Trail of Blood (27 page)

“And you’re acting like an English teacher! Thinking of changing professions?”

“No, teaching’s way too dangerous for me.”

Mary emphasized the danger I’d be in if I were anywhere near the White Eagles today—“and I don’t mean from the White Eagles”—and we said good-bye, in a manner I thought was fairly civilized for threatener and threatenee. I briefly debated whether it was too early to call Bill, decided to call anyway, and had just punched his number on the kitchen phone when my cell phone rang.

“Smith,” came the rumble in my kitchen phone ear.

“I’ll call you back.” I hung up that one up and flipped open the other.

“Good morning, Ms. Chin. David Rosenberg here. I hope I’m not calling too early?”

“Mr. Rosenberg! Good to hear from you. No, it’s not too early at all. How can I help you?”

“I’ve just had a call from one of my reporters in Zurich. He’s been doing the background on Alice Fairchild that you asked for. Nothing he’s found so far is particularly surprising, but I thought you’d like to hear it.”

“Yes, I certainly would.”

“Born Shanghai 1938. Father James Fairchild, mother Frances Fairchild, both Methodist missionaries. One sister, Joan Fairchild Conrad, born 1939. I met her years ago.”

“Yes, I remember you mentioned that.” I tucked the phone onto my shoulder and plopped congee into a bowl. “You said they were Mutt and Jeff. Different from each other.” Lydia Chin, queen of the cultural reference.

“Very much. Joan’s thin and frail, which I gather she always was, and more so lately, some kind of chronic lung problem from those days. Although before she retired she taught high school, so I imagine she’s got a certain toughness. I remember her as humorous and outgoing. The type with a twinkle in her eye.”

“Where does she live?”

“Sharon, Massachusetts. Outside Boston. Her husband died six years ago.”

“Is that where Alice grew up, around Boston?”

“Yes. The Fairchilds left China in November 1945, as soon as they could after the camps were opened. They were put on one of the first ships out—both children were sick, it seems. The family settled in Sharon. Alice went on to law school—unusual for a woman of her day—and married. They divorced after eight years, apparently on amicable terms.”

“Does she have children?”

“No.”

David Rosenberg went on detailing Alice’s career, including her move to Zurich in the eighties and her growing expertise in Holocaust asset recovery. “She’s written a few articles for law journals on the fine points of that work. I’ve asked my staff to pull them. I’ll send them to you.”

“I’d appreciate that. Anything else?”

“Well, I took a look at her financials. Not my reporter, me, from here. It just seemed like the thing to do.”

“Good instincts.”

“I may be hidebound management now, but I did start out pounding the pavement. However, I have to admit everything I found seems in order.”

“So she’s not mortgaged to the hilt, anything like that?”

“Hardly. Not wealthy, but solid. She did take a hit five years ago when the capital markets fell. She’d overreached. For an estate planner it was a touch reckless, the sort of speculation that’s all right when you’re young and have decades to recover, but later you advise clients against it. Maybe she was feeling cocky.”

“But it didn’t cause her problems?”

“If things had gone her way, she’d be much closer to wealth than she is. But even though it was a large sum, she also kept a reasonable amount back. She can certainly maintain her lifestyle on what remains. Maybe that’s why she did it.”

“Why?”

“She was getting older, she had enough to live on. Why not take a flutter?”

“I guess I can see that. So it looks like she’s more or less what she claims to be.” And a number of things she didn’t mention, besides. “Do you have contact information for her sister? Just to be thorough.”

He did. I thanked him, hung up, and dialed Joan Conrad née Fairchild’s number, not sure why. After all, if I was looking for reasons to be suspicious of Alice, I didn’t need to go back any further than this week.

My mother’s always saying old women don’t need much sleep. That may be true, or maybe Joan Conrad was just, like me, an early riser. In any case, she certainly sounded chipper answering the phone.

“Good morning, Mrs. Conrad,” I said in my best outside-Chinatown accent. I felt bad already that I was about to lie to her. But what was I supposed to do, tell her her sister was a jewel thief and a forger and I was a PI snooping into her past? “My name’s Liz Russell and I’m a doctoral student at Columbia doing research for my thesis. I’m studying modern Chinese history with a focus on the Chinese civil war as it overlapped with World War II. I understand you were in Shanghai in those years, and I wonder whether you’d have time to answer a few questions.”

