by Robert Moss
The Communists, though, were not so easily bought. That made them different from the other political factions and elicited grudging admiration from Hugh Mclvor of the municipal police. Inspector McIvor, a young man prematurely aged by the Orient — and, no doubt, by the quantities of gin and quinine water he infused as a prophylactic against malaria and misanthropy — was something of a specialist on Communism.
McIvor had no fixed opinions about Chinese politics. One warlord looked much like another. Only their prices varied. His job was to keep Shanghai open to European commerce. The Communists, who appealed to the misery of the slums and to popular hatred of the “foreign devils,” were therefore his main opponents.
McIvor’s Chinese detectives kept watch on a list of houses and flats whose tenants were thought to be associated with the Communist International. More than a few of these addresses belonged to Americans. There was that foul-mouthed woman writer on the Avenue Dubail in Frenchtown, stocky as a lumberjack, who looked as if she cut her hair with a lawn mower. She had spent time in Russia and seemed to be the first port of call for every transient radical. McIvor suspected her of running a message centre for the Russians, but her passport was genuine and he could not have her deported without further evidence. One of her visitors was a fellow from Seattle who called himself Walsh and had no visible means of employment. McIvor had heard rumours that Walsh was high up in the Communist Party U.S.A. Perhaps they imagined in Moscow that Americans had some special affinity with the Chinese — or that possession of a U.S. passport conveyed some kind of immunity.
McIvor was intrigued by what he had learned about another American recently arrived in the settlement. He called himself Arne Paulsen and had collected a large sum in cash from the Hong Kong Bank. There was an oddity in his passport, which one of McIvor’s contacts at the bank had been shrewd enough to spot. The passport had expired, and Paulsen had it renewed at the American Consulate in Tokyo. It was not unusual for an American consulate to extend an out-of-date passport with a rubber stamp, to save its bearer the delay of waiting in a foreign city for delivery of a new travel document. But the standard extension was for two years, not one. McIvor had checked this with the American consulate in Shanghai. Furthermore — he had since received word — though the passport number matched the records, the American consul in Tokyo had never heard of a man called Arne Paulsen.
Mclvor ordered two of his Chinese detectives to maintain close surveillance. The results, though disappointing, confirmed his suspicions.
The man calling himself Paulsen was tailed to the Avenue Dubail, where he paused outside the woman writer’s apartment building but did not go in. The detectives lost him when he paid a visit to a small shipping agency off the Bund. They watched for him outside, but he did not re-emerge. Mclvor assumed that he must have found his way out through the partners’ entrance and warned his men to be more alert. Paulsen did not return to his hotel that night. One of Mclvor’s men spotted him in the street, quite by chance, two days later. He was followed to a Szechuan restaurant on the Nanking Road, where he took lunch but was not seen to speak to anyone except the waiter. In the afternoon, the suspect was observed loitering on the Bubbling Well Road near the Buddhist Temple.
When he entered the temple, the policemen followed, determined not to be cheated a second time. But to their consternation, they found their quarry was gone. A white man, a stranger to Shanghai, had become as invisible as a native pickpocket.
This satisfied Mclvor that the man was a professional and knew his job. He decided to visit the hotel in person and elicited the fact that the American had paid for a week in advance. The assistant manager agreed to show Mclvor the room. All he found was a forlorn suit on a hanger and a pile of laundry waiting for the maid. No personal papers, and the money from the bank had gone.
He assured the assistant manager that there was no cause for alarm, but he wished to be informed as soon as Mr. Arne Paulsen returned. He had no confidence that this event would take place.
The Chinese girl who pressed up against Johnny in the temple said, “Did you see the five T’ang horses?”
“No,” he responded without looking at her. “There were two, not five.” Then, quickly, “I’m being followed.”
“Come with me now, please.”
