The War That Came Early: West and East Read online

  He picked up a jade tree: not a very big one, but full of detailwork in the carving of branches and leaves, and of peasants and cattle on the base. When he took it over to the counter, the Eurasian man dipped his head again. “You are a man of taste,” he said.

  Which meant the dicker would be harder. “How much do you want for it?” he asked.

  “The price is on the tag here.” The man in the silk suit tapped it with his forefinger. “One hundred twenty-five dollars Mex.”

  That was about forty bucks U.S.—a month’s pay, more or less. The exchange rate went up and down, often wildly. Pete didn’t get mad or storm out. He’d played these games before. “I know that’s what the price tag says,” he said patiently. “But how much do you really want for it?”

  “You are an American,” the Eurasian said. You’ve got lots of cash. Why do you care about getting gouged? Everybody in Shanghai thought that way, and with some reason. But only some. Even Vera thought that way. Pete might be head over heels, but he wasn’t blind. He didn’t think so, anyhow.

  He stayed patient now. “I’m not an American general—I’m an American corporal. A hundred and a quarter Mex is too steep for me.”

  “What a pity,” the man behind the counter murmured. For a moment, Pete thought there’d be no haggle after all. But then the fellow’s narrow shoulders shifted as he sighed. “Perhaps, from an American corporal, I might take a hundred and ten.”

  Pete ended up getting it for seventy-five dollars Mex. He’d hoped to beat the Eurasian down to half the price on the tag, but this wasn’t bad. The man swaddled the jade tree in cotton batting and wrapped it in newspapers full of incomprehensible Chinese hentracks. “Much obliged,” Pete said. It wouldn’t look like anything special as he carried it down the street. In a town where thievery was as much a sport as a crime, that mattered.

  “Not at all, sir. A pleasure matching wits with such a good bargainer,” the Eurasian replied. Of course he’d still made a profit at the price Pete paid—he wasn’t in business for the fun of it. How much had he made? Was that a polite You sucker!? His face gave away nothing. Pete was glad not to have to face him across a poker table.

  Bauble in hand, he walked down Yates Road. He knew where he was going next, and 332 was on the other side of the street from 343. Crossing meant risking his life, but he made it. KEN KEE—EMBROIDERY AND UNDERWEAR, the sign over the door said, with a picture of a lofty pagoda next to the words and some Chinese above them. Pete drew himself up straight before going in, as if advancing on an enemy trench. If you wanted something fancy in the way of lingerie, he’d heard, this was the place that had it.

  The shopgirl who greeted him with a bright smile could have made a mint dancing in any of Shanghai’s fancy clubs. She was tiny and gorgeous. “Yes, sir?” she said, her voice ringing like silver bells.

  “Just looking,” Pete mumbled again. This was harder than going up against a trench full of Japs. They just scared you; they didn’t embarrass you.

  He’d never bought lingerie before. He’d never dreamt he might want to buy lingerie. But when you found yourself with a gorgeous girlfriend, didn’t you want to make her even gorgeouser? (The English teachers who’d rapped his knuckles at every mistake and helped encourage him to drop out of high school and join the Marines would have flinched, but not a goddamn one of them was within 5,000 miles of Shanghai.)

  He nervously eyed a gown. He’d also never dreamt even silk could be so transparent. You could see the more substantial blue thing behind it right through the fabric. He wanted to touch it, but didn’t dare. It looked as if it would tear if you breathed on it. When he thought about seeing Vera through that fabric, he had to turn away from the salesgirl till his hard-on went down.

  When he swung toward her again, he coughed a couple of times and asked, “Um—how much for, uh, this one?” He pointed.

  “Let me see, sir.” She walked over and looked at the tag. “A hundred dollars Mex, even.”

  “Ouch!” Pete exclaimed. “That’s more than I can afford.”

  “It’s very fine quality.” She didn’t add And your girlfriend had better be, if she’s going to put it on, but he could hear it in her chiming voice. She cocked her head to one said, studying him. “Well, what can you afford?”

  No matter what the tags said, there weren’t many fixed prices in Shanghai. “I was thinking, oh, fifty,” Pete answered. Coming back with half the asking price was a standard opening move—a conservative one, but the place intimidated him too much to let him go any lower.

