Around the New Year of 1933, by the lunar calendar
Dice
It was the fifteenth day of the twelfth lunar month, about ten days before New Year’s Eve.
At around 9:35 a.m., Wei Dafu walked up to the front of the Zhejiang Grand Theater, across from which was the Fourth Malu food market.
The Shanghai Municipal Council allowed car owners to park along this stretch of Zhejiang Road, and it was usually packed—besides automobiles there were rickshaws, vendors’ handcarts, and flatbed carts hauling vegetables, so pedestrians heading in and out of the market had to squeeze through the gaps between vehicles.
Wei Dafu suddenly felt something was off today. Order reigned on both sides of the market entrance—though a row of cars was still parked along the road as usual, the wheelbarrows and the flatbed carts with their ropes slung over the pullers’ shoulders were nowhere to be seen, as if someone had stepped around the corner and blocked them all off.
He watched for a while and noticed that once the rickshaws pulled up to the curb, the moment the housewives climbed down, the pullers hurried off with their carts, as if some warning hung in the air—even if it left them sweating and gasping for breath, they seemed to sense they couldn’t linger a moment longer in this forbidden zone. Wei Dafu thought he might just be overly nervous. Then again, it wasn’t unusual, even in the foreign concessions, for the constables to suddenly take a notion to clear loiterers off the street. He told himself he’d probably just been too on edge lately.
A film poster hung outside the theater—today’s showing was Soul of an Overseas Cuckoo, starring Jin Yan and Ziluolan. He suspected it wouldn’t be much good—a film with only three main characters, and by the end all three of them die. Besides, the timing was wrong; the first showing wasn’t until three in the afternoon, he mused absently.
At 9:40 a.m., on the rooftop garden of the Great World Hotel.
The amusement park looked rather forlorn. Winter sunlight fell on the carousel, where a few wooden horses drooped their heads, the flaking paint especially conspicuous. The skating rink and the billiard hall stood empty, the storytelling hall hadn’t opened either, and only one or two customers sat in the open-air teahouse.
Yi Junnian walked to a corner of the garden and stood by the parapet, looking out. Across the street, the building’s bottom two floors housed the market, where housewives and servants were crowded at the entrance—this was the busiest hour. The windows on the upper two floors of the building were all shut. They were the awning-hinged type, which could only be pushed open from below.
“Who did you see this morning?” Ling Wen asked from behind him. By their earlier arrangement, Yi Junnian was supposed to have gone to Ling Wen’s place first thing that morning, and then they would go to the market together. But he hadn’t come; instead he’d had a clerk from his own calligraphy and painting shop deliver a letter asking her to meet him on the rooftop garden of the Great World Hotel. Ling Wen had been here with Yi Junnian before, so it was easy for her to get in and take the elevator up.
“A driver from the Nanshi Police Station. Someone we use.”
“You needed to see him this urgently—did something go wrong?”
Yi Junnian shook his head without turning to face her, still looking down at the road below. After a moment he suddenly said, “The Baiyunguan Detective Squad mustered a group of men in the middle of the night, saying they were going to conduct business in the concession.”
Yi Junnian was Ling Wen’s superior, and by rights he shouldn’t have told her this. But she had worked in this small group the longest, was very capable, and had always handled internal liaison—Yi Junnian kept almost nothing from her.
“Should we notify Lao Fang?” Ling Wen grew anxious at once.
“It may have nothing to do with us. And besides, there’s no time to notify him now.”
Qin Chuan’an did not go in through the market entrance. There was a side door on the north face of the building; he went in that way and took the elevator straight up to the third floor. The moment the elevator doors opened, he heard Schubert—he recognized it as the Unfinished Symphony.
He passed through a dim corridor, the floor laid with parquet tile—pale green with a sawtooth pattern, though it was hard to tell exactly what color it truly was. Along the corridor, one of the room doors on either side stood open, and inside, the folding chairs stacked up were coated in dust.
