City of Devils Read online

  Jack leans on the bar next to Joe, scribbling down the night’s rough take so far on a napkin. Joe’s eyes open wide behind his glasses; Jack shrugs and says, ‘Told you it’d be taxes plus five.’ The world is going to hell in a handcart, China is being ravaged by war just a few miles from Farren’s, but never have two men made more money in one place in all of Shanghai.

  * * *

  Dawn, the grey light of an early Shanghai morning, the neon on the Great Western Road turning pinkish against the first light. There are reminders of the times: armoured vehicles covered in the Rising Sun flag trundle outside on the strip, heading for the shift change at the barbed-wire barricades at the boundary of the Badlands. The last stragglers leave Farren’s. Sasha Vertinsky supports a giggly Boobee out to the street, dragging her cashmere cape with fox fur trim on the pavement. He hails a rickshaw to take them to the YMCA soda shop, where Boobee loves the iced coffee and scores coke off the Ningpoese waiters. The rickshaw pullers crowd round shouting ‘Mr. V., Mr. V.’, knowing Vertinsky goes everywhere by rickshaw, likes to gab in Shanghainese, and always tips big for a Russian.

  Parties are moving on—Fat Tony Perpetuo and the Brazilian consul are arm-in-arm; Elly and the Swiss are heading back for some early-morning cards at the Broadway Mansions; Alice Simmons and the bright young things of the remaining Shanghailander 400 head back to her penthouse for early-morning eggs and bacon; Babe is with some big shot she’s picked up, suggesting they get comfy on a divan just big enough for two up back of the Moon Palace; Sam Levy and the old Red Rose crew are trying to persuade the Dani sisters to take a cab with them, to see how the Jukong Alley swings, and get slapped by their wives for the cheek of it. The crew laughs, the Dani sisters shrug like they could care about these old boys, the wives mock huff and puff—it’s all good-natured. The kitchen staff loiters out back, palming smokes in the alley by the grind joints and Hwa-Wei lottery shacks. Mike’s Music Masters try to pick up the hatcheck and cigarette girls, get a party going back at their digs in Frenchtown. Then everyone’s gone but the help. Joe tells his boychik chauffeur to drive Nellie home; he needs to catch up with Jack.

  Wally Lunzer bolts the door behind the last of them. Faint shafts of sunlight presage another humid day before Shanghai’s long summer finally slumps into autumn and the temperatures start to drop sharply. Lunzer sends a boychik over the road to the you-tiao seller deep-frying dough sticks on the corner to get breakfast for all. A Chinese ayah sweeps up the night’s cigarette butts, discarded taxi dance stubs, and other detritus, snaffling up a couple of dropped gambling chips. Then Joe Farren, Wally Lunzer, and the Vienna boychiks pull up chairs and a table in the centre of the now deserted dance floor. The boys loosen the collars on their flannel shirts, roll up their sleeves, trade gossip, talk girls, bets, Nazis, Europe … Chairs are flipped round, smokes lit, minesweeping the dregs left on the bar. The boychiks stay trim, work out during the day, but can’t shake the ‘nightclub tan’, the ghostly pallor that comes with too little daylight. Joe brings over a tray—tea, sugar, lemon slices. He peels notes off a wad for the boys while the Manilamen band that plays sets between Mike and his Music Masters finishes packing up their instruments and leave. Lunzer unstrips his shoulder holster and hangs his clunky Red 9 over the back of the chair. Several of the boychiks clean their fingernails with cocktail sticks—working for Joe, they’ve begun to imitate his fastidiousness. Joe raises a glass, and the boys do likewise—lemon tea with Johnnie Walker tipped in to give it a kick—mazeltov.

  And there’s one more toast to make. Jack is upstairs in the office with the door locked. Joe knocks, and Mickey O’Brien lets him in. Jack is licking his calloused fingertips and counting notes, putting them into piles—Chinese dollars, American bucks, Japanese yen, British pounds, Dutch East Indies gulden, Filipino pesos, Straits dollars, Mexican silver dollars, Bombay rupees, the multifarious currencies of Shanghai—checking them all for phonies. Albert Rosenbaum is noting down the night’s chits, who owes what for calling in later.

