scotch, but hey, there was a war on. And it could still get you smashed. Next to that, everything else ran a distant second.
Before long, they headed off to another joint, one Joe Orsatti knew. The Hibiscus Blossom was closer to Hotel Street, Honolulu’s main drag for joy bought and sold. It was a rowdier place than the one they’d just left. Barmaids in short, tight skirts and halter tops fetched drinks. The one who took care of Pete and his pals was also a Jap. If only her eyes were blue, she would have looked like a Siamese cat.
Orsatti patted her on the ass after she brought the second round of drinks. She glared at him. “Don’t handle the merchandise, Mac,” she snapped in tones not far removed from Hoboken or Long Island.
The Marine leered back. “If it’s merchandise, sweetheart, how much are you peddling it for?”
“More moolah than you’ve got, Charlie, however much that is,” she retorted. Somebody at another table waved to her. Off she went. The way she moved, a football referee would have flagged her for backfield in motion.
Orsatti sighed as he watched. “If she’s playing Mata Hari for old Hirohito, I bet she hears all kinds of good shit.”
“Listen to her talk without looking at her and you’d bet she’s never even heard of fuckin’ Hirohito,” Pete answered. “For all we know, she hasn’t.”
“Fat chance,” Orsatti said. Pete didn’t argue with him; he was bound to be right. The other Marine went on, “ ’sides, I like looking at her. For a slanty-eyed gal, she’s pretty goddamn cute.”
Pete wouldn’t have bothered with the qualifier. But then, he’d had his long tour in China. Even though he’d ended up falling for a blue-eyed blonde, it wasn’t because he didn’t like the way Asian women looked. They took a little getting used to, but so did beer and scotch and cigarettes and other good stuff. Orsatti had never drawn duty in Peking or Shanghai. Oriental girls still seemed exotic to him.
When the barmaid came back with another round, he tried to pick her up again, this time a little more smoothly. He still wouldn’t have given Gregory Peck or Cary Grant anything to worry about. And he struck out like a high-school kid flailing against Bob Feller.
“Well, hell. Let’s get outa here,” he said after she wiggled off once more, as if it were the Hibiscus Blossom’s fault he had bad luck and worse technique.
They wound up on Hotel Street, as Pete had known they would. Bars, strip joints, whorehouses masquerading as hotels-anything the horny heart could desire was there for the taking-if you had the jack.
Naturally, military men packed the street. So did MPs and Shore Patrolmen. Pete had his pass checked three times inside of fifteen minutes. Since it was legit, he didn’t mind showing it. Somebody who was there without proper authorization swung on the Shore Patrolman who asked for his papers. That wasn’t exactly Phi Beta Kappa. The SP and his buddies drastically revised the jerk’s phrenology with their billy clubs. Then they slung him into a paddy wagon. It hauled him off to the brig.
“Man, if you want to fight, don’t fight those assholes,” Pete said. “More expensive than it’s worth.”
“That sorry SOB was screwed any which way,” one of his friends said. “Soon as they found out he was AWOL, he was gonna catch it.”
“Yeah, but he didn’t have to bleed, too.” Pete was a practical man.
“Sometimes you just feel like brawling and you don’t care who,” the friend said.
“Well, sure.” It wasn’t that Pete had never walked into a bar looking for a fight. It wasn’t that he’d never found one, either. “But even so…” When you took on the SPs, your movie wouldn’t have a happy ending.
His night did, at one of the joyhouses along Hotel Street. If the blonde he chose looked a little like Vera, he didn’t consciously think about that till later on. Polly wasn’t from Russia by way of Harbin; she told him she came from Fargo, North Dakota.
“So why’d you end up in Hawaii, then?” Pete asked. They had time for a Chesterfield afterwards; having been away from women for so long, he’d come in a hurry. Maybe he’d rise again fast enough for another go. He hoped so. In the meantime…
She laughed. “You go where the customers are at, Jack. In my line of work, this here is the Promised Land. And besides, if you was ever in Fargo through the winter, you’d get the hell outa there like your pants was on fire.”
