The Last Mandarin (30 page)

At first he saw only gloom, and stood as if waiting for daylight to follow him in. Some did so, faintly. Before him more light filtered through a long horizontal chink, a gun port or an observation slit. Beneath it a shape loomed and took outline; a concrete bench or platform along the wall. The bunker was empty, not even a discarded ration box. Burnham shivered. A cold, empty bunker.

Kanamori had dropped to his knees. “Step away,” he chirped. Now Burnham saw that he was standing on a concrete slab six or eight feet long and perhaps four wide. He crouched beside Kanamori and saw the Japanese smile, the teeth as on a poster. Burnham had found his war criminal and been lured to an abandoned bunker in a deserted graveyard, and this ruffian knelt beside him with a hammer and a chisel. He saw himself lying dead, chisel through the heart, naked and anonymous, a mystery for the conquering Communists.

Kanamori ignored him and tapped away at the cement that sealed the slab. The clangor echoed, and cement crumbled on the borders of the slab; so it was counterbalanced. An ammunition well or storage bin? Kanamori tapped; a flake of cement stung Burnham's cheek.

Finally the Japanese set down his tools and leaned forward, pressing his hands on the slab. It rotated, grinding harshly. Burnham's flesh prickled. Kanamori reached down and fetched up a small oil lamp. He set it at the edge of the well and struck a match. His shadow swam against the concrete wall, then grew sharp, still and immense in the small room as the lamplight flared and steadied.

Heads together, Burnham and Kanamori stared into the well at two fully clad skeletons lying together like lovers: coolies' trousers, coolies' shirts, cloth shoes.

Kanamori lowered himself into the well and hoisted the two unfortunates to Burnham. Bones spilled and bounced. Burnham tugged them to a corner of the bunker and piled them out of the way.

Again the hammer and chisel. Burnham heard wood splinter. Kanamori was muttering in Japanese. “Yes. Hello. Hello, pot.” To Burnham he said, “You take these. Small heart, please.” Kanamori was standing shoulder-deep in the well, his cheekbones and bald head glistening. He handed Burnham what seemed to be a soup kettle on a tripod. What seemed to be a toy chicken. What seemed to be a ram's horn. What seemed to be a drinking bowl. Carefully Burnham ranged them on the concrete bench. Kanamori muttered, chuckled and excavated. Burnham sensed the answer to many riddles and grew excited. He began to guess what he was handling and took even more care in the grasping and placing. “Small heart,” Kanamori warned again, and Burnham gently accepted a little woman—pottery or procelain he could not tell—with a yoke across her shoulders and buckets dangling. A horse, small but heavy. A lion or tiger or snow leopard. An old man, bearded, the ivory smooth, almost oily, to his hand.

Piece by piece the collection grew. The bench became a museum. Kanamori had stopped twice to open footlockers. Now he paused again, as if thwarted or in prayer, then took up his tools, hammered and pried. Wood splintered. Burnham heard the intake of breath—a true, classic Japanese hiss—and in the silence that followed he prickled again, sensing not mere animation, revival, passion, in Kanamori but a fierce reverence, so that he would not have been surprised if the man had said “Here is God,” but knew that he would say instead, “Here is the last mandarin.”

Kanamori stood and, like a priest, raised a slab of wood on which lay a shining doll that glinted green and gold. Burnham took the slab from him and saw that the doll was fabricated of many platelets sewn together. The hands and feet were shoes and gloves contrived of many small, flat greenish oblongs, and the face was not snub-nosed and rounded like a human face but constructed of similar oblongs, the nose cruelly sharp and the chin square, the head earless and the eyes sparkling a deep, fiery green.

Burnham made this doll the centerpiece. He was dazed and overwhelmed. Kanamori came to stand beside him. Twenty-odd pieces. This minor Japanese thug. Burnham was not truly a connoisseur, but expertise was unnecessary. His awe was enough. If these were genuine … Of course they were genuine! The skeletons alone proved that: coolies rendered forever discreet.

Kanamori's expression of utter sorrow startled him. “There is not money enough—” Burnham began, but desisted before the man's silent tears.

For some time they only gazed. The ram's horn was not a ram's horn but a drinking horn wrought from a single block of onyx, its narrow end an exquisitely carved bull's head. The chicken was of porcelain and was painted. Burnham touched these. He raised the bowl; it was bronze, and of obvious antiquity. The horse was also bronze and unmistakably a T'ang horse.

