Night in Shanghai

3

BY EARLY SPRING, Thomas was keeping up on piano, though hardly delivering the irresistibly danceable keyboard lines the Kings required. This was overlooked partly because he was skilled at arranging and leading, and partly because the classical flights of fancy he delivered onstage brought such responses from the audience that even the brass section dared not raise a voice.

But he could feel things simmering, and one day in March, at the weekly rehearsal, brass player Lester Cole let it out. “When are you going to take a solo, Tails?”

“Well-”

“’Cause we’re getting tired of the Uncle Tom business.”

Thomas heard nothing for an instant save the buzzing in his head and his own sharp intake of breath, but then Charles filled the emptiness by speaking up. “That’s not fair,” he said.

“I agree,” his brother Ernest put in. “I like the new sound.”

Cole bristled. “What do you two know?”

“They know what we all know,” Alonzo said, his sonorous voice drawing everyone’s attention. “You got no call to say that. Whatever you think of the sound, I think we all know we have never had so many people on the dance floor. Not even close. Am I right?”

This brought a mumble of assent, and the logjam loosened enough for Thomas to push ahead, but the vibrato of anxiety stayed in his gut through the whole rehearsal. He called out the changes in the new arrangements, and played a minimally credible piano line beneath the Kings’ bluesy surge, but everything was teetering. He was bringing too much of himself to the role. Back in America, he could never be light enough, never fully pass for European. He had always had to work extra hard on his precision and the subtlety of his touch to compensate, just as he had chosen his clothes and cultivated his manners in the same fashion. He had formed himself prophylactically, creating almost an exact shadow of his obstacles in the persona he presented. But to pass as a jazz musician, he was going to have to drop that, and be someone different.

To start, he had to offer something that sounded like solos, so using scores his new copyist Mr. Hsu had written out, he devised a series of elegant and unexpected elaborations. These impressed the crowd readily enough, but not his musicians.

He envied the way the other Kings could just take off and play, as if inspired to sing a line or two. It was the Kansas City sound, to have solos riffing above a driving, danceable bedrock in flat-four time. All of them could solo, except him. Even after he understood that it was part of the Kansas City sound itself, the way it allowed each man to stand up and stretch out and tell a story, horizontally, melodically, with the steady beat behind him, he remained jealous of what they could do.

And most of his bandmates had something else he was lacking-a girlfriend. Not that he was chaste; girls of every nationality were available, and some of those he sampled had pleased him. He took delight at first in being offered lovely bodies of every shade, in kissing mouths that spoke Russian and French and Hindi and Tonkinese and three or four different Chinese dialects, but in the end, he found it a lonely business, paying for a woman. On the other hand, he was always treated like a gentleman, which he loved, for respect was headier to him than sex, even the sex they had here-more affirming, more restorative, the root note that had been missing from his chord all his life. He made sense in Shanghai.

He had grown to envy the other Kings their women. Some of them were Chinese, two were Russian, one was Malaysian, and Alonzo even lived with Keiko, a Japanese woman he’d met through one of the guys in Buck Clayton’s Harlem Gentlemen. He wanted a special someone too.

Yet it was hard to go out on the town when he got off work at two A.M., so most nights he went home and spent an hour shedding his life completely, no posing, no passing, just paging through the sheets of concertos and sonatas he used to play, and wearing his soft old union suits instead of the silk dressing gowns the tailor had provided. It was ninety days now, and he still did not miss America. He did miss the feel of Creel Street though, and one thing that took him back there was to sit in the concentrated, benevolent light of an oil lamp late at night. In their leanest years, after the War, his widowed mother had used a single hurricane lamp every evening when the power was off, carrying it with them from room to room. Thomas had used it in the last days in the apartment as well, after the electricity went off, and left it behind in the cupboard when he departed. Here in Shanghai, to his joy, he found one like it in a used-goods shop over by Suzhou Creek. Uncle Hua disapproved of the thing, calling it a fire hazard, but Thomas used it in the dead of night anyway, and was comforted by its glow.

He took stock of himself, those nights, and realized he could court a respectable girl, if he could find one. He had money to spend on a woman. Even with all he had dropped on ladies of the night in his first months, he still made more than he could spend, and he kept the excess neatly folded in his wardrobe, underneath his shirts, which were laundered, pressed, and folded to knife creases by Chen Ma. One March day when he was taking some cash out, Uncle Hua materialized in the doorway.

Hua watched for a moment, and said, “Pay my look see, Master.”

“I think you already had a look see,” Thomas answered. It had not taken long for him to understand that he had no privacy at all, a fact to which he was already resigned as he put the little money package back in its not-so-secret spot.

“Master. You give one hundred, bye-bye make pay one oh seven.”

Seven percent? This caught Thomas’s attention. “How?”

Hua’s creased face went stubborn. “That b’long my pidgin.”

“It belong my pidgin if my money’s in it,” Thomas retorted. “How?”

Hua’s eyes narrowed. “Gamble place, my house.”

“Is that so! You must do well, to offer seven.”

“Can do.”

“I see.” Thomas thought, and pulled another hundred from the pouch. “We’ll start small,” he said, holding it out. “One ten, in a month.”

“One month no can do. Three months. One seven five.”

“Two months. One eight five.”

“One eight.”

Thomas considered.

“One eight five?” Hua repeated, and Thomas nodded. “Can puttee book?” he said, barely able to contain his glee.

“Puttee book,” said Greene. “It’s a deal.” He handed him the money and closed the cupboard. “And you stay out of my things, Uncle Hua.” He faked sternness and his majordomo pretended to quail in response, but Thomas understood by now that this was theater, that people were playing their roles, just as he played his. He was getting the hang of it.

Or so he thought.

Every Saturday, Song Yuhua went downtown to collect Du Taitai’s medicine. Seeing to the health needs of the supreme wife and matriarch was a task of importance, even if the old lady was an opium addict who had not left her room in years. The task fell to Song partly because no one else wanted to do it, but she always looked forward to her weekly afternoon abroad in the city, stretching an errand that could be done fairly quickly into several hours of doing what she wanted. She was in no way imprisoned in Du’s mansion on Rue Wagner, for though always on call, she was able to come and go more or less as she wanted. But on Saturdays, Teacher knew she took care of his first wife’s medicines, and so on that day, he never requested her services before evening fell.

On the sidewalks she heard two fur-clad Russian women quarreling, several groups of men speaking English, and bubbles of French and German. Polyglot vitality was one of the things she loved about Shanghai, even though it was the foreign capitalists who had turned Shanghai into a warren of occupied Concessions, enriched themselves, and then looked the other way, refusing to help, when Japan started to press its invasion. It had been one of her only real disagreements with the Communists, the fact that they, like the Nationalists, were so anti-foreign, but this divergence she kept to herself. To think of it was unwise, and to speak of it would be dangerous; one did not disagree with the movement. So she never spoke of liking Western music, or even of any fondness for the language in which she was proficient. Privately, she credited English with having given her a separate and entirely different engine of thought. And there was no getting around the fact that her English was exactly what made her valuable to Du, and therefore to the left, as a spy. It was her weak point, her vulnerability, and at the same time her greatest strength. Thinking about it was like sorting silk threads in a way that only entangled them further.

