“They give me the Black Bear Blues,
They give me the Black Bear Blues,
They give me the Black Bear Blues,
And I ain’t goin’ to be treated this-a-way.”
Alde took a violin solo, even I could tell she was too good, her tone too pure, but by god, she made it work.
“Give me a number for a name,
Give me a number for a name,
Give me a number for a name,
And I ain’t goin’ to be treated this-a-way.”
People started cheering and clapping at that. Clapping in time from the black folks, and the whites got the beat. The went around and around, the balalaika and the mandolin played a duet, a double lead, I guess you call it, and the crowd got just a little bit crazier.
“But I’m goin’ home someday,
I’m goin’ home someday,
I’m goin’ home someday,
And I ain’t goin’ to be treated this-a-way.”
People cheered louder, threw their hats in the air, waved bottles and danced in place. I felt an arm hug my waist, Babs. I gave her the hottest kiss in my vocabulary, and Woody launched into the last verse.
“Goin’ down that road, feelin’ bad,
Goin’ down that road, feelin’ bad,
Goin’ down that road, feelin’ bad,
And I ain’t goin’ to be treated this-a-way.”
Not only did people join in, they made him sing it three more times before they let him quit. The applause and cheering sounded louder than any-Yale Harvard game I ever heard, when my father used to take me when I was a kid. I joined in. I couldn’t hear myself, and I didn’t care. It was nuts. Woody didn’t even take a bow, he just smiled and waved, then took his place back in the band, they kicked off some sort of square-dance tune, the comb and tissue guy stepped forward and started organizing the square dance on the fly as it were, “Couples form up in a line, and promenade, ladies choose your partners, if they won’t dance, find another beau that will. Step lively, ladies and gents, form up now, couples form in a line, stand up and be counted, it’s hoedown time… Shake a leg and let’s get started!
>>>>>>>
I looked at Babs, she looked back up at me; “I don’t dance, but if you want me to try, I will.”
“I don’t think this is something well-bred Jewish girls are taught to do. I have a better idea for the rest of the evening.” And she gave me a kiss that left no doubt as to the thrust of that better idea. Yeah. I can cope. I ceremoniously took her arm and we proceeded towards the exit. I won’t say we promenaded, but there was a certain amount of ceremony in our procession. I thought I saw Yelena, Isis, up against the side wall with a couple more oriental ladies, but I did not call attention to my recognition. Shut up, and keep walking, fat boy, don’t cause any more trouble than you absolutely must.
There was a very ornate and well-armored private train parked a few sidings over from our Recon Train, some big-wigs, but I had better things on my mind. And so, to bed. In the morning, there was the usual paperwork to plow through; some of the staff were still not on the job, while most of the others seemed energized, so efficiency wise, it was a wash. Win some, lose some. I let Babs sleep in, at least until I had a couple cups of coffee, but when she crawled out of the sack, she took one look out the window at the new train and was instantly wide awake.
“You know who that is?”
“Tell me. Coffee?”
“Thanks. That train, dear soul, is flying the personal flags of Soong Mei-ling.”
“Great. I’m impressed. Who is he?
“He is a she. Mei-ling Soong, better known as Madame Chiang Kai-shek.”
“Really?”
“As you would say, Miles, fucking really.” I knew I was a bad influence on her. She used to be such a nice girl too. “Soong Mei-ling met Chiang Kai-shek in 1920. Since he was eleven years her elder, already married, and a Buddhist, May-ling's mother vehemently opposed marriage between the two. She finally agreed to the match after Chiang showed proof of his divorce and promised to convert to Christianity. Supposedly, Chiang told his future mother-in-law that he could not convert immediately, because religion needed to be gradually absorbed, not swallowed like a pill. They married in Shanghai three years ago in 1927.”
“True love?”
“Hardly. Mei-ling is one of the richest women, people, in all of China. Her father was a very rich preacher. He had three daughters, all educated in the States as Methodists. I think in Georgia. The oldest, Soong Ai-ling, born in 1888 married the richest man in China. He was also Finance Minister. His name is H. H. Kung. The second sister, Ching-ling, married Sun Yat-sen in Japan back in 1915.”
