City of Devils Read online

  Joe fixes them up with Doc Borovika, whose retirement fund and opium money are significantly boosted by the boys—and everyone else. Don Chisholm offers the doc free advertising in the Shopping News in return for gossip, but the doc keeps schtum. The Harlem Gentlemen line up Monday mornings with clap, pox, syph, crabs: a jigging queue of horny young men with burning piss and sores on their schvantzes outside the doc’s spare room. The doc tells the startled neighbours that the boys are used to hot weather, and Shanghai gives them colds that just won’t shift.

  For Joe and Nellie, the Canidrome money is everything they’d dreamt of. Nellie finds a decent Frenchtown apartment, and their Woo Foo Lane days of bug tape, chipped enamel sit-and-soak baths, and communal stoves are long over. They move in and move up. Not that all is great in the garden—Joe can’t leave the Follies, the Peaches, or the Hollywood Blondes alone, and that rankles Nellie. He’s getting sloppy about it too—the whiffs of chypre and lily of the valley that linger, lipstick on the collar, blonde hairs caught on the lapels of his winter tweeds, the telltale signs of Joe’s nonstop philandering. They fight but keep it together for the Canidrome punters who want them to glide and slide on the dance floor, Joe slapping backs and shaking hands, Nellie drinking with the big spenders. They’re on the up, and it should have been enough. But Shanghai always offers other temptations: sex, money, success and, of course, the city’s oldest temptress, its single greatest source of profit and wealth and its founding obsession—opium. And the world is about to get an unprecedented hit.

  * * *

  Shanghai is a bastard son of a city, an offspring nobody wants until it has something worth taking. It’s Chinese land surrendered after defeat in battle and a subsequent unequal treaty by a weak China to a powerful England determined to sell opium and wanting the key port that controls the Yangtze trade. The city is an embarrassment to the Nationalist government in Nanking, a symbol of defeat, of historic weakness. Yet it has risen to become the China Coast’s richest metropolis, a repository of treasure, a beacon attracting all of China’s hopeful, ambitious, determined. Shanghai is now a prize worth taking, a son who’s grown to outstrip the father that languishes in poverty, disease, floods that turn to droughts. The neon-bright city feeds off its host of four hundred million peasants barely surviving in China’s fetid hinterlands and laughs at their degradation. Shanghai is an abscess on the country, a contamination. It will be cauterised, cleansed, disinfected—but not yet. For now, the generalíssimo and his Nanking government will let Shanghai persist in the hope that, perhaps, the Western consuls and businessmen, their soldiers and battleships, will keep the greater menace from the east—Tokyo—at bay.

  Four times a year the city’s sky turns black at midday, the sun blotted out, the streets choking as the quarterly bonfires of Chiang Kai-shek’s Opium Suppression Force rage. Seized opium, heroin, cocaine, and vials of morphine stoke the flames. Convicted dope dealers are forced to shovel the haul into brick kilns on wasteland in Pootung, the muddy marshes across the Whangpoo, and ignite it in immense bonfires after customs agents determine the wind is in the right direction. The sweet, sticky, black cloud will descend on the Settlement opposite, reminding its citizens of their transgressions. The men who shovel will later be executed and buried in unmarked graves in those same Pootung marshlands. They are buried alongside the nameless impoverished addicts they fed, the lost opium ghosts they have created.

  When the Whangpoo swells, rises, and bursts its banks, the corpses of the dealers and the addicts will reappear—bloated and blackened. But for now, all the black cloud does is remind the pedestrians on the Avenue Joffre, on the Bubbling Well Road, on the Avenue Haig, that the eternal truth of Shanghai is dope, is opium. It’s a metropolis raised on dope, its foundations permanent reminders of that trade. The cloud that envelops the city is a fraction, a minuscule percentile, an insignificant amount of that which has flowed in and out of the city’s arteries, creating wealth for some and hell for many. As long as a city stands on the banks of the Whangpoo River, dope will flow through its veins.

