King Rat (8 page)

“Oh God,” Daven said deep within himself, “give me the peace of Thy courage. I’m so frightened and such a coward.”

The King was doing the thing he liked most in all the world. He was counting a stack of brand-new notes. Profit from a sale.

Turasan was politely holding his flashlight, the beam carefully dimmed and focused on the table. They were in the “shop” as the King called it, just outside the American hut. Now from the canvas overhang, another piece of canvas fell neatly to the ground, screening the table and the benches from ever-present eyes. It was forbidden for guards and prisoners to trade, by Japanese - and therefore camp - order.

The King wore his “outsmarted-in-a-deal” expression and counted grimly. “Okay,” the King sighed finally as the notes totaled five hundred. “Ichi-bon!”

Turasan nodded. He was a small squat man with a flat moon face and a mouthful of gold teeth. His rifle leaned carelessly against the hut wall behind him. He picked up the Parker fountain pen and re-examined it carefully. The white spot was there. The nib was gold. He held the pen closer to the screened light and squinted to make sure, once more, that the 14 carat was etched into the nib.

“Ichi-bon,” he grunted at length, and sucked air between his teeth. He too wore his “outsmarted-in-a-deal” expression, and he hid his pleasure. At five hundred Japanese dollars the pen was an excellent buy and he knew it would easily bring double that from the Chinese in Singapore.

“You goddam ichi-bon trader,” the King said sullenly. “Next week, ichi-bon watch maybe. But no goddam wong, no trade. I got to make some wong.”

“Too plenty wong,” Turasan said, nodding to the stack of notes. “Watch soon maybe?”

“Maybe.”

Turasan offered his cigarettes. The King accepted one and let Turasan light it for him. Then Turasan sucked in his breath a last time and smiled his golden smile. He shouldered his rifle, bowed courteously and slipped away into the night.

The King beamed as he finished his smoke. A good night’s work, he thought. Fifty bucks for the pen, a hundred and fifty to the man who faked the white spot and etched the nib: three hundred profit. That the color would fade off the nib within a week didn’t bother the King at all. He knew by that time Turasan would have sold it to a Chinese.

The King climbed through the window of his hut. “Thanks, Max,” he said quietly, for most of the Americans in the hut were already asleep. “Here, you can quit now.” He peeled off two ten-dollar bills. “Give the other to Dino.” He did not usually pay his men so much for such a short work period. But tonight he was full of largess.

“Gee, thanks.” Max hurried out and told Dino to relax, giving him a ten-dollar note.

The King set the coffeepot on the hot plate. He stripped off his clothes, hung up his pants and put his shirt, underpants and socks in the dirty-laundry bag. He slipped on a clean sun-bleached loincloth and ducked under his mosquito net.

While he waited for the water to boil, he indexed the day’s work. First the Ronson. He had beaten Major Barry down to five hundred and fifty, less fifty-five dollars, which was his ten percent commission, and had registered the lighter with Captain Brough as a “win in poker.” It was worth at least nine hundred, easy, so that had been a good deal. The way inflation is going, he thought, it’s wise to have the maximum amount of dough in merchandise.

The King had launched the treated tobacco enterprise with a sales conference. It had gone according to plan. All the Americans had volunteered as salesmen, and the King’s Aussie and English contacts had bitched. But that was only normal. He had already arranged to buy twenty pounds of Java weed from Ah Lee, the Chinese who had the concession of the camp store, and he had got it at a good discount. An Aussie cookhouse had agreed to set one of their ovens aside daily for an hour, so the whole batch of tobacco could be cooked at one time under Tex’s supervision. Since all the men were working on percentage, the King’s only outlay was the cost of the tobacco. Tomorrow, the treated tobacco would be on sale. The way he had set it up, he would clear a hundred percent profit. Which was only fair.

Now that the tobacco project was launched, the King was ready to tackle the diamond…

The hiss of the bubbling coffeepot interrupted his contemplations. He slipped from under the mosquito net and unlocked the black box. He put three heaped spoons of coffee in the water and added a pinch of salt. As the water frothed, he took it off the stove and waited until it had subsided.

The aroma of the coffee spilled through the hut, teasing the men still awake.

“Jesus,” Max said involuntarily.

“What’s the matter, Max?” the King said. “Can’t you sleep?”

