Shanghai (75 page)

Tu didn't need to be told that. He knew of a secret entrance to the Warrens about which he had not told a soul.

“What about the Manchus?” asked Loa Wei Fen. “Don't they have access to the Warrens?”

Tu's answer—“That's been taken care of”—startled the Assassin. Then Tu allowed a crooked smile to his face. He was recalling his final negotiations with the Old Buddha. He turned slowly to the strange young man and said, “I don't think any of these problems are important, since we know exactly where in the Warrens we're going, don't we?”

The Carver's son nodded very slowly as his eyes settled for a moment in their sockets. He shuffled over to the large map.

Loa Wei Fen looked at the young man's hand and noted the cuts and scrapes and the hint of dust ground into the creases—he was a carver!

Then the young carver's fingers traced a route on the map and stopped precisely at the secret chamber within which the Narwhal Tusk lay, as if in state. He said simply, “It's there. That is where it is.”

Loa Wei Fen was shocked.

The rest of the meeting went by quickly. Loa Wei Fen, despite all his training, was having trouble concentrating. His mind was racing.

Tu Yueh-sen opened his leather-bound, well-thumbed copy of the
I Ching
and quoted a verse. It dealt with the uncovering and executing of an unbeliever. As he read, he looked right at Loa Wei Fen.

Then another shock.

The man Loa Wei Fen had replaced, the disgraced Red Pole, entered the room and stood beside Tu, and the Mountain Master put his arm around the man's shoulder. The Red Pole looked right at Loa Wei Fen, and his smile bespoke a profound rage. A rage carefully fed for years.

Jiang felt dizzy, and Loa Wei Fen grabbed her by the arm moments before she would have fallen to the deck of the Suzu Creek junk. The Chosen Three had not met there for years but the Assassin had insisted—and insisted that they meet immediately.

Once they had sheltered from the howling wind on the lower deck, Loa Wei Fen told them of the meeting with Tu.

They questioned him, but he silenced their queries with a simple statement. “Are you willing to risk the Tusk?”

“We mustn't. The Tusk hasn't finished revealing its secrets,” Jiang said, thinking back to the five women who had been last revealed. She knew the two women in the first portal were herself and the Dowager Empress, and she was beginning to suspect that she knew who would grow up to be the three women in the second portal.

“Who …” the Confucian began, but he stopped short when he saw the fury in Loa Wei Fen's face.

Jiang completed the question. “Who broke the Ivory Compact? Who betrayed our trust?”

The Assassin softened his features and said, “None of the Chosen Three.” There was an audible sigh of relief, but then slowly all faces turned to the Carver, who was not technically one of the Chosen Three and was the only other person who knew the whereabouts of the Tusk.

“My eldest son,” the Carver said, his voice aching, “betrayed us all. It is my shame. My shame.”

“How do you know?” demanded the Assassin.

“The Dowager Empress's Eunuch, Chesu Hoi, contacted me.”

“Why would he do that?”

“The Head Eunuch of the Emperor's court has always been the Carvers' patron.”

“And you never thought to tell us?” Jiang demanded.

The Carver spoke slowly. “Our Assassin was positioned. When Loa Wei Fen was called by Gangster Tu then we would have to act. Acting earlier might have endangered the Tusk.”

The Confucian turned toward Loa Wei Fen and said, “This Tu Yueh-sen has lived long enough.”

“No,” the Carver said, “he may still be the Man with a Book.” He turned to Loa Wei Fen and asked, “Did he consult the
I Ching
before he set his plans?”

Loa Wei Fen nodded.
Boxes within boxes,
he thought. Then he cast aside the thought and said, “We must act now. We must move and hide the Tusk.”

“How?”

“Indeed how—and where?” demanded the Confucian.

Jiang stepped forward and said simply, “With a diversion, and to my place.”

