Joe Steele (45 page)

It worked tonight. Instead of a drink, he had a cigarette. Esther smiled at him. She must have known what he wanted to do. They'd been together a good many years now. Chances were she understood how he ticked better than he did himself.

Sarah came into the front room. She made a face at seeing her boring old parents listening to the boring old news. At going on ten, she was convinced they were as far behind the times as Neanderthal Man or the Republican Party. What she would be like when that high-school class of 1956 graduated—not nearly so far away now!—Charlie shuddered to think.

“Can someone
please
help me with my arithmetic homework?” she said. As far as she was concerned, the news existed only to keep her from getting the help she needed. She would have made a pretty good cat.

“What are you doing?” Charlie asked.

“It's long division. With decimal places, not remainders.” By the way she said it, that ranked somewhere between Chinese water torture and the Black Hole of Calcutta when measured on the scale of man's inhumanity to students.

“Well, come on to the kitchen table and we'll have a look.” Charlie found a new reason to be glad he hadn't had that bourbon. It wouldn't have helped him do long division even with remainders.

Sober, he didn't need long to see why Sarah was having trouble. She'd multiplied seven by six and got forty-nine. “Oh!” she said. “Is that all it was?” She snatched the paper away and ran off to do the rest of the work by herself.

“That was fast, Einstein,” Esther said when Charlie came back.

“I'm not Einstein,” Charlie said. “I'm the one who's still breathing.” With his wife, he could still come out with things like that. He never would have had the nerve with anybody else. He wondered how Captain Rickover and his scalps were doing with uranium. Joe Steele hadn't told him anything about it. He didn't go out of his way to ask, which was putting it mildly. If anyone decided he needed to know, he'd find out. If nobody did . . . Maybe no news was good news.

The treason trials helped liven up a dreary winter. Andy Wyszynski outdid himself in some of the prosecutions. He would scream at the
luckless men and women the GBI had grabbed: “Shoot these mad dogs! Death to the gangsters who side with that vulture, Trotsky, from whose mouths a bloody venom drips, putrefying the great ideals of democracy. Let's push the animal hatred they bear our beloved Joe Steele back down their throats!”

Shoot those mad dogs, if they were mad dogs, government firing squads did. Things had got simpler and quicker in the justice system year by year after Herbert Hoover went out and Joe Steele came in.

An assistant attorney general also made a reputation for himself in the spy trials. He was a kid from California, only in his mid-thirties, with a Bob Hope ski-slope nose and crisp, curly black hair. He didn't rant like Wyszynski. He just pounded away, relentless as a jackhammer. “Are you now or have you ever been a Red?” he would demand of each defendant in turn, and, “What did you know, and when did you know it?”

He got convictions, too, about as many as his boss. Joe Steele smiled whenever his name came up. Charlie wondered if the President saw something of his own young, ambitious self in that graceless, hard-charging lawyer.

It was going to be another election year. It got to be February 1948 before Charlie even remembered. He laughed at himself. Back in the day, Presidential races had been the biggest affairs in American politics. The only thing that would keep Joe Steele from winning a fifth term now was dying before November rolled around.

And that wouldn't happen. Joe Steele had disposed of swarms of other men, but he showed no sign of being ready to meet the Grim Reaper himself.

“Hup! Hup! Hup-hup-hup!” Mike watched the company of South Japanese troops parade. They wore mostly American uniforms, though their service caps were the short-billed Imperial Japanese style. Most of them were survivors from Hirohito's army. Jobs were hard to come by in South Japan, especially for veterans. The American authorities discouraged employers from hiring them. So the newly formed Constitutional Guard—no one wanted to call it an army—had no trouble finding recruits.

But they weren't
good
recruits. They knew what to do; it wasn't as if they were going through basic. Giving a damn about doing it? That was a different story.

Mike turned to Dick Shirakawa. Dick was his interpreter, a California Jap who'd gone into a labor encampment after Pearl Harbor and eventually into a punishment brigade. His unit, full of Japs, had fought in Europe. The powers that be had figured ordinary American soldiers in the Pacific would shoot at them first and ask questions later. For once, Mike figured the powers that be got it right.

Like him, Dick had stayed in the Army after the war ended and got the P out from under his corporal's stripes. Since he spoke the language, they'd decided he'd be most useful in Japan once the shooting stopped. Mike was glad to have him. His own bits of Japanese, while they helped him, weren't enough to let him ride herd on these clowns.

“Ask 'em what's eating them, will you?” he said to Shirakawa now. “They should make better soldiers than this.”

Dick palavered in Japanese with three or four guys who looked to have a few brain cells to rub together. They had to go back and forth for a while. Mike had learned that Jap notions of politeness involved telling you what they thought you wanted to hear, not what was really on their minds. You had to work past that if you were ever going to get anywhere. When Shirakawa turned away at last, his face wore a bemused expression.

“So what's cookin'?” Mike asked him.

“Well, I found out how come they don't take us serious,” the American Japanese said. “I found out, but I'm not sure I believe it.”

“Give.” Mike had already had some adventures of his own unscrewing the inscrutable.

