The Shanghai Moon (34 page)

“You mean incompetents?” Bill asked.

“Not necessarily. Sometimes, if a guy was a moron but well connected, yes. But they sent Robert Neumann there. The Butcher of Buchenwald, you’ve heard of him. He was good at his job, which was gruesome experiments and murder. But someone decided he was out of control, which by the way he was. So good-bye Dr. Neumann. With Ulrich, it was his mouth got him in trouble. He thought Hitler was misguided on some issues, imagine that. Particularly he suggested they might be focusing a tad too obsessively on Jews, gays, and Gypsies and ought to consider putting resources into defeating other countries’ militaries instead of rounding up civilians—their own and everyone else’s—
and spending good German marks, which were less good every day, building places to put them and paying people to guard and kill them.”

“A champion of human rights.”

“A practical soldier. That Master Race thing drained off a lot of Nazi resources. Brought them down, in the end. But no one wanted to hear it. So they ship Ulrich to Shanghai with his wife and kid. For work, he’s supposed to sniff around the Chinese puppet military, make sure no one’s thinking of overthrowing the Germans’ very close allies and personal friends the Japanese. So he does, and before you can say Jackie Robinson he’s running around with General Zhang. The brother-in-law-to-be of your boy, Chen Kai-rong.”

“Yes,” I said. “We remember who he is.”

“Good, you might pass after all. Ulrich and Zhang get to be bunghole buddies, and Ulrich, that flower of Aryan manhood, flourishes in the rich Shanghai soil. Fertilized, it seems, by the dung at the bottom: gambling dens, bars, establishments of ill repute.”

“Flower houses,” I said.

“Show-off,” he replied.

“I’m not the one who laid out the extended metaphor. Do you do that all the time?”

“If you spent your life trying to wake up stoned snoring slackers—hey, look, I can do alliteration, too. Now, shall I fast-forward to Ulrich’s demise?”

My sense was that any conversation with Professor Edwards was already on fast-forward, but I said, “Yes, please do.”

“February 23, 1943. Recognize the date?”

“Yes, I do, but I’m not sure why.”

“You flunk. That’s the day the Shanghai Municipal Police arrested your boy, Chen Kai-rong. It was the beginning of the end for Major Ulrich here.”

“Why? What did he do?”

“Well, now, that’s an interesting question. Seems he called his very close et cetera the Japanese, asked them to suggest to the SMP that they treat Chen Kai-rong with kid gloves. Chen was his buddy Zhang’s brother-in-law, after all. Zhang must have called him.”

“No. There was no love lost between the general and Kairong. Mei-lin asked the general to help, and he said Kai-rong was a traitor and should rot in jail. She called Ulrich herself.”

“How do you know that?”

“It’s in Mei-lin’s diary. But we didn’t know who Ulrich was.”

“That’s the diary that you’re going to let me read any minute now.”

“Yes, that one.”

“As soon as we’re sure people aren’t being killed because of it,” Bill said. “We wouldn’t want to lose you.”

“Obviously I’m not on your thesis committee. They all want to lose me. So. Ulrich calls the SMP. The SMP, eager to oblige, send Chen back to his cell. Actually we covered that in yesterday’s lecture, working from a different source.”

The professor paused, and though I couldn’t see him I knew he was peering over his glasses.

“Yes,” I said. “I remember.”

“You, too, Smith?”

“Yessir, sir.”

“Good, you might pass, too. Okay, so maybe you remember what happens next. The sister says the Commie ain’t her brother, it’s her husband. She hands over what she says is the general’s list of agents, which U.S. naval intelligence tells us was really her brother’s all along. But first she calls everyone on it and tells them to make themselves scarce. And they do. And the brother escapes. And she and Zhang escape.”

“She escaped?” I said, hope springing. “I thought you said the navy said the general killed her.”

“I did, they did, and he did, for sure. But the SMP doesn’t know that, do they? Our historical perspective eludes them. All they know is, they’ve got zilch. Zero. Goose eggs. So now they’re really mad. If they’d applied the usual pressure to Chen Kai-rong, the thinking goes, he might have cracked. The Japanese say, but he wasn’t the spy. The SMP says, then how come he ran away? Along with, they point out,
everybody
else.

