Quin's Shanghai Circus

INTRODUCTION

WHO KNOWS HOW TED Whittemore came upon this fabulation? By way of introduction, I just finished reading Philip Short’s enormous and compelling biography of Mao Zedong, published in the year 2000. It is so rich, fascinating, and full of history, chicanery, adventure, corruption, and amazing action, that afterwards you need to inhale straight oxygen from a canister for a while simply to recover.

That’s the same feeling produced here by Ted Whittemore’s first novel (written long before Philip Short put the hammer to Mao), now reissued twenty-six years after it debuted thanks to Holt, Rinehart, and Winston (in 1974). It’s a novel as complicated and luridly interesting as a pornographic tattoo parlor, as recondite (in the extreme) as the Kabala, as comic—sometimes!—as the Three Stooges. In short, it is totally amusing (and intriguing) at every twist and turn (of which there are many).

Talk about your inscrutable orient. Whittemore takes us there, and then some. If you like sadistic Japanese gangsters with downright mythical powers, you’ll love this book. If fantasmagoric rock and rollers from another age and another country are your bag, Quin’s Shanghai Circus should be graphically titillating. If you’re in love with the mystical tough underside of our absurdist Twentieth Century skullduggeries, you will get it here served up on a silver platter.

Some of the novel is outrageous cartoon, some is exasperating erudition. All of it is crisply written, occasionally with tongue in cheek, often earnestly weighed down with pathos, and not infrequently suffused with a thrilling violence. Whittemore manipulates history (and convoluted plotlines) like a magician who has smoked enough opium to sink a battleship. Colorful is hardly the word for this book; insane might be more appropriate, except that despite all the surface confusion the author obviously knows exactly what he is about, and everything eventually comes together.

The story takes place At the onset of an era given to murders and assassinations, says the narrator, a time when a hunger for human flesh rumbled in men’s bowels. Look what happened in Nanking where a sergeant strangled his own commanding general. When he told me that on the beach, I knew I was hearing a voice direct from the rectum of lunacy. No one but me would probably ever believe such a voice, but that doesn’t matter now.

That voice direct from the rectum of lunacy is manipulated, throughout the story, by chance, strained coincidence, deliberate farce, and melodramatic hyperbole. Here’s a passage describing how the enormous clown, Geraty, submits to a grilling by Quin himself:

The fat man muttered and swore, laughed, lied when there seemed no reason to lie, and then corrected himself before wandering off on some byway of his four decades of travel through Asia, He recited Manchurian telephone numbers and Chinese addresses, changed costumes, sang circus songs, beat a drum and played a flute, consumed bowls of horseradish and mounds of turnips, sneaked through the black-market district of Mukden late in 1934 and again in 1935, noting discrepancies, brought out all the peeling props and threadbare disguises of an aging clown working his way around the ring. Grinning, weeping, he eventually revealed how he had discovered thirty years ago that Lamereaux was the head of an espionage network in Japan, a network with such an ingenious communication system it was the most successful spy ring in Asia in the years leading up to the Second World War. The information had come to Geraty by chance because he happened to fall asleep in a Tokyo cemetery …

That’s a good enough description of this book and its tone. Whittemore thrives on creating apocalyptic confusion and then setting things straight. He loves spies, and enjoys leading us down one path, and then up a totally different one. Half the time we don’t really know where we’re at, but that’s the fun—and the funhouse—of it. Whittemore, a master of deceptions, doesn’t miss a bewildering trick. At one point a character says, Life is brief and we must listen to every sound. Novels are essentially brief also, but this prose wonderkind certainly listens to every sound.

I don’t know much about Ted Whittemore. He’s dead. He died in 1995. Rumor has it that he once worked for the CIA, and maybe he was a Russian double agent on the Middle Eastern beat, maybe not. Whatever, as Kurt Cobain might’ve said. The fact is, Ted seems to have led a bizarre and complicated and rather mysterious life that fed a bizarre and complicated imagination, and he could write like hell … about hell, and about everything in between.

