It's just not a day on the Silk Road until you've been double-crossed by Ung Lo, I always say.
I remember the last time I passed through the Uighur provinces, back in '36, running guns for the Kuomintang. Usually I relax by the time I get to Ung Lo's territory. The dangers of the Pashtun highlands are behind you, and you're out of the way of nosy British minor nobility with pretensions of either carving out a mountain kingdom near Nepal, or of spreading the lights of civilization. Ung Lo is a straightforward crook. You smile, you hand him a red envelope stuffed with money, and you don't ever accept his invitation to dinner.
That last time it was different. I was keyed up like a hot cat in July. Maybe it was the guns--they had been an unlucky cargo. Maybe it was the monk in Tibet who had taken my pulse and said my karma was a black dog on my heels. Who knows? By the time I managed to get the Chevy into Ung Lo's back yard, I'd have shot the first guy who looked at me crosswise.
Ung Lo comes out with Number One Nephew, smiling and bowing, and his gang trying not to look like they were putting one in the chamber and switching off the safety. I hauled the whippet gun out from between the seats, and carefully thumbed off the safety. The usual exchange occurs. I smile, tell Ung Lo he's looking younger every day. And Number One Nephew! So strong, the girls must love you. Nephew smiles the dull and stupid smile of a randy ox. Ung Lo asks obliquely for his cut, and I produce the red envelope.
One of his gang lets out a holler, and I spin around to see he's got the tarp of the Chevy pulled back where you can read "Mauser" on the crates, clear as day.
The smiles are gone. Ung Lo is backpedalling, and time starts to crawl the way it does when people are shooting at you. I can hear the "whick" of bullets in the dirt at my feet. The whippet is in my hands, and my shoulder is aching from forty hours of driving and the recoil. Madness and confusion, angry shouts of Chinese, and Ung Lo in the middle of it all, with an opened parasol, jabbing it at the truck and yelling.
I don't even remember how I got out of there, but there was an ugly mass of goat fur in the radiator when I checked it in Yangtsu.
06 June 2013, 07:05:51 PM