“Well, my goodness.” There followed a brief pause as Joan Conrad digested everything I’d thrown at her. “Tell me again, dear—you’re writing a thesis?” Her voice was chirpy and soft, like a breathless bird.

“Yes, ma’am. I’m focusing on the relationships among the Japanese occupiers, their German allies, and the two sides in the civil war.” I was on a roll. “I know you were a child in those years—”

“My, I certainly was. However did you find me?”

“I have records from some of the Japanese internment camps. They’re not complete, but I’ve been trying to track down people who were young enough then to give me a chance of finding them now.”

I heard a chuckle. “You mean we old fossils who haven’t yet shuffled off this mortal coil.”

“Oh, I—”

“That’s all right, dear, it’s not news to me that I’m gaining on Methuselah.” A delicate coughing fit interrupted her. I heard another voice in the room, and waited. Joan Conrad returned. “I’m sorry, dear. Yes, thank you, Maria, please leave it here. Yes, I promise I’ll drink it all!” To me again: “Such a tyrant! But a wonderful girl, my Maria.”

“Your daughter?”

“Heavens, no. My caregiver. That’s the word they use now. I think it’s lovely, and she does give me such good care! But I’m sorry, you were asking about Shanghai, weren’t you? For your thesis. About the Japanese and the Germans.”

“And the camp.”

“Oh, but I was such a little girl when we went to the camp. I didn’t know anything about the Japanese except that they sent us there. The Germans, and the Chinese armies—why, they might as well have been on Mars. It was the Americans we were waiting for. Waiting and waiting.”

“That’s all part of what I want to know. How much the people in the camps knew about what was going on and how that was reflected in the camp society. First, can you verify for me which camp your family was in? It was you, your parents, and your sister, right?” I could have asked more directly, but I didn’t know how good Joan Conrad’s memory was, and I didn’t want to plant suggestions.

Apparently, though, her memory was fine. “They called it Chapei camp. The buildings had been built as Great China University, but it hadn’t been that in years.”

Bingo! Keeping my voice level, I said, “Chapei, yes. That camp particularly interests me for my research because it’s one of the few where they held Germans.”

“Germans?”

“For example, a woman and child. A Frau Ulrich, wife of a German officer.”

“Oh, you mean poor Mrs. Ulrich! Goodness, I haven’t thought of her in years.” Another round of coughing broke into Joan Conrad’s reminiscences. “Excuse me, dear.”

“Are you all right?”

“Oh, yes, of course. Mrs. Ulrich!” she marveled. “My, she was beautiful. But I think she was the only German I knew.”

“And her child, isn’t that right?”

“Did she have a child?” A note of doubt wavered in Joan Conrad’s voice. Maybe her memory wasn’t so perfect after all.

“The child died about a year after they’d come to the camp. A few months after Mrs. Ulrich herself.”

“Died. Yes, I suppose so. I think that’s right.” After a moment, in a steadier voice, Joan Conrad said, “Mrs. Ulrich was a friend of my mother’s, you know.” She continued in her cheerful vein; I guessed she was back on solid ground. “She lived in the next room. Oh, but they weren’t really rooms! The building we were in had been a dormitory, you see. Most families had individual rooms, but when we came those were occupied. We were put into the big lounge with some other families. The men were given asphalt boards and old wood, and everyone hammered and sawed. They divided it like a rabbit warren, a room for each family and sometimes dividers inside those, too. Mrs. Ulrich was there without her husband, so my father and some of the others built her room. You could hear everything—people talking, babies crying. Even the men snoring! At the mission in Shanghai my sister and I . . .” Again, a hesitation. “We’d each had our own rooms there. But the camp, with everyone on top of each other! And the food was monotonous and didn’t taste good. At first it was an adventure, but then I wanted to go home.”

Joan Conrad’s description of Chapei Camp sounded just like Rosalie’s account of the Jewish refugees’ shelter. Displaced people, on top of each other, disoriented, frightened, and missing home: everyone’s story the same.

But not exactly the same. Sometimes there were surprises. Like the fact that Frau Ulrich, wife of the intended recipient of the Shanghai Moon, had lived in the same
room
as Alice Fairchild.

“Mrs. Conrad, can you remember anything about Mrs. Ulrich? I’m interested in her case.”

