Trail of Blood (20 page)

24

As we drove back to the highway, I pulled Bill’s papers from the envelope.

“You want to read those again?” he asked. “You’re not depressed enough?”

“Well, for one thing, you paraphrased some, so I haven’t actually read them. But also, I keep having this feeling there’s something we missed.”

“What kind of thing?”

“I don’t know.” I started to go over his translations of Rosalie’s letters again. He was right, they were depressing, but he was also right, I was already depressed. I scanned the ones I’d already read, and was about to slip the last of those back in the envelope and start the first of the ones I hadn’t, when I reached its final paragraph.

“Bill!” I yelped. “This is it! What we missed! It’s the jeweler!”

“What jeweler?”

“Mr. Friedman’s book said the name of the jeweler who made the Shanghai Moon was lost. But here it is! Corens, Herr Corens.” I whipped out my cell phone.

“What do you—”

I waved to shush him as I heard, “Friedman and Sons, you’ve reached Stanley Friedman.”

“Lydia Chin, Mr. Friedman. Do you know a jeweler named Corens? A refugee also, German, I think. He was in Shanghai the same time as Rosalie Gilder.”

“No, I don’t think so. Why?”

“Is there an association, a jewelers’ organization—”

He chuckled. “There are dozens. But the grapevine, it’s better. Shall I check for you?”

“Would you? It’s important.” I thanked him, pocketed the phone, and, in answer to Bill’s skeptical glance, said, “I know, I know, it’s a long shot.”

“Even if he finds him. What could he tell us? And if he’s still alive, he’d be close to a hundred.”

“Right on all counts. But it’s a door.”

And it was a door that wasn’t locked, because as I was finishing the last of Rosalie’s letters, Mr. Friedman called back.

“Yaakov Corens, from Berlin, was in Shanghai from 1933 to 1945,” Mr. Friedman told me. “He emigrated to Australia, one of the first to leave after the war. He died in 1982.”

“Oh.” That deflated me. “Well, maybe that’s not a useful lead after all. But thank you. How did you find that out so fast? That’s some grapevine you jewelers have.”

“Don’t be impressed. Two phone calls, that’s all I made. One to a friend, he retired as secretary of the International Guild of Jewelry Artists a few years ago. He knows everybody. He knew Yaakov Corens.”

“And the other?”

“To Beatrice Gardner.”

“Who’s that?”

“Yaakov Corens’s granddaughter. She inherited her grandfather’s shop, which was her mother’s before her. She’s a jeweler herself.”

“Oh, Mr. Friedman! Thank you so much! Can you give me her number? But you didn’t have to call all the way to Australia. Let me pay for that call.”

“For you, Ms. Chin, if I had to call Australia, I would call Australia. But for this, it was unnecessary. Yaakov Corens left Sydney and came to New York in 1963. Beatrice Gardner has a shop across the street.”

So there we were, back on Forty-seventh Street.

Nothing much had changed since the day before yesterday. Couples stopped to peer in windows; messengers locked bikes to lampposts. A chain-draped rapper with rings on every finger came out of a store grinning, glinting gold teeth. Hasidim in flat hats went by deep in discussion, pockets full of fortunes in stones they’d exchanged on a handshake. Or so I’ve been told. That all these men really carried riches on their persons struck me as doubtful. But the part I liked wasn’t the value of the stones, anyway. It was the handshakes.

We found Sydney Gems and Gold in a street-level shop near the end of the block. A young woman smiled and asked if she could help us. From the back counter an older woman said, “It’s all right, Shana. I think I’m expecting these people.” Like the younger woman’s, her crisp white blouse had a buttoned neck and long sleeves.

“Beatrice Gardner?”

“That’s correct. Ms. Chin?”

“Lydia. And this is Bill Smith. Thanks for seeing us.”

“You come with the recommendation of Stanley Friedman, quite enough for anyone on this street. What can I do for you?” She smiled warmly and shook my outstretched hand. She gave Bill the same warm smile but didn’t offer her hand, which didn’t seem to surprise him.

“We won’t take much of your time,” I said. “I’d like to ask you some questions about your grandfather.”

“Yes, Mr. Friedman told me that. Zayde Corens, of blessed memory. May I ask why?”

“Mr. Friedman didn’t say? It’s about when he lived in Shanghai. He had a jewelry shop on the Avenue Foch, didn’t he?”

“Yes, that’s correct.”

“We found his name in a letter written by an Austrian refugee girl. Rosalie Gilder. Does that name mean anything to you?”

