4. The Interest of Blood

Ah-Fu had never been inside a police station before, and the experience was not one he wished to repeat. They had released him after thirty-six hours of questioning, having extracted nothing useful because there was nothing useful to extract. He had been standing at the Paramount's service entrance when the lights went out, and he had seen nothing, heard nothing, and known nothing. The constables had eventually accepted this, though not without making it clear that his continued freedom depended on his continued ignorance. He had nodded, signed a statement written in English that he could not read, and walked out into the grey morning light with the taste of police tea still coating his tongue.

The message from the lawyer, Pembleton, reached him that afternoon. A clerk delivered it to the rooming house in Hongkou where Ah-Fu rented a cot by the week—a folded square of paper containing an address, two names, and a single line of instruction: Find them. Bring them to the house on Avenue Joffre. The Third Young Master requires their services.

Ah-Fu had served the Tian family for seven years, first as a kitchen boy in the old house, then as a driver when the patriarch decided his son needed a chauffeur who could be trusted with secrets. He had learned that the Tian family's instructions were not to be questioned, only executed. And he had learned that the Third Young Master, for all his foreign education and modern manners, was still his father's son when circumstances demanded it. So he put on his coat, checked the address again, and began his search.

The teahouse was called the Pavilion of Ten Thousand Sounds, and it occupied the ground floor of a narrow building wedged between a coffin-maker's workshop and a shop that sold paper offerings for the dead. Its clientele was a mixture of elderly men who came for the jasmine tea and stayed for the gossip, and younger men who came for the entertainment and stayed because they had nowhere else to go. The entertainment in question stood on a small raised platform at the rear of the room, a man in his late thirties whose face was unremarkable but whose voice was a phenomenon.

A-Ji was performing when Ah-Fu entered. He was doing the sound of a summer night in a Suzhou garden—crickets, a distant flute, the splash of a fish breaking the surface of a pond, the murmur of lovers behind a moon gate. The sounds layered over each other with such precision that the teahouse seemed to dissolve, replaced by a garden that existed only in the minds of the listeners. When he finished, the old men at the front table applauded by tapping their teacups with their fingernails, a sound like rain on a tin roof.

Ah-Fu waited until the performance ended and the audience began to disperse. Then he approached the platform, where A-Ji was packing a small collection of props into a cloth bag—a reed whistle, a bamboo flute, a pair of wooden clappers, a bowl of water whose surface he had used to create the sound of the fish.

"The Third Young Master of the Tian family requires your services," Ah-Fu said, without preamble.

A-Ji's hands paused on the cloth bag. His face, which had been animated during the performance, settled into an expression of careful neutrality. "The Tian family. I have not heard that name in many years. The old master is dead, I understand."

"Three days ago. His son is now the head of the family. He is in police custody, accused of murder. He needs men with unusual skills."

"What skills could a tea-house performer possibly offer the heir to the Qi Society?"

Ah-Fu glanced around the room. The last patrons were shuffling toward the door. The proprietor was counting coins behind the counter. "The skill of imitation. The skill of misdirection. The Third Young Master specifically mentioned that you were expelled from a Peking opera troupe. He did not say why. I suspect you know why, and I suspect the reason is relevant."

A-Ji was silent for a long moment. Then he resumed packing his props, his movements slower now, more deliberate. "I was expelled because I could imitate the troupe master's voice. I used that skill to sign contracts in his name, diverting funds to performers he had cheated. When he discovered the deception, he had me beaten and thrown into the street. I have been performing in teahouses ever since." He tied the cloth bag closed. "What the Third Young Master is asking me to do, I can probably do. But I will not do it for free. The Qi Society has money. I want enough to leave Shanghai and start a new life in Canton, where no one knows my face or my voice."

"The Third Young Master will pay whatever is required. But first, I need to find another man. A man called A-Gou."

A-Ji's expression shifted, something flickering behind his eyes. "The burglar. I know where he is. He lives in a cellar beneath a soy-sauce factory on the Suzhou Creek. He drinks most of what he earns, which is not much, because he has not worked since the warehouse incident. The foreman's men broke three of his fingers. They healed crooked. He can no longer pick locks the way he used to."

"Can he still climb?"

"He can climb. And he can still see in the dark, which is a skill that has nothing to do with fingers." A-Ji slung his bag over his shoulder. "I will take you to him. But I warn you—he does not trust anyone associated with the Qi Society. The old master saved his life, yes, but the old master also made it clear that the debt was eternal. A-Gou has been running from that debt for years. If you remind him of it, he may run again."

