At the Willow Wine shop he knocked. His san-luerh was undamaged, which was perhaps a favorable omen. No one answered his knock. He pounded. In time he heard an angry voice. He pounded again. “Who is it?” “It is I.” A bolt screeched; the gate creaked open an inch or two. “We need no san-luerh,” the voice said. “At this hour! We are a hotel and a restaurant, not a railway station!”
“The American sent me,” Feng said.
The gate swung further and a round head emerged. “And who are you?”
“I am Feng his horse.”
“His horse! I have never seen you.”
“No one sees the ricksha man.”
Hai Lang-t’ou squinted fiercely, but opened the gate. “You have some token?”
Like a lizard’s tongue after a fly, Feng’s hand produced his credentials from his pocket.
“Hsü! Fifty American dollars!” Hai held the bills to the morning light.
“Few ricksha men carry so much.”
“You could have stolen it,” Sea Hammer said.
“Only to show it to Hai Lang-t’ou? Does a thief wear bells and carry a torch?”
“Come in here and tell me what is afoot,” Hai said grimly.
“Come out here and step into my san-luerh,” Feng said. “He has found his Japanese and lost his woman.”
“Curse his Japanese. I know about that. And what does he want with that woman anyway? A fancy whore.”
“The woman is a doctor,” Feng said, “and they were to fly off together, over the water to America.”
“Nonsense. Women are not doctors.”
“Nevertheless. Hai Lang-t’ou, time fleets. Trouble calls. The American is an essential man. When we abandon essential men, the heavens fall.”
“Do not scold me,” Hai grumbled. “Who are you to rebuke a fat man?”
“Only the ricksha driver. I am not essential.”
“And my belly yet empty,” Hai complained.
“You must come.”
“Come where?”
“To the Beggars’ Hospital in Rat’s Alley.”
“Oh gods,” Hai groaned. “Tsitsihaerh.”
“Come.”
“Without a weapon? Wait here, ricksha man.” Sea Hammer turned away.
“My name is Feng. And Master Hai—”
“What is it? Are we in haste, or are we not?”
“My fifty,” Feng said.
“Ai-ya,” Hai cried. “Such absence of mind! Forgive me. In times of crisis, you know …”
“I know.”
29
Inspector Yen was not an excitable man. He was a bad shot with the pistol, but this derived from faulty coordination of hand and eye, not from tremors or sudden surges of hot blood. Nevertheless, he chewed his lower lip now and when he was not cursing he invoked the aid and protection of the supernatural. He was tailing the black sedan at a respectful distance, over the canal and north through Ha Ta Men, and every time he slowed for a cyclist, a honey cart or a gaggle of pedestrians he risked stalling. Moreover, to remain inconspicuous he could not lean on the horn, and the siren was unthinkable.
He took a chance: cutting away from Hatamen Street, he raced for Sung Yun’s compound. If this was Kanamori! Again he imagined himself a true policeman in an ordinary city. “Sergeant Shin? Inspector Yen here. I want twenty men fully armed, here and here and here, and roadblocks in this place and that place, and in precisely thirty minutes you will place a telephone call to the venerable Master Sung …”
Instead of which, one weary if barbered inspector was racketing through grimy alleys, heart and engine knocking. If this was Kanamori … The wolf hunts in packs, and shares his kill; the tiger hunts alone, and gorges.
“Fly now,” he said to his Packard. “Fly to Sung Yun’s house, and let me look one look, and if it is Kanamori I shall commandeer a new ignition for you.”
30
“Just man the telephone,” Burnham said. “Anything whatever, including Kanamori’s head or mine, for Hao-lan.”
“Of course,” said Dr. Shen, “but what you are doing is insane.”
“Not if they know he’s here.”
“Oh yes,” Kanamori said. The Japanese major had vanished again, and the simpleton Kanamori stood beside the cumbersome wooden cart, bald as a melon and tatterdemalion. He was not playacting. He seemed to slip in and out of sanity.
“We should call the police,” Shen worried.
