This Is How It Really Sounds Read online

  “There,” she said at last. “Now you know a little about me. I’m from Suzhou. I teach Chinese. I live in this garden. I play the pipa.”

  She had changed utterly during the course of the evening. He had a thousand questions, but on one side were the questions, and on the other was this simple, unspoiled moment, full of everything still unknown and unnamed. He allowed the quiet to flow around him, looking at her, at the shadowy room and its scattering of simple furnishings. He could ask those questions anytime.

  At last she rustled her heavy silk robe. “Do you know that it is two in the morning?”

  He gave an amused grunt. “That would never have occurred to me.”

  She turned on the lantern and hung the robe up again in the wardrobe, then found a lightweight black cardigan to button over the top of her dress. In half a minute she was leading him through the interlocking passageways of the garden to the gate that they had originally come through, with its single lantern. The lantern at the center of the universe.

  “How do I get home?”

  “Look.” She opened the door and the same taxi was waiting for him. “I told you: my car, my driver. He knows where to go, but you’ll need to pay him three hundred renminbi. No more than that. I will say good-bye now.”

  “Camille. Thank you.” He put his arms on her shoulders. The top of her head came to his nose and he could smell the breadlike odor of her hair along with a lingering trace of jasmine.

  “Camille?”

  She looked up at him. Her face was inches from his. He could feel her breath, then the touch of her nose on his eye, and on his cheek, then her lips against his own, neutral-tasting and alive, and he thought of sea cucumbers, alive. She pulled away from him and stepped back. She seemed completely self-contained again, as if they’d just concluded a lesson about Chinese grammar. “Good night, Peter. I will see you Tuesday.”

  He couldn’t bring himself to get in the car. “This was an amazing night.”

  “I enjoyed it also.”

  He stood there for a few seconds, desperate for a way to narrow the distance he felt swelling between them. His own words surprised him. “I don’t understand any of this.”

  She laughed at him, then touched his shoulder. “Peter. You are so silly. Why do you think you are supposed to understand it?”

  She gave a few last instructions to the cabdriver, and as the car pulled away he watched the door to the garden swing closed behind her.

  2

  The Afterlives

  The next day Peter Harrington looked at the exquisite little machine that he wore on his wrist and calculated that he’d arrived fifteen minutes early. His brain wasn’t hazy, the way it would be after a big drunk, it just felt slightly tired, like an athlete who had run a marathon the day before. He’d had only a few hours of sleep, and the events of the previous night had left him confused and excited. It felt like the offer to take Ernie to lunch had been made by a different Peter Harrington.

  The hotel was a decent one, Chinese-owned: you could tell by the marble in three different colors, arranged in that glossy, grandiose style the government seemed to favor for its lobbies. The old man was sitting in the reception area looking hapless and tentative, as if he’d been left there by a caretaker. He smiled when he saw Harrington and carefully rose to his feet. Once standing, he loomed over his host.

  Harrington had searched his name an hour ago and had been pleased to get a couple of hits on World War II and veteran sites. He’d found him on the Merrill’s Marauders page; he even thought he saw a face that resembled him among the hundreds in the company picture, but it was hard to tell with such an old man, so long ago.

  They shook hands and Harrington guided him to the car, listening to the details of the hotel’s breakfast buffet and Ernie’s difficulties communicating with the front desk. He had arthritis in his ankle, he said, and it was bothering him this morning. The middle-American patter made Peter wish he’d never made the lunch appointment. The old man had seemed so interesting when they’d met at the Bar Rouge. Now, he looked antique and outdated, like an old watch he’d found in his father’s drawer. Mr. Ma opened the door and Ernie fitted himself carefully into the backseat. The business-like traffic noise of downtown Shanghai spattered their windows as they pulled into traffic.

  “You know, your name seems familiar,” the old man said. “Isn’t there a ball player or something named Peter Harrington?”

  Harrington hesitated. People Ernie’s age didn’t run Web searches on acquaintances. “There’s a musician. Pete Harrington. He had a band called the DreamKrushers.”