  * * *

  They haunt the banks of the city’s creeks—the Soochow, the Sawgin, the Siccawei. They crowd into bamboo-matted lean-to shacks in the western slum villages of Fah Wah and Zau de Ke. Some exist aboard rickety and leaky beggar boats, tarp-covered sampans permanently moored in the remoter sections of the fetid creeks. They are slaves to the Foreign Mud, the poisioned chalice of the West: opium. Those that work to suppress the vice estimate that the city contains 100,000 addicted souls. They throng the countless dens of Shanghai on Foochow, Kiangse, Yu Yuen Roads. There are too many flower-smoke rooms on too many streets to name. By day they beg, walking the city, scrounging coppers. By night they smoke, wreathed in the blue smoke of the juice of the poppy. Their complexions are grey, their skin as though bleached, with the consistency of papyrus. They stumble as though weak. Their noses run freely; their eyes water. Their teeth loosen and fall out, leaving bleeding gums; their pupils contract to points; they grow old quickly, with grey hair, stooped backs, cracked fingernails. Their souls are shattered, their minds deranged. Most die prematurely.

  But others live and remain slaves. They survive on the dregs of juice left by others—that considered too poor-quality to keep: the so-called longtou zha. It’s sold to poor men in alleyways by servants from wealthier houses where addicts reside. In their shacks they boil it with water over coal stoves and smoke the residue. The truly desperate buy the pulp left over after this process for just three or four copper coins begged on the street. They then boil that residue down further, securing the last and final dregs. People consider these addicts neither dead nor alive, neither real nor illusory. They have ceased to exist except as opium ghosts, with no ambitions, no future cares, no past rememberances. And so they are known, and avoided, cast out to the far reaches of the city, the dope slum villages, to the beggar boats and the bankside bamboo shacks. The undead slaves of opium—ghosts.

  This, people believed …

  * * *

  9

  The money had gone out of booze real quick when Prohibition was repealed in America in 1933. Technically the ban on drinking had applied to Americans in Shanghai too—the downside of extraterritoriality. But nobody, including the U.S. Court for China and the U.S. Marshal’s office in the city, had been dumb enough to try to enforce the Volstead Act in the Settlement, and Americans in Shanghai had just gone right on drinking and whooping it up throughout. With the city’s minuscule import duties, customs officials notoriously susceptible to bribery and looking the other way at the dockside, and no excise or license fees to pay on booze, American rum-runners brought in case after case of whisky from Ireland and Scotland, brandy and cognac from France, and shipped it all straight back out again as contraband to the States—the long but very profitable way round. Carlos Garcia had made a small fortune shipping his own distilled Mexican tequila into Shanghai and back out again to America’s West Coast in crates marked ‘Chinese Pig Bristles’. Higher-end California speaks and blind pigs relied heavily on shipments of decent liquor from Shanghai. Yes, Prohibiton had surely been good to the Settlement while it lasted. Still, everyone knows dope can make liquor look like small beer.

  Dope is the future, but the killjoys in Washington, D.C., are intent on cracking down on heroin, cocaine, and morphine. Stealth and multiple trafficking routes are urgently required. New York mob boss Little Louis ‘Lepke’ Buchalter dispatches his top procurement mensch, Jacob ‘Yasha’ Katzenberg, east. Yasha hits the ’Hai in time for Chinese New Year 1935—the year of the pig—looking to buy opium and Cadillac pills for shipment to Lepke’s processing plant up on Brooklyn’s Seymour Avenue. Big-Eared Du and his Green Gang have a monopoly on the dope. To facilitate an introduction to him, Yasha needs a Shanghai connection.

  So Yasha looks for his own kind, people he can trust. You can’t just stroll up to Du’s Frenchtown mansion-cum-fortress and get a meeting; you need local go-betweens. Yasha finds what he is looking for
in Albert Rosenbaum, sipping schnapps at the Red Rose Cabaret. Rosenbaum had known Yasha somehow or other, some connection back in the old country, Romania, though people said Rosenbaum was Bulgarian—nobody was sure either what he was or what the difference was. Rosenbaum is tight with Sammy and Al Wiengarten, old-time Shanghai bad hats and owners of the Red Rose.