“So.” She looked somberly at us. “People are still searching for the Shanghai Moon.”

“Then it’s true! Yaakov Corens? He made the Shanghai Moon?”

Beatrice Gardner refolded her hands. “Mr. Friedman says you’re asking questions for an important reason, and it would be a mitzvah to help you. But if all you want is the Shanghai Moon—”

“No, that’s not it,” I said quickly. “We do think the Shanghai Moon might be here in New York, but we don’t want it, not really. Someone we know, another detective, was killed, and the Shanghai Moon may be involved. So we need to know as much about it as we can.”

“Killed?” She paled. “Someone was killed?”

“A friend of ours. Finding who killed him is the reason we’re asking these questions. So you see, it is important.”

She didn’t answer me right away. “And the Shanghai Moon? Why do you think that?”

I told her as much as I thought she needed to know: the find, the fugitive bureaucrat, the letters. She frowned, not at me but into her counter of sparkling gems, as though discussing the situation with them. Finally she looked up and nodded. “I suppose, by now . . . Yes, all right. Zayde Corens made the Shanghai Moon. But he never spoke about it.”

“He didn’t? He didn’t tell you the story?”

“Oh, the story he told. Rosalie Gilder and . . . Chen Kai-rong. Did I say that correctly?”

“Better than I said ‘Yaakov Corens,’ I think.”

Smiling, she said, “Zayde Corens was a dreamer, a romantic. He told the story many times. He had only daughters, and his daughters had daughters. And I have daughters.” She threw a proud glance at the young woman across the shop. “Zayde loved the story of Rosalie and Chen Kai-rong and told it over and over. The jade, the necklace, how they asked him to combine them. How in a time of trouble and loss, hunger and fear, these two young people wanted a lasting symbol of love and of family. Some were offended by this match, Zayde said. But in the face of the horrors and uncertainties around them, to be asked to create an emblem of hope was to him a great and humbling honor. My grandfather was more proud of that piece than of anything else he ever made.”

“Then why do you say he never spoke about it?”

“He told the story, but only in the family, and he said it was our family’s secret. And he would never speak about the Shanghai Moon itself.”

“You mean about what it was worth?”

“Even what it looked like. He’d only say, like the moon, round and glowing for children to dream about. Sometimes people, collectors mostly, who knew he’d been a jeweler in Shanghai, would ask him about it, though you’re the first in a long time. He’d say he could tell them nothing about the Shanghai Moon, except that if it existed he didn’t know where it might be.”

“Did they think he did?”

“They were always hoping.”

“They came because they knew he’d made it?”

“No. Just because they knew he’d been in Shanghai. Written records from that time aren’t so good. If anyone said they’d heard he made it, he denied it. What could they do?”

“Didn’t anyone know, anyone who was there?”

“Not so many knew even in the ghetto days who made the Shanghai Moon. Most were too poor, too hungry, too desperate for news of family they’d left behind, to spare attention for such a thing. The story of Rosalie Gilder and Chen Kai-rong was a fairy tale. Or a scandal, depending on who was telling and who was hearing. And to someone looking for the Shanghai Moon years later, what good was the man who made it? Zayde was paid for it and parted with it in 1942.”

I gazed at a tray of unset rubies and sapphires as I mulled this over. Bill spoke up. “Why wouldn’t he talk about it? Did he ever tell you?”

“Oh, yes.” Her smile grew soft. “When I was a child that was my favorite part. He was asked not to.”

“By whom?”

“A Chinese gentleman.”

I looked up. “Who was this gentleman?”

“Zayde wouldn’t say. It was part of the secret. The story went that a mysterious Chinese gentleman came to the shop one afternoon.”

“In Australia or in New York?”

“No, here, into this very shop. He and Zayde had tea and talked for a long time. After that day Zayde never spoke about the Shanghai Moon outside the family again. The gentleman, he said, had asked him not to. More than that, the reason for it, Zayde wouldn’t say.”

“Did the man threaten him? Did he seem frightened?”

“Oh, not at all. Sad, perhaps. Yes, a little sad. When he told us at dinner about the gentleman, his eyes sparkled as usual—he was a romantic, as I said, and a showman, too; he knew the effect of a story like this—but he had that cheery air adults sometimes wear when they’re hiding distressing things from children.”

“And you didn’t see the Chinese gentleman?”

“No, I was just a child, six years old.”

“Around when was that?” Bill asked.

