Shanghai (52 page)

* * *

“THAT WILL GIVE ME the needed delay,” Li Tian said, then he inserted a series of small bamboo ladders, each with eight rungs. He carefully picked up eight of the stars that he had made by pasting blasting powder to a central stone and rolling it in iron filings. After that he'd rolled them in more blasting powder, more iron filings. The stars, like giant sparklers, were each about two inches in diameter and perfectly round. The first of the stars he placed carefully on the first rung of the first ladder inside the tube, then the second star on the second rung of the second ladder, and so on until each of the eight ladders supported a different star. He aligned the ladders with great care so that the distance between each was exactly the same. Then he filled in the rest of the cavity with more of his explosive mixture. When he had the cavity exactly halfway filled he inserted a second paper disk, through which he threaded another fuse.

December 31, 1889

Another man—a Chinese man with extraordinarily large ears, Tu Yueh-sen—looked at the tumult of Shanghai that New Year's Eve, and as the fireworks lit the sky of the dawning decade, he withdrew a blade from his belt and silently renewed the promise he had made to his dying grandmother. He thought again about the best way to punish the
Fan Kuei
—by hurting them in the only way that they could be hurt, in the marketplace, in money—and in Shanghai, the only vast swell of money was in opium.

He twirled his knife as his man came out of the Old Shanghai Restaurant to tell him that the leader of the Tong of the Righteous Hand (the
Shan Chu
; the
Mountain Master) was fattening his gut on noodles in a private room at the back of the old eatery.

The Tong of the Righteous Hand was once an underground anti-Manchu movement, but it was now just another criminal gang that controlled a small although growing part of the opium trade—the only Chinese part. Tu Yueh-sen planned to take over the Chinese section of the opium trade, then use that as a base to mount his all-out attack against the
Fan Kuei
traders.

Several Tong foot soldiers came out of an alley and ran up the wide staircase leading to the main entrance of the Old Shanghai Restaurant. Tu readied himself. He knew that the time for change had come. He could smell it in the air. In other men there might have been a quickening of the pulse, a slither of excitement moving up the spine, perhaps a cooling of the skin—but not with Tu. He simply took a step farther back into the alley and signalled for his men to be calm.

The Tong foot soldiers disappeared into the restaurant, then the Tong's head bodyguard stepped out, followed by ten Tong lieutenants,
Hung Kwan
(Red Poles). The lieutenants quickly cleared the steps of Chinese couples and families waiting to get into the popular eating spot and took up positions on either side of the staircase as they scanned the street and nearby buildings. They were shortly joined by the foot soldiers.

Their boss, the Mountain Master, will come out first and spoil our plan,
Tu thought. But he was wrong. The Tong's tall, thin Incense Master, who was in charge of the Tong's secret rites and ceremonies, stepped out into the cool night air and belched loudly, and then a second time.

It was the agreed-upon signal.

Tu Yueh-sen smiled.
So they are off a-whoring. Good,
he thought. He turned to his men and whispered, “Follow them from in front.”

“Not possible to follow them when we're ahead of them.”

“Very possible if you know where they're going.”

“Do we know that?”

“
We
don't,” Tu said slowly, noting that he would enjoy this one's death, “
I
do. To Jiang's …” He turned to his men and quickly relayed the information.

A runner immediately sprinted toward the French Concession to alert Tu's men who were already in position there. The plan they had practised for almost two months in the dirty shantytowns where they lived was now to be put into action.

Moments later the Tong boss stepped out of the restaurant. He was closely followed by his head sycophant, known in Tong lore as a “White Paper Fan,” who opened a gold cigarette case and offered a Snake Charmer to his rotund boss. The cigarette almost disappeared into the man's chubby cheeks.

