CHORUS: Woman, be sure your heart is brave; you can take much.
CASSANDRA: None but the unhappy people ever hear such praise.
-- Aeschylus, The Oresteia: Agamemnon (translated by Richmond Lattimore)

16th February 1905

Seo Yo-han was many things to his family and friends: a disappointment to his father, an inconvenience to his stepmother, a source of piggy-back rides to his brothers, an unwanted assistant to Inspector Meng, and currently both a very lost tourist and a very disgruntled detective.

As he tried to make his way through the maze that Shanghai called streets, he reflected that the city had some similarities with the case. He knew some things for certain: the location of the police station and his hotel, and how Jiang had disappeared. He could deduce other things from those facts: he had taken a wrong turn when he left the police station, and money was at the heart of the case. But the all-important facts eluded him: where he was, and what Jiang's plan had really been.

He thought of Jiang in the past tense because secretly, he would be amazed if the man was found alive. Rich young men of twenty-five did not disappear into thin air. Even while in hiding, they would want to live in the style they were accustomed to. Someone would have seen Jiang at a nightclub, or in a restaurant, or at the betting-office. There was only one solution that made sense.

Jiang had become a liability to someone and had been disposed of.

Mr. Jiang Senior owned a railway company that had turned him into a millionaire. It was doing very well indeed. He could have paid the fifty thousand yuan ransom without even noticing. According to him, he had refused because he thought the kidnapping and the demand came from a rival businessman. He'd sent the police in Beijing on a wild goose chase trying to find out if the rival was involved in a case that, as it turned out, could be solved much closer to home.

Why had Jiang Qiu Heng demanded fifty thousand yuan when he knew his father could afford more? What did he intend to do with the money?

Yo-han tried to picture Jiang's intentions. His father would pay the ransom. Jiang would walk out of his hiding place and back home, claiming the kidnappers had released him. He would have ¥50,000 of his father's money that he could quietly put in his own bank account. Had he come up with an elaborate fake kidnapping for money?

Yo-han had been walking along slowly as he puzzled over this. Now he walked into a wall, and came back to reality with a vengeance.

He rubbed his forehead as he looked around. Wait, he recognised that white building with the clock built into its roof. It was part of the university. He'd been directed to a theatre somewhere around here when he was looking for Inspector Meng.

Either he would find a student he could ask for directions, or he would ask someone at the theatre. The street was currently deserted except for Yo-han, but it was after six o'clock. He was bound to find someone sooner or later.

He followed the street, turned a corner, and found himself in the midst of a crowd of young women. At first there seemed to be a hundred of them. He had come up the side of the white building, and they were streaming out of its front door. Some of them wore nurse's uniforms. Others were in their ordinary clothes. They dispersed into smaller groups once they were on the street. They chattered in various dialects of Chinese, with smatterings of English and other European languages. Most of them ignored Yo-han's existence.

A group of young men followed the women. All of them seemed to be in the middle of an argument. Yo-han caught the words "dissection" and "eyeballs" repeated several times in two languages. One of them mistook him for a classmate, and asked him if he agreed that the teacher was a ham-fisted imbecile.

Yo-han decided nodding was the simplest answer.

He found himself swept along the street by the crowd. When they came to another street branching off it, he spotted the theatre a few buildings down. With difficulty he extricated himself from the medical students, who were now having a highly technical discussion on the dissection and the state of someone's pancreas.

He was glad he hadn't eaten recently.

The theatre's doors were open. Two of the women and one of the men went into it ahead of Yo-han. So did five people coming from the other direction.

The last time he was here Yo-han had arrived after the play was over. He stopped to read the posters before going in. The first one said,

LAST PERFORMANCE TONIGHT!

The Duchess of Malfi by John Webster

Beneath was a list of the cast.

The second said,

ST. JAMES UNIVERSITY[1]'S AMATEUR THEATRICAL AWARDS 1905

CONTENDERS:

The Pirates of Penzance

The Butterfly Lovers

The Ghost

The Duchess of Malfi

JUDGING ENDS 16TH FEBRUARY

WINNER ANNOUNCED SATURDAY 18TH

Yo-han wondered if the printer had run out of lower-case letters.

