Empire of Women & One of our Cities is Missing (Armchair Fiction Double Novels Book 25) (19 page)

While Knight and I were talking, we
could hear voices in the adjoining room, which General Zergoff was using as a
staff office.
 
Suddenly the pitch went
higher and we were able to make out the words clearly.
 

“You’ve had ten hours, and all you
produce is excuses.”
 
Zergoff paused and
when he spoke again each word was spaced like the boom
of a
cannon.
 
“I want Willard Clapper here by
noon.
 
Check the refugee detail.
 
If Clapper’s trying to get back here, he’ll
be somewhere on the road.
 

“Then send a car up for him.
 
He’d wait in the mountains for us to pick him
up—I agree with you there.
 
He’d know he
couldn’t get through to headquarters today without our help.”
 

The voices simmered down.
 

Knight said, “Apparently, Stewart, you
were right about Dr. Clapper.
 
That
appears to be obvious.”
 

“If they put Clapper on the air with
us—”

“The accuser and his
victims, all joining hands in the noble cause of Soviet brotherhood.”
 
The Quaker chuckled.
 
“It has amusing possibilities, as a radio
show.
 
I’m afraid it won’t come off.
 
Our intellectuals seem somewhat unwilling
to co-operate.”
 

“Largely as a result of
your example.”
 

“You give me too much credit.
 
Perhaps I helped each of you see more clearly
your own spiritual convictions; that’s all.”
 

Late in the afternoon the General found
time for an interview with me.
 
I thought
I had been brought downstairs with Knight as a matter of convenience.
 
But I discovered that Zergoff had specific
plans for me.
 
I was to be a sort of
intellectual Judas, with my own neck at stake.
 

Zergoff came straight to the point.
 
They had made recordings of my conversations
with Knight, and the General believed the Quaker put unusual value upon my
opinion.
 
I was, therefore, ordered to
persuade Knight to meet Zergoff’s terms.
 

“You think I can do what you haven’t?” I
asked.
 
“Suppose I refuse?”

“You will be shot.”
 
His voice was calm and self-assured.
 
Fear prickled at the roots of my hair; I knew
he meant precisely what he said.
 
He
added, “If I liquidate you, Dr. Roswell, I lose only one man.
 
Granted, you have some use to us, but you are
expendable.
 
You have taken no romantic
moral stand in front of the others.”
 

“But George Knight has.”
 

“Exactly.
 
He is setting the pace for the rest of
you.”
 

The door of the nook slid open.
 
Zergoff looked up at a saluting
subordinate.
 
“Sir, the report on
Clapper—”

“You’ve found him?”

“We sent a jeep into the mountains.
 
Three men, commanded by a sergeant; all we
could spare at the time.
 
We have had no
communication from them in six hours; we presume they’re lost to guerilla
action.”
 

“American guerillas?
 
Don’t be a fool; these bourgeoisie wouldn’t
have the backbone—
”
 
Zergoff
got a grip on his anger.
 
“Send another truck—this time with enough men to do the job.”
 

The junior officer saluted and
departed.
 
Zergoff strode toward the
door.
 
He glanced at me and, more or less
as an afterthought, he added, “One other point you should understand, Dr.
Roswell:
 
I’m giving you a
deadline—eight o’clock tonight…”

My only problem was how much I should
tell Knight.
 
Although our spoken
conversation was monitored, I could have written the facts and passed them
over to him while we chatted of inconsequential things.
 
For some fifteen minutes I sat facing him,
talking bland nonsense, while I tried to make up my mind.
 
And then even that problem no longer mattered.
 

We heard the sound of far away
explosions in the harbor and a sudden scurrying of booted feet out of the
living room.
 

The explosions were suddenly
closer.
 
A plane screamed overhead.
 
The wall burst open, in a blinding chaos of
smoke and flying debris.
 
I was flung
against the couch.
 
Books rained down on
Knight and me, shielding us from the glass that flew out of the narrow
windows.
 

Dazed, I pulled myself to my feet.
 
I saw that the sidewall was gone, open to the
alley back of the house.
 
It meant
escape.
 
At least a
slim chance.
 
Better than staying
where we were.
 
I lifted Knight in my
arms and stumbled toward the opening.
 

Fire was licking at the house as I
carried George Knight through the torn wall.
 
The alley outside seemed to be clear.
 
But suddenly a Communist soldier—an enormous man—loomed out of the
shadows.
 

“Are you Americans?” he asked.
 

I swung my fist; he caught it in his
huge hand.
 

“My name is Chen Phiang,” he whispered
close to my ear.
 
“I am Chinese.
 
I want to help you.
 
Come, I will show you a place to hide.”
 

After a moment, I followed him toward
the side street.
 
Flak from anti-aircraft
shells was falling everywhere.
 
Close by
on the boulevard fire blazed against the dusk sky.
 
I saw the broken skeleton of a fallen plane.
 
The Chinese took George Knight in his
arms.
 

“I am Chen Phiang,” he said again.
 
