Winter, 1938. Shanghai falls.
Shen Yunzhi is twenty-two, the son of a Suzhou sauce shop owner, and the youngest auditor at the Bank of Communications. He can do accounts. He can't do anything else.
The day the Japanese take over the bank, he makes only one request: let him keep auditing the books.
From then on, he keeps two sets of accounts. One for the Japanese, one for the Chinese.
He has never fired a shot. Yet every number he writes in the ledger has several lives hanging behind it. A fraction of a cent can save four people, or cost forty their lives.
All of Shanghai calls him a traitor. In Suzhou, his mother has erased his name from the family register.
Until the morning of September 9, 1945, when someone opens the bathroom door and says, "Mr. Shen, come with me."
At last, he says, "All right."
He has waited seven years for this day.