When you aren’t flinching at the pedophiles and the necromancy, you are liable to be chuckling up a storm. In Quin’s Shanghai Circus all roads lead to the rape of Nanking by the Japanese in 1937, painted—of course—by the alter ego of Ted Whittemore, Hieronymous Bosch. You don’t really want to go there, girlfriend—but you can’t stop from turning such deliciously malevolent pages.

It’s grotesque, the whole mordant circus, and sometimes too arcane for words, and often frustrating, and not a little scary (and excessive) and screwball, but it’s about what happened (more or less) leading up to World War II, and the author rarely glosses over the horrors, or the brief magnificent euphorias of our tragic human experience.

After this novel, Whittemore went on to distinguish himself with The Jerusalem Quartet, a vibrant stew of richly invented books that would put Lawrence Durrell on notice, and may yet claim for Ted a piece of the immortal action in our groves of academe.

But Quin’s came first, greased the skids, as they say, and it is a fascinating novel. You can’t pigeonhole the thing. It can revulse you as much as anything William H. Burroughs (or Hubert Selby Jr.) ever wrote: Naked Lunch meets Last Exit to Shanghai. But although there’s a lot of disturbing stuff for the queasy stomach to rebel against, there’s also a rich and deranged heartbeat that captures the bustling panorama we all call home.

Abandon all hope, ye who enter here … and prepare for a bumpy, yet illuminating, ride. Tennessee Williams once said something to the effect that if it weren’t for his devils his angels would have no place to go. Ted Whittemore has angels and devils galore, and their wide range of halos and pitchforks drive this lusty debauch toward its rousing conclusion.

You can’t say I didn’t warn you … but isn’t that the point?

John Nichols

Taos, New Mexico 2002

To remain whole, be twisted.

To become straight, let yourself be bent.

To become full, be hollow.

Be tattered, that you may be renewed.

Those that have little, may get more,

Those that have much, are but perplexed.

The Sage does not show himself, therefore he is seen everywhere.

He does not define himself, therefore he is distinct.

He does not boast of what he will do, therefore he succeeds.

He is not proud of his work, and therefore it endures.

He does not contend,

And for that very reason no one under heaven can contend with him.

—Tao Te Ching

For by grace are ye saved through faith, and that not of yourselves. It is the gift of God. Not of works, lest any man should boast.

—Ephesians 2

THE IMPOSTOR

1

The suspicious illness and subsequent investigation of a corporal serving in Mukden suggest that an espionage network with astonishing capabilities is operating within the Empire.

The net has access to such important material it must include a member of the General Staff, in addition to whatever foreigners are involved.

The corporal died while undergoing questioning. Just before death, however, he revealed two unrelated facts.

1. The code name of the net is Gobi (the barbarian name for the great desert in western China).

2. The unknown disease from which he was suffering is called, phonetically, Lam-ah-row’s Lumbago.

—From a secret report submitted in the autumn of 1937 to Baron Kikuchi, Japanese General in charge of intelligence activities in Manchuria.

The report was said to have been seen in the archives of the Imperial Japanese Army immediately after the surrender in 1945. But it never reached Allied intelligence officers, having been either lost or destroyed in the first days of the Occupation.

SOME TWENTY YEARS AFTER the end of the war with Japan a freighter arrived in Brooklyn with the largest collection of Japanese pornography ever assembled in a Western tongue. The owner of the collection, a huge, smiling fat man named Geraty, presented a passport to customs that showed he was a native-born American about as old as the century, an exile who had left the United States nearly four decades before.

The collection contained all the pornographic works written in Japan during the last three hundred and fifty years, or since the time when Japan first closed itself to the West. More important, it included rare manuscripts from several thirteenth-century Buddhist monasteries.

According to Geraty, the very existence of these manuscripts had never been suspected. The tales they told began harmlessly, but before the scholar reached the end of the second page he was confronted with astonishingly obscure practices, and by the beginning of the third page he was totally immersed in devices and dreams and masks, all serving the wildest sort of inversions.

The manuscripts were illustrated with ink drawings exquisitely detailed to show every hair. Even the cat hairs could be counted, where cats appeared.

