Xiao Bai - French Concession

“There’s no rush. They’ll tell us when.”

He was grinding coffee beans, and she was cooking oatmeal. The kitchen was full of delicious smells. They could have been an ordinary couple making breakfast together.

“What is he like?”

She looked at Hsueh. His shirt wasn’t tucked in at the back.

“Your boss — I mean, Mr. Ku.”

“You’ll find out when you see him.” She could tell he was trying to make small talk. Her plan was working.

“But how will he get in touch with us? Can he call us? He doesn’t have a phone number for us here. You didn’t give him the landlady’s number, did you? It’s not like you can have a real conversation in her room, anyway.” Hsueh was basically talking to himself. Coffee beans clattered in the grinder.

“I’ll call him.”

“But you haven’t called him yet. Did you call yesterday?”

Leng was suddenly irritated. Hsueh was sounding like one of those men who get up in the morning and start nagging, finding fault with everything.

“How do you know I didn’t call him?” She threw the wooden spoon into the pot and began to scream. “You weren’t even home! You’ve been out all day! Why are you so anxious to see him? Are you—” She cut herself off.

Hsueh was alarmed. She watched his shoulders slump and waited for him to turn around. He looked about wildly, like a thief caught in the act. Ask him now while you have the upper hand, she thought. She grew calmer, and lowered her voice.

“Is there something you should be telling me?” she said slowly. She could tell that he wanted to talk to her, and she was forcing him to talk. But she didn’t want him to lie, so she added:

“Why have you been out for the past few days? Why did you leave me at home all day? You have another woman, don’t you?”

He sighed, slumping like a tabby cat slinking away from a fight. He can’t hide it any longer, she thought — he’s going to tell me the truth.

But Hsueh had one last idea. He dashed out of the kitchen to find the evidence. That didn’t worry Leng; she knew she would win this round. Striding into the bedroom, she saw him rummaging under the bed, and thought, silly you. Did you toss it under the bed and then just forget it was there?

Reaching into the gap between the closet and the wall, she drew out a package wrapped in an old copy of the Ta Kung Pao , the newspaper she was reading. There was a headline about the victory of the Red Army in Kiangsi, where the Communists had executed a local official and put his head on a raft to drift past the town, scaring the remnants of the Kuomintang Army off. She put the package on the table and opened it. The rumpled crepe silk unfurled like a bundle of wilted petals. A moldy powder puff quivered in the sunlight. The victory of the Red Army seemed to echo her own victory over Hsueh.

She sat down, waiting for his confession.

“You probably saw her on the ship,” he began. “She’s a White Russian in the jewelry business. But you’d never guess she also sells firearms on the side. I only found that out later. It’s true I loved her, but I don’t anymore. By the time we were on the ship, I wasn’t in love with her.” His voice was calm. “You may have seen us bickering onboard.” Leng could believe this — she had heard him cursing under his breath by the railing. “Then she slept with someone while we were in Hong Kong, a Chinese man from Vietnam, her business partner. It’s true I liked her a lot, but she couldn’t stop sleeping around. I came home a day early from Canton, put the key in the lock, and caught them in the act. The couch was shoved up against the window and her legs were propped up on the windowsill. The man looked up at me with a sneer, which was even more humiliating than the thought of her with someone else.

“Do you think that’s why I came to talk to you? I can’t pretend it had nothing to do with it, but I’d rather you didn’t think that. You’re such different people. That night, when we escaped from the police station, I thought I was over her. Not just because of you, but because that’s all history now. Meeting you felt like a gift, a sign that things would be different. But just to be friendly, I went to see her yesterday. I thought it would be good for me, and it might help you.”

He means because she sells firearms, she thought. That was unusually brave for Hsueh. If he had really been thinking that, then perhaps he did like her after all. He wasn’t courageous by nature — he was timid and mediocre, but suffering had changed him. Or maybe he gets a kick out of danger, the way some people do from drinking or smoking opium. That doesn’t have to be a bad thing, she thought.

Now was the right time to arrange a meeting with Ku. Whatever Hsueh’s motives for joining the Party were, once he was one of them the cell would educate him and turn him into a true revolutionary. If that happened, then it would be permissible to accept him, to fall in love with him. Even if he were using her to get over his old love, over time that would change. And his connections at the police station would come in useful.

She came up to him and hugged him. As she reached under his belt to straighten his shirt and tuck it in, she let her hand brush against the back of his waist — no, Leng didn’t want to make love right then. There might be time for that later.

For now, she thought, she should listen to him talk about his feelings, without realizing that she wanted to hear about them because she had feelings of her own.

JUNE 27, YEAR 20 OF THE REPUBLIC.

4:25 P.M.

The Nanking commission was convinced that Ku’s people were ordinary criminals, not Communists. Their methods weren’t like Communist methods. And the investigators should know, not just because they were experts on the Communists, but also because a few of them used to be Communists themselves.

That was precisely how Lieutenant Sarly planned to undermine them. He was attending a meeting at the Municipal Office’s Trustees House on Route Pichon in the leafy west of the French Concession. Nominally, the Trustees House was not a government building, and it had been chosen to give the session an informal setting. Consul Baudez had called this meeting in his capacity as a trustee of the Municipal Office, although he was not taking part in it. Ever since M. Brenier de Montmorant, the previous consul, had clashed with the Municipal Office over the police station, the consul had held both posts. At the time, M. Brenier had ordered the trustees dismissed, and surrounded the Municipal Office with police, causing a fracas that escalated all the way to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Paris. Three days later, the trustees were set free on payment of 100,000 francs, and the Ministry had to create a special committee to restore the government of the Concession. From then onward, the police headquarters were placed firmly under the authority of the consul, and its main officers were always trusted lieutenants of his.

“Maybe our visitors simply can’t bear to think that Communists could stoop to ordinary crime. After all, communism is just a youthful phase, isn’t it?” Sarly was taunting the ex-Communists from Nanking. Colonel Bichat of the Shanghai Volunteer Corps also began to laugh — he and Commander Martin, who was also present, supported Sarly’s view. Shanghailanders were growing tired of the fight between the Kuomintang and the Communists. The demonstrations and strikes were bad for business, and now shootouts in the streets verged on civil war, threatening to reduce the concessions to rubble. Perhaps there was nothing for it but to turn Shanghai into a—