The Fools in Town Are on Our Side

by Ross Thomas

  “One hundred and thirty two,” the insufferable little prick said.

  “There!” she said triumphantly. “See. I bet you can’t do that when you are six.”

  “I can’t do it now,” Smalldane said. “I never got past my elevenses.”

  “He also speaks six languages. Maybe even seven. How many could you speak when you were his age, Mr. Know-some-all?”

  “That’s know-it-all,” Smalldane said, “and I could barely get by in English, but at least I stayed out of Mother’s rouge and powder and wore pants, for God’s sake, and not her bathrobe.”

  “Now you don’t like his clothes,” she said, her voice rising. “Now you’re making funny of his clothes. Do you know how much that gown cost? Do you know how many I paid for it? I paid fifteen dollars for it American, that’s how many.”

  “He still looks silly.”

  “That’s not all he’s got. He’s got four more just as expensive. And he’s got fine American clothes too that come from a famous house of fashion.”

  “Sears, Roebuck?”

  “Buster Brown, that’s who,” she said.

  “Jesus,” Smalldane said. “I quit. Look, Katie, I didn’t come here to argue about some Australian kid that you’ve taken to raise. It’s been more than—”

  “I’m not Australian, sir,” I said, “I am an American,” thus proving that there’s a little chauvinism in the best of us.

  “You didn’t pick that accent up in Pittsburgh, kid.”

  I stood straight as a plumb line, scrunched my eyes closed, and recited: “I am six years old and my name is Lucifer Clarence Dye and I was born December 5, 1933, in Moncrief, Montana, United States of America, and my father’s name was Dr. Clarence Dye and I live at Number Twenty-seven.”

  “Okay, Lucifer,” Smalldane interrupted. “That’s fine. I believe you. Relax.” He knelt down so that his head was level with mine and I could smell the Scotch again. “Look, tomorrow I’ll tell you what we’ll do. You’ll play hookey—”

  “What’s hookey?” I said.

  “You’ll miss school and we’ll go down and get you some American clothes and maybe hoist a few at the Shanghai Club.” He looked up at Tante Katerine. “Is old Chi Fo’s tailor shop still going, you know, near the American School in the French Concession?”

  Tante Katerine shrugged to show her indifference. “The American School was closed two years ago, but I assume Chi Fo is still in business.”

  “You mind if I take the kid?”

  “Why should I mind? I’m only a poor Russian, exiled from her country to this war-torn land, friendless and alone, who’s tried to give a decent home to this poor—”

  She was going to the afterburners when Smalldane shot her down. “I don’t want to adopt him, goddamn it, Kate, I just want to buy him a pair of corduroy knickers so he can hear them squeak when he walks. It’s his birthright. I didn’t get any until I was almost eleven and before that I had to wear short pants. God knows what it did to me psychologically. I’m not sure, but maybe it’s already too late.”

  “What do you mean too late?” she said.

  “For the kid. Still,” he added thoughtfully, “perhaps he could do real fine as a female impersonator.”

  “Take him!” she yelled. “Buy him anything you want to! Buy him the—the whole Bund!”

  “How about it, Lucifer?” Smalldane said, still kneeling in front of me. “Would you like some knickers? The corduroy kind?”

  I bowed in the Chinese fashion and then gave him my very best ail-American boy gap-toothed grin. “Very much, sir.”

  “Good,” he said, rising. He turned to Tante Katerine. “Does he go to bed now or do you work him on the night shift?”

  “Goddamn you, Gorman—” she began, but he whacked her on the rear with the palm of his hand and laughed. It’s still the most infectious laugh I’ve ever heard. Then she laughed and he took her hand and they almost raced upstairs. Neither one of them told me good night. Yen Chi brought me my cocoa and I drank it there in the reception hall and thought about Smalldane and the corduroy knickers and Tante Katerine. I had seen her go upstairs before on rare occasions with special “old friends” and it hadn’t bothered me. This time it did. I was only six and didn’t realize it at the time, but I had just met not only my first rival, but also my first male friend. Or maybe cobber, since I spoke as if I came from down that way.

