Shanghai (39 page)

But of course now it was him following—following the History Teller and the red-haired
Fan Kuei
out into the countryside. The inky blackness of the night made his task simple. As they walked he often came within ten yards of them. With his keen eyesight he matched their footfalls and inhalations. They never sensed his presence—although he was acutely aware of them, of everything about them: their steps in perfect pace, her height equal to his, their hands touching, seemingly inadvertently, from time to time.

At the small but neatly kept farmhouse, the
Fan Kuei
and the History Teller removed their shoes, and Loa Wei Fen circled the building. Finding an open door to a dank cellar, he entered and stood very still. He heard them above. He felt his way in the darkness and found a ladder that led to a door in the floor, which he opened an inch. Through the crack he saw Maxi pour wine for the History Teller and a Hakka woman bring out a newborn and two young girls. It was obvious from the way that the red-haired
Fan Kuei
held the baby that the child was his own. The two young girls held their mother's hands, but when they were called over to be introduced to the History Teller they were happy to be with the red-haired
Fan Kuei. These must be stepchildren,
Loa Wei Fen thought.

After their wine and a sticky rice pastry that the History Teller proclaimed to be the finest she'd ever tasted, she and the
Fan Kuei
went out into the fields. Loa Wei Fen retraced his steps and followed them. The fields smelled of newly laid fertilizer, probably night-soil. But the sky was clear and the wind blew gently. Loa Wei Fen climbed a small tree and watched the two of them walk side by side through the rows of sorghum and soya and then enter the dense field of tall bamboo canes. Something about their body language made Loa Wei Fen's heart ache. It was clear to him that these two, despite the
Fan Kuei
'
s
Hakka wife and children, were destined to discover something Loa Wei Fen had never had—love.

That night the History Teller slept in the open room on fresh mats laid on the floor by the Hakka woman. But she was not alone. Up above her, stretched out on a rafter beam, was Loa Wei Fen, watching, protecting the woman for whom his heart ached, the History Teller.

Various locales in the Celestial Kingdom 1860

The Dowager Empress, Tzu Hsi—also known as “Old Buddha”—looked at her beautiful feet and smiled. They were her pride, now that the glitter in her eyes had dulled and the skin of her face had spotted brown. Her feet remained her final claim to the great beauty of her youth. Ah, she had been a very great beauty—a famous beauty—and had taken full advantage of her exquisiteness to satisfy her gargantuan sexual appetites. Even the memory made her glow and waters move where they had not moved in quite some time. Was it the danger that quickened her, loosed her interior streams—gave her access to the lava flow? She didn't know, but she
enjoyed the motion, the life within that even further curled her tiny toes beneath her perfectly arched foot.

“Majesty?”

She'd forgotten that the ugly man was standing at attention waiting for her to answer some question or other. She didn't know which. She'd almost forgotten that she was at a war council that she herself had ordered into session. These were ugly men, though, of that she was sure. The ugliest she had seen in some time. Still, they were better warriors than the pretty ones she had appointed at the beginning of this noisome rebellion.

“Majesty?”

“Report,” she said with a curt nod. That was always a good thing to say.

“Yes, Majesty. The rebels approached our Shanghai positions in force. They were led by General Li Xiucheng.”

Another cow-faced man,
she thought.
This one I'll have boiled in oil when they catch the insolent pup.

“Majesty, they sent letters in advance to the heads of each of the
Fan Kuei
groups guaranteeing the safety of their persons and property. All they wanted from the Round Eyes was a continuation of their neutrality while they attacked our positions.”

But the
Fan Kuei
did not remain neutral,
she thought. Her spies had already told her that the Taiping assault on the Chinese section of Shanghai had been repulsed by the guns from the
Fan Kuei
ships. But why? She stood, and the men in the room leapt to their feet. She smiled, inside this time. Her smile was not for the consumption of these ugly men. She walked with the oh-so-desirable hip-swivelling gait that was the natural result of the binding of her feet as
a little girl. It had hurt terribly, but she'd never cried, never showed the world the cost of attaining beauty—great beauty—celestial beauty.