Qin Chuan’an walked straight to the end of the passage and pushed open a pair of double doors. Inside was a spacious hall with several rows of folding chairs, and at the front of the hall was an entire orchestra. He found a chair pressed against a pillar and sat down. He used to come often to watch the orchestra rehearse; he loved music, and he even kept a phonograph in his own clinic. Whenever the orchestra had a concert at the Town Hall or the Lyceum Theatre, he would usually come early to watch the rehearsal—he liked hearing them repeat certain passages, even certain single phrases.
After listening a while, he checked his watch. By the seventh time he checked, it was already 9:50. Qin Chuan’an left the rehearsal hall, but instead of retracing his path to the elevator, he went up the stairs on the other side of the corridor. The meeting place was on the mezzanine between the third and fourth floors.
At the end of Tongchun Alley stood a very tall wall, and behind it was Gezhi Public School, run by the Shanghai Municipal Council—though the school’s gate opened onto the other side of the block. Every time he went to work, Tian Fei walked this route.
He had spent nine years, on and off, as a student at Gezhi. This British-style public school admitted only boys, and today was the start of winter break—groups of young men kept filing out of the school gate. Though it was cold and they wore cotton robes, every one of them was neat and proper, layering a sky-blue indanthrene-dyed long gown over their padded coats, and wearing round-topped felt caps embroidered with the yellow school badge.
Tian Fei paced back and forth along the wall, between the main gate and the side gate. The pedestrians on the road mostly walked with their hands clasped behind their backs, crowding through the intersection—from behind, all one could see was a sea of round felt hats and fur caps. They were quickly swallowed up by the crowd crossing the street.
He worked at the library, and it was he who had discovered that room behind the stacks—a hidden chamber that had formed naturally over the years, one that few outsiders knew existed between the two floors. This was the archive for preserved books. The innermost few compartments, the ones at the very end of the corridor, held books that were either badly damaged or had been retired because too many newer reprints existed. Even the librarians themselves never went into those compartments; only Tian Fei occasionally wandered in, rescuing a volume here and there from the dust-covered shelves.
A little over a month ago, he had moved aside a pile of books that, having no room on the shelves, had been stacked in a corner—and discovered a door there, its lock rusted beyond use. After he’d pried it open, he found this dust-filled, musty-smelling good hideaway.
In fact, Tian Fei should have arrived a few minutes early, since he needed to unlock the door first. He felt in his pocket—the key was there. He hadn’t bothered looking for the original key to the room; he’d simply pried off the old lock and fitted a new one. He touched his right pocket too—the dominoes were there as well.
Yi Junnian watched Ling Wen step into the descending elevator. Her instincts were always good; he ought to be more careful. Lao Fang had told him the meeting was highly confidential, that the people coming to it had been carefully selected, that they came from different places, and that once they entered the action group they had to completely sever ties with their previous work. Yi Junnian stood there a moment longer—there was no unusual movement around the market entrance—and turned his gaze the other way.
Old Wei was standing on the pavement, a cigarette pack in hand, seemingly about to open it. Then he stopped, raised his head, and stared straight ahead as if he’d suddenly caught sight of something.
Yi Junnian followed Wei Dafu’s line of sight and saw Ling Wen in the middle of the road. Clearly, Wei Dafu had recognized her—his memory really was good. The two of them had indeed met once before, on an occasion of some urgency, when Yi Junnian had had no choice but to send Ling Wen running to that teahouse to tell Wei Dafu to change the meeting spot.
Wei Dafu had just bought cigarettes from the tobacco shop beside the Zhejiang Grand Theater, and as he crossed the street meaning to open the pack and light one, he looked up and saw a woman—lovely, he thought to himself with quiet admiration—no, wait—he looked again more carefully, certain he wasn’t mistaken, he must have seen her somewhere before. But he couldn’t recall where, or under what circumstances.
The second floor of the market was all noodle stalls and rice shops, and the morning trade was in full swing. Cui Wentai had originally meant to just have a bowl of soy milk and a piece of flatbread and be done with it, but once he got there, on impulse he found himself wanting nothing more than a bowl of pork offal soup. The pork offal sold at the Fourth Malu market was the freshest and most famous in all of Shanghai, shipped in every morning by wooden boat along the Suzhou Creek, the baskets still steaming when unloaded from the boats.
