The Last Mandarin (19 page)

So Madam Olga's was shortly closed for repairs: not to the building or the women, but to Kanamori's crates. His two coolies, one a mason's apprentice, worked quickly and with enthusiasm; he had promised high wages for a job well done, and the apprentice, just nineteen, wished to marry, and his girl friend would not marry until he had bestowed upon her the san-chuan, or three-things-that-go-round: a watch, a bicycle and a sewing machine.

Soon the three were roaring through the golden summer afternoon to the cemetery, with the major himself at the wheel of a half-ton truck and several footlockers loaded behind. At the cemetery the coolies worked quickly and well. They mopped their brows and chattered gratitude for the cool of the concrete bunker. Their wages proved to be death. The garbage gathered, the footlockers stowed, the cement mixed, Kanamori shot First Coolie between the eyes. When Second Coolie popped out of the well to keep up with events, Kanamori shot him too between the eyes. Then he shut the slab over them and hemmed it with cement, leveling and trimming carefully with the trowel and feeling rather professional. After removing all tools and equipment to the truck, he slammed the outer door and wedged it shut with a few iron rods, on which he dumped the remaining cement, followed by a choice selection of rusted metal, bones, splintered boards and ordinary gravel. Upon all this he then relieved himself.

He returned to the barracks, showered, changed and had himself driven to Madam Olga's. He strode upstairs feigning wrath, rebuked the captain in charge, freed the women and apologized profusely. Olga was mollified by this intervention; in these tense days the unexpected had shaken her aplomb. Now she expressed delight, opened a fresh bottle of vodka, and was pleased to serve ice. She and Kanamori drank and exchanged gossip. The girls served them and flattered the major. Kanamori lingered, happily intoxicated.

Later, customers circulated. One of them, for seven years a loyal ricksha man and factotum, had been instructed to assassinate Kanamori at a favorable moment of his own choosing. Kanamori resolved to make a night of it. Intoxicated by vodka, by success, by a surge of unaccustomed lust, by a momentary release from years of acknowledged nightmare and unacknowledged self-contempt, he saw himself as the last of the mandarins, and decided that he owed himself a mandarin's revels. “I will stay,” he announced. “I wish a grand supper, with hsia mi.” Hsia mi were tiny shrimp, delectable, from the southern seas. “I will then frolic with two women.” He thought he might enjoy hara-kiri later in the evening: what a gesture! Olga greased the whips, plied him with vodka and encouraged his fantasies. She was frightened—the man was insane, and lunatics were notoriously capricious—but the stakes were high. The Americans were bombing Japan savagely. The tiger heat of July lay upon Peking. Surely the time was right.

In the late watches Kanamori enjoyed his punishment. He crooned and yipped with each lash, he sang, he shouted boisterous laughter and sobbed exultantly. Like an animal he swilled. Like an animal he took one of the women. Like an animal he was beaten again. Toward the end he was briefly puzzled and perturbed by a certain sense of excess, by flashes of true pain replacing the exhilaration, by waves of dizziness and nausea, by flashing colored lights within his head, but Olga reassured him—friendly and reliable Olga, who understood him, who would shelter him and see that he was pleasured and kept safe, and later soothed with ointments. So when his senses failed and even the taste of his own blood faded and the night closed in, he swooned away in peace, as if cradled in his mother's arms.

16

Cots lined both walls of the long whitewashed room. Near the door stood a hot potbellied iron stove; its pipe ran the length of the ward, radiating softer heat. Burnham and Hao-lan stood in the aisle holding hands. Many of the children lay still; others played gravely with wooden blocks. “Trachoma,” Hao-lan said. “Manges and eczemas. There is no beriberi now but there is kala-azar.”

He raised her hand to his lips, and for an incandescent moment their eyes married. “Insane,” she murmured.

“Both of us. Don't fight it. Whatever happens, we have plenty of sadness ahead. What's kala-azar?”

“Visceral leishmaniasis. Hyperplasia in the reticuloendothelial system.”

“The stone drops into the well,” he said glumly in Chinese.

“Oh God,” she said, and hugged him. “How funny you are! I love you for that.”

Lost, goofy, he smiled down at her.