Burnham did not touch the doll, but peered closely. He turned to Kanamori in disbelief.

“It is the jade funeral suit of a prince's son,” Kanamori said. “The rectangles of jade are sewn together with gold thread, and the eyes are emeralds.”

My son, my son! Hundreds of years ago, perhaps thousands.

The ivory gentleman was a lo-han, a bodhisattva, smiling tolerantly. Beside him a gilded Buddha meditated. A jade owl glared, about to hoot. A ferocious dancing warrior, of wood painted red and yellow, lay helpless on his back. A horseman of painted pottery sat tall in the saddle, stiff-backed; behind him on the crupper his hunting cheetah lay curled in repose. A ceramic lion champed its leg in search of fleas. A bronze lion reared, rampant.

“How?” Burnham asked. “How did you—”

“Wang,” Kanamori said. “Wang Hsi-lin. He bought cheap; these were traded for life itself.”

“He sold freedom,” Burnham said. “It is always costly. But this! There is not money enough anywhere. How did you think to—”

“We did not think so far,” Kanamori said. “There is always a way. Piece by piece, for money. Or not for money but for immortality: the guardian of all these would be a national hero, to the old government or the new. Or not for money or for immortality but again for life itself; I might have traded these for amnesty. Wang might have taken them anywhere in the world and lived in peace and plenty.” Kanamori was certainly not addled now. He spoke melodiously, like a man shedding years.

“And those bastards never told me,” Burnham said. “They knew, somehow they knew, but I was not to know. Just find the Japanese and bring him out. Or maybe not. Maybe you were to be delivered up … Maybe they thought somebody
owned
all this … Maybe …”

Then Burnham seemed to see four things at once. He saw Hao-lan in the hands of evil men; he saw the face of a colonel in Tokyo; he saw a lowly Japanese major, no more and no less guilty than a thousand others, condemned in public and hunted in secret. And he saw an ivory lion at the end of the bench.

“Kanamori, what did Wang look like?”

Kanamori considered. Slowly his round face smoothed, and for a moment he seemed almost jolly. His shoulders squared, his head rose, his mouth opened in a soundless snarl, his hands combed back a heavy mane. Before Burnham's very eyes he became a lion.

34

Hao-lan had suffered many indignities in her time but had never before been popped into a bag. One moment she was preparing to cuddle, gazing soulfully into the ardent, bloodshot eyes of her deranged bridegroom; the next came a sharp jolt, and she was derricked out of the pedicab, enveloped by darkness and harsh, stinking cloth, and flung—dumped—into the back seat of a car. She cried out and tried to claw at the cloth, but a drawstring at the bag's mouth pinned her arms.

Cold fear stilled her then, terror compounded by the resinous reek of the jute gunnysack, and then she was struck on the head, just once, and knocked back against the upholstery. The car veered and she was pitched against her tormentor, who slammed her upright. “Stop it!” she bellowed.

A voice said, “Silence, monkey.”

Monkey!

She coughed. “Air. I cannot breathe.”

A second voice said, “Give him air.”

The drawstring slacked.

The second voice warned, “No tricks.”

She knew the voice, but whose was it? And what had they done to Burnham? She drew a shallow breath, then another, and almost sobbed. Burnham! This nightmare, men and their mysteries, cops and robbers and war!

Steady on, old girl. What to do about a nightmare? Wake up. “Where do you take me?”

A smug trill of laughter, then the familiar voice. “To a reunion with your business partner.”

Madness. “And who is my business partner?”

“He is Sung Yun now.”

Sung Yun! Now she knew the voice. Yen, was it? No, Ming. This Ming spoke English. Slang, sunglasses, a tie pin. Hao-lan dared fate: “You're bonkers.”

“No Japanese,” Ming said. “You will speak Chinese only. You are famous for the purity of your Chinese.”

“My dear Ming,” she said, “my dear chap, that was not Japanese. That was English.”

“So you know English too.” Ming was almost convivial. “And you know my name. Interesting.”

“What's this Japanese jazz? No savvy Japanese, buddy. You got a bum steer somewhere.”

“A bum steer! How well you do it!”

She bowed her dizzy head toward the mouth of the sack and drew an enormous breath. Her vital signs fell to human levels. “What do you want with me? Who do you think I am?”

“I think you are Kanamori Shoichi,” Ming said, “and I want you to make me rich.”

