No Accidental Death

by Garrett Hutson

  After looking in the window for almost a minute, Ramsey climbed down the stacked crates, and moved slowly up the alley, looking up and down the brick façade. His eyes moved over Jonesy’s hiding spot, and Jonesy held his breath; but Ramsey’s face quickly pulled back and looked Jonesy directly in the eye.

  “Jones! What are you doing here?”

  “I was about to ask you the same thing.”

  “Working a story,” Ramsey said, vague.

  “I don’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to guess that one, wise guy.”

  Ramsey regarded him warily for a couple of seconds. “S’pose we’re workin’ on the same story?”

  God, I hope not. “I dunno, why don’t you tell me what you’re doing, and we’ll see.”

  Ramsey’s eyes narrowed. “Why aren’t you out talkin’ up military experts? There’s a big invasion happening up at Wusong, in case you hadn’t heard.”

  “Of course I heard. That’s all anyone’s talking about this morning. But you and I both know the rest of the world doesn’t stop just because the Japs are landing troops upriver.”

  “A lot of troops, I hear.”

  Jonesy shrugged. “Sure, but who wants to write the same story as everyone else? That’s gonna get covered six ways from Sunday. I want my name to rise above the noise.”

  Ramsey chuckled. “Guess we’re cut from the same cloth.”

  “Just cut the bull, and tell me what you’re doing here?”

  “Why should I tell first?”

  “Because I was the one standing here when you showed up. Now spill.”

  Ramsey stared at him for a few seconds, and then finally blinked. “Fine, have it your way. I took your advice, got my Chinese kids and their mothers out of Yangtzepoo last week, put ‘em up in a hostel downtown. Been tryin’ to secure ‘em passage to Honolulu. The Chinese gals can go to Hawaii, ya know. Chinese Exclusion Act doesn’t apply there.”

  Jonesy did know that, but he resisted the urge to be snippy. For the moment. “Go on.”

  “I haven’t had much luck. Not many passenger berths available, and they get snatched up right away. But yesterday, I was asking around, and this freighter captain overhears me, and tells me he knows people who arrange for Chinese gals without papers to slip into California. They hide ‘em in the holds with the freight, and drop ‘em off at secret docks the Customs officials don’t know about. And it won’t cost me nothin’—Chinese men on the other side pay for the girls.”

  Ramsey shook his head. “I ain’t interested in that. Lord knows what might happen to my kids, you know? I tell him thanks anyway, I’ll keep lookin’ for passage to Honolulu. But I can’t stop thinkin’, there’s a story in this. So I go back and ask the fella some questions, where to go, who to talk to. And that brought me here.”

  Jonesy kept his cards to his chest. “We might be workin’ on the same thing, just from different angles.”

  Ramsey gave him an appreciative nod. “Oh yeah? Care to tell me about your angle?”

  “Maybe later. Now go on with what you were doin’, and leave me alone. I got stuff to do, an’ you can’t be here for it.”

  Ramsey’s lips tightened, and he pointed an accusing finger at Jonesy. “I told you what I was up to, and you renege on me? What kind of jerk do you take me for?”

  A big one. “I’ll tell you later, ok? Just not yet, or you’ll ruin everything. Now get the hell outta’ here.”

  Jonesy kept his eye on Ramsey while he continued snooping around for the next three or four minutes, and watched for a while after he disappeared around a corner, making sure he didn’t sneak back to spy on what Jonesy was doing.

  “Your colleague will not find anything. They are not stupid enough to leave evidence where it can be seen.”

  Jonesy turned, surprised at the youthful female voice with only a slight Chinese accent. The young woman in front of him was about twenty years old, medium height and slender build, with short-ish black hair—the length that would be long on a boy, but short on a girl—and round glasses.

  “He’s not my colleague,” he said. “More of a rival, really. But what he told me was intriguing, possibly connected with what I’m looking for. I assume you’re here to tell me more?”

  “Zhu Xian sent me,” she said. “I took a job at the house you asked about. I talked to the other servants, earned the confidence of two of the old women. I learned what Mr. Rose is doing.”