She pushed open the door to the dark apothecary shop, a room with floor-to-ceiling drawers and a wood counter trimmed in brass. The herb master, stout and fusty with a sparse white beard, bobbed his head when she came in. “Has Young Mistress eaten?”

“Yes, thank you. And you?”

“Yes.” He smiled happily, and she knew he had. Though a loyal Party member-he took no small risk, hosting meetings in his shop between her and others-the old man did not believe in denying himself. He had not read Marx. He told her once that he was going to go see Marx when he died, and the great man could tell him all about it then. Right now, what mattered was resisting Japan.

He took her prescription and studied the flowing characters in the old doctor’s elegant hand. “This is a complex formula. I suggest you take a moment’s rest, Mistress, in the parlor. I will call for tea.”

She nodded. “Thank you.” They were always careful to say only the right things, even when they were alone.

He reached beneath the counter and pulled a lever so that a section of the wall sprang loose. He swung it back to show a windowless inner room of black wood chairs and side tables, lit by yellow pools of electric light.

When he said he would call for tea, it meant someone wanted to see her, so after he had closed the wall-door behind her, she sat in a warm haze of anticipation, watching the little coals glowing in the brazier. It was always exciting, being told she was wanted for a meeting, and then waiting to see if someone new would walk through the door. At a minimum, that would mean a fresh face to put into the puzzle, for the Party operated in secret. Most enlistees knew only the other members of their cell. Song’s position in Du’s household being too sensitive for a cell, though, she knew only her guide, and the others who came to her in these meetings. Someone new was always of interest.

And if heaven smiled, one day she might meet her comparable other, a man who lived his life as she lived hers, with a mind and will equal to her own. She had always believed in such a man’s existence, even as a small child. Perhaps it was her training in Western languages and stories, this being a Western fantasy-but why should she not find him here, in just this way? The movement was the center of her life. There was never a time when she was called to a meeting that she did not flutter a little, inside.

She remembered the thrill of those early months in ’thirty-two and ’thirty-three when she first joined, going to many secret meetings at the so-called Foreign Language School at number 6 New Yuyang Lu, off Avenue Joffre. The school advertised its French and Russian courses constantly in Minguo Ribao, the Republic Daily, but there were no such courses, even though the place was always full of young people; it was a center for training Communists. She still went there occasionally for high-level meetings.

The strange thing was that it was Du who led her to the Party in the first place. He had been having an affair with an actress, and to keep that fact from his newest wife, he began taking Song out with him in the evening for cover. In the fashion of the season, he invited the actress for coffee before dinner, and she chose the Vienna Garden, which in its late-night hours happened to be one of Du’s favorite clubs.

Yet in the early evening, the Vienna was a meeting place for leftists, something Song discovered as soon as Du and his lady friend disappeared to their private room upstairs, bodyguards surrounding them. Alone with the actress’s friends, she found the conversation instantly exciting, a plunge through white-water rapids. Never before had she been face-to-face with admitted Communists, people who in their aboveground lives were playwrights and musicians. Their sympathies were no secret, for the left-leaning playwrights created stage works that demonized foreign imperialists, just as the musicians wrote songs and motion picture scores with choral singing and stirring martial melodies. They eschewed the “you and me” lyrics of love songs for “we and us” lyrics of nationhood and progress. She had met such people before, but as to who was actually a secret Party member, usually no one was willing to say. Yet that evening, at the Vienna Garden, every one of those around the table said straight out that they were members. Her thrill was made even sharper by her awareness that Du, if he found out, would want to kill several of them-except that he could not, since they were people of reputation.

Ideas flew, not only from men but from women, which excited Song even more. They were all part of a theater world undergoing complete revolution, in which stage forms such as opera, stylized with male-only performers for centuries, were giving way at last to contemporary plays in which women could participate, and through which all the issues of the day could be aired. Theater could spread ideas not only quickly, but in metaphors the Japanese invaders did not grasp, which was why playwrights and producers took risks, and occasionally were assassinated. All theater people lived with danger, just by staging their work, and Song saw how for them, the leap to Communism was almost natural.

The real point was money, said a smart young woman from Nanyang University. Was it not true that the foreign powers used Shanghai for profit, with no concern for whether Shanghai people were free or were slaves? Had they not rammed through the 1932 treaty that prevented China from having her own troops in Shanghai, just so they could make more profit? Money, always money.

At that moment, Song noticed an exceptionally beautiful dance hostess seated against the wall, her qipao slit to the lower thigh, showing off silk stockings and high heels. “That is Miss Zhang,” said the man next to her. They had been introduced when she first sat down; his name was Chen Xing, and he was head of the League of Left-Wing Theater People. “She has become pregnant by Ziliang Soong,” Chen said. “Do you know the name? He is the younger brother of Mei-ling Soong, Chiang Kai-shek’s wife.”

Song drew a sharp breath. She had heard about this in the halls of Rue Wagner, through which rumors always expanded like fog. Normally such a pregnancy would not be a problem, as the girl would be paid to get rid of the baby, but gossip had it that Miss Zhang had refused. Look at her, she has nothing but a Soong baby inside her, and she fights. “What is she asking for?”

“Why, Miss Zhang wants ten thousand,” Chen Xing told her in mild surprise. “She says if she doesn’t get it, she’ll put the story in the papers.”

“Unwise!” Song cried. It was reckless to demand so much money. The Soong family was much too powerful.

“You want to tell her?” Chen Xing said, his mouth a rueful pucker. “Really, you should not become involved.”

His words were barely out when Du Yuesheng’s bodyguards reappeared in the corridor.

Song dropped her eyes before her master came into view and caught her speaking to the man next to her. These are Communists, and I know, and you do not. She could barely contain the thrill that swelled inside her, for she had found a source of power, a way to live. And years later, it had led her here, to wait alone in a secret room behind the herb master’s place.

A half-bald man in a rumpled gown whom she knew well stepped in-her guide. She hid her disappointment as he addressed her, using one of her false names. “Mrs. Ma, how are you? All is well?”

“Yes, Mr. Guo, thank you.” She did not know his real name either.

“Do you have any news?” he said.

“I know Du gave two hundred thousand Chinese dollars to the Nationalists for the war effort. Even if Chiang did just agree to fight side by side with our army!”

They traded smiles. A deal had been struck and Chiang Kai-shek released; now the Nationalists and Communists would form a united front against Japan. “How are your relatives up north?” she said, code for the Communist stronghold and the frontline struggle to push back Japan.

He shook his head. “They can eat bitterness and endure fatigue to the end, but they are overwhelmed. They are starving. They have no-” He abandoned all pretense of talking about his relatives. “They have no ammunition. We need money.”

She blanched. She had never been asked for money before, only information. It was impossible of course, she had no access to money. “I cannot imagine how I could help, Mr. Guo, but the cause is everything. I will go to the temple and pray to the gods to send a solution to your dilemma.” A light knock sounded on the door, and she rose, her moves well studied. “My prescription is ready. Good day.”

Out on the street, she tucked the packet of herbs away in a silk pouch she carried. How could she get money? Du’s money was out of reach, for he knew the whereabouts of his every copper cash. He also had his hands in all the city’s banks, holding a seat on their boards or simply controlling their directors as if by so many puppet strings. Curse all lords and bosses like him, all the masters who steal and extort and drown the city in opium. She may have willingly offered her life in trade for her father’s debt to be canceled, so her clan could avoid poverty and her little sisters could be educated, but she was still a piece of property-on the outside. Inside, she had this, her life, her pledge to her country. If they catch me, let them kill me.

