Americans are doing whatever they’re doing. It’s gone on for four days now. That’s too stinking long.”
“Me? Why me?” Shinjiro Hayashi yipped, but his heart wasn’t in it.
“You’re the educated fellow,” Fujita answered remorselessly, as Hayashi must have known he would. “So go use some of your education for a change.” Fujita himself felt like an idiot whenever he had to talk to one of the microbiologists. That, no doubt, was a feeling they did nothing to discourage.
Sighing as if to say he didn’t think life was fair, Hayashi went off to do as he was told-a definite good point in a subordinate. Fujita already knew life wasn’t fair. He’d had his nose rubbed in it again and again before he made sergeant. Life wasn’t fair now, either, but most of the time he found himself on the other end of the stick for a change.
Hayashi eventually came back with a man who wore spectacles and a white lab coat as if they were extensions of his skin-the way, say, Fujita wore a uniform. “Here is Dr. Doi, Sergeant- san,” Hayashi said. “He will ask Szulc the questions you need.”
“Good.” Fujita bowed deeply to Doi, inferior to superior. “Thank you very much for your help, sir.”
“You are welcome. I am glad to assist. I am also glad for the chance to practice my English. When you do not speak a language for a while, it gets rusty.”
Armed guards brought Szulc over to the compound. He towered over them. He’d be a rough customer in a fight. But who wanted to fight a man who’d thrown away his honor by surrendering? To Dr. Doi, Fujita said, “Please ask him how the Americans are making the count come out wrong.”
Doi spoke English. Fujita could hear that he sounded slow and uncertain. Szulc’s reply was a quick bass rumble that couldn’t have sounded more different from the Japanese scientist’s reedy tenor if it had burst from the throat of a buffalo. Dr. Doi frowned. “He says he does not understand what I say.”
Fujita frowned, too, ominously. “Is that likely?”
“No one will ever think I am an American, but he should be able to follow me,” Doi answered.
That was about what Fujita had expected. “All right, then,” he said, and nodded to one of Szulc’s guards. The man gave Szulc one in the side of the head with his rifle butt. Szulc yelled and staggered, but he didn’t fall over. He didn’t dab at the blood running down his cheek and chin, either. He did give Fujita a hate-filled glare. Fujita cared nothing for that. “Please ask your question again, Doi- san. Please also tell him he’ll get worse if he keeps playing the fool.”
More English from the bacteriologist. Whatever Szulc said this time, it was different from before. It seemed less scornful. A rifle butt to the side of the head would do that, as Fujita had reason to know. “He says he understands now, but he knows nothing about how the count is disarranged,” Doi reported.
“That’s funny, but not funny enough to laugh about,” Fujita said. “Tell him this, very plainly-the next time the count is out of order, we’ll kill enough Americans to set it right.”
“That would waste an important resource,” Dr. Doi protested in Japanese.
“Please tell him anyhow, sir. Let him and the others think we will do it. That will make them behave themselves. I can hope so, anyhow.”
“Ah. All right. I understand.” Doi returned to English. Szulc studied Fujita, as if sniffing for a bluff. Fujita gave back his stoniest stare. On his own, he certainly would kill POWs who complicated his life. Why not? It wasn’t as if prisoners of war were human beings any more. They were just… maruta. Szulc muttered something. Doi said, “He will take word of this back to camp, even though-he claims-he knows nothing of the scheme.”
“He claims, hai.” Fujita gestured to the guards. “Take him back.”
As usual, Fujita had two different men run the count that evening before supper. One reported the proper number of Americans, the other one Marine too few. Fujita lost his temper. He had all the Americans lie down so they couldn’t move without being instantly noticed. He used gestures to explain to them that they’d get shot if they were noticed. This time, the count came out three men light.
“Zakennayo!” Fujita shouted. “How long ago did they get away, and how big a start on us do they have?”
Those were both good questions. He had an answer for neither. Big, strong white men should have been conspicuous around Pingfan. Were the locals sheltering them from the Japanese? Another good question. Fujita wasn’t sure he had an answer for that one, either, but he could make a pretty good guess.