  Her English flowed naturally, at an almost-native pace, unlike Zhu’s slow and careful speech. That and her good accent suggested a high level of education. “Is he somehow involved in sending Chinese girls to the United States?” he asked, wondering how reliable Jack Ramsey’s information was.

  “That is part of it. Before the Chinese Exclusion Act, the United States had already banned the immigration of Chinese women for seven years. Before that, Chinese men sent home for wives only after they had made money and established a place in America; many had not yet done so when the door closed. For seven years, more men came. Chinatowns did not have enough women, and most Chinese in America could not get wives. They are old men now, and many have accumulated much money they are willing to spend to get a wife. They are old-fashioned in their thinking, and they do not want a wife older than fifteen.” She made a face of disgust. “All of them left China before 1882, and China was not a modern country then. The Qing emperors still ruled, and our grandparents were backward in their thinking.”

  Jonesy nodded. “But criminal gangs here could supply the girls. There are thousands like them coming into Shanghai all the time. What’s Rose got to do with all this?”

  “To reduce losses, they need Americans who can make sure the shipments leave China undisturbed, and are not stopped on the other side. The Green Gang recruited Commander Rose to help, and their shipments leave Shanghai when his ship leaves Shanghai. His ship acts as an unofficial escort until they are in the open sea.”

  Jonesy worked over the details. Something was missing though, a big something. “But how would the women working in his house know about that? Do they read things he leaves around?”

  She tilted her head in an exasperated sort of way, and sighed almost imperceptibly. “The men in American Chinatowns only want young girls, thirteen to fifteen. In exchange for his help escorting the illegal freight from Shanghai, Commander Rose demanded the best of the sixteen and seventeen year old girls, so that he could peddle them to rich white American men. He shares the profit with the Green Gang. The old women have overheard him talking on the phone about it. He recruits customers by bringing them to lavish parties in his home, and the older girls circle among them.”

  Jonesy’s pulse quickened with excitement. “Do you know when the next party is planned?”

  “It was planned for Friday—but it has been cancelled because Commander Rose’s ship was called out of Shanghai this morning, unexpectedly.”

  Jonesy nodded, pieces falling into place. “The Japanese invasion.”

  “Probably so,” she said with a slight shrug, as if she didn’t care in the least. “Zhu Xian told me to tell you one more thing. When he is here, Commander Rose hosts his parties every other Friday night. The last one was August thirteenth. The murdered American seaman was there. And he had two white women with him.”

  21

  Shanghai General Hospital

  The wounded were lined up in corridors, along both sides, occupying nearly every available inch of wall space. Walking space inside the General Hospital was tight when Kenny came through that evening after work, having been sent upstairs by the charge nurse to see the head nurse on the first floor.

  The beds inside the wards had been reserved for those that required the most care, and the majority of the nurses remained inside the wards, tending to the seriously wounded. Kenny asked a nurse hurrying by—a young Chinese woman with her arms full of bloody bed linens—where the head nurse was. The young nurse nodded toward a dowdy middle-aged white woman with a long and rather severe face, brown hair pulled back into a
tight bun under her nurse’s cap.

  “First thing you need to know is, I haven’t got time to look after volunteers, and neither do any of my nurses,” the head nurse lectured him in a crisp British accent. “If I give you a task, you do it, or you leave it to someone else who can, understand?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Kenny said, lowering his gaze involuntarily. The head nurse reminded him of a stern and overly-strict school teacher he’d had in the fourth grade, one of the few he’d been afraid of over the years.

  “Good. I need you to wash the patients in Ward B. The orderlies are behind schedule. You’ll find a bucket and a sponge in the custodian’s closet down the hall here. You can fill it with soapy water in the washroom. Ward B is down the hall and on the left. Don’t get their bandages wet, under any circumstances. Don’t take all day about it, either, just a minute per patient. Then mark the wash section on the chart with the time, and move on.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Kenny said, but the head nurse had already turned away the second she stopped speaking.

  He followed instructions to the letter, but when he got to Ward B with his bucket of warm, soapy water, he hesitated, wondering what to do with his suit jacket. He approached a blonde nurse sitting in a wooden chair on wheels at a small desk in the corner, furiously writing something, and asked if he could hang his jacket on the back of the chair.

