Night in Shanghai

8

BY THAT MARCH, Song had been in the Communist headquarters in Yan’an almost a year, thanks to Chen Xing’s letter of recommendation, which got her promptly transferred out of the Eighth Route Army Hostel.

Her new world had not been quite as she imagined. The town itself, situated on a bend in the Yan River between corrugated hills of yellow loess, had been bombed to rubble by the Japanese, though its imposingly high city walls had survived intact. The townspeople and Communists abandoned what lay within the walls and moved to a shadow-city of caves hollowed out of the dry canyons, cut long ago by ancient creeks. The Party University was set up nearby, honeycombed through the repeating hills, invisible to Japanese planes even as it housed several thousand students who were learning to organize and use propaganda. Into this hive of political and military activity came foreigners, including missionaries, reporters, doctors, and adventurers, almost all of whom needed the help of Song’s work unit. Most foreign visitors did not stay long, but the hospital rarely seemed to be without an English-speaking doctor from India or Australia or America, keeping the small team of translators busy.

Song liked using her mind, and translating for doctors and visitors was better than digging terraces in Chen Lu Village, yet she still felt sidelined from anything important. She was far from the thinkers and leaders in their separate canyons. She once asked one of her fellow translators, a middle-aged woman who had worked for Shell Oil in Shanghai, about climbing the ranks in the Party, and the woman had clucked sadly, as if it would be better for Song to forget such ideas. “You and I are foreign-trained,” she said. “That’s a bad class background.”

So even though Song was in Yan’an, she floated in a sea of separation. No one knew anything about her thoughts, her beliefs, her past. She shared a kang in one of the women’s caves with two other female recruits, who spoke to each other in Sichuanese and ignored her. She translated for foreigners, who always complimented her on her English before they left, but she had no friends; few Yan’an people even approached her. You could catch sparrows on her doorstep.

She crawled into the kang next to the other two girls every night, thinking of Thomas, and plugged through every day. When it seemed nothing would ever change, her superior Wu Guoyong called her in and handed her an envelope.

“Orders,” he said. “Special treatment, if you ask me.”

She took the envelope, burning, because she knew he meant her English. When he was gone, she slit it open.

She was to escort an American woman writer out of Communist territory and back to the Japanese-held area.

To Shanghai.

She was so excited she ran to the outhouse, closed the stall door, and squatted over the hole without even taking down her pants, just shaking, imagining what she would do when she saw him, what she would say-if he was still there. But he was, she knew it, she felt it. He was there, and she would see him in less than two weeks.

Her feet barely grazed the ground as she hurried that evening to meet the American writer, Joy Homer, in the bombed-out town. Almost no buildings remained standing, and the walled ruins were off-limits during the day, the better to appear abandoned to any Japanese flyovers. At night, though, any roofless space still halfway intact was lit up and turned into a noodle stall, or a shop for the dispensing of necessary goods, or an improvised stage for opera, or a puppet show. People swarmed down from the hills to enjoy themselves.

The meeting place was a snack stall, so when Song saw a plain white woman with a camera over her shoulder walking up the uneven lane of crumbled half walls and foundations, she asked the vendor to go ahead and prepare them a couple of dishes, and walked down to meet her.

“Miss Song!” Miss Homer thrust out her hand.

“Just call me Song,” she answered, and they shook. “Come. Let’s have dinner.” And they pulled two stools up to a box, overturned in the dirt, which served as a table.

“This is some place,” Joy said, looking around. “You’re all quite young, aren’t you? It’s a young group.”

“That’s true, I suppose.” Certainly the leaders were older, but Miss Homer would not have seen them. Song herself rarely did.

“The soldiers at the headquarters of Marshall Yan are all older,” Miss Homer said. “Did you know we just came from there?” The question was posed with a touch of pride, for the armed camp of this warlord and Nationalist commander was famously difficult to visit. “It’s in loess hills, much like your dwellings. Fantastic place! They shaved the canyon sides down into a series of terraces for their caves, all connected by these little zigzag stairways just like a New York fire escape. The cave we slept in was forty feet deep, the kang big enough for twenty people. Do you know,” she said, leaning forward, “every night soldiers came in and spread out their bedrolls beside us. Why, I thought nothing of sleeping with twelve to fifteen gentlemen a night!” She dissolved in laughter, captivated by her own wit as much as by this strange, exotic world. The vendor set two dishes in front of them, and she reared back slightly. “What’s this?”

“Mashed potatoes with wild vegetables, and steamed sweet millet cake.” Song plucked out the best morsels and put them on the American’s plate. “Tell me what brought you to China.”

“Well.” Miss Homer picked at the potato. “I was sent by the Interdenominational Church Committee for China Relief, you see, as a press correspondent. I’m to gather accurate news on what’s going on, and write a series of articles about it, which will help them raise funds for war relief.”

Song nodded, understanding why they wanted this woman leaving with a good impression.

“You know what surprises me most about Yan’an?” Joy said. “No Russians!”

Song looked up, jolted. “Why would there be Russians?” An explosion of laughter rose from the stall next to them. All around, little lights were strung up, and the demolished square had the gaiety of a village market. A man nearby had set up a table from which he sold knitted socks and scarves, another sold flashlights, yet another small cook pots. The rhythmic cries of guess-fingers, the ubiquitous drinking game, sounded nearby. “We broke with the Russians,” Song said. “We go our own path.” Song knew most Americans were ignorant of this; after all, the official press in China constantly dismissed the Communists as bandits and never reported on their real positions or alliances, much less their real power. The Western public knew nothing.

Yet Joy Homer surprised her. “Unfortunately, Americans are pretty simple. Just you being Communist is enough for them-they all think you are Russian allies, that you have Russian military aid. I can tell them you don’t, but it won’t make a lick of difference. What’s this blob, anyway?” She touched a square cake with her chopsticks.

Song started to like the woman. “Steamed millet cake. Try.”

Joy ate some. “Not bad. Well, I for one was certainly in the dark about your movement before coming here. And today I met a whole class full of students from your Party University-so impressive, the girls in their cute Dutch bob haircuts, the boys in their glasses. And they walked here! They walked all the way from Xi’an!”

“Oh yes,” said Song. “Students are arriving all the time. You see their idealism.” Indeed, the sight of them never failed to stir her.

“To the future,” Joy said impulsively, raising her chipped teacup.

Song responded with a smile, but inside she thought, To Thomas. He will be there. He won’t have left. He’ll have waited a year. And he won’t have another woman. Everything inside her shimmered at the thought. “To the future,” she agreed.

When Thomas first saw her standing outside his house, watching his door, he wondered if he was dreaming. He felt hazy these days, always hungry, one meal a day, dwindling down a niente, to nothing. Surely now his mind carried him away.

But when she stepped out and started toward him, and he saw the year they had been apart gather at the corners of her eyes and spill over, he knew. Then she was in his arms again, nothing changed, even her smell the same, although she was the new Song-short hair, a loose jacket, trousers. Beautiful. “Come inside.”

“This is the first time they sent me to Shanghai,” she said as he opened the front door.

“How did you find me?”

“I went to Ladow’s. They knew where you were.”

When they climbed the little ladder together, he saw her surprise at his tiny chamber, filled by his bed, his clothes, his sheet music, and one small window that gave out on a sloping rooftop. The ceiling in the little cubicle rose at an angle, just high enough on one side for him to stand.

“Paradise,” she said. “I have dreamed of it all my life.”

He laughed with her, and pulled her onto the bed, and it was hours later that he asked her how long she had.

“Three days,” was her answer, and though he tried to hide his hurt that she would leave again so soon, she felt it, and tightened her embrace. They lay with their arms and legs entwined, the way they both knew it should always be.

“Where do you go for the yi hao?” she whispered. “The number one, the bathroom.”

“Sorry, I don’t have a night stool. I use the outhouse in the lane.”

“You just go down, through their room?”

“Actually, no. The roof.” He indicated the window. “But you can’t do that.”

“Of course I can. Let’s go.” And she was up, pulling on her clothes. “Then we’ll come back,” she whispered.

He smiled. He didn’t want to leave the room either.

But once they were outside in the chilly morning air, she said, “Let’s eat before we go back. I remember a place near here for xiao long bao.”

“I don’t have any money,” he said quietly.

Song looked at him, top to bottom, thinking that now things made sense. As glorious as the thing had been between them, she had also noticed he was thin, ready to blow over in a puff of wind. “I’ll buy you breakfast.”

He fell gratefully into step beside her. “How do you have money? Du barely left you anything. Do they pay you, the Party?”

“No. They support me and feed me in exchange for my work. I inherited a little.” She appreciated that he fell silent then, and did not ask her any more. It was inheritance, in a way, even though Du Taitai was still alive. She stopped in front of a street vendor, who lifted the lid of a giant flat-bottomed pan to show tight-packed rows of chubby pork dumplings with sesame-crisped bottoms. The vendor turned up a dumpling corner to show them. “You like sheng jian bao?” Song said.

“I love them,” he answered, and she bought two on the spot, and brushed away his thanks. Money meant nothing to her now.

The diamonds would stay in their stone wall, as long as she remained with the Party. On the day she had left with Joy Homer she had almost done it-taken the diamonds and turned her back on the struggle for good. But she was not yet ready.

So when they awakened together the next morning, and he gathered her to him, she knew, with a bolt of misery, that it was time to be honest about it.

