Night in Shanghai

9

NINETEEN FORTY AND forty-one passed, two years that were hard on Anya Petrova. The Dark World was an occupied city, which no longer attracted international men looking for a sweetheart on whom to spend money the way it once did. The first few years after the Japanese takeover in the fall of ’37 had not been so bad, but once all Europe was at war, it seemed the only people in Shanghai with money to spend were Japanese.

In the summer of 1941 she and her friend Li Lan began seeing high-placed Japanese, in secret, since anyone consorting with the conquerors was automatically in danger. They traveled separately to the Japanese sector in Zhabei and met their clients in private spaces, never entering or leaving with them. But the men, military officers, were polite, certainly better than the Nazis, who had been making their presence felt in Shanghai for many months. Next to them, her Japanese escorts seemed desirable.

Anya had her opinions, but her friend Li Lan had a whole different range of motivations-and she had to be twice as careful as Anya, since she slept with Japanese men for another, much riskier reason: she worked for the resistance.

On November 15, 1941, at a Zhabei jazz club, the two of them sat on the floor, on the tatami mats favored by the invaders. Their private room was separated from the club by a sliding rice-paper wall, which kept out prying eyes but not the strains of the jazz quintet from Osaka. Li Lan’s date was Major General Shibatei Yoshieki, the Japanese Army’s spy chief. He had brought along the top-ranking Japanese in Shanghai, Admiral Tadashi Morioka. Yoshieki knew Morioka loved jazz, so he booked this restaurant and asked Li Lan to bring along the gray-eyed, black-haired Anya as a companion for his friend.

Morioka seemed to have scant interest in her, although he listened intently to the music. He mostly spoke to Yoshieki in Japanese, leaving Anya out.

But not Li Lan. Her Japanese was fluent. Her grandmother was Japanese, and she had grown up in the north, speaking the language at home, a fact she concealed with great care. If Yoshieki and Morioka had any idea she understood them and had come here to mentally record every word they exchanged, they would see her put to death at once. Anya accordingly sparkled with just enough womanly conversation to cover her friend and allow her to follow their discussion, which rose in a heated crescendo before leveling off.

So when Li Lan touched her leg lightly under the table and said, in English, “Please excuse us to restroom,” Anya knew she wanted to say something about the intense volley of Japanese they had just heard. Yoshieki and Morioka barely noticed their rise from the table.

The Chinese girl closed the bathroom door and leaned close. “They were talking about someone you were with. Thomas Greene. Remember? It’s him, isn’t it?

“What?” Anya knew he was still in Shanghai, playing with a Jewish violinist. “Why would they speak of him?”

Li Lan moved right up to her ear and dropped her voice further. “Something is about to happen. It is something Morioka has known about for a while, and Yoshieki just found out, that is why they were talking. I don’t know what it is, but it is big, and very bad for Americans. Yoshieki asked Morioka if he was going to warn Thomas Greene before it was too late. Morioka became angry at him, and said of course not, the operation is top secret.”

Anya’s mouth opened in surprise. She kept her voice as soft as Li Lan’s. “Could they possibly be planning to attack the International Settlement? But then America would retaliate-”

“I don’t know what they are preparing,” said Li Lan. “Only that it’s about Americans. So if you can find a safe way, and you want him to live, you had better tell him.”

Anya squeezed her hand in thanks. They shared a deep breath, reapplied their lipstick, retraced their steps to the sliding screen, and sat again, smiling.

That year, Alonzo and Keiko decided to host an American-style Thanksgiving in their flat, and Thomas went to Hongkou to invite the Epstein family, and explain the holiday.

“You came so far in this war, started life over in a new land,” he said. “It’s something like it was for those first settlers who arrived in America. To survive was their victory; it was enough. They might have starved, but the Indians helped them. So at the harvest they had food, and everyone sat down together, and gave thanks. And that’s why we eat together on this holiday.”

“So this is your people coming to America,” David said.

“Yes,” said Thomas.

“But you were slaves, is it not?”

“Well, it’s about the other people, I suppose. But it doesn’t matter, does it? Because we are all in Shanghai now, and you three have your freedom.” His gaze gathered in David and Margit and Leo, now a solemn boy of five. “So please, come to Thanksgiving.”