“You’re asking me to tell my age?” Her eyes widened in mock horror. Then she smiled. “It was 1967. Early spring. I remember, because I liked the story so much I wanted to dress like a mysterious Chinese gentleman for Purim. But Zayde said if I did, the gentleman wouldn’t be mysterious anymore, and he was part of our family secret. So I dressed like a pirate, to throw everyone off the scent.” She paused, then added, “I admit the story got more elaborate as my sisters and I got older. So maybe the gentleman wasn’t so mysterious, or maybe he and Zayde didn’t talk for so very long. But without doubt it was after that visit that Zayde started to deny to everyone but us that he’d made the Shanghai Moon at all.”

25

“So this mysterious Chinese gentleman,” I said to Bill as we headed back to the subway. “One of ours?”

“Ours being Mr. Chen, Mr. Zhang, or the other Mr. Zhang?”

“Right.”

“Why would they?”

“Why would anyone? Why would you want the jeweler who made the Shanghai Moon not to talk about it?”

“And why wait twenty years to ask?”

“Maybe it took him twenty years to figure out who the maker was.”

“If he was one of ours, wouldn’t he know?”

“Not necessarily. Two of them were children when it was made, and one wasn’t born yet.”

Bill lit a cigarette, took a puff, then stopped in the middle of the sidewalk. “Oh, for God’s sake. Even if they did know. Two of them weren’t here.”

I looked at him, and then, with new respect, at his cigarette. “Of course. Mr. Chen and Mr. Zhang came in ’sixty-six. Then it would have taken them time to find him.”

“But what about C. D. Zhang? When did he get here? If he sponsored them, he was a citizen already, so he must have been here a while.”

“But he was a kid, too, when it was made, and of them all, he’d have been the furthest out of the loop. So he might have needed Chen and Zhang to get here before he found out, assuming it was him who cared. ‘He,’ right? Aren’t you going to tell me to say ‘he’?”

“I wasn’t, no.”

“Good thing, too. So it still could have been any of them.”

“Or someone else.”

“You think?”

“No.”

I flipped my cell phone open. It was time we stopped getting the runaround from these Chinese gentlemen.

Which was an opinion apparently not shared by Mr. Chen or Mr. Zhang. Both Irene Ng at Bright Hopes Jewelry and Fay at Fast River Imports were sorry to inform me their bosses were not available. “I really have to speak to him” and “I know he’s ducking me” didn’t make either man magically reappear.

“Why won’t they talk to me?” My complaint to Bill was rhetorical, but his answer made sense.

“You’re representing someone whose clients wanted that jewelry enough to lie about their identity. Chen and Zhang are sure to have their own networks in the jewelry world, and I’ll bet they’re trying to track down Wong Pan themselves.”

“Well, there’s still one Chinese gentleman left. And we wanted to talk to him anyway.” I poked in another number and spoke to another secretary.

Miraculously, I heard, “Hold, please,” and then C. D. Zhang’s energetic voice: “Ms. Chin! Good afternoon!”

“Good afternoon to you, Mr. Zhang. I was wondering if you had a few minutes?”

“Of course! What can I do for you?”

“I’d like to come speak to you.”

“Is this a part of your quest for the Shanghai Moon?”

“And other things. I can be there in twenty minutes.”

“Such industry! Please, come! Though beyond what I told you yesterday I don’t see how I can help you.”

“I’ll explain when I get there.”

“Ah!” A tiny pause. “Have you made new discoveries?”

“Mostly I’ve found new questions.”

“This is quite exciting! I’ll be expecting you.”

C. D. Zhang and the sleek white tea set were waiting when we arrived. I introduced Bill, and a smile creased C.D. Zhang’s face. “Mr. Smith. Now, you more closely fit my preconceptions of a private eye.”

“It’s a liability,” Bill said.

“Not in all situations, I imagine. Now, please! Sit down! Tell me your new discoveries!” He poured tea and passed cups around.

“We’ve come across some information,” I said. “Facts I wanted to ask you about.” To be polite, I tasted my tea before I began. This was not the smoky tea from yesterday but a flowery jasmine. Delicious, I thought, and said so, and Bill agreed, though I was sure it was too sweet for him.

I decided to lead with yesterday’s question, to soften him up. “Mr. Zhang, you told me Rosalie Gilder took your brother to Hongkew because his mother, Mei-lin, had disappeared. Forgive me, but sir, what you didn’t say was that she disappeared with you and your father. When you escaped the Municipal Police, who were coming to arrest your father for being a Communist spy.”

