Shanghai
PENGUIN CANADA
SHANGHAI
DAVID ROTENBERG is the author of five mystery novels set in Shanghai with a TV series currently in development. He has directed plays on Broadway and around the world, and is the artistic director of the internationally famous Professional Actors Lab. David lives in Toronto with his wife, Susan Santiago. They have two children, Joey and Beth. Further information can be found at www.davidrotenberg.com.
ALSO BY DAVID ROTENBERG
The Shanghai Murders
The Lake Ching Murders
The Hua Shan Hospital Murders
The Hamlet Murders
The Golden Mountain Murders
Shanghai
DAVID ROTENBERG
The Ivory Compact
PENGUIN CANADA
Published by the Penguin Group
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First published in a Viking Canada hardcover by Penguin Group (Canada),
a division of Pearson Canada Inc., 2008
Published in this edition, 2009
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 (OPM)
Copyright © David Rotenberg, 2008
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ISBN: 978-0-14-305228-9
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We have just enough religion to make us hate,
but not enough to make us love, one another.
—JONATHAN SWIFT, 1667–1745
Contents
Book One—From the Holy Mountain
Part One
Chapter One The Ivory Compact
Chapter Two Approaching the Yangtze
Chapter Three The Vrassoons
Chapter Four Maxi
Chapter Five The Master Carver
Chapter Six Near the Bend in the River
Chapter Seven White Birds on Water
Chapter Eight Shanghai
Chapter Nine A Vrassoon at Bedlam
Chapter Ten Hunger
Chapter Eleven At the Grand Canal
Chapter Twelve From the Journals of Richard Hordoon
Chapter Thirteen Treaty Moves
Chapter Fourteen Nanking
Chapter Fifteen The White Birds Land
Chapter Sixteen A Calcutta Death, a Life at the Works
Part Two
Chapter Seventeen The Body Guard, His Brother, and His Nephew
Chapter Eighteen The Selling of Shanghai
Chapter Nineteen Trouble in the Opium Trade
Chapter Twenty A First Foray
Chapter Twenty-One A Second Foray
Chapter Twenty-Two Arrival of the Patriarch
Chapter Twenty-Three Extraterritoriality
Chapter Twenty-Four And Change Comes
Chapter Twenty-Five The French
Chapter Twenty-Six Opium Dreams and Nightmares
Chapter Twenty-Seven The Rise of the Prophet
Chapter Twenty-Eight Meetings
Chapter Twenty-Nine The Settlement and the Taipingers
Chapter Thirty Neutrality and Prosperity
Chapter Thirty-One Death and Birth in the Bamboo
Part Three
Chapter Thirty-Two The History Teller
Chapter Thirty-Three Into the Countryside
Chapter Thirty-Four Journey to the West
Chapter Thirty-Five Deal with a Devil; Deal with an Angel
Chapter Thirty-Six Shanghai Prospers
Chapter Thirty-Seven Final Journey
Chapter Thirty-Eight A Prophecy
* * *
Book Two—A Man with a Book
Chapter One Silas Hordoon
Chapter Two Arise the Assassin
Chapter Three Shanghai, City at the Bend in the River
Chapter Four Gangster Tu
Chapter Five The Chosen Three
Chapter Six Tu’s Attack
Chapter Seven And in Far-Off America
Chapter Eight Stowaway
Chapter Nine The Second Portal
Chapter Ten A Game of Raft
Chapter Eleven The Revolutionary
Chapter Twelve The Go Player’s Secret
Chapter Thirteen Three Graves, Three Memories
Chapter Fourteen Silas’s Inheritance
Chapter Fifteen The Progress of Charles Soon
Chapter Sixteen Jiang’s Choice
Chapter Seventeen The Dowager Empress and the Hundred Days of Reform
Chapter Eighteen Mai Bao, Jiang’s Middle Daughter
Chapter Nineteen Newspapers and Whores—A Marriage Made in Heaven
Chapter Twenty Silas and Charles
Chapter Twenty-One Leaf Contests
Chapter Twenty-Two Richard’s Journal Jiang:
Chapter Twenty-Three A Whore’s Cemetery
Chapter Twenty-Four Silas Finds a New Wife
Chapter Twenty-Five A Meeting of Minds
Chapter Twenty-Six Yin Bao Meets a Feminist
Chapter Twenty-Seven Yin Bao Gets a Husband
Chapter Twenty-Eight A Carver’s Son
Chapter Twenty-Nine The Assassin and His Wife
Chapter Thirty Tu and the Tusk
Chapter Thirty-One A Deal for the Tusk
Chapter Thirty-Two A War Council
Chap
ter Thirty-Three Loa Wei Fen’s Warning
Chapter Thirty-Four Attack on the Warrens
