The Last Mandarin (40 page)

“Sir?”

“Fuel, and possibly diesel trucks.”

“I've detailed officers to forage and commandeer,” Wei said.

“Commandeer. What we do best: conscript and commandeer. Just as well; no need to kill now. It's all over.”

“Not while we hold the city.” Major Wei, mountain-bred, once a textbook officer, now seemed disheveled and elephantine. He flopped into an armchair.

“But we do not hold the city,” the general reminded him. “We have merely paused to regroup and supply—”

“We control all main avenues. We have the provincial governor under house arrest.”

“—before fading into the west like the bandits of old. Really, you must not interrupt a general. It makes no sense to be a general if majors interrupt. In the old days you'd have been demoted for that, or even bastinadoed. As for the provincial governor—” Once more his smile illumined the room. “Poor old Lu Han. He can be an alderman for the Communists. A fate worse than death. All that paperwork.” He stepped to the french windows—no mandarin's shuffle but a crisp military stride. His hair was short and bristly, his figure stocky and strong. “I wish we did hold the city. During the war—that other war—it was busy and optimistic and full of Americans. That was after Lashio, when we were chased out of Burma, a disgrace, I told you about that. I can even remember this hotel. The Yunnan Hotel, it was then. What is it now? Some monstrous name.”

“The Grand Hotel of Kunming and of the Center of the Universe.”

“That's it. Used to be full of diplomats and assorted air corps and infantry officers, and the customary contingent of amiable local ladies.” The general allowed himself a bullish sigh. “There was a hotel near Les Invalides called de Kelly et de l'Univers. There was one in the Pyrenees, I was on leave with a Parisian belle, it was called de Lavelanet et des Quatre Coins du Monde, Lavelanet, that was the name of the town, Hotel of Lavelanet and of the Four Corners of the World. I remember eating a bowl of tiny fish there, heads and all, with warm bread and white wine, dozens of crisp tiny little fish, whitebait they were called, and the lady—”

The knock was thunderous. Major Wei's hand fell to his .45; his eyes requested orders.

The general wore a pistol but had drawn it less with each promotion. He ignored it now and merely nodded. Major Wei bawled, “Come in!”

The door seemed to implode: half a dozen soldiers and one prisoner. They lunged into the room like drunken pallbearers. General Yang saw a greenish flow of snot on a corporal's upper lip and turned away. His expression did not alter. From his breast pocket he extracted a chased-silver cigarette case. He saw, and approved of, Major Wei's anger.

“Sergeant!” Major Wei's bellow stilled the scuffle.

A burly middle-aged man dropped his burden and arched his back. “Sir!”

“Explain this schoolyard scrimmage.”

While the major admonished and the sergeant stammered, General Yang inspected the prisoner, who was almost seated on the floor, hanging like a basket, sustained by a tangle of arms. The prisoner was bleeding. He wore cloth shoes, blue trousers, a blue horse-jacket and a cartridge belt. His hair fell well over the ears and eyes; General Yang saw, behind the fall of it, a bright gaze; the man was conscious and, from the set of his lips, possibly even contemptuous.

“A sniper,” the sergeant was saying. “With the American M-one rifle.”

A sniper? Why bring him here? But Major Wei was asking just that.

“He says he is a Red Bandit,” the sergeant announced in portentous tones.

“Imagine,” General Yang said. He went on in their silence: “Search him, Major.”

Wei found nothing.

“Sergeant. You men. Release him.”

The prisoner fell lumpishly. He tested his arms and legs and shortly sat up, wincing. The bleeding seemed to be from his right shoulder. “Who shot him?”

“I did, sir! Corporal Pao! Pao Wen-shih! Two-five—”

“A family history is not required. Wipe your nose. Major Wei.”

“Sir.”

“A medal for this man.”

“Yes, sir. Which medal would the general recommend?”

General Yang devoted some seconds to this vexing question. “I think perhaps the Order of the Tripod,” he said. “Third class.”

“Fitting, sir. Noted.”

Corporal Pao seemed to grow an inch.

“Sergeant.”

“Sir!”

“Take this squad away now. Ask for Lieutenant An in the next suite and tell him General Yang orders a distribution of cigarettes and one beer each—what is that local stuff called?”

“Yunnan Dragon,” said Major Wei.

