“How many Communist battles against the Japanese have you counted, Mr. MacDonald?” The priest’s upper-class accent irritated the Scotsman. “Or do you need more time?”
“Very few battles,” MacDonald conceded. “And most to defend their own territories. I take your point.”
“Regardless, the Communists are effective,” Dewey Miller insisted. “And they’re not corrupt.”
“Not technically, Mr. Miller,” Mary observed. “Not pecuniarily. But doesn’t the ruthless pursuit of power, for whatever end, however benevolent, also corrupt?”
“That’s a moral question,” MacDonald objected, “almost a theological question for the good Father. It’s not a political question for the working press.”
“It is political,” Monsignor Charles answered. “The Communist leaders have been corrupted by their own dedication. Historically that’s not unique. The same thing has happened to Chiang Kai-shek, who believes he’s not only China’s sole hope, but China itself. He considers his own interests and the nation’s interests indivisible. Therefore, his first duty is to retain power—by whatever means. He, too, is corrupt morally and politically.”
“Moral arguments are a great intellectual exercise, but they’re not the gut issue.” Dewey Miller’s American pragmatism asserted itself. “No matter how you slice it, the Nationalists are a stinking mess of corruption. The Communists aren’t. I’m interested in their effectiveness, not their souls.”
“Besides, Mao’s not an oppressive dictator like Stalin or Hitler,” MacDonald said. “He’s making a better life for the Chinese people. Why shouldn’t he fight for power? He couldn’t do worse than the Gimo.”
“And they say,” Miller added, “that this Communism’s just a means to an end. Mao’s not a raving Bolshevik.”
“Gentlemen, we differ.” Mary’s excessively reasonable tone, her son knew, concealed acute annoyance. “I know no one as flexible tactically as Chou En-lai. I know no one more rigidly dedicated to his own ends. Have you heard of the Cheng-feng Yün-tung, the Movement to Order the Winds?”
“Can’t say I have,” Miller admitted.
“It began in 1942.” Mary’s voice was too sweet. “Total intellectual repression and a sweeping purge. The Movement sought to destroy all Mao’s personal enemies in the Communist Party and to insure that the survivors all practice utmost orthodoxy. Thought control, Gentlemen, orthodox Marxist-Leninist thought control as repressive and ruthless as any purge Stalin ever ordered. How can you possibly say they’re not real Communists?”
“Well,” Miller conceded, “I hadn’t heard about that.”
“Mr. MacDonald, may I introduce a personal note?” Mary asked. “I’ve been revolted by Chungking: American aid funds stolen, arms sold to enemies, intellectuals persecuted, peasants viciously exploited, money the only value. But it’s all very Chinese. If you’d lived in China as long as I, you’d know just how typically Chinese. Moral principles compel the Chinese to look after themselves and their families—at whatever cost to the people and the nation.”
“Confucian morality,” the priest murmured. “But who will look after them if they don’t themselves?”
“The Communists’ll try,” MacDonald said.
“They’re Chinese, too.” Mary pursued her thought. “They’ll use the most extreme means because they seek the most extreme ends. They are determined to create a Heaven on earth, a Marxist Heaven, when merely mitigating this Hell on earth would be a great achievement. The only thing worse than a cynical, self-serving Chinese is a Chinese dedicated to a noble, impossible goal. Like my acquaintance Chou En-lai, he’s twice as ruthless and cruel as the cynic.”
“Maybe no worse than other human beings, though you’ve given me lots to think about.” Dewey Miller rose. “But I’ve got to say I still prefer allies who are decisive and effective. The Nationalists are just no use.”
“The Communists deserve a chance, Mrs. Sekloong,” Archie MacDonald insisted. “They can’t be worse than the Nationalists.”
“Good God!” Mary exploded. “I’m not defending the Nationalists. Far from it. All I ask is that you moderate your transports for Chou En-lai and his henchmen. They’re not …”
“Mother, it’s time for you to leave if you’re to see Randall at the airport.”
“Oh, I’d forgotten. Gentlemen, another day, unless you’re bored with an old lady.”
“Bored, never, Ma’am,” Miller replied gallantly. “But convinced, no. I keep coming back to it: The Communists are efficient and honest.”