Chapter Thirty-Five Victors and Vanquished Mai Bao and Her: Revolutionary
Chapter Thirty-Six Victors and Vanquished: Charles Soong and His Writer
Chapter Thirty-Seven Time Passes
Chapter Thirty-Eight Silas and Automobiles
Chapter Thirty-Nine The Tusk Degrades
Chapter Forty Typhoon
Chapter Forty-One Change—Death of a Dowager
Chapter Forty-Two Change—Death of a Courtesan
Chapter Forty-Three A Gift from Silas
Chapter Forty-Four A Diversion
Chapter Forty-Five A Long, Curved Object
Chapter Forty-Six The Racing Cars Arrive
Chapter Forty-Seven The Blessed Virgin
Chapter Forty-Eight A Laughing Buddha
Chapter Forty-Nine Rolling a Racing Car
Chapter Fifty Race Day
Chapter Fifty-One Getting the Tusk
Chapter Fifty-Two The Race
Chapter Fifty-Three Silas Onboard
Chapter Fifty-Four Richards Journal: The Bible
Chapter Fifty-Five An Ancestral Home for a Sacred Relic
Chapter Fifty-Six Return of the Pilgrim
Chapter Fifty-Seven Interlude—And Time Passes
* * *
Book Three—The End of the Garden
Chapter One The Final Dream of Silas Hordoon
Chapter Two The Funeral of a White Chinaman
Chapter Three Japanese Plans
Chapter Four On and Beneath the Marco Polo Bridge
Chapter Five Beijing
Chapter Six Jiang Passes the Mantle
Chapter Seven The Confucian
Chapter Eight Missives
Chapter Nine The Ecstasy of Charles Soong’s Daughters
Chapter Ten Attack on Shanghai
Chapter Eleven The Naked Man
Chapter Twelve The History Teller
Chapter Thirteen The Chosen Three Decide
Chapter Fourteen Getting to Nanking
Chapter Fifteen The Fall of Nanking and the Rise of the Dragon
Chapter Sixteen Shanghai Under Occupation
Chapter Seventeen World War
Chapter Eighteen A Flash of Light
Chapter Nineteen The History Teller Rewrites
Chapter Twenty Surrender and After
Chapter Twenty-One Confucian Power
Chapter Twenty-Two Mao
Chapter Twenty-Three Journey to What Was Ours
Chapter Twenty-Four A Journey to the Future
Epilogue The Age of Dry Water
Historical Note
Acknowledgments
book one * part one
From the Holy Mountain
Wherein two prophecies are put forward;
one proceeds, the other is fulfilled, and
a city at the Bend in the River grows.
chapter one
The Ivory Compact
January 207 BC
As the late-afternoon winter sun slid behind the towering dark clouds, a shadow swelled across the beautiful but usually desolate foothills of the Green Mountain, the Hua Shan. In the murky light, thousands upon thousands of rebel troops readied themselves to spring a trap that would end the life of the most powerful man the world had ever known, or very possibly would ever know—Q’in She Huang, China’s First Emperor.
A village fisherman raced to the far side of a partially frozen upland lake where his prized eels were supposed to be hibernating in their underwater pen. As he approached, the water was roiling and rich with blood. Females had slithered up onto an ice floe and were giving birth while the thicker, more powerful males thrashed the open water as they gorged themselves on their young. The fisherman watched in shocked silence, then turned his eyes upward, toward the darkening sky. Just down the winding mountain path a hunchbacked farmwife smacked the ice from a blanket she had hung to dry on the bamboo stand the night before and was amazed to find that the coverlet, although frozen stiff, was hot to the touch. Farther back in the foothills, a toothless peasant pinched the night-soil collector’s product between his thumb and forefinger and brought it to his nose. To his amazement, the product was as fresh as the man had claimed it to be. He dropped the human fecal matter to the ground and stared at the night-soil collector. Then he looked to the black clouds, sniffed the air, turned, and ran.
Peasants always recognize the distinctive ozone reek that precedes change.
But as they retreated to their huts and drew their children close to them, none knew the nature of the change that was beginning, not in the foothills with the rebel troops but on the upper plateau of the Hua Shan, the Holy Mountain. Change conceived and brought into being by the renowned Q’in She Huang himself.
