Night in Shanghai

1

THOMAS GREENE AWAKENED on his first morning in Shanghai to the creaking wheels of a cart and a man’s low-pitched singing call. For a long and dearly held moment he thought he was young again, back in Baltimore, with his mother still alive, hearing the cry of the strawberry man who brought his mule-clopping cart up Creel Street in the summer. But then he felt the snap of winter air against his face, and he remembered he was under silk quilts, in China.

The cry sounded again, this time answered by the crowing of neighborhood chickens. He slid out, shivered over to the French doors, and parted the curtains to look down. It was a night soil collector, his musical cry opening doors up and down the lane as housewives set out their night stools. Thomas’s house had modern plumbing and pull-chain lavatories and many other extravagances since, as Lin Ming had put it the day before when they’d pulled up to the place in a motorcar, the Kings were one of the most popular orchestras in Shanghai, and he was their bandleader.

A forest of pops sounded from the south, over the rooftops. Later he would learn it was Japanese soldiers at firing drills on the proving ground below the Hangzhou-Shanghai railhead, but on that first morning, since Lin Ming had told him all about the Japanese invading China, he thought for a chaotic and dreamlike moment that the time had come.

But then it grew quiet again, and he saw the night soil man continuing up the lane unhurried, and the women still opening and closing their doors. No war today. Just his first rehearsal at nine o’clock, when within eight bars, the rest of the orchestra would know he was a fraud.

Not that he was unskilled; on the contrary. He started classical training young, with his mother, then other teachers, and finally in the classrooms at Peabody, where colored students who had shown exceptional promise on their instruments could sit in the back and learn harmony, notation, theory, and composition, so long as they kept quiet. The piano was what people aspired to in his family, a line of ambition that ran through his mother, his grandmother, and now him. When he was small, before his father died in the Great War, his mother used to take him to private salons over in Washington, D.C., to hear polished black musicians play chamber music for hushed audiences. By the time he was nineteen, he himself was performing in starched evening wear. But just a couple of years later, the stock market crashed, and it seemed like no one’d had a nickel to spare since. Teaching dried up, and accompanist work, and playing for church choirs. For a time he got by playing piano for the movies in the theater, but then the talkies came in, and that was that. No one was up in the money, except them that were already rich.

But finally, luck got him work sight-reading the classics at a rich man’s party in Guilford, and word of mouth got him some more. He did not land many jobs, just enough to give his mother a respectable sum toward their rent and food. He should have been happy with that, times being so hard, yet he was always on eggshells because some of these engagements came his way on account of the fact that his looks were light enough to confuse people. He may have been caramel-toned, with eyes as dark as ink, but his features were fine-drawn enough to attract second looks on the street. If he shaved his hair close, he had people asking his nationality. It didn’t hurt that he was a classical player, whom everyone expected to be vaguely foreign, possibly European, though surely from one of the southern countries. When asked his background, he always weighed his answer, since as colored, he got two dollars, but it was five when he performed as a Turk, or a Portuguese-which he did, whenever he thought he could get away with it.

He cracked the wooden wardrobe painted with Chinese scenes to find his meager stack of folded clothes, which seemed to have been arranged on the shelf yesterday before he even made it up the stairs. At home he had been proud of these suits, no, depended on them; they were his badge, the uniform that showed him to be a man of gentle education, fluent in the music of Europe. He had spent his whole life mastering the role, and now-he was here. He knotted his tie and buttoned his threadbare jacket like he was going to a funeral. In a way, he was.

Downstairs, he came upon the servants eating at a round table in the kitchen, but they waved him insistently into the dining room, where he found a table set for one, with china on white damask, all because he was the bandleader. Chen Ma bustled in to serve him some of the rice gruel they were eating in the kitchen along with buttered bread and enough eggs for six men. Hunger overwhelmed him, and when he had satisfied himself and started to slow down, Uncle Hua came in from the kitchen to stand over him.

“Master clothes b’long low class,” Hua sniffed.

“No kidding.” Thomas lifted a shoulder in response, and went on eating with real silver that felt heavy as liquid in his hand. He had seen silverware, of course he had, in rich houses where he had played at parties, but this was the first time he had eaten with it. His mother would be proud; she had made their little place an island of manners and gentility, with her fringed lampshades and her handmade antimacassars, and the exquisite sonatas that trilled out from her parlor every evening. She played the organ and taught piano at the church, and between the two of them, they made do, at least until she got sick.

