Xiao Bai - French Concession

Lin’s dropping out was the worst thing that could have happened, and Ku was always expecting the worst — it helped him to make good decisions quickly in times of danger. Leng’s lie had also shaken him. On the deepest level of the cell’s workings, in terms of maintaining its focus and planning its next attack, he was alone and no one could help him. When loneliness engulfed him, turning to the concrete details of the next operation usually made him feel better. But he used to deal with despair and lethargy by visiting Ch’i.

He had been left without a woman when she died, and he was not about to get himself another. When he had Ch’i, he had always reminded himself that the woman was his weakness, his vulnerability, but he had found it hard to stop thinking about her. Even now, he found it hard to take his mind off her. How could he? He used to say self-deprecatingly that a woman would be his downfall, but now the words just made him sad.

He could not even remember what Ch’i looked like. He knew she had a round face with long bangs that parted in the center and covered her eyes, a face the shape of a melon seed or an egg. But try as he might, he couldn’t picture her eyes or eyebrows or mouth or nose.

Perhaps because of his memory of her death, when he thought of her late at night, it was always her ass that came to mind. If he was happy, he pictured it smiling, and if he was sad, he pictured it crying. The most beautiful part of Ch’i’s body was her ass. He imagined it as being larger than life, able to protect him from actual and metaphorical bullets, from his own successes and failures.

Wearing a gray woolen suit, off-white pants with the cuffs turned up, and a dark gray velvet hat, Ku turned the corner from the Bund onto Nanking Road, dressed like a respectable banker who was squinting in the sunlight because he had just come out of an office. He looked as if he was strolling aimlessly about, but he was actually scrutinizing the buildings with a city planner’s eye for detail, mentally calculating distances and travel times, and noting where the police were posted: at traffic posts twice a man’s height at the crossroads, at guard posts on either side of important buildings, and at the barricades between districts. He also took note of their uniforms and whether they were armed.

He walked past plenty of banks, moneychangers, and bond issuers. He didn’t like the look of the foreign banks along the Bund, which were all heavily guarded and housed in buildings too big to properly control. But too small a target wouldn’t do either. His wrestling classes in Khabarovsk had taught him that you have to hit your opponent where it hurts. That way you’re in control and he’s too busy defending himself to go on the offensive.

Perhaps a medium-size bank on the border between the two concessions would be best. He was walking along Yuyaching Road, which was full of people all day long, especially near the Race Course. A few men sat on benches under the trees reading the racing paper. One of them flipped through the whole paper, screwed up his face in thought, and started tapping the edge of the newspaper with a pencil sharpened on both ends to calm himself down. Walking south along the wall of the Race Course, he could hear the crowds clamoring in the grandstands. This is utter madness, he thought. But then he had his own form of insanity, and he was playing for far higher stakes than they were.

Of course, there was nothing special about that. Everyone in Shanghai was always betting on something. One of these days I’ll lose everything — but not this time, he thought. Wondering when he would lose gave him a rush of excitement. He realized it was an insane gamble, but then he had been driven insane when the Soviets locked him in the pitch-black room where the Purge Commission imprisoned its victims. Not that he knew that at the time; all he remembered was an oak door as thick as a cliff face. He was lucky they hadn’t just taken him out and shot him, probably only because he was a foreigner. And he was twice lucky that they had sent him to a gulag in Azerbaijan, where his insanity turned out to be useful — it allowed him to escape.

To win big, you have to be insane. A madman is terrifying, an insane gambler more so, but if an insane gambler judges risks accurately and thinks clearly, he can terrorize everyone. Power comes from terror, which means, conversely, that terror can alter the present power structure and force existing powers to give up part of their territory. Being weak and complacent, they would rather appease a terrifying new power than risk losing what they already have. Oh yes, they would beg for mercy. They would buy him off.

The Race Club would one day offer to buy him off, as the Green Gang had. But he wasn’t so easily bought. He wanted more than just money. That was what made him different from all those people, and why he thought of himself as a different kind of revolutionary.

He cut across the road and stopped in front of I-pin-hsiang Hotel. Department stores and silk stores lined one side of the street. He went past Sheng-t’ai Dance Hall and the Great World Arcade. He turned from Boulevard de Montigny onto Rue du Consulat, and thought about how much he preferred the Concession to the International Settlement. In the Concession, the streets went every which way, traffic was chaotic, and the crowds sometimes took over half the street. He tried to work out a route that would allow him to speed through the tangle and out of the concessions’ jurisdiction. Standing at the entrance to Hsieh-ta-hsiang Silk Store, he found himself looking at the banks on Rue du Weikwé, which were neither too small nor too big. Just what he wanted. It was true that banks are the heart of the capitalist system, but that was why they were always heavily guarded. He imagined himself watching that heart beat inside a rib cage.

He stopped by the butcher’s, drawing back its cotton curtains to go inside, and had the shop assistant weigh out a pound of meat for him. Although he had called a meeting of the unit leaders, he didn’t want to go back to the candle store just yet. First, he had to find somewhere quiet to think. As he was going into An-le Bathhouse, he decided that Rue du Weikwé wouldn’t be a good spot either. It was too near Rue Palikao, and the street was too short. To think that after going all that way, he had realized the bank opposite the candle store was their best bet, he thought ruefully.

As he relaxed into the hot bathwater, sweat and dirty water ran down his head and face. He inhaled the steam, which made him feel faint. Gray bodies floated along like ghosts. Someone stepped on his toe underwater but it didn’t hurt. An arm’s length in front of him, he could see a dark mass of testicles bobbing near the surface of the water, surrounded by filth the way dirt might collect around a floating corpse on the river. Suddenly, he felt a glimmer of unease, like a flicker in one of the dim lightbulbs on the domed ceiling.

Whenever he felt a chill in his bones like this, he knew it was a sign of danger. It was the same thing he had felt that day on the way to Ch’i’s. He could feel it even now, as he lay soaking in hot water, but he didn’t know why.

He relaxed and leaned back against the porcelain walls, letting the steaming water come up to his neck. It’s just your nerves, he told himself, forcing himself to focus on something positive instead. The best thing he had going for him was that new grenade launcher they were going to buy. In his military technology class in Khabarovsk, he had had to learn about all kinds of weapons, even the ones being developed in Red Army factories, and he had recognized the diagram as soon as he saw it. These grenade launchers would be invaluable to the imminent battle against imperialism. No matter what husk of a vehicle the imperialists were hiding in, the grenade would penetrate it like a poisoned dart and explode in its heart.