The Painter of Shanghai (16 page)

It’s not home
. ‘No,’ she says sharply. ‘That is… I can take a carriage.’
Think. Think. Think.
‘I’ve heard the magistrate is a very generous host,’ she blurts. ‘Would he mind if you – if you brought a guest?’

It’s an absurd proposition: him, the incorruptible, showing up at a prominent home with a well-known prostitute. Yuliang knows this even as she hears herself put it forward. When he looks at her, he does no more than shake his head. But she reads his embarrassment on his features. ‘I’m afraid,’ he says quietly, ‘it’s a very small gathering.’

He begins walking again, more quickly this time. Wretchedly, Yuliang follows. She will, she realizes, simply have to tell them that it can’t be done. He’s not the type. It was a foolish idea from the start. Still as she passes the grimacing Christ, she is thinking again of Mingmei, the blood soaking her ruined dress.

Eyes fixed on her companion’s back, she tries telling herself that this is what she fears most: the punishment. But she knows really that it’s much more than that. It is leaving him now, leaving this peerless day. It’s going back to her room and bed and bountiful jewelry box, and knowing that the next time she sees him –
if
she sees him – they’ll be back to their assigned roles: stiff official, preening whore.

Almost of their own volition, her steps slow as she walks. But not enough to keep her from following him.

Outside, he hails the sedan chair without further comment. Yuliang makes her way toward it, fighting the
urge to turn back and beg him for a reprieve.
I’ll live through this,
she thinks.
It’s just skin. It’s no more than I deserve.
Foolish to think there’d be anything else. Ever… It’s just then, with sickening suddenness, that the sky tilts and the world inverts itself, tossing her to the ground like a sack of rags.

Pan Zanhua turns just in time to catch her. ‘
Aiyaaaa
. Did you hurt yourself?’

And then somehow she’s in his arms and, even more appallingly, crying, even though she’s done no more than trip on a piece of lumber. Nor are they the childlike sniffles she’s learned to use on stingy clients. These are enormous, heaving sobs. They hurt her as they tear free.

‘Here. Come here. Sit down,’ he says, obviously distressed. ‘Sit down with me. Here.’ He instructs the chair to wait.

‘I’m sorry,’ she whispers. ‘I’m so sorry.’

‘Do you need a doctor? Are you – are you unwell?’ There’s real trepidation in his voice, and it occurs to her that he thinks she’s with child. For some reason this strikes her as very funny.
Perhaps I am. Perhaps I’m also a virgin
, she pictures herself saying.

‘Tell me,’ he says. ‘What’s wrong? Really. You can tell me.’

She’s hysterical now, covering her mouth with her hands. ‘I can’t.’

‘Why not?’

Yuliang takes a deep breath. ‘I can’t… just leave.’ She wipes her eyes. ‘Not like this.’

‘Why not?’

‘There will be consequences.’

‘What consequences? Why?’ He seems honestly mystified. ‘You spent time with me. The guild got its wish.’

How can a scholar be so stupid?
‘No, it didn’t. They said not to come back if I didn’t finish.’

‘Finish what?’

Suddenly all she wants to do is get away from him, from this place. From the hope she’s felt without knowing it, simply by being with him all day. She will walk home if she has to. It will hurt her feet, but that is fine. It will prepare her for the far worse pain she’ll face later.

‘It doesn’t matter,’ she says, standing.

‘No, wait.’ He jumps up with her. ‘What are they? What are the consequences?’

The workmen squat as their emptied supper pails are picked up by an old woman, who slings them onto a pole. When Yuliang takes a step toward the street, he follows. ‘Please,’ he says quietly. ‘Please talk to me.’

It won’t change anything. But again, the novelty of the request –
talk to me
– fills her with a strange gratitude.

‘There was a girl,’ she begins, slowly sitting back down. ‘At the – at my house. The madam tied her to the bed, facedown.’ She pauses. ‘Her back and arms bled for half a day. They had to throw the sheets out.’

The foreman puts his thick hands on his haunches and heaves himself to his feet. Yuliang realizes suddenly that until now he hasn’t looked at her twice. In her sober clothes, with this sober man, she’s looked that decent. That ordinary.

‘They
beat
her?’ Pan Zanhua is asking.

‘Yes,’ she says dully. ‘Until she’d all but stopped
breathing. Then Papa Gao – that’s the owner – and his friends, they went in. They locked the door. They…’ She pauses, takes a breath. ‘They said it was compensation.’

