Quin?s Shanghai Circus by Edward Whittemore Read Free Book Online

heard of? No value in them? Does that make sense? Does it? Now does it?
    Geraty was raving, yelling, waving his arms. He lost his balance and fell into the counter, his face coming to rest in a pool of spilled gin.
    He was muttering to himself, Manchurian telephone numbers and Chinese addresses, the name of a bar in Mukden where he had gone to get drunk after buying a supply of films before the war, a description of Bubbling Well Road early one winter morning when he was on his way to a warehouse on the outskirts of Shanghai. He returned to Tokyo, still in the thirties, to make a train connection to a beach just south of the city. He changed buses three or four times in the international quarter of Shanghai before approaching the locked, shuttered room where he went nightly to set up his movie projector, to take off his clothes, to whisper silently to himself the words with which he secretly greeted the wealthy degenerates and drug addicts he was there to entertain, magnificat anima mea Dominum, my soul doth magnify the Lord. He sneaked through the black-market district of Mukden late in 1934, and again in 1935, noting discrepancies.
    Smiling affably during the early months of the Occupation in Japan, having just stolen a secret intelligence report marked with the code name Gobi, he ordered drinks for everyone at his favorite Tokyo bar and shouted out yet again the verses from St. Luke that obsessed him.
    He hiccupped. Someone was poking him in the ribs.
    Wake up, buffalo. What’s the boy’s name and where do I find him?
    Geraty blinked up from the bar. He sneezed, raising a spray.
    You were born there and lived here, I was born here and lived there. See the difference? Don’t bother, there is none. The truth is I don’t know who you are or what you’re talking about. Nothing you’ve told me makes any sense, nothing I’ve heard in years makes any sense. The truth? The truth is that everything they said about my leprosy drugs before the war was a lie, but then and now and forever He hath scattered the proud in the conceit of their heart. Are you satisfied now? Is that what you wanted to hear?
    The boy’s address, buffalo. And Lamereaux’s address in Tokyo. And yours.
    Geraty emptied the gin glass into his mouth without taking his head off the bar. He scribbled the address of the orphanage in Massachusetts, an address in Tokyo, the name of a bar in Tokyo.
    Everybody knows the place. They can tell you where to find me.
    And the boy’s name?
    An odd one, I’ve always thought so. Gobi’s his name. Gobi. The same as the desert in western China.
    Gobi what?
    Nothing. Big Gobi maybe. He seems to like that.
    Geraty was struggling to gather up his arms and legs. His face was purple again, his head swollen. With a groan he lurched off the stool and pocketed his eight single dollar bills that had been left untouched on the bar. His hand rummaged inside his greatcoat and made the flickering motion under his nose. He sneezed, coughed once. Quin watched him heave himself out the door.
    Quin ordered another beer and looked down at the three passports he had stolen from the giant’s pocket. He had taken them thinking the fat man would have to come back for them, but now he realized they were worthless, the props of a clown.
    The nationalities were different, the names were different, the combinations of false eyeglasses and false beards and false moustaches were different in each of them. But there was no mistaking Geraty’s huge scarred face in the three disguises.
    Three costumes. There might be dozens more. Dozens of hidden pockets in the greatcoat stuffed with forged papers. For the bowler and the greatcoat, the army boots from the Second World War, the layers of sweaters and the red flannel tied with string were the props of an impostor as well as a clown.
    Quin nodded to himself. A giant, an impostor, a clown. Yet he knew things, and in the end Quin decided a few facts were