“No. Got too much on my mind. I been thinking. We can make one helluva deal outta that tobacco.”

Tex shifted uneasily, soaring with the aroma. “That smell reminds me of wildcatting.”

“How come?” The King poured in cold water to settle the grounds, then put a heaped spoonful of sugar into his mug and filled it.

“Best part of drilling’s in the mornings. After a long sweaty night’s shift on the rig. When you set with your buddies over the first steaming pot of Java, ‘bout dawn. An’ the coffee’s steamy hot and sweet, an’ at the same time a mite bitter. An’ maybe you look out through the maze of oil derricks at the sun rising over Texas.” There was a long sigh. “Man, that’s living.”

“I’ve never been to Texas,” the King said. “Been all over but not Texas.”

“That’s God’s country.”

“You like a cup?”

“You know it.” Tex was there with his mug. The King poured himself a second cup. Then he gave Tex half a cup.

“Max?”

Max got half a cup too. He drank the coffee quickly. “I’ll fix this for you in the morning,” he said, taking the pot with its bed of grounds.

“Okay. Night, you guys.”

The King slipped under the net once more and made sure it was tight and neat under the mattress. Then he lay back gratefully between the sheets. Across the hut he saw Max add some water to the coffee grounds and set it beside the bunk to marinate. He knew that Max would rebrew the grounds for breakfast. Personally the King never liked re-brewed coffee. It was too bitter. But the boys said it was fine. If Max wanted to rebrew it, great, he thought agreeably. The King did not approve of waste.

He closed his eyes and turned his mind to the diamond. At last he knew who had it, how to get it, and now that luck had brought Peter Marlowe to him, he knew how the vastly complicated deal could be arranged.

Once you know a man, the King told himself contentedly, know his Achilles heel, you know how to play him, how to work him into your plans. Yep, his hunch had paid off when he had first seen Peter Marlowe squatting Woglike hi the dirt, chattering Malay. You got to play hunches in this world.

Now, thinking about the talk he had had with Peter Marlowe after dusk roll call, the King felt the warmth of anticipation spread over him.

“Nothing happens in this lousy dump,” the King had said innocently as they sat in the lee of the hut under a moonless sky.

“That’s right,” Peter Marlowe said. “Sickening. One day’s just like the rest. Enough to drive you around the bend.”

The King nodded. He squashed a mosquito. “I know a guy who has all the excitement he can use, and then some.”

“Oh? What does he do?”

“He goes through the wire. At night.”

“My God. That’s asking for trouble. He must be mad!”

But the King had seen the flicker of excitement in Peter Marlowe’s eyes. He waited in the silence, saying nothing.

“Why does he do it?”

“Most times, just for kicks.”

“You mean excitement?”

The King nodded.

Peter Marlowe whistled softly. “I don’t think I’d have that amount of nerve.”

“Sometimes this guy goes to the Malay village.”

Peter Marlowe looked out of the wire, seeing in his mind the village that they all knew existed on the coast, three miles away. Once he had gone to the topmost cell in the jail and had clambered up to the tiny barred window. He had looked out and seen the panorama of jungle and the village, nestling the coast. There were ships in the waters that day. Fishing ships, and enemy warships - big ones and little ones - set like islands in the glass of the sea. He had stared out, fascinated with the sea’s closeness, hanging to the bars until his hands and arms were tired. After resting awhile he was going to jump up and look out again. But he did not look again. Ever. It hurt too much. He had always lived near the sea. Away from it, he felt lost. Now he was near it again. But it was beyond touch.

“Very dangerous to trust a whole village,” Peter Marlowe said.

“Not if you know them.”

“That’s right. This man really goes to the village?”

“So he told me.”

“I don’t think even Suliman would risk that.”

“Who?”

“Suliman. The Malay I was talking to. This afternoon.”

“It seems more like a month ago,” the King said.

“It does, doesn’t it?”

“What the hell’s a guy like Suliman doing in this dump? Why didn’t he just take off when the war ended?”

“He was caught in Java. Suliman was a rubber tapper on Mac’s plantation. Mac’s one of my unit. Well, Mac’s battalion, the Malayan Regiment, got out of Singapore and were sent to Java. When the war ended, Suliman had to stick with the battalion.”

“Hell, he could’ve got lost. There are millions of them in Java…”

“The Javanese would have recognized him instantly, and probably turned him in.”

