The Emperor's General

by James Webb

  For a moment she seemed startled at my reaction. Her eyes became very round. She threw her hands up into the air. “You’ve overwhelmed me, so I was just thinking—”

  I recovered. “I’m sorry I yelled.”

  She laughed with surprise as I gave her a reassuring hug. “I can’t stop thinking, Jay! But it’s clear to me that our little place in Manila is a long way from being in this room you talk of, filled with giants.”

  Soon the guests began arriving. Divina Clara and I stood together on the terrace as Carlos proudly brought each couple to us, introducing me formally for the first time as his future son-in-law. He seemed to take great pleasure in pointing out again and again that I would soon work for him after completing my special duties with General Douglas MacArthur. As the evening grew longer and the tumblers of scotch passed on one into another, his descriptions of my exploits on behalf of the supreme commander grew. By dinner’s end Carlos seemed to have convinced them all that I, Captain Jay Marsh, the brilliantly schooled, multilingual former football All-American, was truly the hand behind MacArthur’s throne, and that the future of Japan itself would be put into jeopardy when I returned to Manila to join my blood with the Ramirez family and take my position next to the other sons as an equal partner and joint heir-apparent.

  It was great fun. Divina Clara laughed and teased, her eternal eyes flashing messages to me from across the long mahogany table. No one fully believed the exaggerations of the feisty, speech-ridden Carlos, but everyone came away with the comprehension that I had his full affection, and more important his complete loyalty. The word would go out quickly through the business elites of Manila: there would soon be another Ramirez to deal with, one who was Caucasian and had a slightly different surname but on behalf of whom the unbending and redoubtable Carlos Ramirez was prepared to fight and die.

  I spent that night in the guest bedroom of their home. Lying on the plushly sheeted double bed, surrounded by delicate porcelain and richly wooded antiques, in my mellow good fortune I thought of the corn-shuck mattresses and chamber pots of my youth. There was an unshakable irony in my having journeyed from a land of wealth to a land of poverty, where I would make my own final break toward wealth by joining an Asian man’s family. Had my father even known what was on the other side of Arkansas? Did my little sister ever feel one moment of luxury before disease had stalked and destroyed her? Did my brother have a chance perhaps to glimpse an ancient castle before the machine guns of Normandy stitched him lifeless? Was my mother happy in Santa Monica with her walk-in bungalow and her live-in Italian?

  In this undeserved place of contentment on the far side of the sea I dozed. And I will admit I prayed.

  The house fell unearthly quiet. Two rooms away I could hear Carlos’s peaceful, semidrunken snores. Then, unexpectedly, my door slowly opened. In the dim shaft of light that shone behind it I could see the sure and graceful movements of Divina Clara. She silently clicked the door shut behind her. She was barefoot, wearing a loose-fitting satin robe. Her hair was brushed out, full and long, falling onto her shoulders and down her back. The robe opened as she walked toward me. And when she reached the bed it dropped onto the floor.

  “I love you.”

  She whispered it, then eased naked into my bed. When I pulled her to me I could smell the faint aroma of sampaguita. As I began to kiss her I remembered that after dinner her mother had playfully woven a garland of those wondrous blossoms like a tiara into her hair. She kissed me back, eager and unafraid, and I realized that although a veil of propriety would be publicly upheld, now that her father had officially announced we were engaged there was no objection to her visiting me like this in the middle of the night.

  “Don’t make a sound!”

  She knelt over me, slowly taking my hands. For a long time she rubbed them in easy circles along her firm stomach, smiling teasingly and staring unspeaking into my eyes. I started to grasp her waist. As I squeezed it she arched her back, sending her breasts dancing in the shadows before my eyes. Then she moved my hands up to them, one at a time. She held them there, moving them slowly, controlling their motion as if holding back my power at the moment of my greatest arousal. Her chin went high into the air. I began softly kneading her nipples with my thumbs, accepting my imprisonment. She moaned, as if all her energy were seeping away. And then she fell on top of me, covering every part of my body with her own.