Within two minutes he was running behind her through a warren of narrow streets, crouched low to escape the awnings of the street peddlers. Two minutes more and he was lying in the back of a pushcart under coarse hessian sacking and, above it, a load of hot peppers, holding his nose to avoid sneezing. Within two hours he was in the hold of a junk, heading lazily south from the frantic docks of Hongchew towards the southern port of Swiatow.
From Swiatow, he travelled west by riverboat, pony and finally on foot, up stony mountain trails no wider than a man’s body, into liberated China: the Soviet Republic of Kiangsi.
3
Johnny had been in south China for nearly five months when C. asked Colin Bailey to lunch at White’s. Bailey kept the appointment with some misgivings. In his experience, C. invited his subordinates onto private territory when he wanted to mount a sudden flank attack. He wondered whether the chief wanted to pursue that awkward business in Brussels, where a member of the service had been caught with his fingers in the till, filching some of the visa money collected from Jews en route to Palestine.
They drank gin and french at the bar, where the appearance of the Prince of Wales caused not the slightest commotion. C. made a point of introducing Bailey.
“Perfectly decent chap,” C. remarked after the Prince had moved on. “Rather underrated. It’s a pity about that American woman.”
“A bit soft on the Germans,” Bailey ventured to suggest. C. affected not to hear.
He delayed his attack until port and cigars had been served in the smoking room.
“You know Adam de Salis is in town,” C. suddenly remarked. “He asked to see Johnny’s file. Since Johnny was, in a manner of speaking, his discovery, I couldn’t actually refuse, could I?”
“Of course not,” Bailey said automatically, trying to conceal his annoyance that de Salis had been poaching on his territory.
“Adam thought that some of this China stuff smells a bit high.”
“Oh, really? What precisely does he object to?”
Johnny’s reports from Manchuria had been spotty, and there had been a lapse in communications when he was up in the mountains in Kiangsi. But since he had come back to Shanghai and settled into a flat on the Avenue Moliere, in Frenchtown, his reports had been regular and, to Bailey, a source of mounting fascination.
Johnny described a powerful revolutionary movement that was being led to certain destruction by its foreign controllers. The Communists had scored their biggest military successes by hit-and-run tactics, striking the enemy where he was weakest, melting away whenever they were outnumbered, giving up territory to save lives. Now, under the strategy laid down by Emil Brandt, they were painting themselves into a corner.
Emil — who had never set eyes on the province of Kiangsi — had convinced himself that the rebels’ mountain fortress was impregnable. Under the gun and the lash, forced labour battalions were sweating to throw up earthen walls to make it stronger still. In his own reports to Moscow, Emil boasted that the Red Army mustered more than half a million men and could withstand any force the government hurled against it. According to Johnny, there were only half that number, and many of them were armed with sticks and knives. True, the forests of Kiangsi, laced with narrow paths where soldiers could advance only in single file, would be costly to storm in a frontal attack. But the defenders were vulnerable to a protracted siege. Their food supplies were low. All their salt had to be supplied from the outside. If they were squeezed for long enough, their own followers would rise up against them.
Von Seeckt understood this. Steadily, stealthily, he was moving on Kiangsi. His weapon was a garrotte. Johnny had seen the chain of concrete blockhouses and tidy forts, joined up by new mili
tary roads and bristling coils of barbed wire, that von Seeckt was building all around the Communist base area. Week by week, the lines were being tightened. Week by week, it was harder to smuggle food and weapons through. In Kiangsi they began to feel the bite of the wire against their throats.
The Comintern advisers who had been there had given Emil the same advice: break out of the trap; open escape routes; give up as much land as necessary, but save the Red Army. Some argued that in order to survive the Communists must be ready to seal an alliance with anyone who was ready to fight the Nanking government. Overnight, a powerful ally became available. Its appearance was almost miraculous, a gift of the gods. In the province of Fukien, next door to the soviet republic, the Nineteenth Route Army raised the standard of revolt. Its leaders were nationalists, not Communists, but they were opposed to the landowners, the warlords and the Japanese. Join forces with them, some of the Communists urged. Then we can break out of von Seeckt’s ring of steel and open a road to the sea. The Russians will send guns to us from Vladivostok.
