“One of the workers arrested caused the train he was running to be derailed/’ read the Chinaman. “Dead. Three other military trains were derailed yesterday, the rails having been torn up.’
“Have the sabotaging generalized and note on the same reports the manner in which repairs may be made with the least delay/’ said Kyo.
“For every act of sabotage the White Guards shoot. ”
“The Committee knows it. We’ll shoot too. Something else: no trains with firearms?’
“No.’
“Any news about when our troops will be in Ch’eng Ch’ou?”'1
“I have no midnight news yet. The delegate of the Syndicate thinks it will be tonight or tomorrow.
The insurrection would therefore begin the next day or the day following. They would have to await the instructions of the Central Committee. Kyo was thirsty. They went out.
They were now near the spot where they were to separate. Another ship’s siren called three ^mes, in jerks, then once again in a long-drawn moan. Its cry seemed to
1 The last nation before Shanghai.
expand in the rain-saturated night; it died out at last, like a rocket. “Could they be getting anxious aboard the Shantung?” Absurd. The captain was not expecting his customers before eight o’clock. They resumed their walk, their thoughts magnetized by the ship with its cases of guns, anchored out there in the cold and greenish water. It was no longer raining.
“And now to find my man,’ said Kyo. “I’d feel more easy, just the same, if the Shantung would change anchorage/’
Their ways were no longer the same; they fixed a meeting, and separated. Katov was going to get the men.
Kyo finally reached the grilled gate of the concessions. Two Annamite sharpshooters and a colonial sergeant came to examine his papers: he had his French passport. To tempt the post, a Chinese merchant had hung little cakes on the barbs of the wires. (“A good idea for poisoning a post, later on,’ thought Kyo.) The sergeant gave him back his passport. He soon found a taxi and gave the driver the address of the Black Cat.
The car, which the chauffeur drove at full speed, met a few patrols of European volunteers. “The troops of eight nations are on guard here, ’ said the newspapers. This did not matter much: it did not enter into the plans of the Kuomintang to attack the concessions. Deserted boulevards, indistinct figures of petty merchants whose shops consisted of a pair of scales on their shoulders. The car stopped at the entrance to a tiny garden lighted by the luminous sign of the Black Cat. In passing by the cloak-room, Kyo noticed the hour: two o’clock in the morning. “Fortunately one can wear what one pleases here.’ Under his dark-gray sport- jacket of rough material he was wearing a pull-over.
The jazz-orchestra had reached the point of exhaustion. For five hours it had kept up, not gayety, but a savage intoxication to which each couple anxiously clung. Al at once it stopped, and the crowd broke up: at the end of the hall the clients, on the sides the professional dancers: Chinese girls in their sheaths of brocaded silk, Russian girls and half-breeds; a ticket per dance, or per conversation. An old man with the look of a bewildered clergyman remained in the middle of the floor making motions with his elbows like a duck. At the age of fifty-two he had spent the night out for the first time, and, in terror of his wife, had not dared to return home. For eight months he had been spending his nights in the night-clubs, innocent of laundry, changing his linen in the shops of the Chinese shirtmakers, behind a screen. Merchants on the verge of ruin, dancers and prostitutes, those who knew themselves menaced-almost all of them-kept their eyes on that phantom, as if he alone could hold them back on the brink of destruction. They would go to bed, exhausted, at dawn-when the rounds of the executioner would begin again in the Chinese city. At this hour there were only the severed heads in the cages, still black, their hair dripping with rain.
“Like monkeys, my dear girl! They’U be dressed up like monkeys!
The buffoonish voice, that might have belonged to Punchinello, seemed to come from a column. With its nasal twang, set off by a note of bitterness, it evoked the spirit of the place with peculiar appropriateness, isolated in a silence full of the clinking of glasses above the bewildered clergyman. The man Kyo was looking for was present.
He circled the column, and discovered him in the crowd at the end of the hall, where there were several rows of tables not occupied by the dancing-girls. Above a pell-mell of backs and bosoms in a mass of silky garments, a Punchinello, thin and humpless, but who resembled his voice, was making a buffoonish speech to a Russian girl and a half-breed Filipino girl seated at his table. Standing, his elbows glued to his sides and his hands gesticulating, he spoke with all the muscles of his razor-edged face, hampered by the square of black silk which covered his right eye, injured no doubt. No matter what he wore-this evening he had on a dinner-jacket — Baron de Clappique gave the impression of being in disguise. Kyo had decided not to accost him here, to wait until he went out.
“Absolutely, my dear girl, absolutely! Chiang Kai- shek will come in here with his revolutionaries and shout — in classic style, I tell you, clas-sic! as when he takes cities: ‘Dress these merchants up like monkeys, these soldiers like leopards (as when they sit down on freshly painted benches)! Like the last prince of the Liang dynasty, absolutely, my dear, let’s climb on board the imperial junks, let’s contemplate our subjects dressed, for our distraction, each in the color of his profession, blue, red, green, with pigtails and top-knots; not a word, my dear girl, not a word I tell you!’ ”
Then becoming confidentiaclass="underline"
“The only music permitted will be Chinese beils.” “And you, what will you do in ail that?
His voice became plaintive, sobbing.
“What, my dear girl, you can’t guess? I shall be the court astrologer, I shall die trying to pluck the moon out of a pond, one night when I am drunk-tonight?” Scientific:
“. like the poet Tu Fu, whose works certainly enchant your idle days-not a word, I’m sure of it! Moreover..
A ship’s siren filled the hall. Immediately a deafening clash of cymbals swallowed it up, and the dance began again. The Baron had sat down. Making his way among the tables and couples, Kyo reached an unoccupied table a little behind his. The music had drowned all other noises; but now that he had got nearer to Clappique, he heard his voice once more. The Baron was pawing the Filipino girl, but he continued to talk to the slim-faced Russian girl, all eyes:
“.. the trouble, my dear girl, is that there is no more caprice in the world. From time to time’’-pointing with his forefinger-“a European minister sends his wife a 1-litcle parcel by post, she opens it-not a word. ” His forefinger to his lips:
“… it’s the head of her lover. They still talk about it three years later!’
Tearfuclass="underline"
“Lamentable, my dear girl, 1-lamentable! Look at me. You see my face? That’s what twenty years of hereditary whimsicality lead to. It resembles syphilis.-Not a word!”
Full of authority:
“Waiter! champagne for these two ladies. And for me.. ”
Once more confidentiaclass="underline"
“…a 1-litcle Martini.
Severe:
“V-very dry.
(Assuming the worst, with the police, I have an hour before me, thought Kyo. Just the same, how long is this going to last?)