  Jack hands over the night’s figures to a soft oy vey from the proprietor. They both look at the safe stuffed with rolls of notes. Jack loosens his collar, kicks the door closed, and spins the combination wheel. It’s the taxes plus five … and then another five. Wally Lunzer and Mickey O’Brien, with their shotguns and accompanied by Schmidt and a boychik, will drive the take over to a Frenchtown stash house on Route Remi that Rosenbaum has arranged for just such a purpose till the bank opens in a couple of hours. Doesn’t do to leave cash on the premises in the Badlands; Al Israel is still on everyone’s minds. They toast—Joe pours a whisky, Jack knocks back the last of his chicory roast. Farren’s is open for business.

  * * *

  SHOPPING NEWS —‘BREVITIES’—

  MONDAY, DECEMBER 17, 1939

  Troubles aplenty but still merry Christmas from all at Shopping News … and don’t forget to resubscribe for 1940!

  After our recent survey of local police conditions, we find that more than forty foreign officers have tendered their resignations, while another seventy intend doing so. Store detectives, night watchmen and bank security guards make the same money with far less risk to life and limb. There are probably many more members of our once brilliantly organized international police force who, fed up with the disgraceful treatment dished out to them by the Municipal Council, intend resigning.

  Mr. Peacock of the BLUE RIBBON DAIRY on Tunsin Road wishes to let hard pressed Shanghai mothers of young nippers know that, despite the so-called ‘Emergency’, Blue Ribbon STILL has supplies of milk available. However, orders must be made in person and there is a waiting list. Meanwhile we can report, after a weary trek across the Settlement and Frenchtown, that not a single can of condensed milk remains on any store shelf. We have to ask why the authorities are not prioritizing vital milk supplies when stocks are so low?

  GROSVENOR GOWNS wish all Shopping News subscribers to know that they’re opening a new salon this June at 249 Route Cardinal Mercier (Tel: 76058). Grosvenor are ‘Modistes’ in Ladies’ dresses, coats, costumes and hats. All work is performed under the direct personal supervision of a guaranteed European cutter. Shopping News subscribers are welcome to the opening and will receive a 15 per cent discount on all purchases, orders and any alterations for two weeks after the store’s grand opening.

  Got a secret you just have to share? Editorial: Rm 540, 233 Nanking Rd. Tel: Shanghai—10695

  * * *

  26

  The Caddies, Studebakers, Chryslers, and Packards line up nightly on the Great Western Road to deposit their occupants at the front door of Farren’s. The men are in tuxedos, cashmere coats, and white silk scarves; the women in low-necked chiffon dresses and furs. The band plays, the dance floor hops, the waiters careen in and out of the kitchens with trays piled high, the champagne corks pop. Joe is turning over the floor show acts to keep attracting the right crowd and get plenty of free newspaper space—Mike’s Music Masters are getting rave reviews, but on their night off Joe pulls in Harry Fisher, an old Red Rose mensch, and his swing band from the Roxy. He’s rigged wires in the roof and brought in an aerialist who soars over the heads of the late-night diners—it’s a gimmick, but the punters love it. Jack tells him to make sure the girl is svelte or the roof will come down and rain silver dollars on the diners below. The Aristocrats of Harmony sing pre-dinner melodies. Joe books the magician from the Park Hotel’s show after he’s finished and the Svetlanoff Duo exhibition dancers to waltz for the early crowd. He’s also brought in an Aussie couple called the Hartnells who’ve been based in London, fresh from headlining at all the best Mayfair nightspots. Joe bills them as ‘Patter, Chatter, and Dancing’—Sandra and Frederic tumble and mug for the dinner crowd. All the while Jack watches the Manilamen croupiers spin the wheels upstairs and fire the cards at the punters.

  The North-China Daily News, the China Press, the Shanghai Evening Mercury, the Shopping News, and the Chinese papers too, send photographers to jostle on the Great Western
Road and snap the crowd. Sasha Vertinsky pops in nightly, chin held high, monocle in place (hush, there’s no lens, it’s an affectation); Lily Flohr comes by after her show at the Elite wrapped in furs and with bouquets of flowers for Joe’s bar. Now and again she sings torch songs for the crowd and the Yiddish lover’s lament ‘Bei Mir Bistu Shein’, ‘To Me You’re Beautiful’, first in Yiddish, then once more in English. It never fails to tear Joe up. Then she doubles up with Gerhard Gottschalk, another Berlin exile running the Tabarin cabaret in Hongkew up near the Jewish refugee–heavy district of Tilanqiao, and they do comedy numbers, Gottschalk goosing Lily’s rear, mugging for the crowd.