It came on quickly, but word got out and her friends came to visit, all dressed in their best hats and gloves as she would have been. Even his cousins from his grandfather’s side in Easton, across the Chesapeake, came to see her. Thomas had not seen them in years, not since he last traveled as a boy to their small patch of land, hand-cleared out of the dense, mosquito-whining woods, to stay in their brick house with two rooms downstairs and two up. It was jarring to see them full grown now, as he was, and he shook their hands and embraced them and let them all have a few minutes in the bedroom with her to reminisce about the summers when he and his mother rode the colored bus all the way up to Delaware and then back down the Eastern Shore to see them. He had built forts in the woods while she made pies in the morning, before the day grew hot, after which she passed the afternoons on the screened porch with her mother, who had been her own childhood teacher, just as she had been his. Now the years had passed under the bridge like slow water, the Great War come and gone, the ’twenties too, and he and his cousins were full grown, and his mother lay dying.

He never returned to church after the first Sunday of her illness, when the silence of the great pipe organ announced her absence as nothing else could, not even Reverend Martinson leading the congregation in a prayer for her recovery. Who will play at her service if she passes? was what he heard in his head during the prayer, a thought that shamed him like a wrong, discordant note.

When he got back that day, the apartment was already filled with food, as friends and neighbors swept in and out with their home-cooked stews and casseroles. She thanked them for coming, her hand light and bony in theirs. They emerged from the bedroom with their reports: “Had a rough night, I see.” Or “Looks worse, maybe the doctor’s right.”

At the end, everyone grew strangely more positive. “Looking peaceful,” said Mrs. Hazell from downstairs, and Reverend Martinson, his mother’s friend and employer for decades, said, “Good Lord’s smiling on her today.”

Thomas was in the small kitchen heating up the meals the women had brought so he could put them out on the table by the stack of plates. The living room was full of church ladies, trading stories and gossip, passing in and out of the bedroom and telling each other, She looks more at ease, yes, there’s less pain today. I’m certain of it. Let’s let her sleep. Then they descended on him like a warm, powdered, half-sour old flock of birds, hugging him and blessing him and saying they would be back to see his mama on the morrow.

And then he was alone with her. He finished the dishes, let the sadness drain through him as he emptied the sink. Though he had been born in these rooms and lived here all his life and knew every floorboard and wallpaper seam, it was over. If she died, he would have to move. Where? A boardinghouse? Out west? People said there was work in Seattle.

He took a deep breath and pushed open her door, braced for the odd, sweet smell of sickness. It was there, and over it another note, perhaps a perfume carried in by one of the day’s visitors. “Mama? How you feeling?”

He paused. Should he let her sleep?

His eyes adjusted to the low light and he saw she was so rested, she looked like she had sunk right down into the bed. “Mama?” he said once more.

He laid a hand on her arm and jumped back as if he had touched a hot stove. Cool. He touched her again, slowly this time, everything breaking inside him. He’ll come to your house, he won’t stay long.

“Master?” said Hua, standing impatiently over him.

You look in the bed, find your mother gone. Right, his clothes. After selling everything, even the piano, he’d had nothing left but these two suits, his shoes, and his leather briefcase which had belonged to his father, stuffed now with his favorite music, his personal canon, his life’s work. “These are all the clothes I have.”

Uncle Hua shook his head. “Tailor come tonight.”

“I don’t have money. I have not been paid yet.”

Hua blinked, exasperated. “Master paycheck fifteen day, tailor chit thirty day due never mind.”

“I see,” said Thomas. His clothes were something he had never been able to worry about before. “All right, I guess so.”

Just as he spoke, Little Kong, the household errand boy and most junior servant, burst into the room with a spatter of Shanghainese. Before anyone could reply, an older fellow sauntered in, at ease with his rolling gait in a way that Thomas, since leaving Seattle, had decided was peculiar to Americans. The man’s hair was a gray grizzle, and his brown-eyed gaze kind and good-humored as he surveyed the dining room. “Well now, aren’t we the grandee?”

“I was thinking the same thing.” He stood and extended a hand. “Thomas Greene.”

“Alonzo Robbins. Bass player. Seeing as today’s your first rehearsal, I came to take you.”

“Thank you.”

“Didn’t want you to have to walk in all cold by yourself.”

“Very kind of you. Den of lions, eh?”

“Oh no.” Alonzo grinned. “’Course not.”

“Breakfast?” Thomas indicated platters, half-demolished.

“Thanks. I’ve eaten.”

“Well.” No more postponing it. He shrugged on his worn light-brown wool, inadequate for the cold and clearly a rag next to Alonzo’s fine topcoat, and picked up the briefcase he took everywhere.