He drove for a car-rental company. That morning he’d specially taken a fare to drop a passenger at the Jinli Wharf. He’d timed it so he’d arrive at the market right on schedule. Once he finished his business here, he’d head back to the garage to report in, and no one would be any the wiser. In Shanghai, doing secret work sometimes required a car, so the organization had specially arranged for him to be placed at the car-rental firm. It had taken considerable effort to pull this off, and he meant to hold on to this position carefully.
For some reason, Cui Wentai suddenly wanted a bowl of pork offal soup badly, with a few slices of tomato in it—he sprinkled in plenty of pepper, and got two more sesame cakes besides. A bowl of soup, fragrant, spicy, still a bit too hot, and he immediately felt settled inside. Finishing the last spoonful of soup, still chewing on the cake, he checked his pocket watch—not quite 9:50 yet—and slowly stood up, glancing toward the elevator.
Five minutes to ten.
On the east side of the market there was an extremely narrow lane. To its right was the back wall of the market; to its left, a fence, through whose gaps drifted a strange, spicy smell from time to time. Behind the wall, shadows of many people could be seen, all of unusual appearance, dressed in white robes and white caps. Lin Shi looked up toward the top of the building, noting the position of the windows and the fire escape. He checked his watch again and hurried across the road.
On the fourth floor, near the open shelves where library patrons could browse books themselves, Lin Shi stood a little closer to the entrance. A few steps to the right of the door was the staircase; at the turn going down, there was a door, behind which lay a corridor leading to the meeting place.
As ten o’clock approached, a car pulled up to the street corner diagonally across from the market. Someone leaned close to the car window, said a few words quietly to whoever was inside, then quickly walked off. The two men in the back seat exchanged a desultory word here and there, also waiting for the moment to arrive.
“How’s the Great World Hotel?” one of them asked.
The guard-like man in the front passenger seat turned around and said, “The rooftop garden is fun—all sorts of goings-on at night. It’s practically our own territory on the ground—the whole hotel might as well be run by our own police station, even the waiters report in to us on a schedule.”
The Central District Detective Chief, Yao, sitting in the back, didn’t like his subordinates chattering too much, but he simply went on, unruffled: “The rooms aren’t bad either. What do you say—shall we open a room for Squad Leader You over New Year’s, for a soak and a game of cards?”
You Tianxiao shook his head, glancing once at the building across the way. “If someone were standing on the rooftop garden of the Great World Hotel, they’d have a perfect view of anything happening at the market entrance.”
“Squad Leader You is too cautious,” Detective Chief Yao laughed. “The concession police are arresting people here—even if the rooftop were packed with onlookers, what could they possibly do about it?”
Though You Tianxiao held the rank of Chief of the Detective Squad under the Judge Advocate’s Office of the Songhu Garrison Command, he’d never had much dealing with the concession’s own police station. The foreigners at the station, from the Commissioner down to the inspectors, had long looked down on the Longhua Detective Squad, which threw its weight around in the Chinese-administered districts—when the squad’s men tried to operate in the concessions, one slip and they’d find themselves locked up in the police station for days. But relations had improved lately; the Nationalists no longer shouted about overthrowing imperialism, and cooperation agreements on dealing with the Communists, exchanging intelligence, and extraditing criminals had all been signed—naturally the men actually doing the work down below got along fine with each other. You Tianxiao was on close terms with several Chinese detective chiefs at the Shanghai Municipal Police, and his friendship with Detective Chief Yao was especially close.
“That fraud case at the China Merchants Steam Navigation Company—did that fellow Du from the concession really have a hand in it?” You Tianxiao changed the subject. He meant the notorious case from last autumn that everyone had been talking about.
“Li Guojie—he’s just a big fool. The whole thing was rigged against him from the start. I heard his granduncle had some connection with Empress Dowager Cixi, and when Viceroy Li heard about it, he couldn’t sleep for several nights and finally decided to have this good-for-nothing younger brother swallow a packet of poison and be done with it.”
