Night in Shanghai (31 page)

It’s where they keep women
.

A roaring in his ears seemed to drown everything else out, as he pushed his way past the line, up to the desk. “Zhang Zhuli?” he said, over and over, and wrote out the characters, which were the same in Japanese
kanji
.

The man called someone else from the back, who took the name and checked it against a ledger. “Not here,” he said, handing the card back.

“Please! She was sent here!”

The first man pulled out another, older book from beneath the desk, and the second man opened it and flipped through it grudgingly.

Just as he was reaching to close it, he saw her. “Here,” he said, and turned the ledger to show her name. It had a line through it.

“Where is she now?” Lin croaked.

“Gone away,” said the man, and closed the book.

Lin stepped back, reeling.
That means dead
. “Are you sure?” he said, his voice remote, as if it came from somewhere outside himself.

“Sure,” the man barked back, glaring. Shanghai was a vassal city, and its whores, living or dead, were not his concern.

A ringing in Lin Ming’s ears blocked everything as he pushed out, past the line of men waiting to get in. He walked blindly. But then a shout made him stop short, and he saw he had been about to walk into a cart being hauled by two men. In it were eight or ten girls’ bodies stacked like so much cordwood. They had been stripped naked, since their clothes at least still had some value, and their bodies heaped up with a sheet of burlap over them. Their bare white feet stuck out, jouncing with every bump in the road. It was that pitiful sight, the jiggling pile of feet, that cracked his shell and brought out his first long howl of pain.

Thomas had come to know all the voices in his building. He followed the lives of its tenants, their anger and laughter, conversations, the hours at which they came and went. When they had visitors, he knew whether it was someone new or a person who had come to the door before.

So he was surprised one morning to hear a familiar voice outside. It was a man’s voice, someone he knew, and he spoke Chinese in clear, bell-like tones that even Thomas, who still understood only a few words of the language, recognized as cultured. He jumped up and threw on his clothes, unable to place the voice. All he knew was that he never expected to hear it in this Frenchtown alley.

Downstairs, he was startled to discover H. H. Kung attracting a fast-growing circle of onlookers to his front door. The Premier was instantly recognizable.

“Dr. Kung,” Thomas said. He had met the man several times at the Royal, in what felt like another lifetime. “Please come in.”

“Thank you.” Kung touched the rim of his bowler in the American style he had acquired in college and never lost. “But if you don’t mind—” He sent a glance to the lane-mouth, thirty or forty meters down, where Thomas saw his car and driver waited. He understood.

In the car, Kung explained. “It is Lin Ming. He has been working for the Jewish Resettlement Plan, as you know. He arrived in Shanghai four days ago, conducted a very important secret meeting for the Plan, and then vanished.”

“Here? In Shanghai?” the words shook as they came out, for people were getting killed all the time. And it made no sense that Lin would come to the city and not contact him.

Kung raised a hand. “He is alive, but not well. My people found him today. That’s why I came to you.”

“Where is he?”

“In the
Daitu
.”

The Badlands. That was one word Thomas knew. “Was he kidnapped?”

“No.” Kung sighed heavily. “Pearl is dead. His intended. It seems he has been out of his senses ever since he learned. I have sent three of my men in to talk to him, but no one can make him leave.”

“Drinking?”

“No. Heroin. It’s worse than opium.” The car pulled up outside the iron gates to the Hollywood, its lights blinking even in the daytime, its grassy front lot already packed with dark, square-topped motorcars.

“He’s in there?” Thomas said, dismayed at the sprawl of the complex, where it was rumored customers died every night of some excess or other.

“I cannot go in and reason with him,” Kung said, his voice pinched with frustration. “You saw what happened when I stood outside your door for a few minutes. Please. Go and bring him out. He will listen to you.”

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.

“Consul Ho,” said a child’s voice, and he turned to look.

“Lord have mercy,” he exclaimed, one of the first English expressions he had learned as a child from the Norwegians who had schooled him, and which still erupted from him fairly regularly.

It was Lilith-Sylvia Doron. He knew her family; twice he had visited their home for dinner. “What are you doing out here by yourself, Sylvia?”

“I was with some girls from my class. I got separated.” She looked ready to cry, and with good reason, he thought. The Doron family was Jewish, and this parade was a terrifying show of Nazi force.

She was shaking. He slipped his hand through hers. “Come,” he said. “I take you home.”

He sensibly led her away from the military marchers and the crowds shouting
Sieg Heil
, and down quieter streets also lined with bare-limbed trees, the houses stern and silent with their curtains drawn. Consul Ho could feel the eyes on him as he walked the girl down the street.

When he rang her parents’ doorbell and they opened up, they started to cry.

“Now, come,” he said reasonably, “she’s safe and sound. If you are really frightened, I will stay a little while. I am a diplomat! I am the Consul General. No one will harm you while I am here.”

And with that he sat down in the parlor, not far from the welcoming fire, and chatted with Sylvia, and her brother, Karl, and their parents. It was not until evening that Herr and Frau Doron said they felt safe, and that it would be all right if he went home. “Remember,” he said before he left. “We are friends. Any problem, come to me.”

In the months that followed, actions against Jews became frequent and public. He saw SS men waiting outside synagogues, where they grabbed Jewish men emerging from services, shoved them into trucks, and then forced them to use their prayer shawls to scrub the urinals in the SS barracks. Ho Feng-Shan found it childish and hateful.

In midsummer, people started lining up at the Chinese Consulate. Soon the line stretched all the way down the driveway. People stood there for hours.