Xiao Bai - French Concession

“We can cooperate with Nanking. But before we do anything, we’ll need more information. To protect the interests of the Concession, we have to stay one step ahead of our friends in Nanking.” Lieutenant Sarly chose his words carefully. He seemed to be keeping something back from them.

“I heard that the Kin Lee Yuen assassination had to do with financial speculation,” Hsueh began, seizing his chance to make a good impression. “In the weeks after the assassination, the price of public debt rose steeply. Before then it had been declining steadily for a month. When I looked up the papers around then, I found a rumor that an influential man in Nanking was threatening to split off from the Kuomintang and set up a new government in the south. The warlords there supported him, and when the new government had been set up, he said it would take over the Cantonese customs. But public debt is backed by customs receipts in Canton. The victim, Ts’ao, worked for this man. He’d been sent to Canton to test the waters. But, of course, his assassination scared everyone off, and no one has the nerve to do anything now — they won’t even set foot in Shanghai, never mind going to Canton. There were rumors that the assassin was a Nanking special agent, but if that was the case, why would the government’s own people spend so much time investigating it?”

Hsueh hardly ever made speeches like this or used this many long words. The jargon made him sound more eloquent. Leng’s earnestness had rubbed off on him — she was always bringing up her ideals while they were flirting.

Lieutenant Sarly looked at him approvingly. This young man could be observant when he put his mind to it.

“Excellent work,” he said. “But you can’t draw any conclusions yet, although the Nanking investigators may think they can. Their so-called experts are all ex-Communists, so you have to take what they say with a grain of salt. There were good financiers among the Communists. Marx himself was one of them.”

JUNE 24, YEAR 20 OF THE REPUBLIC.

10:15 A.M.

Inspector Maron was annoyed that Hsueh was getting all the attention. Imagine bringing a stray cat home, feeding it, kicking it, training it to catch mice, and then discovering that the cat has become your boss’s pet. Hsueh could tell that Maron was annoyed. To begin with, Maron had never thought of Hsueh as being French anyway, and Hsueh would have to agree with him there. Nor did Maron want the entire detective force supporting Hsueh’s operation, although that was clearly what Sarly wanted.

So Hsueh felt a little uncomfortable when Lieutenant Sarly asked Hsueh to stay for a moment at the end of their meeting, as though he had something private to say to him. As Maron was walking away, he happened to glance over his shoulder; Hsueh met his gaze.

Sarly took a photograph from his drawer and showed it to Hsueh. It was an ordinary group photograph of people standing in two rows in front of a building, the architectural style of which was indecipherable because the photograph was overexposed.

“The British Secret Intelligence Service got hold of this photograph, and Martin swapped it for an entire case of my documents.”

The dome in the background looked like an Orthodox church, an Easter egg, or perhaps a Russian onion? A few of the subjects wore forced smiles; the rest were unsmiling. Perhaps it was the cold or the food, or perhaps their faces were too numb to smile.

“Look at the third man on the left,” Sarly said, directing Hsueh’s attention away from the artistic merit of the photograph. “I’m afraid his features aren’t very clear. The hat gets in the way.”

The man’s hat cast a shadow that stretched past his nose, such that only his chin was visible, and the rest of his face lay in shadow. His eye sockets were dark pools.

“Think what question you’d like to ask.” Sarly sounded pleased.

“Who is he?” Hsueh knew how to play along.

“Exactly! Who is he? Who on earth could he be?”

Lieutenant Sarly unfolded the note in his hands, and began to read aloud in a resonant voice, as if he had good news he couldn’t wait to deliver, and his listener had been anticipating this moment. He might have been eulogizing a philanthropist or announcing the benefactors to a good cause:

“He emerged in 1925 in the Shanghai union movement. Some of the workers thought him intelligent and resolute, while others called him ruthless. It didn’t matter either way, because he soon disappeared from their circles. Half a year later, someone saw him driving a car for the Soviet consulate on 10 Whangpoo Road, wearing a driver’s uniform, with a military official in his car. He was a good driver, and the consul himself sometimes took his car. That was no surprise — everyone said he could do anything he put his mind to. But no one knew why his career as a driver was so short, or what he got up to after that. In November of 1927, when a White Russian loyalist was caught throwing stones at the Soviet consulate, he was spotted in the crowds. He claimed to be a passerby who had been beaten up by drunken Cossacks, and insisted on filing a police report with the International Settlement authorities. Then he disappeared again. Some said he was in Khabarovsk, while others claimed he had gone to Canton.

“Eventually, his face appeared in this photograph. The people in the photograph weren’t classmates. Some of them had been sent to Moscow to study Communist theory, while others were studying electronic communications. Yet others learned how to mix gasoline, rubber, and magnesium powder in a vodka bottle — apparently the trick there is not to put too much gasoline in the bottle, because it can extinguish the detonator. The group disbanded before long, and no one knew where he ended up. Then the British raided a local press in Burma and arrested a few men, one of whom had hidden this photo in the secret compartment of his suitcase, together with his spare fake passports. In fact, if it hadn’t been so carefully hidden, no one would have noticed it. As it was, it inspired the police to play a cruel game of identification with their prisoners, rewarding them for correct names and punishing them for wrong ones. Eventually, all the correct answers were printed up and disseminated. Some of these men were arrested, some disappeared, and one was found dead in a prison in Hankow a couple of years ago. Only recently did we become very interested in the man whose face lies in shadow, in part because of the work of several experts in Nanking. I can tell he’s a megalomaniac. He kept changing his name: Ku San, Ku Yanlong, Ku Fu-kuang, but he’s always refused to change his surname. That’s how you can tell he’s a megalomaniac.”

Sarly exhaled contentedly and leaned back in his chair. His hand wavered over the row of cigars.

“He must be the forty-year-old man, then?” Wait a minute, he thought, this man is Leng’s boss? The one who wants to meet me? Hsueh was growing flustered. You’re giving yourself away.

“Congratulations, right again!” Sarly still sounded pleased.

He was interrupted by the flurry of policemen assembling on the lawn outside, getting ready to begin their shifts. Drill commands echoed through the dank air, along with the ragged thud of men jogging and a few sharp blasts of the whistle. The man driving the armored police vehicle tested the wail of its siren. Before long, the place was quiet again.

“I don’t just want to find him, capture him, and make him give us the names of everyone else in his cell. No, that’s not what we want at all. I want you to get to know him, understand what makes him tick, and wait for him to plan something massive.”