“It is no legend,” Ch’ing said darkly. “I am a businessman and hard of head. I spoke to one who knew. Hu Ch’iao Kuei was killed by a tiger and his men saw him dead. Years ago, before the true war but when the Japanese held Manchuria. He raided against the Japanese. When the men returned for the body, it was not there. Later he was seen raiding all alone, and bullets did not slow him.”
The Major shrugged. “As you wish. At any rate he is raiding now, with half a dozen men. Along the Hsinkiang border, last I heard. That reminds me: Kanfanfu no longer exists. But you will not pass that way.”
“No longer exists?”
“I burned it. They sheltered bandits. This is rotten tea.”
After a silence Ch’ing asked, “Where did you lose your men?”
“In the mountains near Yung-chang. One I shot because he ran. We were tracking a band from Ch’ing-hai, led by a Kashmiri. They were short of ponies and instead of dispersing they doubled up. Fools. We caught up with them and wiped them out.”
Jake recognized the tone. He had heard other majors talk of other battles, and count heads. “Well, what now?” he asked. “Will you be allowed to rest?”
“Rest!” The Major almost spat. “There is no rest. Now I go to refit in Pao-t’ou, and take a bath, and then back across the Black Gobi.”
“You should have more troops.”
K’uang shrugged. “I should be a lieutenant, with such a small command, but we have too many majors. There is no serious work for majors these days. We have almost as many majors as bandits.”
“Bandits,” Ch’ing said. “It is the work of a lifetime.”
“It will never end,” the Major brooded. “But then,” and he smiled briefly, “I like to kill bandits.” The smile vanished. “There are not a hundred good soldiers in this country!” he burst out. “They are not allowed to be good!” He calmed himself. “Well, my men are good. And the American Marines are good,” he said to Jake. “I have heard that.”
Jake was embarrassed for him and spoke sympathetically: “We have bad ones too. Sometimes I used to think I had to win the war all by myself.”
“Yes, yes!” K’uang cried. “I too.” He sighed. “Well. We beat them, did we not.”
“Did we not,” Jake said.
One of K’uang’s men came in and saluted; K’uang waved a lazy acknowledgment. The man spoke, quick and low.
“Ah, really?” K’uang asked, and his eyes flickered to Jake and away. Jake tightened. “With your conspicuous coloring,” K’uang said to Jake, “you do well to act open and innocent, like an honest man.”
“I am indeed an honest man,” Jake said.
“And these goods, they are honest too?” The Major’s ears were without lobes; in the dim light of the yurt his eyes were opaque, expressionless.
“They are honest goods, and they are all I have in this world,” Jake said. “Sir.”
“How I would like to believe you!” the Major said, and rose gracefully. He was handsome and lithe, and his smile was not a true smile. “Come. Let me show you a wonderful thing.”
K’uang’s killers stood like sentries in the sunlight. Like a firing squad momentarily unemployed. K’uang marched to Sweetwater and Bad Smell.
Jake saw his goods laid out on tarps. Cameras, compasses, cigarettes: like a bazaar, a street market. “It is as I said,” he told K’uang.
“Ah yes,” K’uang said. “And the kegs.”
Jake saw the broken seals. The camel-pullers stood glowering. K’uang’s soldiers looked on casually, but their rifles were cradled close. “Well then, the kegs,” Jake said. “Nails. I hope they can be resealed.”
K’uang said, “Nails,” and stepped to the kegs. He tossed Jake a nail, and took another himself.
Jake examined it. “A nail,” he said, and tossed it back. “Construction nails for scaffolding and such. Hence the double head. When the frame is no longer needed, the nails can be pulled easily and the whole dismantled.”
“A nail indeed,” K’uang said. “Now come look.” He slipped the two nails into his shirt pocket and ordered Jake forward with a sharp gesture.
Nested neatly in each of the kegs were small, rectangular green-and-white cardboard boxes, many such, buried among the nails.
“Bugger!” Jake said. “Whatever it is, I knew nothing of it.” He looked to Ch’ing for help. Ch’ing spat.
“You knew nothing,” K’uang said.
“They were sealed!” Jake insisted. “With iron bands! With the seal of my own navy! Defile him! He told me never to trust a seal in China!”
