White Ghosts

10. THE POLICE CAPTAIN

At first Ada had been terrified that the Bernards would fire her, but it turned out that nobody gave her checkered past much thought. Her salary was so insignificant and she herself was so quiet and inconspicuous that it never occurred to Edna to check up on her background.

Mr. Bernard’s books had long been catalogued and placed in order on the shelves and cabinets, and now Ada’s job was to be on call as and when she was needed to find and bring a relevant book from the library.

Following Sam’s advice, Ada came up with an additional task for herself. She would go to bookshops, copying the names of new titles, and then report them back to the Bernards. Sometimes they would choose a book or two, but more often they would tell Ada to use her own initiative and order the books herself. Naturally, she would always choose romantic novels, which she would read and then retell to Sam.

He would listen to Ada with great interest and then share the latest household gossip with her.

“Did you know that Yun has opened a secret cookery school?”

Every day boys aged ten to fifteen would climb through a hole in the fence and come to the servants’ kitchen to study Yun’s culinary arts.

One time Sam and Ada hid behind the garage and spied on Yun’s students handing him small envelopes.

“Those are the fees for his lessons,” Sam explained to Ada. “He gets a dollar apiece. Twenty boys mean twenty dollars. I wonder why Yun needs so much money?”

Every now and then Ada and Sam would split the cost of a lottery ticket and dream about their winnings.

“What would you do with your share?” Ada asked.

“I’d buy myself a library and hire you to manage it,” Sam replied in a serious voice.

Ada laughed. “That’s never going to work because I’m going to America.”

They studied the globe, looking for San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York.

The only fly in the ointment was Edna’s father, Captain Hugh Wyer. Once a week, he would visit his daughter and proceed to terrify everyone in the house. Only Mr. Bernard was unafraid of the captain, but even he detested spending any time with the old man, and as soon as Wyer’s car appeared in the driveway, he would take to his horse and gallop away.

More than anything, Captain Wyer loved to “instill order.” He would go around the rooms, finding the tiniest faults and chastising the servants accordingly. Ada had been on the wrong end of a tongue lashing several times for a misplaced book or a creaking window frame in the library.

Sam called Wyer “the rotten fish.”

“He ruins everything he touches. If we win the lottery,” he told Ada, “I’ll hire thugs to kill him.”

That week, as usual, Captain Wyer appeared at the Bernard’s at eight o’clock sharp. The lobby trembled and thundered under his heavy hobnail boots; the mirror reflected his tall figure in its habitual khaki jacket. Boy Two bowed and took the captain’s cane and pith helmet.

“Breakfast! Now!” barked Wyer. “And tell your master and mistress I’m here and waiting for them.”

The kitchen was thrown into complete pandemonium as the frightened kitchen staff dropped dishes and rattled pans to meet the order in the allotted regulation time. Ten minutes later on the dot, Boy One served up deviled kidneys, sizzling fried sausages, bacon, mushrooms and eggs, grilled tomatoes, and triangles of perfectly brown toast, delivered on an immaculate silver service.

When Sam served the coffee, his hands shook so much that the lid of the coffee pot rattled.

“Are you drunk, or just a gibbering idiot?” exploded Wyer, giving Sam the evil eye. “Get out of my sight, you imbecile!”

Having pronounced sentence on Sam, the captain then summoned Ada for interrogation. “Where’s Mr. Bernard?”

“He went on an expedition to the province of Guangdong,” she said, avoiding the old man’s gaze. “He’s looking for a supplier of rare teas.”

“Has he gone completely mad? What kind of daft expedition is that?”

“I… I don’t know, sir.”

“The bounder,” Wyer muttered. “Alright, I’ll deal with him later. What’s the news here?”

Ada wished there was something she could say but she could not think of anything.

The captain hurled his napkin onto his plate in his impatience. “What a driveling little fool! Can’t you even string a sentence together?”

Finally, Edna entered the dining room, much to Ada’s relief.

“Here she is!” cried the captain as he offered Edna his dry, yellowish hand.

She greeted her father and asked Sam to give her some coffee.

“Ms. Marshall, would you mind going to see if we have any letters today?” she asked.

When Ada came back with the mail, the other servants had already vacated the dining room. She hesitated at the door, not knowing whether she would be scolded for interrupting Captain Wyer, who seem to be talking about something important.

“These hussies are ruining good English families,” he said, rolling his eyes. “Last week, there was a petition doing the rounds of the Shanghai Club to have every single one of these Russian jezebels expelled out of China for their loose moral behavior.”