“That makes sense,” he agreed. Honolulu was bound to have better weather than some pissant burg in North Dakota. Honolulu had better weather than anywhere, possibly including heaven. He stubbed out his cigarette. “How’s about you go down on me for a little while? Then I think I can do it again.”
“How’s about you give me another fin first?” For somebody from Fargo, she imitated his Bronx accent pretty well. Of course, he wouldn’t be da foist guy she evah hoid who talked liked dat.
He pulled an engraved portrait of Abe Lincoln out of his billfold. She stashed it in the nightstand next to the bed in the bare little room. They went on from there.
Alistair Walsh felt like a new man with the uniform back on. He shook his head when that thought crossed his mind. It wasn’t quite right. He felt like his old self again, was what he felt like. He’d felt like a new man in civvies, and he hadn’t fancied the way the new man felt-not a farthing’s worth, he hadn’t.
But he’d left the army out of shame at Neville Chamberlain’s bargain with Hitler, and out of suspicion that the Bentley that ran down Winston Churchill after Churchill loudly and eloquently denounced the deal wasn’t driven by a drunk, but by someone who knew just what he was about.
England’s new government was still looking into that, as it was looking into a great many things its predecessor had done under Chamberlain’s lead, and then under Sir Horace Wilson’s. But one thing that didn’t need looking into was the bargain with Hitler. That went straight into the dustbin. The war was on again.
The former government had put a lot of soldiers out to pasture: men who, like Walsh, couldn’t stomach the big switch, and whom the civilians who’d made the switch couldn’t trust to stay loyal. That was funny, if you liked.
George VI had gone on the BBC, saying the change in government and the change in policy had his blessing. In a separate address of her own, his wife had done the same. Walsh had read somewhere that Hitler called Queen Elizabeth the most dangerous woman in Europe. Considering the source, there was a compliment to be proud of.
No matter what the King and Queen said, the putsch had horrified many, many Britons. The Army hadn’t shot Sir Horace, the way Walsh was convinced the collaborating polecat deserved. Instead, it put him into what some higher up with an unfortunately bureaucratic turn of phrase called “preventive detention.”
If only Walsh knew what the detention was supposed to prevent. It didn’t prevent Horace Wilson from getting endless complaints out and seeing them printed in the Times and the other papers that had fawned on him while he was PM. The Army didn’t come down on the papers for printing that self-serving drivel, either. The generals running the country bent over backward to show they didn’t intend to abridge free speech or any other fundamental rights.
“Meaning no disrespect to you, sir, but it’s bloody ridiculous,” Walsh complained to Ronald Cartland. “The buggers we ousted were more tyrannical than we dare be.”
Cartland nodded and waved to a barmaid for another whiskey: they sat in the pub near the Houses of Parliament where they’d done so much conspiring. “No great surprise there,” the MP said-no, the captain, because he was back in uniform, too. “No matter how odious Sir Horace’s government was, it was constitutionally legitimate. That meant it could do all sorts of outrageous things and get away with them. Because we are extraconstitutional, we have to be much more scrupulous or everyone will start wailing that we’re worse than Hitler. Ironic, what?”
“Oh, perhaps a trifle,” Walsh allowed. He smiled at the barmaid. “Let me have another pint, too, would you, dear?” She was young enough to be his daughter, but he was old enough that a girl young enough to be his daughter could look delicious to him.
Which, sadly, wasn’t the same as saying he was likely to look delicious to her. “Another pint. Okey-doke,” she said in a pseudo-American accent she must have picked up at the cinema. For all the warmth in her voice, he might have been a post-a thirsty post, but a post nonetheless.
He sighed. He was getting to the age where, if he wanted a young, pretty girl to make him happy, he had to lay silver on the dresser beforehand. That was an even bigger shame than any of the troubles related to the change of government.
