Authors: Martin Booth
‘He wants to know your name. There is nothing in your case with it written on.’
Sandingham thrust his hands into his pockets and clenched his fists in an unsuccessful attempt to stop his shaking with fear. He prayed the soldier would not notice his shivering.
‘Sandingham. Joseph.’
He almost added his rank and number, long since forgotten or, more accurately, pushed back into a recess in the catalogue of non-successes and hurt he carried, so well indexed, within himself.
‘He wants to know where you live.’
‘In Kowloon. Waterloo Road.’
There was a discussion between the searcher and his superior. The ship’s officer was spoken to again.
‘He wants to know if you are going to Macau at the order of a man called Leung Ping-kin.’
‘Tell him I’m not,’ said Sandingham, his brain active with fear and, simultaneously, considerable curiosity. ‘I’m going to have a few days’ holiday and to do some gambling. I’ve not been able to go to Macau since before the war.’
This was conveyed to the Chinese officer who demanded Sandingham’s passport, scrutinised it and returned it. He gave another curt order and the guard left the suitcase and they both quit the cabin.
Sandingham felt his knees buckle. The ship’s officer caught him and helped him on to his bunk, clearing aside his clothes with a free hand.
‘Are you all right?’
‘I’m fine, thank you,’ replied Sandingham, trying to show that he had regained his composure.
‘They’ll be gone soon. I suggest you remain here in your cabin.’
His mind was a chaos of confusion. How they had conceivably known his mission was beyond him. He tried to guess what Francis Leung’s dealings with the Communists could be that he should be sought by them. He had no idea. Opium smuggling could hardly be the cause of their searches: if they had wanted that they’d have stopped the returning ferry, not the outward-bound sailing. But anyway nobody exported opium from Hong Kong to Macau. And the drugs were seldom smuggled into China: usually, it was the other way around. Perhaps it was all a mistake, a Communist cock-up: he struggled to remember if Leung’s Chinese name was Ping-kin.
There was a commotion on the deck. Against his better judgement Sandingham went out to see what it was, joining the other passengers at the rail.
Below them and slightly to their aft was the Communist gunboat. Most of the boarding party had returned to it. Now they were bundling on board its foredeck a Chinese passenger. He looked quite ordinary. He was dressed unmemorably and non-descriptly. As soon as he reached the gunboat he was hustled inside the bridge; Sandingham could see him being forced below.
A scapegoat, he thought. They didn’t find whom they were after – or what they were after – and they didn’t dare return empty-handed, so that poor beggar got it. There was always one.
The
Takshing
quickly got under way again, and no sooner had she turned than two Royal Naval craft appeared on the scene. The White Ensigns flapping at their sterns gave Sandingham an inner strength, a lifting of an intense oppression. He was liberated once again. He smiled to himself.
‘We not goin’ to Macau,’ he was told by the steward who came to his cabin as he was repacking his case. ‘We go bac’ Hong Kong.’
‘Thank you,’ said Sandingham. Then he added, ‘Are you okay, steward?’
‘Yes, t’ank you, sir.’ the man grinned expansively.
Sandingham tipped him a dollar bill, though neither of them were sure why, and enquired, ‘Why did they take that man off?’
‘He mek money.’
‘What do you mean, he makes money? Everyone makes money.’
‘No. He mek money. At him home. He mek silwer coins and sen’ it to his family in Canton. They spen’ it.’
‘You mean he is a counterfeiter?’
‘Tha’ wha’ guard say.’
Sandingham wondered, after the steward had gone, if that was another of Francis Leung’s games. Coining. Corrupt the body with opium, the soul with evil and the wallet with tin yuan.
There was a crump. It came from outside the window, to be followed by a liquid spouting noise.
From the salon he could hear shouts and a single, high-pitched scream that was short and sharp and sounded like a steel pin being dragged across glass.
Out of the cabin window he could see Lap Sap Mei Island. On its shore was a flick of light. He automatically counted out loud, like a child waiting for thunder after the lightning.
‘… five, six, sev –’
Another crump. A pillar of water rose three hundred yards short of the
Takshing.
‘Christ!’ he said, though there was nobody near to hear him. ‘They’re shelling us!’