“Ah, the bureaucracy! No. The beggars, maybe. I can go to the beggars, who hear everything. But not before I see this hoard. I need to know what I must trade. One hour. I need to know what is at stake, and I need to meet these villains on my own ground and not thrash about Peking like a blind man. Do not negotiate. Only tell them I await instructions, and what they want they can have.”
Kanamori bobbed his head. “Oh yes.”
“Now let us go,” Burnham said.
There were perhaps forty corpses in the wagon. God bless you all, Burnham thanked them, God bless you and keep you and let us do this one thing right.
They cleared a space in the bed of the wagon, and Burnham climbed aboard and lay prone. He waggled the pistol. While Kanamori and Shen heaped the babies about him, Burnham’s flesh crawled. “More,” Kanamori said. “All my babies.” A tiny foot dangled over Burnham’s right eye. The little bodies were frigid to the touch, cold and smooth as slate in winter. Hands, blind faces, smooth bellies, little porcelain people. Burnham swallowed his gorge.
“It is well,” Shen said.
“Invisible?”
“You have disappeared.”
“The tarp, then. Open in front. Kanamori: between the shafts.”
“Oh yes.”
Burnham sighted on the small of Kanamori’s back. But the Japanese would be no trouble. Within the madness a samurai’s obsessive mulishness dominated; he would stand fast. “This is for Hao-lan, Kanamori.”
“Oh yes. For my lady.”
Shen flung the tarp and laced it in place. Burnham lay in gloom. Now he could not see Kanamori’s head. “Be good, Kanamori. Stay between the shafts and pull like a donkey.”
“I do this for her,” Kanamori said.
“Then move.”
“Good luck,” Shen said.
“You too,” Burnham said.
“I do this for the dead swordsmen,” Kanamori chanted, and leaned into his work. The cart rumbled forward. “I do this for my mother, who was a daughter of Han. I do this for my father, in the village of Saito on the River Omono near Akita, who was a warrior.”
Outside the gate, and into Rat’s Alley, Burnham said, “A brisk pace but no unseemly haste. You are a workingman doing a job.”
“It is the job I do best. I am Kanamori Shoichi.”
And I am Jack Burnham, and if this goes sour I will kill a few. My fault. If they touch her! That face!
The face wavered, dissolved. Burnham panicked. He squeezed his eyes shut and concentrated; feature by feature Hao-lan returned. Hello, he said. Be strong.
My fault. International clown. Self-declared mythic hero. Guns and drums and wounds and women. Brainless!
The cart rumbled to a halt. “What have you there?”
Burnham could not see the speaker.
“Only look,” Kanamori said.
A corner of the tarp rose. “Hsüüü!” The tarp slapped into place. An ugly laugh. “You come from where?”
“From the Beggars’ Hospital.”
“So that is what they do at your hospital. Kill babies.”
Silence. The pistol was suddenly slippery in Burnham’s hand.
“Go on, then. Where do you take them?”
“To the burying ground,” Kanamori said, and the wagon inched forward.
Burnham breathed. A cop? A bad guy?
“It was a coolie in black,” Kanamori said. “We are alone now.”
Burnham could see both sides of the street far ahead but his range narrowed nearer the cart. A winter morning in Peking. There is a shoe, sock and legging shop, and ther
e kitchenware. Gilt characters on black or red signs. There a beggar, and a man-pulled ricksha. And a woman with three small children. No ravens or foxes skulking in doorways. No roadblocks. No beady-eyed dragons loitering conspicuously.
And in all those shops, behind all those walls, lived love, hate, hunger and gallstones; the mandarin with his four-inch pinkie nails or Head Beggar and his goiter. And this flyweight here is Kanamori! Ah, Hao-lan, Hao-lan! Half a billion in China suffering cancer, athlete’s foot, beriberi, torture by secret police, annual famine and annual flood, but Burnham inhabited his own hell. Only he knew what hell was: the absence of that woman with muddy eyes. Well, we all want love, a warm room, a full belly and children. The luxury of love—no, the necessity. Without it we are less than human. That is why the wheat grows, why the heart pumps blood, why Yen gumshoes and Sung Yun collects pieces. It is what Feng awaits and what Head Beggar mourns. In some titanically perverse way it is probably why Kanamori killed. It is why Hao-lan fights the kala-azar. And all my own bullshit, my wise-ass jokes and my truant prick and those voracious blondes, that was all to disguise the absence of love, and now I have it, my small but perfect other half, and I wish I believed in God or somebody who could lay a hand on her shoulder and lead her out of her torment.
