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  A DRAGON FOR

  CHRISTMAS

  Gavin Black was the pseudonym used by Scottish author Oswald Wynd to publish his highly successful thrillers. Born in 1913 to missionary parents in Japan, he was educated at The American School in Tokyo until his family moved to the United States where he undertook a year of high school in Atlantic City. Upon graduation, he attended The University of Edinburgh until the outbreak of WWII. He then joined the Scots Guards and was sent to Malaya with British Intelligence, attached to the Indian Army. After the Japanese invasion, he was captured in the jungle and spent more than three years in a Japanese prison camp in Hokkaido where his fluency in the language aided both himself and other prisoners of war. It was when he returned to Scotland via the Philippines that he thought to try his hand at a ‘first novel’ contest run by Doubleday in America. His entry Black Fountains (about a young American-educated Japanese woman embroiled in the war) won him both first prize and the staggering sum of $20,000. He went on to make his fame and fortune writing critically acclaimed thrillers as Gavin Black, most of which were set in Asia and featured Paul Harris. He died in 1998.

  A DRAGON FOR

  CHRISTMAS

  GAVIN BLACK

  THE LANGTAIL PRESS

  LONDON

  This edition published 2010 by

  The Langtail Press

  www.langtailpress.com

  A Dragon for Christmas © 1962 Gavin Black

  ISBN 978-1-78002-023-5

  A DRAGON FOR

  CHRISTMAS

  CHAPTER I

  I WENT OUT on deck to look at the New China. It looked very much like the old China to me, the same few bare winter trees which had escaped being chopped up for firewood, and the same yellow soil where the snow let it show. The houses were yellow and so was the water in the river. The dogs were yellow, too, running along the banks yapping at us, the same as they used to. A new order can’t do much about changing dogs.

  The ship was moving up the Pei-Ho river, which twists across flat land for twenty miles from the Yellow Sea to Tientsin. It was certainly cold out on deck. The cold came from Manchuria and the terrible desolations of desert beyond it, from mountains scraped bare of trees by a million years of winds blowing. The cold bit at me, but with a kick to it, a little like the cold in New York, only harder. I could feel it getting through the layers of wool to my body in which circulated tropic-thinned blood. And I kept my breathing to the upper half of my lungs, not to let that cold really get inside.

  “China closes about us,” said a voice at my elbow.

  I turned to Mr. Kishimura. He was a Japanese business man, like me no longer bright with youth, but with a face better polished up to cover this. Everything about Mr. Kishimura was polished. His glasses shone. So did his teeth.

  “What are you selling them?” I asked.

  I’d had four days from Kobe in which to ask this question, but hadn’t, even one evening when we played Japanese chess in the saloon. Mr. Kishimura wasn’t coy about his career.

  “Shoeses,” he said simply. “Boots, also.”

  He smiled out at China.

  “I am Okura Shoten Trading Company, Mr. Harris.”

  “With seven hundred million people waiting here for your shoes?”

  “We hope, indeed.”

  “Have you been over before?”

  “My first visit in some years.”

  “So you’re after new business?”

  “Not exactly. Mr. Obata he come to China for my company. He meets misfortune, maybe.”

  “How?”

  “Perhaps throat slitted.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Mr. Obata not come back home. I find … maybe.”

  He didn’t sound as if he really expected to find Mr. Obata at all. It somehow put a curious emphasis on aspects of my mission which I had minimised to that rather small circle of people whom I can honestly claim love me. It was a perfectly straightforward business trip, I had said, in to do a job and then out again. Now, creeping into China, I couldn’t help thinking about the out again.

  “You expect to sell many Dolphin engine?” Mr. Kishimura asked.

  “How did you know I’m selling them?”

  “I am informed in Japan.”

  They are always informed, these little friends of ours, these allies. Other people’s business is also their business, or they mean to make it so.

  “Okura Shoten is interested in engines?”

  “No, Mr. Harris. Only shoeses.”

  On principle I never believe any straight-from-the-shoulder from them. I smiled at Mr. Kishimura and he returned the smile.

  “You like to play Japanese chess, eh? Tientsin some time, I think.”

  “Delighted.”

  We went into the packed, seething heat of the passages and along to the little saloon where the chess had been left set out, waiting. I hung up my coat near the door. Mr. Kishimura had been out on deck without his, for a ritual hardening of the flesh.

  “Ha,” he said, sitting down to pleasure.

  Mr. Kishimura beat me at the first game. “Go” is like chess but it was a long time since I had been in practice. As a boy I had sat on the porch of a villa at Gotemba in Japan and played “Go” with our hired man. He was hired to bring us water, for there was none piped in, and to take other things away, but he had plenty of time for “Go”.

  “You are long time not playing?” Mr. Kishimura said after his third win.

  “That’s right.”

  “But I think you are instinct of game.”

  “Thanks for the comfort.”

  “It means for me to watch carefully.”

  “Why?”

  “To understand ‘Go’ is to understand Japanese mind. So I must watching.”

  “You’re selling shoes. I’m selling engines. Remember?”

  “So,” said Mr. Kishimura. Then he giggled.

  He beat me at the fourth game, but I took the fifth.