This was real power, and it lifted her lips in a smile as she crossed the street.

“You gave the house steward your salary?” said Lin Ming. He and Thomas stood outside the Cathay Cinema, on Avenue Joffre, waiting to see Pennies from Heaven with Bing Crosby and Louis Armstrong.

“He’s done well, so far. Eight and a half percent.”

Lin grinned at this proof that his bandleader was doing more than playing his role, he was thinking. He had deduced from the beginning there was something more to this one than met the eye. “That’s higher than the bank.”

“It was for that reason we reached a deal.”

With a blink, Lin Ming realized Thomas was staring at the shuoming shu Lin had been perusing, the bastardized and unfailingly entertaining English-Chinese plot summary that was passed out at most Shanghai movie houses. No, he was mistaken, the American had to be looking at something else. The shuoming shu, with its sophisticated cult following, was strictly the province of Shanghai’s cognoscenti.

“When you’re finished with that, can I keep it?” Thomas said, dispelling all doubts.

“You read them?”

“I collect them.” And they laughed together as the line started to move. Good. Lin needed something light to take his mind off the new danger posed by this Japanese Admiral.

Was this the time to warn Little Greene? The question teased itself into knots as they took their seats and spoke of small things, waiting for the lights to dim. Unquestionably, Lin would have to tell him, despite the danger to himself in subverting any plan of Du’s. But he had to choose the right moment, and so far, there was no immediate threat. Lin’s paid informants had assured him that Morioka listened to jazz only in his apartments, on his gramophone; he had not gone out. Not a single club had seen him cross the doorstep. Lin pondered until the lights fell and the velvet curtains cranked apart, and then it was too late. To bring it up now would only create fear, just as speaking of a tiger makes one pale.

“Are you coming to the theater?” Thomas asked him after the picture, when they poured out with the rest of the audience onto the rounded corner sidewalk, under the tall, narrow modern-style stacked letters CATHAY. The street down which they watched for a conveyance was lined with Gallic-style four-story conjoined buildings, three ornate brick floors above for apartments, and the first floor a twinkling line of shops, restaurants, and teahouses fronted by plate glass windows all lit up for the evening.

“Not tonight,” Lin answered him, raising his hand to a rickshaw. “I have others to see to.” It was his habit to excuse himself in this way, and on this night he had reason to be vague, since he was meeting H. H. Kung for dinner. Despite all his wealth and power, Kung remained at Du Yuesheng’s mercy in many ways, and periodic ultra-private conversations with Lin Ming helped him keep up with the master’s leanings.

“Has he talked about moving his assets yet?” Kung said from across the table at the Sun Ya. They were dining on bird’s nest soup with pigeon eggs, whelk with chicken liver slices, frogs’ legs braised with thin broccoli stalks for bones, and shad steamed in caul fat with a crystal sauce.

The question startled Lin Ming. Moving assets would mean he accepted that the Japanese would take Shanghai. It was true that it was now impossible to turn on the radio without hearing how close their army was to Peking and Tianjin in the north. And here in Shanghai, there were suddenly Japanese everywhere in the streets, not just soldiers but families, civilians, including many who came into his cabarets and ballrooms at night. But a Japanese invasion? “On that, he has said nothing.”

“His money and bullion can be moved quickly,” Kung said, “but our situation is different. We are disassembling whole factories and moving them to the interior, trying to keep China on her feet through industry. We cannot wait until they are at our gates.” Kung shrugged as he reached for choice morsels, his hands precise and balletic as he loaded Lin Ming’s plate before his own, like any good friend.

Lin felt his stomach turn. Duke Kung was twice his age and ten thousand times more powerful, so if he sensed the invasion was near, it probably was. “Is there nothing that can turn them back?”

“Possibly,” Kung said. “Moscow has floated the idea, tentatively, very entre nous, of organizing a group of countries to oppose Japanese aggression. Maybe even the Americans, though no one has approached them yet.” He signaled for more wine. “I leave next week for Moscow, from there to Germany, to discuss it.”

“Germany?”

“I went to graduate school in Berlin, did you know that? After Yale. I know people there, I can get things done, arrange meetings at the highest levels. I will meet with Hitler. But I am also going to check on my friends, Schwartz and Shengold, two men I went to school with. Jews. Very powerful bankers. They have not answered my letters. Have you heard anything of the situation of the Jews in Germany?”

“Nothing clear,” said Lin.

“My friend Dr. Ho Feng-Shan, the First Secretary of the legation in Vienna, has been updating me. They have passed anti-Jewish laws and seized Jewish property. I plan to find my friends, and if this is true, I will bring it up with Hitler. But above all, I will persuade him to join us in opposing Japan. That’s my commitment.”

They raised their glasses to it, and drank. “And you?” said Kung. “What is yours? You have no clan, no place to sweep the graveyard-you’re just the sort who could commit to something.”

“Never,” Lin said.

“Isn’t that ‘forgetting the war, forgetting the motherland’?”

Lin shook his head. “Of course I oppose Japan without question. I am Chinese. But I serve Du, remember.”

“You’re not a member of the Gang, are you?”

“No.” The Qing Bang initiates were sworn for life. “I am his son. That’s enough.”

“And I suppose you’ll never inherit.”

“No.” Lin was not a real son, born neither of a nei ren, an inside person, a wife, nor of a concubine, nor even of a mistress-but in the lowest possible way, of a whore. And his salary was stingy, just enough to keep his small flat in Frenchtown.

Regarding Dr. Kung across the stacked, fragrant platters, Lin remembered why Kung was under Du Yuesheng’s power too: the Green Gang and the top Nationalist leaders were bound by a blood debt. It was Du Yuesheng who had carried out the 1927 Shanghai massacre that wiped out many high-level Communist leaders, lured to Shanghai by the Nationalists through the promise of peaceful talks. The bloodbath had cemented the power of the Nationalist clique and ended the Communists’ long-term status as a legitimate wing of the Nationalist Party. Everything changed for the Communists then as they were driven underground, at least in the cities. In the countryside, they pulled back to Jiangxi, where Chiang’s armies encircled them and drove them out. From there they set out on a long march to Shaanxi Province in north China, where they consolidated their new headquarters and continued to fight the Japanese.

It was thanks to Du Yuesheng that the Communists had been driven out of the true government, and the highest Nationalist officials would always be in his pocket because of it. Moreover, they were all a family, the Nationalist leaders, related by marriage to the Soong sisters. Soong Mei-ling was the wife of Chiang Kai-shek, Soong Ai-ling was Kung’s wife, and Soong Qing-ling the widow of Sun Yat-sen. Their brother T. V. Soong was a former top Finance official. They brought the sense of a dynasty to the leadership of the Nationalist Party, and it seemed to cement their absolute power despite the fact that the Imperial system had fallen back in 1911. Whatever the case, they held China’s reins, and as a family had grown fabulously rich-yet still they had to appease Du.

