Edward Whittemore: Quin’s Shanghai Circus

And the boy’s name?

An odd one, I’ve always thought so. Gobi’s his name. Gobi. The same as the desert in western China.

Gobi what?

Nothing. Big Gobi maybe. He seems to like that.

Geraty was struggling to gather up his arms and legs. His face was purple again, his head swollen. With a groan he lurched off the stool and pocketed his eight single dollar bills that had been left untouched on the bar. His hand rummaged inside his greatcoat and made the flickering motion under his nose. He sneezed, coughed once. Quin watched him heave himself out the door.

Quin ordered another beer and looked down at the three passports he had stolen from the giant’s pocket. He had taken them thinking the fat man would have to come back for them, but now he realized they were worthless, the props of a clown.

The nationalities were different, the names were different, the combinations of false eyeglasses and false beards and false moustaches were different in each of them. But there was no mistaking Geraty’s huge scarred face in the three disguises.

Three costumes. There might be dozens more. Dozens of hidden pockets in the greatcoat stuffed with forged papers. For the bowler and the greatcoat, the army boots from the Second World War, the layers of sweaters and the red flannel tied with string were the props of an impostor as well as a clown.

Quin nodded to himself. A giant, an impostor, a clown. Yet he knew things, and in the end Quin decided a few facts were reasonably certain.

For one, a recluse named Father Lamereaux must have known his father and mother.

For another, the priest wanted him to bring to Japan a retarded boy who was probably his bastard son.

And third and most intriguing of all, the best player of liar’s dice he had ever met bore the name, real or assumed, of the neighborhood bar where he had spent a good part of his life.

Jade, Quin. Geraty brought it all the way from Japan. It comes from palaces where princesses live. And there are dragons there and people who speak a funny language no one can understand.

But they’ll probably understand me sometimes because I look a little like them. Geraty said so.

There was only one other passenger on the Japanese freighter sailing from Brooklyn, a solitary young student who had just completed two years of graduate work in New York. The student was plump and carelessly dressed. His straight black hair, parted in the middle, hung down to his shoulders. He also wore false sideburns and a false moustache, being unable to grow them himself.

The student’s name was Hato. Quin and Big Gobi talked with him only once during the Pacific crossing, on the evening the ship sailed when he invited them to his cabin to share a bottle of beer before dinner. The lower berth in Hato’s cabin, the only one made up for use, was strewn with a thick layer of well-handled movie magazines pressed down as if someone had been lying on them. The magazines dated from the 1930s and were stamped with the name of a student film society from which Hato had evidently stolen them.

There was also an amazing array of shoeboxes in the room, neatly piled and arranged, some of the stacks reaching as high as the porthole. The shoeboxes were numbered and marked with Japanese characters. When Quin asked about them the nervous student broke into a short but violent diatribe on the cruelty of Americans to foreigners. He refused to discuss the shoeboxes and a few minutes later they left the cabin in silence, Hato choosing to sit with the Japanese officers rather than with his fellow passengers.

During the next few days Hato spent all his time in the lounge coaxing one or another of the off-duty officers into a game of checkers. On the third day he was caught cheating at checkers, and thereafter no one would play with him. Hato took to his cabin and locked the door, staying there the rest of the voyage. He had his meals brought to him and visited the bathroom only after midnight.

A few months after the freighter docked in Japan, Quin was to spend a long night in the company of Hato. And although Hato subsequently strangled himself while playing a drum in an apartment rented by Quin, having first caused a murder that led to the largest funeral celebration in Asia since the thirteenth century, an anonymous event in which only Quin and three or four other people knew the true identity of the deceased, he was never to connect the strangled Tokyo gangster with the retiring student who had guarded the secret of his shoeboxes across the Pacific. For as soon as Hato set foot in his homeland he abandoned his hairpieces and shaved his head, put on an immaculate dark business suit, and stopped speaking English.

In addition he quickly lost a great leal of weight due to the calisthenics forced on him by nis new employer, the cigar-smoking poet who staged the magnificent funeral and saw to it that most of Tokyo’s twelve million inhabitants spent an entire day watching the black procession circle the city.

As soon as the ship was out of sight of land Big Gobi sat down on the deck beside Quin’s chair and admired the green glass paperweight that had been stolen from the desk of a customs official in New York. Gently he turned the paperweight over and over and held it up to the sky.

Jade, Quin. Geraty brought it all the way from Japan. It comes from palaces where princesses live. And there are dragons there and people speak a funny language no one can understand. But they’ll probably understand me sometimes because I look a little like them. Geraty said so.

Big Gobi smiled shyly. He placed the paperweight carefully on the deck and with a deep breath touched the small gold cross that was hanging from his neck. Along with the paperweight it was Big Gobi’s most treasured possession. As far as Quin knew these two objects, given him by Geraty, were the only belongings Big Gobi had wanted to take with him when he left the orphanage.

The paperweight was a personal gift from Geraty. The small gold cross was supposedly a gift from Father Lamereaux that Geraty had been asked to deliver. The cross had unusual markings on it. To Big Gobi it was no more important than the paperweight, but Quin had been curious enough to ask one of the priests at the orphanage about it.

I suspect it’s very valuable, the priest had said. The markings may be an ancient form of Syrian which means it could be a Nestorian cross. If it’s genuine it could go back very far indeed, a thousand years or more, perhaps as much as fifteen hundred years. If you ever have a chance, I suggest you ask the former owner.

I intend to, said Quin. By the way, Father, what can you tell me about Father Lamereaux?

Nothing, answered the priest. He was apparently known by one of the fathers here before he went to Japan, but that was fifty years ago, long before my time. I suppose Father Lamereaux contacted his former acquaintance here when he was, trying to find a place for his orphan just before the war.

And by reputation?

Nothing. Nothing whatsoever except that old story they tell in seminaries about him and Aquinas.

What’s that?

Well it seems that when Father Lamereaux first began studying Aquinas, he memorized the entire Summa theologica . They asked him why and his answer was that the thirteenth century seemed crucial to him in the history of the church. Something of an eccentric, I’d say.

The priest smiled. Quin thanked him and said good-bye.

He had learned a little about Father Lamereaux, less about the small gold cross that in fact was not a gift from Father Lamereaux, who had never seen it although he knew every step of the strange journey that had brought it across central Asia. Yet the small gold cross would turn out to be vital nonetheless, for as Quin eventually discovered, it had belonged at one time or another not only to his mother and Big Gobi’s mother but to the two men who had played the most significant roles in his father’s life, the one his chief collaborator, the other the Russian linguist who had assembled the vast collection of pornography that Geraty tried unsuccessfully to pass off as his own in the customs house in New York. The ancient Nestorian relic, then, had a long history prior to its arrival in Shanghai during the 1927 Communist uprising, there to entwine the lives of many people before Geraty finally intervened one night, ten years later, to steal it from a drugged woman who came to him with a confession.