End of the Beginning Read online

  One nice thing: cholera scared the Japs, too. Several guards had died just as fast as any prisoners. Beriberi, by contrast, didn’t bother them at all. Why should it? They had plenty to eat, and the right kind of food, not just a starvation diet of boiled white rice and not much else.

  Peterson looked around, hoping to spot a gecko. POWs ate the little lizards whenever they could catch them. Sometimes they roasted them over little fires. More often, they didn’t bother. When you were in the kind of shape they were in, raw meat was as precious as any other kind.

  “You know what?” Gordy Braddon asked from beside Peterson. The Tennessean was as skinny as he was, with knees wider than his thighs. A nasty abscess ulcerated one calf. Pretty soon, the medical officer would have to cut it out to keep it from going gangrenous. A puckered red scar on Peterson’s leg showed where he’d gone through that. Ether? Chloroform? The Japs had them. They laughed when the medical officers asked for some. The medical officers were lucky to get iodine, let alone anything more.

  “Tell me,” Peterson said after a while. Beriberi sapped the will as well as debilitating the body. Sometimes even conversation seemed more trouble than it was worth.

  “We’re gonna leave one man dead for every foot of tunnel we drive,” Braddon said.

  Peterson contemplated that. Again, he took his time. He couldn’t help taking his time—his wits wouldn’t work fast no matter how much he wanted them to. “One man?” he said after the slow calculations were complete. “We’re liable to leave five or ten men dead for every foot of tunnel.”

  His companion in misery took his own sweet time thinking about that. “Wouldn’t be surprised,” he said at last. “God damn Walter London to hell and gone.”

  “Yeah.” Even in his present decrepit state, Peterson didn’t need to think that over before he agreed with it. He managed a graveyard chuckle. “Well, you know what the Japs say. ‘Always prenty plisoner.’ ”

  At the rate POWs were dying in the Kalihi Valley, he wondered how long there would be plenty of prisoners. Of course, this place was specifically designed to use them up. A lot of men who went into the ever-deepening tunnel shaft lasted only a few days. The ones who managed to get past that dreadful initiation to life here did better—if survival was better, which didn’t always strike Peterson as obvious.

  “All I want is to be alive when we take this goddamn place back,” Braddon said. “Reckon I get to pay these sons of bitches back then for what they owe me.”

  “Yeah, that’s what keeps me going, too,” Peterson agreed. “Sometimes the idea of getting my own back is about the only thing that does keep me going.”

  He wondered whether the USA would be able to take Hawaii back. When he’d been in the POW camp up near Opana and the ordinary labor gangs, he’d had some connection with the outside world. Part of what he got was Jap propaganda, of course, but not everything was. Here and there, people had clandestine radio sets and heard the other side of the news.

  Not in the Kalihi Valley. The Japs hardly bothered with propaganda here, because they didn’t think the poor damned souls working on the tunnel were ever coming out. If any of the prisoners had a radio, no news from it had ever got to Jim Peterson’s ear.

  He started to settle down for sleep. A thrashing in the bushes made him pause. A furious grunting made him scramble to his feet. Braddon jumped up, too. So did men in worse shape than either of them. So did men in worse shape than either of them who’d been sunk deep in exhausted sleep.

  That grunting meant a wild pig was out there. If they could catch it, if they could kill it, they could eat it. The mere thought of a chunk of pork drove Jim Peterson harder than any Japanese taskmaster’s bamboo club.

  Pigs did wander into the camp every once in a while, looking for garbage—or maybe looking to dig up bodies buried in shallow graves and do unto humans what humans were in the habit of doing unto them. The POWs had pigstickers—bamboo spears with points made from iron smuggled out of the tunnel. They hid them in the jungle; if the guards found them, they confiscated them and beat everybody in the nearest barracks. To the guards, anything that could stick a pig could also stick one of them. The guards weren’t wrong, either. Peterson dreamt of spearing a couple of them. Only the certain knowledge of what would happen to him and everybody else if he tried stayed his hand.

