Night in Shanghai

6

SONG YUHUA SAT in front of her mirror Friday evening, August thirteenth, struggling to restore her inner calm as she applied rouge from a small pot. Two days before, Chinese troops had defied the ’thirty-two ban by marching into Shanghai, and were joyfully greeted by cheering crowds, including Song, who waved her handkerchief from the bridge above Suzhou Creek and shouted with the throng-Ten thousand years to China! Though she spilled tears of joy at the sight of troops, she also knew somehow that the brown dwarfs would not be stopped, not by these men, or any number of additional Chinese soldiers who might follow them. Demands and reprisals flew back and forth between the two governments as a result of the entering soldiers’ having broken the treaty, until the Chinese army promised not to fire first; thus was a fragile calm achieved.

In this pause, this bubble of safety, Du decided to go ahead with a large party he had planned for the evening. Scores of invitations had gone out, opera singers were engaged-Du adored opera, and despite his lack of education had earned the city’s respect as a connoisseur-and caterers worked furiously in the kitchens. By seven o’clock, black motorcars clogged the driveway and every room was full, even the foyer, with men and women in evening dress talking in fluid Mandarin and the lighter staccato tap of Shanghainese.

Song was about to rise when her door swung open suddenly, rudely, with no knock. She nearly let out some brusque words, but left them to dissolve in her throat when she saw it was Fiery Old Crow, who was always to be obeyed.

“Number fourteen,” he said curtly, and she followed him down the hall, knowing he meant one of the many small wood-paneled, curtained, and bulletproofed studies that lined the second floor. Du scattered his meetings among these rooms, always changing, so that no one outside the building ever knew his location.

Her mask almost cracked when she walked into the room and saw that the man waiting next to Teacher was Dai Li, the infamous head of the Nationalist Secret Police. He was known not only for killing Communists but for stretching their deaths out to be as long and entertaining as possible.

He has come for me. The thought seemed to tear her heart out of her chest. But she steadied herself, watching him, waiting.

Within a minute, she saw there was no danger; he barely perceived her. He did not even glance at her body, tight-sheathed in crimson silk, or her hair, tied back with hothouse gardenias. This fit what was said of Dai-that he did not go with women, and not with men either, preferring to avoid the house thing altogether. He even required all the men under his command to be celibate as well. Whatever the reason, she was apparently invisible to him, and could breathe again.

“Here.” Du thrust out a copy of the North China Daily News, China’s most important English-language paper. “She reads English,” he said to Dai Li, as if this rare ability was commonplace among bondmaids.

“Teacher,” Song said respectfully, with lowered eyes. Quickly she scanned the article before starting to translate, and her last hopes sank. The foreign powers were calling on Shanghai to simply give up-surrender to Japan!

When she was almost finished putting the article into Chinese, the door clicked open and Lin Ming came in, making a silent reverence to Du and Dai Li. She came to the last paragraph: “However bitterly Japanese aggression may be resented, it can hardly be denied that its extension would be encouraged rather than stayed by physical resistance from the Central Government, and would be accompanied by such complete destruction of China’s resources that all hopes of national reconstruction would have to be indefinitely postponed.”

The silence of outrage filled the room. Everyone had been hoping the Concession powers would help them-depending on it, in fact.

Du spoke first. “How dare they print such a treasonous demand?”

“They are telling us to what? Form a puppet government?” said Dai Li. “Just like they did in Manchuria, with ‘Emperor’ Pu Yi!”

“That poor fool,” said Du. “Haven’t you heard it said? The ghost of one devoured by the tiger helps the tiger to devour others.”

Dai Li nodded. “England and France and America do not care if we fall to Japan or anyone else, so long as they can keep making money.”

A rustle of movement brought Du’s attention to Lin, who still stood beside Song, his face full of pain. “Teacher, forgive my intrusion, but I just heard the news from Uncle Hua that you have been awaiting. Thomas Greene received an invitation today by message boy from Admiral Morioka, to tea.”

“Tea?” said Du. “Where? When?”

“Tomorrow, at the hour of the rooster. Café Volga on Avenue Édouard VII.”

“It’s a trap,” guessed Dai Li.

“Trap of what?” countered Du. “Our men aren’t going to be out in the open.”

“All I know,” Lin said, “is he sent his boy with the invitation. And Thomas Greene accepted.”

Song wanted to scream and tear at her hair. How could he accept, after he had been warned-by Lin, by her-

Dai Li, with his bulbous forehead and flabby midsection, bounced from one foot to the other in a dark troll parody of childish excitement. “We won’t miss. His mother! We’ll kill everyone within ten feet of him.”

“Not the piano player!” said Lin. “Not the American.”

She touched his arm from behind, wanting to get him alone so they could talk.

Du turned toward Lin’s voice and saw to his surprise that Song was still there, standing behind Lin, listening. “Go,” he ordered, and she obeyed.

It was past eight the next morning when she awoke to the thud of bombs and distant, toylike pops of gunfire. She jumped up. Plumes of smoke were rising above the rooftops far to the north, well beyond Suzhou Creek, in the direction of Japanese Army Headquarters. She prayed their evil command center had been hit by Chinese bombers. Late last night, word had raced through the Party that a full-on Chinese counteroffensive was about to start.

Just as she began to dress, Ah Pan slipped in. “Elder Brother’s downstairs.”

Thanks to heaven. “Have Lin wait for me in the garden. Bring Dongting oolong and xi fan. Tell him by the time the tea is ready to pour I will be there.” She paused in front of the mirror to put up her hair. “Go!”

Ah Pan vanished.

On the back lawn she found him waiting, brooding as he stared across the back wall toward the smoke. For the first time ever, he looked old to her, his face sunken, cheekbones bulging. He looked more like Teacher.

“It’s going to rain,” she said, to lighten things with a joke, for now, even as the Japanese bore down from the north, a typhoon was roaring toward them from the east, its black clouds piling up in the sky.

Lin smiled mirthlessly as servants appeared with xi fan and condiments. She ladled the rice gruel into his bowl, and added the spring onion, smoked fish, shreds of river moss, and crisp peanuts she knew he liked. Another explosion boomed from the northeast, where the skies were darkening, though it was morning.

“Ge,” she said, Elder Brother. “About Thomas.”

“I know!” Lin burst out. “I warned him. Nets above and snares below-how could he do this?”

“He has to be warned again.”

Lin spooned up his xi fan, wincing at the far-off grumble of thunder. “They are watching me day and night.”

“I’ll go,” Song said quickly. “No one will suspect me.” It was true; though she translated nimbly whenever English was needed, Du saw her mind as capable of containing the two languages, and nothing more. “Why would they connect me to him? He is nothing to me.” She watched Lin carefully and saw to her relief that he had no idea she and Thomas had met, not one time, but twice.

Lin said slowly, “Do you think they would let you go out today?” He glanced to the north, where bombs flickered against the storm clouds.

“It’s Saturday. Every Saturday I go downtown to buy Taitai’s medicine. Taitai needs her medicine.” She did not have to remind him that even though the Supreme Wife was incapacitated, in traditional ranking she was still the most important person in the household next to Du himself. “Should I go to his lilong house off Rue Lafayette?”

“No. I just telephoned; he is not there. He went to a studio he keeps on Peking Road, just off the Bund, opposite the river. I have told him it’s unsafe there.”

Her eyes widened; unsafe indeed. That intersection lay directly in front of the Idzumo, the Imperial Navy’s flagship, a massive war machine and an obvious target. “Don’t worry, Brother, I’ll go. I’ll take care of it.”

Normally she left to buy the herbs late in the day, but at one o’clock, seeing the northern suburbs burning, she decided she dared wait no longer. The radio buzzed and chattered: last night Chiang had given the order to begin attacking Japanese positions, and now Zhabei, Wusong, and Jiangwan were on fire, with the Eighty-eighth Division struggling to hold the Japanese back and sending up plumes over the cityscape. The time was now.

At the front door she was accosted by the guard. “I must get Taitai’s herbs.”

“Danger. No one goes out.”

“Taitai needs medicine. You know I go every Saturday. Her medicine is used up.” She raised the prescription. “I must go.”

She saw him hesitate. “Give a look.” She threw her gaze out toward Rue Wagner. “It is quiet now, safe. In a few hours, who knows?”

“The Supreme Wind is coming.” Tai Feng.

“I will be back before it is upon us.”

She saw his mind working. Taitai’s health was no small matter. “If Teacher comes home to find her sick-”

“All right,” he said. “But one person, no. Someone must accompany you.”

“I’ll get my maid,” she said, needing to grasp the reins quickly, before he could call one of the guards.

A minute later, she and Ah Pan passed out through the compound gate into Rue Wagner, and instantly were pushed and eddied by a crowd unlike anything either had ever seen. A mass of Chinese made an endless white-shirted column trudging through the sweltering streets, carrying what they could, everyone pushing into the French Concession, another country, neutral, where they hoped to be safe from Japanese bombs or street-by-street attacks. Blocking the tide of refugees were islands of those who had walked as far as they could and then stopped, huddled on the ground to rest or sleep, children and clothing and cook pots shielded from the plodding line by their bodies.

Song and Ah Pan linked hands and pushed through to Édouard VII, where Song’s hopes that the trolley might be running soon evaporated, for nothing moved there except the slow streams of people. “We will walk,” Song said, wondering how she was going to separate from the maid to see Thomas. They pushed against the human flow, out of the French Concession.

“Come, little one,” Song said, when the girl’s pace slowed. “Not much further.”

But the bondmaid stopped. “I have to go,” Ah Pan said.

“Go where?”

“Home.”