Detective Chief Yao always talked this way—jumping from one thing to another like a game of checkers.
“It was obvious from the start—Chen Fumu took the money and hung up his official seal and ran. That side was well prepared in advance. Just not sure whether Du Daheng was the one who set it all in motion.”
“They say he did have a hand in it,” said Yao, and even his usual bigmouthed self grew a bit careful when it came to Old Du. “The concession papers reacted so fast, whoever set it up had real reach. I heard it’s because Li Guojie had the Anhui Hatchet Gang assassinate the Steam Navigation Company’s general manager, then replaced several ship captains—stepped right on the tiger’s tail. Du personally went to Lushan to cry to the Generalissimo—”
Someone came running hurriedly across the road toward the car. You Tianxiao, seeing who it was, immediately pushed the door open and got out, listened to the report, then turned to Detective Chief Yao, who had also gotten out, and said, “That man of yours—we didn’t catch him this morning, and now it’s going to be trouble.”
“What happened?”
You Tianxiao felt like cursing, though it wasn’t really this man’s fault—the police station had always been a mixed bag of good and bad, and if anyone was to blame it was his own side’s chaotic handling of intelligence. By the time he’d gone to the political section of the police station and squared things with the deputy commissioner, and the men and their assignments had all been handed out, word came that there was a traitor inside the police station—and that traitor was among the very officers assigned to take part in the operation. But why hadn’t the man simply fled for his life, instead of running here? Had he come to give warning? He was practically throwing his life away.
Around ten o’clock, the people coming for the meeting filed into the room one by one. A long table stood in the middle of the room, its green baize cloth stained with grease and scorched here and there by cigarette burns. Everyone took a few dominoes from their pockets and set them on the table.
Yi Junnian stood by the table, straightening the dominoes people had set down carelessly, and said, looking them over, “Not everyone’s here yet—” He raised his head and studied everyone in the room one by one: besides Ling Wen, Wei Dafu, Tian Fei, there were seven other unfamiliar faces, but no Lao Fang. Lao Fang had urgently called everyone to this meeting—why hadn’t he shown up himself? Yi Junnian suddenly felt uneasy, sensing that something might go wrong today.
He checked his watch again—already a quarter past ten. Wei Dafu suddenly said, “If there’s something to say, say it quickly—let’s hurry this meeting along and be done.”
You Tianxiao had another man come running with a report: things had already started inside the market. If a man doesn’t care about his own life, he really can worm his way in anywhere. First he’d cozied up to some colleagues at the police station who didn’t know what was going on, and slipped through the cordon set up at the market’s side entrance. Unable to get to the passenger elevator, he’d forced his way in and gone up to the third floor via the market’s cold-storage freight elevator, meant for goods. Stopped on the third floor, he had now caused an uproar in the rehearsal hall, wounding one of the plainclothes detective squad men and sending a whole orchestra of musicians fleeing in panic through the building, before retreating back to the freight elevator and going up to the fourth floor.
You Tianxiao lit a cigarette, then thought better of it and handed one to Detective Chief Yao as well. He took a few drags, then threw the half-smoked cigarette to the ground. “Can’t wait for their meeting any longer. Let’s go make the arrests directly.”
From far down the corridor came two muffled thuds, and everyone in the mezzanine room froze. Yi Junnian sprang swiftly to the door, listened, then opened it—there was no movement in the corridor, and the door to the staircase was still shut. He turned back, shook his head at everyone, and put a finger to his lips. Everyone fell silent, watching him.
Yi Junnian glanced once at Wei Dafu, then returned to the table.
But just as he was about to speak again—a sound came from the ceiling. Now everyone was certain it was gunfire; many people were screaming, and the sound of feet fleeing in all directions came from the floor above—and then, from outside the window—someone had opened the window earlier because the damp, musty smell in the room bothered them.
There came a clatter, and a steel window frame fell from the fourth floor, followed by a person, hitting the ground with a heavy thud. Tian Fei rushed to the window and leaned out to look. Someone had snapped the hinges and fallen with the window itself from the fourth floor.