“The Japanese are embarrassed. They didn’t just lose the police some crook. These were Commies! Oh, no! And the only guy they can put their mitts on is Ulrich. So they do. They haul him to Bridge House, which was a lower circle of the same hell as Number 76, run by the Japanese themselves. To make sure he comes clean, they scoop up his wife and kid and slap them in an internment camp. This was almost unheard of, interning their very dear friends the Germans, except for being Allied spies. Then the Germans straightened it out if they weren’t, or the Japanese shot them if they were.”

“And in this case?”

“Unfortunately for the wife and kid, this turned out to be a special case. Ulrich, in the middle of being persuaded to spill the beans, up and died.”

“The Japanese killed him?”

“Seems to have been an accident. Had a seizure, bingo, the end. Whether the electrodes or the baling wire or the big tub of ice water had anything to do with it, I couldn’t tell you. But it was damned inconvenient. The Japanese couldn’t prove he was a Commie rat. The Germans couldn’t prove he wasn’t, either. So they did the only sensible thing. They forgot all about it.”

“Just like that?”

“You know, get some closure, put it behind you, move on! Come on, everybody’s doin’ it! The Ulrich affair was forgotten and everyone lived happily ever after. Except the wife and kid. The Germans started tentative negotiations to get them out, but the Japanese were of the opinion the wife might know something. Or said they were. They were probably just saving face. But the Germans backed off. Some dame, some brat, what did they care? Keep ’em, they said. So the Japanese did.”

“What happened to them?”

“They died.” He sounded wistful. I suddenly wondered what it was like to be a historian, involved with people who’d lived and died long before you came across them. “Those camps weren’t nice places. Not much to eat, and a lot to get sick on. The mother went first, not long after they got there, late ’forty-three, cholera. The kid died July ’forty-four.”

“Dr. Edwards? How many of those internment camps did the Japanese have?”

“In Shanghai, eight. In other parts of China there were a few more, but generally they didn’t ship prisoners up the river.”

“Which one were Ulrich’s wife and child in?”

“Chapei. Why?”

“Just wanted to know.”

“Pure intellectual curiosity! Refreshing as a Tsingtao ale. Chapei wasn’t any nicer than any of the others, I can tell you that.”

“Are there records from the camps?”

“What kinds of records?”

“Lists of internees, I was thinking.”

“It’s hard to say how accurate they are. How would we know who’s missing? But they exist.”

“Can you find out if an American missionary family named Fairchild was also in the Chapei camp?”

“Might do. That would require my researcher to ferret out another set of documents in another language, so she might get her A after all. But you’re not about to tell me why, are you?”

“Not yet, no. I’m sorry. But you’ve been a big help.”

“I’m tickled. And now
I
have a question for
you
.”

“Go ahead.”

“If Ulrich’s buddy General Zhang wanted his brother-in-law Chen to rot, and if Ulrich’s mission was to cozy up to guys like Zhang, why did Ulrich bite when Chen’s sister called? Was she Ulrich’s bit on the side?”

“No. She couldn’t stand him.”

“Well, if it wasn’t sex it must have been money.”

“In a way. She promised him the moon.”

Professor Edwards said he’d call us with information on the Fairchilds if he found it, and we said we’d let him know what it was all about as soon as we could. After we hung up, Bill lit a cigarette. “You said that about promising Ulrich the moon to show you’re as clever as the professor.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. That would imply I’m the competitive type.”

“Oh, right, and that’s nuts, isn’t it? Listen, when we get a minute we’d better copy that diary for him. I think he deserves it.”

I nodded vaguely, distracted by something I couldn’t quite place.

“Now, in the spirit of intellectual inquiry, I have a question, too,” Bill went on. “What if it turns out Alice was in the same camp as Ulrich’s wife and child? She was a kid herself. You think she learned something then that would tell her now where to find the Shanghai Moon? Why would it have taken all these years? And how does it tie into what’s been going on? And what are you scowling about?”

“This isn’t a scowl, it’s a contemplative frown. I’m trying to remember something.”

“What?”

“How do I know? I don’t remember it. Ah! Aha! Mr. Friedman!”

“Aha Mr. Friedman what?”

“I knew this sounded familiar! His book. Didn’t it say
something about a rumor, a German officer’s widow in an internment camp having the Shanghai Moon?”

Bill, also being contemplative, drew on his cigarette. “I think you’re right. But that doesn’t make it true.”

“But it makes it an old rumor. Look: Mei-lin gives it to Ulrich, he slips it to his wife when they come for him.”