As he spoke, one of the Royal Navy craft returned fire. The boom was loud, making the air and the wooden slats on the cabin door vibrate. A billow of grey smoke issued from her gun, the final cords of smoke stringing out on the wind like some deadly ectoplasm. Another shot was fired.
Seated in the salon once more, Sandingham ignored the jingoistic, complaining talk that hummed around him. He ordered a large whiskey from the steward. Now that they were well and truly safe in Hong Kong territorial waters he could let himself go. His hands shook. His eyelid twitched. He could not sit still. The drink would calm him. A pipe could, too, but he was without his emergency supply, which was still folded up behind the cistern in his hotel room.
The
Takshing
shuddered as her engines were run to their limits.
* * *
That afternoon, Sandingham was summoned back to the house on the Castle Peak Road, the message given to him by a rickshaw coolie at the Macau ferry dock. Presumably, had he reached Macau and collected the opium brick, this coolie would have been his drop on his return.
‘So you could not help it. I know that. Never mind,’ Leung said.
‘What will you do? Shall I go again?’
‘You know what you were to carry for me?’
He nodded. He knew Leung knew he knew. There was nothing to be gained by pretence.
‘Right. And no, you do not need to go. I’ve had a friend bring it in. Another friend,’ he added obviously.
‘If another job crops up…’
He had not told Leung that the Communists had known something about him. That would perhaps be to know too much. It was best he kept this to himself. In any case, Leung was probably aware of the facts already.
‘Not for a long time, Joseph.’
Leung looked at his watch. Sandingham noticed that it was a new Patek Phillipe in silver – no: it would be white gold or platinum – on a black leather strap. He had seen such watches in the window of a high-class jewellery store in one of the expensive shopping arcades in Central District. This was definitely not a watch from one of the jewellers’ shops in Hankow Road.
‘Your bus will be along in less than ten minutes,’ Leung stated pointedly. ‘You’d best get down to the stop by the beach steps.’
As Sandingham was about to step off the patio, Leung said, ‘One thing more, Joseph. As you did not complete the assignment, I shall need back the money you spent on clothes for the trip.’
It came out of the blue. The hair on the back of Sandingham’s neck rose against his collar.
‘I haven’t that kind of money. I do have some left over from expenses.’
It sounded so trite, like an office boy accounting for the petty cash to his manager.
He took out about thirty dollars from his jacket pocket.
Leung accepted this, folding the notes before passing them to a henchman who counted them, then continued, ‘That’s the down payment. I shall need the rest back. A fortnight?’
‘It’s impossible. I can’t even steal that much that quickly.’
He could not afford to lose his temper, but he wanted to.
‘You’ll be able.’
‘What if I can’t?’
‘You will. If not … Ah Moy will be a customer short, will she not?’
At the bus stop, Sandingham raged within himself. His anger took on no firm shape; no definite actions occurred to him. He just stood there in the hot afternoon sun and cursed himself, his luck and the world. And Leung.
Just as the bus pulled away from the dusty kerb he saw, down on the beach, the boy from the hotel. He was playing with another child near the water’s edge. They were guiding toy tanks over a corrugated battlefield. As he watched, the second child hit the boy’s tank with a handful of damp sand. It knocked it over and half-buried it. They both jumped up at the fun of it and, abandoning their toys, ran splashing into the sea.
P
ART
E
IGHT
Japan: 1943 — 1945
T
HE SOUP WAS
watery and faintly mauve. Small bits of blanched fibre floated in it along with strips of parchment-like material and some shreds of potato peelings that had not been added for the cooking but later, as an afterthought to nutritional requirements.
Tentatively dipping his metal spoon into the soup, Sandingham made every effort to avoid noticing its colour.
‘Purple death,’ said Norb. ‘You ain’t had it before?’
Sandingham shook his head and asked if it were as poisonous as it appeared.
‘No – does you no harm. Probably does you no good, too. We have it about once a month. Takes its colour from water-lily stems. Them’s the stringy bits.’