When she came to a stop two servants rushed to place a satin stool behind her. Without looking down the Dowager Empress of China plopped her rump on the padded seat. As she did, she remarked, “Perhaps it is time to approach the Foreign Devils—perhaps it is finally time for them to join us in ridding the Celestial Kingdom of these heavenly fools.” Then she thought of the ugliness of the Foreign Devils and momentarily the sweetmeats she had consumed an hour before threatened to move up her throat and out her mouth. She let out a breath that picked up the scent of the anise flower that she kept in her left cheek and listened to her stomach flip one last time. Perhaps it was better just to poison the
Fan Kuei
's water supply and be done with them. She smiled at the thought—to rid the world of so many ugly people at one time pleased her. She glanced at her tiny feet in her tiny satin shoes and thought,
Beautiful. Truly beautiful.

She looked up at her ugly generals and said, “Offer the
Fan Kuei
trading access to Beijing if they commit their forces to join ours to rid China of these Taiping fools.” She looked away. How long could she bear to look at these unsightly men? Then she thought,
First the
Fan Kuei
will help us eradicate the rebels, and then I will eradicate them.

* * *

MAXI REACHED UP and touched the tunnel struts beneath the Taiping stronghold. He gave one a yank and it didn't budge. He shook his head.

The three Taipingers with him hadn't seen their strange red-haired
Fan Kuei
behave like this before. His translator, a Hakka man whom Maxi called Cupid, asked, “Is something wrong, sir?”

Maxi called the man Cupid because he couldn't begin to pronounce the man's Hakka name, and the man also had a bizarrely tiny, bow-shaped mouth. But Maxi had also been to battle with Cupid and knew him to be a man with a warrior's heart, and because of that he trusted him, not something Maxi did often or easily.

“They're getting better,” Maxi said.

“The Manchus?”

“Yes, the Manchus, unless someone else built this tunnel,” Maxi, uncharacteristically, snapped. Maxi had successfully defended several of the Taipingers' walled cities against Manchu attack. His strategy wasn't complicated. Once he was sure the city's walls were sound—and many of the walls were very sound—then he knew the attack would have to come from underground. That being the case he sent out spies to try to establish where dirt piles were accumulating. Then he drew what amounted to a straight line from the dirt pile to the nearest section of the city's walls. That was where the tunnel would be. In the night he'd instruct his men to dig down and intersect the Manchu tunnel.

Initially he'd simply diverted sewage from the town into the tunnels and allowed the townspeople to laugh at their filth-covered enemy as they emerged. Naturally the laughing citizens were safely behind their yards-thick walls. Then he'd begun to undermine the tunnels themselves, strategically removing solid struts and replacing them with hollow pieces of timber filled with blasting charges. When his spies told him that the Manchus had entered their tunnels he would set off the
charges and the tunnel would collapse on them. The strategy had worked for quite some time, but this tunnel was different. It was built by a craftsman. Maxi, despite himself, admired the workmanship. Then he said, “Blow it up,” and returned to the surface.

Once back above ground he turned to Cupid and said, “I want to go up.” Cupid hollered a series of orders and a horse was brought. Maxi leapt on its back and cantered down the rickety streets to the hill on the west side of the city centre. Standing on the back of his horse he reached for a rope harness that hung from a sturdy, tall pole and fitted it about his waist—just as he had done years ago in India, when he had retrieved the Hordoon brothers' first opium supply. With one end of the rope dangling he grabbed the other and hoisted himself into the air. As he did, he admired the lightness and strength of the silk ropes and the efficiency of the knots he had learned onboard the ship that had first brought him and his brother to China. He had since sat with several Taiping craftsmen, and they'd made porcelain block-and-tackle devices to direct the ropes, so that now he could hoist himself high in the air, and then switch harnesses and pull himself along an adjoining guide wire across the top of the crowded city.

