The Deadly Eurasian

by Alexander Cordell

Genres: General Fiction; Historical Fiction; War & Military

Synopsis

Mei Kayling, a member of the Chinese Red Guard and undercover agent, must lead a column of refugees across the mountains of China into Hong Kong, a perilous journey through villages blasted by an apparent nuclear explosion. It soon becomes clear that the blast was caused by a bomb from an American warship, carried out by a crewmember who has since disappeared; and so Mei must hunt for the missing man, a quest that takes her to the US in her efforts to determine if the explosion was an accident, or was ordered by the Pentagon...

Release date: July 24, 2014

Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton

Print pages: 192

Sample

It is necessary at certain intervals to dye my hair: about this need I am reserved, so I do not often mention it. In the Extra-Murals of Peking University, which is the greatest in the world, there was a professor who would upbraid any girl seen using lipstick or dye, this being against the edicts of the Cultural Revolution. But when he saw me in the corridors he merely bowed.

Kwan To Lin, however, used to love my bright hair. He showed not the slightest embarrassment when seen with me in public; at the School of Espionage, despite his other faults, he was most careful to ensure that I received exactly the same treatment and privileges as the pure-blood Chinese students. There are some in this world who understand the predicaments of humans, and some who do not. Once he said to me:

“This is my woman, Mei Kayling, and she has hair like a wand of gold.”

“It is shameful hair,” I retorted, “it is not Chinese.”

Smiling with slow charm, he said, “Is nationality important when one is making love?”

“It is important to know to whom one is making love. Soon I shall dye it.”

At the door he said, “You will dye it when you are given permission, not before.”

“You are going now?” I asked.

“Of course. I will meet you at the Hsin Chiao Hotel for the First Investigation.”

“I will be there.”

After Kwan had gone I sat at the bedroom table and stared into the mirror. The face that stared back at me was the face of a European. With the greatest care, and the aid of mascara, I changed my face into that of a Chinese.

Let lovers stop to think of the perfection of love, these lovers of east and west who waste their words in dark places, mouth to mouth, in the honeyed sweetness of their loins and the panic of their breath.

Before they make Eurasians.

There is about the city of Peking in midsummer an air of triviality, of banter and gaiety that runs hand-in-hand with the gorgeous decoration which Nature sheds so bountifully. It is always a little astonishing to me that the blossoms blooming on the trees which we have planted since the Revolution bloom with equal brightness on the trees of the decadent west. The morning was flourishing with sweet air, the sky already glowing with the molten heat to come, as I paid off the boarding-house keeper.

The woman said, “One yuan fifty, missus.”

I paid her, this little scramble of flesh out of old Honan. My green uniform with the armband of the Red Guard did not impress her, for she had seen the old chain-gang of the Kuomintang, and the sack of Canton.

“Your man has already gone?”

I replied, “My husband is concerned with the affairs of the Youth League: there is to be a big parade today, so he left early.”

“There is much coming and going of husbands.”

Peasants have the ability to be insulting without really trying.

Sunlight struck me in the face as I opened the door, adopting an air of unconcern, though Kwan was a fool, I reflected, to make this assignation so close to the city limits. For one destined to rise to high places he had little sense of social responsibility. The woman said:

“It is terrible, isn’t it?”

“The accident in Kwangtung?”

She whispered, “The desecration of the graves.”

“Such things are inevitable. In the search for absolute national purity all vestige of the old landed proprietors must be removed.”

“Aye, but these are dead.”

Kwan and I had heard them in the night, and listened, hand-in-hand. The new Red Guard movement finding its feet in eradicating the foul memory of China’s travail. Kwan said it was a heresy of violence, but I did not agree. Bonfires had been lit in the streets, the headstones of the old European cemetery overturned. Chairman Mao himself had pledged his support to the new, violent movement: this was enough for me.

But the ancients of China still worship their ancestors: there is no way of changing such customs but to wait until they die out. I said to this woman:

“You are a good Communist?”

Her walnut face regarded me. “Ah, excellent.”

“You told my husband that you came from the farms?”

“From Honan, many winters ago.”

“And you remember the old Honan?”

“Every leaf, every bough, every starvation.”

I replied, “Then you would marvel at the new Honan that the Red Guards have built. Do you know your Su Shiun?”

It frightened her, and was meant to. One can forgive presumption but not such intolerable impertinence.

“Who?” Her broken teeth leered from her shattered face, an appalling apparition made more dreadful by sun.

I said with command, “If you are a good Communist you are bound to know your Su Shiun. Now tell me,” I quoted, “‘The soil. …’”

She said tonelessly, “‘The soil has ceased to belong to those who till it. And they who have the owning thereof …’” she faltered.

“Think, woman, think.”

“‘And … and they who have the owning thereof toil not in the fields. Of their yield the landlord takes one half, for every ten farmers there is one proprietor.’”

“Excellent,” I said. “I will tell my husband that despite your age you have a good memory.”