The soy-sauce factory was a cavernous brick building that exhaled the fermented breath of a million soybeans. In the cellar beneath its fermentation vats, accessible only through a trapdoor hidden behind stacks of empty barrels, A-Gou had constructed a small empire of shadows. The walls were lined with newspaper clippings about burglaries he admired, their yellowed surfaces annotated with a calligraphy brush in a hand so small it required a magnifying glass to read. A single light bulb hung from the ceiling, its cord patched with black electrical tape. In the corner, a cot was piled with blankets that had not been washed since the Qing dynasty.

A-Gou himself was a man of indeterminate age, somewhere between forty and sixty, his body wiry and compact, his hands wrapped in strips of cloth that had once been white. His face was dominated by eyes that seemed too large for their sockets, giving him the perpetually startled expression of a nocturnal animal caught in daylight. When Ah-Fu and A-Ji descended into his cellar, he was sitting cross-legged on the cot, eating cold rice from a cracked bowl, and he did not look surprised to see them.

"The rooster leads the dog to the fox," he said, his voice rasping like a file on iron. "I have been expecting this. Not you specifically, but someone. The old master told me, before he died, that his son would need my skills one day. He said the debt would come due when the cock crowed at midnight. I did not understand what he meant, but I understand now. The Third Young Master is in prison, and someone needs to steal something."

"How do you know this?" Ah-Fu asked.

"I read the newspapers. I listen to the gossip in the wine shops. I watch the patterns of the police patrols and the movements of the Qi Society's enforcers. The entire city knows that Tian Wenqing has been arrested. The entire city knows that Uncle Wei has seized control of the society. The only question is whether the Third Young Master will hang for a murder he did not commit, or whether something else will happen first."

"Something else," Ah-Fu said. "The Third Young Master has a plan. He needs a man who can enter a guarded building and retrieve an object from a locked safe. And he needs a man who can create a sound that will open a gate that can only be opened at dawn."

A-Gou set down his rice bowl and flexed his bandaged hands. "The safe, I can manage. My fingers may be crooked, but my ears are still good. I can hear the tumblers fall. The gate—that is A-Ji's task. A rooster's crow, I assume? That is the classic method. Lord Mengchang at Hangu Pass. I read that story when I was a boy. I never thought I would be called upon to reenact it."

A-Ji, who had been silent since entering the cellar, stepped forward. "The reenactment requires precision. A rooster crows only at certain hours, and the guards at any gate know the difference between a real bird and a human imitation. I can produce the sound—I have practiced the calls of every bird that nests within Shanghai's walls—but I need to know the gate, the guards, the routine. I need to study them."

"You will have that opportunity," Ah-Fu said. "But first, we need to speak with the Third Young Master directly. He is being held at the Central Police Station. Visitation is restricted to his lawyer, but his lawyer is an Englishman who can be persuaded to carry more than legal documents."

"An English lawyer carrying messages between gangsters," A-Gou said, and his thin mouth twisted into something that might have been a smile. "Shanghai has changed since I was young. In my day, the English stayed on their side of the Bund and pretended not to see what happened on ours."

"Everyone sees everything now," A-Ji said quietly. "That is the problem. The law has learned to read Chinese. The foreigners have learned to speak our language. The old shadows are shrinking, and men like us—men who lived in those shadows—are being squeezed into the light. If we do this thing for the Third Young Master, we must demand enough payment to escape before the light finds us."

"We will demand enough payment to escape," Ah-Fu agreed. "But first, we earn it."

The plan took shape over the following three days.

Through Arthur Pembleton, whose scruples had been further eroded by a second envelope of Hong Kong dollars delivered to his office by a man who did not give his name, Wenqing received detailed reports of the preparations. Ah-Fu had secured a floor plan of the Central Police Station, obtained from a clerk in the Municipal Works Department who owed gambling debts to the Qi Society. A-Ji had spent two nights crouched in an alley across from the station, memorizing the rhythm of the patrols, the shift changes, the voices of the constables as they called to each other in the darkness. A-Gou had acquired a set of lock-picking tools from a pawnshop on Foochow Road and had spent hours practicing on the locks of abandoned warehouses along the creek, his crooked fingers relearning the language of metal on metal.

The target was not the cell itself—that would require a level of violence that Wenqing had forbidden. The target was the police evidence room on the station's second floor, where a German safe contained the Browning pistol, the forged registration documents, and a collection of other materials that the prosecution intended to use at trial. If those materials could be removed and replaced with substitutes, the case against Wenqing would collapse. The witnesses—Delacroix and his wife—would remain problematic, but without physical evidence, their testimony would be insufficient for conviction. A competent defense lawyer could dismantle them on cross-examination.