  Like the Venus close by, the Red Rose is where the city’s Jewish demimonde and underworld gather, kvetching about business, tightwad punters, meshuggeneh showgirls and schlemiel associates. Joe Farren still hangs out at the Red Rose after hours occasionally, even though he’s now the ‘dapper Ziegfeld’ of the North-China Daily News society column, slurping goulash at the end of the bar with nightclub legends Sol Greenberg of the Casanova and Monte Berg, who runs the longtime popular Little Club. Joe likes Sammy Wiengarten; he’s an old-timer, a mensch, an all-round nice guy if you don’t cross him. Sammy should have retired long ago, but he’d just shrug, look up at the ceiling, and ask where he was supposed to retire to: fucking Jew-hating Romania? Sammy and Joe introduce Yasha to Rosenbaum, who’s a moneyman and dealmaker with a finger in plenty of pies across town. All business, all deals; Jews without any romanticism or nostalgia for any old country, any shithole shtetl or slum tenement. They’re all looking to make money, get rich, move up.

  When the Paramount and the Canidrome close for the night, the Red Rose carries on till dawn with the late, late crowd, cars lined up all down the street, local Chinese kids paid to guard each one from car thieves. The Red Rose is nothing special; it’s drafty and threadbare, with a White Russian manageress always dressed in black, still in mourning for her long-dead husband killed fighting the Bolsheviks. Close-to-past-it hookers grift the crowd while slumming swells jig to gypsy jazz from a White Russian balalaika band plinking away, done up like Kalderash clan gitanes. No Joe Farren–choreographed hoofers here; instead it’s all Russians singing late-night torch songs mourning lost homelands over lukewarm borscht. Stateless Russians cry into their vodka alongside second-rate Ukranian gypsy boulevardiers, Shanghailanders swilling Japanese rotgut whisky. But it paid—vunbottlvine two dollars Mex to a known face, five dollars to a drunk sailor, ten bucks to a sojourning tourist, and never more than a buck twenty to a down-at-heel fellow Russian. Sammy is cheap with the acts—the night’s big joke comes when a particularly croak-throated crooner starts their favourite Russian dirge, ‘Dark Eyes’. The patrons empty their pockets of change, and the clatter of coppers generally drowns out the rotten sound, while the singer scoops up the coins and disappears offstage.

  Early morning it’s Farren, Rosenbaum, and the Wiengarten brothers backstage, all Yiddish bonhomie, old-time Shanghai stories from the twenties, checking out the new Russian and Jewish girls down from Harbin. The old gag: those girls dressed on credit and disrobed for cash. Joe checks several of his Follies and Peaches doing a little off-the-books business. They smile back; they know Joe’s got the roving eye and the keys to half a dozen apartments he can take them to. Sammy Wiengarten and Al Rosenbaum lay it out: Du can supply the dope, but Yasha wants contacts to run his routes, and he only trusts his own. There’s no crossing Yasha: his backers are Lepke Buchalter and Meyer Lansky of New York’s Lower East Side mob, and both have reputations that cross the Pacific.

  Buying off the Shanghai ports is no problem—Chinese customs officers are soon queuing up at the Buick showrooms with hundred-dollar bills shipped straight from Brooklyn. But Yasha drops major coin buying up U.S. customs to establish a direct route, and he urgently needs plenty of mules. Then Yasha and Lepke hear the U.S. Treasury is pushing the SMP to watch sailings from Shanghai to the States. Sammy thinks back to his pimping days and remembers how ladies travelled hassle-free. Go counterintuitive: zig when the Treasury boys expect you to zag. Girls board at Shanghai and go to Marseilles, then either go straight to New York or overland to somewhere like La Rochelle or Hamburg, and then on to the East Coast. No American citizens, foreign passports only. Send some alone and some with ‘husbands’ as cover. A few could go west via Manila or Yokohama and cross to mob-friendly L.A., maybe sail up to British Columbia and Vancouver, to be met dockside by someone with a train ticket to the East Coast. All it needs is girls, girls, girls. And all the boys know a mensch who can be trusted, a guy who knows girls, plenty of foreign girls—ones who could be encouraged to move on and have a stake waiting for them in America.

