Rising Sun, Falling Shadow Read Free

you to Civic Assembly Center. All now! All others to go immediately.”
    The soldiers advanced toward the prisoners with their rifles levelled. Sunny hugged Simon and kissed him on the cheek. “We will bring you supplies as soon as we can.”
    Simon grinned. “I would never say no to more of Yang’s treats, that’s for sure. Kosher or not, I love your housekeeper’s rice balls.”
    Franz stepped forward. Lost for words, he simply clapped Simon’s shoulder and shook his hand.
    â€œI give the Nazis and the Japs six months tops,” Simon said, though Franz doubted his friend believed that fantasy any more than he did.
    Sunny reached for Franz’s hand and guided him back a few steps, allowing Simon and Esther a moment of privacy.
    Even after the other prisoners had fallen into line, Esther and Simon stood with their foreheads touching, exchanging whispered words. A Japanese soldier hurried over and jabbed Simon in the back with the butt of his rifle. After regaining his balance, Simon kissed Esther on the lips, then turned and headed for the end of the line without a look back.
    * * *
    Sunny, Esther and Franz trudged down Bubbling Well Road in sombre silence. Tall neoclassical and art deco buildings loomed overhead, including the city’s tallest skyscraper, the Park Hotel. Rickshaws and pedicabs rushed down the four-lane road. Until recently, roaring American automobiles and coughing trucks had lined the thoroughfare, but the Japanese, in their need to stockpile fuel, had since prohibited the use of non-military vehicles in the city.
    They reached the main road, named Avenue Edward VII on the north side and Avenue Foche on the south. Until Pearl Harbor, it had served as an informal border between two separately administered entities within the city: the International Settlement and the French Concession, known by most as simply Frenchtown. The sovereign distinction was long gone. Still, it was hard to ignore the sudden shift in architectural style from the prim and proper British rigour that dominated the International Settlement to the more laissez-faire approach of Frenchtown.
    â€œWhy don’t you come home with us, Essie?” Sunny asked. “We can collect your belongings later.”
    â€œNo, thank you,” Esther murmured. “I need a little time to organize my home first.”
    Franz suspected that she also needed private time to grieve. His heart ached for Essie. After more than a decade as a widower, he could not stomach the idea of being forcibly separated from Sunny again. Their eight-month marriage had been the bright spot in an otherwise dark and difficult few years. During the week that he had been held captive in Bridge House, the idea that he might never see her again was harder to endure than the physical torture.
    Franz had met Sunny on his first visit to the refugee hospital more than four years earlier. She was the only volunteer nurse there who was neither German nor Jewish. After years of unofficial apprenticeship at the side of her father, a prominent local physician, Sunny was as knowledgeable as any doctor. Franz offered to mentor her in surgical technique and, within a few years, she was performing at the level of a junior surgeon or better. He had been struck from their first encounter by her delicate Eurasian features: her teardrop-shaped eyes, sloping cheekbones and glowing alabaster skin. But it was her poise, compassion and empathy—the way she could read his mood in a glance and know exactly when to offer him a reassuring smile—that had stolen his heart.
    Franz and Sunny walked Esther home through the damp, littered streets of Frenchtown, passing luckless merchants and skeletal beggars, but like most others in the street, they had nothing to offer them. Eventually, they reached Avenue Joffre in the heart of Little Russia: a neighbourhood populated with White Russians who had fled to Shanghai after the Russian Civil War. Since