The difficulty was access. The evidence room was guarded at all hours by a constable who sat at a desk in the corridor. The safe was a 1924 Krupp model with a combination lock that required three numbers entered in sequence. The room itself was monitored by a night sergeant who made rounds every forty minutes. And the station's front desk never closed, its entrance illuminated by electric lights that burned through the darkest hours of the night.

"Tell the Third Young Master," A-Ji said, on the third evening of preparation, "that I have a solution for the guard. The constable who watches the evidence room—his name is MacLeish, a Scotsman from Glasgow. He has been in Shanghai for eight years. He is a creature of habit. Every night at half past eleven, he receives a telephone call from his wife, who worries about him. She calls the front desk, and the desk sergeant transfers the call to the extension on the second floor. MacLeish leaves his post and walks to the telephone alcove at the end of the corridor. He is gone for exactly four minutes."

Ah-Fu relayed this information to Pembleton, who relayed it to Wenqing on a morning when the cell's light seemed especially grey. Wenqing listened without expression, then said, "Four minutes is not enough. A-Gou needs time to open the safe, remove the evidence, and replace it with the substitutes. He will need at least ten minutes."

"Tell him," A-Gou said, when this objection reached him, "that four minutes is enough to open the safe if I already know the combination. And I will know the combination, because the desk sergeant knows the combination, and the desk sergeant writes it down in a small notebook that he keeps in the breast pocket of his uniform. He thinks no one knows this. I know this. I watched him for three hours yesterday through the station window, pretending to be a drunk sleeping in the gutter. He touches the pocket every time someone asks him for the key to the holding cells."

"And how will you obtain the notebook?"

"The desk sergeant has a weakness. He visits a bathhouse on Canton Road every Thursday evening. The bathhouse has private rooms. The private rooms have windows. I can climb to the window while he is occupied with his... bathing companions. The notebook will be in his discarded uniform. I will photograph the relevant pages with a miniature camera that I acquired during my previous career. He will never know it was taken."

On Thursday evening, A-Gou accomplished exactly what he had described. The camera, a Leica the size of a cigarette packet, captured three pages of the sergeant's notebook, including a sequence of numbers that were labeled, in the sergeant's careful English handwriting, "Evidence Room Safe - Current." The combination was 23-7-41. By midnight, those numbers were committed to memory by every member of the plan.

The next obstacle was the night sergeant's rounds. Every forty minutes, Sergeant Holloway walked the corridors of the station's upper floors, checking the evidence room, the interrogation rooms, the holding cells. His route was invariant, his timing precise. A-Ji studied him for two nights and reported that Holloway was a man who believed in the sanctity of routine. He had walked the same route for eleven years. He would not deviate.

"Unless something distracts him," A-Ji added. "He responds to sounds. If he hears a disturbance, he investigates. If the disturbance is convincing enough, he will leave his route."

"What kind of disturbance?"

"A fight between constables. An argument that sounds as though it might escalate. Voices he recognizes, speaking words that demand his attention." A-Ji allowed a small smile to cross his face. "I have recorded the voices of six different constables during my observations. I know their accents, their speech patterns, their favorite curses. I can create an argument between two of them that will sound entirely real, coming from the first-floor locker room. Sergeant Holloway will go to investigate. That will give A-Gou an additional five minutes."

The final piece was the exit. Once the evidence was replaced, A-Gou needed to leave the station without being detected. The front entrance was impossible—the desk sergeant would see him. The rear entrance was locked after ten o'clock and could only be opened from the inside by a constable with a key. The windows on the ground floor were barred.

"There is a roof access," Ah-Fu said, consulting the floor plan. "A maintenance hatch in the ceiling of the third-floor storeroom. It leads to the flat roof, which adjoins the roof of the building next door—a textile warehouse. From the warehouse roof, there is a fire escape to the alley. If A-Gou can reach the roof, he can escape without passing any guard post."

"I can reach the roof," A-Gou confirmed. "The third-floor corridor is unguarded after midnight. The storeroom door has a simple lock. The hatch is probably rusted shut, but rust can be persuaded."

Wenqing received these reports in his cell, each new detail a filament of hope in the surrounding darkness. He had been imprisoned for eight days now, and the preliminary hearing was scheduled in four more. If the plan succeeded, there would be no hearing—or rather, there would be a hearing at which the prosecution would discover that its key evidence had been replaced with blank paper and iron weights wrapped in cloth, and the case would dissolve like smoke in a strong wind.

But there was still the matter of the ledger. Inspector Zhang visited again on the ninth day, his face as unreadable as ever, and repeated his offer. The ledger in exchange for a prosecution that would include Uncle Wei and the other elders. Wenqing listened, nodded, and said he was still considering.

