Free French Concession by Xiao Bai Page B

tattered trunks, but that wasn’t true. Romantz had been pacing along the Whampoa, close to despair, when Fate thought of him, and a large wallet fell from a rickshaw. A chance like that is what you make of it. If Romantz had kept the wallet, it might have paid for a couple weeks’ worth of beer. Instead he snatched up the wallet and dashed after the rickshaw, and things turned out very differently.
    The owner of the wallet was the old captain who managed Astor House Hotel. He was so impressed by Romantz’s honesty that he offered him a job on the spot. Romantz spent twelve years at the hotel as a steward, in charge of the silver cutlery and French porcelain. After ten years, Fate thought of him again, and this time she sent him a wife. Mrs. Romantz was a Russian Jewish woman who kept rooms in the hotel to entertain single foreign men. Finding that Romantz could be as attentive to her as he was careful with the captain’s French porcelain, she agreed to marry him. They decided to marry in secret, outside the synagogue, because as long as they did not declare their marriage before the Lord, Mrs. Romantz could continue pursuing her lucrative profession. They would tell Him when they had scrimped and saved enough money for the restaurant. Sure enough, on the very same day Bendigo opened, they had a proper Jewish wedding at the synagogue.
    Romantz was a legend. Perhaps because the Concession was something of a floating city, rootless, without a past and with no guarantee of a future, it functioned like a huge vat of dye that tinted all its characters with the quality of timelessness, which turned them into legends.
    But Zung had not come to Bendigo to listen to Concession stories. He was neither a journalist nor a tourist, and besides, he had heard them all before. He was meeting someone here. It was Sunday, and the restaurant was almost empty.
    His rooms were in the Oriental Hotel, facing No. 5 Horse Road,opposite the bright lights of Ch’ün-yü Alley. The main door of the hotel opened northwest onto Yuyaching Road, as if its architect had hoped that the wealth of the Race Course would rub off on it. Zung had to sign himself into the hotel guest book using a Chinese name, so he called himself Ch’en Ku-yüeh. Of the fountain pen and calligraphy brush provided, he chose the brush and signed his name in excessively florid cursive, an honest form of dishonesty. He presented neither the proof of residence issued by the colonial Hong Kong government to Ch’en Chi-shih, nor the travel authorization granted by the Hanoi Police to Mr. Paul Ch’en. The Municipal Police required all hotels to record the names of guests, but few hotels did so.
    That afternoon, Ch’ien, the steward from Hopeh, beckoned to him from the hotel counter and told him to leave by the back door instead of by Yuyaching Road, which was jam-packed because the famous storyteller Li Po-k’ang had jumped ship to Eastern Bookstore, and every rickshaw in town seemed to be coming here to hear him perform.
    Zung put his skullcap on the counter. He was wearing a gray jacket that came down to his knees, cinched black trousers, and a length of silk for a belt, the ends of which hung over the back of the chair, as though he had draped a pouch over it. The police were here at noon, Ch’ien said. They inspected the sign-in books and asked questions about a certain Mr. Ch’en.
    â€œYou’re kidding.”
    â€œI swear I’ve never told a lie in my life.”
    Therese was right, he thought. I should be careful. Maybe I should move to another hotel right now. At the YMCA swimming pool, Zung told Therese what he had heard at the hotel. But she did not seem concerned. She did seem tired. On the weekends she disappeared, and Yindee told him that Therese was spending her weekends with that half-breed photographer. To top it all off, it was Maslenitsa that weekend, and Therese always made a point of taking Maslenitsa off.