Had this person chosen to jump from here in order to sound an alarm? There was no time to think it through—Yi Junnian, lowering his voice, said to the room, “Go, quickly, out the back door!”
The back door opened onto another corridor that led to the stairs.
“Remember!” Yi Junnian reminded everyone once more, “Once downstairs, don’t rush out onto the street—first mix in with the crowd in the market.”
Wei Dafu was the first out the door. He ran down the corridor, shoved open the fire door, and dashed down the stairs a few steps at a time, with several others who’d been at the meeting close behind him. Before the others could reach the stairwell, the constables pouring in from the other end of the corridor fired off a volley of shots this way—just as Lin Shi pushed open the fire door, a bullet caught him in the leg.
The door to the stairwell was blocked. Yi Junnian led everyone back, running toward the corridor by the front door, the one they’d come in through earlier—but the door at the end of that corridor was now standing wide open, with several constables posted there, rifles at the ready.
Yi Junnian went back into the room and sat down before the pai gow tiles. An extra pair of dice had appeared on the table; he picked them up and put them in his pocket, steadied himself, and had just opened his mouth to speak when the door burst open.
“Well now—quite a crowd. What are you all hiding here for?”
You Tianxiao strode into the room, walked straight to the long table, and clapped his hands. Constables poured in behind him, each holding a rifle, surrounding everyone in the room. A few plainclothes men lounged idly by the door—Longhua Detective Squad men, brought in by You Tianxiao himself. He glanced at them, seeming none too pleased with their performance.
Yi Junnian looked coldly at this swaggering man, then turned his gaze to the table, and suddenly said with a smile, “Quite an operation for a bit of gambling.”
“Gambling, is it?” You Tianxiao walked up to Yi Junnian, took a pair of dice from his pocket, lined up two sixes, and set them down on the table beside the pai gow tiles. “Come with us, then. We’ll find you somewhere else to play.”
Seeing You Tianxiao produce a pair of dice, everyone froze. Yi Junnian’s heart lurched—this was the prearranged signal for a contact meeting; the superior sent to deliver the assignment was to produce a pair of dice—but how could this man possibly know that?
“Take them all!” You Tianxiao ordered.
Cui Wentai had been running behind Wei Dafu earlier, but after descending just one flight of stairs and turning, the man who’d been shouting about hurrying up the meeting had already vanished, leaving him no choice but to turn right into the corridor. He’d lost all sense of direction and simply ran as fast as he could—behind a door he spotted an elevator and dashed in. It turned out to be the cold-storage freight elevator, and it let him out on the ground floor. He grabbed a piece of burlap sacking lying nearby and threw it over his shoulders, then hoisted up a whole side of pork.
Outside stood the police station’s black patrol car, with a group of constables watching the exit. Cui Wentai buried his face behind the raw pork and slipped out of the market amid the crowd.
The man who had jumped lay curled up in the middle of the road. Constables had cordoned off the area; someone was taking photographs, someone else crouched beside him checking whether he’d stopped breathing. A crowd of onlookers had gathered on the far side of the road; the constables tried to disperse them, but the crowd wouldn’t budge—this city had too many people who were too curious, too eager to poke their noses into other people’s business. Cui Wentai didn’t dare look closely and turned to run toward the corner.
Just as he rounded the corner, another police car came toward him head-on. He ducked into an alley, and a hand suddenly clapped him on the back. Cui Wentai’s heart lurched—before he could even turn his head, he was yanked into the shadows.
“Lao Fang!” Cui Wentai gasped, recovering from the fright.
“Where are the others?”
“All scattered!” Cui Wentai panted.
Lao Fang surveyed the situation on the road—some constables had begun sealing off the intersection. “This alley leads to the road behind—split up and go separately!” He put on the hat in his hand and slipped out of the alley, sidling off among the scattering crowd, and in the blink of an eye had vanished.
Cui Wentai immediately ran further into the alley—he needed to circle back and retrieve his car. As he reached the end of the alley, it suddenly occurred to him: surely Lao Fang wouldn’t think he’d made off with a side of pork in the confusion?