“I know you are committed.” He brushed hair tenderly back from her forehead. “I love this about you. So why not marry me and take me with you? I know they don’t need piano players up there, but I’m strong. There must be something I can do.”

“You’re a foreigner,” she said.

“I’m hardly from the ruling class. Maybe you noticed.”

“Don’t,” she said. “It’s not you, it’s everything foreign. Politics, culture, learning.”

“Learning?” He raised his brows.

“They welcome doctors and engineers for visits, as long as they side with the cause, but even those visitors don’t stay-almost never. And marriages between Party members and foreigners are discouraged.” She exaggerated slightly; marriage with a foreigner might be permitted, but the fact was that such a marriage would shut all the important doors to her. It would be much harder to get ahead.

“You’re saying I could not live there with you.”

“It would not be secure for you.”

“For you, you mean,” he shot back, and she wilted inside. “It would cast doubts on you.”

“Shi zhei yang de,” she said in Chinese, unhappily. “True.”

“What kind of system is that?” he said disdainfully. “Reject people because they are different? Prejudice.”

“Reality,” she countered. “It is natural for us to feel this way. Look what Japan has done.”

“America didn’t do that.”

“But America did not help us, and neither did Britain or France. They threw us to Japan like so many scraps of meat.”

He switched tactics. “Song. You’re foreign-trained yourself. If I cannot be secure up there, how can you be?”

“You have the point,” she said, agreeing, but her concession gave him no comfort.

After she left, he spiraled down quickly, getting by on his one meal a day with the Huangs and some money she had left behind for him. In April, when he ran into Eugen Silverman at an audition, he mentioned he was low on money, and Eugen took him to meet a Chinese man named Mr. Pao. This man was looking to hire an American, though the job had nothing to do with music.

“I run a newspaper,” Mr. Pao explained over tea in his modest apartment, “the Shanghai Daily. You have heard of it?”

“Of course.” Thomas and Eugen exchanged looks; it was one of the papers whose ads they followed.

“I need a publisher,” said Mr. Pao, and then tittered at Thomas’s horrified expression. “No experience necessary. Only the use of your name. With an American publisher, we can continue printing. They will leave us alone. I will pay you the salary. You see?”

Yes, Thomas saw. He also saw that newspaper offices had been bombed, and their employees killed, all over town. Newspapers were magnets. “Sorry, pal. Too dangerous.”

“It is a salary,” Eugen protested.

“Too high a price.” Thomas remembered the words of warning he’d been given in Seattle: People disagree, they end up dead. Play your music and keep clear of it. “Can’t do it.”

So his clothes grew looser on him, and he spent most of his time in his room, waiting for the evening to come, when he got food and an hour of listening to the radio. He lost himself in his dreams of Song, but in his rational moments, he was aware of life slipping away.

Early summer had brought warm days when a man came to the door of the crowded lane house asking for Thomas Greene. He was white, European, underfed, with a shock of brown hair above soft, sensitive eyes. He carried a violin case.

“David Epstein,” he said, and they shook.

“Thomas Greene.”

“You will forgive my English. Aaron Avshalomov gave me your name-you know him? Arosha?”

“Why yes,” Thomas cried, glad to hear of his friend. “How is he?”

“He is well. He said he thought you might be free to play. You see? I have the hope.” Epstein smiled apologetically and hoisted his instrument.

Thomas shook his head; he had not played in so long, he was not sure he even still could. “Play what?”

“My desire? My most constant dream since I left Vienna? To play my favorite of Mozart’s two sonatas for violin and piano in B-flat.”

“Oh.” Thomas had never played either, though they were gorgeous. “I’ve had no piano for a year.”

“No? If I find piano, will you play the Mozart with me? I so miss to make music.”

Thomas considered.

Epstein looked him up and down, no doubt noticing he was thinner than a man with enough money to eat ought to be. “We could play for tips. Make enough to eat, if we are good.”

“I would have to practice.”

“We can find something.”

He thought again. “Some friends of mine play at Ladow’s. Maybe there, in the morning. But I only sight-read, Mr. Epstein. I would need sheet music.”

“David. Call me David. I’ll come back with music.”

A few days later he was back with sheet music, by which time Thomas had been told that Ladow’s would allow them to practice in the club early in the day.

The first day they met, on Avenue Édouard VII, under a bright morning sun, David drew out the opening pages of the Largo-Allegro, the first movement of the Mozart, right on the street, before they even went inside. “I would need to read through this once or twice,” Thomas said.

“I thought so. You say many months, no playing, is it not? So I bring this, too.” The Viennese drew out another sheaf of music, and opened it to the first page.

Thomas saw it was Liebesleid by the violin master and composer Fritz Kreisler, a piece written by and for the violinist in which the piano played a lesser role and could be sight-read by any competent accompanist.

“Of course I can play this,” he said, covering his embarrassment at having implied he needed something so easy. “Naturally.”

“The piano is simple,” David admitted, “but that is not why I bring this piece. I need money, Mr. Greene. I have a wife and baby in Hongkou and-”

“You came to Shanghai with a wife and baby?”

“Yes! We are so lucky to get out. We had to leave my wife’s parents-I am sure they will die-and her cousin-” He choked for a moment, and recovered himself. “Forgive me. We cannot get the rest of our family out-our friends-we have left so many behind. But now I have my wife and son here, they need to eat, and I need money. And you and I, Mr. Greene, we can make money playing in the hotel lobbies. That’s why the Kreisler. His music is very, how do I say, gemütlich. German and Austrian people love it, because it sounds to them like comfortable times, happy, before the war. You understand? This Vienna, they want to remember. It will make them tip us well.”

They practiced together for several weeks, during which Thomas found himself smiling again, even at little things like the street acrobats and puppet shows now reappearing in the lanes with the warm weather. He was still weak, but music returned, as reliably as any true faith, always demanding, always giving. He still played for Song, too, though she was far away. Those were the moments when he caught a surprised grin from David, and knew he had played well.

By the first week of June, the two of them were ready. They went first to talk to the manager of the Park Hotel, because Thomas had noticed a Steinway there.

The man knew his name. “You were one of the brightest stars of Night in Shanghai,” he said, wistfully recalling a time which had ended only two years before but already seemed like it belonged in another century. “Of course you can play in the lobby. I cannot pay you, but you can open the violin case for tips-and, all right, you may each have one meal in the restaurant, free, for every music shift. Agreed?”

They went from one hotel to another, making the same arrangement, which had natural appeal for hotel management. Shanghai was full of people living quietly, waiting it out, surviving on little. Hotel lobbies in Frenchtown and the Gudao were free, semipublic spaces, and many of the people coming in would order tea and cake.

In this manner Thomas and David started at the Park, kicking off with the Mozart. Later on, they played the Kreisler pieces. David grinned and motioned with his chin-and the whole violin-to people retrieving handkerchiefs to wipe at their eyes. “You see? They hear Kreisler and they get all verklempt.”

He was right, for the Liebesleid and Liebesfreud brought double the tips of Mozart and Brahms. When the plaintive strains of Kreisler started, that was when the older men in their moth-eaten suits turned to their wives, took their swollen hands, and steered them out onto the dance floor among the potted palms. This is what they want from the music, a feeling, a connection to another time. He glanced at David, who had brought him here. Thank you. He poured his gratitude into the passage he was playing, stretching out the feeling with shameless melodrama and rubato, and touched hearts all around the room-if the sudden rainfall of coins in the violin case was any indication. He caught David’s eye, and the flash of his grin, its pure happiness, was better even than the sound of the money.

Lin Ming left the town of Tengchong in an open jeep, with a driver of the local Bai minority, on the last stretch of the Burma Road before they hit the border to that adjoining nation. Tengchong was high on a stony plateau, surrounded by volcanoes and smoking, bubbling hot springs that sent columns of steam into the air. Life was simple and pastoral, with hundreds of local families engaged in cutting basalt flagstones for use as pavement in the region’s towns. Yet there was energy here, in the hot springs; trained engineers would be able to turn it into electricity.

As they left the cooler plateau and descended toward the warm, low-lying jungles of the border, they stopped in a village called Heshun, with cobbled streets and a river winding around it. Many people from this village had gone overseas and made their fortunes, and then sent money back to build a large library with tall windows and tens of thousands of volumes. Below the village the road descended into a broad, unoccupied valley, fertile and well watered. And as long as anyone could remember, the area had also been home to a lively trade in jadeite and rubies. The Jews will like it here, he thought.

They would have to be fed at first, and housed, and that would be his job. Right now, all he could think about was Sun Fo and Kung’s petition, which had been passed by the legislature on April twenty-second.

Jewish people holding citizenship of foreign countries retain the duties and rights of citizens of those countries, and, if they wish to enter China, they can do so in accordance with the usual practices and regulations… stateless Jewish people are in a special situation. We ought to do everything possible to assist them in expression of our country’s commitment to humanitarianism.

It was law now: one hundred thousand Jews to be selected and brought here to start over. Looking out over the verdant, empty countryside, he swelled with the rightness of it.

Now Kung was going to pay him all the rest of the money he needed to buy out his qin’ai de Zhuli. As they descended through the valley, he thought of his last visit with her, when he held her through the night and told her it would not be long. “My plan is almost ready,” he whispered, and she lay against him, content, unquestioning, waiting. She trusted him.

