Xiao Bai - French Concession

But then everything changed. Officially this was because the French intelligence agency had received reliable information that Comintern and Moscow were sponsoring subversive radical groups in Indo-China, via Shanghai-based organizations that offered financial and practical assistance. The mail from Haiphong brought all kinds of news in documents from heavy bound reports to scattered notes discovered in raids. Lieutenant Sarly decided he would have to do something about it, if only to placate Paris. Perhaps he wanted to beef up the line on his résumé about supervising a colonial police force. In any case, he began to read the files. The biggest problems will resolve themselves if you look away, Lieutenant Sarly liked telling his men. But even a trace of something fishy can turn into a case if you look hard enough. All it takes is imagination.

Sarly himself had an active imagination, and he prided himself on knowing the city well. How many of the goings-on in the Concession’s maze of longtangs really escaped his gaze? People thought of the French as being idle and free-spirited, but there was more to them than that, he thought. They could govern just as competently as the English could, or better, and their colonies would be more interesting places for it.

All the detectives in the Political Section had their own team of informers, and every informer had his eyes and ears on the ground. They penetrated every tissue of the city like a network of veins. They each had to file a report every day, even if it was scribbled on the foil from a cigarette packet. If they were illiterate, they could also give an oral report to be recorded by their superiors. All those bits of paper in dubious handwriting would end up on the secretarial division’s desk, to be sorted through and translated, and the juiciest stories found their way to Lieutenant Sarly’s desk.

That was how the assortment of handwritten notes that Hsueh wrote on scraps of paper — several, in fact, on Astor letterhead printed for the hotel’s guests — wound up on Lieutenant Sarly’s desk an hour later, in a fat file delivered by Inspector Maron. Not only did Lieutenant Sarly notice that this amateur photographer could write entire reports in French, he also found a familiar name in the records of Avenue Joffre Police Station: Weiss, Pierre Weiss. Weiss had been a Frenchman doing business in the Concession when war broke out. He had returned to France to enlist and had never come back to Shanghai. He and his Chinese mistress had had a son, one Weiss “Wei-shih” Hsueh, who was now an informant for the detectives of the Political Section, taking part in an important investigation.

Inspector Maron told Lieutenant Sarly that he had ordered a search of Hsueh’s rooms on Route J. Frelupt. Lieutenant Sarly looked up from his papers. Cancel it, he said. But Maron replied that Ta-p’u-chiao’s Chinese policemen were already on their way.

JUNE 11, YEAR 20 OF THE REPUBLIC.

6:15 P.M.

Hsueh was outraged. He wanted to get even with Maron. He was glad he hadn’t told him everything he knew that morning at the police station. When he got home, he was startled by the sight of his wardrobes flung open and drawers tipped onto the floor. His clothes lay scattered everywhere, but bundles of newspapers and letters, and — yes, photographs, were all stacked on his bed. A picture of the French executing a spy at the corner of a trench was propped up on the toaster rack, the rifle pointing toward a pot of jam. His father had leaped out of the trench to take this photograph, standing on the edge of the trench just above the head of the man who was about to be executed.

Upon inspecting his possessions, he found that all of his important letters and photographs had disappeared, including his father’s photographs, and pictures of his mother and Therese. He was mortified. Those were his most private possessions. He was enraged by the thought of how Maron would sneer when he saw those photos.

An observer might be forgiven for thinking that Therese didn’t look all that sexy in his pictures. In some, she was leering so widely that her nostrils flared. In others, the perspective made her thighs look fat, and her ass looked flabby. But he thought they were beautiful shots and true to reality. He remembered one overexposed photograph in which Therese’s legs were curled up, and she looked like a white sapote fruit cut open to reveal its pulp. She was aroused, and her pubic hair was visibly wet, though Hsueh would have to admit that the wetness was partly his saliva.

He could not imagine what someone who saw those photographs would think of him. They recorded moments of pure abandon. He had given Therese the photographs that portrayed her accurately and not as a strange creature. The rest, the ones he’d kept, were the ones the police had taken. It had to have been the police. Maron was behind this.

All afternoon he seethed with rage and humiliation. He had spent days making up stories to satisfy Maron’s appetite. That man slurped Hsueh’s stories down like spaghetti, and kept shoveling more in. Strung together like cheese, Hsueh’s stories all ended up in Maron’s insatiable stomach. He wrote about what Therese liked in bed. He invented an entire daily schedule for her: where she ate, where she had her dresses tailored, whom she met and where. To please Maron, he was forced to lie about some things. He said he was Therese’s closest business associate, that there was no one she trusted more. He accompanied her everywhere, and when she was not able to attend a meeting in person, he would attend it on her behalf. He even wrote his reports in French, afraid that a careless translator might leave something out. He scoured the Concession’s bookstores for detective novels that would contain the firearms terminology he needed.

Of course he was selective in what he told Maron. He heaped most of the blame on Therese’s wicked friends. She herself might not be aware of what was happening, he wrote. Her real expertise was in jewelry, and she allowed Zung to take care of other business. (Inspector Maron had told him that the man’s name was Zung.) But sometimes he told the truth, like that morning. Inspector Maron had been grumbling that Hsueh was all talk and no action, so Hsueh told him about following Zung and the other two men to Rue Amiral Bayle. He even mentioned the woman who had disappeared in the Kin Lee Yuen assassination case. But although he could easily have said more, he did not. He did not mention that the woman lived in the apartment overlooking the longtang. He even concealed the location of the apartment — it was late, he claimed, he could not remember which longtang it was in, and she had only appeared briefly at the entrance to the longtang. But he had seen her picture in the newspaper, and he had a photographer’s memory for faces.

When he left the police building, he had still been feeling indecisive. He had been afraid. He hadn’t had the nerve to do what he had to do. By the time he turned the corner of Route Stanislas Chevalier, he had begun to regret the whole thing. He knew his reports could hurt Therese. He considered telling her everything, but he was afraid of Inspector Maron, afraid of the darkness and smell inside that bucket.

Now he was no longer afraid. He walked downstairs to his landlady’s rooms to borrow a phone. She looked concerned. What were those policemen after when they barged in this afternoon? she asked. He was unafraid.

But when the call went through, he suddenly found himself tongue-tied. All he could think to say to Therese was that he missed her. His landlady was listening through the living room door. Therese laughed. He heard something clatter onto the floor on the other end of the line, and guessed that she must be pulling on the long telephone cord.