“Your village? In Hebei? No,” said Song. This was impossible, no matter how much Song might have wished for privacy. “Too dangerous! There are no trolleys. What makes you think there are trains? You don’t even have money.”

“I have money,” said Ah Pan, and touched her pocket to make a pathetic jingle of coins.

“Ah Pan, listen to me.” Song took both the maid’s hands. “You are better off here. In Teacher’s house you will be safe, safer than almost anywhere.”

“It’s my family,” said Ah Pan.

Song felt the stab of it. It could hardly be worse for Ah Pan’s family; her native place had been overrun. “Listen,” said Song. “When this is over, I’ll ask leave for you to go see them. I’ll take you. We’ll go together. Right now-” she gestured toward the explosions, wondering if the maid would even be able to get out of the city alive. Thunder broke and mumbled across the sky; on top of everything else, Shanghai’s low-lying streets would soon be knee-deep in water as well. “Come,” she said to the girl, “let’s walk.”

When they reached the herbalist, she turned to Ah Pan. Risky though it was to leave the girl on the sidewalk for a minute, to take her inside was impossible. No one from her life could meet the herbalist. “I need you to wait out here for a moment while I get the herbs. You cannot travel now. I swear to you, as soon as it is safe, we will go.” That was all she could say. She believed in freedom, and that meant the girl was not hers to command, in the end.

Ah Pan stood stubborn, and they faced each other like two trees rooted in the earth. Finally the girl said, “Xia yi beizi,” next life. “Ni jin qu ba.” Go inside.

“Please don’t go.” She didn’t want to let Ah Pan leave; it was dangerous. She wished she could command her. Suddenly everything that had drawn her, the rights of the worker, the equity, the higher way of thinking-all of it was xin luan ru ma, as tangled as a heap of rope. Her voice was a whisper. “Wait here. Please.” And she turned away even as it sliced her to do it, and walked inside.

Uncle Hua stood at the kitchen door with his pant legs rolled up, slapping at mosquitoes on his calf as he peered up at the blackening sky. A siren screamed in the distance, making his heart startle and his flesh jump, turning his thoughts again to Master, who had not slept at home the night before, and still had not returned. Hua had told him over and over that his studio was dangerous, sitting as it did directly across from the Idzumo, but Master never wanted to listen. Wooden head, wooden brain. Moreover, it was wrong for him to leave Hua alone with the young brothers now, with the enemy approaching. He was the only servant left. Little Kong, Chen Ma, and Uncle Zhu had all departed the day before, back to their home villages, leaving a lot of trouble for Hua.

Then there was his gambling business, which had abruptly withered. Things had never before gotten so bad that people stopped gambling, and though he was sure they were overreacting, they stopped playing nonetheless, and he could not bring them back. Twice cursed was the fact that just now he was out three thousand, most of which was Master’s money. This was a sum he could normally make back in two or three weeks of busy operations, but now he had no operations at all. Curse the brown dwarf invaders. Curse their mothers. May their guts shrivel and protrude out through their mouths and be gnawed off by rats.

He heard a noise behind him and saw Ernest in the doorway. “Little Master always look see,” he said, pretending annoyance at the teenager, whom he liked.

“Hua Shu,” said Ernest, having added “Uncle” to his modest repertoire of Chinese words. “Where’s Thomas? He still didn’t come back.”

“Master stay studio side.”

“Not now,” said Ernest. “Listen to the bombs.”

“Master working.”

“Not now. Thomas knows it’s just the three of us here. He would have come home if everything was all right.”

Hua shrugged.

“I have to go check. Give me the address, catchee chop-chop.”

Hua folded his arms. “No can do! Trouble very bad. Many peoples dead.”

“That’s why I need to go.”

“No! Two Little Masters stay here.”

“Yes. I am going to look for him.”

“No. You stay! I go.” Hua rolled down his pants, then huffed and muttered as he poked through the cupboard, finally pulling out an ancient black umbrella which he unfurled with dignity, leaning halfway out the door to open it and stepping out carefully beneath its canopy. Charles had come clattering in behind Ernest, and the two of them watched as Uncle Hua stomped away in the wind, twisting his umbrella this way and that to shield himself. Soon his gown was soaked and clinging to his midsection, and the wind, which the radio said was at seventy-eight kilometers per hour, tore his umbrella right out of his hands. He plodded on in his bubble of dignity, turned the corner, and vanished.

Song made her way north on Jiangsu Road, turned right at the Land Bank, and crossed Yuanmingyuan Road. That was when she saw it, the Bund, the Peking Road Jetty, and the Idzumo, the great flag-snapping killer whale, moored right there in the river and surrounded by passenger liners, junks, freighters, and bobbling sampans, all tied down and riding hard at anchor. The first raindrops started to fall on her as she hurried down the block, past the majestic offices of Jardine Matheson and Canadian Pacific, to the small side door Lin had described to her, opening directly onto the sidewalk twenty or thirty meters in from the Bund. Next to the door was a louvered wood shutter, and behind it the window was open. She could hear the piano.

Inside the room, Thomas had been playing since he awakened, still full of feeling from what he had seen the night before. It had been hot, and the waiters had propped open the lobby doors for air, so that through set after set, Thomas and his fellow Kings had watched the steady stream of people carrying bundles and children and elders on their backs, pouring into Frenchtown, where they thought they would be safe. The band performed to them all night, doors open, and every number they played carried the rootless blues of their homeland.

When he awakened in the studio, he could smell the coming rain, and hear the river churning, boats butting and knocking, warning sounds he knew well from the coves near his grandfather’s farm on the Eastern Shore. It was enthralling, a drama, and it drew him naturally to the piano.

He laid his hands on the keys in D-flat major and played the arpeggiated left-hand waterfall of Liszt’s concert étude Un Sospiro. In his right hand, he added a simple melody, not Liszt’s melody, his own, but bent and stretched, with the worried notes added. It grew, drawing energy from the weather. He kept up Liszt’s left-hand pattern, and with his right hand, he followed the wind, calling, responding. Then the rain started, first a scattered counter-rhythm of drops, but soon a jackhammering roar. He played to it, swelling the sound, until he heard something.

It was a pounding. Someone knocking at the door.

Who would come here? Quickly he pulled on his trousers, and snapped the suspenders up over his bare shoulders. Where was his shirt? He tilted up the shutters.

Song! He yanked the door open.

She jumped in, out of the rain, her cotton qipao plastered to her legs and body.

“How long were you standing there?”

“Since the rain started. I ran here almost all the way, but when I heard you, I was listening.”

“Is something wrong?” He took her shoulders, lightly, and feeling how wet they were, reached for a towel and unfolded it over her back. “Why are you alone, with all this?”

“My maid was with me, but she left. She wants to go home. I could not stop her.” She drew the rough-nubbed cotton close to her while the rain drummed on the shutters.

“Leaving Shanghai, now? Shouldn’t we go look for her?” There was so much ren qing in his face, and it slipped its warm and simple arms around her though they stood several feet apart.

She caught her breath. It was that same safe feeling she’d had before, in the teahouse with him. Before her mother died, she had felt this way all the time, protected as if by the laws of nature, but never since, with any other person. “No,” she said heavily. “But I thank you. She is gone. To find her is impossible.”

“I’ll go with you, if you want. We can try.”

She shook her head. “It was her choice, Thomas.” She softened the words by touching his arm, wanting to let him know how much his kindness meant to her at that moment.

He guided her to the single chair and sat opposite her, on the piano bench, while she took down her hair and then expertly, unconsciously, re-twisted it behind her neck. “I came for Lin,” she said, “though no one can ever connect this with him. Swear.”

“No one will.”

“He says you must not go today. I say the same. No doubt you came to the same conclusion. Perhaps you said yes just to throw him off? But this chance Lin and I can’t take. We decided one of us had to come.”

“Don’t worry. I would not dream of going. And he won’t go either. I mean,” he added quickly, “not in these conditions.” He glanced out at the storm with its bass notes rumbling underneath the random percussion of explosions from the city’s north side. “Come.” And he stood and held a hand out.

The single room held the bed, a chair, a bureau, the piano, and a screened-off corner for the washbasin, but he led her into the little square of floor between the bed and the shuttered windows.

On top of the bureau the gramophone waited, lid raised. Thomas wound the crank, pushed the lever, and dropped the needle. The song was “Saddest Tale,” Duke Ellington’s big-band blues; it started with a cry from the clarinet that rose like a breaking wave to start off a slow, heart-thudding rhythm. “Do you want to dance?”

She looked anxious. “I do not dance.”

“Neither do I,” he said. “I am always at the piano, remember? Try.” He opened his arms to her, the gesture marking the slow, stepping rhythm, and guided her into position. “That’s it,” he said. “Now just follow.”

The rhythm was languid, yet the song was anything but simple. Every chorus kicked off a new set of chord changes-one reason he had been listening to it, that and the deep, tinny sadness of the bass-scored trombones. Now he was just glad of the pulled-out beat that let him draw the length of her close to him.

Duke’s mournful voice came through, so soft it was almost a bubble from the depths, speaking the song’s few lyrics: Saddest tale told on land or sea is the tale they told when they told the truth on me. She stumbled and he caught her easily. “Step on my feet. That’s right, just like that. You’re so light.” And he got her moving with him, finally. He could feel her reticence beneath his hands, the little quiver under her skin, so he kept his arms strong but loose around her. He would wait for her.

They stepped apart when the song ended, both a little scared. She busied herself looking through the music on the piano. “What’s this?”

“Charts and scores for the band’s songs.”

“And this?”

“Something I made up.”

“What’s meaning, made up?”

“Wrote. Invented.”

“Play it,” she said.

