Righteous Fist: Swagger, #2

By Matthew Waite

When Eight Countries gang up to plunder an aging empire, only a fool would get in their way.

The Brits called it the Boxer Rebellion, but the 'Boxers' called themselves YiHeQuan; Righteous Fist, and they faced off against the Eight Nation Alliance, their ambitious plan being to rid China of foreigners. It was going to be a bloodbath.

Our hero, however, had better things to do; opium, female companionship and some innocuous bribery and corruption. With any luck he'd be able to sidestep any seismic shift in the tectonic plates of the Orient. But lady luck is fickle, and the 'troubles' catch our hero literally with his pants down.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Matthew Waite
• Release date: Mar 1, 2023
• ISBN: 9798215938874

Matthew Waite

I fell in love with China's people and history when I began teaching in Shandong Province some years ago. I'm an Australian man of no fixed address, teacher, writer, biker, sailor, with the hands of a surgeon and the body clock of a brothel owner.

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Prologue

Sixteen-year-old Wilhelm , the future King, stepped up to the altar and dropped his lederhosen.  He knew this was going to hurt. His Calvinist tutor, Georg Hinzpeter, had told him that entry into the Scottish Rite was an essential part of his preparation as future leader of Germany. The sadistic old bastard favored the mortification of the flesh as the most pious path to God.

The chapel where this cult met every month had been brooding here on the outskirts of Berlin since the thirteenth century, and steadfastly eschewed electric illumination—despite hundreds of candles in dozens of candelabras, the space remained dim and gloomy. The adults gathered in the rough-hewn wooden pews of the austere chapel were the power brokers of Europe, and Wilhelm would need their help when the time came. There were forty of them, all wearing brown hooded robes and were evenly spaced, symmetrical, in eight rows of five men each. They looked like sleeping owls. He needed to join their stupid club and wear their stupid apron. All their talk of ancient mystical power and symbolism was just so much twaddle, but they held the reins, so he had to join their cult.

The pain of a few paddles on the arse would subside more quickly than the cuts of the cilice that his tutor had made him wear once. That thing was savage and left scars on his inner thigh. Twelve strokes of a short wooden paddle would be over quickly.

A snow flurry rattled the stained-glass rose window high up on the bluestone wall behind the altar. The window depicted St John the Baptist in lurid colors of purple and emerald. Wilhelm wondered why Freemasons had chosen a Jewish prophet as their patron saint, given that membership in the order was strictly non-Jewish.

He propped his torso up on the white marble altar using his elbows rather than his hands. His right hand had never worked properly, and he didn't want his audience to see the limp and shrunken limb. He cursed his mother for the thousandth time for his birth. She was English, the daughter of Queen Victoria, and had refused to allow German doctors to treat her during his breech birth, preferring to consult only with British doctors. It was her fault he'd contracted Erb's palsy, and it was probably her fault that his father had recently contracted throat cancer.

Grand Master Hertzog delivered a sonorous incantation, then the first whack. If Wilhelm had thought the Grand Master would go easy on the future king, he was sorely mistaken. It felt like he'd been kicked by a horse. His arse burned, and his eyes welled up. He clenched his jaw and reminded himself that although he was only second in line to the German throne, his father and grandfather were gravely ill. He'd soon be kaiser. The House of Hohenzollern had ruled Prussia for three hundred years and now ruled over a newly united Germany.

The burning of his bottom cheeks subsided a little, and he was pleased the water in his eyes hadn't turned into tears and run down his cheeks. He hoped no one could see his erection. He needed the bankers, and they were all Freemasons. All the non-Jewish bankers, anyway.

He stared at the marble tiles on the floor with their black and white chessboard pattern and readied himself for the second blow. Yellow light swam and swirled across the tiles from the flickering candles above. When it came, the second blow was hard as the first, but he'd found his special place. He'd learned as a child that he could retreat into himself when he needed to, and he needed to now, for the remaining blows.

The third blow arrived. His eyes unfocused and his mind wandered. The finance he'd get from these bankers was for a world-class navy. He'd been reading up on naval warfare and enjoyed making drawings of ships. He'd studied every volume he could find on the subject of Britain's domination of India, and sea superiority was definitely a key plank of their strategy. Wilhelm regarded the plundering of India's riches and the subjugation of her people as the smartest thing the Brits had ever done. Soon it would be his turn to emulate, then surpass, Britain's domination of the globe.

