The Chinese Bandit Read online

  Jake was also nervous. He reminded himself that he was a shrewd merchant and an experienced thief and that nothing whatsoever could go wrong. “Okay,” he said.

  “Sir,” Conn said. “The war’s over.”

  “Yes, sir. I’ll round up the others.”

  “I suppose the bloody trucks’ll boil over.”

  That was another thing. Bloody. These postwar college boys all thought they were limeys. Be carrying a swagger stick before you knew it, and putting in for an elephant to ride. Lady-killers and doubtless fine waltzers. Jake had known Australians who said bladdyfackin every third word, but it was their language and they fought like hell. They could say any god damn thing they wanted and it was all right with Jake.

  Conn was nervous too, Jake saw. Colonel Leonhardt was nervous and his officers naturally followed suit. The Colonel fretted and bitched. All he wanted now was to pull the unit out by the numbers, nobody in a Chinese brig and nobody dead or maimed. It would not be long, China was disintegrating, no question. The exchange rate was sixty thousand to one and rising daily. One of these mornings the Reds would just walk in. The Colonel wanted out. He hated to see a truck leave the compound.

  Nobody liked the job: herding a dozen trucks through Tientsin to the docks, and loading them up from the godowns—the warehouse sheds—before thieves or politicians made off with everything, and blaring their way back to the compound. Jake preferred rickshas. Driving in China, a car or a truck, you just leaned on the horn and prayed.

  “You ever notice,” Conn asked, “that parade grounds and barracks all smell the same?”

  “Yep,” Jake said. “Depending on the season. Hot wood and hot dust.”

  “And somebody yelling ‘Hut, toop, reep, paw.’”

  Almost fondly Jake said, “That’s like the old school song to me.”

  “The old school song,” Conn mused, and a distant look came to his eye. Jake figured he was remembering some party with pink champagne. Or the time he maneuvered one hand onto a society tit. “Half an hour,” Conn said. “Garreau, his M.P.’s, and your drivers. All in khakis. Better move.”

  Jake said, “Aye aye, sir,” and turned away. Crossing the dusty yellow parade ground he decided not to march. He ambled. He released the belch tenderly—“Don’t yank on that trigger, shitbird, squeeze it off”—with healthy satisfaction and a hammy aftertaste. Nothing would go wrong. He knew he was safe, and started a cocky smile, but his heart was not in it.

  “All right, now.” Conn scowled. “We’ll stay together and use the horn. Anybody gets lost, you’ve got the dock in Chinese on those cards, and your home address on the back.”

  No place like home, Jake thought. The compound had been home to a Japanese regiment. Marines still found an occasional pencil or bottle cap with Japanese on it. The new men hoarded them, and swapped.

  “Sergeant Dodds takes the point,” Conn said. “Move out.”

  Garreau scrambled into the cab with Jake. “The point,” he said. “How do you like that. Chinese snipers gonna get us, rat-a-tat-tat.” Garreau was not blond and not dark, not tall and not short, not fat and not skinny. His nose was normal and his eyes were the color of soup. Jake thought of him as the perfect I.D. photo; he looked like everybody.

  Jake had showered and changed and was sweating through his skivvies again. The truck roared. “It works,” he said.

  “Go ahead,” Garreau said. “Lieutenant wavin at us, go ahead.”

  Khakis. The Colonel had explained that they would lose face if they did manual labor in front of the Chinese. The Colonel was an expert on the Chinese mind. He could say “Thank you” in Mandarin. So dungarees were verboten off the compound. Garreau wore a .45 and carried a carbine. Jake too wore a .45. He had not fired a weapon for some time and doubted that he would today. “Khakis,” the Colonel had said. “You can always send them out to the Chinese laundry.” The officers and noncoms had laughed heartily. Except Jake; but nobody had noticed. On the whole Jake preferred Chinamen. There was a lot more complicated politeness but a lot less simple bullshit.

  He drove through busy Tientsin now, in traffic and pounding the horn. The stream of rickshas, carts and pedestrians parted miraculously; nobody even looked up, but a way was made.

  A ricksha man spat as they passed, and called cheerfully, “Dogs defile you all.”

  Jake slowed and leaned outboard to shout, “Foreign devils defile your mother upside down in a ricksha.”

