The Last Mandarin

by Stephen Becker

  “He is the local expert on Kanamori.”

  Hai’s face grew fatter, and he laughed like a goat. “Eh, eh, eh.” His flesh trembled. “He is, is he? But my dear friend, no one will ever tell Yen the truth. He has not that easy way with common people. He is too stiff from bowing to his superiors, too canny from much desiring rank and emoluments.”

  “You know much.”

  “One hears.”

  “Is he to be trusted?”

  “No. You should work alone.” Hai was positive. “You move well by instinct. You found Isuzu.”

  “That was easy,” Burnham said. “Journeying from town to town, handed along by men of good bones, drawing the countryside tight like a seine. Besides, he was afraid of the Russians. He bolted into my snare like a rabbit.”

  “Yet in his time he was a dragon. A scourge.”

  “No longer.”

  “Times change,” Hai said. “Perhaps the wily Chinese should be left to find their own destiny.”

  Burnham did not answer immediately. “Kanamori was an animal,” he said at last.

  “So were we all. Dragons. Hares. Wolves and tigers. Weasels.” Hai quaffed his wine and poured again. “Well, I will help all I can. Tell me, old friend, how long have you graced Peking?”

  Indignantly Burnham said, “Not two hours. Would I let the sun set on old friends?”

  “Old friends,” Hai murmured.

  Burnham let the silence hang, and sipped at his firewater. Hai seemed to pout, and went on slowly: “To see you is joy. You must not misunderstand.”

  “It is not that I misunderstand, but that I do not understand at all. You cannot want Kanamori to roam free.”

  “It is only …” Hai poured more wine.

  “I am a mere barbarian,” Burnham said, “and unpracticed in delicacies of speech.”

  “We owe the Americans so much. Perhaps too much.”

  Burnham said, “Ah.”

  “How pleasant,” Hai said, “how just, how inspiring, if we could now doctor our own horses.”

  “Yet this horse,” Burnham said, “has not been found, much less doctored.”

  “After years of battle, herds of fallen steeds dot the field. Here and there one screams or whickers. To make him well, or to ease him out of life, is for those whose field it is.”

  “Then I insult your soup by pouring my own spices into it.”

  “You could never insult our soup,” Hai said, “you who saved the pot. And yet. Listen, my friend: if your own life were at stake I would fling away my apron and take up my bow. But the Kanamoris of this world must settle their accounts with us and with no others. Understand, I know nothing, only rumor. But my heart whispers warnings and rebukes. You have slain your thousands by our side; to let you do more would be ungenerous, and would taste of shame.”

  “Yen was less sensitive.”

  “Yen is perhaps stirring a different soup.”

  “Ah.”

  “Kanamori is of no importance to the Americans,” Hai said gently. “It is what he knows, or has. And that is more important to us, to us Chinese. It was Chinese, in China, that he killed and raped and robbed. Still”—Hai brightened—“I will do what I can. You will go doctor your horse, and when he is well, or dead, you will return here, and we will eat walnut soup and nutty pheasant, and carouse like warriors.”

  “Of course,” Burnham answered, “without fail,” and each man masked the moment with a smile. “Now show me this famous room.”

  They crossed a tiny courtyard, ten steps, and entered the rear wing. Sea Hammer opened a wooden door, ushered Burnham into a pleasant room and demonstrated: he jammed the door shut behind them and shot the bolt. Burnham approved, and tossed his duffel bag on the huge bed. “A wooden bed. A stitched mattress. The bridal suite.”

  “As in a way it is”—Sea Hammer chuckled—“when I rent it by the hour. And a footlocker, and a chest of drawers, and a dandy little stove and a teapot—you see, ‘The wine cups have been polished, and are impatient.’”

  “Why, that is nobly said. You are kind to an old comrade.”

  “So. It is yours. I suppose you will be in and out at all hours. And I suppose”—he sighed dolefully—“you will entertain a lovely friend or two.”

  “You wrong me,” Burnham protested.

  “Ha! A bet?”

  “No bet.”

  “What is your wish about unexpected visitors?”

  Burnham considered briefly. With so little to go on he decided to welcome complications and possibilities. “Let them in. But warn me.”