The lane was alive in the winter sunlight. Local women sold food from a cart, and one lifted the lid of a wide shallow pan to show them steam-fragrant rows of dumplings. “Tell me about the Kings,” said Thomas, “where they came from.”

Alonzo nodded. “Well-the first members were some guys who played with Bennie Moten’s gang at the Reno Club in Kansas City. But then last year Bennie died having his tonsils out, and Bill Basie took over-you’ve heard of him, people call him the Count because he carries this card around that says ‘Beware, the Count is here.’ You know the Count?” They had come to the end of the lane and Alonzo raised his hand for a conveyance.

“He brought in new players from back east, like Hershel Evans, so he had to drop some guys too,” said Alonzo, “and those guys joined us, along with a couple of fellows from Walter Page’s old group, the Blue Devils. That’s where the Kings came from. We had been playing together in Kansas City about six months when Mr. Lin showed up and hired us over here.”

“I didn’t know he went as far east as Kansas City, looking.”

“Lucky for us he did, I’ll tell you that. Hell of a place! Where’d he find you?”

“Seattle,” said Thomas. That made it sound simple; it had been anything but. By the time he made it to that mist-shrouded city, he was broke and starving, and when the Blue Rose on Yesler Way offered him janitorial work, he did everything but fall to his knees in gratitude. The jazz club opened every night in the basement, and he cleaned it daily in exchange for meals and a small room at the back.

In the afternoons, his work done, he returned to the now pristine basement and its baby grand. In those last hours before sunset, when weak light slanted in through the dust motes in the air, his piano playing would make the owner, Big Lewis Richardson, along with anyone else who happened to be in the house, stop what they were doing and drift down the stairs to listen.

He understood that they were not used to hearing this kind of music in the house, read from the page, at this level of difficulty. “It’s a commitment,” his mother used to say, with a hush, as if art stood above all else. But what had this commitment brought him? Two dollars a night if he was a colored man, five if he was not.

She had not minded about him passing, but she was always afraid he would be distracted by the sounds of stride and Dixieland. “You’re not playing that Saturday night music, are you?” she would say. “Put that sound right out your mind.” She didn’t even like it when he embellished his classical pieces with extra ornaments, or a little too much rubato. “Don’t doctor it up,” she would tell him. “You think you know better than Mendelssohn?”

But when it came to jazz, she need not have feared, since he could not play it. He had heard it sure enough, wailing underground in clubs and speakeasies, all through Prohibition, hot, polyphonic, toe-tapping, full of syncopated rhythms and bent, naughty notes-perfect for small and secret spaces. Now that alcohol was legal again, the music was changing, along with the very character of the night itself. Swanky clubs and ballrooms opened, featuring larger, dancehall-type orchestras. With so many more instruments, especially on top in the reeds and the brass, songs had to be tightly arranged, by skilled bandleaders. This meant work, and it was considerably closer to Thomas’s own playing than the exuberant Dixie-style polyphony of the ’twenties had been-but still out of reach.

This was clear to him after he heard the top bandleaders like Henderson and Ellington, who played whole orchestras like instruments. Thomas could play, but they were titans, and there was never a moment when he did not know the difference.

Big Lewis certainly knew. “You play nice,” he said, that first week in Seattle. “But where you going to get work playing like that?”

“That’s the problem,” said Thomas.

“What you need is to learn the standards, with a little swing.” Big Lewis launched into singing “About a Quarter to Nine,” a popular song from the film 42nd Street.“Go on!” He waved toward the keys.

Thomas shrank, humiliated. “I can’t play that way. Reading is all I can do.”

“You serious? That’s it?”

“Yes. If it’s written, I can play it. Let me get the music for that one and look at it.” So Big Lewis advanced him five cents, and Thomas went down to Jackson Street for the sheet music, came back, and read it through. When he did, it was so simple he was embarrassed. In playing it for Big Lewis, he did his best to embellish it so it would sound more presentable.

But the older man was unimpressed. “Swing the rhythm! Let it go!”

Thomas started again.

“No! You turned the beat around again. Where are you, in church?” Big Lewis gave a slam to the nearest tabletop and scuffed off.

Each night Thomas listened closely to the jazz in the basement, especially the piano work of Julian Henson, which was tightly controlled even when he improvised. There was restraint to it, a kind of glassy hardness. If I could play jazz, I would play like this fellow. But when he tried it at the piano the next day, it still eluded him.