They also did not seem to be able to stop Japan. The fact that they had relocated their Nationalist government south to Nanjing and also prudently moved 640,000 priceless art treasures out of the Forbidden City seemed to signal that they expected Peking and Tianjin to fall to Japan. Would the enemy be allowed to occupy these cities, unopposed? If so, Shanghai would be next.

“If they take us,” Lin said, “the night-world will wither and die faster than you can turn a head. The clubs, the money, the jazz-it will all be finished.”

“Along with everything else,” said Kung. “On that day there will be gloom in heaven and darkness below. That is why I must go to Moscow and Berlin and London, and you, my friend”-Kung’s eyes ticked up, and Lin could see, behind his round glasses, the flicker of Christian compassion-“you must not interfere if they have a clear shot at Morioka. Do you understand? Even if he happens to be standing next to one of your men.”

Lin’s face hardened into a mask to cover the roiling sea of his awareness. This was the end of his fragile equilibrium.

“Agreed?”

Lin lowered his eyes. “Agreed,” he lied.

That Friday was Du Taitai’s regular visit from Dr. Feng. Song sat beside the physician at the bedside as he took the pulses of Du’s revered first wife, and examined the whites of her eyes and her tongue. He wrote out a new list of herbs, and counseled rest in a darkened room-as if the Supreme One could do anything else in her opium-addicted state. Song thanked him respectfully and shook the last few silver dollars from Taitai’s private purse to pay him.

When he was gone she showed Taitai the empty purse. It had never been empty before, and there was still the medicine to buy.

A white, clawlike hand came out to brush at Song’s wrist. “There.” The old lady pointed to the wall.

What? The painting in its frame? The striped wallpaper? Song leaned closer.

“Behind the painting.”

Song was amazed; the old lady had never before said anything so coherent. In the frame was a cheap copy of a minor fan painting by the Ming artist Chen Hongshou, the sort of piece favored by middle-class Chinese aspiring to display good art.

“Behind,” Taitai repeated, and Song pulled the edge of the frame away from the wall. Behind it she saw only the yellow rose wallpaper.

But the Supreme Wife continued to gesture with her curled fingers, and Song peered at the back of the frame itself, where she saw a small velvet pouch webbed to the frame with an ancient, dust-covered crisscross of thread.

“This?” She tipped the frame up so the old lady could see the pouch, glad the maid was out washing the sheets and no one was in the room at this moment but Taitai and herself.

“It’s mine,” Taitai whispered. “From my mother. No one knows, not even him.”

Song separated the fraying threads and removed the pouch. “Here.” She held it out to Taitai.

The translucent little fingers could only flutter weakly. “You open it.”

It was closed with no more than a drawstring. Song leaned over the dark blue quilt cover, opened the bag, and gently turned it over. A small river of white diamonds poured out, capped by the sharp sound of her own breath.

“Take one,” the lady said. “Trade it for the medicine. Will it be enough? No. Take two or three.” She might sound more lucid than Song had ever heard her, yet she still seemed to think it would take two or three diamonds to buy a week’s herbs.

Song was certain Taitai had forgotten about these diamonds long ago, for the story around Rue Wagner was that when she was younger, and first starting to use the Big Smoke, she and Du had many arguments about money. He limited her cash to try to slow her addiction. As sure as it was that she had forgotten the gems, it was just as sure that Du did not know they existed, for if he did, they would be gone.

Song stared at the stones, a pool of glinting light against the dark silk. It gave her a new jolt of power to think that Du was in this room at least once a week, visiting Taitai, sitting here on this bed, and he knew nothing of the diamonds.

When Du came, she knew he told his wife news of the family, as if she could still listen. To him, she was ill, for was it not true that millions used opium with no problems? As her husband, he took care of her, sitting by her for an hour a week, for which he was as faithful as the changing moon. Song could find no fault in how he ministered to his wife; it was something she had to admire about him.

The wave of sadness drowned her again, disappointment that she had been sold to an old man, one who perceived her not as a woman but as a tool. She was grateful for that, she did not want him anywhere near her, yet at the same time, it hurt that her womanhood had never been allowed to develop. Du would release her one day, but she would be past thirty then, and would have nothing.

Except for the Party.

She looked at the jewels, and remembered what she had said: I will pray to the gods to send a solution to your dilemma. Was this the moment to which her vows had led her? She rolled the diamonds in her hand, unable to take her eyes from them, thinking back once more to her reasons and her commitment.

Du’s affair with the actress had continued for much of 1932, and she’d sat through many evenings at the Vienna Garden listening to Huang Weimin, a well-known editor and playwright who, she realized as they spoke around the cigarette-clouded table, was also a secret leader of the Communist underground. She remembered the whiff of danger, but above all the fun of interacting with a like mind as they spoke of literature, and matched each other with lines of poetry. She had been there for almost an hour when she realized the beautiful, bold, and pregnant Miss Zhang was not present. “What happened to that Miss Zhang?” she asked. “Did she give in and stop the baby?”

“No,” said Huang, “she held her ground. In fact she was here, earlier this evening. I saw her.”

So Song watched, curious, thinking the girl might return at any moment to join the others being paid dance by dance, ticket by ticket. The left-wing debate continued and the pregnant girl did not appear; instead, sometime later, Song saw Teacher, coming down the hall behind Flowery Flag.

“Zou ba,” he said abruptly when he reached her, let’s go. She jumped up and followed him, noticing that his other bodyguard, Fiery Old Crow, was not with him.

At the car, she saw Fiery was already inside, waiting in the front passenger seat. He leaped out to hold the door for the boss, who climbed in the back, next to Song, and they headed out Bubbling Well Road. The driver, as always, was Flowery Flag, who had earned his nickname by once having worked as chauffeur for the American Embassy.

But he did not take any of the expected streets back into the French Concession that night. Instead he turned north into the side streets, until he reached the banks of Suzhou Creek. He turned at the top of the bank, and followed the waterway out to the suburbs, where wooded stretches and farming plots alternated with huddles of darkened houses. No one spoke in the car, and she kept her face set, while fear clawed at her inside.

Flowery left the road and followed a short gravel driveway to the riverbank, where they ground to a stop beneath the bare trees. “Get out,” Du ordered.

Around back, he unlatched the trunk and then stepped aside. “Go ahead. Raise it.”

She did, and looked down into the agonized, pleading eyes of Miss Zhang, the pregnant dance hostess, who shook, rags tied around her mouth, her ankles, her hands behind her back-

“Please,” Song said, her voice cracking. “Don’t do it.”

“Step back,” he ordered, each word a separate blow. “I want you to watch.”

Fiery and Flowery bent over the trunk and attached cement blocks to her feet with lengths of chain while she squirmed and squealed through the rag. Song stood with tears running, hating herself for her powerlessness, while they hauled the girl out, still struggling, and then counted to three in a good-natured, almost boyish way over her muffled shrieks, swinging her back and forth in order to land her out in deep water, where she hit with a massive, heaving splash. The water boiled, and frothed with bubbles for a minute, before it settled and returned to its dark placidity.

Flowery and Fiery had already turned back to the car. She followed, trembling, agonized, certain she would never get the girl’s eyes out of her mind.

“We call that ‘growing water lilies,’” Du said.

