The Last Mandarin Read Online Free PDF Page B

Lieutenant Pao was a soldier of valor and probity. Kanamori had not been seen for three years and more, but was known to have been in Peking when the war ended.
    â€œI thank you for the translation,” Burnham said, “and I believe Lieutenant Pao.”
    â€œSo do I,” said Yen. “Have you read the beggar’s report?”
    â€œNo. I have just come to the advice and opinions of Dr. Nien.”
    Yen snorted.
    Interrogated, Dr. Nien Hao-lan recalled nothing and no one out of the ordinary. The personnel who left the hospital were the personnel who returned. The doctor had never heard of Kanamori. There were so many war criminals. A friend of the doctor had been raped by an American marine. The marine had been sentenced to twenty years in jail after serious student demonstrations. Shipped back to the United States, he had been reprimanded and released. Why should a Kanamori be more momentous? Money was worthless and the populace starving: why should a Kanamori matter at all? The government was collapsing, the students were rioting, the generals were preparing to sell the city; what if a Kanamori lived or died? Through ten years of war Chinese regiments had broken, dissolved, scampered home, leaving whole provinces defenseless against these Kanamoris; who was more at fault? The army had just lost thirty divisions in Manchuria, half of them American-equipped; what was a Kanamori? Dr. Nien had spoken in unseemly terms.
    â€œNow I come to the beggar,” Burnham said. “Tell me about the beggars.”
    â€œAbout the beggars?” Yen was amazed. “They are the scum of the earth, and that is all there is to say. They are of many nations. I myself have seen beggars with light hair and blue eyes,” he added in undisguised and creamy satisfaction. “There are a hundred thousand. They should be eliminated.”
    In May of 1946 a beggar called One Foot One Hand had presented himself at the police house off Lantern Street, near West Station, in the Chinese City.
    â€œAlmost three years ago,” Burnham said. “Was this reported at the time?”
    â€œIt was not. Nor even set down in writing and filed. I learned of it only this week, from the Meng you will read of.”
    Filthy and lousy, and unprepossessing at his best, One Foot One Hand had been detained outside by the guards, but he blew the mustache—soared into a state of high excitement—and jabbered that he had seen a famous Japanese, and would tell the story to the proper official for the proper remuneration. There were many Japanese who had elected to remain in north China and Manchuria; the guards scoffed. A uniformed official emerged, sparkling with medals and insignia of rank. (“Formally bedecked, I cowed him,” was the best translation of Superintendent Meng’s remark, jotted in hasty grass script in the margin.) One Foot One Hand then demanded an enormous sum for the information, the equivalent of ten American dollars. Superintendent Meng had feigned amazement and outrage, but had scented truth, and finally promised some payment.
    One Foot One Hand thereupon reported that in the time of his youth, some three years before, he had been an assassin, specializing in the Japanese who occupied Peking. He was then hale and hearty, and had not yet been maimed and mangled by an exploding boiler. He alone had accounted for six Japanese, and not one was an easy job.
    Superintendent Meng instructed him to cease blowing the cow—bragging—and get on with his story.
    One Foot One Hand stated that Major Kanamori of the Japanese occupation forces was now a beggar; that he had been gravely injured in a manner unknown to One Foot One Hand, sheltered and restored to health by the beggars, and permitted to remain as one of them. One Foot One Hand knew the face because he had spied upon Kanamori in 1945, thinking what a prize this one would be. Of course the beggar bureaucracy knew that the man was Japanese,