Sandalwood Death (46 page)

“Sun Bing,” he said, “where are the three German hostages?”

“Qian,” Sun Bing said with a teeth-grinding snarl, “go ahead, kill me, if that’s what you want. Everyone else in my family is dead, so it makes no difference to me if I live or die.”

“Tell me where the Germans are.”

“Them?” With a sarcastic grin, he began to sing:
“When you ask where all the German dogs are~~that makes this Supreme Commander’s spirits fly far~~they are sleeping in heaven~~they are hidden deep in the ground~~they exist in latrines~~they line the stomachs of dogs, that is where they are~~”

“Have you killed them?”

“They are alive and well, and it is up to you to go find them.”

“Sun Bing,” the Magistrate said as he let go of the neck and adopted a friendlier tone, “I have to tell you that Meiniang is now in the hands of the Germans, and if you do not release their people, they will hang her from the city gate.”

“That is up to them,” Sun Bing replied. “Marrying off a daughter is like spilling a pail of water. She is no longer my concern.”

“But she is your only daughter, and you owe her a lifetime of debts. If you refuse to free your German hostages, then I have no choice but to take you back with me today.” The Magistrate took Sun Bing by the arm and walked him out of the shed, where they were met by a burst of crowd noise. There on the dry riverbed, hundreds of men in their red kerchiefs, red sashes, and painted faces, under the leadership of several other men in stage costume, were heading their way, a bawling, raucous wave of black heads closing in and surrounding the Magistrate and Sun Bing before they could react. One of them, a general in a tiger-skin apron, his face painted like a monkey, leaped into the center, pointed his iron cudgel at the Magistrate’s head, and, affecting an accent from somewhere, said:

“Alien evildoer, how dare you cause our Supreme Commander to suffer such an outrage!”

“I, Gaomi County Magistrate, have come to negotiate the release of hostages and to take Sun Bing into custody!”

“County Magistrate, you shall do nothing of the sort! You are an evil spirit in human form. Destroy his evil powers, my children!”

Before he knew it, the people behind the Magistrate had dumped a pail of dog’s blood over his head, followed by a coating of manure. This was more filth than had ever degraded and soiled the fastidious Magistrate’s body. As his stomach lurched and nausea began to claim him, he bent over to vomit and, in the process, let go of Sun Bing’s arm.

“Sun Bing, bring the hostages to the north gate of the county seat tomorrow at noon, or your daughter will suffer grievously.” The Magistrate wiped his face with his hand, revealing a pair of eyes clouded with manure and blood; he presented a sad sight, and yet spoke with firm self-assurance: “Do not let what I say drift past your ears on the wind!”

“Kill him! Kill this dog-shit official!” many in the crowd shouted.

“I am doing this for your own good, fellow townsmen.” The Magistrate spoke from his heart. “After you deliver the hostages tomorrow, you may do whatever you please. Do not make the mistake of following Sun Bing.” He turned to the pair of Righteous Harmony Boxers and said in a mocking tone, “Then there’s you two. His Excellency Yuan, Governor of the Province, has sent an edict that Boxers are to be killed, down to the last man. None are to be spared. But since you have come from far away, that makes you guests of a sort, and I am willing to send you on your way in peace. Leave now, before provincial troops arrive, for by then it will be too late.”

His words had a stupefying effect on the men in the roles of Sun Wukong and Zhu Bajie, so he quickly took advantage of the changed mood. “Sun Bing,” he called out loudly, “your daughter’s life is at stake, and you must meet your responsibility. At noon tomorrow I will be waiting for you at the San Li River Bridge outside the north gate.” With that, he parted the crowd and strode purposefully down the street. His carriers rushed to pick up the palanquin and trot after him. He was also followed by the slightly off-tune strains of a Maoqiang opera, intoned by Sun Wukong:

“Righteous Harmony, we sacred Boxers~~slaughter the foreigners to preserve our land! Boxers of Righteous Harmony~~our power is great~~indestructible ~~together we band . . .”

Once he was on the outskirts of town, the Magistrate began to run, faster and faster, his carriers and attendants straining to keep up, like a flock of sheep. The stink of the man’s body easily reached them, and the sight he presented, a mixture of red and brown, so completely flummoxed them that they dared not laugh, they dared not cry, and they dared not ask what had happened; so they just kept running. When they reached the Masang River Bridge, the Magistrate jumped in, spraying water in all directions.