  The photographers snap sexy Sandra Hartnell; they catch Babe with a good-looking Basque boy on each arm. The flashbulbs pop and catch Joe, followed by Jack and Evelyn. They pop some more and snap Shanghai Bund gold-bullion heiress Alice Daisy Simmons, still single and a high-ranking catch, on the arm of glamorous flyer Hal du Berrier (she’ll end up paying Don Chisholm dearly to keep that picture out of the Shopping News and spare her poor daddy heart palpitations). Here’s Mickey Hahn, New Yorker correspondent and nightlife maven, with her pet gibbon Mr. Mills done up in a tux on her shoulder; here’s Clara Ivanoff, the most beautiful of the Paramount Peaches, with her handsome boyfriend, Vasia, who plays clarinet in the Paramount’s White Russian house band. Nellie never shows after opening night; her dancing days are over and she hates Jack’s guts. She can’t help feeling that all this will go bad, sometime, sooner or later. Joe makes the most of her absence with a Dani sister or a Peach. He’s hardly ever home; Nellie sits and fumes. Inside Farren’s is a place to forget the war, the barbed-wire barricades, the checkpoints, the shakedowns, the inflation eroding your savings, the newsreels showing Europe going down in flames, the bar stool gossip that maybe that was the last evacuation ship and now your fate is entwined with Shanghai’s, like it or not.

  * * *

  The only catch is the Badlands itself, which is still bad—and violence is ultimately bad for business. J. B. Powell at the China Weekly Review sums up the assassinations and shootings, the robberies and kidnappings as Shanghai’s ‘carnival of crime’.

  It starts with sanctioned theft; licenced extortion. Number 76 thugs loot a gambling den on Connaught Road, hijack cars full of foreigners returning to the Settlement from the now nearly marooned Columbia Country Club, and shoot up a Chinese wedding, grabbing the fat red envelopes stuffed with lucky money for the bride and groom. Two guests are gunned down, seven others wounded; no arrests are made. It moves on to street warfare: more number 76 gangsters on stolen motorbikes strafe an SMP patrol with machine-gun fire and lob two grenades towards their armoured patrol car. The SMP return fire and take down two of the motorcyclists, dead on the pavement.

  The stock market spirals out of control; speculators hawk ‘War Baby’ shares in gun companies at crazy prices, promising fast and big returns claiming fake contracts with the British and German armies. It’s a scam. The dividends don’t materialize, and the gullible swallow opium to end their shame as their families are bankrupted. Rumours fly round, the market bounces up and down, hoarders stash cotton supplies in godowns—bought at a thousand Chinese bucks a bale, they boost the price to two grand. Those who sell profit; those who hold too long will see the market collapse completely. Fifty cotton trading import–export companies go bankrupt in one day; a half dozen Shanghai cotton merchants leap from their office windows, several of whom leave markers unpaid at Farren’s. But when one racket collapses, another rises—calico, Saigon rice, sorghum, silk, and always, always in Shanghai, opium.

  Decent dope is in short supply in the Badlands because Soochow Creek is silting up and Cabbage Moh’s junks can’t get through with the uncut stuff. Cabbage is supplementing the Badlands’ narcotics diet with opium black pills and heroin red pills—‘reds or blacks?’ is the new cry of the street dealers. Little Nicky is back in the North-China Daily News estimating that the city has twenty-five hundred street dealers, many of them moonlighting cops, selling to an ever growing three hundred thousand addicts—and why wouldn’t they swap law enforcement for drug dealing, as inflation wipes out their wages daily? Official black Nash cars cruise the strip bordering the Badlands with the SMP high honchos, armed bodyguards on the running boards, checking up on their sergeants, now clad in thick blue winter uniforms to keep out the bitter Shanghai winds.

  Little Nicky heads to the Badlands to see the show for himself. The Western Roads are outside his remit as a U.S. Treasury agent, but he knows the men he wants are its denizens. Standing on the corner of the Great Western and Edinburgh Roads, a sideshow, a carnival of the doped, the beaten, and the crazed. He walks round to the Avenue Haig strip and encounters the playground of Shanghai’s crackpots, cranks, gondoos, and lunatics. He’s accosted constantly: casino touts, hustling pimps, dope dealers; monkeys on chains, dancing dogs, kids turning tumbles, Chinese ‘look see’ boys offering to watch your car. Their numbers rise as the Japs turn the screws on Shanghai ever tighter. Half-crazy American missionaries try to sell him Bibles printed on rice paper—saving souls in the Badlands is one tough beat. The Chinese hawkers do no better with their porno cards of naked dyed blondes, Disney characters in lewd poses, and bare-arsed Chinese girls, all underage. Barkers for the strip shows and porno flicks up the alleyways guarantee genuine French celluloid of the filthiest kind. Beggars abound, near the dealers and bootleggers in the shadows, selling fake heroin pills and bootleg samogon Russian vodka, distilled in alleyways, that just might leave you blind.

