The Last Mandarin (31 page)

Sung Yun was once more courting and appeasing. “So the lady speaks English! Alas, that I do not!”

“I am not a lady. I am a doctor, and attended medical school in London.” Hao-lan inspected the courtesans for traces of joy or awe, but saw only the ivory smiles.

“Medical school in London! So remote! The antipodes! My songbirds,” he addressed his mopsies, “you will attend to this lady's every need. You will serve tea and the little ginger cakes, and set out the better cigarettes. The lady's knowledge of English literature is extensive; there is reading matter in Ming's room. The breadth of culture!” He rejoiced in Hao-lan's existence. “That such a lady should be discommoded!” He almost fluttered, his hands soared and swooped, but Hao-lan noticed that his body and eyes were serene. “I leave you now, to resolve this lamentable confusion. Should my dear friend Burnham call, you will of course speak to him? Good. Forgive me. You will be alone for a matter of seconds only. My lady.”

Sung Yun bowed and backed out of the room. Hao-lan was indeed alone. She drooped. On a shelf beside her a ceramic lion ramped and roared—ancient, painted, once a gaudy trinket, now priceless. Otherwise the room seemed forlorn—faded rectangular patches on the walls, few knickknacks, bare tables. She blinked away the delicate sting of unshed tears. This was only stupid, and not dangerous. Some foolish people had made a mistake.

This
cannot
be a trick! Burnham?

Still. The faint prick of doubt.

Miss Ai returned, bearing books and magazines. It served Dr. Nien right: here she was in a waiting room, and the nurse was clicking and smiling, and at any moment the podiatrist would emerge. She murmured thanks and examined the books.
The Silken Lash. Chained in Soho. The Reader's Digest
. She smiled gratefully. Miss Ai dimpled and cast down her eyes. Hao-lan opened a book at random. Heaving bosom, swollen lips, senses reeled. Dear God, am I like that? I suppose so. Burnham too, twirling villainous mustaches. Trust him whatever. A constant, he said. No, he is not hurt, and no, he has not gone to the airport. Big crooked nose, greedy eyes. How he loves to look at me! Goofy. That fat smug grin!

Miss Mei materialized. A tray, teapot, cups, the little ginger cakes. How do you do. A fine winter morn, is it not? Indeed, Vicar, and how goes it with you? A lot of clap in the parish at this season.

In the magazine Hao-lan read that she should decide now precisely what she wanted to be doing five years from now, and should do nothing that would deflect her from her goal. She invented herself: five years from now I want to be a pediatrician in private practice in a place called California, my name will be Helen Burnham, and every night, and perhaps even every morning, a burly, hairy man with a broken nose will hug the bejesus out of me. So I must do what will lead me there, and not be deflected. For example …

She could think of nothing. Escape? Recruit these two doxies? Start a fire?

Miss Mei offered pumpkin seeds.

And there they sat when Sung Yun returned: three women, one sipping tea and hoping for the best, the others smiling at unpredictable intervals.

“Your Burnham has gone,” Sung Yun announced, “and no one knows where.”

“He is doubtless conferring with the police.”

“Frenzied and distraught! I may sit? Thank you. Tea, my peony.” Miss Mei hastened to pour. “The estimable Inspector Yen, perhaps. You know Inspector Yen, of course.”

“I have heard the name.”

“The inspector too seeks Kanamori.”

Hao-lan sat silent.

“You know about Kanamori. Perhaps you have met him.” Sung Yun sipped, and sighed his delectation.

“I know nothing of this Kanamori.”

“As well you may not! A villain of deepest dye, my dear Doctor. My dove, will you fetch Ming and Liao?” Miss Ai departed swiftly. “So!” Sung Yun offered a fatherly smile. “How romantic! In the best tradition of the classical novel. The barbarian and his Chinese maiden. The spark of love. Rocky going, the jealous fates, the angry princes, confused identities, but at last all is well, and in palanquins the happy couple is escorted to the Great Wall, and disappears into the desert holding hands and blushing.”

“Nothing so grand,” she said carefully. “Only an aircraft, and surely difficulties with the immigration service.”

“An aircraft! How imperial! A man of importance, our Burnham. Aircraft at his beck and call.”

“He is important to me.”