“Eminence!” Chunsheng and Liu Pu shouted together.

Suicide was what they were thinking. They ran down to the riverbank, prepared to jump in and save their Magistrate, until they saw his head break the surface. Though it was by then the fourth lunar month, a bit of wintry weather lingered on, and a chill rose from the clear blue water. Still in the middle of the river, the Magistrate shed his official clothing and rinsed it out in the river. He repeated the action, this time with his hat.

With his clothing now clean, he waded unsteadily up to the riverbank, aided by his attendants. He seemed shrunken, thanks to the cold water, and had trouble straightening up, but after draping Chunsheng’s jacket over his shoulders and stepping into Liu Pu’s pants, he crawled into his palanquin. Then, once Chunsheng spread his official garments over top of the palanquin and Liu Pu hung his hat from one of the shafts, the carriers picked up the chair and hurried home, followed by the Magistrate’s troops and attendants.

“Damn!” he was thinking as he was carried along, “I look like one of those opera-stage adulterers!”

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3

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The story that the Germans had taken Sun Meiniang hostage was a complete fabrication, either something the Magistrate had made up on the spot or what he had assumed the Germans would do if Sun Bing refused to repatriate their countrymen. Now he led his personal attendants to meet the German Plenipotentiary, von Ketteler, and his entourage at the prearranged site on the San Li River bridgehead near the city’s north gate, where they awaited the arrival of Sun Bing. The Magistrate had not mentioned a hostage swap to the German official, telling him only that a repentant Sun Bing had agreed to release the hostages. The Plenipotentiary, inordinately pleased by the news, told the Magistrate through his interpreter that if his countrymen were returned unharmed, he would praise the Magistrate’s efforts to Excellency Yuan himself. This did little to ease the Magistrate’s misgivings, and he responded with a bitter smile as he recalled the dreadful premonition that Sun Bing’s ambiguous comments had left him with the day before, a fear that the three German captives had already come to grief. He prepared for the meeting trusting to luck that all would end well, and with that in mind, he mentioned Sun Meiniang to no one, including Chunsheng and Liu Pu. He merely told them to ready a two-man palanquin, in which he had them place a large rock.

The Plenipotentiary, who was growing impatient as the sun rose high in the sky, kept looking at his pocket watch and telling his interpreter to ask whether Sun Bing was playing them for fools. The Magistrate equivocated as much as possible, avoiding a direct response to the man’s questions and his growing suspicions. Though he was churning with anxiety, he put on a brave, jovial face.

“Please ask the Plenipotentiary for me,” he said to the rat-faced interpreter, “why his eyes are blue.”

The befuddled interpreter could only sputter in response. The Magistrate had a big laugh over his little joke.

A pair of magpies were chattering loudly in a nearby willow tree, their black and white feathers making a lively show around branches that were just turning yellow. The scene was a work of art. Across the river, men with handcarts or carrying poles were making their way up the levee; before they reached the bridgehead, they spotted the foreign Plenipotentiary, who had remained in the saddle of his mighty steed, and the County Magistrate, who was standing in front of his palanquin; they turned tail and ran back down the levee.

When the sun was directly overhead, the sound of horns and drums signaled the arrival of a delegation from the north. The Plenipotentiary hastily lifted his field glasses to his eyes; the Magistrate shaded his eyes with his hand and strained to see who was coming, and heard the Plenipotentiary shout out to him:

“Qian, where are the hostages?”

