The Last Mandarin (2 page)

“San Francisco.”

“Long way.”

“Worse. Washington and back, first. Then Tokyo by way of Dutch Harbor. Dutch Harbor in January.”

“Hell of a time to go to Peking,” Moran said. “Mukden's gone, Kalgan went Christmas Eve, and Mao's about a bicycle ride from Peking and Tientsin both.”

“It's always the wrong time when they send me in,” Burnham said gloomily.

“Been in before, then.”

“Hell, I lived there almost twenty years. Then they dropped me in back in '44, and it was hairy and scary.”

“Dropped you where?”

“Manchuria. With the guerrillas.”

“Oh Christ, Reds,” Moran said.

“Guerrillas. Not all Reds. And let me tell you, those were hard guys. Out all night, twenty below, cut your throat before breakfast. They could curse you to death at five miles.” Burnham enjoyed a small surge of good cheer; memory had its uses. “We had a little town up there once for a day or so, and the phones worked. Japanese efficiency. So I called the Japanese in Tsitsihaerh and jabbered away at them. Scared hell out of them. They put planes in the air and all, flying off in the wrong direction.”

“By golly, a war hero,” Moran said. “Got a medal, I bet.”

“Indeed and indeed. A shiny little medal. Last I saw it, it was way out there at the tip of a full Angora sweater. Jesus,” he moaned, “I'm wasting my life. A goddam do-gooder.”

“Do-gooder, hell. If you volunteered for Manchuria in '44 you must enjoy these excursions.”

“Volunteer?” Burnham was outraged. “Enjoy? Listen, that idiot MacArthur dropped me in there. ‘You may have to improvise,' he said. ‘Remember, you bear the flag. Stay in uniform at all times. Orientals respect only force.' Know what that means? It means MacArthur respects only force. No brains, believe me.”

“Glad he's not my boss,” Moran said.

“Well, he was mine, all right. When I came out of Manchuria he asked me what I thought. So I told him. Jesus. How dumb can a major be?” Burnham winced in bitter mirth, pain, ironic wonder. “So I was expelled from the race of man. Hah! All I said was, the Communists are going to win. I figured anybody over the age of three knew that already. He looked down his parrot's nose at me and he said, “Burnham, I don't like quitters.'”

“An anarchist,” Moran said. “A free lance. What have you been doing since? Making bombs? Robbing post offices?”

“I am a graduate electrical engineer,” Burnham said, “and have built a powerhouse north of the Arctic Circle.”

“Where you got that jacket. Eskimo clothes.”

“Good parka. Won it in a card game in Fairbanks. Three fours. Those small three of a kinds take courage.”

“What else you done?”

“Kicked around some. Organized for the Democrats and got old Harry Truman elected.”

“At least it wasn't Henry Wallace.”

“Nothing wrong with old Henry,” Burnham said. “Just ahead of his time, is all. So after the election I caught up on my drinking, and then those fools in Washington called and I was summoned from a warm and crowded bed to fly into a doomed city and root out an animal who may or may not be there. If I don't find him I will shortly be drowning in Communists, and if I do find him he will doubtless scramble my giblets.”

“A warm and crowded bed.” Moran scowled. “I suppose you have one of those bachelor apartments.”

“You know the sort of thing,” Burnham said airily. “The bidet seats six.”

“Don't talk like that. I'm a married man.”

“You're luckier than you know,” Burnham said. “You wouldn't believe how boring it can be to wake up with a different woman every week.”

Moran was aghast. “I got to spell the co-pilot. You can lie to
him
for a while.”

The co-pilot was more mechanically inclined, a trim man who showed no emotion or even interest until it transpired that Burnham had jumped from DC–3s and even flown one for an hour or two. This established the social level, and the co-pilot allowed a smile. Toward the tail, the enlisted men played cards.

By midmorning Burnham was in fair command of all bodily functions, sat sprawled rather than huddled, and chewed with growing interest on a ham-and-cheese sandwich. Moran rejoined him. Burnham washed down the last crumbs with coffee, set his mug on the next seat and glanced out a starboard port for the tenth time. He saw land, and held his breath.

Moran noticed. “What you lookin at out there?”

“Lü Shun K'ou.”

“No kiddin'. What's that in Merkin?”

“Port Arthur.”