For the officials at the Brooklyn customs house the sudden appearance of Geraty’s collection was an uncommon event. Although they frequently handled questionable materials, never in anyone’s memory had the pornography to be examined been of such vast scope.

Thus a second official immediately applied himself to the case, and a third soon joined the second. In fact by the end of Geraty’s first day in New York there were no less than eight customs officials of differing ranks and seniority, representing a reliable spectrum of American ethnic and racial and cultural backgrounds, lined up behind a row of desks at one end of the spacious customs warehouse in Brooklyn, solemnly listening to Geraty deliver a lecture on the secret merits of his collection.

He noted at random, for example, in order to emphasize the artistry of the drawings, the patina that had been worked into the leather phalluses and the grain that showed in the spiraled ivory finger pieces. Because of these touches, he claimed, a specialist could easily tell whether the leather was cow or pig or whether the ivory was from north or south India.

The women depicted in the illustrations were as numerous as the men, but they were always shown with their own kind. There was no mixing of the sexes.

After pointing out the value of the manuscripts in the fields of animal husbandry, trade, and sociology, Geraty went on to discuss their literary and historical merits.

The manuscripts were invariably told in the first person. Therefore they were source material for modern Japanese fiction, which was also confessional.

The century under study, the thirteenth, was an era of national upheaval in Japan, an age of revolution led by innumerable orders of fanatical monks. Therefore the manuscripts were a record of the unknown thoughts of these warring monks at a time when Zen and the game of Go, the tea ceremony, rock gardens, and No plays and so many other unique Japanese arts, notorious for their refinement and austerity, first became revered throughout the islands.

Geraty, in short, was able to trace most of modern Japanese history to the pornographic fantasies found in his collection.

The documents had been translated and bound under his personal supervision, a project that had taken forty years of his life. Although reluctant to part with his treasure, he was now returning to the United States to retire. He intended to sell the collection to a university or some other academic institution so that it could be available to scholars.

Or so he claimed.

Finally, with special pride, Geraty discussed his system of annotations. The system was exclusive and comprehensive, his own invention, and could only be understood by using the key or code book. It consisted of numbers in the margins, entered by hand, often as many as sixty-four numbers next to only one line of print. The drawings were thus wedged in between swarms of minute jottings.

These masses of numbers, it seemed, identified and cross-referenced every real or imagined act that took place in all those tens of thousands of pages.

Because he was so fat, Geraty sometimes gave the impression of being less than a giant. When he was sprawled over a bench in the customs warehouse waiting for his audience to assemble, doing nothing, staring blankly at the ceiling, he looked as if he might be only six and a half feet tall. But the moment he began to gather up his arms and legs, a transformation took place.

He seemed to put on weight as he pulled his parts together. It took several minutes for him to find his balance, but when at last he was standing he filled the room he was in, any room, his immense bulk the equal of three or four large men.

Geraty leaned far back to keep his belly from dragging him over. His feet were splayed to support his body, his chin rested on his chest, his massive arms stood out to the sides. When he moved, his hands hung behind him, stiffly jarred by each step. His white hair was clipped short in outdated military fashion and his face was scarred by pockmarks, or perhaps a combination of pockmarks and poorly treated knife wounds.

When he got to his feet the blood rushed to his head, causing it to expand, opening the pits and scars. After a while this swelling subsided together with the deep purple coloring that had accompanied it.

Geraty arrived in New York toward the end of winter. The unraveled tops of three or four sweaters showed at his neck, which was swathed in a piece of red flannel tied with a string. He wore torn military boots, the type issued to American soldiers during the Second World War, and a black bowler hat that might have belonged to a circus performer in the 1920s. Over everything was a military greatcoat, ancient and spotted and patched, of no recognizable era or campaign. Despite his size the ancient greatcoat covered him completely to the floor.

Before much time had passed the eight customs officials were no longer curious or suspicious or even bored, they were simply dazed with disbelief. For several days Geraty had been lecturing them, and they could no longer pretend to understand what he was talking about, or why. The senior of the eight officials, therefore, interrupted Geraty to ask him if he had a letter from a university, or a document of any kind from any academic institution, expressing interest in his collection.