“—for work well done.”

“Yes, sir!”

But Yang saw that the sergeant was depressed and offended: no medal. “Sergeant.”

“Sir!”

“You are—?”

“Chang, sir! One two two, sir! First battalion, second company, second platoon.”

“Corporal Pao.”

“Sir!”

“You heard the sergeant's answer?”

“I heard, sir!”

“That is how to make an officer remember you. Did you truly think a general wanted to know your given name and serial number?”

“First battalion—”

“Too late, Corporal. Thank you, Sergeant Chang. Outside, now.”

General Yang at last lit his cigarette. It was an Antelope, acrid, a painful experience. For an instant he recalled fresh Virginia tobacco, and he decided that there should be a correlation, a ratio, between the cost of a good silver cigarette case and the quality of the cigarettes with which one furnished it. Turkish too would do. It had once been his habit (acquired in France after a harsh and unnecessary regime of army cigarettes, the mégot du poilu, the French doughboy's gasper, inconceivably vile and fabricated, the story went, in Algeria from camel dung) to smoke Balkan Sobranies. At the Chinese taxpayers' expense; but everything came back to that. God created the world and said, “The Chinese taxpayer will fund this project.”

He made himself comfortable in an upholstered armchair behind an imposing desk. Before him a brass ashtray gleamed, a tiny glistening Buddha at each corner: a tourist knicknack. Beyond the french windows a pale winter sun westered. A long hard day. On the wall hung an almost expired calendar of 1949. And how did you pass Tuesday, 20 December 1949, General? Or in the Chinese fashion, twentieth day, twelfth month, thirty-eighth (and last) year of the Republic?

Well, in the morning I conquered a large city, the capital of Yunnan, a large and heterogeneous province in the extreme southwest of China. In the afternoon I governed it. I accomplished this with something under three hundred men, whose numbers will shortly be halved, and halved again, by desertion, opportunism, simple fatigue, a death or two. If I am lucky, my government will nevertheless send me the payroll for a full division. That is, if I have a government and if I can find it.

“So you admit that you are a Red Bandit.”

With his left hand the sniper swept the hair from his eyes. His face was bruised and he needed a shave, but the eyes were steady and sullen. O gods, a hero, the general mused. A hero of the left. Well, very possibly. This one was old enough to be a veteran of the Long March. “I admit nothing,” the man said. “I affirm it. I am a member of the Communist Party of China.”

“And a brave one, I'm sure,” said the general, “but a poor tactician. You gain nothing by sniping at my men, or even at me. We are only passing through, as you know very well. Liu Poch'eng, has Chungking and is slicing south. Lin Piao and the Fourth took Nanning on the sixth. You knew that? No? Then I bring you good news. Today is the twentieth and he will surely—”

“The twenty-first,” said the sniper.

General Yang glanced again at the calendar, perplexed. “Wednesday? I seem to have lost a whole day.”

“It comes of not sleeping,” Wei said gently.

“So. At any rate”—he addressed the sniper—“we are of no real consequence.”

“You arrested the governor,” the sniper said. “He formally surrendered the province to the Communist armies ten days ago and you have arrested him.”

General Yang grinned again, a pumpkin. “No. Lu Han surrendered to a delegation, and yielded his sword by telegraph. Never surrender to a delegation, Major Wei, or, for that matter, you, Master Sniper. What is your name?”

“My name is of no importance.”

“True enough. I was only attempting to raise the level of discourse. Nothing is important but the march of the progressive and freedom-loving peoples of the world toward equality and self-determination. Have I got that right? Major, open those french windows.”

Wei obeyed. The men observed a silence. They could hear the creak and clatter of hand-drawn wagons; then a clop-clop, a donkey. “Look one look, Major Wei, and tell us what you see.”

“I see strollers. I see a ricksha man cruising.”

“Cruising a city without government, food, fuel or even useful money,” the general said.

“I see a vendor of fritters. And a boy and a girl arm in arm.”

“Enough,” said General Yang. Even as he spoke they heard the vendor's cry, “Yuuuuuping!” and the squeak of a cart. “That is the calm of resignation, of acceptance,” the general went on. “It is as if these people were saying, ‘Han hastened, and was killed by a tiger; Lin loitered, and was killed by a tiger. Therefore we shall do what we would ordinarily do.' The bloodletting is over. In a day or two,” he said to the sniper, “your comrades will march in the east gate as my shredded battalion toils out the west gate.”