They did come, and when they first climbed the stairs and walked into Alonzo’s apartment, they were made speechless, not by the dining table, which was loaded with all Keiko’s best dishes and a whole fragrant roast chicken, that being as close as they could come to a turkey, but by the large windows, framed with curtains, showing all the lights in the houses up and down the lane. To the Epsteins, after years in their little room, the simple glass panes were a fairyland of light. They stood there gazing out, laughing and exclaiming in their own language, which pleased Thomas.

He had played with David all through 1940 and 1941, and had long since accepted the Viennese as his brother. He still worried about the family’s safety, though so far the only restriction the Japanese had placed on the Jews was to require all the refugees-they now numbered more than 25,000-to live in Hongkou, where almost all of them were living anyway. The Nazis tried to organize a boycott of businesses employing Jews, but no one paid much attention to it, and if, in the end, a few Aryans ceased to patronize these companies, their absence was hardly felt. Shanghai’s Jews were surviving, even thriving. At the same time, their relatives back in Europe were going silent, their letters suddenly ceasing. If the long arm of Berlin managed to reach Shanghai, Thomas knew the same thing would happen here.

But now he had more immediate worries-Anya’s warning.

He had not seen her in over two years, when she fell into step beside him the evening before, as he left the Majestic Hotel. “Anya?”

“Let us walk like old friends. Do not make a fuss.” And she dropped her voice, and told him what she had learned.

“And you don’t know what Japan is going to do?”

“No. Only that the Americans are in danger. They argued about Morioka warning you.”

“I can see the buildup, all of us can. But no one knows what it means.”

“It means you should leave,” she said.

“I wish I could.” He took her hand as they walked, a simple gesture from the past, instantly retrieved. “I can’t. I don’t have the fare. And my friends don’t either, and I can’t leave them anyway.” He stayed for Song too, but he would not mention that now.

“I understand.” That was all she said, and when they reached the next intersection, she turned away, as if walking next to him had been a random accident.

He remembered how he had taken a few steps forward through the crowd before he realized Anya had vanished. Now, standing by the window before Thanksgiving dinner, he sent gratitude to her too, since she had taken a risk to warn him. Never mind that he could not act on it.

When the feast was laid out, they pulled their chairs around the table, linked hands for a prayer, and began the happy passing of platters.

In addition to roast chicken, Keiko had made rice and eggplant braised in miso, and hot and sour Korean-style cabbage. When they were finished and David was tamping and puffing on his pipe, Alonzo took out a guitar and started to play a circular twelve-bar blues, a direct, unconscious pattern. Thomas sat back in the chair, listening, giving thanks for the music in addition to everything else. Alonzo caught his eye and sent him the smile of the older friend, knowing, accepting, lighting the long path of the years ahead with his benediction: It’s all right. Somehow it will work, and one day you’ll be as old as I.

After a few minutes Ernest unlatched his case and lifted his tenor from its worn velvet bed, dampened the reed, and mouthed it; then he began to blow atop Alonzo, crying, complaining in short bursts like comments on the guitar lines. Finally Charles took up his alto and joined in, first shadowing his brother in their trademark thirds and later playing off him in their own call-and-response.

Everyone in the room pulsed together, Leo in his mother’s lap, Thomas on the chair, Keiko-any sense of separate nationhood had dropped away. This was Shanghai, itself an eclectic improvisation, a loop like this twelve-bar blues, playing again and again, bringing all possibilities to life.

At last David rose and unsnapped his violin case. Thomas felt pride burst out of him, for David had always said he would never improvise, that it terrified him. He looked unsure as he fit his beloved instrument to his chin, and the first few bars he played straight, the way he knew how to do it.

Alonzo shook his head. “Turn the beat around,” he said, and used the next measure to emphasize the displacement of accents onto the weak beats.

David understood instantly, and began again, adding the Gypsy plaintiveness for which he was so gifted. After a while he began to grasp their hesitations and use of space, and he left more emptiness as he answered their lines with his.

He said, “So you are flatting the third, the fifth-”

“And the seventh,” said Ernest.

“Judiciously,” Alonzo added.

