“I’ll bet you did,” Oscar said, again lightly. She made as if to hit him. He made as if to duck. They both laughed this time. Oscar wouldn’t have been surprised if she was a first-class secretary. She’d be good at anything she set her mind to. She sure as hell screwed as if they were going to outlaw it day after tomorrow.
“What are you up to?” she asked.
“Some surfboarding lessons. Some sailboarding lessons. You know about sailboards?” He waited till she nodded, then struck a pose and went on with what he hoped was pardonable pride: “I invented ’em. And I do some fishing, and I trade the fish for other stuff.”
“You thought of sailboards?” Susie said. Now Oscar nodded. She grinned at him. “That’s swell. I’ve seen some guys using them. Maybe I’ve even seen you out there on the water—who knows?”
“Like you’d care.” Oscar did his best to sound as if he was still teasing. It wasn’t so easy now.
“I might,” Susie said. “How do you know unless you try to find out?”
“And get slapped down for my trouble? Fat chance.”
“Hey, we had fun.” Susie might have been challenging him to deny it, and he couldn’t. She continued, “Maybe we could have some more.”
“We’d just start fighting again.” Now Oscar dared her to tell him he was wrong.
“Maybe we wouldn’t,” she said—if that meant she thought he was wrong, it didn’t mean she thought he was very wrong.
He’d thought he would gloat, but he didn’t. All he said was, “What’s wrong with the fellow you’re taking dictation from?”
Even as he said it, he wondered if it would make her mad. It didn’t. She answered matter-of-factly: “Underhill? He’s got a Chinese wife he’s crazy about and three little kids. It happens.” Her shrug held all sorts of knowledge.
They had had fun—in bed. Anything else? As he’d said to Charlie, anything else had been trouble. So did the one make up for the other? Maybe it did. She hadn’t stolen from him, anyway, and she’d had plenty of chances. He thought it over. “Heck, come along if you want to,” he said, knowing he’d probably regret it but not right away.
“You still have that apartment in Waikiki?” Susie asked. When he nodded, she said, “Why don’t you come to my place instead? It’s a lot closer.”
“Okay.” Oscar was nothing if not agreeable.
He was so agreeable, Susie made another face at him. “Listen, buster,” she said, “do you know how many guys would give their left one for an invite like that? Do you?” She sounded half joking, half belligerent.
“Probably a bunch,” Oscar answered. “If they start beating down the door, can I go out the window?”
“You’re a terrible man.” Susie Higgins scowled. “Come on, before I change my mind like you deserve.”
Her apartment was roomier than his, and likely more expensive, too. He wondered in what coin she was paying for it, but then shook his head. Whatever she was, she wasn’t a pro. And she was getting by, where plenty of people who’d been here a lot longer were having all sorts of trouble.
As soon as she closed the door behind her, she pulled the sun dress off over her head. “We had fun, didn’t we?” she repeated.
Oscar caught her to him. “Sure,” he said . . . agreeably.
CAPTAIN KIICHI HASEGAWA glowered at Commander Minoru Genda. “The Army is being very difficult,” complained the senior naval officer in Hawaii.
“Yes, sir,” Genda said—usually a safe answer when a superior was fuming.
“Here in my own quarters on Akagi, I can tell you what I really think of those people,” Hasegawa said. “You won’t run off at the mouth.”
“No, sir,” Genda said. That was also safe when it turned out to be agreement.
Hasegawa reached into a desk drawer and pulled out a bottle of whiskey. He rummaged a little more and came up with two glasses. He poured a knock for himself and another for Genda, sliding the second across the desk. “ Kampai!” he said.
Genda echoed the toast. The whiskey glided smoothly down his throat and started a small fire in his belly. “What can you do, sir?” he asked.
“I can’t do a damned thing,” Hasegawa answered. “General Yamashita outranks me. He’s stubborn as an ox, and not much smarter.”
“Sir”—now Genda spoke with considerable urgency—“the Army and the Navy have to get along here. We need both services to defend the island, and each needs to know what it must do and what the other will do.”
