Xiao Bai - French Concession

Leng couldn’t sleep. It wasn’t as if she knew the White Russian woman — she couldn’t even remember what she looked like. She had only seen her in a photograph in which her face had appeared distorted, and her eyes were staring off to one side. Maybe she was lying down in the picture, which would explain the seventy-degree angle of the smoke rising from her cigarette. Therese was a stranger to her — she only knew that name from Hsueh, and she could barely bring herself to call that woman, of all people, by her first name.

She had first learned of that woman’s existence via a pair of stained, musty silk drawers under Hsueh’s bed. At the time they had repulsed her. But now she was reminded of them. They proved what the lipstick and photograph could not prove — that their owner was a living, breathing human being.

Her old nightmare was back and crowding in on her. She felt trapped between two choices. She was pacing through an inescapable maze.

I’ll go with the first instinct I have when I wake up, she decided. But she barely slept. She couldn’t tell when she had woken up because she felt as though she had never fallen asleep. She did try going back to sleep, but her first thought upon opening her eyes again was the complete opposite.

When she finally made a decision, she told herself it was because she wanted Hsueh to feel he was being treated fairly. He mustn’t have any doubts about working for the cell.

But when she left the apartment, she was at a loss for where to find Hsueh or the White Russian woman. Finally, she thought of the phone number on the back of that photograph.

She waited outside Yong’an, the greengrocer, for the first cab to come out of the Shell gas station. The driver said he wasn’t allowed to pick up a fare on the street, and told her to order a cab at the counters of the cab company. She didn’t know what to say, but she gazed sadly at him until he agreed to take her.

Now she was standing in Hsueh’s rooms. She knew exactly where the photograph was because she had put it there — in that newspaper package, together with the silk drawers. Together, those two things formed the face of a woman she had never actually met, but whose life she was about to save. She had to warn the White Russian woman not to go to her meeting with Hsueh. I’ve always wanted them to stop seeing each other, she thought. I’ve always wanted to wrap her in paper and stuff her in the gap between the closet and the wall. As soon as she picked up the phone, she felt like the jealous wife in the tales, telling the fox demon to stop seducing her husband, telling Therese not to go to meet Hsueh.

When she put down the phone, she didn’t know what to do or where to go. By now someone would have told Ku that she had disappeared in the crucial final hours before the operation. They would guess what she had gone off to do, and treat it as a betrayal, but she had nowhere to go. She couldn’t find Hsueh, and she was still wanted by the police. It was too dangerous to go out alone. She could be recognized by a policeman, or by an inquisitive but unfriendly journalist.

She eventually decided to return to the apartment on West Avenue Joffre. She had no home or friends. The cell was her home, and her comrades were her friends.

JULY 13, YEAR 20 OF THE REPUBLIC.

6:45 P.M.

The visitor Lin had brought with him was sitting in a teahouse opposite them on Boulevard des Deux Républiques and looking across to the east-facing windows of their house. Their rooms were in the eastern wing, and that rascal Hsueh was lying on the bed by the window.

It was the beginning of summer, and at nearly seven in the evening it was still bright outside. Lin sat in the living room. How could he even begin to explain what was going on? Things were happening so quickly he could barely catch his breath.

Not in his wildest dreams had he imagined that Cheng Yün-tuan might be a Communist mole who had infiltrated the Kuomintang’s Investigative Unit for Party Affairs. A real Communist! He couldn’t stop thinking about it on the way back, replaying everything that Cheng had said to him. He realized Cheng had given him plenty of hints. Believe me, one of these days we’ll be comrades, Cheng had said. Why hadn’t he realized what was happening? Why hadn’t he caught the hint of warmth in Cheng’s voice?

The previous night after dinner, when the other operatives were getting sleepy, Cheng had opened the louver door to the storeroom. He didn’t shout at Lin as he had previously done. Instead he gave him a friendly look, a look that said we are comrades, though at the time Lin took it for fake chumminess. Cheng even bent over to lean into the dusty storeroom and extend his hand to Lin.

Lin had no idea what was going on. He figured the operative had a new trick up his sleeve. Only later, when he had come to trust Cheng and grasp that he was being rescued, did he see how difficult it must have been to plant a mole in the enemy’s most secret operations. Cheng had run the considerable risk of exposing his own identity. Liberating even a few misguided young revolutionaries was a tricky business.

He refused Cheng’s hand and looked coldly at him, but he did come out of the storeroom.

Comrade Cheng didn’t waste a single moment. “First thing tomorrow morning we’re sending you to the French Concession Police,” he breathed into Lin’s ear.

“Why? You don’t have my testimony yet,” Lin said tartly.

“A comrade at the Concession Police let slip the news that you had been arrested by Nanking. Just this morning, the police called to demand that we turn you over.”

“A comrade?”

“There’s no time to explain. You’ll understand soon enough. But be prepared. The Party is going to rescue you.”

Lin felt faint.

“Be careful. Don’t be nervous, but don’t let yourself relax. There will be another interrogation tonight. Tseng Nan-p’u is in Nanking and won’t be able to get back in time, so I’ll be interrogating you. Just do what you usually do. The Concession Police will send a car to pick you up tomorrow morning. Our inside man there has bribed someone to make sure the car will spend an extra half hour on the road. Another black car will come and take you away, and it will be a rescue squad sent by the Party. But if the enemy discovers this and there is a fight — whatever happens, you must tell them that the rescuers were sent by Ku Fu-kuang.”

That interrogation may have seemed even more brutal than the previous ones had been. Cheng actually came up to him and slapped him on the face. But the questions themselves were run-of-the-mill, and he had been asked them all before. Growing impatient, Lin became brusque with his interrogators, which only made his questioning look more violent.

He barely slept that night. He kept thinking through the conversations of the previous day, trying to absorb them. The storeroom seemed sultrier and the corner he was leaning against narrower than it had been.

Early the next morning, a black Ford did come to pick him up. He didn’t see Comrade Cheng again. (Comrade Cheng — that was how he had taken to thinking of Cheng, ten hours later.) Two young operatives handed him over to the armed policemen, one of whom was, surprisingly, a foreigner. Lin had taken two years of English classes in college, but when he asked the foreigner a question in English, the man smiled and didn’t answer. Producing a pencil stub, he wrote a few words on the back of a piece of cigarette foil and handed it to Lin:

For we went,