And David nodded as his elegant violin shifted the song into something stranger and more mournfully European. Thomas saw Alonzo and Ernest exchange looks, interested. Gunfire sounded outside, and everyone glanced up, then returned to the music, used to the sounds of violence.

The song ended to cheers and laughter, and then Thomas, the only one of the musicians who had not played, spoke up. “My turn. Music is my nation, and you are my people.” He raised his glass. “This is our country, right here: America is in a song. We have just proven it. Thank you, pioneers.” And they all drained their wine.

The next day, November twenty-eighth, Admiral Morioka left the Japanese Naval Headquarters with a sheaf of freshly decoded documents in a small, stiff leather map case inside his greatcoat. He needed to think, away from the frenzy of cables, the clamoring subordinates. In a few weeks Japan would attack America, and his forces had to be positioned like a clamp around Shanghai, ready to tighten at exactly the same moment. Thousands of his men were garrisoned in the city, and thousands more waited in the rural districts surrounding it. It was essential that he quickly overwhelm the Marines and other foreign troops in the International Settlement, taking the British gunboat Petrel and the American gunboat Wake, moored in the Huangpu, as his first act. Then he would have his men move through the downtown streets en masse, executing any who offered resistance. And then it won’t be your Lonely Island anymore. It will be ours.

He would have all the Allied diplomatic personnel in the city detained at the Cathay Mansions in the French Concession, and keep them under house arrest. Their colonization of China was over. He would take the Shanghai Club from the British and turn it into a club for Japanese officers. And those garish bronze lions in front of the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank, the ones whose feet poor superstitious Chinese rubbed for good luck, he would get rid of those too, just as soon as he had the British flag taken down and the Rising Sun hoisted in its place.

And then there were Shanghai’s eight thousand Allied citizens, British, American, and Dutch. As enemy aliens, they would have to wear numbered armbands in public and be barred from all places of entertainment such as restaurants, theaters, and clubs. Their bank accounts would be frozen, their assets seized. They would be restricted and pushed down until they were lower than the Chinese, and then, by January or February, he would have them all moved out of Shanghai and into prison camps. Their villas and apartments would be of use to him and his men.

It still troubled him to think of all this landing on the American musicians he so admired. But he was a man who held loyalty above all things, and breaching the extreme secrecy of this attack was out of the question.

He also believed deeply that Japan’s enterprise in taking China was a noble one. It would end British domination of Shanghai after 101 years. China had never been able to liberate herself from Anglo-Saxon tyranny; only Japan could do it. China would be free at last-and cared for, that being Japan’s duty as the natural leader of East Asia. The strong should care for the weak. It was correct.

But today’s cable from Berlin had sent him to his chauffeured car, to the back seat where he could not be seen, to tell his driver to take him past French Park. What to do? The bare treetops sketched questions against the gray sky, and he studied them as the motorcar rumbled past the park walls.

The Germans were furious that so many Jews were being allowed to live in Shanghai, allowed to work, provide for their families, and form a community. They wanted something done. It was a complaint to which he had always replied simply that Shanghai was under Japan’s control, not Germany’s. Now things had shifted; the pressure was no longer local. It was coming from Berlin.

He felt the weight of a thousand boulders on him. With their sneak attack about to draw the world into war, it was no time for him to put the alliance with Germany at risk. But Shanghai belonged to Japan, and the tribe of Israelites had flourished here. What was he expected to do, deny them the right to work? And what about the rich Sephardic Jews, like Sassoon and Kadoorie, pillars of the city who had been here since the nineteenth century and lived in vast mansions, off Bubbling Well Road? Surely they were to be excluded from the ugly intimations in today’s cable. His hand went to the leather document case inside his coat. The whole thing was impossible.

“Turn right,” he said when he saw the Cercle Sportif Français up ahead. Every Friday afternoon, Thomas played in the lobby below the grand curving staircases; to hear music would give him clarity. “Wait for me,” he said.

In the lobby, he ignored the barely audible intake of breath, still distracted by the conflict within him. Yet as soon as he heard the music floating across the polished floor, he was righted again. He walked closer, the violin and piano calming him, and took a seat.