“I suppose it's nothing to be funny about.” A schoolchild's complicated joke, and he had been showing off: in Mandarin “I do not understand” was “Bu doong,” and what is the sound of a stone dropped into the well? Bu-doong! A schoolchild's joke and she loved him for it! “But I really do not understand. I've never heard of it.”

“An internal infection caused by a parasite, borne by a fly. It used to be a problem in Szechuan and the northwest. With the war, and all the shuffling, it spread. A protozoan. No fun.”

“No fun.” Some of these tots were skin and bones, others more potbellied than the stove. At least one girl seemed totally blind. The walls were streaked, the old floor waxed dark. Odors rose and mingled: urine, alcohol, a faint overlay of rot. The blind girl seemed to listen; was this strange language a menace?

“What happens,” Hao-lan said, “is that these little Leishman-Donovan bodies muck about with the spleen and liver and phagocytes.” This was gibberish to Burnham but he knew the information was nothing and the tone was all, bitter and flat, an absence of passion that had set in long before, when anger was exhausted. “This causes anemia, emaciation, irregular fever and a sharp drop in the number of white corpuscles. The liver swells and the spleen balloons. If you want, I'll let you feel a spleen. I have one so badly swollen that it runs all the way from the stomach down to the crest of the pelvic bone. The girl is eleven. The best way to diagnose is to stick a long needle right down into the spleen and—”

“Stop it now,” he said, and slewed her gently, his hands firm on her shoulders; he kissed her forehead and held her for some moments. “It's necessary work. It's noble.”

“It's miserable and I hate it.” Her voice was like iron; she muffled it, pressing her face to his chest. “It's mostly nursing care. We need something called a Romanovsky stain for diagnosis and we have none and the government won't give us any and we have to beg it from the national hospital or the missionaries. And kala-azar isn't all.” She pulled away and the words tumbled: “There's simple malnutrition and battered children and girls raped.
Little
girls. And there are some with dysentery and some with meningitis, and we haven't even started on
normal
diseases and accidents. The lucky ones are the little dead ones Mother brings in, or the beggars—twenty, thirty, forty a day.” Her voice had rung shrill, and Burnham tightened his hold: on her, on himself.

She felt his anger. “We needn't stay here,” she said. “The children amuse themselves.”

“No need to flee.”

“But it bothers you.”

“Christ yes, it bothers me! I don't like hospitals. I don't like sick children. I don't like a world where … ah, the Lord works in mysterious ways!”

“The Lord.”

“A notorious bungler,” he said. A boy of ten or so offered him a block. Burnham released Hao-lan's hand and knelt to make a house of blocks. Children drifted closer. The house rose tier by tier. There seemed an infinity of blocks, wooden blocks, stone blocks, tiny concrete blocks.

“From various demolitions,” Hao-lan said. “The beggars loot old sites. They bring pipes and wire, too, and tiles; they can be sold to the scrap merchants, and the money buys food.”

Burnham's house was waist-high. Enough. He stepped back, forcing a smile. Immediately a boy ran forward, buzzing like an aircraft, his arms wings, and flung himself onto the house, razing it with a great clatter. A shout of laughter rewarded him. Half a dozen kids commenced reconstruction, chattering and conferring. Many of the little heads were shaved. Many of the little eyes were caked. Many of the little faces were marred by sores. Ragged shoe soles flapped. The blind girl listened.

A vast dismay chilled Burnham, a numbing horror. Swept by obscure shame, he wished for whiskey. What fun it was to gallivant through China! What a romantic, exotic life! Guns and drums and wounds and women! “I think I want to go now,” he said. Hao-lan touched his cheek.

In the office he met Dr. Teng, lean and silent, nodded to Mother and a nurse, and sat with Hao-lan. The chill vanished; between them a dizzying, unquenchable joy seemed to leap and spark. “At this late date,” he said, “the foolishness of first love is embarrassing.”

“Nobody will laugh at you,” she said shyly.

“I'll come for you tonight,” he said, “but I have things to do and I may be late.”

“Things?”

“I don't really care much any more. Yesterday I saw mysteries, plots, wheels within wheels. Today I see a lot of tired, sick flesh and blood. Sung Yun even, with his dirty money. Yen playing cop while the world blows up around him. Ming from the funny papers.”

“You're tired.”

“And whose fault is that?”

