When Tamara returned home, her children greeted her excitedly: “We were listening to your show! It was so funny!”
Tony kissed her hand and asked how Klim was getting on. “I’m so glad you’re friends.”
Tamara’s happiness would have been complete, but on July 9, 1926, alarming news arrived from the south that the NRA, led by General Chiang Kai-shek, had launched an offensive against the northern provinces.
“If the war reaches Shanghai, we’ll have to move to Japan,” Tony informed Tamara. “Just in case, I’ve ordered for our most valuable possessions to be packed and sent to Nagasaki.”
The prospect of being evacuated made Tamara feel sick to the stomach. She would have no job and no friends in Japan.
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.”