Bertie knew the score, though he tried to put an egalitarian spin on it. During yacht races at Cowes Week, the future King Edward VII of Britain had explained imperialism as if they'd done the natives a favor. Uncle Bertie, as Wilhelm knew him, talked about noblesse oblige and the dissemination of the one true faith. Pfft. It wasn't the industrial revolution, the scientific institutions, or even the Protestant work ethic that had elevated Britain to the status of the largest colonizers the world had ever known. It was India and the plundering thereof, pure and simple. They liked to tell everyone they were civilizing the savages and spreading the word of God. It was a rationalization, and Wilhelm wondered why they even bothered trying to legitimize the concept. They should be proud of their conquests.

Wilhelm wasn't so squeamish and felt no obligation to appease the the bleeding-heart liberals. Arrive at foreign shores with an overwhelming navy, kill any of the locals that object, enslave the rest, and take everything of value. It was a simple template, and Wilhelm doubted that anyone in the current British ruling elite had the stomach for repeating the procedure, even though it was a modus operandi that got them where they were today. The liberals were in the ascendant in the British parliament and had recently succeeded in abolishing slavery, more or less. They were eroding every plank of British imperialism and weakening the country, and Wilhelm knew that Britain was rapidly becoming an easy target. If they struggled in any way to hold on to their colonial possessions, he knew how he could take them off their hands.

Wilhelm had the stomach for conquest, Brit liberals be damned. With a big navy and enough money, he would follow the India template and do the same thing to the Far East. And he needed to hurry before Britain, France, Russia, and even those yellow heathen savages, the Japanese, could carve it up before he got there.

It might be years before he'd get his hands on the reins of power. His grandfather wasn't long for this world, but his father's throat cancer might or might not kill him in the near future. The doctors refused to make any predictions. When the tumors finally choked his father to death, Wilhelm would be kaiser. It could be soon, or it could be a decade away. But making influential friends now was a wise investment, even if he wouldn't utilize them for years. And even if he wouldn't be able to sit down for a week.

Arise, apprentice. The Grand Master had removed his hood and was telling him that he could stand and pull his pants up. He did so, easing the lederhosen gingerly over his tender cheeks. He turned to face the congregation, who stood, removed their hoods and applauded in unison. He absorbed the applause graciously and magnanimously. Even though a teenager, he was their superior in every way that counted. He knew it, and they knew it, and these pale and effete men would soon be lining up to curry favor with the future King. Wilhelm would grant such favors, provided rivers of cash flowed into the war machine's coffers, and facilitated Germany's domination of Europe and Asia. Continents that were his by divine right.

Wilhelm scanned the pews and soon found the face he was looking for, that of Arthur de Rothschild, whose genetic ancestry was sufficiently diluted as to make him only one- sixteenth Jewish and thus eligible for membership in the Paris Freemason Lodge. His visit here to the Berlin Lodge was no coincidence. The Rothschilds played a long game, too, and Arthur was here to begin setting things up for the future kaiser. The corpulent banker returned Wilhelm's look, and they gave each other a silent nod. They shared the belief that the greatest riches were in the Far East, underexploited to date, just waiting for an iron-willed monarch to claim them.  

There would be no diplomatic maneuvers or negotiations. Wilhelm would take them by force because God had ordained that it be so.

Chapter One

It hurt when I breathed . One of my ribs was probably cracked.

My assigned opponent had kicked me in the sternum, and I'd gone down like a sack of rice, gasping in the sand. I rolled to one side and sat on my haunches, spitting sand and taking shallow breaths. I hadn't realized that calisthenics was a contact sport. I'd come to the beach at dawn for an exercise class. The first red flag should have been the class's title: The Righteous and Harmonious Fists, Yihequan in Chinese. The righteous foot that had buried itself in my chest told my oxygen-starved brain that I might be in the wrong place.

But I was in the right place. Yantai was lovely in the spring, and my workload was modest. Here on the beach, with the bustling city just over the dunes to the west, I could see the Yi River languidly pour its silt-laden golden water into Moon Bay, which opened out to become the Bohai Sea. Sadly, the river water had recently been made toxic by a mining accident upstream. Corrupt Manchu officials had been blamed for allowing toxic metals to leech into the river. The river still looked pretty, but I resolved not to eat river fish for a while.

