Even the most cunning man becomes a fool for a beautiful woman. Friends’ warnings fall on deaf ears. Men blind themselves to the schemes behind the pretty face and the poisons in the beloved heart. When clothes come off, thinking stops.
My job was simple in principle, though not in operation. It was to win Lung’s complete love and trust, then lure him to a place where the Red Demons gang could assassinate him. Of course I’d been told to do the murdering myself should the right situation arise. But this was really chiren shuomeng, crazy dreaming – pure wishful thinking on their part.
Because before every time I was allowed inside Lung’s bedroom or hotel room, I’d be stripped naked and searched thoroughly by Gao, his head bodyguard. I was even asked to jump up and down in case a weapon – small knife, razor, poisonous pill – had been hidden inside my vagina. Of course he’d also scrape my mouth for possible pills wedged between my teeth. Was I humiliated? No, because acquiring a thick skin was part of my training. I had learned not to be distracted by pointless feelings such as humiliation or embarrassment. These things were just part of the job, along with the singing and dancing, except that this part was in private, with only one admirer instead of a hall filled with them. But it was boring, not to mention tedious.
Whenever I came out of Lung’s room, Gao would look flushed and embarrassed. His eyes would be filled with bitterness or sadness, depending on what he’d heard – cow-slaughtering cries or puppy-beating whimpers – from my fake orgasm. Like the young master, the head bodyguard seemed to have stepped onto a dangerous path by falling for a woman he’d be better off pretending not to notice.
Anyway, even a beggar on the street in Shanghai would know that to assassinate Lung would be as difficult as to get a virgin pregnant. Lung, Zhu and all the bodyguards were extremely cautious. Gao, though, might be different, because of his crush on me. Sometimes I wondered, if I became his lover, would he kill Lung for me? But to imagine this was pointless; to seduce the bodyguard under Zhu’s sharp eyes was as likely as a baby crawling out from a virgin’s narrow gate.
Warlords, though powerful, were not invulnerable, since many ended up being assassinated. Some, however, managed to live to die in bed. But survival required constant vigilance. It was rumoured that Lung had a double who would travel in his limousine, while the boss himself went by another route. So to eliminate Lung was no simple matter. It was also rumoured that Lung wouldn’t trust any Chinese tailor for fear that he might be an assassin in disguise. Scissors in the back during a fitting were not unknown in Shanghai.
I was Wang’s means to discover his rival’s defense tactics, his daily routine, where he entered and exited, his secret hiding places, who of his guards were the most formidable. And the grand prize: Lung’s bank account.
Most of spying is not exciting but tedious, though still very dangerous. I was supposed to put together a complete list of Lung’s contacts: his close friends, relatives and all who worked for him or did business with him. Not only those in the underworld but those supposedly above it. This also included a list of the spies who worked for Lung and who, ironically, might turn out to be my boss, Big Brother Wang’s, most trusted men!
Like Lung, Wang always had an ominous feeling that he was marked for assassination. Of course the most likely source would be the Flying Dragons. So I was to try to find out who was on up Lung’s assassination list and how high up Wang was. Eliminating Lung had been Wang’s goal from the moment he became a gang head. He just hadn’t yet figured out a good plan – until his underling Mr Ho had discovered me in the orphanage.
After winning the title of Heavenly Songbird last year, I was given a luxury apartment inside the French Concession. This included a maid and a driver, but I knew full well that their real jobs were to keep track of me for Wang. I made good money, but unfortunately Wang took his half and most of the rest for ‘safekeeping.’ He knew that if I had my own money, his hold on me would be weakened. Though I was free to go places within Shanghai, I couldn’t just disappear. Wang repeatedly warned me that his gang men were everywhere, so he would know everywhere I went and everything I did.
Yet life as a nightclub singer was incomparably better than in the orphanage. I now had a comfortable apartment, which was decorated in a mixture of Chinese and Western styles. The Chinese elements – calligraphy, landscape paintings, antique furniture and vases – were there to impress on people, especially the refined ones, that I was not just a singer but one steeped in traditional culture and taste, perhaps from a prominent family. The Western decor – velvet curtains, soft sofas with silky coverings, a gilded and latticework clock and oil paintings showing classical scenes – was to show that I was also cosmopolitan.
To others I was the beautiful, sophisticated woman who had it all. But I was well aware that Big Brother Wang didn’t pay my rent because he liked my singing, but to keep me under his control. My amah and cook, Ah Fong, and driver, Ah Wen, who did almost everything for me, were also his spies. The best I could do about this was, from day one, to tip them generously, hoping they would avert their eyes or keep mum when I needed them to.
Unlike most gangsters, Lung favoured talented women. With me it was singing; before it might have been speaking a foreign language, horseback-riding or even flying a plane. For him, women like us were like a rare Ming vase, while others were but ordinary kitchenware. No doubt this was Lung’s way to compensate for starting out as a shoe-shine boy.
Now that Lung had finally fallen for me, I had to work steadily to complete my mission, because the boss of the Flying Dragons gang would not stay long with any woman. No flower blooms all year long. No matter how enamoured he was with her, Lung believed that any woman who’d warm his bed for too long would bring bad luck, polluting his bedchamber and harming his business. That was why the sudden appearance of Shadow worried me. I did not want him to be thinking of her as my successor.
But with or without Shadow, my situation would likely be lose-lose. Mission successfully completed, I’d have served my purpose. And as in the Chinese saying, ‘After the rabbits are caught, the hounds will be cooked.’
That was the inevitable fate of spies. I had read that, in China’s Harbin province, one time the Japanese sent a prostitute-spy to seduce a Russian general so as to steal his map. On this map were marked the soldiers’ positions, their planned route of attack, and their supply lines. Succeeding in stealing the map, she was able to send it to the Japanese embassy. But the Japanese never sent anyone to rescue her. Instead, they referred to her as ‘the sakura blossom without root’ and abandoned her to die alone in a prison in Siberia.
If I did not begin to plan for my escape, I was sure to end up being another sakura blossom without root, if not in Siberia, then in my own homeland. Not in a prison but sprawled in a back alley, bobbing in the Huangpu River or rotting in a well. Or, as the story was told of one of Lung’s former mistresses, fed to tigers …
Someday, probably soon, I would need to escape. I would need a plan, and I would need money. So I tried my best to save. Although I didn’t get to keep much from the nightclub, I got expensive gifts from admirers, most generously from Master Lung, who had been pampering me with American gold pieces, fur coats and lavish jewellery. Of course my boss, Wang, knew about the gifts, but he could not take away those from Lung, who might notice that they were missing. Meanwhile, I tried to waste as little as possible on frivolities like the theatre, movies, high tea or amusement parks.
However, even if I had the money to escape, where would I go? I had neither relatives nor real friends. I knew great danger was approaching, but all I could do was wait for the right moment to act. As the sages tell us in the three-thousand-year-old Yijing, or Book of Changes, ‘If you step on the tail of a tiger but use extreme caution, you will be fortunate in the end.’
When you first glimpsed him, Lung looked quite ordinary. This was in fact a gift from heaven that enabled him to conceal his astute mind and scheming heart. But, despite his small stature, Lung could inspire fear. His dealings were of extreme complexity, but, unfortunately for me, he seemed