  The old man slapped his forehead. “That must be it. Gee whiz, I thought I’d heard it somewhere before. People make that mistake often?”

  “Once in a while. If the restaurant host looks disappointed when I show up, I know they were expecting the other Pete Harrington. So—” Little pieces of the garden kept glinting in his mind: that moment in the cave, the party reflected across the black water, the sense of one space being replicated a thousand different ways. He searched for a question to ask Ernie about Old Shanghai, since that was their reason for getting together. “How many years were you here after the war?”

  “Off and on, the four years after the war. I left just after the Nationalists abandoned Nanjing.”

  They chatted about conditions at the time: Ernie got stuck trying to dredge up the different varieties of currencies issued by the teetering Nationalist government. “Let’s see: there were still some Japanese dollars floating around, then the gold yuan, and after that the silver yuan, then Communist paper money from the Liberated areas. Wait a second”—he grimaced—“I might be wrong there. Maybe the silver yuan came first, then the gold yuan.”

  They turned the corner onto the Bund and Ernie took out a bulky, outdated camera and pointed it through the glass at the line of buildings. He made an exasperated sound as he lowered it. “I hate these digital cameras,” he said. “I’ve got a perfectly good camera at home, but you can’t get the film developed anymore. Who’d have imagined that?”

  Harrington felt a little sorry that a man who’d once been so formidable was so completely adrift with his digital camera. “Just tell me when you want a picture and I can take it for you. Is this a good place to start walking?”

  They were in front of the building that held the Bar Rouge. Ernie lifted his camera again, sweeping it far down the street. “Yeah. This place brings back a lot of memories.”

  A few seconds later, Mr. Ma opened Emie’s door for him to get out. He was still fussing with his camera as Mr. Ma drove off to find a parking space.

  They began walking and Ernie named the buildings, reeling off the forgotten purposes of the 1930s streetscape. The Customs House, the Russo-Chinese Bank building. He stopped in front of the Waldorf Astoria Hotel. “This was the Shanghai Club, where they had the Long Bar. They claimed it was the longest bar in the world. I had a friend I used to meet there that ended up getting killed by headhunters in New Guinea in 1947.”

  Ernie’s memory wasn’t perfect. He mistook some of the most famous buildings, even though they had plaques right on them. And most of his information wasn’t particularly interesting. Every tourist already knew that the Shanghai Club had the longest bar in the world. He found himself dropping out of Ernie’s discourse to reflect on things Camille had said. It must be sad to be so rich! The affection in that ridicule. What makes you think you are supposed to understand it? He should call her this afternoon. He also had to read that material about the Akron sewer system. They were planning to take it over and they had an important meeting with Shenzhen Red Dragon in two days to talk about it. There was a lot at stake. With Red Dragon’s infusion of capital and credibility, the whole project would quickly reach critical mass. He was supposed to get together with Kell and David Lau later this afternoon to get ready. He never should have made this appointment.

  “Excuse me.” He took out his cell phone as if he’d received a call and stepped off to the side for
a half minute. He mumbled a few phrases then approached the old man again. “Ernie, I’m afraid something unexpected came up and I have to go in a few minutes. I’m so sorry about lunch. I’ll take a cab and Mr. Ma can stay with you and drive you around. And lunch is on me, of course. Mr. Ma will take care of it.”

  The tall man looked at his watch. “Sure! Not a problem. But you know, there’s just one more thing I want to show you—” He looked around the street, squinted, and to Harrington’s frustration, began to walk in the opposite direction of the Peace Hotel. He stopped, seemed about to say something, then started walking again. Harrington trailed beside him helplessly. They continued a few hundred feet to an alley and then Ernie stopped, raised his hand to his forehead, and looked to the side. “It was back here somewhere…” He started walking along the alley, seeming to hunt for something.

  “Ernie!” Harrington called to him, then reluctantly followed.