* * *
“YOU THINK ME MAD,” China’s First Emperor said in a hoarse whisper. “You—all three of you—think I am beyond my wits. That I was tempted here in the depths of winter to this lonely mountaintop to …” His voice trailed off. For a moment, Q’in She Huang allowed himself to look toward the vine-covered mouth of the cave behind him. He took a deep breath and let it out slowly in a fine line of white mist.
His breath dusted the faces of the three people he trusted most on this earth, his Chosen: his personal Body Guard; his head Confucian; and Jiang, his favourite concubine. What are you thinking now, in your secret hearts? he wondered, then put the thought aside. He knew there was no way to know another’s hidden self. There was no way to find the mind’s construction in a person’s face.
He raised his arms, setting the abalone shells sewn into his silk coverlet tinkling. Then he spoke loudly. “Do you believe that I, who had the Great Wall built, I, who receive personal tribute from the barbarian lands far to the west, from the cruel kingdoms of the south and the arrogant men of the island called Nippon, that I, who united the Middle Kingdom for the first time, am now beyond my wits?”
The Confucian noted the subtle shift in the First Emperor’s language. No longer was he using the immoderate style of the ancient writers. Now his words were succinct and to the point. More importantly, his thoughts weren’t the erratic, unpredictable rantings of a man insanely searching for the secret to eternal life. These were the lucid, considered thoughts of the man who had designed the longest man-made waterway in the world, joining the Yangtze River with Beijing, who had standardized the character writing distinctive to the Black-Haired people and created the Mandarin system of examinations that had led to the world’s first organized civil service. This was the First Emperor he had known as a young man, not the one who had burned Confucians along with their books—a madness that he had witnessed and written about in his private journal.
“Do you believe that I am now infirm of mind—mad? That I brought you here to this barren place in search of some mountebank’s charade, some alchemist’s folly—a stone that would grant me eternal life? Do you believe that is why we now stand here and shiver in the cold while below the rebel troops surround this mountain? Do you believe that of me?”
Yes, thought the Body Guard, that is precisely what I believe. It all began with your madness—your madness within madness. Then its seductive strands slithered beneath the latched door of your chamber and out into the world.
For in Q’in She Huang’s madness, his imperial madness, he had somehow eternally bound them all to him. But none of them then understood that. All they knew was his lunacy, his screams for light in the darkness, for them to “Find it. Find it for me now!” And now these new orders. Two porters to be hobbled and then their flesh slashed so that “their blood will bring to light that which will be.”
The sun, almost at the western horizon, broke through the dense cloud cover and instantly banished the gloom. Suddenly the massive clouds were in furious motion, racing away to the north.
Q’in She Huang looked up and marvelled at their speed. Shortly, the sky was perfectly clear—and still, so still. As if some d
eity had swept it clean with one great breath, he thought. Then a cold wind, all the way from the Gobi Desert, swept up the mountainside and blew the long plaits of his lacquered hair against his cheek, creasing the wind’s sudden howl with a sharp thwap, thwap, thwap.
Jiang, the concubine, wrapped her woven shawl tightly around her, but still the cold entered her, hurt her, like an angry lover. She looked to her last angry lover, Q’in She Huang, and remembered his exacting instructions about the way to reveal a sacred relic. She shivered involuntarily at the memory. More madness!
The First Emperor turned to face the coming cold. “Even nature is in harmony with my intent,” he said softly, and was tempted to smile—but didn’t.
—
At the western base of the mountain, the rebel general’s Mongolian pony stirred beneath him as the desert wind engulfed them. From the desert. Madness wind, he thought.
A tear formed, then fell from his left eye. The malformation of the socket, like that of his father and his father before him, prevented the eyelid from fully covering the pupil. The gusting wind found the point of access to his eye and the irritation always brought tears. It infuriated him.
He turned to his adjutant. “Are our men in place?”
“Yes, General.”
“Their orders?”
“As you commanded, to kill on sight anyone who comes down from the Holy Mountain.”
The rebel general was about to retort that there were no holy mountains but was distracted by the commotion of the horses behind him. The unfamiliar desert wind was frightening the animals. “Hold your ranks,” he ordered. “Every man is to control his horse on pain of death!” Then he bellowed, “Q’in She Huang either freezes to death on the mountain or is slain as he comes down. His infamy dies with him and his followers this night.”
A cheer rose from his men.
As it did, the sibilant voice of the court’s Head Eunuch, Chesu Hoi, whispered in his ear, “There are caves, great General.” Even with the swirling desert wind, the general smelled the jasmine-scented breath of the half-man. He didn’t like the Eunuch to be so close to him, but he managed a smile. The First Emperor’s Head Eunuch had powerful allies at court.