So after resting a microsecond on the low D-flat, he let go of the rippling, repeating pattern in the left hand he had used before, modeled at first on Liszt, now mutated into something new. His right hand sang with his melody, simple and unexpected in its counterpoint against the complexity of the left.

Then with no warning his right hand started something new, a melody he had not tried before, which came from nowhere and belonged to that moment, making it as much hers as his. As he followed it, the melody became everything he had wanted to show her, his little family of Mother and his grandparents and his father, who had died, and then his mother going too, leaving him. That was pain, and it circled around the melody in every kind of way, crying of loss and sadness. And then, as if following the movements of a sonata, he broke into the passage that answered those cries with resolve and harmony. Here was his odyssey across America, the land for which his father died. He traversed the sweet, tangled woods of Maryland and Ohio, the velvet-block fields of the Midwest, the sheets of sunlight over alpine meadows atop the Rockies, then Seattle, Shanghai. When he came to the last phrase and the final, tonic D-flat chord, home again, it sounded the deep bump of their lighter against the wharf, the magic moment they disembarked, he and Lin, the beginning and the end. He let the note hang and then rested his hands in his lap until the drumming of rain once again filled the room, nothing else. He had played as well as ever before.

And improvised. It was a simple feeling, clear as a bar of light on the wood floor, and it had something to do with her being there.

Standing behind him, Song sensed it too; she had never heard him play quite like this. She felt the charge, almost saw it in the air between them.

Everything seemed possible. He was open to her. But she also felt the chill of fear. She was no maiden, yet no man had seen her naked body, and she had little sense of what men and women actually did together. She knew how it ended, of course, because Du had done that, stabbing her distractedly as if relieving an itch. But there was more, surely. Certainly.

Part of her still believed, had never stopped, and from that private place she reached down and slid his suspenders off his bare shoulders. He turned, joy and surprise in his face, searching her eyes, seeking a yes, a sure yes, and then catching her hands in his and drawing her down to his lap.

The wind had dropped back slightly and the rain settled to a steady spit by the time they were quiet atop the sheets, arms and legs tangled in a way that Thomas knew would somehow link them forever, no matter where they went after today.

“Do you know,” she said, her hand moving through his hair, “this is the first time I did this of my own desire. If you had rejected me, I don’t know what I would have done.”

“Never. I dreamed of this.” It was true in more ways than he knew how to count. Every girl he had known, even the nice girls back in Baltimore who had been out of reach for him on account of his poverty, had been imperfect. There was always something off, some qualifying streak to mar their appeal. Not her. She was all his hopes, idealized.

So it was a surprise when she continued, her voice tentative. “He did it quickly, and never even looked at me. For all these years I have thought I did the thing wrong. Or that maybe something was not right inside, though I bled the first time-”

“Song.” He looked at her exquisite body, yellowed-ivory skin, the strong, frank hips that had urged him higher and higher. “You were wonderful. It was wonderful. Couldn’t you tell?”

“Yes!” She pressed against him. “But I didn’t know. He never even saw me naked.” She touched his chest. “You know all my secrets.”

“All of them?” He parted her legs. “Did he do this to you?”

Her mouth opened, surprised. “No.”

He felt more love, as she arched up to meet him, than he had ever felt before, for anyone. He steadied her hip with his hand, and his voice went down to a whisper. “Let me show you.”

Much later he got up and moved to the piano, and once again started to improvise. He played full of happiness, even though bombs kept sending their shuddering blasts up, just a few miles away. No love without death. And then just as a sob can escape a man’s throat before he is quite aware of it, a melody came up from nowhere through his hands and made a lovely, melancholy little turn.

He left it, played on, and came back to it again. He was riding it more than creating it, and for the first time in his life, he felt the difference. It was a kind of ecstasy, something like being with her. Then he heard something new, a voice-it was her, singing along with him, high and clear and true to pitch. All that, and this too?

She sang the line back when he was finished, replicating it perfectly, and asked him what it was.

“Just a melody,” he said, unable to stop grinning at her singing. “You pick a name for it.”

“My name,” she said. “Song.”

“No, no, everything is a song. All of America is in a song. Pick another name.”

“Tell me the style of the piece.”

“The way I was playing it, with that arpeggiated left hand and the melodic, singing right hand-that would be a nocturne. A piece for the night.”

“Like Ye Shanghai,” she said.

“Yes, Night in Shanghai.”

“Call it that. It belongs to this city.”

“All right.” He pulled her naked body to him. “Song, I want to stay here with you forever, but it’s bad outside. Don’t you hear it? I need to take you back to Rue Wagner.”

“I know.” She wrapped herself around him. “I was going to say it too.”

“Then say we’ll see each other again.”

“We’ll see each other again,” she answered, but the sudden dullness in her voice made him bite back what he wanted to say, which was Tell me when. Tell me how. Instead, he closed the mahogany lid over the keys and they got dressed.

As Thomas and Song were leaving the Peking Road studio, Zhao Funian, Du’s hired assassin, was peering out into the rain from his rented room on the corner of Avenue Édouard VII and Tibet Road. The restaurant where that brown dwarf whore Morioka and the foreign piano player were supposed to meet, right next to the Great World Amusement Center, was ideally located across the street from his window. The only problem was that the Great World had decided to hand out free tea and rice, and thousands of refugees, who had been filling the French Concession for days, were now squeezed into a clotted bottleneck directly in front of his target. He would never get a clear shot without killing a few others, but what did that matter now? One had to be thorough in crushing dry weeds and smashing rotten wood. His rifle was poised, and he scanned through the rain, while Wing Bean, who stood next to him, studied the crowd through binoculars.

“Ei, is that leper turd really going to show up here? Today?” The radio was chattering about the fighting in the northern districts, and the bomb concussions could be heard and felt underneath the rain, while the street below roiled with people fleeing for their lives. Morioka seemed unlikely to keep a tea date. It was five minutes to the appointed time.

“The rain is slowing,” Wing Bean said, continuing to sweep his binoculars back and forth across the packed sidewalk in front of the restaurant.

Zhao shook his head at the futility of it. “That whore’s not coming.”

But then Wing Bean staggered, so suddenly Zhao thought he had been hit by some stray bullet, shot, and felt a stab of sadness, such a young man-

But the younger man was only shocked. “Gods bear witness! I see him. It’s him. The piano player.”

“What!” Zhao snatched the field glasses from him and trained them down on the dense mass of refugees, dialing the focus, frantic. “Are you blind in your dog’s eyes?”

“No. I work at the Royal! That’s him.”

“Where?”

“On the corner. See? He’s with a woman.”

“A woman-” Now Zhao had him at last in his sights, and his stomach turned over: oh yes. He was with a woman all right.

Song Yuhua.

“Get the camera,” he whispered. She was pressed close to the American as they moved together, her dress wet and clinging, her hips sinuous, talking to him, pressed up to him, touching him, by all his ancestors. Touching him. “Hurry!” he cried to Wing Bean, who saw the same thing and stood with his mouth hanging slack.

“But that whore Morioka could arrive any second. He’s the one we-”

“Stupid melon! Get the camera!”

Wing Bean pawed through his canvas bag.

“Give it to me. Is there film in it? Hurry!”

But Wing Bean held it back from him. Something profitable was about to occur, without him. “Why?”

“Never you mind!”

“Why?” Wing Bean repeated, which caused Zhao to swing at him-and miss.

Zhao glanced out across the street. Her clothes were wet and everything of her body was visible. He swallowed back excitement. “The girl?” he said. “Take another look.”

Wing Bean’s mouth dropped as he recognized her.

Zhao kept his palm open, his eyes hard as steel. “Give.”

“Reward. I want half.”

“Dog bone! There will be nothing if I don’t take a picture!”

“Forty parts of a hundred.”

“Twenty-five. And that’s generous!”

“Thirty-five.”

“Twenty-eight.”

“Done,” said Wing Bean, pleased, and allowed him to snatch the camera.

“Curse you and that scar of your mother’s you slid out from.” Zhao yanked off the lens cap, raised it to his eye, and twisted the focus, no, too far. Back again. Now he had lost them in the tide of people. There. Shameless! She was holding his arm. His face would be huge when Big-Eared Du saw these photographs, along with a bonus big enough to take back to Zhejiang and show his brothers how a real man lived. He was the best of the five of them. He had climbed the mountain. There: he snapped. Perfect. Then another. A third. All gods! Now he was pointing down the block, toward the café where he was supposed to meet Morioka, and they were talking-now turning away from the café, hurrying south on Boulevard de Montigny instead. She was whoring with him! He clicked off pictures until they turned again at the first corner, away from the boulevard, and passed out of sight. Zhao’s guts went to jelly as he imagined what Du was going to do to her when he saw these photographs. “Any sign of the Admiral?”

Wing Bean did not answer. He wore a strange look.

“Speak! What is it?” said Zhao.

Wing Bean said only, “Look,” his voice slow, his finger rising to point. There, against the rumbling bank of storm clouds, a Chinese fighter plane was lit up, one of its engines exploding into flame and hemorrhaging smoke, making it roll and pitch wildly.

Zhao shot a rapid, involuntary glance back to the street. Du’s woman and the American were gone. But the pictures were safe in his hands.

Then he heard a word from Wing Bean, soft, barely audible, “Amithaba.”

Why does he invoke the Buddha? he wondered. Only then, above the avenue, did he see the stepwise line of bombs falling from the plane like pellets, gusting with the rain, drifting sideways, directly toward them. It was the last thing he saw.

Thomas and Song were halfway down the next block when the blast that was to kill a thousand people at the corner of Édouard VII and Tibet Road shattered the air around them, muffling their ears into silence for long pressurized seconds until their drums popped, and a wall of screams rose up from one block over. Plumes of smoke and dust billowed over the rooftops.