From the very first day he and David played at the Park, Thomas took home enough to start eating more, and he soon rebounded to full energy. The flexing of his musical imagination followed, and he started taking liberties with the scores. He still sight-read on automatic, like riding a bicycle, but now he found himself departing from what was written for more than the occasional ornament. He also pulled the rhythmic accents out of line, the way they had done on stage at the Royal. His little solos never undermined the melodic themes or structures of the piece. He always knew where he was.

At the Park, they ate their meal in the restaurant during a break: steak, whipped potatoes, green beans, and hot, delicate cloverleaf rolls. Thomas relished the Western food even though he knew the Huangs would hold his supper for him until he got back. David, on the other hand, ate quickly, with a barely contained desperation that Thomas knew all too well. And he’s here with a wife and child.

“What do you gentlemen say to our cuisine here at the Park?” It was the hotel manager, brimming with pride in his high-class service and also happy with the music, having seen a sharp uptick in beverage service.

“It’s very fine,” said Thomas. “Just one problem. We really should not eat while we play.”

David looked stricken.

Thomas pushed on. “It is distracting. So we were wondering, while we perform, can Mr. Epstein’s wife and son come to the hotel and have our meals, in our place?” He was bland and perfectly sensible.

“Why not?” the manager said. And across the table Thomas saw David’s eyes fill with gratitude. From then on, when they played the Park, Margit and Leo came, rail-thin in their best Vienna clothes, and ate as fine a Western meal as money could buy, while white-jacketed waiters hovered around them. Thomas noticed that Leo was ravenous but Margit ate sparingly, and packed up food to take home for David. All the while, the open violin case accumulated coins and banknotes.

He knew he was himself again when he took Alonzo and Ernest and Charles to lunch at a Russian restaurant, and insisted on picking up the check. He even said he was going to start saving again for their tickets, and get them out.

“Sure you are,” Ernest said.

“Forget it, pal,” Charles put in.

Alonzo was laughing while they spoke, with his bumping bass rumble that always sounded like it might have come from his instrument, and soon they all joined in, even Thomas, who in the sudden clarity of mirth saw that he had been a fool since the very beginning. Their lives were their own. If they had wanted to save money, they would have. Alonzo sent his money home to his family; Ernest and Charles simply burned through whatever they had. Nothing Thomas had ever suggested to them had made any difference. But they liked their lives, all three of them, and they were choosing to remain, the same way he was. There was a new scent of freedom around them, and him too, when he could finally let them be that way.

In that June of 1939 a woman doctor arrived in Yan’an, a surgeon named Dr. Wei. She was the first woman doctor Song had met, and though she had the broad cheekbones and cheerful smile of a rural girl, she had in fact been trained at Peking Union Medical College in all the latest advances. Long lines of women from throughout the encampment, all eager to consult a female doctor, formed to see her.

Dr. Wei was Chinese and needed no translator, so it was mere luck that Song was assigned to assist her on the day a messenger arrived on horseback from Baoding Village with the news that a nine-year-old girl had fallen from a second-floor window onto her head. Dr. Wei barked out the supplies she needed as she sloughed off her clinic coat and grabbed her medical bag. “You!” she said to Song. “Take this, follow me to the truck. You can help.”

“I’m not a nurse,” Song said, as the leather cases were piled into her arms.

“Doesn’t matter!” Dr. Wei called. A flatbed truck was waiting, and Song climbed up in the big square cab beside her.

It was a hard two hours over a bumpy road to Baoding, where they scrambled out in a grove of cypress trees, and ran into the building where the girl waited. “Here!” the villagers cried. And at the end of the hall they found her, lying on a table, unconscious, with a contusion on the side of her skull just behind the ear.

Dr. Wei bent over the girl, examining her quickly. When she took off the blood pressure cuff, her face was worried. She told the women to boil water, and then turned to Song. “Subdural hematoma. We have to operate right away.”

“Here?” said Song, looking around the village meeting room, with its clay walls and rustic wood roof.

“Otherwise she will die. She has only a short time.” Wei was terse and crisp now, the scientist, as she set out a tray of instruments for Song to sterilize with long-handled tongs. “Then you will hand them to me with the sterile tongs.” Bright lights were brought in and arranged around the farm table, towels and gauze and bandages and suture thread laid out according to rapid-fire instructions. Dr. Wei scrubbed her hands furiously with caustic soap and made Song do the same; they covered their hair and wore masks from her medical bag.

“Get her family out of here,” said the doctor, and the village women hustled them out while she shaved the girl’s head, swabbed it with iodine, and braced it between rolled towels.

“What if she wakes up?” Song whispered.

“She won’t.” Wei was sectioning back the skin on the girl’s head. “We have to relieve the pressure.” The doctor used a hand drill to cut through the child’s skull, periodically issuing brief commands to a terrified Song.

The instant she removed a section of the skull, the tissue inside bulged out through the opening. “Dura mater,” said Dr. Wei, as if she were a professor, and took a scalpel to cut through it. It was surprisingly tough and leathery-looking. The first slice freed a gush of blood and clots, and she could hear Dr. Wei exhale in relief as the spurting blood released its death grip on the brain. Then the surgeon moved on to the torn bridging veins that had caused the buildup of blood in the first place between the dura and the arachnoid, the layer below-first clamping, then repairing them. Long, tense minutes went by. Several times the family opened the door, and were scolded away.

Finally Dr. Wei said, “That is the end of it. Ready to close up.” This part seemed easy for the doctor, and she chatted about the complications of head injuries as she worked, finishing with a clean bandage.

By the time they went to the outer room to talk to the girl’s parents, Dr. Wei seemed energized, and ready to explain everything to the parents, whether they understood it or not. “The bridging veins were torn by the head trauma, and they poured blood into the space between the skull and the brain, pressing on it. The pressure was the threat; it would have killed her. Now that it is relieved, and she is stable, she should survive. We have to wait for her to wake up to know more.”

“Aren’t you going to give them special instructions?” Song said when the parents had left the room.

“Instructions?” Dr. Wei looked at her. “No. We are going to stay here. She must be watched.” And though Song offered to stay with the unconscious girl while the surgeon rested, this too Dr. Wei brushed off, and sat by the child herself.

In the end they remained in Baoding Village for five days, until the child was well enough to ride back to Yan’an with them for postoperative care. During those days, Dr. Wei saw all the villagers with health complaints.

In their makeshift clinic, a little gang of four girls, headed by the bossy Plum Blossom, turned up every day to help. When they closed the door in the evening, the girls cleaned everything and asked questions, wanting the use of all Dr. Wei’s tools explained to them.

Like most village children, they were illiterate, and the second night Song said, “Would you like to have lessons?” They responded in an eager chorus, and every night, when the clinic closed, they worked on characters. Song wrote them out in stages for each girl so they could practice without forgetting the stroke order. To her surprise they loved it, wanting to stay late and learn more, and every morning they came in with their characters memorized. They were ravenous to read. It was not something that had been planned or scheduled, yet it turned out to be the most useful and joyful thing she had experienced since she came north.

On their last night in Baoding, Song carried a tray of food in to Dr. Wei. “You give so much of yourself,” she said admiringly.

Dr. Wei looked up, surprised. “No. It is what your people are doing that will change things. Do you realize-these villagers have never seen a doctor! Just like most peasants in China. No one ever brought medical care to them before-no emperor, no leader-not until you people came. Those girls had never been taught their characters either! That’s why I’m here, you know. That’s why I believe in what you are doing.”

And in the truck the next day, watching the doctor cradle her patient on the ride back to Yan’an, and thinking of Plum Blossom and her friends, Song knew that she believed too. Their movement was the future. Maybe it was meant to be greater than love.

Thomas and David were soon playing six days a week. They developed a following, folks who showed up to listen as they moved from one shabby, war-worn lobby to another, the Metropole, the Astor House, the Palace, and Le Cercle Sportif Français, which was not a hotel but a country club. At each place, they asked for the same deal, a full meal in the restaurant for each of them, and then, when the establishment was happy with the stream of patrons and the busy lobby service, they asked that the meal be transferred to David’s wife and son. Thomas saw how David lit up when they came in, his wife in white gloves and her grandmother’s necklace, the boy in short pants and socks and a little blazer, clumping in his childish oxfords as if nothing had changed, as if they had not lost their world forever, along with everyone in it.

Yet in playing with David, Thomas saw that the Epstein family and the other refugees in their community had brought some of their world here with them. He felt it every time the aging couples got up from their velvet-trimmed chairs and took a turn around the floor. The two musicians traded a look the first time they saw it, and the next time they met, without words having been necessary, David brought with him Chopin’s Grande Valse Brillante and one of Strauss’s New Vienna Waltzes. It worked. More and more men started taking their wives’ hands, and once two or three pairs were out there, more tended to follow. The lobby became a dance floor, smiles jumping from one to another, from old to young. As they turned on the floor, he noticed their faded sleeves still bore the outline of the Star of David patches they had worn back home, yet here, dancing, all of them looked happy again.

The crowds grew, and in July, Morioka also began to appear where they were playing-never directly, but by engaging in meetings nearby. It happened too often, and at too many hotels, for it to be an accident. The Admiral did not speak to them, since to do so might put the musicians in danger from the resistance, and Thomas appreciated his restraint. He did not mind that the man came to listen, even though Song would be furious if she knew; to him, music was a separate country, within which war was set aside. And actually, the one time Morioka did speak to them, it was only to ask about David. “Where come from your friend?”

“Admiral Morioka, David Epstein. Mr. Epstein is from Vienna.”