  “Suit yourself,” the nurse replied in an American accent, not even looking up. He slipped his jacket off and hung it on the back of the chair, and started rolling up his sleeves. The nurse nearly collided with him when she bolted from the seat with the paper she’d been writing on. “Watch yourself!” she warned as she stepped around him.

  The beds in Ward B were full of amputees. Every patient in the long room was missing at least one limb, and many of them more than one. The charts at the ends of the beds had their names in both Roman and Chinese script, and Kenny decided to greet them by name. The first several stared back at him blankly, their expressions unreadable. He started his task in silence.

  Kenny soon found that most of them were nearly covered in bandages, and he only had to clean dried blood off of small areas of exposed skin. He also washed their faces, a few of which were still streaked in the dirt and grime of the battlefield.

  Nurses and orderlies rushed around the room, none of them seeming to pay any attention to Kenny or his task. He started to feel invisible.

  He’d gone nearly all the way down one side of the ward when he came to a patient who struck him, for some reason. This one was alert, looking around the room. He was in a seated position, barely resting against the pillows behind his back. His right arm had been amputated above the elbow, and the stump and his right shoulder were covered in thick white bandages. The rest of his torso—his very muscular torso, Kenny couldn’t help noticing—was mostly unharmed, only a few abrasions on his right side and on his forehead.

  “Good evening, Gu Cheng,” Kenny said, reading the name on the chart, and then nodding at the patient.

  “Good evening, sir,” the young man replied in careful English, bowing his head at Kenny.

  “Oh! I wasn’t expecting you to speak English,” Kenny said, blushing; he told himself the blush was from the error, and nothing else.

  “I am aviation officer,” Gu Cheng replied. “Last year, I attend Central Aviation School outside Hangzhou. Elite American flight training. I am First Lieutenant Gu Cheng. I fly American plane—Curtiss Hawk Three.”

  “How fascinating,” Kenny said, dipping his sponge into the soapy water that was by now barely lukewarm. He began to run the sponge over Gu Cheng’s broad chest, and his mouth went dry. He swallowed hard, keenly aware of the young aviator watching him with his deep-set dark eyes. “Were you shot down?” he asked, and cringed at the shakiness of his own voice.

  “Yes. Japanese gun hit wing, and my arm—what word?” His handsome square face tightened with concentration.

  “Shrapnel?” Kenny offered. When Gu looked unsure, Kenny explained. “Pieces of metal, from the gun shell.”

  “Yes, shrap-nel,” Gu said, his mouth working the new word slowly.

  “I’m terribly sorry for that,” Kenny said, trying to focus on his task, but distracted by the firmness of Gu Cheng’s abdomen under his sponge.

  “It is war,” Gu Cheng replied, evenly. “Many pilot did not survive. I am alive.” He looked around the room. “Many are worse.”

  Kenny nodded as he finished up. “Yes, you are more fortunate than most of the men here, I think.” He straightened, forced a nervous half-smile, and extended his hand toward the pilot. If Gu had studied under American flight instructors, he’d probably learned to shake hands. Then Kenny realized he’d extended his right hand out of habit, so he quickly switched to his left hand, and flushed with embarrassment.

  Gu Cheng took Kenny’s hand in his remaining one and shook it. His grasp was warm, and he looked Kenny in the eye. The intensity of Gu’s gaze flustered Kenny, and he held the handshake for a second too long. He looked away in embarrassment, mumbling “I wish you a speedy recovery, Lieutenant Gu.”

  But when he released the handshake, Gu Cheng’s fingers traced the inside of his palm as they pulled slowly away.

  Kenny’s breath caught, and a lightness filled his chest that he hadn’t felt in a long time.

  Doubt set in immediately, of course, almost the second he got to the next bed and greeted the sullen patient lying there. He had probably imagined it. No, it had been real, he thought, replaying the two-second interaction in his head as if on a loop; but that didn’t mean the Chinese pilot had meant anything by it. Shaking hands wasn’t natural for him, after all.