“Look,” she said. The plane, clearly marked with the Nationalist flag, was wheeling away into the clouds.

“It’s Chinese.”

“How can that be?” She looked like she might cry.

“A mistake,” he said, arms around her. “Listen. You sure you’re all right? Yes? Then we have to get you home, now.”

“But if the bombs fell right in that crowd-” Cries for help and mercy were carried to them on the wind.

“Song.” He took her face in his hands and turned it toward him, because she could not tear her gaze from the corner, where people stumbling away from the blast were already filling the street. “You’ve got to go inside the compound. Everyone will be focused on this. You can get in.”

She slipped her arms around his neck.

“Not here,” he cautioned, but before either could move, they heard the click of a shutter. He turned in shock and horror to see Wing Bean, from the Royal.

“Big-Ear Du will very like that one,” he said, winding the film on to the next shot.

“Wing Bean,” Thomas said, strong. “What are you doing?”

“Taking picture.” Wing Bean, still clicking, was clearly hurt, bleeding from a wound to his head, as he stood in the middle of the road, snapping photos.

“Give me that,” said Thomas.

“No. So many picture, touch and kiss. How much you give me?”

Thomas saw that the side of Wing Bean’s head was caved in, his skull broken. How was he standing up?

“What you give me?” Wing Bean repeated, and started to cough. A second later, bloody foam bubbled from his mouth and into his cupped hand, which distracted him for a second as he stared at it in surprise. One hard lunge, a fast grab, and Thomas had the camera. In an instant he had ripped out the film, unspooling it in the light.

“Doesn’t matter!” Wing Bean cried, and tumbled to his knees, gasping, gurgling. Behind him, the crowd stumbling away from the bomb site surged closer. “I saw you! Zhao saw you too, but he is dead-I saw! I am going to tell Du everything.”

Thomas took Song’s arm and pulled her back a step, out of the way of the human wall barreling up Boulevard de Montigny behind Wing Bean. The waiter did not see them; he was still shrieking at Thomas, his words bubbling in blood.

Neither answered, because at that moment another huge bomb exploded from the northeast, and a smoke-and-debris cloud tufted up from the area around the Bund-where Thomas’s studio lay. Wing Bean turned too, and saw the crowd running straight into him, knocking him over. In a short time he was flattened, barely visible but for the rumple of clothes and the blood running out under people’s feet. They must have been able to feel the squish and bump beneath their shoes, they must have known, but it was madness, death all around, and no one stopped even to look. Her hand crept into his.

They stood a long minute, and neither needed to speak. “Go home,” he said finally, into her ear, and she turned away.

The next day he and Ernest and Charles gathered around the radio to hear the news: three thousand dead from the bombs that fell in the International Settlement. This was followed by an official announcement made for foreign residents.

“Here we go.” Thomas turned it up, and they huddled close.

The consulates of Great Britain and the United States hereby advise all citizens to book immediate passage out. Shanghai is in a state of war and these governments cannot guarantee the safety of their citizens who choose to remain behind.

“Book passage?” Thomas said. “How?” The brothers had only a few hundred saved between them, and all the cash he had was with Uncle Hua, more than two thousand Chinese dollars, another reason they needed to find the old man, because that would be enough to get all three of them out, and Alonzo too, if he was finally ready to go.

But Uncle Hua had not come back. Thomas guessed he had gone home to his family, but he knew it could be worse. Thousands were dead. And what had happened with Wing Bean had shown him that it took only one bolt out of the blue to snatch one’s life, or warp one’s fortunes. It was like the unexpected ninth in Duke Ellington’s “Blue Ramble,” the ninth in the bottom of the stacked chord that changed the song, changed everything. The turn. Wing Bean was dead, and they were safe.

That night, at the Royal, he brought up Hua’s absence with Lin Ming, who puckered in concern, and said, “Tomorrow morning we go see his family in the Chinese City.”

On the way there, Lin scolded him for feigning acceptance of Morioka’s invitation in the first place.

“I had no intention of going,” Thomas protested. “You warned me. But his boy was standing there. My servants used to handle these things for me, and I did not know what to say.” Weak though this was, he was keeping the truth to himself.

“That’s stupid,” Lin snapped. “Wooden head! I was so worried, I had to send my sister. And then everything happened and she barely made it back!”

“But she’s all right?” said Thomas, barely able to breathe now that she had been mentioned.

“Song? Yes. She’s fine,” Lin said, his brows lifting quizzically at Thomas’s interest. Good, he did not know.

They disembarked on Zizhong Road, where Hua’s family lived in a third-floor room so crowded Thomas wondered how Uncle Hua could run a gambling operation in it. Lin and Hua’s wife talked in light, percussive Shanghainese-bird talk, Thomas always thought when he heard it-while the children, two boys and a girl, watched in silence. Thomas relaxed a little, looking around, for Hua’s wife sounded normal, which to him meant that she knew her husband’s whereabouts.

Ah, there was the gaming table, behind a curtain. The small space also contained beds, a shelf of books, a single charcoal burner for cooking and heating, and a yellow-painted night stool in one corner half-hidden behind another curtain, merely a bucket with a simple lid and a seat on top.

The place was small, but the family benefited in all ways from the city outside. Lin Ming broke off from his chat with Hua’s wife for a moment to show Thomas the basket and rope the family lowered to the street to exchange coins with vendors when they heard the cries of their favorite snacks: Steamed rice cakes made of rugosa rose and white sugar! Shrimp-dumpling and noodle soup! And-From the east side of the Huangpu River-beans of five-fold flavor! The basket went down with a few coins, and came up with food.

And then there was the gambling business, the gaming table. Thomas certainly hoped his savings were safe.

At that moment Hua’s wife suddenly released a long, high-pitched wail of grief, shaking her hands in the air as if they burned. It was ice-cold clear that until that moment, she had thought her husband safe at the house off Rue Lafayette.

There were so many dead that most of them had been piled quickly into common graves while the tapering rain washed the gutters clean of blood. Thomas and Lin exchanged a look of pure pain as they realized where Hua must have ended up and, each man holding an arm, they helped Hua’s suddenly weak wife to a chair. For a long time that day they sat with her, while she alternated between keening sobs and tearful conversation, none of which Thomas understood as it poured out of her. He felt awful; Hua had gone out looking for him.

“It was his fate,” Lin told him, when they finally picked their way back down the stairs to the hot, noisy street.

Before their departure, Thomas had seen him repeat his condolences and then insist she accept all the cash he had on him. Now, it appeared that Hua’s unfortunate ending was not his burden anymore. But it’s mine. Just like Wing Bean.

“I asked about your money,” Lin said. “She has no idea where it is, if there is any. Hua was down right before he disappeared, almost three thousand.”

“Figures,” said Thomas. Was this the first of his many punishments? Because that was his savings, vanished. Everything had happened so quickly-the turn, the discord, the unexpected ninth-and now he was broke, and could not leave. And yet Song had come to him too, which in its own way made it right, all of it.

They went on playing every night, and the crowds kept coming in, even while smoke still drifted from the rubble outside. One of their own was missing, Wing Bean, and Floor Manager Zhou prodded everyone about him. “You see Wing Bean, yes-no?” he asked Thomas, the other musicians, the hat-and-coat-check girls, even the men who worked in the kitchen. It went on for days. Thomas froze every time he had to answer, and barely managed to get out the word no before he collected himself and made a promise to keep an eye out for the young man. The way it happened kept coming back to him, like small explosions in his mind. He remembered how, after Song had hurried off down the chaotic street toward Rue Wagner, he threw the film into the carcass of a burning car and watched it shrink and shrivel, ignoring the pleas and screams all around him. Before he turned toward Rue Lafayette, where he knew the brothers would be worried about him, the crowd had thinned for a second, and he had seen for the last time the spreading stain that had been Wing Bean. And now Zhou would not stop asking.

By the next Friday night, the storm water that had flooded the low-lying streets had receded, and huge fires broke out in the Pudong and Wayside districts, big enough to light the sky. On Sunday, heavy shelling could still be heard from Hongkou when the Kings finished their last set at two A.M. A couple of nights after that, huge guns and mortars sounded from Jiangwan. And yet the house kept filling every night, and the six of them performed.

He longed for her, wondered day and night when he would see her again, but when he really felt close to Song was when he was playing. Even simple, affectionate standards like their signature, “Exactly Like You,” were now anthems to her. At the piano, he imagined a life with her that could never have been, staying in the studio, remaining in that room forever.

When they grew hungry, he would tip a beggar boy who lived across the Bund in a space underneath the pilings to fetch hot food. “German or Cantonese?” he would ask her.

“Cantonese,” she would say with a laugh, and move closer to him.

It was all they would do, love each other. He would play the piano, make tea. Dressed or not dressed, speaking or silent, their togetherness would express itself in thought and laughter, music, the day’s routines. “Shall I send the boy for dim sum?” he would say as he held out her cup.

Before, he had mastered his repertoire through practice. Now he closed his eyes, found melodies, and followed them until they grew through their own turns and variations, always as he dreamed of her. He realized this was the same feeling the other fellows had when they soloed, and with only six of them now, everyone except Thomas took long solo flights.

Tonight he might do it, full as he was of love and loss and troubled notes-so that when he signaled a solo for himself, and all the other instruments fell back in surprise, he took straight off into the sky with a rhapsodic ladder of joyfully tinkling dance steps that brought shouts and applause from the ballroom floor, and grins and nods from the bandstand, even Lester and Errol. Beautiful, said the voice in his head, and he understood that it was Song’s. She was with him.

