China Seas

by John Harris

  The Kuomintang had resisted the invasion in the Old City and had sunk freighters in an attempt to block the river, but the Japanese had been relying on aircraft and their bombers had devastated Nantao and Hongkew and, when the Chinese fighters had lifted up against them, they had been shot out of the sky.

  When it was all over, the Europeans, considering it none of their business, drove out to the scene to look at the trenches dug by the Chinese, the spilled cartridges, the discarded rifles, the artillery still with the dead horses in the traces, the belts of machine-gun ammunition, even the dead soldiers in the ditches, in the canals, among the reeds. Occupied with his rage over the loss of his ship, to Willie their behaviour seemed obscene.

  Several other Western-owned ships besides the Kum Kum Kiuw had been sunk and Honeyford tried to win people round to his view with the prospect of compensation.

  ‘It will be paid,’ he reassured claimants. ‘The Japanese government has said so.’

  ‘Not to the bloody Chinese, I’ll bet,’ Willie snapped.

  ‘Of course not! A state of hostilities between them and the Japanese has arrived.’

  ‘That doesn’t mean a damn thing! To Japan this war with China’s only a step forward. The final bloody reckoning will be with all the rest of us with land in the Pacific and the China Seas.’

  Honeyford’s protest that he was talking through his hat was indignant, but Willie knew he was right. The fighting spread and continued on and off until the American and British governments finally brought about peace. The European powers were falling over themselves to placate the Japanese, who did nothing to help and, with odd bursts of fighting, continued to spread their influence.

  Chinese nationalism brought constant friction and the League of Nations seemed powerless. It was obvious to Willie that the Japanese had not withdrawn and he was well aware that the Europeans in the East could never profit from what was happening. For the Chinese, though the enemy was Japan, there was also no love for the foreign settlements, of which the most important was always Shanghai. Despite a population of a million Chinese against a mere forty thousand Europeans, the Chinese still had little say in its administration and the Municipal Council was still elected by foreigners, while foreign investors complacently supported Chiang in his efforts to eliminate Communism. They had failed in Russia but they were determined not to fail in China.

  Willie watched the manoeuvrings with some disgust. ‘Chiang’s chief concern’s money,’ he told Nadya, ‘and China’s administered chiefly for the benefit of himself and his relations.’

  He was in Singapore when the new war between China and Japan started. The first shots were fired in Peking in an incident which appeared to be very obscure and was more than likely due to Japanese provocation, and it was obvious even from across the China Sea that the Japanese had a crushing superiority both in equipment and training. Within weeks they were in Peking and Tientsin, and within a few more in Shensi, and Chiang began to move his government to distant Chungking out of their reach.

  Almost immediately, Willie’s agents passed the news that Zychov had gone with them. Willie had never forgotten Shantu or Port Arthur, never forgotten the fact that he ought to have finished Zychov for good somehow in Hong Kong. While he was alive there was always a threat to Nadya and his new marriage. Again and again, he had made plans to face him, but they had all come to nothing and now he began to wonder if it were worth going to Chungking.

  But the war was in the way, even if hundreds of miles to the north, and it didn’t seem worth it. But then he heard that Chiang, cut off from the coast, was planning to bring in the supplies he needed from Burma.

  ‘By lorries,’ Willie pointed out as he and Kee sat round Da Braga’s brandy bottle discussing what it could mean.

  ‘It’s not possible,’ Kee said. ‘There isn’t a single road over the border that would take the heavy lorries they would need.’

  Willie gestured. ‘I’ve heard they’re going to build one.’

  ‘Who are?’

  ‘The Chinese. My son, Tom, heard. Through the students.’

  ‘But what with? They haven’t the tools. No tractors, no bulldozers, no diggers. What are they going to use?’

  ‘People,’ Willie said. ‘They’ve never been short of those. If I go to Chungking and fix it, are we prepared to back it up?’

  ‘Who’s supplying the lorries?’

  ‘America and Britain.’

  ‘Tom’s heard all this?’ Da Braga asked.

  ‘Tom hears a hell of a lot.’