Geraty had to admit he had nothing to show them.

He was then asked to produce academic credentials from the United States or Japan or any country in the world. Again he had to admit he had nothing to offer but his collection.

Throughout these interviews, or lectures, he continued to address everyone as nephew.

The obscenity laws were still strict. Even so, Geraty’s case might not have been dismissed as fraudulent had it not been for two facts. First, he never turned up at the customs warehouse even partially sober. Second, it was apparent from his eyes that he was suffering from a long-term addiction to some drug, probably of the stimulant class.

In the midst of a harangue he would suddenly rush away to the toilet, muttering about an incurable Oriental disease acquired in his youth. But later the same day even this pretense would be dropped. Instead of leaving the end of the warehouse where he was lecturing, he would turn around in the middle of an incomprehensible sentence and bury his head in his greatcoat. There would be the unmistakable sound of liquid being sucked through a straw, then a rapid movement of the hands followed by a sneeze and a violent cough.

Geraty turned back to face the eight officials as if nothing had happened, but it was impossible not to smell the fresh alcohol on his breath, or to ignore the unnatural luster of his eyes which were now bulging from his head more prominently than ever.

After these lapses he never failed to make reference to the charity shown to slaves by the founder of the first monastery for women in Ireland, the gently forgiving lady known to history as St. Brigid.

Yet the collection was still an extraordinary effort by someone, and that was the only reason the eight officials spent as much time with him as they did. They took the trouble of sending a report through a special review process, including a senior board that was then in session. To do more Geraty would have had to take his case to court.

All this was explained to him at length one winter morning in the customs warehouse in Brooklyn when the time came to confiscate the collection. Geraty listened gloomily to the decision, then began the long process of getting to his feet. Not until he was standing at full height did he break his silence.

He roared and upended three of the desks. He bellowed and knocked over the other five desks. He shouted that he had no money for lawyers, that America was a lunatic asylum, that the whole country could drink dragon piss down to the day of judgment. When a platoon of guards finally reached the end of the warehouse that Geraty had demolished, they found him struggling to take off his clothes, trying to strip himself naked, either to free himself for a fight or because he was sweating so heavily.

Geraty landed in the street in an Oriental squatting position, perhaps a modification of the lotus, his greatcoat soaking up the snow that had turned to slush in the morning sun. During the next few minutes he was totally immobile, either because he was meditating or because he was stunned, then he abruptly lurched to his feet and staggered down the block shouting the names of saints. He entered the first cheap waterfront bar he came to and was told to shut up or leave. He scratched himself, ordered a double gin, and collapsed in a booth by the window.

For the next thirteen hours he remained in the booth, not leaving even to go to the toilet. He stared at the grimy snow in the gutter, drank gin, and sank into a stupor, all the while carrying on an incoherent dialogue with himself in a variety of Oriental languages and dialects, a journey that began in Japan and moved west and south through Manchuria, from Mukden down the coast of China to Shanghai. From there he took a freighter to the Philippines, snored in the mountains during the Second World War, took a United States army airplane back to Japan, and began the journey again.

When the sun went down Geraty emptied out the pockets of his greatcoat. In the manner of a fortune-teller he spread the objects across the table in front of him. He tapped each one three times and studied it.

A freighter ticket for the return trip to Yokohama.

His real passport.

An empty pint of gin with a straw twisted around the neck.

Sixty-odd dollars, a few less than the years he had lived.

A small gold cross, a Nestorian relic of incalculable value.

Several tattered passports from the 1930s, forged, stating that the bearer was a Belgian expert in animal husbandry, a Belgian dealer in films, a Canadian dealer in patent drugs. None of these false papers of any use anywhere in the world.

A worthless green paperweight that might have been meant to resemble jade, stolen from one of the desks he had overturned that morning.

Along with a screw-top jar hidden in a recess of his greatcoat, this was all he owned in the world.

Late that night Geraty took a subway to the Bowery and knocked on the door of a shelter for homeless alcoholics. Before entering he insisted on presenting his counterfeit Canadian passport with the consular stamp that was thirty years out of date. He was fumigated, given a shower, and sent to bed.