Applause washed over him in waves. To keep it going, he led a quick chord change into “In a Sentimental Mood” in D minor, and then, in a subtle show of virtuosity, modulated to F major after managing to toy with D-flat major for a moment-but tickling it perfectly, lightly, his beat exactly square. He was true and he was a liar; he had dealt both love and death.

From his end of the stage, Alonzo heard Thomas’s playing soaring on its own, and kept his eyes on the piano as his own left hand ranged up and down his fretboard and his right plucked, slapped, and hammered down the percussion and the bass, as one. He wondered about it as his fingers danced the beat up and down, pulling it, popping it, until the truth swam into view: the young man was in love. That’s it, son. Right there. He caught Thomas’s eye and added his own smile to the roar of approval that was washing up from the dance floor. The boy had been to the mountaintop.

On the thirteenth of September, a month after the fighting started, Song met Chen Xing at Café Louis on Bubbling Well Road. Here, the city’s most elegant cakes and chocolates were created by chefs plucked from the tide of skilled Jewish refugees pouring into the city. To Song they were an oppressed people, and as Shanghai ren she was proud of her city for welcoming them in, while she also enjoyed the fruits of their talents with candid pleasure, such as the signature ganache here at Café Louis. Like most places in the French and International Concessions, the restaurant had reopened after the first few days of the battle, even though shelling, bombing, and small-arms fire could be heard almost every day and night, and intermittent food shortages played havoc with the menus.

This time Chen Xing came alone, and they talked in voices pillowed almost to a whisper, since Shanghai was filled with spies. The Communists themselves had moles in the Nationalist government, the French police, the Bank of China, and many other places.

He appeared pessimistic. “We will not hold out for long. The Japanese have been landing reinforcements at Wusong and up and down the Huangpu for days. Thousands of dwarf soldiers have put ashore.”

“But the Italians?” she said hopefully. The wireless had been reporting that the Savoy Grenadiers were on their way from Addis Ababa.

“No. Unless one of the big Western powers joins the fight, the city will fall.” He looked at her with sympathy. “What will you do?”

“I am a bonded servant,” she reminded him.

“If that changes?” He watched her face. “Many people are leaving. You know the government has already abandoned Nanjing and moved to Chongqing,” the new wartime capital. “Some people are going to Hong Kong. If they are staying in China, they go either to Chongqing-”

“-if they are with the Nationalists.”

“Correct. Or Yan’an.”

She nodded. That was the Communists’ wartime capital, a dusty, wind-whistling town on the Yan River which was where every true pilgrim of the movement wished to go-including her. Securely behind Red lines, in a part of north China controlled by the CCP, it was that mythic place where she would be able to live openly in her beliefs. Glorious.

She put her gaze back on Chen Xing. “What about you?” she said, for he could either come out now with the Communists, or continue to hide among the Nationalists.

“I’ll go to Chongqing,” he said.

“So you will stay belowground.”

“It suits me.”

She nodded. He was the scion of a well-off family; no doubt he wanted to hold on to his wealth and privilege a little longer, too. Living as a double agent would make it possible.

“Your new contact will get in touch with you through a business you already patronize,” Chen told her.

Song understood. The Party owned many businesses, everything from furniture stores to tea shops to real estate agencies. Their premises were used for meetings and handoffs, sometimes without managers or employees even knowing. Song loved seeing the pieces fit together behind the surface scrim of reality; she had come to understand that perception itself was power.

So was planning. If Du left, or if he set her free-who knew what this war might bring about?-she would have to be ready to act.

She could go with Thomas to America. The thought brought an onrush of love shot through with the darkness of their last moment together, watching Wing Bean die. He would protect her, she knew that. Even though he had not asked her, and she had not said yes, she knew the door to him lay open.

To go with him, though, meant giving up her cause completely. “I have often thought of going north,” she said, this being of course the only version of her future she would present to Chen Xing.

“To Yan’an?” His eyebrows rose. “You’re the sort of modern woman I’d expect to run to Hong Kong or America the minute the manacles were off you.”

She bristled. “You doubt my commitment?”

“Not at all.” His eyes registered her response. “I am impressed by the risks you take. But I warn you, be careful. You will always have the taint of foreignness.”

“What about you?” she shot back. “You are ‘leaning down’ from a well-off family. Your family’s wealth is as dangerous as my English. It is a risk for both of us. But if you run from a risk, then how do you call that commitment?”

“Touché.” He pronounced the French with a burnish of irony, and she wondered with a jolt if he had been testing her.

But she could pass any test. “If I were free, I might go north. And if I do-”

“You will need introductions. When the time comes, send word here”-and he wrote a few characters on the back of his card for her-“to my brother’s house in Chongqing. I will write to them about you.”

She took the card, grateful. Everything was a political process. “Thank you.”

“Not at all. Are we not the same purpose?” On her way out, she savored this new term he had used, tongzhi, same purpose. Comrade. She liked it. She wondered if it would catch on in the movement.

Fighting continued through September, mostly sparing the French Concession and International Settlement, but leaving parts of Hongkou and Zhabei so bombed out that only a few hardy souls were left holed up in the damaged buildings. Thomas crept back and forth to the theater every day, and even the Higgins brothers returned straight home after work. They spent hours on stage trying not to wince at the intermittent bursts of shooting and shelling, and by the time the clock hit two and the lights finally winked up, everyone wanted to shake hands at the door and hurry home. Late at night, when they were all in and safe, and Thomas was alone in his room with his oil lamp, he worried. All of them were saving as much as they could, but inflation was driving things up, and getting enough cash to go home seemed far out of reach.

And there was Song. He ached every day for her, and wondered how he had gotten through all those years before he met her. It did not matter, because they knew each other now, in every possible way, and he had no doubt they would be together every minute if it were not for Du. She would be with him if she could.

By the end of the month, there were signs around the city that a climactic offensive was coming. Fresh soldiers and supplies moved through the streets by the truckload, in vehicles painted with the Rising Sun. The radio reported that separate Japanese divisions were marching simultaneously toward Nanjing. The Americans had doubled the number of Marines in Shanghai to three thousand, hoping to protect American property. Trouble was ahead, and everyone could feel it.

October kicked off the offensive, shooting and explosions from all directions, and the bass thunder of big guns. By late in the month, Thomas had to acknowledge that China was losing. Wave after wave of Chinese recruits had come in, looking pathetically young, fifteen, sixteen-even Charles and Ernest were older. And then Chiang Kai-shek ordered a retreat to defend the rural suburbs, and in a blink, those last soldiers were gone altogether. Japanese flags sprouted at intersections and post offices, and the streets outside the neutral Concessions were littered with eerily abandoned firing nests, sandbags still piled protectively, shell casings on the ground.

A single Chinese battalion stayed behind to cover the retreat. In what was surely a suicide mission, eight hundred men withdrew to the Sihang, or Four-Bank Warehouse on Suzhou Creek at the corner of North Tibet Road. Because the warehouse was directly across from the neutral International Settlement, the Japanese were afraid to attack it. By the second day, British soldiers were brazenly crossing the bridge to deliver food, cigarettes, ammunition, and first aid supplies to the warehouse.

When the onslaught against the eight hundred finally began, everyone in Shanghai was glued to the saga of the brave soldiers dubbed the Gu Jun, the Lonely Battalion.

On October twenty-ninth the sun came up over the Chinese flag, smuggled in by a twenty-two-year-old girl and miraculously hoisted high above the warehouse roof. Thomas and Charles and Ernest hurried to see it, and found thirty thousand people lining the banks of the creek that bordered the International Settlement, chanting and waving Chinese flags.

They stayed until it was time to go home and dress for work, but then a messenger arrived with a note from Floor Manager Zhou. “The Royal is closed tonight!” Thomas cried, scanning it. “We are to play on the roof of the Gas Works building, right across the creek from the warehouse. They will roll a grand piano out there and put down a dance floor.”

They arrived to find the roof transformed into a chilly autumn fairyland of hanging Chinese lanterns and potted chrysanthemums, already filling up with guests in evening wear, both Western and Chinese. Waiters circulated with champagne, and as soon as the Kings swung into “Exactly Like You,” couples stepped into each other’s arms and onto the dance floor. Pops and spatters of gunfire sounded down below, adding grit and hesitations to their rhythm. Every time there was a large explosion, the air would fill with screams and cries as all the men and women rushed to the roof’s edge, to look over and cheer with the crowds below, and on the rooftops all around.

Between sets they took a break, and he saw a familiar elongated shape emerge from the elevator inside the propped-open doors: Du Yuesheng. Thomas barely breathed as he counted out the entourage-until there she was, Song. And then as quickly as they had appeared, they were gone, vanished to a lower floor, it was rumored, to watch the battle from a private room. Thomas steeled himself and focused on playing.

Suddenly, after midnight, the cries of astonishment from the crowd became so urgent that the musicians ran to the parapet to see. Three Japanese soldiers had managed to sneak a ladder over to one side of the building and climb up to a bombed-out opening. Just as they reached it, a man appeared in the opening, the battalion’s commander, Xie Jinyuan. Everyone on the roof held their breath as he shot the first Japanese, strangled the second with his hands, and threw the third off the ladder before knocking it away altogether. The rooftop went mad with joy, and for a few precious minutes, chaos reigned. Thomas used this time to move quickly through the crowd, and look for her. But she was absent, along with Du and his bodyguards.

They played out the last set and then kept going, responding to the crowd, pushing further. Everyone sensed this was the end.

It was not until dawn was near that they shut off the lights. Lester and Errol went home, and Alonzo took Charles and Ernest out to help them find a rickshaw, which left almost no one on the rooftop except Thomas and the workmen, cleaning up. So he took some music from his briefcase and played Brahms, because it calmed him.