They proceeded eastward, Kanamori Shoichi and his forty-one passengers, forty dead and one dying slowly.
“Tell me what you see,” Burnham said. “Speak as if singing, and do not turn.”
“I see the observatory, high upon the wall,” Kanamori sang.
“And in the street?”
“In the street I see men and women and children. I see a seller of corn in the ear. Where does he find corn in the ear at this season?”
“And why do we turn now?”
“To approach the Eastern Handy Gate, where there is a guard, and each day this guard greets me.”
“You are no longer Mother,” Burnham reminded him. “He will wonder.”
He did wonder. Within the massive, arched stone gate Kanamori halted, and a deep bass voice rumbled, “What have we here?”
“The poor dead little ones,” Kanamori said, and Burnham feared that the guard would recognize the voice, until he recalled that the guard had never heard it.
“Why, so it is: the baby cart. And where is the mute woman?”
Kanamori said, “She is dead.”
“Hu! A good woman she was, and hard-working. And how did she die?” Burnham could not see the guard but imagined a barrel-chested sergeant.
“She took her own life,” Kanamori said.
“That is evil, and bad luck even to speak of. So you will come each day?”
“If the gods wish.”
“Well, go along then.” Burnham heard the canvas rattle. “A big load today.” The buttery tones of a born gossip.
“And not the only baby cart in Peking,” Kanamori said.
“Hsü, it is a sorrow. The old woman gone too, and the bandits at the gates.”
Burnham dreamed of Hao-lan. His mind flickered like a news-reel. It was odd what a man remembered. A swimming pool in Tokyo, the YMCA, and Burnham aged six half drowned at the deep end, and no one noticed and he could not shout because of the water in his gullet, so he grabbed a passing Japanese foot and was towed to the shallows; he could still see the astonished Japanese face, the crew cut, the teeth. A quarter century later, ice on the Sungari and Burnham’s boot full of water. Hai told him to remove the boot and build a fire lest he lose his foot, and when Burnham protested—no time, danger—Hai and Lou sat on him, tugged the boot off, built a small fire and lectured him sternly. But how could you lose with lieutenants named Hai and Lou? Maybe that was Kanamori in the swimming pool. Maybe that was Lou guarding the gate.
Burnham realized uneasily that the world was now unmanageable, that good and evil were, like all old couples, coming to resemble each other. He offered a bargain to the gods: only let him pluck her out of this coil, and he would—well, what? Be faithful? Responsible? A decent man? Foolish promises without meaning. Fate and history made no deals. Life was a slow fire, and events were the chips and kindling, and the end was always ashes, which was what they would all be in fifty years. But oh those fifty years!
31
Dr. Shen was helpless. He sat at Nurse An’s desk and smoked while rage warred with grief. He knew he was smoking too much, but each day taught the same lesson. Life was heartbreaking, so what mattered a day more or less? Death was sure, so why not make a friend of it? It was no philosophy for a doctor, and he knew that he was wrong. Life was indeed cruel; its joys were therefore triumphs over great odds. And death was indeed sure, which was the best of all reasons to love life.
He should report this abduction. All well and good for the foreigner to prowl off like some bandit hero, but the police would be better, with their weapons, resources and informers. Yü! One asked only to heal children. One did without food, without sleep, without the comforts and pleasures of a hearth. One suffered senseless wars, venal politicians, greedy overlords. And now this irruption of foreigners, with plots and schemes and private wars!