“Oh, I was so young . . . but I remember she was glamorous! The women I was used to were missionaries, very plain, you see. Mrs. Ulrich worked at keeping up appearances. She’d brought cosmetics to the camp, rouge and powder and all sorts of things missionary children didn’t see. She hadn’t packed very practically. As though she weren’t intending to be there long. Nobody was, of course not, but we weren’t allowed to bring much, so most people packed clothes and personal items, practical things. But now that I think of it, Mrs. Ulrich had a number of suitcases. I don’t know how many, but more than one. We were only allowed one each, the Japanese made that rule. I remember because my sister and I had to both sit on my suitcase to close it again after I opened it to sneak my teddy bear in. But Mrs. Ulrich had more.”

“Maybe because she was German? Maybe the Japanese treated her better than they treated Americans, could that be?”

“You know, dear, I think you’re right. I do remember the guards bowed to her. Not that that kept them from ordering her around. And she certainly didn’t feel well treated. I was a bit frightened of her, actually, as I think about it. Oh, such times are coming back to me!”

“Why were you frightened?”

“She was angry. All the time, so angry. My mother was usually able to calm her with a word or a cup of tea, but she never stopped being angry even when she didn’t act it. Children sense that sort of thing.”

“Angry at who? The Japanese?”

“Whom, dear,” Joan Conrad said mildly. “At the graduate level there’s really no excuse for sloppy grammar and syntax.”

“Yes, my adviser is always telling me that. Whom was Mrs. Ulrich angry at?”

“With whom was she angry, you mean. Partly the Japanese, of course, the way all the adults were. She was also furious with her husband. I remember that! He wasn’t in the camp. I think she might have lost him, though I’m not sure. But, no, that must be wrong, because I can’t imagine she’d speak so badly of him if he’d passed away! And she did harp on it. What a stupid, greedy man he was. She’d say that to anyone who’d listen. That it was his fault they were there at all—” She stopped. “They! She said ‘they’! ‘We,’ I mean. Oh, I can hear her, that soft German accent she had. Not one of the grating ones, but the other kind. ‘Vee vouldn’t be here iff he vassn’t so greedy.’ It would have been nice to listen to her if I hadn’t felt frightened. But she said ‘we’! If her husband wasn’t there, you must be right. She must have had a child, mustn’t she? Oh, my. And toys. In those suitcases, toys, yes, yes. The little wooden horse, I still have it, over there on the shelf with my teddy bear. From one of her suitcases.” Again, Joan Conrad’s voice faltered. “The wooden horse . . . And Alice, Alice has a top . . . In any case, if she had toys she must have had a child. But I don’t remember. I’m sorry, my dear. I was young . . . some of those memories . . .”

“I understand. The camps were difficult places, I know.”

“Harder for the adults than the children, though. Children are so resilient! We played marbles and tops in the dust. We made up games and had dolls that we brought with us or that our mothers made from sticks and rags. Even when we were ill, and we were ill most of the time. Dysentery, croup . . . That’s where my cough came from—and here it comes again.” I waited while she coughed; then she laughed. “That was well timed, wasn’t it?”

“You seem very comfortable with your memories of those days, Mrs. Conrad.”

“Oh, children adjust. It just became our life. It was hardest toward the end, when there wasn’t much to eat . . . to this day I can’t bear sweet potatoes. I can’t get over the idea they have worms in them! The scariest part, I think, was that the adults were frightened. During roll call, when if you’d done something against the rules you’d get summoned for punishment. You never knew if you’d done anything until then, you see. Or the Japanese would order us to assemble when something had happened that made them angry, in the war, I mean, not the camp. Then someone would get punished, an American or English person would be beaten, because of where their country’s planes had dropped a bomb. Sometimes rations would get cut, or there’d be no water for a day or two. Of course, I didn’t know about those things then, I mean the reasons why these scary things happened. For us, for the children, it was just our life. And Alice always took care of me, so I was shielded more than most.” She paused. “Oh, dear. Is any of this what you wanted to know? Am I helping you at all?”

“Oh, very much. This is fascinating. May I ask you about something specific that’s come up in my research? Something curious?”

“Yes, of course.”

I took a breath and, trying for no change in my voice, asked, “Mrs. Conrad, have you ever heard of a gem called the Shanghai Moon?”