The children ran beneath him trying to keep up, but this was no game. This city had been under siege for almost three months and the system he had developed allowed him to see the oncoming armies of the Manchus—the seemingly endless oncoming armies—armies that were getting better at their craft. The glint of light on the ground in the west fulfilled his worst fears—the Manchus were building a moat. They had made real advances in their ability to guide the course of rivers, and now they'd ushered the water into their
moat, from which they would guide it toward the walls. Walls were nothing more than two stacks of bricks or stone filled with dried mud between the masonry. If the Manchus were able to channel their moat water toward the walls, the dried mud would soak up the water and make the walls themselves unstable. And there was nothing Maxi could do about it.

The Manchus had finally found a way to besiege the Taiping cities. Maxi let himself down slowly. A grim smile was on his face.

“What?” asked Cupid.

“Nothing,” Maxi answered, but he knew that the Taipingers couldn't win, and this brave man would undoubtedly die for a doomed cause.

It never occurred to Maxi to worry about his own safety. He was responsible for the safety of others, and that was all that concerned him.

* * *

ELIAZAR VRASSOON SQUIRMED uncomfortably. It was quickly approaching sundown and it was Friday. But the two men standing in front of him seemed to be in no hurry to complete their business. If this had been opium business or silk business or rubber business or silver business, then Vrassoon would have put up his hands and called a stop to the proceedings. He had religious obligations that, unlike business negotiations, could not wait. But these men in front of him were not traders. They were emissaries sent directly from Tzu Hsi, the Dowager Empress of China. And they were proposing a most interesting arrangement—a deal to allow the traders full access to the very heart of China, to Beijing and its surrounds.

The interior of China had remained entirely off limits to the traders. They had entered the Yangtze and traded with varying degrees of success upriver until the Taipingers took over Nanking, but never up the Grand Canal to Beijing itself. Few Whites had ever seen the interior of China's capital city. None had entered the Empress's Forbidden City. Despite the specific agreements in the Treaty of Nanking, the Chinese had always refused to allow any foreigner into their capital, let alone permit
Fan Kuei
to trade freely in Beijing.

Vrassoon glanced out the window. The sun had not yet set—but it would shortly. He stood quickly and the Manchu Mandarins were shocked into silence. “Tell Her Majesty in Beijing that I am very interested in her proposition and will present it to the other traders. Now, as you can see, the sun is going down, and I have religious obligations that call upon my time.”

The translator stumbled over this last, since religious obligations linked to sunset were the result of ancient desert thinking—not the thinking of the Middle Kingdom that joins Heaven and Earth. Eventually he conveyed Vrassoon's basic meaning.

The Mandarins both raised an eyebrow, creating a humorous picture of Oriental confusion—where in fact none existed. Both men had been fully briefed concerning the odd “religious obligations” of the Vrassoon Patriarch and had purposefully extended their meeting to back up against the setting of the sun. Both men then bowed slightly and canted their heads to one side—perfect bookends again. But Eliazar Vrassoon didn't notice. He had already left the room and was heading toward the Beth Tzedic Synagogue—a place he had built and that he found very good for the contemplation of both religious and strategic problems. If his mind had
been so inclined he might have seen the similarities between the two—but the Vrassoon Patriarch's mind was not so inclined.

After sunset of the next day Eliazar Vrassoon presented the Dowager's offer to the heads of Dents, Oliphant, and Jardine Matheson—he felt no need to contact the Baghdadi boy. The men listened in what Hercules thought of as a perfunctory silence. Then the Scot broke that silence with a single word: “Why?”

“Indeed,” Percy St. John Dent added, “why bother? The rebellion has been a boon to our little town. Without it we'd still be lifting and toting our own goods and living without servants or retainers. Now, thanks to the violence in the countryside, Shanghai prospers—we prosper. Why endanger that on the promise of a Celestial? We all know how much such promises are worth. They still haven't lived up to their side of the Treaty of Nanking, and it's been more than fifteen years.”

He didn't bother mentioning that the traders hadn't lived up to their side of the treaty either, but that was-n't the issue as far as Percy St. John Dent, now the head of Dent and Company of London, was concerned.