Her house was in Nantao, the Old Chinese City with its Confucius Temple and its Willow Teahouse. It was painted a green that matched her hat and her eyes and had a high brick wall across its front which shielded a tiny garden. The house was an unusual (for Shanghai) three stories high, and not more than forty feet wide, and it looked magnificently immense to me. It was furnished with an odd mixture of carved Chinese pieces with lots of dragons’ heads and with what passed for modern in the 1930s. I thought it all very beautiful. Tante Katerine called out as we entered the house followed by the amah. A number of young women came into the wide reception hall and started to make a fuss over me. One of them was assigned the task of giving me a bath. Another was instructed to buy me some new clothes. Tante Katerine remembered her promise and gave me a piece of candied ginger. There was a peculiarly sweetish, pungent, odor in the air and an old man with a whisp of a white beard shuffled slowly toward the door that led to the garden and the gate and the street. He didn’t look at me; he didn’t look at anybody. One of the girls took my hand and started pulling me toward the stairs. She was Chinese and I asked her if she had seen my father. She said no. About half of the girls were Chinese and about half were foreign: French, American, White Russian, a couple of big-boned Australians, three Germans from Berlin, and a lone representative from Italy. Rome, as I recall. They were all very nice to me, but it was a year or so later before I fully understood that Tante Katerine, a White Russian late of Manchuria, ran what was generally regarded as the fanciest whorehouse in Shanghai.
Chapter 7
It took twenty-four hours and an autopsy before the island city-state’s police were satisfied that we hadn’t murdered Li Teh with some kind of infernal machine. He had died of cardiac arrest — or what was once called heart failure — brought on, so I understand, by severe emotional shock. It could have been the blue flashes that had danced around the room. He probably thought that he was being electrocuted.
I learned later that Shoftstall went stupid and came up with a fanciful story that no one believed. He told them that Li Teh’s name was Mr. Jones and that I’d wanted to question him with a lie detector because he’d applied for a $200,000 life insurance policy and I wasn’t at all satisfied with the information he’d given on his application. After that, they knocked Shoftstall around for a while, which only made him stubborn. All he would say after the beating was that as an American citizen, he demanded to see a representative of the U.S. Embassy. They threw him back in a cell.
Bourland was a little brighter, but not much. He said that the polygraph examination of Li Teh was merely routine.
“What kind of routine, Mr. Bourland?” one of them asked.
“Why, routine procedure,” he said.
They knocked him around until they got tired and then threw him back in a cell, too. He didn’t get a chance to call the Embassy either. I later learned all this from Carmingler.
They questioned us separately, of course, and they were good. At least the man who questioned me and who called himself Mr. Tung was good. Quite good. He said that he was from the Ministry of Defense and Security and I found no reason to doubt it.
I spent the first twenty-four hours in solitary. They had taken away my clothes, cigarettes, keys, wallet, and watch. I missed the cigarettes most of all. It really didn’t seem to matter much what time it was. They gave me the gray cotton, pajamalike uniform, the one that I was to wear for three months without change. The cell was small, five-feet wide and seven-feet long. It was windowless and contained a strawstuffed mattress, a bucket that served as a toilet, and a small plastic jug of water. Nothing else. The walls were built of gray, porous stones that were clammy and wet. The floor was concrete. A single forty-watt bulb was screwed into the ceiling. It never went off. The temperature seemed to be in the upper nineties, right alongside the humidity.
I was fed twice before I saw Tung. The first meal was a large bowl of rice with some pieces of unidentifiable fish mixed into it. The second meal was the same and so were all the other meals during the next three months. From long ago experience I choked down everything they gave me and didn’t lose a pound. Maybe they’re right after all and fish and rice are everything you really need.
The room that Tung questioned me in was on the second floor of the prison that the British had built a hundred years or so before with loving attention to all the details that would make it as uncomfortable as possible. The room had two windows that looked out over the prison yard which was surrounded by walls built of that same gray, porous stone. They must have been at least twenty-five feet high. A number of prisoners were walking around the yard, either by themselves or in twos and threes. I didn’t bother to ask if I could join them.
Mr. Tung (I never knew his other names, if he had any), was somewhere in his thirties, short, slim, and dapper. He wore a crisp white shirt with a neatly knotted blue tie and light blue linen slacks that were pressed to perfection. There were four ball-point pens clipped to his shirt pocket, all different colors. His black eyes seemed to snap a little and he had the nervous habit of tugging at his right earlobe when he was trying to phrase a question. He didn’t smile much, at least not when talking to me, and we spent quite some time talking.
Two prison guards brought me into the room and then left. I stood before Tung’s desk while he carefully looked me over. The room contained only the desk, Tung’s chair, and the one that he motioned me to sit in. There was nothing on his desk other than a round tin of Players, the kind that holds fifty cigarettes. He offered me one and I accepted it gratefully.
We sat there smoking for a while and then Tung said, “Well, you blew it, didn’t you?” I couldn’t place his accent despite the use of the vernacular. It wasn’t American and it wasn’t British. It was that in between, international brand, the kind that Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. used to speak before he began spending too much time in London.
I shrugged at his question and said nothing. There really wasn’t anything to say.
“Too bad about Li Teh,” Tung said. “I take it that you didn’t know about his heart condition?”
“No.”
“He wasn’t a bad chap really.”
“You knew him?”
“Not too well,” Tung said. “He was dickering to open one of his shops here, but I suppose you knew that.”
“No.”
“Yes. As a matter of fact, he’d recently received a promotion. But I’m sure you did know that.”
“No,” I said.
Tung looked at me carefully and then took a tin ashtray from a desk drawer and placed it halfway between us. I put some ashes into it.
“Really, Mr. Dye, I almost believe that you are as ignorant as you pretend to be.”
“I’m just ignorant,” I said.
“Then I’ll bring you up to date. Peking promoted Li Teh six weeks ago. He was told to keep his operations going in Hong Kong, but to set up a shop down here and run it on a part-time basis. When it was a going concern, they would send someone down from Peking to take over. In the meantime, he’d commute between here and Hong Kong. He didn’t tell you any of this?” Tung tugged at his earlobe again. The right one.
“No,” I said.
“I think you’re lying,” Tung said. “But that’s to be expected. At any rate, we approached Li. I confess that our approach was none too subtle. Either he doubled for us, or we’d throw him in jail.”