  She was all fullness and warmth and honesty, that is the only way I can describe those moments with Divina Clara. The fullness of her lips, of her breasts, of her flesh at every point it touched me. The warmth not only of her skin but of the energy that emanated from inside her, her arms and legs grasping me and squeezing, her eyes burning into me when they opened and then slowly closed again. The honesty of her emotions, a simple power filled with promises, the depth of which I had never before imagined.

  Yoshiko had come to me obsessed by duty, fraught with the desire to please. She had soon begun to care for me, but more in the manner of someone living in a cage, with both the burden and protection of knowing she would never be free and thus also knowing that our moments together would never pass beyond fantasy. Divina Clara had stripped away all her own defenses, leaving her heart just as naked as the rest of her when she dropped her robe and clutched me to her round and luscious breasts. She was there before me, deliberately and unspeakably at my mercy, to be loved or crushed for all the rest of her life.

  Finally I rolled on top of her. She whispered with pleasure, almost as if she were singing. In moments I was gasping and shuddering with an intensity that I did not believe was possible. And as I held her to me, falling to sleep, I knew that no one else would ever make me feel so full.

  That was why I loved her. Indeed, that is why I love her still.

  CHAPTER 17

  I had been to Muntinglupa’s Bilibid before.

  In February I had traveled with MacArthur as he made the thirty-mile journey south from Manila to Muntinglupa on the day our soldiers liberated the old prisoner of war camp. It was at this Bilibid—the Filipino word for prison—that he first forced himself to peer into the faces of those he had left behind when he escaped to Australia. Or to be more precise, those from that ever-dwindling pool who survived more combat after his escape, then the death march down the Bataan Peninsula, and finally the harshness of captivity. More than 40 percent of the army that had surrendered after his escape, those who had already fought at Bataan and on Corregidor only to face the terrors of torture and captivity, had died as prisoners of the Japanese.

  The faces into which MacArthur stared at Muntinglupa were like haunting mirrors, the dreadful forever after that combat commanders dream of only in their nightmares. Long rows of shocked, bulging eyes had peered curiously back at him, belonging to men who truly were half dead. They limped and shuffled when they walked. Their heads were perched loosely atop wrinkled pencils of necks. Ribs were countable. Clavicles protruded. Uniforms had dissolved into dingy gauze.

  These were his once-proud soldiers. After he had greeted them he left the prison camp and forced our driver to take him far into the battle lines, telling us he needed to hear the sound of guns. In what he called an avenging moment he marched past a squad of frontline troops into direct range of Japanese machine-gun fire, daring his fate. But I knew it was not vengeance that impelled him toward those barking guns. Rather, it was guilt. He had left the battlefield three years before, under orders from Washington to be sure, but nonetheless he had deserted his soldiers to those guns, and his only expiation was to face them again and again until he was either forgiven or dead. In this mix of Christian and Asian that had become both his conscience and his spirit, each time he marched so recklessly forward he tested his Asian karma and then decided afterward that his Christian God was still sparing him for some even greater task.

  As MacArthur was touring the just-liberated prisoner camp, I met an emaciated wisp of half-ghost who laconically informed me that he once had been a sergeant. He was a tall, teeter
ing man with parched eyes and a voice that had been starved into a whisper. His hair had flecked into grey over the years of his captivity. It was impossible to discern his age, but he seemed somewhere between thirty and fifty. The sergeant wanted to show me a spiritual vision that he said had kept him alive. Despite myself I had recoiled slightly when he pulled on my sleeve, staining my just-cleaned fatigues with the filth of his captivity. And so I followed him, more out of embarrassment than curiosity, as he led me behind the run-down buildings to a place of stench and ruin.

  Once in the rear yard, the sergeant pointed to a tree that from a distance reminded me of an oriental julep, rich with pink and orange blossoms. It seemed beautiful and fecund. He called the tree the Joshua tree. I do not know why.

  The sergeant told me that for long months he had looked at the tree from the barracks bed where he had been left to die and had gained strength from its beauty. If the tree could thrive in these hateful times, he reasoned, then so could he. Then when he had regained his strength and his resolve, he had visited the tree, only to discover that the tree was dead. Its blossoms were not blossoms, but rather were large jungle-bred insects that clung to its twigs and branches by day and fed like green flies off the ever-increasing piles of nearby American corpses once the darkness fell.

