The Fools in Town Are on Our Side (8 page)

I stumbled over to her and stood there, gazing up at her face, my father's remains clutched tightly to my chest. I bawled. She looked at me, frowned, and gestured that I should go away. When I didn't, but just stood there bawling some more, smeared from top to bottom with blood, she turned and snapped something at the Chinese woman. She spoke French, but I didn't know it then. All I knew was that my cuts and scratches and abrasions hurt, that I was lost, and that I couldn't find the rest of my father.

The Chinese woman came over to me and knelt down and began speaking softly in English. I knew it was English but I couldn't understand very much of it and when she saw that it wasn't working too well, she switched to the Shanghai dialect. That was better. She wanted to know who I was and how I'd gotten hurt and where my parents were. The blond woman in the floppy hat kept waving her parasol and yelling for Fat Li-san. I told the Chinese woman that I was Lucifer Clarence Dye and had she seen my father? The woman in the Deanna Durbin dress moved closer, but not too close. She said something in
French to the Chinese woman, who turned out to be her
amah.
The
amah
shook her head, rose, and backed off. The woman with the big floppy green hat grimaced and stretched out her hand.

“Donnez la moi!”
she said. Or so she told me later. Much later. I didn't understand her then, but the outstretched hand made things plain enough and I hugged my father's severed forearm, wrist, hand, and watch even closer. I bawled some more, partly because I was one of the 865 wounded by the Chinese Air Corps which bombed its own city and partly because my father was among the 729 who were dead for the same reason.

The woman in the green hat stripped the white glove from her right hand, snatched all that was left of my father away from me, and started to throw it in the gutter. However, she saw the watch and paused long enough to remove it from the wrist. She was always quite practical. After that, she tossed it into the gutter. A dusty red dog covered with sores nuzzled my father's hand, picked it up in his jaws, and trotted off down the street. The dog seemed to be grinning.

The woman in the floppy hat smiled at me and started to pat me on the head, but thought better of it. My hair was matted with blood. “We go my house,” she said in her best pidgin English. I understood that and asked her, this time in Mandarin, if she'd seen my father. I wasn't too familiar with death, not familiar at all really, and I'd have liked to have given my father back his hand and wrist and forearm and watch.

“We go,” she said and once more yelled for the missing Fat Li-san. A large maroon 1935 Airflow Chrysler, an automotive abortion that was to be rivaled by the Edsel years later, bulldozed its way to the curb, clipping a rickshaw. Fat Li-san had finally arrived. The woman in the green hat sent him off for some newspapers and when he returned he spread them over the back seat so that I wouldn't bleed all over the mohair. The
amah
got in the front with Fat Li-san and I was guided to the newspapers. The woman in the green hat got in at last. Fat Li-san leaned on the horn and bluffed his way through the jammed traffic.

The blond woman started talking to me. She used a mixture of pidgin English, some of which I got, French (which I didn't understand),
and Russian (totally incomprehensible). With the help of some interpretative asides from the
amah
in the Shanghai dialect, I gathered that I could stay at her house until she located my parents; that I was to call her Tante Catherine or Katerine, and that if I were good, she would give me something nice.

Her house was in Nantao, the Old Chinese City with its Confucius Temple and its Willow Teahouse. It was painted a green that matched her hat and her eyes and had a high brick wall across its front which shielded a tiny garden. The house was an unusual (for Shanghai) three stories high, and not more than forty feet wide, and it looked magnificently immense to me. It was furnished with an odd mixture of carved Chinese pieces with lots of dragons' heads and with what passed for modern in the 1930s. I thought it all very beautiful. Tante Katerine called out as we entered the house followed by the
amah.
A number of young women came into the wide reception hall and started to make a fuss over me. One of them was assigned the task of giving me a bath. Another was instructed to buy me some new clothes. Tante Katerine remembered her promise and gave me a piece of candied ginger. There was a peculiarly sweetish, pungent, odor in the air and an old man with a whisp of a white beard shuffled slowly toward the door that led to the garden and the gate and the street. He didn't look at me; he didn't look at anybody. One of the girls took my hand and started pulling me toward the stairs. She was Chinese and I asked her if she had seen my father. She said no. About half of the girls were Chinese and about half were foreign: French, American, White Russian, a couple of big-boned Australians, three Germans from Berlin, and a lone representative from Italy. Rome, as I recall. They were all very nice to me, but it was a year or so later before I fully understood that Tante Katerine, a White Russian late of Manchuria, ran what was generally regarded as the fanciest whorehouse in Shanghai.