“Then you’ll have to expel a lot of the English men as well,” Edna replied. “Let’s face it, their moral standards aren’t exactly exemplary either.”

“So you’ve found out, have you?”

“I’ve found out what?”

“That your philandering husband has gone and made Nina Kupina pregnant and left you to deal with the mess.”

Edna recoiled visibly as if her father had slapped her. “That can’t be true,” she said in a barely audible voice, but her father wasn’t listening.

“Daniel has no children with you, and it won’t bode any good if he has an heir on the side. What if he decides to adopt the baby? What will happen then is that this Russian whore’s bastard will inherit all your property.”

Ada backed away and quietly slipped away from the dining room door.

Klim had been held up at work, and Ada waited impatiently for him at their apartment. She was eager to tell him the news about Nina’s pregnancy.

Finally she heard keys turning in the door, footsteps, and the sound of something heavy being dragged along the floor. Ada ran out into the hallway and saw Klim pulling a large crate into their apartment.

“What is it?” Ada asked.

“A Victoria gramophone,” Klim announced cheerfully. “Where do you think would be a good place to put it? Do you want to have it in your room?”

He dragged the crate to Ada’s room and pulled a gleaming polished box out of the straw packaging.

“It’s a beauty,” he said. “See, the horn is neatly stored inside, and all the mechanical parts are made of nickel.”

“How much did it cost?” Ada asked.

Klim waved his hand dismissively. He took a brand new record out of its envelope and started winding the Victrola’s mechanism.

“Is señorita dancing?” he asked with a smile.

The sounds of a tango rumbled from the depths of the Victrola, and Ada put her hand on Klim’s shoulder.

“Do you make enough money to pay for toys like this?”

“Who cares about money when you can tango?”

Ada leaned towards him. It was lovely when he brought all sorts of curious presents, and even better to have him all to herself to dance with.

Later, they had their dinner together in the kitchen. Ada had baked an apple pie, and it had been the first time the recipe had worked out. Klim was drinking tea from his recently purchased painted cup and was telling Ada about a story he had picked up about the rivalry between two dance halls in the French Concession. The owner of the first one had hired men to release a bag full of snakes onto his competitor’s dance floor. The second man had got back at him by hiring thugs who just sat in his rival’s premises spitting chewing tobacco all over the dance floor.

Ada listened politely but in the end she couldn’t restrain herself any longer.

“Did you know that your wife is going to have Mr. Bernard’s baby?” she asked. “But as soon as she got pregnant, he just left her.”

Ada expected her words to make Klim furious, but he just shrugged.

“Everybody in our editorial office knows about it. A lot of people are jealous of Edna and happy to spread rumors like that around. They are saying that’s what happens to a woman who concentrates too much on her work and not enough on her family.”

Klim was much more worried about Edna’s wounded pride than his own, and he had spent a long time taking the gossipers to task for showing pleasure in a colleague’s misfortunes instead of standing by her.

“But what about you?” Ada asked. “Nina has cheated on you as well.”

“Who cares? We weren’t together for more than a year.”

Klim told Ada that he had to get up early tomorrow and excused himself from the table, without finishing his tea.

“Whatever you do, don’t tell anyone that Nina and I were married,” he instructed Ada. “It would be better for both of us if Edna knows nothing about it.”

It might have been easier if Daniel Bernard had been a complete stranger to me. But we’ve shaken hands on many occasions at Edna’s. The world of white Shanghai is a small one.

I don’t fully understand why I’m so ashamed of Nina. We have nothing to do with each other anymore. Nevertheless, I still feel like a man who has donated his last coins to a church only to find out that the priest has squandered everything on drink.

I’m trying not to think about what has happened, but my desk is close to the door, so I can hear every word coming from the corridor and the smoking room where people are discussing the minutiae of Edna’s misfortunes.

I started to avoid her out of embarrassment, the woman I owe my very survival to. She is perplexed by my behavior, unable to understand what’s going on. It’s hard enough when your loved one betrays you, but even more so when it seems that everybody else is turning their back on you. But I can’t master my feelings. The sight of Edna, broken and gloomy, causes me to recall the craziest things from my childhood. I still remember the smallest details of the scenes that my father used to make if my mother so much as smiled at a younger or better-looking man. A bit of my father’s envious green blood would appear to be flowing in my veins as well, and it takes me a great effort to stop myself from…

Well, I’m not going to put to paper some of the notions that come into my head at times like this.

Now that everybody knows who Nina is, it’s not been difficult to track down her address, and yesterday I went to negotiate our divorce and put an end to this vile farce of a marriage.