Yuliang drops her eyes to the marble entrance to the church. The mica flecks embedded in it twinkle deceptively, like little stars. She’d like to stay here and stare at them until the real stars have risen. But when the foreman shouts again, calling the workers back to work, Yuliang stands along with them.

At first the inspector doesn’t move. Then he’s beside her, touching her arm again. ‘Zhang
xiaojie.
Please wait. I’d like to help you.’

‘I’ll find a rickshaw,’ she says, and tries to smile.

‘No,’ he says. ‘Not that way. I’d like for you to come with me.’

She shakes her head. ‘It’ll be worse if they see us like that.’

‘I don’t care what they see. I care what’s
right.
Haven’t you understood that?’ He takes a breath. ‘I want you to come to my house.’

She struggles to keep the relief from cracking her voice. ‘I can sleep on the floor tonight. Then I’ll find some way to explain it to them tomorrow.’

‘That’s not what I meant either,’ he says, signaling his sedan-chair carriers.

Suddenly she is very tired, almost too tired to care. Still she asks, ‘What
do
you mean?’

He blinks a few times, as though readying himself. When he finally speaks, his tone is formal, as though making a public proclamation.

‘I’ve decided,’ he says. ‘I’m going to take you out.’

PART FOUR
The Concubine

At fourteen I married My Lord you
I never laughed, being bashful.
Lowering my head, I looked at the wall.
Called to, a thousand times, I never looked back.

Li Bai

(Ezra Pound translation)

14. Wuhu, 1916

‘It has been a long time,’ Godmother says.

It is not a nicety, although the brothel manager’s voice is as sweet and oily as ever. She is talking about money: Yuliang is certain that every missed appointment has been entered in the madam’s merciless black book.

As though confirming the thought, Godmother flicks her red-tipped fingers against the table. Calculating on an invisible abacus. It’s hot. Beads of sweat cling to her inky hairline. Yuliang watches one drip down, tinged lightly with gray.

‘Six weeks,’ retorts the lawyer negotiating Yuliang’s release. ‘No longer than it takes most girls to recover from the clap.’ He says it easily, inspecting and smoothing the lapels of his heat-wrinkled suit.

The madam sniffs. ‘Believe me, I’m not complaining. This one’s been nothing but trouble from the day I bought her.’

In her years at the Hall Yuliang was beaten less than any other flower there, and she draws a sharp breath to say so. Then she feels Zanhua’s hand on the small of her back. Following the silent hint, she keeps her lips sealed. Wen had warned them earlier.
She’ll try to upset you. Make you lose face, as she has. Whatever you do, don’t let her do it.

‘You paid cash?’ the attorney asks now blithely, as
though referring to the madam’s myriad bangles and not the girl seated across from her.

‘A turn of phrase,’ Godmother snaps. ‘She’s my daughter. I have papers.’

Wen looks down at his documents, adjusting his spectacles with fingers as thin and dry as twigs. Slavery, they all know, was outlawed since the Republicans took over. Adoption is just one way around the prohibition.

‘How old did you say she was?’ he asks.

Yuliang awaits the inevitable
sixteen
; everyone at the Hall is always sixteen. To her surprise, though, the madam stays silent.

‘My understanding,’ the lawyer says, easing back in his chair, ‘is seventeen. Which means she was fourteen when you bought – I’m sorry. Took her in.’ He smiles, baring a mouthful of smoke-stained teeth. ‘Which is a bit of a problem, since the law prohibits children under sixteen from living in a brothel.’

‘I know the law,’ the madam says sharply. ‘She’s my daughter. Where was she to sleep? In the street? Who was going to protect her?’

Yuliang thinks of the Christian who sank his teeth into her foot. Of the water-dealer, who likes to pay girls to urinate for him and then beat them for being ‘dirty.’ She thinks of the dead flower found in Wuhu Lake, and of Jinling bound and mauled in an automobile’s trunk. A helpless fury begins to build as the manager-mother’s smirk widens.

‘Judge Li is a friend,’ Godmother continues. ‘He assured me that there are certain… exceptions.’ As the barrister raises an eyebrow, she adds hastily, ‘He’s never had one
of my girls, of course.’ It’s also against the law for civil officials to frequent flower houses, a fact Yuliang well knows after smuggling several of them out her windows.

Attorney Wen laces his fingers together and stretches his arms over his head. The room resonates with the soft patter-pop of ligaments cracking beneath the skin.

