Xiao Bai - French Concession

Her voice was husky and tender, a voice made for old songs. While the Victrola turned slowly on the bar table, she sat at a table by the window. The black of the wrought iron grilles stood out against the blue diamond-shaped glass, and a naked woman was engraved in yellow on the glass. It was raining, and the pavement had an oily red sheen. When the song ended, she would clap hysterically.

He had thought he was seducing her, so he was startled to find that she had turned their relationship on its head, conquering both him and his camera in the space of a week. His own passive tendency to go along with what other people wanted was to blame.

This afternoon, Therese would be waiting for him in her suite on the fourth floor of the Astor. She might even be in bed, if she had already spent enough time soaking in the bath, warm like a mug of cream swirled with pink fruit juice. Like a filly clambering out of a pond, she would climb out of the bath and skip right into bed. She had an aristocratic air that the White Russian men who claimed to have been dukes or navy admirals rarely possessed. Their huge bodies cowered in the dark corners of the Concession’s bars, members of a defeated northern tribe. Therese, on the other hand, pushed Hsueh onto the bed, had him lie straight, and sat astride him, swaying and waving one arm, as though she were waving a Cossack dagger.

If he didn’t love her, he wouldn’t be losing his temper or interrogating her. He imagined the sultry Southeast Asian breeze whetting her appetite. One day she would decide he couldn’t satisfy her. She would slip out of the hotel room and into someone else’s room. He pictured the man in the other room as an old friend, whereas he himself was only a fling. He imagined her lifting her legs under someone else’s body. The very idea tormented him.

He began to think he didn’t love her after all. He preferred thinking of himself as a dandy taking advantage of the fact that Therese was both wealthy and generous. That made him feel better.

But he still wanted to know whom she had met in the hotel. She would not tell him. If he began to ask, she would get mad, or pounce on him, or even pretend not to hear him and ignore him altogether. He began to daydream about investigating her, but he wouldn’t know how to start. He had no wiles. Li Pao-i might, but Hsueh did not.

MAY 27, YEAR 20 OF THE REPUBLIC.

1:20 P.M.

It was the White Russian woman who first attracted Lieutenant Sarly’s attention. The French Concession Police had a file on every foreigner in Shanghai, and it recorded that she was known as Lady Holly, but the name had nothing to do with her real name or provenance. Only the Chinese used that name, and she had often dealt with Chinese.

She had come to Talien by boat, and before then she had probably lived in Vladivostok. As a southerner, Lieutenant Sarly had never been that far north. He was Corsican; Corsicans controlled all the important posts in the police force.

There were a few documents in her police file, among them a report signed by Foreign Agent 119, which gave her real name as Irxmayer, Therese and noted that Irxmayer was her late husband’s name. The German name concealed the fact that she was a Russian Jew. There were some faded notes, the earliest records of this woman. Most of them dated from the two months after she first arrived in Shanghai. After that, she seemed to have slipped out of sight. No one in the police’s network of agents and investigators mentioned her.

A month ago, on the lawn adjacent to the police headquarters on Route Stanislas Chevalier, thirty meters or so from the women’s rattan tea tables, Commissioner Martin had told him something interesting. Martin was his English counterpart at the International Settlement’s Municipal Police. The other officers had been playing a game of pétanque à la lyonnaise on the lawn. The lower ranked officers never tired of playing this game. That day, the prize was a trophy and a three-star bottle of brandy. Gripping the iron boule with his palm facing down, Inspector Maron threw the final boule. A man ran into the playing area and traced out a circle with a piece of string to count out the number of points scored by the winner, and all the families got up from their bamboo chairs. When they counted to the fifth boule, the onlookers cheered.

The colonial police and administrators formed their own social circle that congregated at tea parties and various joint conferences. At these events, Sarly often received veiled hints of local vested interests, and it was as important to satisfy them as it was to placate London or Paris, thousands of miles away. Business in the colonies was conducted informally, as it had always been. So you couldn’t always take what Hong Kong’s British colonial police force said on paper seriously — even they might not be taking themselves seriously. And what was anyone to make of their ambiguous choice of words? You may have noticed , or, It would appear from subsequent investigations. .

Martin was dressed in full hunting gear that day, but the paper he drew from his pocket was not a map of some unknown country. It was the last page of a long letter about the suspicious activities of one Zung, a businessman from Hong Kong who had been spotted at deserted villages around the bay. Since no opium, alcohol, or the usual smuggled goods appeared to be involved, the case was passed on to the Special Branch of the Hong Kong Police. The letter closed by making casual reference to a German woman and the firm she ran, Irxmayer & Co. She lived in the French Concession, the Hong Kong police learned. Not long thereafter, one of the letters that the colonial police force in Hanoi sent each week by sea was found to contain a detailed description of a botched police sweep. Careless Indo-Chinese terrorists (all the plotting could wear these people out) had left a note under a pillow in their hotel room. Solid information, the Hanoi police concluded— assez généreux, nous voudrions dire . They sent the original note to their English colleagues in Hong Kong without opaque formalities or polite equivocations. It simply contained a post office box number: P.O. Box No. 639.

From there it was a short step to discovering that the post office box belonged to a businessman in his early thirties, one Zung Ts-Mih. The Hong Kong police realized immediately that this man had long been a subject of interest. Further investigations revealed that the respectable-looking Mr. Zung had a complicated background and obscure ancestry. In the sailors’ taverns it was rumored that despite his Chinese name, Zung was at most half Chinese. Even his father was said to have been a British subject “of mixed blood.” These words had been circled in red in the report, and a big bent arrow, like a circus clown’s tilted hat, pointed to a rectangle containing the word Siamese .

At least three of Mr. Zung’s close contacts were under surveillance by the Hanoi Police. And yet the British insisted that their policy permitted them to investigate the suspects and photograph them but not arrest them. Lieutenant Sarly considered this so-called policy an instance of British arrogance, appeasement, and sheer neglect. The real subject of their investigation was one Alimin, a roaming wolf whose travels had taken him all over East Asia, to Bangkok, Johore, Amoy, and Hankow, and reportedly even to Vladivostok and Chita, where he was said to have received some form of technical training. The photograph was indistinct, but in it he was wearing a shirt with a jacket and black bow tie, together with a pair of those baggy knee-length shorts worn over a sarong of the kind the natives wore. He had a thick brow and huge nose.