  Gorman Smalldane had been a twenty-seven-year-old reporter for United Press in 1932 when he met Tante Katerine in Mukden. The Japanese invasion of Manchuria had just begun and Tante Katerine wanted out. With Smalldane’s help, she made it to Shanghai where she went into business for herself, found a wealthy Chinese protector or patron, who turned out to be the local version of Lucky Luciano, and opened her sin palace in 1933.

  Her sponsor was Du Wei-sung (some spelled it Dou-Yen-Seng or even Fu-Seng), a peasant who had started out in the best Horatio Alger tradition as a fruit hawker in the French Concession. Ambitious, tough, and completely ruthless, Du staked out the opium trade as his own private monopoly. He also branched out into gambling, prostitution and the protection racket, operating eventually out of a luxurious high-walled compound in the French Concession.

  A self-cured opium addict himself, which indicated his singlemindedness, Du fully appreciated the rich potential that lay within a drug monopoly. He dominated the opium traffic completely after he combined the Red and Green Societies, two rival groups that had started out as secret political fraternities but had degenerated into criminal gangs interested in anything that would turn a quick Shanghai dollar. Before Du merged the rival mobs they spent much of their time shooting each other up on Shanghai’s west side.

  With a fortune securely based on his opium monopoly, Du diversified further and went into legitimate business. China’s Who’s Who listed him as a director of paper mills, forty banks, cotton mills, and shipping companies. He was also a member of the executive committee of the Chinese Chamber of Commerce and bought himself the managing directorship of Shanghai’s leading newspaper, The China Press, at one time Shanghai’s leading American newspaper.

  Du seemed to be as shrewd at public relations as he was at finance. He supported two free hospitals and served as their president; he was the chief angel for a couple of orphanages; he buried beggars free, and even sponsored a model farming community.

  He also ran the French Concession and the two thousand French who lived there were content to ignore his shady sidelines as long as he maintained a semblance of law and order. They were so grateful, in fact, that they even elected him to the Concession’s governing municipal council.

  But perhaps Du’s crowning achievement came from his fellow member in the Ching Pang, or Green Society. The fellow member’s name was Chiang Kai-shek, and he addressed Du as Elder Brother. As a newly converted Methodist, Chiang was understandably concerned about the increasing opium traffic. To control it he created something called the Shanghai Opium Oppression Bureau, which was an offshoot of the Nationalist government’s six-year opium suppression program. Only the congenitally naive were surprised when Chiang appointed Du as director of the Shanghai Opium Oppression Bureau. In return for the honor, Du sometimes impounded fifty pounds or so of opium and publicly burned it. Everyone agreed it was a nice gesture. In the meantime, he controlled the opium trade, contributed millions to the Nationalist treasury for the purchase of American fighter planes, and whenever an epidemic or a flood ravaged the land, Du could be counted on for a hefty contribution.

  Tante Katerine kicked back twenty percent of her profits to Du’s organization and the vice squad never got around to bothering her.

  I soon learned that Gorman Smalldane was not the famous radio correspondent that Tante Katerine claimed. After Manchuria, he had continued to work for United Press in Nanking until they transferred him to Hong Kong. From there he went to Ethiopia in 1935 to write about what Mussolini was up to and from there to Spain to cover Franco’s side of the Civil War.

  In Spain
he met H. V. Kaltenborn, who was then broadcasting twice a week for CBS for $50 a broadcast and paying his own expenses. In October of 1937 Kaltenborn came down with a bad case of laryngitis and couldn’t go on the air. He offered Smalldane $25 to come to a French border town and do his broadcast for him. Edward R. Murrow, then European manager of CBS, heard it, liked Smalldane’s voice, as well as the style and content of his news, and hired him as a stringer.

  Smalldane probably knew China as well as any American correspondent. He had been born in Canton in 1905 of Methodist missionary parents, now dead, and had gone to Northwestern—a sound Methodist school—on a scholarship, graduating in 1926. He returned to Shanghai in 1927 and because he was fluent in Chinese he got a job with the then American-run China Press, later transferring to United Press. At thirty-four when I met him, Smalldane still thought of himself as an orphan, which established a bond between us and also indicated something or other about his personality.