 

 

It took twenty-four hours and an autopsy before the island city-state's police were
satisfied that we hadn't murdered Li Teh with some kind of infernal machine. He had died of cardiac arrest—or what was once called heart failure—brought on, so I understand, by severe emotional shock. It could have been the blue flashes that had danced around the room. He probably thought that he was being electrocuted.

I learned later that Shoftstall went stupid and came up with a fanciful story that no one believed. He told them that Li Teh's name was Mr. Jones and that I'd wanted to question him with a lie detector because he'd applied for a $200,000 life insurance policy and I wasn't at all satisfied with the information he'd given on his application. After that, they knocked Shoftstall around for a while, which only made him stubborn. All he would say after the beating was that as an American citizen, he demanded to see a representative of the U.S. Embassy. They threw him back in a cell.

Bourland was a little brighter, but not much. He said that the polygraph examination of Li Teh was merely routine.

“What kind of routine, Mr. Bourland?” one of them asked.

“Why, routine procedure,” he said.

They knocked him around until they got tired and then threw him
back in a cell, too. He didn't get a chance to call the Embassy either. I later learned all this from Carmingler.

They questioned us separately, of course, and they were good. At least the man who questioned me and who called himself Mr. Tung was good. Quite good. He said that he was from the Ministry of Defense and Security and I found no reason to doubt it.

I spent the first twenty-four hours in solitary. They had taken away my clothes, cigarettes, keys, wallet, and watch. I missed the cigarettes most of all. It really didn't seem to matter much what time it was. They gave me the gray cotton, pajamalike uniform, the one that I was to wear for three months without change. The cell was small, five-feet wide and seven-feet long. It was windowless and contained a strawstuffed mattress, a bucket that served as a toilet, and a small plastic jug of water. Nothing else. The walls were built of gray, porous stones that were clammy and wet. The floor was concrete. A single forty-watt bulb was screwed into the ceiling. It never went off. The temperature seemed to be in the upper nineties, right alongside the humidity.

I was fed twice before I saw Tung. The first meal was a large bowl of rice with some pieces of unidentifiable fish mixed into it. The second meal was the same and so were all the other meals during the next three months. From long ago experience I choked down everything they gave me and didn't lose a pound. Maybe they're right after all and fish and rice are everything you really need.

The room that Tung questioned me in was on the second floor of the prison that the British had built a hundred years or so before with loving attention to all the details that would make it as uncomfortable as possible. The room had two windows that looked out over the prison yard which was surrounded by walls built of that same gray, porous stone. They must have been at least twenty-five feet high. A number of prisoners were walking around the yard, either by themselves or in twos and threes. I didn't bother to ask if I could join them.

Mr. Tung (I never knew his other names, if he had any), was somewhere in his thirties, short, slim, and dapper. He wore a crisp white shirt with a neatly knotted blue tie and light blue linen slacks that were pressed to perfection. There were four ball-point pens clipped to his
shirt pocket, all different colors. His black eyes seemed to snap a little and he had the nervous habit of tugging at his right earlobe when he was trying to phrase a question. He didn't smile much, at least not when talking to me, and we spent quite some time talking.

Two prison guards brought me into the room and then left. I stood before Tung's desk while he carefully looked me over. The room contained only the desk, Tung's chair, and the one that he motioned me to sit in. There was nothing on his desk other than a round tin of Players, the kind that holds fifty cigarettes. He offered me one and I accepted it gratefully.