“Ah,” said Morioka, his eyes widening in understanding. “You are Jew. Many your people live Hongkou.”

This hung somewhat frighteningly in the air, until he bowed and walked away. “Ready?” Thomas whispered urgently, with a glance to the music stand. David nodded, raised his violin, and followed him when he counted down.

Lin Ming arrived in Shanghai with five thousand in his money belt, riding high on having reached his threshold at last. But he did not go to the Osmanthus Pavilion right away, where Pearl would be waiting; first he had an important meeting with the Jewish leaders in Hongkou, about the Resettlement Plan.

He hastened out of the train station, still an empty shell. Only the tracks had been repaired, along with the necessary walkways, and trains and passengers came and went as before. Much had been cleaned up and even rebuilt in the two years since the battle, but the city was still missing its spark; it looked to Lin like a prison of sad, huddled brown buildings. Nobody referred to it by Ye Shanghai anymore, Night in Shanghai. Now Hei’an Shijie was the term people used. The Dark World. Walking to the trolley, he felt the darkness all around.

But even the gloom could not dampen his excitement about the meeting. The Resettlement Plan was no longer a secret, having been passed in open legislative session, and retaliation from the Japanese could come at any time, so he was careful. He changed routes twice, and several times entered shops only to exit through a back door onto some other street. By the time he met David Epstein at the alley door to his building, as planned, he knew no one had seen him.

“Thank you for bringing these men together,” he said, when they were inside.

David guided him through long interior corridors past dozens of doors, each marked with a tiny scroll case, each little room housing a family. Most rooms lacked windows, so their doors sat open, and he nodded in polite acknowledgment to the families inside, as they passed. He knew that the Japanese authorities had labeled the Jews “stateless persons” and otherwise left them alone, but this was the first time he had actually seen how they were living. “Thank you for bringing me,” he said, but David brushed it off. “You are the friend of Thomas,” he said, in a tone which said that settled everything.

Inside, he found three men waiting beside David’s wife and son, an older European man with a tonsure-shaped fringe of white hair, a dark-haired European in his prime, and an Asian man, also young and strong-looking.

David introduced Lin Ming, and the older man spoke. “I am Herr Ackerman. This is Amleto Vespa and An Gong Geun. Mr. An is the younger brother of An Jung Geun, the Korean revolutionary martyr. As for Mr. Vespa, he is from Rome, and I from Vienna, and we represent the Sword of David Society. We fought for you here in Hongkou in ’thirty-seven, did you know that? We sabotaged Japanese positions and equipment constantly, and planted bombs in their trucks.”

Lin inclined his head. “It is known. No other foreign groups fought with us, and we thank you and respect you for that.”

Now that it was recognized, Ackerman waved it away. “We are in your debt for what your government has proposed.”

“I am only the messenger,” Lin said. “And do not thank me yet, for we need your help. We need money, U.S. dollars and gold bars, at least fifty thousand worth, as fast as possible. Plans are already drawn up for barracks and kitchens and food delivery along the Burma Road.”

Lin watched as they looked at one another, nodding, and saw that this huge sum was no problem for them. “There are dangers,” he cautioned. “We need this money delivered in Chongqing-and the Japanese will do anything to stop us bringing one hundred thousand Jews to China. They know it will earn us sympathy from the West. They will put a high price on your heads. They are very smart.”

An and Vespa exchanged hard, needle-sharp looks. “Not smart like we are,” An said, speaking for the first time.

Vespa nodded. He was medium height, dark-haired, wiry, and looked like he had steel cables under his skin when he moved his jaw to speak. “Just tell us where you want that first package delivered.”

Before Lin left, Margit took him aside. “Thomas said I could ask you this. Please-I hope it’s all right. My cousin Hannah Rosen, in Vienna? She has two children? I am afraid they will die there-the Chinese Consul in Vienna is giving visas, but somehow she could not get one. If you can ask Dr. Kung-if there is anything he can do-”

“I will ask,” he promised. Her eyes were brimming, and he took a clean lawn handkerchief from his pocket and gave it to her for a moment.

He left the meeting, still cautious, yet feeling grand too, because they were going to save lives, right under the noses of the Japanese and the Germans. Not a few lives. Many.

And now, Pearl. Life was on his side again.

He boarded a trolley, and found a seat near the rear door, the safest position since one could melt off the car and escape in case of trouble.

But he rode in ease, clacking along the streets, watching people step on and step off, his chest bursting with delight. I am coming, Pearl. I am almost there. He dismounted through the back door and walked to Stone Lion Lane.

He arrived to find the Pavilion closed, its gate locked, not entirely surprising at this hour of the morning. He knocked until the old gatekeeper opened a small metal window within the gate.

“Old Feng! Let me in.”

“Mister Lin-is it you?”

“Who else? Open up. I want to see Pearl.”

“No Pearl here.”

“Of course she’s here.” Lin ignored the frightened pounding in his head. “Top of the stairs, third room on the right.”

But Old Feng looked not too clear. Was his mind going dim?

“She wore that red satin jacket in the winter.”

Feng’s eyes came into focus. “With the fur trim, that one! Oh yes, Zhuli. Sweet girl. But she is gone now. More than two weeks.”

The earth seemed to drop out from under Lin’s feet, and the old man opened the metal door for him. Lin pushed past the madam, and the girls, who suddenly all looked strange to him, and took the stairs three at a leap to her room.

He opened the door, and everything had changed, the clothes, the smell. A woman lay in the bed beneath a man who turned his head and snarled, “Ei? Sha jiba!” Stupid dick!

Lin backed out, running. A minute later he was out the gate with an address in his hand, given him by the madam: the place to which Pearl had been sent. He did not even hear Old Feng’s farewell.

The first part of his hope started to shrivel when he realized the address was in Zhabei, a Japanese area. As soon as he crossed Suzhou Creek on the bridge at the end of Carter Road, passing out of the Lonely Island and into enemy territory, he could feel the change. The Japanese were all around, women, children, families, elders, and men in uniform, everywhere. It no longer looked like a Chinese place.

He came almost to the green edge of the Cantonese cemetery before he found the address: a long, low, white featureless building, with a line of Japanese soldiers snaking out the front door and down the road as far as he could see.

It’s where they keep women.

A roaring in his ears seemed to drown everything else out, as he pushed his way past the line, up to the desk. “Zhang Zhuli?” he said, over and over, and wrote out the characters, which were the same in Japanese kanji.

The man called someone else from the back, who took the name and checked it against a ledger. “Not here,” he said, handing the card back.

“Please! She was sent here!”

The first man pulled out another, older book from beneath the desk, and the second man opened it and flipped through it grudgingly.

Just as he was reaching to close it, he saw her. “Here,” he said, and turned the ledger to show her name. It had a line through it.

“Where is she now?” Lin croaked.

“Gone away,” said the man, and closed the book.

Lin stepped back, reeling. That means dead. “Are you sure?” he said, his voice remote, as if it came from somewhere outside himself.

“Sure,” the man barked back, glaring. Shanghai was a vassal city, and its whores, living or dead, were not his concern.

A ringing in Lin Ming’s ears blocked everything as he pushed out, past the line of men waiting to get in. He walked blindly. But then a shout made him stop short, and he saw he had been about to walk into a cart being hauled by two men. In it were eight or ten girls’ bodies stacked like so much cordwood. They had been stripped naked, since their clothes at least still had some value, and their bodies heaped up with a sheet of burlap over them. Their bare white feet stuck out, jouncing with every bump in the road. It was that pitiful sight, the jiggling pile of feet, that cracked his shell and brought out his first long howl of pain.

Thomas had come to know all the voices in his building. He followed the lives of its tenants, their anger and laughter, conversations, the hours at which they came and went. When they had visitors, he knew whether it was someone new or a person who had come to the door before.

So he was surprised one morning to hear a familiar voice outside. It was a man’s voice, someone he knew, and he spoke Chinese in clear, bell-like tones that even Thomas, who still understood only a few words of the language, recognized as cultured. He jumped up and threw on his clothes, unable to place the voice. All he knew was that he never expected to hear it in this Frenchtown alley.

Downstairs, he was startled to discover H. H. Kung attracting a fast-growing circle of onlookers to his front door. The Premier was instantly recognizable.

“Dr. Kung,” Thomas said. He had met the man several times at the Royal, in what felt like another lifetime. “Please come in.”

“Thank you.” Kung touched the rim of his bowler in the American style he had acquired in college and never lost. “But if you don’t mind-” He sent a glance to the lane-mouth, thirty or forty meters down, where Thomas saw his car and driver waited. He understood.

In the car, Kung explained. “It is Lin Ming. He has been working for the Jewish Resettlement Plan, as you know. He arrived in Shanghai four days ago, conducted a very important secret meeting for the Plan, and then vanished.”

“Here? In Shanghai?” the words shook as they came out, for people were getting killed all the time. And it made no sense that Lin would come to the city and not contact him.

Kung raised a hand. “He is alive, but not well. My people found him today. That’s why I came to you.”

“Where is he?”

“In the Daitu.”

The Badlands. That was one word Thomas knew. “Was he kidnapped?”

“No.” Kung sighed heavily. “Pearl is dead. His intended. It seems he has been out of his senses ever since he learned. I have sent three of my men in to talk to him, but no one can make him leave.”

“Drinking?”