The piece contained the world. Morioka found it so moving that he summoned one of the pinch-chested middle-aged men they called boys, who now quavered before him in fear.

“What name this music?” Morioka said, and the boy evaporated to find out. Usually when Thomas and David played, people danced, but today they filled the chairs and settees and all the space in between, listening as silently as he was. He closed his eyes to the music’s purity, and everything seemed clear. The maze in front of him was not so difficult; he would find his way through it. He would make the right decision.

When the movement ended, there was a pause, and he opened his eyes to see the Jew, David Epstein, nodding to the boy and writing something on a piece of paper. Then Thomas Greene caught his eye, and sent him a discreet nod, which he returned with a short bow, for they were masters to him, and war or no war, he venerated them.

A second later the boy was at his side, unable to stop the paper from shaking as he proffered it. The Admiral handed him a coin to get rid of him, and unfolded it.

Mozart, Sonata for Piano and Violin in B-flat, No. 454.

A rare smile touched his mouth. Mozart’s music was the pinnacle of European culture, and he had just heard a sublime interpretation by this David Epstein, a Jew. Nothing could have made it clearer to Tadashi Morioka that the Nazis were overreaching with their pressures.

He felt even more certain of it as he listened to the third movement, an allegretto full of light-filled, dancing runs, and when it ended, and a storm of applause erupted, he rose and walked out the lobby door. The winter sun was warm, and he felt at peace as he opened his greatcoat and touched the stiff leather document case inside. It was neutral now, the burn of anxiety gone from it.

He would not let the Germans push him, not when it came to his Jews.

Up in Yan’an, reports of the Japanese buildup around Shanghai poured in. The only part of the city not already under Japanese control was the Gudao, or International Settlement, for the Chinese had already been beaten, and France was a Nazi vassal state. In Yan’an, everyone thought the signs meant there was about to be an attack on the Settlement. There was no other explanation.

That did not mean there was much sympathy for the unfortunate Westerners who would be caught up in the attack, for they were dismissed as imperialists. The news sparked terror in Song that others did not share.

Alone, she worried about Thomas, for she had not been back to Shanghai since all three of them met there in ’thirty-nine-and that was two years ago. He might be gone, or he might be with someone else and not want to see her. But inside, she felt sure he was still there. And she had to warn him.

So she went before her superior to ask for family leave.

“You have family in Shanghai?” said Wu Guoyong, looking through her file. “I do not see that.”

“Friends.”

“Foreigners,” he said, and she did not deny it.

He turned a few pages. “You have never asked for leave before, and when family is in danger, we grant it. But-”

She just held her eyes on him and let her request stand.

He tapped the file with a sigh. “You know that travel to Shanghai has never been more dangerous than it is right now. Is it worth it?”

“Yes,” she said, putting everything she had on the word.

He glanced at a report. “You have done well. I see the children of Baoding Village are very fond of you.”

“It is my honor to serve the people,” she said automatically, thinking with a pang of Plum Blossom, who was expecting her this weekend, and would wait for her all day.

“All right,” he said, and signed the form. “Two weeks.”

The next day she was in Xi’an, and this time she went straight to the temple near the Eighth Route Army Liaison Office.

From the outside, it looked the same as when she had first seen it four years before, but anything could have happened. Maybe someone had found the diamonds. If so, it was fate. She entered the main chamber and meditated for a time to calm herself. If the diamonds are there or if they are not, I accept it. Plum Blossom, I’m sorry to abandon you. The monk came by, nodded to her, neutral, his face empty of recognition. He had forgotten her. She waited until he left, then walked into the empty courtyard and moved close to the wall, heart jumping, until she found the spot and felt the moss intact, grown over the stone she had prised out and replaced so long ago.

Using a small knife, her fingers freezing, she worked the rock loose. There: the pouch, still waiting. The Goddess of Mercy had smiled on her, a fellow woman. She took it and fixed the wall.

Back inside the shadows of the temple, she sat again, heart racing. She was committed now. She had the diamonds and she was going.

She had always had a vision of the moment when she would place the little black pouch in his hands. Maybe she would do it on the ship, or maybe when they docked in the Beautiful Country. She loved the scene no matter where she set it, and she lived it again and again like a moving picture, or a favorite dream. It was her portal, and she followed it now to the Xi’an train station and the steaming, belching Number Twenty-one to Shanghai.

