He sipped tea from a severely plain earthenware cup. “The food is still good,” he said.
Hsia grunted, unwilling to admit anything. But, like Nieh, he’d demolished thelu-wei-p’in-p’an — ham, minced pork, pigs’ tripes and tongue, and bamboo shoots-all in a thick gravy-that was one of Jung Yuan’s specialties. Pork and poultry were the only meat you saw these days; pigs and chickens ate anything, and so were eaten themselves.
A serving girl came up and asked, “More rice?” When Nieh nodded, she hurried away and returned with a large bowlful. Hsia used the lacquerware spoon to fill his own eating bowl, then held it up to his mouth and shoveled in rice with his chopsticks. He slurped from a bowl ofkao liang, a potent wine brewed from millet, and belched enormously to show his approval.
“You are a true proletarian,” Nieh Ho-T’ing said, not at all ironically. Hsia Shou-Tao beamed at the compliment.
A couple of tables over, a group of men in Western-style suits was having a dinner party, complete with singsong girls and a raucous orchestra. Despite all Peking had been through, the men looked plump and prosperous. Some had their arms around singsong girls, while others were trying to slide their hands up the slits in the girls’ silk dresses. A couple of the girls pulled away; not all entertainers were courtesans. Most, though, accepted the attentions either as their due or with mercenary calculation in their eyes.
“Collaborators,” Nieh said in a voice that would have meant the firing squad in territory controlled by the People’s Liberation Army. “They could not be so rich without working hand in glove with the little scaly devils.”
“You’re right,” Hsia grunted. He filled his bowl of rice again. With his mouth full, he added, “That one there, in the dark shiny green, she’s a lot of woman.”
“And her beauty is exploited,” Nieh answered. Like a lot of Communist officials, he had a wide puritanical streak in him. Sex for sport, sex for anything but procreation, made him uneasy. His stay in a Shanghai brothel had reinforced that opinion rather than changed it.
“So it is,” Hsia said; Nieh’s doctrine was true. But the other man did not sound happy to concur.
“You are not an animal. You are a man of the revolution,” Nieh Ho-T’ing reminded him. “If joy girls are what you wanted in life, you should have joined the Kuomintang instead.”
“I am a man of the revolution,” Hsia repeated dutifully. “Coveting women who are forced to show their bodies”-a Chinese euphemism for prostitution-“to get money to live proves I have not yet removed all the old corrupt ways from my heart. Humbly, I shall try to do better.”
Had he made the self-criticism at a meeting of Party members, he would have stood with head bowed in contrition. Here, that would have given him away for what he was-and the scaly devils and their running dogs were as eager as either Chiang’s clique or the Japanese had been to be rid of Communists. Hsia stayed in his seat and slurped millet wine… and, in spite of self-criticism, his eyes kept sliding toward the singsong girl in the green silk dress.
Nieh Ho-T’ing tried to bring his attention back to the matter at hand. Keeping his voice low, he said, “We have to put fear into these collaborators. If a few of them die, the rest will serve the little devils with less attention to their duties, for they will always be looking over their shoulder to see if they will be next to pay for their treacheries. Some may even decide to cooperate with us in the struggle against imperialist aggression.”
Hsia Shou-Tao made a face. “Yes, and then they’d sell us back to the scaly devils, along with their own mothers. That kind of friend does our cause no good; we need people truly committed to revolution and justice.”
“We would be fools to trust them very far,” Nieh agreed, “but intelligence is always valuable.”
“And can always be compromised,” Hsia shot back. He was a stubborn man; once an opinion lodged in his mind, a team of water buffaloes would have had trouble dragging it out.
Nieh didn’t try. All he said was, “The sooner some are slain, the sooner we have the chance to see what the rest are made of.”
That appealed to Hsia, as Nieh had thought it might: his comrade was a man who favored direct action. But Hsia said, “Not that the miserable turtles don’t deserve to die, but it won’t be as easy even as it was in Shanghai. The little scaly devils aren’t stupid, and they learn more about security every day.”
“Security for themselves, yes,” Nieh said, “but for their parasites? There they are not so good. Every set of foreign devils that has tried to rule China-the Mongols, the English, the Japanese-worked with and through native traitors. The little scaly devils are no different. How will they gather in food and collect taxes if no one keeps records for them?”
Hsia noisily blew his nose on his fingers. A couple of the scaly devils’ running dogs looked at him with distaste; they’d learned Western manners to go with their Western clothes. He glared back at them. Nieh Ho-T’ing had seen him do such things before: he needed to hate his enemies on a personal level, not just an ideological one.
Nieh set down five Mex dollars to cover the cost of the meal; war and repeated conquest had left Peking, like Shanghai, an abominably expensive place to live. Both men blinked as they walked out into the bright sun of the western part of the Chinese City of Peking. Monuments of the past glories of imperial China were all around them. Nieh Ho-T’ing looked at the massive brickwork of the Ch’ien Men Gate with as much scorn as he’d given to the scaly devils’ puppets. Come the revolution, all the buildings war had spared deserved to be torn down. The people would erect their own monuments.
He and Hsia shared a room in a grimy little lodging house not far from the gate. The man who ran it was himself progressive, and asked no questions about his lodgers’ political affiliations. In return, no one struck at the oppressors and their minions anywhere close to the lodging house, to keep suspicion from falling on it.
That evening, over tea and soup, Nieh and his comrades planned how best to harass the little devils. After considerable comradely discussion-an outsider would have called it raucous wrangling-they decided to attack the municipal office building, an ugly modern structure close to the western shore of the Chung Hai, the Southern Lake.
Hsia Shou-Tao wanted to do there what Nieh Ho-T’ing and his followers had done in Shanghai: smuggle guerrillas and weapons into the building under the cover of waiters and cooks bringing in food. Nieh vetoed that: “The little scaly devils are not stupid, as you yourself said. They will know we have used this trick once, and will be on their guard against it.”
“We will not be using it against them, only against the men who lick their backsides,” Hsia said sulkily.
“We will not be using it at all,” Nieh Ho-T’ing repeated. “The risk is too large.”
“Whatshall we do, then?” Hsia demanded. That brought on another round of comradely discussion, even more raucous than the one before. But when the discussion was done, they had a plan they could live with-and one which, with luck, not too many of them would die with.
The next morning, Nieh Ho-T’ing went with several of his comrades to the national library, which was just across Hsi An Meen-Western Peace Gate-Street, to the north of the municipal offices. They all wore Western clothes like those the running dogs in the hibiscus-flower garden had had on; Nieh’s shoes pinched his feet without mercy. The librarians bowed to them and were most helpful-who could have guessed they were not carrying papers in their briefcases?
The day was hot and sticky; the windows on the south side of the library were open, to help the air move. Nieh smiled. He had counted on that. All his companions could read. Not all of them had been able to when they first joined the People’s Liberation Army, but ignorance was one means through which warlords and magnates held the people in bondage. The Communists fought it hard. That was useful generally, and a special advantage now: they fit right in until the time came for them to go into action.