The Last Mandarin (24 page)

Sung Yun made teeth like tiles. “Oh, what a rascal you are, Liao! You did well, you did well.”

“I am so pleased to be a woman,” Miss Mei murmured, and the others glanced at her, startled, unsure how to take this original remark, this independence of thought.

“As indeed you should be,” Sung Yun said finally. “Both of you. The world of men is a world of brutish horror, but you women are all beauty and light. So,” he said to Liao and Ming, “if more than that happened, or less, it is fate and cannot be altered. Thank you, Liao.” His gesture dismissed the man, who bowed and marched out. “Yi, so much depends on this!” He brightened, as if struck by a comical thought. “And Inspector Yen. What has the virtuous and talented Inspector Yen done with his hours?”

“What he usually does,” Ming said. “He spent most of the day at his office, eating sunflower seeds, smoking cigarettes and complaining that he had no personnel. He then quarreled with his car, which eventually yielded and deigned to locomote. After dark he paid a visit to the American's room. Then he went home.”

“Splendid. His customary civic accomplishments.” Sung Yun rubbed his hands. “I begin to think again that Kanamori is long dead. That all this is merely a fuss of righteous bounty hunters, adventurers and frustrated authorities, and that we must resign ourselves to the loss. We have all been taken in by false reports.”

“Nevertheless,” Ming said firmly, “Liao will proceed. I believe the American to be less foolish than he appears.”

“He could scarcely be more so,” Sung Yun said. “Good. Liao will indeed proceed. A brief enlistment in the local constabulary.” Sung Yun enjoyed a moment of imperial joy: he was a glossy spider at the center of an intricate web. Each hour a new strand. He glanced complacently at his wall, where hung three painted scrolls, priceless if genuine, by Ma Fen, Ma Lin and Ma Yüan, a family unequaled for seven hundred years. His wine was served him in exquisite porcelain cups. Miss Ai and Miss Mei were incomparable, except to each other. His clothes were tailored by Old Silver Needle himself, and in his kitchen the rarest red peppers from Szechuan sat opposite the rarest top-leaf tea from Chekiang. Financially he missed his collection; sentimentally he missed only the lions. He was particularly partial to lions, porcelain or bronze.

A shame to leave all this, with the Red Bandits swarming closer by the minute. Still, the man of character is at home in a hut. A hut! It would never come to that. One ivory, shrewdly sold, would keep him for years. “If he lives, we must have him,” Sung Yun said lightly. “However faint the spoor, we must follow. How I want that one! What an opportunity: to kill him twice!”

“If he lives, we shall find him,” Ming said. “My bones tell me it is a matter of hours.”

“You will report to me throughout the night.”

“You will remain watchful?”

“I shall remain awake,” Sung Yun said. “The mind paces, you understand.”

Ming allowed himself a small smile. “I understand.”

“Do you know what I miss in winter?” Sung Yun asked. “Tangerines. A tangerine would be interesting at breakfast. A tangerine and good news.” His face fell into the smooth sad lines of inexpressible sorrow. “Think, Ming, one day soon, my last breakfast in Peking.”

20

At the hospital Kanamori was asleep, locked in his own tiny, bare room. Feng had volunteered to play sentry, sleeping on the door-sill, but Burnham assured him that a quarter-grain of morphine would subdue even the craziest Japanese for some hours. So again they gathered in the kitchen, where soup might now be served at leisure and with decorum, but Burnham set them all at sevens and eights by rolling in like an unruly and purposeful bear, stepping right across to Hao-lan and saying, “I believe I have learned something of value. I do not want this Kanamori. They can elect him emperor for all I care. All I want is you. I want you to come away with me tomorrow.”

Nurse An served soup while Hao-lan and Dr. Shen argued, Burnham having shot his bolt or at least suffered a flash of good sense that enjoined some minutes of silence: the decision was more momentous for her than for him. But not much more, by God! Feng was tranquil now, placid, full of wonder, and sat at his end of the long wooden table shy and impressed, though sucking up noisy gouts of soup. “Whatever happens,” Shen said after a time, “you will be Ch'en wearing Li's hat. When the Communists come, you will be a daughter of the upper bourgeoisie and a lover of things foreign.”

Burnham's brows twitched. Shen saw his own joke and apologized. “At least I too am bourgeois,” Burnham said. “I am not hoping to marry above my station in life—though far above my merit,” he added immediately.

“Well,” Shen said, “and what are your prospects?”