Then he heard a woman clear her throat, a gentle but specific sound already as close and natural to him as middle C. It was Song, just inside the door, half-hidden in the darkness. “I thought you left,” he whispered.

“Careful,” she said.

He looked. The only other people on the roof were men folding tables and taking up the dance floor. Not one of them was looking in Thomas’s direction.

Six steps, and he was with her, in the shadows. “Where is Du?”

“In a meeting, downstairs. They think I am gone to the restroom.”

That meant she had only a minute. “Song-”

“No,” she said quietly, putting two cool fingers on his mouth, “Don’t.” Her other hand sought his, and their fingers linked quickly and naturally. She brought her face so close to his that their cheeks grazed. “I know,” she whispered, and they stood for a long moment, until a fresh burst of gunfire startled them, followed by a grenade blast and the rumble of falling masonry.

“All of them will either die or surrender,” she said bitterly. “Then it’s finished. We will belong to Japan.”

“Not Frenchtown. Not the International Settlement.”

“Congratulations-a lonely island in an occupied city. And now my time is run out,” she said miserably, holding his eyes. “Stay alive for me.” And after a brief, desperate squeeze of his hand, she vanished.

Over the next few days, the dominoes fell. The Lonely Battalion was down to 376 men, and Commander Xie Jinyuan had them make a run out of the building and across the bridge into the International Settlement, protected by their gravely wounded compatriots who were dying anyway and had volunteered to cover them from the machine gun nests. British troops cheered them into the Settlement, arrested them, confiscated their weapons to prevent anything falling into the hands of the Japanese, and put them up in a building on Singapore Road they dubbed the Lost Battalion Barracks.

With this last act, Shanghai’s War of Resistance shuddered to a close. Through November, Thomas saw brown-uniformed soldiers rolling in by the truckloads, placid, complacent, bouncing along. He saw them down by the river on their time off, walking with a bottle of sake jammed in one pocket and two bottles of Asahi in the other, eating fruits out of hand, taking what they wanted from stores as they passed.

They set up checkpoints at intersections and bridges. At the steel-truss Garden Bridge, which connected the unoccupied Bund to the occupied Hongkou district, everyone had to bow from the waist to Japan, with no exceptions-cars had to stop, the tram down the middle of the bridge halted and disgorged its passengers; everyone had to do it. Thomas adapted with relative ease to this new regime, for all his life, around white people, it had almost always been necessary to defer. And since he was a foreigner, the Japanese went easy on him, letting him pass with the kind of perfunctory bow that would have gotten a Chinese slammed with a rifle butt. Suddenly his race was the right card to hold in the game of fear and death. Sickening. The new slang word for the occupiers, which even Thomas, with his nonexistent Chinese, learned to recognize, was mo shou, the evil hand.

One day at the end of November, Lin Ming received a message that he was to be at Rue Wagner, at the hour of the rooster. His first fear was that the conquerors were taking over one of his ballrooms, because the night-world continued to roar, with the drugs, gambling, and liquor flowing so fast that all over town, the abacuses chattered until dawn. Backstage office safes bulged with profits, and he was dreading the day the Japanese decided to take the money for themselves. He had been sensing doom; was tonight the night?

Or maybe there was trouble with the Germans again. The Nazi organization in Shanghai was small but well established, with its own network of spies and agitators, and they were furious about the numbers of Jewish refugees arriving in the city. They also hated the fact that the city’s very wealthy Jews, like Sir Victor Sassoon, and Horace Kadoorie, had stepped up to care for penniless arrivals in dormitories and soup kitchens. Small loans were arranged for individuals wishing to open the same businesses they had run in Germany, and soon the Jews had started their own schools and clinics, and even built a synagogue. He and Kung had passed several evenings with Du, urging him to resist the Nazis’ demands to restrict the refugees, whose numbers were currently swelling by a thousand a month as they stepped off the Lloyd Triestino ships from Genoa. Fortunately for them, Du was not hard to convince; he had hated the Nazis ever since Hitler told Kung they should surrender to Japan.

Lin Ming arrived at the tightly shuttered second-floor meeting room first, and realized that all these identical red-tufted rooms were another of the old man’s superstitions, like the lucky mummified monkey’s head that he wore hanging from his back collar inside his gown. Like the ancestral temple he paid to have built in his home village, where the air was clouded by incense and the lights of candles danced along the wall, even though his forebears were nothing but dirt-poor alley dwellers. And like this room, with its dark wood paneling and softly glowing silk lotus-bud lamps, which brought back his brothel boyhood. Of course his father kept his rooms like this. One day Lin probably would too, if he made it through this war.

And he had his own beliefs, his superstitions; one of them was Pearl, and the weeks of battle had shown him that he cared about her, and her safety, too much to leave her in the brothel. He had to save to get her out.

He had been with her the night before, and all her goodness was still there, her sweetness, even though she had passed her twenty-eighth birthday and he had not talked about buying her out. It was over, forgiven, and she loved him just the same, which opened him enough to tell her he had started to save. He did not know how long it would take-there was the war, years maybe-and it embarrassed him to hear himself saying these things, which were still weak and evasive, but she burst into tears beneath him, holding his shoulders, her legs going limp around him in her rush of love and gratitude, forgetting entirely that they had been in the middle of the house thing. He held her, and knew that he was committed; he would raise her buyout, no matter what it took, or how long. The war had made it all clear.

The secret door clicked, and Du entered in a gray silk gown.

“Teacher,” Lin said respectfully.

Du responded with a nod of his bald head. “I need you to translate.”

“Of course.” In some situations, only a male translator would do.

“A Japanese officer has arrived in Shanghai and insists on seeing me now, tonight. Just a few minutes, he says. Doihara is his name.”

“General Doihara? Head of the Japanese First Army in north China? The one who calls himself Lawrence of Manchuria?”

“The very one.”

“But you need no translation. He speaks Mandarin. And, they say, some Shanghainese.”

“I know. I have had him informed that I speak neither language. You and I will speak tonight in Suzhou dialect.”

Lin suppressed a smile; Suzhou hua, the language of his mother. Du was always a step ahead. “Isn’t Doihara the one who set up Pu Yi as puppet emperor in Manchuria?”

“That’s right. He has a lot of brass between his legs, coming here. Does he think I am corruptible? Perhaps he does not know that in Shanghai, thieves and police work together. The cat and mouse sleep entwined. We already are the government! It is an outrage-as if I would turn against my city.”

“When is he coming?”

“He is here now, the dog’s fart. I suppose we have kept him waiting long enough.” Du opened the room’s main door and stepped out into the corridor, at the other end of which was one of the larger studies, with a desk at one end and soft, antimacassared chairs squared around a low table in Chinese style at the other. The room had been deliberately overheated on Du’s orders, made stifling, and in the center of it, a compact sweat-beaded Japanese in full dress uniform, heavy with medals, waited uncomfortably on the Tianjin carpet.

As they entered, Lin’s father spoke to him in soft Suzhou hua. “Look at him. See how he smiles? He’s a liar! He pretends to come in civility, but even now they are sharpening their weapons for the fight.”

The General had a small, severe mustache and large, sad, droopy-lidded eyes, above which one eyebrow rose perennially higher than the other. He touched his heels with a light tap and bowed.

Lin bobbed his head in return, and said in Mandarin, “Please excuse us that I must translate for you. My master speaks only his native dialect.”

“No excuse needed,” said Doihara, “and please thank him. I know he is very busy.”

“Tell him of course I am,” said Du, masking his Suzhou dialect even further with a coarse country accent. “How can I rest for even a moment? Dwarf fiends are running amok.”

Lin said, “He says, he has an engagement tonight. But as you said this was a matter of importance-”

“We want to help you keep peace in your city,” said the General.

“That’s a damn lie. He needs to withdraw from our city.”

“We do not require your help,” Lin said.

Doihara sighed, as if dealing with a stubborn youngster. “Hostilities may have ceased, but we need a functional government. That is the important thing. Then Shanghai can return to normal. We will run things very well-deferring of course to you, Lord Du.” And he lowered his head.

Lin smiled inwardly. He had heard the gaffe, and he knew Du had too. No one addressed Du that way. Papa Du, and Teacher, but never Lord Du. Doihara’s Mandarin was excellent but his advance work incomplete.

“Tell him to fuck his ancestors.”

“What did he say?” said Doihara, the words in Suzhou dialect being a little too close to those he understood.

“Forgive my hesitation,” said Lin. “My master used an old-fashioned honorific, a form used between rulers and diplomats-” Ah, good, at this Doihara’s face brightened. “What he said was, fen ting kang li.” He is so happy to receive you as equals.

Lin was afraid he would not swallow this, but Doihara gleamed. “Tell him thank you. That is why I am here-to find a way to stop all the violence and restore order, which is better for everyone, is it not? But I do not want a Japanese leader for the city. No! For this is China.” Doihara stood taller, rising to his prepared remarks. “There must be one supreme leader, all-powerful, answerable only to the emperor. Leadership. Greatness. One man above all.”

Lin translated.

Du was furious. “Does he dare to imply that I will be his cursed dog’s legs? Am I a traitor, to lick the evil hand? No. He’s playing fiddle in his pants. Tell him that. Go on.”

“My master regrets his duties leave him little time to concern himself with city politics.”

“Not so!” said Doihara, seizing what he thought was an opening. “There is no citizen more august, more widely loved, more trusted by Shanghai people than Du Yuesheng.”

Lin found this so priceless that he had a hard time keeping the glimmer of a smile off his face while he put the words in Suzhou hua.

Du snorted. “He’s blowing the ox vagina so hard, isn’t he afraid it’s going to explode? Translate that.”

“My master says, you exaggerate.”

