Night in Shanghai (6 page)

The crowd screamed again. Behind him, the first musicians strode out in their blue suits. He prayed that Thomas was going to be ready, and spread his arms wide. “Please welcome back the Kansas City Kings!”

The room exploded, and the words were lost as Thomas stepped out behind him into the light, somehow tall and imposing even though he was a man of slight and ordinary build.

He slid into place at the keyboard, under the spotlight, raised his right hand, and ran off a complex, instantly impressive Lisztian phrase that sent a gasp through the hall. As abruptly as the line had started, it stopped, a warm-up. The same hand lifted again, and tapping time with his feet, he counted down the opening bar of “Stompin’ at the Savoy,” which needed only a few notes to send the crowd prancing onto the floor in delight.

Good. Lin heard how the arrangement drew attention away from Thomas’s piano, which, after the showy intro, became all but invisible, keeping time, no more. He was young, green, just out of his thatched cottage, but he was already doing something fresh by quoting the classics. Lin hoped it would reassure those who still thought of jazz as a savage and dangerous current in the
yang bang he
, the river of foreign culture. No one listening to this could see jazz as something wild that came from the jungle. Yet despite Thomas’s style, the Kings were hot, especially the toe-tapping, knob-kneed young brothers, Charles and Ernest Higgins, who broke the song’s theme over and over on their saxophones in tight harmony, while the brass called out melody lines and the guitar slapped a rhythm underneath.

And the money was flowing: two songs in, the ballroom was over capacity and they were turning people away. Every time Lin passed the business office, he heard the safe opening and closing. Du was going to be pleased.

The boss arrived shortly after midnight, when ’thirty-seven took off with an ear-rattling fusillade of popping champagne corks, and a chorus of “Auld Lang Syne.” The band had just started back in with dance music when Du appeared. He had Fiery Old Crow and Flowery Flag on either side, and Song bringing up the rear in a tea-length
qipao
like some calendar girl from the ’twenties. “Little Sister,” Lin said, and she gave him the warm smile they always shared as she vanished up the lobby stairs behind her master.

On the stairs, once Lin Ming was out of view, Song Yuhua matched her steps to the men climbing ahead of her, Teacher and his bodyguards. She always walked in last place in public, unshielded by his men. Not like the actress she remembered from a few years ago, whose dressing room door was always attended by a couple of Du’s dog’s legs. Each of his two most recent wives had her own security guard assigned to her apartments in the mansion, too.

Not Song. She lived up on the low-ceilinged top floor. Hot in summer, cold in winter. She had a bedroom, a small sitting room, and a tiny chamber just big enough to hold a cot for her maid, Ah Pan. Du had no intention of wasting either space or staff on her. All this because her father gambled away the family estate to the Green Gang, and Du Yuesheng, arriving to take possession, offered to take her into service instead.

As translator and arm-piece, she had tasks and obligations, but at least she was not one of his women. He had taken her twice that way, shortly after she entered his service at eighteen, and after, never touched her again. This was a blessing to her, and also a constant reminder of a failure she barely understood. Sometimes she watched the wives, and wondered what they knew about the house thing that she did not. Fourth Wife talked with her on occasion, and more than once Song had helped her look after the children, but though Fourth Wife was the youngest of the wives and closest to Song in age, they never spoke of private things.

Still, she was worlds away from the submissive girl she had been when she arrived in Shanghai. She had her own loyalties now. And this was where being out with Du had its advantages, for he was master of Shanghai, the fulcrum for all agreements legal or illegal, so she was positioned to overhear things. As she ascended the stairs at the Royal, last in line as always, she scanned the bubbles of conversation that floated out between the tied-back curtains of each box. Understanding English was her great advantage; foreigners babbled like fools in front of her.

Ahead of her Du paused at a box, and stepped inside to trade greetings. Flowery and Fiery assumed their positions. As she entered, she recognized the rotund form of H. H. Kung, and next to him a dissipated older Englishman she had seen in the papers—Sir Frederick Leith-Ross, sent by England to help China control its economy.
Bloodsucking ghost capitalist
. She looked with disdain at his few remaining white hairs combed over his bald head, at his face pouched and ruddy from drink.

