Cynthia also drank. But her voice was completely sober. “Too soon to worry about it, yes. Much too soon? I don’t think so.”
Since Genda didn’t really think it was much too soon, either, he didn’t try to argue with her. He asked, “How is his Majesty?”
“He didn’t think . . . this would happen when he let you put the crown on his head,” she answered. Genda already knew that. She went on, “It’s funny. He’s at least hapa-haole himself, but he really is angry with haoles for what they’ve done to Hawaiians. That’s genuine. A lot of him is bluff and bluster and bullshit”—maybe she felt the almost-gin after all—“but that’s for real.” She looked down at her ring and flushed again. “Well, he isn’t angry at all the haoles.”
“No one could be—can be?—could be angry at you,” Genda said.
“That’s sweet. You’re sweet.” Now Cynthia Laanui kissed him. A long time ago, someone had told him that the person who started a kiss was the one who needed it more. By the desperate way Cynthia clung to him, that held a lot of truth. When they separated, she said, “You don’t know me very well. You can’t know me very well, if you tell me something like that. Don’t get me wrong—I like it. But I know it’s silly, too.”
“I don’t think so.” Genda was sure she was right, but he didn’t care. Right now, they had nothing left but each other, and they might not have each other long, either. He gathered himself, picked her up, and carried her to the bed. He was a small man, two or three centimeters shorter than she was, but he was strong.
Their lovemaking had always had the sweetness of stolen fruit. Now, every time they touched, they knew it might be the last. The way things were these days, each joining might be the last thing they ever did. For him, and evidently for her, too, that only made the flame burn hotter.
Afterwards, a pink flush mottling the pale skin between her breasts, she said, “I wish I had a cigarette.”
With the air of a successful stage magician, Genda pulled a pack of Chesterfields from a trouser pocket. “Here,” he said.
Cynthia squealed and kissed him. “My God, my God, my God!” she said. “Where on earth did you get these? Where?” To hear her talk, the tobacco drought might have been worldwide, not confined to Hawaii.
Genda made a small ceremony of lighting one for her and one for himself. “A friend gave them to me,” he said, and let it go at that. The friend had got them from another friend, who’d got them from a dead U.S. Marine. That might be more than Cynthia wanted to hear.
She coughed when she first inhaled. Genda had done the same thing. They’d gone without tobacco so long, it was as if they’d never smoked at all. But the second puff made her smile. “Jesus, that’s good!” she said, and then, after a momentary pause, “Can I have a few to take back to Stanley? I’m sorry. I know it’s greedy. But if I give him cigarettes, he won’t wonder why I went out.”
“Okay,” Genda said. The slang made Cynthia smile. Genda didn’t begrudge her five Chesterfields . . . very much. He knew she was right. If she gave the king those, he’d think she’d left Iolani Palace to get her hands on them. That she’d got them from her lover wouldn’t cross his mind—or Genda hoped it wouldn’t.
She smoked her cigarette down to the tiniest of butts, then stared sorrowfully at the scrap of tobacco that remained. “I feel like chewing this like a hillbilly,” she said.
Although Genda knew about snuff, chewing tobacco had never caught on in Japan. The idea made him queasy—or maybe it was just the Chesterfield.
The Queen of Hawaii got out of bed and started dressing. “I’d better go back now,” she said. As she had on the way from the palace to Hotel Street, she tucked her hair up under her hat and put on the sunglasses.
“We will do everything we can,” Genda said. Cynthia Laanui nodded. And after they’d done that . . . Neither one wanted to dwell on what might happen then. She nodded one more time, then walked the bicycle out the door without a backward glance.
Genda waited five minutes before he dressed so they wouldn’t be seen leaving together. He wrestled his own bicycle down the stairs and started back to Pearl Harbor. He hadn’t gone far before he realized the great naval center was under attack. Planes roared above it: fighters strafing and dive bombers stooping on targets to drop their bombs. Japanese antiaircraft guns—and some captured from the Americans at the surrender—filled the sky with puffs of black smoke.