"You do not have much time to consider," Zhang said. "The preliminary hearing is in four days. Once it begins, the evidence becomes part of the official court record. My ability to shape the prosecution's case will be significantly reduced."

"I understand. I will give you my answer before the hearing."

After Zhang departed, Wenqing composed another message for Pembleton, this one concerning the ledger's location. It was beneath the floorboards of the ancestral shrine in the old house on Avenue Joffre—the house that Uncle Wei's men now controlled. Retrieving it would require a second operation, one that could not be undertaken until the first had succeeded and Wenqing was free. But the information itself was a bargaining chip, and he needed Zhang to believe that the ledger would eventually be his.

The plan was set to execute on the night of the eleventh day.

The rain returned to Shanghai that evening, a cold December rain that blurred the neon signs and sent pedestrians scurrying for cover. It was ideal weather for a burglary—the constables would be huddled in their guard posts, the street noise would mask any small sounds, and the wet rooftops would be treacherous enough to discourage any pursuit.

At half past eleven, the telephone on the second floor of the Central Police Station rang. Constable MacLeish, a red-haired Scotsman whose uniform was always slightly too tight across the shoulders, rose from his desk and walked to the alcove at the end of the corridor. He picked up the receiver and said, "MacLeish here, love. Yes. Yes, I ate the sandwich you packed. No, nothing interesting. Another quiet night." His voice faded into the murmur of domestic ritual, the small intimacies of a marriage conducted largely by telephone.

A-Gou slipped through the evidence room door.

He had entered the building through the textile warehouse next door, climbing its fire escape in the rain and crossing the narrow gap between the rooftops on a plank that Ah-Fu had positioned earlier that day. The maintenance hatch on the station's roof had yielded to a crowbar wrapped in cloth to muffle the sound. The third-floor corridor had been empty, as promised, and the staircase to the second floor had been dark. Now he stood in the evidence room, his rubber-soled shoes silent on the linoleum, and faced the Krupp safe.

The combination numbers were burned into his memory: 23-7-41. He knelt before the safe, pressed his ear to the cold metal, and began to turn the dial. His crooked fingers moved with surprising delicacy, feeling the vibrations of the tumblers, listening for the subtle clicks that indicated alignment. The first number engaged. The second. The third.

The safe door swung open with a sound no louder than a breath.

Inside, neatly arranged on metal shelves, were the materials of a dozen prosecutions. A-Gou found the Browning pistol wrapped in a cloth marked with evidence tags. He found the registration documents in a sealed envelope. He found a collection of photographs and witness statements. Working with the speed of long practice, he removed each item and replaced it with a substitute from the canvas bag slung across his shoulder. The pistol became a replica carved from wood and painted black—a prop from a theater company that A-Ji had acquired through old connections. The documents became blank sheets of paper of identical weight, folded to the same dimensions. The photographs became prints of empty rooms, developed by Ah-Fu in a makeshift darkroom.

The entire operation took seven minutes.

As A-Gou closed the safe and spun the dial to reset the lock, he heard the sound that A-Ji had promised. From somewhere on the first floor, two constables—or rather, two voices that sounded exactly like constables—were having a heated argument about a missing bottle of whiskey. The voices rose in volume, accusations flying, and then the heavy tread of Sergeant Holloway descended the staircase to investigate. A-Gou counted the footsteps. By the time they reached the first-floor landing, he was already climbing the stairs to the third floor, his canvas bag lighter than it had been, his heart beating at a rate that was not entirely due to exertion.

He crossed the roof in the rain, retrieved the plank, and descended the warehouse fire escape to an alley where Ah-Fu waited with the Packard's engine running. They did not speak. They did not need to. By the time Constable MacLeish returned to his desk, the evidence room was exactly as he had left it, and the safe's contents were already being driven through the empty streets toward a hiding place beneath the floorboards of a warehouse on the Suzhou Creek.

The discovery came the next morning.

A junior prosecutor, preparing for the preliminary hearing, opened the safe to review the evidence and found a wooden pistol, blank paper, and photographs of rooms that had never existed. The alarm spread through the Central Police Station with the speed of an epidemic. Inspector Zhang was summoned from his office. Sergeant Holloway was interrogated. Constable MacLeish was suspended pending an investigation. The desk sergeant's notebook was examined, its contents compared to the safe's current combination, and no discrepancy was found—the sergeant had changed the combination after A-Gou's visit to the bathhouse, as he did every month, and the new numbers had not been recorded anywhere that a thief could reach.