“I have at last remembered the wisdom of my
paternal grandparent.”
 

 Artist Unknown

III
.
 
The
City—Friday at
dusk Chen Phiang

I AM ONLY seventeen.
 
I have a poor memory of my paternal
grandparent, who was a tea merchant in Hong Kong.
 
He came frequently to visit my father’s shop
in Canton.
 
I listened carefully when he
spoke, because in those days we honored the wisdom of our elders.
 

The soldiers of the people’s government
took me from my father’s shop when I was very small.
 
I remember my mother’s tears and my father’s
terror.
 
My mother held me against her
heart.
 
A soldier struck her with his
rifle.
 

My father was a landowner and an enemy
of the people.
 
They told me that much
later, at a school in Peking, and I believed them, because they were skillful
teachers.
 
It was right for my mother and
my father to be liquidated; I believed that, too, for I was a conscientious
student.
 
The teachers said I would not
be a good citizen until I wiped away every memory of my parents and my grandparents.
 

At fifteen I began my military training.
 
Six months later, because I was large and
strong and quick thinking, I was transferred to the paratroops.
 
Our training was rigid.
 
When we were not practicing in the planes
our Russian allies gave us, we were hardening our muscles with athletic drills
and hand-to-hand conflict.
 
One hour each
morning we had classes for political indoctrination; four hours every night we
learned English.
 

During the indoctrination sessions,
special political officers came from Pekin to explain current news.
 
We had one mortal enemy, they told
us:
 
the Fascist
government of the United States, which kept its own people in ignorance and
slavery.
 

I know, now, it was all a lie.
 
My heart is burning with the taste of
betrayal.
 
I was a part of it.
 
I marched blindly with the others.
 

I learned to hate the enemy with a
terrible loathing, for I had cousins who lived in the United States.
 
We had never met; it surprised me that they
were even aware of my humble existence.
 
Yet, from time to time, the political officer from Pekin brought me letters
from my cousins—pitiful, tragic pleas for us to release them from their
reactionary masters.
 
Many of the men in
my corps had similar letters from their own kin.
 
Our hatred was inflamed.
 

On the day our Russian allies were forced
to occupy Paris to protect the people from the Wall Street plutocrats, our
military corps was ordered to leave Pekin.
 

Our corps flew north to a Russian base
in Siberia, a new field more elaborately camouflaged than anything I had ever
seen.
 

The paratroopers packed into the dugouts
were all approximately my age; they had all been separated from their parents
in early childhood and reared in government schools.
 

During the two days of our confinement
the only language we were permitted to speak was English.
 
The officers gave us American newspapers and
periodicals to read.
 

Toward the end of the second day we
heard the bombers overhead.
 
The
commissar ordered us out of our hammocks.
 
We crowded together in front of the television screen.
 
Automatic transmitters set up in the cities
showed us the holocaust of the bombing, until the transmitters themselves were
destroyed.
 
Moscow, Pekin, Shanghai,
Canton, Bombay, Leningrad, Berlin,
Madrid
:
 
we watched them die.
 
Our homes, the cities we prided, the people
we knew as friends—destroyed by the sneak attack of American planes.
 
Undeclared war.
 

The commissar brought us liquor.
 
We smashed the empty bottles against the
earthen wall, as we would have smashed the enemy.
 

Shortly before dawn—I am not sure of the
hour, because I had drunk myself into a stupor—we were loaded into the
transports.
 

I slept until a needle pricked my
arm.
 
I opened my eyes and saw the
commissar jerk out the empty hypodermic.
 
“You’ll feel fine in a minute,” he said as he moved on to the next
man.
 

Half an hour later we made the
jump.
 
Ours was not the first wave of the
invasion.
 
Soviet paratroops had landed
during the night and seized key points.
 
The morning sun was bright and clear as I parachuted toward Los
Angeles.
 

I checked in at the nearest Soviet
guard post.
 
The Lieutenant in charge
recorded my identification number and assigned me to the refugee detail.
 
Our job was to unsnarl the traffic and get
the people off the streets.
 

An interminable flood of cars continued
to crowd in from the desert.
 
And this, I
thought, was happening on all the highways leading into the city.
 
By weight of numbers alone the Americans
could have subdued us.
 
They seemed
unaware of that.
 

By mid-afternoon my drugged
god-feeling
was gone.
 
I had to hold to my post doggedly, fighting fatigue.
 
My nerves were raw.
 
I screamed orders at the prisoners, sometimes
forgetting to speak in English.
 
I used
my gun more frequently, on very little provocation.
 
My only emotion was hatred.
 

A very old, very crowded automobile
came toward us.
 
The motor was coughing;
steam shot from the open radiator.
 
I
strode toward it, swinging my submachine gun angrily.
 

The motor stalled again.
 
A rear door banged open and four children
spilled out; the eldest was no more than nine.
 
They began to plead with me in their shrill, childish voices.
 
Please, would I be patient?
 
Their mother was sick; she had been burned by
the bomb.
 

