Drifting Down the Old Whangpoo

There was a mysterious old guy Roy saw now and again walking in the neighborhood who would disappear for weeks or months until Roy thought he must have died or gone away and then suddenly there he was, wearing the same baggy brown suit and black slouch hat with a crumpled brim. Roy wondered who the man was and asked around about him but nobody had any information. Most everyone Roy asked had not noticed the guy, not even Don Diego Rosagante, who stood all day and night outside Phil and Leonard’s Restaurant on Bavaria Avenue opening the door for tips. Don Diego Rosagante, whose real name was Emmanuel Snitzer, prided himself on being at the very least on nodding acquaintance with everybody in the neighborhood. He called himself Don Diego because, as he explained, “that was Zorro’s real handle.” He’d adopted Rosagante, which means “splendid” in Spanish, “because it’s a lot classier-sounding than Snitzer.” Don Diego was forty-six years old and lived with his mother over Rube and Ruby’s Laundromat where his mother worked beating dust and dirt out of rugs in a lot out back.

After Roy described the man to him, Don Diego said, “Oh, yeah, I think maybe I seen him goin’ by a few times, always from across the street, though. He looks like that actor got knifed or poisoned by a child prostitute named Little Kiss in a floating cat house driftin’ down the old Whangpoo River in the movie Shanghai After Midnight. That Little Kiss was a real doll.”

Roy figured the guy was in his late sixties or seventies because he was slightly stooped and shuffled his feet. A few months passed between sightings and then, just before Roy’s twelfth birthday, on the first really cold day in October, the man was heading in Roy’s direction on Washtenaw.

“Pardon me, mister,” Roy said to him before the man could pass, “could I ask you a question?”

He stopped and looked at Roy. They were almost the same height. Roy had not noticed before how short the man was. His nose was very long and mottled like an old dill pickle, and his eyes were almost closed so that Roy could not tell what color they were.

“You already have,” the man said.

Roy hesitated for a moment, then smiled and said, “You’re right, I did.”

“What’s your next question?”

“Do you live around here?”

“There’s no price on my head, if that’s what you’re looking for. No reward for turning me in.”

The man spoke with an accent that Roy did not recognize.

“Where are you from?”

The man raised his head slightly and from under his heavy lids studied the boy’s face. He kept smiling.

“Before Chicago, you mean?”

Roy nodded.

“Why do you stop to ask me this?”

“I don’t know. I’ve seen you around and I’m just curious, I guess.”

“Hongkew.”

“I never heard of that place. Where is it?”

“If you’re really curious, you’ll find out,” the man said, and walked away.

The next time Roy was in the library he looked up Hongkew in the encyclopedia. Hongkew, it said, was a ghetto in Shanghai, China, where Jewish refugees from Europe lived after Germany invaded their countries before and during World War II.

Roy told Don Diego Rosagante that he might be right about the old man after all.

“What do you mean?” asked Don Diego.

“I ran into him walkin’ on Washtenaw and he told me before he came to Chicago he lived in Hongkew, which is part of Shanghai. So maybe he was in that movie you saw where the guy gets murdered on a boat in the river.”

“The Old Whangpoo. He said that, huh?”

“He didn’t say the name of the river, or even Shanghai. He just told me Hongkew, so I looked it up in the encyclopedia and it said that’s where Jews went to in China to escape the Nazis during the war.”

“How about that?” said Don Diego. “Hey, next time you see him, ask how well did he know Little Kiss.”