Since this was the last performance, he might as well see it if there was still a seat available. He went in.

~~~~

Almost three hours later, Yo-han didn't know who was more insane: the playwright, or the people who had decided to perform this. It wasn't that it was a bad show. Violent, yes. Depressing, yes. Full of improbable deaths, yes. In a word, it was simply unnerving.

Yo-han had understood only half of the plot and less than that of the dialogue. The only lines that stuck in his mind were, fittingly, the ones that summarised the plot.

"Other sins only speak; murder shrieks out."

"Cover her face; mine eyes dazzle: she died young."

When the curtain fell on a stage littered with corpses it left him with the disagreeable feeling of having witnessed an actual murder.

Something nagged at Yo-han as the lights went on and the audience began to leave. Something to do with the play, but also connected to the Jiang case. How could there be a connection? He wracked his brains. All he could think of was that line again: murder shrieks out. There was no definite evidence that Jiang had been murdered. But that proved nothing. If a man was murdered and his body was never found, he was still dead even if the crime couldn't be said to shriek out...

For an amateur theatre group's production of an obscure, very depressing play, the performance had been well-attended. A young woman several rows in front of Yo-han stood up and turned to the left as she waited for her neighbours to leave and let her out. The light shone on her face. Abruptly Yo-han realised what the link was. She was Inspector Meng's sister. He'd met her that first night, though he hadn't paid much attention to her.

Why was she here again? Why would anyone want to sit through The Duchess of Malfi twice?

Well, whatever she was doing here, she could might know where to find the Central Hotel[2].

He stood up and made his way towards her.

"Excuse me, Miss Meng—" he began, but she didn't notice.

Another man had appeared in a great hurry from somewhere near the stage. There was something both familiar and odd about him. His face especially seemed... strange. Yo-han blinked and looked again. The resemblance to an exaggerated drawing faded when he realised the man was simply wearing stage make-up. One of the actors, then. Yo-han couldn't remember exactly which character he'd played.

The man had been speaking in a hurried undertone ever since he approached Miss Meng. The first words Yo-han caught were, "My landlady won't have it. She says they bark too much."

Miss Meng was turned away from Yo-han so he could only see the side of her face. He could tell she wasn't impressed by the way she folded her arms.

"I can't take your dogs. Why don't you ask Edward?"

The actor swept a hand through his hair, smudging the greasepaint on his forehead. "He lives downstairs. Mrs. Buchanan would still hear them barking."

"What about Mr. Kanayama?"

"He has a cat. You're the only person I know who doesn't have a pet or a landlady!"

"No," Miss Meng agreed frostily. "But what do you think my mother will say if I come home with your dogs?"

Something in her voice suggested she wanted to put an adjective in that sentence, but remembered her manners in time.

The actor fell silent. Around them most of the chairs were empty. For some reason the audience seemed to gather around the back two rows before leaving. Yo-han took advantage of the pause to speak.

"Excuse me, Miss Meng."

She turned and stared at him in confusion and mild alarm. "Yes?"

Yo-han hurried to reassure her. He should have realised a stranger approaching her out of the blue would be startling. "I work with your brother. We met here on Monday."

"I remember now," Miss Meng said, not sounding very interested. "You thought you'd found that missing man."

Yo-han decided this wasn't the time to correct her. Especially not with the actor listening in. Maybe it was just the make-up, but he seemed to be staring intently at Yo-han.

"I've lost my way and I hoped you could direct me back to the police station," he said.

Miss Meng glanced at the actor out of the corner of her eye. There was a hint of snide amusement in her voice as she said, "Mr. Goncharovsky lives near it. He can guide you."

Mr. Goncharovsky gave her a truly ferocious glare. Yo-han finally placed him. He had played Bosola.

"You'll have to wait while I get this paint off," he snapped, managing to make a mundane comment sound very rude. To Miss Meng he said, "What about your brother? Would he look after them?"

"He doesn't have time to look after dogs," Miss Meng said firmly. She turned to Yo-han. "Come and wait backstage. You can meet the rest of the cast."

She walked away, leaving Yo-han and Goncharovsky no choice but to follow. Goncharovsky had not made a good impression so far, but he looked so upset that Yo-han could overlook his rudeness. Anyone would be angry if they had to worry about their pets.

"Why can't you keep your dogs?" he asked.

Goncharovsky bristled as if he had been personally insulted. It was amazing how, through a combination of stage make-up, a permanent frown, and a near-constantly snappish tone, he made his every word sound curt. "My landlady says they bark too much. She lives downstairs."

"Couldn't you ask her for a different room?"

"She only has two. Hannay has the other." He took it for granted Yo-han would know who Hannay was.

They reached a door beside the stage. They went through it, and Yo-han found himself looking at a combination of a sitting room and kitchen. He was sure it hadn't actually been hit by a hurricane, but it certainly gave that impression. The furniture was all over the place; a sofa in front of the table, an armchair turned away so anyone sitting in it would be staring out at the stairs up to the stage, two other armchairs placed in the middle of the room and looking as if they had been set down there and forgotten. There were also chairs stacked beside the oven. Someone had left a plate of noodles on the sofa. Someone else had draped a coat over the back of the stacked chairs. It had fallen off and now lay on the floor.

Goncharovsky left without a word. Strange noises came from the stage and distant voices came from somewhere outside the room. Miss Meng emptied the plate into the bin and sat down on the sofa. She offered Yo-han one of the armchairs.

The minor mystery of why she came to the play twice was solved as soon as she began to speak. Yo-han got the impression that she told him all this because she wanted to talk to someone, and he just happened to be there.

"Cecilia — she played the Duchess — is in my class. She thought the play would fail. I think it was very good. It's all because of Mr. Hannay. He's the director. He played Ferdinand too."

Yo-han nodded and made noises that could be taken for agreement as she went into Ferdinand's motives. He thought that if the university newspaper ever needed someone to review plays for them, they should ask Miss Meng.

Voices and footsteps approached from somewhere further into the theatre. The acoustics backstage were so odd that Yo-han couldn't tell if they were coming from behind or to the right. The door beside the cupboard was always ajar. Now it opened fully. A foreign man and woman walked in arm-in-arm, chattering loudly about someone's terrible exam results. They crossed the room and went out the other door without acknowledging Yo-han and Miss Meng.

She watched them with a scowl. "That was Otterbourne the producer and his fiancée," she grumbled.

She said no more on the subject. It seemed to belatedly occur to her that she'd been telling a stranger things that couldn't possibly interest him, and she fell silent. Yo-han amused himself by deducing facts about various people.

In the minute before another crowd joined them, he made up a list of facts.

1. Miss Meng was mainly interested in one character. He could make various guesses about why, but he didn't bother.

2. Mr. Goncharovsky had a Russian name yet spoke English with an American accent.

3. Mr. Goncharovsky was either a naturally short-tempered person, or was worried about something. His dogs or his studies, probably.

4. Miss Meng didn't approve of Mr. Otterbourne and his fiancée.

5. Mr. Goncharovsky took a very long time to get changed.

That last one provided Yo-han with an interesting puzzle. The actor had already changed out of his costume into his ordinary clothes before he spoke to Miss Meng. Therefore, it actually took him a very short time to change. He could only be removing his make-up and possibly brushing his hair. How could that take seven minutes?

Yo-han was still wondering just how vain a man could be when Goncharovsky returned, as part of a crowd scene. The room had seemed large when Yo-han and Miss Meng were alone. Now it became very cramped. Six people entered one after the other.

The first was a young foreign woman in a nurse's uniform. She sat down beside Miss Meng and they began to discuss the play.

She was followed by Goncharovsky, looking as sullen as ever. There was something slightly off about his face. It reminded Yo-han of something he couldn't explain. Behind him came four men, two foreign and two Chinese. No, Yo-han corrected himself when he heard them speak. One Chinese and one Japanese.

One of the other foreign men noticed Yo-han. "Hello! Are you from the judges?"

An annoyed look flashed across Goncharovsky's face. Either he didn't like being reminded of Yo-han's existence, or he didn't like a potential delay to getting home. Possibly both.

"No," Yo-han said. "I work with Miss Meng's brother."

An odd, eager expression crossed the foreign man's face. "Is he here?"

He was obviously European, yet he spoke with a curiously Chinese accent. When he switched to Mandarin — presumably under the impression Yo-han was Chinese — Yo-han noticed he could manage all four tones. Deduction: he had lived in China for most or all of his life. Reasonable inference: his parents were either diplomats or missionaries.

"No," Yo-han said in Mandarin. "I came myself."

The foreign man's face fell. Yo-han wondered why he was so eager to talk to Inspector Meng.

Goncharovsky had been putting on his coat. He lifted his hat off the stand and jerked his head towards the door. "I'm going home now. I'll show you back to the police station."

The rest of the cast took the time out of their own conversations to nod and say goodbye.

As he got up, Yo-han said, "If you want to see Inspector Meng, I can ask him to come here."

The foreign man smiled and shook his head. "We'll tell him some other time. But thank you."

Something about his phrasing sounded odd. Yo-han followed Goncharovsky out the door and back through the now-empty seating area, still puzzling over it. Finally he realised. From anyone other European he would have thought the plural pronoun was a mistake. But the man spoke Mandarin fluently.

What did an amateur theatrical group want to tell Inspector Meng?

