Xiao Bai - French Concession

He felt like a protective lover telling her to be careful. But she still looked worried.

JUNE 14, YEAR 20 OF THE REPUBLIC.

1:05 P.M.

Ta-sheng-yu Candle Store was the second storefront on Rue Palikao, just after Rue de Weikwé. An-le Bathhouse took up the whole street corner and the first storefront. Between the bathhouse and the candle store there was a longtang called Yu-i Alley, and coal for the baths lay piled at the entrance to the longtang. Rainy days were the worst, but even on a sunny day like this, Lin had unwittingly tracked black footprints onto the candle store’s green tile floors.

“Are you sure they don’t know about this place?”

“I never told them about it.”

Ku was silent for a while. The attic was filled with boxes that smelled of dry dust and gunpowder. An arrhythmic sound of hammering came from the direction of Yung-he-hsiang-pai, the blacksmith. Deep in the alleyway, a girl training to be a Chinese opera singer accompanied a hu-ch’in in a raspy voice.

“Why were you carrying guns? I know they don’t have any brains, but don’t you use yours?”

Ku spoke in a low voice. He had lost his temper, but in the dead of the afternoon, against the backdrop of the singer’s shrill voice, his anger sounded unreal.

He was waiting for Park to call. He knew something like this was bound to happen with this lot. They were little more than children. Most of their peers were still in school, fetching water for their teachers, scampering through the streets, and getting into fights. There was an upside and a downside to working with young people. The downside was unexpected misadventures like this one. The upside was that they were naïve, bold, energetic, and treated danger like a game. In some respects, they blew trained operatives out of the water.

He took the phone from the storeroom up to the attic, and told a young member of the cell named Ch’in to mind the store. The attic was stocked not only with candles and foil, but also with matches, firecrackers, and fireworks. Sitting among the boxes was like sitting on a heap of explosives. But Ku was perfectly at ease lighting his cigarette with a match. He knew all about explosives. He had learned to make them from scratch in Khabarovsk.

No. 10 Yu-i Alley was visible through the tall wooden windows, over the back wall of the candle shop. Scallions grew in a battered aluminum basin on the wall of the rooftop patio south of them.

Whenever he was in a new place, Ku would take note of all the doorways and passages, mentally working out escape routes. This was part instinct and part rigorous training. Instructor Berzin had said that a good undercover agent must be as wary as a victim of claustrophobia, but more assertive and aggressive.

Here, for instance, the south-facing window had been boarded up against thieves, but Ku took the boards down so that the window now opened directly onto Yu-i Alley. In a corner of the alley piled high with An-le Bathhouse’s coal, there was a single brick in the wall which could be removed to reveal a loaded German-made Luger pistol wrapped in wax paper. The storeroom also had a back door leading into the courtyard of a shih house, one of the gray brick town houses with interior courtyards that lined all the alleyways. If you went through the courtyard you could come out of the entrance to No. 10 Yu-i Alley, take a left, go through the longtang leading to Rue de Weikwé, and turn onto Boulevard de Montigny. Once you were inside the Great World Arcade, you could melt safely into the crowds. In a pinch, you could always open the window facing west, climb onto the balcony and out onto the roof, and then look for your chance to escape.

Boulevard des Deux Républiques and environs

There’s always one threat or another, but you can cope. You are a trained marksman and were taught how to fight with your bare hands, to disguise yourself. You have been involved in dangerous business all your life. So you’ll take a deep breath and suppress your anger. Even if that man does get caught by the police, he won’t know where the Rue Palikao safe house is. And if he breaks under interrogation and gives them the address on Rue Amiral Bayle, the most they can do is arrest Leng, which would be a heavy but not a fatal blow. Leng only knows one phone number, which would take a full day to trace, and the Concession Police are slowpokes.

At almost two, the phone finally rang. It was Park, calling from a public phone. He spoke in a low voice and the line was crackly. His voice hissed into Ku’s ear like an echo carried by the wind, or rather, an echo shattered by impurities in the copper telephone lines.

When he put the receiver down, Ku lit another cigarette.

Lin shifted uneasily, watching the match burn out into a crooked stick of white ash in his hand. As it melted in the wind, he finally asked:

“Well?”

“Park confirmed that Comrade Chou Li-min has given his life for the cause as a result of this morning’s altercation.” Ku screwed his eyes up, and the corner of his eye twitched, as though irritated by smoke. “He wasn’t sure of the rumor, so he went to Chao-chia Creek, where he found the police dragging the creek for Chou’s body. It looks like he was pursued there, leaped in, hoping to swim to the other side, and the police opened fire.”

Silence.

Lin said nothing. Ku watched him carefully. Was he afraid? A lighthearted morning excursion had ended in death. Or was he angry? Anger could be useful if it was channeled into courage. They would need it — they were about to make another move.

“Comrade Chou had the courage to sacrifice his own life to protect his comrades. After mourning him, we must press on and avenge him.” He suspected his words were not forceful enough. He swallowed the cigarette smoke into his throat, allowing it to seep out from the corners of his mouth. His hoarse voice became smokier.

“The problem now is that Leng has disappeared. She is not in the apartment on Rue Amiral Bayle. You agreed she would wait for you there, and I’m afraid she may have run away because the gunfire frightened her. It’s too dangerous for her to be wandering around alone during the day.”

Lin started, as though waking from a dream, and got up abruptly. “I’ll go and find her.” He bent over to pick up the rope ladder.

“Where do you think she might be?” Ku mused. Then he said out loud: “She will call. If she does not call by five o’clock, we should evacuate this place.”

Lin couldn’t just sit down. He wanted to do something to avoid being overcome by grief. He didn’t stop to ask himself whether Chou’s death had frightened him. He was young. As a student, he had been just in time for the tail end of the revolutionary times. Before he knew what he was doing, he had been swept up by an unthinking frenzy and gone along with it. Then the violence of the struggle had surprised him like a sudden rainstorm. One of his comrades was shot dead by the army in a demonstration — the man had been his point of contact with the Party, and just like that, he had lost touch with his cell. Sometimes he thought to himself that if he had managed to stay in touch, he would have been killed. The thousands of young people swept up by the revolution hadn’t had time to organize themselves, and when the counterrevolutionaries retaliated, many of them simply lost touch with their cells and hence with the Party. Some of them resisted, and were killed. But he was not afraid. He was angry. He had actually been contemplating a suicide mission of some sort when he met Ku. Ku was a prudent, experienced revolutionary with meticulous offensive and defensive plans. He and his comrades were pinning their hopes on Ku because they thought he could win.