In Danger's Path (61 page)

“My father dead,” Doto-Si said.

Brewer said what he was thinking: “I eat aboard the
Panay
. The wash boys do my clothes.”

“You can fuck wash boys?”

“Jesus Christ!”

“I like to fuck with you,” Doto-Si said. “I be good to you.”

“Don't say ‘fuck,'” he said.

“What I should say?”

“Just don't say ‘fuck.'”

“You sleep. I come back in two hours. Okay?”

He didn't reply.

“You better put money belt and pants on,” she said.

“This isn't going to work,” he thought aloud. “Christ, I don't want a Chinese woman!”

“I be good to you. We try it, okay?”

When he didn't say no, she picked up her dress and put it on and started to leave.

“Hey!” he said, as she reached the door. She turned to look at him. “What's your name?”

“Doto-Si,” she said.

She came back in two hours. He had tried to sleep, but couldn't.

She sat on the bed. “I find two rooms. Living room, bedroom, and toilet. For twenty-five dollar American. Too much money?”

“Let's have a look,” he said.

“Okay,” Doto-Si said.

They continued to look at each other for a long moment, and then he put his fingers to her cheek. “You're so young,” he said.

“I old enough for you,” she said firmly, and then she took his hand and pulled him to his feet.

As they walked through the Sailor's Rest bar to the street, Brewer decided it was really a depressing place. And when he saw Kan-Chee smirking at him and Doto-Si knowingly, he decided he would never come in this fucking joint again, and he never did.

They had one child, a boy, and another was on the way when Chief Brewer transferred off the
Panay
into the Fleet Reserve and opened the Fouled Anchor.

A week after he went ashore from the
Panay
for the last time, Brewer and Doto-Si were married by a minister from the Christian & Missionary Alliance.

Even though Doto-Si thought that was sort of comical, he was uncomfortable about being the proprietor of a whorehouse. The only time he went upstairs was when something—a light fixture, a water pipe, something like that—needed fixing, and he had nothing to do with the girls.

Nobody ever got rolled in the Fouled Anchor, or got the clap or anything worse. A lot of people who came to the bar and restaurant never went upstairs, and the girls didn't come downstairs to the bar looking for customers. Doto-Si handled that side of the business upstairs, where there was a parlor.

The whole thing seemed to be too good to be true. He was making more money than he ever imagined, and Doto-Si was good to him, and he loved the kids. They had a first-class apartment now, and they rode back and forth to work in a 1940 Oldsmobile that had an automatic transmission. Brewer didn't think that would work, or work long, but it did. Didn't even have a clutch pedal.

By then, Brewer didn't tend bar anymore, or serve as the bouncer. Doto-Si hired Chinese to do that. Brewer spent his time in the Fouled Anchor keeping an eye on things, sitting at a rear table in the bar playing poker or acey-deucey, making a few loans, serving as respected intermediary between westerners wanting to do business with Chinese and doing a little business himself.

But war was coming, and when that happened, everything was going to hell. He started making plans. Primarily, he started accumulating gold, which was all anyone was going to take when the war started.

Because he was respected, other old Yangtze sailors and Army and Marine retirees who also knew what was coming sought him out and talked over what they would do when the time came. The Americans could, of course, leave anytime they wanted to and be in San Francisco in a month. But their wives could not get visas to enter the United States. Some Americans went home anyway, just leaving their Chinese wives and children and promising to send money.

But Brewer never even considered leaving Doto-Si and the kids. She was his
wife
, for Christ's sake, the
mother
of his
children
. You don't just up anchor and sail away and leave your wife and kids to make out as best they can to save your own ass.

Soon, several others had decided to band together and get the hell out with their wives and kids. There were nine other retired Yangtze sailors with Chinese wives and kids, and one with a German wife; and there were two retired Marines, one with a White Russian wife, and one, Technical Sergeant Abraham, whose Chinese wife had died, but whose mother-in-law was taking care of his three kids.

And then word of what they were planning also reached some of the soldiers who had retired from the 15th Infantry in Tientsin, and they sent a retired staff sergeant named Willis T. Cawber, Jr., to Peking to see what Brewer had in mind.

From the beginning, Doto-Si had made it clear to the others that the only way they could get out of China was through Mongolia—the Gobi Desert—and into India. That wasn't easy for them to grasp: She was the only one in the band who had ever even been to Mongolia, and most thought the Gobi Desert was miles and miles of shifting sand, like the Sahara. But eventually they came around to her way of thinking. Even though she still looked young as hell, there was something about her eyes that made others realize that she was smart and tough as hell.

Much of the Gobi was rocks and thin vegetation, she told them, not sand. That meant it could be traversed by wagon. In the summer, there was enough grass to feed sheep and goats and horses. On the other hand, water was a problem—you had to know where to find it, but it was there—and it was very, very cold at night.

There was also, Doto-Si told Brewer privately, a genuine threat from Chinese and Mongolian bandits, who robbed caravans whenever they thought they had the caravan outnumbered. That meant they would have to be armed, and prepared to fight.

That was going to be a hell of a problem, Brewer realized. Very few of the Yangtze sailors had any experience in that kind of fighting. And though soldiers from the 15th Infantry could be presumed to know how to handle weapons, he didn't know how many of them would be willing to trust their survival to the Mongolian madam of a Peking whorehouse.