  He had stopped where a small awning covered the doorway of a restaurant. “This was a shipping office. The owner was a German Jew who’d escaped to Shanghai in 1937.” Ernie went silent, staring at the door, then turned toward the banker with a strange, mild look of remembrance on his face. “Actually, he wanted to hire me to kill someone.”

  Harrington examined the aged features in front of him, which no longer seemed bumbling and uncertain. “He wanted to hire you to kill someone? Why?”

  “There were a lot of scores to be settled after the war,” the old man said slowly. “Scores that can’t be settled.”

  He turned back to the freight office, gazing at it in a way that seemed to bore through the upscale façade into an interior that had been entombed there for more than sixty years. Harrington waited, wondering what was going through Ernie’s mind. Then the old man looked at his watch and started walking back toward the Bund. The financier tagged along, lost in the deepening story. “Who did he want you to kill?”

  Ernie didn’t answer until they had arrived back at the luxurious entryway of the Waldorf Astoria. He stood in front of it.

  “The Shanghai Club was members only. I used to come up here to smoke cigars. I had a South African acquaintance who was a member, by the name of Vorster. The old-timers used to tell me he never would have been allowed through the door before the Japanese Occupation. He was Afrikaaner: those guys never were big supporters of the Allies. This Vorster had finagled permission from the Japs to stay in Shanghai during the war with some sort of bogus Red Cross cover story, and he used that to make a fortune for himself in the black market. He was an operator. Into everything: gambling, currency speculation. One of those types, you know? When he’s buying you drinks he’s the swellest guy in the world, but if you got on the wrong end of one his schemes, by golly you’d want to put a bullet in his head. Of course”—he smiled faintly—“he just might have someone put a bullet in yours first.” Ernie turned to Harrington. “Kind of tricky that way.”

  “Was that the man you were hired to kill?”

  Ernie raised the camera and took a picture of the doors, then turned to the street and pointed it in that direction. At last he lowered the camera from his face. “I said he wanted to hire me. I didn’t say I accepted the job. The war was over, and despite what you see in the movies, Uncle Sam doesn’t take kindly to that kind of moonlighting.”

  By now the financier was beginning to forget all about his other obligations. He’d entered a different Shanghai. An illustrated-novel Shanghai he’d imagined but never gotten this close to. “Why did this refugee want to kill Vorster?”

  Ernie frowned. “Big-time operator. Probably double-crossed a lot of people—nature of the business. I’ll bet he had a dozen people that wanted him dead.” He put the camera back in the pocket of his sport coat, smiled playfully. “But it wasn’t Vorster.”

  At that moment Mr. Ma came up, signaling his presence to his employer then dropping back several yards. The old man eyed him for a few seconds, then looked off down the street toward the old Peace Hotel. It had recently undergone a massive renovation by a global luxury hotel chain, and its gothic darkness had been somewhat alleviated. Now the veteran motioned toward it. “That was the Cathay Hotel, as you know. Sassoon’s place. That’s where the guy was staying. Right under Sassoon’s nose. That’s how I ended up hearing about it.”

  “You knew Victor Sassoon?”

  Ernie shrugged. “Met him a few times. Just like a couple hundred other people who ‘knew’ Sassoon. He was rich, he was famous. Half of Shanghai claimed they ‘knew’ him.”

  “But it sounds like you actually did know him. How did you meet him?”

  Ernie shrugged. “He wanted to buy some scrap metal.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  The older man laughed and looked at his watch again and waved his hand. “It’s a long story, and I don’t want to keep you. I know you’re busy.”

  Harrington began to panic. “No, really, this is fascinating. Let me see if I can rearrange my schedule.” He took out his phone and walked fifteen feet away, then faked another phone call. He returned a half minute later. “Okay,” he said. “I pushed my other meeting back. We’re all clear.”

  As transparent as it was, Ernie accepted the lie with an innocent gratitude. “Gosh, that’s nice of you. I’ll tell you what: it’s just about lunchtime. Why don’t we go over to the Cathay, like you suggested, and I’ll tell you the story over lunch.”

