Dynasty

by Elegant, Robert;

  “Calmly? Did I take it calmly when I discovered that three-quarters of the anti-toxin I finally wangled out of Washington had disappeared? Only the rich can get medicines. But they’re in for a shock. When, not if, but when the typhoid epidemic breaks, they’ll find they’re not immune. The poor they’ve deprived of immunization will infect them.”

  “That bad, George?”

  “Worse! I’m holding my breath and praying. That’s all I can do. They’d steal my old stethoscope if they could. The corruption’s unbelievable—and the infighting’s worse than the plague in Hong Kong in ’09. But, this time, Chinese are fighting Chinese instead of the British. I can only pray we don’t have another plague epidemic. It’s already virulent in places in Yunnan. So I tell them to kill rats. It’s all happened before.”

  “But your public health conference, George. Certainly, the governors and mayors can …”

  “Not a hope. They have no power, and the generals won’t move. Too busy stealing supplies, collecting pay for phantom soldiers, and counting their rake-off from the black market. God help us, a vial of penicillin that could save a soldier with peritonitis goes to some fat merchant’s concubine, who thinks—wrongly, it happens—that it will cure her cold. All Chinese think an injection is magic, if it costs enough. I’m ready to throw in my hand.”

  “Only a while, now,” Gwinnie soothed, “and we’ll be going home.”

  George Parker’s despondency made his wife long for the end of his tour of duty. They had returned to China with enthusiastic hopes of preventing the threatening epidemics. After only three months, even the ebullient Dr. Parker had despaired. Her concern for her husband overcame her concern for her native country, and Gwinnie marked the passage of time with black strokes on her calendar. Another fifty-six days would see them safely out of China.

  Compassion contended against revulsion when she looked around the crowded, narrow street on the steep hillside. She had been too long in the United States to ignore the misery her mother pretended not to see; the pervasive suffering was intolerable to Gwinnie. Maimed beggars with suppurating ulcers on their stumps held up emaciated children while officers and their ladies strolled past unseeing. Bone-thin private soldiers in patched uniforms jostled plump merchants in silk long-gowns. Green slime coated the broken cobblestones and, it seemed, hung in droplets in the air itself.

  Whoo-ee! Whoo-ee! Whoo-ee! The sirens’ piercing ululation silenced the crowds’ babble.

  “Ching-pao! Hung-cha ching-pao!” The ubiquitous policemen in shabby uniforms shouted. “Alarm! Air-raid alarm!”

  Gwinnie and George Parker were swept up by the throngs surging into the mouth of an air-raid shelter. The Chinese were proud of those deep tunnels that honeycombed Chungking’s cliffs. Most accommodated at least 30,000, and the new tunnel in the East City sheltered 40,000. The Parkers were carried through the wide portals into gloom half-lit by kerosene lanterns. Jostled by the frightened crowd, Gwinnie clutched her husband’s arm.

  “Shouldn’t be long,” George assured her. “Our fighters’ll drive them off. Pity there’s no fog today.”

  Seated on their coats near the tunnel’s mouth, they heard bombs exploding, anti-aircraft batteries chattering, and airplane engines whining. Gwinnie crushed a crawling insect on her neck. Disease-bearing fleas, mites, ticks, and flies infested Chungking. She shuddered and wiped her blood-stained fingers on her handkerchief.

  Her husband did not notice her discomfort. His eyes were fixed on the patch of light cast on the packed-earth wall by the flickering lantern hanging from the low ceiling. A rivulet of earth was trickling from the wall. He knew it was not his imagination, for he could see the fissure widen as he watched. A gout of mud fell from the ceiling, and the wooden beams supporting the packed earth groaned on their stout props. A stick of bombs exploded close by, their serried thunder reverberating through the cavern, and Parker saw the props jump. The wooden crossbeams trembled, shifting in their sockets.

  “Let’s get out!” He grasped Gwinnie’s hand. “The tunnel’s going. Come on, Gwinnie, quick.”

  Daylight shone tantalizingly from the exit thirty yards away. Treading carelessly on reclining bodies, George Parker pulled his wife toward safety. A moment later, the entire crowd pushed toward the exit. The Parkers were twenty feet from the tunnel’s mouth when the earth shrieked and the tunnel collapsed. An avalanche of mud, beams, and stones bore them down. Guinevere and George Parker died when the viscous soil filled their noses and mouths. Her hand was still clasped tightly in his.

