Росс Томас - The Fools in Town Are on Our Side

For a block there was nothing but mangled bodies. A dead traffic cop was doubled over the side of his control tower, his eyes open. Flies crawled over them. I passed Honan Road where Nanking Road curves slightly and kept on going through a crowd that gradually came alive and chattered and moaned and screamed. They hadn’t been hit. I passed Chekiang Road and the Sincere and Wing On department stores and kept on going. A Sikh policeman stared at me once and then looked quickly away. My amah had told me to stay away from the Sikh cops because they were mean. The only ones who were meaner, she said, were the Annamites that the French had brought into their Concession. They call them Vietnamese now. I suppose the Sikh cop looked away because he didn’t want to fool with a four-year-old foreigner smeared with his own blood and that of others, dirty, disheveled, and bawling, who stumbled through the crowd, panicky, carrying a man’s hand, wrist, and forearm against his chest much as he would hold his favorite teddy bear. I remember that after the bombs exploded there was that Godawful silence, so profound that all I could hear was my own voice and the tick of the watch which was still strapped to my father’s wrist.

I must have gone two or three streets past the department stores before I saw her. She wore an organdy dress with lots of ruffles and flounces in a style that I later found had been popularized by an American actress called Deanna Durbin. I’ve yet to see one of her films.

I thought then, and perhaps still do, that the woman in the organdy dress was the most beautiful person in the world. She stood there at the curb, waving a silk parasol, and yelling for someone called Fat Li-san. Her blond hair was capped by a wide-brimmed, floppy hat. Dark green, I remember, a color that almost matched her eyes. Slightly behind her stood a Chinese woman who also yelled for Fat Li-san.

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.