Norbert Heybler occupied the
tatame
above Sandingham’s own. He was a tall and thin New Yorker who had worked for the city transportation department before the war; upon the destruction of Pearl Harbour he had been drafted into the US Navy as an officer in charge of vehicles at a shore base in southern California. After that he had been sent to sea, been sunk off the Philippines, captured in the fall of Manila and since then had done the rounds of five camps – one in the Philippines, one in Formosa, one in Okinawa, one near Osaka and now here. Sandingham had known all this within the first quarter of an hour of meeting him. Like all Americans, it seemed, Norb had told his life story right at the start. If it was a national trait it was one that Sandingham liked: it promoted friendship.
‘It ain’t so bad when you’ve gotten used to it,’ he encouraged Sandingham, seeing that the Englishman was not overly keen to sample the delights of the soup. ‘Think of it just as a food colour. We colour things in the States – you get canned pears that are emerald green. How I could eat a pear right now! You know what I mean?’
Sandingham knew exactly what he meant.
‘You married?’
‘No. Had a broad once. Hung around with her, but she went off with this insurance salesman from Schenectady. I’d known her from high school, too. Still. Just as well. I’m alive and he bought it near Syracuse.’
‘Fighting?’
For a moment, Norb had to think; no one fought there. Then he realised.
‘Hell, no. Syracuse, up-state New York. Icy road and this car of his slips off the carriageway and rolls down a bank. Clouts a wall, flips over. Hits the river. Cracks the ice – early winter, see? Not too thick as yet. Goes straight through. Freezes over on top. Didn’t find him till the level dropped in the summer and the wheels of the car showed through the surface.’ He chuckled. ‘If I’d have married her, it might have been me.’
The logic of this study of potential destiny confounded Sandingham who concentrated instead on the consumption of his purple death.
With his soup swallowed, Sandingham hunched forwards and considered Norb’s attitude to life. Skinny and starving, with ulcers on his back and pains in his swollen joints, he could sit in a prison camp in Japan and cogitate upon how unlucky he might have been to have wed a certain girl in the States and wind up as an insurance representative at the bottom of a frozen river. If that was poor fortune avoided in the past then, conversely, he must think of himself now to be better off. At best, luckier than dead. He was alive and, by his reckoning, he was better off than some: he had no tax affairs to settle with the IRS, no mortgage owed to the First City Bank of Where-he-lived, no wife to worry over (either how she was coping without him or, in his own words, who she was balling in the ‘big brass bridal bed’), no kids to put through college, no accountant or attorney to subsidise, no Blue Cross Plan to pay out. That he now had no doctor to treat the sores on his spine or dentist to extract his rotten molar, nor sufficient food to keep illness and hunger at bay was neither here nor there.
Had Sandingham drawn his attention to these facts he would have been quick to point out that they did have a doctor and a dentist – they did not have drugs, anaesthetics, medicinal supplies and bandages or surgical instruments, but that wasn’t the point. For example, the wagon-train masters hadn’t any of those things either and they had successfully taken their folk over the prairies and the Rockies to the Promised Land, through disease, drought, starvation, Apaches and ‘other hostiles’, flood and vicious mid-continental winters. Norb could quote in detail the stories of Jack London, plot by plot –
Tales of the Klondike
– and what about the man in
To Build a Fire
who died frozen to death through his own stupidity? There was always one somewhere worse off than oneself. Sandingham doubted it but marvelled at the pioneer spirit and the optimism of his comrade-in-barbed-wire.
The mention of ice and a North American winter brought back to him the condition of his own surroundings. It might have been warmer in the insurance salesman’s car after the accident. Certainly, it would have been in the old man’s cabin at Sulphur Creek.
He was seated by the
hibachi,
a small brazier at the end of the barrack room. The Japanese camp commandant had just conceded that it was indeed now winter, the day being 3 January, and had issued them with some fuel. This consisted of three one-hundredweight bags of very small coal particles that had been swept up from the concrete platform where coal was unloaded at the railway station three miles away. Much of the contents of the bags was coal dust and the prisoners who were too sick to go to work had spent the day forming this into balls by mixing it with water and a little clay. The quantity of clay had to be exact – too little and the balls fell apart, too much and they wouldn’t burn. It was an acquired art that only the longer-term inmates had mastered.