  Still, the feathery-voiced sergeant insisted that he had taken meaning from this grotesque anomaly. “Death regenerates into an ugly beauty,” he informed me solemnly, as if he had rehearsed these lines in his heart a million times. “But even beauty feeds off of death. Do you understand? When I get home I will paint this tree and keep it in my living room.”

  I still do not know what he meant, or why he would want to rise every morning in his later years and stare at this haunting reminder of his terror. But this was the old Muntinglupa Bilibid: dead trees whose branches hosted clusters of cockroach-sized flying insects that fed and thrived off the carrion of American flesh, courtesy of a Japanese army that could not understand why any surrendering soldier would even want his family to know he was still alive after having disgraced them into succeeding generations by choosing surrender over an honorable death in battle.

  The Muntinglupa Bilibid had been scrubbed, deloused, and sanitized by our army. The army was using the facility as one of the administration points for the repatriation of some fifty thousand Japanese soldiers who had survived the brutal combat that killed off a majority of their ranks. It was at Muntinglupa that I was sent to again meet General Tomoyuki Yamashita. If one chose to believe Sam Genius, the wages of the emperor’s relatives at Nanking would soon be paid by this commoner general in Manila. But even if one did not agree with this theory, it was undeniable that the thought of this so-called Tiger of Malaya having a podium of any sort on Japanese soil put fear into both MacArthur and the Japanese imperial court. MacArthur had said it bluntly in the privacy of his office: Yamashita was not going home, other than as a pile of ashes inside a ceramic jar.

  Yet at this moment I did not regret that reality, either. I had seen the corpses and the wreckage of Manila, and I had heard other, personal tales of senseless slaughter from Divina Clara’s family. The retreating Japanese had gone on an insane rampage of bloodlust and chaotic ruin. These were not the leavings of battle, they were the sediments of mass murder piled on top of deliberate destruction.

  Among my other errands, MacArthur had ordered me to meet with General Yamashita’s American defense counsel, a courtesy call meant to make the supreme commander’s presence felt all the way from Tokyo. MacArthur’s outward justification was that I should discuss the convening orders for the special commission and assure that the preparation for trial was proceeding smoothly. The subtler message would be clear to any soldier involved in these proceedings: General MacArthur wanted Yamashita dead, and he was in a hurry.

  Since MacArthur had also instructed me to conduct a physical inspection both of General Yamashita and of his living spaces, I arranged to perform both assigned tasks simultaneously. Captain Frank Witherspoon, Yamashita’s principal lawyer, had offered to come to the Muntinglupa Bilibid and brief me on the case.

  Witherspoon met me in the prison’s small chapel, explaining that it was the only building capable through size and privacy to hold such a meeting. He was a spare, hawk-faced man in his early thirties, with red hair and the soft, slender hands of an academe. He was waiting for me as I walked into the chapel, sitting irreverently at the small pulpit just underneath a large cross on the wall. A statuette of Jesus was still nailed to the cross, which told me that I had entered a Catholic chapel, as Protestant churches showed only the cross. We simple Baptists, never able to afford such luxuries as statuettes in our little country churches, rationalized that He shouldn’t be up there anyway, since He’d been taken off the Tower and carried inside a cave, where He had risen from the dead, rolled back the rock, and disappeared.

  Witherspoon came to his feet when I entered the chapel and walked briskly to meet me. His eyes darted electrically all over me as we shook hands. He was taking everything in, looking for clues. Witherspoon was not a career soldier and had been slated to leave the Philippines before he had been brought into the Yamashita case. I had heard that he was a graduate of Harvard Law and that before the war he had been a top trial lawyer in Boston. He had a clear air of both money and authority about him as he grasped my hand.

  “I’ll get right to the point,” he said, gesturing toward a pew where I took a seat. “This is a fucking mess.”