Moran squinted at his wristwatch. “Right on time. Your old hometown, or something?”

“Never been there.”

“You plan to be long in Peking?”

“Can't say.”

“Reason I ask,” Moran said, “we may not be able to fly in there forever.”

“Fly anything out?”

“Big shots. Bags of gold, probably. Antiques. What the hell do I know? But it's a good run. Peking's a nice old town.”

A nice old town!

“So there goes China,” Moran said sadly.

“No,” Burnham said. “She'll be right where she always was. Any flak along here?” He stretched to retrieve his duffel bag.

“None. Peaceful. You mind if I ask what line of work you're in?”

Burnham freed the lock and rummaged. “Kidnapping.” He dumped garments, cloth shoes. He brandished a round winter hat, heavily ruffed in rabbit fur.

“Good pay?”

“Civil service.”

“Pension.”

“Benefits.” Burnham took off his parka, sweater and khaki shirt. Aft, the murmuring died; they were watching him. He removed his mukluks and trousers, and stood tall in socks and skivvies.

Moran asked, “Do you do this on commercial flights?”

Burnham drew on the padded dark-blue Chinese trousers. The waistband was forty-four inches; he folded it over in front and belted it with a red silk sash. He donned a heavy cotton shirt, cream-colored, the collar Prussian but rounded, the buttons of cloth, knots that slipped into loops. Then the quilted gown, dark blue; then the overgown, dark blue; and the black shoes with many-layered cotton soles. He bowed. Moran and the others applauded. He transferred his wallet, passport and bandanna to mysteriously located pockets, like a magician preparing surprises, stuffed his Western clothes into the duffel bag, locked it, then sat back and set the winter hat square on his head. He rolled down the furry ruff; it fell to his shoulders.

“Come on out,” Moran said.

Burnham tugged the hat off and rolled up the ruff. “You can cut holes for eyes.”

They gossiped for a while then, Did-you-ever-know-Dale-Ball-No-but-how-about-Phil-Hanes, so that Burnham almost forgot his destination, but at the sudden sight of the Chinese landscape he prickled, and his blood sang.

“I bet you do just fine with those Chinese women,” Moran was saying. Burnham grunted, gazing down on snowy fields. “Millions and millions of 'em,” Moran said, “and you sweet-talkin' in their language and showin' real money.”

Burnham ignored him. He saw a river and fisherman's boat and a village in a hollow, half misted over.

It was one thing, Burnham knew, to love Peking from the air on a shiny winter morn: to glimpse the massive city walls from a thousand feet, the Temple of Heaven, the Forbidden City, the tiny rise of Coal Hill, the shifting sparkle of sunlight off tiled roofs, bright red, some blue, most green—little yellow now and he missed it, the warm imperial yellow of old Peking—the darker blue lakes, and the black lines of canals and railroad tracks.

It was another thing, he knew, to be a Pekinger, man or woman, and never to see all that. To be someone for whom Peking was not the glittering Cambaluc but a nest of squalid alleys, or perhaps worse, the grimy corner of a foul room off one of those alleys. Where the poor of Peking lived, the alleys reeked of excrement, dead animals and, on lucky days, opium; and in them swarmed tens of thousands whose lives darkened quickly from trachoma, who hobbled and lurched from rickets, whose ancestors had vanished in flood or famine and whose near and dear in plague and war, leaving no tablets to be revered, no land, no silver, no pigs or pots, whose bellies were clenched fists, who sucked the dry bones of despair and were too empty to weep.

Yet this superman's sight of China excited him; he almost shook. This was home. In his mind English faded away and the great Eastern voice rose: the voice of the Middle Kingdom, ancient and musical, the song of pied birds and fat gods, of archers and empresses, of the cardinal points and the eight winds, of moon gates and pagodas, and the same song a dirge for myriad upon myriad of men, women and children whose bones filled the Great Wall, and fertilized whole provinces, and paved riverbeds. The anthem of a land where civil officials of the fifth grade had formerly worn as a badge of rank not a star, thunderbolt, dagger or death's-head, but a silver pheasant.

The aircraft banked and swooped. Shanties bloomed below, and fields patchy with snow. Then a wall, a runway, a row of lights mute now at noon, a bump, a squeal. They taxied past the low terminal, crawled among fighters and transports and halted.