  “As you say. Try to respect the reputation of the house. No dynamite or messy torture.”

  “I am a guest in your land,” Burnham said solemnly.

  “No, no, you are at home,” Hai said, “you have made yourself one of us,” and added, “as if floods and famine were not enough,” and let himself out, with a last shake of the head and a mournful “Yüü!”

  Burnham unpacked. He was not a tidy man but preferred not to live out of a duffel bag. The chest of drawers sufficed; he would reserve the footlocker for corpses and souvenirs. He stripped off the padded gown, tossed it on the bed, and went down the hall to the convenience. An Oriental toilet in a minuscule dungeon. Two little starting blocks for the feet, and you hunkered, and if you were lucky there was a chain somewhere to pull. He returned to his room, made his .38 comfortable in a shoulder holster, donned the gown, and practiced his draw. About five seconds minimum; the pistol was, for practical purposes, in storage. But he was an errand boy and not a cowhand. The knife, however, lodged in his left sleeve, might be useful. He bowed, crossed hands up his sleeves in the Chinese manner, and drew the knife with a flourish.

  He stashed his money in an inner pocket and left his new home. No one molested him in the courtyard; he passed through the restaurant, nodded at the slim waiter, and stepped out into Stone Buddha Alley beaming in the cold glow like a village idiot. He drew his fur hat snug; a west wind whistled through the alley. He turned onto Red Head Street and was assailed by rickshas.

  Only five pedicabs, really, but they surrounded him and the jabber was fierce. He waited. In time they quieted; it was after all necessary to learns the foreigner’s destination before whacking him with a price.

  “I would go to the Beggars’ Hospital in Rat’s Alley near the Eastern Handy Gate.”

  The screaming commenced. It was half an hour’s ride at most. They were competing for a nickel. Four cents. Shrill cries. Jostling. Three cents.

  Only one did not speak or move. He was a tall man, well-timbered and young, and beneath his tattered cloth hat his eyes were steady and even contemptuous.

  “And what is your price?” Burnham asked him.

  The others fell silent, shocked.

  The large man did not answer for some seconds. He wore a short, padded black jacket, and black trousers bound by a legging at the ankle, and tattered cloth shoes bound to his feet by rags. His black hair hung lank.

  “One half an American dollar,” he said.

  “That is a great deal.”

  “It is a long trip on a cold day. Good grazing makes fast horses.”

  Burnham nodded. “It will do.” He stepped to the pedicab, a commodious double.

  “What!” cried one, and then all of them: “What! Hsüü! Madness! A trick!” One voice detached itself: “Why, sir, why?”

  Burnham settled in. “It is not a trick. I am honoring pride.”

  “Pride!” They buzzed and exclaimed, and finally the voice rose again: “One whole dollar, then!” And in a cheerful chorus, “One dollar and a half! Two dollars!”

  Burnham’s man hopped to the seat and leaned into the pedals. They skirted the group and struck off down the street. Behind him Burnham heard a last wail: “An ounce of gold, foreign devil!” But by then his pedicab was warping smoothly into a calm sea of traffic.

  Burnham sat back and inhaled Peking, rubbernecking his way to K’uang An Men Street and noting cloth shops, lamp shops, meat shops, a
small shop specializing in white vegetables, a shop for small gods—so the sign said: SMALL GODS. Probably large gods had to be ordered in advance. He saw shops without signs. Soldiers patrolled in pairs. A bus racketed past, ancient, perhaps a week to live; fenders clanked and clattered, gouts of yellowish smoke stained its wake. Burnham saw a foreigner in Chinese clothes, and a Chinese in a velvet-collared overcoat, a surgical mask over his mouth. Two young men walked hand in hand. It was the Chinese way. In San Francisco they would be mocked or arrested. Smells came to him, the rich medley of the Orient. When he was out of China almost nothing was good enough to remind him of China, but now and then, once a year, he would pass a restaurant in a poor neighborhood, unsanitary, and a little whiff of the East would bruise his heart.

  The pedicab lurched. Burnham heard a slap-slap-slap, and the screech of dry brakes; they halted. The driver sat. After a moment he dismounted heavily, and went to look at his front tire. He made a queer noise. Startled, suddenly disturbed, Burnham recognized a sob.