“Why not stay,” asked the sniper, “and join the future?”

“I have my own future. It is in those two footlockers.” He gestured. In a shadowed corner of the room the footlockers stood, one upon the other, gifts for Greenwood.

“Gold!” The sniper was scornful.

“Not gold. Gold is nothing, I agree. I have the past in those footlockers, and China's past is my future.” If the message had reached Greenwood; if Greenwood had reached Pawlu.

“Works of art that belong to the people.”

“Don't even try to guess,” Yang said. “Do you know who I am?”

“I think you are Yang Yu-lin,” said the round-faced, bushy-browed sniper.

“I am.”

“Yang Yu-lin was a good man. Yang Yu-lin fought the Japanese hard, when his colleagues were too busy fighting us. You disappeared in the Huai-Hai battles.” The sniper showed curiosity.

“Disguises,” Yang said. “I was a woman, which was farcical, and a mule driver, which was at least honorable, and a Russian's servant, which was degrading. That reminds me—where is the colonel?”

Wei asked, “Colonel Ou?”

“We have only the one colonel,” General Yang said patiently, “and I must ask you not to take that dry tone with me. He is a legitimate, decorated colonel in the army of the Republic of China, which he entered as a lieutenant and in which he has served for twenty years with gallantry and distinction.”

“He has also served a myriad of Chinese women and he is a Russian.”

“He is a Russian,
sir
,” Yang said quite sharply.

“Sir,” Wei said, and then, “I'm sorry, sir.”

“Where is he?”

“Inspecting the guard at Lu Han's compound. Shall I send for him? The telephones work.”

“The telephones always work except when you need reinforcements.” Yang rose and strode to the sniper, who braced himself. The general reached for the cigarette case; the sniper flinched; the case flew open.

“No,” said the sniper.

Yang sighed. “Don't be silly. These are Antelopes, made by the Chinese proletariat with Chinese tobacco, worse luck. Come now. Your sainted Mao Tse-tung wouldn't turn it down. You're not selling your soul; I fought the Japanese at Taierhchuang. Even a Communist may allow himself a moment of pleasure from time to time. Lenin was afraid of Beethoven, you know; it made him feel warm, and fraternal, and loving, and human, and reluctant to follow Marx and Engels in heaping contempt upon the gentle Kropotkins of his time. But a cigarette can scarcely be so potent.”

“Much of that I do not understand,” the sniper said. “What do you know of Lenin and Marx and Engels?”

This time the smile was glorious. “I was a Communist in nineteen eighteen,” General Yang announced with extravagant pleasure, “before there
was
a Chinese Communist Party. I was”—he sighed richly—“a Parisian Communist. Même le drapeau rouge avait un certain chic francais. Even the red flag had its own French elegance.” He paused to enjoy Major Wei's consternation.

The sniper pursed his lips, sniffed in a noisy breath and selected a cigarette. He then said, “Thank you,” which gratified the general, who struck a match and offered fire.

“Just don't burn down the hotel,” Yang said. “I have a deep, unreasoning fear of fires.”

“Not unreasoning,” the sniper said. “Footlockers are inflammable.”

With great good nature the general said, “That must be it. But I was talking about the telephones, wasn't I. Let me tell you, last summer in Shanghai the gunfire across Soochow Creek, both ways, was murderous, with both sides pinned down for days, so somebody in a dress shop on the east bank would call the Marine Hotel on the west bank, or somebody in a waterfront godown on the west bank would call the East Side post office, and when the other fellow answered they'd shout, ‘Red Bandit motherfucker!' or ‘imperialist fascist motherfucker!' Something eerie and unpleasant in that: men kill and die, governments rise and fall, but wires and rails go on crossing all lines.”

“What will you do with me?” asked the sniper. “What will you do with Lu Han?”

“Probably nothing. Lu Han did the correct thing. Yunnan is a large province, and there is no one left to defend it. He acted prematurely, that's all. Ten days ago there wasn't a Red battalion within a hundred miles of Kunming. There was, however,
us
. We stole a few marches.” General Yang dimmed his smile by an obvious effort of modesty.