The Last Mandarin (33 page)

“I am shot and cannot take you by the throat,” Burnham said, “but if you are not inside and the door shut within two seconds—”

Kanamori reached out to grasp Feng's wrist, shifted his weight slightly and twisted. Feng cried “Yai!” and sailed aboard.

“Now go!” Burnham told Hao-lan. They plunged ahead. “Feng! The door!” Feng hung out over the mud, caught the door and slammed it shut. As they jerked and skidded north, Burnham caught a last glimpse of the mass grave, the baby cart, Kanamori's bunker, and then they were through the gate.

“For God's sake, shift!” Burnham said.

“I don't know how! I found reverse and first but not second. It's an American car.”

“Clutch,” he said. She clutched. With his left hand he shifted into second. “Again,” they were in high, and on an avenue, and Burnham said, “Don't stop for anything,” and punched at the siren—
rree-ee! rree-ee!
—and all the cosmopolitan traffic of a Chinese street parted like the Red Sea. They might yet see the promised land. “Go like the wind,” he said.

“You're hurt.”

“Right arm won't work. I'll live.”

“The hospital.”

“Hospital, hell. The airport, madam, and step on it.” He craned to scout behind. “Kanamori, can you still fire a pistol?”

“I should not. Oh, I should not!”

“Defile it!” Burnham said. “In time of need you will. Ah, Hai! They killed Hai! Feng, are you all right?”

“I am unhurt, but you must set me down.”

“Set you down?”

“My san-luerh,” Feng said. “It will be stolen.”

Burnham ached all over; his arm was on fire and he noticed that Hao-lan was tear-streaked. “By the gods, what is a san-luerh now?”

“The gentleman is surely right,” Feng said, “but it had a brand-new tire.”

Inspector Yen struggled to a sitting position and felt his head. His hand came away bloody and matted with hair. He seemed to be alone. Shakily he came to his feet. The graveyard was deserted and silent: tombs and bunkers, a two-wheeled cart, forlorn. Yen took an unsteady step, stumbled, almost fell, broke the fall with his hand and felt flesh. The fat man lay on his face in the mud. Across his back the tread of a tire stood out like a pattern in the cloth of his gray gown.

My car! Yen shook himself awake. They have stolen my car! They have stolen the car of a police inspector! They have stolen a car that will not even start!

He gathered up his pistol, saw Sea Hammer's and took that too, and wondered why there was all this fuss over a whore. She was surely a woman. She was not, for example, Kanamori in disguise.

Kanamori! All these connivers and marksmen must know something! Inspector Yen ran.

38

For some minutes no one spoke while Hao-lan dodged through traffic. It was not ordinary traffic. Today the hum of the city was a din, an irregular chorus of whoops and outcries and occasional gunfire. Squads of troops and police seemed to be out for late-morning sprints and drill. Here and there a shopfront gaped, splintered. “Disorder, not true chaos,” Hao-lan said. “Greed and small revenges.”

They were breathing normally now and Burnham had knotted a bandanna above the wound. “I need a doctor.”

“I suppose it will always be like this,” she said. “I never planned to marry a juvenile delinquent.”

“And I never planned to marry a doctor,” Burnham said. “I suppose the phone will ring all night. Cheer up. Things will quiet down after the honeymoon. Keep to the right, for the love of Christ!”

“Of course. That's what it is. A honeymoon. In my whole life I have never driven on the right.”

“Haven't driven since merry old England?”

“Not once.”

“No speed limits here, you know. How's the gas?”

“Petrol. It reads empty.”

“God almighty. Probably broken.” Burnham was in high spirits. He recognized the onset of delirium. “Damn these bicycles!”

“The siren.”

Burnham obliged. Indignant faces bloomed and faded. Peking raced by. Hai was dead. Sea Hammer. Burnham saw the old Sea Hammer, slim and hard, saw the white teeth flash in joy at a good explosion. “I like explosions,” Hai had once said, “and twice-cooked pork, and women too are amusing. I do not like clerks, policemen and foreigners.”

Nothing behind them yet, and a straight run to the airport. But Ming knew where they must go; would he also know a shortcut?

Inspector Yen had hailed a bus, and now stood, feeling cracked, leaky and slightly nauseated, holding his pistol to the head of an indignant bus driver.

