The Fools in Town Are on Our Side

by Ross Thomas

  “You believe him?” he said in the same, hurt tone that he’d use if I were to disagree with his favorite contention that Marciano could have taken Clay in three rounds.

  “He was dying,” I said. “Why should he lie?”

  “You’re not that naive.”

  “Maybe I am. But then he said something else, too,” I said, rather pleased with my own skill as a liar.

  “What?”

  “He said you made a mistake. I agree with him.”

  That didn’t bother Vicker either. It only caused him to raise an eyebrow. His left one. “What mistake?”

  Vicker actually had made a number of mistakes and some of them he couldn’t help, such as the fact that I didn’t much like him. But there were others. One was the call that he’d made from his office just before we left for the meeting with Pai. After that, the two chunky Chinese showed up. That might be called a coincidental mistake, Then he accused Pai of trying to tumble me to the Chinese Communists who already knew everything they needed to know about me. That could only be called a dumb mistake—one very much unlike Vicker. Almost last was the mistake Vicker made when he shot Pai before the Chinese could tell me what he had on his mind. That, I suppose, could be labeled an irritating mistake. But I wasn’t going to tell him about all of them just then—only about the final and worst mistake that he’d made.

  “Pai said you shot the wrong man, Gerald,” I said. “That was your big mistake. You should have shot me instead.”

  CHAPTER 13

  I learned to recite the alphabet and how to write a name in the Bridge House Apartments, which the Japanese had converted into a prison. The alphabet was the usual one, but the name was my new one, William Smalldane, firstborn son of the noted American correspondent, Gorman Smalldane.

  The Japanese who arrested us on December 8 made Smalldane drive Tante Katerine’s Chrysler across Szechwan Road Bridge and into the Bridge House compound, which was located about two blocks from the central post office in the Hongkew section. During the drive Smalldane managed to slip me his two thousand-word story that never got filed. I dropped it on the floorboards and kicked it back under the front seat. They must never have found it. If they had, Smalldane probably would have been executed either as a top-grade spy or a small-time prophet.

  There was a crowd of foreigners at Bridge House that morning, some of them half-dressed, all of them a little bewildered. They kept talking about Pearl Harbor, but it meant nothing to me. I was more interested in watching them empty their pockets onto a desk behind which sat two Japanese officers, a captain and a major.

  “Get this straight, Lucifer,” Smalldane whispered to me. “You’re now William Smalldane. My only son. You got that? William Smalldane.”

  “William Smalldane,” I said, reveling a little in the sound of it. Even then I didn’t care much for Lucifer. When we got to the major and the captain they made Smalldane empty his pockets. They placed the items in a brown envelope and then demanded that he remove his belt.

  “The child,” the captain said. “Your son?”

  “Yes,” Smalldane said.

  “He must empty his pockets.”

  I had quite a nice collection. A half-package of Lucky Strikes; a switchblade knife with a seven-inch blade; an empty spool; four dirty pictures; a lint-flaked piece of candied ginger; a chain to a bathtub stopper; a box of wax matches; an Indian head U.S. penny, dated 1902; a purple Crayola; and a Three Little Pigs and Big Bad Wolf pocket watch which didn’t run.

  The Japanese captain listed everything, even the ginger, and then sealed it in an official envelope, except for the dirty pictures. He snickered at them and kept two for himself and gave the major the other two.

  It was cold in Shanghai and I was wearing my treasured corduroy knickers with thick woolen socks; high-topped brown shoes; a flannel shirt; a woolen sweater; a plaid woolen lumberjack coat; a knitted red cap; and long underwear. Underneath all that I wore the handmade money belt that I had painstakingly fashioned out of an old pillowcase. It contained around $1,000 in American and British currency. The money was the proceeds from my drunk-rolling efforts and I always wore it, even to bed.

  The Japanese officers produced another form and began asking Smalldane questions about where we were born, nationality, occupation, age, and length of residence in Shanghai. Smalldane answered everything and even volunteered information about his alleged ex-wife, and my new mother, who had died in what he claimed to have been the terrible San Francisco cholera epidemic of 1934. They seemed to believe him.