  The ricksha man hollered in amazement, and his brows shot up, vanishing under his coolie hat; Jake laughed wildly and slapped the steering wheel.

  “Crissake,” Garreau said. “Watch the road.”

  From the curb beggars waved and wailed. Mothers hustled children off the street. Good smells floated to Jake, spicy hot meats and hot oil and sunshine and honey-carts. The honey-carts gathered all manner of shit, including the small pellets of goat- and sheepshit that in a richer country might be ignored. Jake had heard that honey-cart men cauterized their infant sons’ nostrils with hot irons, and the trade was hereditary. They kept the streets clean, and when enough honey-carts had poured enough honey into enough honey-trucks and honey-barges, the poor damn starving country managed to fertilize some of its exhausted fields. Waste not, want not. Jake approved. He enjoyed many smells that others thought putrid.

  He noted a sign in English and bore left, and soon he saw the river and turned east, and there were the docks and more signs—BRIBERY, one of them read, IS PUNISHABLE BY DEATH, this because there were customs officials here—and the godowns cooking in the summer sun. He was glad that he was not a coolie today. He was always glad that he was not a coolie, but more so on a day like this. They would curse and sweat, and their loads would slip.

  He pulled up, set the brake, and cut the engine. “Report to the lieutenant,” he told Garreau. “And try not to kill anybody. They hate us as it is.”

  The lighter was still fast to the dock, and a burly gray-haired chief presented the lieutenant with a long manifest. He explained one thing and another. The lieutenant made important noises and clacked into an office.

  “Sir,” Jake explained.

  “What’s that?” The chief looked him up and down.

  “You got to say sir,” Jake said. “The war’s over.”

  “That’s right,” the chief said. “I forgot.” A blue bandanna was knotted around his neck; he pulled another from his pocket and swabbed his face. “How long you been puttn up with it?”

  “Almost twelve years,” Jake said.

  “Y’oughta be bettern a sergeant,” the chief said. “You look like a god damn ox.”

  “I was,” Jake said. He was tired of this conversation but it was repeated often. “Twice.”

  The chief grunted. “Gunny?”

  Jake nodded.

  “And you fucked up.”

  “My heart just ain’t in it,” Jake said.

  The chief said, “Wish that boy’d sign that paper. Like to get back down the river and out of this god damn heat.”

  “A scorcher,” Jake agreed. “What’d you bring?”

  “The usual. Cigarettes and whiskey. Tools. What do they want with all those tools? Set of wrenches. Tool kits. Hundreds of ’em. For Chrissake. They’re gonna be outta here soon.”

  “It’s a way to give the stuff to the Chinese army,” Jake said, “without calling it military aid. We’ll just leave it all.”

  “Shit,” the chief said. “What they do with my taxes.”

  “The arsenal of democracy,” Jake said. “Beats losing men, anyway. Almost got my ass shot off last year, taking supply trucks up to Peking.”

  “When they killed that lieutenant.”

  “You heard,” Jake said. “And three other guys. A four-hour firefight.”

  “Rough,” the chief said. “We have to stick our dick in everybody’s wars.”

  “Makes no sense,” Jake said. “Another time we took a lot of stuff up to Peking for UNRRA. Chinese all bowing and sucking. Later some brass from the state
s fly in the check, who’s getting what, and the Chinamen take them out and show them a pretty little temple they just built, in honor of UNRRA.”

  “Crissake, a whole temple?”

  “Well, no, more like a little shelter in a garden where you can drink a cup of tea and jack off while admiring the sunset. Cost them maybe a thousand bags of rice. So the Americans say, ‘That’s very beautiful.’” Jake spat.

  The chief too spat. “Ours not to reason why. Anyway, I got some Zippos. Hope the Chinese army goes for that. Binoculars and compasses, lots of flashlights, I guess that’s for night combat, a hundred god damn kegs of nails left over from the Seabees, about a mile and a half of electric wire, a lot of batteries and about a thousand hatchet heads. What the hell they want with hatchet heads? Also some drafting sets, some scope sights and plenty canteens. That’s for desert warfare. And then food. Sides of beef, canned goods, coffee. It’s all yours. There’s tea in there, too,” he added. “For Chrissake, tea.”

