End of the Beginning Read online

  This was going to be a gun emplacement. It was nicely sited: on the south side of a low hill, to make it harder to spot from the north—the probable direction of any invasion—but there’d be an observer at the top of the hill to guide the firing. He’d be hard to spot, too, especially once they got done camouflaging his position; running a phone line between the one place and the other would be easy as pie. Fletch had a thoroughly professional appreciation of what the Japs were doing right here.

  He didn’t appreciate having to work on it. Making him do that went dead against the Geneva Convention. The Japs were proud that they hadn’t signed it. Anybody who complained on that particular score caught hell—or even more hell than anybody else caught.

  Odds were the phone line the Japs used to link the top of the hill and the gun emplacement would be captured American equipment. They were using as much of what they’d grabbed here as they could.

  And they were fortifying Oahu to a fare-thee-well. The United States had put a lot of men, a lot of equipment, and a lot of ships in Hawaii. Having done that, the Americans smugly decided no one would have the nerve to attack them here. And look what that got us, Fletch thought, turning another shovelful of earth.

  The Japs labored under no such illusions. They knew the USA wanted Hawaii back. If the Americans managed to land, they would have to fight their way south an inch at a time, through works their own countrymen had made. Every time Fletch stuck his shovel in the ground, he gave aid and comfort to the enemy.

  He didn’t like feeling like a traitor. He didn’t know what he could do about it, though. If he didn’t do what the Japs told him to, they would kill him. It wouldn’t be as neat or quick as knocking him over the head, either. They would make him suffer so nobody else got frisky ideas.

  “Isogi!” the closest Jap noncom shouted. Like everybody else who heard him, Fletch worked faster for a while. He didn’t look back to see if the bandy-legged bugger was yelling at him in particular, he just sped up. Looking back suggested to the Japs that you had a guilty conscience. It gave them an excuse to wallop you, as if they needed much in the way of excuses.

  Ten minutes later, Fletch did look back over his shoulder. The Jap was standing there spraddle-legged, his back to the POWs, taking a leak. Fletch promptly eased off. He wasn’t the only one who did.

  One of the fellows in his shooting squad was a tall, sandy-haired guy from Mississippi named Clyde Newcomb. “Lord almighty,” he said, wiping his sweaty face with his filthy sleeve. “Now I know what bein’ a nigger in the cotton fields feels like.”

  Fletch dug out another shovelful of dirt and flung it aside. “I do believe I’d sell my soul to be a nigger in a cotton field right now,” he said, “as long as it was a cotton field on the mainland.”

  “Well, yeah, far as the work goes, I would, too,” Newcomb said. “I wouldn’t ask more’n about a dime for it, neither. But that’s not what I meant. Nobody ever treated me like a goddamn nigger till I stacked my Springfield and surrendered. We ain’t nothin’ but dirt to the Japs, an’ low-grade dirt at that.”

  “So you Southern guys treated niggers like dirt?” Fletch didn’t care much one way or the other, but anything you could talk about helped make time go by, and that was all to the good.

  “You’re agitatin’ me.” Newcomb spoke without heat. “But seriously, you gotta let the niggers know who’s boss. You don’t, and pretty soon they’ll start thinkin’ they’re just as good as white folks.”

  “You mean like the Japs here in Hawaii started thinking they were just as good as haoles?” Fletch asked. Whites here hadn’t lynched local Japanese, the way whites lynched Negroes in Mississippi. They’d found other, not quite so brutal, ways to keep them in their place. Even so, they were paying now for what they’d done then. If the Japs here had been treated better, there would be fewer collaborators these days.

  Clyde Newcomb gave him a funny look. “Yeah, kind of—only niggers really are down lower than we are.”

  Fletch took it no further. What was the point? Newcomb was so blind to some things, he didn’t even know he couldn’t see them. And we’re supposed to win this war? God help us! Did the Japs have clodhoppers like Newcomb running around loose? Maybe they did. Some of these guards sure acted as if a rifle was far and away the most complicated thing they’d ever had to worry about. Fletch hoped so. If the other side’s yahoos didn’t cancel out ours, we were in a hell of a lot of trouble.