The whole following day he slept. The next day he was able to swallow some soup. On the third day, feeling stronger, he resurrected himself and broke the lock on the closet where his clothes were stored. He made his way to the city bus terminal and found a bus that was journeying north through the Berkshires to a town where there happened to be an orphanage run by an order of Catholic fathers.

Forty-eight hours later he was back in New York without the precious small gold cross or the worthless glass paperweight, his money down to sixteen dollars. As insurance against a robbery attempt he bought a pint of gin, then took a subway to the Bronx, dozing most of the way, occasionally ordering a round of drinks in one Oriental language or another. He found a bar with a steam table and bought three large corned beef sandwiches which he covered with a thick layer of green paste from the screw-top jar hidden in his greatcoat.

He ended the meal with a double gin and a small dab of green paste tucked into each side of his nose. He sneezed and heaved himself out the door, his money now reduced to eight single dollar bills.

Darkness had fallen, the slush was freezing into ice. Geraty picked his way carefully along the sidewalk, his bulging eyes rolling over the buildings and down the alleys. From time to time he stopped under a streetlight to gaze at a fire alarm box, the number on a tenement, the stairs leading down to a basement. Once in the course of every block his hand dipped into the greatcoat and came out with a pinch of green paste which he pushed into his nose absentmindedly.

At last he came to the corner he was looking for, a bar with an old wooden sign in the window. There was a larger neon sign with a different name, but the old-fashioned lettering on the wood, in faded green paint, could still be read beneath the buzzing coils of electric light.

Geraty’s.

For several minutes he gazed dully at the sign. He had come to the United States for only two reasons, and when those tasks were accomplished he had intended to return to Japan immediately. In the first he had failed. He had been unable to sell his magical collection of pornography. And in the second he had succeeded. He had returned the mysterious small gold cross to its rightful owner.

But now a third possibility crossed his mind. Instead of just making a nostalgic visit to his family’s old neighborhood in the Bronx, he would honor his mother by invoking her memory on the feast day of the saint for whom she had been named.

Geraty crossed himself, the first time he had done so in thirty years. From St. Edward the Confessor he begged forgiveness for what he was about to do, for what it might lead to, for the lost paths that might be opened and the forgotten lives that might be discovered. Then he crossed himself once more and kicked aside the door of the bar, shuffled to the counter, clamped a paw on the bartender.

Dragon piss, nephew.

How’s that?

Double gin.

He rested both arms on the counter listening to the noisy conversations around him. Twenty minutes later he was on his way to the toilet at the back, bumping into drinkers as he passed. When he returned he bumped into them again, this time choosing a stool toward one end of the counter next to a younger man whose name was Quin.

Geraty had heard the name soon after coming into the bar. There were two drinkers there with that name, one closer to the right age than the other, but before he approached his man he wanted to be sure the name was spelled correctly. So he had waited until both men were near the counter and picked their pockets as he went to the toilet, replacing their wallets on the way back.

In the years he had spent wandering around Asia he had known only one other man named Quin, a lecherous and violent drunkard who had last been seen in Shanghai before the war, supposedly in a warehouse on the outskirts of the city. There were rumors of a terrible night in that warehouse, but Geraty never knew whether they were true or not. By the time he got to the warehouse the next morning, it was deserted. The only sign that anyone had been there was a discarded hat on a mound of sawdust, the black bowler he himself was now wearing.

Geraty spread his greatcoat over the stool and lowered himself into place.

Quin was then about thirty. He had grown up in the Bronx, played stickball and fought in the streets as a boy, spent two years in the navy and one in prison as a man. A short time ago his only relative had died, the woman who had raised him, his father’s older sister. The aunt had left him a small amount of money, and he was trying to decide what to do with it the night a fat staggering giant, old and drunk and ragged, wheezing and muttering, lurched into his stool and nearly knocked him to the floor.

A dozen years ago, perhaps even two or three, Quin might have broken a bottle over the old man’s head. But at the moment he was paralyzed. A hideous stench had enveloped him, a mixture of rotting wool and rotting cheese, sour wax and decaying skin, all of it overwhelmed and held together by a pervasive smell of mustard.