By noon, the Shanghai Municipal Police had concluded that the evidence had been tampered with by an unknown party, that the chain of custody had been broken, and that the case against Tian Wenqing was no longer viable. The preliminary hearing was canceled. Arthur Pembleton filed an emergency petition for his client's release, citing the collapse of the prosecution's evidence and the failure of the police to maintain proper security. A British magistrate, annoyed by the incompetence of his own constabulary, signed the release order at four o'clock in the afternoon.

At five o'clock, Tian Wenqing walked out of the Central Police Station into the grey December light. Ah-Fu was waiting with the Packard. Wenqing climbed into the back seat and allowed himself, for the first time in twelve days, to close his eyes without the bars of a cell imprinting themselves on the inside of his eyelids.

"To the house on Avenue Joffre," he said. "I need to retrieve something from beneath the ancestral shrine before Uncle Wei realizes I am free."

But when they arrived at the house, the gate was already open. The front door was ajar. And in the entrance hall, slumped against the rosewood table where the funeral wreaths had been arranged, Old Shen was waiting.

His face was grey. His spectacles were cracked. And his left hand, which clutched a torn piece of paper, was stained with blood that had dried to the color of old rust.

"Third Young Master," Old Shen whispered, and the sound was like paper tearing. "I tried to stop them. I tried. But Wei's men came this morning, and they knew about the shrine. They knew where to look. The ledger—they have the ledger. And they have taken it to the one person in Shanghai who can use it to destroy us all."

"Who?" Wenqing knelt beside him, pressing his hand against the wound, feeling the faint flutter of a pulse that was fading. "Who did they take it to?"

Old Shen's eyes, behind the cracked lenses, were full of a terror that Wenqing had never seen in all the years of their association. "Not the police. Not Inspector Zhang. They took it to the French Concession. To the consulate. To Delacroix. He has been working with Wei from the beginning. The deputy consul—he is not a diplomat. He is an agent of the Sûreté. French intelligence. And the ledger contains names that the French government would kill to keep secret. Your father—your father knew things about the French concession administration that no one was ever supposed to know. Things about the opium routes from Indochina. Things about payments to officials in Paris. Delacroix came to Shanghai to find that ledger. Wei gave it to him. And now—"

His voice broke. The paper slipped from his hand. Wenqing caught it before it reached the floor and unfolded it. The writing was in French, in a hand he recognized from the invitation to the Paramount Ballroom:

Mon cher Wei—The transaction is complete. The ledger is in our possession. The Tian heir will be released, as arranged, but his freedom will be temporary. The information in this ledger implicates him as his father's successor in crimes against the French Republic. We will issue a warrant for his extradition to Hanoi within the week. He will face a French military tribunal. There is no acquittal from a French military tribunal. Thank you for your cooperation in this matter. The concessions you requested have been granted. — H.D.

Wenqing lowered the paper. Old Shen's eyes had closed. His chest no longer rose and fell. The silence in the entrance hall was absolute, broken only by the ticking of the grandfather clock that Tian Ba had imported from London in 1925, which continued to mark time with the indifference of all machines.

The fox-fur coat had been stolen back from the king's treasury. The false rooster had crowed, and the gates had opened, and the Third Young Master had escaped from the kingdom of Qin. But the king's soldiers were still pursuing. And this time, the gate ahead led not to the safety of Qi, but to a French military prison in the jungles of Indochina, where the law was written in a language Wenqing could speak but could not outrun.

He folded Delacroix's letter and placed it in his inner pocket. Then he stood, looked down at the body of the man who had been his father's accountant and his own most faithful counselor, and made a decision.

"Ah-Fu," he said. "Find A-Ji and A-Gou. Tell them the escape is not over. It has only changed direction. And send a message to Inspector Zhang. Tell him I am ready to discuss the ledger. Tell him I know where it is, and I know who has it, and I am prepared to help him recover it—for a price."

"What price?"

Wenqing turned toward the door, where the December rain was still falling, and the city of Shanghai was lighting its neon signs against the gathering dark.

"The complete destruction of Deputy Consul Henri Delacroix and every man who helped him betray me. Inspector Zhang wants justice for his family. I want something simpler. I want to finish what my father started and what I was too weak to complete. I want to wash the debt clean—not with ink, but with the only currency that men like Delacroix and Wei understand. The question is whether Inspector Zhang is willing to bend the law far enough to achieve the justice he claims to serve."

The grandfather clock struck the hour. Six notes, each one falling into the silence like a stone into deep water. And somewhere outside, in the wet darkness of the Avenue Joffre, a single rooster crowed—premature, confused by the city's eternal false lights, but unmistakable.

A-Ji was already practicing.