The Stone Bell

An adventure for Shanghai PCs, working for Uncle Ho.

Three men have disappeared.

Willie Clayton. Trumpet player with the Harlem Gentlemen.

Last seen leaving a gig at the Shanghai Canidrome. With a beautiful Caucasian woman who nobody seemed to recognise. Drummer thought her accent sounded Russian. Wasn’t sure. Had been complaining a lot about the heat.

Ed Pickering. Lieutenant in the China Marines.

Told his sergeant he was meeting a girl in the bar at the Cathay Hotel. Sounded excited. Never seen again. Had been acting strange. Walked around shirtless. Drank ice water. Dove into the Huangpu in the middle of the day.

Bao Mengqi. Tabloid reporter for The Crystal.

Loves sexual gossip. Frequently sued. Spoke to Ed and Willie’s friends. Published a story. BLOODY RED STRIPPER VAMPIRES: MOSCOW’S LATEST MENACE. Then vanished as well. Wife says he’d been running a high fever. Sweating through his sheets.

New drug on the Shanghai streets.

Five Minerals Powder.

Fluorite. Quartz. Red clay. Sulphur. Stalactite milk. That’s a guess - the precise recipe is unknown.

Popular with Three Kingdoms poets. Famously used by the Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove - mad alcoholic philosophers who fled into exile to avoid the deadly intrigues of the imperial court.

Raises body temperature. Fever. Ecstasy. Hallucinations. Blindness. Skin lesions. Agony. Death. In roughly that order. Over a few weeks.

Ulcerated victims lie in the gutter. Clutch their heads. Beg for mercy. Respectable citizens give them a wide berth.

Street dealers. Heads shaved. Working for Pockmark Huang Jinrong. Big shot in the Green Gang. Former detective in the French Concession.

Operates from the Great World Amusement Arcade.

An entertainment complex in the International Settlement. Five floors. Balconies. Towers. Rickety bamboo fire escape. Known as the “stairway to heaven”. Suicidal gamblers leap from the top.

Fan-tan. Mahjong. Contortionists. Pickpockets. Cricket and tortoise races. Tightrope walkers. Ice-cream parlours. Marriage brokers. Ring-toss games.

Firecrackers. Peep shows. Herbalists. Slot machines. Mirror maze. Stuffed whale. Shanghai’s fastest electric lift. Slits in the side of cheongsams. Vice quotient increases with every staircase climbed.

Earwax cleaners. Love-letter writers who guarantee results. Western-style toilets, exhibited as a novelty. Punters dare each other to use them. Green Gang thugs with topknots watch over the girls.

Big-Eared Du, casino boss. China’s Al Capone. Used to work for Huang - now outranks him. Controls the Shanghai opium trade. Keeps three monkey heads sewn into his silk shirt at the small of his back. Believes, correctly, they bring him good luck.

Close to Chiang Kai-shek. Handles the KMT’s anti-Communist operations. Disarms workers’ militias. Beheads agitators. Sexually disfigures women with short hair.

Office full of lucky charms. Hands them out to his thugs. They sometimes work.

Five Minerals Powder comes from the Loess Plateau. Shaanxi Province. Northwest China. Miners dwelling in thousand-year-old cave houses. Buy ingredients from morlocks. Dig into the Hollow Earth.

Zhang Zongchang. The Dogmeat General of Shandong Province.

Has a deal with Huang. Often seen in the Great World. Ships the Powder to Shanghai aboard his armoured trains.

Keeps court in Jinan. Arms dealers. Journalists. Concubines. Jesters. Cossack mercenaries. Feasts of roast duck in heated mansions while the countryside starves. Gallons of plum wine to toast the General’s health.

Gigantic penis. Addicted to pai gow. Writes terrible poetry. Keeps black Chow Chow dogs for their meat. Father was a trumpeter and professional head shaver. Mother a witch.

Tests new swords on the skulls of prisoners. Hangs dissidents from telephone poles. Proud of his small air force. Bankrolling the film career of his favourite actress, Yang Naimei.