“You know what the trouble is?” Dick said. “The trouble is, we're too fucking nice. I shit you not, Sergeant. That's what they tell me. Their own noncoms slugged them and kicked them whenever they pulled a rock. We don't do any of that stuff, so the way it looks to them is, we don't give a rat's ass. To them, we're just going through the motions. That's all they think they need to do, too.”

“Fuck me.” Mike lit a cigarette. He'd imagined a lot of different troubles, but that wasn't any of them. “You know what they sound like? They sound like a broad who's only happy when her husband knocks her around, 'cause that's how she knows he loves her. He cares enough to smack her one.”

Shirakawa nodded. “That's about the size of it. What are we supposed to do? Our own brass would court-martial us—hell, they'd crucify us—if we treated these guys the way
their
sergeants did.”

“I'll talk with Captain Armstrong about it, see what he thinks,” Mike said. “In the meantime, tell 'em it's not our custom to beat the crap out of people who didn't really earn it. Tell 'em that doesn't make us soft, any more than surrendering or taking prisoners does. Remind 'em we won the war and they damn well didn't, so our ways of doing things work, too.”

“I'll try.” Shirakawa harangued the company in Japanese. Mike got maybe one word in ten; he never could have done it by himself. The Constitutional Guardsmen listened attentively. They bowed to the corporal
and then, more deeply, to Mike. After that, they marched a little better, but not a lot better.

When Mike talked with Calvin Armstrong, the young officer nodded. “I've heard other reports like that,” he said, frowning. “I don't know what to do about them. If we treat the Japs the way their old army did, aren't we as bad as they were?”

“If we don't treat 'em that way, will the new army—”

“The Constitutional Guard.”

“The Constitutional Guard. Right. Sorry. Will the goddamn Constitutional Guard be worth the paper it's printed on? Is the idea to be nice to them or to get them so they're able to fight?”

“I can't order you to rough them up. My own superiors would land on me like a ton of bricks,” Armstrong said unhappily.

“Yes, sir. I understand that,” Mike said. “But I'll tell you one thing.”

“What's that?”

“The sorry bastards in the North Japanese Army, they don't ever worry that the Russians telling 'em what to do are too fucking soft.”

Armstrong laughed what might have been the least mirthful laugh Mike had ever heard. “Boy, you've got that right,” he said. “The Red Army's just about as dog-eat-dog as the Japs were.”

“They may be even worse,” Mike said. “Their officers have those NKVD bastards looking over their shoulder all the time.”

“Uh-huh.” Armstrong nodded. “Wouldn't it be fun if the Jeebies kept an eye on our guys like that?”

“I never really thought about it, sir,” Mike answered. He liked Calvin Armstrong. He respected him. But he didn't trust him enough to say anything bad about the GBI where the younger man could hear him. He didn't want to wind up in a labor encampment again if Armstrong reported him. No, the Jeebies didn't put political officers in U.S. Army units, or they hadn't yet, anyhow. That didn't mean they had no influence in the Army. Oh, no. It didn't mean that at all.

*   *   *

E
sther had got a call from the elementary school where Sarah and Pat went. She had to go in early and bring Pat home. He'd landed in trouble
on the playground at lunchtime. Esther told Charlie the story over the phone, but he wanted to hear it from the criminal himself. Not every kindergarten kid could pull off a stunt like that.

“What happened, sport?” Charlie asked when he came back from the White House.

“Nothin' much.” His son seemed not at all put out by landing in hot water.

“No? I heard you had kind of a fight.”

“Yeah, kind of.” Pat shrugged. No, it didn't bother him.

“How come?”

Another shrug. “I had on this same shirt”—it was crimson cotton, just the thing for Washington's warm spring—“and Melvin, he asked me, ‘Are you now or have you ever been a Red?'”

“And so?”

“And so I bopped him in the ol' beezer,” Pat said, not without pride. “Everybody knows Red is a dirty name. But he got a bloody nose, and he started crying all over the place. I guess that's why they sent me home.”

“‘Everybody knows Red is a dirty name,'” Esther echoed.

“When the five- and six-year-olds throw it at each other, you know it's sunk in pretty deep, all right.” Charlie turned back to Pat. “From now on, don't hit anybody unless he hits you first, okay?”

“Okay,” Pat said with no great enthusiasm.

“Promise?”

“Promise,” Pat said, more reluctantly yet. But Charlie and Esther had taught him that promises were important, and that if you made one you had to keep it. With any luck at all, this one would keep Pat from becoming the scourge of the schoolyard—or from getting his block knocked off if he goofed.

Not long after dinner, the phone rang. Thinking it might be someone from the White House, Charlie grabbed it. “Hello?”

“Mr. Sullivan?” a woman's voice asked. When Charlie admitted he was himself, she went on, “I am Miss Hannegan, the principal at your children's school. I'm calling about what unfortunately happened this afternoon.”

“Oh, sure,” Charlie said. “We gave Pat a good talking-to. I don't think you'll have any more of that kind of trouble out of him.”

