Xiao Bai - French Concession

Therese was furious. With one foot out of the car, she had been just about to step out and yell at Hsueh. Instead she leaned back into the car and reached for her handbag, groping for the Browning under the cigarette case. Craning her neck out, she struck her head on the doorframe but barely noticed the pain as she drew the gun in her right hand, pulling the trigger—

The pistol never fired. The trigger had only been partly held down, not far enough to discharge the round. She would have missed anyway, because she hadn’t had time to take aim. Her opponent had already leaped onto the pavement and was firing at her from the right flank of the Ford. The bullet lodged in her stomach. She was still sitting there with the door half open when the bullet pierced through layers of silk to bury itself under her skin.

Before she passed out, she saw Hsueh leap at the gun and clutch the driver’s arm. The two men who had thrown themselves against the wall only seconds before rushed at Hsueh and bundled him into another car. Just as she was about to faint, a thought suddenly occurred to her: had Hsueh saved her life instead?

JULY 13, YEAR 20 OF THE REPUBLIC.

10:35 A.M.

If Park hadn’t been so incensed by the Japanese soldiers while he was driving, their car would have arrived at the Astor a few minutes earlier. It couldn’t be helped, because he was Korean. But that way the shootout at the door wouldn’t have happened, and maybe Therese wouldn’t have gotten shot.

If they hadn’t stopped by Mud Crossing on their way to Pu-tung Pier, and unloaded a few packages into a hut in a field sunken about five meters below the main road, they might have gotten there a couple hours earlier. And if Hsueh hadn’t been racking his brains for a way to refuse Park’s offer of a lift, so that he could make a phone call to Sarly, maybe they would have gotten there earlier still. Before he passed out, Hsueh realized that he hadn’t had a chance to give Sarly an update. Then someone struck him with a heavy piece of metal on the head. A pistol, he realized, and immediately lost consciousness.

When he awoke, he found himself lying in bed. Ku was sitting at the edge of the bed, smiling at him.

“Good, you’re awake. That was impulsive of you.”

Impulsive? Hsueh was surprised, but he couldn’t say a word. There was a hammer thudding against his temple.

“Comrade Leng went missing this morning. She may already have been killed. That White Russian woman showed up at your rooms and found her there. Leng sent a message this morning, but we only just got it. It looks as though Lady Holly came to the Astor because she was after you. They pulled their guns as soon as they got out of the car.”

Hsueh needed to think hard about Ku’s words, but his brain had turned to jelly, and he could barely make out what the man was saying.

“Don’t worry, we know you care about Leng. We’re trying to locate her and we will. So have a good rest. Our comrades here will look after you. Ask them for anything you need. You’ve already met Ch’in.”

It didn’t add up — there was no reason why Therese would want Leng dead. Although he did see her pull out a gun, he didn’t believe she would really have fired at them.

Then Ku left the room hurriedly. From the footsteps clattering on the stairs, Hsueh could tell he had brought quite a group with him. He looked round at the paneled walls. Ch’in poked his head out the window, where someone was shouting up at him from the courtyard. Clearly the window overlooked a courtyard; glancing at the sky, Hsueh judged that their room was in the east wing of a shih-k’u-men house. There was someone in the living room.

He tried to get up, but he had no strength in his arms. Ch’in saw him try, and came over to help him up, propping his pillow behind him so that he could sit up in bed. Hsueh’s mouth felt dry, and he needed a drink.

After gulping down some water, he realized he was exhausted from having been up all night. He tried hard to picture that hut by the road. He remembered helping to carry those packages down a pebbly slope. In fact, he’d nearly slid into a grassy pit about five meters deep, with a hut at the bottom. The road lay higher than the thatched roof of the hut, and only a few steps away along the road, the hut disappeared from view.

The sun streamed onto the wooden floor in front of him. His coat had been draped over him, but he was getting too warm, and tossed it to one side. He thought of Therese taking the bullet in her stomach, and felt a sympathetic spasm of pain in his own.

He still couldn’t figure out why she would want to kill Leng. He thought about Leng. Could it be jealousy? Ku could well be right. Therese did keep a pistol in her handbag.

But you couldn’t just pull a gun out in Shanghai and casually shoot someone dead — this was a bustling city with a million inhabitants. Sure, the newspapers were full of stories of murder and arson, and Hsueh himself had seen gunfights on the streets before. In fact, a few years ago, they were actually quite common. But they had never had anything to do with him or with anyone he knew well. This degree of terror and suspense was what he might expect to find at the theater, to be enjoyed and then promptly forgotten.

He felt as though he had been hypnotized by Therese, by Leng, by Lieutenant Sarly and Inspector Maron, and by Ku Fu-kuang. He was in a dream world in which shooting someone dead was a perfectly ordinary thing to do, and he couldn’t just decide to wake up. Everyone around him seemed to have gone raving mad. Sarly’s words came to mind: Shanghai is like a volcano about to erupt.

Or maybe he wouldn’t want to wake up, because this life, so different from his old life, had its own appeal. It felt like a hair-raising and never-ending game of poker in which everyone thought they held the best cards. The same throbbing heartbeat, the same sensation of being numb to everything beyond the game. They were right about what adrenaline did to you, he thought. Poker wasn’t a perfect metaphor — perhaps it was more like looking down from the roof of a skyscraper, and enjoying the illusory feeling of tipping forward, the sensation of buoyancy. Or like cutting across the road just as a car was speeding past, letting it brush against his jacket tails.

He wanted to share these musings with someone, but neither Ch’in nor the other man who kept walking past the door to his room were likely to be the right kind of interlocutor.

Ch’in was leaning on the windowsill and staring out into the courtyard. That will make his hair warm from the sun, Hsueh thought as he drifted into sleep.

When he woke it was almost evening. Ch’in was still leaning on the windowsill and looking out when he turned with a startled look, and opened his mouth, as if to shout, but stifled his cry. He heaved his leg off the chair and called toward the living room: “Do you know who—”

But before he could finish his sentence, there was a knock at the door. Opening the door, Ch’in gasped with surprise.

Hsueh recognized one of the shadowy figures at the door. In fact, he recognized him from the night when this man was having dinner with Zung and Park. Hsueh knew that his name was Lin, and that he was one of the comrades Leng trusted most.

Someone said: “I’ll go and see if there’s anyone outside.” Then Hsueh heard footsteps on the stairs.

The newcomer stood motionless in the doorway. In the late afternoon light, you could see that his cheek had been badly scratched, and his neck and chin were bruised. The scar along his nose was so long it looked fake. Nonetheless, Hsueh knew the man at a glance. He did have a photographer’s memory for faces.