Their words made no impression, but
their faces did.
 
For
they were Chinese.
 
Chinese like
myself
.
 

The man got out.
 
He began to address me awkwardly in Cantonese.
 

“I speak English,” I told him
proudly.
 

His face relaxed.
 
“Sir, my wife is very ill.
 
A doctor examined her; he said she might
possibly live if—”

“What are you doing with these Fascist
pigs?”

He looked me straight in the eye.
 
“I am an American.”
 
He said it without shame.
 
With a dignity that made me writhe, he
returned to the car and lifted out his wife.
 
A white man from another vehicle came and talked to him.
 
They put the Chinese woman in the second car;
a white woman slid behind the wheel, after first making a pillow of her coat
and sliding it behind the Chinese woman’s head.
 

That unexpected gesture of kindness gave
me my first doubt.
 
The letters from my
cousin had said that the Chinese, without exception, were the most persecuted
slaves of capitalism.
 
Yet now, with my
own eyes, I had seen a white family help a Chinese woman.
 

The four children climbed into the
second car.
 
Since there was no one left
to drive the wreck belonging to the Chinese, I ordered four prisoners to push
it into a side street, to clear the road.
 
Until it was out of the way, the second car was stalled, and all the
long column of vehicles behind it.
 
The
eldest Chinese child—a girl—got out and walked toward me.
 

“Do you know a working class man whose
name is Lin Yeng?” I asked her.
 

“You talk in such a foolish way.
 
What’s a working class?
 
The only
kind
of
classes I know about are the ones in school, and we don’t work unless we have
to.”
 

My nerves began to tense in anger
again; the tone of my voice went up a notch.
 
“Do you know Lin Yeng?” I repeated.
 

“No, but lots of
Chinese live in Los Angeles.
 

“How would I find Lin Yeng?” I
asked.
 
“He’s a cousin of mine; we have
corresponded for many years.”
 

“Try the phone book.
 
But take a tip from me, soldier; I don’t
think he’s going to give you the red carpet treatment.”
 

Late in the afternoon we were relieved
at the barricade by fresh troops.
 
I
reported back to the guard post.
 
The
Lieutenant gave me my billet assignment in a hotel overlooking the public
bathing beach, a mile or so south of the harbor.
 

I ate in the hotel dining room, at a
table with two infantry privates and a Russian air force sergeant.
 
It was a magnificent meal.
 
We had all the food and liquor of a captured
city at our disposal.
 

During a lull I asked—simply to be
saying something, not because it really mattered to me—I asked why we were so
sure the American counterattack would come from the sea.
 

The sergeant spoke up, “I was in one of
the planes.
 
I saw the orders.
 
We built a wall around the city, so we could
have time to bring our troops in.”
 
He
drank and the whiskey spilled down his chin.
 
“Not a real wall, you understand.
 
But it works the same.
 
We dropped
a ring of baby H-bombs all around the city, a couple of hundred miles back
from the coast.
 
One
hell of a big ditch.
 
And it’ll
stay radioactive maybe a week.
 
After
that they can cross it—if they wear the right equipment—but by that time it’ll
be too late.”
 

So the bombs had been ours.
 
We had murdered defenseless people.
 

I gulped the rest of my meal.
 
It was tasteless.
 
I left the dining room.
 
The hotel lobby was jammed with our troops,
all very drunk.
 

I saw a telephone booth and I remembered
what the Chinese girl had said.
 
In the
directory I read through the listings until I found the name of Lin Yeng.
 
I copied the address on a scrap of paper.
 

His address was south of the hotel, two
city blocks
back
from the beachfront boulevard.
 

The houses behind the boulevard were
less
imposing,
although still larger than anything I
was accustomed to.
 
Lin Yeng’s address
was in a small, secondary shopping district.
 
I passed a vast hall, called a super-market, a drug store, and a
cleaning establishment, before I saw Lin Yeng’s place of business —a Chinese
restaurant on the corner.
 
His name in
large gold letters was painted on the window.
 

I walked down a narrow alley.
 
Dangerous, perhaps, in an enemy city, but I
was well armed.
 
Behind some of the shops
there were living quarters.
 
Lin Yeng
had an apartment over a big garage, where I saw a gleaming car called a
Cadillac as well as a delivery truck with my cousin’s name painted on the
panel.
 
My cousin?
 
No, this must be another Lin Yeng.
 
My cousin was a worker.
 
He had told me that many times in his
letters.
 
It had to be true; still,
something within me drove me to make certain.
 

In the apartment I saw a light.
 
I crept up the outer steps, until I could see
through a partly opened window, where the curtain had been drawn not quite to
the sill.
 
The room was furnished with
all the magnificence of a party official’s residence:
 
many comfortable chairs, a lounge, Chinese
scrolls on the wall, jade work standing on a side table, at least four reading
lamps—in one room!—a tremendous radio, and a television set.
 
This Lin Yeng must have been a very rich
plutocrat to be able to afford a private television screen for his own family
alone.