Shanghai (99 page)

The old phrase came from deep in the collective memory of the Black-Haired people. When overwhelming forces were at work, you could do little more than ride the dragon's tail.

“So you propose we do nothing?” the Confucian demanded.

“Absolutely not,” Jiang shot back at him. “I propose we track the dragon and see where he leads. Even the
strongest of dragons eventually sleeps—and when he does, we will use our influence to have him killed.”

The Carver nodded, as did the Assassin. But on the Confucian's face Jiang saw, just for an instant, something that could have been rage.

The new Captain came onboard the junk at the south end of the Grand Canal, just past Chinkiang. Chiao Ming was startled by the man's appearance: one eye socket was empty, and the skin there was translucent, revealing a pulsing vein and splaying capillaries. An odd thought crossed her mind.
If I put my finger into that socket I could feel his brain
. She dismissed it as just more nonsense imposed on her by the raging hormones that were feeding the life within her.

Chen came up quickly behind her and grabbed her elbow, supporting her. She hadn't realized that she was tottering, but she quickly recovered and said, “I'm fine,” then smoothed the cloth of the apron that covered her growing belly.

“Good,” Chen said, “because this new Captain is one of us, and intends you no harm.”

“If you're trying to avoid harm you're heading in the wrong direction,” the one-eyed Captain said, and spat far out into the fast-moving waters of the Yangtze. “There'll be much harm in Nanking, before too long.”

“Have you been there?”

“This junk's a trader, boy. Nanking is a major manufacturing centre, so of course I've been there.”

“That's not what I meant, and you know it,” Chen fired back.

“Ah, you meant have I been there lately?” the Captain asked and turned away.

“That,” Chen said, not trying to hide the annoyance in his voice.

The Captain turned his single eye toward the young couple. The fact that her belly was slightly distended beneath the cover of her apron didn't escape his inspection. Finally he said, “No one will be going to Nanking soon—the Japanese will, no doubt, block all river traffic east of the city.” He spat a second time. “If the Japanese want to rule the Middle Kingdom they have to take Nanking. They have no choice.” He looked closely at these two young people, then said, “But that's where you're heading, isn't it?”

Chen nodded.

Chiao Ming thought she felt a stirring in her belly—then a strong kick. She almost winced.

“The Japanese are demons,” the Captain said.

“No they are not, Captain,” Chen said. “They are just indoctrinated peasants who don't know who their friends are.”

The Captain's single eye opened wide, and he laughed.

“What?” Chen demanded.

“Are you going to Nanking to educate these demons?”

“Yes.”

“They'll cut off your head and put it on a pike.”

“Reason is …”

“Reason is nonsense in a war. If you are going to Nanking, it better be to kill Japs—period.”

Nanking—capital of the Tang and Ming dynasties, for ten years Chiang Kai Shek's Republican seat of government, and for Hung Hsiu-ch'uan and his Taiping followers the Heavenly Capital—fell to the Japanese after less than four days of resistance.

Neither Mao's forces nor the Kuomintang came to the defence of the city, so, on the evening of December 13, 1937, although small pockets of resistance remained, Generals Akira and Yukiko walked on foot into the city at the head of a column of tanks—without bothering to unholster their weapons.

—

That night, as Chiao Ming helped her comrades reinforce their barricade, she caught a glimpse of her lover's face. The deep lines of betrayal were still there, somehow more prominent than ever. She would never forget the moment when the Japanese soldiers had pulled out pistols from their uniforms and aimed them at him.

“I came here in peace,” he'd said, “as a comrade—a fellow worker.”

They hadn't laughed—but they might as well have. Two of the younger students whom Chen had convinced to come with them had quickly found themselves on their knees, one with his head lolling at an unnatural angle from his neck. A second had had a small hatchet buried deep in his chest. It was almost comic—but blood and screams are seldom very funny for very long.

Chiao Ming had pulled Chen aside just in time for them to escape down an alleyway.

