Xiao Bai - French Concession

“In fact, Dame Juliana Berners of Sopwell Nunnery said as long ago as the fifteenth century that a good horse possesses the back of a donkey, the tail of a fox, the eyes of a rabbit, the bones of a man, and the chest and hair of a woman. A good racing horse is proud and holds its head high, like a beautiful woman.”

Brenen repeated this speech, looking at Therese.

A bay horse came galloping in from the north side of the field.

“Ah Pau! Ah Pau!” the onlookers cried.

Ah Pau was indeed galloping down the hillside on the bay horse. The Chinese servant was the central figure of the Paper Hunt Club. Several of the club officers had retired and returned home, while others had lost their lives in the Great War, making Ah Pau the only constant: now in his fifties, he had served the club faithfully for thirty years.

The jittery racehorses crowded along the fences on the northern edge of the field, and the gates were finally opened. Margot climbed into the saddle and waved at Therese, who was standing in the field. A gust of wind lifted her hat, and as she dropped the reins to catch her hat, the gray mare suddenly started forward.

Margot lurched in the saddle, but Brenen steadied it for her, picked the reins up nimbly from the ground and placed them in her hands.

“Ladies and gentlemen, on your mark, get set, go!”

The horses rushed out the gate. One of them crashed into the fence and knocked the post askew so that it ripped out of the ground, tearing up clods of mud. Hundreds of hooves thundered down the hill. The grass glinted in the breeze, and someone called out: “Tally-ho!”

Previously, when he was explaining the rules of the game, Brenen had told her that the expression was borrowed from the cry the Indians used for their hunting hounds. In the paper hunt, riders who found the strips of paper hidden in the hedges or under pebbles cried tally-ho to alert the official observers.

They raced down the hill into a cabbage patch. Margot tugged at the reins, steering her horse into the cabbages. Suddenly, a Chinese man appeared from the bushes, stamping his feet and shouting at her. Startled, her horse took a step back and began pawing at the ground, flinging up mud. Brenen caught up with her and flung a silver coin on the ground. The shouting stopped.

They had lost the group, and there were no scraps of paper in sight. They were standing on a small plateau hemmed in by a stream. Margot got the map out, and Brenen pointed to a Z-shaped stream called Zigzag Jump.

They steered their horses east along the stream, past a wooden bridge, and stopped in front of a mound of yellow earth next to a copse. On top of the mound lay an obelisk built of rubble, the club’s war memorial plaque.

It was almost noon, the sun was shining on the bottle green stream, and insects darted among the poisonous leaves of the oleander. Margot felt that she could not allow Brenen to touch her. She melted a little whenever he came close. It was she who had fallen in love with him. She felt like a bee with its wings caught in nectar.

JUNE 5, YEAR 20 OF THE REPUBLIC.

9:50 A.M.

Hsueh thought of Therese. He pictured her hair, which was curly like a shock of cornflower petals. Curiously, the darker the room was and the more pain he was in, the more clearly he could picture Therese. But that was only to be expected, since he had taken dozens of photographs of her.

He did not know what they wanted with him or why they had brought him here. From where he lived on Route J. Frelupt, the car had only made two turns, which meant they must be at the police headquarters on Route Stanislas Chevalier. They drove through the iron gates and into a passageway on the north side of the building, between the red brick wall and a high fence lined with glass shards, where they dragged him out of the car. It was cold and there was no sunlight.

They pushed him into the building. The walls of the corridor were dark green with black paneling, and the floors were painted black. He was brought into what looked like an interrogation room and forced onto a chair fitted with high boards. As soon as he sat down, the boards were rotated so that they were positioned right under his arms.

The Chinese sergeant sat behind the desk, asking questions and filling out the printed form he had in front of him. When he had finished with each page, he handed it to the secretary who sat beside him, a Chinese man who knew French and who was busy translating and typing up the document.

The questions slowly began to focus on his trip with Therese. The sergeant stopped filling out forms and began to write down Hsueh’s answers on a piece of grid paper.

Where did you go in Hong Kong? What about Hanoi? Haiphong? Can you only remember the hotels? Did you go to the pier? To bars? Restaurants? Did you meet anyone?

But he had little to say. No, he was not lying. I’ll give you ten minutes to think about it, said the sergeant, and walked off, probably because he needed to piss. He came back, his clothes smelling of Lysol. Hsueh still had nothing to say.

“Ah yes, she did go to see a man in another room in Hanoi,” Hsueh said. Of course the thought had been in the back of his mind all this time. A Chinese man. I don’t know him, I know nothing about him, but he looked a little shady, said Hsueh, glad of the chance to disparage his rival.

“Well, then let us help jog your memory,” the sergeant cried.

They dragged him into an empty room. Pushing him onto the ground, they tied him up and held his head down. Huddling on the cold cement floor, he watched apprehensively as the men brought a tin bucket. Then they jerked his head upward and pushed it into the bucket. It felt as if there was something clenching his heart. He heard loud voices, footsteps, and before he had time to process all this, his head was smashed first one way and then the other. He could feel the force of the blows through the bucket.

The pain was concentrated at one point to begin with — his nose, which happened to have been bashed into a ridge on the inside of the bucket. That was just a dull pain, like walking into a pole in winter. But then his entire face started burning, and someone was clubbing the back of his skull, making it swell up. His shoulders ached. His head was being kicked this way and that, he was nauseated, and all his joints hurt. His throat felt as though it had a dried pepper stuck down it.

Eventually his joints were pushed to their extremes and began to give out. A pleasant numbness replaced his exhaustion, and there was a roaring in his ears, as if a crowd of people were shouting and talking into the bucket.

After what felt like ages, the bucket was shaken hard, and his nose hurt sharply. He could taste and smell the rust. The bucket clanged to the ground behind him, and sunlight glinted on the windows, blinding Hsueh momentarily. Then the stench of rust went away. The setting sun played on the edges of clouds and reflected on the glass. Hsueh thought he could almost smell the sunshine.

He was taken to another room, where his linen jacket, tailored at Wei Lee, had been hung carefully on the coatrack. He had quite forgotten when he had been stripped down to his shorts, and as he was putting on his pants, he examined the bruises on his bony knees with self-pity. He couldn’t tell whether he had gotten them from being kicked around or from kneeling on the ground.

Someone lifted him up and put him on a chair, as if he were a photograph being fished out of developer and hung up to dry. Things became unblurred, took on straight lines, and came right side up. The man smiling at him was not the Chinese sergeant who had been grinning and screaming at him before his head was stuffed into the tin bucket, but a Frenchman.