  ‘So what do we get out of it, if the Americans and the British are supplying the lorries?’

  ‘Tyres. Spares. Servicing. To run fleets of lorries you have to have a back-up system and there’ll never be enough British or American “experts” to cover the thing.’

  ‘It’ll mean going to Chungking.’

  ‘What’s wrong with that?’

  Da Braga tapped his artificial leg. ‘I can’t go,’ he said.

  Willie leaned forward. ‘I can, Luis.’

  Da Braga grinned. He could see Willie was itching to be off. As long as he’d known him, he’d always been restless, ready to disappear over the horizon at the drop of a hat.

  ‘It’ll be difficult,’ he said. ‘It’s around fifteen hundred miles.’

  ‘I’ve checked. It can be done. By rail, steamer and junk. What’s more, I’ve just found an Australian who can use Chinese silk, wax candles, varnish and lithographic inks. That would pay for the trip even if the other part didn’t come off.’

  Da Braga studied Willie shrewdly. ‘Is this lorry project the only reason?’ he asked.

  Willie’s face hardened. ‘No,’ he admitted. ‘Zychov’s up there, too. I’ve been making enquiries for a long time. I might bump into him.’

  Da Braga smiled. ‘Rather you than me, Willie,’ he said.

  Willie wasn’t in the slightest put off by the pessimism of Da Braga and Kee. Getting to difficult places had always been a challenge to him and he arrived in the west on a small, powerful flat-bottomed steamer with the Stars and Stripes painted on her sides. Her passengers included a group of three business men out to make money from China’s new crisis, who practised golf strokes on the after deck for half an hour every day at the same time. Leaving the steamer, they took a train along a battered railway line that was constantly being bombed by the Japanese and just as constantly repaired with amazing speed by Chinese coolies.

  Chungking was a sleepy town above the Yangtze at the junction where the Chialing River joined the main stream and, after five centuries, its boundary wall was still virtually intact. Once the place had been remote and self-sufficient because Szechwan province had always been regarded as backward. But now it was impossible to find a room in a hotel, so Willie unearthed an American he knew called Putnam who had been doing business with him from Chungking for years and was prepared to loan him a sofa for the nights.

  ‘It’s kinda crowded,’ Putnam said. ‘Chiang’s government personnel are pouring in. Offices are migrating en masse, by bus, car, truck, rickshaw, barrow, boat and on foot. And, following the goddam officials and politicians come their families, and after the families the shopkeepers seeking their trade. Behind the shopkeepers come the pedlars, and finally behind the pedlars the prostitutes and the beggars.’

  ‘How about Russians?’

  ‘There aren’t any Russians here,’ Putnam said. ‘Chiang quarrelled with them years ago.’

  ‘Not with this one, I heard. Name of Zychov.’

  Putnam frowned. ‘The only Russian I know of is somewhere in the south with one of Chiang’s generals. The general’s a crook – but then, so are more than a few of Chiang’s boys – and since this Russian guy’s his sidekick, he’s probably one as well. Did you want to meet him?’

  Willie wasn’t sure what his plans were. He had brought the old Russian revolver with him in the faint hope that he might blow Zychov’s head off down a dark alley, but he wasn’t sure now that he could do such a th
ing in cold blood. There were always Chinese, of course, who would do anything for a price, but he wasn’t sure he was capable even of that and he decided to leave it and see what happened, especially as Zychov seemed out of reach, anyway.

  Chungking was totally unlike a seat of government. New buildings had spread like fungus. Since there was no steel, bamboo was used. Since there were no nails, bamboo was split and interlaced for walls and then coated with mud and roofed with thatch. On every new building there was a sign. Nanking Hat Shop. Shanghai Garage. Hankow Dry Cleaners. Huschow Coffee Store. Every province was represented and, because they didn’t like Szechwanese cooking, the newcomers had brought their own.

  ‘You can get Fukienese fish food, Hunanese chicken, Peking duck,’ Putnam grinned. ‘If you ask your way in Mandarin, ten to one you’ll be answered by a Cantonese who speaks it worse than you do. Everything’s written down because the Szechwanese messengers can’t understand what’s said and even the street names are a mess. The government’s renamed them all, but to the rickshaw boys the Road of the Republic’s still the Cliff of the Kindly Buddha, and the Road of the People’s Prosperity’s the Slope of all the Stars.’