“Who?”
Jake stood fuming and sullen in the noonday sun, and after a while he said, “Old Kao. Kao Hu-tsuan. My partner in Peking.” He met the Major’s eye then and said, still angry, flushed, knowing this was trouble and knowing he deserved trouble but not this trouble, “All right, Major. What are they? I really do not know.”
And K’uang said to himself, This one is telling the truth. No question, he is telling the truth. A golden ox. The body of a warrior and the brains of a carp. He is telling the truth because his eyes say so, and the flush of his skin, and because he is not smart enough to lie successfully. His ears would turn blue, or his teeth drop out.
They are as bad as the Russians, or the English in their short pants.
Look at him! He should be slaughtered and butchered. He would make fine steaks as the foreigners cut them.
Still, he fought. He has few scars but they were painful at the time.
I should shoot him.
“I should shoot you,” K’uang said.
“No,” Jake said firmly. “I did not know of this and I have done no wrong. I don’t even know what they are.”
“They are penicillin,” K’uang said.
“I thought at least diamonds,” Jake said.
He is telling me the truth, K’uang said to himself. There is something wrong here, it stinks like shit to the smallest nose, but he is telling the truth. Ah, defile him! I have better work to do. And the caravan master, this old, crafty camel-puller: he glanced at Ch’ing.
“I know nothing of this,” Ch’ing protested. “Major, you know me. You know the House of Wu. I curse myself for carrying a foreigner. Other than that I have done no wrong.”
“A shame that we must carry foreigners.”
“One must live,” Ch’ing muttered. “He paid.”
“Ah yes. A necessary evil.”
Ch’ing muttered, “He is not truly of the caravan, nor of the House of Wu.”
K’uang relented: “Be easy, Master Ch’ing.” He turned back to Jake.
“It is in powder form,” K’uang said, “and the vials in those boxes are full. It is, I think, worth its weight in gold.”
Jake stood mute, with the sun bashing down on the back of his neck. He tilted the coolie hat. “I knew nothing of this.”
“And if you had?”
Jake weighed that. If I had. “I cannot tell. I might have walked the crooked way.”
K’uang nodded. He issued orders. His men stacked the small boxes. They spread tarps and emptied the kegs. Nails trickled, gushed, splashed, lay in pools. Soldiers picked through them and found nothing. “Corporal Shih,” K’uang ordered, “have the kegs refilled.”
Corporal Shih was a big one, tiny eyes and a great flat nose: the eyes photographed Jake.
“I am confiscating these boxes,” K’uang told Jake.
I hope you get a good price for it, Jake said, but not aloud. God damn old Kao! Like a son to him, was I!
“I think I will not shoot you,” K’uang went on playfully. “I will punish you by making you listen to advice.”
“I will listen,” Jake said.
“I advise you not to travel alone,” K’uang said. “Henceforth and west of here, your nation and rank will mean nothing. Maintain an honest appearance. Do not adjust your hat under a plum tree.”
“What does that mean?” Relief was chasing the anger out of him, and the small fear. This major would let h
im off. Damn Kao!
“Do not be furtive.”
“I have nothing to be furtive about.”
The Major sighed. “This is such an awkward moment for you to say that.”
The two measured each other. The soldiers and camel-pullers watched and waited. Somewhere in the village children screamed, piping voices cursed.
“Whatever you are up to,” K’uang said, “I believe you will fail. But I need wish you no evil. You will find plenty of evil without my help.” He tossed a salute in Jake’s direction.
Jake returned the salute snappily. “See you again. Sir.”
“I doubt it,” said Major K’uang, and strode off after a last hard look at all of them.
Ch’ing hopped and danced in a cockerel’s fury. “Either,” he screeched, “you are deficient in virtue or you are a sheep with four horns. Whichever, I will plaster the seven apertures of your empty head with camel turd.”
“Stop this ranting,” Jake told him. “I did nothing wrong.”
“You should have told me!” Ch’ing cried. “We all buy-sell a little! It is the way! But we do not lie to the caravan master!”
Jake turned to Jim and showed palm helplessly. Hsü-to and Chu-chu were intent on Jake’s goods, and the repacking.