  Another load of dirt flew from Fletch’s shovel, and another, and another. Every so often, a noncom would yell at the POWs to hurry up again. And they would . . . for a little while, or till he turned his back. Even if Newcomb didn’t know his ass from third base, it was the rhythm of a cotton field, but of a cotton field back in slavery days before the Civil War. Nobody here worked any harder than he absolutely had to.

  The overseers knew it as well as the slaves. They made an example out of somebody who moved too slowly to suit them—or maybe somebody chosen at random—almost every day. And they were more savage than the overseers of the American South. Negro slaves had been expensive pieces of property; overseers back then could get in trouble for damaging them. None of the Japs cared what happened to POWs here. The more of them who dropped dead, the happier they seemed.

  A whistle blew when the sun went down. The work gang lined up for the little lumps of rice and greens that wouldn’t have been enough to keep men alive if they’d lain around doing nothing. Then they slept. Exhaustion made bare ground a perfect mattress. Fletch closed his eyes and he was gone.

  When he dreamt, he dreamt of Jane. That hadn’t happened in a while. But he didn’t dream of her naked and lively in the bedroom, the way he had after they first broke up. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d dreamt of Jane—or even of a Hotel Street hooker—that way.

  This dream was even more excruciatingly sensual, and filled him with an even more desolate sense of loss. He dreamt of Jane naked and lively . . . in the kitchen. She was fixing him the breakfast to end all breakfasts. Half a dozen eggs fried over medium—just the way he liked them—in butter. A dozen thick slices of smoke-rich bacon, hot fat glistening on them. A foot-high pile of golden flapjacks slathered in more butter, yellow as tigers, and real Vermont maple syrup. Wheat toast with homemade strawberry preserves. Coffee, as much as he could drink. Cream. Sugar.

  “Oh, God!” He made enough noise to wake himself up. He looked down to see if he’d come in his pants. He hadn’t. He was damned if he knew why not.

  CORPORAL TAKEO SHIMIZU LED HIS SQUAD on patrol down King Street. The Japanese soldiers marched in the middle of the street; there was no wheeled traffic to interfere with them except for rickshaws, pedicabs, and the occasional horse-drawn carriage or wagon. It was another perfect Honolulu day, not too hot, not too muggy, just right.

  Shiro Wakuzawa’s eyes swung to the right. “I still say that’s the funniest-looking thing I ever saw,” he remarked.

  “Have you looked in a mirror lately?” Shimizu asked. The rest of the squad laughed at Wakuzawa. But it wasn’t cruel laughter, as it would have been in a lot of units. Shimizu hadn’t said it intending to wound. He’d just made a joke, and the soldiers he led took it that way.

  And Wakuzawa wasn’t far wrong. The water tower decked out with painted sheet metal to look like an enormous pineapple was one of the funniest-looking things Shimizu had ever seen, too. Senior Private Yasuo Furusawa, who had a thoughtful turn of mind, said, “What’s even funnier is that it stood up through all the fighting.”

  He wasn’t wrong, either. After bombing Pearl Harbor, Japanese planes had also pounded Honolulu’s harbor district. The Aloha Tower, down right by the Pacific, was only a ruin. But the water tower, which had to be one of the ugliest things ever made, still stood.

  On the patrol went. Japanese soldiers and sailors on leave scrambled to get out of their way. Since Shimizu was on patrol, he could have asked them for their papers if he felt officious. Some of them probably didn’t have valid papers. If he
wanted to make his superiors smile on him, catching such miscreants was a good way to do it. But Shimizu was a long way from officious, and didn’t like sucking up to his superiors. He enjoyed a good time himself; why shouldn’t others feel the same way?

  Civilians bowed. Shimizu marched his men through one of the unofficial markets that dotted this part of Honolulu. They were technically illegal. He could have caused trouble for the locals by hauling in buyers and sellers. But, again—why? You had to go along to get along, and he didn’t see how a trade in fish and rice and coconuts did anybody any harm.

  Besides, this market was within sight of Iolani Palace. If the guards didn’t like it, they could close it down. Shimizu snickered. The Japanese soldiers and naval landing troops at Iolani Palace were just as much a ceremonial force as the Hawaiian unit with whom they now shared their duty. They probably weren’t good for much that involved actual work.