Shanghai was a place of many eyes. Secrecy was its most elusive and often most expensive commodity. Spies were everywhere, reporting on everything—every new face in a neighbourhood, every person who suddenly changed their order in a water shop, every carriage and rickshaw that passed, every large item carried or toted. Almost every faction in the city paid for such information—paid handsomely enough that thousands upon thousands of eyes watched and reported what they had seen. And no doubt soon there would be an unusually large reward offered for anyone reporting a large, heavy object about six feet long being carried on foot, in a rick-shaw—in any way. The spies would enlist their children, who would then enlist their friends. The thousands of eyes would become hundreds of thousands of eyes—and the Chosen Three knew it.

“So what sort of diversion do we need to move the Tusk?” the Confucian asked.

“Something major,” Jiang said.

There was a long silence in the belly of the junk as the foul-smelling waters of the Suzu Creek slapped against the ancient hull. Everyone there knew that there was one sure diversion, but it could cost lives.

Finally, it was the Assassin who mentioned the unmentionable. “Fire.”

—

The blaze was reminiscent of the great fire that had swept through the city at the Bend in the River the night before the History Teller started on her epic journey upriver some forty years before. Once again, the conflagration
began in a whorehouse and spread quickly through the makeshift outbuildings, then to the buildings on either side of the alley. The wind picked up the flames and tossed them across streets, igniting rooftops—and screams followed, screams of the injured and dying.

As a secondary diversion the Carver and the Confucian carried the large mahogany box that had once contained the Tusk through the southern exit of the Warrens. As they did, Jiang emerged from a western exit yelling at a strangely dressed porter who carried a large, stiff carpet on his shoulder.

“Hurry, you slug! And watch my carpet! If it burns, you burn with it!” Jiang was gratified to see that the chaos caused by the fire had drawn every eye. She whispered, “Hurry, a storm is coming.”

The Assassin shifted the carpet on his shoulders. He kept his head bowed, but his eyes scanned the street as he followed Jiang to her establishment, the Sacred Tusk safely rolled inside the carpet.

—

Tu smelled the smoke before the others in the room and leaped to his feet. He moved quickly to the tall windows of his warehouse office that overlooked the Suzu Creek. For a moment he couldn't see the smoke, then he saw a tall, thin line seemingly cross the full moon hung low on the eastern horizon.

“Fire, boss?”

Tu thought about that. Fire was not uncommon in the city at the Bend in the River, but he was suspicious.

“Call our lieutenants. We move tonight.”

—

The Assassin secreted the Tusk in the velvet-covered box bench that Jiang had prepared in the front room of her brothel, then turned to her.

“He's not a fool.”

“Your boss? Is that to whom you refer?”

“Why do you mock me? I serve the Compact as you do.”

“I meant no harm,” said Jiang, thinking that she “served” the Compact in an even more intimate way with his boss. “So what do you mean by Big-Eared Tu not being a fool?”

“He might find the fire suspicious—its timing, anyway. He might attack the Warrens sooner than he'd planned.”

Fine,
Jiang thought,
the Tusk is not there.
Then it occurred to her that she could prepare a surprise for Big-Eared Tu's men. Tu might be the Man with a Book, but his men were not. Robbing Tu Yueh-sen of at least some of his thugs struck Jiang as a good idea, and an opportunity for a bit of revenge for the pain and financial losses he had inflicted on her. She dismissed Loa Wei Fen and sent for Mai Bao.

An hour later her handsome middle daughter bobbed a bow and said, “Mother, you sent for me?”

“I did. I need your help.” Quickly Jiang asked her daughter to contact the police officer with whom she'd had an affair.

Mai Bao's hand flew to the neck of her robe as if she had exposed herself, but all she managed to say was, “Mother!”

Jiang swatted the complaint aside. “Tell him that Big-Eared Tu's men will shortly invade the Warrens. His men should be ready.”

—

Mai Bao summoned her covered carriage and hopped into the back seat as four coolies pulled the thing into motion. The inside of the carriage was dark and it took a moment for her eyes to adjust. When they did, she was shocked to see her ex-lover, the Revolutionary, sitting across from her. The wine stain on his face seemed to pulse with the blood captured there.

“Riding with coolies pulling you, like any empress.” He momentarily looked out the window and then snapped the covering shut. He looked her full in the face and screamed, “Men are not beasts!” Before she knew it he had a clump of her hair in his hand and was twisting it downward as hard as he could. She fell to her knees before him, and he reached down and yanked her face up to see his. “Open your eyes, whore.”