“No. Heroin. It’s worse than opium.” The car pulled up outside the iron gates to the Hollywood, its lights blinking even in the daytime, its grassy front lot already packed with dark, square-topped motorcars.

“He’s in there?” Thomas said, dismayed at the sprawl of the complex, where it was rumored customers died every night of some excess or other.

“I cannot go in and reason with him,” Kung said, his voice pinched with frustration. “You saw what happened when I stood outside your door for a few minutes. Please. Go and bring him out. He will listen to you.”

As soon as he entered the lobby, Thomas felt he was inside some giant machine full of noise and flashing lights. The din of a mediocre orchestra came from behind one set of doors, and the strains of a competing cover band floated from another. Following Kung’s instructions, he made his way to a small drug room at the end of the easternmost corridor, where he found Lin Ming on a narrow rattan daybed, one of four occupied by men who were similarly reclining, eyes half-lidded, apparently unaware of each other.

“Lin.” He jostled his shoulder. “Time to go.”

His friend’s head turned so slowly he seemed to trail phosphorescence with his chin. He gazed out through pinpoint pupils, from a far distance. “Little Greene.”

“Come on. Car’s waiting.”

Lin let Thomas lift him by the shoulders until he was sitting up, but when Thomas took hold of both his wrists and tried to pull him to his feet, he crumpled. “Can’t go out there.”

“Outside?”

“There.” Lin’s glass eyes went to the door, and Thomas understood. Lin was seeing the place where Pearl had been taken, the place Shanghai whispered about, where Chinese girls were used by a different Japanese soldier every fifteen minutes until they died.

“I know,” he said, and gathered his friend into his arms. “But you’re not going alone.” And he maneuvered him to his feet.

In the car, they quickly realized the best thing to do was to take him to Thomas’s room, where Thomas could stay by him as he came out of it. “He’s going to be sick,” Kung warned. “It lasts three days when they stop.”

Once they got him up the ladder and on the bed, Kung tried to give Thomas a small roll of cash, for Lin’s expenses, but Thomas refused. “I’m working.”

“Please.” Kung pushed the cash into his shirt pocket. “He is my friend too. At least you should have cash for his needs.” He looked around the small, low-ceilinged room. “And, if I may.” He pulled off another bill and stuck it in the same pocket. “Buy a night stool. He is going to need it.”

“All right.”

“When he comes out of it, tell him I am very, very sorry about Pearl-but also, tell him he did well. The package is on its way to Chongqing. Many people will live because of him-women and children.”

“I’ll tell him.”

“Thank you, Little Greene. May I call you that? That’s how he always refers to you.”

“Sure. And you’re welcome.”

Dr. Kung picked up his bowler and turned nimbly, like a large cat, to retreat feet first down the ladder into the Huang family’s room as if he did such a thing every day.

Thomas sat through the first night with Lin, and for the next few days traded off with Alonzo, who worked evenings. There was nothing they could do, really, except sponge him down and tell him it would end, calm him when he grew agitated, and cajole him into taking soup, even when it came back up again. By the fourth day he was sweaty and pale, but himself again.

“You’ve been sleeping on the floor?” Lin’s exhausted eyes traveled to the stack of folded quilts and pillows against the wall. “I’m sorry. How many days?”

“Three. Feeling better?”

“No. You should have left me.”

“Sure, pal. You think we’re letting you go that easy?”

“Who’s we?”

“Alonzo. Me. And Keiko, she made soup for you. Charles and Ernest wanted to come, but I didn’t want them to see you like you were.”

Lin turned his face to the wall. “I wish you had left me.”

Thomas argued with him no more that day, but kept him there in his tingzijian, and made sure he spent time with Alonzo, too, so that he would never be alone. On many days, Alonzo brought Lin along to hear Thomas’s performances with David, and so it was natural that he eventually brought his bass, too, and started sitting in. Alonzo did not read, so he just listened to a few bars and then joined in, creating bottom lines of surprising complexity and even a hint of swing.

When they came to sections that were naturally repetitive, like the call-and-response sequence between the violin and piano in the first movement of one of the Mozart violin sonatas, they would pause on the pattern, and run back and forth over it; once in a while, Thomas and Alonzo flatted the seventh or third, or hesitated extra long to give more syncopation than the composer intended. The audience always cheered at these digressions, but it was the smile from Lin Ming that they were looking for.

One night Thomas was invited to David and Margit’s for dinner, and Lin did not want to go. Congested with a summer cold, he said he would stay in, and go to sleep early on the floor, where he insisted on making his bed these days, claiming beds were too soft for him anyway. “Go,” he said. “I am all right.”

So Thomas took a trolley downtown and walked north along the Bund and across the Garden Bridge-bowing to Japan-to Hongkou, the dense, ramshackle district that was now the refuge of the Jews. David had written out long, baroque instructions with arrows and diagrams, because his apartment did not have an address of its own, tucked as it was into a labyrinth of rooms subdivided from some larger building.

David saw him coming down the long, dim tunnel, and let out a cry of welcome, drawing him into a room with one tiny window, high up in the wall. It had been made cheerful with a checkered cloth on the table, and the good smell of stew rising from the stove.

Thomas hugged Margit and reached down to shake hands with Leo. “Aren’t you two brave to bring a youngster so far,” he said.

“Brave?” said David. “No, so lucky! You cannot imagine how hard it was to get out, how dangerous. But we are the lucky ones, yes. Mark the words. They mean to kill us, all of us.”

“That’s awful,” said Thomas. “There are millions of you in Europe.”

This brought Margit decisively to her feet. “Shall we eat?” she said, and soon was ladling hot stew into bowls, and cutting a freshly baked loaf into thick slices to pair with a crock of butter.

Before they ate, David lowered his eyes and intoned a prayer in Hebrew, of which Thomas understood only one word, Yisroel. Then he said, “That was a prayer to give thanks to God, that we are here, alive and free; that so many of us got out of Germany and Austria, and that here we have made new lives-thanks to friends like you.”

Margit buttered a piece of bread for Leo. “To see us now, you cannot imagine how impossible it was to get out of Vienna. We were desperate. The Nazis would let us leave only if we had a visa for someplace else.”

“And no country would give us one,” said David.

“Then how did you get out?”

“God led us out,” said David. “God sent us the Chinese Consul General in Vienna, a righteous man named Ho Feng-Shan.”

More than a year earlier, on a brisk Saturday morning in March 1938, Ho Feng-Shan had left his home in Vienna on foot after breakfast, thinking he would walk to the consulate and check on the news about Germany. He had watched with concern as calls and demands flew back and forth between Germany and Austria, everything stalled, nothing certain, lines forming at the banks because everyone wanted their money out. Dr. Kung had cabled him the day before, through back channels to be safe, advising him that a Nazi takeover of Austria appeared imminent, but was expected to be peaceful. At the office, he could find out more, and as it was a fine late winter day, he needed no more than his overcoat and fedora for the walk.

As he came close to the wide, tree-lined boulevard, he heard truck engines, a crowd, marching feet. He thought he had misheard until he turned a corner and saw that the boulevard was thick with lines of marching troops. No mistake-the Germans were entering Vienna.

He stopped among the crowds who had gathered eight or ten deep behind the barricades, some of them cheering and extending their arms in the Nazi salute. Fools, he thought. He craned this way and that, and saw only the soldiers, six abreast, hundreds beyond count. His heart sank.

“Consul Ho,” said a child’s voice, and he turned to look.

“Lord have mercy,” he exclaimed, one of the first English expressions he had learned as a child from the Norwegians who had schooled him, and which still erupted from him fairly regularly.

It was Lilith-Sylvia Doron. He knew her family; twice he had visited their home for dinner. “What are you doing out here by yourself, Sylvia?”

“I was with some girls from my class. I got separated.” She looked ready to cry, and with good reason, he thought. The Doron family was Jewish, and this parade was a terrifying show of Nazi force.

She was shaking. He slipped his hand through hers. “Come,” he said. “I take you home.”

He sensibly led her away from the military marchers and the crowds shouting Sieg Heil, and down quieter streets also lined with bare-limbed trees, the houses stern and silent with their curtains drawn. Consul Ho could feel the eyes on him as he walked the girl down the street.

When he rang her parents’ doorbell and they opened up, they started to cry.

“Now, come,” he said reasonably, “she’s safe and sound. If you are really frightened, I will stay a little while. I am a diplomat! I am the Consul General. No one will harm you while I am here.”

And with that he sat down in the parlor, not far from the welcoming fire, and chatted with Sylvia, and her brother, Karl, and their parents. It was not until evening that Herr and Frau Doron said they felt safe, and that it would be all right if he went home. “Remember,” he said before he left. “We are friends. Any problem, come to me.”

In the months that followed, actions against Jews became frequent and public. He saw SS men waiting outside synagogues, where they grabbed Jewish men emerging from services, shoved them into trucks, and then forced them to use their prayer shawls to scrub the urinals in the SS barracks. Ho Feng-Shan found it childish and hateful.

In midsummer, people started lining up at the Chinese Consulate. Soon the line stretched all the way down the driveway. People stood there for hours.

Jews.

“Shenmo shi?” he hissed to Guomei, his secretary, when he came in. What is it?

“Visas,” she said. “They want visas.”

“What do you mean? What sort of visas?”

She shrugged.

He went in his office with its striped wallpaper and reassuringly heavy desk, thinking maybe he could shut out the noise and the line of people. He knew that the Nazis would not let Jews out of the country unless they had a visa to enter someplace else, and since no country would take them, they were trapped.

