Xiao Bai - French Concession

When the men sent by the Green Gang arrived at his cabin, Ts’ao had breakfasted and was fully dressed. Two of the bodyguards lugged his trunks out onto the deck. He reclined on the sofa in the cabin while Leng stood by the railing outside. He had no idea why Leng didn’t just stay home. She insisted on traveling with him, but when she came she always had that mournful look. She shivered, went up to the trunk, opened it, and retrieved a red scarf, which she tied around her head.

The garde municipale , the police force of the French Concession, had been notified of Ts’ao’s secret mission, but he would also need the Green Gang’s protection. So instead of disembarking at Kung-ho-hsiang Pier in the International Settlement, he took a speedboat to Kin Lee Yuen Wharf, south of Lokatse. That was in the French Concession, within Green Gang territory.

Two boats were let down from the ship at the same time. One carried a Frenchman, a messenger who regularly traveled from Hanoi by train and sea via Haiphong to Shanghai, with documents that had to be personally signed for by the head of the Political Section of the French Concession Police. The other boat carried an important member of the Nanking government, his wife, his own bodyguards, and four bodyguards sent by the Green Gang. Before long, his wife started complaining of seasickness and insisted on sitting at the cabin window to get some air.

The sky was bright. Lin P’ei-wen was sitting on a rusty ladder that dipped below the waterline. The waves foamed around the pier, while bits of wood and leaves floated downstream. From where he was on Fishermen’s Pier, he could see the porters on Kin Lee Yuen Wharf wearing their copper badges — only registered workers were allowed onto piers permitting overside delivery. He looked out to Lokatse, a bit of land on the eastern shore of the river that jutted out where the river took a sharp turn south. Someone said that it was called Lokatse because there used to be six families living there— lok meant six. But there were far more than six families there now. All the foreign trading houses were claiming land along the waterfront and building warehouses there. The few remaining rapeseed fields between dirty black walls looked like gaps in a mouth full of rotten teeth. There’s no way I can keep track of all the boats rounding the corner past Lokatse, Lin thought. The papers said that the authorities were planning large-scale works to fill in deep fissures in the riverbed there.

Lin had collected a telegram in the early hours of the morning using forged identity papers. He had reported the contents of the telegram to Ku: their target, the hero of the day, would be arriving as planned. In a sense, Lin and his associates were merely the supporting cast.

In the early morning, Ku Fu-kuang had been at Mud Crossing in Pu-tung, waiting to cross the river with two other men. The Concession authorities prohibited boats other than the licensed Chinese and Western-run ferries from taking passengers across the river, but there were always boatmen willing to risk the passage across the narrow, winding river for a fee.

Now they were sitting in a chestnut-colored Peugeot sedan parked at the entrance to Kin Lee Yuen Wharf.

Lin saw two boats round the corner, one after another. A woman stood at the entrance to the cabin of the speedboat, the chrome-plated railing glinting in the sunlight, her red head scarf flapping in the wind. Slipping out of Fishermen’s Pier from a hole in the wire-mesh fence, he went up to the Peugeot and waved.

Ko Ya-min jumped out of the car and melted into the crowd. The entrance of the wharf led out onto the crowded Quai de France. Lin immediately picked out the reporter Li Pao-i, whose shifty air gave him away.

The Arsène Lupin had never employed more than three people at a time. It was printed once every three days, and each paper consisted of a single broadsheet folded up into a tabloid paper, so calling Li Pao-i a newspaper reporter was a stretch. But he had somehow gotten a tip and arrived early to get a piece of the action. This was a big scoop, and he didn’t have the nerve to hog it, so he had also sold the tip to a handful of more reputable newspapers whose reporters he saw regularly at the teahouse. Now they were standing next to him, while men with cameras waited about ten meters away.

Sergeant Ch’eng Yu-t’ao strode through the entrance to the wharf with several of his men from North Gate Police Station. Someone important was disembarking today. The Green Gang had undertaken to protect him, and the sergeant’s job was to shoo busybodies away and seal off the floating dock connected to the jetty, so that the motorcade could drive directly up the jetty onto the dock. When the cops arrived, the Peugeot drove slowly away from the entrance to the wharf.

Ku was now standing on the southern end of Rue Takoo with a Browning No. 2 pistol tucked under his shirt, in the left pocket of his gray serge trousers. The pocket had been specially sewn on, and it was extra deep so his gun would fit snugly inside. The strange windowless building behind him was a cold storage warehouse belonging to Shun-ch’ang Fish Traders. Ku was frantic. He realized the flaw in his plan. The jetty had been sealed off and no one was allowed to enter the floating dock. If the party had a motorcade, or if the blinds on the cars were drawn, then all was lost.

Lin P’ei-wen was standing at the opposite corner and looking toward him. Behind Ku, a narrow street called Rue de la Porte de l’Est ran south along the Quai de France, two blocks from Rue Takoo and parallel to it. On the side that intersected with the Quai de France, there was an iron gate with a police guard post. Farther south, where the French Concession ended and Chinese territory began, the road was called Waima Road, and the building on the intersection where the Quai de France became Waima Road was the headquarters of the Shanghai Special Marine Police Branch. Lin’s job was to watch those two buildings closely. Ku himself was standing at the spot with the best view, and he had a clear view of the entrance to Kin Lee Yuen Wharf. The Peugeot was parked on the other end of Rue Takoo, near Rue du Whampoo.

Leng had already disembarked. She too realized that things had not gone according to plan. There were three eight-cylinder Ford sedans waiting for them, and they got into the middle one, with Ts’ao sitting next to her. She did not know whether anyone could tell which car they were in, and the blinds were drawn.

She made a decision without thinking twice.

Sergeant Ch’eng Yu-t’ao was standing on the floating dock to welcome his guests. He had Ts’ao’s personal bodyguards hand over their Mauser rifles. Civilians were not allowed to carry unregistered firearms in the Concession, and what mattered was that they had the Green Gang’s protection.

The car drove slowly up the jetty, turning past a building toward the entrance to the wharf.

It was just past ten. Li Pao-i would claim that he had heard the clock at the Customs House chime, or at least that was what he later told Hsueh at the teahouse.

The assassination at Kin Lee Yuen Wharf

Just then, a string of firecrackers exploded with a deafening boom behind the rickshaws lined up on the northern side of the entrance. Later, the police confirmed that a string of firecrackers had indeed been hanging on the iron fences surrounding the wharf. The ground along the wall was strewn with tiny bits of paper, and the place stank of nitrates and sulfates. The Concession Police had developed a conditioned response to firecrackers — although harmless, they had often been used in recent protests and riots to sow chaos at the scene.