“No wonder at all, sir,” Cade said.
Once more, he didn’t feel like arguing with his superior. It wasn’t even that he thought Jeff Walpole was wrong. But the Red Chinese didn’t have planes and abundant artillery and bunches of tanks. They had bunches of men with rifles and submachine guns. The Americans could spend ordnance to kill them. They had to spend men to kill Americans, and did what they had to do. That their commanders did it as cold-bloodedly as if they were snakes lent itself to Walpole’s point, but to fight the war at all they would have had to do it whether they cared to or not.
Off in the distance, a rifle banged-once, twice. That was a Mosin-Nagant, probably in a Chinaman’s hands, maybe fired by one of Kim Il-sung’s finest. A Browning machine gun stammered death back at it. One more bang from the rifle. Another quick, professional burst from the Browning.
Cade hefted his own Soviet submachine gun. If things heated up, he was ready. But they didn’t. One of the clowns on the other side had got excited about nothing, and that was as far as it went.
Walpole pointed to the PPSh. “Like that piece better than the carbine they gave you, huh?”
“You bet, sir,” Cade said, in lieu of You bet your ass, sir.
But all Walpole said was, “You’re nobody’s fool, kid. The carbine’s a piece of junk, but you can do yourself some good with one of those babies.” They beamed at each other. For an old guy, Cade thought, the major was all right.
20
Vasili Yasevich shook his head in what he hoped was a convincing show of regret. “No, sir. I am very sorry, sir, but I have no opium to sell,” he said. “Use of opium is not allowed any more, not under the just laws of the People’s Republic.”
“But you are a druggist. You can get medicines like this.” The man was about fifty. His clothes were as plain as Vasili’s. No one flaunted wealth in China these days. His voice, though, had the self-assured growl that said he was used to getting whatever he wanted.
He wasn’t going to get opium from Vasili. “I am very sorry, sir,” the Russian expatriate repeated. “Having the poppy is a capital crime. It is not the kind of chance a poor man, an honest man, wants to take.”
“Comrade Wang’s wife told me you could get her whatever she needed,” the man said.
“Comrade Wang’s wife never asked me for opium,” Vasili said, which was true. “I got her ma huang. That’s legal.”
“She didn’t talk about what you got her. She talked about what you could get her.” The man bore down hard on the word that made the difference.
Bitch! Cunt! Whore! Fucking whore! When Vasili swore inside his own head, he swore in Russian, not Chinese. Maybe that was because he’d learned the one language slightly ahead of the other. Maybe it was just because Russian sounded and felt earthier, more obscene, to him.
The bow he gave the important man, though, was Chinese. It was so Chinese, getting it from a round-eyed barbarian, even one who spoke the language of the Middle Kingdom, visibly surprised the fellow. “Comrade Wang’s wife is a wise woman,” Vasili said. “I am sad to have to tell you, though, that even the wisest is sometimes mistaken.”
“Curse you, I need the poppy!” the man said. He wasn’t telling Vasili anything Vasili hadn’t guessed. If the fellow had had the habit for a while, even laws that threatened death to people who used the drug wouldn’t get its claws out of his head. He went on, “You want money? I’ll give you money! I’ve got plenty of money.”
He reached into a trouser pocket. When he opened his hand, gold coins from Russia and England and Austria-Hungary gleamed like the sun.
He had plenty of money, yes. What he lacked was sense. The shabby streetcorner where they stood talking hadn’t seen that much gold in all the centuries Harbin was there. “Put it away!” Vasili hissed. “Do you want somebody to knock you over the head?”
“Who would dare?” The man had the arrogance of a high official, of someone who was likely to know Comrade Wang and his wife. Again, though, arrogance was no substitute for caution.
“Who? There are people in this part of town who would kill you for that many coppers.” At various times in Vasili’s life, he might have been one of them. Not mentioning that seemed smart.
“I can have everyone in this part of town machine-gunned tomorrow morning,” the man snapped. “Don’t play games with me.”
“Do you think they care what you can do, Comrade Commissar?” Vasili didn’t know the man’s title, but that seemed a good bet. “They’ve had an atom bomb fall on them. After that, what are some machine guns?”
For a wonder, what he said seemed to get through to the Chinese. To Vasili’s relief, the man closed his hand and got the intoxicating gold out of sight. He also seemed to slump a little. How bad were the demons in his head? How soon before his brain felt emptied from the inside out, before every muscle in his body knotted, before snot flooded out of his nose, before he started shitting himself?
“You have to get me the poppy,” he said, but now with the first touch of doubt and pleading in his voice.
“Sir, please forgive this unworthy one, but he cannot do what he cannot do,” Vasili said. “Before the glorious People’s Republic triumphed, the eastern dwarfs”-a snide Chinese gibe at the Japanese-“wanted people to use opium, because it made them tame. Not many of those people still walk under the sun. Mao’s justice is fast and sure.”
The commissar slapped him in the face. Vasili had the straight razor in his pocket and a knife in his boot top. Had he thought he could pay back the commissar without being seen, he would have done it. On a street corner in a Chinese city, though? No. He made himself stand still.
“You stinking turd!” The man’s voice rose to something close to a scream. He wheeled and stormed away. Vasili didn’t follow him. With any luck, before long the man’s own body would do worse to him than he’d done to the Russian.
A skinny fellow with a tray of millet cakes held to his front by a rope around his neck said, “That guy didn’t like you.”
“Da,” Vasili agreed absently. The skinny fellow nodded; everybody in Harbin followed that. Vasili went on, “But he’s a big man, so what can you do?” The phrase meant an important person.
“What did he want from you?” the cake-seller asked.
“Something I don’t have. Something I can’t get,” Vasili said.
“Not so good when a big man wants something like that from you,” the skinny fellow said shrewdly. “Especially when you’re a round-eye. You stand out in a crowd.”
Other Russians did still live here, but not so many of them. Vasili shrugged. “Nothing I can do about how I look.”
“No, but if he wants to make you sorry, his friends won’t have much trouble finding you.”
Vasili bowed to him, too. “Thanks a lot, pal. You just made my day.” It wasn’t that the man who sold millet cakes was wrong. From now on, Vasili would have to worry every time somebody knocked on the door of the tumbledown shack where he was staying.
He did have some poppy juice there. He told himself he’d have to stash it somewhere else for a while. The commissar might come after it himself. Or he might send the secret police to search. If they found any, Vasili was out of business for good.
He decided to take care of that right away. He kept ducking into doorways on his way home, checking to see whether anyone was tailing him. As best he could tell, nobody was. He stopped at a little teahouse and drank a cup, watching Harbin go by in front of the shop. Harbin didn’t seem to care at all about Vasili Yasevich. That suited him fine.
“Do you want another cup?” the serving girl asked. She was pretty, even if she only came up to the bottom of Vasili’s chin. He’d hardly noticed her when he asked for the first cup. He’d just wanted to keep an eye on things for a few minutes.