Leith-Ross, meanwhile, was making little effort to conceal his distaste at the sight of Du’s trademark large ears, bald head, and long gown. “Shocking that they let him in here! And in a box! It’s a disgrace.”

“Of course he is a blackmailer or murderer or worse,” Duke Kung replied in his smooth English, “but my dear sir, one hundred thousand men in Shanghai obey his orders.” That was an exaggeration, Song knew—the number was closer to ten thousand—but Kung was rolling, and his eyes gleamed behind his round tortoiseshell glasses. “The only reason the Nationalists can even hold Shanghai is because of Du and his men. Why, what choice do we have? He could create a disturbance at any moment!” Switching to Shanghainese, he turned to address Du. Called “Duke” because of his direct descent from Confucius, he lowered his eyes respectfully. “Teacher. I am always and ever will be your servant.”

“Where? Where?” said Du, chiding him affectionately for his flattery, as was proper.

Kung switched back to English. “May I introduce Sir Frederick Leith-Ross?”

They both turned to the Englishman, who had now trained his rheumy eyes on Song. “Good God, his tart is young enough to be his daughter!”

Turtle egg. Stinking son of a slave girl
. She stretched out a hand and spoke in English. “Forgive me, but I do not believe we have been introduced. I am Song Yuhua. You are . . . ?”

He choked on his spittle. “Sir Frederick Leith-Ross.”

“Enchanted.” She turned to Kung, who kept the play going by raising the back of her hand to his mouth for a pretend European-style kiss. “Duke Kung,” she continued in English, “it is always a pleasure to see you.” And then she smiled sweetly and stepped back as Teacher made his magisterial Chinese farewells and swept out, surrounded by his men.

What she’d said had been flawlessly polite, yet the man’s choleric face showed that her arrow had found its mark, and Duke Kung was fighting down his laughter. Good; the foreigner was a toad, a parasite.

She settled into her chair in their box, and scanned the crowd as she always did, to settle the fear that she might see someone from her native place, where no one knew she had been sold to Du in payment for her father’s debts. That night she saw no one from Anhui, but she did notice quite a few Shanghai luminaries, bankers and shipping magnates and real estate barons—even Ah Fu, the Russian Jewish composer. Everyone on the dance floor below had their eyes on this new ghost pianist, who did not, despite the Chinese-language advertisements that had been trumpeting the club’s reopening for the past week, look like a man who had come straight from the cotton fields.

His playing had an upright feel that sounded familiar to her, carrying her back to when she was a child, and her Western tutor gave her piano lessons. Yet it was a dance orchestra too. She decided this was a fresh hybrid from America, and she liked it.

Sometime after two in the morning Lin Ming appeared in the box, his sleeves rolled up, exhausted, dazed.
“Mou qu bao li,”
he said, treasure and exuberant profit.

Du made a curt nod of acknowledgment, which was a lot for him, and Lin discreetly patted the sheen off his brow as he heard the first tinkly piano notes of the band’s signature song, “Exactly Like You.” They played it as an instrumental, with Charles and Ernest trading off voices, a two-saxophone duet of the melody Benny Goodman had made famous on the clarinet.

I know why I’ve waited, know why I’ve been blue
,

Prayed each night for someone

Exactly like you
.

The song’s end brought a cascade of applause and cheers, during which Lin Ming touched Song’s elbow in good-bye and slipped out. Then the house quieted, and even the air hung still, suspended, as everyone held their breath for the encore.

The piano player lifted his hands. A spotlight circled him, as all else went black.

A rising cry from the clarinet sailed out of the darkness behind him and resolved itself into the famous first notes of
Rhapsody in Blue
. Song recognized it from the radio, though she had never expected to hear it in a ballroom.

The clarinet walked atop the melody and the piano’s first chords rained down. For a while she listened, her eyes half-closed, and when she opened them and looked down, she beheld something she had not seen before, ever: a dance floor full of people in expensive evening clothes, perfectly still, all quiet as shafts of light, listening, all under the spell. She too sat motionless, suspended. To think of the hardship he had come from . . . and now he raised a tapered, aristocratic-looking hand to bring in the horns.

