I tried various tactics on Ying. Bribery. Reasoning. More bribery. He wouldn’t budge. American dollars had depreciated after the war started; one hundred dollars would only buy him a drink. Finally, I threatened him. “I know what you were doing with all the money I gave you, Ying. If you let me out, I’ll keep my mouth shut. Otherwise I’ll tell Sinmay you turned rogue.”
“I’m not turning rogue.”
“I saw you near an alley the day the Japanese bombed the Settlement. Don’t deny it.” He was doing the arms trade for profit, common for reckless people.
“‘Life is precious, love is priceless, but compared to freedom, both are worthless.’ Have you heard of that?”
“Since when did you become a poet? Maybe I should just tell Sinmay?”
A grunt, then the rattle of the lock. I grabbed a scarf and a hat on the dresser and almost flew out of the door.
“You look terrible,” Ying said.
“So do you.” Ying, who unlike Cheng, paid little attention to his appearance, was ragged. His hair was messy, vest unbuttoned, a suspender loosened.
“Don’t tell Sinmay I let you out. He’ll kill me. Wait, where are you going? Isn’t your wedding in two days?”
“Who knows.” I sprinted down the path to the garden, then to the front central courtyard near the gate. The open air, the long winding path, the rain-drenched osmanthus bushes—everything was freedom. Near my Nash parked by the fountain, I heard the mah-jongg tiles clash and Sinmay’s voice from the reception room. I held my breath.
“One hundred forty-two times! Can you believe it? Those bastards bombed the Nationalists’ capital one hundred forty-two times for the past three years!”
“That’s almost forty-eight times a year, four times a month, and Buddha bless me, once a week!” Peiyu’s voice.
“The capital must have been reduced to rubble,” Cheng said. “How did they survive?”
“We could win this war if the Nationalists and the Communists unite and attack the Japanese while they are expanding in South Asia.” Sinmay’s voice.
“That would never happen. They hate each other. Chiang Kai-shek would never forgive his subordinates for conspiring with the Communists to kidnap him.”
“He got out alive. Besides, kidnapping wasn’t the Communists’ fault. Didn’t Zhou Enlai negotiate to set him free?”
“Let’s not talk about war at the mah-jongg table,” Cheng’s mother said. “Peiyu, have you confirmed the menu with the restaurant? We must have oranges for my son’s wedding. No excuses of orange shortages.”
I ducked into the Nash, delighted to see my chauffeur napping inside. I gave him a tap on the shoulder and put my finger on my lips. He looked happy to see me, nodding nonstop—his habit—and started the engine. My Nash had broken a wiper during the bombing, and the engine groaned and shuddered as it lumbered out of the gate. It was excruciatingly slow.
From the reception room came the faint voice of Sinmay asking where my chauffeur was going, but the magic of mah-jongg was most powerful—it bound them all, and no one left in the middle of the game.
Ying had said the streets were flooded with Japanese soldiers; he was not lying. Checkpoints were popping up like bamboo shoots after the spring rain, especially in the streets near the Settlement. When we were one block away from the inn, I got out, tucked the scarf around my face, and passed the patrolling soldiers shouting in Japanese. In the inn, a room was reserved for me, but Ernest hadn’t arrived yet.
I took the key and went to the room, previously the inn owner’s bedroom. It had bare, drab walls, a bed with a thin white cotton quilt, a low three-foot bamboo nightstand, and a narrow side door open to a walled vegetable garden accessible from the kitchen. Like all private homes of poor people in Shanghai, it had no fireplace, no wallpaper, and no chandeliers, and the bed had no mattress, only a bare wooden board covered with red sheets under the quilt.
I took off my scarf and sat on the edge of the bed. I could hear the shrill berating of a woman outside accusing her neighbor of stealing her socks, the constant chopping in the kitchen, and the vigorous groans of a man and a woman through the wall.
My heart pounding, I waited.
What was taking him so long? I stood up, walked around, and sat. And I stood up again. I remembered once Sinmay had read something like this at his salon about waiting: like riding a boat loaded with barrels of petroleum, there was the calmness of being carried away and the excitement of seeing the light at the end of the journey; yet with each passing minute, each lap of the water set aflame barrels of doubt, suspicion, and anxiety.