  “Skill returning again,” Mr. Kishimura said, as though this made him happy. “Why are you not speaking Japanese?”

  “I’m rusty. Very.”

  “But you are listening to talks on ship?”

  I got his point. It was a Japanese ship.

  “I was sitting lapping everything up,” I said.

  “You are wiser?”

  “Not much. Except that I know what a happy people you all are these days. Jolly.”

  “You think?”

  “The world is a Japanese oyster, Mr. Kishimura. And you’ve got the wedge in. Poor old Britain is getting hungrier and hungrier.”

  “I not understand?”

  “The direct point, Mr. Kishimura, is that the Dolphin engine manufactured under licence in Singapore by my associates is a very much better engine than the one manufactured in Osaka, which you are trying to sell … along with shoes.”

  “Ah …” he said. “Of engine I know nothing.”

  “Then let me tell you something. The Dolphin uses less fuel, very much less, than your Nishin. About a third less, in fact. It is ideal for Chinese river craft. And it has already been tested on something like eight hundred junks. Your Nishin has only been out for six months and if you want my opinion you haven’t ironed out the wrinkles yet.”

  “Excuse?”

  “The flaws. It hasn’t been adequately trial-tested. The Chinese won’t buy it. Stick to shoes.”

  “You hear many things in Japan, I think.”

  “The moment I get off a ship or a plane in your country, Mr. Kishimura, I get right down on the ground and put my ear to it. And this time I got the warning that Nishin had big eyes on the China market. It occurred to me that I might have a rival on board. Did you pack in a hurry?”

  “My
wife pack,” said Mr. Kishimura. “You have wife in Singapore?”

  “No.”

  “So?” He was genuinely surprised. “At your age you are not father many times?”

  “At the moment my family ends with me.”

  The thought saddened him. It put him off his next game, which I won.

  The door opened and the second mate came in, a young man who did judo exercises on the boat-deck every morning and who was clearly totally fit.

  “Tientsin da yo,” the mate said.

  We all went and looked out of a forward porthole and there was the city all right, sprung on us out of flat China, the yellow country suddenly giving over to a place which smoked.

  I wished now that I had flown in, though that isn’t easy to do when you have an engine in your luggage. Coming this way was not only too deliberate, but it was moving into the past again, digging at memory. Tientsin was a lively town once, and there was a splendid hotel, the Astor, where at dinner there were always three amiable Chinese “boys” for every table, wearing felt slippers and breathing quietly. They were also psychic about your wants. It was luxury, imperialist, no doubt evil, but extremely pleasant at the receiving end. My father had been on the receiving end in the Orient all his life until his very last months, and some of the pleasures had certainly come off on his son.

  Now, looking at the city swelling towards us, I thought of Mr. Obata. Okura Shoten shoes did seem an indifferent cause for which to have one’s throat slit. But, of course, the Oriental doesn’t hug the importance of his little individual life in the way we do. He has the comfort of a deep consciousness of race, and when he has to die for shoes he knows that another home boy salesman will come along to take his place. Our promotion men might get to work on this as a new keenness angle, but I suspect it’s too late. It might have gone down with those first Elizabethans who were so steamed up over being British, but our crowd hasn’t got the fire any more. We mostly plan for pensions.

  I watched the tying up of the Hashimi Maru to that Tientsin quay with mixed feelings. We were being warped in against waiting China and I saw the Japanese sun flag blowing from the stern with more warmth than was my usual reaction. This little tub, billed in the brochure as “a floating palace of rest and recreation”, was suddenly all the security there was in the world, neutral and immune to the vast and frightening immensity of the country beyond us. Tourists may romp around Moscow these days, with tea dances in the big hotels, but China offers none of this tolerance. It doesn’t look as though it ever will, and on this grey morning all possibility of incidental pleasure was denied by winter. I had the sharpest feeling that the sale of a thousand Dolphin engines in a packaged deal just wasn’t worth it. If that had been my only business in China I might have stayed on the ship and sailed back to nice, gay, polite Japan again. But it wasn’t my only business in China.

  “Ah,” said Mr. Kishimura. “Reception committee, I think.”

  “Eh? Where?”

  He pointed and he was right.

  Down there on the dock were seven men in a row. They might have marched here in that formation, swinging around a crane in a Scots Guards swank parade drill. They stood now perfectly motionless, looking at us, up at the boat-deck, seven men all dressed alike, in a kind of uniform of blue serge, and without overcoats, even in that biting wind. The comforts of the flesh didn’t concern them.

  “They look like warders,” I said.

  “Please?”

  “Prison keepers.”

  “Ah, so. Too truly. Even lady keeper.”

  “Lady?”

  “End one,” said Mr. Kishimura.

  I don’t know by what instinct he had identified sex. The end one was certainly a little shorter, and a little bulkier, perhaps from combies of knitted yak’s wool under the tunic. But if she had more hair it was tucked away up under her peaked cap. And her expression was just as intent, just as passive as the others, who all waited for their moment soon to come.

  “In Japan,” Mr. Kishimura said, “lady now wear kimono again. I think good, no?”

  “Very good.”

  “Lady in uniform is not pleasant.”

