Harry Turtledove - Tilting the Balance

They didn’t. They went off with their purchases, holding them carefully to avoid the lobsters’ flailing claws. Bobby Fiore followed them back across the Garden Bridge. The Lizards paid no attention to him; as far as they were concerned, he was just another Big Ugly.

Now which commandant were you talking about? he asked them silently. They went through the Public Garden near the south edge of the Garden Bridge, and then on to the British Consulate. Fiore skinned back his teeth in a fierce grin; that was where the Lizard commandant for all Shanghai had his headquarters.

Not all of the International Settlement was posh buildings full of foreigners-or rather, now, full of Lizards. In an alley off Foochow Road, jammed in between other equally unpretentious erections, was a dilapidated place called the Sweetheart; the door had the name in English and what he presumed to be its equivalent in Chinese characters. When Fiore went inside, he was greeted by a blast of scratchy jazz from a phonograph and by the multilingual chatter of the working girls in the front lounge.

He snorted laughter. Nieh Ho-T’ing was one smart cookie. The Reds had a reputation for being bluenoses. Who would have figured one of their big wheels would set up shop in a whorehouse?

As far as Bobby knew, Nieh didn’t go to bed with any of the girls. He didn’t mind if Fiore enjoyed himself, though, and some of the Russians, girls whose parents had been on the losing side of the Revolution and had to get out one step ahead of Lenin’s bully boys, were simply gorgeous. He wondered what they thought of being in cahoots with a Red now. He hadn’t tried finding out; he’d learned to keep his mouth shut when he wasn’t sure about the person he was talking to.

He opened the door to the lounge. The jazz got louder. The chatter, on the other hand, suddenly stopped. Then the girls recognized him and started gabbing again.

He looked around like a kid in a candy store. Russians, Eurasians, Chinese, Koreans, some in European-style lingerie, others in clinging dresses of Chinese silk slit up to here and sometimes down to there too… just being a fly on the wall at the Sweetheart was almost as good as getting laid at some of the dismal sporting houses he’d been to back in the States.

“Is Uncle Wu around?” he asked; that was the name Nieh Ho-T’ing used hereabouts. Another wonderful thing about the Sweetheart was that he could speak English. Almost all the girls understood it, and two or three of them were about as fluent as he was.

One of the Russians, a blonde in a silk dress slit up to here and then a couple of inches farther, pointed to the stairway and said, “Da, Bobby, he is in his room now.”

“Thanks, Shura.” Bobby made himself look away from the display of creamy thigh and head for the stairs.

Up on the second floor, he made sure he knocked on the third door on the left. If he’d picked the wrong one by mistake, he might have interrupted somebody who didn’t want to be interrupted. Too many people in Shanghai carried guns to make that a good idea.

As a matter of fact, when Nieh Ho-T’ing opened the door, he was holding a submachine gun himself. He relaxed when he saw Fiore-or relaxed as far as he ever did, which wasn’t much. “Come in,” he said, and closed the door behind Fiore. “What do you have for me?”

Bobby hated shifting from English to his halting Chinese, but he knew Nieh Ho-T’ing would burst a blood vessel if he suggested using one of the hookers to interpret. The Red officer waved him to a chair. On either wall, multitudes of mirrored images of him also sat down: this was a room in a brothel, sure enough.

He told Nieh Ho-T’ing what he’d heard in the Hongkew market. Nieh listened, asked questions, and finally nodded. “Luncheon tomorrow for their commandant in the British Consulate, you say?” he mused when Fiore was done. “Maybe we can make it a livelier occasion than the little scaly devils expect, eh?”

“Yeah,” Bobby Fiore said; one of his frustrations in speaking Chinese was that he couldn’t qualify anything. He had to go thumbs-up or thumbs-down, with nothing in the middle.

Nieh Ho-T’ing smiled, not altogether pleasantly. He said, “I was wise to use you and not liquidate you out in the countryside. You have brought information I can employ, and which I could not have had without you.”

“That’s nice,” Fiore said with an uneasy answering smile. Liquidate wasn’t a Chinese word he’d figured he’d pick up in ordinary conversation, but Nieh used it a lot. The Reds were in deadly earnest about what they did. You weren’t with them, you’d better have your life insurance paid up.

The really crazy part of it was, whenever Nieh Ho-T’ing didn’t make like a revolutionary or a Mafia soldier, he was as nice a guy as you’d ever want to meet. It was as if he put all the murderous stuff in a box and took it out whenever he needed it, but when he wasn’t using it, you wouldn’t guess it was there.

Now his smile was broad and happy, as if such things as liquidation had never crossed his mind. He said, “I’m going to do you a favor in return for the one you did me. I am sure you will take it in the intended spirit.”

“Yeah? What kind of favor?” Fiore asked suspiciously. Favors always sounded good. Sometimes they were, as when Nieh had said it was okay for him to fool around with the girls’ downstairs. But sometimes…

This was one of those times. Still beaming, Nieh said, “I am going to keep the promise I made you: you will be part of our raiding team.”

“Uh, thank you.” That was the best Fiore could do in Chinese. If he’d been speaking English, it would have, come out, Oh boy, thanks a lot.

If Nieh Ho-Ting noticed the irony and lack of enthusiasm, he didn’t show it. “Aiding in the fight against the imperialist devils from another world is surely the duty of every human being. Those who do not join in the struggle are the devils’ running dogs, and we know the fate of running dogs, eh?”

“Uh, yeah, sure,” Bobby Fiore muttered. Talk about stuck between a rock and a hard place! If he came along for the ride, the Lizards would shoot him. If he didn’t, the Chinese Reds would take care of the job. Either way, he could forget about finding out how the latest serial over at the Nanking on Avenue Edward VII was going to end.

Musingly, Nieh Ho-T’ing said, “Your pistol is not a good enough weapon for this work. We will make certain you have a submachine gun.” He held up a hand. “No, don’t thank me. It is for the mission as much as for yourself.”

Bobby hadn’t planned on thanking him. He wished he were back in the Lizard prison camp with Liu Han, and that he’d never, ever tried to teach that Chinaman named Lo how not to throw like a girl.

With a slight curl to his lip-he really was a bluenose at heart-Nieh said, “Why don’t you go downstairs and amuse yourself for a time, if you have nothing better to do? I need to find out if we can do what needs doing on such short notice, and the best way to do it if we can.”

Fiore didn’t need any more urging to go downstairs. If he was going off to get shot at (he carefully didn’t think of it as to get shot) tomorrow, he’d have fun tonight. Not much later, he ended up back in one of those mirrored rooms with Shura the White Russian blonde. By any objective standard, she was prettier and better in the sack than Liu Han had been, so he wondered why he didn’t feel as happy as he might have when he went back to the room where he slept.

The only thing he could think of was that he’d cared about Liu Han and she about him, but Shura was just going through the motions, even if she played the mattress the way Billy Herman played second base. “Goddamn,” he muttered sleepily. “I guess it was love.” Next thing he knew, the sun was up.