Xiao Bai - French Concession

He was extremely interested in this case. He thought he liked this man, this Ku Fu-kuang. After comparing a number of different reports, he was convinced that this was the man’s real name. People who knew him back when he was a union organizer said that he was a chi kung master who could punch through a door or break a brick with his bare hands. He was said to be audacious and extremely intelligent, good at making quick decisions and acting on them even in chaos. Tseng Nan-p’u picked out one incident that seemed to shed light on his character. Apparently Ku had once emptied a sack of night soil over the head of a factory foreman with ties to the Green Gang. The man lost face in front of hundreds of workers, and Ku himself became a union leader overnight. Then he had worked briefly as a guard at the Soviet consulate before gradually disappearing from public view.

There was some evidence that he had gone on to receive training at Khabarovsk. The Political Section of the British Police had acquired a photograph of a graduation ceremony from somewhere in India, and the Investigative Unit for Party Affairs got hold of a copy via an agreement to exchange intelligence. Someone looked at the photo and recognized a prisoner in the Nanking Military Court Model Prison. The man was immediately questioned, and he testified that Ku had been active in Southeast Asia as a businessman until he was caught up in the Soviet purges. As far as he knew, Ku had already been executed.

Tseng Nan-p’u couldn’t tell how Ku had made it back to Shanghai, but he was certain that Ku, like him, had completely abandoned his former beliefs (or perhaps he shouldn’t say that of himself, since he had never really had strong beliefs).

The door opened slowly, and Cheng came into the room with a half-eaten apple. He had been standing behind the subject during the interrogation, and had slipped out halfway through. Tseng didn’t stop him. He guessed that he was phoning in a report to Nanking.

“Did you read the interrogation notes?”

“I just did. We were right — they’re all in the dark about Ku.”

Cheng Yün-tuan was the man posted to their group by the Investigative Unit for Party Affairs, but the two of them got on very well. That was because he, Tseng, was very open. He used to be a university professor, and he knew how to talk to young people.

“It was a heavy blow for him,” Cheng said, commenting as if he were a narrator in a student play. “He’s questioning his deepest beliefs. If he is disoriented, we should strike now instead of allowing him to reestablish his defenses.”

“Let’s wait a while longer. Give him time to weigh the evidence and have him look at a few newspapers.”

“We’re running out of time. Tomorrow we have to notify the French Concession Police, and the day after tomorrow we’ll have to hand him over.”

“We’ll keep him here for now. I’d like for us to crack this case.” Tseng still couldn’t work out why the Concession Police kept insisting Ku’s group was a Communist cell. He suspected they had their motives for refusing to believe otherwise.

“Why are they so sure that these people are Communists?” he asked softly, not because he thought Cheng would have an answer.

Cheng’s apple squeaked as he bit into it. He threw it, half-eaten, into the wastepaper basket. Tseng thought wasting food like that reflected poorly on how a young man had been brought up. But maybe the bad habit made people feel comfortable around him.

“Easy,” Cheng said. “It merely confirms what they have thought all along, that the fight between the Kuomintang and the Communists is the source of all trouble in the foreign concessions. Maybe Lieutenant Sarly wants to take credit for a major case, or maybe he wants the case to stay within the remit of Political Section. Maybe arresting a Communist cell will look better on his record of colonial service. Relations between France and the Soviet Union have been deteriorating. There’ve been trade delegations withdrawn and diplomats expelled. The Soviet Union’s biggest enemy is Paris rather than London now, or so they say.”

“That sounds reasonable. You could write a report on it. That’s all the more reason why we shouldn’t hand him over to the Concession Police. It’s a conspiracy.”

“An imperialist conspiracy.” Cheng added an adjective that would make their imagined report sound self-evidently true to the typical Nanking politician.

“Maybe you should talk to him. You’re young people, you’ll get along. The truth is that he’s been taken in. As long as he’s willing to talk, we can speak up for him, rig things so that other people get the blame. We can teach him how to talk so that the Concession Police will dismiss him as being harmless. If he is truly willing to work for us, we may not even have to turn him over to the police. We’d send him straight to a training program instead of juvenile detention. These young socialists can be very promising. After all, if a man can’t see the injustice in society at twenty, he has no heart.”

Tseng wasn’t worried that Cheng Yün-tuan would report him to Nanking. The Party Affairs people were all specialists in communism, from the head of the department down to the typists. You could bet their document archives in Nanking were chock full of Communist pamphlets, whereas the Central Bureau had burned most of theirs in case they were surprised by a search.

JULY 1, YEAR 20 OF THE REPUBLIC.

8:15 P.M.

Hsueh had no idea how to clean up this mess. It was a mess that he had created, chiefly by being unable to say no and not wanting to disappoint anyone. But there were two people involved whom he really didn’t want to get hurt. He couldn’t even warn them of the danger they were in. He walked along the narrow path by the wall of the police headquarters, toward the stairs.

He had had lunch at Therese’s apartment before leaving. He could tell that she was falling in love with him just as quickly as Leng was. Paradoxically, to make a cheeky observation, she was less focused on making love to him, and wanted to talk instead. But Hsueh was aware that he had gotten himself into this mess by talking too much. This morning, for instance, they had barely done anything. She had only allowed him to put his dick in halfway, and while she ran her fingers around the other half, she wanted him to promise to take her to his family home in Canton. He talked about the bamboo mattresses they had there, which printed lines on your face that made you wake up looking like a rice cake cut into squares. She told him about the farm she remembered: the cows, donkeys, barns full of hay, and the swamp of a pond that turned to ice for half the year.

He was lost in thought for a long time. The sun shone into his armpits and on Therese’s shoulders. Hsueh didn’t have a care in the world until Therese brought up the deal again, over lunch. He was forced to say that Mr. Ku was very keen. It was exactly what he wanted, and money was no object, so he would go through with the deal. All he wanted to know was whether the weapon was as powerful as advertised.

“Is it?”

Ah Kwai was in the kitchen. Therese reached her hand beneath the flowery tablecloth and into his underpants. She gripped him:

“Of course, just like you.”

Therese said he wasn’t acting quickly enough. Since Ku was sure he wanted the goods, they should settle on a time and place for delivery. There was no need for her to meet him. Hsueh could take care of everything, but he had to give her a clear date and order size, so that she could arrange for someone to deliver the goods.