All he had ever said about the incident was a single sentence: “I came to Nanking to help workers, to help them.” Then he had returned to his silence.

The baby kicked inside her.

Rage swelled in him.

Although the Japanese easily overpowered most of the under-armed Chinese resistance, the small Communist unit that Chen and Chiao Ming had joined held its ground. All around them Chinese fighters fell back, often throwing their antique firearms aside as they scurried, like rats from a flooded boat.

The Japanese tried to assail the Communist position three times, then decided to simply encircle it. The Communists bolstered their defences, preparing for an onslaught. Their backs were to the Yangtze, so the young Communists could have escaped if they had wanted, but they had come to Nanking to fight—not run.

On the second day of the occupation a stray bullet ricocheted off an alley wall and pierced the neck of their leader. Despite their best efforts the man bled out in less than an hour. Suddenly there was panic in their ranks. To everyone's surprise, Chen stepped forward and took command. And he led by example. That very evening he headed a raiding party against the Japanese and came back with both food and ammunition. The next morning he did the same, with even better results. What little opposition there had been to his leadership vanished.

Chen deployed his men carefully. Every morning as the sun rose he attacked the Japanese west of their position, and as the sun sank low in the sky he attacked the Japanese to his east—each time coming out of the sun. For three days the tactic worked. Then the Japanese had had enough and they called in aircraft to strafe the Communist enclave while the Japanese Imperial Navy bombarded the site. Under Chen's leadership the unit held its position, although their numbers were depleting quickly.

On the final day the naval shelling was so thick—and accurate—that almost every building in the area of Nanking that they held was flattened. Then the Japanese army's shock troops mounted a final assault.

“You have to go,” Chen screamed at Chiao Ming.

“I came to fight, like you,” she screamed back at him.

“And our baby? Did it come to fight too?” He turned quickly. There were three Japanese soldiers cresting the pile of rubble to his left. They all shot at once. Two shots tore into his chest. The third hit Chiao Ming in the shoulder and bored out a large hole as it left her body. She staggered back. He grabbed for her. She saw his eyes go wild and he mouthed the words “hiding place” and “boat.”

They had fought about the damned hiding place and the damned boat. She hadn't wanted it. He had insisted. “If things get crazy, you head to that boat and get out of here.”

“Why, because I'm a woman?”

“No,” he'd said, “not that.”

He'd never said,
Because I love you
. The only man who had ever said he loved her was her father, whom the world now called the History Teller. And thinking of her father, and the baby in her womb, she staggered toward the entrance to the basement of what they had prepared as “the hiding place.” And there she waited while the Japanese tanks rattled overhead, flattening what little was left of their unit's defences. Night fell, and she waited, and listened for the telltales of Japanese soldiers' footfalls, but none came. Slowly she allowed herself to relax, and then the pain took her. She lay back on the blankets that they had prepared and gingerly felt her wound. The baby kicked. She smiled—then fell into darkness, unconsciousness saving her, momentarily, from present agony.

* * *

SHORTLY AFTER THE REMOVAL of the Communist resistance, the madness of Akira and Yukiko spread from them and entered their men—and Hell opened its maw and belched forth horror.

The graceful streets of the Old City quickly began to reek like a charnel house in the still of August. Flies buzzed constantly in the chill air and grew fatter and fatter until many couldn't fly. Great black vultures gathered from the mountains and circled endlessly, at
times blotting out the winter sun, impatiently awaiting their turn. Dogs ran mad in the city and could be seen scurrying away into the shadows with slimy mouthfuls of what could well have been slabs of human liver or kidneys.

The Japanese shat in the holy wells and forced mothers to throw their children from the city walls. The upper Yangtze turned pink, then red, then glowed crimson in the sunsets—oddly beautiful—as it made its majestic way eastward, toward the sea.

And no one slept, not victim or torturer. For days, weeks, the terror continued until neither Chinese or Japanese could tell if they were awake or asleep, dreaming or staring into the abyss.

For six weeks the Japanese army raped and murdered with a frenzy never before unleashed in the Middle Kingdom.