“We need to report this,” Senior Private Hayashi said regretfully.
“I know,” Fujita answered, more regretfully still. They’d catch it for allowing an escape, and catch it again for not noticing right away. But they couldn’t cover it up. Somebody’d blab. Even the American Marines might, to get their guards in trouble. “Zakennayo!” he yelled again, even louder this time.
Out of the frying pan, into the fire. That was how Peggy Druce thought of it, anyway. As soon as the people in Philadelphia discovered she really could stir folks up about the war, they sent her out to do it again and again.
After York, Lancaster. Red Roses instead of White. When she made that crack in Lancaster, somebody told her the two towns’ bush-league baseball teams actually did refight the War of the Roses every time they took the field against each other. She laughed, but later she wondered why. That showed more of a sense of history than was common in the United States.
Not in Europe. They had a sense of history there, all right. Everybody could give you all the reasons for the past 900-or sometimes 1,900-years that showed why he deserved to kick his neighbor in the teeth with a steel-toed jackboot. And his neighbor had reasons just as numerous and just as ancient for kicking him.
And the Japanese were responding to something ancient, too. For hundreds of years, Europeans and Americans had lorded it over the proud, ancient, weak empires in Asia. They’d had the warships and the guns and the military doctrine that let them do it. They’d had the arrogance that let them do it, too. What was that sign in the Shanghai park supposed to say? NO DOGS OR CHINSESE, that was it. Maybe the sign really was, or had been, there. Maybe it was just a story. Either way, it showed an attitude that was definitely there.
Now the Japs had licked the Russians twice. So they thought they were strong enough to swing the bat against the white men’s first team. The United States was going to have to throw a high hard one right at Hirohito’s head to convince them they weren’t ready for the big leagues yet.
Or maybe they were. The war news coming out of the Pacific was uniformly lousy. The Philippines were falling. A bomb from a Japanese plane was said to have blown General MacArthur into dog food. The Japs claimed that at the tops of their lungs. The USA said nothing one way or the other. Peggy’s time in Europe had made her sensitive to the nuances of propaganda. You didn’t talk about what you didn’t like.
By the same token, the American papers weren’t saying much about the way Japan was overrunning Malaya and the Dutch East Indies. You heard occasional stories about how heroic the handful of American ships in the area were. If you paid close attention and checked a map, you notice that fewer and fewer U.S. Navy vessels got mentioned by name. Even the survivors were reported as being heroic farther and farther south.
But how many people checked that closely? How many Americans knew off the tops of their heads whether Borneo was south of Java or the other way around? Peggy hadn’t, not till she looked, and she’d traveled a lot more than most folks. Timor? Sumbawa? Cerami? They sounded like the noises your stomach made after you ate bratwurst and sauerkraut. (At least it wasn’t Liberty Cabbage in this war. Then again, Germany still remained officially neutral toward the USA.)
Peggy didn’t blame the administration for minimizing failures and playing up whatever small successes it could find. If she had, she wouldn’t have gone to Reading, to Easton, to Scranton, to Altoona, to Williamsport… You did what you needed to do, and you tried not to tell too many lies while you were doing it. If you couldn’t help telling a lie, you tried not to make it a whopper.
She stuck to the principles she hoped the administration was also using. It worked. She got big hands everywhere she went. War bond sales at her rallies were bigger yet. So were contributions to the Democratic Party. An election was coming next year, after all. It seemed as if an election was always coming next year. If it wasn’t, it was coming this year instead.
The one place she didn’t go was Pittsburgh. The world had a North Pole and a South Pole. Pennsylvania, by contrast, had an East Pole and a West Pole. Philadelphia was bigger and older and richer and snootier than Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh was tougher and grittier-and if you didn’t believe it, all you had to do was ask anybody who came from there. Pittsburgh prided itself on coal and steel the way Philadelphia bragged about the Main Line. If Chicago hadn’t called itself the City of the Big Shoulders, Pittsburgh would have.
