I looked at Alice Fairchild. “I don’t understand. These were Jews escaping the Nazis? But-they were going to Shanghai?”
“It was their only choice.”
“What do you mean? I thought they went to other countries in Europe, or came here.”
“Survivors did, after the war. But as the Nazis rose in the thirties, countries all over the world closed their doors. Everyone knew what was happening, but no government was willing to deal with a flood of desperate refugees.”
“Even the U.S.?”
“The U.S. had small quotas by country and looked at the Jews as Germans, Austrians, Poles, wherever they were from. All the normal paperwork was required.”
“This is a surprise?” Joel asked me. “There were Chinese quotas, too, you know.”
“I know that. But I thought-”
“It was just you? Wrong.”
I sipped tea to hide my annoyance that Joel had caught me out being ignorant, and in front of the client, too. “Well, but Shanghai? It seems so… unlikely.”
“I’m sure it did to them, too,” Alice said. “But visas were relatively easy to get, and often passengers off ships weren’t asked for papers in any case. Anyone who could get there could stay. It was the only place.”
“How many refugees went?”
“Twenty thousand.”
“Twenty thousand?” Where had I been during world history class?
“The story’s not well known.” Alice read my mind. “It’s been eclipsed by the war, the concentration camps. They began arriving in numbers in 1937. By 1942, fighting in Europe and the Pacific had closed the routes.”
“But 1937-that’s when Japan invaded China.” I hadn’t slept through world history completely, after all. “The Japanese let them in?”
“ Shanghai ’s open port was what made it wealthy. That early, Japan wasn’t planning on war with the West and saw no reason to change anything.”
Alice looked at Joel, then at me. “Rosalie Gilder was eighteen, her brother Paul fourteen, when they fled Salzburg by train for Trieste, to board the Conte Biancamano. Their mother, Elke, a widow, and her brother, Horst Peretz, had tickets to Shanghai three months later by the overland route-Trans-Siberian Railway to a ship at Dairen.”
I asked, “Why didn’t they all go together?”
“ Germany had annexed Austria a month before. Extermination wasn’t yet the Nazis’ plan for the Jews; they meant to force them out. They’d arrest Jewish men, and only let them go once their families produced travel documents. That happened to Horst. Elke was able to get train tickets, so he was released, but three months was a frighteningly long time to wait. She moved heaven and earth to get berths on a ship leaving sooner, and managed two. She sent her children. She hoped she and Horst could follow on another ship.”
“Did they?”
“No.”
“So they went by train?”
“They never got out.”
My gaze fell to the photo again, sister and brother smiling on a windy day. I looked at Joel. His face was carefully blank. It occurred to me he must have grown up hearing countless tragic variations on this same story.
“In the letter you see a reference to their suitcases,” Alice resumed briskly. “Jews who left weren’t allowed to take much money, or anything valuable. Paul and Rosalie packed only clothing and a few household items-a pair of pewter candlesticks, for example.”
“What happened to things people left behind?”
“The Nazis seized them. Most can’t be traced. My work involves trying to recover the ones that can-paintings, antiques. In this case, though, that’s not what I’m after. As Rosalie predicted, Paul turned out to be not much of a correspondent. But he was good with his hands. He’d built hidden compartments into the suitcases, where they concealed their mother’s jewelry.”
Joel raised his eyebrows. “That’s why she says the suitcases are intact.”
“Yes. She was telling her mother they’d held on to the jewelry. Earning a living in Shanghai was hard for the refugees, and these were teenagers. The jewelry was their safety net.”
“What happened to them? Rosalie and Paul?”
“That’s actually unclear. After the end of the war they can’t be traced. You can imagine what chaos those times were. Record-keeping wasn’t anyone’s priority. Now, as I’m sure you know, Shanghai ’s in the middle of a building boom.”
I nodded. That was something I did know.
“A month ago, excavation for a tower in what had been the International Settlement, in a place called Jiangming Street, unearthed a carved box containing five pieces of jewelry. I was able to identify it as Rosalie Gilder’s.” Reaching into her briefcase again, she handed us photographs of a necklace, two rings, and two bracelets. “I represent the grandchildren of Horst Peretz, Rosalie and Paul’s uncle. He’d sent his daughter to live in Switzerland in 1935. She survived the war. My clients are her sons.
“The Chinese government considers anything found on their soil Chinese cultural patrimony, not to be removed from the country without permission. In this case, because the jewelry is so clearly European in origin, I was able to persuade them to negotiate. I went to Shanghai, and things were going smoothly until a few days ago, when the jewelry, and a midlevel official from the Shanghai Ministry of Culture, disappeared.”
“The official ran off with the jewelry?”
“Oh, well, I don’t know that, do I?” Her eyes sparkled. “But I have reason to think that he-Wong Pan is his name; this is his picture-arrived in New York two days ago.” She handed us photos of a round-faced man.
“Is the jewelry very valuable?” I asked.
“By jewelry standards, no. Each piece is probably worth between twenty and forty thousand dollars. But for a Chinese bureaucrat, you can see the temptation. To my clients, of course, it’s priceless.
“So now you can see why I need you both. Under most circumstances, if I were trying to sell antique jewelry in New York, I’d head to the Diamond District.” She nodded at Joel. New York ’s Diamond District on Forty-seventh Street is almost exclusively the province of Orthodox Jews.
“Except maybe if you were Chinese.” I began to catch on.
“Exactly. Then I might try Canal Street, even though I understand antiques aren’t Canal Street ’s specialty.”
“No, those shops deal mostly in new pieces. Still…”
“Yes, exactly. So I’d like you to show these photographs around and see if anything’s turned up.”
Joel studied the photos. “And if it has?”
“If you find someone who’s bought any, let them know I’m in New York and interested in recovering it. Between us, the family’s prepared to buy the jewelry back, to save years of headaches. You might stress I’m not the long arm of Chinese law.”
“What if we get a lead on the bureaucrat? Wong Pan?”
“If he still has the jewelry, I’ll be willing to deal with him. I’m not crazy about someone profiting from a stunt like this, but my charge is the assets. Now”- Alice sat back-“I have to tell you, I have another, more personal reason for my interest in this case. I was born in Shanghai. In those years.”
Joel did the gallant thing. “How can that be? Someone as young as you?”
“You’re a very sweet liar. My parents were American missionaries. We spent two and a half years in a Japanese internment camp after Pearl Harbor. Of course I was very young-then.” She smiled. “Most of my memories are from the camp, not Shanghai itself, and they’re not particularly pleasant. Still, when this case came along, it did seem like something I’d want to see through. As if somehow it might, a tiny bit, redeem that experience. I’m not sure that makes any sense.”
Joel said, “It does to me.”
Personally, I had doubts about experiences being redeemable, but I kept them to myself.