  He stepped out. “What has happened?”

  The man gestured. Burnham saw the tire, shredded.

  “You have no spare?”

  “Spare!” The voice was heavy with bitterness. “And now the wheel is bent.”

  Burnham joined him. “It cannot be repaired?”

  “Repaired! Look at it. Defile it!” Tears stood bright in the man’s eyes, but his gaze was steady on Burnham.

  “You cannot patch it?”

  “For the tenth time? Look again! Which is tire, and which is patch?”

  Another pedicab whispered to a stop beside them, and its driver said, “Sir. You will transfer.”

  Squatting, his hand on the broken wheel, Burnham’s driver scowled. “Go,” he said. “The gentleman owes me nothing.”

  Burnham nodded. To the second driver he said, “Move along. I will stay.”

  The second man shrugged and pedaled away.

  Again Burnham’s driver said, “Defile it! Not even God sees the ricksha man.”

  “If I pay you now,” Burnham said, “will you buy a new tire?”

  “A new tire! A new tire is twice that.” The driver defiled this misbegotten bugger of a wheel. He then defiled his government, his day of birth, and money too fragile even for use behind. “I will beg the price of a hank of rope,” he finished, “and hang myself and have done with it.”

  “I think not.”

  “I am a large man and in two days have eaten but one bowl of noodles,” the squatting man said angrily. “I have killed many men and now cannot keep myself alive!”

  “What is your esteemed name?”

  “My miserable name is Feng. It is not a lucky name.”

  “Well then, Feng,” Burnham said, “we will walk to a bicycle shop and buy you a new tire, and have the wheel repaired.”

  Feng stood quickly. His chin rose, his eyes narrowed. “And then what? What does the gentleman want of me?”

  “I want to go to the Beggars’ Hospital in Rat’s Alley,” Burnham said reasonably.

  Feng wiped his face with his sleeve. The bones of his face were strong; he reminded Burnham of the hardy Manchurians up by the Russian border. “The gentleman means this,” Feng said.

  “I mean it,” Burnham said. “Without the poor, there would be no rich; the rich are therefore indebted.”

  “By the lord of all under heaven! I have lost a sheep and found an ox!” Feng drew himself up even straighter: “Foreign gentleman, I am yours to command.”

  Peking was dotted with bicycle shops; they were like bars in San Francisco. Burnham wondered how many pedicabs the city supported. Many thousands. The two men walked only two blocks. “My ricksha barn is over by the East Station,” Feng said. “Fortunately, that is too far. They would only kick me and tell me not to return.”

  “Then the san-luerh is not yours?”

  “Mine!” Feng went so far as to laugh. “Good sir, if I worked for a year, and did not eat, and went naked, and did without a roof, then perhaps I could buy a san-luerh. But by then,” he added gloomily, “the money would be worthless.”

  “Well, you are in luck.”

  “‘When bad fortune reaches its natural limit, good fortune must follow,’” Feng said. “Though I do not believe that. It sounds well, but I do not believe it.”

  “It is the remark of an educated man,” Burnham said.

  “I learned it from my father,” Feng said. “My father was a tiler.”

  “An artisan.”

  “And a good one.”

  “What became of him?”

  “The Japanese,” Feng said. “My father would not lick piles, so they killed him.”

  There were times when Burnham preferred English: “kissing ass” was so much more genteel. “A tragedy,” he said. “And your mother?”

  “We had no money and no food and no nothing,” Feng said sadly. “Shortly she went to the dark dwelling.”

  “Bad,” Burnham said. “Defile them all, it is bad. Good men and women plant a willow slip and do not live to enjoy the shade of the tree.”

  “‘The morning cannot guarantee the evening,’” Feng said. “But here we are. ‘Tun Kuan-kuang, bicycles and repairs.’”

  Together they opened the wooden door and pushed the san-luerh into the shop. “Busy, busy!” cried a voice from the back. “Not today! Too busy.”

  Unabashed, Burnham enjoyed the fruits of imperialism. “Nevertheless,” he said loudly, “you will repair this san-luerh immediately.”