“Not at all,” said the General. “He is the one to lead. He deserves it. Please ask him to take his time, and think back and forth. Give me his answer forthwith.”

“I’ll give it to him now, the suppurating pustule! Tell him if he is not off my grounds in ten minutes, I’ll have his throat slit. Tell him.”

“My master regrets,” said Lin. But efforts to sanitize what the boss said had become useless.

Du’s face was reddening. He made a curt bow, a deliberate parody of the Japanese gesture.

Lin heard Doihara’s gasp. “If I may,” he said, and moved to guide their guest to the door, in at least some semblance of dignity.

But Du stopped him. “Flowery Flag will see him out.”

Another insult, for Lin was a son and Flowery a thug. Lin watched, his heart hammering, as the bodyguard clomped out the door with the General, every step seeming to seal his father’s fate. Of course the older man would never collaborate, having poured half his fortune into the Nationalist war coffers, but this?

The door closed. “I went too far,” Du admitted.

Lin bit back astonishment; never had his father acknowledged fault before. He had certainly gone too far, and now there would be retribution. But he had shown courage, too, which Lin admired. “Spilt water cannot be gathered,” he said gently. “You handled him just right.”

The messenger said Song was to meet Duke Kung in the lobby of the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank building on the Bund, but he did not say why. She assumed he would be relaying instructions from Du, whom she had not seen since they all fled Rue Wagner in the middle of the night after Du’s debacle with Doihara, following which the Japanese military circled the house with loud-droning fighter planes until Du finally abandoned it, bundling them all into cars, and dispersing them to safe houses around the city. He had been the last one out of the mansion, padlocking it before Song saw him climb into another car with Flowery, Fiery, Fourth Wife, and their children.

But that had been three nights ago, and since then Song, like the rest of Du’s staff, had heard nothing. At least now the waiting would be over, for Duke Kung would know everything.

Outside the bank, she surprised herself by pausing to give a good-luck rub to the paw of one of the two bronze lions on either side of the door. This was a custom of Shanghai’s poor, and the lions’ paws were polished to a bright gold by all their hopeful hands. I’m one of the people, she thought, but she felt no luck, only trepidation as she strode into the bank.

With its gilded columns and faraway ceilings, the lobby had the magnificence of a cathedral, the sounds of voices and telephones and leather shoes tapping the marble floors hushed by the immensity of space and money. Yet her eye found Kung instantly, his small, portly figure commanding attention. Then she turned and saw Lin Ming walking through the door behind her. So it was the two of us who were summoned.

Kung led them to a group of overstuffed chairs, and as soon as they sat down, a young woman appeared with a teapot and three lidded cups on a tray. She poured and retreated to a respectful distance.

“Old Du asked me to call you,” Kung said. “He’s gone.”

A muffle of silence seemed to fall as she and Lin threw shocked looks at each other.

“Gone?” Lin said. “Speak reasonably.”

“I am. He left last night on a French steamer.”

Song said, “To where?”

“Hong Kong. Eventually, Chongqing. But he has left Shanghai.” Kung picked up his tea, looked at it, and set it back on the low table between them, where their cups also lay untouched.

“Forever?” Lin said shakily.

“Forever”-Kung narrowed his expression ever so slightly as he paused, to convey the delicacy of his answer -“well. Naturally he hopes to return. But at the same time, by leaving, he knows he renounces his power over the Green Gang-and over you. That is forever, whether he comes back or not.”

“Both of us?” Her voice was sick with hope.

Kung pulled a key from his vest pocket. “Let’s go,” he said. “I’ll show you.”

As soon as they rose from their seats, a fawning bank manager materialized to lead them to the safe deposit vault, and in a room with locked metal drawers stacked to the ceiling, they sat at a small wooden table while Kung opened the box. He handed each of them an envelope.

She gave hers to Lin. “I can’t. Tell me what it says.”

He tore it open. “You’re free. He renounces the claim on your family’s property.” She sagged in shock while he read his own. “Me too, free. He gives us each a thousand in severance pay.”

“Ge,” she said quickly, Elder Brother. “Take mine. You need it for Pearl.”

His face twisted. “I need more than that for Pearl. And how could I take your severance? You have nothing, Meimei.”

Her face closed, pulling down the curtain. She could go with Thomas now, or north to join the cause, and in either case a thousand meant nothing next to the diamonds. But what she said was “I don’t care about the money. Just being free is enough.” And that was true.

“He could have kept you another-”

“Ten years,” she said abruptly, because she had always known, every day, every minute, how much longer it was. Now, after they had said dazed good-byes to Kung and stepped back out into the December cold, she tore the flowers from her hair and threw them on the sidewalk; never would she wear them again.

Lin watched the fragile blooms turn quickly to pulp under the careless boots of passersby. “What are you going to do?”

She could be with Thomas, walk into his arms right now, abandon her country and stay with him forever. The thousand was just enough to buy them two tickets, and she could surprise him with the diamonds at sea.

Or she could go north, and reach the culmination of the dream she had been living for all this time.

Not both.

“Well?” he said.

“I don’t know yet. But before I go anywhere, may I borrow the key to the padlock at Rue Wagner? I need to go back for something.”

“Du cursed the place. He said none were to enter it.”

“Du’s gone. One hour, and I’ll bring the key back to you.”

“Gowns, furs, what?” He dug in his pocket. “You always said you hated that stuff.”

“I do hate it. It’s something else, of no value to anyone but me.” She took the key. “Just a picture on the wall.”

That night, when the Kings closed out their last set and came back for the encore, Thomas was halfway through a highly embellished, rhythmically arch version of Rhapsody in Blue when he looked up and saw something he had never before seen, Song entering by herself. Instead of climbing the stairs to the balcony box, she walked straight into the ballroom, looking different, her delicate frame overwhelmed by a mannish wool overcoat. She stood watching him as he faltered, recovered his place in the music, and made it to the end only because he had played the Rhapsody so many times. When it was over, the applause roared up, crested, and dribbled away as the lights winked up and he flew to her, presto agitato.

“What’s happened?” She wore no earrings, no rouge, just her skin, clean and plain. She had never been more beautiful.

“Du’s gone.” She took both his hands in hers, something she would never have dared in public before.

“I ran to the mansion when I heard-it was locked up-I looked everywhere.” He blinked. “What do you mean, gone?”

“He insulted the Japanese General who came to negotiate with him, and now he cannot come back. I am free.”

“And your family’s debt?” he said.

“Forgiven.”

He took her hand then and led her straight out to the lobby, returning only to get his coat when she insisted. For the first time since the night they opened, he bypassed the crowds who congregated around the door, and fled directly into the street. “Du has put me in a small apartment for a week,” she said as she beckoned to a pedicab with an awning-covered seat. They spread their wool coats over them like blankets and nestled in deep beneath the awning, hidden from view, for the long ride across Frenchtown and then into the circular labyrinth of the Chinese City. Finally, was all he could think. He knew she had her life, her cause, and he wasn’t going anywhere near all that. But he also wasn’t going to let her go again, not if he could help it.

Once inside her room, they did not leave again until noon the next day, when the need for tea and something to eat finally drove them downstairs. Outside, Thomas found the world transformed, animated, vibrant, the lane bright and clattery with vehicles and voices. The winter walls on either side were strung with banners, and the cobblestones coursed with folk in padded coats. On the bottom floor of her building was a rice shop with gunnysacks of grain stacked almost to the ceiling, and it seemed like the center of the world, with customers streaming in and out all day. He was awake to life.

And hungry; he was sure he had never been so ravenous. “Here,” she said, stepping into a sesame cake shop, and soon they were sitting on porcelain stools, washing down crullers called you tiao with scalding tea.

“I love this,” he said.

“Me too,” she said, thinking he referred to the breakfast. “It’s simple. When I was a child, it made me proud to be rich. Not now. All that time I lived in Du’s mansion, I didn’t like any corner of it.”

“I know,” he said. “But I meant you,” he said. “Being here. Waking up with you.”

Her eyes shone with agreement and her hand sought his. “I have never known anything like this.”

“Come home with me. Come meet Charles and Ernest, they’ll just be having breakfast.” It was disarmingly casual, and to his joy brought a grin of agreement from her. He hadn’t expected her to say yes, any more than he had expected himself to ask, but this was Song, and now she was free and everything was different.

He knew somehow during those weeks that no matter how long he lived, he would never feel anything higher or better. First she moved into the studio, after the room Du had rented ran out. Whereas Anya had filled the room to overflowing with her clothes and shoes and hatboxes and assorted treasures, Song brought almost nothing with her, a small square suitcase which held several plain, side-slit qipao dresses, and a spare pair of shoes. Aside from her overcoat, she kept everything folded in the suitcase. He said something about the bureau being almost empty, but she used only the suitcase, and he did not suggest it again. It pained him a little to see it there, packed and ready, even when they were naked and she was abandoning herself to him completely. In time this would be something he understood about her, that she needed an out, even from love, even when she told she had been waiting for it all her life, even when they both could feel it growing, in their little room, night after night.

He did not mention the future, and he did not ask her what she did all day, either, for when they arose at midday, she always left, and did not rejoin him until she arrived at the Royal sometime that night. He understood her commitment, so he kept quiet, afraid to ask her to choose.

Outside their door, the city was sliding. The Green Gang was rudderless without Du, causing all the areas of Shanghai life it had once controlled to tip into disorder. The guilds of beggars and undertakers, peddlers, touts, and night soil collectors all ceased to function. Somehow the trains ran, though the station itself was a shell, and every train leaving Shanghai seemed to be full of residents streaming out of the city.

