The Last Rose of Shanghai(25)

I was right all along—Ernest and I made the perfect winning pair; we were meant to be. When he played, I couldn’t take my eyes off him, drinking in his music, his smile, his rapt face.



When I arrived home late one night, my old butler told me Sinmay wanted to see me in his study.

“What do you think you’re doing, Aiyi?” Sinmay said, sitting at a giant redwood desk strewn with scrolls and four of his study treasures: a black ink stone, a brush, sheets of thin calligraphy papers, and his personal seal. “You said you’d let the pianist go, but why did I hear that all of Shanghai is talking about him?”

“You’ve heard of it?” I walked to inspect the bust of Sappho in a glass frame, his most prized possession. He had thrown away fifty thousand silver, a small fortune, for that bust. Calling her a goddess, he had composed three poems lauding her beauty and peerless inspiration. But I thought this was his most laughable folly of all, all that money for a plain Greek poetess with blank eyes.

“I do own a few magazines.”

“I was going to let him go, older brother. But many people come to listen to his stride piano, so it would be foolish to fire him. He’s good for the business—”

“He’s bad for our family’s reputation.”

Sinmay wouldn’t listen to me. I was tempted to lie to get out of this. “Who told you?”

“None of your concern.”

Did Cheng tell him? Or his poet friends? Emily Hahn? Then it occurred to me Emily would have been the last person who would care about my family’s reputation. In fact, Emily could help me. A journalist, she held the great weight of swaying the pendulum of reputation with her words. If she wrote a feature on my club and put out a good word for me, then Sinmay would stop pressuring me. As an additional benefit, her article would help promote Ernest and his status, create buzz, and further increase my club’s value.

There was only one problem: Emily, fifteen years my senior, a well-known reporter, could be quite condescending. And frankly, until now, I had not felt inclined to befriend her, a foreigner, out of my concern for Peiyu’s reaction.

“Is Emily coming here soon?”

“How am I supposed to know?” Sinmay said grumpily, holding a black calligraphy brush made with wolf fur. “She does whatever she wants. I told her to stop drinking with Sassoon, but she drinks anyway, says she loves whiskey. What’s wrong with the sorghum wine? It has more than one thousand years of history!”

He was jealous. Emily had been Sassoon’s lover before she was Sinmay’s.

It seemed I needed to make a trip to meet up with Emily, and I must talk her into helping me.





18


ERNEST


After months of playing the piano, he could no longer ignore the pain in his hand. The wound that had healed was growing tender again; the muscles in his arm contracted, his fingers were stiff, and it was difficult to find the keys. Ernest went to the H?pital Sainte Marie for more morphine and chatted with the elderly Catholic nuns, asking them how to stay in touch with people in Europe since he would like to know when his parents would arrive. There was a German post office in the Settlement, the nun with gray hair said.

He thanked them. He would need to find the post office later.

With morphine, the pain in his arm eased and he was able to play the piano again. Each morning he crashed in his apartment with jazz in his ears, and each afternoon before dusk he returned to play, basking in the smiles of the crowd. People treated him with cigarettes—Garricks, Red Peony, Front Gate, the local brands made of coarse tobacco, often soggy from the incessant summer rain. He was no longer called guizi, the ghost, but laowai, the old foreigner, a friendlier nickname; he loved it.

He was living in a dream where money, adoration, and friends surrounded him, where he was loved, valued, and accepted for being a jazz pianist. Aiyi raised his wage to forty fabi a day, and he was beginning to have savings.

With the money he made, he purchased a pair of shoes for Miriam. She had grown withdrawn and irritable since they’d talked months ago; she even stopped asking to go out, which he thought was a good change.

Then one day in June, when he returned, the room was empty.



“Miriam?” He spun around in their apartment. “Miriam!”

He raked his hands through his hair, feeling sick at heart. He should have understood it was too much to ask a teenager to stay inside an apartment all day. Miriam was lonely and bored, and she had run away. If anything happened to her, he would never forgive himself.

Alley by alley, street by street, he searched, shouting at the top of his lungs, “Miriam!”

It was just after dawn; the streets were empty and shops were not yet open. He asked the coal sellers, the noodle peddlers, the night-bucket collectors, the rickshaw pullers, the shoppers, and even the sanitary truck drivers collecting abandoned bodies. They couldn’t understand him.

No one would help. Chinese police were nonexistent; Japanese soldiers couldn’t care less. He rushed down the streets to the Settlement; near the barbed wire gate, he begged for the help of two enormous Sikh policemen in black turbans. One grabbed him. “I let you go and now you’re back!”

It took Ernest a moment to realize this was the Sikh who’d arrested him at the hotel. “You’re a good policeman,” he said, begging. “Please help me. Please find my sister—a girl with a beige shearling trapper hat.” The Sikh policeman turned his back on him.