Emil was deaf to all these entreaties. The soviet republic is secure, he insisted. The rebels in Fukien are bourgeois opportunists. Those in our camp who promote their cause are Trotskyite adventurers. Until we have overthrown the chiefs of the Nineteenth Route Army and replaced them with Communists, we can have nothing to do with them. Emil had ordered an American journalist on his payroll whose Shanghai-based publication, China Forum, was financed with secret Comintern funds to write an article quoting fictitious interviews with rebel leaders in Fukien province to make these points. He had later denounced the same journalist as a Trotskyite, forcing him to flee from Shanghai.
So, while Emil hunted Trotskyite adventurers, the military rebels in Fukien were left to face the onslaught of Generalissimo Chiang’s brand-new tanks and warplanes. Von Seeckt’s influence had begun to tell. For once the government soldiers did not turn and flee at the sound of battle. The Fukien rebels were crushed, and the Communists were left in utter isolation to face the next extermination campaign. The generalissimo bragged that he had marshalled nine hundred thousand men to wipe them off the map of China.
In Johnny’s account, Emil Brandt had set himself up as absolute dictator of the Communist party in China. He enforced his authority with bullying and threats of denunciation to Moscow. At the same time he lived in abject terror of incurring Stalin’s disfavour. His mind moved in a parallel reality. By repeating and inflating his fabrications over and over, he had convinced himself that they were truer than the evidence of his own eyes.
Bailey knew the depth of Johnny’s hatred and contempt for Emil Brandt and made allowances for this in assessing his material. Even so, he found the head of the Far Eastern Bureau an intriguing psychological study. A man addicted to his own illusions. What would become of him when his illusions — as Johnny predicted with such assurance — exploded in his face?
“De Salis’s point,” the chief of the Secret Service was saying, “is that Johnny’s reports from Shanghai are too good to be true. He’s telling us that without anyone’s help the Communists are going to blow themselves up. Wouldn’t you agree that’s the gist of it?”
“More or less,” Bailey concurred. “He says the Kiangsi soviet can’t hold out for more than six months.”
“Which is, of course, what we would wish to hear.”
“I’m not sure I follow.”
“De Salis believes it possible that Johnny has been turned, and that these reports from China are part of a deception plan.”
“With what motive?”
“To keep us smug and inert while the Communists make another grab for Shanghai. It’s the richest prize in the East. There’s more silver in the Shanghai banks than anywhere else on earth.”
“I don’t see it,” Bailey objected. “An insurrection in Shanghai would be doomed unless they got help from outside. There’s no help in sight.”
C. reflected on this before asking, “Do we have any independent confirmation of what Johnny is telling us?”
“Well, Killen thinks he’s on the right track.”
Killen was their man in Shanghai. Only recently arrived in China, he had a job as a griffin — a junior assistant — at the offices of the British Cigarette Company.
“Killen hasn’t had much experience though, has he?” C. observed. “Against his opinion, we have to weigh the wireless intercepts.”
Recently deciphered traffic had included a message from Emil to Moscow, restating his confident prospectus for the Communists in south China. His figures, of course, had been wildly at variance with Johnny’s.
“I suppose it boils down to whether we trust our man or not,” Bailey remarked. “For my money, he’s proved himself several times over.”
“Adam suggested we put it to the test.”
De Salis believes...Adam suggested...one of C.’s more irritating habits was to attribute his own doubts to a third party. It saved him from having to go into the firing line before he had made up his mind.
“May I ask in what way?”
“By using Johnny to stop some of the Red leaders in Shanghai. Emil Brandt, for one. The fellow who poses as a music teacher. And that other military expert, what’s-his-name—”
“Otto Braun.”
“Just so. I understand we’ve already had an inquiry from the Shanghai police.”
A Scot called Mclvor, a police inspector, had indeed paid a call on James Killen. It seemed his detectives had followed Johnny to Killen’s home — evidence of a lapse of security on the part of both the Russians and Bailey’s own service.