  She nodded and came down a little. Pete moved up. He felt less confident than he had haggling with the Eurasian who sold jade trees. Thinking about jade trees didn’t make him horny. Thinking about this gown … He almost had to turn away from the shopgirl again.

  He ended up paying eighty dollars Mex, more than the carved tree had cost. So much cash, for something that was hardly there! Well, that was the point, wasn’t it?

  When the girl wrapped up the gown, it seemed to take up no space at all. It didn’t weigh anything, either. Maybe it wasn’t silk after all. Maybe some clever Chinaman had figured out how to curdle air, just a little.

  Pete got out of Ken Kee’s as if the place had caught fire behind him. The salesgirl didn’t laugh at his retreat, but he could feel her amused eyes on his back. How many guys had she seen sneaking out of there? It wasn’t as if he were buying dirty pictures, dammit. He paused out on the sidewalk on Yates Road. Dirty pictures only promised. This nightgown would deliver. Boy, would it ever!

  But he wasn’t completely stupid. The next time he saw Vera, he gave her the jade tree first. “Got something for you, babe,” he said, as casually as he could.

  “Chto?” That meant What? When you caught her by surprise, she still sometimes came out with Russian without thinking. He’d got some real wrapping paper from a clerk at the consulate, so the tree looked nicer now than it had when he took it out of the shop. Vera’s quick, clever fingers stripped off the paper and the cotton wool. “Ahh,” she said. “It is very pretty, Pete.” Chances were she could guess to the penny what he’d paid for it, too. By the warmth of the kiss she gave him, she approved. “We go out now?”

  They went out. He was throwing away money like a drunken sailor—like a drunken Marine—but he didn’t care. Not while he was with Vera he didn’t, anyhow.

  They ate. They drank. They danced. They drank. By the time they went back to her little chamber, he was a drunken Marine. Not too drunk, though. He hoped.

  With an air of suddenly remembering, he pulled the smaller package from an inside pocket. “This is for you, too,” he said. If she didn’t like it … Would dying on the spot or wishing he were dead be worse?

  She wasn’t quite so deft unwrapping this one; she’d also been knocking them back. “Ahh,” she said once more, this time on a different note. She unfolded the gown and held it up. It still might as well have not been there. She gave him a slow sidelong smile. “For myself, darling, I would not buy this. I would not wear this. For you … Do you want me to?”

  “Jesus, do I!” he said hoarsely. “Do you gotta ask?”

  Asking was part of the game. Vera understood that, even if Pete didn’t. She also understood enough to walk behind him and say, “Not to turn around until I am telling you.” A pause. Faint rustlings. “Okay now.”

  He turned. She looked even better than he’d imagined, and he hadn’t thought such a thing possible. He took her in his arms. Somehow, the silk also made her feel more like a woman than she ever had before, and she’d always felt about as much like a woman as a woman could feel.

  And he wasn’t too drunk. Oh, no. That turned out to be better than ever, too. One more time, he hadn’t dreamt it could.

  * * *

  SERGEANT CARRASQUEL GLOWERED in the direction of downtown Madrid, only a few kilometers away but as unreachable as the bottom of the sea or the mountains of the moon. “Stupid bastards,” he snarled at no one in particular. “They brought us here to take th
e capital away from the Republic, but we’re farther away than we were right after we came up from Gibraltar.”

  “It’s those damned Internationals, Sergeant.” Joaquin Delgadillo knew he had to soften up the underofficer before Carrasquel started throwing around extra duty or dangerous assignments. “If they hadn’t got between us and the city, we might be in there by now.”

  “That’s what she said,” Carrasquel retorted. “Just shows the brass has its head up its ass, that’s all.”

  “You didn’t say things like that when Marshal Sanjurjo came up to look things over,” Joaquin said slyly.

  “I said plenty. What good would more have done?” Carrasquel replied. “He is a marshal. He talked nice to me, but to the likes of him a sergeant isn’t even a squashed turd on the sole of his boot.” He looked around. “I won’t go on about taking things up the ass where Major Uribe can hear me, either. He’d think it was a good idea.”

  Joaquin giggled, deliciously scandalized. “He’s got cojones,” he said in what might or might not have been reproof.

  “Sure he does,” the sergeant agreed. “And he’d like ’em to be slapping the backside of some pretty little boy—or he’d like some big manly fellow’s cojones slapping his backside. Or maybe both?”

