The Chinese Bandit

by Stephen Becker

  After a respectable delay, Jake headed for the cab, ramming his way again through a platoon of beggars. They were like packs of dogs in the street. There were millions of them in China and they annoyed the decent foreigners. Jake knew that many were organized, an elaborate union with territories laid out like wards and districts, with apprentices and journeymen and masters, and for all Jake knew a training academy. Seeing one with rotten stumps for teeth, he grew queasy again, but he reminded himself that all serious money was hard-earned, so pushed on. Their foul breath sickened him; it was the stench of a bad latrine, and inhuman.

  He rapped on the door of the cab and waved cheerfully to Garreau. “China!” he bawled, over the music.

  Garreau called, “The lieutenant won’t like this.”

  “Stand by the truck.”

  “Couldn’t move if I wanted to,” Garreau said.

  “Stand fast and show the colors,” Jake said. And they stood fast, with the music for entertainment and the beggars for company; and finally no more rickshas came, and the crowd of beggars thinned.

  The funeral seemed to have moved along.

  “You know,” Garreau said, “this vehicle is on a slant.”

  “We lost the rear wheels,” Jake said.

  “And a radiator cap and a pair of windshield wipers,” Garreau said.

  In doorways, at the mouths of alleys, a few loiterers still watched. Jake heard one of them say, “It is a foreign engine for uphill travel.”

  Jake said to Garreau, “It’ll be a story for your kids.”

  Garreau strangled on a hysterical laugh.

  Jake squinted at him: “You about to cry?”

  “I’m a Christian,” Garreau said. “I never saw a place like this.”

  “Hell,” Jake said, “we’re lucky we still got our jock.”

  “Okay. We’re lucky. Now what?”

  “Back to the compound.”

  “On two wheels?”

  “We’ll take a ricksha,” Jake said. “Must be some around.”

  “You got no brains, Sergeant. What about the cargo?”

  “Shucks,” Jake said, “you’re right. Well, you’re the M.P. You stand guard. I’ll go report and bring some help.”

  “That’s it,” Garreau said. “See if you can get the United States Marines. I hear they’re tough.”

  Jake hailed a bicycle ricksha, and settled back in great contentment.

  4

  Jake was announced; he marched in, halted briskly and froze at attention. He looked at Harry Truman’s bow tie. The photograph was tilted. Not Jake.

  Behind him the door swung shut. Jake swallowed hard, up to his ass in it now.

  Colonel Leonhardt said, “At ease, Dodds.”

  Jake stood easy, but not at rest; he shifted briskly into the new position, and once there he was motionless, staring at the polka-dotted bow tie. He figured they would break him to private and brig him for five years, and then a dishonorable discharge. His blood ran bitter.

  “Oh hell,” the Colonel said. “Sit down there.”

  Warily, Jake looked him in the eye.

  “Come on, come on,” the Colonel said, waving a fat hand. “You’ve got twelve years, I’ve got twenty-five. We don’t need to bow and scrape.”

  “Aye aye, sir,” Jake said. His muscles eased and his mind leapt: could he hope? Maybe. He sat and waited with that look of respectful interest the brass always appreciated. He saw his service record on the Colonel’s desk. Warm air flowed through the screened windows. The Colonel was a thickset man, and could not be enjoying the heat. His hair was crew-cut, black with a sprinkle of silver over the ears; his brown eyes were hard as bullets, and his nose was a wrestler’s snout. A good man in a waterfront bar, once.

  “Dodds,” he said, “I hear things about you that I don’t like. That I don’t understand.”

  “Yessir,” Jake said, and heard the beat of his own heart.

  “You’ve got twelve years. You’ve got a Navy god damn Cross, a Silver Star and a Purple Heart. You’re an expert rifleman. The only thing you ain’t got is a Good Conduct ribbon, and I guess you never will.”

  “Yessir,” Jake said.

  “You know more about small arms than any man in Tientsin. Maybe more’n anybody west of Pearl.”

  “Yessir,” Jake said.

  “And now I hear this strange story.”

  “Yessir,” Jake said, “what’s that, sir?” His skivvy shirt lay sticky. He was too big, and short of breath.

  “I hear you want to quit,” the Colonel said. “Now I ask you, Sergeant, what kind of talk is that?”