When Monsignor Charles had seen the correspondents out, he threw back his head and laughed.
“Now will you be good?” he asked. “That’s the clear-sighted foreign press for you. You know a clever Chinese can always fool a clever foreigner. And Chou En-lai is very clever.”
“A dusk take-off, very tricky,” Colonel Charles Sekloong observed. “But the pilots are good, very good.”
The Sekloongs had rapidly exhausted the conversational resources of their famous son-in-law. What more was there to say to Commander Randall Martin after sending affectionate greetings and exotic presents to Charlotte and the children?
Young Charles had pleaded important business elsewhere. Although he did not approve of Charlotte’s new marriage, which was bigamous in the eyes of the Church, he was no longer the callow young priest who, on religious principles alone, would have shrunk from any association with Randall Martin. He had on this occasion absented himself simply to avoid any more of the actor’s fatuous chatter.
Martin snapped at his five-man crew of Navy enlisted men: “You’re sure you’ve got all the film? I don’t want a reel turning up missing. We can’t do a retake.”
“Aye, aye, Sir,” answered his weathered chief petty officer. “We don’t want to come back again, either.”
“Impertinent,” Colonel Charles Sekloong muttered.
“We’re doing all right, Sir,” Martin said. “Just different ways from your people.”
“How do they get those water buffalo off the landing strip?” Mary interjected.
“You’ve seen the drill. Just before take-off, little boys shoo them away. Haven’t lost a plane to a buffalo yet,” Charles joked.
They did not mention the long-range Zero fighters operating from the newly captured airfield at Liuchow, three hundred and fifty miles to the east. Commander Randall Martin was already dreading the hazardous take-off from Sand Spit Island, which lay in midstream of the Chialing River. The cliffs flanking the gorge forced pilots to make a dangerous approach by weaving down to the short airstrip, and the transports were totally vulnerable to enemy fighters. American and Chinese interceptors would take off if the alarm were sounded by the network of thousands of aircraft spotters scattered across Japanese-occupied territory. But the transports’ best protection was a landing just before dusk, a quick turn-around, and a high-angle take-off.
A twinkling speck in the east resolved itself into a twin-engined aircraft. Landing lights glared through the haze, and the cockpit windows glittered like a greenhouse. Engines roaring at full power, the C-46 Commando swooped through the gorge and touched down amid clouds of red dust. Propellers whirling in reverse pitch, it halted a hundred feet from the wood-hut terminal. As the door opened, the engines still turned over slowly.
Two jeeps darted toward the idling aircraft. Commander Randall Martin waved from his perch on a stack of camera equipment. Colonel Charles Sekloong saluted in farewell.
The six men and their bulky equipment were embarked within three minutes, and the Commando swung around. While the pilot, almost standing on the brakes, moved the throttles to full power, the same jeeps discharged the incoming passengers at the terminal. Dr. George Chapman Parker, spry at sixty and wearing the single stars of a brigadier general, embraced Mary and shook Charles’s hand. Guinevere Sekloong Parker, who was swathed in an outsized field jacket, kissed her mother and father. The family watched the Commando’s juddering takeoff along the steel-strip runway.
The watchers on the ground saw what the pilot could not. A gray water buffalo loped onto the landing strip, pursued by a shouting twelve-year-old waving a long switch. The louder the boy shouted, the faster the frightened animal trotted. As the Commando left the ground, the buffalo broke into a frantic trot. A flashing four-bladed propeller tossed the animal forty feet into the air.
The Commando veered off the runway, sheered through a shack, and plowed to a stop in a rice paddy, one wing cocked high. Fearing an explosion, men tumbled from the hatches.
A jeep carrying fire extinguishers raced toward the aircraft. Clutching his medical bag, Dr. Parker clambered into a second jeep. The Commando lay inert like a beached silver whale.
The air crew were clustered a hundred feet from their wrecked aircraft. The pilot, a slim, red-haired captain, tensely puffed a cigarette.
“Goddamn it! Goddamn it!” he repeated. “At least I cut the switches. Goddamn it! What a way to crash. A goddamned cow.”
The sailors were a group apart. The chief petty officer knelt beside Commander Randall Martin, who lay unmoving on the ground.
“We hauled him out, Sir,” he told Dr. Parker. “But he’s out. Hasn’t moved or said a word.”
