Chapter 33 On the Waterfront
After parting from Luk Yee earlier in the evening, Li Chang had slowly
made his way through the downpour toward the harbor and the ship which would
provide him safe passage to Taiwan. It had been a fearful night at first, the
heavens seemingly erupting with a thunderous rage that boiled over into
intermittent flashes of jagged lightning. Shivering in the coldness of the
night air, which grew ever-cooler as he drew nearer and nearer to the wind-swept
harbor, he took a circuitous route, looking over his shoulder from time to time.
The streets of Shanghai were always crowded in weather anything less cataclysmic
than a typhoon; despite his precautions it was impossible to know with any
certainty whether he was being followed.
As Li approached the harbor the tempest seemed to slacken, and the
unseasonal squall gradually dissipated into first a heavy shower and eventually
a light drizzle. As he wiped the raindrops from his brow, Li pondered his
predicament. How had Richard Chan come to suspect him, to set the trap into
which he had fallen so ignominiously? He had had no idea that the Lord of the
Scorpions had doubted his fidelity.
Had there been a spy planted among the various cells of his followers?
He had misjudged the cleverness of the Chans, probably because of his experience
with the ignorance and baseness of their lackeys. He resolved never to
underestimate the subtlety and thoroughness of the sinister brothers again.
As he made his way through the dark wet streets of the great metropolis,
his environs set Li to thinking, as he often did, about the unlimited potential
of his countrymen. The Chinese were, he was confident, as intelligent and
industrious a people as any on earth -- and far more numerous. More than two
thousand years ago, at the time of Confucius, China had been the most advanced
nation in the world . And it had been again as recently as the latter end of
the period the Europeans called the Dark Ages, when Kublai Khan had entertained
the Polos with art and science and technology that had amazed the Venetians.
But generations, no, make that centuries of internecine infighting,
coupled with some dynastic inbreeding, had reduced his once mighty land to a
pale shadow of its former eminence. A huge, sprawling almost defenseless
weakling of a nation upon which small enclaves of Europeans, emboldened by
powerful fleets, could assert altogether too much influence. While an effete
emperor, a domineering dowager empress, and a corrupt court reigned but did not
truly rule from their self-imposed isolation in the citadel of the Forbidden
City.
Preoccupied with his thoughts Li stepped into a deep puddle, wetting his
feet up to the ankles. Cursing to himself he lurched awkwardly out of the
puddle, his shoes soaked. Hearing the rhythmic roll of the ocean crashing
against the timbers of an ancient wharf, he realized that he was in the harbor
area proper now. He espied a bench on a nearby quay not far from the water's
edge and made his way toward it, anxious to empty the water from his shoes.
As Li slid onto the bench and eased one shoe off, he watched as two
figures, illumined by the light of a full moon, cast off from the wharf in a
small fishing boat which bobbed back and forth in the receding swells of the
harbor. The boat's stern was emblazoned with Chinese characters proclaiming it,
rather optimistically, the "Gem of the China Sea". The larger of the two
figures in the boat seemed to be giving directions to the smaller. Just then
the smaller figure turned and faced the moonlight and Li noticed that it was the
face of a striking young woman. She seemed to listen respectfully to the other
person, as though she were a maritime apprentice absorbing the experience of a
grizzled veteran of a thousand voyages.
Li Chang watched the small craft drift out into the endless darkness of
the bay as he emptied his other soggy shoe. The great harbor of Shanghai was
formed by the confluence of three great bodies of water, the mouth of the
Yangtze-Kiang, the great river of central China, and two great arms of the vast
Pacific ocean, the Yellow and East China seas. Unfortunately for his homeland,
the Europeans had made themselves masters of these seas and the oceans beyond;
China would require a navy worthy of the country's immensity before it could
ever hope to achieve its rightful place as a leader among the great powers of
the world.
His shoes drained of their liquid contents, Li put them back on again
and began walking slowly in the direction of Pier 147, whence his vessel to
Taipei would embark. Despite the unfortunate circumstances, part of him looked
forward to a visit to Taiwan, the "Terraced Bay", as the Chinese called it.
