Xiao Bai - French Concession

He already knew it was a weapon called the Schiessbecher , manufactured by the German company Rheinmetall. But he couldn’t describe it in Chinese or give it a Chinese name. He knew it was extremely dangerous, and powerful enough to penetrate the steel plates on an armored vehicle. He felt that just knowing it existed put him in danger. He intuitively thought he should hide what he knew, so he didn’t tell Sarly what he had just learned and only half understood. But now he had a diagram of the weapon and an information sheet about it. He decided to give Sarly the diagram.

As he walked along the corridor toward Sarly’s office, he noticed that the door to the detective squad’s office was open. Inspector Maron was not in, and the poet from Marseille was sitting at a desk by the door. An idea occurred to Hsueh. He rapped on the door and opened it before the poet even answered. But he could not convince himself to ask his questions, especially now that he knew about this powerful weapon. He sat on a folding chair across from the poet for a few minutes, and decided not to ask. He would just make something up for the report he was going to write this evening under Leng’s supervision and hand in to Ku the next day. After all, you could see police vehicles with rifles on their turrets everywhere. He would invent an even number of vehicles, twenty-two armored vehicles belonging to the Concession Police. He liked even numbers as long as they weren’t round numbers, which looked fake.

He reached into his jacket pocket for the diagram, and gave it to Lieutenant Sarly. It made his own diagram look like the work of a drunkard, or a child’s assignment scribbled at the last minute.

Lieutenant Sarly wanted to know exactly when the delivery would take place. Of course Hsueh didn’t have a clue. He was just a go-between, a flighty lover given a task far beyond his abilities. He had only ended up in this mess by sheer coincidence, and Sarly was well aware of that fact.

All the vigilance and tiptoeing around sometimes got the better of him and drove him to start prattling recklessly away. It was happening again.

“Why not just arrest them on charges of conspiring to commit a crime?” Hsueh asked. “They’re perfectly capable of shooting people and planting bombs. I’ve met this Mr. Ku, and he looks dangerous. He should be locked up. He’s inciting people to give their lives to his cause, and some of them must be decent people. He should be arrested now before he does anything else. He’s planning to rob a bank.”

Hsueh suddenly realized he had told a terrible lie, and also revealed something he had meant to keep to himself. It was true he had met Mr. Ku. It was not true that they were planning to rob a bank.

“You’ve met him?” It was the true statement that first caught Lieutenant Sarly’s attention. Without waiting for Hsueh to answer, he asked: “And you say he means to rob a bank?” He paused for a few seconds between the two questions, as though the information was only just sinking in.

“That’s right,” Hsueh continued, without letting the pause linger too long. “The weapons will be delivered soon, so he had someone contact me to fix a time and place. Of course I couldn’t make that decision — I’m just the middleman. Leng sounded frightened. Things aren’t going the way she’d imagined them. She said their main goal right now is to rob a bank.”

“Why a bank? Since when have Communists gone in for bank robbery?”

“Oh, it’s quite possible. You did say once that there were financiers among them.” He should sound firm, he thought, and tried again. “It’s only natural. Banks are the heart of the capitalist world, circulating the blood of the capitalist system. A bank is like a fortress.”

Hsueh wondered whether he was using all that jargon correctly. Jargon is invented to name the inconceivable, to pin down something that’s hard to explain. The force of the word itself makes the speaker more convincing, so that he can influence you to do what he wants you to do and think what he wants you to think.

Lieutenant Sarly didn’t recognize the weapon in the diagram either. Hsueh guessed that Sarly had never even heard of it. He didn’t pay much attention to the diagram: he simply glanced at it while cleaning out his pipe, and tried to smooth out a small crease on the page. Then he stuffed it into his document folder, along with all those photographs, forms, and neatly printed reports.

Hsueh had sprinkled his speech with details that might later come in useful. He did so subconsciously; he simply had a knack for mashing everything together, and he was always trying to be helpful to someone. For instance, he had mentioned that Leng was afraid. This was a reasonable thing to say, he thought, and it would come in useful some day. He thought of Sarly as his talisman, and you can make demands of your talisman. One day, he thought, he would be able to plead with Sarly to let Leng and Therese go. Hsueh was optimistic by nature. He saw them as good people caught up in complicated circumstances, like himself.

He would still be in an optimistic mood when he wrote his report for Mr. Ku that night. Influenced by Sarly’s hints, Hsueh imagined that Ku was plotting something that would petrify everyone. He embellished the report, exaggerated somewhat, writing that Ku was the Political Section’s most important suspect, and that nearly all their resources were devoted to investigating him. Based on his vague impressions and the dubious snippets of information floating around in his brain, he concocted a story that even he thought sounded crazy. The French Concession Police and the Shanghai Municipal Police were jointly ordering a new fleet of police vehicles from Rolls-Royce, he wrote, not only to patrol the streets, but also equipped with sufficient personnel and firepower to be rented out to private and public entities, such as banks. Then he thought of a way to incorporate his newly acquired knowledge into the report. Current models can withstand ordinary bullets, but not the newest antitank grenades projected from rifle-mounted launchers, he wrote. The new, reinforced fleet of police vehicles will rectify this vulnerability.

For a moment, he was terrified by his own imagination. He felt as though he himself was planning a violent crime, not Ku. Leng stood there holding his hand, puzzled by how much it was sweating.

JULY 1, YEAR 20 OF THE REPUBLIC.

9:35 P.M.

Leng wished she hadn’t told Ku about Hsueh and his gun-peddling woman. It had slipped out when Ku was telling her off for lying to the cell about her and Hsueh being old acquaintances. Maybe she had only told Ku about the Russian jeweler to make herself feel less guilty. But she had to admit that she was jealous. Maybe she had told Ku because it would help her find out who this woman really was. Of course, if she was an arms dealer, that could actually be useful, and Ku might decide to buy something from her.

But right now she regretted it as she clutched Hsueh’s clammy hand. She could tell he was nervous, and she shouldn’t have gotten him involved to begin with. She stood behind him and gazed at his curly hair, choking up with a sudden feeling of tenderness.

Taking her left foot out of her slipper, she brushed her toe up against her other ankle, leaning closer to Hsueh. The way she was standing wasn’t all that sexy, but she still wished he could see her now. She tried picking the slipper up with her toes, but that made her falter.

She had to beat the other woman. That was how this game worked. She had to seduce Hsueh and become his woman, replace all those other women, in order to make him take up his part in the class struggle. That was her mission, and when she didn’t know there were other women, she had been certain she would succeed. Now she was less certain.