Xiao Bai - French Concession

Later, when they debriefed, Park mentioned that he had backed the car along the wall several times, so that the passenger door would be right next to the wooden door to the storage room: “We didn’t want to give him another second to squint.” Lin jumped in from the right passenger door, and Park opened the window between the front and back of the cab, telling his passenger to stay calm and not get jumpy. Not that he could move with a Mauser pointed at his brain — or rather, jabbing into his eyelid. Having your eyeball burn while your eyelashes itched must be uncomfortable, Ku snickered.

At night, 181 Avenue Foch lit up from all its windows like a huge lantern or a gold furnace. Cash flowed like molten gold at the tables.

But Ku wasn’t after the money at Fu-sheng — he was smarter than that. Besides, if they could pull this off, wouldn’t every other casino in the Concession be showering People’s Strength with protection money? He might not be working toward a Communist revolution, but he did think of himself as revolutionizing the power dynamics of the Concession.

Right now, he wanted revenge. Not only had the Concession powers underestimated him, but they had also killed his woman, and if she hadn’t taken a bullet for him, he might be dead too. He did not tell the rest of the cell about his grudge against Morris Jr. and goal of revenge. But whenever he thought about it, his whole body longed for Ch’i.

While the others were preoccupied, he kneed the captive in the groin, slamming his balls from beneath, so that the man fell over and rolled on the floor with pain. Luckily Te-hsing Hotel was a family-run boardinghouse, and he had been able to book all the adjacent rooms on the third floor, as well as those above and below his own, for only ten yuan. From the room downstairs, Lin heard the man crash to the floor. Ku’s subordinates burst in, and he let them drag Morris Jr. downstairs, noting with satisfaction that Morris Jr. still couldn’t stand up straight. The fun had only just started. There was no reason why the cell should know that this was a matter of private revenge — the corrupt gangs were their enemies by default. Not only were the gangs the product of a reactionary society, but they had also massacred Communists on behalf of the authorities.

He stood on the third floor of the hotel and looked out toward the barbed fence on Route Ratard, toward the black expanse of the lawn. Backlit, the flower beds glimmered like ghosts. A dim electric light was hung at the entrance to the greenhouse, and someone was smoking beneath it. The huge golden lantern seemed almost to be soundproof. Not a sound could be heard despite the blazing light, which made it even eerier.

He saw Lin and company cross Route Ratard with Morris Jr., whose arms had been tied behind his back. The beefy Morris was nicknamed the “rice dumpling,” and now he was tied up like a dumpling wrapped in leaves. None of the passersby paid any attention to the curious group. The casino at 181 Avenue Foch was known for odd goings-on, and no one batted an eyelash. A few of them might have stopped to stare from about a hundred feet away, and then given the group a wide berth. He was worried that Route Ratard might be watched by gang lookouts, but the road was quiet for miles around, and nothing moved.

They were knocking at the door. The shadows near the garden side moved toward the wall. One man tried to open the little window from which the guards collected the mail, but Lin reached out and shoved his head down. His people were crowded to the left of the gate. One of them stood on the right side, with his gun trained on the crack in the gate. Another stood on the street with his back to the gate.

Young people did this the best. They were unafraid and treated the operation like a game. The guards who had come to open the gate were now under their control. The gate itself was half-closed, and the guards in their room on the east side of the building seemed to have overlooked the unusual scene on the lawn.

Morris Jr. was dragged into the dead center of the lawn. Now his legs had been tied up too. He really did look like a pyramid-shaped rice dumpling rolling onto the grass, with his head, ass, and legs at each vertex of the pyramid.

They were waiting.

The man who was about to be executed was waiting.

Ku was also waiting. He glanced at the dark mass that lay under a blue-patterned hotel tablecloth, one end stretched out over the edge of the balcony like the mouth of a giant carnivorous flower. Then he checked his watch and waited for the appointed time.

Eight o’clock. There was a red glow behind the villa, followed instantly by the sound of one explosion after another. The stout lantern seemed to quiver. Two light beams shot out of the guardroom, roving the lawn, and settled on the dumpling.

This was exactly what they had planned. At first they were going to use two hand grenades, but after Ch’i died they had come up with a more elaborate plan, including the fireworks that were going off on the lawn. A handful of their more alert neighbors had opened their windows or even ventured out onto their balconies. As guns rang out, Ku whisked the tablecloth away to reveal a gigantic horn loudspeaker. Holding the microphone firmly, he recited his speech by heart:

“Fellow citizens, fellow residents of Shanghai, on behalf of all my comrades from People’s Strength. . I hereby declare that we are executing this counterrevolutionary.” He hadn’t realized that the loudspeaker would be so loud. The noise hurt his eardrums, and he could hardly hear his own voice. But sending a message was crucial. He took a deep breath and recited it again. These declarations were a Soviet invention, one of the methods that Mikhail Borodin had brought to Canton when he was advising the Party there.

As he was making his speech for the third time, he saw Lin take aim and fire at the center of the lawn. Guards were pouring out of the building, but they could not get to the black lawn in time. The nighttime dew made the lawn as slippery as the banks of a lake. Turning around, he bounded down the stairs, and jumped into the driver’s seat, with Lin and the others piled into the back. He started the car, and the engine began to warm up. At this very moment, outside the north gate of the building, Park would also be revving his car up and heading east.

JUNE 22, YEAR 20 OF THE REPUBLIC.

9:00 P.M.

Leng could not find a new apartment on short notice, so Ku booked rooms for her in the Singapore Hotel on Rue du Consulat. Of course, she couldn’t be spending too much time in crowded public places. This is only temporary, Ku had said. Keep moving. Don’t spend more than two or three days in one hotel. But being rootless made her resent her mission. She was no longer passionate about the revolution. How would she survive watching movies and sitting in teahouses with a young dandy?

There’s no turning back in what we do, Ku said, but our goal justifies any sacrifice. Any sacrifice is worthwhile. From the moment she accepted Ts’ao’s proposal in Lunghwa Garrison Command, there had been no going back. Maybe up until then, things could have been different. But reminding herself that it was all fated forced her to stop daydreaming and focus, like a despairing man who finds something trivial to obsess over, or the musicians on a sinking ship who spend the final hours of their lives picking apart a complex harmonic passage.

She was constantly dissatisfied with her own performance. At night she reeled back to her hotel room exhausted, as if she had just come from a movie set.