An offshore breeze brought the bitter lemon scent of flowering Mulberry trees just beyond the grassy dune. Salt-stained fishing junks rested on logs on the sand, ready to be hauled into the water come sunset. I watched a group of women sitting on the beach, mending nets and gossiping. The breeze also brought the smell of wheat noodles with pork and boiled cabbage. Breakfast beckoned.

The pain in my chest eased, and I looked up at my assigned opponent, a pig of a man named Hao Zhang, and he was still scowling triumphantly down at me with his one eye while I tried to figure out if I'd been on the receiving end of genuine malice, or merely over-enthusiastic sparring. I wasn't aware of having wronged the man in any way, but I had to concede to myself that I may have. I was a customs inspector at the Chinese Imperial Maritime Customs Service or IMCS for short. I put a lot of noses out of joint in that job. Nobody likes the taxman. Perhaps he was an importer who didn't know that all he needed to do to gain a partial exemption from import tariffs was to discretely hand me the occasional envelope of cash. Baksheesh was a tradition as old as China, and I saw no reason to opt out of the custom.

Or perhaps he was the father or husband of that gorgeous and enthusiastic waitress that I spent the previous evening with.

The class's instructor, Fang, came over, shouldered Hao Zhang aside, and helped me up. Hao Zhang slunk away. You alright there, teacher? In addition to my customs duties, I did a little literacy tutoring in the evenings, hence the instructor calling me 'teacher.' My Chinese is excellent, having been well schooled by my Chinese mother. My father is British, and I was raised in the remote north of Australia. In the genetic soup from which I had sprung, I was blessed with my father's height of six foot one and my mother's Chinese features of black hair and dark brown eyes. Both Mother and Father had an aristocratic demeanor and were most insistent that I learn English and Mandarin thoroughly enough to be able to speak both like a native. Just how they came to find themselves exiled in Darwin was a mystery; they fobbed me off whenever I tried to prize the history out of them.

Shandong was proudly agricultural, the breadbasket of the nation, but its people were mostly illiterate. It was 1899, on the cusp of a new century, and the Qing dynasty government wanted China to enter it with something higher than a thirteen percent literacy rate. To that end, the IMCS had been asked to hold classes for the local peasants, and I'd drawn the short straw, being the only person on staff fluent enough. Hence the 'teacher' moniker.

Yeah, Fang. I'm okay, I wheezed. I didn't realize this class was going to be so rough.

The coming struggle will be merciless. We all need to be ready.

I won't be participating in any coming struggle, old mate. I'm just here for the exercise. Revolutionary talk was nothing new. People spoke of imminent uprisings all the time. Shandong people, in particular, had a reputation for being pugnacious. Starting an uprising here would be as easy as lighting a match.

Fang squinted up at me and raised his hand to shield his eyes from the rising sun. Maybe you'll have no choice but to participate.

You've got me mixed up with someone else, I said, gathering up my jacket and brushing the sand off it. I love it here, but I'm not a permanent fixture. My bosses will move me on sooner or later. Speaking of moving on, it's breakfast time. Fang smiled and gave me the baoquan li, the fist-and-palm salute, and bowed slightly. I did the same, turned, and walked in the direction of the noodle scent that had been getting stronger.

I'd gone only a few steps up the scrubby dune when a strong hand clasped around my upper arm. Fearing further fisticuffs I spun around with my other arm raised and my feet ready to deliver a high kick. But I needn't have done so,  I'd been stopped by a woman holding a fishing net. She let my arm go and was now wringing her hands. Her brow was furrowed. Mister teacher, my sons are missing. Now I recognized her from one of my classes. She'd invited me to her home for dinner to thank me for teaching her sons to read Mandarin characters. We had a lavish family dinner in their modest shack near the beach. The man of the house was a successful fisherman with two boats. When the sons inherited the business, they'd have a boat each. We'd eaten lobster, crab, mussels, and octopus, all washed down with one of Shandong's most lethal plum wines.

Her name finally came to me. Mrs. Song, what's happened?

Liu and Fu snuck out after supper last night. Their beds have not been slept in. My husband had to cast off the boats this morning without them. He's out fishing with the crew. Can you help me find the boys?