  It was obvious that the refugees from the more developed areas of the coastal plains disliked Chungking and regarded the Szechwanese as second-grade people, with their dirty headcloths and whining voices and their suspicion of motor cars. The Szechwanese, who still cured their ills with recipes of husk, herbs and children’s urine, just as firmly regarded the downriver people as interlopers who were here to be swindled. They disapproved of boys and girls eating together in restaurants and of the lipstick and waved hair the newcomers’ women brought with them.

  Hated most of all was the weather. Winter was a time of fogs and rains that made everything cold and damp, while the summer sun brought a humid heat that dripped perspiration and encouraged swarms of insects – orange ones in the drinking water, huge brown ones on the walls, and always the mosquitoes. Putnam insisted they worked in threes – two to lift the mosquito net and the third to zoom in for the kill.

  Meat spoiled, there was never enough water, and dysentery was spreading. The noises you heard about the city were the ancient sounds of China – pigs, babies, hens, gossiping women, yelling men. Always there was the sing-song chant of coolies, the rhythmic clack-clack of a cotton salesman beating on a block of wood as he walked, the cries of the notion dealer, the chant of the night soil collector, the clinking of the brassware man, with his cats’ bells, knives, toothpicks and earcleaners dangling from a pole, the violin strumming of vibrating strings in the shops that made cotton quilts.

  ‘Watch for the Jap bombers,’ Putnam advised. ‘They haven’t been for a while, but the winter fogs have finished now so they’ll be along before the month’s out.’

  It wasn’t difficult for Willie to arrange for the consignment of silk and wax and, while he was at it, tea, rice, hides and wool which he knew Da Braga-Kee’s could sell, and the Chinese were all in favour of accepting help in the shape of tyres, spares and servicing. They had been promised munitions from Russia and they were planning to bring what they needed over the Burma border. The rumours Tom had heard were sound and the road had been planned to run between Lashio, at the end of the Burmese railway from Rangoon, and Chungking, and thousands upon thousands of Chinese peasants were being pushed into the area with nothing but the ancient tools their forefathers had used for centuries, and baskets to carry away the spoil.

  It didn’t take long to find a Chinese entrepreneur to work with. He looked pretty shifty to Willie and as if he were probably lining his pockets from the Chinese people’s misery, gut there was no one else and he knew he would have to accept that the Chinese would doubtless syphon off some of the money involved for himself. But the profits were sound and, with everything in writing, Willie was all set to vanish again the following day when Putnam appeared in a hurry.

  ‘Your buddy, Zychov,’ he said. ‘He’s here in Chungking.’

  ‘Doing what?’

  ‘Sent his general to report. If you want him, you’d better get cracking. I hear questions are being asked and we’ve got proof that money’s missing. There are also strong rumours they’ve been selling Chinese rice to the Japanese.’

  ‘Does Chiang know?’

  ‘Probably. But it isn’t Chiang who’s interested, because I reckon he’s syphoning off government money, too. No, it’ll be one of the lesser lights who’s doing it, and is worrying his share’s dwindling. Anyway, what’s so goddam important about this guy, Zychov? What are you goin’ to do when you see him?’

  Willie still hadn’t made up his mind. He was certain at least that he could never destroy Zychov in cold blood, but Putnam’s knowledge that the Chinese general he worked with was corrupt gave him a weapon he thought he might use at some time.

  It was difficult to obtain a rickshaw and Putnam decided that something must be happening. ‘They always disappear when something’s in the wind,’ he said. ‘We’d better walk.’

  It was late evening and the lights of the city had just come on when Putnam noticed that passers-by were beginning to hurry and that on gallows-like poles on the surrounding high hills large yellow paper lanterns had been lit.

  ‘Oh, bejesus,’ he said. ‘It’s an air raid!’

  Willie was still brooding on how he should tackle his problem. Zychov was a slippery customer and he realised he had no plan to deal with him. An outright accusation might work, however. If Putnam had proof of corruption, it might force someone to look into it.

