Xiao Bai - French Concession

Afterward he went into the bakery on Rue du Consulat and ordered a coffee. He was pleased to hear the radio broadcast coming from the other side of the house. This was definitely a good idea, he thought.

And when Hsueh told him where Ku was planning to attack, Sarly had to forgive him. If Hsueh hadn’t done what these people wanted, he would never have been able to get away, and he wouldn’t have been able to give the police the details of Ku’s operation. Hsueh sometimes thought that Sarly was playing a game of cat and mouse with him, that he could see exactly what Hsueh was up to from his lofty vantage point, and would tolerate Hsueh’s tricks as long as he wanted to keep playing.

At eleven o’clock, he arrived punctually at Mallet Police Station. The poet was waiting for him at the entrance, and Maron’s detective squad had assembled in a large conference room.

Sarly was in a smaller, adjacent room. He took the news with extraordinary calm. He had dealt with an indigenous uprising in French-occupied Côte d’Ivoire in 1912, and after the Great War he had searched houses in Hanoi for homemade bomb factories run by the independence activists. When he was in a good mood, he would boast to Hsueh about the highlights of his career serving overseas. Right now he was fascinated by the Communists, and he was disappointed by Hsueh’s news. He was especially disappointed that Hsueh had gone to the newspapers and radio stations with it. Hsueh realized that he had let Sarly down. He attributed Sarly’s reaction to wounded pride, to having been mistaken about Ku.

Sarly was pleased with the diagram that Hsueh had drawn from memory, and had Inspector Maron take it into the conference room. Successfully thwarting Ku’s next operation would help Hsueh to save face with Sarly, but it would also allow Sarly himself to save face. Hsueh sincerely hoped Ku’s operation would fail. In fact, he hoped the police would shoot Ku dead on the spot. Lin, his new friend, would want that too — after all, Ku was an imposter misrepresenting the Communist Party. The trouble was that no one knew when the attack would take place.

But Sarly didn’t seem troubled. He smoked his pipe and waited.

Inspector Maron burst in. “We’ll have to seal the streets off with armored police vehicles,” he barked, the boorish ex-wrestler in him coming to the fore. “There are too many pedestrians on the road, and if we don’t scare them off, we’ll lose control of the situation.”

“But they could put the attack off to tomorrow or the day after tomorrow,” Sarly said irresolutely.

“Today isn’t just any day. All policemen are reporting to duty, and half of them are at the Koukaza Gardens because Consul Baudez and the directors of the Municipal Office are reviewing the troops. The commanding officer of the Indo-Chinese troops will be up on the platform as well.”

Only now did Hsueh realize that it was the fourteenth of July; not for nothing had Ku chosen to strike on Bastille Day.

“I’ll go myself as soon as we wrap up here. Remember that we want to wait until the robbery is under way before striking. Tell me about your plan of attack.” Lieutenant Sarly had put Inspector Maron in charge of coordinating the operation.

“We’ve stationed snipers at the guard post on Rue des Pères, and the bank is swarming with plainclothes Chinese policemen. It only takes two minutes for a car to get from here to the location of the attack. The police stations on Avenue Joffre and Avenue Foch are both on standby alert, and all police cars are circling the streets near Rue du Consulat. As soon as the alarm is sounded, the entire district will be sealed off.”

“Very good. What’s there to worry about?”

Sarly drew out the small brown bag that contained his private possessions. He undid the string, took out a copper pick, and started to clean his pipe. But as he was about to pack the pipe, they heard an explosion in the distance, to their west. It was two in the afternoon. Many days later, after things had died down, Sarly said to Hsueh: “It hadn’t occurred to me that he would start with an explosion. If he wanted to rob a bank, why start by tossing a grenade? No one does that. I thought he was insane — anyone else would have crept into the bank, quietly taken control, and told everyone to get down on the floor. They would need time to put all that cash in bags or crates. Most of it would be in silver, so the crates would be extremely heavy, and they would have to be lugged into a car. I knew he was armed and could break through a barricade. We were extremely well prepared. We had policemen lying in wait inside and outside the bank with rifles, and as soon as they came out, we were going to open fire from all sides. I told our men that they would have at least ten minutes to take up their positions outside the bank. But they didn’t want to give us any time. In fact, they didn’t even want to give themselves any time.”

The explosions were followed by a barrage of shots as well as single shots that rang out one at a time, as if to avoid being drowned out by the rest of the gunfire. If Hsueh didn’t know what they were, he would think these were firecrackers at a wedding banquet. People might assume there was a big banquet at a fancy restaurant like the Hung-yün, or a store opening on Rue du Consulat.

Inspector Maron rushed out with his detectives. They had gotten the tip, and they were ready. The explosions didn’t faze them, and police cars awaited them at the gate. Sarly had Hsueh go with himself.

The two of them got into an armored Rolls-Royce. With terrified pedestrians thronging the roads, it took them seven or eight minutes rather than two minutes to reach the bank, although it was less than a kilometer away. By the time they got there, the shootout was almost over.

Hsueh recognized the officer in charge at the scene, Sergeant Ch’eng of North Gate Police Station. Sergeant Ch’eng glanced at Hsueh before giving Lieutenant Sarly an account of the gunfight. Even though his men had been ready, they had been bewildered when the operation started. It couldn’t be said that they were unprepared. Yes, when they saw that car pull up to the door of the bank, they had “tensed up,” in the words of one of the snipers. Yes, they had seen three bicycles screech to a halt by the colonnades, one on the same side of the street as the bank, and two on the opposite side, exactly where the diagram had them. But no one would have guessed that the men who jumped out of the Peugeot would each throw a grenade at the door of the bank. At the same time, a loud explosion could be heard coming from each of the bicycles: firecrackers, quantities of them, rerigged so that a single match would make them all go off at once.

The robbers were complete amateurs, Sergeant Ch’eng sniffed. They were terrified out of their wits before they’d even gotten started. And it hadn’t occurred to them that there could be an ambush. The police had begun to fire seconds later, and it looked as though they hadn’t anticipated that at all. The three men who had burst into the bank through the smoke of the explosion were trapped. They were under fire from behind the bank counters as well as from the steps of the bank.

Then things took a farcical turn. The three men on bikes had been ready to back up their comrades inside the bank from behind the cover of the columns, but as soon as they pulled out their guns, they could tell that things had gone very wrong. They ran out from the colonnades, jumped into the car, and rushed off before the police could take aim, abandoning the men inside.

“They went in the direction of Boulevard de Montigny,” Sergeant Ch’eng said. As though to confirm his words, gunfire rang out from the direction of Rue Passejo, to their west.

“They won’t get away. They won’t be able to get past Boulevard de Montigny,” Lieutenant Sarly said, looking at the scene of the explosion. The three corpses lay in a pile of broken glass in the lobby, and who knew how many other casualties there were.