Slowly Mai Bao opened her eyes. She was shocked to see the hatred in the Revolutionary's face. “What do you want with me?”

“So are you bringing the clouds and rain to the fat White man now?”

She went to move her head away, but his fingers dug deep into her face; a nail cut her cheek, sending a single ribbon of blood over his hand and down her neck.

“First they take our country, then our women.”

Mai Bao remembered his violence in pillow matters. His disdain for children, his angry refusal of intercourse in favour of more rudimentary forms of pleasure. Then she saw the glint of a knife in his free hand. With supreme effort she calmed her racing heart, then reached a hand forward toward his centre and rested it there. The rage didn't diminish in his eyes, but she felt him swell beneath her fingers.

Then he threw her hand aside and demanded, “Where are you going, and in such haste?”

Relieved that it seemed he didn't want sex in any form, she told him about going to the police to get them into the Warrens to ambush Gangster Tu.

“What is Gangster Tu doing in the Warrens?”

For a beat she didn't know what to say, then she said simply, “Stealing something hidden there, I assume.”

The moment her words were out of her mouth a smile crossed her ex-lover's face. He flung open the door, ordered the coolies to stop, and jumped down. While holding the door open he turned back to Mai Bao and then casually spat in her face.

“Thanks, whore. You may have served your people in spite of yourself.”

—

“I'm not sure I like the new bench,” the ancient Go player said as Jiang entered the reception hall of her brothel.

“Why would that be, old man?”

“I noticed that in the games I've played since sitting on this new bench my thinking has been somehow slowed.”

“Is the bench uncomfortable for your bony bottom?”

“No. And thank you for mentioning my bottom. It has been many years since a courtesan deigned to discuss my posterior.”

“My pleasure, I think,” Jiang said, anxious to end the conversation about the newly arrived, velvet-covered, six-foot-long box bench.

“What happened to my old stool?” the ancient Go player asked.

“We're having it bronzed and a plaque affixed to it.”

“And this plaque says?” the Go player inquired with a smile.

“
Upon this simple stool, a Go player's rump did sit
.”

“Poetic, but I think it's missing something.”

“And that would be?” Jiang asked cautiously.

“The words
brilliant
and
much desired
, as in: Upon this simple stool, a brilliant Go player's much desired rump did sit.”

“Fine. A fine correction. I will be sure to get that to the engraver.”

“Do so quickly, please. I will not live forever.”

Jiang thought,
Perhaps not forever, but you have already lived for the better part of forever
. Then she noticed his keen eyes and, not for the first time, wondered if he had guessed what lay inside his newly acquired but evidently uncomfortable box bench.

She ordered him sweetmeats and a glass of wine, then sat down opposite him.

“A game?” he suggested, clearly surprised.

“No. I have no need to be shown how talented you are at the board.” She paused, looked around her, then said, “We have known each other for a long time.”

“Known each other only the once, and that was for a long time, but a long time ago.” He smiled his crooked smile and said, “So what is in the box upon which my bony bottom sits?”

Mai Bao's message to her ex-lover the detective was received at eleven-thirty that night. By dawn the police had established seven major traps for Gangster Tu and his men throughout the vast tunnel complex of the Warrens.

By nine that morning the Revolutionary had his six cadres positioned and ready to move.

By noon the fire was under control.

By three o'clock the Dowager Empress's troops had completed their encirclement of the city at the Bend in the River, as she had promised Tu.

At four o'clock precisely, the Revolutionary's six cadres, in a daring raid, overpowered a lightly guarded city arsenal and, for the first time in their existence, had the means in hand to foment the bloody revolution of which they had been dreaming for almost a decade.

As the sun set, Tu Yueh-sen's Incense Master started the blood ceremonies that always preceded a major Triad battle action. The slaughtered calf's blood ran down the corners of the mouths of the ninety or so initiates as they completed the most ancient of Triad rites on the wild side of the Huangpo River, the Pudong.