“Then I will tell you for the last time,” Jake said. “I did not know. I will not speak of this again. Perhaps I will not speak at all again because I am not accustomed to conversation with rubes, thieves, swine, one-horned rams and those who carry their brains in a small bag between the legs.”
“Now I believe him,” Hsü-to said.
“He was lucky,” Chu-chu said. “K’uang also believed him.”
“I am afraid to travel on,” Ch’ing said in despair.
“Do not be more of a dunce than necessary,” Jake said. “This is the end of the bad luck, and we have scraped through it with no harm done.”
“No harm!” Ch’ing exploded, but calmed down immediately. “Why, that is true. So then, to work.” He clapped hands.
“Everybody is working but you,” Chu-chu said, and Ch’ing marched off in a huff.
16
A few days west and it was honest-to-god desert sand, thick and drifting, an endless shifting dazzle of white sunlight. They pushed hard, forced marches, on the trail well before dawn with a long midday rest and supper by starlight.
They followed the northern track. Jim said it crossed more desert but fewer miles. Most of the Gobi, he said, was rock and gravel, a lot of it black, some of it flat as a lake for hundreds of miles. But there were also bad stretches of sand, patches of dune ten days across, and the air boiling and blistering.
With luck they would make this crossing in seven days, and fetch up at Dengin Hudag near an unreliable lake. “Sometimes it is not there at all,” Ch’ing said gloomily. “In my grandfather’s time it was ten miles west of now.”
A week after that—with luck, always with luck—they would round the northern shores of Gashun Nor and Sogo Nor, two lakes only a few miles from the Outer Mongolian border. Jake traced the route on his map more than once. This part of the map was almost blank. Then another three or four weeks and they would reach the Turkestan border. Hsinkiang. After the Black Gobi and some mountains.
Meanwhile Jake was thirsty, and Jim was out of jokes and songs. Sand sifted into every damn thing: their eyes and their pants, their boots and their food, their weapons and their canteens. At night they stacked their pack saddles and hung their gear high; even so it was sandy by dawn. They sat about the fire in a breeze-less cool night, and still the fine sand floated down unseen. Jim and Chu-chu played dominoes, and taught Jake how. “No such frivolity in the old days,” Chu-chu said. “Only dice and cards.” He owned a deck of cards, soft cardboard, two inches wide and four inches long, with dragons and leopards and camels for suits.
“I’m tired of mutton fat,” Jake said. “Any chance of beef? Or game?”
“Beef!” Another foreign joke. “But game, yes. When we pass the sands. At the Five Ugly Foals are wild asses. And many ducks and geese on the lakes. Many edible birds. Cranes, and herons.”
A couple of days later they crossed a faint track coming in from the north. Ch’ing had dismounted and was studying it. He swung an arm north. “Yunbeize,” he said, “where the bandits lived in the old days. Hard men and without mercy.”
“Anybody been along lately?”
“Hard to tell. With no wind tracks last forever. Hsü-to has gone to look for droppings. He went north this morning.”
The track ran north forever. Mongol armies had used it centuries before. So much space. Jake was uneasy. So many thousands of miles. The line of camels was a comfort, and the camel-pullers were good company, tough.
“Let’s move,” Ch’ing said. “He’ll catch up. He’s riding Snowball.”
And Hsü-to caught up; trotted into camp that night singing and cheerful. Not a sign of anything for three hours out.
“Then the luck has changed,” Ch’ing said. “Give the Tartar a nice fat yellow piece of the small gut.”
The luck had changed. The lake near Dengin Hudag was not too low and the water was sweet enough. When they had watered the camels and topped off, Jake went a little way aside and dropped his pants and scrubbed at the villainous crabs with one of his precious bars of soap. He had been scrubbing with sand, but that was abrasive, and caked if you were sweaty. He rinsed off. Then he had a better idea, and shouted to Ch’ing.
“Now what?” Ch’ing called back. “Sharks?”
“Will it offend any demons if I swim?”
“If you what?”
“If I take a bath.”
He heard Ch’ing’s mutter, and then mirth. “It will not offend the spirits,” Ch’ing called, “and it will certainly not offend the rest of us.” They laughed.
“Don’t let it shrink,” Jim yelled.