“Yes, yes.” Hasegawa said it, but he didn’t mean it.
Sensing as much, Genda spoke more urgently still: “The Americans divided responsibility here, too. They didn’t do a very good job of it. That’s one reason these islands are ours now. Do you want to imitate them?”
With that, he did get Captain Hasegawa’s attention. Hasegawa took a meditative sip from his drink and then said, “At least the Americans had the sense to make a Navy man the senior officer in the islands.”
So that’s what’s eating you, Genda thought. Aloud, he said, “Nobody here can do anything about that, sir. The only people who can change the command setup are in Tokyo.”
“Don’t I know it!” Hasegawa said bitterly. “They don’t want to listen to me. They especially don’t want to listen to me after the Yankee bombers raided us. All they want to do is bring in more soldiers and more Army airplanes. As if we didn’t have to drag the Army to Hawaii kicking and screaming!” He gulped down the whiskey and poured himself another healthy dose.
Trying to put the best face he could on it, Genda said, “Now the Army understands how important it was to seize these islands.”
“Maybe,” Hasegawa said. “Then again, maybe not, too. The Army just has to say, ‘Take this and that from Japan to Honolulu.’ The Army just has to say it. The Navy has to do it. And once the men and the airplanes get here, does the Army worry about the food and fuel we have to haul in to keep everything the way it’s supposed to be? Not likely! The Army seemed to think we can bring in everything easy as you please.”
“I’ve been keeping track of the food situation, sir,” Genda said. “It’s not quite as bad as it was right after the surrender.”
“Yes, I know that,” Hasegawa agreed. “Things can hardly help growing here. That will take care of itself once we clear the land that was planted with sugarcane and pineapple and turn it over to rice and other real crops, crops people can eat. But you can’t plant gasoline bushes, dammit.”
Genda had been keeping track of that, too. Genda kept track of everything he could; it was part of his nature. When he said, “We have . . . enough,” he put things in the best light he could.
“We have enough to go from one routine day to the next, yes,” Hasegawa said. “Do we have enough if we really have to fight? I don’t have much good to say about the Yankees. We licked them just the way we should have. But they will never lose because they run short of things. Can we say the same?”
Genda wished Japan could. He knew she couldn’t. That was what this war was about: getting the Japanese Empire the oil and the rubber and the tin—the things—it needed to stay a great power. He said, “Once we win, we will be able to say that. It will be true then.”
“Then, yes. Now?” Hasegawa rolled his eyes. “The Prime Minister can afford to worry about then. I have to worry about now. I know I am only an ignorant sea captain, but the way it looks to me is, if now isn’t the way we want it, then won’t be, either.”
It looked the same way to Genda. He said so, adding, “If we didn’t have to keep bringing in more soldiers and more Army airplanes, we could bring in more supplies for what’s already here instead. That would serve us better in the long run.”
“We should be able to do both, neh?” Hasegawa said.
“Yes, we should.” Genda let it go at that. He knew—as Hasegawa undoubtedly did, too—the Japanese didn’t have enough shipping capacity to let them bring in reinforcements and fully supply them, too. “If we could make sure American submarines didn�
�t trouble us . . .”
Hasegawa looked as unhappy as Genda felt. The first time a U.S. sub sank a Japanese freighter, it had been news, a chance to complain about America’s inhumanity. It had happened several times since then, and Japan hadn’t said a word. Acknowledging each sinking would have been the same as admitting the shoe was starting to pinch. American bombers from the mainland couldn’t bother Hawaii. American submarines setting out from the West Coast had no trouble at all.
“The Army has complained that we don’t stop all submarines before they make trouble for us,” Hasegawa said.
“Let the Army try it! Good luck to them!” Genda burst out. “We do what we can. We use convoys. We zigzag. We escort with destroyers. We use all the tricks we learned in the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean in the last war.”
“Yes, I know,” Hasegawa said unhappily. “They aren’t always enough.”
“That’s because we’re finding out what kind of tricks the Americans learned then—and since,” Genda added.