Morioka was irritated by the intrusion of his secretary, who clicked his heels and bowed abjectly. “So sorry, Admiral. We pleaded with him to meet with an assistant, but he insists on seeing you. It is the German, Gestapo Colonel Meisinger. He is here, in the outer office.”

“What! Here in Shanghai?” It was Monday morning and he was only halfway through the stack of cables from Tokyo, some of which mentioned this Josef Meisinger wanting to discuss the Jews here in Shanghai. But to arrive here, uninvited…

Now he was trapped. “Show him to the downstairs east parlor,” he said tightly, “and interrupt us after five minutes.”

He pushed back from his desk and saw the calendar-the first of December, 1941. He took a deep breath, steadying himself by imagining the opening bars of the Mozart violin sonata as he had heard it in the lobby of Le Cercle Sportif a few days before. He had to appear normal, smooth, no more agitated than any Admiral in charge of naval operations at the mouth of the Yangtze ought to be. Meisinger must suspect nothing.

Morioka strode into the unfurnished east parlor. If Meisinger found it uncomfortable to stand in the frigid, unheated room, he did not let on. He was blond and solidly built, almost heavy; his features were even and would have been handsome, except for his dissolute mouth.

“Admiral,” said the Colonel jovially, as if they were equals.

Morioka hardened. But his voice was neutral as he spoke in simple English instead of calling a German interpreter, which would raise the risk of whatever they said being repeated. “What I can do for you?”

“I have come on a private mission, my government to yours.”

“Be brief.”

Meisinger blinked, surprised, Morioka’s coolness finally penetrating his blond wall of self-assurance. “It concerns our Jews,” Meisinger said. “Germany’s Jews. The ones in Shanghai.”

“Your Jews? Germany’s Jews?”

“You have twenty-five thousand of them here.”

“They are stateless people. You took away their German citizenship, is it not?”

“We did. But they are still our enemies, and we have a new plan for them now. It won’t be finalized until our Conference at Wannsee next month, but we are ready to build camps. We’ll take care of all the Jews in Europe. We need your help with only one little group-the ones you have here.”

Meisinger leaned forward, and his milky European smell wafted over the Admiral. Batakusai, Morioka thought with distaste, stinks of butter. “What is it you want?”

“For you to kill them,” Meisinger said.

Morioka stared. “All those people?”

The overweight blond man returned his gaze insolently. “Not difficult. They all go to their temples on Rosh Hashanah, and that is when you gather them up. Load them into boats without food and water and send them out to sea, or set up a camp on an island downriver and let them starve.”

Morioka stopped trying to conceal his revulsion. “Why?”

“Because they must be eliminated,” said Meisinger calmly. “So we cannot leave your twenty-five thousand here.” With his words came another gust of sour breath. “You understand.”

Morioka’s eyes shot to the door. He had seven thousand new troops arriving on warships in the next twenty-four hours alone; teams of assistants awaited him.

Why should he kill them when he had a war to fight?

“So you will give me your decision?” said Meisinger.

“In time,” Morioka said, though he had made his decision already, days before, listening to Mozart. You will not harm my Jews. If you want them, you will have to take Shanghai from me to get them.

He had less than a week left until the attack.

Song made it to Shanghai on Saturday the sixth. The dark-skinned Ceylonese gem trader she visited in a small side street off the Bund did not even blink at the mismatch between her bedraggled rural clothes and the fantastic value of the single gem she presented, used as he was to the eccentric habits of the rich. A specialist in anonymous cash transactions, he counted out her money with studied disinterest.

She melted back into the crowd. No one looked twice at her in her plain padded jacket, another war-battered refugee fleeing destruction and starvation in the countryside, and this served her well until she tried to ask the doorman at the Palace Hotel where Greene and Epstein were playing, and he barked her right off the steps. The doorman at the Cathay across the street was kind enough to tell her they would be at the Astor House the next day.

