Xiao Bai - French Concession

Lieutenant Sarly wanted to bring his family to Shanghai, but his Corsican wife could not stand the humid Asian weather, so she took their children back to Marseille on a ship via Saigon. He did not keep a Chinese mistress, preferring to travel home once a year on vacation. By contrast, M. Baudez, the French consul, had brought his entire family to Shanghai, even though diplomats were posted to new locations more frequently than were the police.

That evening, Lieutenant Sarly was sitting in the study in the consul’s villa. Huge balconies lay outside the French windows, and behind the railings you could see the great lawns. A sharp cry came from the direction of the parasol trees. Consul Baudez stood up and looked outside. A boy was lying on the path between the lawn and the trees planted along the wall, entangled in his bike. But it was the girl standing on one of the lawn chairs who had been screaming. She was rocking the chair back and forth, her leg straddling the back of the chair, with its peeling black paint. Meanwhile, the boy on the ground struggled to free himself from the rubber tires and bike frame.

“They gave us all the testimony they collected,” Lieutenant Sarly continued. He was giving the consul his customary briefing on intelligence received by the Political Section.

A Nanking intellectual who claimed to be a professor had come to him with the report, which consisted of testimony followed by an analysis of intelligence collated from various sources. Sarly flipped to the signatures on the last page, which appeared to indicate a sort of investigative research group, probably staffed by a handful of young intellectuals culled from the thousands who were fleeing inland towns for the large coastal cities, ambitious types willing to submit to the direction of a middle-aged professor. Nanking attracted scores of young people like that with its proliferation of study groups, associations, and societies of learning. The card they had given him carried one of those curious names. What was it again? A research society, or was it an investigative institute? Lieutenant Sarly glanced at the report on the table.

“We were eventually able to persuade that man to talk,” the man had said. He had been wearing a Chinese suit, his eyes gleaming behind his spectacles. He did resemble a diffident university professor. “It’s better for Chinese matters to be taken into Chinese hands. You are guests here, and guests will always be too courteous. Besides, according to the terms of the lease, one day you will leave.” The shy professor began to laugh, as though the laughter would prove he believed in Sun Yat-sen’s nationalist principles.

The Nanking investigators concluded that Mr. Petroff Alexis Alexeievitch, who was registered in the Political Section’s fingerprint records as Mr. Brandt, File No. 2578, was not, as he had claimed, a thirty-nine-year-old German businessman. He refused to answer any questions when he was being interrogated at police headquarters. Nanking insisted on having him transferred first to Lunghwa Garrison Command, and then to the Nanking military prison. Sarly decided that the consul probably did not want to know what had happened to Mr. Brandt in prison. He himself did not want to know. He had heard that a prisoner there would be made to kneel in front of a large iron clamp and have his head placed inside it. For every three notches the screw was turned, the clamp would grow one centimeter tighter.

Mr. Brandt’s testimony was recorded four times. He handled the situation admirably. Each testimony was flawless and internally consistent, and each time it completely contradicted the testimony he had previously given. The interrogators had easily been fooled into thinking that each of those testimonies was a real breakthrough. Sarly doubted that even the last of them exhausted what Mr. Brandt knew. He could not even be sure that Alexis Alexeievitch was his real name. Not that that mattered, since Mr. Brandt probably did not know his real name either.

In any case, this was valuable intelligence. It demonstrated conclusively that Shanghai was becoming a center for the firearms trade. Large numbers of bank documents and deposit slips had been found in Mr. Brandt’s apartment, totaling some 738,200 yuan.

Documents showed that the bank account was extraordinarily active, yet Mr. Brandt could not produce any invoices or receipts. This did not work in his favor. He had enough money to buy a whole house, and he could not explain where the funds came from, or to whom he had paid them. He insisted that he was representing a German trading company based in Hamburg, which planned to buy property in Hong Kong or Shanghai as the first step toward establishing an Asian presence.

In Nanking, Mr. Brandt kept changing his story. First he said he was trading opium, and then it was firearms. In his third testimony — Sarly figured this must be the tenth turn of the screw — Brandt said that the German company was a shell belonging to a shadowy Moscow firm, one of the firms that had sprung up when Comrade Lenin discovered that his newly established Communist country would have to use the exploitative imperialist methods of international trade if it was to feed itself.

But the Nanking investigators did not believe this story. The Concession Police never arrested foreign businessmen without incriminatory evidence — not that Brandt would know this — and two sources had fingered him separately. Brandt later admitted that while his mother was a born and bred Berliner, his father had been born in Moscow. Then, in a raid on revolutionary cells in Hanoi, the French police there had found Brandt’s correspondence address in Shanghai. The Political Section of the Concession Police initially thought he might be the leader of the Pan-Pacific Association of Unions. But not long thereafter, in a botched military operation in a small city in Kiangsi province, the Kuomintang discovered documents that the newly established Soviet government had forgotten to destroy in its hurry to retreat. Clues in the documents had led to a series of arrests made by the Kuomintang military in Kiangsi. One of them had caved when threatened with torture and divulged the numbers of a few bank accounts in Shanghai.

According to the interrogation notes from Nanking, in his fourth testimony Brandt had admitted to leading a new Communist organization with a mandate to support the socialist movement across Asia from Shanghai. The organization would provide expertise, strategy, and, crucially, funding to other radical groups. Lieutenant Sarly had his doubts about that confession too. The manuscript was too logical, too well written. It read like a carefully crafted masterpiece pretending to be a draft. The writer hesitated, contradicted himself, crossed out large sections, and yet when he got to the point it was unambiguous and succinct.

But although the Brandt case raised many questions, all parties involved agreed on one fact: they had a common enemy, one that was disciplined, well organized, and well funded. After setbacks in Europe, particularly in Germany, their enemy had refocused its strategy on the Far East, which the Comintern considered the weakest link in the capitalist chain. The best place for them to detonate their bomb would be Shanghai, Asia’s most heterogeneous and ungovernable city.

In their private conversations, Consul Baudez and Lieutenant Sarly agreed that the French Concession was the most vulnerable part of Shanghai. A few Shanghailanders, mostly real estate developers, had strong opinions about the Communists. Although the consul had thus far remained neutral, he would seize this opportunity to take action. Baudez too had received a private letter from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Paris via diplomatic mail, hinting that the Concession authorities should make a few high-profile arrests in line with France’s shifting policy toward the Soviet Union. The animosity between the two countries was no longer a mere trade dispute.