Naval guns were also firing on Pearl Harbor, from ranges beyond the reach of shore-based artillery. Genda wished Japan hadn’t had to wreck the great coast-defense guns the USA had installed along the southern coast of Oahu. They would have taught those ships respect. But they could have harmed the Japanese Navy, and so Aichi dive bombers with armor-piercing bombs had blown up the casements in which they lurked.
Were those landing craft in the water? Whatever they were, they looked a lot more sophisticated than the Daihatsu barges on which Japan relied. Genda pedaled harder. He’d had permission to leave his station, but he wanted to be there to defend the harbor as long as he could. As if one man will make any difference now, he thought bitterly. But his legs pumped up and down all the same.
THEBUNKER HILLWAS A GOING CONCERN AGAIN, flight deck repaired, incinerated planes shoved into the drink, new Hellcats and Dauntlesses taken aboard. Joe Crosetti missed the fighter that had gone up in flames, but the new one would do the job just fine. He missed the men lost when that Jap crashed his Zero into the carrier far more. You couldn’t replace men the way you could airplanes.
Not far away, the Copahee was still under repair. The escort carrier had taken a bomb from that same Jap. The guy was a son of a bitch, yeah, but he’d done a hell of a piece of work there.
Sailors on the baby flattop took off their caps and waved to Joe as he and his buddies from the Bunker Hill flew over them, bound for Oahu. He waggled his wings to return the compliment. By rights, the sailors could have been pissed off. How had that Jap got through in spite of radar and the combat air patrol overhead?
Joe feared he knew the answer. The Americans had got overconfident and fallen asleep at the switch. The blip on the radar coming in alone? So what? It was bound to be another American plane, wasn’t it? Well, no. And the guys flying CAP had been slow getting a handle on it, too.
The carriers fell away behind him. So did the destroyers and cruisers screening them. He came up on the warships bombarding Oahu. Their guns thundered below him. Flame and smoke belched from the muzzles. The ships heeled in the water at the recoil. Some dug-in Japs would be catching hell.
Fewer bombardment ships remained north of Oahu. A good many had steamed around the island to pummel Pearl Harbor. Joe and his fellow fliers were on their way there, too. He’d shot up the harbor before, plenty of times. Things were different today. Marines and dogfaces were landing. They were going to take the base away from the Japs. Just about all the Japanese soldiers were at the front. What kind of fight could sailors and other odds and sods put up?
“We’ll fix ’em, goddammit,” Joe said. A second front here would do almost as much good as the second front in Europe Stalin kept shouting for. Catch the enemy between hammer and anvil and smash him flat. “Yeah,” Joe muttered. “Yeah.”
One thing the Japs had already made very plain—they had no quit in them. All the antiaircraft guns that hadn’t been knocked out were banging away like nobody’s business. Flying past a near miss was like driving a car over a hole in the road. You went down and then you went up again, sometimes hard enough for your teeth to click together. But you didn’t pick up shrapnel from a hole in the road unless somebody’d stuck a land mine down there.
Something clanged against the new Hellcat’s fuselage. Joe automatically checked the gauges. Everything looked good. These babies could take it. Hit a Zero or an Oscar with a good burst of .50-caliber bullets, and it’d break up in midair. The Army fighter the Americans called the Tony was a tougher bird, but nowhere near as tough as a Hellcat.
Orders were to shoot up anyth
ing Japanese at Pearl that might shoot back. Joe went in at not much above treetop height, machine guns blazing. He wondered if the place was worth taking away from the Nips. Two campaigns inside of two years had turned it into a pretty fair approximation of hell on earth. The water had a greasy sheen. He was so low, the odor of spilled fuel oil got into the canopy. Wrecked American and Japanese ships lay side by side, brothers in death. Before the war started, nobody except a few aviation-minded cranks had really believed airplanes could sink capital ships all by themselves.
“I believe! Oh, Lord, I believe!” Joe sounded like a Holy Roller preacher. How many hundred thousand tons of twisted steel lay below him? The last two times the U.S. and Japanese fleets clashed, neither side’s ships had set eyes on the other’s. Planes did all the dirty work.