  He grabbed a spear now, and plunged into the dripping emerald jungle in the direction of the grunting. Before he got there, it rose to a furious squealing. “For Christ’s sake, don’t let it get away!” he shouted, and ran harder than ever.

  He found where the pig was by almost falling over it. It was a boar, as nasty a razorback as ever roamed the hills in Arkansas. Two men had already driven spears into it, and hung on to them for dear life. A boar’s tushes could rip the guts out of a man almost as well as a bayonet could. And a wild pig was faster and stronger than a Jap with an Arisaka.

  Peterson thrust his spear into the boar’s side. Much more by luck than by design, the point—which had started its career at the end of a pick—pierced the pig’s heart. The beast let out a last grunt, one that seemed more startled than pained, and fell over dead.

  “My God!” Peterson panted. “Meat!”

  The boar was almost as scrawny as the prisoners who’d slain it. Hunger must have made it chance the camp, just as the POWs’ hunger had made them attack it. More men ran up behind Peterson.

  By camp custom, the prisoners who’d done the actual killing got first crack at the carcass. Also by camp custom, they took less than they might have—enough to fill their bellies once, no more—and left the rest for their comrades who hadn’t been quite so fast or quite so lucky.

  Peterson toasted his chunk of meat over a small fire. He wolfed it down, charred on the outside and blood-rare—close enough to raw to make no difference—inside. In happier times, people warned against pork that wasn’t cooked all the way through. They talked about trichinosis. He couldn’t have cared less. He would have eaten that pig knowing it had died of the black plague.

  His stomach made astonished, and astonishing, noises. It wasn’t used to such wealth. He had to gulp against nausea once or twice. Meat was rich fare after rice and nowhere near enough of it.

  For a little while, the pins and needles in his extremities would ebb. Some of the men with wet beriberi would lose a little fluid from their limbs, and from their lungs. Their hearts wouldn’t race quite so hard whenever they had to move. And then, until the next time a pig got desperate or unlucky enough to fall foul of the POWs, things would go back to the way they’d been before. You couldn’t win. The most you could do was stretch the game out a little.

  “By God, I’ve done that,” he muttered. He slept better than he had in weeks. Too soon, though, his next shift came. It would have been killing work even with all the food he wanted all the time. As things were . . . As things were, by the time he finished, he wondered whether he’d stretched the game at all—and, if he had, whether he’d done himself any favors.

  JANE ARMITAGE WEEDED HER TURNIPS AND POTATOES with painstaking care. Weeds grew as enthusiastically as everything else in Hawaii. She chopped and dug and chopped and dug, and didn’t notice Tsuyoshi Nakayama coming up behind her till he spoke.

  “Oh. Hello!” she said, hoping she didn’t sound as startled as she felt. “What can I do for you?” Nakayama might have been a gardener before Hawaii changed hands. He was still a gardener, in fact, and a damn good one. But, because he was Major Hirabayashi’s liaison man, he was also a major power in Wahiawa these days. You had to be careful around him.

  “You don’t have husband, do you?” he asked now.

  Ice avalanched along Jane’s spine. Had somebody else seen Fletch? Had somebody ratted on her to the Japs? Could you trust anybody at all these days? It sure didn’t seem that way. “I’m not married,” she said firmly, and thanked heaven she’d taken off her wedding ring as soon as she threw Fletch out of the apartment. It would have made a liar of her on the spot.

 
; “You don’t have husband, even in the Army?” Yosh Nakayama persisted.

  “I’m not married,” Jane said again. And the divorce would have been final by now—would have been final long since—if everything in Hawaii hadn’t gone to hell the second the Japs came ashore.

  “You sure?” Nakayama said.

  “I’m sure.” If she had to, she’d show him the papers she did have. They ought to be convincing enough, even if the final interlocutory decree hadn’t been formally granted. (She wondered why they called it that. It was the decree that meant people weren’t interlocked any more.)

  The gardener who was also right-hand man to the occupiers’ local commandant grunted. If that wasn’t an inscrutable noise, Jane had never heard one. Nakayama said, “Maybe you should be careful for a while. You have family you can go to?”

