S Rozan - Trail of Blood

I looked up. “How do you know that?”

“Yaakov Corens told me.”

I held the brooch to the light as he went on, “By the time my cousin and I came to America, Lao-li’s obsession with the Shanghai Moon was total. Its legend had grown in the decades since it vanished, both in his mind and in the world of collectors. When I found we were in the same city with its maker, I could not risk Lao-li discovering its truth.”

“Why not? Did you have it by then?”

As though the words were cumbersome, Mr. Zhang spoke slowly. “I have always had it.”

“Then what are you talking about, ‘the decades since it vanished’? It never vanished. You had it!” I thrust out my hand, the brooch sparkling in it. “How could you do that to Mr. Chen? How could you let his obsession ever get started? Why didn’t you tell him? What was the point?”

The silence returned, and lasted so long I was starting to think Mr. Zhang had no answer. And really, what answer could there be? Greed? A family bitterness, a rivalry? Something to lord over his cousin, a way to control him?

Softly, Mr. Zhang spoke. “The seed of the legend of the Shanghai Moon was planted in desperate, dark times. It was watered with tragedy and tended in heartbreak. Public and private. Private and public.

“The truth you hold you in your hand, that small, flawed thing, was meaningless in the face of people’s need-Chinese people and exiled Jews and others besides-to believe something glorious could exist outside the despair and horrors of wartime Shanghai. No, more: could exist amid that despair and horror. From the moment it was made its legend began. That Rosalie would not show it only helped the legend flourish. In whispers, in rumors.

“Those rumors were why, years later, the robbers came for it.” He reached out and took the brooch from me. “But they did not leave with it.”

Mr. Zhang turned the gem in his hand, watching it gleam. “The moment he shot Aunt Rosalie, the robbers’ leader panicked. He commanded the others to retreat. They did. When I reached Aunt Rosalie-as I told you, I was the first-I found the Shanghai Moon’s gold chain broken but the gem still on it, on the floor beside her. I put it in my pocket. I wanted to be the one to give it back to her, when she was well. I wanted to be the one to bring her that happiness.

“But of course there was to be no happiness. Rosalie was dead. When Uncle Paul found her so, and saw the Shanghai Moon gone from about her throat, he wailed and, shocking me, began to curse the gem and those who now possessed it, calling down all manner of misery upon them. They had stolen it, they had killed for it, and now let them suffer all the torments of hell for it. His inconsolable grief and anger frightened me as much as the robbers had. He saw that, and calmed; he embraced me; he asked me to attend to my young cousin while he cared for Grandfather, who was badly hurt. I did so. For many hours I tried to comfort Lao-li with sweets and stories, sang to him, made tea. I brought water for Uncle Paul and tore cloth into bandages. I helped without question in whatever way I was asked. Trying to be good. Trying to hide my guilt and my terror. Because as day turned tonight I’d come to understand that the loss of the Shanghai Moon had killed Aunt Rosalie. Also that punishment was assured to-and deserved by-whoever possessed it now.”

Mr. Zhang paused, sad eyes still on the gem. He seemed to have shrunk.

“Oh,” I said, “but that’s-”

“Yes.” He nodded without looking up. “But I was eight years old.

“Over the next few days, barricaded in the kitchen, Uncle Paul nursed Grandfather while I tried to comfort and distract my cousin. In the dead of night we stole to the garden to bury Rosalie. Uncle Paul chanted prayers and shed tears. And I kept my terrifying secret.

“When Uncle Kai-rong surprised us with his return, he echoed Uncle Paul’s shock, his grief and his curses. Echoed and multiplied them. He forbade us ever to speak of the gem again. And with tears in his eyes he said Lao-li and I were his treasures. A treasure-that was what I wanted to be! Not a thief! Not a cursed killer!

“I thought many times to bury the Shanghai Moon in the garden. To throw it in the river. As though that would remove the curse! Always I was stopped by the thought of Aunt Rosalie. How she had loved it. I hid it among my things.

“In the weeks that followed, I found my young cousin shared my understanding that the loss of the gem had caused Rosalie’s death. Hadn’t Uncle Paul and Uncle Kairong said exactly that? At first we returned to that day over and over, trying to comprehend, but finally, terrified of its power, we made a pact never to speak about it. We kept to our word until my cousin stunned me, weeks later, with an idea spoken casually, as simple truth: Finding the gem would bring his mother back.

“I was a child, at the limit of my understanding, but I knew this was wrong. He went on to confess his greatest fear: that he was not up to the task, and that she could not come back until he accomplished it.

“What I would have given for adult counsel! But I could ask for none. But I also could not bear for my cousin to shoulder this impossible task and the guilt that would accompany his inevitable failure. I was racked with enough guilt for two already! I determined to take the only course I saw. I would show him the Shanghai Moon. I had no doubt this would bring down on my head the punishments the gem’s thief and possessor deserved, but it had to be done for my cousin’s sake.

“Some nights later, by the glow of a forbidden candle, and with my heart pounding, I retrieved the Shanghai Moon and held it out to him. He took it from me with a child’s interest in a sparkling, pretty thing, admired it, and gave it back. He didn’t seem to understand. ‘This is the Shanghai Moon,’ I said. ‘It was Aunt Rosalie’s. Cousin, in this life she cannot come back.’

“He smiled as though I was kind but simple-minded. ‘No,’ he said. ‘When I find the Shanghai Moon, she will come back.’

“Possibly you can imagine how it was for me then. A child alone with this secret, this quandary! Three more times in the next months I tried to show the gem to him, and three times he denied the jewel I had was the missing Shanghai Moon. Until finally he became angry with me. His shouting and his tears brought Uncle Paul running to see what the trouble was. Neither of us would say. In my terror of being discovered I professed ignorance, and my cousin said only that I had been teasing him. Uncle Paul asked us please to find ways to be kind to each other. Then he sat us down and said he had something to tell us that would make us sad, so he was going to tell us now, when we were sad already. He was going away, he said, leaving Shanghai. He was on his way to America, a beautiful place, and we were to stay with Kai-rong and Grandfather, but someday we could come see him in America, too. A few weeks later, he sailed from the harbor.

“I never again showed the Shanghai Moon to anyone, from that day to this. Aunt Rosalie’s death, my cousin’s anger, Uncle Paul’s leaving us-all these things were bound in my mind to the gem. As I grew to manhood, of course, I came to understand that the truth was both simpler and more complex than my childhood fears had made it. Still, it was years before the magic powers of the Shanghai Moon ceased to hold me, and to frighten me.”

Mr. Zhang turned the brooch in his fingers. “Those powers have never ceased to hold my cousin. He grew up obsessed with the gem. In time he began to laugh at his former connection between its return and Rosalie’s. The fantasy of a grieving child, innocent and foolish. Or so he said, and no doubt believed he believed. But his obsession did not diminish. Nothing interested him but gems. He read and studied, became an authority, and when we arrived here he took up his profession without hesitation. And, freed of the embargo against the world outside China under which we had grown up, he immersed himself happily in the search for the Shanghai Moon.”