City of Devils Read online

  North of the Soochow Creek fires still smoulder. Endless blocks of sprawling ruins stretch as far as the eye can see, where once were mills, filatures, factories, tenements, schools, shops, temples, homes; where two million Chinese lived, worked, procreated, hoped. Now, come nightfall, across most of this district, the streets are deserted. Chinese who have to pass through move swiftly, believing the ghosts of the dead hover above their former residences. Japanese sentries seldom venture abroad in these quarters after sundown. The clanging of gongs is heard from one bombed-out and deserted terrace; devils innumerable are believed to gather at the firestormed North Railway Station terminus at night seeking reunification with their dead relatives.

  On certain nights, so it is said, when the moon is especially bright, kuei huo, devils’ fireballs, can be seen bounding chaotically down the broken streets and passageways. The Japanese call them rin-kwa or kin-kwa—gold fire; the foreigners know them as will-o’-the-wisps. Japanese soldiers foolish enough to follow these ghost lights do not return and are found dead in the morning, in alleys and laneways, their eyes wide open and reddened by fire. The Japanese say that the phosphorescent lights are Chinese Hitodama, ‘soul flames’, found on battlefields and summoned by fox demons, the demons of fire. The Chinese say the kuei huo are a force summoned by the legion of Shanghai’s dead to take revenge on the Japanese. The kuei huo retreat, as the soldiers seek to capture them, and then engulf and consume them in fire.

  They are manifestations of the Whangpoo’s marsh gas, seeping through the cracks of the city to expel the unwanted, poison them, destroy them.

  This, people believed …

  * * *

  24

  Plum rains; gold fever. The annual plum rains, the meiyu, hammer Shanghai in July 1939, steaming off the sidewalks as the newly arrived humidity evaporates the rainwater to a fine mist. Settlement streets become unpassable and Frenchtown basements swiftly flood, drowning Chinese refugee families caught by surprise. In Hongkew, the Sawgin Creek overflows, the drains back up, sewage spills into the streets. Flooding in the Soochow Creek washes dead bodies downriver and deposits them in the alluvial mud flats of the Whangpoo by the Bund, to be fished out by the marine police using long bamboo poles with boat hooks on the end before the taipans in the offices overlooking the river have their luncheons disturbed by them. Riverside godowns flood in a matter of minutes; legions of rats swarm out of their trapdoors into the surrounding alleys.

  On Shanghai’s streets Chinese shroffs and bookkeepers hold sodden newspapers over their Kobe felt hats; Shanghailanders sweating in worsted wool suits still—linen is in short supply this year—turn up their collars despite the newly humid air. Office ladies, shop girls, and off-duty taxi dancers raise their oiled paper umbrellas as they hurry along the Bubbling Well Road up near the Paramount, skip the puddles in Frenchtown on the Avenue Joffre, seek sanctuary in the cafés of Little Russia, and huddle under the awning outside DD’s till the worst passes. It’s not cold, though the plum rains do bring the temperature down to a more comfortable level; it’s simply damp. And then the rains stop as suddenly as they come. The people sheltering in the doorways of the Settlement and under the plane trees of Frenchtown resume their journeys. Rickshaw pullers wipe off their seat cushions and look for the richest pickings from among the crowd of pedestrians. Pedicab drivers push down on their pedals to get moving, stiff limbs responding to their efforts, and look once again for fares. Shanghai is temporarily cleansed.

  But the queues outside the bullion dealers on the Bund never move during the plum rain downpours. The isolated and surrounded city has slumped into massive stagflation: the value of notes and coins changes daily, and the exchange rates leave people dizzy. The expectant have risen early to join the line at the Shanghai Gold Exchange, behind people who have spent all night on the pavement to be first in the doors. Others queue by the brokers’ offices—a line two hundred long waits patiently, soaked, snaking round the corner from the offices of Simmons, the Settlement’s largest bullion brokers. Wealthier Shanghainese pay peasants to sleep out in the queue and hold their place till morning. Gold becomes an obsession, and rumours swell: only gold is safe, only gold will survive and increase in value. The exchanges see prices rise sky-high; brokers like Simmons see their profits surge on the fears of the populace. Prices swell for everything. Bread that was twenty cents before the Japanese came is now $1.20 Chinese; coal that was a ten-spot a tonne is now 250 Chinese bucks and largely dust. Rice dealers, accused of hoarding and profiteering, are attacked by mobs of hungry, inflation-ruined peasants.