Somehow the Japanese were enacting upon the people of Nanking a revenge for their entire history as “China's second son.” All the years of perceived slights and insults, the boasts that Japan was nothing more than a bastard colony of the Celestial Kingdom. All the taunting: that Japan had not even invented its own writing system or civil service or … But those were reasons, and reason had nothing to do with what happened between December 13, 1937, and early February of 1938 in Nanking. Reason has no place where a father is forced to rape his daughter in front of his son. Reason has fled a city whose walls are festooned with the bodies of old men allowed to die slowly, twisting in pain around and around large spikes that nailed them to walls, their feet off the ground. Reason is laughable in a place where over three hundred thousand civilians are murdered in less than six weeks. Reason is an obscenity
in a place where bayonet practice was held every morning using live Chinese men as targets. Reason is an insult in the world that was Nanking for six weeks at the end of 1937 and the beginning of 1938.

And the great birds drifted lower and lower over the city, hiding the sun's face. And the screams of the victims only infuriated the conquerors. And—like Akira and Yukiko beneath the third arch of the Marco Polo Bridge with young Corporal Minoto—the Japanese had crossed a moral line, and had left humanity behind them. And in its place they could not be differentiated from either the marauding packs of wild dogs or the swooping vultures or the fat flies that could no longer fly and crunched underfoot. They were horrors themselves. And each horror they inflicted pushed them a step further into the darkness, until the Komodo dragon that sleeps deep within every man was finally loosed, and they paraded openly on their four powerful legs, their talons clicking on the stone streets of the ancient city.

And men all behaved like dogs.

And the shit came down so heavy you needed a hat.

And the violence hid in the hallways.

And it clung to the curtains.

And death reared its blackened jaws on its scrawny neck and laughed to the heavens, but the stars averted their eyes and the sun wept such fat tears that it could not see—and the god in the Temple of the City God wept blood. But nothing stopped the carnage.

Babies were ripped live from their mothers' wombs with knives and impaled on boards leaned up against the houses of their families. On the main streets there was not a lamppost without at least three men hung from the armature. Women were gang-raped, then gang-raped again—then shot as they were clearly now unclean. Men
had their arms cut off at the elbow and then were harnessed to oxcarts and made to pull soldiers in a bizarre parody of chariot racing.

And beneath it all—pushing it, thrusting it forward and upward, challenging the heavens—was the madness of Akira and Yukiko, now permanently white with rage, insane from lack of sleep. And both—now with hunks of human offal hanging from their rubbery Komodo lips and unsheathed claws, now permanently crimson—strutted before their men and demanded further horror.

King cobras were let loose in nurseries as the Japanese soldiers bet on which child would be bitten first. Men were buried to their necks and run over by the treads of tanks. Wild dog packs were guided into the homes of the aged and infirm while Japanese soldiers cheered on the slaughter. And no one slept—and the night and fog went on and on and on.

* * *

CHIAO MING KNEW that she had to get help. She was weak, but her baby was still alive. She could feel him grow within her, although he kicked less now. Her food was running low and she doubted the drinking water they had secreted in the hiding place was still good. She grabbed hold of a pole and pulled herself to her feet. Something sharp arched into her belly—the baby kicked, angry with the pain as Chiao Ming made her way back up onto the horrifying streets of Nanking.

* * *

“EVEN IF HALF of what we hear from Nanking is true, it's enough,” the Assassin said.

“And what will the Guild do?” asked the Confucian.

“That for which they have trained so long,” said Jiang, stopping the Assassin from answering the Confucian's question. Then touching the Assassin's shoulder she whispered, “Safe journey and return.”

* * *

IN NANKING the horrors continued, unabated and unopposed, until a junk downriver disgorged its twenty-six men, who under cover of night clung to makeshift rafts and swam their way into the city.

A safe house awaited the Assassin, the men of his Guild, and the red-haired
Fan Kuei,
Maximilian. Once they had secured the place they immediately started their work.