“I expect the locals are jittery,” C. went on. “The government didn’t do much last time the city was under attack. If we break the back of this conspiracy now, we can do them and ourselves a favour.”
“I don’t agree,” Bailey said mildly.
“Let me be sure I understand you. You’re worried that Johnny will be blown. Is that it?”
“He might be blown. But there is something else to consider.”
“Well?”
“If Johnny’s reports are reliable, the last man in Shanghai we would wish to see behind bars is Emil Brandt. He’ll wreck the whole Communist enterprise in China without any assistance from us. The policy called for is masterly inertia.”
“Are you serious, Colin?”
“Yes. But I admit the situation does have its humorous side.”
When C. failed to respond immediately, Bailey knew he had won his argument. His approach was not quite as passive as he had indicated to his chief. He had culled from Johnny’s reports the names of the most effective Communist organizers. Feeding Emil’s — and the Russians’ — paranoia about Trotsky’s influence, Bailey had arranged to have Trotskyite materials mailed to some of them anonymously. He had resolved to deliver the Chinamen on the list to the police when the appropriate occasion presented itself. They included the man code-named “Slavein,” who was the main link between the Far Eastern Bureau and the Chinese party. But for the moment, as he had advised Killen in Shanghai, they must be content to watch and wait.
4
For Johnny, living in the Shanghai underground under a new identity, waiting was impossible. He found relief in action, as always, in flouting the rules of all his employers by involving himself personally in risky operations. He staged holdups, smuggled guns off a freighter on the Whangpoo river under the noses of the police, planted explosives in a car belonging to the Blue Shirts, Chiang’s dreaded secret police. The younger Chinese Communists he helped to train — the ones who had a vocation for death — admired him for it.
He, in turn, admired them. They gave freely of themselves, asking nothing in return, with a generosity of spirit that was totally alien to the carping, conspiring party bigwigs in Berlin and Moscow. These young Chinese reminded Johnny of his own youth, and of Heinz — and then of the men who had murdered him. He had a mournful suspicion that his Chinese commandos would end the same way. He did not feel he was betraying them when he smug
gled his reports to Killen, Bailey’s man in Shanghai. It was the men in charge of the Chinese revolt who were the betrayers: carping graduates of the Lenin School, less Chinese than Russian; lost souls like Emil Brandt, who toadied to Moscow to cover up his terror and lack of conviction.
Johnny had toyed with the idea of shooting Emil one night, when rumours of a police raid had sent the members of the Far Eastern bureau scuttling out of a meeting and he found himself alone with Brandt on a blacked-out street, silent except for the distant thunder of an angry crowd and the howl of police klaxons. What saved Emil then, and helped to sustain Johnny now, was his realization that Brandt was doing the job himself. All Emil’s grovelling to Stalin would not save him, surely, when his mistakes in China resulted in another rout. Johnny was scrupulous in relating the full magnitude of those mistakes in his private correspondence with General Berzin.
When he needed women, they were never far. Within Emil’s organization, as in Moscow in the old days, it was as natural to go to bed with any consenting partner as to go to the bathroom. It was accepted, too, that for people who lived with the daily prospect of violent death, the urge was stronger than in others. It was not necessary to confine the appetite to party members. In the city of Shanghai, one house in twelve was a bordello. The women were of every age, shape, colour and nationality. Some of them, inevitably, were “swallows” in the service of the party, or the police.
Now Johnny was on his back in a room above the Cockatoo Club, a cabaret on the Avenue Joffre, hands folded behind his head, eyes closed, a cigarette dangling from his lower lip. The girl who was working to arouse him with her lips and fingers was patient and skilful. May had the wide cheekbones and blue eyes of her Russian father, the simian grace of her Japanese mother. He had been with her before. He liked her because she was beautiful and clever and never shammed pleasure she did not experience. At least not with him. She had confessed to him that she was utterly indifferent to what took place on her bed.