  The end of year two of the war, the first twenty-four months of Gudao is approaching, and Shanghai has gold fever bad. Bullion sharks—inflation millionaires, speculators—are the new symbol of the city’s venality, and everyone wants to be one. More rumours swirl: the yuan will be devalued overnight; the puppets will refuse to recognise Free China currency, wiping savings out instantly; the Japanese will destroy all currency and replace it with their own ‘invasion money’. The Japanese cannot abide the yuan—it’s still a Nationalist currency and gives Free China a financial foothold in encircled Shanghai.

  All fears are realised as the value of yuan collapses even further under the onslaught of stagflation. Talk of war in Europe throughout the summer only accentuates Shanghai’s financial panic. Alice Daisy Simmons and her father deal more bullion than ever: bullion is transportable; bullion is dependable. The moneychangers along the Bund do a roaring business; it’s said they can tell a bad dollar by blowing on the edge of coin and listening. But over in the Badlands, any money—gold; silver; dollars American, Chinese, or Mexican; yen; yuan; taels—rolls and rolls …

  On September 1, 1939, those European war jitters become reality. Germany invades Poland—and two days later London and Paris declare war on Berlin. Priorities change. Already the Solitary Island, Shanghai becomes even more isolated, and with the British now at war for their own island’s survival, the Settlement will be barely defended as the Royal Navy and any remaining soldiers head elsewhere. The news from Chungking is almost as bad, as the dreaded Mitsubishi bombers pound the Nationalist citadel nightly. But in the midst of this, there’s no alternative for Shanghai, no other option for Joe and Jack but to carry on: Farren’s opens on the twenty-first with a Riley-backed casino upstairs and Joe’s name in neon, shining out over the Great Western Road.

  25

  Finally: opening night—Farren’s. Inside, a full house—bar, restaurant, and floor show, with three more floors of gambling upstairs. The master of ceremonies? Joe Farren, the dapper Ziegfeld of Shanghai. Want to play the wheels? Then talk to the casino’s pit boss, the man who’ll sign your marker or have you escorted to the door sans jewellery, watch, wallet, and wedding ring: Jack T. Riley.

  Joe and Jack’s new joint can hold six hundred at full capacity, seat two hundred for dinner and the floor show, with the gambling up on the floors above to cater to the rest—roulette, chemin de fer, craps, dice, and, naturally, slots. Reassuringly heavy security is provided courtesy of Wally Lunzer and the boychiks—recent bomb attacks by Free China hit squads on Jap-friendly gambling and dance venues are fresh in the mind. Still … it’s opening night. The Great Western Road is arc-lit like a Hollywood premier outside Grauman’s Chinese Theater. Let no one say Joe Farren ever lacked ambition—a decade in Shanghai and now he’s ruling the nightclub roost with a vengeance, just like he said he would.

  The swells—or what’s left of them after the evacuation ships have departed—start to arrive at ten p.m. It’s still a pretty swank crowd for a still just-about swank town—a cavalcade of the great and the good of the sin capital of the Orient, tripping down in limos and taxis from the Settlement to see what Dapper Joe’s got for them. At its more reputable end, a few uptight taipans or stuckup Brits, swinging loose for one night with the wives sent to safety in Hong Kong, Australia, or back to Blighty; catch them on the red carpet with their secretaries on their arms and a pack of ambitious griffins not far beh
ind. Those that make money even in the worst of times, the traders and go-betweens; the compradors and brokers. Al Rosenbaum personally escorts the bullion broker’s daughter, Alice Daisy Simmons, up the stairs to the roulette tables. She’s exactly the kind of high roller Farren’s wants. Later, Jack will make sure Alice and her friends are comped drinks and smokes all night to make sure they don’t stray too far from the tables.

  Here’s the honorary Cuban consul, a man with his hand permanently out for cumshaw; the slimeball Portuguese commercial attaché, talking up Macao’s neutrality with his arm round the honorary Brazilian consul—the Portuguese mobs paid both men three times as much as their government salaries in squeeze every month. Here also is the nest-feathering brigade of officials from swamps like Venezuela, Mexico, Chile, all with passports for sale and letters of transit falling like confetti, now worth more than gold. A Portuguese visa had been a few hundred dollars’ cumshaw to a corrupt official a year before; now the price is treble, quadruple. Still they mingle—Portuguese bossman Fat Tony Perpetuo, Macassared hair slicked back with some simmering señorita on his arm, trades gossip with fellow countryman José Bothelo, while the consuls in white linen suits hover near and smile through nicotine-stained teeth.

