The Lady and the Panda

The Lady and the Panda by Vicki Croke

Book: The Lady and the Panda by Vicki Croke Read Free Book Online
Authors: Vicki Croke
Ads: Link
that luxurious wonder, the twenty-story, air-conditioned Cathay. Inside the Palace's gleaming mahogany-paneled lobby, as was painfully obvious on this day, the modern marvel of air-conditioning had not been installed. It didn't matter. Harkness was on a budget, and at twelve dollars a night, the little hotel that had been good enough for Bill during his long stay in Shanghai was good enough for her.
    From the moment she settled in to Bill's old digs, the introductions and invitations poured in, and she wrote home immediately, frantic for the satin evening slip she had forgotten to pack.
    Within days, a fleet of pilots from the China National Aviation Corporation, or CNAC, which was a partnership between the Chinese government and Pan Am, began to court her. There was a Frenchman in hot pursuit, a German Jew, and a “darling” young pilot in his twenties who buzzed around, taking her out often. Speaking of her youngest suitor, she joked to friends that she'd “like a son to be like him.” Among her many new pals was an American newspaper reporter named Victor Keane, a fun-loving graduate of her own alma mater, the University of Colorado. The two fell in tight with each other, and the hard-drinking, wisecracking Vic showed her the town.
    Certainly there was plenty to see. The first word under the “nightlife” section of one mid-thirties guide to Shanghai was “WHOOPEE!” And if the reader required more of an explanation, it was provided: “High hats and low necks; long tails and short knickers; inebriates and slumming puritans… When the sun goes in and the lights come out Shanghai becomes another city.”
    At about seven in the evening, Harkness would find herself sitting in a low wicker chair on the great verandah of the Race Club, sipping gimlets and chatting up a whole new smart set. The club was a lush, green twelve-acre oasis in the heart of Shanghai, and as night closed in and the sky darkened, Harkness could watch the surrounding city begin to blaze with light, its candy-colored neon signs snapping to life with luminous threads of violet, magenta, and fuchsia braided into Chinese characters.
    At the Chinese clubs, local gangsters danced the rumba to Russian orchestras. Chinese rich boys with jet-black hair, brilliantined to a lacquer finish, squired modern Chinese girls in stiletto heels and highnecked brocade silk sheaths slit up to the hips. Revelers could try a Polish mazurka or the Parisian Apache, the carioca, the tango. Crooners and torch singers bawled American jazz through the night.
    Harkness and Keane would commence with drinks in the afternoon, sometimes finding themselves having “closed up Shanghai at six thenext morning.” Cocktail hour, it was said, ended in Shanghai “anytime between 2 A.M. until Breakfast,” and then for most it was off to Delmonico's, in the Chinese territory, for a plate of scrambled eggs just before dawn. Exhausted partygoers then would head back to their hotels, where the early-morning vacuums would have already started humming.
    Harkness couldn't have asked for a better guide than Vic Keane. He was the picture of the suave, good-natured American in Shanghai. He lived amicably away from his wife, while in a large, handsome apartment he kept a beautiful and possessive White Russian mistress, whom Harkness described as “a really entrancing creature who speaks practically no English, but enough I gather to make his life fairly miserable.” When he had to make trips out of town, his wife not only took over the reporting job for him but also assumed guardianship of the mistress, who was “as helpless as a kitten.”
    Shanghai was a place of serious debauchery and vicious crime.
    Because Western nations had carved it up into three distinct sections—the International Settlement, the French Concession, and the Chinese area—there were ample cracks in the system, allowing crime to fester. A lax moral atmosphere, multiple jurisdictions, and incredible wealth combined to

Similar Books

The Life

Bethany-Kris

Brando 2

J.D. Hawkins

Mignon

James M. Cain

The Dark Queen

Michael Williams

Moon Called

Patricia Briggs

Lost in Flight

Neeny Boucher