“This bus does not go to the West Gate,” the driver insisted. “This is a number seven bus and goes from the Altar of the Earth in the north to the Altar of Heaven in the south.”

“Hsi Chih Men,” Yen repeated. “I am a policeman and this is official business.”

“Some policeman,” a passenger hooted. “In foreign dress. Policemen wear uniforms.”

A general grumbling arose. The streets were crowded with demonstrators, students, left-wingers. Tentative looting had begun. Here and there a shop was fired, and the Communists were not even in sight, so why were the police gallivanting about on buses? It was not as if they purchased tickets.

“Nevertheless,” Yen said. They were rattling westward. Yen had not much hope of answers—he scarcely knew how to state the riddles—but a poetically just rendezvous at the airport, where he had first met Burnham, was as likely as anything else. He thought almost longingly of the Communists, who would know how to run a police department. Of course there would be questions about his previous affiliations, but he was, after all, a man accustomed to—devoted to—upholding the established order. Did it really matter who established it?

“I am doing this because I must,” the driver said, “but I call upon these witnesses: I do it under coercion.”

“I will descend along Hsi-nei,” a passenger said emphatically, “by the Horses of Heaven Porcelain Shop.”

“And me?” another called. “I am to select and purchase four hundred feet of eight-inch stovepipe at Mu's in Feng-t'ai. In winter stovepipe cannot wait.”

“You will all be liberated at the West Gate Police Barracks,” Yen said. He was faint. Perhaps he would pass out and be torn limb from limb by these irate citizens. “Make speed,” he told the driver.

“Speed! Look about you, man. This is a Ming Dynasty omnibus.”

“Nevertheless,” Yen repeated. It seemed to him that all his life he had been saying “Nevertheless.” Perhaps that was how matters were ordered in China: all was accomplished “nevertheless.”

Burnham was still mourning Hai Lang-t'ou, a scoundrel and a rogue, a cutthroat of the first chop but one who stood fast, and who now had died for him. Not to rescue Hao-lan and not to snare Kanamori, but because Burnham had failed him. Yet there was some deeper success in this.

He looked gratefully upon his girl and forgot Sea Hammer. A bullet in your arm and two hoods after you, and she is driving to endanger, and what shall I do about Feng, and here is a Japanese war criminal goggling at the countryside, and I am about to betray my mission and in a way my country, and I am happy as a tick on a beagle because this smallish creature is beside me and I can gaze my fill at her face. A grown man. I am supposed to be doing important things like working and voting, and instead I sit here composing valentines.

Burnham knew that he should make some effort to organize the rest of this unusual day. Here was the familiar stretch of road where he had seen the Peking cart pulled by a pony. Soon he would see the teahouse, and then the airport. The same road crew would be be tamping the same earth.

Hao-lan's face, that very face, was haggard. Hell of a courtship. “Cheer up,” he said again. “They can't shoot down an airplane.”

“I'll cheer up when I bloody well want to.”

“That's the trouble with China. The women wear the pants.” His arm throbbed and streaks of pain shot up into his shoulder. Hai was dead and the top of Burnham's head was floating away. Plenty of time for fits and vapors when we're in the air. Much to be said for marrying a doctor; a man can have fits and vapors whenever he bloody well wants to.

Defile it, Hai, I'm sorry, but I'd have cut your throat myself for this woman.

He saw Hai, scornful, crabbed and full of spleen, heard him snort.

“Kanamori,” he said, “tell us what-all under heaven has befallen you these last dozen years.”

And Kanamori recited, at first halting and apologetic, then running and jumping. In the end the picture was clear, a sordid but not extraordinary portrait of degradation and inhumanity, and Kanamori's face was grim but his voice only calm and weary.

All along the way knots of people were gathered at the roadside, and men made speeches, and bands of demonstrators carried banners, and one shop burned unattended. Soldiers marched and trotted, and convoys passed, transporting sullen troops into the city. The outskirts were furling inward; the old rulers were retreating, leaving a vacuum of power into which the new rulers would rush.

There was no sign of the black sedan.

The airport was in disorder. Senile pursuit planes huddled, some guarded by frightened sentries: P-40s, P-47s, two Zeroes. Crowds swirled about the sheds and godowns, prospecting and shoplifting. A line of frantic travelers besieged a DC-4, and Burnham saw crates, trunks, sacks, baggage in mounds, Chinese pilots shouting instructions.