  His mind was full of pictures of Zychov languishing in prison when he noticed that the people around him were beginning to move faster, the rickshaw boys heading away from the centre of the city, the barrow men pushing their heavy vehicles into alleys and yards and removing a wheel so they couldn’t be stolen, before following the rickshaw coolies. Then the siren went again and they saw the large paper lanterns had been replaced by two red ones.

  ‘Close now,’ Putnam said. ‘We’d better get off the road.’

  The noise of the teeming streets had changed now to a panicky sound and then, as they headed for the caves dug in the cliffs for air raid shelters, they saw the red lights had also disappeared, and the chatter of the crowd changed to shouts and everybody started to run. Babies were crying and women were wailing. A few peasants were hurrying by with chickens, mattresses, tea-kettles, here and there the corpse of a relative; sometimes in a rickshaw, sometimes in a car or even a sedan chair, all heading for the fields outside the city.

  Willie and Putnam had reached the shelter of a ditch when the planes arrived and they waited with a crowd of Chinese who were clutching their children to them, their eyes lifted upwards. The planes came in wingtip to wingtip and the light jade-coloured evening sky that tinted the silvery crescents of the paddy fields along the slopes was spotted with the antiaircraft shells bursting in pink puffs of smoke, all of them short or off-target because the gun barrels were worn out.

  The wailing had stopped now and throughout the din of the bombs Putnam went on talking, shouting his observations in Willie’s ear as they ducked and flinched at the explosions. ‘The Slopeheads all accept they can be killed any sunny day,’ he yelled. ‘So they keep their office files ready stacked for whipping into a dugout. If the sun’s going to shine, people set off early so they can be close to a shelter. They save their longer errands for a cloudy day.’ He smiled. ‘There’s one thing the bombing’s done, though. It’s made the Szechwanese and the Cantonese and all the other “eses” realise they aren’t as different from each other as they thought. They’ve discovered they’re all the same people and the youngsters have even started to marry each other.’

  The raid was a bad one and went on a long time. When the all clear went – represented by a long green paper windsock on the hillside – Chungking seemed to be on fire from one end to the other. Shop fronts were smashed and there were acres of burned-out devastation where the bamboo and mud squalour of the new housing ha
d vanished. The incendiaries had chewed out a series of old slums, and ancient temples had caught fire, so that they could hear the timbers whistling and cracking and the popping of the bamboo joints as they burned.

  It was obvious they were not going to see Zychov and, sure enough, when they asked the next day they learned he had left. They had worked most of the night with the Chinese, dragging out corpses and carrying away the injured until, with daylight, covered with dirt and ash, they had stumbled back to Putnam’s flat and fallen into chairs.

  ‘Not as bad as the first time,’ Putnam pointed out grimly. ‘Then, they didn’t know what to expect and they packed the main street so goddam tight they couldn’t move, and men, women and kids were roasted where they stood.’

  ‘Does Chiang ever try to drive the Japs back?’ Willie asked.

  Putnam grimaced. ‘Old Dogleg has too many shifty people round him,’ he said. ‘He thinks Japan can’t be defeated, but he thinks the good old USA will finally have to take sides with him, so it’s his job to look after the Communists.’ He shrugged. ‘I guess he’s right, too. China’s so big, the Japanese can never capture all of it, and all he’s got to do is retreat a bit more when necessary and keep out of the way.’ He handed Willie a drink. ‘He’ll get all he wants,’ he added, ‘when we finally slap the Japs down.’ He paused. ‘As we’re bound to eventually,’ he added.

  Part Five

  1939–1945

  One

  ‘Eventually’ proved to be much sooner than anyone expected. Despite the new war in China, in the East business did not come to a halt and if care were taken to choose a route between battle zones, it was always possible to travel between the occupied and free zones. The Chinese post office even maintained its service between the two areas so that you could send mail from Chungking to Shanghai and vice versa, even send Japanese goods for sale to Chiang’s new capital, where they were immediately snapped up by the luxury-deprived inhabitants.