I'm sorry, Mrs. Song, I can't. My duties. But they are almost men, and they have only been missing for one night. Please don't worry. I'm sure they'll be back soon. The boys would come back. There were half a dozen places in town where a man of any age could imbibe booze and opium and spend the night in the arms of skilled and alluring women. Such an evening's entertainment didn't come cheap, but there was much to recommend it. If I could afford it, I'd be doing that every night. Mrs. Song's sons would be sleeping off a hangover in one of the dens and would stagger home when the proprietor kicked them out. She looked unconvinced. Look. If they haven't come home by supper time tonight, come and find me, and we'll start a search. Fair enough?

She nodded, but her brow remained furrowed. I gave her my most empathetic smile and left her there on the sand.

I walked through the little grove of Mulberry trees on the fringes of the beach, grateful for the shade. Beyond the grove I sauntered along the boulevard that would take me to my breakfast meeting. It was lined with carefully manicured Ginko trees that were said to have been planted by Confucius himself, whose birthplace was only a few hundred miles from here. I knew Ginko trees were long-lived, but I was skeptical that these could have been planted 2500 years ago. The Chinese love a good legend, no matter how thinly it stretches the truth. I liked that about them. It was a shame the Ginko trees gave off a stench that was like a soldier's socks.

The day was only an hour old, and Yantai was already a hive of activity, with everyone on the streets carrying or hauling goods of some kind, wearing rough cotton tunics of every shade of brown. I handed a coin to a man hauling a cart of fish. He nodded and took the coin. I jumped up onto his cart and enjoyed the slow ride. Yantai was prosperous enough to have smooth, slate-paved roads in the town, for which my arse was grateful. The same slate covered the walls and roofs of the two-story buildings which lined the street. Businesses on the ground floor, dwellings above, and laundry hung from bamboo poles wedged into the upper-story window frames. No smoke emanated from chimneys, spring was well underway, and it felt as if we were in for a hot summer.

We passed a larger building that loomed over the rest of the street: Customs House. It was made from the same slate, but its architecture was steadfastly European, with Doric columns, parapets on the roof, and an elaborate portico entrance. My office was in there, but I wasn't due at work for another couple of hours. My chosen breakfast venue, however, was on the opposite side of the street, about two hundred yards beyond Customs House. I slipped off the moving cart and patted the man on the back by way of thanks.

I paused before crossing the pavement and entering the café. The man I was hoping to dine with was a man with bewildering mood swings and loyalties so mixed I could never figure out where he stood. He'd got word to me that we simply had to meet. The fact that he'd been in Berlin until recently made me wonder if I really wanted to hear what he had to say. Only a few years ago I got mixed up in geopolitics and was lucky to come out alive. I hoped against hope that his news was mundane and wouldn't complicate my life, just when I'd got it running right.

Chapter Two

Mai's was the only place in town that carried imported coffee, which went down very well with some Chinese cigarettes. Something about the herbal infusion that flavoured the tobacco made it interact with a mouthful of sweet arabica coffee as if the molecules were falling in love. The lettering on the bamboo awning over the entrance enticed the public with the words, in English, Mai's Hevenli Gold Cofi Home, a translation I'd once offered to correct but was politely rebuffed. Signwriters were expensive.

I took a seat at the back, facing the door, and waited for my friend Rui Jingren to arrive. The café was unusual in that it was more like a bar, with a central island serving area surrounded by stools, and small bamboo two-seat tables surrounding that. Lining three of the walls were two-seater booths with red brocade seat backs and red lacquered table tops. It was Euro-chic with Chinese characteristics. The clientele were almost all Chinese middle-class aspirants. Working folk had no time to idle away in a café. I scanned the room and saw merchants, bureaucrats, office clerks, and two foreigners at a table near the door. Electric Chinese lanterns illuminated the space, and the one above my booth was, unsurprisingly, red. I could smell bao being taken out of the ovens. Mai would dust her bao, the traditional steamed bun and a Shandong specialty, with icing sugar to make it look a little more European. They sold like, well, hotcakes.