“Oops. You know this how?”
“I told you I studied Chinese history in school. A fascinating story. It was so convoluted and interesting; I did some more research. I did a term paper on the Soongs. Soong Ching-Ling's father was an American-educated Methodist minister named Charles Soong, who made his fortune in banking and the printing of Bibles; though he had been a personal friend of Sun's, he was enraged when Sun announced his intention to marry Ching-ling.”
“His problem?” I had to ask. She was a great story teller, easy to see she was the historian I was pretending to be. In my spare time.
“Well, basically because Sun called himself a Christian yet kept two wives, Lu Muzhen and Kaoru Otsuki; Otsuki was Japanese. Soong viewed Sun's actions as running directly against their shared religion.”
“And being too tricky by half. Not going to get his claws on the preacher’s baby daughter, no doubt a tender blossom. I have heard of Sun Yat-sen. They call him the George Washington of China.”
“They do. But the real story is more complex. Sun Yat-sen was born in 1866, he was variously a physician, writer, philosopher, calligrapher, and revolutionary. He became the first president and founding father of the Republic of China. The Father of the Nation they call him, officially."
“He spent time living in Japan while in exile. He befriended and was financially aided by a democratic revolutionary named Miyazaki Toten. Most Japanese who actively worked with Sun shared a pan-Asian fear of encroaching Western imperialism. While in Japan, Sun met and befriended Mariano Ponce, then a diplomat of the First Philippine Republic.”
“During the Philippine Revolution and the Philippine–American War, Sun helped Ponce procure weapons salvaged from the Imperial Japanese Army and ship the weapons to the Philippines. By helping the Philippine Republic, Sun hoped that the Filipinos would win their independence so that he could use the archipelago as a staging point of another revolution, his own. However, by the time the war ended in July 1902, America emerged victorious. Therefore, the Filipino dream of independence vanished with Sun's hopes of collaborating with the Philippines in his revolution in China.” I could tell from her phrasing that she was quoting her own term paper.
I broke in “Tell me this has nothing to do with the new “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, or whatever they are calling it now.”
“You have a low, suspicious Slavic mind, dear heart, and you are dead on the money. This has been in the works for a third of a century and more.”
“So when the Japs tell Chiang to shup up and play ball…”
“Of course. There is more; in 1900, Sun launched an uprising to attack Huizhou and provincial authorities in Guangdong. This came five years after the Guangzhou uprising which failed. This time, Sun appealed to the triads the gangs, for help. This uprising was also a failure. Miyazaki, that same guy, who participated in the revolt, wrote an account of this revolutionary effort called ‘The Thirty-Three Year Dream’ with Sun.”
“And the Japs were behind that, to, let me guess, put a spoke in the Brits’ wheel, while pasting innocent smiles on their faces.”
She poured us more coffee, and snagged the last sweet roll. “Sun had been in exile not only in Japan but also in Europe, the United States, and Canada. He traveled all over the world, at least the civilized part of the world to raise
money for his revolutionary party and to support uprisings in China. In 1896 he was detained at the Chinese Legation in London, where the Chinese Imperial secret service planned to kill him. He was released after twelve days through the efforts of James Cantlie, The Times, and the Foreign Office, leaving Sun a hero in Britain. James Cantlie had been Sun's former teacher at the Hong Kong College of Medicine for Chinese.”
“And could not have been working for British Intelligence. Foolish thought.”
“No thicker than thieves. Of course, not. You would have to write dime novels to believe stuff like that,” she smiled.
“Ouch. She got me. Thud. I’m dead.”
“And the second sister, Sun’s widow, is, you will never guess…”
“Married Patton?”
“Has joined and is bankrolling the Commies.”
“Babs, it dawns on me, that we are so fucking out-classed here, it’s not even silly. I sure hope they decide that it is cheaper and easier to let us go home than to kill us off in situ.”
“Think happy thoughts, Miles, think happy thoughts.”
“Oh, I am. This is just the shape of my face. Slavic, you know.”
“Yeah. I get that. You are just a bubbling cauldron of optimism. That’s why I love you so much. All their lives, each sister followed her own beliefs in terms of supporting the Kuomintang, the Nationalists, or the Communist Party of China. By now, Soong Ai-ling and Mei-ling are the two richest women in China. Both of them support the Nationalists. Except when they don’t.”