“What about the co-prosperity sphere yak? You know, Asia for the Asiatics?”

“I’m afraid that doesn’t mean much. It didn’t do the Javanese much good, either. Not if they didn’t obey.”

“How do you mean?”

“In ‘42, autumn of ‘42, I was in a camp just outside Bandung,” Peter Marlowe said. “That’s up in the hills of Java, in the center of the island. At that time there were a lot of Ambonese, Menadonese and a number of Javanese with us — men who were in the Dutch army. Well, the camp was tough on the Javanese because many of them were from Bandung, and their wives and children were living just outside the wire. For a long time they used to slip out and spend the night, then get back into the camp before dawn. The camp was lightly guarded, so it was easy. Very dangerous for Europeans though, because the Javanese’d turn you over to the Japs and that’d be your lot. One day the Japs gave out an order that anyone caught outside would be shot. Of course the Javanese thought it applied to everyone except them — they had been told that in a couple of weeks they were all to go free anyway. One morning seven of them got caught. We were paraded the next day. The whole camp. The Javanese were put up against a wall and shot. Just like that, in front of us. The seven bodies were buried — with military honors — where they fell. Then the Japs made a little garden around the graves. They planted flowers and put a tiny white rope fence around the whole area and put up a sign in Malay, Japanese and English. It said, These men died for their country.”

“You’re kidding!”

“No I’m not. But the funny thing about it was that the Japs posted an honor guard at the grave. After that, every Jap guard, every Jap officer who passed the ‘shrine,’ saluted. Everyone. And at that time POW’s had to get up and bow if a Jap private came within seeing distance. If you didn’t, you got the thick end of a rifle butt around your head.”

“Doesn’t make sense. The garden and saluting.”

“It does to them. That’s the Oriental mind. To them that’s complete sense.”

“It sure as hell isn’t. Nohow!”

“That’s why I don’t like them,” Peter Marlowe said thoughtfully. “I’m afraid of them, because you’ve no yardstick to judge them. They don’t react the way they should. Never.”

“I don’t know about that. They know the value of a buck and you can trust them most times.”

“You mean in business?” Peter Marlowe laughed. “Well, I don’t know about that. But as far as the people themselves… Another thing I saw. In another camp in Java — they were always shifting us around there, not like in Singapore — it was also in Bandung. There was a Jap guard, one of the better ones. Didn’t pick on you like most of them. Well, this man, we used to call him Sunny because he was always smiling. Sunny loved dogs. And he always had half a dozen with him as he went around the camp. His favorite was a sheepdog — a bitch. One day the bitch had a litter of puppies, the cutest dogs you ever saw, and Sunny was just about the happiest Jap in the whole world, training the puppies, laughing and playing with them. When they could walk he made leads for them out of string and he’d walk around the camp with them in tow. One day he was pulling the pups around — one of them sat on its haunches. You know how pups are, they get tired, and they just sit. So Sunny dragged it a little way, then gave it a real jerk. The pup yelped but stuck its feet in.”

Peter Marlowe paused and made a cigarette. Then he continued. “Sunny took a firm grip on the string and started swinging the pup around his head on the end of the rope. He whirled it maybe a dozen times, laughing as though this was the greatest joke in the world. Then as the screaming pup gathered momentum, he gave it a final whirl and let go of the string. The pup must have gone fifty feet into the air. And when it fell on the iron-hard ground, it burst like a ripe tomato.”

“Bastard!”

After a moment Peter Marlowe said, “Sunny went over to the pup. He looked down at it, then burst into tears. One of our chaps got a spade and buried the remains and, all the time, Sunny tore at himself with grief. When the grave was smoothed over, he brushed away his tears, gave the man a pack of cigarettes, cursed him for five minutes, angrily shoved the butt of the rifle in the man’s groin, then bowed to the grave, bowed to the hurt man, and marched off, beaming happily, with the other pups and dogs.”

The King shook his head slowly. “Maybe he was just crazy. Syphilitic.”

“No, Sunny wasn’t. Japs seem to act like children — but they’ve men’s bodies and men’s strength. They just look at things as a child does. Their perspective is oblique - to us - and distorted.”

“I heard things were rough in Java, after the capitulation,” the King said to keep him talking. It had taken him almost an hour to get Peter Marlowe started and he wanted him to feel at home.