  “Both?” The straitlaced private hadn’t thought of that. Could you both do and be done by? He supposed you could, but … “¡Madre de Dios!”

  “She hasn’t got any cojones. I’m sure of that. Hell, she didn’t even get Joseph’s,” Carrasquel said.

  This time, Delgadillo didn’t answer right away. He was scandalized all over again, and not so deliciously this time. At last, stiffly, he said, “If you’re going to make filthy jokes about the Virgin, you really should fight for the Republic.” Everybody knew the people on the other side hated God—and He hated them, too.

  “God understands me,” Carrasquel said. “If a snot-nosed private doesn’t, I won’t lose sleep over it.”

  Major Uribe had said that God forgave his love life. Everybody seemed to think God would be soft on him in particular, even if all the other sinners running around loose would roast on Satan’s grill forever, with demons sticking pitchforks into them every so often to turn them and make sure they cooked evenly on all sides. Joaquin didn’t think God worked that way. It wasn’t as if God had told him He didn’t—God didn’t waste time talking to a snot-nosed private. But that was how it looked to him.

  “Go liberate some firewood.” Sergeant Carrasquel talked to him, all right. “If you’ve got the time to jaw with me, you’ve got the time to do some real work.” With a martyred sigh, Joaquin started scrounging. He’d tried to keep Carrasquel sweet-tempered, and look what he got for it! Nobody else would sympathize, either. The rest of the guys would just be glad he was busting his butt and they weren’t.

  To add injury to insult, Major Uribe chose him to join a raiding party that night. “We need some prisoners, sweethearts,” Uribe lisped. “We always need prisoners. Have to keep track of what the dirty Reds are up to. They’re going straight to hell, and you can count on it.” He crossed himself.

  So did Delgadillo. He also started working the beads on his rosary. How many prayers would he need to stay safe in a trench raid? The probable number struck him as unpleasantly large. He worked the beads harder. Hail, Mary, full of grace. Don’t listen to the foul-mouthed sergeant. That wasn’t your standard Ave Maria, but it came from the bottom of his heart.

  After he got done with the rosary, Joaquin fixed the bayonet on his rifle—something he hardly ever did—and sharpened one edge of the blade on his entrenching tool. Trench raiding was close-quarters fighting at its nastiest. A couple of the men in the raiding party carried machine pistols, to fill the air around them with lead. Major Uribe had a sword—not an officer’s ceremonial sword, but a shorter, fatter blade, almost a pirate’s cutlass. Christ only knew where he’d found it. By the way he made it wheep! through the air as he limbered up in the Nationalist trenches, he knew what to do with it. And it went without saying that he would lead the party himself. No matter how queer he was, he never sent men where he wouldn’t go himself.

  No moon tonight. That was good. Light wouldn’t betray the raiders as they crawled toward the Republican lines. A few hundred meters away, some of the other soldiers in the Nationalist trenches started shooting at the enemy. As Major Uribe had hoped, the Republicans fired back. With luck, the racket would cover any little noises the raiding party made.

  With luck! What beautiful words those were! Joaquin had thought about that before, usually when artillery dropped too close. It crossed his mind again as he scrambled out of the trench and slithered forward.

  Somewhere not far away, a cricket chirped. It fell silent as the Nationalist soldiers went by. “Mierda,” Joaquin muttered under his breath. An alert Republican sentry might wonder why the bug suddenly shut up.

  He couldn’t do anything about that. All he could do was go on. The Republicans had barbed wire in front of their positions, damn them. Most wiring in Spain was halfhearted: a few strands, easy to cut through and to get through. Not here. The Internationals took war seriously. Damn them, too, in spades.

  “No worries,” Major Uribe said. He had wire cutters. The lengths twanged as they parted one by one. The noise seemed very loud to Joaquin, but the enemy didn’t start shooting. Maybe the Mother of God was watching over him. The major hissed in the darkness. “Come along, lambs. All clear now.”

  On they went, mostly on their bellies. There was the parapet. In. Grab. Out. It would be easy. It could be easy.

  “At my count of three, we rush,” Uribe whispered. “Uno … Dos …”

  He never got to tres. All hell broke loose. Internationals popped up along the parapet and started blasting away with everything they had. The Nationalists shrieked in despair. Major Uribe ran forward, sword drawn. Starlight glittered on the blade—for a moment. Then a bullet caught him. He groaned and fell. The sword flew from his hand.