  I agreed with that sentiment too. I felt a lot closer to Mr. Kishimura in these moments. Rival he might be, and almost certainly was, but he was human, with a common denominator of the weaknesses and vices of our species. Those waiting didn’t look as though they tolerated any kind of relaxing vice.

  “We go to saloon now,” Mr. Kishimura said. “They come.”

  And that was what happened. We went down to the saloon and sat waiting for Red China. We heard it first, and that was almost consoling, the ripple of the language, the curious rapid lightness of it, which is not unlike hearing French for the first time spoken by natives on a Messageries Maritimes liner, a kind of bubbling strangeness against which English seems prosy and dull. The voices swelled up outside the door to the saloon, and then the door opened. They came in, one by one, six flat-faced men followed, at the end, by Miss New China. They all had the same kind of eyes and noses and ears and mouths, except the girl, whose face was leaner, with cheek bones. And her eyes weren’t dark, hidden in slits, they were wide and green.

  Green! I couldn’t believe it. I stared. Blue wouldn’t have startled me so much, for there are blue-eyed Orientals, Siamese girls from north of Chiengmai with eyes like the cats of the country. But green, never. And yet the planes of this girl’s face were Oriental. I could see now that under the padding she was almost certainly very slight, with the kind of body made for a cheongsam.

  There were seven of us waiting in the saloon, four Japanese, two Indonesians, and me. We had our names called by number one warder, the Japanese names first, to which each of the island empire’s business men answered with a polite little “hai”. Then the warder said: “Hal-lis?”

  “Here,” I told him, feeling oddly back in school.

  Warder number one was not an appealing specimen. Smallpox had really hit him once, and his face was pitted. By the left of his nose was a small crater. While he had his head down, over that list, there was only a line for his eyes, two pencil strokes with no wrinkles on the lids or beneath. Then he lifted his head and looked at me, with his eyes showing, very black, very cold, with the iciness of a kind of permanent anger.

  I was a lackey of murderous imperialism far from home but still dangerous. I knew then that it was a label I was going to be wearing for the whole of my time in the celestial socialist republic. Warder number one’s eyes, fixed on me, said that. He would have enjoyed slitting my throat.

  “Welcome to New China,” he said.

  The Japanese business men made a faint buzzing noise of appreciation, pushing the sound through their teeth. The Indonesians, both wearing round little hats above aquiline faces of burnished bronze, smiled and bobbed their heads. I moved in my seat a little.

  “We now assist you in all difficulties,” warder number one said, and it sounded like a threat.

  I was conscious of green eyes fixed on me, staring harder than I had. The girl’s look didn’t waver when I met it either. I might have been a specimen on a slab on which she was going to be examined later. It was her job to dissect me out so carefully that there couldn’t be any unpleasant surprises. She was getting the all-over picture now before she took out her scalpel kit.

  Miss New China had certainly thrown away charm. She stood with her legs apart, like an “at ease” on parade, but waiting for the order to come to attention. She wore boots which were only a slightly smaller version of the boots of her fellow-warders. If Mr. Kishimura had more feminine-looking footwear amongst his samples he was carrying useless deadweight.

  It was no surprise to me when warder number one began a series of introductions and I was assigned to the girl. He was People’s Guardian Yang Yi and she was Miss Mei Lan, which seemed to me something of an old order hangover, an oddly flowery name for a lady hatchet-woman not to have got rid of. She was apparently an apprentice People’s Guardian, and I was sure a ne
w one, keen to prove herself. Given a choice I would have plumped for a woman warder, but not this one.

  Eurasian, there wasn’t a shadow of doubt about it. A touch of the West somewhere in her family history which had left her with those eyes, and probably a burning determination to work hard to overcome this natural disadvantage. She would be a letter-of-the-regulations girl all the way, and then some, trying to work out of her probationer status with a triumphant success over me.

  I wondered, under observation from those jade eyes, just what Miss Mei Lan’s idea of success involved. And I found myself digging then for all those arguments I had used earlier in Singapore about the essential simplicity of my mission. I wasn’t a journalist likely to burst into print with impressions of three weeks in China. Nor was I an undercover man for the British Foreign Office, just a simple business type bent on the capitalistic end of stuffing my already overflowing warehouses with more gold sweated out of the proletarian workers of the world. It seemed to me then important to establish this clearly and soon. There was, of course, the nasty little fact that I had a certain history of private anti-Red activity, but that had been a long way from China. And if it was in my dossier … well, after all, it was exactly what they expected from us. We were enemies doing a deal under the cover of a kind of economic truce.

  “You have Miss Mei,” People’s Guardian Yang said, making this quite clear.

  He caught hold of the girl’s arm and brought her a bit closer to the western imperialist. I was aware then that the Chinese still like garlic cookery.

  “How do you do, Miss Mei.”

  “Good day,” the girl said flatly, using the permitted greeting from her instruction book, but even this with caution.

  “You selling motor machine for boat,” Yang informed me, and daring me to try and sell anything else.

  “That is correct.”

  “Miss Mei your interpreter. You speak Cantonese?”

  “Some.”

  “Very well, I think. No good in north China.”