It turns out my wife is living in a white mansion with a perfectly clipped lawn in the front yard. She’s managed to acquire all the material things that she always dreamed of, but it would appear that all her well-laid plans have come to nought now that she is pregnant and no longer of any value to her sugar daddy lover. Alas, even the most gregarious and gorgeous courtesans don’t remain in a powerful man’s affections for long.

I wonder what will happen to my “sing-song girl”? Who will take care of her now?

While I was standing there looking at her house, a black Ford with bright white lights and yellow wheels came out of the gate, and I spotted Nina’s face in the car window. I don’t know if she saw me, or maybe she chose not to recognize me. Anyway, we never did meet.

For months I have been trying to work out what it was that brought Nina to Lincheng. Now it’s all as clear as day to me. She went there for the sake of Daniel Bernard. But if that’s the case, why did she bring me back to her compartment that night? I’m afraid I’ll never get to the bottom of it.

I keep trying to accept that Nina will soon be giving birth to another man’s child. Even though I have no rights over her any longer, it all appears to be some kind of sacrilege to me, a gross violation of the most basic laws of life. Now it seems incredible to imagine that at one time, little more than a couple of years ago, we were lying in each other’s arms thinking up names for our future children. I wanted to call our daughter Katya after my mother, and if we had a boy we would have called him…

But there’s no point writing any of this now. I’m only rubbing salt into my own wounds.

In his heart Klim’s was dying to find someone to pick a reckless fight with, it didn’t matter who. Being employed to write the newspaper’s regular column on the city’s criminal underworld, he didn’t have long to wait for an opportunity to let out his pent-up frustration.

A police team in plain clothes had surrounded a house with a sign in English and Chinese saying: “Magic Cloud Pharmacy. Reliable remedies for all ailments.”

The pharmacy’s owner was not there, and Klim was waiting for him on the corner of the street, along with the head of the Drug Enforcement Division, Johnny Collor, and his assistant Felix.

Felix, a tall, dark-haired and hook-nosed young man, had been a former Russian cadet.

“What foul weather!” he grumbled, shoving his reddened hands into the pockets of his great coat. “But who’s complaining? This is much better than having to hide in barrels on the docks in the summer heat. The sun roasted us from above, and the mosquitoes were biting our butts from below. It was a whole fortnight before I could sit comfortably again after that operation.”

Johnny peered around the corner.

“Here’s our pharmacist,” he whispered excitedly, pointing at the elderly Chinese man climbing up the pharmacy porch.

Short and stocky, Johnny resembled a gray-haired fox terrier, ready to lunge for his prey’s throat. His eyes were shining, and he was constantly reaching for the holster under his jacket.

“Don’t give any quarter, boys,” Johnny warned Klim and Felix. “The pharmacy belongs to the Green Gang. Those bastards won’t hesitate to put a bullet through your brain.”

He looked at his watch and raised his hand. “It’s time!”

Klim ran behind the policemen into the pharmacy and stood squinting under the bright light of a lamp. The policemen searched the place as calmly and efficiently as if they were on a training run. Glass crunched under their shoes, and the air was filled with ashes from a raked-up oven.

Klim looked around the cluttered rooms. Along the walls there were dark red cabinets with lots of drawers. The shelves were crammed with sealed pots, and on the table, next to the brass weights and writing implements, lay a large white doll studded with long needles. Its body was covered with lines showing the flow of qi, life energy.

Klim heard the sound of heavy boots on the stairs.

“There’s a safe in the bedroom on the second floor, sir,” cried Sergeant Trots.

Johnny had the pharmacist by his lapels.

“Ask him where the keys are,” he told the translator.

The pharmacist started to babble something, spraying the policemen with his saliva in his terror. Johnny pushed him away in disgust.

“What is he saying?”

The translator pulled a sour face. “He doesn’t understand a thing, sir. It seems he’s from a different province and doesn’t speak Shanghainese.”

“The bastard’s lying.”

Johnny pulled a revolver out of a holster and shot the wall behind the pharmacist’s back. The man gave a whimper and fell on the floor face down.

“Feeble people,” said Felix through his teeth.

Johnny searched the pharmacist’s desk. “Here are the keys. Let’s go.”

They went up the stairs. In the bedroom, a woman with two terrified children sat in the far corner of a big bed with a red cover on it.

“Clear them out,” ordered Johnny, and the policemen quickly took them out of the room.

