Chapter Two
Thursday, December 23, 1948, six years later
Osaka, Japan
Seventy yen richer. And a bag of black-market groceries weighing down one arm. Miyako had the handles looped twice around her wrist. One could never be too safe from the thieves, ah? That bag made it her best night in a week, and she was going to make sure it came home with her, in spite of the desperate hucksters that infested Osaka’s streets.
Best night. Of course tonight was only best by comparison to nights like the one before. Men—airmen and Marines—had streamed by the streetcorner where she stood all evening. Appraising what they could see of her and jeering at what they couldn’t. She dragged herself home at the end, feet burning like each step fell on embers. Legs that ached from ankle to thigh.
Aching feet and a wet coat. That was all she brought home last night, after working the street for hours.
Tonight was a best night because men wanted her. Wanted to slip her cash to do things she had to work hard not to think about later. But the math was simple. Two full hours of those things and she could feed Papa-san and herself and put something aside for the rent and for Papa-san’s doctor.
Best night meant yen in her purse, the reek of sweat and whiskey and aftershave in her nostrils, and the grime of their bodies ground into her pores. Which she endured for what? For the contents of the bag that had worn a groove in her forearm. Two small sacks of rice, a pair of sweet potatoes, and packets of dried seaweed and fermented beans.
It was no feast, ah? But it beat going hungry. She smiled a little, picturing how Papa-san’s face would brighten when he saw the meal.
A blast of soggy wind battered her from around a corner. She lit a cigarette and huddled into her coat, appreciating more than its warmth. It was a blissful feeling to no longer have her body on display.
She hugged the bag against her chest to keep it as secure as she could and turned into a side street. Or what had been a street, before the gaijin bombs. Now it was a strip of cracked pavement lined with crude shacks assembled from anything people had salvaged. It smelled of open fires and rotting garbage.
She passed a hut with a length of canvas stretched across its bare window. Flickering light from inside revealed oil stains and a frayed edge. It was the right faded mustard color for a piece of old uniform.
“Hey, lady. Shine your shoes?” The voice piped from the evening shadows in the alley right past the hut.
“No, thank you.” She tensed and hugged her bag tighter.
He stood from the crate he’d been sitting on. He looked about nine years old. His face caught the light and her chest constricted. The way his smooth bangs reflected the glare from the streetlamp behind her. The shape of his chin. If it weren’t for the dirt smudged across one cheek and the cigarette dangling from his fingers, the kid could be Hiro-chan.
Something inside her crumbled. She took a deep breath and stopped walking. “You should go home.”
“Home.” He laughed, took a pull on his cigarette, and studied her. His eyes lingered on her bag.
She dropped her cigarette, clutched the bag and braced herself for him to lunge.
Move on. Move away. She knew she should, but she couldn’t take her eyes off his face.
“Leave her alone, Jiro.” Another voice, not as shrill, from a few feet farther back in the alley. “She sees what you’re up to.” She could barely make out the boy this voice belonged to. He was taller than Jiro, but far from full grown.
Jiro gave her a lopsided grin. He picked up the cigarette she’d discarded and wandered off into the shadows. She stared after him for a long moment, the familiar hollow feeling worming its way from the pit of her stomach toward her chest. Hiro-chan. If only...
Her memories of Hiro-chan were wearing as thin as that army-canvas curtain. She could no longer hear the echo of his voice clearly. But she could see his bright eyes above the top edge of his favorite phoenix kite. Feel the smooth warmth of his little hand in hers. See the silent agony on Mama-san’s face that day, when she came home and choked out the news.
Her late mother’s voice breathed from some hidden corner of her mind, soft but insistent as the breeze. If only what, Miyako-chan?
Kataki-uchi. Ritual revenge. Since her older brother Akira-san’s glorious death in battle, the duty—the honor—of avenging Hiro-chan’s murder fell to her. A sacred obligation. But how to fulfill it, ah? Several years had passed. So much had been sacrificed. Yet she’d done nothing.
Her helplessness gnawed at her. There were gaijin occupiers everywhere. She had a gaijin airman as a regular. But you couldn’t kill just anyone. Kataki-uchi was personal. She had to target the gaijin criminal who dropped that bomb—the man the emperor himself had named as a war criminal for his role in that raid. Or the man who ordered it.
She spoke it out loud to her little brother’s hotoke. “If only I could make it up to you, Hiro-chan.”
And then, join you.
Miyako rounded the smoke-blackened corner of Namba Station. About twenty people stood on the platform, queued for the train. Streetlights cast cold shadows down their faces, bringing hollow cheeks and sunken eyes into harsh relief.
Several beggars huddled in the station doorway. An older man with grime-streaked cheeks lay curled in a corner, eyes closed tight as if to ward off the streetlights’ glare. He pulled what was left of his navy uniform around him—a captain, about Papa-san’s age.
No one left to care for that one.
A deep melancholy washed through her, making it hard to swallow. Out of all their family, she was the only one left to take care of Papa-san.
She studied the beggar and fingered her purse. Maybe a coin or two. Then she thought of Papa-san’s doctor bills and swore. She needed every sen.
A rogue gust of wind pushed an icy blast into her face. She turned up her collar, choked back her grief, and found something else to look at.
A gaijin in a sturdy greatcoat caught her eye. He worked his way along the queue from the far end of the platform, handing out some kind of brochure. He reached Miyako, gave her a little bow—patches of ruddy scalp showing between sparse wisps of straw-colored hair—and held out a copy. “I hope you’ll join us, young lady. It’s going to be a very special presentation.”