In the car, riding back that night, staring straight ahead through the windshield, she had decided that this was the last time she would feel so impotent against evil. She would join. She would work the rest of her life against people like Du, and against Japan, as long as its army fought on Chinese soil. She remembered how a deep and unexpected sense of calm, of resolution, settled over her. It was the beginning of her new life.

Now, as she sat in Du Taitai’s room, she made a silent vow to Miss Zhang, the poor dance hostess who had opened her heart to the son of a powerful family, conceived his child, and met her death while Song looked on. She had been a helpless girl then, no better than a slave, not the canny woman she was now. She would take these diamonds, and she would keep them for Miss Zhang. For herself, too.

She shook four diamonds into her hand like fractured light. She deserved them, she pleased the old lady. The maids said Taitai responded to her as to no one else, not even her husband. When Song was not present, she lay in bed, an empty seedpod, rattling on life’s last puffs of wind. Song fixed the pouch back in its place and resettled the picture on the wall.

She turned to see Taitai watching her, puzzled. “Was the picture crooked?”

Song searched the old face, her heart pounding. Already she has forgotten. “A little,” she lied.

Taitai gave the fan painting a blank look. “Pretty.” The lucidity had been like a flash of light in a forest.

The maid came back in, and observed that First Wife was tired. They settled her more comfortably on the pillow.

When the Supreme One slept, Song tilted open the wooden shutter slats and cranked out the windows for a few minutes to release the heavy smell of the opium and bring in the scent of the city. She straightened the chairs and dusted the bureau, which held all that was left of Taitai’s life: the wedding picture, a bronze pocket-plaque inscribed with sutras for some long-ago journey, a pair of jade earrings, and several books which had not been opened in many years. The old lady had lost interest in these things, in the room, in everything but the drug.

After the first couple of years, Song stopped asking herself what had made Taitai this way, whether it was the marriage to Du or something that came before; she saw only a sweet old lady worn thin as a ghost. She smoothed the paper-dry brow and turned the light down, sitting quietly for a while before she latched the window, darkened the shutters, and eased out.

In April of that year, the Kings lost their first member to the war when their violinist, Solomon Kirk, told them he was going home. This revelation came midway through an uncomfortable rehearsal, in which the brass players started talking disrespectfully about Mr. Hsu, who had not yet arrived.

Thomas got right up from his piano bench. “What was that?” He knew it was Errol Mutter who had spoken. “You want to tell everyone?”

“I said, your boy’s not here yet. Maybe you can’t work without your boy.”

“Mr. Mutter. Mr. Hsu is the reason I can give you written music.” Thomas had slipped into his angry voice, crisp and a little controlling. He did not like to deploy it, it was not part of his jazz man persona, but Mr. Hsu worked tirelessly for his eight dollars a month. That was exactly the wage he had asked for, too; Thomas never once tried to bargain with him. He wondered how Mr. Hsu could survive on that amount, but Lin Ming had told him that the copyist lived in a tingzijian, a pavilion room or scholar’s room, which was a small, closed-off loft above another room. “Of his skills none of you can possibly have the slightest doubt,” Thomas said.

“But can you play without him?” Errol pressed.

“It’s not him. It’s written music I cannot play without. I told you that at our first rehearsal.”

“He did tell you that.” The voice came ringing down over the empty seats from Lin Ming, who had climbed the stairs quietly and taken a seat in Du’s box without anyone noticing. “Mr. Hsu is here, standing in the lobby, you know. He just arrived. He heard what you said.”

Appearing in the archway, Mr. Hsu let loose a stream of light, consonant-tapping Shanghainese.

Lin translated to the group. “He wants to know what is the meaning, calling him ‘boy’?”

The men shifted in their seats. In Shanghai, male servants, hotel attendants, rickshaw pullers, and the like were called “boys” regardless of age, but Mr. Hsu was an educated musician, and they all knew it. Thomas waited for Errol to answer.

“It’s an insult,” Errol mumbled at last, and Mr. Hsu immediately turned toward the lobby door to leave.

“Wait!” Thomas said. “Please.” He saw Mr. Hsu hesitate.

Lin Ming jumped in, cajoling Hsu with wave after wave of appeasement, until finally the man unrolled his paper, uncapped his pen, and sat down to work.

“You must be more polite to Mr. Hsu, or he will not stay,” Lin said from the balcony.

“We will do better,” Thomas said humbly, pretending to take the blame, because here, everything was vertical authority, and as bandleader, he stood for the behavior of his men. It was Lin’s obligation to upbraid him, and Thomas’s to absorb the blame.

The rehearsal had barely teetered back on track when Solomon got up and made his announcement, saying he was sorry to leave, but the Japanese were everywhere, and to him it did not look good. He had saved his fare-that was what they had all agreed to when they came over on the one-way ticket. He wished them well. They were braver than he. He played his heart out for the rest of the rehearsal, even though he would be gone by Saturday night.

The first night they played without Solomon was the night a pretty, dark-haired white woman came into the ballroom, wearing a simple but close-fitting satin gown. She sat alone, unusual for one so attractive, and Thomas noticed she refused several offers to dance, instead sitting regally at her table, posture perfect, eyes bright. He felt a pull to her growing stronger through the evening, until finally, after the last set, he took a deep breath and introduced himself.

She smiled and extended a slim, white hand. “Anya Petrova, of Saint Petersburg. Your playing is very beautiful.”

“Thank you.” Saint Petersburg. Those who used the old name were White Russians, he remembered, as he took in her shiny dark bobbed hair and disconcertingly pale gray eyes. “Not as beautiful as you.” Normally, he was too worldly to say such a thing, but in her case, it was the truth.

“Pfft.” Unimpressed, she flicked at the air with two manicured fingers. “Do you know, when I was a girl, I was the plain one in the family? My parents, the servants, even the coachmen, all they talked about was how beautiful was my sister Elena. Never me.”

Servants. Coachmen. “Then they were wrong.”

“Flatterer.” She flashed a smile. “You are sweet. I must go now. Good night.”

“Please come again.” He watched her walk away across the ballroom, deliberately bewitching, moving her hips for him, making sure he would remember. It was a good bet she would be back.

She was, in less than a week, and he asked her to dinner after the show. Back in the dressing room, Alonzo said, “Who is that girl? I’ve seen her somewhere before.”

“Her name is Anya.”

“I know, I saw her on stage somewhere. She sings. Say-Mr. Lin was looking for you. Said he had something to talk to you about. He catch up with you?”

“No.” Thomas bounced on the balls of his feet, encased these days in top-grade Italian leather; he was eager to get back to Anya. “You choose,” he told her when he did, and she selected an all-night Chinese restaurant called Golden Tripod Kitchen, which surprised him. His expectations were further upended when, on their arrival, she greeted the staff in peremptory Shanghainese, to which they responded in the same tongue. Fascination bloomed. “How many languages do you speak?”

“Six,” she said.

Back home, Thomas had never met anyone who spoke another language, other than high school teachers at Mergenthaler. It was not like music, which was everyone’s second language back on Creel Street. Many people could play a simple song. The I-IV-V song form was easy, abbreviated; a child did not have to go on in music in order to know it. A song could be bent any which way and filtered through any kind of lens, but it was still a song, and still the spirit of America, as Thomas was increasingly coming to see. Strange he had to leave America to grasp it. So he had only this one language, music, the song, whereas she had mastered all these others. And she was beautiful. “Tell me,” he said, his admiration pulling him forward on his elbows, across the table, closer to her. “Your languages.”