“And the Japanese secret service own the both of them.”
“Most likely. Yes. And the oldest sister is neck-deep in international banking circles.”
“I think the fucking Rothschilds had best cash in their chips and retire before these three bimbos clean house with them.”
“You think you are kidding? My grandfather knew the Rothschilds. They are rich, but not that rich. I understand Germany is becoming uncomfortable for them. The Austrian branch of the family was hurt in the crash of 1929, and even though Baron Louis von Rothschild attempted to shore up the Creditanstalt, Austria's largest bank, to prevent its collapse, he failed and took a lot of the blame from the Goering people. They may have to flee, if they can. Antisemitism is becoming almost a state religion in Grosse Deutschland, and many Jews are scared for their life and property.”
I had to agree; “It’s bad enough in the States.”
“Tell me something I don’t know.”
“Sorry. I didn’t mean to hurt you.”
“You touched a raw nerve, not your fault.” I kissed her, but felt some damage had been done somehow. Nobody hurts worse than Jews. And if it takes an exiled Ukrainian to tell you that, you are deep in the shit. “There is a new political party, backed by Fat Herman, the National Socialist Workers Party, that is overtly anti-Semitic. They have a brilliant figurehead, this Adolf Hitler, a real rabble-rouser, and he is riding a wave of hate right into power. He is smart enough to truckle to Goering, at least for the time being, but there are rumors of very ugly atrocities against Jews in the Ukraine and what used to be Poland and Russia.”
An ugly picture. I got it and said, “You can stop trying to cheer me up any time now… And none of this is official, nothing on State Radio, right?
“You win a prize.”
“A prize I could live without. Want to go back to bed?”
“We have work to do. Remember?”
“Slave driver.”
>>>>>>>
Not a day to breed optimism. The Victory Broadcasting Service, VBS, had given up on the happy chatter, and were declaring various States of Emergency, bulletins every quarter hour, with even more patriotic music to fill in the cracks. Drawing lines on maps and reading between lines, it looked like New England was a write-off, the main lines of defense were the Hudson River and the Great Lakes, with a major battle raging for Toronto, across the Detroit River. An armored thrust had been launched into Canada from Buffalo, “with important success.”
Which reminded me of Lupe’s wisecrack about Patton victoriously advancing on Houston. They had to hold Detroit and Pittsburg, the Hudson, or they would have no industry left. They hadn’t lost Springfield and Hartford yet, so they still had the gun factories, all those machinist-based industries. Curtiss, the airplane maker was in Buffalo too, and the big steel workers were around the south end of Lake Michigan. They could not afford to lose them. Huge amounts of coal and iron and grain traveled the Great Lakes, and I didn’t suppose there was much of a navy up there. Maye some training ships and a lot of Coast Guards in dinky little patrol boats, futilely trying to stop rumrunners. That was all history now, I don’t suppose the krauts could get U-boats past Niagara Falls, but they sure could put artillery on ships and barges and play pirate all they wanted. Jesus Christ on a crutch, we were fucked. Maybe we should stay here. Dalny looked better all the time. You can live on rice and fish, right? The weather was not that bad.
Still no real word from Mexico, bullshit flying in every direction. The Portuguese had the Panama Canal reopened, under the control of Colombia, and they were encouraging, it says here, so-called volunteers making their way north over the proposed but barely sketched-in Pan American Highway.
There were constant low-level naval actions all over the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico, U-boats and USN ships and god knows who all else. Pirate days come again. Small boats were skulking island to island all over the Caribbean, smuggling who-knows-what to god-knows-where. And fun was being had by all.
For years, decades, we had lorded it over the rest of the world, creating chaos everywhere we went, and now it was all coming back to us. At us. Proverbs about winds and whirlwinds were appropriate.
Just when I had a gut-full of bad news, and had managed to get it all down on paper, a messenger brought a note requiring my presence at a meeting at HQ in two hours. I decided to bring Barbara, she knew more about what was happening than I did, for sure. I got into my best uniform, she found a decent black dress, and off we went.