Big Lewis heard. “You’re trying too hard. It’s variations on a song. Think of it like that, a song.” He showed Thomas how to use the blues scale to force what he called the worried notes, especially the flatted third and seventh, over a major chord progression. When Thomas could not hear how to layer these up with counter-rhythms, or how to build chords from dissonant intervals, the older man sang him through it and showed him, using his voice, how to dance around his improvisations and get off them as quick as a grace note. By the end of that week Thomas could play at least a few of the popular ballroom numbers, like “Body and Soul” and “I Can’t Get Started,” and his renditions sounded respectable, if not exactly right.

“Will I get by?” he asked Big Lewis.

“No. Not around here-too many good musicians. Now, in a small town, I ’spect your sound could get over. You want that to happen, you got to work, and work hard.”

So Thomas threw himself into practicing dance numbers every afternoon, and though he got better, he knew he was still well shy of the mark when Big Lewis pulled him aside one night at closing time and told him there was an agent in the house, a man from China, who needed a piano player.

“To play in China?”

“Shanghai. I’ve heard tell of it-fellows get recruited.”

Thomas stared. Shanghai! It was alluring, dangerous; there were songs about it. “Is that him?” he said of the tall, rangy fellow who was the only Asian man left in the place now that it had emptied out. He had a narrow face, doorknob cheekbones jutting beneath his long, dark eyes. Thomas noticed his hair was combed straight back and pomaded down, while his suit still showed creases from the steamer trunk. He dressed like a gentleman, which struck Thomas as a promising chord of commonality.

“Go talk to him,” Big Lewis said.

“What if he-”

“Say you’re a pianist, then just play. Don’t say anything else.”

He looked down at his overalls. Maybe it was a good thing, a lucky thing, the way he was dressed. “Play what?” he said nervously.

“The Rhapsody.”

Thomas closed his eyes for a second; yes, genius, Big Lewis was right. Rhapsody in Blue was the one piece he had memorized which was flat-out impressive and also danced at least a little bit close to the music he had to pretend to know. So he crossed the floor, still littered and sticky, and set his mop and bucket down with a neat slosh. “Name’s Thomas Greene,” he said. “My boss tells me you’re looking.”

And now he was in Shanghai, beside Alonzo, coming to the end of the lane, to Rue Lafayette, where they paused before turning. Thomas studied the older man’s face. “You look like you like it here.”

“Best thing ever happened to me. All my life I knew what I deserved, but Shanghai is the only place I ever got it. You’ll see.” With those words, Alonzo raised a casually crooked finger, and a panting coolie ran up with a rickshaw. Alonzo climbed up onto the rattan seat and slid over, making room for Thomas, who stood frozen. The older man had been here a year and knew all the holes and corners, sure, but should they really be pulled along by a poor, unfortunate man in a harness? Even the slaves had not done work like this. But the bare-armed coolie stamped impatiently, slick with sweat in the cold air, his sinews ropy, his legs strong. He wanted to resume running.

Alonzo was looking down with compassion, and Thomas understood that he too must have crossed this particular threshold on arrival. The city was cruel. Maybe all cities were cruel.

“You know what?” Alonzo said to him. “Man’s got a right to choose his master.” He patted the seat.

And Thomas climbed up beside him.

They swayed and jostled down the street, the gasping, heaving coolie pulling them at a steady rhythmic lope. Thomas felt almost sick, sweat popping out, though whether it was his discomfort with the coolie or the rocking motion roiling his overambitious breakfast, he was not sure. Alonzo seemed wholly undisturbed, placid almost, as he gazed down at the traffic, so Thomas forced his mind off the rickshaw puller, instead ranging back over what other musicians had told him about Shanghai before he left Seattle.

“Freest place on earth,” Roger Felton had said. “Pleasure every damn place you look, and your money just as good as any white man’s. Think on that! Fellows earn a lot, no two ways about it, but there isn’t a one of them I’ve seen come back with a penny. They spend it all.”

Not I, had been Thomas’s silent reaction. I can save money. He had been much more sobered by what Roger had said when he asked about politics. “Say the Japanese fighting the Chinese, and the Chinese fighting each other. Say gangsters running the city. People disagree, they end up dead, so you best play your music and keep clear of it. Hear?”

The money Lin Ming had quoted him seemed to override such concerns, not to mention his own insufficient skills: fifty dollars a week for band members, and one hundred dollars a week for him, the leader. Granted, those were Shanghai dollars, worth only a third of American, but Lin had said Shanghai prices were as low as dirt-twelve dollars for a tailor-made suit, two for dinner in a restaurant, three dollars for a woman, all night. And in Shanghai he could have any woman, no race laws, a thought that would not stop tugging at him as they steamed across the Pacific.