He saw he had left the door half-open, and when he got up to close it, he heard a familiar voice, asking for him, being told to wait, asking again.

He put his head out. “Sylvia?”

“Consul Ho!” She broke away from Guomei and ran toward him.

“What are you doing here?”

“You have to help! You said to come to you, remember-”

“Sit down, child,” he said kindly, and slipped into Chinese to ask the secretary to bring tea. “It’s clear you’ve had a fright. Now.” He fixed his eyes on her. He was known for his serene, calming gaze. Maybe it was because he himself was filled with trust, for had not life always been good to him, despite such difficult beginnings? Had not God always treated him kindly? So he was kind in return. “Tell me what’s happened.”

“They arrested Karl!”

“What! Where is he?”

“They put him on a train to Dachau.”

Dachau. Ho Feng-Shan felt the chill in his intestines.

“They won’t let him out unless he has a visa to go somewhere else. Can you give him one for Shanghai? Please!”

He felt his brows knit. “The Chinese Consulate does not issue any visas for Shanghai,” he said. “You do not need a visa to go there. No one does. There is no such thing as a Shanghai visa.”

Tears streamed down her face. He realized she would always be a child to him, even though she stood before him now on the edge of growing up. He would do anything to help her.

His mind ranged over Karl’s case. It was true that no one needed a visa or even any form of identification to enter Shanghai. All arrivals were welcome, no matter where they came from or how they got there.

“Give him one anyway,” she said through her tears.

“We can certainly try, no? Guomei!” he called imperiously. “Bring me a visa form.” And then, to her answering stream of Chinese, he said, “How would I know? Bring whatever you think a visa form should look like.”

Twenty minutes later they had a reasonable facsimile of a visa form, and an official-looking series of stamps to make it seem authentic. “You see?” said Ho. “The very first Shanghai visa.” He signed with a flourish, and then dictated a stern letter to the Commandant at Dachau advising him to release Karl Doron immediately so that he could leave Austria under this visa, with his entire family included. Etcetera. In the name of the Republic of China. Consul General. And so on.

To his intense embarrassment, Sylvia clung to his arm and sobbed, choked with gratitude, and he dried her tears and scolded her a little, telling her to be strong. “Take care of Karl’s envelope. Here is another visa for your family, just in case. Put them inside your jacket. Yes, that’s a good girl. Now, Sylvia-don’t wait. Pack quickly and get out, just as soon as you get Karl back again. Hurry.”

“Yes,” she said. “Thank you.” She moved to the door.

“And Sylvia? God be with you and your family.” He meant it. He felt sure the Lutherans would have wanted him to help.

He watched from the tall window, half-hidden behind its heavy velvet curtain, as she ran out the front door and pushed past the line of people winding out toward the gate. He sensed a murmur go through the crowd at her appearance, a frisson of hope.

“Guomei?” he called over his shoulder. “About that visa form.” He followed the line with his eyes, estimating the numbers. “I want you to produce as many as you can. Hire an assistant. We’re going to need one hundred blank forms, right away. Another hundred by the end of the day Wednesday.”

“You could just turn them away,” she said.

“No,” he said, without explanation. Ho Feng-Shan had been privileged to see God’s goodness; he could not expect everybody to understand.

He had been born of peasant stock. Though he was given the optimistic name Feng-Shan, meaning a phoenix that rises from the mountain, in truth he was the poorest of the poor. His father died when he was seven and his mother could no longer care for him. She gave him to the Norwegian Lutheran Mission over his screaming protests, asking of them only that they feed him. They did that and more, educating him in English and in their ways. He believed in God and Christ, after his years with them. They did not have to explain it to him, he saw it; they redeemed him. Raised him and nurtured him and handed him an education, all in the name of doing God’s work. Now, as a diplomat, he did the same for others.

And so it was that Ho Feng-Shan said yes to the person at the head of the line, the one after that, and the one after that. He sat at his desk all day, signing visas until his hand ached. Each visa was good for a whole family-why not, they were his visas, he was inventing them. One paper per family was more economical, and yet still the line stretched every day, as far as he could see. How many Jews could there be in Vienna? Yes, you’re welcome, good luck, bon voyage, now please step aside so the next person can come in.

The Ambassador in Berlin heard what he was doing and excoriated Consul Ho for his impudence. He ordered him to stop at once. The Consul put the angry cables in a drawer and ignored them.

Then he arrived in the morning to find Guomei reading even more cables, her sensible skirt clinging to the swell of her hips, her red lips parted in fear. “He says stop or you’ll be arrested,” she said. For the first time, she looked scared.

“I will not stop,” Ho said calmly. “They will have to drag me away.” He sat. “You have a fresh stack of forms? Ah, good. Thank you. Now send the first one in.”

That summer David watched Margit playing with Leo in their locked room, wondering how long she could keep him inside where it was safe. It was no life for a small boy. He agonized constantly about whether they should leave, and how to get them out, even though he had nowhere for them to go. His parents were dead. Her parents were still here in Vienna, old and infirm. They refused to leave, but urged David to get Margit and Leo out. Her dear cousin Hannah was also desperate to get out with her husband and children.

David and Margit spent hours in bed, planning it out: each would take no more than one small valise, with a third bag devoted to things for Leo. Margit packed the boy’s hand-crocheted blankets and miniature satin-trimmed nightshirts, while David lay awake long after she and Leo were asleep and blinked painfully at the ceiling, trying to figure out how it could be done. He had enough money for steerage, now euphemistically called Tourist Class, and a little extra; they would need every last schilling to get started in their new land, wherever that was.

And therein lay the trouble, for no land would take them. He had been to almost every embassy and consulate in Vienna. Think. Find a way. He lay for a long time and no answer came to him, except that he must venture out again the next day, to wait in another line.

It was then, standing in line at the Mexican Embassy, that he heard Ho Feng-Shan at the Chinese Consulate was making up phony visas for a free port that required none, and giving them out as fast as he could write them. David left the Mexico line and ran to the Chinese Consulate, arriving there at midday with nothing but his violin case, which he carried everywhere with him. After one look at the line, he considered going home first to get food, but he saw people coming from all directions, hurrying to the queue, joining it, tailing it longer and longer, so he stepped in quickly and took his place, just inside the gate, before the line spilled out of the consulate grounds.

There followed a long day and cold night, one in which he could not dare to sleep, or even sit on the ground for a few minutes, lest he drift off and lose his place, his violin, or both. Instead he stayed upright, stamping, moving, clapping through the hours. He knew Margit would be beside herself with worry, but there was nothing he could do about that; now, with many hundreds in line behind him, he would not leave.

Around eight the next morning, as he stood bleary-eyed, a shiver of excitement swept up the long snake-coil of people stretching down the block: Ho Feng-Shan was coming. And David yawned and popped his ears and then he could hear it too, the approaching automobile.

As it turned in to the long driveway, the square black vehicle with silver running boards was instantly surrounded by people waving, tapping the windows, calling out to the mild-faced Asian man in the back seat. The car ground to a stop, idling, spitting exhaust. The force of the crowd pushed David right up to the car, against the window. He saw that the man in the back kept a serene gaze, despite the chaos outside the car. Be patient. I will take care of you, all of you.

Ho Feng-Shan must have sensed him there, because he turned at that moment and met David’s eyes. They joined in a bubble of shared silence amid the din of shouts and pleas and cries.

Wordlessly, David raised his violin case to display it through the window. This is who I am. Help me.

To his amazement, the Consul on the other side of the glass took a paper from a stack on the seat beside him, signed it, and then cranked the window open a few inches to thrust it out.

David stared, dumbfounded, frozen.

The Consul gave the paper a shake. Take it.

So David did, and at that moment the crowd parted in front of the vehicle and the driver inched forward. David looked at the paper. It was a family visa for Shanghai, stamped, signed, the ink still wet, only one line left blank, the one where he would write their names, David and Margit Epstein and Leo. They would sail right away, get on a ship out of Genoa, and trust God to protect them at sea.

Our freedom our freedom our freedom. He tucked the precious paper inside his shirt and pressed his violin case against it all the way home. As soon as he inserted his key in the door, he heard her glad shriek, and his heart twisted again at the thought of all she had suffered through the night, not knowing what had happened, imagining every possible reason why he’d failed to come home-the door creaked open to her face, swollen with tears, happy now, praising God, and then going mute at something too good to be true, a dream fulfilled from nowhere, out of the air.

“Pack, Liebchen. We are going to Shanghai.” He threw the bolt behind him, pressed the visa into her hands, and fell exhausted, shoes, suspenders and all, across the bed.

She tucked a pillow under his head, covered him with their big woolen wedding blanket, and let him sleep while she dried her tears and prayed her thanks to God.

A humble silence fell over the little group around the table. David’s and Margit’s eyes were locked in gratitude, while Leo slept in his mother’s lap. All of them felt the grace of God, suspended in the room with the last words of the story. “I too am grateful to Consul Ho,” Thomas said at last. “That you are here, well and healthy.”

At this Margit got up, handed Leo to David, and went out with a short excuse, as if going to use the alley outhouse, except that as she brushed past him to the door, Thomas saw her eyes welling.

“It’s her cousin Hannah,” David said softly after she was gone. “We write letter after letter, and there is never any reply. No news from anyone in Vienna. The children are just a little older than Leo. We don’t know if they are alive or dead.” He looked down at his own son, safe in his trembling arms, and held him tighter.