Captain Hasegawa sent him a sour stare. “Commander, this operation is more your brainchild than anyone else’s—and that includes Admiral Yamamoto. We did everything we had to do to take these islands. Frankly, we did more than I thought we could do. Why can’t you be contented now?”
“Two reasons, sir,” Genda answered. “The first is, I hoped losing Hawaii would knock all the spirit out of the Americans and knock them clean out of the war before it really got started. We can see that hasn’t happened. They’re still fighting. They haven’t figured out what they want to do and how they want to do it yet, and we have to hope they will take a long time before they do. That leads me to the second worry. Taking these islands was one sort of problem. Holding them is a very different one.”
“Oh, yes,” Hasegawa said in a voice like iron. “Oh, yes. Holding Hawaii is the reason we have to put up with these Army bumpkins.”
Genda managed a thin smile. “They would say, Taking Hawaii is the reason we have to put up with these Navy snobs.”
“I don’t give a shit what the Army says.” Hasegawa sounded more like a bumpkin than a snob. “I want to be replaced. I’ve already told Tokyo as much. They need to send a Navy man out here who has the rank to deal with Yamashita. Until they do that, I have no faith that these islands can be held, because the Army will make a hash of it.”
Genda couldn’t say what he was thinking, not to a superior officer. He would have spoken his mind with Mitsuo Fuchida, and was pretty sure Fuchida would have done the same with him. But not with Captain Hasegawa, especially since Genda thought the senior Navy man in Hawaii had made a frightful mistake. Genda was sure Hasegawa would be relieved of his post here. He’d just done his best to make himself impossible. But Genda didn’t think the Navy would send out an admiral to counterbalance the Army commandant. That would have to go through the Cabinet, and Hideki Tojo, the Prime Minister, was a general himself.
When Genda didn’t say anything, Hasegawa had to know what was in his mind. The Akagi’s skipper didn’t push him on it. He just said, “That will be all, Commander.”
“Yes, sir.” Genda rose, saluted, and left the captain’s cabin. Like any ship’s compartment, the cabin had a heavy steel waterproof door. Genda closed it as gently as he could. It thudded into place even so. The sound of metal meeting metal seemed much more final than he would have wanted.
WHENEVER MAJOR HIRABAYASHI summoned the people of Wahiawa at an unusual time, Jane Armitage started worrying. After watching Mr. Murphy get it in the neck—literally—she feared the Jap in charge of this part of the island would offer up another object lesson. One of those had been a thousand too many.
Yosh Nakayama stood up on a table to translate for Hirabayashi. The gardener’s face was impassive as he turned the major’s excited Japanese into far more stolid-seeming English. “The Japanese Empire announces that the island of Corregidor has surrendered to imperial forces under General Homma. The Empire also announces the fall of Port Moresby in New Guinea.” He had to go back and forth with Hirabayashi several times before he got that one straight.
Jane knew where New Guinea was, but couldn’t have said where on the island Port Moresby lay to save herself from Hirabayashi’s sword. She knew New Guinea wasn’t far from Australia. If the Japs were taking towns there, were they looking to go after the Land Down Under next?
Could anybody stop them? Up until the day she threw Fletch out, he’d insisted that the USA could kick Japan around the block. She’d thought he knew what he was talking about. On the evidence so far, he’d been as misguided a soldier as he had been a husband.
“Banzai! for the Japanese Empire!” Nakayama said.
“Banzai!” the people of Wahiawa said. Jane hated herself for joining the cheer. You couldn’t get out of it, though. Bad things happened to people who tried. It wasn’t even safe to mouth the word without saying it out loud. Somebody would be watching you. Somebody would be listening to you. You couldn’t show your thoughts anywhere, not if they weren’t the sort of thoughts the Japs wanted you to have.
She looked around the crowd. More than a few people in Wahiawa had cheered when the American bombers flew over the town on their way to plaster the Japanese planes at Wheeler Field. There were missing faces these days. What had happened to the men and women who’d disappeared? The people who knew weren’t talking. Not knowing only made their fate more frightening to everyone else.