She dimpled with the guilty, gleeful smile of a sinful girl, and he laughed at the innocence of it. “I'll give it one last try with the beggars,” he said.

“Be careful.”

“I will. I wish …”

They were silent for a moment. “So do I,” she said. “Did you sleep?”

“A little. I'll nap now. You?”

“A little. I wish we lived on some other planet.”

“Just the two of us.”

“Fields. Lakes.”

“Fat fish.”

“And no nasty protozoa.”

“Poor girl. What a hell of a time you must have.”

“It could be worse,” she said. “I could be a patient.”

Feng took him home. “I saw nothing.”

“Perhaps there is nothing to see. Perhaps it is all foolishness. The man may be dead. Back in Japan. Out west and a bandit. But come for me at six, will you? We must toss one last stone, to see if the sleepers wake.”

But it was not Burnham who tossed the stone; Burnham was the sleeper who woke. He woke in gloom, confused, haunted by the last tatters of a bad dream: assassins, exile.

He knew that he was not alone in his small room. He cursed Hai for a bungler. As usual, his weapons were not handy. He lay in the half-darkness, unmoving, barely breathing.

A match flared, and lit the stub of a candle. Burnham saw two men. He saw only one knife but it was sufficient; its point approached and pricked his neck. This was annoying, and Burnham felt that resentment was justified, but the other thug held Burnham's .38 affectionately, and the instant did not seem propitious for heroics.

Knife said, “Come along now. Rise slowly, and dress warmly.”

Pistol made big gray teeth.

Burnham obeyed. His blood jangled, his brain creaked, and he wanted to brush his teeth. It was bad form to be abducted with hairy lips, an emery tongue and a head full of sawdust. “How did you enter?”

Knife said, “The alleys and the window. One man's out is another man's in. Hsü! You are a big fellow.”

“Who are you?” Better off without weapons. Do not stir up the natives. He would use his wits: a rare opportunity.

“The scum of the earth,” Knife said.

Burnham's roll of bills seemed intact.

“The hat,” said Knife.

Burnham donned the fur hat. Knife grinned, and pricked Burnham's chin. Later Burnham realized that Pistol had sapped him with his own .38. Now there was only an explosion of light, and then darkness.

Shadows ebbed and surged like waves. Burnham saw a vast flat field and a red swastika. A crowd whispered.

He lay on his back. The shadows ceased to ebb and surge, and only flickered. Lamps. He was in a room and staring at a wall. The red swastika was painted on the wall, the color of fresh blood. The crowd buzzed and hummed like bees.

Burnham's head ached slightly but he was glad enough to be alive. He was not bound; he rubbed his face and sat up. The voices died. His head throbbed.

It was a left-handed swastika and therefore Buddhist. This was good news. Sufficient unto the day was the evil thereof without Nazis. Furthermore the Buddhist swastika signified good luck.

The room seemed to be a disused restaurant or shop. A couple of dozen men and women watched him, some sitting on wooden benches along the wall and most smoking. To the rear a kettle sat on a stone stove.

Burnham had been lying on a stone bed. His pistol and knife had not been restored to him. We'll have to scrape by on charm, he told himself, and bobbed a nod at the men and women. Beggars all. “Is there water?” he asked. “I am always thirsty after being beaten about the head.”

The others gazed at a scrawny man of middle age, who nodded. A woman moved to pour water, and brought it to Burnham in an earthen bowl. He drank it off. It was pure and sweet. “Thank you,” he said. She took the bowl and withdrew.

“Our visitor is a gentleman,” a scratchy voice intoned.

The speaker stood beside a large table concocted of planks and bricks. Burnham rose and stepped toward him. On the table lay stacks of documents and heaps of currency, and a couple of ballpoint pens, still rare in China; this was a modern enterprise. There was a lamp too, the old-fashioned standard oil-for-the-lamps-of-China lamp. It cast a trembling light on Head Beggar.

The kai-t'ou was a rooster of a man, in padded trousers and a short padded jacket. He sported a rooster's sharp beak and bright eyes, and instead of a comb, a monstrous growth on the left side of his scrawny neck, a reddish-purple tumor or goiter like an external liver, running from the ear down the jaw and neck. Having noticed it, Burnham could not look away; the growth could not be ignored. He made the best of a sickening moment, and examined it frankly. His stomach yawed.