At home, in Maryland, he’d had his share of white women. Sometimes, when he played a party, he got lucky with a good-time girl afterward, and once in a while, when he was performing as an Egyptian or an Argentine, that girl would be white. None of them were the kind of girls he could know, or call on; they were janes, party girls, girls with bobbed hair and short flapper skirts who liked to be drunk every night, and were still young and pretty enough to do it. Actually there were very few girls back in Baltimore that he could call on, because he had never earned enough money to court the kind of respectable girl he wanted. He hoped Shanghai was going to be different.

On the ship, in his tiny metal-riveted cabin, in the small mirror screwed to the wall, he assessed his face as he tried to put his hopes in order. He took after his father’s family, everyone always said so, light-skinned people. His father’s mother had been a teacher, and her father a chemist and an officer in the Twenty-fifth Infantry regiment in the Indian Wars. He had inherited his father’s looks and his mother’s ear for music, which came in turn from her own mother. But that grandmother fell in love with a landowning man during the Reconstruction years and became a farm wife outside Easton on the Chesapeake’s far shore. She never wavered, his grandmother; a cream and tan beauty in her youth, she played the rest of her life on a parlor upright, performing works that asked hard, crashing questions with no easy answers, pouring through open windows to dissipate in the tangled woods. He had loved that place.

But it was gone, separated from him first by a continent on the rails, and now by the blue Pacific. He had never been at sea before, or on any vessel larger than the flat-bottomed scow he and his cousins had used to explore the tributaries of the Chesapeake up and down Talbot County. He stayed in his cabin that whole first day aboard ship, so afraid was he. It was not until the sun was dropping into the December horizon that he heard the thump of music from Lin Ming’s cabin, and stood with his ear to the metal wall. He knew the song, he had heard it on the radio, back on Creel Street-“Memphis Blues,” by Fletcher Henderson. In a rush of longing, home came back to him, the velvet air, damp and biting in winter, sweet in summer. He almost heard the far-off roar of the crowd at an Orioles game, the slipping, satisfying ring of leather shoes on white marble steps. He had left that world, but not its music, for that had crossed the ocean and was here with him, making him bold. He stepped out and knocked on Lin Ming’s door.

His knuckle had barely touched the metal when the door swung back. Lin looked at him like a thirsty man seeing water; farther along, Thomas would understand how much the other man hated to be alone. “Come in! I thought you would never be emerging. What?” He followed Thomas’s gaze to his ankle-length Chinese gown, slit up each side for easy movement, worn over trousers. “You never saw one? It is freedom. Try sometime. You like Fletcher Henderson?”

“Very much,” said Thomas, always appreciative of the musician’s formality and control.

Lin looked pleased. “He is high level. And to me, he sounds like someone who works from the sheet music. Like you. What’s wrong? You look like you want to show a clean pair of heels! Don’t be embarrassed. I could see that you work by the reading and writing. Now here.” He piled a stack of seventy-eights into Thomas’s arms. “Take these to your room. Take my gramophone. These are songs the Kansas City Kings play, and we have twenty-two days to Shanghai, enough time for you to write them out. At least you can arrive with something.”

Raised on obstacles, Thomas felt the surprise of gratitude almost like a blow. In his experience, one got help from friends, from family, not outsiders. “Thank you.”

Lin waved him away. “Don’t thank me yet. I am taking you to China, where things are as precarious as a pile of eggs. Japan is invading us, they need land and food and the labor of our millions. They already occupy part of the north and are pushing south. China should be united to fight them, but we are divided into the two sides who want to kill each other-the Nationalists and Communists.”

“Whose side are you on?”

“Neither. And I tell you why. The Nationalists and Communists may be poles apart, heaven in the north and the earth in the south, but they do agree on one thing-they think jazz is a dangerous element, and must be banned. So! How can I support either side?”

“Ban jazz?”

“I know.” Lin shook his head. “The arrogance. One hundred mouths could not explain it away. And how could the government ever ban any type of music anyway? This is the age of radio! But Little Greene, listen.” He had started using the nickname on account of Thomas being twenty-five to his twenty-eight. “When you get to Shanghai, Japanese people will try to tell you we Chinese are incapable of governing ourselves. That is their superstition, that we are lazy and disorganized, stupid, we are children who need them to take care of us. They will tell you that we want them there.”

“I don’t think they’ll tell me anything. I’m a musician.”

“Just remember, no matter what they say, do not believe it. They want us as their slaves.” He stretched, settled his gown, and said, “I am dying of the hunger. Let us go to dinner.”