  When they were through asking questions, they made Smalldane sign the form. Then they handed me the pen, but Smalldane took it away from me, shook his head sadly at the Japanese officers, and tapped his forehead in the universal gesture that means not quite bright. The Japanese nodded, almost in sympathy, I thought, and let Smalldane sign the form for me. They did, however, insist on fingerprinting us both.

  We were turned over to a couple of Japanese guards who escorted us through a door that led to the ground floor of the former Bridge House Apartments. The ground floor was designed originally to house small shops, but it had been converted into cells whose thick doors were bolted with chains and locks and bars. The guards directed us to a Japanese sergeant who seemed to be the chief jailer. He sat behind a plain wooden desk. On the wall back of him were lists of what I guessed were names, written in Chinese and several other languages, or so Smalldane later told me.

  “By God,” he said to me, “they’ve had it planned for months. All that time I spent digging and nobody even had a smell of this place.” He was, forever, the reporter. The jailer told him to shut up.

  It was cold and the light was dim in Bridge House. The jailer looked at us carefully and then selected some keys from a bunch that must have weighed six pounds. He motioned for the guards to follow him and they prodded us down the hall to one of the cells. The jailer twisted keys in the two locks, slid back the bolt, undid some chains, and motioned us in. Then he clanged the door behind us. We weren’t alone. There were almost three-dozen other persons in the cell, which was eighteen feet long and twelve feet wide. Smalldane grabbed my hand and we managed to find a place near enough to a wall so that we could lean against it.

  I counted the persons in the room. There were thirty-three of them, including eleven women. It was a cosmopolitan bunch: English, Americans, Chinese, one Korean, four Canadians, and a redheaded man who claimed to be a Mexican national, but remembering Tante Katerine’s admonition, I didn’t believe him. The Japanese didn’t either.

  “Will somebody please tell me just what the hell happened at Pearl Harbor?” Smalldane said.

  They told him, those who’d listened to the radio that morning of December 8, 1941, in Shanghai. It was December 7 at Pearl Harbor because of the international dateline. Others had heard that the Japanese had landed on the east coast of Malaya, which both depressed and elated Smalldane. “By God,” he said, “if I’d just filed last week I’d’ve had fifteen job offers today and I could’ve named the price.”

  “Would it not present a formidable problem to report a war from the inside of a jail?” I said in my most logical French.

  “Why don’t you take a nap?” Smalldane said. “A long one.”

  The meals came twice a day, shoved through a twelve-inch aperture in the cell door. The first meal was a bowl of rice which contained the heads of three dried herrings. It was warm. The second meal was the same, except that it was cold. There was no third meal. Having been reared on much superior fare, I refused to eat the first day. Smalldane shrugged, reached for my bowl, and polished it off, fish heads and all. On the second day and thereafter I ate everything edible and some that was not.

  The Japanese started coming for Smalldane after we had been in Bridge House a week. They led him away and when he came back, he came with bruises, and once with a black eye, and once with a tooth missing. A lower one on the left side.

  “They think I’m the goddamned Scarlet Pimpernel of Shanghai
,” he told me and when I said I didn’t know who the Scarlet Pimpernel was, he spent the next three or four days reciting the tale and improving on its dialogue. The other prisoners listened intently. They had nothing else to do.

  Bridge House prison had either fifteen or sixteen cells which were solid, windowless walls on three sides. At the front of the cell large wooden bars, about six inches in diameter, were set a couple of inches apart. The door was wood, at least four inches thick, and there was a great deal of clanging and banging of chains and bars whenever it was opened. The sound haunted me for years.

  A wooden box in the corner served as a toilet. Whenever the women used it, the men turned their backs or looked the other way. It was emptied by the Chinese prisoners at night. They often argued for the privilege since it at least got them out of the cell.

