The Nine Fold Heaven by Mingmei Yip Read Free Book Online

Good, so it’ll be next Wednesday at six in the evening. I’ll ask my driver to pick you up. But you have to give me the address of the orphanage.”
    “Please don’t. I can go to your place by myself.”
    “Can you at least give me their phone number in case I need to contact you?”
    Reluctantly, I wrote down the phone number on a napkin and gave it to him. “But, Edward, please don’t call and get me into trouble. I’ll call you two, three times a week, how’s that?”
    He didn’t look very happy. “All right, if that’s what you want.” Then he wrote down a phone number and the name Emily Andrews. “If you call, dial this number. Emily is the governess and takes care of my personal stuff.”
    “Thank you. But, Edward, I don’t have any decent clothes to wear. . . .”
    “Don’t worry, I’ll tell Emily to find a dress for you. Just arrive an hour early at four-thirty and show the guard my card.”
    He picked up the card, signed it, then gave it back to me.
     
    Back in the hotel that night, I couldn’t decide if it would be good luck or bad luck to sing at this ambassador’s party. But I knew it wouldn’t be bad to know someone that important. Anyway, if it turned out that I didn’t need him, I could just waft away from his life like a summer breeze. And he’d find another girl, possibly on the street like me, or wherever his karma led him.
    After my encounter with Edward Miller, I kept thinking I should disappear from his life now when he was unlikely to go looking for me. But the opportunity seemed too good to pass up, so I decided I’d go sing at his garden party and hope my luck would hold.
    Waiting for Wednesday’s party, I didn’t do much except lie around in my hotel room, consume food, and read the Shanghai newspapers. I was almost disappointed that there was nothing about the gangs or myself. Had even my die-hard fans already forgotten about their beloved Songbird? Or had another pretty, talented girl been discovered to take over my place at the Bright Moon Nightclub? I decided to visit my former establishment to see if I could find any news of my old acquaintances, possibly even Madame Lewinsky.
    Bright Moon, Shanghai’s most fashionable and expensive entertainment establishment, was located in the International Concession between Yuyuan Road—the Fool’s Garden—and Fanhuangdu Road—the Emperor’s Crossing. The nightclub had a gaudily lit circular façade topped with a torchlike cylindrical tower. Inside was a huge hall with tables surrounding a polished dance floor. Above was a mezzanine from which the VIPs could watch those equally rich but less important.
    Though three months had passed—which seemed like an entire incarnation—nothing seemed to have changed inside the fashionable nightclub. Under the chandeliers, an impeccable Filipino band was playing a waltz tune. The richest and most powerful continued to have a good time side by side with the most evil, chugging down expensive wine or liquor and scraping their mirror-polished shoes on the nightclub’s famous glass floor. But there was one curious fact. As the men aged, their women remained forever young—still beautiful, flirtatious, and scheming.
    I asked to be seated in a far corner shunned by the glitterati so I could observe without being observed. That everything looked so familiar after all that happened surprised me. I was back here not as the Heavenly Songbird Camilla, but in my new incarnation as an unknown young lad. This strategy is called jieshi huanhun, “borrowing the corpse to re-instill the soul.”
    Who would have guessed that the young man sitting at a dim corner was the same person who, only three months ago, had taken the center stage of Shanghai’s most famous nightclub endorsed by the most powerful gangster head?
    Since I dressed like the men in a fashionable white suit with half-matching black and white leather shoes, I didn’t think I’d arouse any men’s attention. But that didn’t