She noticed that the musicians were staring at him too, surprised, almost awestruck. A few stumbled slightly, before finding their way into the rhythm, which the pianist, in this piece at least, had in his keeping. A few seconds later, they were in his time, following him. She could feel the shift.

Too soon it was over, and applause exploded through the ballroom for the last time that night. Song turned to Du and said, feigning modesty, “Not bad. Wouldn’t you agree?”

He gave her a cold look. She should have expected it; jazz, like all Western music, was only noise to him. He wanted everything Chinese, and nothing foreign; everything old, nothing new. He was a gangster, a criminal, but in his mind he belonged to some lost aristocracy. He and his fellows hoped to silence composers, declare jazz dangerous, ban new plays, and remove dissenting editors from their posts. She hated him.

Most of the young people like her in Shanghai who joined the Communist underground felt as she did; they were struggling writers, actors, journalists, and musicians, living for the future. Whether they were of humble origins, or were the children of well-fed families who were leaning down to the workers’ cause, they were idealistic, typical of young “urban path” Communists, as opposed to those who found their way to the movement along the “rural path,” in the provinces. They were smart and passionate and sophisticated; they believed. That Song was one of them, secretly, made every day of her life worth living.

Du stood to go, and she rose with him, her lies contained and her surfaces flawless.

Two floors below, Thomas Greene stood by the brass-trimmed door. His head was spinning with relief as he thanked people and wished them well. The whole theater seemed to be surging toward him with compliments and congratulations.

“Happy New Year! Yes, thank you,” he said. “So kind of you. Don’t forget the rest of the Kansas City Kings, fine musicians, every one. Yes, thank you. The best for nineteen thirty-seven. Come again.” Lin stood next to him saying the same things in Chinese, and everyone in the theater had to squeeze past them.

Atop the sea of heads Thomas saw one man taller than the others, tall as Lin Ming, but older, and he knew at once it was the father, the crime lord, Du Yuesheng. Should he greet him? But people said he spoke no English.

Du did not give him the chance. Refusing to look at him, he stared straight ahead as he passed.

But behind him, trailing in the wake of his bodyguards, floated a woman with the most brilliantly intelligent eyes, and gardenias fixed at the back of her neck.

Thomas watched as she was carried toward him on the tide, forced ahead, laughing. When she came abreast, he held her eyes, just for a second, and then the crowd bore her away. After one last moment of clinging to her with his gaze, he turned back to the line of people.

Lin saw him staring. “Don’t look at her.”

“Why not?”

“You deaf in your dog’s ears? She belongs to him.” And he slid back into Chinese with the next man in line.

“Is she his wife?”

“Nothing like that,” said Lin.

Then like what?
Thomas wanted to know, but he said no more, because playing his part properly meant giving in sometimes, as he had been taught from the beginning of his life. But that had always been irrelevant to what he thought, felt, and planned inside—and now he had noticed her, and he would be watching for her in the future. In his own time.

When at last the crowd thinned, he stepped outside, where musicians and well-wishers were still gathered. Among them he noticed a man Alonzo had pointed out across the ballroom, a slight, blue-eyed Russian Jew in a Chinese gown. Greene crossed to him and extended a hand. “Happy New Year. Thomas Greene.”

They grasped warmly. “Delighted, and the same to you.” The older man’s accent was a mash of European tones. “Aaron Avshalomov. The evening was most wonderful. I always say one should go to the classics first. Your
Rhapsody
was resplendent! The essence of America, with all its brashness. I conducted it in Tianjin a few years ago with a Russian cabaret pianist, but to you he did not compare! You were marvelous. We should meet again. We must, I insist. May we please? Let us agree to it for the new year.”

“I’d like that,” Thomas said, riding the sudden swell of acceptance, wanting the same thing he had always wanted, the respect of serious musicians like Avshalomov, who, after a quick good night, was borne away in a rickshaw, his light, unruly cloud of hair bouncing above the folded-back awning.

Thomas turned to see the two reed players beside him, Charles and Ernest. “Come on, Tails,” said Ernest—the nickname having arisen earlier that night on account of the cutaway coat he wore as bandleader—“You promised us on the night we opened, you’d go celebrate.”