We sat there smoking for a while and then Tung said, “Well, you blew it, didn't you?” I couldn't place his accent despite the use of the vernacular. It wasn't American and it wasn't British. It was that in between, international brand, the kind that Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. used to speak before he began spending too much time in London.

I shrugged at his question and said nothing. There really wasn't anything to say.

“Too bad about Li Teh,” Tung said. “I take it that you didn't know about his heart condition?”

“No.”

“He wasn't a bad chap really.”

“You knew him?”

“Not too well,” Tung said. “He was dickering to open one of his shops here, but I suppose you knew that.”

“No.”

“Yes. As a matter of fact, he'd recently received a promotion. But I'm sure you did know that.”

“No,” I said.

Tung looked at me carefully and then took a tin ashtray from a desk drawer and placed it halfway between us. I put some ashes into it.

“Really, Mr. Dye, I almost believe that you are as ignorant as you pretend to be.”

“I'm just ignorant,” I said.

“Then I'll bring you up to date. Peking promoted Li Teh six weeks
ago. He was told to keep his operations going in Hong Kong, but to set up a shop down here and run it on a part-time basis. When it was a going concern, they would send someone down from Peking to take over. In the meantime, he'd commute between here and Hong Kong. He didn't tell you any of this?” Tung tugged at his earlobe again. The right one.

“No,” I said.

“I think you're lying,” Tung said. “But that's to be expected. At any rate, we approached Li. I confess that our approach was none too subtle. Either he doubled for us, or we'd throw him in jail.”

“Why did you think he was an agent?” I said.

Tung smiled a little, but not much. “Why did you?”

There seemed to be nothing to say to that either. Tung, however, was waiting for an answer. I let him wait while a fat, heavy silence spread through the room.

“The premier's most unhappy,” he said after a time, “Really? Why?”

“Because of you, Mr. Dye, and your organization which, I might add, fully lives up to its reputation for bungling. Really remarkable. The premier, of course, is just hopping mad. But I've said that, haven't I?”

“Just what am I charged with?” I said.

“We'll think of something.”

“I'm sure.”

“You should be. But to return to Li Teh. He told us that he thought you'd go as high as three thousand dollars a month. American. Did you?” When I didn't say anything, Tung continued. “We offered to pay him something. Of course, we could never match your largesse, but we did offer him one thousand dollars a month (our variety) and the promise that he wouldn't go to jail which was, I think you'll agree since you've seen our jail, a rather enticing fringe benefit. And by the way, he told us all about you—how you used to meet in out of the way places in Hong Kong and so forth. Even gave us dates and times.”

“He talked a lot,” I said.

“We can be rather persuasive.”

“I can imagine.”

Tung rose and walked over to the window and looked out. He was silent for a time and I thought that he may have been counting the prisoners. With his back still to me, he said, “We're going to ask your people for thirty million dollars.”

“You'll never get it,” I said and helped myself to another cigarette.

“That's our asking price,” he said, turning from the window. “We'll settle for ten cents on the dollar. A million each for you and your two colleagues.” He lowered himself into his chair again, reached for one of the cigarettes, and this time he did smile. He had good teeth. “But the money's not really important, of course.”

“Of course,” I said.

“What we really want is a letter of apology.”

“From whom?”

“From your Secretary of State. The premier was thinking of going directly to the White House, but he was dissuaded.”

“You won't get anything,” I said.

“You think not?”

“I think not.”

“Well, let's see what we have to offer,” Tung said and laid his cigarette in the tin tray so that he could count on the fingers of his right hand. “On the surface, we have the dead body of a Chinese spy; two insurance salesmen from here, and their managing director from Hong Kong. Minneapolis Mutual, isn't it?”

“Minneapolis Mutual,” I said.

“That's on the surface. Now beneath the surface we have the following interesting documentation.” He was using his fingers to count on again. “One, we have a tape recording of the conversation that took place last night in the hotel between you and your two colleagues, even that part where one of them was reassuring Li Teh that the lie detector wouldn't hurt a bit. That's one. I'll play it for you, if you like.”