The Liberty Princess sailed up the Yangtze to Shanghai. The city had more Western-style buildings than any other in China, having been the center of the round-eyed devils’ imperialist ambitions before the coming of first the eastern dwarfs from Japan and then the little scaly devils. Liu Han had known that, of course, but it had meant little to her because she’d seen few Western-style buildings before coming to the United States. Now she’d spent months in a city of nothing but Western-style buildings. She studied the ones in Shanghai with new eyes.

The city meant something different to Liu Mei. “So this is where my father died,” she said in musing tones. “That did not mean so much to me before I learned about him from the American who knows so much about the little devils.”

“Nieh Ho-T’ing always said he died very bravely,” Liu Han said, which was true. “He helped men of the People’s Liberation Army escape after they struck the little devils a stinging blow.” She looked at Shanghai with new eyes herself. Memories of Bobby Fiore came flooding into her mind-and a little jealousy at how interested Liu Mei had been in the American half of her family.

Again, her daughter might have picked the thought from her mind. “In everything that matters, I am Chinese,” Liu Mei said. “You were the one who raised me. We are going home.” Liu Han smiled and nodded. Liu Mei wasn’t as right as she thought, thanks to the little scaly devil named Ttomalss. Liu Han’s daughter did not smile, because the little devil had not-could not-smile at her while trying to raise her after stealing her as a newborn from Liu Han. Liu Mei knew that had happened to her, but remembered none of it. It had marked her just the same.

“Now we have only to get off this ship, get onto the train, and go home to Peking,” Liu Han said. “And, I think, before we do that, we have to stop somewhere and get something to eat. It will be good to eat proper food again.”

“Truth,” Liu Mei said, and used an emphatic cough. “The Americans eat some very strange things indeed. Fried potatoes are not bad once you get used to them, but cheese-how do they eat cheese?”

“I don’t know.” Liu Han shuddered. “What else is it but rotten milk? They should throw it away or feed it to pigs.”

Shortly thereafter, she conceived the identical opinion of the Chinese customs officials who manned the Shanghai customs office for the little scaly devils. She had hoped-she had, in fact, been assured-officials who sympathized with the Party and the People’s Liberation Army would ease her passage back into China. Hopes and assurances or not, it didn’t happen. The customs men who dealt with her daughter and her might have been working for the Kuomintang, or they might have completely prostituted themselves to the little devils. Liu Han never was sure of that. She was sure they thought her false papers were false papers, no matter how artfully they’d been forged.

“Stupid women!” one of the customs men shouted. “We know who you are! You are Reds! Do not deny it. You cannot deceive us.”

Liu Mei said nothing. Her face stayed expressionless, as it usually did, but her eyes blazed. She got angry at being called a Red, even though she was one. When Liu Han had time, she would laugh about that. She didn’t have time now.

“We are the people our papers say we are,” she said, over and over and over again.

“You are liars!” the boss customs man said. “I will haul you up in front of the little scaly devils. Let us see you tell your lies to them. They will know your papers are as false as a dragon’s wings on a duck.”

The threat worried Liu Han to some degree: the little scaly devils might be able to tell the papers were false where human beings could not. Underestimating their technical skill was always dangerous. But they were disastrously bad at interrogation; next to them, the Americans were paragons. And so, with a sneer, Liu Han said, “Yes, take us to the little scaly devils. I can tell them the truth and hope they will listen.” She could tell them a pack of lies and hope they believed her.

But her willingness to go before them rocked the customs man, as she’d thought it would. To most Chinese, the little devils remained objects of superstitious dread. Surely no one with anything to hide would want to talk to them. The customs man took a somewhat more conciliatory tone: “If you are not the people we think you are, how is it that you come off the American ship?”

“We got aboard in Manila,” Liu Han said for about the tenth time. The false papers said the same thing; a good many Chinese merchants lived in the Philippines. “Maybe, while you have been badgering us, the people you want, whoever they are, have gotten away. They are probably halfway to Harbin by now.”

“Harbin!” the customs man shouted. “Stupid woman! Foolish woman! Ignorant woman! The Reds are not strong in Harbin.”

“I do not know anything about that,” answered Liu Han, who knew quite a bit about it. “I have been telling you for a long, long time now, I do not know anything about that. And neither does my niece here, either.”

“You do not know anything about anything,” the customs man said. “Go on, get out of here, and your stupid turtle of a niece, too.”

“He is the stupid turtle,” Liu Mei said once they were well out of the boss customs man’s hearing.

Liu Han shook her head. “No, he did his job well-he was right to be suspicious of us, and I had to work hard to make him let us go. If he were stupid, I would have had an easier time. That was not the trouble. The trouble was that he serves the imperialist little devils-or maybe our enemies in the Kuomintang-with too much zeal.”

“Something should happen to him, then,” Liu Mei said.

“And maybe something will,” Liu Han said. “The Party here in Shanghai must know about him. And if they do not, we can pass the word from Peking. Yes, maybe something will happen to the running dog.”

The Shanghai train station stood not far from the docks: a large gray stone pile of a building, again in the Western style. Because it was not far, Liu Han and Liu Mei walked. To go with their assumption of the role of Chinese from the Philippines, they now had less baggage than they’d taken aboard the Liberty Princess in Los Angeles. Liu Han was glad not to have to exploit the labor of a rickshaw puller or a pedicab driver. Such work might be necessary, but it was degrading. Now that she had seen the United States, she felt that more strongly than ever.

Lines in front of the ticket sellers were not neat and orderly, as they would have been back in the USA. They were hardly lines at all. People jostled and shouted and cursed one another, all shoving forward to wave money in the faces of the clerks. Liu Han felt swamped, smothered in humanity. Shanghai was no more crowded than Peking, but her most recent standard of comparison was Los Angeles, a town far more spread out than either Chinese city. Liu Mei at her back, she elbowed her way forward.

After much bad blood, she managed to buy two second-class tickets north to Peking. The platform on which she and her daughter had to wait was as crowded as the cramped space in front of the ticket sellers. She’d expected that. The train came into the station three hours late. She’d expected that, too.

But, after she and Liu Mei fought their way to seats on the hard benches of a second-class car, she relaxed. In spite of all inconveniences, they were going home.

Johannes Drucker muttered something unpleasant under his breath as he floated weightless in Kathe, the upper stage of his A-45. The radio wasn’t set to transmit, so nobody down on the ground could hear him. That was doubtless just as well.

He checked himself. He hoped nobody down on the ground could hear him. He remained politically suspect, and knew it. He wouldn’t have put it past the SS to sneak a secret microphone and transmitter into Kathe, in the hope he would say something damning when he thought no one was listening. If he had any opinions about Heinrich Himmler and sheep, he’d be smart to pull the wool over them.