But about that time he began to hear scuttlebutt in the Fouled Anchor that Sergeant James R. Sweatley and some of the other active-duty Marines in the Peking legation detachment had announced they weren't just going to raise the white flag when the war came and turn themselves in as Japanese prisoners.

The very next time—in early November 1941—Sergeant Sweatley came into the Fouled Anchor, Chief Brewer and Technical Sergeant Abraham were waiting for him. They bought him a couple of drinks, then took him into Brewer's office to sound him out.

Brewer didn't think much of Sweatley. He was still only a buck sergeant after twenty years in the Marines, and on several occasions, he had been a troublesome drunk both in the bar and upstairs.

But Abraham argued that he was a Marine sergeant on active duty, and that meant he would be in a position to get weapons, which the others didn't have and damned sure were going to need. On top of that, he and the other Marines he'd bring with him were young. A good thing, under the circumstances—especially considering some of the others who would be going into the Gobi.

“What we say here goes no further,” Brewer began.

“What we say about what?”

Technical Sergeant Abraham decided to cut through the bullshit. “The scuttlebutt is that you and some of the other Marines are not going to surrender to the Japanese when this war starts. Is that true, or are you just running your mouth?”

“Who said I said something like that?”

“Two of the Marines who say you're taking them with you,” Abraham told him, and furnished their names.

Who else
, Sergeant Sweatley wondered,
have those bastards been running their mouth to?

Then he said the thought aloud.

“As far as I know, nobody else,” Abraham replied. “I had a little talk with them. Told them if any of their officers, or even some of their noncoms, heard them, they'd be confined until it was time to surrender.”

“What do you want, you and Brewer?”

“The same thing you do, to stay out of a Jap POW enclosure. To get the hell out of China, into India, or maybe even Russia.”

“Yeah?”

“And to take our families with us,” Brewer added.

Sweatley knew about Brewer's family. And he knew about Abraham. He had three kids with his Chinese woman, and then she'd up and died on him, and he had stayed in China because of the kids, to take care of them.

“If I was planning something like that, and I'm not saying I am, what I would do is head for India,” Sweatley said. “On horseback. Traveling fast and light across the Altai Mountains into the Gobi Desert and then across it.”

Jesus
, Chief Brewer thought,
that makes him the second person
—
Doto-Si being the first
—
who understands that the only way to get out of China is through the Gobi Desert
.

“Ride horses across sand dunes?” Brewer countered sarcastically.

“Let me tell you something, Chief. The Gobi is mostly rocks, not sand. If you had a car and enough gas, you could drive across the sonofabitch.”

“Then why don't you just drive across it?”

“I thought about it. And did the numbers. For one thing, there's no way I could carry that much gas. For another, trucks would be conspicuous. That's the last thing I can afford.”

“You really think a dozen or more Marines on horseback wouldn't be conspicuous?” Abraham asked.

“Meaning what?”

“Meaning you'd be white men in Mongolia.”

“I'll worry about that later. If, I mean, I was thinking about something like this.”

“I've been thinking along the same lines,” Brewer said. “My wife and me, and some other people. My wife is a Mongolian. She knows all about the Gobi Desert.”

“No shit?”

“We're thinking of crossing it in horse-drawn, rubber-tired wagons,” Abraham said.

They were doing more than thinking about it: Three days before, Brewer had sent Doto-Si to Peking in the Oldsmobile, with the kids and one of the bouncers, to go to Baotou to buy wagons.

“And you don't think you're going to stand out as a white man in Mongolia?”

“I've got a Nansen passport,” Brewer said. “It's phony, but I can't tell the difference between it and a real one. I can pass myself off as a White Russian.”

“Oh.”

Brewer's smarter than I thought
, Sweatley thought.
I didn't even think about getting a phony Nansen passport
.

“And I got a Mongolian wife and kids,” Brewer went on. “If I stay in the wagon and let her do the talking, I might not even have to show anybody my Nansen passport.”

“So what do you want from me?” Sweatley asked.

Brewer looked at Abraham, who nodded. Then Brewer took the chance and told Sweatley. “There's ten Yangtze sailors, including me, who stayed here when we went into the Fleet Reserve. All of us are married. Mostly to Chinese, but there's a German wife, and a White Russian. There's two Marines, Abraham and a guy named Brugemann, who used to be the finance sergeant in the Fourth. And, all told, twenty kids. I have also been talking to some soldiers who took their retirement here. There's maybe six, seven of them in Tientsin.”

“Like I said, what do you want from me?”

“We could be useful to each other,” Brewer said.

“You tell me, Sergeant Abraham, how are—what did you say, twelve?—twelve wives and twenty kids going to help me get to India.”

“You know how to navigate?” Chief Brewer asked.

“I know what a compass is,” Sweatley said.

“A compass won't be much help in the middle of the Gobi Desert,” Abraham said. “There's only a few roads, and the Japs will be watching them. You're going to have to cross the Gobi Desert the same way you cross an ocean, by celestial navigation, by the stars.”

Sweatley understood that he was being told the truth. And navigating across the Gobi Desert was something else he hadn't given much thought to. Brewer and Abraham obviously had.

“For the third time, what do you want from me?”

“You've seen the wagon train movies,” Chief Brewer said. “Women and children and farmers, protected by cavalry. That's what you're going to be. The Marines, and maybe some of the 15th Infantry soldiers, would be the cavalry. In exchange for that, we'll feed you, and hide you from the Japs and Chinese bandits.”