  Because the Hongkew section of Shanghai had been under Japanese military control since 1937, they had had no trouble in keeping Bridge House prison a secret. Before Pearl Harbor, I learned that it had been used to jail those Chinese who disappeared suddenly from either the French Concession or the International Settlement. Two of the Chinese in our cell told Smalldane that they had been there so long that they had forgotten what they were originally charged with.

  Smalldane was the only foreigner that I ever knew the Japanese to beat, although the guards smacked the Chinese around regularly, often with one-by-four-inch planks that they liked to break over Chinese heads. Any Chinese head. It seemed to be a favorite form of exercise. We were treated casually enough for the first month, except for Smalldane, and then the word apparently came down and the Japanese got tough. There was absolutely no heat in the Bridge House cells and our only warmth came from huddling close together under thin, lice-infested blankets. Smalldane taught me how to kill lice by cracking them between my fingernails. You couldn’t just mash them to death. The Japanese guards laughed about the lice. When they weren’t laughing about that, they cackled over a Chinese prisoner whose right leg one of them had jabbed with a bayonet. The wound developed gangrene and the Chinese moaned and screamed a lot before he died.

  The new crackdown ruled that prisoners couldn’t talk to each other, something that the Japanese didn’t enforce too stringently except when they had nothing better to do. But because more prisoners were daily being jammed into the cells, they forced us to sit in rows. That made it easier for them to conduct their head count every four hours. We sat, our knees drawn up to our chests, our heads bowed, facing in the general direction of Tokyo and, I suppose, Hirohito. As punishment, they made us sit Japanese fashion, which didn’t bother me too much, but which played hell with the circulation of the older prisoners. After six or seven hours of it, some couldn’t walk for days.

  They searched each prisoner every two days or so. All but me. For some reason the guards didn’t think that a child would conceal anything. It wasn’t until we’d been in jail for a month that I told Smalldane about the money belt.

  “You have what?” he said, and he must have said it in an incredulous whisper although I no longer remember.

  “My money belt.”

  “How much?” he said.

  “What’s the British pound worth now?” said the rotten little money changer.

  “Damn it, I don’t know, make it five dollars a pound.”

  “Then I have twelve hundred and seventy-five dollars U.S.”

  “Jesus,” Smalldane muttered and then slumped into a halfway comfortable position so that he could think about what use to make of the windfall.

  On Christmas, 1941, Tante Katerine sent us a basket of food containing three roast chickens, cigarettes, brandy, tinned goods, including a plum pudding that she had scrounged somewhere, candy, nuts, and about four-dozen dainty sandwiches filled with pâté de foie gras. One of the Japanese guards pounded on the small opening of the cell door and yelled for the Smardane. When the Smardane made his way to the door, the guard displayed each item in the basket. Then he ripped off a chicken leg and chewed it noisily. Next he tried some of the candy. He liked that, too. Finally, he bit into one of the sandwiches, didn’t like the pâté, and spat it out. “Here,” he said and shoved the sandwiches at Smalldane, who brought them back to our row.

  Smalldane wasn’t as interested in eating the sandwiches as he was in examining their filling. On the dozenth one that he opened, he found what he was looking for, a note from Tante Katerine.

  “Well, it looks like we have Christmas dinner after all, Lucifer.” I shook my head and made a vague kind of gesture that took in the entire cell. We were all scruffy by then, dirty, cold, and incredibly hungry. Most of the prisoners sat or knelt huddled in their filthy blankets, their sunken eyes staring at the pile of sandwiches. The Chinese prisoners were the worst of all because they didn’t for a minute believe that they would share in our luck. They looked, then looked away, and then looked back again. They couldn’t help themselves.

  “Aw, shit,” Smalldane said. He took four of the sandwiches and gave me the rest. “Here, Tiny Tim, it’s your last chance to play Scrooge.”

  “Who’re they?” I said.

  “Go pass out the sandwiches and I’ll tell you.”

  I crawled around the filthy floor, passing out cute little pâté de fois gras Sandwiches which had all the crust carefully sliced off. Some said thank you. Others said Merry Christmas or God bless you. And still others just silently snatched the food from my hand and crammed it into their mouths.