“Difficult to imagine how she could have kept it hidden in the camp, though I guess she might have. But if she had it, why didn’t she use it to bribe their way out? And what happened to it when she died?”

“Maybe she didn’t have it, but she knew where it was.”

“Same questions.”

“Okay, I admit that’s all a little fuzzy. But I really, really want to know whether Alice was in that same camp.”

Bill got to his feet. “Let’s go ask her.”

Twenty minutes later Bill and I were sitting in the sticky heat of Sara Roosevelt Park. If I’d had a watch, I’d have been checking it every five seconds. I did check Bill’s a few times, until, with a sideways look, he pocketed it.

“She won’t get here any faster if you do that.”

“What if she doesn’t come at all?”

“It was her idea,” he said.

That didn’t particularly reassure me; I have lots of ideas I don’t follow through. I scanned for the moon, but the streetlights’ glow saturated the haze.

“Do you see Mary? Or any cops?” I asked Bill.

“No.”

“Good. Then Alice won’t spot them either. Wait! There she is!” By which I didn’t mean Mary, and he knew it.

A compact shape in a black straw hat and, despite the darkness, sunglasses, hurried along Chrystie and into the park. She peered around, then headed our way. Bill slid over and made a space between us. Slipping the sunglasses off, Alice Fairchild said, “Thank you both. For indulging me.”

Bill didn’t answer; my client, my show.

“Alice,” I said, “what’s going on?”

She watched her hands finger the sunglasses. “Lydia, I’m so ashamed. It’s fraud.”

No kidding. “Tell us.”

“Yes, that’s why I’m here.” She shoved the sunglasses into her purse as though they suddenly annoyed her. “I can hardly believe I did it, but it’s true.”

“What is? What did you do?”

She took a deep breath. “I . . . It was all so wrong. It started a few weeks ago, when I heard about jewelry being unearthed in Shanghai.”

“How?”

“How I heard? I maintain sources there. No one in the asset recovery community is interested in Shanghai except me. Anything that made it there was by definition not confiscated, you see? But I know how it was there. And I’ve always thought so much must have been lost, left behind. When I heard about this find, I thought the jewelry might have been a refugee’s. I wondered who, and if they had family. Then the next day, sitting at my desk, I suddenly remembered the Shanghai Moon.”

“You thought it was part of the find?”

“Oh, no. That news would have gotten out. But I remembered the name of its owner, and the story that she’d had other jewelry. So I did some research. Ambulance chasing, I guess. If I found heirs, I was going to propose that I try to recover it.”

“But you didn’t.”

“I learned two things. One, the find certainly sounded like Rosalie’s jewelry. And two, the family was gone. Horst Peretz died in Salzburg in the spring of 1938, Elke Gilder in the Stutthof concentration camp a few years later. I couldn’t trace either Rosalie or her brother, Paul, as the Shanghai community broke up. So—”

“He lives in New Jersey.”

“What?”

“Paul Gilder. With his granddaughter’s family.”

“Now? He’s still alive?” Her voice dropped to a shocked whisper.

“He came in 1949. Just after Rosalie died.”

“ ’Forty-nine. They stayed on in Shanghai. That’s why the Red Cross had no record. Oh, God. It just gets worse and worse.” Shaking her head, she went on. “In any case, I didn’t find anyone. Maybe I didn’t look as hard as I might have. Because over the next few weeks, I couldn’t get that jewelry out of my mind. I think . . . It’s probably self-serving to say I went a little mad, but I think I did. I associate Shanghai with so much unhappiness. And the business I’m in . . . You have to understand how disheartening it is. Emotions run so high. People feel
owed,
though of course what they’re really owed they can never get back. Cases take years, and it’s hard every step of the way. No one, collectors or museums, banks, governments, no one does anything but throw up roadblocks. And then . . .” She petered out.

“Then?”

“If we do recover anything, the heirs turn around and sell it. Almost always. You see recovered assets on the auction markets all the time. It’s not because they’re greedy. Once things are returned, people find they can’t bear to have them around, knowing why they were lost, knowing who had them all these years. Asset recovery can give you a kind of cold satisfaction, but really, it doesn’t make anyone happy.”

A gust of wind mixed the shadows around on the path.
“So you decided if you personally recovered
these
assets, it would make
you
happy.”