  “Corporal-san, do those Hawaiian soldiers have live ammunition in their rifles?” Private Wakuzawa asked.

  “They didn’t used to, but I hear they finally do,” Shimizu said. “We’re pretending they’re a real kingdom, so it would be an insult if they didn’t, neh?”

  “I suppose so,” Wakuzawa said. “Are they reliable, though?”

  Senior Private Furusawa answered that before Shimizu could: “As long as we outnumber them, they’re reliable.”

  Everybody in the squad laughed, Shimizu included. It looked that way to him, too. “This is like Manchukuo, only more so,” he said. The soldiers nodded at that; they all understood it. Manchukuo had a real army and a real air arm, not the toy force the King of Hawaii boasted. But the soldiers and fliers obeyed the Japanese officers on the spot, not the puppet Emperor of Manchukuo. And if they ever decided not to, Japan had more than enough men in Manchukuo to squash them flat.

  The Hawaiians were impressive-looking men. Many of them were more than a head taller than their Japanese counterparts. But the American defenders of Oahu had been bigger than Shimizu and his comrades. And much good it did them, he thought.

  On marched Shimizu’s squad. Every so often, he looked back over his shoulder to make sure his men were parading properly. He didn’t catch them doing anything they shouldn’t. They always pointed their faces straight ahead, and kept them impassive. If their eyes slid to the right or the left every now and then to look at a pretty girl in a skimpy sun dress or a halter top—well, so did Shimizu’s. No woman back in Japan would have let herself be seen dressed—or undressed—like that.

  A Japanese captain stepped out from a side street. “Salute!” Shimizu exclaimed, and smartly brought up his own right arm.

  If anyone saluted poorly or in a sloppy way, the officer could land the whole squad in trouble. If Shimizu hadn’t seen him, and the men marched past without saluting . . . He didn’t care to think about what would have happened then. Aside from the beating he and his men would have got, his company commander probably would have busted him back to private. How could he have lived with the disgrace?

  Well, it hadn’t happened. The captain saw the salutes. He must have found them acceptable, for he went on about his business without ordering Shimizu’s men to halt.

  “Keep your eyes open,” Shimizu warned. “Later we’ll be going through Hotel Street. There will be plenty of officers there, outside the bars and the fancy brothels. A lot of them won’t care that they’re on leave. If you don’t spot them, if you don’t salute, they’ll make you sorry. Wakarimasu-ka?”

  “Hai!” the soldiers chorused. It was a rhetorical question; by now they’d had plenty of time to learn to understand the vagaries, the vanity, and the touchy tempers of the officers under whom they served. And since those officers had essentially absolute power over them, mere understanding wasn’t enough. They had to placate and propitiate those officers like any other angry gods.

  They got their own back by coming down hard on the people over whom they ruled. Furusawa pointed to a haole man in his twenties. “He didn’t bow, Corporal!”

  “No, eh?” Shimizu said. “Well, he’ll be sorry.” He raised his voice to a shout: “You!” He also pointed at the white man.

  The fellow froze. He looked as if he wanted to bolt, but he feared the Japanese would do something dreadful to him if he tried. He was absolutely right about that. He also realized what he hadn’t done. He did bow now, and spoke with desperate urgency—in English, since he knew no Japanese.

  That wouldn’t save him. Shimizu tramped up to him and barked, “Your papers!” He spoke in Japanese, of course: it was the only language he knew. His tone and his outthrust hand got his meaning across. The local man pulled out his wallet and showed Shimizu his driver’s license. It had his photograph on it.

  Shimizu gave him a stony glare even so. The white man reached into the wallet and pulled out a ten-dollar bill. Shimizu made it disappear fast as lightning—it was more than the Army paid him in two months. Despite the bribe, he slapped the man in the face, the way he might have slapped one of his own soldiers who’d done something stupid. The white man gasped in surprise and pain, but after that he took it as well as a soldier might have. Satisfied, Shimizu nodded coldly and went back to his men.

  “Come on,” he told them. “Get moving.” Down the street they went. He looked back over his shoulder once. The white man was staring after them, eyes enormous in a cloud-pale face.

