Xiao Bai - French Concession

JUNE 26, YEAR 20 OF THE REPUBLIC.

7:45 P.M.

Therese did believe Hsueh, but not because he mentioned the diagram, though that certainly helped. She believed him because he said he had seen Zung and Ku meet the night before. Zung had previously sent her a telegram from Hong Kong saying he would be back in Shanghai, and he was supposed to have arrived two days ago. But he did not appear until that morning, when he had turned up at her apartment with some absurd story about how his ship had sailed into the first typhoon of the year near Chou-shan and run aground on the muddy banks of Wu-sung-k’ou. Only early this morning at high tide did the pilot manage to steer us back on course, he said.

This, along with the fact that Zung was frequently unable to account for discrepancies in the books (though Yindee could sometimes explain them) made her realize that Zung must be doing deals of his own behind her back. She could not just get rid of him. She had to have a comprador . And Chinese compradors always did deals behind their bosses’ backs. But she would have to warn him. Wresting this piece of business from him might be a good way of doing that without having to confront him directly. All she would have to do was get him to hand over the invoice.

On a deeper level, Therese might have been more willing to believe Hsueh because she was still reeling from a shock she had had two days ago, when Zung claimed to have been violently seasick at Chou-shan or Wu-sung-k’ou. The postman had delivered a note from Baron Pidol with distressing news: Therese’s friend Margot, the Baroness Pidol, was in intensive care at Ste-Marie Hospital on Route Père Robert. A gastroenterologist was doing all he could to save her life. Before going into a coma, she had begged to be allowed to see Therese. Therese didn’t even wait to call a cab. She dashed out of the lobby, hailed the first rickshaw she saw, and made straight for the hospital.

But by the time she got there, Margot’s pupils had dilated, and she had stopped breathing. The cause of death was acute barbiturate poisoning. Margot’s face was covered with cold sweat, and Therese couldn’t help wondering why she would have been sweating. Her skin had turned a greenish color, her face had shrunk, and the cleft between her nose and mouth looked sunken in.

Baron Pidol drew a bundle of letters tied up with a ribbon from under the sheet covering Margot’s body.

“These letters are addressed to you. I didn’t read them. She once said she couldn’t write her diaries to the empty window she sat at, so she kept it in the form of letters to you. She said if she were alive, she would be too embarrassed to let you read them.” The baron’s voice was tired, but not terribly sad. Now that the contest had ended with one of them dead and another wounded, the survivor barely had the strength to stumble out of the wrestling ring.

She spent all evening reading those letters, and went on reading the following morning. Margot’s letters read like an elementary school student’s composition exercises. She used all the forms of the past tense, including the ones peculiar to written French. She must have written them long after the fact, carefully using the verb tenses to distinguish events of the previous day and of an hour ago.

The first few letters were oblique. They were full of phrases like “I am sure Mr. Blair will handle these matters admirably,” or “He certainly is a noble and generous (a sympathetic) friend.” But then the writer grew more impassioned, more absorbed, more direct.

Have you ever read a detailed account of a secret extramarital affair by a friend after her death?

“Sometimes I think a woman is like a lock, and a man like a key. There’s only one that fits every gear and groove of your lock. It’s not just a question of common interests or strong emotions. It’s like you’ve always known each other. Even your bodies fit together. His is the right key, and it fits my lock exactly. We’re so happy together. You know that afternoon at the Paper Hunt Club? That was our first time, and he was standing, or rather, we were both standing, so he didn’t get that far in, but it was the best sex I’d had.”

Therese cringed at some of these passages, even though their writer was already dead and her body cold.

“We’re trying out something new. I think all women want to be a man’s slave, to kneel at his feet, to beg him for happiness. That’s what we all secretly want. Semen (forgive me — isn’t that what doctors call it?) smells heavenly, like freshly milled wheat or almond flour. Maybe it depends on whose semen it is.

“Nagasaki is a beautiful port city, just as he said it would be. The waitress brought us a poisonous fish called fugu , which means the fish of happiness. After eating it I felt faint, as if I myself were a fish floating in water. Wooden clogs click in an unnerving way outside the windows at night, but they are only geisha . You wouldn’t have thought it, but Nagasaki is paved with long slabs of limestone like a seventeenth-century Dutch city.”

Therese could not believe that her friend had gotten so carried away in three short months. Maybe it had started long before that trip to Nagasaki. The letters alluded vaguely to a psychiatrist, but she hardly talked about her husband. Once, she mentioned him when they were together at a holiday resort at Mo-kan-shan, one of the baron’s investments. On another occasion, she wrote about sitting in the living room with her husband and several other guests, all longtime Shanghailanders, smoking Luzon cigars and talking about roads to be built beyond the boundaries of the Concession. They were discussing two possible scenarios, the Greater Shanghai Plan and the Free City Scheme, as if they were configurations on a chessboard. Something to do with speculation. Does money equal freedom? she wondered in her letter. Surely only love can set you free.

But Margot’s lover was an ambitious young man, and running away to Nagasaki for half a month with her while the baron was away in Europe was the most imprudent thing Mr. Blair had ever done. The local columns of the Concession newspapers followed their trip, and someone even managed to find the hotel where they had stayed. When they got back to Shanghai, Mr. Blair had to start behaving properly again — after all, he was a man with responsibilities. Baron Pidol’s new circle disapproved of such goings-on. A young man like Mr. Blair could easily forget his place, they said. All the men who had made their fortunes in Shanghai had a say in the colonial matters of their own countries, especially when it came to Shanghai. That meant the affair couldn’t go on, which left Margot stuck like a ship run aground without a skipper.

It looked as though Margot might have died of a nervous breakdown. Therese was astonished by the euphoria of those letters. Her friend seemed to have been living in an endless carnival. Therese could imagine Margot writing those letters in the lulls between those euphoric moments, on rainy mornings, or on evenings when her husband was attending a ball. Claiming a headache, she would stay home and sit at her dressing table calling her happiest memories to mind, with the mysterious Oriental scent of cinnamon trees on the evening breeze.

Therese gave no thought to the parallels between Hsueh and Mr. Blair. It was Margot’s euphoria that fascinated her. She wondered how anyone could just decide to die like that, like throwing a tantrum: if you make me mad I’ll pretend to ignore you and go to sleep.