George Parker kneeled in the mud of the rice paddy. He flicked his brother-in-law’s eyelids open, applied his ear to the actor’s chest, and gently palpitated his skull. Finally Parker rose, shaking his head.
“He’s gone,” the Doctor said. “Broken neck.”
“A cow! For Chris’sake!” The chief petty officer pronounced Randall Martin’s epitaph. “What a shitty way to die!”
Charlotte Sekloong Way d’Alivère Martin received her parents’ delayed radiogram seventy-two hours later, the day before the Navy Department finally informed her of its deep regrets. Her mock-Moorish mansion in Beverly Hills was thereafter a miniature bedlam; telephones shrilling, doorbells chiming, and mail sacks piling up as motion-picture cameras ground for the sensation-seeking masses.
Caught up in preparations for the most ostentatious obsequies Hollywood had ever staged, Charlotte mercifully failed to comprehend fully her loss of the one man who had given her contentment. Those preparations were at least as complex as the staff work preceding an amphibious landing—and notably more efficient. Since patriotism marched in step with self-interest, the funerary pageant was staged by those two master publicity-mongers: the United States Government, through the U.S. Navy, and the motion-picture community, through Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Charlotte’s febrile spirit rose to the excitement, and only red Seconal capsules could bear her into disturbed sleep.
Dewey Miller received urgent demands for minute details of the crash, the embalming of the most famous body in the world, and its shipment to the United States. To his intense disgust, even Archie Mac-Donald was instructed to record the actor’s last days and death. Randall Martin bestrode the world of popular culture like a brazen colossus, and flags flew at half-mast throughout the Free World.
Tokyo proclaimed a school holiday to celebrate a “great victory.” RANDARU MAHTIN’S DEATH DEMORALIZES AMERICA, bannered the daily Yomuiri. HARRIWADO’S GOD OF FILM PERISHES, apothesized the rival Mainichi. “Do not weep for ‘Randaru’,” the Fujin Shukan (Ladies’ Weekly) counseled millions of stricken housewives and factory girls. “He was not the gallant hero he appeared in his films, but an evil enemy of the God-Emperor. The Goddess Amaterasu-Omikami herself struck him down.”
Colonel Tsuji Masanobu, the erratic strategist and spy master who had already attained semi-divinity as Japan’s “God of Operations,” did not deny that the martyred water buffalo had been divinely inspired; neither did his subordinates deny that their network of agents included a twelve-year-old buffalo-boy in Chungking.
Both Sir Jonathan Sekloong in The Castle on The Peak and Captain Jonathan Osgood Sekloong in a prisoner-of-war labor camp on the Kobe Docks were informed by the Japanese the day before Charlotte received her parents’ radiogram.
Sir Jonathan received the news with surpassing calmness. He, who had never met Randall Martin, was one of the few thousand human beings in the civilized world who had never seen the actor’s image flickering on the screen.
In the winter of 1944, the Sekloong was, at ninety-two, a living monument to Chinese endurance and courage. The Japanese had, therefore, dealt with him most correctly. Opal presided over a greatly diminished staff of servants, and many of the former splendors of The Castle had vanished. But the household suffered neither the depredations of drunken soldiers nor severe deprivation. The fact that the Sekloong household enjoyed a sufficiency of food was remarkable in a moribund Hong Kong, from which a million of its prewar population of 1.6 million had been removed, either by flight or by death. The Japanese still believed Hong Kong could serve the Imperial Forces in Southeast Asia as a major supply center and workshop—if only the Chinese would work harder and cease their wilful sabotage. Sir Jonathan’s active cooperation with the Greater East-Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere could unlock the gates that divided the conquerors from the recalcitrant Chinese community, if they could find the key to the Sekloong himself.
The Old Gentleman had met their previous approaches with formal expressions of gratitude and with protestations of unworthiness. He had regretted that his great age rendered him unfit to join the Japanese administration or even lend it his name. But the Japanese knew he was the enemy of the British, particularly Derwent’s, the Universally Virtuous hong; and they knew that he was the father of Sek Sai-loong, the martyr to Sino-Japanese amity who was commemorated by the shrine the Imperial Army had erected in Nanking. The occupation authorities in Hong King reasoned that Sir Jonathan must feel both bitter resentment against the British and a burning desire for vengeance upon his son’s assassins. This time, they were convinced, they could win him to their side.