“Nobly said! I could envy this Burnham, were it not for Miss Ai and Miss Mei. Incomparable beauties. I am truly attached to them. You must not be deceived by my age, dear lady; there is snow on the roof, but fire in the hearth. Believe me, I rejoice for you. Another small cake? The coarsest flour, but these are straitened times.”

“The cakes are delicious, thank you, but I cannot.”

“As you wish. A brutal shock to the nerves. I can only hope that time will efface the bad impression.”

“I am sure that none of us will want to remember it.”

“I trust my men were gentle—ah! and here they are! Ming and Liao, do join us. A fascinating conversation.” Ming sat, looking affable, and Liao stood sentry near the door. Hao-lan noticed that Sung Yun's windows were casements, with leaded panes, foreign, almost English. “You will scarcely believe this,” Sung Yun went on, “but our dear Dr. Nien has, in the space of two days, met our friend Burnham, fallen in love, and accepted his proposal of marriage. And all the time we thought he was tracking a Japanese butcher! By the way, Ming, in these two whole days Dr. Nien has not met Inspector Yen, and knows nothing of Kanamori.”

Ming was hearty and prankish. “But there has surely been a mistake! In my own presence, and in Burnham's very room, the doctor met Inspector Yen.”

Again this trouble breathing. “Oh, that was Inspector Yen? Then I have of course met him, though you must forgive my little charade. It is Burnham's elfin sense of humor.”

“A sense of humor! So valuable in trying times!” Sung Yun was positively expansive. “And never once speaking of Kanamori—that too was his little joke. He told you that he had come to Peking only so the gods could unite you.”

Hao-lan tried to smile. “Government business, he said.”

“What a coincidence! Unknown to you both, his government business concerned the very man about whom you—his gift of providence!—had been interrogated not a month ago.”

“Yü,” she said faintly. “Was that the name? Kanamori?”

“You see!” Sung Yun said in triumph. “We all make mistakes. Careless errors of identity, often leading to extreme embarrassment and confused misunderstanding. You will forgive me? Good, good. Now then, Ming, and you too, Liao, let us thank the gods for this curious and enchanting encounter, and restore Dr. Nien to her indulgent lover.” He ran on for some seconds about long life, many children, richly merited bliss. Hao-lan's smile grew feebler, but finally she was in the courtyard, and Ming ushered her smoothly, deferentially, to the black sedan, assured himself that she was comfortable, and then said, “My dear lady! My dear Dr. Nien! Thass a crock, honey. I'm going to take you for a ride.”

35

Inspector Yen was famished. He was also chilly. Moreover, he was tired of standing in doorways like a cop on the beat. He could not see through the wall of Sung Yun's compound, and could hear nothing from within. He reviewed his predicament, then abandoned his doorway and proceeded to his car. He turned the key and pressed the starter.

The motor ground and would not catch it. It ground again, then whined. “All I ask,” he said, “is to edge this lemon to the corner where I will have a view of the gate.” He pressed the starter again, and was answered by silence.

Hong Kong, he thought. I will transfer to Hong Kong, where the vehicles are of commendable modernity. Or I will adopt another trade. Pedagogy: a teacher of the martial arts in a middle school. Or suicide. Why not suicide? How reasonable!

He banged the dashboard in anger and stepped out. He returned to the shop and dug into his pocket for a small jimmy. The lock yielded and Yen's eyes widened: something had gone right! He stepped into the shop and closed the door. In the dim light he glanced about. On a table he saw facsimiles of fish, fowl and pig's heads, used in divination. On the walls he saw charts of the planets with their elements and characteristics, charts of the cycles of the years, and bunches of paper strips covered with calligraphy and hanging like horsetails. On a shelf he saw tortoise shells and small bones. Also many bowls. He shrugged. Superstition.

At the small window he commanded a fine view of Sung Yun's gate. Superstition or no, he thanked his household gods that he had not delayed: within minutes a squad of black-clad coolies, chattering and joking, but knaves to a man if he knew his business, came marching up the street and pressed through the gateway. A large household, Sung Yun's. Ming the snake, the false policeman, the whore. Sung's women, and now the riffraff.

Yen grinned. He was not accustomed to grinning, but this might yet prove a fascinating day. If Burnham should follow along, he would walk into a fine nest of vipers.

He wondered if Kanamori was truly in Peking. He wondered again if Kanamori was even among the living.

When Ming and Liao escorted Burnham's whore through Sung Yun's gate and into the black sedan, Yen stopped wondering anything, cursed himself for a triple imbecile and prayed to the god that ripens grain, as well as to the righteous phoenix, that his unaccommodating automobile would reform.