The Magistrate took the field glasses the official held out to him. The still-distant contingent of men leaped into his line of vision. He saw that Sun Bing was still wearing his tattered stage costume, still holding his date-wood club, and still riding the same old nag. It was hard to tell whether the smile on his face was that of a dull-witted man or a crafty one. In front of his horse, as always, was Zhang Bao the monkey, while the silly-looking Wang Heng was walking behind him, followed by Sun Bing’s senior attendants, Sun Wukong and Zhu Bajie, who were both on horseback. They were followed by four musicians—two playing the suona and two on horns—who preceded a slow-moving mule-drawn wagon with wooden wheels on which a tent had been set up. Next in the procession were a dozen red-kerchiefed young men carrying swords and spears. Only the Germans were missing. The Magistrate’s heart turned to ice, and his vision blurred. Even though this was what he had anticipated, he held out a ray of hope that the three German captives were there in the tent on the slow-moving mule-drawn wagon. He handed the field glasses back to the foreigner and avoided the German’s anxious eyes. In his mind’s eye he gauged whether or not the tent could accommodate three good-sized Germans. Two scenarios played out in his head: One was that Sun Bing was according his German hostages the courtesy of riding to their salvation in a mule-drawn wagon. The other was that three bloody corpses were piled inside that tent. Neither superstitious nor much of a believer in ghosts and spirits, the Magistrate surprised even himself by offering up a silent prayer: All you spirits and demons in heaven and on earth, I beg you to let those three German soldiers step unharmed from that wagon. If they cannot walk, being carried off is acceptable. As long as there is still breath in their bodies, all is not lost. If three bloody corpses were carried out of the tent, the Magistrate could not bear to think of what that would lead to. A bloody, full-scale war was a distinct possibility, or a massacre. One thing was certain: his career would be over.

While thoughts thronged the Magistrate’s mind, Sun Bing’s procession approached the bridgehead, making field glasses unnecessary to see all the men, their animals, and the mysterious mule-drawn wagon; the Magistrate’s attention was focused on the wagon, which bounced and bumped its way along, appearing to have plenty of heft without being overly heavy. The iron-rimmed wooden wheels turned slowly, creaking noisily with each revolution. As soon as it reached the bridgehead, the procession halted, and the musicians put down their instruments. Sun Bing spurred his horse up the levee, and when he reached the top he shouted, “You are in the presence of the great Song general Yue Fei. I demand to know the name of the general I face!”

The Magistrate responded loudly:

“Sun Bing, release your captives at once!”

“First tell that dog beside you to let my daughter go!” Sun Bing replied.

“The truth is, Sun Bing, they never did take your daughter,” the Magistrate said as he pulled back the curtain of his palanquin.” There is nothing but a large rock in here.”

“I knew it was a lie,” Sun Bing said with a smile. “This Supreme Commander has eyes and ears everywhere in the city. You cannot make a move there without my learning of it.”

“If you do not free the hostages, I cannot guarantee Meiniang’s safety,” the Magistrate warned him.

“This commander’s emotional attachment to his daughter no longer exists. You decide whether she lives or dies,” Sun Bing replied. “But in the spirit of magnanimity, and despite the alien dog’s lack of humanity, this commander must retain his righteousness, and so I have brought the three alien dogs with me and herewith hand them over.”

With a casual wave, Sun Bing signaled the Boxer troops behind him to remove three burlap sacks from the mule-drawn wagon, which they dragged up to the bridgehead. The Magistrate saw signs of struggle inside the sacks and heard strange muffled sounds. The Boxers stood in the middle of the road waiting for Sun Bing’s command:

“Let them out!”

They opened the three bags, picked them up from the bottom, and dumped out the contents: a pair of pigs dressed in German uniforms and a white dog wearing a German soldier’s cap. With squeals and frantic barks, the animals scrambled across the ground, heading straight for the Plenipotentiary, like children rushing into the arms of family.

“They turned themselves into pigs and dogs!” Sun Bing announced earnestly.

His troops echoed his words:

“They turned themselves into pigs and dogs!”

Magistrate Qian did not know whether to laugh or cry at the scene playing out in front of him. The Plenipotentiary, on the other hand, drew his pistol and fired at Sun Bing, hitting the club in his hand and producing an unusual sound. But to look at Sun Bing, one would have thought that his club had hit the bullet rather than the other way around. At the very instant when the foreigner fired his pistol, one of the young musketeers behind Sun Bing took aim at the German and fired a spray of buckshot, some of which struck the man’s horse, which reared up in pain and threw its rider; his foot was caught in the stirrup, and he was dragged by the blinded animal toward the river. The Magistrate flew to the rescue, like a panther pouncing on its prey; he wrapped his arms around the horse’s neck and slowed it enough for the foreign attendants to rush up and free the Plenipotentiary, who had been hit in the ear by a buckshot pellet, from the stirrup. He reached up to feel his ear, and when he saw the blood on his hand, he screamed something unintelligible.