Once upon a time, Ford Island, there in the middle of Pearl Harbor, had been a tropical paradise, all palm trees and bougainvillea and frangipani. Nothing green was left now, just dirt and char marks and the wreckage of buildings—and antiaircraft guns among the wreckage. Joe squeezed the firing button on top of the stick. His six .50s hammered away. The recoil made the Hellcat jerk in the air. Japs scrambled for cover. He might have been playing pinball, except those were real people down there. Real people I hope I kill, he thought.
Out at the edge of the harbor, landing craft were coming ashore. Some of the AA guns were firing at them instead of at the airplanes overhead. That wasn’t so good. A three-inch gun could do horrible things to a boat that was meant to be equally awkward by land and sea. Joe strafed a gun from behind. He didn’t think its crew heard him coming. What .50-caliber slugs did to human flesh was even worse than what antiaircraft guns did to landing craft.
Some of the ugly, boxy boats came right up the channel. Wrecks blocked bigger ships from getting in, but the landing craft scraped past them. Joe wagged his wings in salute as he shot at a Japanese machine-gun nest.
A Hellcat trailing smoke plunged into the water of the West Loch. Joe looked around. He didn’t see a parachute. Maybe the poor bastard inside the plane was lucky not to get out. He would have come down in the middle of a big swarm of Japs, with a piss-poor chance of getting away. What they would have done to him before they let him die . . . Compared to that, going straight into the drink looked pretty good.
Joe made pass after pass, firing short bursts so he wouldn’t overheat his guns and burn out the barrels. Finally, his ammo ran dry. He still had plenty of fuel, but so what? Unless he wanted to imitate that Jap and see how big a fire he could start, it didn’t do him much good here.
It would take him home, though. He flew back over Oahu toward the Bunker Hill. The Japs shot at him several more times, and missed every one. Hitting a fast-moving airplane wasn’t easy. Frustrated gunners on both sides could testify to that.
A few more puffs of black smoke around him, and then he was out over the Pacific. He hoped none of the American ships would fire on him. If one did, they all would, and they threw up a lot of shells and bullets. They might not get him anyway, but why take chances?
He ran the gauntlet. A CAP fighter came over to have a look at him, but it pulled away when the pilot recognized he was in a Hellcat. It waggled its wings as it went. He returned the courtesy.
As always, landing on the Bunker Hill meant turning off his own will and doing exactly what the landing officer told him to. Fighter pilots were a willful breed. He hated surrendering control to somebody else. But the easiest of the many ways to kill yourself on carrier duty was to think you knew better than the landing officer. However little Joe liked it, he believed it.
At the officer’s signal, he shoved the stick forward and dove for the deck. “Jesus!” he said as he slammed home. His tailhook caught the second arrester wire. The Hellcat jerked to a stop.
Flightcrew men came running up as Joe opened the canopy and got out. “How’d it go, Mr. Crosetti?” one of them called.
“Piece of cake,” Joe answered. “I need ammo. Then I can go back and give ’em some more. We’re going to take Pearl Harbor back from those bastards—you better believe we are.”
The sailors cheered. “We’ll have you back in the air in nothin’ flat, sir,” an armorer said. “Don’t you worry about a thing.”
“Not me,” Joe said. “That’s for the guys with lots of gold braid.” As an ensign, he outranked all the ratings around him. He was an officer, of course. But he felt he was barely an officer. Just about all the others on the ship were entitled to give him orders.
That was a worry for another day. Now all he wanted to do was hit the Japs another lick. What would end up happening to Pearl Harbor once the Americans took it back—was also a worry for another day, and not for the likes of him.
FIGHTING WAS GETTING CLOSE to Honolulu now. The roar of battle from Pearl Harbor never went away, no matter how much Jiro Takahashi wished it would. He’d made a bet not long after the Japanese conquered Hawaii. He’d bet they were the winning side. For a while, that bet looked pretty good. It didn’t any more.
He wished his sons would give him a harder time about it. He deserved a hard time for his foolishness. But they treated him sympathetically, as if he were an old rake coming back to earth after a spree with a young floozy who took him for everything but the gold in his teeth.
“Shigata ga nai, Father,” Hiroshi said. “When the Americans come back, we just have to try to keep you out of trouble if we can.”
