Night in Shanghai (20 page)

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.