  Jane shook her head. “I just moved here a few years ago.” She wished she could have the words back. They didn’t quite scream that she’d come to Wahiawa as part of a military family, but that was the way to bet.

  Another grunt from Yosh Nakayama. “You go somewhere else for a while? Honolulu? Waimea? Anywhere?”

  She had no travel documents. She thought about what was likely to happen if she ran into a column of Jap soldiers when she didn’t—or even when she did. More ice formed under her skin. “I’m staying right here.”

  He sighed this time instead of grunting. “If I get you papers, will you go?”

  If she left, she would have to walk. The thought she’d had a moment before came back. How much good would papers do her? “No, thanks, Mr. Nakayama,” she said. He’d never been Mr. Nakayama before the war. If she talked to him at all then, she called him Yosh. How could it be otherwise? She was a white woman, after all, and he was just a Jap.

  Now she knew how it could be otherwise. She knew, all right, and wished she didn’t.

  Yosh Nakayama let out another sigh. She had the feeling he was washing his hands of her. But no, for he said, “You change your mind, you let me know right away. Right away, you hear?”

  “Yes, Mr. Nakayama.” Before the war, she would have added chop-chop, pidgin for pronto. Never mind that Nakayama didn’t use pidgin, but real English—slow, sometimes clumsy, but real English. She would have said it just to keep him in his place, in her mind and in his.

  He shrugged his broad shoulders now. He must have known she didn’t intend to do anything of the sort. Off he went, shaking his head. She returned to weeding, but the worm of worry wouldn’t leave. He’d been trying to tell her something. Whatever it was, she hadn’t got the message.

  The next morning, she was about to go out to the vegetable plot again when someone knocked on the door. She opened it—and found herself facing three Japanese soldiers, two privates and a noncom. “You—Jane Armitage?” In the noncom’s mouth, her name was barely comprehensible.

  She thought about denying it, but decided she couldn’t. “Yes. What is it?”

  He spoke in Japanese. The two privates lunged with their bayonets, the points stopping inches from her face. She yelped and hopped back. “You come,” the sergeant said.

  Jane yelped again. “I haven’t done anything!” Fletch. God help me, they must know about Fletch.

  “You come,” the Jap repeated. Maybe he didn’t understand what she said. Maybe—more likely—he didn’t care.

  Since the other choice was getting killed on the spot, Jane came. The Japanese soldiers marched her about four blocks to another apartment building, one that had stood empty since Wahiawa fell. Now it had bars on the windows and guards out in front. A sign in Japanese said something Jane couldn’t read.

  Three or four other parties of Japanese soldiers were also coming up to the place. Each of them had a woman with it. All the women were in their twenties or thirties. All but one were white; the other was Chinese. All of them were prettier than average. A horrid suspicion flowered in Jane. “What is this place?” she demanded.

  “You come.” The noncom pointed to the front door. He’d used just about all the English he had. The soldiers prodded her with the bayonets. She didn’t think they drew blood, but she didn’t think they would hesitate—at anything—if she balked, either. She took an involuntary step. They prodded her again, and she went inside.

  Eight or ten more women already crowded the lobby, along with an equal number of soldiers to make sure they didn’t go anywhere. Jane’s fear grew. Maybe this didn’t have anything to do with Fletch after all, but that wasn’t necessarily good news. Oh, no, not even a little bit.

  Yosh was trying to warn me. Sweet Jesus, he told me to get lost, and I didn’t listen to him. And what was she liable to get for being stupid? In the old days, they’d called this a fate worse than death. To her, the phrase had always been one from bad melodrama. Now, suddenly, she understood just what it meant. It wasn’t so far wrong after all.

  She looked around at her companions in misery. About half looked as terrified as she felt. They had to be the ones who’d added things up the same way she had. The others just seemed confused. Ignorance, here, was liable to be bliss—but not for long.

  One of the Japs in the crowded lobby was a lieutenant she didn’t remember seeing before. “You will listen to me,” he said in very good English. “It is not, ah, convenient for Japanese soldiers in this part of Oahu to travel to Honolulu for comfort and relaxation. So, we set up a comfort house here. You are chosen to man this house.”

