“From?”

“The fact that really, you can’t control anything.”

I thought about that as I speared some water spinach. “And Mr. Chen.”

“What about him?”

“The Shanghai Moon. It was his mother’s. He lost her, and he’s spent his life looking for it. I get that, now.”

We ate in silence for a while, until finally we ran out of things to eat.

“I’m still hungry,” I said.

“I know.”

“What do you mean, you know?”

“You always eat a lot when your adrenaline’s pumping. Like when you’ve been in a fight. Or now.”

“We should have gotten roast pork,” I said.

“Uh-huh. And a baak chit gai.”

“You know that term?”

“I’m not as white as I look.”

Luckily, I didn’t need to answer that. A cell phone rang, but when I grabbed mine up, it nestled in my hand in innocent silence. “Smith,” Bill said into the one that was actually ringing. Glancing at me, he said, “That’s great. Can’t wait to hear it, but can you call back? We’re at Lydia’s office. We’ll put you on speaker.” He gave my office number, and in the ten seconds between one call and the other, he told me, “Professor Edwards.”

“Oh, good. But you know, your cell phone has a speaker function.” He looked at it blankly as my desk phone rang. I hit the button. “Hi, Professor. How are you?”

“Just jim-dandy,” Professor Edwards’s voice boomed. “My researcher found you some stuff. I might have to give her an A.”

“It’s that good?”

“From where I sit. No idea whether it’s useful to you, though. Come to think of it, it was pretty much all in the same place-German war records, China division-so maybe it’ll just be an A minus. Ready?”

“Shoot,” said Bill.

“Your boy Ulrich, Gunther. Rank: Major. Sent to Shanghai 1938. Want to know why?”

“Why?”

“He was a pain in the Führer’s ass, that’s why. Now, I could have told you that without wasting this young woman’s time looking anything up. The only officers the Reich shipped to Shanghai to help out their very close allies and personal friends the Japanese were the ones they didn’t want screwing up the home front.”

“You mean incompetents?” Bill asked.

“Not necessarily. Sometimes, if a guy was a moron but well connected, yes. But they sent Robert Neumann there. The Butcher of Buchenwald, you’ve heard of him. He was good at his job, which was gruesome experiments and murder. But someone decided he was out of control, which by the way he was. So good-bye Dr. Neumann. With Ulrich, it was his mouth got him in trouble. He thought Hitler was misguided on some issues, imagine that. Particularly he suggested they might be focusing a tad too obsessively on Jews, gays, and Gypsies and ought to consider putting resources into defeating other countries’ militaries instead of rounding up civilians-their own and everyone else’s-and spending good German marks, which were less good every day, building places to put them and paying people to guard and kill them.”

“A champion of human rights.”

“A practical soldier. That Master Race thing drained off a lot of Nazi resources. Brought them down, in the end. But no one wanted to hear it. So they ship Ulrich to Shanghai with his wife and kid. For work, he’s supposed to sniff around the Chinese puppet military, make sure no one’s thinking of overthrowing the Germans’ very close allies and personal friends the Japanese. So he does, and before you can say Jackie Robinson he’s running around with General Zhang. The brother-in-law-to-be of your boy, Chen Kai-rong.”

“Yes,” I said. “We remember who he is.”

“Good, you might pass after all. Ulrich and Zhang get to be bunghole buddies, and Ulrich, that flower of Aryan manhood, flourishes in the rich Shanghai soil. Fertilized, it seems, by the dung at the bottom: gambling dens, bars, establishments of ill repute.”

“Flower houses,” I said.

“Show-off,” he replied.

“I’m not the one who laid out the extended metaphor. Do you do that all the time?”

“If you spent your life trying to wake up stoned snoring slackers-hey, look, I can do alliteration, too. Now, shall I fast-forward to Ulrich’s demise?”

My sense was that any conversation with Professor Edwards was already on fast-forward, but I said, “Yes, please do.”

“February 23, 1943. Recognize the date?”

“Yes, I do, but I’m not sure why.”

“You flunk. That’s the day the Shanghai Municipal Police arrested your boy, Chen Kai-rong. It was the beginning of the end for Major Ulrich here.”

“Why? What did he do?”

“Well, now, that’s an interesting question. Seems he called his very close et cetera the Japanese, asked them to suggest to the SMP that they treat Chen Kai-rong with kid gloves. Chen was his buddy Zhang’s brother-in-law, after all. Zhang must have called him.”

“No. There was no love lost between the general and Kairong. Mei-lin asked the general to help, and he said Kai-rong was a traitor and should rot in jail. She called Ulrich herself.”

“How do you know that?”

“It’s in Mei-lin’s diary. But we didn’t know who Ulrich was.”

“That’s the diary that you’re going to let me read any minute now.”

“Yes, that one.”

“As soon as we’re sure people aren’t being killed because of it,” Bill said. “We wouldn’t want to lose you.”

“Obviously I’m not on your thesis committee. They all want to lose me. So. Ulrich calls the SMP. The SMP, eager to oblige, send Chen back to his cell. Actually we covered that in yesterday’s lecture, working from a different source.”

The professor paused, and though I couldn’t see him I knew he was peering over his glasses.

“Yes,” I said. “I remember.”

“You, too, Smith?”

“Yessir, sir.”

“Good, you might pass, too. Okay, so maybe you remember what happens next. The sister says the Commie ain’t her brother, it’s her husband. She hands over what she says is the general’s list of agents, which U.S. naval intelligence tells us was really her brother’s all along. But first she calls everyone on it and tells them to make themselves scarce. And they do. And the brother escapes. And she and Zhang escape.”

“She escaped?” I said, hope springing. “I thought you said the navy said the general killed her.”

“I did, they did, and he did, for sure. But the SMP doesn’t know that, do they? Our historical perspective eludes them. All they know is, they’ve got zilch. Zero. Goose eggs. So now they’re really mad. If they’d applied the usual pressure to Chen Kai-rong, the thinking goes, he might have cracked. The Japanese say, but he wasn’t the spy. The SMP says, then how come he ran away? Along with, they point out, everybody else.

“The Japanese are embarrassed. They didn’t just lose the police some crook. These were Commies! Oh, no! And the only guy they can put their mitts on is Ulrich. So they do. They haul him to Bridge House, which was a lower circle of the same hell as Number 76, run by the Japanese themselves. To make sure he comes clean, they scoop up his wife and kid and slap them in an internment camp. This was almost unheard of, interning their very dear friends the Germans, except for being Allied spies. Then the Germans straightened it out if they weren’t, or the Japanese shot them if they were.”

“And in this case?”

“Unfortunately for the wife and kid, this turned out to be a special case. Ulrich, in the middle of being persuaded to spill the beans, up and died.”

“The Japanese killed him?”

“Seems to have been an accident. Had a seizure, bingo, the end. Whether the electrodes or the baling wire or the big tub of ice water had anything to do with it, I couldn’t tell you. But it was damned inconvenient. The Japanese couldn’t prove he was a Commie rat. The Germans couldn’t prove he wasn’t, either. So they did the only sensible thing. They forgot all about it.”

“Just like that?”

“You know, get some closure, put it behind you, move on! Come on, everybody’s doin’ it! The Ulrich affair was forgotten and everyone lived happily ever after. Except the wife and kid. The Germans started tentative negotiations to get them out, but the Japanese were of the opinion the wife might know something. Or said they were. They were probably just saving face. But the Germans backed off. Some dame, some brat, what did they care? Keep ’em, they said. So the Japanese did.”