White Ghosts

25. THE NORTHERN EXPEDITION

Daniel, his fellow pilots, and the air mechanics were among the first to head north, and very quickly they discovered that what they were involved in was not so much a war as a wanton waste of material and human resources.

The soldiers of the NRA marched barefoot through the green hills in the blazing sun, the columns stretching back for dozens of miles. Every piece of artillery had to be disassembled and carried by hand along tracks that were too narrow for even a handcart to pass through. The soldiers’ brown heels packed the dirt and sweat poured from their straining bodies.

The troops crossed dizzying gorges spanned by ancient suspension bridges, and whole companies were lost when the crude ropes gave way under their weight. Cholera claimed the lives of hundreds of other soldiers—the doctors recruited by the NRA were often relatives of the high-ups, with no qualifications whatsoever. The best that most of them could do was to let off firecrackers in the superstitious hope that this would drive away evil spirits.

The only reason the NRA hadn’t been completely annihilated was because the northerners’ forces were in an even worse condition and even more poorly equipped. The warlords held their people in such scant regard that they sent them into battle armed with swords against machine guns.

Daniel took refuge in cynicism. He convinced himself that a brutal civil war was the only way to cope with the country’s gross overpopulation, and if the Chinese cared so little about their fellow countrymen, why should he? His duty was to serve Germany, and he was doing exactly that by keeping a close eye on his Russian “colleagues” and sending his findings back to Berlin.

In several months, the NRA seized the key industrial city of Wuhan on the Yangtze River, and Mikhail Borodin, the chief political adviser sent from Moscow, declared that he would turn it into a model communist city, free of all private property and exploitation. The poor applauded him wildly, but the Chinese officers and Chiang Kai-shek were markedly less enthusiastic about the Russians’ ideas and popular support. The right wing of the Kuomintang began to openly question whether China had exchanged one kind of white overlord for another, and whether this was a cause that was worth fighting for.

Daniel did his best to increase the mutual mistrust between the Kuomintang and the Russians. After a busy day of talks and intrigues, he would come “home,” to a requisitioned merchant’s house. A timorous cook would hand him a pot of boiled beans, Daniel would have his dinner and retire to his broken bed in the master bedroom.

He would take the netsuke that Nina had given him out of his pocket and scrutinize the gleaming figure with its nine tails, wondering what had happened to Nina after his departure. No matter how things turned out, nothing good would come of her staying in Shanghai. When the NRA soldiers burst into the city, the mob would make short work of all the “white ghosts” in the foreign concessions.

However, since Nina had chosen Klim Rogov over him, there was nothing Daniel could do to help her.

The hospitals were overcrowded and lacked medicine, so the commanders of the NRA ordered that a number of the trophies captured at Wuhan be auctioned to raise income for the Red Cross.

The auction was held in the former governor’s mansion. Its gate gaped wide open and its floors were slick with the melted dirty snow that had been tramped in by taciturn officers in their military boots. They wandered around the tables where the auction items were arranged but no one dared open the bidding and let the others know that they had money. That would be tantamount to admitting that they had taken part in the town’s looting.

A drably-uniformed official from the new communist government would occasionally peek into the auction rooms. They had already made a killing trading food and fuel on the black market, and now they were waiting for the Red Cross to drop their prices for the auctioned treasures.

Daniel Bernard wasn’t there to buy anything; he had come to the mansion to meet up with an old friend from Shanghai. He moved from room to room admiring pale blue vases—the color of the sky after a downpour, works of embroidery as light as the breath of a child, and ancient lacquered jewelry boxes which had been privy to countless generations of secrets.

Daniel finally spotted Fernando accompanied by One-Eye and his other bodyguards.

“Hello comrade!” the Don yelled and he shook Daniel’s hand. “How about treasure hunting today? I like this one,” he said pointing his finger at a nearby painting on rice paper.

Daniel smiled indulgently. “That’s ‘The Noise of the Shadows Shaken by the Wind,’ It’s from the seventeenth century, the Ming Dynasty era.”

“Wrap it up for me then,” Fernando said. “And that statue with the red face too.”

“That is Guan Yu, the Taoist God of war, camaraderie, and a good fight,” Daniel said.

“Oh!” The Don frowned. “Better put it back, boys. I don’t want any pagan gods, otherwise the Holy Virgin might get upset. I’d better take that one with the woman playing a flute. And please, don’t tell me who she is.”