Rui Jingren was the former aide to the governor of Shandong, Li Bingheng, who himself had recently been fired. I needed Rui's take on the latest political rumblings coming from Beijing. Reading the tea leaves myself, I could tell that the Qing were once again eyeing off the Imperial Maritime Customs Service as a target for a takeover. The Manchu officials were just itching for an excuse to take over the IMCS, which, even though Chinese-owned, was nonetheless mostly staffed with non-Chinese. We at the IMCS brought in almost half the Qing dynasty government's revenue, and though they were nervous about messing with it, threatening the river of cash, they were nonetheless miffed that it was not being run by their own people. Our boss was the venerable and diminutive Robert Hart. And though Irish, and thus a British subject, he ran the IMCS for the sole benefit of China and steadfastly refused to do the bidding of the Brits. He knew that if the Manchus ever took it over, corruption and nepotism would destroy it and the Qing treasury with it.

Yantai's IMCS office was an excellent place to be posted. Still in Shandong but far enough away from my former posting of Dongying that there was no risk of bumping into old foes. Yantai was a big enough city to have everything available but small enough to be able to maintain just a hint of anonymity. It was on the coast, and I prefer to be near the sea whenever possible, even if the horizon was shrouded in mist much of the time.

I inhaled a lung full of tobacco smoke and my ribcage sent a stab of pain to my chest. I winced just as Rui sat down in the chair opposite me. You look hungover, Swagger.

Though I was born with the name Philip Swageman, my high school nickname ‘Swagger’ was what my friends called me. And you look unemployed, Rui.

He wore a beige linen suit with a red and gold striped tie. He was clean shaven, and like most Chinese men, had shaved his hairline back a few inches. The rest of his hair was plaited into a cue that was draped over his shoulder and threatened to dunk itself into his coffee. Well, unlike you, I never took bribes in my work for the governor, so I have no network of thieves, pimps, and dealers to fall back on, now that my services are no longer required by the Qing. They're getting along very well without me, no doubt.

Sarcasm becomes you, mate, I said. Rui's network of thieves, pimps, and dealers was as extensive as it was secret.

Rui said, If they ever catch you taking bribes, they'll cut your balls off before casting you loose. You'll have no option but to become a coolie, a profession to which I believe you are entirely unsuited. He was one to talk. The old rogue and his boss had engaged in many a dodgy activity that, while nominally for the good of the realm, never failed to deliver some revenue into their own pockets and the pockets of their loyal soldiers. Commandeered loot, in fact, formed the lion's share of a bureaucrat's pay.

Rui had been an aide to Xu Jingcheng, China's minister in Berlin. Back in '97, Jingcheng had told Kaiser Wilhelm, whose colonial ambitions were in full flight, to 'simply go an occupy any Chinese harbor that suits.' The kaiser sent a fleet to China and seized Jiaozhou Bay on Shandong's southern coast. The soldiers were reportedly urged by Kaiser Wilhelm personally to slaughter the Yellow Peril, resulting in what was now known as the 'Qingdao Outrage.' On his return from Berlin, Rui began work for Li Bingheng, the governor of Shandong. But Bingheng was sacked only a month later for failing to prevent the Qingdao Outrage, and now Rui was self-employed. Some smuggling here, a protection racket there, buying and selling information. Whatever brought in cash. He was a survivor. He was a friend for now, but life could be tough in these turbulent times, and I had no doubt that if backed into a corner, Rui would sell me out if he had no other choice.

Are you still doing those classes? he asked.

Even though he was no longer in the employ of the Qing, Rui's intelligence network must be as strong as ever. Strong enough to know where I'd been that very morning. Just started. Learned how hard it is to breathe after a kick in the chest. Those guys fight rough. I thought the class would be more like those ones where old ladies do tai chi in the park, but this was something else. My sparring partner seemed to have it in for me. A fellow named Hao Zhang. Know him? I don't think my ribcage will ever forget him.

No, not that class. The reading and writing classes for the peasants. You still teaching those?

"Oh, those classes. They're going okay. Most of my students can now at least write their own names and fill in the occasional government form. I hope it makes them a little less susceptible to being exploited."

"Oh, wait a minute, you mean one-eyed Zhang? You sparred with him? Rui let out a chuckle. That's funny. Now I know why your chest hurts. Isn't his daughter in your literacy class?"

I grimaced as a spasm of pain embraced my ribcage, and my brain connected the dots. I had indeed enjoyed some vigorous romps with Zhang's daughter after class. In my defense, the seduction was entirely initiated by her. But I don't imagine that would be any defense in the eyes of her father, whose boot had so forcefully connected with my chest. Anyway, there's no way he could know unless she told him.

I didn't reply, and we both took sips of coffee and puffs on our cigarettes and