3. A Seat of Jade

The office on the third floor of the Public Information Bureau was a closet with a window, but it was Li Jun’s closet, and the window looked out over the rooftops of the International Settlement. If he pressed his cheek to the cold glass, he could see a sliver of the Huangpu River between two granite bank buildings, crowded with freighters and naval vessels. He spent his first week doing nothing—literally nothing. No one gave him work. No one spoke to him beyond the barest pleasantries. He sat at his desk from eight until five, sharpening pencils he never used, reading back issues of Shen Bao that he stole from the lobby. The other clerks ignored him with the practiced indifference of men who understood that some colleagues were not colleagues at all, but ghosts placed among the living for reasons better left unexamined.

The salary arrived on the first of December in a small brown envelope. Thirty silver dollars. Li counted them three times in the privacy of his office, his fingers shaking. Thirty dollars a month was more than his father had earned in a year before the typhoid took him. It was more than the foreman Chen made at Shen Bao. It was respectability, printed on paper and minted in silver, and Li hated it with a ferocity that surprised him. Every coin bore the profile of Sun Yat-sen, the father of the republic, a man who had preached democracy and died watching his revolution devoured by warlords. Li thought of Shi Liangcai, who had believed in those same ideals, and the coins grew cold in his palm.

He spent the money anyway. What else was there to do?

He moved out of the pressroom dormitory and rented a room in a boarding house on Bubbling Well Road, a narrow building wedged between a tailor’s shop and a Russian bakery. The room had a real bed with a horsehair mattress, a washstand with a porcelain basin, and a window that opened onto a courtyard where the landlady kept a coop of listless chickens. It was not the Astor House. It was not the Shi mansion. But it was his, and at night he could lie in the darkness and pretend the sounds of the street were a lullaby.

The wardrobe came next. He visited a tailor on Nanking Road, a bent little man with pins in his mouth and the rapid, assessing eyes of someone who had dressed every class of Shanghai resident from rickshaw coolies to taipans. Li ordered three suits: one in charcoal gray, one in deep navy, one in a brown tweed that the tailor assured him was the latest fashion in London. He bought shirts with detachable collars, silk neckties in muted patterns, a pair of leather oxfords that pinched his toes but gleamed like polished obsidian. When he looked in the tailor’s full-length mirror, he saw a stranger with hollow eyes and a straight spine. The newsboy on the Bund was dead, and this new creature had risen from his corpse.

But the old life clung to him like the smell of ink. It was in the way he flinched at sudden noises, the way he hoarded bread crusts in his desk drawer long after the need for them had passed. It was in the recurring dream that woke him every few nights—the dream where he was back on the highway near Haining, and the black sedan was before him, but this time the door opened and Shi Liangcai stepped out, perfectly alive, and asked in that calm, patient voice why Li had let them kill him. Li never had an answer. He woke with the question ringing in his ears.

The invitations began in the second week of December. A dinner at the French Club, hosted by a Belgian importer who wanted to cultivate government contacts. A cocktail reception at the American consulate, where Li stood in a corner for three hours drinking warm gin and nodding at jokes he did not understand. A private luncheon at the Park Hotel, the newest and tallest building in Shanghai, where the elite gathered to see and be seen. Li attended them all, because Zhao had told him to, and because refusing would have meant admitting that he did not belong.

He did belong. That was the strange, sickening truth. The other guests accepted him without question. They saw the suit, the confident posture, the government position printed on the embossed cards he presented. They did not see the newsboy. They did not see the blood. Shanghai’s high society was a mechanism for laundering reputations, and Li had been washed clean by the simple alchemy of money and access. He spoke little at these gatherings, cultivating an air of quiet mystery that others mistook for sophistication. When asked about his background, he offered a vague story about a merchant family from Suzhou, a father ruined by the Japanese occupation of Manchuria, a self-made rise through the civil service. No one questioned it. No one wanted to.

It was at the Park Hotel luncheon that he first saw Mei-Lin, though he did not learn her name until later. She was seated two tables away, laughing at something a gray-haired Englishman was saying. She had the kind of face that made men forget their wives—high cheekbones, eyes that tilted slightly at the corners, a mouth painted the deep red of crushed mulberries. Her qipao was emerald silk embroidered with silver peonies, and when she moved, the fabric caught the light like a dragonfly’s wing. Li could not stop looking at her, and after a moment, she noticed. Her gaze flickered to his, held for a long, assessing second, and then returned to the Englishman. There was no invitation in that glance, but no dismissal either. It was the look of someone who understood her own value and was accustomed to being appraised.

Li made inquiries, as Zhao had taught him. Her name was Fang Mei-Lin. Her father was Fang Zhenxiu, a comprador for the Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation, one of the wealthiest Chinese businessmen in the International Settlement. The Fangs were old money by Shanghai standards, which meant their fortune was only two generations deep but already encrusted with the necessary trappings: a mansion on Avenue Haig, a summer house in Moganshan, a son at Oxford, a daughter who was considered the finest marriage prize in the concession. She was twenty-one, sophisticated, and entirely out of Li’s reach.

Which was exactly why he wanted her.