~~~~

The walk back to the police station gave Yo-han another puzzle. Goncharovsky talked almost the whole way. First he told Yo-han about how his parents had been Polish aristocrats forced into exile. Yo-han politely pretended to believe him. Then he described his efforts at studying medicine, which had ended when he realised how much blood was involved; his brief foray into economics; and his current studies of chemistry and Chinese history. He also had some worrying opinions on modern China, specifically the parts that weren't Han.

By the time they reached a street Yo-han recognised, he had decided that Goncharovsky was the most unpleasant person he'd ever met.

"Thank you, I can find my way from here," he said politely but firmly.

They said goodbye. As Goncharovsky turned to go, a streetlamp shone full on his face. Yo-han finally realised what had struck him as off, and why Goncharovsky had taken so long to get changed. Goncharovsky was wearing make-up. It was flesh-coloured and concentrated mainly around his forehead. A skin condition? A birthmark he would rather conceal?

Yo-han wondered about it before deciding it didn't matter. If he was lucky, he would never meet Goncharovsky again.

Chapter Footnotes:

[1] The university is fictional but loosely based on Shanghai's real St. John's University, which was founded in 1879 and closed in 1952.

[2] There was a Central Hotel in Shanghai in the 1800s, but it had been rebuilt and renamed by 1905. This one is fictional.