  “What’s the note from Tante Katerine say?” I asked Smalldane when I crawled back to our row.

  “Read it yourself. But, hell, you can’t read. She says that a boat’s leaving for the States with foreign civilians that are going to be traded for Japanese civilians. You got that?”

  I nodded.

  “She’s trying to juice our way on to that boat. She’s gone to the Swiss Embassy, to Wu, to everybody she can think of. It’s cost her a packet. She mentioned how much, of course.”

  I nodded again. “Of course. How much?”

  “Six thousand American so far.”

  I was impressed, not with the amount so much as with Tante Katerine’s willingness to part with a dollar that didn’t guarantee her a rapid return of at least eight percent compounded semi-annually. I started to cry. It was the first time I’d cried since I’d been in jail.

  “What the fuck’s wrong with you?” Smalldane said.

  “I want to go home,” I said.

  “Your home’s in the States now, kid.”

  “I don’t know anybody there,” I said between sobs, “I want to go home to Number Twenty-seven and Tante Katerine.”

  Smalldane sighed and patted me on the shoulder. “You can’t anymore.”

  “Why?”

  “They closed it down today. That’s what Kate says. The whorehouse is no longer your home.”

  When you’re eight years old and in jail and someone tells you that the only home you ever really remember no longer exists, it hits hard. I think I went into shock for a few moments and then I stopped crying and started to bawl—in earnest. Smalldane kept patting away on my shoulder, a little embarrassed. He nodded apologetically at the rest of the prisoners, some of whom nodded back, some sympathetically, some dully. But none complained. Finally, Smalldane got bored with my emotional exhibition, leaned over, and speaking Cantonese, whispered into my ear: “If you don’t silence yourself, my cowardly little turtle, I will sell you to the fat Japanese guard for the night. He has offered more than a fair price.”

  I shut up.

  “That’s better,” Smalldane said. “Now for your education. First the alphabet.”

  It took me an hour to memorize the alphabet by rote and another hour to learn how to draw William Smalldane with my finger in the dirt and filth of the floor. I didn’t know which letter was which, but I could draw it fairly well after an hour.

  “That’s my new name?”

  “That’s it,” Smalldane said.

  “Please, Gorman, could you teach me something e
lse?”

  “What?”

  “Could you teach me how to draw Lucifer Clarence Dye?”

  He smiled at me, a sad kind of a smile, I thought, then nodded and said, “Sure, kid. You might even need it again one of these days.”

  CHAPTER 14

  They didn’t waste any time. The phone rang in my room in the Sycamore Hotel (Swankerton’s Oldest and Finest) before the bellhop got through showing me how the color television set worked. I gave him a dollar and a smile and nodded my goodbye as I picked up the green instrument and said hello.

  “Mr. Dye?” It was a woman’s voice.

  “Yes.”

  “Would you hold on for Mr. Ramsey Lynch?”

  I told her yes and then Lynch was talking, his voice as smooth and as buttery as his brother’s, but deeper, more confident, and with much less contentiousness in the tone. It was a good voice for a liar and I automatically assumed that he was one of the best.

  “Welcome to Swankerton, Mr. Dye,” Lynch said.

  “Thank you.”

  “I understand that you’re the man.”

  “From whom?”

  “From here and there.”

  “That’s where, not who.”

  “Well, Brother Gerald did mention you to me.”

  “I thought he might.”

  “He sent his best.”

  “His best what?”

  Lynch chuckled. It was a rich, warm, comfortable sound such as fat men make after they no longer mind being fat. “Regards, of course,” he said. “Gerry mentioned that he’d recommended you highly.”

  “So I heard.”

  “Surprised?”

  “Probably not as much as I should be, but then Gerald was always full of surprises.”

  Lynch chuckled again, happily. “Even as a kid. Never knew what he’d do next. But the real reason I called is that we’re having a little policy meeting this afternoon, and I kind of thought you might like to sit in.”

  “What kind of policy?”

  “Civic policy, Mr. Dye. Seems that there may be sort of a hassle going on during the next couple of months so we thought we’d lay out some ground rules.”