  “Dogs defile your get!” the voice called. A figure loomed out of the shadows. “Moreover, be off—But sir!” Tun bowed. “If I had known! Please. You do infinite honor to my contemptible shop.”

  “I will do even more honor by paying in foreign money,” Burnham said.

  “A dazzling notion,” said Tun, and then asked swiftly, “Of what country?”

  “America.”

  Tun bowed low. “‘The flowers blush, and the moon hides her face.’”

  “You fool!” Burnham said. “That was said of a beautiful woman, not of a rich man.”

  Tun bowed again. “You are no American, sir, and not even a foreigner. You are of course a scholar.”

  “‘He who lives by flattery,’” Burnham said coldly, “‘works harder than the peasant.’”

  “Sir.” Tun bowed a third time. “You have but to express your wishes.”

  “My man will explain,” Burnham said.

  Feng stiffened for a moment, but quickly saw that this was Burnham’s joke; he turned to Tun and said, “Now see here. We require the wheel to be straightened and weak spokes replaced, and then a new front tire.”

  “Without delay,” Tun said. He knelt to examine the catastrophe. “Half an hour,” he said. “Perhaps less.”

  “We shall return,” Burnham said, and to Feng, “Come along.”

  Outside, Feng asked, “Where does the gentleman take me?”

  Burnham pointed across the street. “My horse needs oats.”

  Feng hung his head. “But I cannot. This passes the bounds.”

  “I need to drink tea,” Burnham said. “While drinking tea I need someone to chat with. There is no reason why you should not enjoy a bowl of pork-liver-rice-soup while you oblige me. Come. We will drink and peck.”

  Feng heaved a great moan, and followed Burnham to the dingy restaurant.

  It was the kind of a place Burnham had always loved: dark, dirty, the wooden tables and stools worn shiny even in the gloom, the proprietor bald, the customers shabby. There was, as this foreigner entered, the customary sharp, total hush, followed by the customary awkward resumption of low gossip. Burnham and Feng took a table and ordered. Waiting, Burnham eavesdropped. A man who could not eavesdrop was not truly at home in any language. The customers were speaking of money, or the lack of it; of the Communists, or the lack of them; and of heating, or the lack of it.

  Feng devoured his meat soup and several cups of tea in what seemed a few seconds. Burnham clucked and ordered another for h
im. Embarrassed, Feng asked, “Will the gentleman not?”

  “No. I have eaten, and sworn a vow not to stuff myself like a foreign pig.”

  “Vows must be kept.”

  “You too have sworn vows?”

  Feng made big teeth. “I vowed to kill five Japanese for my father, and five for my mother.”

  “And did you keep that vow?”

  “I am one short.”

  Well, I may be able to help you, Burnham thought. “And the enemy has departed.”

  “The Lord of all under heaven will forgive me.”

  “And what of the future?”

  Feng shrugged. “One must wait.”

  “What is the gossip?”

  “Oh, the city will fall. It is already sold.” With two fingers Feng made the sign for the number eight.

  Burnham nodded recognition. The Red Army, after a reorganization in 1937, had become the Eighth Route Army. They, and later the New Fourth Army, had fought hard against the Japanese; men and units had died in their tracks if need be. Some of the Nationalists also had fought well, but more often whole regiments vanished like dew in the heat of war. It was a bitter joke, perhaps a slander but much circulated, that the only time Chiang Kai-shek attacked was when he attacked the Eighth Route and New Fourth. Then too he was beaten.

  The proprietor slid a fresh bowl before Feng.

  “And how do you know that the city is sold?” Burnham asked.

  “Well”—Feng addressed his soup more sedately this time—“perhaps two months ago the government in Nanking announced that Peking would hold out to the last man.” He waved his chopsticks. “That was customary and meaningless. The gentleman surely knows about such matters.”

  “It is international practice.”

  “So, so. What is more important, General Fu said the same thing last month.”

  “That is Fu Tso-yi.”

  “That is Fu Tso-yi. A Shansi man and a shrewd country boy, though being a general he is now over fifty.” Feng smacked his lips. “Words cannot express the savor of this soup. Chu kan t’ang fan! Rice is scarce, you know. In the south is nothing but rice. Not so here.”

  “Go on about Fu,” Burnham said.