“Well sir,” Burnham said, “I am an electrical engineer and a good one, and there is always need for such. I seem to be a failure as a hunter of Japanese, but that is a declining trade. I promise that Hao-lan will never go hungry, and will have her own key.”

Shen smiled in embarrassment and Teng laughed frankly. Feng caught Burnham's eye and timidly revealed the package of Lucky Strikes; Burnham nodded, and Feng, after offering one first to Burnham, then to Hao-lan and Nurse An, and then—he was observing some strict personal protocol—Shen and Teng, ignited a cigarette and inhaled voraciously.

Hao-lan sighed. “And legal complications? Will I be welcome?”

“Yü,” Burnham said, “I shall tell them that you are Kanamori.”

“Not funny,” Hao-lan said. “And how is it all to be accomplished? A visit to your consulate with my passport? I have one, you know.”

Suffused by mischievous joy, Burnham meditated this possibility. At this season the gentlemen would sport ties and waistcoats. They were men of breadth and sympathy, in danger of transfer to Africa or Iceland if they told the truth about China, and consequently a touch higher-strung than the diplomat's exterior would indicate. Also about half a million Red Chinese troops were knocking at the gates: a busy time for all. And here comes old Burnham without a visa, bearing pistol, knife and Luxury Pipe Pack, and on his arm this myopic dumpling who claims to be a doctor, and Burnham wants a license and a preacher and two first-class tickets to Niagara Falls, and mumbles an apology about some Japanese nobody ever heard of.

“I am about to make a splendid impression,” he said, “so listen, all. Where is your telephone?”

“At my desk,” said Nurse An.

Burnham beckoned them into the admissions office. Behind him they crowded through the doorway.

He hoped the damn thing would work. Clicks. Buzzes. Shrieks. The demons of the upper air. Disembodied go-betweens. Burnham's impulse with Chinese telephones was to hold the receiver some inches from his face and shout. Voices twanged and jingled: hobgoblins, busy signals, the spirits of ineptitude and treachery, the gods of the short circuit. “Patience,” he advised his audience.

A voice: “Number, please.”

“Liu erh wu, liu pa liu.”

Silence. Bravely he smiled at Hao-lan, who obviously mistrusted this performance.

A sharp click, a businesslike American voice: “Yankee Stadium.”

“Hello, Yankee Stadium,” Burnham said. “This is Babe Ruth.”

“Son of a bitch,” the voice said. “You work fast, Babe. Whatcha want?”

“I want the player bus for ten ack emma tomorrow.”

“You're lucky, boy. We're terminating that franchise. We'll have a bus all warmed up. Listen, you any use in the right-hand seat?”

“Had about four hours.”

“Good. We're short a man here. You wouldn't believe what we've been ferrying where.”

“I don't even want to hear about it.”

“Good thinking. Hey! You mean to say you got your home run?”

“You bet your sweet ass I got my home run. Seoul or Tokyo?”

“Seoul, buddy. Don't worry about it. Once you get through the tubes it's all Bridgeport. Nice goin', old son.”

“Thanks,” Burnham said. “Over and out.”

“Over and out.”

Burnham hung up and waved in airy triumph. “I have just reserved a private aircraft.”

Teng said, “Americans! A people of miracles!”

“A people of gall,” Hao-lan said.

Burnham shooed them back into the kitchen. “It is for Seoul only, and the clerks there will wear out a brush or two before letting us go further. We shall tell them you are Chiang Kai-shek's daughter.”

“A patriot,” Hao-lan said. “An officer and a gentleman. You lie to your superiors.”

“They are not my superiors,” Burnham said, “and they will be angry, but not at you. At me”—he knew a moment's shame—“because I did not do my job.”

“That I understand,” Hao-lan said. “I too have a job, and cannot do it.”

Shen dismissed the question. “Listen to your heart. In time there will be doctors here aplenty, and nurses too, and dentists.”

Nurse An served another round of soup, steamed dough and tea. Smoke hung blue. Savors and odors mingled, and winter was forgotten. “I myself would go,” Nurse An said, “and not because of the distinguished visitor, whom I hardly know, though he is not unpleasing in appearance and speaks a proper local tongue, but because I have never left Peking, and the world is a carnival place. To see even Mukden or Shanghai!”

“It is not only leaving my own people,” Hao-lan objected. “It is living among Americans. More than once I was insulted in England. The assumption was made that a woman not English lacked morals.” Her eyes flashed suddenly at Burnham. “Did you make the same assumption? You grew up among us; was the easy little Chinese maiden always at your beck and call? Was it less a sin than with Miss Blue Eyes?”