“I’m so sorry,” Thomas said. And they sat together in silence until Margit came back, and he thanked them, and embraced them from the deeper well of all they had told him.

In the tingzijian he found the light on and Lin awake, leaning against the wall in the corner where he had made his pallet. Before Thomas could even speak, he looked up and said, “I finally reached Duke Kung. He is a busy man.”

“Clearly.”

“But he left a meeting to talk to me.”

“He was worried. He cares about you.”

“I don’t know why.”

“Stop talking like that. Look at all you do. You brought jazz here. You got everyone dancing.”

“You did, you and your men, just like Buck Clayton and Teddy Weatherford before you. Not me. But that’s finished now. Night in Shanghai is dead.”

“We’re not, and we are still with you, in case you hadn’t noticed. So is Kung. He seems to think of you as a son.”

“No surprise, I guess. It’s as clear as looking into water that I needed another father.” It was the first spark of the old, wry Lin that Thomas had seen since the day they pulled him out of the Hollywood.

Encouraged, he lowered himself to the floor beside his friend, leveling their eyes. “All of us you brought here-we never had this before. I’m not talking about the money. Respect. I would say it’s something true of every musician you brought here, that he yearned for that all his life. And this is the one place we all found it, because of you. You saved us that way. Even when we go back to America, back to the bottom, we’ll know.”

Lin nodded.

“And now, you are helping the Jews-including Margit’s cousin-”

“Hope can be brutal,” Lin cut in. “I advise you, don’t hope. Her cousin has not been heard from in too long.”

“I know,” Thomas said, the sight of Margit’s tears still burned into his mind. “But with the Resettlement Plan, you will save so many others. That’s why you must regain your strength. A hundred thousand.”

“If it works,” Lin said dully.

“If it works.”

“Then why could I not save one?” Lin whispered, and tears he had held in through all these days rose to his eyes and spilled out. “Why did I not come one month sooner?”

“I know,” Thomas said quietly, a hand on his arm. “It’s lousy.” And it is the blues, he thought, a realm he finally understood. They sat together in silence, as only old friends can, until past midnight.

In October of that year, Song was still returning to Baoding Village every three weeks, bringing new workbooks for the girls and teaching them new characters. Plum Blossom, the group’s ringleader, learned the fastest, and by the time autumn’s chill had descended, she had composed a short letter to Song, proudly sent down the mountain on a truck hauling casks of vinegar. The phrasing was off and some of the characters incorrect, but it brought Song perhaps her purest single moment of happiness since she came north. She expressed her happiness and pride in large, clear characters and gave the letter back to the vinegar seller to carry to Baoding, just as a messenger approached her. She was requested at a meeting.

She found herself delivered to a set of steps that zigzagged steeply up the canyon wall-a canyon she had never been in before, where higher-level cadres worked. She entered a large cave outfitted as a meeting room, with a low table surrounded by men in squared-off chairs, and gas lamps flickering from ledges on the walls. A Tartar rug covered the floor.

“Interpreter Song,” said the oldest man present, “I am Comrade Feng.” He waved her to a seat and continued. “We have news from our spies in Manchuria.”

Her eyes widened. Secrets, like power, had seemed so far from her in Yan’an.

“The Japanese have learned that the Nationalists have a plan to resettle Jews in Yunnan, and they have devised their own plan. A counter-plan they call the Fugu Plan.”

“For Jews?” she said, trying to follow.

“Yes. They want the sympathy of the West for themselves, not for China. So they are proposing to move the more than twenty thousand Jews now in Shanghai up to Manchuria.”

“What? Why?” She could not imagine why Shanghai’s Jews would want to go to that frozen tundra, when they had already built a successful community in Shanghai.

“They say it is to let them farm. A lie. According to our agents, they want them as a human buffer between themselves and hostile Chinese forces. They will exploit them. The problem is that they are going to try to introduce this Fugu Plan as a humanitarian act, so the West will support them in their conquest of China.”

“But how are they saving anyone? These people are already safe in Shanghai.”

“Exactly. We support the Chinese plan, even though it comes from the Nationalists. Bringing in one hundred thousand more people-to Yunnan.”

She nodded agreement. Ordinarily she would not expect the Party to back any Nationalist idea, but this Jewish Resettlement Plan was different.

“Here is where you are needed. We have learned that the Japanese are about to go to all the newspapers and magazines in Shanghai about this Fugu Plan, with a lot of big lies to get the Jewish refugees to accept it and move up there. We understand you knew foreign people in the past in Shanghai-no, no,” said Comrade Feng, “do not be frightened, it’s all right-and that you may know them still. Yes? Is it so? Then we need you to go there immediately, do whatever must be done to make the right contacts, and make sure Japan’s lies are not published. We cannot let the Jews be misled about this Fugu Plan.”

She soared inside. Shanghai! And Thomas. “Yes, Comrade. Of course.” Her mind raced with possibilities. “You wish to influence the press against the Fugu Plan as well?”

He gave a slight but discernible nod of approval. “If it is possible to plant our view of the matter in the press, even better.”

Three days later, having learned Thomas was to play that afternoon at the Central Hotel, she stood waiting in front, on Canton Road, scanning the crowds in every direction. He was due to appear at two thirty with a violinist, a Jew of all lucky things, whom she had just met inside. Now she waited, anxious, praying she would see joy on his face when he recognized her.

As Song watched, Thomas was approaching the intersection with Lin Ming beside him. He had been listening to Lin tell him about the months he had worked for Duke Kung. “I went looking for my mother, you know.” They waited at the intersection for the flood of rickshaws and carts and motorcars to cease so they could cross. “Look,” Lin interrupted himself, “old number-three redhead is about to change.”

The red-turbaned Sikh on the pedestal stopped the traffic in front of them with wide-swinging hand signals, and they moved out with the flood of pedestrians and vehicles that had clotted up behind them as they waited. “So I went to Jiangsu, looking for her,” Lin said, “but she is gone from this world. Old Du lives, but I am finished with him. All I have left is my friends, all of you-and though I do not know exactly where she is, somewhere I also have-”

Lin Ming stood a second in frozen silence before he stepped up on the sidewalk, “-Song Yuhua,” he finished.

Because there she was, waiting for them in front of the hotel, her smile so wide it lit the sidewalk. Lin reached her first, stepping quickly into her embrace, and then she turned to Thomas.

As they embraced he said, “How did you learn where I would be?”

She laughed. “Ye Shanghai has not been gone for so very long-your name is still known. All I had to do was ask where Thomas Greene was playing, and in two turns of the head I had the answer. As for him”-she smiled at Lin-“I was hoping you might have news of his doings. It was beyond my hope that you would bring him with you.”

Thomas felt a stab of sadness, for soon she would hear of Pearl’s fate, and Lin’s fall. Right now, however, he was late. “The three of us have so much to say, but you must forgive me-my partner and I were supposed to begin playing a few minutes ago. I finish at seven. Could we all meet after that, for dinner?”

“Wonderful,” she said, before Lin could speak. “What about De Xing Guan, at the bottom of Dong Men Lu, just off the Bund? It’s not far from here.”

“All right,” said Thomas, and Lin acquiesced too, as pedestrians flowed around them, old ladies in padded jackets, young women with sleek hair, sunburned country people straining under shoulder poles.

“So good to be back,” Song said, and sent Thomas a beam of excitement before she took Lin’s arm and walked away down the street. Thomas watched from the hotel entrance as Lin stopped her, and spoke, and she cried out and threw her arms around him. So he had told her.

Thomas was so keyed up that day that he forgot where he was several times, and came crashing down in the kind of discord that could not be passed off as creative interpretation. David grinned at him, knowing the reason, as she had come in asking for him.

“I knew it was her,” David said. “So beautiful. I see also it is you that she wants to see. She does not expect your Mr. Lin. He is your rival?”

“No, he is her foster brother.”

“Ah,” said David. “Then you will see her later, and all will be well.”

Thomas laughed at this simple forecast, and yet he was able to calm his flutters and play after that, keeping his eyes on the music. But never in all his months with David had he packed up his scores and left as quickly as he did that evening.

Soon he was on Dongmen Road, passing shop after shop where the merchants had folded back their shutters so the whole establishment lay open to the street, lit up now for the evening with tasseled lanterns of wood and painted glass. Shoppers laughed and talked as they browsed each proprietor’s goods: pyramids of fruits and bins of autumn vegetables, clothing hanging in rows from rafters, stacked-up enamel bowls and spittoons.

At the bottom of the street, facing the water, he found the restaurant and realized it was the same one in which Lin Ming had given him advice about Anya a lifetime ago; he remembered the rich seafood soup as he climbed the worn-down stone stairs to the second floor. Lin and Song were already there, at a table by the window. Below them, the river cacophony of Asia was subdued, as it had been in the two years since Japan invaded. The merchant vessels, tramp steamers, winged junks, barges, and foreign liners had come back to ply the river, but lights were trimmed and horns silenced. The exuberance was gone.

Yet in front of him now was Song, smiling, more lovely than he had ever seen her. Her eyes shone with humor and self-assurance, and her every move was fluid. Seeing her now, he could barely remember the tight, stiffly brocaded qipao dresses Du had made her wear. Her skin had darkened in the sun, and even here in the city, she wore the blue tunic and black trousers of a country woman, yet she was radiant.