  His downfall—at least a temporary one—came late in 1939. He had written a series of what he called “goddamned brilliant” features on Shanghai which had received unusually wide play in the U.S. He then came up with the idea of doing an exposé of Du Wei-sung, the opium king, and his connections with Chiang Kai-shek. He spent seven weeks of hard, intensive digging on the three-part series and mailed it to the States. The first one ran, the other two were killed, and UP fired Smalldane, supposedly at the insistence of Chiang himself, who then refused him accreditation to Chungking.

  At Tante Katerine’s urging, Smalldane gave up his room at the American Club (she paid his considerable tab) and moved to Number 27. He made a couple of broadcasts a month for CBS, sold some harmless freelance stuff to North American Newspaper Alliance, and once to Liberty Magazine, and worked a few rather profitable deals on the black market. If Du Wei-sung knew that Smalldane was living rent-and-board free in one of the whorehouses that he protected, it didn’t seem to bother him, and the American got along famously with the Japanese’s number one boy, Major Dogshit. But then Smalldane got along famously with everyone most of the time, especially me.

  It was a kind of hero worship, I suppose. He got me out of the brocade robe and into corduroy knickers. He taught me how to throw a baseball like a boy instead of a girl. He spent long hours lecturing me on the finer points and intricacies of football, although I’d never seen a game; he demonstrated (often) the making of a proper martini; extolled the merits of Franklin D. Roosevelt and the shortcomings of Wendell Willkie; described the sexual aberrations of Adolf Hitler; explained the fact that the earth was really round after all; and predicted the coming war between the United States and Japan in the Pacific, Of this, Smalldane was completely convinced.

  Although Major Dogshit spoke no English and Smalldane spoke no Japanese, they communicated well enough in a mixture of French, Chinese, and graphic sign language. And it was in early November of 1941 that the major, well into his cups, gave Smalldane what could have been the biggest newsbeat in history. The major was paying his last visit to Number 27 and he was maudlin about it. He was distressed that he had to leave his great friend “Smardane” and his little friend “Rucifer.” But most distressing of all was that he had to give up his monthly stipend and free samples from Number 27 where, he assured us, he had spent the happiest days of his life. He liked Americans, he said, or at least that’s what we thought he said, and he did not want to fight them.

  Smalldane asked what part of China he was being transferred to, but Major Dogshit wagged a finger at him and shook his head. Not China, he said. No more China. He was going South—far, far South. He was being assigned to a special force for intensive training. Then he giggled and mumbled something in French about not from the sea, but from the land. After that he passed out and Smalldane got one of the house boys to get him home.

  Sitting there in what Tante Katerine referred to as Number 27’s “hospitality room,” which was really a medium-sized cocktail lounge where customers could look over the merchandise, Smalldane tried to figure it out. He got a map from his room and spread it over the table.

  “Dogshit said South,” he said.

  “Which way is that?” I asked.

  “Straight down, you ignorant piece of filth,” he said to me in Cantonese.

  “How could it be down on the map when it is that way where we now are?” I asked, pointing to my left, and since it was a most logical question, speaking in French.

  “What’s that say right there?” Smalldane asked, jabbing his finger at the map’s compass.

  “How should I know?” I said. “I am only eight years old and can neither read nor write.”

  “Christ, I keep forgetting.”

  “I can now do my multiplication tables up to fifteen,” I said. “You want to know what fifteen times fourteen is? It’s two hundred and ten.”

  “Kate!” Smalldane roared at Tante Katerine who was across the room listening to the marital problems of a minor French official. She excused herself and came over to our table.

  “When’re you going to teach him to read and write?” he said, jerking a thumb at me.

  She shrugged. “He has plenty of time. Perhaps we’ll teach him next year. Or the next. You’re the expert writer. Why don’t you teach him?”

  “Goddamn it, I will, starting right now!”

  Tante Katerine shrugged and swayed back to her Frenchman and the problems that he was having with his wife. He was a regular customer who came to Number 27 more for advice than for sex.

  “Here,” Smalldane said to me in a harsh tone. “What’s that word?” And he jabbed his forefinger at a dot on the map.