  Nobody ever talks about who brokered the deal, but Joe Farren, choreographer, exhibition dancer, hirer of more young women for the purposes of dance-hall entertainment in Shanghai than anyone else, puts out feelers to take out a lease on a big nightclub somewhere on the western edge of the Settlement and Frenchtown, out where Al Israel’s got the Del Monte coining it, out where the law gets a little sketchier. He’s planning to staff it up, put a floor show together, poach the best chefs in town and let it be known there might a casino on the top floors. He says he can do it with no debt. Albert Rosenbaum sets him up with a front company to secure the licences and keep the Municipal Council happy. Serious gelt is spent; good luck to you if you want to see the accounts. Guess where the money came from? You’ll never prove it; nobody will ever talk. But Joe Farren worked at the Canidrome: Carlos Garcia–owned, fronted by the smooth French banker Bouvier with Big-Eared Du as a silent partner; connect Du to the girls on the boats via Yasha, with the Red Rose as the meeting place for New York–trusted Albert Rosenbaum handling the money, and Sammy Wiengarten serving the drinks.

  Joe Farren puts out casting calls all over town for any girl with a slim ankle and a wide smile who ever wanted to dance in a revue. A few get hired; plenty of others get offered other options that involve a boat ticket and a new opportunity. Albert Rosenbaum hands them passports, letters of transit, some cash for a new start, a package of dope for their false-bottomed suitcase, and the name of a man who’ll meet them at the Chelsea Piers in New York.

  The shipments start in December 1935. All is copacetic; everyone who is anyone is involved. The only catch is there’s so much dope there just aren’t enough girls willing to ship out. New York is exerting pressure, demanding more shipments. Rosenbaum is stumped, but Joe tells him he’s got an idea. Remember Jack Riley and those slot machines? The Navy transports? Rosenbaum gets it: rotating marines and nurses head back stateside constantly with packs that’ll hold a stash and no serious customs checks on the military. But Rosenbaum’s no dummy, and he’s not so keen on Riley; he tells Joe to make sure the independently minded Slots King knows exactly whom he’s working for in New York, and understands their reputation.

  Joe fixes it with Jack, who assures him there are any number of leathernecks, sailor boys, and army nurses more than happy to make a little extra on the trip back. He’ll work his Fourth Marines contacts. Jack whistles when he hears who he’s working for and shows respect, but thinks, fucking New Yorkers; Tulsa’s tougher. It’s on, but Joe reminds him that there are no side deals; you cannot fuck with these mensches. Joe finds the showgirls who want passage home; Jack works the Fourth Marines Club for rotating leathernecks. Yasha’s men wait dockside in Manhattan and along the West Coast, from Seattle to L.A.

  10

  Nobody in Washington or the SMP thinks to look beyond the passenger liners departing Stateside. Long-established protocol means nobody interferes with the U.S. Navy transports heading to Manila and back home. Nobody checks as the heroes march down the gangplanks in California and Seattle, a sweet stash in their backpacks, straight to a back-alley bar where a man in a large suit with a bulge under his arm relieves them of their packages in return for some cash. Joe and Jack are in on the dope business.

  The dope runs start up, and it’s all running smooth as Shantung silk. By Chinese New Year 1936 Jack’s got Nazedha in his bed and keeping things straight, ensuring DD’s business is a decent-sized mint, despite losing some business to the Canidrome, and the slots all over town are still paying well. But he knows a roulette wheel could make in twenty minutes what a craps game takes ten hours to make and
a line of slots a whole evening to earn. Tables are the ultimate—high stakes, appealing to the swells who can’t throw a die more than they can do a day’s hard work. Rig the wheels to high heaven, courtesy of wannabe gigolo Manilamen croupiers who learnt their trade back in the twenties from operators like Garcia, and reap the rewards. He’s heard the late-night rumours up at the Venus, the Red Rose; the scuttlebutt that Joe intends to use his dope money to front a major joint out to the west of town and wants roulette wheels and a full casino. That could be Jack’s chance too; he can run the casino and leave Joe to set up the floor show and get the whole shebang right to bring in the high spending crowd. Joe might just be his ticket to ringside. The Manhattan, the Hut, DD’s, the slots, delivering willing leathernecks and nurses to the Red Rose dope ring—it’s all paying, but fronting a casino for Joe’s joint, cash cow as he’s sure it will eventually be, will initially cost still more than all these ventures earn, much more, and he doesn’t want to miss this shot.

  Temptation. So many empty knapsacks heading Stateside; so many more leathernecks, nurses, and assorted military personnel who could be carrying dope. And it’s dope that only he would profit from. He promised Joe no side deals. But if Joe doesn’t know, then he won’t care.