Wen-chi had taken him and Liu there when they were young years ago, and it had
seemed a strange and exotic island then, as most islands do to children. The
Europeans called it "Ilha Formosa" - Beautiful Isle - a name given to it by
Portuguese sailors long ago. And fresh and green in the advent of an April's
spring was how he still remembered it.
As he drew nearer his destination Li came upon fishermen with their
voluminous nets and odoriferous cargos, dockworkers manhandling huge bales of
textiles, sailors, many of them drunkenly laughing and singing in twos and
threes, fresh from their unsavory excursions to the dingy dives which
proliferated in every port. All of these creatures of the waterfront had one
thing in common besides their dependence on the vastness of the sea -- their
foul language. There seemed to Li to be a certain resonance in a sailor's
discourse that revealed his curses to be just that, even if spoken in a language
with which one was utterly unfamiliar. Li had a smattering of Portuguese,
Spanish, German, and French, along with a fair command of English, and he heard
imprecations in each of these tongues and more -- including Malay, Japanese,
Tagalog and Hindi, as he continued toward the east end of the harbor.
It occurred to him as he walked that the Black Pagoda was only a few
minutes inland from the harbor; he cast occasional nervous glances over his
shoulder, half expecting to see the ghostly spectres of black-shirted Scorpions
in his wake. When there were none, he tried to laugh off his apprehensiveness;
there was no particular reason to think that they would be looking for him so
soon, and certainly no reason for the Chans to be searching for him in the
crowded harbor district as midnight approached.
At last Li arrived at Pier 147 and booked his passage from a tiny
bird-faced woman at a humble kiosk not far from the water's edge. The vessel on
which he was bound to Taipei was called "The Firth of Clyde" and flew the blue
and white colors of the cross of St Andrew high in the night sky. Far above him
on the steamer's deck, he noticed a red-bearded man in an officer's jacket
decked with gold braid using an eye-glass to study something across the dark
water. When a thin patch of clouds that had been shielding the moon suddenly
dissipated, Li Chang followed the seafarer's gaze. Curiously the bearded man
seemed to be staring at something or someone on the "Gem of the China Sea"; the
red characters against the white hull of that vessel were visible in the bright
moonlight even at this considerable distance.
Li leaned against a decrepit wooden railing while he pondered that
coincidence for a long moment, lost in thought. Suddenly he sensed a movement
in the shadows to his right. He looked up to see that a skinny pimple-faced
adolescent who looked vaguely familiar had joined him at the railing.
The boy returned his glance and then a glimmer of recognition crossed his
homely face. "It's you!" the boy said. "Do you remember me? From the lake in
the mountains - I am Lin, the son of the innkeeper."
"Ah, of course -- now I remember," Li replied, as his thoughts turned
briefly to the ravishing fair-haired fraulein whose superb body he and Ming-tsu
had taken such delight in subjecting to the torments of burning sun and stinging
switches. What had ever happened to that golden goddess, he wondered to
himself, before continuing. "How is your father -- Hong, wasn't it? What
brings you to Shanghai? Are you planning a voyage?"
Momentarily distracted by the small talk, Li relaxed his guard, only to
hear a gruff voice behind him growl, "The only voyage you'll be taking tonight,
you treacherous bastard, is one straight to hell!"
Li looked over his shoulder just in time to see four more black-clad
figures figures encircling him. He turned to flee in the direction of the
red-faced teenager, but his hopes for escape were dashed by a sudden crushing
pain on the back of his head that caused him to slump slowly to the ground.
"Escaped prisoner," Feng declared to the few onlookers who noticed the
brief struggle, as he slid his 'night-stick' back into his belt. He flashed an
official-looking document, which George Chan had had the prescience to obtain
from General Wang's trusted friend, Hsi Fong, the Minister of Seals. For all
the curious passersby could discern, Feng and his comrades were acting as agents
of the emperor himself.