After One-Eye had carried the purchases to the car, Don Fernando invited Daniel to the snow-clad courtyard which had a dark, neglected pond at its center.

“How are things going in Shanghai?” Daniel inquired, shivering. His thin coat didn’t afford him much protection from the cold.

“Everybody is going crazy, like rats trapped in a bucket,” Fernando replied. “Chiang Kai-shek’s criminal record has mysteriously gone missing from the International Settlement police archive. Well, you can’t blame them. Any day now they might need to enter into negotiations with him.”

Daniel smiled. “What prudence!”

The Don told him that more than a hundred thousand refugees had entered Shanghai in the past few months. They were fleeing not only the NRA but the retreating northern armies. The influx of people and the summer drought had caused food prices to double, and the authorities were expecting riots any day.

“The Governor is out of his mind with fear,” Fernando said. “He has ordered his soldiers to arrest anyone suspected of sympathizing with the communists or the Kuomintang. The prisons are so full that they are summarily executing suspects in the streets. Then they put their heads in bamboo cages and hang them from lampposts.”

Don Fernando offered Daniel an Egyptian cigarette with a gold tip, a luxury even the top brass at the NRA hadn’t enjoyed for several months.

“The Bolsheviks have learned their lessons from the general strike,” the Don said, blowing the smoke towards his feet. “The Chinese will only fight the foreigners if there are civilian casualties. And if the authorities don’t provide them with a massacre, the Bolsheviks will provoke them into one. They’ve formed a number of detachments of shock troops from the most loyal Shanghai workers, and they are ready to sack the foreign concessions at the first signal. In response, the Great Powers will kill thousands of Chinese—innocent and guilty alike—and this will lead to riots across the whole of the country. The Bolsheviks are hoping to ride this wave of unrest in order to seize power in China.”

Don Fernando looked into Daniel’s eyes. “I have a message for you from Big-Eared Du.”

“The Green Gang ringleader?”

“The very same. We know that Chiang Kai-shek is not happy with his Russian advisers but can’t oppose them openly because they are paying his bills. But if Chiang Kai-shek promises to leave the foreign concessions alone and purge the commies in his army, Shanghai will surrender without a fight, and your commander-in-chief will be provided with a different source of income.”

“From the opium traders?”

“Not only them. The Great Powers want to negotiate peace, which could mean international support and loans for Chiang Kai-shek.”

“I’ll find out if he’s ready to negotiate,” said Daniel.

In the evening he sent a coded cable to Berlin, and the answer returned immediately: Daniel was to take part in the negotiations and gather as much intelligence as possible.

Soon after, he and Fernando paid a visit to the commander-in-chief's headquarters, and several days later the two of them returned to Shanghai with the news that Chiang Kai-shek was willing to listen to the representatives of the foreign concessions and the Green Gang.

Throughout dinner, Klim read his newspaper while Nina looked at him, feeling dejected and miserable. She had been waiting for him to ask her about her day in the office, but instead, he had been studiously ignoring her.

The candles flickered inside the carved lanterns on the table casting moving shadows onto Klim’s newspaper. Its headline read: “Forty warships with reinforcements from the Great Powers expected to arrive by March.”

It was highly unlikely they would reach Shanghai before the NRA.

“Did you hear that the Defense Committee commandeered all my employees?” Nina asked.

“Yes, I know,” Klim said. “They need every man capable of bearing arms to guard the barricades around the concessions.”

“But they’ve ruined my business! I have nothing left but an empty office, and my telephone is ringing off the hook. My customers are expecting their bodyguards to turn up for duty, and now they are threatening to sue me for breach of contract.”

Klim didn’t even look up from his paper.

“Don’t you have anything to say?” Nina asked, her voice shaking.

“What do you want me to say?”

She snatched his paper from him and hurled it to the floor.

“Wake up, for Christ sake! There’s a war on. We could die. Don’t you realize that we have to patch up our quarrel and do something about our situation? For the sake of our own survival, if nothing else.”

Klim took a coin out of his pocket and put it on top of one of the lanterns.

“Pick it up,” he suggested.

Nina looked at him, puzzled.

“Go ahead, don’t be scared,” Klim encouraged. “It’s solid silver. It’s very valuable.”

