SHANGHAI, AUGUST 1937

In the morning light, Shanghai, modern and bright, a European city, arises on the River Whangpoo, off the South China Sea. On the yellow water, picked clean by scavenger boats, junks, steam ships and yachts drift past, and unload their passengers and wares. Chinese coolies, stripped to the waist, work the docks and haul great loads from daybreak to dusk. 

On the Bund, where the British have built their hotels and their palaces dedicated to business and banking, and in the International Settlement where they live in enormous houses, and in their smoky, whiskey and cigar filled clubs, on their cricket lawns, racecourse and tennis courts, life moves at a slow privileged pace. 

In the French Concession, which is not inhabited by the French but by Russians, stores open, bakeries display their wares, and dance hall girls and musicians crawl into bed in the early morning after long nights playing the clubs. 

And there are things which are unspeakable, animals and people who have died on the streets at night, child prostitutes, boys, girls, and women, Chinese, Korean and white, who cater to any taste, any depravity imagined by the human race.

The gangs run the city and control the drug trade, and people come from all over the world seeking adventure and escape. Everywhere the odor is rank and unmistakable. It is of the unwashed bodies of the poor, the stench of cooking oil that lingers in the air, the pervasive and revolting smell of shit that is inescapable; and always the damp, which crawls into each and every corner. 

The day was promising to be hot and sticky as Tatiana Alexeyevna Zhukova walked down the Bund. She was a slight, dark woman of twenty-five. She had designed her own costume, an asymmetrical bone colored gabardine that recalled the silhouette of the city itself. The skirt was pencil thin, hindering her stride, which was further hobbled by high heels. Her hat, a glazed straw concoction, recalled the hats of coolies who worked in the fields under the blazing sun. She was easily more stylish than any of the white women or the rich Chinese in the city, yet despite her attention to design, she had little sense of herself. She was what she was, no matter how she adorned her treacherous body. Tanya was a mix of bravado, shyness, self-criticism and ambition, yet oblivious to the effect her manner and beauty had on other people since she could not see it in herself. 

She was in a rush that morning after an early office meeting with her employer, the architect, Ladislav Hrbek. She had to get to the villa of their new client, which was also in the International Settlement. The trouble was that Tanya had known him before and recognized the ball of tension welling up inside her, but that was how it had always been with him. Hellyer. George Richard Arthur Hellyer; she repeated his name.

 It was not the first time she would be seeing the villa. Ladislav had taken her to see the site and the building in progress many times, and then unapprised of their past, he had sent her to see Hellyer, who was waiting, seated in a planter’s chair with his legs crossed, a superior smile on his lips, amused at her discomfort, though anyone who did not know her well would not have recognized it. She had fumbled with her portfolio, but then they had sat side by side, and he had grown quiet once he had seen what she intended to do with the interior of his new house. 

Hellyer was decidedly coming up in the world, but she was not sure she liked it. They had been equals in the beginning, she thought. Well, not quite equals, never that, but his status had not been as high then, and he had been somehow more approachable. I work for him now, she reasoned. I am employed by him. It put them on a different footing, and her skin began to prickle at the thought of it.

It’s the heat, she said to herself, but knew it was a sense of anxiety, the same anxiety, which drove her forward; the anxiety that she felt when she thought about herself and her future, and the past. The feeling followed her because she knew she had no real place in Shanghai, that her position was precarious and depended not as much on her talent as her ability to please and get along.

Ladislav had hired her for her looks, though she did not know it and thought it was because she came cheap and was willing to put in endless hours, toiling away on ideas he would throw her way, expecting her to refine and finish them. All the credit went to him, of course. She was considered merely a pretty appendage by male clients, and perhaps they even thought Ladislav brought her along to meetings as an incentive, and that they would be able to prevail upon her after kissing her hand and saying what a charming young lady she was. All the while, she knew what they were thinking. To them, she was another impoverished Russian, not really all that white, not European in any sense, one step up from the Chinese, one step up from being a woman they could hire. 

It had been different when she was young. She still believed something would happen, or someone would come along and restore her to her rightful position, well not that, but a respectable life, a safe life where things that were too frightening wouldn’t touch her. And then she had realized that she had never had a rightful position of any sort, that her father had died soon after she was born, and that her family was ruined even before the revolution – before all their friends were, before she had had chance to taste life. 