So, you are going to get fucked, are you, fat man?
Tu thought. Tu had been with his share of women but seldom found it satisfying—in fact he often felt a profound disgust when he was finished, especially if the girl continued to writhe beneath him—astride him—before him—her eyes rolled back in her head searching—searching for something.
No doubt the same thing this pudgy Mountain Master is in search of,
Tu thought. Then the chubby Tong boss strode down the steps of the restaurant like a great conqueror returning to his people.

Tu spat. His saliva glistened in the reflected glow from the fireworks that lit the northern heavens. Then
he stepped on the spit, as his grandmother had taught him, “to send the curse deep into the ground.” He took out his knife and allowed its keen edge to cut lightly into his palm, as he had when just an urchin boy in the trash-filled alleys, where his friends looked to him to lead them to a better life. And he had, by unleashing unheard of levels of violence. The violence had led to power and the power to better food, better homes, and, as he grew—better women. His life had been so consistently involved with violence that he simply saw it as the way the world functioned. He didn't think of things in terms of right and wrong. Rather, he thought of violence as nothing more than the most direct means to an end. Although he found no joy in inflicting pain, on occasions he saw the beauty of it. The elongation of time when the blade entered a living thing always thrilled him. And, oh yes, his realm of violence had much to do with sharp things—knives. But although he owned a sacred swalto blade he chose not to use it. His reading of the
I Ching
had convinced him that he must respect the sacred. That as long as his killing was in the arena of the profane, he would continue to progress toward his goal—the end of
Fan Kuei
power. But if he cut into the sphere of the hallowed, “disaster that way lay.” His work and the sacred must not mix. He lit joss sticks most mornings at the Long Hua Temple after he read from the
I Ching
, always taking time to admire the carved lions on the narrow struts at the roofs' edges. His rage was not against the gods. His rage was against the
Fan Kuei
. The fires of his rage had been stoked long ago by his grandmother. And it was her voice he heard in his ears whispering for him to “wreak revenge on them, on all of them.” Whose owl-claw hands grasped him by the throat from her deathbed and screamed at him that
it was “Your duty to use your strength to punish them. To punish the
Fan Kuei
. To take back all that they have taken from this family!” Tu had heard often enough the story of the family's wealth and position being stolen by the
Fan Kuei
. How the family had fallen all the way down to the shantytown that, as a boy, he had called home. But now his targets were in his sites. First take over the Tong of the Righteous Hand's opium assets, then use them as a base to mount an assault on the
Fan Kuei
traders.

Tu Yueh-sen, he who would soon be called Gangster Tu, looked again at the rotund Mountain Master of the Tong of the Righteous Hand. The man waddled down the restaurant steps looking at his feet. “Look up, fat man,” Tu whispered, then added, “See how these fireworks rise, explode in light, then fall to earth? Well, my fat friend, your fire has already been extinguished, and now it is time for you to fall all the way to Hell.”

* * *

LI TIAN REPEATED the process with his other eight bamboo ladders and eight more sparkler stars, but this time the ladders were closer to the centre—a tighter circle than the one below.

Then he filled that cavity with his blasting mixture. He sealed the top of the firework, sat back, and lit a cigarette. It may have been the
Fan Kuei
's New Year's Eve, but it was his night to shine—like no one had ever shone before.

December 31, 1889

Even as the Mountain Master of the Tong of the Righteous Hand made his leisurely way to Jiang's, Jiang herself, the Carver, and the Confucian waited in the deep, secret cavern of the Warrens for the arrival of the new member of the Chosen Three.

The sound of the Huangpo River could be heard on the other side of the stone wall. The winter dampness had entered Jiang's bones, and she shivered as she wondered how the old Body Guard's son would accept the duties of the Ivory Compact he had inherited from his father. She nodded briefly as she remembered how her mother had given her the initial instructions about the family's obligation to the First Emperor's prophetic relic.
Her mother had taken her aside only a few hours before she would attend her first meeting of the Chosen Three and told her all that she needed to know about the Compact. Then the old woman had kissed her hard on the forehead and said, “Now your name is Jiang, and what was mine is yours. Do me and your much-honoured older sister, the History Teller, proud. Make them revere you the way they did her.”