“They can’t get him for treason.” Kenzo spoke as if Jiro weren’t in the tent in the botanical garden. “He’s not a U.S. citizen. He was just helping his own country.” No matter how dumb he was. He didn’t say that. He didn’t need to say it. Everything that had happened since the Americans came back shouted it for him.
“Do you think they’ll care?” Hiroshi asked. “To them, he’ll be a Jap who helped the other Japs.” The hateful key word was in English. His older son went on, “They’ll probably deal with all the people like that, so we’d better have some good reasons why they shouldn’t.”
“Don’t worry about me, boys,” Jiro said. “Consul Kita told me he would take care of me if he could, and I’m sure he meant it.”
They both stared at him. “Big deal,” Kenzo said. “Kita can’t even help himself now, let alone anybody else.”
“That’s the truth,” Hiroshi agreed. “All just talk and nonsense.”
“Well, I hope not,” Jiro said. “The consulate is still up and running.”
“Up and standing still, you mean,” Kenzo said. “It hasn’t got anywhere to run to. The Americans are in Pearl Harbor, Father. They’ll be here in Honolulu any day now. What can Kita do?”
Jiro shrugged. He got to his feet. “I don’t know. Maybe I ought to go and see, neh?”
“You ought to leave that place alone, Father,” Kenzo said. “Haven’t you got in enough trouble because you went there?”
“If America wins, you will be happy,” Jiro said. “All right—be happy. I wouldn’t be happy even if I never went on the radio. America is not my country. It has never been my country. I came here to make some money, not to live.”
“And you made more than you ever would have in Japan,” Hiroshi said.
“So what?” Jiro shrugged again. “So what, I say? I have lived for all these years in a land that does not like me, does not want me, and does not speak my language. If you want to go on being Japs”—he brought out the English word, too, and laced it with contempt—“in America, fine. Not for me, not if I can help it.”
He pushed past Hiroshi and Kenzo and out of the tent. His sons didn’t try to stop him. If they had, they would have got a surprise. They were taller and younger than he was, but he was meaner. I raised them soft, he thought. Most of the time, that pleased him. They didn’t need to be as hard as he had. But they didn’t have that toughness to fall back on, either.
The air stank of smoke, of burning. It wasn’t so bad as it had been when all the fuel at Pearl Harbor burned. Then Honolulu wore a shroud for weeks, till th
e fires finally burned themselves out. Still, it left his lungs as raw as if he were smoking three cigarettes at the same time. He smiled wryly. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d smoked one cigarette, let alone three.
Up Nuuanu Avenue he went. The guards at the Japanese consulate waved to him. “Konichiwa, Fisherman!” they called. “You haven’t got any goodies for us today?”
“Please excuse me, no,” Jiro answered. With so many American ships operating south of Oahu now, they probably would have sunk the Oshima Maru if he dared put to sea in her. “Is Kita-san in?”
“Yes—for now,” a guard said. Another one sent him a reproving look, as if he might have said too much. But no one stopped Jiro from walking up the stairs and into the consulate.
When he got inside, the smell of smoke was thicker. He needed only a moment to see why: secretaries were busy tearing up papers and burning them. That sobered him. If the staff at the consulate didn’t think Honolulu could hold, the game really was coming to an end.
One of the secretaries looked up from ripping reports into strips. For all Jiro knew, they were reports about him. If they were, better they should go into the fire. “Oh, hello, Takahashi-san,” the secretary said. “The honorable consul will be glad to see you. He was just talking about you, in fact.”
Maybe those reports really were about Jiro, then. “Thank you,” he said, and went on into Nagao Kita’s office.
“Do whatever you can to buy time. We need it,” Kita was saying into the telephone when Jiro walked in. The consul waved and gestured to a chair. When he finished talking, he hung up. “Good to see you, Takahashi-san,” he said. “Things are . . .” His little wave was more expressive than words could be.
“I see you are getting rid of your papers,” Jiro said.
“Can’t be helped,” Kita said. “Better not to let the Americans find out some of the things we did here. Better not to let the Americans find us here, either.”
End of the Beginning Page 46