  Badlands faces. Slots King Jack, Evil Evelyn on his arm, signs markers; Mickey O’Brien, in his first tux, keeps a wary eye on the croupiers and feels the itchy starch on his neck. Albert Rosenbaum bites the silver dollars to ensure their genuine Mexican provenance. Babe, back from yet another Jack-funded dope cure with the German hypnotist, wafts in looking like a million dollars in an apple-green cheongsam to wish Jack luck. The DD’s crew, with their trademark blondes on their arms.

  Less welcome these days is Don Chisholm, who’s decided he thinks Berlin and Tokyo are the future. He’s got a nightly gig broadcasting anti-American, anti-Allied crap on Kempeitai-funded XGRS radio. Joe’s quite clear—he can’t stand Chisholm or his claptrap on the wireless, but tonight isn’t the night for a ruckus. Everyone’s favourite Shanghai crook, Elly Widler—gun runner, conman, grifter, purveyor of rare Tibetan furs, gambler and thief—arrives with his new squeeze on his arm. Elly’s pushing fifty; she’s not yet twenty. Elly kvetches as ever with Sam Levy; his girlfriend looks bored and eyes the Basque jai alai stars in their tight pongee suits. His all-Swiss crew mingles with the Russian boys from the Broadway Mansions card games, keen to see how Jack runs his wheels. Elly moves on to chat with old timers Bill Hawkins and Stuart Price, muse over the old days, grabbing drinks off passing trays to toast the memory of poor old Al Israel. Elly proposes the toast: alav ha-sholom, may he rest in peace. At the front tables the ‘reserved’ signs are whipped away as Shanghai’s number one fixer, Carlos Garcia, and his French moneyman, Louis Bouvier, arrive with their wives dripping diamonds. Joe makes sure they get what they want when they want it.

  The local celebrities turn up to give the gawkers a gawk—here’s Farren’s boyhood favourite, Viennese chanteuse and former silent-movie star Lily Flohr. In exile from the Nazis now, she’s still a star in Shanghai. The boychiks clear a path for George ‘Lewko’ Levchenko, their welterweight hero now that Andre Shelaeff’s gone to find fame in the golden boxing rings of California. Lewko is straining the seams of his suit with a silky blonde Harbintsy babe on his arm, while his manager grabs the press boys for pics and column inches. Here are all the Paramount Peaches, of course, coming to say hi to their old boss, Follies mingling; the Hollywood Blondes, who’ve just finished at the Canidrome, have pedicabbed it over. Here’s Sasha Vertinsky from the Gardenia round the corner, with his trademark silver-tipped cane, top hat, tails, and monocle, and the gorgeous Boobee in satin, sniffing the last dabs of coke up her beautiful aquiline nose.

  Vertinsky and Boobee are White Russian Badlands royalty. He was a genuine star of the pre-revolutionary Russian stage who moved through the Russian émigré communities of Constantinople, Berlin, Paris, and America before ending up in Shanghai. He entertains nightly at the Gardenia, and the crowd always applauds before he sings ‘Dorogoi dlinnoyu’—‘Those Were the Days’—‘Kokainetka,’ and ‘Tango Magnolia’. Boobee, with dresses that barely conceal her porcelain skin, manages the Gardenia for him. She is the queen of the Settlement’s army of Natashas. Her cleavage is deep, her back exposed from sharp shoulder blades to arse, a place only those wanting a hard slap would ever dare put their hand. When Boobee hops on a bar stool, lights an opium-tipped cigarette, and crosses her long legs, the sound of a dozen tensed-up male necks swinging round is like the report of a gunshot across the floor of the Gardenia. Boobee and Vertinsky have quick-fire tempers: they argue at the club and throw glasses; the punters duck for cover, but it never keeps them away. She calls him ublyudok, bastard, which he is, technically; he called her shlyukha, whore, which she isn’t quite. Both have fearsomely bad cocaine habits.

  These days, the natives get some Badlands action too—there’s not enough foreign money to go round in these times of war and repatriation. The Badlands welcomes all … and their wallets. Here are some playboy Chinese with their Cambridge accents and Oxford brogues—none of them have ever worked a day in their lives, and certainly never set foot in daddy’s stinking sweatshop in Chapei. Here too are the hack-pack regulars who’ve squeezed and begged their way onto Farren’s guest list: the whoremongering Ralph Shaw from the North-China Daily News, that fruit from the Shanghai Times said to have a taste for young Japanese boys, the Associated Press guy with his White Russian princess, who’s about as royal as Joe’s hairy Jewish tukhes. Shura Giraldi, the hermaphrodite boss of the Peking Badlands, is in town for the opening, with his dance troupe girls done up like ersatz Dietrichs. Frenchtown flics come over the border for a complimentary pastis or three: district Sûreté captains check out the action and the girls. The local contingents of Corsican dope runners and Maltese pimps attend, of course, looking to get some grease from Farren. Even a couple of Manila-based silver smugglers come to see how Shanghai swings. And finally, there’s a special long table for the old Red Rose gang—Monte Berg, Sol Greenberg, Freddy Kaufmann, Fred Stern, Joe Klein, Demon Hyde, and Al Wiengarten—the veteran wise rabbis of Shanghai’s rackets with their plump, attentive wives in attendance. Joe passes out cigars and brandies, Jack comps each wife a pile of chips for upstairs to go and lose.