It was the twentieth of December when they finally steamed up the Huangpu, watching from the rail in the cold as lines of coolies carried goods to and from the docks at the water’s edge. They sailed around a turn in the river and the Bund came into view, an imposing colonnaded line of eclectic façades topped with cupolas and clock towers. Behind it crouched a city of low brown buildings.

The ship dropped anchor, and passengers lined up to board the lighter that would take them to shore. He could see the Bund was thick with traffic, its sidewalks crowded. The energy seemed to come right through his feet the moment they bumped the dock and he stepped on the ground again, dear solid ground; he dodged through the crowd behind Lin Ming. All around them passengers swirled away to meet friends, relatives, and servants, then dispersed across a narrow strip of grass directly onto the boulevard.

“No customs?” said Thomas, for they had simply walked ashore, without even showing their identification.

“A free port,” Lin said proudly. “All are welcome.”

On the sidewalk, the air rang with a dozen languages. They were surrounded by men in Chinese gowns and padded jackets, and wand-like women in high-necked dresses and sumptuous fur wraps. Other men passed wearing tunics from India and robes from Arabia, some with faces darker than his own. Suddenly he was not different anymore, everybody was different. No one looked twice at him, for the first time in his life. And no one cared that he stood right there on the sidewalk, neither deferring nor giving way nor lifting his hand to tip his hat, which was in itself a marvel. Even a few pale foreign women in their tick-tock heels and woolen coats walked right past him, unconcerned. He could feel a grin growing on his face.

“Over here,” Lin Ming called, and Thomas saw him holding open the door to a black car. Rarely had Thomas ridden in a private car, but he slid in now, the smooth, fragrant leather and the murmur of the engine enveloping him. Shanghai was a fairy world, he decided as they drove along the river with its endless docks and braying vessels of all shapes and sizes.

The city was mighty, yet Thomas could see hints of the war Lin had described, too: clots of soldiers in brown uniforms standing along the wharves, puttees tight to their knees and rifles hooked casually on their shoulders.

“Japanese,” Lin confirmed.

“I thought you said they had only taken over the northeast.”

“Yes. Shanghai still belongs to China. But there was trouble four years ago, in ’thirty-two-fighting-and the foreign powers forced a cease-fire by promising that only Japan could have troops in Shanghai. China could not.”

“No Chinese troops here? But it is a Chinese city.”

“Correct.” Lin dripped dark irony.

“How could foreign powers force China to accept a thing like that?”

Lin almost wanted to laugh. “You are forgetting what I told you on the voyage. Shanghai is the city of foreign Concessions. Little colonies, each owned by another country. The city seems very free to you foreigners, but we Chinese must serve someone else. Do not forget that. You are a jueshi jia, a jazz man, you of all people should understand that we are not free. Up ahead, you see that row of docks? The Quai de France? That is the Frenchtown. This part now, we pass through? This is the International Settlement, belongs to Britain and America.”

“Like foreign colonies,” said Thomas.

“Concessions,” Lin corrected him, and said something musical in light, tapping tones to the driver, who made a right turn. “And here is the Avenue Édouard VII, the border of Frenchtown.”

Thomas saw that the street signs on the right were in Chinese, while suddenly on the left, he read Rue Petit, Rue Tourane, Rue Saigon. The buildings here had red stone façades with tall French doors and wrought-iron balconies, and between the cross-streets, small lanes led away. Peering into these, he saw women carrying vegetables for the evening meal, young girls in groups with their arms linked, grannies shepherding little children. It was as foreign as it could be, yet faintly familiar.

The false sense of welcome evaporated when Lin cut into his thoughts. “There is one thing you must know about the International Settlement, the district we just left behind-there are race laws.”

“What did you say?”

“It is shared by England and America, but they have the American race laws. Like your South.”

“Like the South?” Thomas felt his head squeezed. Here? On the other side of the world?

“Now, now,” said Lin, “do not react so. You are seeing a serpent’s image in a wine cup. It is only in that one district, and they will love you everyplace else, especially here, in Frenchtown, where they are crazy for musicians like you. Everyone will think you are exotic.”

Thomas sank back into the seat. Only one district? There was no way he was going to avoid the International Settlement, for it included the center of the city, the downtown, the docks, the Bund. He mulled this new worry as they rolled through Frenchtown.