There, the British doorman took one look at her on Sunday afternoon and held up his hand, barring her from entry, but he stepped back quickly enough when she slipped a roll of bills into his hand. She could hear them, playing on the other side of the lobby, and just as it had been since the very first time, she felt everything about her lift at his sound, ordered yet unexpected, opening a higher vista of what life could be, if she had the will to see it and hear it.

And then the song stopped, abruptly-they had seen her. They were staring, and so was everyone else in the lobby.

Thomas was across the floor to her in an instant, David behind. “Are you all right?” he said, touching her filthy face, as if two years of separation were gone in an instant.

She covered his hand with hers. “I am well. It is safer to travel like this.” She looked around the columned lobby, filled with expensively dressed white people. All of you have no idea what is about to happen. “Let’s go someplace to talk.”

The three of them stepped into a small side room where David and Thomas left their hats and overcoats. “Japan is preparing a major assault on Shanghai.”

David and Thomas exchanged glances. “We’ve seen the soldiers,” said Thomas. “And also, I’ve heard things.” He thought of what Anya had told him.

“There are many more soldiers than you can see,” she said. “At least five thousand in a ring around the city, waiting to pounce. I came down here because the opinion of our leaders is that they are preparing to attack the International Settlement. The Gudao. Any day.”

Thomas and David were silent.

“That means British and Americans,” she said. “You cannot be taken prisoner by the Japanese. Do you understand? You must leave. Now.”

“What about David and his family? All the Jews?”

“This attack is not against them. They are already under the control of Japan, and Japan leaves them alone, as they do the French. The only armed forces here are the British and American soldiers protecting the Gudao. If the Imperial Army is sending ten thousand men, it is for them.” She paused. “You must go.”

“I can’t,” Thomas said. “Don’t have the money.”

“But I do. A boat sails at nine thirty tonight for San Francisco. I’ll get the tickets.”

“Stop joking. How could you have enough to buy them?”

“I do,” she said stubbornly. “And I will. You too, if you want,” she turned to David. “And your family. Though I believe you are safe.”

“You are kind, but”-he raised his hands, still holding his violin-“if we sail to the United States, they will send us back to Germany. No, we stay here.” He turned to Thomas, his arms open, and they held each other for a long, speechless minute. “Thank you,” said Thomas, and David refused to hear it, just as Thomas had refused to hear it from Lin Ming.

He turned to Song. “You’re going with me.” It was not a question.

She took a deep breath. “Yes.” She had the diamonds, they were in her pocket, so why did the words seem to catch in her throat and not want to come out?

He took her in his arms. “But there’s a problem,” he said, and she pulled back to see him. “I can’t leave my men here.”

“Get them! What time is it?”

“Around quarter to eight.”

“Get them.”

“Song! How many tickets can you buy?”

“How many men do you have?”

“Three. And they play with five others. So you see-”

“Bring them all,” she said.

“Are you sure you-”

“Hurry! Meet me at the Old Dock off Broadway Road. The anchor goes up at nine thirty-go! Make them believe you.” And she gave him a push, away from her.

At the front door of Ladow’s, he talked his way quickly past Senhor Tamaral, the Macanese floor manager whose suit hung loose from his whippet frame. The cavernous ballroom was full, and he sidestepped waiters, and silk-clad dance hostesses. Once, this place had seemed grand to him, with its two-story box-beam ceiling, its balcony mezzanines running the length of the room on each side. Now it was all finished.

He waited until the song ended, then whispered to Earl Whaley. “Call a break. Please. Emergency.”

Earl’s brows drew together. “Who do you think you are? We are thirty minutes from a break.”

“Something’s happened.” He motioned with his eyes toward the door and the outside. “We have to talk.” At last Whaley relented, and the men pulled in around F. C. Stoffer’s piano, to hear Thomas’s explanation.

“Bullshit” was Earl’s reaction, when he finished.

“It’s true. Tickets for everyone who wants to go. Tonight.”

“You know how much money that is?” said Stoffer.

“Who’s this friend?” said Alonzo. “Mister Lin?”

“No. Lin’s in Hong Kong.”

“I know,” said Ernest. “His sister. That fine woman.” His guess was confirmed by Thomas’s face.

“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” said Alonzo. “She coming too?”

But Earl cut back in. “Now listen! This is all nothing, empty as a gin bottle Sunday morning. You don’t believe him.” His eyes circled his men. “Do you?”