  Another bullet grazed Joaquin’s shoulder. “Aii!” he howled, and then clapped both hands to his mouth. The more noise he made, the easier the target he gave the enemy. Well, a slug had found him anyhow. Blood dripped warm down his arm.

  The firing eased for a moment. From the trench, someone called out in accented Spanish: “Surrender! Come in now! We’ll take prisoners if you do. If you don’t, you’re dead. First chance, last chance, only chance. Now!”

  How many meters back to his own lines? Too many. Joaquin was sure of that. Maybe they would take prisoners. His side had wanted some, after all. “I’m coming!” he said. Two or three other men also gave up. The others, he decided, would never move again, not in this life.

  He slid down into the trench. An International frisked him in the dark. The fellow took everything that would have done him any good in a fight, and his wallet, too. That was a joke—he had all of seven pesetas in there. He didn’t say anything. The foreigner would find out this wasn’t even chicken feed.

  “Get moving,” the guy said in bad Spanish. “Not to do anything stupid, or I shoot you in the back. ¿Comprende?”

  “Sí,” Joaquin said miserably, and then, “Where are you from?”

  “Estados Unidos. Nueva Iorque,” the International answered as they started toward Madrid.

  “Why did you come here?” If Joaquin kept the guy talking, maybe he wouldn’t shoot him for the fun of it. Maybe.

  “For freedom,” the American said. “Why do you want to fight for a puto like Marshal Sanjurjo?”

  “For my country,” Joaquin replied. The American—was he a Jew? wasn’t everybody from New York a Jew? Joaquin had never talked with a Jew before—laughed at him. He would have laughed at the other fellow’s so-called freedom, if only he were the one holding the rifle. But he wasn’t. Head down, he shambled off into captivity.

  NIGHT IN THE SIBERIAN WOODS. Hideki Fujita sat in a foxhole, slapping at mosquitoes. Daytime, nighttime … The mosquitoes didn’t care. They bit whenever they found bare s
kin. Fujita had itchy welts all over. The damn mosquitoes had bitten him right through his puttees. He wouldn’t have believed they could do that till he got here, but he did now.

  “Hayashi!” he called.

  “What is it, Sergeant-san?” the superior private asked.

  “What’s the name of that bloodsucking demon in the American movie?”

  “Ah! He’s called Dracula, Sergeant-san,” Shinjiro Hayashi answered. Fujita could hear the relief in his voice. He’d figured Fujita wanted something harder, something more dangerous. Whatever a sergeant wanted, a private had to give it to him.

  “Hai! Dracula!” Fujita said, and slapped again. “The night tonight is full of Draculas. You hear them buzzing, neh?”

  “That’s right,” Hayashi said. Not even a private with an education would ever tell a sergeant he was wrong. If he did, he’d get an education of a brand-new kind, but not one he’d want.

  Fujita wanted a cigarette. He didn’t light up. Who could guess where a Russian sniper might be lurking? Like any other hairy animals, the Russians were at home among the trees. A bullet might fly out of nowhere if he struck a match. Or even the smell of burning tobacco might guide a sniper toward him. Who could say how Russians knew what they knew?

  They didn’t know how to give up. Though the Kwantung Army had cut the Trans-Siberian Railroad, Red Army counterattacks showed that the enemy would keep trying to restore the lifeline to Vladivostok.

  A buzz in the air … Fujita paused with his hand raised to swat at something. This was no mosquito: this was a deeper sound, almost a rumble. Japanese bombers flew by at night to pound Russian positions farther north. And sometimes the Russians returned the favor. These sounded like Russian machines, sure as hell. Their note was different from those of Japanese airplanes. To Fujita, it seemed more guttural, like the incomprehensible Russian language compared to his own.

  “Bombers!” someone yelled in perfectly comprehensible Japanese.

  Just before the bombs started whistling down, Fujita did stick a cigarette in his mouth and light it. Why not? It would make him feel a tiny bit better—and, if there were Russian snipers in the neighborhood, they’d be scared out of their wits, too. Those planes were dropping by dead reckoning, dropping blind. Bombers, as Fujita had found, were none too accurate even when they could see their targets. When they couldn’t … Any Russian snipers faced at least as much danger as the Japanese on whom they preyed.