“And you, Mother, the way they revere you still.”

“For that praise, I thank you.”

Mother and daughter embraced. Then her mother said, “Now get out of here. Even a whore, no, fuck that,
especially
a whore, has a right to die in some privacy.”

Those words had echoed in her mind as she sat through her first meeting in the secret chamber of the Warrens. That was almost twenty-five years ago, and soon she would have to assign the name Jiang to one of her two younger daughters—and then tell her to “get out of here,” because—and on this she totally agreed with her mother—after a life as a whore, she had the right to privacy at the end.

On that long-ago night she had returned from her first meeting of the Ivory Compact to find her mother's delicate features twisted in pain and her face bloated black from the poison that she had swallowed. A poison not so different from the one that Jiang herself, standing in the cold of the Warrens on that decadal evening, carried in a hidden pocket of her silk robe. Although there was a time when she'd doubted that she could ever take her own life, life itself had taught her many lessons, not the least of which was that only if you were willing to take your own life were you in control of your life. And control had been a major tenet of hers during her
almost quarter of a century in control of the Chinese demimonde of Shanghai.

The Confucian was younger than Jiang by probably ten years, and the two had known each other for several years but not intimately. The Confucian was a very private man. His father had passed on his responsibilities in the Ivory Compact in the opening pages of a lengthy diary, the entries of which—every one by Confucians in the Ivory Compact—stretched all the way back to the time of the First Emperor. The young man had found the extraordinary document beneath his father's ancient writing stone two days after his passing.

He would never forget the first meeting of the Chosen Three he attended. He had thought it nothing but foolishness, but quickly changed his mind when he peered into the first portal of the Narwhal Tusk. That night he read the entirety of the diary and made his first written contribution to the Confucian legacy. That was just over twenty years and hundreds of diary entries ago.

“He's late,” the Carver said. Despite the fact that the Carver was easily the youngest in the room he assumed a senior position to the others—as the Carver always had, from the very beginning on the Holy Mountain.

They heard a loud thump from the south corridor and Jiang looked to the men. Both quickly ran down the length of the hidden corridor and found the Body Guard's son slumped against a wall just past an overhanging ledge that was a little known marker for an access to the hidden corridor from the south. They helped him into the chamber. The man's clothes were soaked through with the blood of his initiation, but once he was in the chamber he stood erect. Jiang noted
the signs of great age in his eyes—something closer to the many years of his grandfather the Fisherman.

The Confucian was aware of something very different about this young man. Upon Loa Wei Fen's death on the stage in Chinkiang, the Fisherman's younger son had become the Body Guard. He had now passed the torch to his son. But this young man was not a bodyguard. He was clearly an Assassin. Bodyguards used their exceptional martial arts skills in a purely defensive posture. Assassins used those same skills to take steps to advance the prophecy of the Ivory, the most serious of which was the re-formation of the ancient Guild of Assassins.

For the very first time in the Ivory Compact the Body Guard had been replaced by an Assassin—potentially the head of the Guild of Assassins. A serious change to the constituency of the Compact. But they all knew the time was right for a man of action to be part of their conspiracy.

“Are you weak from your wounds?” Jiang asked.

“No. They make me strong,” the Assassin responded.

The Confucian nodded. A particularly loud series of fireworks sent dull, concussive thuds through the underground chamber.

Lao Wei Fen held his hands over his ears until the sound dissipated.

Jiang watched him closely. “Does the sound hurt you?”

“No. Not the sound. The fact that the sound is theirs, not ours. Their new year, not ours. Their new decade, not ours.” He looked at the others of the Ivory Compact and stated the obvious. “Theirs, the
Fan Kuei,
not ours.” As the sound of the waves of the Huangpo River outside the walls of the Warrens chamber slowly pushed aside the din of the fireworks, a calm descended on him.
The sound of the Huangpo River was the sound of their river. A Chinese river.