Shanghai (59 page)

Vrassoon threw up his arms and shouted, “Enough,” to the translator. He reached beneath his desk and pressed a button. Immediately four brawny men entered from hidden panels behind him. Two were Sikhs who rushed in with weapons drawn.

Tu didn't back off a step. He put two fingers in his mouth and produced an ear-splitting whistle. For a breath nothing happened, then all twenty of the floor-to-ceiling windows of the large room exploded inward as Tu's men, led by Loa Wei Fen, broke into the room with weapons aimed and ready.

“How dare you?” shouted Vrassoon.

The translator translated that accurately.

“I dare because I am Tu Yueh-sen, the Mountain Master, the
Shan Chu
of the Tong of the Righteous Hand, and I am not a man to be insulted by a foolish, ugly Round-Eye.”

The translator translated that accurately, except for the very end, where he replaced “Round-Eye” with “Foreign Devil,” feeling somehow that was less offensive.

Tu screamed an order. The front door of the Vrassoons' office was flung open and two large dollies carrying many mango-wood chests full of opium were wheeled into the room.

“What is the meaning of this?” Vrassoon demanded.

“Look at the markings on the chests, foolish man,” Tu said, pointing to the stamped ownership on the bills of lading attached to the chests: “Property of the British East India Company.”

Vrassoon gasped, “Are you …?”

Tu looked to the translator, who did his best to translate and fill in the end of Vrassoon's thought without accusing Tu of any wrongdoing.

Tu laughed and spat out, “It was me who assaulted your ship in the harbour. And I can do it over and over again, and there is nothing that you or your British friends can do about it. Now, do you want your property back or not?”

The translator put that into simple, extremely accurate English.

Vrassoon surprised everyone by sitting back behind his desk and ordering his men away. Then he waited.

Tu smiled, nodded to Loa Wei Fen, and then ordered his men to leave as well. The men retreated, leaving only the echoes of crunched glass in the room.

Finally the room was empty except for Vrassoon, Gangster Tu, and the translator—and of course the swirling winter wind that blew through the broken windows and lofted the heavy curtains like sails that had been cut from their riggings.

The men quickly dropped the insults and moved to ground that both understood: bargaining. This was business at its starkest. The threat of immediate violence sat on Tu's right hand, the threat of the British Navy sat on Vrassoon's left—and between the two sat the possibility of control of the great opium trade of Shanghai, which had slipped from the Vrassoons' hands by the late 1870s. Since the death of the Vrassoon Patriarch the family had consolidated its assets and now was more invested in real estate and the large mercantile emporiums that would eventually be called department stores. But neither enterprise had the consistent staying power or the virtually guaranteed profits of the old opium trade.

From Tu's perspective, he needed a backer. A powerful backer to move from thief to master of the opium trade—a necessary half-step for him to have the power base to fulfill his promise to his grandmother to punish the
Fan Kuei
.

Vrassoon knew he needed muscle and daring to re-enter as a major player in the opium game. Ever since the Vrassoons had lost their monopoly on direct trade from England to China, the family's share in the opium trade had dwindled. Was this Chink thug what he needed to regain supremacy in the
Chandra
trade?

The men approached each other warily and began to make progress, until Vrassoon suddenly went silent. He looked at the photograph of his father on the desk—his father's desk. The Vrassoons had never had a Chinese partner. His father's strict prohibition against dealing
with anyone who was not “of the faith” had not really been lessened after his death. “They are our consumers, not our partners,” the old Patriarch had told him on his deathbed. “Their religion makes them weak, so they succumb to the lures of
Chandra
. They were made to lift and tote and smoke themselves into oblivion. Remember that, son.”

“Is there a problem?” Tu asked, and the translator conveyed the question to Vrassoon.

Vrassoon thought about his father's words a second time, then abruptly stood. Tu was shocked at such impoliteness. Vrassoon turned to the translator and said, “Tell him that he has thirty seconds to get his Slant eyes out of my home, and that I expect restitution for the damage done here and the full return of the property that belongs to the British East India Company.” Then he turned on his heel and exited.