“I'm glad to hear it.” Miss Hannegan didn't just sound glad. She sounded massively relieved. “I wanted to be positive you weren't angry at Miss Tarleton for bringing Patrick to my office, and to remind you that
of course
”—she bore down hard on that—“Melvin Vangilder had no idea what you do, or he never would have said what he said to your son.”

“Uh-huh. If you hadn't called, I never would have thought of that,” Charlie said. Miss Hannegan seemed more relieved than ever. He said his good-byes as quickly as he could and hung up.

Then he fixed himself a drink. Esther gave him a look, but he did it anyway. The principal had called to make sure he wasn't an ogre. She assumed that someone who worked at the White House had but to say the word and Miss Tarleton (who taught Pat's kindergarten class) would disappear into a labor encampment. So would Melvin Vangilder's mother and father. So would Melvin himself, and never mind that he might or might not have had his sixth birthday. She might not have been wrong, either.

“But doggone it, I'm
not
an ogre,” Charlie muttered when he'd finished the drink—which didn't take long.

“What?” his wife asked.

“Never mind.” The real trouble was, he understood why Miss Hannegan had been so worried. If he were an ogre, she couldn't stop him from doing whatever he wanted to Miss Tarleton and to the Vangilders. All she could do was beg him. If he didn't feel like listening, what would he do? He'd pick up the phone and call J. Edgar Hoover. The Jeebies would take it from there.

He'd never used his influence that way. It hadn't occurred to him, which he supposed meant that his own parents had raised him the right way. He wondered whether Lazar Kagan, say, had got even with somebody who beat him up on a school playground back around the turn of the century. He couldn't very well ask the next time he bumped into Kagan in the White House. And, all things considered, he was bound to be better off not knowing.

*   *   *

W
hen American soldiers in Japan got some leave, they often went to Shikoku. Yes, the natives there resented their presence more than Japs in other parts of South Japan did. But the cities and towns of Shikoku had just
had the hell bombed out of them. They hadn't had the hell bombed out of them and then been fought over house by house. It made a difference.

Along with Dick Shirakawa, Mike took the ferry from Wakayama on Honshu to Tokushima on Shikoku. The ferry was a wallowing landing craft, the kind he'd ridden towards unfriendly beaches too many times. The only part of Wakayama that had much life, even now, was the harbor, and Americans were in charge there.

Tokushima . . . wasn't like that. It was the friendliest beach Mike had ever landed on. It was, in fact, a quickly run-up, low-rent version of Honolulu. The whole town, or at least the waterfront district, was designed to give servicemen a good time while separating them from their cash.

You could go to the USO and have a wholesome good time for next to nothing. Or you could do other things. You could gamble. You could drink. You could dance with taxi dancers who might or might not be available for other services, too. You could go to any number of strip joints—Japanese women, even if most of them were none too busty, had fewer inhibitions about nakedness than their American sisters did. Or you could go to a brothel. The quality of what you got there varied according to how much you felt like spending, as it did anywhere else.

MPs and shore patrolmen did their best to keep the U.S. servicemen from adding brawling to their fun and games. They also stayed alert for Jap diehards who still wanted to kill Americans even two years after the surrender. Japs not in the Constitutional Guard or the police forces weren't supposed to have firearms. Mike knew what a forlorn hope that was. Before the American invasion, the authorities had armed as many people in the Home Islands as they could. You could get your hands on anything from one of those sad black-powder muskets to an Arisaka rifle or a Nambu light machine gun with no trouble at all.

You could also get your hands on what American soldiers still called knee mortars. You couldn't really fire them off your knee, but you could lob the little bombs they threw for most of a mile. Every so often, Japs in the suburbs would shoot at the bright lights of the waterfront. They were only a nuisance—unless you happened to be standing where a bomb went off. The Americans seldom caught anybody. Knee mortars were too easy to ditch.

Nobody fired anything at Tokushima while Mike and Dick were in town. The days were hot and muggy: a lot like New York City in the summertime. Nights were warm and muggy. A lot of the eateries by the harbor featured hamburgers and hot dogs, or steaks if you had more money.

But you could find Japanese food, too. Mike was the only round-eye in the place he and Dick went into. He'd got halfway decent with
hashi
, which made the serving girl giggle in surprise. When Americans did come in here, they usually asked for a fork, not chopsticks. Between pieces of sushi, Mike said, “Before I crossed the Pacific, I never would've touched raw octopus or raw fish or sea urchin. I guess I know better now.”

“We mostly ate American food in L.A.,” Dick said. “Except for the rice—my mom always made sticky rice. But oh, yeah—this is good, too.”

Mike held up his empty glass.
“Biru, domo.”
He went back to English: “Beer washes it down great.”

“You got that right,” Shirakawa said.

They also tended to other pleasures, and went back to Wakayama four days later, lighter in the wallet but sated and otherwise amused. Mike signed for a jeep in the motor pool there, and he and Dick started north again, back toward the Agano River and the increasingly nervous demilitarized zone. Almost all of the traffic was American jeeps and trucks. That was a good thing. The Japs had driven on the left, British-style, before the occupation. Sometimes—especially when they'd had a snootful—they forgot the rules had changed. Head-on collisions with American-driven vehicles happened all too often.