  You wanna spend? Farren’s got eight craps tables, each with its own sticksman; sixteen blackjack, fifty slots, and three roulette wheels. You suggest they’re rigged, and Farren’s head of security, Wally Lunzer, will come over and acquaint your head with the Great Western Road flagstones. You want a marker? See Jack Riley. Short on cash and want to turn that emerald necklace into chips? Albert Rosenbaum will quote you a price. And here’s the floor show: the Dani sisters looking all dark-eyed and lovely, harmonising while the entrées are served. Joe and Nellie take to the floor and glide like old times, their disagreements put aside momentarily, Joe’s cheating temporarily forgotten. The crowd roars when they bow, the men stand and applaud, the old Red Rose wives dab their eyes. Nellie still looking as fabulous as she did at the Majestic in ’29. Then dancing, the band—Mike’s Music Masters of Swing, fresh in from playing at the Oost Java Club in Batavia, exclusive now to Farren’s. It’s everything Joe ever wanted.

  Outside, the beggars of the Badlands congregate as the cars and rickshaws pull up, shaking their Craven A cigarette tins for coins. There are country children with twisted limbs, women in rags thrusting forward near-dead babies; others display evidence of leprosy or syphilis or gangrene; limbs lost to the deadly shuttles of the silk filatures that power the Settlement’s riches; horrific burns on show. Opium ghosts stagger through the crowds, heads down, noses running, hands outstretched. Bad joss, some say, to not throw coppers into their open palms.

  Wally Lunzer’s boychiks know the beggars’ tricks and move them on, roughly, with kicks, flicking lit Camels in their faces, cursing them in Yiddish, then pidgin—no wantchee, no wantchee. If they’re allowed to congregate, they’ll stand still, hands ou
t, begging. If coins come, they move on; if a Shanghailander tries to shove one aside, the beggar will collapse to the pavement, writhing, rolling around, yelling. The other beggars will swarm and raise an outcry until only a pocketful of change flung high into the air will disperse them as they fight each other for copper coins.

  Ignore the rest of the Badlands—Farren’s is bringing high-class Shanghai back for the first time since Bloody Saturday. It’s like the old days of the Plaza or the Majestic, the early days of the Paramount, and the heyday of the Canidrome all over again. And Joe loves his crowd. They’ve followed him from the Settlement via Frenchtown, up to Hongkew, down to Siccawei, and now to the Badlands. They hail from England, France, Mitteleuropa, the moneyed latifundia of the Argentine and Brazilian rubber plantations, Mediterranean ports, and White Russian émigré communities.

  With Farren’s, Joe got all the trimmings he’d read about in American magazines. The two great arc lights are ‘borrowed’ from the Fourth Marines for the night and jerry-rigged into the Settlement’s electricity to scan the heavens. He’s got the velvet rope, the boychiks in monkey suits, that impressive neon sign, Farren’s: the House of Surprises. It’s all complemented by the stainless steel cutlery (he’d have preferred silver but knew it would go missing in the punters’ pockets if the staff didn’t get it first), good Irish linen on the tables, and red-lacquered lamps of Ningpo cheval glass. Dinner is tender beef steak from Hongkew Market cooked by chefs poached from the Canidrome (Tung and Vong were pissed at that stunt), the bar stocked by Egal & Cie and, just before sunup and curfew’s end, good hot coffee and fresh pastries from Bianchi’s on the Nanking Road.

  Joe stands at the bar, watches the punters dance, the gigolos eye up the single women, watches the gamblers move on to the upper floors and knows that the casino upstairs is packed. It’s been a struggle: Shanghai being the Solitary Island means paying off multiple smuggling rings for just about everything—decent steak, branded liquor, acceptable wines. But Shanghai is still a town where just about anything is possible at a price. Japanese barricade guards still just about look the other way for a cut.