  Hotel Street was as raucous and lascivious a place as ever. Shimizu wished he were visiting it on leave and not on patrol. Music blared from the open doorways of half a dozen dives. Some of it was Japanese, the rest the syrupy-sweet tunes of the West. Shimizu had heard that Americans found Japanese music peculiar. He knew he thought Western music was strange.

  Harried-looking military policemen tried to keep some kind of order. Drunk soldiers and sailors wanted no part of it. Every so often, the military policemen knocked a couple of heads together. Even that accomplished less than it would have anywhere else.

  “The Americans are foolish to attack our ships,” Senior Private Furusawa said. “If they dropped bombs on Hotel Street, they could wipe out all our forces.” Everybody in Shimizu’s squad laughed, for it was funny, but the laughter quickly stopped, for it also held too much truth.

  “Here! You!” A military policeman pointed at Shimizu. “Come take charge of this man.” He shook a sozzled sailor, who giggled foolishly.

  “So sorry, Sergeant-san, but we’re on patrol and we still have a lot of ground to cover. Please excuse me,” Shimizu said. Because he and his men were on duty of their own, the military policeman had no choice but to nod. Shimizu didn’t smile till the fellow couldn’t see him any more. Saying no—being able to say no—to one of the hated military police felt wonderful. “Forward!” he called, and the patrol went on.

  IV

  OSCAR VAN DER KIRK AND CHARLIE KAAPU SAT IN A WAIKIKI SALOON DRINKING what the bartender alleged to be Primo beer. Hawaii’s native suds had never been a brew to make anybody forget fancy German beer—or, for that matter, even Schlitz. This stuff tasted more like bathwater after the University of Hawaii football team got clean in it.

  Charlie had a different opinion. “So,” he asked the man behind the bar, “how sick was the horse when he pissed in your bottles?”

  “Funny,” the barkeep said. “Funny like a crutch. You try getting fucking barley these days. For beer brewed from rice, this ain’t half bad.”

  “Beer brewed from rice is sake, isn’t it?” Oscar said.

  “Sort of. I have some of that, in case any Japanese officers wander in,” the bartender said. By the way he said Japanese officers, he meant Japs. But he wouldn’t say that, not around people he didn’t completely trust. Oscar knew he and Charlie weren’t informers, but the barkeep didn’t. Fiddling with his black bow tie, he went on, “There are some real hops in this, though. It’s doing its best to be beer, honest.”

  “That’s not very good,” Charlie said, and then, incongruously, “Give me another one, will you?”

 
; “Me, too,” Oscar said as he emptied his glass. “Primo’s closer to real beer than what they call gin or okolehao is to the real McCoy these days.”

  “You got that right, brother.” Charlie Kaapu made a horrible face.

  “Yeah, well, you don’t want to know some of the shit that goes into them.” The bartender set up two more beers. “Four bits,” he said. Oscar slid a half-dollar across the bar. The bartender scooped it up.

  Oscar raised his glass. “Mud in your eye,” he said to Charlie.

  “Same to you,” the half-Hawaiian surf rider replied. They both drank. They both sighed. This Primo wasn’t good, even if it wasn’t so bad as it might have been. Charlie sighed again. “We ought to do something different,” he said.

  “Like what?” Oscar asked. “Just getting along is hard enough.”

  “That’s the point,” Charlie said. “That’s why we ought to do something different.”

  Back when Oscar was at Stanford, his philosophy prof would have called that a non sequitur. Somehow, he didn’t think Charlie would appreciate philosophy. “What have you got in mind?” he asked.

  “We ought to go back to the north shore,” Charlie said. “We haven’t been up there in a hell of a long time.”

  Oscar stared at him. “Are you out of your goddamn mind?” he exclaimed. “The last time we did go up there, we damn near got killed.” Just thinking about it brought back gut-wrenching, bladder-squeezing raw terror.

  “Yeah, I know.” His hapa-Hawaiian buddy looked vaguely embarrassed. Maybe he was remembering fear, too. But he went on, “That’s another reason to go back. It’s like when you fall off a horse—you get back on again, right?”