Bonkers indeed. Two psychopaths in one week—three, if you, counted Burnham.

The car slowed, swerved; a blast of the horn, full speed ahead.

“What is this ‘bonkers'?” Ming asked.

“British slang. A new field entirely for you, rich and historic. Bonkers means you're crazy, nuts, section eight.”

“And how would a Japanese officer know this?”

“I am not a Japanese officer.” Carefully Hao-lan suppressed hysteria, speaking in patient, gentle, medical tones. “I am a Chinese woman, and a doctor. You have made a serious mistake, and you had better take me back, or Burnham will nail your hide to the wall, if Sung Yun himself does not.”

The long silence allowed hope.

“Listen to me, Ming. I am Burnham's friend. You and I have met. We met two nights ago at the Willow Wine Shop.”

The car slowed, then stopped. “Release her,” Ming said.

The gunnysack was plucked away. Within the sedan the air smelled of petrol and exhaust, but was infinitely sweet. Hao-lan smoothed her hair, met Ming's eyes, then glanced at the other—a policeman, impassive. The same everywhere: an outcast's outrage shook her.

“A doctor? A woman, yes, but a doctor? Who was that doctor I saw you with last night? That was no doctor, that was a floozie!” Ming chortled. “A whore playing whore's tricks. If you're a good one maybe Burnham will swap you for Kanamori. You know the word? ‘Swap'?”

“I know the word.”

“And you know Kanamori?”

“I do not know Kanamori.”

“Burnham did not tell you?”

“Burnham and I speak of other matters,” she said demurely. “I think now you must take me back to the hospital.”

“Not on your life.”

Hao-lan shivered. The policeman seemed to be smiling.

Sung Yun hurled thunder and lightning. “Mule and blockhead! Oaf and dullard! Numskull and half-wit!”

“I followed orders,” Ming said stubbornly. “Do not berate me before the woman.”

But Sung Yun had paused in his tirade and was bowing again to Hao-lan, a ghastly smile writhing upon his face. He radiated humility, he oozed apology. “Please be seated, please be seated.” He returned to Ming: “If I sent you for leeks, would you bring me pig's feet? Did it never cross your mind—mind! mind! the compliment is undeserved!—that this beautiful”—he bowed quickly to Hao-lan and the lion's smile flashed—“elegant, young Chinese lady was perhaps not a scrawny, aging Japanese officer?”

“There was no time to verify. One could scarcely demand papers of identity.”

“Silence! There is no explanation possible. No excuse is acceptable. You have offended this exquisite creature. You have offended our American colleague Burnham, whose betrothed I gather she is. You have offended
all
my American friends unless we can set this right. That you have offended me is unimportant. Yü!”

Hao-lan perked up. The presence—the tailored, barbered, laundered appearance—of this elderly gentleman had defanged Ming and rendered human the silent steely man in policeman's uniform. The master of these premises was not a white slaver, an international spy or Dr. Fu Manchu. At Sung Yun's parody of a grin she had feigned outrage: “How the white teeth shine through the artful smile!” Now she said, “All you need do is drive me back to the hospital. Burnham is a man of understanding; moreover, his happiness, like mine, will leave no place for anger.”

“Yes, dear lady, yes, but this … there have been … Ming!” Sung Yun the obsequious was replaced by the leonine Master Sung. “If this is a diversion? If he is even now on his way to the airport with Kanamori?”

For one molten moment Hao-lan admired the notion. Ah, you sly fox, Burnham! Anger churned, anger at this false mandarin for daring to make the suggestion, anger at herself for accepting the possibility, anger at Burnham and the world because, yes, it would make sense; it would be no more vile than war, kala-azar and famine.

“Sisters!” Sung Yun clapped.

Sisters? Hao-lan's spirits prepared to rise.

“We must confer,” Sung Yun told Ming. “I am displeased. You and Liao will await me in my study.”

Ming removed his sunglasses to clarify the dirty look he cast at Hao-lan, and followed Liao out of the room, squeezing aside for Miss Ai and Miss Mei, who were entering. Hao-lan dismissed Ming from her mind and struggled with disbelief at this brace of quail, so obviously the introductory painting on a long and classically pornographic scroll. She warmed, and sketched a smile in a first effort to weave some frail bond of womanhood, to evoke the common sympathy of underdogs. The corners of their mouths rose, but these were figurines, and even their smiles seemed carven.