  His English might be good, but it wasn’t perfect. Manning wasn’t what the Japs had in mind for them. What they did have in mind . . . Nobody could keep any illusions any more. The women started screaming and cursing and telling the lieutenant no in terms as certain as they could make them.

  He let them yell for a minute or two, then spoke in Japanese to the soldiers by him. They raised their rifles. As one man, they chambered a round. Those sharp clicks pierced the din like a steak knife cutting tender, blood-rare prime rib. Even at that dreadful moment, food came to the forefront of Jane’s thoughts.

  “Enough,” the officer said. “If you do this, you will be well fed. The term of service will be six months. You will not be liable again. If you do not . . .” He shrugged. “If you do not, you will be . . . persuaded.”

  “I’d rather die!” one of the women shouted. She got the words out only a split second before Jane would have.

  With another shrug, the lieutenant barked an order in his own language. Two soldiers handed their rifles to other men, then grabbed the woman, threw her down on the floor, and started beating and kicking her. Her screams and those of the other women filled the lobby. The Japanese seemed altogether indifferent.

  They knew what they were doing, too. They inflicted the most pain they could with the least real damage. When they finished, the woman lay there crumpled and sobbing, but not too badly hurt. She was an object lesson, and a frighteningly good one.

  After yet another order, the soldiers started taking women out of the lobby one by one. Some screamed and had hysterics. The Japs ignored that. Some tried to fight. The soldiers didn’t put up with any nonsense. They grabbed the women’s hands. If that didn’t do the job, or if the women tried to kick, they beat them into submission. They didn’t seem particularly malicious about it; they might have been dealing with restive horses.

  When it came to be Jane’s turn, she did her best to boot one of the Japs right in the balls. Her face must have given her away, because he laughed and hopped back and left her looking like a Rockette with her foot way up in the air. A second later, his buddy punched her in the jaw.

  Had it been a prizefight, the referee would have stopped it and called it a TKO. She didn’t fall down and she didn’t pass out. But everything went blurry for a while after that. When the Japs hustled her along, her feet walked. Her will, her wits—they were somewhere far away.

  She came back to herself sitting at the edge of a bed in a room with bars on the window. I have to get out of here, she thought, and hurried to the door. She was a little wobbly, a
nd the side of her face hurt like hell, but she stayed on her pins. The door opened when she thumbed the latch. She hadn’t been sure it would. But Japanese soldiers in the hallway leered at her when she stuck her head out. No way in hell she could get by them. She ducked back in a hurry.

  Down the hall, a woman started to scream, and then another. A black, choking cloud of fear filled Jane. I have to get away, she thought again. What she thought she had to do and what she could do, though, were two horribly different things.

  She’d just had the bright idea of using the bed for a barricade when the door opened. Too late again, just as she’d been too late figuring out what Yosh Nakayama was trying to tell her.

  In strode the lieutenant who spoke English. “I decided I would start you out myself,” he said, as if she ought to be honored.

  “Why?” Jane whispered.

  “We need comfort women,” he answered. “And I liked your looks.” He took a step toward her. “Let’s get it over with, neh? Then you will know what you have to do.”

  “No,” Jane said.

  But it wasn’t no. She screamed, too, adding to the chorus that had to make this building sound like one of the nastier suburbs of hell. She did her best to fight, too. Again, her best was nowhere near good enough. She took another shot to the jaw. This time, things did gray out for a little while. She came back to herself with her jeans on the floor and the Jap pumping away between her legs. That hurt, too—the pain was probably what brought her back. He didn’t care if she screamed, but he slapped her when she tried to punch him.

  A minute or a lifetime later, he grunted and shuddered and briskly pulled out of her. “Not bad,” he said, getting to his feet and briskly doing up his trousers. “No, not bad at all.”

  Jane lay huddled on the bed. “Why?” she asked again. “What did I ever do to you?”

  “You are the enemy,” he answered. “You are the enemy, and you have lost. You do not ask why after that happens. It is part of war.” He reached out and swatted her bare backside. “Maybe I will see you again.” Away he went, as pleased with himself as any man is afterwards.