“What did the stupid smelly man say?” Tu demanded.

The translator hemmed and hawed in both languages.

“Fine,” Tu said, then added, “if you value your life, or that of your idiot wife and rat children, tell me exactly what the
Fan Kuei
said.”

The translator did so, word for word.

Tu allowed the anger to make its way through his body, then said, “Find him and tell him this—exactly. He will never get back his opium. I will never give him money to fix his ridiculous house, and he had better not appear without guards on all sides of him if he wishes to breathe the air of the city at the Bend in the River beyond the end of the week.”

With that, Tu turned and headed toward the door. Halfway there he stopped, opened his flies, and let loose a long, arcing stream of urine that quickly soaked into the fabulously expensive Mosul carpet.

Ru Chou, the hot-water store owner, checked in on his sleeping daughters, then made his way in the pre-dawn light down the stairs to the small courtyard in the back of his
lilong
that fronted on the alley. Six years ago he had converted the living room of his home into his now quite popular hot-water store and teashop. Earlier that morning he'd heard the rumble of the night-soil cart, and he was happy to see that his family's “honeypot” had been not only emptied but also well scrubbed. He lifted the round, red-painted wooden bucket by its brass handles and placed it by the back door—far enough away from the kitchen, but close enough that the curtain hung there could be pulled to offer a person some privacy as they did their daily ablutions.

Before he put down the night-soil bucket he heard the song of the newspaper seller, followed shortly by the pleasant song of the flower seller. He bought a paper from one and purple winter irises from the other, which he placed in a vase on a small table beneath the circular wall mirror. Then he opened his store just as his usual first customer of the day—a poor labourer—approached his shop. It was another fine, cold day. Ru Chou's business was progressing, and he was happy with the simple repetition of his daily rituals. It reassured him. It made him feel part of this great growing thing called Shanghai. He pocketed the poor man's single coin, pulled off three sheets of toilet paper, and handed them over. The man tugged on each sheet to be sure that it was solid, then handed over a second coin. Ru Chou gave him two cigarettes. The poor labourer turned and headed toward the public outhouse. It had been thus with this man for several years, and with luck, Ru Chou thought, would be for many, many more.

The poor labourer was not the only one who used Ru Chou's hot-water store for assistance in getting the day started.

Outside, in the alley, two barbers were setting up their stools. Because one was new to the sidewalk, Ru Chou assumed there would be trouble. Rich people fought over money and prestige and women; poor people fought over space. Barbers always had to be near hot-water stores to get the necessary heated water for shaving, so this scenario was not new to Ru Chou.

Ru Chou saw frost on the north-facing window, so he knew that it would be a busy day. He stoked the fire beneath the great cauldron with bean sprout stems and other wood refuse. He'd thought about using coal but had decided against it. Instead he had taken the money
he saved and bought two fine tables. Now he had a brisk business in serving tea at those tables, made from the same hot water boiling away in the great cauldron, which would also be used for those interested in public bathing in the back.

He began to fill hot-water bottles. For the poor they were the only relief from the severe cold of a Shanghai February.

As he did, a housemaid entered and beckoned to him. She opened her apron and displayed the remains of a broken opium pipe and two small tin containers filled with the opium dregs she'd scraped out of pipes and off trays and from the tips of piercing needles. Ru Chou smelled the materials and slipped three coins onto the table. The maid gladly picked them up and left the shop. Ru Chou took the pipe and the dregs behind the counter and added them to the other dregs he had bought over the past few days. A dealer would be around later in the day, and Ru Chou would sell his stock of dregs to the man. The dealer would then, in turn, clean the pipes and other leavings of opium smokers into a large bowl, add water, and put it over a flame. The mixture would take on the various properties of opium in a tea-like form that he would then sell to labourers far too poor to avail themselves of the Indian opium smoked by the wealthy. Everyone gained. The wealthy woman's maid earned a few coppers she would not normally have, Ru Chou benefited from his markup, the seller of opium dregs gained when he sold the opium tea, and the workers gained when they finally found some affordable relief from the pain and drudgery of their lives. Thus was Shanghai.

