A bloodstained ledger, and three people who are each other’s “most familiar strangers.”
My name is Shen Yanzhi. I’m the deputy director of finance at the Japanese-run No. 76 Secret Service Headquarters in Shanghai. Every day, I balance the books for the Japanese. They don’t know that hidden in the 3.7 percent loss rate on every “rural pacification” expense I handle are the coordinates of an arms depot; that 500 scrapped fountain pens point to an underground communications station; or that every account book is encrypted intelligence, coded with the “Four Pillars Calculation Method” my father taught me.
My younger sister is the chief reporter at a pro-Japanese newspaper, and every one of her economic editorials is an encrypted directive. My younger brother is a Japanese-language translator at the French Concession Police Bureau, and every document he submits just happens to have a crucial coordinate mistranslated.
Every night, we sit down to dinner together in our apartment on Avenue Joffre. We pass Morse code through the spacing of cups and plates, and discuss assassination plans under the guise of stock market chatter. We all know the others are putting on an act, but none of us knows who they’re acting for, until a top-secret ledger marked with the risk of our entire family being wiped out surfaces.
This is a war of abacuses and firearms, where numbers are deadlier than bullets. When family ties become the perfect disguise, this silent battle that began at the dinner table will ultimately use all of Shanghai’s night sky as the cover of its ledger.
