The Last Rose of Shanghai(5)
Customers were calling me: “Good evening, Miss Shao.”
“You look lovely, Miss Shao. Where is my favorite whiskey you promised?”
“Have you gotten my brandy yet, Miss Shao?”
I struck a pose, a nice, appealing silhouette that worked well at attracting eyeballs and helping customers spend more money. Being a young female business owner in a man’s world had taught me how to keep a balance between attracting customers’ attention and driving them away. I was good at creating an impression of affability without encouraging their approach. “Don’t you trust me? Of course, I’ll get all the drinks. Soon, very soon.”
Then nodding to a group here and waving to the dancers there, I sat at the bar. By the shimmering lights, I counted the bottles on the shelves. Sixteen. All I had. Including the cheap local rice wine, some soda, and leftover gin. They would last for three days, five at most. Then I would be out of stock, and the market had run out of soda, sorghum wine, beer, gin, and all kinds of whiskey months ago.
My business had started to decline last year, and I had been hoping to sustain it with the sale of alcohol. Now I didn’t know what to do. I had never imagined having to deal with this kind of problem. Three years ago, before the war, I was the wealthiest heiress in Shanghai with the inheritance Mother had left me, and I had never thought to manage a jazz club—working wasn’t meant for someone like me. But the Japanese bombed the city, and the coward Nationalist armies failed to protect us. Victorious, the greedy Japanese took over the city, froze my bank account, and confiscated my family’s fortune. I was poor—I was stunned. I never thought I would need to work, but to survive, I had to learn how to make money.
Desperate, I ended my college plans and asked for help from a cousin, a former shareholder of this jazz club that had gone bankrupt. I sold my jewelry, bought the business at a bargain, and donned a long, fitted dress with a slit near the thigh. I learned to multiply double digits in my head. I carried a peony-hued ledger in my purse to keep track of the daily expenses. When I came across lascivious men and their outstretched claws, I seldom screamed; instead, I trained myself to be an excellent drinker and invented a drinking game to encourage their spending on alcohol. This club, this business, was my life.
The band finished their song, and the crowd swayed off the dance floor, rushing toward the bar, toward me. A wave of groans rose. “What? No brandy? Let’s go to Ciro’s.”
Ciro’s, Sassoon’s nightclub, also catered to the locals. It was one of the many competitors I faced, among them a number of dance clubs in the French Concession that lured customers with exotic Russian dancing girls, and a dozen small local clubs with cheap admission fees.
I took a glass from the counter. “Who wants to play a drinking game?”
“Sorry, Miss Shao. We need good whiskey and brandy,” Mr. Zhang, the gangster knife spinner, said.
“I have brandy.”
“You’ve been out of the good stuff for a month.”
He headed to the entrance with his men. Several customers, shaking their heads, followed. The band looked at me, their violins and trumpets in their laps.
“Let’s hear some Duke Ellington.” I waved, touching my tender forehead. I had two choices left. Either let my business continue to languish or go visit Sassoon again.
5
ERNEST
The lobby in the Embankment Building was dimly lit by a lamp in the corner, the globe of light shedding a sheen of yellow on the steel bunk beds spreading from wall to wall, some plaid cloth hung between them as curtains. The radiator grille buzzed somewhere; the air was rank and humid, but Ernest grew used to it. Quietly, he made his way through the bunk beds, taking care not to step on coats and hats strewn on the floor. In the hallway, people were piled on the stacks of suitcases; it was hard to tell one from the other. Twice he stumbled over an elbow until he finally reached the dim ballroom, where his bunk was.
Miriam was asleep on the top bunk, their suitcase at her feet. He lay down, listening to all sorts of noises: the phlegmy coughs, the stressful sighs, the muffled sobs, and the grumpy voice of a woman speaking German—“How can we survive in this strange city?” He could feel the dreadful weight of stress from all the people around him. At least one thousand Jews, he was told, had crammed into the ground floor of the building. Some of them were German, most Austrian, arriving at Shanghai via ocean liners. Germany had attacked Poland when Ernest left Berlin for Italy to board the ocean liner, which he and Miriam had waited six months for. Now rumor said Germany had conquered Poland, and France and Britain had declared war against Germany. It was devastating, but he couldn’t confirm it without reading a newspaper or hearing the radio.
The voyage from Italy to Shanghai had taken nearly one month, stopping at Port Said, navigating through the Gulf of Suez and the Gulf of Aden, veering eastward, and finally reaching Shanghai. The time on the ocean liner had been a time of luxury and hope. Yes. He could do this; he would start a new life in Shanghai, protect Miriam, and wait for his parents left behind. But when he arrived, he’d had to take a moment. Shanghai was under Japanese occupation, he had learned, but he had not imagined the city in such a sorry state. The Huangpu River, where many banana-shaped ships, skiffs, trawlers, and sailing boats docked, was a turgid yellow sluice filled with glistening oil and lumps of trash. Across the river, behind the high-rises and art deco buildings, were the bomb-gutted houses; dark, burrow-like alleys; and low windowless shanties. The entire city was boiling with an overpowering stench and a cacophony of automobiles’ honks and the sharp squeaks of rickshaws’ wooden wheels; on the street bicycles, wagons, automobiles, and carriages weaved among emaciated rickshaw pullers, amputee beggars, and coughing Chinese refugees with sickly sallow skin and dead eyes.