  When Gwinnie and George did not appear for lunch, Charles and Mary summoned sedan chairs to carry them to the American medical team’s headquarters in the East City. The telephone system was hopeless. The General and Mrs. Parker, a sympathetic lieutenant told them, had set out to attend a public health conference in a compound near the giant new East City Tunnel shortly before the air raid. No, he said, he’d had no word from them, and the sergeant sent to inquire reported that they had not arrived at the conference hall.

  For two days, Mary and Charles watched rescue workers digging in the debris to unearth broken bodies. The workmen, who wore cloth masks against the stench rising from the earth, scraped with crude spades and hoes at the impacted mass of rocks and clay.

  Mary was dry-eyed in shock, though unshed tears shone in Charles’s hazel eyes.

  “I feel old,” he said dully, “and helpless.”

  She slipped her arm around his waist. He grasped her shoulder and pulled her close.

  “I never thought it would be Gwinnie,” she said slowly. “I’ve been afraid, so afraid for Jonnie, for Thomas, and for James. But Gwinnie shouldn’t even have been here. Why Gwinnie?”

  Late in the afternoon, four American bulldozers clanked through the narrow streets toward the blocked mouth of the tunnel.

  “Now,” Mary reassured Charles, “we’ll see something happen. The machines’ll get them out.”

  Fifteen minutes later, Charles clasped Mary’s arm.

  “The bulldozers are closing the tunnel,” he faltered. “They’re giving up. It’s all over.”

  The keening of the crowds tormented the cold afternoon. Charles and Mary walked slowly down the hillside. His bad leg dragged on the cobbles, and he leaned heavily on his cane. Her vision obscured by a mist of tears, Mary tightened her arm around his waist. He guiding her and she supporting him, they stumbled through streets bubbling with irrepressible life.

  “I hear they’ve demoted three of the officials who built the East City Tunnel.” Dewey Miller stamped his cold feet on the steel-plate runway of the Sand Spit. “Real fierce punishment, isn’t it?”

  “Who knows?” Archie MacDonald’s response was unusually bland. “It could have been honest error, not graft.”

  “You don’t really believe that, Archie?”

  “No, not really, but there’s no proof.”

  “And there never will be,” Miller said savagely. “Someone big might get hurt. After all, what’s 40,000 lives?”

  “You heard about the Parkers?”

  “Yeah, Archie. Your Sekloongs are having a hell of a time. All that money doesn’t help much, does it?”

  “No, Dewey,” the Scotsman replied with his normal acerbity, “though it may cushion the worst. But here they come.”

  Twelve impassive Communist delegates led by Chou En-lai climbed out of their jeeps and walked with self-conscious dignity toward the waiting American C-47. The Communist negotiator could gain no additional propaganda advantage from further repetition and rejection of the same proposals and counterproposals. He was returning to Yenan on December 9, 1944, just three years and one day after the Great War in the Pacific had begun with the Japanese attacks on Pearl Harbor, Hong Kong, and Malaya.

  “Do you have a statement for us, Commissioner Chou?” the Associated Press correspondent called out. “When will you be back?”

  “Will you be back?” shouted the Reuter correspondent.

  Wooden-faced in his role of Major Gen
eral Shih Ai-kuo, James Sekloong turned to the correspondents. He spoke slowly and distinctly in English.

  “Commissioner Chou cannot reply to questions. He will return when the Nationalists show they are sincere in their intentions. He cannot predict when that happy event will occur.”

  “Anything to add?” the Associated Press man persisted. “Then this isn’t the end of negotiations?”

  “We hope not,” James replied. “We earnestly hope not, but the Nationalists must demonstrate their sincerity. That is all.”

  “Can’t you give us a statement?” insisted Reuter.

  James conferred briefly with Chou En-lai before replying.

  “Secretary-General Mao Tse-tung has pointed out a clear phenomenon. The Nationalists have said to us: ‘If you give up your army, we will give you freedom.’ If their offer is sincere, then the parties and groups that have no armies should already have enjoyed freedom for some time. But they have no freedom. Because the workers, peasants, students, intellectuals, and national bourgeoisie have no army, they have lost their freedom. We will not walk into the tiger’s lair unarmed.”