Uncertainty skipped from one to the other. All had seen the buildup of soldiers, and each had found his own explanation to rationalize it, until tonight.

“I been paying you for years,” said Earl, “and you’re gonna listen to him? Look at all that yellow on him. And he plays their music, too, every day of the week. Classical! With a damn German!”

“A Jew,” said Thomas. “From Austria.”

This Earl waved away. “Don’t believe what he says. He’s not one of us.”

“He is,” said Ernest.

Thomas raised his hands. “It doesn’t matter what I play, or who I am. We all came here for the same reason, and I never wanted to leave either. But if they invade the Lonely Island, it’s going to vanish beneath the water. You won’t be playing anymore. And tonight we can go, all of us, before it happens.”

“Bullshit,” Earl repeated.

A silence fell as the line deepened in the sand. Finally Alonzo spoke, slowly. “You keep talkin’ like that. You go on. You just go right ahead on.” He rose, relaxed, flaunting the accumulation of years behind him. “I’m getting my bass.”

Thomas almost collapsed in thanks.

“Us too,” said Ernest, and he and Charles laid their horns in their cases.

“Listen to me!” Earl thundered. “Any one of you goes down to the dock to try to get on this imaginary boat, don’t bother coming back. You won’t have a job here tomorrow!”

“Earl,” said Thomas. “Come with us.”

“You’re out of your mind,” Whaley retorted. “Well? Earl?” he said to his guitar player, Earl West.

“Not going,” said West.

He fixed his eyes on the bassist, Reginald Jones. “You?”

Jones shook his head. “Take more than that to make me leave my Filipina sweetie.”

“Stoffer?” Earl said to his pianist. “You going?”

Stoffer said, “No. Staying with you.”

Thomas sank inside, his eyes searching the five of them one last time. “You sure?”

No one spoke. The minute hand was advancing. Thomas seemed to hear Lin Ming’s voice, as clear as if his friend were not in Hong Kong but still standing next to him. An inch of gold can’t buy an inch of time. They’d had their inch. Time to go.

He led the way, and the four of them strode past a dance floor full of stilled, silent patrons. As they stepped out into the street, Thomas said only one word to Alonzo, maybe the bluest word he knew at that moment, “Keiko.”

“A hell of a thing,” said the older man, and turned toward their apartment, which was close.

Thomas waited outside while the three of them ran upstairs, the brothers to grab a few belongings, and Alonzo to say good-bye.

“You don’t have your things,” said Ernest when they came back down.

“I have my music.” Thomas raised his briefcase.

Alonzo came down last, sick with sorrow, and they took off together at a run, back up Rue Vincent Mathieu toward Avenue Édouard VII.

Thomas kept asking people the time on the trolley, until the car clanged to a stop on the Bund and they jumped off, instruments swinging; it was nine fifteen. “It’s faster to cross the Garden Bridge on foot. But we can’t run,” he said. “Walk.” And so in an agony of slow, absurd steps they covered the long stretch past Jardine Matheson, Canadian Pacific, and the British Consulate, casual American musicians out with their instruments on Sunday night. Then they came to the bridge.

“Tomette!” shouted one of the sentries.

They halted.

“Ogigi oshite!” another screamed, and they all understood this too, since no one in Shanghai crossed this bridge without bowing to Japan. Alonzo managed it as best he could with one hand balancing his instrument case.

It was not enough. One of the soldiers raised the butt of his rifle and knocked Alonzo to the ground. He fell awkwardly, and his bass hit with a dissonance of wood and strings.

“Nanda?” the soldier demanded, taking a swing at the case to make the sound again.

“No!” Alonzo pleaded. “Please, no, it’s an instrument-” And he got to his knees beside the case. “Look. Look. I’ll show you. All right?” Slowly, cautiously, because seven bayonet-tipped rifles were now aimed at his head, he eased his long-fingered hands toward the brass latches, unsnapped them, and lifted the lid.

The soldiers leaned forward. Excited spatters of Japanese were exchanged. “Now listen, fellows.” Alonzo had somehow regained his paternal calm. “Lemme just show you.” And he lifted the instrument, set it on its end pin, and gave it a practiced twirl until it landed light and exact against his hand. The soldiers rumbled, their weapons still poised, and he plucked off a quick, rippling run.