A Japanese! He had scarcely noticed the “mute woman” at all. And this large, imperious American, plucking a flower of China! Dr. Shen’s heart ached. He had admired in silence, had felt his soul awaken at her entrance or her voice, and now …
Rat’s Alley was no longer simply an alley; it was a battlefield. If he told the police? He was to keep the telephone open. If Teng sat by the phone, and Shen braved the roadside wolves and walked quickly to the police station?
Who could say what web had been woven? He imagined himself speaking to the police. I am a doctor from the Beggars’ Hospital. For three years we have harbored a Japanese war criminal.
You have what?
Unknowingly, of course.
Continue.
This morning an attempt was made to abduct him.
One may hope it was successful.
It was not. A woman, a doctor, was abducted instead.
A woman? Abducted for a man? Women are not doctors.
The Japanese had lived as a woman. The abductors were in error.
Error, indeed. And who are these abductors?
We do not know. The ricksha man may have seen them, but he has disappeared.
What is this story of Japanese and doctors and abductors and ricksha men? What ricksha man?
The American’s.
Now an American! Who is this American?
He too sought the Japanese
By now the desk sergeant would be crooking a finger for help, and within minutes Dr. Shen would be a guest of the municipal constabulary.
He decided to omit the police. He would be a good soldier and sit by the phone. He was pouring tea when Feng and Hai burst in. He spilled tea and scalded his hand. “Feng!”
“They are here?”
“They are not here. Who is this?” Startled by his own shrill tone, Dr. Shen fought down rising alarm.
“A Sea Hammer and the American’s friend. Quickly now,” Hai urged, “Where are they?”
“That I do not know,” Shen said.
Sea Hammer came to him, angry and businesslike, and placed a fat finger on Shen’s nose. In the other hand he waggled a pistol, a huge weapon. Dr. Shen flinched. “Now, you listen,” Hai said. “You are a doctor, but even so I have killed more men than you have, and I will dispatch a few more for his sake if I must. I owe him a life.”
Dr. Shen made a stubborn mouth. He had never before been called upon for heroics. He rose to the occasion. “I will tell you nothing.”
“You will tell me where they are, and right now,” Hai said.
Feng said, “Good Doctor, we must know. These are a good man and a good woman and we must go to him and recover her.”
“We do not know you,” Shen muttered. “It is a matter of the woman’s life.”
“It is that!” Hai said. “And no time for debates.”
“You do indeed know us,” Feng said. “You know me; we
have taken food and drink together. We have raised a toast to the bride and groom. Now I bring this man, who is his friend and owes him a life.”
Teng and Nurse An had stepped into the room; Hai showed the pistol. “Fools!” he cried to all. “It was in my wineshop that they sealed their love!” His brown eyes flashed above his fat cheeks, and he loomed tall; the room seemed small and crowded. “This man and I killed Japanese for one whole winter on the frozen plain. Each stanched the other’s wounds, and we shared all, food and warmth and women and danger. I knew then that he was an essential man because he had crossed half the world to fight by my side, would not lie even in war and killed without hesitation but with reluctance. I was a skinny dog then and not worth a worn cash, but never did he hang back in my time of need. So I found that I could not hang back in his time of need, and for that season I too felt essential.”
Sea Hammer’s voice boomed. In his mind he heard the northerlies whistle down across Heilungkiang, saw a Japanese truck explode in flames, rejoiced again as a butt-plate bruised his shoulder. He could almost taste again a fat sturgeon caught and fried one frosty, clear morning, and he could almost hear Burnham gobbling the flaky hot fish and cursing because there were no onions and the barbarous Chinese grew no coffee. “We made no vows, because there are things we Chinese do not say aloud to foreigners, but he knew that his women and children would be my care as mine would be his care, and that one’s trouble would always be the other’s. Well, time has cooled the warriors’ blood, but the unspoken vow is the one we must not break, and what will the world think of me, and of us all, if I cannot find him now? Must I beg? I will beg. Must I plead? I will plead. Must I kowtow? I will kowtow. Must I beat it out of you? I will beat it out of you.” He made tiger’s teeth, and roared gently. “By the gods, this makes me young again! No use to play a lute before an ox,” he said to Feng. “I must thrash this fellow.”
The Last Mandarin Page 22