“Shanghainese and English, you know-also Russian, French, Latin, and Greek.”

“You went to good schools.”

“Yes. It seems so far away now. And you? I hear a good musical education.”

“Actually, I would not have been allowed to attend most music schools in America. In addition, I grew up in a very poor part of the city. My mother was a domestic.”

Anya drew her brows together.

“A maid.” Thomas hauled up his own reins and reminded himself to pay attention, since this was not the story he had told the other men in the orchestra. As far as they knew, he was a farm boy from Easton, on the Chesapeake’s remote far shore. That had suited him well enough, since it put a believable framework around the naïveté of his playing relative to theirs. With Anya, he wanted to be a different kind of man, and he felt his way slowly with his story. “Though she cleaned rich people’s houses for a living, she knew the piano, and she was my first teacher. She taught me to read the staff at the same time I learned the alphabet. And she showed me if you play well, people will appear along the way to help you.” As he spoke, he realized he had learned this from America, not just his mother, and it was the first genuinely nostalgic thought he’d had about his country since coming to China.

“Were your family slaves?”

“All that ended seventy years ago,” he answered, deliberately vague, because actually his ancestors had been free people of color, as far as he knew. But that was not a good story for Shanghai, where he was a jazz man; he should be from the crossroads, someplace cruel, preferably in the Deep South. The longer he was away from the U.S., the more detached he became from the actual facts of his life there, gaining the freedom to unfold himself anew in this city. Everyone in Shanghai had a story. It was that kind of place.

But Anya was eyeing him shrewdly. “I see why they love your music, the Chinese. To them you are marvelous, and also pitiable. They themselves are slaves-to the foreign powers in the Concessions, and now to the Japanese. When they see you, they feel better, because you were the same.”

“Not exactly.”

“In their eyes, yes. The Communists might feel something similar.”

“Anya, really-”

But she held her hand up. “I predict it! Has one approached you yet, a Communist?”

“No.” On this Thomas was emphatic, because he had not met even one. “People say one third of Shanghai is Communist-but I don’t know where they are, any of them.”

She snorted with laughter. “Don’t be silly, you have met them, they are right in front of you. They lie, they pass as law-abiding people, they are everywhere.”

“Really.” He sat back, unwilling to believe that he, the master of appearances, could be so completely fooled. “What are they like?”

“They are bandits,” she shot back, “crude and evil. They killed my parents and my little sister.”

“Where was that?” he said gently. He reached for her hands, but she pulled them away.

“Russia.”

“And then where did you go?”

“Mukden, in north China.” She let a tremor go through her, and then pushed the whole thing away, refashioning her face until it was bright and gay again.

She changed the subject to music, and would say no more of her family. She told him it was true, she sang in clubs sometimes, and she loved jazz, though when he asked her whom she enjoyed, she could not name a single group. He saw what she was doing, but it didn’t matter to him, he loved it, loved her, or at least loved spending time with her. It was a joy to be with a beautiful, educated woman who was here because she liked him, not because he was paying her.

The two of them talked and laughed until they seemed to be the only ones left in the restaurant, which had grown quiet around them as the night deepened. By the time they rose to leave, she had drunk so much she could barely stand, and was in need of a steadying arm. He bundled her into a rickshaw and climbed up beside her and together they swayed down Route Gustave de Boissezon beneath rows of trees, in a night-world washed of color. When they came to her front door, he bowed over her hand to say good night. She responded by rising on her toes to kiss his cheek, then took an uneven step and vanished inside, clicking the door behind her.

The light of infatuation was lit, but what Alonzo had said back at the theater about Lin needing to see him was still tugging at him as well. He decided to go by Lin’s place on the way home, this being the time when Thomas knew his friend usually came home from his nightly circuit.

He threw a few small pebbles at Lin Ming’s window, and sure enough, it opened up, the room’s occupant still fully dressed and wearing a scowl which fell away as soon as he recognized Thomas down below.

“I’m glad you’re here,” he said when he got to the front door.

“Is something wrong?” Thomas followed him inside and up the stairs.

“Come inside,” Lin said, latching the door of his tiny two-room apartment behind them. “Sit.”

Thomas sank down on the couch and let his face sag into his hands. “I’ve been worried too. Solomon’s leaving. I’ve got ten men still, and all of them are anxious for me to tell them if it’s okay to stay here.”

Lin nodded his understanding, and for the first time Thomas could remember, he shrugged and gave no answer.

“So what’s going to happen?”

“As to that, no one knows, but-”

“Come on,” said Thomas.

“-but powerful people expect Japan to invade Shanghai.”

“What! When?”

“Who knows. Not immediately, but they are taking factories apart and moving them to the interior.”

Thomas felt the blood drain from his head. “And what does that mean for us? The Americans?”

Lin shrugged. “I would think, if they tried to avoid hurting anyone, it would be the Americans. The last thing they want is a war with you.”

“Would we be able to keep playing?”

Lin took a long, hesitant breath. “It is not a question of whether you and the Kansas City Kings can play. It is a question of whether Ye Shanghai will continue to exist at all. But Little Greene, right now we have a more immediate danger, concerning the new Japanese Admiral, Morioka. That’s why I was looking for you. To warn you.”

Thomas felt his eyes grow wide.

“First-swear to secrecy.” Lin swallowed nervously. “If anyone knows I warned you, my life will be forfeit. Do you understand? They will kill me. Swear to tell no one.”

“I swear,” he said softly.

Lin tightened his mouth. A perceptible shiver ran the length of his body. “Listen carefully.”

Through the next few days, Lin Ming could not shake the apprehension that he had crossed the line, and that retribution might come swiftly, at any time, and out of nowhere. He had disobeyed orders.

Lin was not so naïve as to think his physical parentage would be enough to protect him if he were caught; he was a son, but not a real one. Not that Du had ever denied having fathered him. Indeed he had acknowledged the boy as soon as he laid eyes on him, since he was childless then, his first wife, Du Taitai, having proved barren. Acknowledging Lin Ming was insurance, but the policy was never cashed, for Du was later to add wives who had more sons, sons of his line, born within his house and thus his legal heirs. But Lin Ming was conceived before all that, when Du himself was only fifteen and practically living in Lin’s mother’s room.

In her day it was the fashion for girls such as herself in the houses behind Avenue Édouard VII to claim to be from Suzhou, since that charming town of canals and gardens was known for its lovely and sweet-voiced girls-yet Lin’s mother truly had been born and raised there. In Shanghai she was called a “one-two” because a man could drink with her for one dollar and pierce her for two. One-twos were not the lowest-those were the Cantonese saltwater sisters, who worked the docks, and the alley girls who let themselves be had against a wall for thirty cents-but they were far from the highest. A step up from them were the two-threes, and many tiers above them were the city’s premier courtesans, perfectly formed, gorgeously dressed, able to sing, play, and hold their own in games of poetry and calligraphy with the very rich.

Lin Ming’s mother was nothing like them. But Du was hardly more than a boy himself when he met her, and little better than she. He never paid for her; they were friends. That was another reason why, years later, when he heard about the tall, thin boy who looked so much like him, being raised in the Suzhou brothel to which Lin’s mother returned after giving birth, Du decided to have himself driven to that peaceful garden town so he could see the child up close.