“Look,” said Lin, “here we are.” They had stopped before a wrought-iron gate leading to a small front courtyard and a large house. Its European-style stone façade and tall windows were topped by upturned Chinese eaves; four or five bedrooms at least, Thomas thought, nothing like the small apartment in which he had been brought up. We are gentlefolk, his mother had always said, but that had been more a philosophy than a reality. The longing stabbed through him to have his own room; that would be a fine thing, after all the cramped and crowded places he had rested his head since his mother had passed. “How many of the fellows live here?”

Lin was already up the front steps. “Just you,” he said over his shoulder.

Impossible, he thought, stepping up just as the door opened to a middle-aged Chinese man in a white tunic. Two other men and an older woman formed a hasty line behind him.

“Who are these people?” said Thomas. Through the door he glimpsed rosewood wainscoting and an expensive-looking porcelain bowl on the hall table.

“Your servants,” said Lin Ming. “This is Uncle Hua, your steward.”

“Servants?” The first word Thomas attempted to speak in his new household was so thick with disbelief it stuck in his mouth.

Uncle Hua joined his fists before his chest, and lowered his eyes deferentially. “Yes, Master,” he said.

Jesus, was it only yesterday? was his amazed thought as he and Alonzo dismounted from the rickshaw in front of the Royal. The older man unlocked the lobby door, and dropped the brass key in Thomas’s hand. “This was Augustus’s key.”

It felt heavy and cold to Thomas. The bandleader he was replacing had died of a heart attack, in a brothel, and as he slipped the key into his pocket, he understood with a lurch that the house, the servants, the piano in the parlor, even the bed with its silk quilts must have belonged to Augustus too. Now their footsteps were shushing across the empty marble floors of the lobby, through the arch. Across the ballroom, on the stage, ten other men waited in a pearly circle of light, their legs crossed, loose-trousered, instruments on their laps.

Thomas got up beside the piano, one hand on the lid to cover his tremble. He knew he was a liar, and soon they would know too. “First, before anything else, my sympathy to every one of you for the loss of Augustus Jones. It was a shock, and I’m sorry. But now we have ten days before the theater reopens on New Year’s Eve. I know fourteen of your songs. That’s not enough, and I aim to learn the rest just as fast as I can. Hope you’ll bear with me.”

A resentful mumble circled the room.

A squat, short-legged man with a French horn cradled in his lap said, “How come you don’t know the songs? Where’d you play before?”

Sweat trickled as Thomas tried to deliver the answer he had worked out earlier. “Various places. Pittsburgh, Richmond, Wilmington.” In fact, with the exception of Wilmington, Thomas had never even visited those places. He was hoping none of the band members had either. “Let’s start with your signature tune-‘Exactly Like You.’” The 1930 song, perennially popular on the radio, was sweet and simple, easy to play. He had practiced it. But as soon as he started it, instead of falling in with him, the others stayed in for only a phrase or two, and dropped off. He stopped. “What?”

“You gotta be kidding,” said the other horn player, whose jowls seemed to hang straight from the point of his chin to his collar.

“All right, sir,” said Thomas. “You are?”

“Errol Mutter.”

“Pleasure to meet you. Why don’t I count you off, and you play just a few bars of your version so I can hear it?” And before anyone could protest, he ticked backwards until they started. Within two bars he heard how his accent had been on the wrong beat, and he came back in on piano, this time more or less correctly, if without the proper swing. He saw Errol exchange a look with the other horn player, and felt the drops track down his spine as he bent his face closer to the keys. It was not until the end of the song that he realized Lin Ming had come in, and gone up to the balcony to watch.

Lin was not alone in his box above the stage; he had come to observe with his sister-by-affection, Song Yuhua. She sat very straight beside him in her closely fitted qipao of stiff blue brocade, her hair bound at the neck with flowers, the way Du Yuesheng liked it. He wanted the women in his entourage to look sweet and old-fashioned.

Song was not one of Du’s wives, only an indentured servant, if an educated one. She was versed in the classics, at home with literature, fluent in English, and passable in French. She could play a simple Bach invention. For Du Yuesheng, who was illiterate, she was not only a translator but an accessory of incalculable value; for her he had paid a considerable price.

Lin Ming was the boss’s illegitimate son, so to him Song was family, and also the only person in Du Yuesheng’s inner circle he could really trust. “What news of Chiang Kai-shek?” he asked, for as soon as the ship docked, he had heard how the Nationalist leader had been kidnapped by his own allies in the north.

“He refuses to even talk to the Communists,” said Song. “He keeps insisting he will fight them until they submit to him, and only then will he resist the Japanese. His kidnappers are threatening to execute Chiang if he won’t stop fighting the Communists!”

“And what does Chiang say?”