“Bugger all,” Jake shouted, and plunged in, and enjoyed a good wallow. He was not sure that you could drown lice, but he gave it a good try. He could always pick up more tomorrow.
At supper they were a happy crew. Fresh water did that. They drank gallons of tea, and Ch’ing told funny stories about the Japanese, who always took half of the goods but never seemed to suspect that the caravans also carried intelligence. How if you cursed the Chinese government properly the Japanese thought you were reliable. “I have spent my whole life cursing the government. What is lower than a tax collector?”
Later they lay back and smoked, and counted the stars. On the desert starlight was amazing. Even without a moon you could almost read. “You see,” Jim said. “That’s north.”
“I know that. Up from the dipper.”
“Yes. You people call it a dipper, too?”
“Yes.”
“And there is the dragon,” Jim said, “and the ox, and the emperor and his concubines.” Jake barely looked. Peace was upon him. In the starlight, in the silence, he settled into the sand, and was a boulder in the desert. The night was cool but a fire now would corrupt his night vision and erase the stars. He dozed. They all dozed. Hsü-to woke them with a huge, racking yawn like a bull’s bellow, and Ch’ing said, “Think if it had been the other end,” and they all laughed and turned in. All but the sentries.
The first thieves came that night, with the camel-pullers sleeping like dead men, the sentries too. The camels stirred and whispered in mysterious humped rows, and the men lay sprawled and snoring.
One prowled near Jake, who judged later that the poor bugger must have taken a good sharp look at this white-haired monster with a nose like a goose’s; it surprised a curse out of him, and the curse woke Jake. Jake’s hand did not dart immediately to the .45; Jake did not seize him immediately by the throat. Jake hardly knew where he was. He saw a strange face. Then he saw a hand, and a knife in the hand, and he remembered Kao hanging, and Kao’s goods, and he was awake. He was a new man in town, and this was a stranger of doubtful intentions.
So Jake’s hand swept under the pack and came up with t
he .45, and Jake said the proper thing, which being translated was, “Do not move.” The man understood. Then Jake hollered, “Thief! Thief!” and little mounds and humps of men stirred and shook. Footsteps pattered, running steps, and a shot sounded, and many fierce cries of “Turtle egg!” and “What now?”
There were three of them, and it turned out that they had come from the west on white donkeys and were armed with long knives. “And where before that?” Chu-chu was indignant. “To cross a whole desert with a donkey and a knife?”
“They’re Torgut Mongols,” Ch’ing said.
The caravan men stood in a loose circle at the center of the bivouac. Chu-chu and a little camel-puller from the first lien, a skinny fellow who looked more like a scholar, were covering three strangers and two donkeys. One of the strangers was Jake’s contribution. Another had landed hard when Ch’ing shot his donkey out from under him, and Hsü-to, who was by then aboard a young cow, raced out and rounded him up. The third was plenty confused when everything went wrong, and sooner than make a bad mistake he stood where he was.
They all looked about nineteen. They were emaciated and might have been brothers. In rags. Dull of eye, and snotty.
“This is what happened,” Ch’ing said. “They were cut loose from a caravan for thievery. That was a mistake. They hung about near the lakes because there is no other place. They lived for a little by stealing. Maybe they killed for the donkeys. Maybe there are bodies beneath the sand.”
Head of Pot had built up a fire, and now it flamed forth, and the men seemed to twist and wriggle in the dancing light. The three thieves stood motionless, heads bowed.
“Desert rats,” Jim said to Jake. “Not even rats. Little mice. Instead of stampeding the caravan and cutting out some real loot, they sneak up at night and settle for a brick of tea and a shirt.”
The camel-pullers were annoyed. Sullenly they yawned and spat. One called for tea. Half asleep, Jake reckoned idly, as a man will count balls on a pool table or cows in a field. “Bugger,” he said suddenly.
Ch’ing roared, “Now what? Are you never quiet?”
“The whole family is here,” Jake said. “A couple more thieves could run off with a whole pa. How do you know there were only these three?” Chu-chu was already moving out, toward the tail, and the skinny scholar headed for the point on the double. “You two.” Any two. Jake just stabbed the air. “Patrol. Together. A circle. I’ll be along. Don’t shoot me. Hsü-to: do you think there’s anything out there?”
The Chinese Bandit Page 12