  “Well, I’ve just been thinking about it, sir,” Jake said. My God. “Just thinking it over. From all angles.” Was that all!

  “That’s what I figured,” the Colonel said. “That’s why I sent for you. I said to myself, the man is too good to lose. I have a duty to the Corps, and part of that duty is to hang on to sailors like you.”

  Jake smiled briefly in acknowledgment. “Sailor” was an insult at first, or from your equals, but after some years, and from your superiors, it was an endearment. Behind his polite smile Jake was laughing insanely.

  “Now, tell me what’s on your mind,” the Colonel said.

  “Well,” Jake said, “it’s a big world out there. And no more war. Thought I might go into business. Be my own man. I mean, what’s America for.”

  “No particular beefs about the Corps.”

  “No, sir. Corps been mother and father to me.”

  “Ah,” the Colonel said warmly. “But are you sure. I see you’ve been up and down a couple of times. Might bear a grudge.”

  Jake shook his head and looked shocked. “No grudge, sir. First time it was my own temper. I, ah, struck an officer.” A flash of anger brightened him even now, years later; son of a bitch of a Navy lieutenant with a million-dollar doll on his arm, and Jake half bombed with the usual scrawny whore, and this sailor saying, “Oh, Marines. We have Marines aboard the carrier, you know. Officers. To wash the admiral’s skivvies, and keep the head clean.” And Jake the only jarhead in the place, surly, stumping up like a dinosaur and flattening the prick, and turning to smile sweetly at Tits there and say, “You know, a broad with an ass like yours,” and then somebody hit him with something and he woke up behind bars. “I don’t seem to be a gentleman,” Jake went on.

  The Colonel chuckled in a fatherly manner.

  “Probably officers and enlisted men should never drink in the same spots,” Jake said.

  “Second time seems to have been just bad habits.”

  Jake nodded firmly. “That’s it, sir. Sorry to say it was the best week of my life.”

  The Colonel cocked his head. “What’d you do? Record doesn’t say.”

  “No, sir, I guess it doesn’t. I spent it in a kind of hotel a few miles from Kobe. Bathhouse, whorehouse, restaurant and so on. It was pure pleasure from start to finish. Only thing was, I, ah, extended a forty-eight by about five days.”

  “Dumb damn thing,” the Colonel said. “Could’ve been back there every weekend forever.”

  “Well, that’s it.” Through his shirt front, Jake scratched his chest. His fingers came away moist. “If I was my own man I could do as I pleased.”

  “You know,” the Colonel said, “it’s little enough the Corps asks.” He opened a desk drawer and set one foot on it; he leaned back in his swivel chair and broke wind absently. “Just show up on time, and don’t bitch when you’re asked to kill somebody. Once we settle in anywhere, like here, discipline’s not too rough. Plenty of time off, and we stand up for each other. Hell, you know all that.” He brooded. “Look. The war’s over. They’ve cut us way down. That means whoever we keep ought to be the best. You understand? We’ll have some little wars, skirmishes. But mostly it’ll be good times and free beer, and afterward a pretty fair pension. Chrissake, Sergeant, if the Corps runs to seed what’s the country got?”

  “Well, I don’t know what they got anyway,” Jake said. “They got a lot of fo
lks made money out of the war. They got a lot of politicians came in for half a year to pick up a record and a cheap medal. They got the same fraternity boys in the same leather chairs playing high-low with their stocks and bonds.”

  “That’s unimportant,” the Colonel said. “The main thing is we won a rough war. We did save the world, you know.”

  “We did, huh? You don’t mind my saying so, Colonel, it looks like just about the same kind of shitbirds in charge of the world as before. They just call themselves other names.”

  “Not true,” the Colonel said. “Although I wouldn’t give you one Chinese dollar for the average civilian. I’ll agree with you that far. There’s another thing: why would you want to leave the Corps and go out into a world full of shitbirds?”

  “Tell you,” Jake said, “in a world of shitbirds even a half-wit can go places.”

  “That’s so,” Leonhardt said grudgingly. He extracted a kerchief from his hip pocket and swabbed his wrinkled brow. Jake took the act for permission to do the same. “No question that you’re better than average all around. What would you do outside?”