Yet those who remained kept coming to the Royal, frantic, determined, wading through hillocks of rubble in their silks and flashing jewels, crossing into the blessedly unoccupied areas of the French Concession and the International Settlement, now dubbed the Gudao, or Lonely Island. The drinks flowed, the restaurants served, The Good Earth played at the Grand Theater, and when darkness fell and the Kings stepped out on the stage to a full house, it felt almost like it had felt before.

But soon Japanese men started showing up, peering into things, checking the kitchens, counting the staff. This was the real Shanghai, Thomas understood, not the free-roaming symphony of opportunity and respect he had first glimpsed, but a hard-grinding machine of money and power, the kind you see and the kind you don’t, with no music to it at all.

The person he needed to help sort this out was Lin, but he had been in Hong Kong doing a job for H. H. Kung to raise the money to buy out his girlfriend. It was almost New Year’s before Thomas finally saw his friend’s spindly form in the archway to the lobby. “Call the men over,” Lin said. “I have come back to chaos.”

“Did you at least make enough to meet your goal?” said Thomas. Lin had revealed how much it would cost him to buy Pearl out, a daunting amount, five thousand.

“Far from it. But I am closer. And you? And Song?”

“We’re well.” They had gone to Lin, to tell him everything, before he left for Hong Kong.

“Have you been taking care of her?”

“I would take care of her forever, if she would have me.”

“She has her own ideas.”

“I know,” Thomas said, his face pinched by so much yearning that Lin laid a hand on his arm in sympathy.

The men were gathering around. Lin said, “The Tung Vong Company has been dissolved. The Green Gang has fallen apart. Three of you live in housing provided by the Gang.” He looked at Thomas, Charles, and Ernest. “That’s over. You must be out by the first of next month, by January first, nineteen thirty-eight. I’m sorry.”

The murmur went around the group that it was not his fault.

“Charles,” he said, “Ernest. You have some place to go?”

“They can stay with me and Keiko,” Alonzo volunteered. “We’ve got the spare room.” This brought a murmur of thanks.

“Lester and Errol, you live with your girlfriends-right? Thomas?”

“I’ll stay in my studio. But what about the club?” As bandleader, he was responsible for the others and their livelihood. “Japanese have been in here, looking around. And if there’s no Tung Vong Company-”

“I know,” said Lin. “The ballroom has been running on its own steam, making money. But I have no control over what our new masters do-none.”

“Are we safe?” said Charles.

Lin smiled patiently at the same old question. “Yes and no. Anything is possible, and we all know about the massacre in Nanjing that began while I was gone.” They all nodded gravely; though none had a personal connection to it, the Rape of Nanjing sounded almost too horrible to believe.

“But here,” Lin continued, “the battle is over. Your country is neutral. As long as America is not Japan’s enemy, you should be safe here. No promising. But if America enters the war against Japan, that is the difference. You cannot be here. You must be gone before that. Everyone understand?”

Several protested that America would never enter the war, and so there was no chance they could ever be anything but neutral, but they all agreed to the risks anyway.

Thomas had been told this before. Who was it, Avshalomov? Or Anya? He had seen Anya when he was walking up Tianjin Road the week before; she was entering the Grand Shanghai Hotel. He had drawn back, silent, to watch her, thinking it felt as if years had passed since they were together, not months, so different was he now. No, he thought as the lobby doors closed behind her, it is Shanghai itself that has changed.

In late January, the conquerors got the Royal. Manager Zhou called them together to tell them the theater was being taken over, and he distributed their last pay. Alonzo just stood smiling as if amused by fate. The brothers looked outraged, even though they had already played long past their original contract.

“It is not my say-so,” Zhou assured them. “I want to stay. But everything at noontime tomorrow is locked up for good, so take your instruments.” And he walked away, muttering to himself, down the hall.

That night, everyone said, the Kansas City Kings put on their greatest show ever. People shrieked and applauded, and one or two men twirled dance partners above their heads. At the close of the last set, Thomas played his usual encore, the Rhapsody, and then another encore that put things over the top, the piece he wrote, the piece he had started playing when he was alone with Song on that magical first afternoon, which he had continued to write later, all through the months of battle.

He started it with the undulating, cascading left hand and the cantabile melody in the right, the song of his wanderings. He played his way across the country on freight trains, and he could feel Song listening out in the audience, just as she had listened in the studio on their first day together. He crossed the ocean to the city with its rabid, unruly buildings and its clotted streets, its vigor and its free ricochet of possibilities.

He came to the last part and played it with his eyes closed, barely aware, following the melody and the rhythm out the door and all through Frenchtown, past the waltzing, strutting dancers, the pirouetting waiters, the looping walk of the man who’s drunk too much, and the confident toss of the gambler, once, twice, again. The music rose on a crescendo of success and then sank with loss. When he came to the end, he returned as if by jazz magic to the lovely turning phrase on which everything had begun, his home, the place he had loved and left behind. He had improvised, joined their orchestra at last. Too late, maybe, but it was real, and he knew it from the screaming and stamping of the crowd.

Then it was over, and time to pack up. Thomas could make only one final run of his hand over the eighty-eight keys while the others closed their instrument cases. Now the scuffs on the dance floor were obvious, as were the stains and cigarette burns on the velvet curtains. Nothing was sadder than a nightclub when the lights went up, and the magic of darkness was gone-even this one, in which Song now stood quietly, waiting for him.

Lester and Errol had saved their fare; they said good-bye outside the theater. Alonzo took Charles and Ernest home to Keiko’s. Above their heads, the lights blinked out for the last time spelling the tall vertical word ROYAL.

That night as they lay in bed, he said, “What shall we do? We can stay here if you like, I can find work. Or we could go to America, if you would do me the honor of marrying me.” He said it lightly, so as not to scare her, but still saw the pinch of hesitation in her eyes.

For a moment, she did not speak.

“What?”

“Just-it is too soon. I can’t talk about this yet, first I need to go north. It’s just for a while,” she added, when she saw his face. “My dream for so long, the center of the movement, all the leaders are there, all the thinkers…” She pressed closer to him, willing him to understand.

“What do you mean? How long?”

“I don’t know, a few months,” she said. “After five years in hiding-”

“I understand.” She needed the same thing he had needed when he left home and came to Shanghai, but freedom was different for him than for her. Seeing this, he wrapped her in tenderness, and gave his blessing, even though the last thing he wanted was to let her go. “Just promise you’ll come back,” he said, and she did.

Then she was gone, and he had no work. After giving Keiko enough to cover the first month of the boys’ board, he had 430 Shanghai dollars left, not quite enough for a single tourist-class ticket even if he had wanted to go.

The city had gone quiet, no explosions, no war planes, no rattle-pops of gunfire. Even the cold air off the river, the scent of coal smoke, had a new silence to it. There was little boat traffic. Outside, the Idzumo still sat there, its flag stiff in the winter wind, and around it were Japanese merchant ships, but for the first time, he saw no Chinese vessels, no lorchas and junks, no sampans. They had fled to other waters.

He himself had only his piano, and fourteen handmade suits. He had chalk stripe, gabardine, seersucker, linen, basket weave, wool tropical, and winter-weight flannel, from three-piece suits to casual single-button sport coats with complementary trousers, suits for every occasion. They hung in a row along one wall, as useless as he was. You are special, his mother had told him when he was small. Opportunities come to those special enough to deserve them. Not anymore.

Most of the clubs had closed. Only one American orchestra was still playing, and that was Earl Whaley and his Red Hot Syncopators; they had left Saint Anna’s and moved to Ladow’s Casanova, a cavernous ballroom at 545 Avenue Édouard VII. The place was owned by the Eurasian son of Louis Ladow, an American ex-con and octoroon who, before his death, had run the Carleton Hotel and Astor House ballrooms.

There would be no spot for Thomas, since Whaley had signed on piano F. C. Stoffer, but he thought Alonzo and the two brothers might get positions. Unfortunately Charles, like Earl, played alto, but Charles was good on clarinet, too. Thomas invited the bandleader to lunch.

“The son may be half-Chinese, but he’s still an American,” Earl Whaley said as they cut into their veal chops at the Park Hotel Grill. “So as long as America stays neutral, the Japs’ll let him keep operating. That’s the beauty, right there. Because everybody else has been shut down.”

Thomas nodded, at the same time mentally quivering as he counted up the bill, five dollars at least, but where else were his band members going to get work? The invaders had taken everything. “I hear Japan is setting up a vice district here in Frenchtown.”

Earl lined English peas up along his knife, precise, effortless, a sax man. “I heard about that too. It’s going to be rock bottom. Every kind of low-down operation. You stick your arm in a slot with a few dollars in it, they inject you with morphine.”

“Music clubs?”

Earl snorted. “If you call ’em that. Nobody’s going to play there, ’cept Filipinos.” Filipino bands worked the lowest rung of Shanghai’s club-world, always with passable renditions of the season’s hit songs.

“And everyplace else is closed down?”

“’Cept Ladow’s,” said Earl comfortably. “We’re changing our name, what with the new lineup-Earl Whaley and His Coloured Boys. What do you think?”

“Good,” said Thomas, his mind churning. There was no place else. A year ago he would have dismissed Ladow’s as a second-tier establishment, since they employed dance hostesses. But that world was gone, Earl’s was going to be the only black orchestra still playing, and Ladow’s the one jazz place that had not gone Japanese, thanks to its American owner. It was his only shot.

His mouth felt dry as paper. He reached for his tea.

“How about some pie?” said Earl.

“They have lemon meringue,” said Thomas, wanting to scream. Two pieces of pie was a dollar. He signaled the waiter anyway, and two wedges were slid in front of them.

Now. They were two dark men in a white-tablecloth restaurant that was deserted save for them, waiters standing idle, in a city of dreams that had crashed into ruins. “Earl,” he said. “I need a favor.”