Xiao Bai - French Concession

Sarly stopped speaking abruptly, as though that long speech had exhausted him.

“We need to catch a big fish,” he murmured.

Hsueh thought he knew what Lieutenant Sarly meant. He must be thinking it was time he showed he had the patience to crack a big case, and he might as well give Hsueh, the poor son of his old friend, a chance to prove himself as well.

Hsueh never let himself think too hard about ethics, consequences, the meaning of life, things like that. He lived in the moment. The future, to him, was tomorrow, or at most next Wednesday. He often thought of himself as a gambler playing an all-or-nothing game, and in games like that, you can’t afford to be distracted by anything besides the game itself. The trickier things got, the more Hsueh tended to resign himself to his fate. That said, he usually erred on the side of going ahead with something and worrying about its consequences later. He didn’t know how to stop, to think about whether he had an out. He generally looked ahead and pressed on.

He went along the sidewalk beneath the balconies on Rue du Consulat, and stopped at the door of the National Industrial Bank. At least the job at the police station meant he was suddenly rolling in cash. Sarly had told him to see the poet from Marseille in the Political Section’s office before he left. The poet handed Hsueh a check. Hsueh wouldn’t be drawing a salary from the police department, so the check was issued in the name of an entertainment company based on Avenue Foch. It was tenable for any amount of money within a specified range, in support of Inspector Maron’s special investigations. “Consider it a gift from the Green Gang,” the poet had said. Hsueh cashed the check right away. He bought a basket of tangerines at the fruit stall, and went into a stairwell up the creaky stairs past a shoe store and a record company.

The stairs led to the Singapore Hotel, which was advertised by a sign that hung from its second-floor window. The receptionist sat in the stairwell. When he opened the door, Leng was standing right there. He reached out his hand to touch the stretch of bare skin on her arms below her cheongsam, but she ducked. When he drew his hand back and rubbed his nose with it, grinning, she pounced at him and hugged him.

She had been drinking. A wine glass and bottle stood on the table. Her mouth tasted of wine, which she didn’t even like all that much — at restaurants she barely touched it. He pretended not to understand what that meant, and passively allowed her to kiss him enthusiastically and too deliberately. He let his hand slide from the nape of her neck down to her waist.

Luckily he was pretending to be unaware of what was happening and didn’t take advantage of her right away, or she wouldn’t have told him her story. Luckily he hadn’t been hugging her tightly — she soon slipped out of his grasp.

Through the window they could hear actors bantering on the radio, with the occasional clang of a zither or thump of castanets, which melted into the endless clatter of dominoes. Hsueh had walked a long way, and after their brief and passionate embrace, his shirt was now soaked. Leng’s cheongsam was also stained with sweat.

She told him her story. He used to think that characters and reversals like that could only be found in novels. She had been fated to make such weighty decisions, including a choice about love that had life-or-death consequences. He might have seen parallels to his own life, if it had occurred to him to look. This is your last chance to stop listening and walk away, he thought. One more step and you’ll have fallen into the trap.

JUNE 24, YEAR 20 OF THE REPUBLIC.

12:15 P.M.

There was nothing for it — she would have to convince Hsueh to meet with Ku, because it was what the Party wanted. “We must persuade him to become one of us.” They would also have to find a safe location for the meeting, because Hsueh’s identity had yet to be verified.

She was worried about having lied to Ku about their being old acquaintances, when they had actually met for the first time on the Paul Lecat . She had lied to the Party. Of course she couldn’t ask Hsueh to cover up her lie, but maybe she could hint at what he could say instead.

She had started by playing the part of a victim, second-guessing her own emotions, and striving to win her audience over. Now she was surprised to find herself getting into character, drawn into an endless debate with herself. While trying to sway him, she herself had been swayed; in attempting to persuade him, she had persuaded herself of her feelings.

She told Hsueh how much she used to admire Wang for being sharp, passionate, making brilliant speeches. He could be arrogant, but he had also been brave in prison. Did she love him? She asked herself the question out loud, while stealing a glance at her audience, and answered, yes. But choosing her words carefully, since this was difficult to admit and she had never even told her cell, she told him that Wang’s work was so important to him that everything else was a mere extension of his work. He was uniformly kind to everyone, including all the women, simply because his work trumped all human relationships.

Had she been disappointed? She had asked herself that question, as if Hsueh’s silence were a way of probing her for more. And she had to admit that there had been no time for disappointment. She and Wang had been arrested in the same series of mass arrests, when their entire cell had been arrested. She didn’t say too much about how she had suffered in jail, which had been such an ugly place that even talking about it felt demeaning.

Now that she was completely in character, she hoped Hsueh would respond by asking questions that gave her another chance to examine herself and defend her actions. She told him about Ts’ao’s offer. “He said that given the way things were and the position he was in, he could only get them to release me if we were family, if I married him.” She wanted Hsueh to either affirm her decision or argue with her and taunt her for being weak, but he said nothing, playing the part of the admiring audience.

She had been asking and answering all the questions, but this time she wanted Hsueh to ask a question: When Ts’ao first made this offer to you, or rather, when you first rejected it, what did that have to do with Wang’s death? That way she could tell him that Ts’ao wouldn’t have killed Wang — he wasn’t that kind of man. She hadn’t dared to say that to the cell. Of course, she had had her doubts, and she had thought hard about Ko Ya-min’s question about timing. She had asked about the exact date of Wang’s execution, and tried to reconstruct the time of year from the clouds and wind, the uniform the soldiers were wearing. She had counted the days to work out whether Wang was killed in between the time when she rejected and when she accepted Ts’ao’s offer. It would be a relief to know for sure. She hazily remembered accepting Ts’ao’s offer of marriage after he told her that Wang had already been killed, but she suspected her memories might be warped by guilt. As if in a daze, she imagined sitting in that office in the Military Justice Unit, and relived the flood of immense relief that made her despise herself.

It would be like Hsueh to tell her it wasn’t her fault, reassure her that she couldn’t have known what was happening, that Wang’s death had nothing to do with her. She would probably hate him for sounding so objective, but she wanted him to do that anyway.

Instead, he sighed and exhaled a puff of white smoke that clouded his face. He’ll never learn to be serious, she thought. He was silent for a long time, as if searching for the right words, afraid of being a bad listener. Then he said: “It’s like a movie with you as the main actress.”