‘Either way,’ Godmother huffs, ‘the girl owes. She owes plenty. Many people – hardworking people – depended on her for their livelihoods. It wasn’t just me she robbed.’

‘No one’s robbed anyone,’ Zanhua snaps, himself forgetting Attorney Wen’s injunction.

The madam just smiles indulgently, as at a whining child. ‘Besides,’ she continues, ‘it’s costly to take a girl’s name down. The censors want fifty taels just to switch her status on the registry.’

Yuliang looks at her lawyer: it hasn’t occurred to her that her name is still hanging outside the Hall. Although of course, now that she thinks about it, it would be. A brothel’s lineup is its official roster. It’s the way authorities keep tabs on who has come and left, who has died and who has disappeared. Essentially, in the end, who is taxable. The thought unsettles her more: it is as though the wind-fluttered characters have more truth and substance than the girls whose false names they advertise.

‘Then there’s her debts,’ the madam is saying. ‘Seven weeks of missed appointments.’

‘Five weeks, six days,’ Attorney Wen counters.

‘And her dressmaker’s bills,’ the madam continues, eyeing Yuliang’s dove-gray tunic with disdain. ‘Gorgeous things. But exorbitant. I know – I paid for most of them.
I’d give a bit of that back for the embroidery work she did for us sometimes. But the quality was terrible…’ Yuliang clenches her fist beneath the table. ‘And the
smoking
!’ Godmother shakes her head.

It’s too much.
‘I don’t smoke!’
Yuliang says shrilly. ‘You’re a liar!’

The outburst is followed by a small, shocked silence. Godmother twists her lips victoriously.

‘Please, Zhang
xiaojie
,’ Attorney Wen says quietly.

‘
And
there was damage to her room,’ the madam continues. ‘Did you know, eminence, that this girl likes to light fires?’

‘How much?’ Zanhua says between gritted teeth. ‘Just a figure.’

Godmother waits a beat, an actor delivering a key line. ‘Two thousand yuan,’ she says.

Yuliang looks at Zanhua in time to see him wince.
That is it
, she thinks.
It’s the end.
She waits for Attorney Wen and Zanhua to stand in outrage. To throw up their hands, stalk out of her life. To her surprise, though, both remain in their seats, although it does seem to her that Zanhua shifts away slightly. Toward the window, the costless cheer of the blue sky.

‘You’ve made your point,’ Attorney Wen says dryly. ‘The girl is profitable. Especially since two thirds of her time with you was tax-free.’ He picks up his abacus and begins flicking beads, his fingers so long they look like they are tangling. ‘Let me see. Even assuming you paid the proper taxes… the fine per day… what was it, ten? Twenty?’

‘No one pays attention to that rule,’ the woman
protests. ‘We already pay the police their cursed protection money. If I pay taxes too, how do I compete?’

‘That, unfortunately, is not the law’s concern,’ Attorney Wen says. But he’s made his point; he sets the abacus back down. ‘I’d also suggest you take the honorable Master Li’s advice with a small grain of caution. There’ve been complaints about him recently. New China, new morality. All of that. Some say flower houses will be outlawed altogether. But I’m sure he’s told you that.’

The madam’s mouth, a rouge-smeared bud, purses as she turns viciously on Yuliang. ‘You’re such a little fool,’ she spits. ‘You think he’s
rescuing
you.’ She flicks her painted eyes toward Zanhua. ‘You know, don’t you, Master Inspector, that these girls never really change? Oh, you can pluck them away from us. But you can’t dig up the roots. You can’t fight
fate
.’

Zanhua’s lips tighten. As his eyes meet Yuliang’s, she attempts a small smile. He just looks away.

‘Madame Ping,’ Attorney Wen says coolly, ‘bear in mind whose protection the plaintiff enjoys. His eminence can still have quite an impact on your customers’ fortunes.’

‘And they on his,’ she retorts ominously.

‘I’ll also point out that no court that I know of would send down an order for more than a thousand. Not even’ – he sniffs – ‘the honorable Judge Li’s.’

‘Thievery. Thievery! I’ll be driven from business.’ The madam raps her fan against her shoulder in anger.

‘I’m sorry to say that I doubt that.’ Attorney Wen pushes his chair back and stands. ‘Still, we’re willing to see this to the courthouse, if you insist.’ He turns, signaling his clients to follow. The madam watches them go with
narrowed eyes, fan still tapping in anger. It’s a gesture Yuliang knows well. At the Hall it often foretells a beating: even now her back tightens instinctively.