Chapter 53

The next morning at the crack of dawn, in order to stir up momentum for his operation and divert the attention of the Japanese Army, Leitao rode his motorcycle at full speed to the entrance of a newspaper office in the American Concession (Hongkou District). He pulled up, cut the engine, and leapt off the bike, bolting toward the entrance. He never expected to run headlong into someone coming from the other direction. "Bang!" Leitao felt as if he had collided with a wall that was soft yet strangely stubborn, and the impact sent him stumbling back a step. At the same time, he heard a flurry of gibberish in a foreign tongue. Looking up, he saw a foreign woman with blonde hair and blue eyes—it was Alice. She, too, had been knocked dizzy. The suitcase and camera she had been carrying clattered to the ground, and the colorful scarf around her neck had skewed to one side, looking like a drunken ribbon. "Hey! You jerk, are your eyes growing on top of your head?" Alice shouted in Chinese, heavily accented. Her bright blue eyes were wide as copper bells, flickering with little flames of anger. As she spoke, she scrambled to fix her disheveled hair.