There were a number of half-sentences and unintelligible phrases such as “you promised to” and “I couldn’t get away” and “over two years without” and “long time” and “it’s so good to” and all the rest of the things that two persons who are fond of each other say after a long separation. I stood there, probably smirking a little, and watched and listened.
Tante Katerine spotted me then and beckoned. “Lucifer, dear, come. I want you to meet a very good and old friend of mine, Mr. Gorman Smalldane, the famous American radio correspondent. Gorman, this is my ward, Lucifer Dye.” She must have looked up “ward” someplace because it was the first time I’d ever heard her use it.
“Mr. Smalldane,” I said, bowing stiffly, more in the European than the Chinese manner. One of the girls from Berlin had contributed that. Her name was Use.
“He’s an insufferable little prick, isn’t he?” Smalldane said. “Who the hell lets him paint himself up like that?”
“I think it’s sehr aufgeweckt,” she said because nobody in Shanghai then had much use for “cute.”
“Looks like you’re training him for a job in Sammy Ching’s place down on the waterfront — if the Japs haven’t closed it yet. Sailors like little pogey bait like him.”
“Well, you’re wrong, Mr. Gorman Famous Smalldane,” Tante Katerine said. “He’s just a little boy and he goes to school every day. For three hours.”
“Where?”
“Here. We teach him here.”
Smalldane grinned and shook his head. “I bet he does learn a lot at that. And all of it useful.”
I found the conversation fascinating, doubtless because they were talking about me.
“He can do his multiplication through the twelveses,” Tante Katerine said, her English lapsing as her anger rose. “You want to hear him? What’s twelve times eleven, Lucifer?”
“One hundred and thirty two,” the insufferable little prick said.
“There!” she said triumphantly. “See. I bet you can’t do that when you are six.”
“I can’t do it now,” Smalldane said. “I never got past my elevenses.”
“He also speaks six languages. Maybe even seven. How many could you speak when you were his age, Mr. Know-some-all?”
“That’s know-it-all,” Smalldane said, “and I could barely get by in English, but at least I stayed out of Mother’s rouge and powder and wore pants, for God’s sake, and not her bathrobe.”
“Now you don’t like his clothes,” she said, her voice rising. “Now you’re making funny of his clothes. Do you know how much that gown cost? Do you know how many I paid for it? I paid fifteen dollars for it American, that’s how many.”
“He still looks silly.”
“That’s not all he’s got. He’s got four more just as expensive. And he’s got fine American clothes too that come from a famous house of fashion.”
“Sears, Roebuck?”
“Buster Brown, that’s who,” she said.
“Jesus,” Smalldane said. “I quit. Look, Katie, I didn’t come here to argue about some Australian kid that you’ve taken to raise. It’s been more than—”
“I’m not Australian, sir,” I said, “I am an American,” thus proving that there’s a little chauvinism in the best of us.
“You didn’t pick that accent up in Pittsburgh, kid.”
I stood straight as a plumb line, scrunched my eyes closed, and recited: “I am six years old and my name is Lucifer Clarence Dye and I was born December 5, 1933, in Moncrief, Montana, United States of America, and my father’s name was Dr. Clarence Dye and I live at Number Twenty-seven.”
“Okay, Lucifer,” Smalldane interrupted. “That’s fine. I believe you. Relax.” He knelt down so that his head was level with mine and I could smell the Scotch again. “Look, tomorrow I’ll tell you what we’ll do. You’ll play hookey—”
“What’s hookey?” I said.
“You’ll miss school and we’ll go down and get you some American clothes and maybe hoist a few at the Shanghai Club.” He looked up at Tante Katerine. “Is old Chi Fo’s tailor shop still going, you know, near the American School in the French Concession?”
Tante Katerine shrugged to show her indifference. “The American School was closed two years ago, but I assume Chi Fo is still in business.”
“You mind if I take the kid?”
“Why should I mind? I’m only a poor Russian, exiled from her country to this war-torn land, friendless and alone, who’s tried to give a decent home to this poor—”
She was going to the afterburners when Smalldane shot her down. “I don’t want to adopt him, goddamn it, Kate, I just want to buy him a pair of corduroy knickers so he can hear them squeak when he walks. It’s his birthright. I didn’t get any until I was almost eleven and before that I had to wear short pants. God knows what it did to me psychologically. I’m not sure, but maybe it’s already too late.”
“What do you mean too late?” she said.
“For the kid. Still,” he added thoughtfully, “perhaps he could do real fine as a female impersonator.”
“Take him!” she yelled. “Buy him anything you want to! Buy him the — the whole Bund!”
“How about it, Lucifer?” Smalldane said, still kneeling in front of me. “Would you like some knickers? The corduroy kind?”
I bowed in the Chinese fashion and then gave him my very best ail-American boy gap-toothed grin. “Very much, sir.”
“Good,” he said, rising. He turned to Tante Katerine. “Does he go to bed now or do you work him on the night shift?”
“Goddamn you, Gorman—” she began, but he whacked her on the rear with the palm of his hand and laughed. It’s still the most infectious laugh I’ve ever heard. Then she laughed and he took her hand and they almost raced upstairs. Neither one of them told me good night. Yen Chi brought me my cocoa and I drank it there in the reception hall and thought about Smalldane and the corduroy knickers and Tante Katerine. I had seen her go upstairs before on rare occasions with special “old friends” and it hadn’t bothered me. This time it did. I was only six and didn’t realize it at the time, but I had just met not only my first rival, but also my first male friend. Or maybe cobber, since I spoke as if I came from down that way.
Gorman Smalldane had been a twenty-seven-year-old reporter for United Press in 1932 when he met Tante Katerine in Mukden. The Japanese invasion of Manchuria had just begun and Tante Katerine wanted out. With Smalldane’s help, she made it to Shanghai where she went into business for herself, found a wealthy Chinese protector or patron, who turned out to be the local version of Lucky Luciano, and opened her sin palace in 1933.
Her sponsor was Du Wei-sung (some spelled it Dou-Yen-Seng or even Fu-Seng), a peasant who had started out in the best Horatio Alger tradition as a fruit hawker in the French Concession. Ambitious, tough, and completely ruthless, Du staked out the opium trade as his own private monopoly. He also branched out into gambling, prostitution and the protection racket, operating eventually out of a luxurious high-walled compound in the French Concession.
A self-cured opium addict himself, which indicated his singlemindedness, Du fully appreciated the rich potential that lay within a drug monopoly. He dominated the opium traffic completely after he combined the Red and Green Societies, two rival groups that had started out as secret political fraternities but had degenerated into criminal gangs interested in anything that would turn a quick Shanghai dollar. Before Du merged the rival mobs they spent much of their time shooting each other up on Shanghai’s west side.