“He says no! He just repeats that the Communists have to submit to him. Then he goes in his room and sits on his bed and reads his Bible.”

“Speak reasonably!”

“I do! Every word is true. They are at an impasse. Maybe they will kill him,” she said, her voice faintly hopeful.

He shot her a look.

“Someone has to do something,” she protested. “Look how close Japan’s army is to Peking and Tianjin. If those cities fall, we have no hope. We are fish swimming in a cooking pot.”

“If,” Lin repeated. “For now, they are still far away, and as long as that lasts, as long as the city crowds into our ballrooms to dance to mi mi zhi yin,” decadent and sentimental music, “we will be here. And so will my American jueshi jia.” He nodded toward the stage below, where Thomas Greene had just come to the end of a song and risen from the piano bench to address the others.

“Now, with Augustus,” they heard Thomas say, “which did you-all follow? Scores or charts?”

“Scores?” said Cecil Pratt, the trumpet player. “Charts? We just followed Augustus.”

Snorts of laughter rose. “Hell to pay if you weren’t there by the second measure, too!”

“Do you like it that way?” Thomas said, sensing an opening. “Because I’ll tell you, I cannot play without either a score or a chart, for the life of me. So if there’s anyone who would like written music…”

A wondering quiet spread. “Man,” came the voice of the violin player. “You’d do that?”

Watching from above, Lin and Song exchanged worried looks.

“You’d write out all that stuff?” said the drummer.

“I would,” Thomas said.

Up in the box, Song said to Lin, “You have to get him a copyist.”

“Immediately,” Lin agreed. Thomas needed someone who could shadow the band at rehearsals, and write scores and charts all night. As was generally the case with servants in Shanghai, the cost would be insignificant, chicken feathers and garlic skins.

“How many want scores?” Thomas was saying, on the stage below, and hands went up. These were the ones who could read music. “Charts?” The rest of the hands rose. He made a note and then sat down to play the opening chords of the next tune, and the musicians, mollified for a moment, moved with him. Reeds were moistened, brass lifted to the ready, and they set the pace for him to follow.

By the time rehearsal ended at six, the box where Lin Ming and Song Yuhua had sat was empty, a fact Thomas could not help but notice as he went out to the lobby to say good-bye to each man, repeat his thanks, and stress again his sympathy for the loss of Augustus. He was deliberately warm to the horn players. And he was surprised by how, up close, the two brothers who played reeds looked even younger than he had thought. He wondered how they had gotten themselves over here with the Kings in the first place.

“Don’t you worry,” said Alonzo, beside him. “Those boys cause more trouble than six men, you’ll see.”

“I will, eh? By the way-did you see Lin Ming in the box up above stage left?”

“’Course I did,” said Alonzo. “That’s the big boss’s box. Once in a while he’ll show up late at night. You’ll know who he is when you see him.”

“Boss of what?” Thomas said, confused. “The company?”

“Company?” Alonzo gave him a long look, speculation drifting to amusement. “Is that what Mr. Lin told you?”

“He said his father was head of the Tung Vong Company, and that they owned a controlling stake in the Royal.” Thomas was pretty sure that was what his new friend had said.

Alonzo was laughing, in his gentle way. “Well, that’s probably true. And about the Green Gang holding some big old part of the Tung Vong Company, you can forget I ever told you, if you like-”

“No, of course not.” Thomas was embarrassed. He had to adjust, take in everything, or he would fail. Probably he would fail anyway. “Tell me.”

“The Green Gang is who Mr. Lin works for, make no mistake. It’s the biggest Triad in China, and his father runs it.”

“His father?”

“He didn’t tell you that?”

“No.” Thomas tried to stay composed. “And a Triad is-”

“A gang, but bigger, and more like a secret society. These fellows swear their lives, forever.”

Thomas felt his eyes blind over as these new facets of his world turned before him. You don’t know anything yet. Still he had to play the boss right now, the bandleader, and so he turned a calm expression to Alonzo, who was twenty years his senior, and clearly knew all about Shanghai, and said, “Thank you for telling me.” He reached up to switch off the lobby lights. “But to my mind, that’s Lin Ming’s affair. Like you said about the rickshaw coolie, man’s got a right to choose his master. Right? See you in the morning, then. And thanks for today. I mean it.” And they buttoned their coats up high and walked briskly in opposite directions, fedoras pulled down low against the cold.

Thomas was freezing, and all he wanted was to get home to that big, lonely house so he could practice for the next day. This time he would not hesitate, not even look twice at the coolie; he would leap right up on the seat, and tell the boy chop-chop.