  But as Kenny silently worked to clean off the next patient, he risked a quick glance at Gu Cheng, sitting up in the next bed. His pulse started to race when he saw Gu watching him work.

  He risked another quick look a moment later, when he finished with this patient, and this time his gaze caught Gu’s, and their eyes held each other for a couple of seconds before Kenny looked away in embarrassment.

  No, he hadn’t imagined it.

  There was a new lightness in his step as he went down the corridor to empty his bucket and get fresh soapy water for the other half of the ward.

  **

  Wusong

  The USS Valparaiso sat dead center of the Baoshan Waterway, the four-mile wide branch of the Yangtze estuary between Changxing Island and the south shore, where the Wusong fortress stood a mile upstream from the mouth of the Huang Po River. The gateway to Shanghai.

  Steaming down the Yangtze toward them, the USS Panay—one of nine gunboats in the navy’s Yangtze Patrol—escorted an American freighter past the Japanese cruisers that shelled the Chinese shore defenses.

  Commander Rose had ordered the Valparaiso’s twelve six-inch guns aimed in the general direction of the Japanese cruiser group “as a warning to them.” The Panay and the freighter passed between the Valparaiso and Changxing Island, keeping the larger Omaha-class cruiser between them and the Japanese.

  Doug stood on the Port bow, binoculars at his eyes, watching Japanese amphibious craft unloading thousands of marines on the sandy shore east of the fortress. The fortress was raining a steady fire on the Japanese Army’s Third Division, which had landed a short ways up the Huang Po just south of Wusong.

  His fingers tingled, his excitement electric. Even at this distance, two miles from shore, he could see the amphibious landing craft better than he could in the dark this morning, and they were a wonder. Over the years, he’d read thousands upon thousands of pages of intelligence reports about Japanese naval capabilities—aircraft carriers, battleships, submarines, the works—but he couldn’t recall anything about these amphibious landing craft.

  No one had ever seen anything like this.

  Commander Rose came up beside him. “We got a report that the Japanese Eleventh Division landed this morning at Chuan-shakou, eight miles upriver, and they’re on the march down the shore, toward Baoshan. The action’s
about to get hotter.”

  Doug nodded. “Pincer movement.” Baoshan was a town on the Yangtze, just above Wusong Fortress; a strategic spot from which to train batteries on the fortress, and bombard it into rubble. Then they’d be able to land troops with impunity.

  Rose raised his own binoculars. “Jap marines?”

  Doug nodded. “The only thing the Japanese Imperial Navy hates almost as much as the Chinese is the Japanese Imperial Army. And it’s mutual. The Admirals want credit for taking the fortress and saving the army’s hide.”

  Rose chuckled. “Sounds about right.” He lowered his binoculars. “I’m going to keep us positioned right here. We’re in a prime location to keep those Jap ships clear of our commercial shipping. And you can still see the action on shore from here.”

  Doug nodded, but didn’t lower his binoculars. “This will do.” In truth, he’d love to be closer than two miles, but that would put the ship and crew at greater risk.

  “We’ve got the whole company on alert, ready for anything. Let me know if you need any assistance from the crew, Doug.” Rose gave him a cursory salute as he turned away.

  “I will. Thanks, Monty.”

  A growing rumble from the west turned into black dots against the clouds. These grew into Chinese Air Force fighter-attack planes, which swooped down on the Japanese marine landings, strafing them with machine gun fire.

  “I’ll be damned,” Doug muttered. “Those are Hawk IIIs.”

  The Curtiss Model 68 Hawk III was a metal biplane, manufactured for the U.S. Navy since 1933; but starting in 1935, Curtiss Aeroplane had started selling them to China and Thailand for their air forces. The Chinese Air Force was technically outside of his scope in Naval Intelligence, falling instead under the American Military Attaché’s office, but since this was a naval plane model, Doug paid close attention to how the Chinese pilots used them.

  He pulled a camera from a pouch at his side, focused the lens on the plane formations, and snapped several pictures.

  Several minutes later, a deeper rumble rose quickly from behind them, and he turned to see a swarm of Japanese planes barreling toward them from the east, swooping up the Yangtze.