Leisure and I shook hands with Admiral Yates Stirling, exchanged acknowledgments, and at the admiral’s signal took the three chairs opposite his desk. One of them, a leather padded captain’s chair, was clearly meant for Darrow, and he took it grandly.
The admiral sat, leaning back in his swivel chair, hands resting on the arms.
“You will have the full cooperation of my men and myself,” Stirling said. “Full access to your clients, of course, twenty-four hours a day.”
Darrow crossed his legs. “Your dedication to your people is commendable, Admiral. And I appreciate you giving us your time, this afternoon.”
“It’s my pleasure,” the admiral said. “I think you’ll find that, despite the grim nature of your mission, these beautiful islands have much to commend them.”
“We couldn’t have asked for a lovelier day for our arrival,” Darrow said.
“Merely a typical Hawaiian day, Mr. Darrow—the sort of day so magnificent it’s almost enough to make one forget the existence of certain sordid people permitted to exist on these heavenly shores by a too-trusting Providence…. If you’d like to smoke, gentlemen, please go right ahead.”
The admiral was filling an ivory meerschaum with tobacco from a wooden humidor with an anchor carved on it; he didn’t drop a flake of stray tobacco on the spotless desk.
“I imagine you refer,” Darrow said, as he began casually building a cigarette, “to Mrs. Massie’s five assailants.”
“They’re only a symptom of the disease, sir.” Stirling was lighting up the pipe with a kitchen match. He puffed at it, got it going, like a tugboat’s smokestack. Then he leaned back in the chair and spoke reflectively.
“When I first visited Hawaii, well before the turn of the century, long before I dreamed a naval command here would be mine, these beautiful gems of the Pacific were ruled over by a dusky Hawaiian queen. Since then, a once- proud Polynesian race has been displaced by Orientals, coming from the coolie class chiefly, the lowest caste in the Orient. That picturesque simple Hawaiian civilization has well nigh passed away, never to return….”
I knew racial rot like this was anathema to Darrow; but I also knew he needed to stay on the admiral’s good side. Still, I knew he wouldn’t let this pass….
“Yes, it is a pity,” Darrow said as he lighted his cigarette from a matchbook, neither sarcasm nor recrimination in his tone, “that so many waves of cheap yellow labor were brought in to work on the white man’s plantations.”
The admiral only nodded, puffed at his pipe solemnly. “The large number of people of alien blood in these islands is a matter of grave concern to the government; nearly half the population here is Japanese!”
“Is that a fact.”
“Even factoring in our twenty thousand military personnel, Caucasians number barely over ten percent. The dangers of such a polyglot population are obvious.”
“I should say they are,” Darrow said. “Now. Admiral…”
“Hawaii is of prime strategic importance—she must be made invulnerable from attack, or an enemy would have a sword to the throat of our Pacific coast. And that’s why, strange as it may seem, this unfortunate Massie affair may provide an unexpected blessing.”
Suddenly Darrow was interested in Stirling’s racist editorializing. “In what way, Admiral?”
“Well, as I’ve already made clear, I’m no advocate of the melting pot experiment. I’ve been lobbying for some time that the U.S. needs to limit suffrage in Hawaii. I’ve long expressed my firm belief that the controlling government here should be under the jurisdiction of the Navy, and Army.”
“The reports in the mainland press,” Darrow said gently, “of women unsafe on your streets at night, that a hoodlum element here is holding Honolulu in its grip…these have opened the door to Washington considering martial law?”
The mildest frown grazed the admiral’s face. “That may yet happen, though I take no pleasure in the fact, Mr. Darrow. Until this affair, I’d always had congenial and cordial relations with Governor Judd…. We’ve often gone out in a mutual friend’s motor sampan, to different parts of the islands, for deep-sea fishing.”
Wasn’t that just peachy.
“But,” the admiral was saying, “it is the irresponsibility of the Territorial government, and the corruption, and incompetence, of the local police, that transformed the Massie case from a mere crime into a major tragedy.”
“Admiral,” I said, risking a question, “do you mind telling us how you think that happened?”
“Yes,” Leisure said, “we’ve made ourselves familiar with the facts of the case, but we’re burdened with an outsider’s point of view.”
The admiral was shaking his head; smoke curled out of his pipe in corkscrew fashion. “It’s hard to describe how hard the news hit this base…that a gang of half-breed hoodlums on the Ala Moana had ravaged one of our younger set. Thalia Massie is a friend of my daughter’s, you know—Mrs. Massie is a demure, attractive, quiet-spoken, sweet young woman.”
“We’ve met with her,” Darrow said, nodding. “I concur with your assessment, sir.”
His pipe in hand waved a curl of smoke in the air. “Imagine thousands of young officers, sailors and marines, on the naval base, in ships, who as American youth had been taught to hold the honor of their women sacred.”
Well, I knew more than a few sailors on leave in Chicago who hadn’t held the honor of women so very goddamn sacred….
“My first inclination,” he continued, his eyes hard under the pouches, “was to seize the brutes and string them up on trees. But…I set that impulse aside, to give the authorities a chance to carry out the law.”
Darrow seemed about to say something; he seemed about to burst, and the admiral’s endorsement of lynch law wasn’t something he was likely to let ride, even when he needed to….