  Cautiously Jake said, “Thought I might stay here awhile, and see what export-import was all about.”

  “Here?” Leonhardt flung up his hands, rocking forward to scrabble for the edge of his desk as his chair rolled. “This place is finished. The State Department’s pulling out. We’re pulling out. The Reds come in, there is no export-import. You’re crazy. Sergeant. How you even going to get a passport? Not to mention that we don’t have to discharge you here. We can send you out home first.”

  “Then I might try Japan,” Jake said.

  “Ah.” The Colonel nodded, canny and sympathetic. “You really like Asia.”

  “Yes,” Jake said.

  “You’ll go crazy,” the Colonel said flatly. “These people haven’t even got an alphabet. You ask for the men’s room and get directed to the train station. Crissake, even I got in trouble last year.”

  “Heard about that,” Jake said, “but no details. What was it, anyway? If, ah, if I may ask, sir.”

  “It was my driver, not me,” the Colonel said, “but when they embarrass a colonel they get more apologies, and gifts, and formal acknowledgments and all that. We were tooling along the boulevard in my jeep and a little old lady pigeon-toed out of the mob, dashed right across, and we hit her. Broke her leg. Turned out it was an evil spirit.”

  “Evil spirit,” Jake said.

  “That’s it,” the Colonel said. “That is, there was one following her. I had it all explained to me. Evil spirits only travel in straight lines. So if you’ve got one on your tail and you want to shake him, you cut in front of a vehicle, and cut it close. Vehicle detaches evil spirit. So this old dame cut it too close. We paid the bills. Listen, these people are very different. Different enough so you could really hate them. You understand?”

  “Well, I know they’re different,” Jake said comfortably, but the Colonel was not listening.

  “Or you’ll die of it,” the Colonel said. “Sooner or later. Cholera. Typhoid. Dysentery. All that night soil on the lettuce. Or you go Asiatic, and start creeping around in women’s clothes. Crissake, boy. Not,” he added quickly, “that I have anything against these people. You take your average educated Chinaman, he’s all right, quite a fellow, good businessman and some of them very artistic and all that. But hell, boy, you’re no businessman anyway.” He slapped Jake’s records. “You’re a fighter and a wild man. You’re a big, strong dumb fucker with a bad temper. Exactly what we need. An outlet. The Corps is an outlet for all that. You use it constructively. You try this other thing and you’ll be sorry as hell ten years from now, when it’s too late.”

  “Nothing ventured, nothing gained,” Jake said.

  “You’re important, Dodds,” the Colonel said. “You know the Takarev Model Forty?”

  “Seven point six two millimeters,” Jake recited. “I could break it down blindfolded.”

  “And reassemble it. Well, that’s the sort of thing we need. I hate to see you throw away a good career. Listen: I’ll get you a transfer anywhere you want if you take another hitch. That’s a promise.”

  “I appreciate it,” Jake said.

  “Washington,” the Colonel said. “The embassy in Paris. I just don’t want you to make a mistake.” He considered, and glowered. “Business! They hijacked you. That’s what they call business around here. Clean you out in a minute. Can’t trust a Chinaman.” With real curiosity he asked, “How’d that all happen, anyway? Were you scared?”

  Jake said, “No,” and eased off: “I was scared on Saipan.”

  “That was the Purple Heart.”

  “Right,” Jake said in a lively voice. “A Jap grenade went off right between my feet. I was all blood inside the legs and I figured the family jewels were blown right off me, and I was going to put a bullet through my own head if that was true. I was lying there in the tropical jungle and I was never so cold in my whole life. That was scared. The other day, that was nothing. At the worst, in a jam like that, you shoot two or three and the others run for home. Sorry, sir. Didn’t mean to talk so much.”

  “No, no. Interesting, interesting,” the Colonel said. “You think about this. You do right by the Corps and the Corps’ll do right by you. Hell,” he said, “I know how you feel. After Niggeragua there wasn’t a god damn thing to do until Pearl Harbor. We just drank and whored. But then they needed us, and we were ready. Always happens. You’re something like me, you know. No reason you shouldn’t be an officer. You wouldn’t believe,” he said gloomily, “the lieutenants they send me now. Anyway, my advice is to forget about China. You really don’t want to spend your life with these people.”