Hellyer had never promised her anything, and eventually she had stopped expecting anything from him. He wasn’t like the other Englishmen who had come out to the big trading houses as griffons and aspired to become tai-pans. He had been different. She hadn’t been able to place him at first, and then after she had heard his story, that he had been born in St. Petersburg where his father had been working at the time, and that they had only been back to England for a short time only before his father had gotten ill and had to move ever southward to France and Italy for his health, had she understood that he was as rootless as she was. But they had not been alike. He was wild and where she was afraid of things touching her, he had wanted to experience everything, to see everything in all the raw ugliness that was so terrifying to her, and it was that which stimulated him and made him feel alive. 

It was all those things which had attracted her, which intrigued her, that, and his tales of places she had dreamed of in her imaginings, not just France and Italy, but Oxford where he had been educated, and Greece, and Turkey, and Arabia where he had traveled. He had lived in Africa before he had shipped out to India, before transferring to Shanghai, where there was a place for promising men with his talents and languages. She had loved those stories, and his rooms with all their collections, the African masks and Turkish carpets, the Persian tiles, the carved ivory, and Mogul miniatures. 

‘That kind of man is dangerous,’ her landlady Natalia Ivanovna had said, eyeing him up and down once when he had stopped for a moment to collect her. But later that evening when Tanya had insisted she knew how to take care of herself, Natalia Ivanovna had lit a cigar, and letting her eternally present robe carelessly fall open to expose her soiled slip, replied, ‘I’m speaking of the danger to your heart, my dear.’ And she had replied that she expected nothing, that she had had such a pinched little life, and that she liked his stories, and Natalia had just laughed, opening her mouth to reveal red lipstick smeared over her yellowed teeth. 

Eventually, there had come a time in those rooms when she did come to expect something, not a declaration nor a proposal, but some show of feeling which she suspected he might have for her. When it didn’t come, when he started to change, becoming more serious about his work and how he appeared to others, she had withdrawn from his life. 

Stop thinking about that, Tanya commanded herself, and she did. It’s just business. You will meet him once more and you will be on your way, leaving him to his own fate. She knew it was impossible to make her appointment on time and remain cool and crisp, and so she hailed a cab, which dropped her off in front of the white villa with its curving facade and linear overhangs. 

It was a lovely house, she thought, but she refused to speculate what might have been, though her heart had begun beating in an irregular way. She paid the driver and walked down the drive, up two steps to the front door. She saw the door was ajar, and she opened it and stepped into the house, knowing that she shouldn’t. The new furniture hadn’t yet arrived, his rugs were still rolled up, his collections were in crates, half unpacked, not yet displayed, and everything was eerie and still. 

She called for the servants and when no one came, she called for him by name. She went to the back of the house, stepping down into the kitchen and saw a pot of water on the stove, and fresh vegetables, and a whole fish on the chopping block. The work had been interrupted, though the stove was cold and the rear entrance closed. For a moment, she thought to run out of the house and call for help, but something propelled her up the stairs to the second floor bedrooms. 

Now, the only thing she heard in the stillness of the afternoon was the sound of her own blood coursing through her veins. The street was silent despite the open windows where the curtains had been pushed aside. No breeze came through, just the oppressive afternoon heat, though the fan swirling overhead made a soft whirring sound. 

The unmade bed was rumpled and reminded her of a long afternoon of love making, though she couldn’t be sure why she would have that impression. Perhaps it was envy, she thought. She walked through the entire second floor, but there was nothing and no one to be seen. The open door was reason enough to be suspicious but what could it possibly mean? A crime, a robbery? She wouldn’t have known if anything was missing, in any case. 

She thought about calling the police but then reconsidered. Corruption was rife among the department, and who knew how they would deal with her. No, she would telephone Ladislav and ask for his advice. It would be better to let him handle it the way he saw fit. He was a rational man, and she was certain he would have a reasonable explanation. But the whole time, she knew something was terribly amiss and she was doing the wrong thing. She tried the telephone but the line was dead. It was only then that she heard the explosions. It could only mean one thing. The Japanese had arrived in Shanghai.

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