an oppressed people, and as
Shanghai ren
she was proud of her city for welcoming them in, while she also enjoyed the fruits of their talents with candid pleasure, such as the signature
ganache
here at Café Louis. Like most places in the French and International Concessions, the restaurant had reopened after the first few days of the battle, even though shelling, bombing, and small-arms fire could be heard almost every day and night, and intermittent food shortages played havoc with the menus.

This time Chen Xing came alone, and they talked in voices pillowed almost to a whisper, since Shanghai was filled with spies. The Communists themselves had moles in the Nationalist government, the French police, the Bank of China, and many other places.

He appeared pessimistic. “We will not hold out for long. The Japanese have been landing reinforcements at Wusong and up and down the Huangpu for days. Thousands of dwarf soldiers have put ashore.”

“But the Italians?” she said hopefully. The wireless had been reporting that the Savoy Grenadiers were on their way from Addis Ababa.

“No. Unless one of the big Western powers joins the fight, the city will fall.” He looked at her with sympathy. “What will you do?”

“I am a bonded servant,” she reminded him.

“If that changes?” He watched her face. “Many people are leaving. You know the government has already abandoned Nanjing and moved to Chongqing,” the new wartime capital. “Some people are going to Hong Kong. If they are staying in China, they go either to Chongqing—”

“—if they are with the Nationalists.”

“Correct. Or Yan’an.”

She nodded. That was the Communists’ wartime capital, a dusty, wind-whistling town on the Yan River which was where every true pilgrim of the movement wished to go—including her. Securely behind Red lines, in a part of north China controlled by the CCP, it was that mythic place where she would be able to live openly in her beliefs. Glorious.

She put her gaze back on Chen Xing. “What about you?” she said, for he could either come out now with the Communists, or continue to hide among the Nationalists.

“I’ll go to Chongqing,” he said.

“So you will stay belowground.”

“It suits me.”

She nodded. He was the scion of a well-off family; no doubt he wanted to hold on to his wealth and privilege a little longer, too. Living as a double agent would make it possible.

“Your new contact will get in touch with you through a business you already patronize,” Chen told her.

Song understood. The Party owned many businesses, everything from furniture stores to tea shops to real estate agencies. Their premises were used for meetings and handoffs, sometimes without managers or employees even knowing. Song loved seeing the pieces fit together behind the surface scrim of reality; she had come to understand that perception itself was power.