C. D. Zhang stayed silent for a long minute. His face slid from buoyant to rueful. “He wasn’t, of course.”

“A spy? No, Chen Kai-rong was.”

“Yes. The Communist cause, as miserable a failure as it became, was guided in those early days by idealism and ideology. Those were not goods in which my father traded. Tell me, how did you learn this?”

“We’ve been doing research. There’s a navy intelligence report that lays out the incident based on interviews with former members of the Municipal Police. Why did you let me believe you had no idea what happened to Mei-lin?”

“You came here to unearth the Shanghai Moon, not the disgraceful secrets of my family. What happened to my poor stepmother isn’t part of the story of the Shanghai Moon.”

“I think it may be. Can you tell us about it?”

“In what way could the two possibly be related?”

“I’d rather you told the story first. So your memories aren’t tainted by what I think.”

His glittering eyes regarded me. “And if I do, you’ll tell me why?”

“Yes.”

Another few moments; then he put his teacup down. He folded one hand over the other and let some time go by before he began. “My stepmother did indeed leave for Chongqing with my father and myself, and not happily. I was frightened, not because of our rapid flight—I was twelve, young enough to be excited, not old enough to fully comprehend the danger—but because my stepmother was so wretched. I thought that was because we didn’t take the time to fetch my brother at the Chen home, and wondered why we didn’t. My father, of course, explained nothing.”

“How did he know to run? Did Mei-lin tell him?”

“No. He was warned—in your profession you’d say ‘tipped off.’ ” He gave a wan smile. “A bought-and-paid-for friend in the SMP.”

“What happened after you left Shanghai?”

“We boarded a train for the interior, rattling over the miles in air electric with Mei-lin’s misery, my father’s anger, and stiff silence. Late at night my father and Mei-lin left our compartment. He returned without her. I knew my father’s fury, and even in the weak lamp from the corridor I could see it was best to play at being asleep. But I didn’t sleep that night, though my father did. I heard his snores. In the morning I asked where my stepmother had gone. My father said she’d betrayed us and now she’d left us. I asked if she’d gone back to Shanghai, and when we would be going back. My father replied that I’d be punished if he heard my voice again before we reached Chongqing.”

“So you never knew what happened?”

“I never knew, and for years I wouldn’t let myself imagine. But it’s clear.” He looked at me sadly, and I had to agree.

“And after that?”

“After that? Where the train line ended, my father bribed the border guards. From filthy cafés he hired drivers. At one point we rode hidden in an oxcart. If not for my father’s smoldering fury and my loneliness, it would have been thrilling. Finally we arrived in Chongqing. We set up house. A new amah—young and beautiful—and new tutors. My father, as always, gone much of the day, and I more lonely than before. I missed my stepmother. I missed my small brother, who made me laugh. It was a long time before I let go of the idea that Mei-lin had returned to Shanghai. I pictured the garden at the Chen home, the acacia in bloom, everyone playing, happy together. I was consumed with envy! But of course I said nothing to my father. He, in a change of heart I only understood years later when I learned the reason for our flight, had joined the army of Chiang Kai-shek. I did the same myself when I was of age, though as I said, my value increased with my unit’s distance from actual combat. But my lack of military talent pales beside my father’s political judgment. He had a genius, apparently, for picking the losing side. In a three-way war, he chose it twice.

“Now.” C. D. Zhang’s smile re-emerged. “That’s our sordid family story, and I’m ready to be enlightened. Where in all this is the Shanghai Moon?”

Well, we’d made a deal. Before I could start, though, Bill asked, “Could you just tell me one more thing? How did you and your father get out of China?”

C. D. Zhang waved an arm. “I’ve told this to Ms. Chin. I thought partners shared everything! Our escape was dramatic, but not unique. With companions from my unit, I reached Shanghai scarely ahead of Mao’s barefoot soldiers. My father had gone earlier, to negotiate passage on the
Taipei Pearl
—one of the last ships. I nearly missed boarding it. A frantic crush streamed up the gangway, many losing their footing, plunging into the oily water. My father, on the deck, screamed at the crewmen repelling the mob to let me board. As though they were troops under his command! Of course they ignored him. As my friends and I fought our way to the top of the slope, a desperate sailor unhitched the gangway from the ship. I leapt, crashing onto the deck as the steel plates fell away below and sent hundreds into the river. My companions were among them. With screams still echoing we set course for Taipei.”

