High Road to China. Jon Cleary

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СКАЧАТЬ a box of matches fitted into a small gold case, handed it to me. I don’t think I was awkward with women, even in those days; but I was fumble-fingered just then. I had never lit a woman’s cigarette before; I held the spluttering match towards her like an apprentice on Guy Fawkes’s team. She smiled, puffed on the cigarette, then stood looking around the aerodrome as the last of the joyriding machines came gliding in.

      ‘Mr Henty told me you were an ace. Thirty-two aeroplanes, is that right?’ I nodded. Or 44 men, if you wanted to count it another way: some of the machines had been two-seaters, such as the Albatros C7. But I never counted it that way, couldn’t. ‘Do you miss it all? The war, I mean?’

      ‘No. Only lunatics and generals love war.’

      That’s a glib statement these days, something you see on demonstrators’ banners, but no less true for being glib. But the Battle of the Somme was only four years behind us then: I July 1916, when the British Army alone lost 60,000 men, the day that finally put an end to the glory of war. I was there that Saturday morning, in the third wave to leave the trenches. I saw the men ahead of us going up the hill, strung out like a frieze against the skyline, a frieze quickly ripped to pieces as the German machine-guns cut them down. The second wave went on, never hesitating, just walking smack into death. When I led my platoon over the top I already knew half of them would not live to reach the top of the hill. They died like flowers under the scythe and by the time I reached the top of the hill and could go no further, was trapped in a shell crater with three dead men and another one dying, I wasn’t wanting to fight the Germans but to turn back and go hunting for the blind, stupid, living-in-the-past generals who had ordered this massacre. I survived that day and I didn’t go hunting the generals. Instead, I joined the Royal Flying Corps, where you were above the carnage and the muck and, if you had to die, you died a clean, sensible death.

      ‘I miss the thrill of flying, I mean the way we flew in the war. I’m grateful for this job, Miss Tozer. Not just for the money.’

      ‘It won’t be fun, Mr O’Malley. Not for me, anyway.’

      ‘I wasn’t thinking of it as fun. I was thinking that once again I’ll be flying an aeroplane somewhere for some purpose.’

      I looked east, towards Kent, the Channel, France and everything that lay between us and China. In the foreground stood Mr Sun Nan, bowler-hatted, black-suited, patient-faced. I couldn’t hate him, not even if I’d had George’s prejudices. He was the one who had rescued me from Oxo and all the other graffiti I had planned to scrawl on the sky.

       End of extract from O’Malley manuscript.

       3

      General Meng had started life with the burdening name of Swaying Flower: his mother, going against the grain, had wanted a daughter instead of a son. At the age of six, already ferocious, he had changed it to Tiger Claw; by the time he was eighteen and had already killed six men he had had half a dozen other names. Now, at fifty and with countless dead behind him, he called himself Lord of the Sword. He knew there were people who called him other names and if he chanced to hear them he terminated their opportunities to call anyone any name at all.

      So far Bradley Tozer had called him nothing but General. ‘You are a respectful man, Mr Tozer.’

      ‘Not really, General. Just circumspect. I call you other names, but only to myself.’

      General Meng nodded, unoffended; if he had to kill this American he would do so for other reasons. He pulled back the sleeve of his voluminous blue silk robe and waved a decorated fan in front of his face. He had come originally from the cooler steppes of Sinkiang and he had never really become accustomed to the more humid heat of Hunan. He was a tall man with a handsome Mongolian face and a head of thick dark hair that was his main vanity. Every morning one of his concubines brushed the black hair for fifteen minutes. It shone like the feathers of a mallard, reflecting any lights that shone on it; the walls of his yamen, his palace, were lined with mirrors to add to the light. Meng could admire himself from any angle at any time of day and his head, the object of his admiration, gleamed like an evil totem to the scores of people who served him in the palace.

      He looked at himself in a convenient mirror, then back at the American who could have been his half-brother. ‘I’ll kill you if the statue is not returned in time. I am a man of my word. At least, when it pleases me to be.’

      They both spoke in Mandarin, the words a little awkward in their mouths: each in his own way was a foreigner to Peking. Tozer could also speak Cantonese, but Meng had only contempt for the dialect of the shopkeepers from the south. They were not warriors like himself.

      ‘My daughter will bring the statue. I told you, General – I prize the statue, but not above my own life.’

      ‘Are you afraid, Mr Tozer?’

      ‘No,’ said Tozer, hoping he sounded unafraid.

      He was taller than Meng, with a hard-boned thrusting face and impatient eyes; he had inherited some of his mother’s features but none of her placidity. Never having known his mother, he had decided to be an American: to have been chosen All-American had brought him a double satisfaction that no one else had known of. He had no time for fools or incompetents, but he was a fair-minded man and he paid better wages than his competitors, and those who survived his stringent standards and demands usually stayed with him for years. He was also a sensible man and he knew there was no sense in applying standards or demands in the present circumstances. Also, he knew enough of Meng’s reputation to believe that the General would be a man of his word. When it pleased him to be.

      ‘Why is this statue so important to you, General?’

      Meng continued to fan himself. He looked at the two bodyguards standing behind him. They were Mongols from the Tsaidam, muscular men in blue coarse wool robes, worn with a sash beneath which the skirt of the robe flared out. Their riding boots had upturned toes and each man had his long pipe stowed in the side of the boot. The robe was worn with one arm free and the shoulder exposed, a décolleté effect that was more threatening than provocative, since the hand of each bare arm always rested on a broadsword hung from a loop in the sash. The martial effect was only spoiled by the flat tweed caps they wore, suggesting a trade union frame of mind that had so far escaped their master. They hated the local Hunanese and were in turn hated, a state of affairs that kept them constantly alert for their own safety and, by projection, that of General Meng.

      He waved the fan at them, dismissing them, and they went out of the small room, their heels clumping on the bare wooden floor. Meng waited till the door closed behind them, knowing they would take up their stance outside it, then turned back to Bradley Tozer.

      ‘Neither of those men speaks Mandarin, but one can’t be too careful. I can’t have them thinking I’m less than perfect.’ He looked at himself again in a mirror, nodded in satisfaction as if the mirror had told him he was as close to perfection as it was possible to be. ‘I am superstitious, Mr Tozer, my only failing. The twin statues of Lao-Tze have brought me good fortune ever since I acquired them some years ago.’

      ‘How did you acquire them?’

      ‘I made their owner, a landlord in a neighbouring province, an offer he couldn’t refuse. It’s an old Chinese custom which I believe a certain secret society in Italy has now copied from us.’

      ‘What was the offer?’

      ‘His head for the statues. Unfortunately, one of my bodyguards misunderstood an order I gave and the landlord lost his head anyway.’

      ‘I СКАЧАТЬ