“Jūbun!” cried one of the soldiers with a wave of his arm, and Alonzo grabbed the case with one hand and the neck of the bass with the other as the three of them sprinted across, laughing through their fear, flying. They could see the German and Soviet consulates at the other end, and the huddled brown stone walls of Broadway Mansions.

Church bells pealed the time: nine thirty.

Too late too late too late. They ran gasping, heaving, turned right at the Astor House to reach the Old Dock faster. “There it is,” Thomas said, and suddenly in front of them was the liner, the sheer black vertical hull of it. Sailors were just working loose the ropes.

Song stood watching them from up above a wooden piling, saw as they came running, and then stopped short at the ship in front of them. The river was deep here, and the liners nestled up to their berths instead of using lighters.

The men looked all around, frantic to find her. She counted four of them, including Thomas. She checked, and counted again. Four.

Life, or love?

She fanned the tickets out in her hands. She always had to choose. Why did fate always force her? When she was young, it was her happiness or her family’s survival, not both. Now she could be a patriot, or a woman. But not both.

Four men waited for her below.

Just then she heard a long, low boat horn calling from downriver, and because of where she stood, she could see far. She strained into the night, watching the form of something in the river come closer, something large, until she saw it was a battleship, and behind it steamed another, and another behind that, a whole line of warships coming up the river.

So the attack was starting tonight.

Anger ignited within her, rage she had felt at her father, and at Du, and at those who would keep down girls like Plum Blossom, like herself. Watching the line of ships, she understood that without this feeling, she would wither and die. She would go cold. And then he will go cold to me too.

She fanned out four of the tickets, and let the rest drop from her hands to the dark river below, where they vanished. “Thomas!” she called.

He looked up, relief sagging every joint in his body. The brothers had been hopping and Alonzo pacing; sailors were waiting at the top of the passenger ramp.

In a second she was beside him, and in his arms. “Thank you,” he breathed.

“I got them.” She passed him the envelope, stamped DECEMBER 7, 1941. “But they had only four left.”

Her words were transparent to him. “You are going back north.”

She nodded. “I can’t leave now. Not yet. You knew.”

“Just as you knew I would not leave without the others.”

“True,” she said. “Pure gold proves its worth in a fire. But I have always known that about you.” They held each other until a sharp blast from the ship’s horn jolted them apart.

“After-” she blurted.

He stopped her. “No more of that. Just stay alive for me.”

“I will.” He felt her arms go inside his coat, and her hand slip something into his trouser pocket.

“Go. Ni zou ba.” Her voice broke.

“Tails!” Charles shouted. Sailors were moving to pull up the ramp. And now he, too, saw something behind them, down the river, a shape-what? He held her face. “See you again,” he said, as Lin had said to him, and she nodded in misery and gave him a push, away from her. In a few steps he covered the salt-brined boards to where his men stood with their own America, their instruments and music, ready to go home, and he saw the first warship, its lights blacked out and its engines quiet.

“Hurry,” he said, and followed them up the ramp.

I watched them steam away that night, passing the first Japanese warship so close they surely could see the rows of soldiers, thousands, rifles at twelve o’clock, bayonets glinting. I shrank into the shadows as they passed, and blessed the ship that bore him away.

I could have left then too, taken a level and more peaceful road to free China, or Hong Kong. But I belonged to the war, I was a creature of its struggle, and so I returned north. I had good years there before the winds changed, and blew fortune away from me. I was a foreign-trained translator, able to read the words of the Westerners and understand their music; maybe it was inevitable that first one comrade, then another, would denounce me as a spy. Now I live alone in a small cell. My punishment is my isolation, hunger rations, and this one, simple masterstroke: I may lie only on my left side. I must always face the door, my hands visible. There is a paradise on my right side, a place of singing angels, and I dream of it every night. Even Thomas waits for me there. But I may not turn.

Despite all this, I am free. I think in English as I like, and roam at will through the halls of memory, still visiting every corner of that glittering world that is gone, never to return, which we called Ye Shanghai.