Sir Jonathan’s protégé, Mosing Way, was an enthusiastic collaborator. He entertained every visiting Japanese dignitary and deployed the resources of the Bank of East Asia in the service of the Co-Prosperity Sphere.
“But, somehow it doesn’t do them much good,” the Senior Adviser to the Military Government confided to his old friend. “You know how inefficient we Chinese are. Papers are always getting lost, and it’s so difficult to enforce directives. Of course, I do my best.”
Mosing Way had assumed the role Sir Jonathan could not play. His effusive pretence of cooperation had already saved more than five hundred lives. The junks he controlled smuggled wanted men out of Hong Kong and landed Chungking’s agents, who sabotaged military installations and transmitted information on ship movements. Two or three such agents were normally part of the constantly changing staff of The Castle, for Sir Jonathan planned the elaborate deceptions Mosing Way executed.
The Old Gentleman’s bland obduracy deceived the Japanese more effectively than would either active cooperation or surly defiance. Besides, his grandson, Francis, the son of Sydney Sek, was amassing a fortune in Occupation yen and, since he was no fool, gold by trading for the Japanese. After reviewing the favorable auguries, Colonel Okamoto Fusanosuke, chief of civil affairs, decided to carry the report of Randall Martin’s death to Sir Jonathan personally.
“I regret, Your Excellency, that I am the bearer of ill tidings,” he said in good Mandarin. “The husband of your granddaughter Charlotte was killed yesterday in Chungking. A regrettable accident in which the Imperial Forces took no part. Please accept my deepest, most sincere condolences.”
“I am honored by your calling upon me and touched deeply by your news,” Sir Jonathan replied as formally. “I shall or
der mourning for the household.”
“Now that I am here,” Colonel Okamoto persisted, “perhaps we can chat about general affairs?”
“I am always delighted to chat. A useless old man sees too few guests nowadays.”
“I have finally secured permission to release your granddaughter-in-law from Stanley Internment Camp,” the Colonel added. “Though certain conditions are required. I have fought to have her released for some time, but my superiors must be satisfied. You’ll understand of course.”
“Of course,” echoed Sir Jonathan, who had used the same device many times. It was always more advantageous to present one’s self as an agent, rather than a principal, when negotiating. One could ascribe difficulties to recalcitrant principals, while claiming that all concessions were won by one’s own efforts.
Colonel Okamoto chatted for two hours before Opal insisted that Sir Jonathan needed rest. The Colonel left The Castle in his Packard staff car content that he was finally wearing away the Old Gentleman’s marble obstinacy. He had won no specific concession, and he had been maneuvered into releasing Sarah Haleevie Sekloong from the civilian internment camp at Stanley. Still, Colonel Okamoto reassured himself with the Japanese proverb that she was only a prawn to entice a tuna—and Sir Jonathan was definitely softening.
Sarah was bowed out of camp with expressions of profound regret for the long captivity that had reduced her to eighty-six pounds. She was further assured that, unlike the Germans, the Japanese had the highest regard for the Jews. She was mildly chagrined. Her premature release might be embarrassing after the Japanese defeat, and after all, her vegetables had been flourishing in one of the small plots the prisoners were allowed to help feed themselves.
That measured wry reaction proceeded from the sturdy self-reliance Sarah Haleevie Sekloong had learned during almost three years of captivity. The fabric of her securely privileged life had been shredded by the Japanese conquest, which deprived her of a home and a much-loved husband, whose fate she still did not know. The integrity of her body and her spirit had been shattered by the brutal mass rape. But she had gradually regained her self-esteem by attaining understanding that her body, but not her soul, had been soiled. Surviving in the internment camp had demanded all her resources, as had helping her fellow prisoners, who in turn helped her. She could not, therefore, permit herself to brood on her humiliation. Besides, she was by no means alone; a number of the women in the Stanley Camp had suffered the same brutal treatment. Outwardly once again sprightly, even seemingly frivolous when she was released, Sarah had developed a strength and compassion that would sustain her all her life. She longed only for Jonnie to make her totally whole again.
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