Lin Ming’s whole world then was the brothel, with its successive courtyards, its butterfly flock of aunties, its vermilion Gate of Coming and Going. Beyond the gate, cobbled streets unwound beneath overhanging willows, soft in summer with green-dappled light. Canals were crossed by stone bridges whose half-moon arches made circles in the water. From the ponds and fields and wooded hills came peddlers with live flapping fish, caged ducks, bundles of freshwater greens, and tender shoots of baby green bamboo. All around were the lilting strands of Suzhou dialect. If it was Third Month, he would use the coins in his pocket to buy green dumplings stuffed with lotus root. In the autumn, at the festival of the weaver and the cowherd, he would eat the special coiled, sugary cakes. The world was his, and it passed in front of him in the stream of faces, the scudding clouds above the roofs, the crisp flapping banners of merchants. Back then he never thought about the future.

That changed the day his father came.

He remembered the way his mother entered his tiny room at dawn to awaken him. Normally she herself never arose before noon. “Get up, Sprout,” she said; he remembered because she used his milk name. He yanked away from her.

“Bathe,” she told him. “Put on your new blue gown.”

“It’s scratchy. I bathed last night.”

“Put it on.”

“Why?”

“Your father is coming.”

He went still. She might as well have said the sun and the moon had changed places, for he had no father.

“Get on the horse,” she said, smoothing the bedclothes as if she could take away all the bumps in the road ahead. “Time to be a man.”

A clamor rose in the lane, the squawks of chickens, cries of children, rumble of a motorcar. He pulled on his clothes and ran to stand in the courtyard between Jiang Ma, the proprietress, and his mother.

The big square automobile puttered in and crunched to a long and extravagant stop. A knot of bodyguards climbed out, followed by a tall man with a shiny shaved head and a long loose gown that swung with his steps. He had crossbow cheekbones and big ears. Ears like mine. A hot knife of panic slid into Lin’s middle.

The man looked at him for a long time without expression and then turned to talk to his mother. They had not seen each other since she left Shanghai during her pregnancy, but a wisp of affection was still evident between them as they turned away from Lin without a glance and walked toward the reception hall, already negotiating. A few days later he was sent to Hankou.

Much later Lin Ming understood that it was an investment. Du had enrolled him in Hankou’s Lamb of God Missionary School so that someone in his sphere might understand the language and thoughts of the foreigners. That Lin had repaid the Gang’s investment through profit was undeniable, for the jazz he arranged brought people into the clubs to dance and drink and dine, and many of them went on to spend even more money in the brothels and opium dens just outside, from which profits also flowed straight to the Qing Bang’s coffers.

Yet this success was due less to his parentage than to the fact that he had grown up in a foreign boarding school, with Western music. Every day there had started in chapel with the other pupils, singing hymns and learning their tempered twelve-note scale with its chords and intervals. Their music became another of his languages, and later his ticket to the night-world. Some rival agents around Frenchtown sniped that his success was due only to his proximity to the throne. A waterfront pavilion gets moonlight first, they liked to whisper. They were wrong. It was all because he and his jueshi jia listened to the same songs as children, hymns, the bedrock of the church. His ear was like theirs. They were brothers beneath the skin.

In his world, there had never been room for a wife. That was why Zhuli was the perfect girl for him, Beautiful Pearl, all his in the moment and yet after, not his responsibility. They understood each other. And walking through the brass-studded gate of the Osmanthus Pavilion in Stone Lion Lane, he felt the familiar flutter of anticipation.

Inside, high ceilings and flickering gas lamps might have signaled any fussy, old-fashioned city mansion, except for the fact that it was full of girls lounging in loose robes with free, unbound breasts moving for anyone to see. “Lin Xiansheng lai le!” they trilled when he came in, at ease, childish, for they knew he would never choose one of them. He came here for Zhuli, and her alone. When she was busy, he waited.

Tonight she signaled her presence at the top of the steps with a delicate cough, her hair freshened, her lips moist, her gray silk skirts rustling beneath a close-fitting vest of red brocade.

In her room they fell together, struggling from their clothes. He knew how many men she had here, and he did not mind. She was like him, a fellow traveler, able to give her heart freely to no one. He knew she would never ask any more of him than what they had together, never ask for his money or his protection; knowing this freed him. War was in the air, and it was all he could do to keep himself and his men safe.

They joined happiness and afterward lay back in the sheets. He always paid for the night, which meant he could sleep until noon.

She turned him over and began a soft kneading of the muscles in his back with a touch that was expert, professional, but also intimate. She understood where he hid his anger and his fear, surrounded it with gentle fingers and drew it out until all under heaven was peaceful. Was this love? he wondered, deep in the profound state of rest he always felt under her hands. Was this the feeling? She finished and lay beside him.

He had been conceived just like this, in a room not far from here, in a brothel. Lin always made a prideful point of insisting that he was nothing like his father, but here he was the same, and he knew it. He felt for Pearl just as his father had felt for his mother, though unlike his father, he knew he would feel that way always. With her, all his cares, even the fact that he had just broken ranks to warn Little Greene, melted away.

“What is it?” she said, turning.

“Nothing.” He put her head back down, loving her. “Sleep a while.”

That night, while Lin Ming lay twined with Zhuli, Admiral Morioka crisscrossed Frenchtown in the back seat of his curtained chauffeured car, looking for music. In his previous China postings, Peking and Tianjin, he had always been able to find some club where a jazz group, Japanese, Chinese, sometimes even American, was playing. And neither of those cities could compare to Shanghai.

Yet in his short time here, it already seemed to Morioka that the Chinese government tolerated Shanghai like a man tolerates a boil on his skin. Night in Shanghai made money, and so was allowed to exist, but what the Chinese government really wanted was to ban foreign music, not just jazz but all of it. Hopeless. A more useless goal for China’s future Morioka could hardly imagine. It proved once again that the Chinese were not mature, strategic thinkers. Ban music? What next, forbid moving pictures? Yet this notion, of the toxicity of foreign culture, was promoted by both Nationalists and Communists alike. Amazing.

Morioka never ceased to marvel at China’s two parties and the way they squabbled and fought each other, especially as Japan carved their country away from them bit by bit. Clearly, they need us.

He had his driver roll slowly past the Ambassador, the Canidrome, the Casanova, and the Palais, all the nearby places where jazz could be heard. His secretary had made a list for him, but so far, he had not ventured into any Shanghai ballroom. Tonight was the night that would change.

He consulted his list one last time. “Driver,” he said, deciding. “Take me to the Saint Anna.”

Song Yuhua walked down Nanjing Road, the most famous shopping street in Asia and a patchwork of Shanghai’s international influences: Parisian bakeries, Balkan dairy shops, and Austrian-style cafés competing with shops dispensing nuts and dried fruits from central Asia. Her eyes always lingered on the international places, not the Chinese establishments like the Wing On and Sincere department stores. The foreign names were music in her mind as she read them off against the clicking of her spool heels on the sidewalk.