His sharp eyes flicked to me. “Ah, Ms. Chin, you look so sad! The past is gone. Those hundreds are long dead, and many worse things have happened since those days, and many better ones, too. As for my father and myself, when the ship reached Formosa—or as we now say, Taiwan—Chiang’s men settled in to await the day, sure to come soon, when they’d regain the country. My father mocked them as fools. He said China and the past had both betrayed us and he wanted nothing more to do with them. We continued to America, to start new lives in the land of opportunity! Where, for a man who told any who’d listen that he’d turned his back on the past, my father spent a good deal of time tending his garden of bitter memories.”

“One of those memories was Mei-lin’s betrayal?” My synapses suddenly made a connection. “That’s why he wouldn’t have wanted you to sponsor your brother and your cousin?”

“Yes, Ms. Chin. Exactly.” C. D. Zhang offered the teapot around. I accepted; Bill declined. “Now, you’ve heard my story and wrested from me a dark family secret. The very least you can do is tell me why. Do you suppose Mei-lin had the Shanghai Moon with her when we left, and my father unwittingly . . . discarded it?”

“No, that’s not it,” I said. “Do you remember a German friend of your father’s, a Major Ulrich?”

“Major Ulrich, of course. A sneering fellow, not so different from my father. Why?”

“He’s the man who stopped the Municipal Police from beating Kai-rong. To get him to do that, Mei-lin and Rosalie may have promised him the Shanghai Moon.”

A flush of excitement crept into C. D. Zhang’s face. “Ms. Chin! New discoveries indeed! How did you learn this?”

“We’ve found some documents. Mei-lin’s diary and some other things. Papers no one’s seen before.”

“My stepmother’s diary! And other things?”

“Yes.”

I didn’t elaborate, and after a moment he asked, “Where did you find them?”

“As an academic told us, it’s unbelievable what’s maintained in government archives at taxpayers’ expense.” That was deliberately misleading and I felt bad about it. But Paul Gilder could have handed any of these men his rosewood box at any time over the years. If he’d chosen to keep it secret, it wasn’t my business to give him away. “There’s a lot of material, apparently, that hasn’t been translated.”

“And something you found says Major Ulrich had the Shanghai Moon?”

“No. The documents seem to say he was promised it. It’s not clear whether he ever got it.”

“Ulrich . . .” C. D. Zhang’s brows knit in thought. “He died not long after we arrived in Chongqing, I think. We were sent word. He was part of the escape plot?”

“Just that limited role, it seems, to keep Kai-rong safe while Mei-lin worked out the rest of the plan.”

“And you don’t know whether he actually got the gem,” he mused. “Although if he had . . . that would explain . . .”

“Explain what?”

C. D. Zhang kept his gaze on the nighttime photo. He spoke quietly. “As I told you, the rumor persisted that Rosalie Gilder always wore the Shanghai Moon at her throat. But when her body was laid out for burial, it wasn’t found. My cousin and my brother have always assumed it to have been stolen when she died. I never agreed. I’ve thought it must have been hidden in the gardens of the Chen villa—as we now see her other jewelry was. But if she and my stepmother gave it years before to Major Ulrich, that would explain why it wasn’t found.”

“Stolen when she died? Who by?”

“She died during a robbery near the end of the war. Li and Lao-li have always thought the robbers took the Shanghai Moon with them.”

“Do you know anything more about that? Rosalie’s death?”

He paused, then shook his head. “There was no law toward the war’s end. Money had no value, and life even less. Any object that could be traded for rice, fuel, or passage out of China was stolen and stolen again. We had been hungry so long we no longer felt hunger, just desperation and fear. It was a terrible time and drove many mad.”

Poor Rosalie, I thought, escaping the nightmare of Europe only to have to live through, and die in, times like that.

“But if you’ve come to ask if my stepmother ever said anything about Major Ulrich,” C. D. Zhang said, “I’m afraid she didn’t.”

“I admit I was hoping. Mr. Zhang, think back. Couldn’t there be anything, maybe something that didn’t make sense at the time?”

He smiled. “I suppose there may be. Not much made sense to me at that time. However, nothing my stepmother said stands out. But Ms. Chin, your documents. Is it possible they hold something? Something you haven’t recognized? Would you like me to look at them?”

“I don’t think there’s anything there. Mei-lin’s diary, for example, stops the day you left Shanghai. She gave it to Rosalie. Along with your brother.”

I watched his face as this sank in. “Her most precious things.”

“Yes.”

“All these years,” he said slowly, “I thought it was a quirk of fate that my brother was at Rosalie’s home when we fled and was left behind.”

“No. I think Mei-lin was afraid of what might happen.”

“What my father might do, you mean.”