Burnham clambered down the steel ladder and set foot once more in China.

3

Toward the end of 1937 the Japanese crushed the worm people along the Yangtze River. They left behind a pale and terrified Shanghai, millions of worm people—and better yet, thousands of paper-colored foreigners—trembling like moths. They swept west, all units—units with names like Nakajima, Hatanaka, Minoura, Inoki, and many more—and raced to the Purple Mountain at Nanking, two hundred miles in one month.

Their impatience was understandable. They had waited decades. In 1931 they had finally conquered Manchuria (“self-defense,” they said). In 1932 they had invaded Shanghai and withdrawn when asked by the League of Nations (“statesmanship,” they said). Their moment came in July of 1937, when they took advantage of a minor incident outside Peking to vent half a century of frustration: they committed themselves to the conquest of all China, seized Shanghai firmly and started west (Asia for the Asiatics, they called it, and later the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere).

On the road to Nanking Sublieutenant Kanamori Shoichi made a wager with Sublieutenant Kurusu Kiyoshi: that he would set foot first on the Purple Mountain and piss down on Nanking. Thus soldiers spoke and laughed and swaggered. With Kurusu he made another wager, and soon the whole division spoke of it, and later the
Asahi
and the
Japan Advertiser
and the whole world: the winner would be he who first killed one hundred Chinese in combat with the sword. Women and children would not count. For most Japanese officers this was the first campaign offering scope to the sword.

The Chinese inflicted forty thousand casualties. Between Shanghai and Nanking, knowing themselves vanquished, fighting without transport, wielding kitchen utensils, firing obsolete, pitted and homemade rifles, they still felled forty thousand. A worm would peer over a mud wall, fire one round, and then be disintegrated by Japanese fire. But his one round would have killed or wounded a monkey. Some of the Chinese had been trained by Germans. This was perhaps an irony, but ironies were the way of Asia. German-trained Chinese machine-gunners would form a suicide squad and open heavy fire on a Japanese column or truck convoy. The squad would be wiped out. The Japanese advance was inexorable; why then did the worms resist? The Japanese became less jolly and more angry.

It is crowded country west of Shanghai, many villaqes along the river and many small farms. The Japanese swept along the river and also overland, through martyred villages and towns and cities called Ch'ang-chou and Tan-yang and Chü-jung. The weather held clear for the most part, though there were days of autumn rain. As the Japanese advanced along the river the screen of rain would part and on the river would be a sampan or a small fishing boat, the fisherman at the sweep. These were fine targets, with the challenge of bad light, haze, rain and only the brief moment. Several shots would sound, and as the soldiers laughed the fisherman would seem to slide down his sweep and into the Yangtze like a fisher of pearls or an ungainly cormorant.

On 20 November 1937, thirty miles from Nanking, Kanamori killed his first man with the sword. The man was trapped and had no choice. He stood panting and his eyes darted like mice, but he made an effort. Kanamori lunged and feinted left; the man parried like a child. Kanamori lunged and feinted right; the man lurched and hunched. Kanamori leaped forward, shouted “Ima!” (“Now!”) and sliced through the neck. This was Kanamori's dance, to the left, to the right, and slash; and it became known as Kanamori's three-step. Afterward he sat to bow his head and pray. He prayed thanks to his father, though his father, who had killed four Russians in one day with the sword during the battle of the River Sha thirty-three years before, was still alive. Until this first killing by sword Kanamori had in truth scarcely felt like a soldier. On the blade near the hilt was his name: Kanamori Shoichi.

He was a warrior but he was not insensible to the humor of war. A fall day, overcast, and the fields dun, here and there a burnt-out farmhouse, a village leveled, smoking still, the women and children afraid even to beg for their lives. His platoon surrounded six Chinese soldiers obviously cut off and making their way like frogs along an irrigation ditch. “Up, up, up!” cried the Japanese, and the Chinese stumbled up from the ditch—raw young men, farmers and no true fighters—and stood shivering in the dank breeze. Already the Japanese were laughing, and Sergeant Ito called out, “Which one first, Lieutenant?”

“Let them decide.”

Ito knew some Chinese; he spoke. (Kanamori's Chinese was fluent, but his men never learned this.) The Chinese did not understand; that is, they understood the words but not the proposal. Kanamori drew his saber; he slashed the air and thrust.