Hao-lan steered them through the chaos. Twice they were slowed by hostile groups; twice Burnham made the foreign presence known; twice they were waved on. “There. Just past that hangar. The one with two engines.”

The DC-3 was idling with the door down, strictly against regulations. From the pilot's window a man shook a fist, then waved for haste, and Burnham recognized Captain Moran. Hao-lan pulled up and they piled out. Burnham waved a salute. Moran seemed to be cursing him, but the voice was lost in the engine noise. Burnham turned to Feng and Kanamori. A decent farewell. His arm ached and his brain swam, but a sense of safety, of arrival, of leisure, warmed and eased him.

Ming cut a man down to reach the aircraft. He sped into the airport from the Hai-tien road and shot straight across baggage areas and runways, toward the American—or by now perhaps ex-American—operations shed. He saw Yen's car, and when a boisterous band of looters, or just shouters, surged up to block his way he swerved very little, blasting through, and caught one on his right fender, hurling him high and away. He saw the four travelers standing in casual conversation, saw an American hanging out the pilot's window and gesticulating. “Liao. That pilot. Ground them first.”

Liao ran down the window and steadied his pistol on the frame. The pistol jolted and clattered. He raised it and aimed free. Better. He waited. He knew pistols and their limitations. In time he fired.

The pilot flopped forward, his arm swinging like a pendulum.

Ming shot past the plane, stood on the brake pedal and skidded into a turn and stop. He and Liao scrambled out on the far side.

Burnham saw the sedan fly past and shoved Hao-lan to the ladder. “In! Keep down! Feng! Kanamori! Run!” He turned to signal Moran and saw the inert body, the red hair, the arm dangling. He leaped up the ladder. “Hao-lan! The pilot!” He tugged at the door's cables, and was dizzied; his hand slipped and he fell to his knees. He groped for his pistol, fumbled it, picked it up. “He's dead!” Hao-lan called, and came running.

“Co-pilot?”

“There is no co-pilot.”

“Keep down. Christ, I'm going to pass out.”

“Lie down. Head down. Oh, God.”

He took a deep breath of cold air and was grateful for winter. The smell of oil and metal was familiar. Pain tore at him, but it was pain for Hao-lan. “Damn you,” he said, “I never used to be afraid before I fell in love.”

At the Hsi Chih Men Police Barracks, Inspector Yen thanked his bus driver, commended his fellow passengers for their patience and patriotism, and left the bus to a chorus of imaginative Chinese razzing: “The turtle squad.” “Go annoy a criminal now.” “Go redeem your uniform from the pawnbroker.” He trotted into the barracks and explained quickly to the duty sergeant. “Explained” was perhaps inaccurate; how could this be explained? He rapped out a splendid fabrication: Communist agitators, foreigners, a bank robbed. The sergeant had already called for his captain. Yen showed identification and they set out at a brisk walk for the barracks motor pool, which was, this being Peking, three blocks away and consisted, this being Peking, of an antique Fiat, a prehistoric Daimler and a monstrous American hybrid. All were equipped with sirens and floodlights, and were therefore police cars.

Within a commendably short time two armed men manned each car, and the cars were on the move. From Yen's vehicle, the hybrid, several pieces of metal dropped clanking to the road, but the car persisted in its forward motion, and Yen nodded gratitude. After a moment he activated the siren. Grudgingly the populace made way. It was a small satisfaction.

“We must rush them,” Ming said.

“We should wait. Cover the door and wait.”

“For what? These mobs? Soldiers? Other interested parties? There were four. Four! One of those two Chinese was Kanamori.”

“Kanamori is Japanese.”

“Fool! Now listen: you will dash out at some distance, directly opposite the door. Dash out beyond Yen's car. I will slip beneath the tail. You will fire and keep them busy. I will slip along the fuselage and take them at close quarters. You understand?”

“The risk is great.”

“When the reward is sufficient, risk is not a factor. You understand?”

“I understand.”

“Then go!”

Liao moved out.

Burnham saw the uniformed policeman—Liao was his name, according to Hao-lan—and recognized him vaguely: once in Sung Yun's courtyard, a glimpse when they took Hao-lan. The man scuttled toward Yen's car and Burnham tried not to hurry his shot. He braced his left arm against the doorjamb. Now, Hai, grant me a double measure of your spirit, and a Sea Hammer's eye.