Behind the bed was a huge iron safe covered with an embroidered spread. A bronze candlestick and vases were placed on top of it. Johnny removed the spread and, after fiddling with the keys for a few seconds, finally had the safe open.

Klim craned his neck to see what was inside.

“Wow!” he whistled looking at the parcels piled up one on top of the other.

Felix pulled out a pen knife and cut several of the parcels open.

“It’s Indian opium,” he said after trying the dark sticky paste. “And here’s some cocaine.”

Johnny took a thick binder out of safe and called the translator over. “What are these papers?”

The Chinese glanced through it. “These are lists of suppliers, sir.”

Johnny’s eyes lit up. “Well, this should see our friendly neighborhood pharmacist in prison for a while.”

There was stamping on the stairs, and a boy of about fourteen burst into the room. He was hiding something under his green shirt.

“Grab him!” screamed someone from downstairs.

Sergeant Trots grabbed the youngster by his shoulder, but the boy took a revolver from inside his shirt and fired at him.

The sergeant, bleeding heavily, fell down the stairs. The youngster headed to the window and, crashing into Klim on the way, pointed his revolver at him.

This is it, Klim thought.

The revolver went off again, the boy yelped, and something heavy hit the floor.

A moment later Klim realized what had happened: Felix had hurled the heavy candlestick at the boy, breaking his wrist.

More police arrived on the scene followed closely by reporters and photographers. All of them wanted the full story from Felix, but he was too modest and left his boss to do the explaining.

“Felix Rodionov is that rare breed of man whose actions speak louder than his words,” Johnny said proudly. “He came to our station hoping to get a job, but he was so emaciated that the commissioner was about to turn him down. However, I asked him, ‘What can you do?’ And he told me to try to attack him with a knife. What do you think happened? The son of a gun knocked the knife right out of my hand! If I’ve told you once, gentlemen, I’ve told you a thousand times: We shall continue to man our forces on the basis of race. The Russians are an asset to the force that the Chinese can never be.”

Johnny then saddled up his hobby horse and began to hold forth on the perfidious Chinese and their numerous conspiracies against the ruling whites.

“More than two-thirds of our men are Chinese and Sikhs from India,” he said warming to his theme. “The same could be said of the French Concession, but they have Vietnamese instead of Sikhs.”

The reporters recorded his every word, and Klim who had heard his sermon many times before, went off to talk to Felix.

He found the young man sitting on a bench on the back porch, smoking and stroking a fat ginger cat at his feet.

“Thank you for saving my life,” Klim said as he sat down next to him.

Felix sniffed. “My pleasure.”

They got to talking. Felix had been an orphan from Omsk and had joined the cadets at a very young age. He and his fellow trainee officers had been among the first to be evacuated to Vladivostok and then to China after the outbreak of the civil war.

A Shanghai merchant had allowed the boys to stay in his house, and there they had lived in close quarters. Space had been so scarce that they had to take turns to sleep. It was hard to feed seven hundred teenagers, and the French Consul resolved to hold a lottery for the younger orphans, and that was how they raised funds. The majority of the boys dug graves and guarded warehouses for a living, and only a few, like Felix, had been lucky enough to find decent jobs.

“I really hope I’ll get promoted to inspector one day,” he said dreamily. “Inspectors get three hundred dollars a month and a paid vacation of seventeen days a year or, if you want, seven months every five years. But first I will need to distinguish myself.”

“Do you have any ideas how you’re going to do this?” Klim asked.

Felix nodded. “My friend works as a doorman at the Three Pleasures pub. He says that all the alcohol they sell there is bought duty-free and delivered by the local Czechoslovak Consul. I’ve suggested having him arrested a long time ago, but Johnny is reluctant to go there because it’s a French protectorate. But the consul, Jiří Labuda, is a resident in the International Settlement, and therefore he comes under our jurisdiction.”

“Who did you say?” Klim asked, stunned. “Jiří Labuda?”

“That’s his name,” Felix nodded. “If you want, we could track him down together. You’ll get an exclusive for your paper, and I’ll get my promotion. It’s a great story—a respectable diplomat turned small-time crook.”

Klim didn’t know what to think. What kind of people had Nina got herself mixed up with?

“There won’t be the slightest problem,” Felix persuaded. “This Labuda is a sickly individual. One punch and he’ll be done for. His driver won’t be so easy. He’s as big as an ox. But between the two of us, we’ll be more than a match for them.”

“Let’s go hunting then,” said Klim after a pause.

Felix beamed. “Good. I’ll see you at the Three Pleasures tomorrow at seven o’clock.”