The fat giant had breathed on him as he settled down on the next stool.

Blow it the other way, said Quin.

Double gin, nephew, the fat man called down the bar. Quin swung his elbow and the fat man hiccupped.

You stink, buffalo.

How’s that?

You bumped into me just now.

Not me, nephew.

You. Twice.

The fat man rubbed the red flannel around his neck while sneaking a hand under his greatcoat. Quin saw him unscrew the top of a jar. A finger came out with a dab of green paste, the cap was rescrewed, the finger flickered under his nose. It was all done in one quick movement, but Quin recognized the smell.

Hooked on horseradish, buffalo?

A Japanese blend. By far the most effective.

For what?

For the thirty years I’ve used it which is little enough in the game the Almighty plays. He looks for longer scores and every point is as hard as a dragon’s hemorrhoids. I know what I’m talking about, nephew, I’ve spent most of my life there.

Where?

The other side, the dark side, our own foreign shore. A place so different, saints preserve us, it’s whatever you want it to be. Where are the dice? It’s time to drink to what we were and are becoming.

Money?

The fat man grumbled and put his eight single dollar bills on the bar. Quin nodded. No one in Geraty’s had ever been able to beat him at liar’s dice. The fat man rolled and passed the cup. On Quin’s second roll the fat man called him.

You win, buffalo. Where did you say that place was?

Where? The old Tokyo and the old Shanghai, cities that don’t exist anymore. Cities where people went around in disguises passing themselves off as emperors and Buddhas and dwarfs and precision masturbators. So afraid, some of them, they hid in unlocked cages waiting for the hinges to rust. The Orient, that’s where. This is the first time I’ve been back here in forty years. I’ve been to Massachusetts and I’ve seen the Bronx and now I’m leaving.

I spent a year in Massachusetts, said Quin.

Doing what?

Time.

What kind of time?

Mailboxes.

An unworthy cause, nephew. Your mother wouldn’t have liked that.

Never knew her.

Your father wouldn’t have liked it either.

Never knew him.

I know, muttered the fat man.

What do you know?

The fat man’s face suddenly darkened. The scars and pits opened as he fumbled for his gin glass. He emptied the glass and his eyes receded, the hat settled back on his head. He pointed at the cup of dice.

Roll. We need a drink.

Quin lost. The fat man massaged his enormous belly and licked the new glass of gin with a long yellow tongue. Quin’s question had turned him into a huge jungle beast crouching beside a path.

What I know is that over there, before the war, everybody was plotting. One day a hundred conspiracies, the next day a hundred new ones. Agents everywhere and all of them changing sides yesterday or tomorrow. From what to what? Why? International networks spent millions of dollars while others were so clandestine they consisted of only one individual, existed in only one man’s head. His private fantasy? No. The Almighty had dumped His creatures in a secret bag and put the bag on His back and was dancing over the earth. The thirties, nephew, the Orient. This overcoat I’m wearing belonged to a sergeant who murdered the general responsible for the rape of Nanking. An overcoat? For He hath put down the mighty from their seat. Or the beach just south of Tokyo where four people once sat down to a picnic that only one of them ate. Why? Because the other three were wearing gas masks. The beach was near the estate owned by Baron Kikuchi, the most feared man in the Japanese secret police, and at the end of the afternoon those picnickers had arrived at a decision that kept the Germans from capturing Moscow ten years later. A picnic? Impossible? For He that is mighty hath done great things to me. Let’s have another game.

The fat man scratched his gallbladder with the dice. Once more Quin lost and had to pay for the drinks.

I knew them, the fat man announced abruptly.

Who?

Your parents. Over there of course, before you were born. Your father had a limp, shrapnel in his leg, some kind of hero in the First World War. Left New York in the early 1920s, worked his way to Paris, ended up in Asia. Where? Shanghai? Tokyo? A postcard to your aunt once in a while, the last news from south China in the late 1920s. Canton? In any case nothing after that for eight years. Eight years? Not until 1935 when a missionary couple brought a baby to your aunt. War was coming, China was unsafe. The Quins were to follow in