Росс Томас - The Fools in Town Are on Our Side

“How much?”

“Enough.”

“How much, goddamn it?”

He smiled. “Five thousand dollars. American. At that price you wouldn’t live two hours in Hong Kong.”

“And here?”

“It doesn’t matter here.”

I nodded. “Monsters of all kinds shall be destroyed.”

“Where’s that from?”

“From China,” I said. “From Chairman Mao.”

Until I was a little more than eight years old I went to school each afternoon for three hours following lunch. My teachers were prostitutes. I would have liked to have gone to school in the morning, but the ladies were never up.

I learned simple arithmetic (they were all good at that), French, Russian, German, and English — speaking the last, I was told, with a pronounced Australian accent. I also learned a highly garbled version of world history, spiced with tales of high romance and shattered dreams during the impossibly good old days in Berlin, Sydney, Canton, Rome, Marseilles, St. Petersburg, and San Diego. My Chinese also improved, but by the time I was eight I still couldn’t read or write my name in any language.

And it wasn’t until my seventh birthday that they stopped dressing me in rich brocades and silk. Until then I wore a series of long Mandarin gowns with high collars. My trousers were made of contrasting raw silk and red felt slippers covered my feet. The girls took turns painting my cheeks and plucking my eyebrows and powdering my face until it was chalk white except for two round spots of rouge on either cheek. I was a hell of a sight.

I’ve never been quite sure why Tante Katerine took me home with her or even kept me around after she did. It may have been some latent maternal instinct, but that’s doubtful. More likely, she made one of her usually accurate snap judgments and decided that having an American towel boy in her whorehouse would provide a novelty well worth the cost of my room and board.

Three years later, when I was nearly seven, she told me that the officials at the U.S. Consulate, as well as the Texaco management, as sumed that both my father and I had been blown to bits in 1937 by the Nanking Road explosions. A few days after she brought me home with her she had coached one of her American girls — the one from San Diego, Doris, I recall — for an hour or so and then had had her telephone both the Consulate and Texaco.

Posing as an old friend of the Dye family, Doris inquired if the doctor’s relatives in the States had been informed of his death and that of his son. She was told that the doctor had no living relatives. She then asked if there were any personal effects and the Texaco man said that there was nothing other than the doctor’s medical bag, his clothes and those of his son, and four five-year diaries that the doctor had faithfully kept since he was fourteen years old. Doris somehow talked the Texaco man into sending her the diaries to some poste restante or other under the unlikely pretext that they would be of immense value to the Montana State Historical Society, of whose board of directors she claimed to be chairman. After the diaries arrived, Doris occasionally read me some of the juicier passages. I’m still not sure how Doris knew about the Montana State Historical Society, but it may have been that she had once whored in Helena for a while.

Tante Katerine must have been close to forty in 1939. Her full name, so she said, was Katerine Obrenovitch, and she claimed to be a distant cousin of ex-King Alexander of Serbia, who took over the throne when his father, King Milan, abdicated in 1889. She also said that she had been born in St. Petersburg (she could never bring herself to say Leningrad) and had fled the revolution to Manchuria along with a sizeable bunch of other White Russians. I heard the tale dozens of times. It always had a lot of snow in it and even some wolves chasing a sleigh. Although still a very small child, I knew that most of it was a lie, but it was one that I never grew tired of hearing.

When the Japanese took control of Shanghai on November 8, 1937 — except for the International Settlement and the French Concession — Katerine employed every guile she had learned during twenty years of varied experience to determine who was what she, in her cosmopolitan patois, called, “Señor Number One Garçon.”

Mr. Number One Boy turned out to be a Japanese major who had been too long in grade, at least in his opinion, and was not at all averse to being bribed with both money and free samples. I remember the major, although I can’t recall his real name. The girls referred to him as Major Dogshit. That was close enough and since he didn’t understand English, he didn’t mind. His preferences in money ran to English pounds and American dollars, which commanded an exorbitant rate of exchange on the black market. He liked his girls in matched sets of twos and threes and when that was over, he liked his opium pipe. If I’d been a little older, he might even have liked me.

Tante Katerine’s cultivation of Major Dogshit paid off. Hers was the last foreign-staffed whorehouse in Nantao to close its doors, on Christmas Day, 1941. There were about twenty of them running wide open in 1937, offering not only whores and opium, but also gambling. After 6 P.M., my task was to greet the procession of Chinese quislings, Japanese big shots, and foreign dignitaries who often clogged the narrow street in the cool of the evening, borne by their Pierce-Arrows, Chryslers, Humbers, and the occasional Lincoln-Zephyr V-12, a car that I passionately admired.

The Chinese always arrived with four or five hard-faced bodyguards standing on the running boards. The bodyguards wore big Colt .45 automatics strapped to their bellies and they liked to wave them around a lot. All decked out in my silk and brocade finery, which was topped off by a round hat copied from the one that Johnny used to wear in the old Philip Morris ads, my eyebrows plucked, my face powdered and painted, but unlipsticked (I drew the line there), I greeted the guests, each in his own language, with florid phrases of welcome. The scripts had been written by Tante Katerine and I’d learned them by rote. One of the Chinese girls taught me what she considered to be the proper bows and flourishes.

I can still remember that the English paean went something like this in my best Australian twang: “May it please your lordship (even a merchant seaman arriving in a rickshaw was a lordship if he had the cash) to accept the poor hospitality of this humble house (flourish and bow and up). Your presence brings great honor to this wretched establishment and we humbly seek to satisfy your every need (leer and flourish and bow and up). We pray that time spent with us will help to banish the great cares that surely accompany your exalted position (flourish and bow and up). This way, sir, if you please.”

I could rattle that off by the time I was five and a half in English, French, Chinese, Russian (not much call), Japanese, and German, even if I didn’t understand a tenth of what I was saying.

That chore kept me busy from nine until eleven P.M. After that I sometimes prepared a few opium pipes and by midnight I usually had prepared enough so that I fell into my own dopey stupor and had to be undressed and put to bed, where I discovered what pleasant dreams really are. I still don’t know why I didn’t get hooked.

Occasionally, I accompanied Tante Katerine on shopping sprees in the International Settlement and the French Concession. She liked to show off her figure and her looks, which she kept through rigid dieting, chin straps, massage, and carefully applied makeup. It usually took her two hours at the mirror before she felt she was ready to greet customers. Her hair was still blond in 1939, although she had discarded Deanna Durbin in favor of the ringlets of Jeanette MacDonald. To me she remained the most beautiful person in the world and I remember clutching her hand as we sometimes strolled along the Bund, her silk parasol in her right hand and mine in her left, the devoted amah , Yen Chi, trotting along behind us. Tante Katerine nodded and smiled at regular customers if they were alone or with other men and ignored them if they were with their wives or mistresses. She kept up a running commentary to me on the sexual prowess and eccentricities of each which I found educational as well as interesting.