  Although he was older than I, we were of equal rank and neither of us were career soldiers. So there was no need for drawn-out formalities. I clutched my briefcase to my chest as I crossed a leg, and then laughed at his abruptness. “Do you know Colonel Sam Genius?”

  “Why should I?”

  “You’ve got a lot in common. He’s in charge of the war crimes accountability section on the supreme commander’s staff, and you just summed up his views on this case.”

  Witherspoon grunted, unimpressed. “Then he must be a lawyer with at least half a brain.”

  “He believes Yamashita should be tried in Tokyo next year, with the other major defendants.”

  “How about simply ‘tried,’ Captain? In a court of law?”

  I carefully demurred. “Isn’t that what they asked you to do?”

  Witherspoon shot me a withering glare. “I said a court of law.” He threw up his hands in exasperation. “Look, I’ve been ready to go home for a long time. The war is over, I’ve got a lucrative practice, and up until a week ago all I’d been doing was tracking down war claims for Filipino citizens whose houses were blown up or whose pigs got killed. But then they ask me to defend a man in an extremely complicated murder trial, and how can I say no?”

  Witherspoon caught himself, as if he were a machine gunner about to waste a lot of ammunition on an irrelevant target. His eyes swarmed all over me again. “In what capacity are you here, Captain? I mean, will it do any good for me to go through this, or is this just a feel-good little chat?”

  I shrugged casually, trying to be candid. “I’m a captain. MacArthur wears five stars. He wanted me to pay you a visit to make sure things are going smoothly, but I can’t guarantee he’ll listen to a word I say.”

  “He sent you down here to intimidate me, didn’t he?”

  Witherspoon was getting hot. I could sense immediately that if MacArthur wanted a quick trial with a doormat for a defense counsel, his legal staff had picked the wrong attorney. His eyes had a way of locking me into his gaze, just as physically as if he were holding me by the shoulders. “If this were even a real court-martial that would be undue command influence. It would be illegal.”

  “Look,” I answered, “I’m down here because MacArthur wanted no misunderstandings. He wants General Yamashita tried, and he wants a speedy resolution to the case. If you want to shoot the messenger, fine. I’m just a running back from SC who heard about Pearl Harbor on the radio and went down and signed up for the army because ships make me throw up. OK? That’s it.
If MacArthur tells me to go, I go. If MacArthur tells me to report, I report. I don’t know what’s legal or not. And I may be taller than you, but I don’t feel particularly intimidating.”

  “Cute,” Witherspoon muttered. “The perfect General’s weenie.” He may as well have been spitting onto the floor.

  I gave off an exaggerated sigh, trying to lighten him up. “Let’s not get personal, all right? I could pick you up and break you in two, Witherspoon. But it wouldn’t help either of us, would it? If you’ve got a problem tell me, and I’ll bring it back to him.”

  He had not lost his look of disgust. “What are you to him? He doesn’t need to hear from you about what I’m going through. Why the hell do you think he has a legal section? But he sent you for a reason. He’s smart. So, why are you here?”

  “I’m here because he sent me. That’s the way I live these days.” I could not fathom this unprovoked anger from a man I had never before met. I stood up from the pew, making to leave. “Look, don’t overestimate your importance to Douglas MacArthur. Back home you may be a famous lawyer, but here in the army you’re a puky little captain, just like me. Why would MacArthur waste his time wanting to intimidate you when he can scare the pants off of three-star generals? Maybe I’m offering you an avenue to the General, in case you felt you needed one. I’ll just assume you feel like you don’t need one.”

  “OK, maybe the asshole actually wants to hear the truth. Tell him this, Captain.” Witherspoon’s chin was raised defiantly. His eyes were ablaze. “Tell him I may be a puky little captain, but I’m not afraid of him, OK? Tell him I don’t need a promotion and I don’t need a good assignment when I go home, so there’s nothing he can do to me. I’ve been given a job to defend a man against serious charges and I really don’t give a rat’s ass if my client is a yellow-skinned Nip general with slanty eyes and a shaved head. I don’t care if people back in the States might think I’m a turncoat for trying to keep him from being convicted, either. They all hate lawyers, anyway, so what’s new? Tell him that.”