“Listen, can you translate technical documents into English?” he asked. “You can see how much stuff I’ve accumulated?” Don Fernando pointed at the crates on the deck. “Tomorrow morning I’m going to Canton, and half of my papers are in Russian which nobody there understands at all.”
Klim shrugged. “I can try.”
It would be good to provide the Don with a service, he thought, and then ask him to return the courtesy.
A Chinese boy brought them a binder, and Klim looked through the creased pages covered with scribbles in pencil. It was a list of military equipment—grenades, artillery shells, gas masks, field telephones, etc. The list had been compiled using the old Russian spelling rules that had been common before the revolution.
“Where did you get all these?” Klim asked the Don.
“I bought it from your countrymen, the Cossacks. Their steamer, the Mongugai, lies anchored right across from the Wusong fortress at the mouth of the Huangpu River. It was the last White Army ship to arrive in China, and the authorities refused the Cossacks permission to go ashore. They’re stuck on board, their engine room is completely ruined, and they have nothing to eat, so they’re selling off their arsenal.”
“And you’re planning to resell it in Canton?”
Don Fernando nodded. “Something is brewing there, you know, so the demand for weapons is huge. Sun Yat-sen wants to levy taxes on the local merchants to pay for his military expenses, so the Chamber of Commerce has raised a local militia to defend themselves against him.”
Don Fernando ordered his boy to bring Klim a pen, an inkwell, and paper.
“Sit down right here under the canopy and write. I used to have a Czech translator who was good at Russian. He wanted to get home, to Prague, but didn’t have the money, so he agreed to help me for a share in the business. Unfortunately, he’s dead now.”
Klim couldn’t help but smile: things were working out much quicker than he had anticipated.
“The Cossacks have been sitting on that ship for almost a year,” Don Fernando said, lighting up a cigar. “The Chinese governor has demanded that they give up all their weapons for nothing, but they are worth at least a hundred thousand dollars. Naturally, the Russians have turned down his generous offer, and now the Chinese navy is holding the Mongugai at gunpoint until the Cossacks starve to death.”
“What do the foreign concessions have to say about this?” Klim asked.
“The whites in Shanghai are pretending that they know nothing about the whole situation.”
They’re so greedy, they’ve lost their minds, Klim thought. They’re torturing innocent people for no reason whatsoever, and as a result, all these weapons will end up in Sun Yat-sen’s hands for a song.
It took Klim the whole day to finish the translation.
“Oh, I forgot about the Avro!” Don Fernando said as Klim handed him the final page. “The Cossacks offered me a brand new biplane, still in its original packaging. It’s too big for the Santa Maria, and I won’t take it with me this time, but I’ll try to find a buyer for it in Canton. One-Eye, bring me the papers the Russians gave us.”
Klim couldn’t understand a word of the biplane specifications.
“I’ll need a technical dictionary,” he said. “I have one at home, and I could bring you the translation tomorrow.”
“That sounds fine with me,” Don Fernando said. “How much do you want for your services?”
Klim put the biplane’s specifications into his wallet. “I’d like to interview you for my newspaper.”
Don Fernando exchanged glances with One-Eye. “My! We have become popular all of a sudden. All right, tomorrow you’ll get your interview along with my heartfelt thanks. But don’t be late. We set sail at ten in the morning.”
Tony Aulman called Nina and told her that he had succeeded in releasing the cash from her bank account.
“Come and take it,” he said. “Your account is closed.”
Half an hour later the driver brought Nina to Peking Road where she saw young Chinese men and women queuing at the entrance and up the stairs leading to the lawyers’ waiting room.
“Who are these people?” Nina asked as she entered Tony’s office.
“Actors,” he sighed.
Tony explained that his client, a film company called Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, had asked him to find a couple of indigenous people to play the main roles in their new motion picture about China. Tony had been very reluctant to take up the job. “I’m not a casting agency,” he had told the film producers, but they promised to grant him the rights to show the films in China, and Tony had relented. After all, outside of America, Shanghai was one of the biggest movie markets, and the offer had been too tempting to resist.
“I’ve had enough of these actresses,” Tony complained as he counted out Nina’s money. “We placed an ad in the Chinese newspapers: ‘Healthy twenty-year-old men and women required for casting, fluent in English, pleasant appearance.’ And what do you think we got? The world and his wife! Pimple-faced old men, and women with bound feet who can barely walk. Hardly one of them speaks a single word of English. I don’t know what they were expecting.”
Nina put the banknotes into her purse, waved goodbye to Tony, and went out. Thank God, I have cash now, she thought. She hadn’t taken a copper of Klim’s money to spend on herself and was eager to buy something that wasn’t just a necessity item.
On her way out of the building, she came across European woman selling cigarettes, magazines, and wall calendars featuring scantily clad blondes. The seller was Russian, of course: no other European woman would have demeaned herself by working on the streets.
Nina bought a ladies’ magazine and started to flip through the pages. A new type of a cloche hat in the shape of a bell had come into fashion that season, the waistline on the dresses was still low, but the hemlines had risen markedly.
“Would you like a calendar?” the saleswoman asked. “White people seem to like them.”
Nina looked up at her. “What about the Chinese?”
“They don’t understand this sort of art. They think white girls are ugly.”
A rickshaw stopped nearby, and a young Chinese lady stepped out on the road. She wore a crimson hat and an elegant gray dress complete with a garnet necklace. Her feet were a normal size, not deformed.
“Do you know who she is?” the saleswoman asked Nina. “Her name is Hua Binbin, she’s an actress. Her first film was such a success, and she’s such a celebrity that even the British newspapers are writing articles about her.”
“What was it about?” asked Nina.
“The story is about a father who wants to marry his daughter to a wealthy official, but she disobeys him and runs off with a young student. This is a shocking storyline for the Chinese because love matches are unheard of. All their marriages are arranged by the parents.”
“I’d like a copy of each of these calendars,” Nina said. “And could you write on them which fashions are selling better and which ones are not selling at all?”
Back home, Nina spread the calendars on the floor of the living room and stood there, examining every detail of the fresh pink-cheeked faces.
What if she replaced these Western starlets with Chinese women like Hua Binbin? More and more Chinese women with short hair and modern, stylish dresses were turning up on the streets of Shanghai. If the Chinese people were taking up Western styles, then the demand and market for Chinese fashion calendars would be immense.
Nina tried to calculate how much seed capital she would need to set up a publishing company. She would have to find models and artists, rent a studio, pay for the printing, storage, and delivery. It was going to be a fairly considerable sum. Nina’s savings would never be enough, no bank would give her a loan, and she didn’t want to ask Tamara for money. Where was she going to get the funds she needed?