Lin was the opposite, gray with sorrow, his constant companion these days. He was bent over the table, studying the bai jiu bottle and then measuring out the fiery liquor into three tiny cups. They drank to each other, and then she told them what she had come to do.

“But that is easy,” Lin said with a wave of his hand. “I will take you to the Sword of David Society.” They were the ones who had dispatched An Gong Geun and Amleto Vespa to Chongqing with the money; they would spread the truth about the Fugu Plan throughout Hongkou.

“And what about Mr. Pao, the editor of the Shanghai Daily who I went to see?” Thomas said. “He might like to write an article about the Fugu Plan.”

“You are right,” Lin agreed. “Don’t worry, Sister. Soon everyone in Shanghai will know the facts.”

“Thank you.” They all drank.

Lin became morose again. “It seems so long ago, Ye Shanghai.”

“Another world,” said Thomas, remembering the three-month battle, stealing glances at Song. Yes.

“The night is gone,” Lin complained. “The music. I walked all over last night, even through the Daitu, the Badlands-what a joke.”

The waiter brought a tureen of the fish soup, which sat between them. Lin shook his head. “We may be here again, the three of us, but this time we make the minor chord.” He drained his cup and refilled it. He had forgotten to make a toast.

Song met Thomas’s eyes. “Brother,” she said, half rising to ladle out the fragrant soup. “Eat something. You’ve had a terrible loss.”

“You need time,” Thomas said.

“No one has time now,” Lin said, tipping up his cup. “The war has eaten our lives. Though we try to escape it.” He poured again.

“Come on,” Song said to Lin, again meeting Thomas’s eyes. She slid Lin’s soup bowl a little closer. “The broth will restore you, the fish, the scallops and sea cucumber, tofu and mustard greens-such a Shanghai taste.”

Lin poured more bai jiu. “You know what is Shanghai taste to me? The shrimp dumpling and noodle peddler.”

“Oh yes,” Song agreed.

“He would come through our neighborhood with his own little kitchen on shoulder poles. He had his own song. You always knew when he was coming, for no one else had just that melody. All gone.”

“Not gone,” she objected. “These things will return in their time. Soon we start a new decade, 1940, and before you know it, the sour plums of late spring will be here, the ones sold on the street with a frosting of sugar.” To Thomas she added, “When they appear, it is the start of huang mei tian, the yellow plum rainy season.”

“Remember the hot roasted ginkgo nuts?” Lin cut in. “The vendor comes through calling-let me think-‘Hand-burning hot ginkgo nuts! Each one is popped, each one is big!’” Putting the chant in English brought at least a small lift to the corner of his mouth.

“Shanghai still lives,” Song assured him.

Thomas said, “I agree.”

And at last Lin pulled his bowl and spoon closer and began to eat. But after a minute he reached for the wine again and refilled his cup, shaking the last drops out of the small crock. “And the Resettlement Plan,” he said morosely. “What if Chiang Kai-shek cuts it off?”

“Why would he?” said Song. “It’s as fine an idea as anyone ever had. Even my side thinks so.”

“The Germans will hate it. And Chiang wants to please them. Why, he would lick Hitler’s running sores if he could get close enough!”

“Niu bi hong hong,” Song said, meaning the ox vagina was steaming red, a way of saying he exaggerated.

Lin gave her a laugh as he pushed back and got to his feet, for this was the kind of language she would never have used before. “You’ve grown up, Meimei,” he said, and then he steadied himself against the tabletop and squared them both in the eye. “Don’t make my mistake. An inch of gold cannot buy an inch of time. You could die first, both of you.” Thomas reached for her hand under the table, humbled by love, while Lin closed his eyes and rocked on his heels, as if trying to remember something else he had wanted to say to them. He gave up, and dropped his voice to a mumble. “I should go.”

But then he remembered. “Oh. I know. There’s one more thing I miss. The vendor with the new corn, those tender baby kernels-you know-who comes down the lane singing, ‘Pearl-grained corn! Pearl-grained corn!’” He shook his head. “Gone.”

“It is past the time for corn,” Song said.

“I told you, no more time.” He turned for the door. A low, sustained boat horn sounded from the river below.

“We’ll see you home,” Thomas said.

But Lin raised a hand to wave him off. “I’m all right. See you tomorrow. We will go to Hongkou about your business, Song.”

“And I’ll call on that newspaper editor,” said Thomas.

With that, Lin settled his hat on his head with tipsy dignity, stepped out of the dining room, and vanished down the stone staircase.

Her hand trailed up Thomas’s leg, which made him tremble. “I know I come and go with no warning,” she said. “I never know when they will send me here. It’s unfair. I’m sorry. Sometimes I wonder if it is wrong, what I feel with you.” Her voice was very soft. “But if you still want, I have a room in a hostel, and-”

“Let’s go,” he said brusquely.

Much later she lay next to him, watching him sleep. She looked at his hand with love, so skilled, the exquisite fingers now thrown carelessly across her leg, and held her own hand next to it, smaller, paler, crude by comparison. Through his hands he was able to pour all he knew and felt, on the piano, on her body, on the map of her life. She was his, and every time she came back to him, she knew it again.

But. Her head was heavy with uncertainty, and she laid it down next to his on the pillow.

She had once again left the diamonds in Xi’an.

The next day at noon, Thomas came back to the tingzijian to change his clothes, and found Lin Ming frantically dressing.

“Where’s Song?” Lin said.

“She went down the street to the laohuzao.” Tiger stove shops, the name used for the local bathhouses, was in his tiny vocabulary, even though he patronized them only when he could afford it, making do in leaner times with a bowl and pitcher. “Half an hour is all she needs. Then she wants us all to have lunch at Sun Ya and-” He stopped short as he saw Lin was stuffing all his belongings into a cloth sack. “What are you doing?”

“Leaving.”

“Leaving Shanghai?”

“Leaving China.” He pulled the bag’s drawstring tight with a sick finality. “The Plan is dead. Hitler threatened Chiang Kai-shek, and Chiang crumpled. A hundred thousand doomed, just like that. They will die.”

“And their children.”

Lin straightened up, silent.

“But-leave China?”

“I’m next on the list. Kung just cabled me.”

“What list?”

“The men I sent out from Shanghai, An and Vespa? With the dollars and the gold bars? Dead, both of them. Intercepted. The Japs want everyone dead who was involved in this.”

“What about people here in Shanghai?” Thomas heard his voice rise in fear. “Could An and Vespa have talked?”

“No. They were professionals. Moreover, I heard they were killed by snipers. I know what you are thinking-David and his family. Believe me, if the Japanese knew their names, they would already be dead. It turns out An and Vespa died months ago, almost as soon as they arrived in Chongqing. The Epsteins are safe.”

“Then perhaps you-”

“No.” Lin’s face was stretched tight over his cheekbones with worry, and for a moment he looked like his father. “I worked on the Plan for two months. Everybody in Tengchong County knows who I am.”

“I suppose also, with all the press in the last few days…”

Their eyes met, and a spark of satisfaction jumped between them. Thomas had called on Mr. Pao, and Lin had approached the Chinese-language newspapers and magazines, which resulted in an avalanche of Fugu Plan exposés. Not a single Jew would now be willing to leave Shanghai for Japanese Manchuria.

Thomas exhaled. “Where will you go?”

“Hong Kong.”

“Today?” It was usually impossible to buy anything on the day of departure except first-class tickets, and sometimes not even those.

“Kung went through my father. The old man still owns the Da Da shipping line. They serve the Subei ports, not Hong Kong, but I have a transfer from Haimen.”

“When do you leave?”

“One hour.” Lin stuck out his hand, a last American gesture.

Thomas ignored it and embraced him instead. “I’ll walk with you.”

“No. You attract attention.”

Thomas tried to swallow but his mouth was too dry. He was losing his bedrock. “Are you coming back?”

“Naturally. This is my home! But as long as the brown dwarf bandits are here, I cannot visit except in secret. Remember that.”

Thomas drew an X over his heart. “What about your sister?”

“I will stop at the laohuzao.”

They stood in silence for a moment at the top of the ladder. “Thank you,” said Lin.

“Don’t even start,” said Thomas, which made Lin laugh.

“All right,” said Lin, “Then say good-bye in Chinese. Zai jian. Means, see you again.”

“See you again,” Thomas managed, as he watched his friend go down the ladder.

Admiral Morioka was writing a top-secret cable in his office at Naval Headquarters when an aide tapped on the door and announced Major General Shibatei Yoshieki.

Quickly Morioka secreted the cable in a drawer. Yoshieki was chief of espionage at Japanese Army Headquarters, a man who knew China well-he had been born here-but some matters were still between Morioka and Tokyo, and not for his eyes.

No sooner had the aide clicked the door shut behind him than Yoshieki burst out, “It’s dead. They killed the Fugu Plan.”

“Pressure from the Western powers?” said Morioka. He had been bracing for diplomatic trouble ever since the Shanghai press came out with attacks on the plan.

Yoshieki nodded. “How did the press even get the details of the plan?” he said.

“Do not waste any time on that.” Morioka fingered the knob on his desk drawer, knowing that today’s secret cables, concerning the terms of the new military alliance with Germany, were infinitely more important than this Fugu Plan-which he had disliked anyway. The Jews in Shanghai were his, and he wanted them left alone. Even if the Nazis were now his allies. “If you will excuse me?”

Yoshieki bowed, clicked his heels, and left.