As a lonely child in a rural household, learning English from her tutor, she had sustained herself with fantasies fed by foreign books. She imagined herself a woman, grown, beautiful, traveling the world, speaking foreign languages. She had believed in love, in the kind of connection she had never observed in her clan compound in Anhui, and the language of this hope was always English. Now that she believed in the cause, she spoke English only when commanded, and otherwise kept it to herself. She did not really know what to do with her feelings about things foreign.

She stopped at the edge of the Bund, next to the Cathay Hotel with its green copper pyramid roof, and in front of her, along China’s most celebrated boulevard, rolled a convoy of trucks filled with weapons and supplies, marked with the red sun of Japan. Her fists bunched and her eyes stung, not at this blatant show of fattening up the Japanese Army warehouses, but at the expressions on the soldiers’ faces, placid, impervious, already sure of their victory.

Turtle eggs. Of course we ought to distrust all foreigners. She left the Bund and hurried up Sichuan Road to Avenue Édouard VII, the boundary street between Frenchtown and the International Settlement, with a number-three redhead Sikh on the pedestal in the center of the intersection, directing traffic. She watched him send motorcars, pedicabs, and buses through the intersection with his hand signals, and when a lull in the traffic cleared the avenue, she was startled to see the new American piano player from the Royal. He stood on the corner looking east, toward the river, which gave her time to study him. Though his renown in the city had already put ten thousand pairs of eyes on him, as people liked to say, he did not seem to stand out. His face was reserved, and did not announce him.

When the Sikh gave a burst on his whistle and signaled with stiff-stretched arms, she started across with the knot of pedestrians who had accumulated around her. She was within a few feet of him and was opening her mouth to speak when he turned and saw her.

“I almost walked into you,” she said.

“What?” His mouth went slack. “You speak English!”

“Song Yuhua.” She touched the tip of her nose with her forefinger in the Chinese style rather than extending her hand.

“Thomas Greene,” he answered, looking at her through a daze. “Would you call me Thomas?”

She stared at him on the sidewalk, while people streamed around them, gamblers, office workers, painted-up prostitutes with their stout old amahs hurrying behind them, bald Buddhist nuns in ash-colored robes. “All right. And I am Song.”

“May I ask where you learned such good English?”

“Tutors, at home.” She could not unlock from his eyes, which were round and fringed and very dark in his milk-tea-colored face.

“All families in China do that?”

“Only wealthy people,” she said, and in this unexpected moment, face-to-face with the American, she felt the protective shell of forgetting she usually kept around herself dissolve, and she saw her old life, the existence she had taken apart in her mind and stored away. There it was again, her home, the cistern quickening with its fantailed goldfish, the wall of fragrant wisteria, the plum tree court with rattan recliners. In the warm weather her mother used to lie back in her silk pajamas beneath the branches, and recite Tang dynasty poems. That was the last time she had felt truly understood by another, during those soft nights, answering those great classic lines with quick smiles of understanding; after that, her mother had died. And her father had started to gamble.

Thomas Greene held her gaze in his, as if he wanted to see all the way through, straight into her. “You’re far away,” he said. “Back home?”

“Yes.” Her eyes lifted in surprise.

“I lost my home too. My mother passed away, and I had to strike out on my own.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be,” he said. “I wish you’d tell me how you came to be here, in Shanghai.”

She noticed he was rocking from foot to foot, unsettled, forgetting himself. Maybe he felt something too.

But she was not free to feel anything. Du had thousands of men in Shanghai who would kill anyone who crossed him, including her, at his slightest signal. We call this growing water lilies. She was not even free to stand here with this American, two rocks in the human stream, face-to-face, visible to all. Even that was dangerous. “It is bad for us to be speaking like this, on the street.”

“Somewhere else, then,” he said. “I’ll meet you.”

“No,” she answered. “Impossible. I am sorry.” And she turned away quickly, so he would not see how much it hurt her to do it.

Thomas found himself endlessly checking the archway into the lobby that night, hoping she might appear behind Du Yuesheng. But the box remained dark. He had no idea when he might see her again, if ever. He told himself when he kept his eyes on the door that he was watching for the Japanese Admiral Lin had warned him about, but that was untrue.

On the third night he finally caught a movement of skirts in the lobby, and his heart almost jumped up his throat. He lost his way in the music, recovered. Errol and Lester sent him looks, always the first to notice his mistakes. He looked up again: Anya. It was Anya.

It had been more than a week since their dinner. She had not returned to the club, and though he had gone by her rooming house once and left his visiting card beneath her door, he had heard nothing. After his brief meeting with Song, Anya had frankly drifted from his mind, but Song was someone he might never see again, and Anya was here, beautiful in a floor-length white silk dress, smiling. Quickly he motioned to one of the waiters, a skinny fellow named Wing Bean, and in the toe-tapping space between two songs, he slipped him some money to go out for a gardenia.

When the band took a break, she came right over. “A joy to see you,” he said, tenderly fastening the flower in her hair. “Our evening together was unforgettable.”

Her face clouded. “Oh, dear. I don’t remember anything-did I disgrace myself?”

“That would not be possible,” he said.

“Why?” Her cashmere brows drew together.

“Because anything you did would be all right.”

She smiled at this and said, “I received your card. I was out of town.”

“Then welcome back.” He caught her arm. “Stay,” he said tenderly. “Stay until we finish.”

She did, and as soon as the last set ended, they left the theater and rode a rickshaw directly to her lodging.

The place was smaller than he had imagined, only one room, cramped by a bed, dresser, and chair, with one tiny gabled window. It also lay at the top of four long flights, but that he barely noticed; he would have climbed mountains to get to her, to have love in his arms for a night.

Anya filled a small cup with water from the old-fashioned basin and pitcher atop the dresser, detached the flower from her hair, and with thrifty care settled it in the cup. He had a strange sense of being back in Baltimore, in a narrow row house where vents were closed off to save all the heat for one room, and a child’s clothing, when torn, was always taken apart to be stitched into something else. He had seen his mother linger for long minutes at the strawberry man’s mule-drawn cart, finding what was bruised and crushed and talking the man into letting her have it for a few cents less.

He watched as Anya placed the flower by the bed and then peeled her dress from her milky shoulders. She turned her back with a natural ease for him to unhook her. He put his hands on her skin, different, satin to his velvet, and the pale feel of it was exciting to him. As he picked her up and laid her on the bed and undressed her, the greatest difficulty was holding himself back, and their first time was over all too soon.

But he awoke before dawn the next morning and they did it again, slowly now, and at leisure, until both were still and content.

He thought she might protest when he said he had to go, but she was sweet, acquiescent. “There’s a clean washcloth on the dresser, and a towel. Beside the basin.”

He washed and stepped into his clothes before he kissed her. “Thank you.”

“No, no, all thanks is for you.” She wound her arms around him and kissed him back, stopping just before she drew him down again.

It was getting light when he came to the house. He let himself in quietly, slipped up to his room, and stretched out between his sheets. Now he had what he wanted, a real woman. He folded a pillow behind his head and closed his eyes to enjoy the first early voices from the lane, the tinkle of cart bells, the crank-up cough of an automobile. He was replete with love, so every sound was music to him, every noise an echo of beauty, doors opening and closing, wheels creaking, the burbled cooing of the spotted dove outside his window. But just before he surrendered to sleep, when the real world started to clank apart and disassociate itself into the other, it was Song’s face he saw, not Anya’s.