  Off the Avenue Haig, Nicky, making sure of his gun in its shoulder holster, ventures up the side streets and narrow laneways that buzz with the purveyors of cure-all tonics, hawkers of appetite suppressants, male pick-me-ups promising endless virility. Everything is for sale—back-street abortions and unwanted baby girls alongside corn and callus removers, street barbers, and earwax pickers. The stalls of the letter writers for the illiterate are next to the sellers of pills to cure opium addiction. He sees desperate refugees offered spurious Nansen passports, dubious visas for neutral Macao, well-forged letters of transit for Brazil. He could have his fortune told twenty times over (gypsy tarot cards or Chinese bone chuckers? Your choice). He could eat his fill—grilled meat and rice stalls—or he could start a whole new life: end-of-the-worlders and Korean propagandists offer cheap land in Mongolia and Manchukuo.

  Nicky wanders the thoroughfares and the back alleys of the Western Roads and sees life, such as it is lived in the Shanghai Badlands, on the eve of 1940.

  27

  Things remain tense after the New Year. Puppet mayor Fu Xiao’an launches a ‘Badlands Cleanup’ campaign, ordering the gambling joints to close but, beyond switching off their gate lights, nothing happens; behind the doors the roulette wheels keep spinning. It’s not only the puppet authorities who are keen to impose order; the Municipal Council wants to look like it’s getting tough on the Western Roads District. Tall, lanky, very English Godfrey Phillips, the Shanghai Municipal Council commissioner-general and the Settlement’s top civil servant, opens talks with Mayor Fu on a joint SMP–Japanese police force for the Badlands to be called the Western Shanghai Area Special Police. Within the hour they’re nicknamed the WASPs.

  Days later, at nine a.m. on January 6, Phillips is driven down the Avenue Haig with Crime Squad boss John Crighton to see the now-notorious strip of sin for himself. Crighton is an SMP veteran, no stranger to raids, violent crime, and deadly shootouts with gangsters who would never surrender alive. He’s a family man, but the law comes first. Famously, he had once been off duty and out shopping with his wife, Julia, when he noticed some men acting suspiciously. They began to rob a pedestrian. John Crighton pulled his gun and faced the robbers down. They ran. He left his wife on the street and chased them down a laneway. She heard shots fired and feared the worst. He arrested the men, finding that their pistol was linked to twenty-six recent robberies and a murder. He then took his wife to finish their shopping trip and carried the
ir parcels home—he’s that kind of Shanghai cop. Crighton was awarded the SMP’s Distinguished Conduct Medal. Few senior officers were more respected by the ranks of the SMP, or more feared by the city’s criminal elements. Godfrey Phillips, a man who spent his life behind a desk signing chits, was fortunate to have John Crighton with him that day.

  As the car moves down the Avenue Haig, three hijacked rickshaws block the road, forcing the SMP armoured Nash 400 sedan to stop; three gunmen open fire at point-blank range. That Saturday morning Godfrey Phillips is the luckiest man in Shanghai; a dozen Mauser Red 9 pistol shots rip by him, one missing his ear by a whisker, another passing between his legs. Not one hits him. Crighton pushes Phillips down on the floor of the Nash, covers him with bulletproof vests, and they hightail it out of there back into the Settlement.

  Phillips and Mayor Fu agree on the formation of the WASPs. Phillips listens to Crighton and makes sure he gets what he wants in the deal. Crucially, the new force is tasked with investigating any cases involving foreign nationals and suppressing all forms of vice and crime in the Badlands. Phillips, echoing Crighton, wants the new force to serve notice on the foreign gangs of Shanghai, with immediate effect. In reality it won’t be that fast, but the gangs will have no choice but to defend their interests—no matter their nationality. And that includes Joe and Jack.

  * * *

  The first few months of 1940 have been decent for Joe and Jack—the tables at Farren’s are raking it in. The casino makes good money even with the increasing Kempeitai and number 76 tax demands, which involve Jack having to break bread with his Japanese contacts in Hongkew to try to keep the demands from spiraling ever upwards. But by the beginning of summer, Jack’s major troubles are in Frenchtown rather than Little Tokyo.