  “Beef’ll be flyblown, too long in this heat.”

  “Hell, it was flyblown when we got it,” the chief said. “I got eighteen years in. I just wanna go manage a PX in Newport News for the next twelve. After that I live on a sailboat and eat only fresh fish.”

  “You been out here too long,” Jake said.

  “I was out here too long about the third day,” the chief said.

  “Where the hell is that dancing teacher of yours?”

  The coolies sweated and cursed. An endless snake of them trudged out of the godown heavy-laden, stowed cargo and trudged off. The twelve trucks were backed up to a loading platform. “Bugger all big noses,” a coolie muttered. The drivers and M.P.’s supervised, using sign language and grunts.

  Jake drifted to the godown. Lieutenant Conn stood at one end of the platform, no detail escaping his eagle eye. Two of the coolies ran dollies and handled the heavier crates. Promoted to stevedore. Quietly Jake said, “Last truck on the left for that. And no food. No meat for that truck.”

  “Hu-hu,” the stevedore said in some surprise, hearing Chinese from this barbarian.

  They would load his truck with large amounts of potluck, but a few crates of precision instruments would please old Kao. Jake murmured to the other stevedore. The godown was dark but no less hot than outdoors. Jake murmured to a coolie.

  The old chief was long gone; the lighter had cast off and growled its way downstream.

  Flashlights were useless without proper batteries.

  The insulated wire would do, and the drafting sets. Tool kits and sets of wrenches. Small pumps and compressors. A garbage heap for Yankee know-how. Kegs of nails for ballast: horseshoe nails, tenpenny, twenty-penny, spikes. U.S. Navy Construction Battalion.

  Jake murmured again. “No whiskey in the last truck.” The officers would miss whiskey, and bitch, and investigate.

  “You lead the way, Lieutenant,” he said. “We’ll bring up the rear.” He was soaked. The coolies had flopped against the bulkhead, in the shade of the godown, and were smoking cigarettes. One of them showed off the pack: Lucky Strike. They laughed. They babbled. “Plenty cigarettes, thanks a lot.” “Keep it coming, foreigners.”

  “What are they saying?” Conn asked.

  “I don’t know,” Jake said. “I only understand a few words.”

  “Cut our throats in a second,” Conn said.

  “Right,” Jake said. “I guess one foreigner’s pretty much like another to them.”

  “Well, we got it all,” Conn said easily. “I checked the manifest.”

  “Some of these guys weigh about one twenty,” Jake said, “and they handle a side of beef.”

  “It’s like judo,” Conn said. “Tough little bastards. Great balance. Christ, it’s hot.”

  “Let’s move out,” Jake said. “Close on to four o’clock. Sir.”

  “All right,” The lieutenant raised his voice and issued orders. Jake and Garreau hopped aboard. “Beer,” Garreau said. “I am going to drown myself in beer. The only thing the slants make as good as home.”

  “Won’t be long now.” Jake’s blood zinged, and his eyes gleamed. He let in the clutch and eased away.

  They retraced their route. Here and there Jake fell a bit behind, and Garreau squirmed: “Catch up, old buddy.” Jake let rickshas cut them off, used the horn less, slowed for pedestrians. The truck passed between rows of open stalls. On the boulevard they swept by large office buildings, and expressionless policemen waved them ahead. Consulates. British American Tobacco. The Coal Board. Then a turn, and they were back in China, the black signboards and gold characters, the shops that sold white vegetables and one hundred teas and small gods. Coal balls and horse-jackets and hats of river-otter fur. It was also possible to buy a boy or a girl, as Jake knew. Not for a night but for good.

  There were precious-metal shops, leather shops and luck shops, where you could buy tables of numbers, systems for various games, jade charms, money-drawing oil or ancient coins that concentrated the good fortune of many centuries. No skyscrapers. There were second-story balconies, and on some of them old men drank tea and played cards. Pigeons fluttered.

  So did Jake’s stomach, as they drew near the Street of the Three Unhappy Brides. Half the column would be past it by now, and Conn a long way off. Jake slowed. The truck in front of them slowed, then pushed forward gently like a boat in weedy waters. Jake too pushed forward but the crowd pressed in, and the other truck drew away.

  “What’s that music?” Garreau asked. “A parade?”