She added, looking at nothing, “The Red Guards labour with the harvest, they feed the people, they are the blood of China, and they rejoice in the glory of Chairman Mao’s thoughts.”

“Good day,” I said.

There was little to be done with her, her generation was transitional. Steeped in gossip, scandalising and folk-lore, she was the epitome of old China: one moment enthusing about the gigantic success of the communes, the next burning paper money before her ancestral gods. But she also had a tongue.

It was cleaner in the street.

Violent with gay red streamers and plumes, the great coaches came hurrying down the wide boulevards of Tien An Men, crammed with students coming to attend yet another gala day of rejoicing. Vaguely, I wondered who it was this time: we were wooing the east. Afro-Asians in gorgeous saris strolled by in graceless excitement, their white-palmed hands jabbering in fine frenzy below the white flash of their teeth; their men darker and sultry with sun, expensively dressed in European suits. Probably Somaliland, I reflected – she had not been in Peking for a considerable time, and I wondered at the wisdom of these lavish entertainments. It was rather like fiddling while Rome was burning, as the Europeans say. Now a cavalcade of cars was coming from the city airport, and the crowds lining the square swayed and rippled with the wind of excitement. I paused, watching. It was the processional hymn of everlasting friendship, a proclamation that the east was Red: the tambourines and Asian dances of the students who jigged with false delight to the diplomatic hand-waving and bows of the visiting dignitaries – all this but a tinsel decoration that covered the face of national grief: ten thousand dead in the province of Kwangtung. Ten thousand dead and many thousands blinded. I closed my eyes. It was a national calamity for which the scientists would pay with their lives. And amid the growing clamour of the crowds I pushed my way on, seeing in the eye of my mind a shattered Canton, her skeleton timbers rearing in blackened desolation through the plumes of fire.

I reached the edge of the fantastic Tien An Men square. Here the students paraded. The scarf-dance of the falling harvest was in full swing, and the wheat fell obliquely to the scythe: a swathe of ten thousand children laying themselves flat on their faces as a giant blade of silver moved among them. The crowd roared. Distantly, on the balcony before the Great Hall of the People, I saw our beloved Chairman Mao and flung out my hands to him, shrieking his name. The loud-speakers shattered the morning, the martial music roared to a higher note. Doves rose in a white cloud above Tien An Men, scattering themselves into a molten sky like a handful of shavings flung into the wind. Lin Piao I saw, and Chou En-lai, the leaders of the Cultural Revolution, the heroes of the Long March. Like the crowd I shrieked with joy, banishing my thoughts of burning Kwangtung. A million people roared their loyalty into the beauty of the morning, and their devotion to Mao Tse-tung.

I looked at my watch. It was nearly ten o’clock.

Kwan was waiting on the steps of the Hsin Chiao hotel, as I expected.

I nodded briefly. He was in one of his damn-fool moods and I didn’t like it.

He asked, “Did you rest well, Mei Kayling?”

I said, walking past him, “Not as I had hoped. The lodging was noisy, the politics poor by peasant standards and the company bourgeois-intellectual.”

“Did you report this?”

Over my shoulder I said, “I might even do that,” and added, “Actually, I spent most of the night awake.”

It delighted him and he smiled, saying, “Somebody else must have had the enjoyment.”

“Have the others come?” I ignored this rudeness.

“They have been here six minutes. You are late.”

“I am sorry. The crowds in Tien An Men.”

I followed him into the foyer. To me it seemed a ridiculous place for a conference. This was eminently a hotel for foreigners, though none, I noticed, seemed to be around today. Kwan said:

“Where is your suitcase?”

“At the People’s Hostel.”

“But you did not spend last night at the People’s Hostel.”

“Don’t be a fool, Kwan, send for it.”

There stand, above the crimson foyer of the Hsin Chiao, two life-sized figures of China Revived: they stared at me with blank eyes, and condemnation. Coming up the stairs behind me Kwan said:

“It is inconceivable that beneath those green trousers walk the most beautiful legs.”

In this mood he was dangerous. I smiled, walking on, returning bows.

“Uniforms,” he said softly, “are a form of treachery. They induce in the old an unwarranted dignity. Simplified, they add inches to a man’s political stature – our own leaders are a terrifying example. But to women they do the most dreadful things, especially trousers.”

I ignored him, but it was frightening. Kwan was versed in the freedoms and scope of the new institutions. He was principal of the Junior School of Espionage, and this, I supposed, allowed him almost unlimited licence of expression. Mine was limited. As a Student of Espionage, second-class and but recently graduated, there was, for me, the hidden microphone. Behind every one of the ten million trees they have planted since the Revolution there is, it is said, an eye.

At the top of the stairs I turned to the right.

“This way,” said Kwan, and opened a door.

A man was sitting at a table; he was alone in the small room.

This was the Second Investigator; the First Investigation would come later, in Council.