  I looked carefully. “It’s a dot with a circle around it,” I said.

  “Not the symbol, my little snot, the word! Don’t you even know the goddamned alphabet?”

  “I am only a child of eight years and can—”

  “Start learning right now,” Smalldane said. “That’s an S, that’s an I, that’s an N, and that’s a G. Now repeat them.”

  “S-I-N-G,” I said promptly and then yawned on purpose. “There’s really not much to it, is there?”

  “What does it spell, stupid?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “It spells sing. S-I-N-G. Sing.”

  “Like a song,” I said.

  “Like Singapore, you toad of a pimp.” Then he forgot about his tutorial ambitions and started running his finger down Indo-China. “Look,” he said to me because he had no other audience, “the Japs have already got Indo-China and they can jump off to Malaya and hit Singapore from the rear. South, Dogshit said. And I’ll bet seventeen dollars and thirty-eight cents that means Singapore from the land and not from the sea.” Smalldane was always betting $17.38 on something. I never knew why.

  For the next four weeks he was out all day and half the night trying to confirm his theory. He borrowed money from Tante Katerine to get Japanese officers drunk and to bribe privates and non-coms to tell him what little they knew about troop movements. He spent hours in the Shanghai Club talking to its British members about Malaya and Singapore’s defenses. “Impregnable, old boy,” he would say to me, mocking their accent. “Absolutely impregnable.”

  I didn’t know when or where he got what he thought was the last piece to his jigsaw, but he got it, and then spent three days writing a two thousand-word story. I still remember its lead. Smalldane read it to me at least six times:

  JAPANESE IMPERIAL ARMY WILL INVADE EAST COAST MALAYA EARLY DECEMBER ETSTRIKE THROUGH JUNGLE AT SINGAPORES UNPROTECTED REAR UNIMPEACHABLE SOURCES REVEALED HERE TODAY

  “You left out a few words, didn’t you?” I said, still completely vague about where Singapore was.

  “They’ll put them back in in New York,” Smalldane said. “You want to go with me to file it?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  We borrowed Tante Katerine’s Airflow Chrysler and started to the Press Wireless office. It was the morning of December 8, 1941, and Japanese troops arrested us both before we got h
alfway there.

  CHAPTER 11

  We flew first class from San Francisco to Swankerton and it was dull and fast as most air travel is now that they keep the jets up around thirty-five thousand or more where you can’t see anything.

  After dinner the night before, Orcutt had asked us to stop by his suite. He was staying at the Fairmont on California and Mason and the suite probably didn’t cost him much more than $125 a day. He told Carol Thackerty to order him a cup of hot chocolate and anything that we wanted. Necessary and I asked for brandy; Carol Thackerty wanted nothing.

  Orcutt made some small talk, mostly about Ernie’s, while we waited for the drinks to arrive. After they came, he took a sip of his hot chocolate and said, “I like to drink it quickly before that slimy skim forms on top.” We waited silently while he drank it in small, rapid sips, much like a bird drinks, except that he didn’t have to raise his head to let the chocolate flow down his throat. He said, “Ah,” when he finished and I assumed that he had gotten it all down without running into any of the slimy skim that forms on top.

  “Now then,” he said to me, “there are a few items that I’ve had prepared in anticipation of your joining us, Mr. Dye.”

  “You must have been confident,” I said.

  “Not altogether. It’s just that I always like everything ready. I simply detest last-minute scrambling about doing things that could have been done at a normal pace. Carol, would you please give me Mr. Dye’s envelope?”

  She reached into her large, almost briefcase-sized purse and took out an oblong manila envelope which she handed to him. Orcutt peeked inside it and then motioned for me to join him on the couch. I took my brandy with me.

  “First,” he said, “your Social Security card. In case you don’t remember, it’s your right number.” I glanced at the card and Orcutt was correct: it was the right number. “Strange about the Social Security card,” he said. “It’s almost worthless as identification, but the number itself is becoming increasingly important. It’s replaced the individual serial number in the armed forces, in fact. I think it’s safe to predict that one of these days—quite soon, really—the number will be used to maintain a full dossier on every citizen of this country. What do you think, Mr. Dye?”