  “General Shih, can you tell us …”

  “Commissioner Chou, just one more picture.”

  “General, is there no hope of …”

  The Communist delegates climbed the short aluminum ladder into the C-47. Before the door clanged shut, James turned again to the throng of correspondents.

  “Comrade Chou has asked me,” he smiled, “to tell you that he hopes to see you all again, soon. But he cannot say when.”

  The twin engines spat gray smoke, and the C-47 began taxiing.

  “You know,” Miller said meditatively, “I could swear that big bastard had been crying. He’s not that cut up about the talks, is he?”

  “Dewey, don’t forget it was his sister,” MacDonald reminded him. “They’re still family—capitalist or Communist.”

  “I forgot,” Miller answered. “Poor bastard. But when’ll they be back? Will they be back?”

  “Oh, they’ll be back. No question, though who knows when? There’s still a lot of talking to get through before the fighting starts. Both sides want to keep up the pretence a little longer, at least till the Japs are out of the picture.”

  “Fighting?” Miller pressed disingenuously. “You’re sure they’ll fight it out.”

  “What else?” MacDonald shrugged.

  “And who’ll win?” Miller persisted. “The Communists or the Nationalists?”

  “Come now, Dewey,” MacDonald snapped. “Who do you think’ll win?”

  Interlude

  June 27, 1970

  10:30 P.M. to 12 M.

  The violent assault of Typhoon Linda, passing just thirty miles from the center of the Colony, enveloped The Peak in opaque cascades. The typhoon’s myriad claws ripped at hillsides and gashed foundations. The waves in the harbor rose sixteen feet to batter the sea walls, break over those embankments, and flood the plaza of City Hall. An 18,000-ton freighter was torn from its moorings, her massive iron–chain tether snapping like a silk skein. The Oriental Monarch was driven inexorably toward the jutting finger of the man-made runway of Kaitak Airport. Her twin screws thrashed impotently against the foam-whipped waters, while her captain clung white-faced to the binnacle, alternately demanding more power from the engine-room and praying in a terrified monotone. In Repulse Bay, blocks of jerry-built “luxury” high-rise flats swayed in the winds. Windows shattered under the gusts; flying flower-pots and porch furniture crashed into living rooms inches deep in water; and two-inch cracks opened in concrete façades. In Wanchai, the wild torrents pouring down from the hillsides into the tenements and shacks swept away automobiles, filling the side streets with yellow mud that flowed like lava.

  Ponderous as a 300,000-ton supertanker riding out a gale off the Cape of Good Hope, The Castle was contemptuously secure against the shrieking 110-mile-an-hour winds. Its great stones withstood the fury of Typhoon Linda as they had the battering of scores of earlier mighty tropical storms. Occasionally, when a door opened, the diners heard the creaking of tortured shutters amid the wild wail of the typhoon. In spite of these intrusions, the banquet celebrating Lady Mary’s ninetieth birthday spun out its ceremonial length undisturbed.

  Sir Jonathan had built his fortress to withstand the assaults of nature, the malevolence of human enemies, and the erosion of time itself. Lady Mary remembered her first glimpse of Sekloong Manor when Harry, dead these past thirty-one years, showed her the construction site that recalled the building of the eternal pyramids. The Castle would endure. But, she wondered, would the Sekloongs themselves prove as impregnable against the forces that threatened them? Her own generation had passed, and her children’s generation was passing. But what of the others, her grandchildren and great-grandchildren? Lady Mary’s violet eyes swept around the table, judging the animated faces of her descendants.

  Halfway down the arc of the round table, her son James listened with amused disdain to the loud, adulatory questions of his grandnephew, George Chapman Parker III. Inevitably called Chappie, the nineteen-year-old son of American Air Force Major General George Chapman Parker, Jr., was a self-avowed Maoist who had dropped out of Princeton to “fight for the cause.” The heir to $4.5 million through his Sekloong mother and his deceased grandfather Dr. George Parker was annoying his Communist granduncle by the same undisciplined zealotry that had for years enraged his reflexively conservative father and his uncle by marriage, the Under Secretary of State. This once he looked reasonably clean in the faded jeans and open-necked shirt that were his concession to formal attire, though his long hair, caught by a rubber-band in a pony tail, would have benefited from a shampoo.

