On the other hand, those scientist-officers didn’t take him inside the enormous walled-off facility that was Pingfan’s beating heart. He didn’t know what happened to the maruta who went in there, not in any detail. He wasn’t interested in finding out, either. And, unless you were a scientist yourself, once you went behind those high walls, you didn’t come out again: not alive, anyhow.
For a little while, he’d feared he’d infuriated the authorities enough to make them decide to turn him into a maruta. Next to that fate, a couple of beatings didn’t seem so bad.
The sergeant soon set over him, a bruiser named Toshiyaki Wakamatsu, made him remember all the reasons he’d despised sergeants before becoming one himself. Wakamatsu was loudmouthed and brutal. He fawned on officers but wouldn’t listen to anyone of rank lower than his own.
Was I like that? Fujita wondered. He hoped not, but feared he might have been. He couldn’t ask the enlisted men from his squad. They’d never give him a straight answer, any more than he would give one to Wakamatsu. Giving straight answers was a most un-Japanese thing to do. You told your superiors what you thought they wanted to hear. If they had any sense, they knew how to interpret what you said. If they didn’t, their heads swelled up with all the praise you lavished on them.
Sergeant Wakamatsu had his own way of dealing with the Americans. He couldn’t talk to them, any more than Fujita had been able to. Fujita had learned that some of the Americans knew scraps of Chinese. Senior Private Hayashi spoke Chinese fluently. Fujita said not a word of that to the man now holding down his place. Neither did Hayashi. His silence made the demoted noncom feel good. The clever senior private still felt loyal to him-or at least didn’t want to do the blowhard who’d taken his slot any favors.
Instead of talking to the Americans, Wakamatsu gestured to show what he wanted. When the prisoners didn’t catch on fast enough to suit him, he clouted them. That helped him less than he’d seemed to think it would.
“Bakatare! Bakayaro!” he roared at the Yanks. Had he really expected them to cooperate? If he had, he was an idiot himself, even if he called them by that name. Prisoners might have lost their honor simply by letting themselves be captured, but they didn’t go out of their way to help their captors. Anyone with a gram of sense should have been able to see that.
Since Sergeant Wakamatsu couldn’t… Fujita did his best to stay out of the sergeant’s way. His new superior was setting himself up to crash and burn. Fujita didn’t want to catch fire when Wakamatsu did. He hardly cared if the authorities gave him back his old collar tabs.
He kept an eye on the American named Herman Szulc. Wakamatsu still hadn’t figured out that Szulc was a leading troublemaker. And Szulc had a buddy, a smaller fellow called Max Weinstein. One look at that fellow and anyone with a suspicious mind would hear alarm bells.
Weinstein knew some Chinese. Fujita had heard him jabbering with the laborers who did the work around Pingfan that the Japanese didn’t care to do for themselves. Sergeant Wakamatsu must have heard him, too. Did Wakamatsu take any special notice? Fujita was convinced Wakamatsu wouldn’t have noticed his own cock if he didn’t need to piss through it now and then.
“What is the American saying?” Fujita asked Senior Private Hayashi.
“When I’ve heard him, he’s been trying to get extra food from the Chinese,” the conscripted student answered.
“What do you suppose he’s talking about with them when you’re not around to hear?” Fujita persisted.
“Please excuse me, Sergeant- san — I mean, Corporal- san — but how am I supposed to know that?” Hayashi sounded and looked as exasperated as an inferior could afford to do when responding to a superior’s stupid question.
But Fujita still didn’t think it was so very stupid. “Come on. Use your fancy brains,” he snapped. “Is the American a Red? Have the Chinese Reds infiltrated our labor force?”
The Japanese often worried more about Communists in China than they did about the forces that followed Chiang Kai-shek’s government. The Communists were sneakier than the regular Chinese forces, and they made more trouble. They were committed to what they did in ways the regular Chinese forces couldn’t approach.
All the same, Senior Private Hayashi replied, “How can an American be a Red? The Yankees hate Communists almost as much as we do.”
“Maybe,” Fujita replied, in tones that declared he didn’t believe it for a minute. And he had his reasons, too: “In that case, how come they’re cheering when England stops helping Germany and starts helping the miserable, stinking Russians again?” He knew exactly how he felt about the Russians. How else could he feel, considering the too many times they’d come too close to killing him?
To his surprise, Senior Private Hayashi had a comeback. “I think it’s because Hitler scares Roosevelt, Corporal- san,” he said. “Hitler scares just about everybody. He would scare us, too, if he weren’t on the far side of the world.”
“Nothing scares Japan,” Fujita declared.
“Of course, Corporal- san.” Hayashi might have been humoring a boy who was too little to know he’d come out with something silly.
“Nothing does, dammit,” the nettled Fujita said. “If anything scared us, would we have beaten the Red Army? If anything scared us, would we go to war against America and England at the same time as we’re fighting in China?”
Hayashi pursed his lips, as if wondering how much he might safely say. He and Fujita had served side by side in Mongolia and Siberia before coming to Pingfan. Even so, he chose his words with obvious care: “I hope it doesn’t happen that we bit off more than we can chew.”
“Don’t be silly! The Navy is kicking the crap out of the American fleet,” Fujita said. “The Yanks are on the run. The Philippines are falling. If the Americans want a war with us, they’ll have to fight their way through islands that belong to us. Honto? ”
“Honto,” Hayashi said, because it was true. Somehow, though, even his agreement sounded dubious.
Fujita didn’t push it. He’d lost face as well as rank; he didn’t want to antagonize someone who still seemed to respect him. He went back to what they’d been talking about before: “Do pay attention to that Weinstein. If he starts talking to the Chinamen about anything but food-”
“Shall I tell Sergeant Wakamatsu?” Hayashi broke in.
“Oh, yes. Of course. That’s just what you should do.” No one could claim Fujita hadn’t given the proper response. If his tone didn’t match his words… well, how could you report something like that? He and Hayashi both smiled. Yes, they understood each other, all right.
Chapter 11
Bam! Bam! Bam! A battery of German 88mm antiaircraft guns thundered away at the Russian bombers high overhead. Willi Dernen watched puffs of black smoke appear among the planes. None of them caught fire and fell out of the sky, though. How many thousands of meters up there were they? However many it was, they didn’t make easy targets.
Even though the gunners kept missing, Willi waved to them as he trudged past their position. He liked having 88s around. They might have been designed as flak guns, but the high mucky-mucks had made sure they could do other tricks, too. They had armor-piercing rounds in their inventory, for instance. And a high-velocity AP round from an 88 could make even a KV-1 say uncle, when the huge Soviet panzers laughed at almost every other weapon in the German inventory.
“Come on, Dernen! Get it in gear!” Arno Baatz barked.
“Jawohl, Herr Unteroffizier!” Willi answered, as abjectly as if Awful Arno were a field marshal, not a lousy corporal. He did get it in gear, too-for half a dozen paces. As soon as Baatz started yapping at someone else, Willi slowed down again. He hadn’t figured it would take long, and it didn’t.
“Naughty, naughty,” Adam Pfaff said in a prison-yard whisper Awful Arno would never hear.
“Ahh, your mother.” Willi’s reply was no louder. They both chuckled as they marched on. Hating the noncoms set over you was as old and as universal as soldiering. Willi was sure the Ivans’ privates couldn’t stand their corporals and sergeants, either. He would have bet the Japanese and the Amis felt the same way. Caesar’s