And who had betrayed them? Obviously, you were a fool to trust any of the local Japanese. That didn’t mean none of them was trustworthy. Some of the younger ones really were patriotic Americans. But others pretended, and were good at pretending. Finding out who belonged to which group could cost you your neck. Much less dangerous to think of all of them as menaces.
Much as Jane wished it did, that didn’t mean all whites were reliable. Some of them didn’t even bother to hide their collaboration. They, at least, were honestly disgusting. The snakes hiding in the grass were the ones that killed when they bit, though.
As for Chinese and Filipinos, they barely entered into Jane’s calculations. She’d had little to do with them before the war started, and she still had little to do with them. To her, they were more nearly part of the landscape than people in their own right.
Major Hirabayashi spoke in Japanese once more. “You can go now,” Yosh Nakayama said laconically. The local commandant had probably said something like, You are dismissed. That was how people who ran things talked. The only thing Nakayama had ever run was his nursery. He didn’t talk fancy.
Jane despised him less than she had when he first became Hirabayashi’s right-hand man. He did what he could for Wahiawa. He passed on the Jap’s orders without glorying in them and without seeming to imagine they came from him. She would have thought more of him if he’d chosen to have nothing to do with the major, but he could have been worse.
She wanted to go back to her apartment, put her feet up, and do nothing for a while. What she wanted to do and what she had to do were two different things. It was back to the potato plot to weed and to pick bugs off the plants and to smash them once she had picked them off.
Every time she looked at her hands, she wanted to cry. Those calluses, those short, ragged, black-rimmed nails . . . Things would have been even worse if everybody else’s hands weren’t about the same. As Jane worked, she watched tendons jut and muscles surge under her skin. She’d lost weight; she didn’t think she had an ounce of fat anywhere on her body. But she was stronger than she’d ever been in her life.
Of course, she was also working harder than she ever had in her life. Teaching third grade was nothing next to keeping a garden plot going. Somewhere not far down her family tree were farmers. That was true of almost everyone. Now she understood why they’d gone to town and found other lines of work. What she didn’t understand was why anybody who didn’t have to grow crops did. You had to be starving or nuts to break your back like this every day . . . didn’t you?
On her way to the plot
, two Japanese soldiers came up the sidewalk toward her. She stepped aside and bowed as they tramped past. They walked by as if she didn’t exist. That was better than when they leered. When they leered, she had all she could do not to run away. There hadn’t been a lot of rapes in Wahiawa, but there had been some. One of the women had had the courage to protest to Major Hirabayashi afterwards. It hadn’t done her any good. Nobody was going to punish the Japs for anything they did to locals.
Once Jane was weeding with her head down, she felt a little safer. Not only was she less visible, but other locals were around her. They would squawk if Japanese soldiers tried to drag her away. How much those squawks would help . . . She tried not to think about that.
In fact, she tried not to think about anything. If she didn’t think, she could get through a minute at a time, an hour at a time, a day at a time. Whatever happened, it would simply be . . . gone. And with most of what happened these days, it was better that way.
AS USUAL, JIRO TAKAHASHI was by himself when he took fish up to the Japanese consulate. He wished Hiroshi or Kenzo would come with him, but he didn’t try to talk them into it. He’d given up on trying to talk them into anything that had anything to do with politics or with the war. Their ideas were as fixed as his. (That wasn’t precisely how he looked at it, of course. To him, they were a pair of stubborn young fools.)
He bowed to the guards outside the building. They returned the courtesy. “It’s the Fisherman!” one of them said. “What have you got today, Fisherman? Anything especially good?” He licked his lips.
Laughing, Jiro shook his head. “Just some ahi. It was a pretty slow run, out there on the ocean.”
“Ahi is good,” the guard said. “Not that we ever get more than a mouthful—and not even that very often. Eh, boys?” The other Japanese soldiers mournfully nodded agreement.
Days of Infamy Page 40