Ru Chou noted a lean, hungry-looking young man with a purple birthmark covering much of his face
eyeing him through the front window of his store. Ru Chou's family slept above the store, and people in the
lilong
complex all looked out for one another, but he assumed that none of them had seen this particular hungry boy—no, this was no boy, it was a young man, and from the way he carried himself and the clothes he wore, an arrogant, literate young man.

Suddenly the door opened and the young man entered the shop. “May I help you?” Ru Chou asked.

“May I help you?” the young man mocked back.

“Is there something wrong?” Ru Chou asked, quickly scanning the street to see if there was anyone around—there wasn't. Where had the barbers gone?

“Wrong? Why should there be something wrong? This is Shanghai, everything is wonderful in soulless Shanghai. You make money, everyone makes money, but there is no soul here. No advancement of the human mind. Just money! Endless grubbing for money.”

Ru Chou slid behind the counter and allowed his fingers to touch the two hot-water bottles sitting there. They were not much of a weapon, but they were something.

“What say you to that, merchant Ru Chou? What say you?”

“I say that people come to Shanghai to have a better way of life, and that many have found that here. Me and my family came here with almost nothing, and now we have a home and a shop, and my daughter is to be married.”

The young man scratched at the large raspberry birthmark on his face, then nodded his head. Finally he said, “But at what cost?”

“No cost,” Ru Chou replied, gaining confidence that this young man was not a robber. “No cost except the
sweat from our brows and the calluses on our hands. If you work, you eat in Shanghai, not like in the country.”

“And the educated, do they eat in Shanghai?”

“If they work.”

“What about their work learning the classic literature of our people?”

“Stupidity. A waste of time and good paper,” Ru Chou said, then laughed.

The young man with the wine stain on his face didn't laugh. Instead, he pointed directly at Ru Chou's heart and made the sound of a gunshot.

Two men from the alley arrived with soap and towels and paid Ru Chou to use two of the six tightly packed tubs on the far side of his cauldron. The men pulled the privacy curtain, disrobed, and held their clothes out to Ru Chou, who slipped them onto hangers and then, with the assistance of a twelve-foot bamboo pole, hung the garments on a very high bar suspended from the ceiling.

“So that thieves will not steal the clothes of the fat merchants,” snarled the young man.

“Exactly, but you may have noticed that neither of the men is fat, and for your information, both work in the sugar factory.”

“For the
Fan Kuei!
”

“Yes, this is the Foreign Settlement, so—”

“Shameful!” the young man spat out. “Shameful!” Then he calmly took a small-calibre pistol from a pocket of his long robe and shot Ru Chou through the heart. The merchant fell instantly to the floor beside the cauldron.

Suddenly the young man sensed someone watching him. He whirled to his right only to see his own countenance reflected back at him from the circular wall mirror.
The purple blotch on his face was almost the same colour as the winter irises in the vase beneath the mirror. He turned quickly from the mirror. Then, without rushing, he stepped up to Ru Chou's body and drew two characters on the hot-water store owner's forehead: “Murdered Collaborator.”

Jiang watched the Go players. The older man she had known for many years; the younger one had only recently begun to frequent her brothel. Years ago the old man had been considered quite a goat in the bedroom, his prowess known to many of the girls. His exertions were often just on the edge of cruelty and had not gone unnoted. But now he was just an old man who was lucky enough to have the wherewithal to spend his days in Jiang's house, much as older men without money spent their days sitting and chatting with the street barber or the street cobbler. In Jiang's house he was charged a minimal fee that he paid at the end of every fourth month. In return he could come and go as he pleased, be served middle- to low-ranking tea, and play Go to his heart's content.

The old man's knurled fingers slipped into the porcelain cup that held his black stones. The board was almost two-thirds filled with his pieces and the younger man's white ones. The outcome of the game looked to be still in doubt—or so the casual viewer would have believed. But Jiang had never seen the old man lose a game, even though he often gave his opponent substantial handicaps, sometimes as much as four or even six pieces. However, judging by the considerable amount of money bet on the contest, money that now sat on one side of the board, Jiang doubted that the old man had given his younger opponent much of an edge.