Do not let them frighten you, Kwan once said. Such investigations, which come automatically before every project, are relegated to the crusty old heroes of the Long March who call into the Intelligence Department before being transferred to minor positions in the Party Organisation. But Kwan, I was to find, though right in so many things, was quite wrong in this.

The man at the table was old: his head was bald, a skull screwed on to a hairless neck, his teeth projecting over bloodless lips. Yet his voice, when he spoke, was strangely beautiful, coming from a crack in the coffin of his soul.

“Mei Kayling?”

“1869681, Mei Kayling, Red Guard, Second Class.”

“Please come in.” He waved a hand and I sat to attention before him.

“You know why you are here?”

“Yes, Investigator.”

He folded his hands on the desk before him, motioned Kwan to a chair, and said, “But you do not know in detail?”

“She knows nothing in detail,” said Kwan.

“I am referring my remarks to the woman Mei. You have a tongue of your own?” he asked me.

“Yes, Investigator.”

“Then use it. Where were you born?”

“In Hong Kong.”

“How long did you live there?” He began to write, a slow, precise hand.

“For two years only.”

“How old are you, Mei Kayling?”

“Twenty-four.”

“And your parents are dead, it says here.”

I nodded, glancing at Kwan. He was sitting with his legs crossed, his face betraying his usual boredom. Nothing infuriated him more than the intensity of aged officialdom. Had Kwan been given his head I should have been on the ’plane south by now, but this was sheer stupidity. The Party knew my history down to the most trifling detail. The Investigator said:

“I have your record here, woman. In your own words state it again, that I may check it with the official history.”

Kwan said instantly, “Investigator. When we have finished here she has the First Investigation in Council to face. Everything is before you. I myself recommended this woman on the basis of that record.”

“Then if she states her own history she will know it that much more clearly, will she not?”

“She has stated it every week in the School of Espionage for the past two years.”

“So you identify her?”

“As my most brilliant pupil.”

“Excellent. But brothers, under certain circumstances, have the greatest difficulty in identifying sisters; husbands are equally remiss with wives; and lovers, Kwan To Lin, are the most untrustworthy of the lot.”

I closed my eyes. Sweat flooded to my face as I remembered the boarding-house keeper, the woman of Honan. The Investigator said, and I dared not look at Kwan:

“It matters little, Mei Kayling. The amorous nature of your tutor in no way denies the brilliance of his espionage. State your record.”

I began obediently, with the intonation of a parrot:

“My name is Mei Kayling. I am the daughter of a Chinese mother and a British father. I have a sister living, her name is Chieh, and she is of pure Chinese blood, being two years older than me. When my father died my mother took us to live in Macau, and there Chieh and I worked in the firecracker factories of a Portuguese imperialist. When I was ten years old we moved to the village of Hoon, which is north of Canton in the province of Kwangtung. I was top of my class in the school of Sun Commune, and on my twelfth birthday a letter came from the Government calling me to Canton Middle School for further education. …”

The Investigator interjected, “But for reasons best known to herself your mother sent your sister Chieh to Canton Middle School, with your papers.”

“That is correct, Investigator.”

“And then?”

“Within three days the authorities had sent my sister back to Hoon. She could not pass the entrance examination.”

“Pray continue.”

I heard Kwan sigh, and I said, “My mother did nothing for a month, then a letter came from the Canton authorities demanding that she should appear before the elders of Hoon village: that she should explain her reasons for trying to educate the wrong child. …”

“What followed after this?” The Investigator examined my record with scrupulous care.

In better words than these I told him, words that had become a part of a life-long explanation of my birth, my countenance, my hair; something like this I told him:

That they sat cross-legged in a half-circle before me, these Hoon elders. With impassive eyes they sat while I stood with my mother on trial. And around me, the greatest degradation of all, stood the village children, fingers in their mouths, eyes wide with the expectation of a public execution, the victim a mongrel bitch with long, golden hair.

“You sent the wrong child to Canton School, woman?” asked an Elder.

My mother clutched herself, saying, “It is a sad story and I am most embarrassed.”

“You will be more embarrassed if the Government institutes an inquiry. What is this child’s name?”

“By my name she is a Wong; in English it is Warren, the name of her English father. Shall I be punished?”

“Does one beat a donkey for mating with a horse? What name do you call her?”

“Mei Kayling. Out of shame I gave her this name.”

The wind whispered about us, blowing my bright hair over my face. The watching children nudged each other; women whispered behind their hands.

“Where was she conceived?”

“In Spring Garden Lane, a roof-top in Hong Kong.”

“You later married this Englishman?”

“After she was born. He was going to take us to England, but when she was two years old he died.”

“So she was born a bastard?”

My mother raised her face. “Women starve before men in Hong Kong. It is not the first time the womb has saved the stomach, so do not look so saintly.”

“Do not be impudent. Confine yourself to replies or you will appear before the Commune Director. Why did you not send this Mei Kayling to Canton as you were ordered? Why send the loutish sister?”

“It was enough that I was shamed before my village. When she was born thi. . .