It was not love. Li was too hollow for love, and honest enough with himself to recognize the craving for what it was. Mei-Lin was a symbol, a final proof of arrival. To win her would be to erase the last traces of the Bund gutter rat, to plant a flag in the soil of the new world and declare himself its rightful inhabitant. He had climbed out of the mud. Now he wanted a throne.

He engineered their first meeting with the same cold calculation he had once applied to sorting Shi’s correspondence. A mutual acquaintance at the Bureau provided an introduction. A chance encounter at a charity concert at the Lyceum Theatre, where Li had purchased a seat in the row behind the Fangs. A brief conversation during the intermission, carefully rehearsed, in which he complimented not her beauty but her father’s recent remarks on currency reform, which he had memorized from the financial pages. Mei-Lin’s expression flickered with surprise, and then with something that might have been interest.

The courtship that followed was conducted in the public rituals of Shanghai’s elite: afternoon tea at the Palace Hotel, a charity ball at the French Club, a Saturday excursion to the races at the Shanghai Race Club. Li spent money he did not have, buying flowers and boxes of Belgian chocolates and tickets to sold-out performances of Mei Lanfang’s Peking opera. He borrowed from his salary, then from the envelope of blood money, then from a moneylender in Hongkew who charged ten percent weekly and employed large men with broken noses. The debt piled up, but Li barely noticed. He was intoxicated by proximity, by the scent of Mei-Lin’s jasmine perfume, by the way other men’s eyes followed her and then flickered to him with reluctant respect.

Mei-Lin herself was a puzzle he could not quite solve. She accepted his attentions with the practiced grace of someone who had been receiving such attentions since the age of fifteen, but she revealed little of her own feelings. Sometimes, when they walked in the Public Gardens or sat together in the darkness of the cinema, she would grow quiet, her gaze distant, as if she were watching a scene play out on a screen only she could see. At other times, she was sharp and teasing, testing his opinions on politics and art with the merciless precision of a fencer.

“You are not like the others,” she said one afternoon, as they sat in the lounge of the Cathay Hotel, watching rain streak the windows. “The other men who court me. They are all so sure of themselves. They have been rich since birth, and it has made them soft. You are not soft.”

Li felt a chill that had nothing to do with the weather. “Is that a compliment?”

“It is an observation.” She stirred her tea, her bangles chiming. “You are hungry. I can see it in the way you move, the way you speak. You want things. You want them very badly. I find that interesting.”

“Everyone wants things,” Li said carefully.

“Not everyone is willing to bleed for them.” She looked at him over the rim of her cup, and her eyes were older than her years. “I wonder what you have bled for, Li Jun. I wonder what you have given up.”

He changed the subject. He always did, when the conversation veered too close to the truth. But her words stayed with him, a splinter beneath the skin that he could not extract.

While Li pursued his gilded future, the past did not lie quiet. Shi Liangcai’s murder had convulsed Shanghai, and the aftershocks continued to ripple through the city. The newspapers—what remained of them after the crackdown—reported the official story: a robbery gone wrong, bandits on the highway, a tragic loss for Chinese journalism. No one believed it. The rumors were louder than the headlines. Everyone knew the Nationalists had ordered the hit, that Chiang Kai-shek had tired of Shi’s editorials demanding resistance against Japan, that Dai Li’s secret police had done the deed. But knowing and saying were different things, and most people knew enough to keep their mouths shut.

A few did not. A handful of journalists tried to investigate. Two of them were arrested within the week, charged with “spreading false rumors” and transferred to the Ward Road Gaol. A third, an American stringer for the New York Times, was beaten in an alley and put on the next steamer out of Shanghai. The message was clear: Shi Liangcai was dead, and anyone who asked too many questions about his death would join him.

Li followed these developments with an almost clinical detachment. He had learned to compartmentalize his mind, to wall off the memories of November thirteenth in a corner he did not visit. The strategy worked during the daylight hours, when he was occupied with the theater of his new life. It failed at night. The dreams grew worse. He took to drinking before bed, a habit he had observed among the other clerks at the Bureau, and soon a bottle of brandy became a permanent fixture on his nightstand. The dreams still came, but they were blurrier now, softened by alcohol into shapes he could almost bear.

Zhao Lijun resurfaced on the twentieth of December, appearing in Li’s office without warning, as he always did. He wore a new uniform, the insignia of a colonel now, and his thin smile was the same as ever. He sat in the visitor’s chair without being invited and lit a cigarette, filling the small room with smoke.

“You have settled in well,” Zhao said, looking around the office with faint amusement. “I hear you are courting Fang Zhenxiu’s daughter. Ambitious. I approve.”

Li said nothing. He had learned that silence was safer than speech with Zhao.

“The Bureau is pleased with your progress,” Zhao continued. “But progress requires maintenance. You understand.” He drew on his cigarette, the tip flaring orange. “There is a problem. Shi Liangcai’s widow has been speaking to certain people. Old friends of her husband. She has mentioned that Shi received threats in the weeks before his death. She has mentioned a boy at the household, a new apprentice who had access to the family schedule.”

The brandy in Li’s stomach turned to ice. “She cannot know anything. I was careful.”