  Lady Mary wrinkled her nose in distaste. Chappie was no favorite of hers. She was mildly offended by his eccentric dress, his immature political opinions, and the grime that normally layered his neck. Her anger was, however, roused by the impenetrable layers of ignorance that sustained his doctrinaire convictions. She herself had studied every word written by Chairman Mao Tse-tung with great attention—and occasional enthusiasm. But her great-grandson was arrogantly uninformed; he had never read the basic texts of the creed he professed. As far as she could ascertain, Chappie believed simply that his adored Chairman wanted to blow up the world—nothing less and nothing more. While awaiting that universal apotheosis, he regularly blew his own mind with LSD.

  “Right on, Uncle Comrade!” Chappie’s voice was shrill in approbation. “We’ll destroy every last mother of the exploiters, even if we leave nothing but a smoking pyre. Right on, Uncle Comrade!”

  General Shih Ai-kuo looked infinitely pained. Regretting his earlier outburst, he reflected that he had not been sent to Hong Kong to quarrel with his elder brother, who still worshipped the fallen idol Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek. But neither had he been sent to listen to adolescent prattle. He caught the eye of Spencer Taylor Smith, whom Lady Mary had seated three places away, and grimaced in mute disgust at their nephew’s idiocy. For once in wholehearted agreement with the Deputy Political Commissar of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army, the American Under Secretary of State smiled his sympathy.

  “Ah, Chappie.” General Shih turned back to his grand-nephew. “Who are these mothers you wish to destroy? A most unfilial ambition.”

  “You know what I mean, Uncle Comrade. You know. All those mother-friggers, the guys who screw the people. You know.”

  “A strange expression.” The representative of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party was deliberately obtuse. “I must study the American language.”

  “Don’t take my son as a model, General Shih,” Major General George Chapman Parker, Jr., cautioned. “His jargon changes so fast, Sir, even I can’t keep up with it.”

  “Why don’t you call me Uncle James, George?” the Communist leader suggested. “Everyone else seems to. But not, if you please, Uncle Comrade.”

  “No fear of that, Sir … Uncle James,” Parker answered.

&nb
sp; “I might add, General Shih, that our mutual nephew’s political opinions change as rapidly as his jargon.” The Under Secretary of State was searching for an opening, for a point of human contact with the enemy. His instructions were clear. Unlike China’s Premier Chou En-lai, the American policy-maker Henry Kissinger had defined his subordinate’s mission precisely.

  “I trust, Mr. Secretary, that, ah, Chappie’s opinions will mature,” the Communist General replied. “On one point, however, he and I are agreed. There can be no compromise with Soviet social-imperialism or American imperialism. Eventually, of course, we shall destroy you as well as the Soviets. But Chappie himself needs to learn much, needs opportunity for serious study.”

  The Under Secretary groped for a temperate reply, but Chappie’s eager response broke in before he could speak.

  “Could I, Uncle Comrade, could I? Hot shit! What an opportunity!”

  “Could you what, young man? No one is interested in your bodily functions. And, if you wish to use the facilities, you don’t require my permission.”

  “You know what I mean, Uncle Comrade. Hot shit! Could I come to China and see what you’ve created? What a trip that would be! Could I, Uncle Comrade?”

  “You could presumably apply for a visa, though that is not within my province. But I don’t see that such a visit would benefit either the Chinese people or yourself. You need to learn much beforehand. Above all, you need to learn discipline, self-discipline, if you are to serve the people.”

  “Shit, Uncle Comrade, that’s what they all say. Discipline, that’s what the older generation—everybody over thirty—keeps preaching at us. Are you putting us on, too, Uncle Comrade? Anyway, how can I learn in Amerika? Man, it’s a bad scene. Fascism, suppression, racism, exploitive capitalism. The whole rotten bag!”

  “You must read the works of Chairman Mao, learn to understand his thoughts thoroughly and penetratingly.” General Shih Ai-kuo was enjoying himself. “You must study and learn … learn to make revolution by making revolution. We Communists will help as much as we can. But only the American people can liberate the American people.”