Taxing Shandong to death. Has printed so much paper money that it’s become worthless. Likes to hand huge wads of the stuff out as tips.

Soldiers disorganised. Routinely defect. Peasant mobs rise against him under the Red Spear Society flag, disrupting Powder traffic. Insists everything’s under control.

Brings his friends everywhere he goes.

The Menshikov Brothers - gigantic Cossacks. Tong Huaga - Taoist fortune teller, mentally details trains. Zoya - pale silent Russian nurse. Date Junnosuke - katana-wielding samurai, self-proclaimed “continental ronin”, drinking buddy. Sentimental about bushido. Weeps into the beer.

In debt to Wu Fang.

Legendary criminal mastermind. Dwells in a hidden cave fortress in Shaanxi. Everyone but Zhang terrified of him. Afraid to speak his name.

Has a demon watching Zhang. Bat-winged flying eye that follows him around. Projects a weak death ray. Zhang likes showing it his dick.

Victor Sassoon. 3rd Baronet of Bombay.

One of China’s richest men. Comes from a family of rich Baghdadi Jews - the Rothschilds of the East. Lives in the 10th-floor penthouse of the recently constructed Cathay Hotel, overlooking the Bund.

Acquired a limp in a Great War plane crash. Served with distinction with the Royal Flying Corps.

Amateur photographer. Racehorse owner. Ivory collector. Pen pals with Charlie Chaplin. Owns more than a thousand properties across central Shanghai. Seems a little shy, but friendly enough.

Gordon Currie. Manservant. Bodyguard.

Squat army sergeant. Served with Sassoon in the war. Grateful to him. Never far from his side.

Cockney accent. Bald. Spent a few years as a pirate hunter in the South China Sea. Bicep tattoo of a dragon. Likes to break bones.

Some months ago a pair of Russians arrived in Shanghai. Brunette in her twenties. Bearded man in his fifties with hypnotic, hollow eyes.

Brunette was sick. Skin turning blue. Dying. Had, in fact, already died. Stripped naked for Sassoon - exposed her bullet holes. Love at first sight.

Anastasia Romanov. Heir to the Russian throne.

Rasputin. Mad monk. Dug her body out of a mass grave near Yekaterinburg. Used his necromancy to bring her back to life.

Can’t indefinitely keep her upright. Needs a certain fluid, painfully extracted from the living body of a Five Minerals Powder addict, to restore her to full health.

Has set up a lab in the Cathay Hotel basement. Gleaming medical equipment. Bubbling alembics. Freezers full of heads.

Sassoon’s arranged for the Green Gang to flood Shanghai with the drug.

Anastasia singles out addicts who interest her. Brings them back to the Cathay. Straps them to a table.

Rasputin vivisects them. Extracts their vital fluids. Dumps the bones in the sewer.

Makes dumplings from excess organs. Sells them in the hotel’s Peking Banquet restaurant, under the name Emperor’s Surprise.

The Cathay Hotel’s famous for its parties.

Creme de menthe for breakfast. Pet gibbons on leashes. Millionaire heiresses fuck war correspondents in the halls. American film stars walk around naked, fondle the porters, demand more oysters and cocaine.

Bathtubs full of cognac. Tory MPs in ballgowns. Oil magnates spank flappers. A Hong Kong rubber merchant offers a Sikh policeman twenty thousand dollars to lick vomit off his shoe. Sailors threaten to toss a houseboy off the roof.

Heaving banquet tables. Platters of roast duck. Carp eaten alive. A bright-eyed lady journalist hands you an opium pipe. “Don’t be such a fusspot, dear. This is the East!”

Anastasia mingles with the crowd. Doesn’t talk much. Smiles secretively when her name is asked. Looks rosier by the day.

Plans to marry Sassoon. Make him the new Tsar of Russia. Use his enormous fortune and political clout to raise an army for Bolshevik overthrow. First step in one of Wu Fang’s many plans for world domination.

Can’t wait to be alive again. Dearly looking forward to ruling the world.