“But I’ll burn my fingers.”

“How do you know?”

“Because I know that’s what’s going to happen if I touch that coin.”

“And I know exactly what’s going to happen if we patch things up.”

Klim stood up.

“I’ll stay in Shanghai as long as possible,” he said. “We have no other anchorman left, and someone has to read the news to the public. Tamara and her children are going to move to her other house in Nagasaki, and she has offered to take Kitty with her. I’m sure you can go too if you want.”

The shop owners wanted to sell as much of their stock as possible before the war reached Shanghai, and Sincere Department Store announced a huge Christmas sale.

Nina wandered aimlessly from one department to another until she stopped in front of a display containing a big wrapped gift box tied with a red satin bow. To all appearances, it contained a valuable present, but Nina knew it was empty. It was the perfect metaphor for her own life.

No matter how hard she tried she couldn’t save her marriage and business, and the only thing she had to look forward to was to return to the humiliating situation of living off Tamara’s charity.

Nina went up to the second floor, where shelves with liquors stretched from the floor to the ceiling. A bottle of whiskey—that was all she wanted for Christmas.

She noticed a poster on the wall of a girl in a swimming suit about to dive into a wine glass. Let’s consider it an omen, Nina decided. She took a bottle from the shelf and turned to go to the checkout.

“Hello,” said Daniel Bernard, who had been watching her, his arms crossed. His hair was close-cropped, his face had grown thinner, and gray streaks had appeared at his temples.

“What are you doing here?” Nina said in amazement.

“I was just following your every move and waiting for you to be good enough to notice me,” Daniel said, smiling. “How are you?”

Nina didn’t know what to say.

“I’m fine,” she muttered finally and put the whiskey bottle back, blushing.

Daniel shook his head disapprovingly. “Let’s find a place to sit and talk.”

Klim had told Nina that this man was working for the NRA. It was clear that he had come to Shanghai for a good reason, yet she resisted the urge to call the police. Instead, she followed him to the third floor where there was a half-empty movie theatre.

The film started, and to the crackling sound of the projector and the accompaniment of an out-of-tune piano, Nina confided to Daniel everything that had happened to her over the last few months.

“It’s all your fault,” she whispered in despair. “You’ve ruined my life."

“Then it’s up to me to fix it,” Daniel said in a serious voice. “I have some business to see to in Shanghai, and then I’ll go back to Wuhan. You should come with me.”

“Are you kidding? It’s a nest of communists. I know that Mikhail Borodin has his headquarters there.”

“Believe me it would be better for you to stay away from Shanghai for the foreseeable future.”

Nina went cold. “Is there going be a siege?”

“I just strongly recommend that you buy yourself a ticket on the Pamyat Lenina. It’s a Soviet merchant ship. It will set sail for Wuhan next Thursday.”

“But Wuhan is in the middle of a war zone!”

“There are no front lines in China,” Daniel said. “Battles flare up wherever the opposing troops happen to run into each other. British and American warships are patrolling the Yangtze, and merchant ships are still free to sail up and down the river.”

Nina stared blankly at the screen. Rudolph Valentino was fighting valiantly to win the heart of his fair lady.

If Kitty went to Nagasaki, there would be nothing to keep Nina in Shanghai. And she couldn’t face having to swallow her pride and become Tamara’s kept companion again. The very thought of it made Nina sick.

Klim had refused to mend their relationship and ended up turning his worst suspicions into a self-fulfilling prophecy. Daniel might be a man of extremely dubious honor, but at least he was ready to help Nina escape the trap that was enclosing them.

If I go with him to Wuhan, she thought, I’ll meet new people and find new opportunities. What does it matter that Daniel is working for the NRA? If he can get along with these people, then so can I. I just need a break, and then I’ll be able to breathe again and think of something.

She sensed Daniel’s intense gaze.

“Well, will you come with me?” he asked.

“I… I don’t know.”

Nina took a deep breath. Should she leave everything behind? If she did, there would be no turning back. But if I stay in Shanghai, she thought, I’ll end up doing myself a mischief.

“I won’t promise you anything—” she began, but Daniel didn’t let her finish.

“I’ll see you on the ship.”

Nina didn’t wait for the movie to end but stood up and went outside. It would be better for both of them if no one were to see her with Daniel.