This was not a question to evade, and Burnham did his best. “It was more a sin. Because heathen Chinese, they told us, were like untutored children, and were in our charge, and to take advantage of a Chinese girl would be heinous, like striking a servant. Oh, how I burned! And yet—yes, the Chinese were lesser. In America too you will be insulted. You will be asked if you are Japanese or Siamese or Eskimo. As here I am called a Russian sometimes by men of the northwest, and pointed reference is made to my nose.” She winced lovingly at the bad pun. “And some will offend you by good cheer and tolerance. They will speak clearly for your poor foreign ear. They will touch you—your hand, your forearm, a kiss on the cheek—to show that they accept Asian skin and fear no contamination. We have many black people, and there are still Americans who believe that the black rubs off, that white is clean, that yellow is cowardly. You are tan and in places ruddy like an apple, but to them you will be one of the yellow people.

“All of this will lessen,” Burnham said, “but in our lifetime fools will abound. All I can say for sure is that I will love you as long as I can—I think as long as I live, but tonight I am not reciting romance—and will keep harm from you. But the important reasons are not these.”

“Why then, tell me the important reasons.”

“Never, before others. You have no shame. Morals indeed!”

Shen and Teng laughed; Nurse An tktked. Feng seemed not to understand, quite, and sat diffident, silent, prepared to smile.

Hao-lan said, “The future here. It matters.”

“Yes, it matters. There will be more and better medicine and much to rejoice the social soul. That too is irrelevant.”

“Well, I am impatient to hear what is relevant. You are all smoke and no fire.”

“A bold and forward woman,” Burnham grumbled. “Very well, then, before the world: I love only you. How this happened remains a mystery. Without you I will be only what I was: a foolish boy. And without me, you—you—ah, it is not for me to say, but together we can be the only one that is more than two,” and he slipped into English, saying softly, “a very singular plural,” and she translated, so that Nurse An and Teng and Shen said, “Ah, pretty, pretty,” and Hao-lan herself, though she tried to look too wise for elegant flattery, only glowed.

For some moments then, as if they were all overcome, they focused on food and drink. Shen muttered, “A disgrace that we have no wine.”

With a trace of misery in her voice but no real conviction, Hao-lan said, “I must think. It is all so final. I would no longer be Hao-lan. I would be Helen.
Helen
, they called me in England”—her laughter dissipated much of her anguish—“and in Chinese that is hei-lin, which can mean black bladder trouble. Imagine being called Black Clap.”

“Or Hei-lung,” Burnham smiled. “I did some fighting up in Heilungkiang.” It was a province of Manchuria and meant Black Dragon River. “You will be my Black Dragon, and breathe fire upon me.”

Her full lips parted slightly; she breathed fire upon him, and retreated almost blushing to her cabbage soup.

Feng astonished them all, evidently including himself, by speaking. “In Peking are people of all nations and degrees. There are Mohammedans and Cantonese and foreigners like the gentleman, some with yellow hair, and older foreign women, those with immense bosoms, and the foreign priests, and once I carried foreign sailors with buttons atop their hats like chrysanthemums. Surely it is so elsewhere. And surely a Pekinger in a foreign land would be superior. Pekingers are superior to Shanghainese and Nankingers, so it must follow.” He subsided in confusion, and slurped tea.

“There you have it,” Burnham said. “Must we take a vote?”

Hao-lan laughed again. “Nurse An?”

Nurse An nodded, her eyes gleaming; gently she touched Hao-lan's arm.

“No, no, no!” Hao-lan cried. “It is all too beautiful, but I must think. And we two must speak alone.”

Burnham only gazed upon his girl and sighed.

21

Inspector Yen Chieh-kuo admired the English word “flatfoot.” He thought often that he would have made a good flatfoot in some progressive country with microscopes, fingerprint kits and electric chairs. He was a Peking man, born and bred in a quiet quarter near the Lama Temple up by Tung Chih Men; his father had been a supervisor of streets, roads and alleys for the municipal government, first under the Dowager Empress and then under various warlords and republics. Yen thought of himself as an oppressed civil servant, with immense tasks and no resources, hunting fiery dragons with a paper sword. He was married but childless, and not for lack of effort; it was a tragedy but no longer, in modern times, a shame. His wife was unlettered, and his house was a man's house; when colleagues came to dinner, they left their wives home, and Yen's woman ate alone. They kept one servant, a scolding old cook. Yen's wife had little to do. Yen assumed that she had her interests and hobbies. He was wrong; hers was a wasted life, and that was all that could ever be said about her. No one bothered to say it.