  Don’t want to spend my life with these people, Jake thought. To the Colonel he said, “I’ll think hard about it. I won’t do anything until I’ve talked to you again.”

  “That’s the spirit. Maybe you’d like further training, some specialist school. Surveyor. A pilot, maybe. You think about it.”

  “I will, sir.” Jake rose. So did the Colonel, and extended a hand. Jake shook it. He had ten pounds on the Colonel and maybe four inches of reach. Plus fifteen years, maybe more. He imagined the Colonel puffing hard, and folding from a shot to the gut. Then a chop to the side of the head. A big round man. He would bounce twice.

  “Have a good time meanwhile,” the Colonel said. “Watch out for clap. Use the pro kits. You wear your decorations?”

  “Oh, yessir,” Jake lied.

  “Good. We like to impress these people. I suppose there’s still a chance we can save this country, but the odds are against us.”

  Jake made sympathetic noises.

  “You come and see me a week from today,” the Colonel said.

  Jake promised, and the Colonel shoved his records to one side and fussed with desk drawers. Jake was halfway out the door when the Colonel’s voice, crisp and cold, halted him.

  Jake turned. “Yessir.”

  “It is customary,” the Colonel said, “to stand at attention until dismissed. It’s the Corps’ polite way,” and he smiled thinly, “of demonstrating respect.”

  “Aye aye, sir,” Jake said, and waited, rigid.

  Dushok had loitered, waiting for him in a corner of the parade ground. They walked together in the shade of B barracks.

  “What was that all about?” Dushok asked.

  “Reenlistment.”

  “I thought it might be the truck you lost.”

  Jake said nothing, and they walked along for some way.

  “In the old days,” Dushok said, “if a village had two stonemasons and one butcher, and the butcher committed murder, they would hang one of the stonemasons for it. That way justice was done and society was not discommoded.”

  “Now what’s that all about?” Jake asked.

  “The Chinese police have shot four beggars for that hijack,” Dushok said. “Tomorrow morning the Colonel will receive a long, flowery letter from the Chinese government. Just f
or the record.”

  Again Jake said nothing.

  “I may have to nail you to the wall,” Dushok said.

  “Ah, blow it out your ass,” Jake said, and walked another way.

  5

  “A festive evening,” Kao said. “Like a national holiday.” It was so: the Palace of the Night Chickens seemed noisy and crowded.

  “Carrying things too far,” Jake said. “Two lieutenants and a captain.” He drank, openly annoyed, and huffed aloud. “And those civilians look like politicians. The one with the eagle’s nose, the little guy, he waves his hands when he talks.”

  “There is plenty of talking,” Kao said, raising his voice slightly.

  The Marine officers laughed in gusts. “Shee-it,” one of them said, “I never did learn Morse code,” and they rollicked some.

  “More wine,” Kao suggested.

  “Yes indeed,” Jake said. Kao poured the hot, clear grain spirit. With his supper Jake had drunk the hot yellow wine, but this clear by-gar, as the Chinese called it, was sterner stuff, to match his mood.

  Mei-li had said helplessly, “I didn’t expect you tonight.”

  “Dry cup,” he said to Kao.

  “I am older and less ferocious,” Kao said. “Forgive me if I don’t keep up with you.”

  “Got to celebrate,” Jake said.

  Sue was beating the p’i-p’a like a banjo, and the Prince was browsing at the library.

  “All right,” Jake said, and set down the cup unlipped. “Maybe I ought to smoke.”

  Across the room the two new civilians argued. The taller of them, the one with a goat’s nose, spoke in booms and blasts. “A hundred years,” he claimed. “Until then they’ve got to have foreign management.”

  The little one said, “Ze question is,” and was drowned out by the captain, at a table much too close to Jake: “In San Francisco. You couldn’t tell if it was a house or not. I mean, a sorority house maybe.”

  “That’s what they are,” Jake muttered. “A god damn sorority.”

  “Forgive me,” Kao said. “My stupid way with foreign languages.”

  “No, no, no, I’m sorry,” Jake said. The p’i-p’a whinnied and twanged. The little fellow was a Frenchman, maybe. Jake drank up. “Tell me something cheerful.”