Or tried to. We made it to the platform, waiting for our staff car, then Peaches ran out with a sheet of paper. “You need to take this. We just got a report from something called RFC, Radio Free Canada, Vancouver, that British Columbia and the next province over, Alberta, have seceded from Canada, and from the Commonwealth, and have declared themselves the independent state of West Canada. The declare themselves neutral, and are prepared to defend their borders against all comers.”
“Holy shit. Is that all?”
“Yeah, except that they have been recognized as an independent nation by, brace yourself, Mexico, Colombia, and the Empire of Japan. How you like them fucking apples, Miles?”
“Jesus fuckers. This is big. Right?”
“Yeah, that’s what I figure. A set-up. They have had to have this all negotiated and lined up to get Japan and Colombia to recognize them this fast. Not to mention Mexico. Who the fuck even knows what and where the Mexican government is these days?”
“Not me.” A beat-up old Dodge staff car was pulling up to the platform. I took the paper, said, “Get Bobby-O and Lupo on this. This is something. I don’t know what, but…”
She nodded. “Something. Something big. On it. Later.”
>>>>>>>
On the way to HQ we passed the airfield, there was a cluster of new shiny staff cars around what I thought was a Trimotor. But on second look, it was one of those German Junkers tris, with crudely painted white stars slapped all over it. I saw a small dark man in a nice suit being escorted into the lead car by Ray Reynolds, there was an honor guard of eight solders in full uniform. Odd. As that little girl in the book said, “Curiouser and curiouser.”
It got even more so; the first person to greet us outside the door was my old what-ever-the-fuck-she was, Isis. She was in western civilian clothes, restrained dress suit, like a female bank head might wear. “Nadia Yelena Akhtiorskaya, allow me to introduce you to my companion, Barbara Wertheim. Barbara, Yelena works in Counter I
ntelligence…”
She ignored all that, didn’t even offer to shake hands; “No longer. Miles, you remember I wanted you to get us to America. I am about to return the favor. Mind your Ps and Qs, and all this has a chance of working out, but we skate on thin ice. Understand?”
I was just as brusque. “Isis, have you heard that the two westernmost provinces of Canada have seceded, formed an independent country?”
“They are moving fast. The thinnest of ice. We have to skate very fast.”
“Indeed. Good luck.”
She pretended to smile. Sort of. “There is no luck. There is preparation and audacity.”
“And lots of guns. I stand corrected.” She turned away, went to stand next to an older, plainly dressed Chinese woman, we went on inside.
“You know who that other woman was?”
“Hit me.” I answered in an undertone.
“Ching-ling Soong.”
“The commie?”
“These are very deep waters.”
“Full of sharks.” She didn’t reply, just squeezed my arm. Yeah. That. Thin ice, deep waters, and sharks. It’s not nice to mix metaphors, but sometimes they describe reality.
>>>>>>>>
Bless her, Babs had remembered to bring a folder, pens, and paper. We were ushered to a front row seat far over on the right, so I deduced l might have to speak. They had a table set up front, with nine chairs, as many flags on stands, a blackboard, map, and a lectern. I saw one of Hodges’ aides standing by the door, I beetled over, and gave him the paper I got from Peaches. I had folded it, written, “Gen. Hodges; For Your Eyes Only… Miles,” on the outside. I did my best to impress the aide of its importance, he knocked on the door, handed off the note, went back to attention.
We didn’t have long to wait. There was a Japanese Admiral, thousands of miles from the coast, and his aide was our old buddy, the mysterious Aneko. Old fucking home week. Every time I saw her she was in a position of greater power, and greater obscurity. She was in uniform as a USA colonel, and was apparently there as a translator. Sure.
The next seated was our boy Ivan Hodak. He was Siberian, had introduced me to Aneko, was supposedly a Brigadier in charge of Hodges’ 37th (Mechanized) Division, which was undoubtedly the most motley collection of half-breed outlaws in the history of the US Army. That would include the 10th Cavalry Buffalo Soldiers, their Indian scouts, and few War of 1812 privateers thrown in for full measure. Sitting right next to the Jap admiral. I can take a hint, I can.
Black Bear Blues Page 21