  Not the Peace Hotel, the Cathay. That’s where they were headed, no question about it. This man had known Sassoon! How many people alive could say that? Harrington had thought the city was something fixed in place with names and numbers—this club or that restaurant—but it had suddenly become much more than that. As in the garden the night before, he sensed the afterlives of Shanghai’s denizens in the throng of people who surrounded him on the broad walkway. Taxi dancers and bar girls, bankers and businessmen, traders, veterans, hustlers, police: people who at this moment looked as modern as they had looked in 1946, still unexamined by the curious backward gaze of the future. Ernie was one of them, and he realized that he himself was one of them, coursing along through the black-and-white past, a figment of someone else’s imagination.

  “One second,” Ernie said. He stopped beside the formidable bronze lions of the old Hongkong Bank and fumbled with his camera. He aimed it into the distance, muttering something about the focus, when there, in a sight so strange and wonderful that Peter Harrington thought at first it was a hallucination, there was the unmistakable head of curly blond hair, the famous face, the entourage of Chinese onlookers soaking him into their cell phone cameras. Closer, until there could be no doubt about who it was, nonsensical on the Shanghai sidewalk. He was approaching, his expression intense and focused solely on Peter, as if he somehow remembered him from that bar in New York all those years ago and realized that they were both rock stars after all. Straight toward him, as if his other life had finally arrived: it was Pete Harrington.

  III

  Kickin’ It with The Man

  1

  The House at Wilksbury

  The bus had broken down somewhere outside Wilksbury, Pennsylvania, after a gig in Cleveland. Pete Harrington remembered that because, when he was a teenager, his grandfather had told him that as a young man drifting through Wilksbury he’d met the most beautiful girl he’d ever seen, and that if he’d had half a chance to win her, he would have stayed on there the rest of his life. That was 1932, and a pretty girl didn’t have much interest in a twenty-year-old hobo offering to do chores for food. Pete never understood why the old man was still telling the story fifty years later: he thought maybe Gramps had run out of things to talk about. Then, between a gig in Cleveland and another in Philadelphia, he’d been drifting off to sleep when he saw a green highway sign for Wilksbury, and he remembered his grandfather and the girl. The next thing he knew he woke up and the bus was silent and stationary. Everyone else in the band was sleeping.

  The gas station sat far from the highway. An old one, with white c
lapboard sheathing and a solid wooden garage door that swung up on springs. Christmas-tree air fresheners in little packets. A glass-doored vending machine with pale white-bread sandwiches in it. It had nothing interesting about it, but at the same time its antiquated presence buzzed with mysterious lives whose contours he could almost imagine.

  It was five A.M. They were wrapping up the Wreckage tour, so it must have been autumn. It had been raining around there; it seemed like it would start raining again any minute. Behind them, the highway cars were hissing into the bleached-out dawn sky, and big trucks groaned and gunned their engines to climb the grade, bouncing their machine voices off the rock cuts.

  The owner of the station had just arrived wearing a pair of blue coveralls with a little white oval on the breast that said LES, and he dumped some coffee into a frilly filter and set it gurgling. Les and the driver and Bobby talked over how long it would take to get parts from Pittsburgh, and could he find them transportation to Charleston? Pete wandered away to the edge of the parking lot to take a leak and looked out over the fields that floated through the mist down below him. A red barn sat at the bottom of the slope, and, far off on the other side, he could see a farmhouse with a wide porch and a tree in the front yard. For some reason he thought about Gramps again and his half-century-old story about the house and the girl, and he realized that this must be that house. He scrambled down through the litter and the wet bushes to check it out.

  The barn was open at the sides, and there were big yellow leaves hanging all around from the rafters, which he realized, to his amazement, was tobacco. Bales of hay formed a little fortress in one corner; some had been broken down into a big soft pile that smelled so sweet and grassy that it went to his head, the best thing he’d ever smelled. He saw a pitchfork, a tractor attachment of some sort. There was a faint odor of diesel and lubricants. He was startled when something moved. Then he heard the snuffling and dense breathing of a horse. He felt uneasy all of a sudden, and he stepped out again, into the field.