  The mob swirled about them. Jake was short of the intersection and barely moving. This was not the first time he had been cut off; it produced a hollow sensation, always, and then excitement, in the jungle or the city or a back alley.

  Beyond the intersection the other truck halted. Its driver semaphored.

  Along the Street of the Three Unhappy Brides a sad procession blocked the crossing.

  “It’s a funeral,” Jake said. “Sit tight.” Garreau crossed himself.

  Jake cut the engine and swung himself half out of the cab, clinging to the open door and standing tall. He waved ahead: Go on. He leaned into the joint of the door and waved with both arms: Go on. The other driver sketched a salute and disappeared into his cab.

  “All I want is a brew,” Garreau said.

  The funeral jammed the intersection now: many well-dressed mourners marching beside a kind of palanquin, half sedan chair and half bier. Jake wondered if a deceased was really in there. Drummers drummed huge hollow banging notes; horns wailed. To either side of the palanquin and stretching back a way were lines of enclosed rickshas.

  “A big shot,” Garreau said. “A fancy funeral. Twenty limousines.”

  Beggars hung at the edges of the procession like flies, and more joined them; they limped and stumped among the rickshas, wailing and pleading. They eddied toward the truck. The horns and drums shrieked and thumped; mourners keened. Around the truck the mob thickened; the beggars buzzed and circled.

  “Jesus Christ,” Garreau said. “Where’d they come from? Roll up your window. Holy Christ, there goes the radiator cap.”

  “I’m going out there,” Jake said. “Show ’em the uniform. You sit tight and hold that weapon where we can all see it. Don’t use it.”

  “Out!” Garreau said. “Jesus Christ, there’s hundreds of ’em.” But Jake was swinging to the roadway. Beggars pressed at him. He spat; it was traditional to make a disgusted face and spit. Garreau shouted something indecipherable. Beyond the beggars, up at the intersection, Jake could see the first rickshas peeling off.

  Ordinarily that would have been good for a satisfied laugh, but the beggars whined and chattered and pressed closer, with their matted hair and their eye sockets full of pus. “Make room,” he snarled. “Make room!”

  The first ricksha approached Jake and passed him; he watched it circle behind the truck and turned back to the beggars. He raised both arms for quiet and shouted, “Have you eaten, gentlemen?” which was a fancy way to say he
llo.

  The beggars laughed and cheered. One with no hands waved the stumps. Jake checked Garreau, who was pale and trying to appear stern and official.

  A ricksha raced back to the intersection. A second and a third had passed behind Jake. The beggars stank. He pressed his hands together and bowed, and they laughed again. The band boomed and blared.

  He called in to Garreau, “Only thing to do is stand fast. They’ll quit soon. Or the cops’ll come.”

  “Thass a crock. I could fire in the air.”

  “Colonel have your ass for that. Keep cool, buddy. Ain’t but one riot.”

  Too slow, too slow! Jake felt anger stirring. A second ricksha popped out, a third. There were three or four men on the truck now, unloading. Jake sweated. The beggars clamored. There was a man with no nose. Jake figured there was not much more to see in life, but was queasy anyway. You saw dead men and spilled guts, and a stream in the hills running blood-red, he had seen that, but there was always a surprise to come.

  The truck quivered and jolted; Garreau called out. “I’ll check it out,” Jake shouted.

  Thirty seconds a ricksha, they had calculated. Maybe it was just that time seemed to pass slowly. The loop of rickshas was endless, down the street, around the truck, up the street.

  He fought his way back, cursing the beggars. Out of Garreau’s sight he mopped his sweat. The beggars jeered and danced. “Misbegotten turtles,” he said. Rags and boils and simple snot. His belly rippled. Were they with him or not? There were syphilitics and madmen.

  The near hind wheel was gone. Jake laughed aloud. The beggars echoed him. The truck lurched slightly. He had no need to investigate: the off hind wheel would be gone. He had not foreseen that and enjoyed the joke.

  He lingered at the rear, but did not interrupt the work or complicate matters for the coolies. Beside him rickshas lined up, three, four. Amiably he nodded to one of the ricksha men. The man nodded back, a fierce, abrupt, puzzled nod, and then seemed to look around for police or soldiers. A touch of nerves was understandable.