“Of course you were. But the widow is grieving, and grief makes people reckless. She has engaged a private investigator—a former detective from the Shanghai Municipal Police, a Welshman named Owen. He has been asking questions at the pressroom. He has interviewed the foreman, Chen. He has the list of all employees who worked at Shen Bao in the autumn.” Zhao’s voice was calm, almost conversational. “Your name is on that list, Li Jun. It is only a matter of time before he finds you.”

Li’s hands gripped the edge of his desk. “What do you want me to do?”

“Nothing, for now. I have already taken measures. Owen will be discouraged from pursuing his investigation. But you must be more careful. Endear yourself to the Fang family quickly. A marriage alliance will make you untouchable. No one will dare accuse the son-in-law of Fang Zhenxiu.” Zhao stood, crushing his cigarette in Li’s ashtray. “And Li Jun—do not forget who made you. The ladder you climbed can be cut down just as easily.”

He left without waiting for a response, and the smoke he left behind curled in the air like a question mark.

That night, Li drank more than usual. He sat in his boarding house room, the brandy bottle half-empty, staring at the document Zhao had given him. The document that promised him a position, a future, a name. It was supposed to be his armor. It felt, increasingly, like a target pinned to his back.

The knock on his door came at midnight.

Li opened it to find his landlady, her face pinched with unease. Behind her stood a figure in a dark coat, a man with a gaunt, tired face and eyes that had seen too much. It was Huang, the senior editor from Shen Bao—Shi’s old confidant, the man whose voice Li had overheard discussing the Hangzhou trip. He looked older than Li remembered, his hair grayer, his shoulders slumped as if under a permanent weight.

“I need to speak with you,” Huang said, his voice a hoarse whisper. “It is about the murder. I think—I think there is something you should know.”

Li’s heart stopped, then started again at double speed. He stepped aside and let Huang enter, closing the door behind him. The room was small and dim, the only light a kerosene lamp on the nightstand. The brandy bottle glinted amber in its glow.

Huang sat heavily on the single chair, refusing the drink Li offered. His hands were shaking. “I have been going through Shi’s personal papers. His widow asked me to organize them for the family archive. I found something. A carbon copy of a memorandum, dated the ninth of November. It listed his schedule for the Hangzhou trip—times, routes, everything. The original was supposed to have been destroyed, but the copy was misfiled.”

Li felt the floor tilt beneath him. He kept his face still, a skill he had perfected over months of lies. “What does that have to do with me?”

“The memorandum was in a folder with other documents from the pressroom. Documents that only certain personnel had access to. Chen has narrowed it down to a handful of clerks and apprentices.” Huang looked at him directly, and there was pain in his eyes. “Li, you were one of them. I do not want to believe—but the widow is pressing. She wants names. She wants someone to blame.”

“And you have come to warn me?” Li’s voice was flat.

“I have come to give you a chance.” Huang stood, his movements heavy. “If you know something—if there is anything you can tell me, anything that might lead to the real killers—now is the time. The investigator, Owen, is not going to give up. He is a stubborn man. He has been offered bribes, threats, and still he digs. Eventually, he will find something. If you are innocent, help me prove it. If you are not...” He let the sentence hang.

Li stared at the floor. The brandy was a furnace in his gut, but his mind was suddenly, terribly clear. Huang was offering him a way out—or a trap. He could not tell which. He knew only that Zhao’s warning was still fresh in his ears, and that the noose was tightening from all directions.

“I know nothing,” Li said. “I was only an apprentice. I sorted letters. I mopped floors. I had no access to schedules.”

Huang looked at him for a long, unreadable moment. Then he nodded, a slow, sad motion. “I thought you would say that. The widow will not be satisfied with my report, but I will do what I can to protect you.” He moved toward the door, then paused with his hand on the knob. “One more thing. The memorandum was not the only document in the file. There was also a letter, addressed to Shi, warning him that someone in his household was leaking information. The letter was unsigned, but the handwriting was distinctive. The widow is having it examined by a graphologist.”

He left without another word, and the door clicked shut like a cell locking.

Li stood motionless in the lamplight. The letter. An unsigned warning. Someone had known, before the murder, that a traitor was in Shi’s household. Someone had tried to save him. And now that warning was in the hands of Shi’s widow, who would stop at nothing to avenge her husband.

Li poured the rest of the brandy down his throat and hurled the empty bottle against the wall. It shattered, and the sound was oddly satisfying, a small violence in a room full of ghosts. He sank onto the bed and buried his face in his hands.

He had to warn Zhao. He had to protect himself. He had to marry Mei-Lin quickly, before the investigation closed around him. He had to do a hundred things at once, and he had no idea where to begin.

But as the brandy dragged him down into a mercifully dreamless sleep, one thought surfaced above the chaos: the handwriting on the anonymous warning. He had not seen it, did not know it. But someone had written it. Someone who knew the secret. Someone who might, even now, be watching him.

In the morning, he woke to find a note slipped under his door. It was written on plain paper, in an elegant, old-fashioned script that he had seen somewhere before but could not quite place. The message was four characters long, and it chilled him more than any threat Zhao had ever uttered.

It read: "I am still watching."