He barely waited for the black sedan to move. Before it reached the corner he was racing for his Packard. The engine obliged him on the first try, but he forgot to thank the god or the phoenix.

36

Below the East Single P'ai-lou Ming eased the sedan to a halt and cut the motor. Hatamen Street was thronged, midmorning bustle, clusters of agitated rumormongers and argufying shopkeepers. Hao-lan looked at the glacis where the foreigners formerly played polo, and south to the city wall and the legations, where men in neckties and wingtip shoes spoke English, French and Italian. West of the glacis was the Peking Hotel and its French Book Store, and she ached for civility, order, learning, courtesy, for a bobby unarmed and polite, for the might and majesty of the Crown.

“The whole time you did not smoke,” Ming said.

“I forgot.”

“You were frightened. Have a cigarette now.”

“Yes.”

They might have been tourists, or brother and sister.

“If Burnham's taken a powder,” Ming said, “then you don't matter a damn.”

“He has not.”

“I need to know one of two things: who and where Kanamori is, or who and where the last mandarin is. I think Burnham knows.”

“But I don't. Sung Yun won't like—”

“The hell with Sung Yun,” Ming said, and leaned to pat her hand. “Of course you know something. You must have heard of Kanamori, and you couldn't have forgotten Yen, so you were lying.”

“These awful cigarettes.” Hao-lan's voice struck her as reedy.

“Camels. From the American navy. They were waterlogged somewhere about three years ago. We got five thousand cartons cheap.”

A fire brigade trotted by, a dozen or so men pulling a wooden cart, straining like mules, chanting their ancient lament. On the cart was a huge metal tank brooding over a border of buckets like a monstrous sow with her farrow.

“It's only money,” Ming said. “It's not as if empires were falling or people being wiped out, so we have to assume that everybody knows more than he ought to.”

“This is hopeless,” Hao-lan said. “I truly do not know why your Kanamori matters.”

“Trouble is, it's
lots
of money. Bags of gold, honey. So I'd ice Burnham in a second. I might rub him out for the hell of it if I got sore. Maybe if I cut you up a little? Liao knows how. Then Burnham loses his head and charges into the china shop.”

Ming wore a cheap cotton shirt, pinkish with a maroon pencil-stripe. A seedy boy in jacket, silk tie, sunglasses, his mustache sparse and unhealthy. A shaky beginner, a man of no bones, no permanent name, with not yet a true face. His immaturity frightened Hao-lan, and reminded her of dangerous fish and snakes, which strike by reflex and cannot be reasoned with as can bears and even the great cats.

She found it impossible to speak of Kanamori. Perhaps for doctors human life was simply not expendable. “I really know nothing.” A beggar peered into the car, raised two claws, saw Liao in uniform and vanished. “One thing only I heard. I believe it was Inspector Yen who told this to Burnham.” It was an improvisation, but it felt right. “The last mandarin is somewhere in the Cemetery of the Hereditary Wardens of the Thirteen Gates.”

Ming pressed the starter, shifted and turned the wheel in what seemed one motion. The sedan bucked and shot into traffic. Rickshas wobbled to a stop, pedestrians shouted. Ming cut east, leaning on the horn. Hao-lan saw a cartful of caged chickens loom and shut her eyes, and felt the veer and sway. She looked back: the livid chickenmonger stood with both fists raised high, but his cargo was intact.

She could not imagine what Sung Yun wanted with a corpse. A relative? Well. Perhaps she had saved Burnham's life. Her bones seemed to soften, her lips to curve. She would remind him of this in moments of stress and domestic turbulence. Soon they would share a san-luerh again, soon they would ride in loving state to the airport, soon—

She believed none of this, and buried her face in her hands.

37

Burnham and Kanamori repacked the hoard, set the dead lamp on a crate and swung the slab back into place. Outside they rammed the door shut and replaced the debris. Burnham was explaining that there was no time to bury the babies. He remembered Head Beggar saying, “Let the dead bury the dead.” He was groping for a way to tell the Japanese that he must now be exchanged, and all this loot with him if necessary, when a pedicab wheeled through the south gate and started up the rutted track toward them. He rushed Kanamori behind a bunker, flung him to earth and hit the deck beside him, tugging at the pistol. A mocking voice blared, “Up, you fool!”