She accepted the flier and returned the bow. Courtesy demanded that much.
As she straightened, she caught another glimpse of the Navy captain in the station doorway. The old officer stirred then huddled into his ragged uniform. Five years earlier, his slightest command would have meant life or death for dozens of men. Now he shivered on the pavement among drifts of dead leaves.
She eyed the nubby thick wool on the gaijin’s collar as the Nankai Line train rumbled into view.
“A week from Sunday.” The gaijin hurried away.
She shifted her shoulders inside her own second-hand coat with its mended lining. She had no interest in the man with his sturdy wool and his special speaker and his propaganda. Or any further reminders of who’d won the war and who had merely survived it, ground into the pavement by humiliation and defeat.
She jabbed the brochure into the top of her bag, where it would stay out of sight until she found a trash can to hurl it in. But as it folded into the mouth of the bag, the title flashed up at her. A single word in stark white kanji characters against a sailor-blue background.
Horyo.
Prisoner. The most humiliating capitulation of all.
She studied the photo beneath it. A gaijin soldier, crisp cap at a jaunty angle, looking hale and cheerful and quite pleased with himself. His penetrating eyes arrested her.
This man, horyo? The incongruity jarred her. She flipped the brochure open.
I suffered in Japanese prisons for forty months. When I piloted Plane Seventeen in General Jimmy Doolittle’s raid over Japan on April 18, 1942...
She sucked in her breath. Doolittle’s raid. April 18, 1942. The raid that killed both her brothers. Her eyes flew down the columns.
Osaka. Only one bomber had violated Osaka’s skies that day.
Her pulse throbbed against her eardrums. She closed the brochure, fingers trembling so badly she nearly dropped it. She took a long, jagged breath and stared at the photo on the cover.
You. The gaijin murderer with the bombs. It was you.
She studied him, and her throat constricted. The outrage of it—the intruder daring to drop those first bombs on Japan. And the ache of it—Hiro-chan’s little body buckled beneath a girder, his lifeblood leaking crimson through her fingers.
Her gut twisting, she turned the flier over. The back bore a stamp heralding an appearance by this gaijin in Osaka in a little over a week.
The fellow behind her made a “harrumph” sound, and she looked up. The train was at the platform. She hadn’t heard it. Passengers mounted the steps, everything going on as if the clock hadn’t stopped ticking and the ground hadn’t just shifted.
She climbed onto the train. Sank into a bench seat, clinging to the brochure like a piece of fine silk. Sat perfectly still, looking ahead.
Images played through her mind. Precious Hiro-chan, with his fresh-scrubbed face, murdered on the street outside his school. Akira-san, always Papa-san’s pride, lost with his ship during the same raid. And Mama-san. She couldn’t bring herself to summon a picture of Mama-san. But even a fleeting image of her bore a swish of silk and a whiff of peony.
It was clear enough what she was expected to do. Otherwise, what did it mean, the promise she’d made to Hiro-chan so many times? She was hardly equipped to be an assassin. But she knew her duty. She knew how to honor her dead, and she had the courage to do it.
But how? And what would become of Papa-san—and her own miserable life—afterward?
If she was determined enough, destiny would provide a path. As to the how, Papa-san would have some ideas. He had to.
She tried wrapping her tongue around the gaijin’s name. “Delham. Sergeant David Delham.”
Six-and-a-half years she’d waited for this—for access to one of the men who had a direct hand in her brothers’ deaths. Six-and-a-half years, and this bomb-wielding Delham thought he could come back to Osaka.
Six-and-a-half years, and she’d not had a single chance. Until now.
Chapter Three
Saturday 18 April 1942
Zhejiang Province, China
About halfway across the China Sea, dingy gray clouds began to infiltrate the dazzling spring sky. The weather continued to close in. By evening, when Payback reached the Chinese coast, they soared through a blanket of fog. Gusts knocked them around and hurled rain into the windshield.
“Thank God for the tailwind,” Watt said. “But this overcast...”
Dave shook his head. “If there’s a coastline there, I can’t see a glimmer of it. Which means—”
“Which means no way to confirm Vitty’s dead reckoning.” Watt took a meaningful glance at the fuel gauge.
Dave tried to look at something—anything—else. They were going to have to put their bird down soon. Where was that landing strip?
This wasn’t the way his first combat mission was supposed to end.
He craned his neck for a better view. There was nothing beyond the plane’s Plexiglas snout but velvety blackness. Either the clouds were dense enough to completely obscure the ground or there was still nothing there.
“C’mon.” He yanked his headphone off his right ear and yelled over his shoulder, “Vitiollo, where’s Choo Chow Lishui? Where’s our airstrip?”
The navigator left his instruments and his tiny steel table littered with charts, compass, slide rule, and battered pencil stubs. He leaned between Dave and Watt. “We should be on top of it now.” He raked a hand through hair as unruly as his work surface. “I triple-checked. My math’s right. I know it is.”
Dave scanned Vitty’s face. “Nothing on the radio?”
“Not a thing.”
“No homing beacon?”
“No, sir.” Vitty turned to Watt. “How much longer can we stay up, sir?”
Dave cleared his throat. “We’re not on zero yet, Vitty. Try the distress signal.”
“Yes, sir.” The man’s thick Jersey accent carried a sharp edge. He returned to his station and threw a switch on the squawk box. “Mayday. Mayday.”
Watt’s normally relaxed features looked drawn in the instrument panel’s ghastly green glow. He spoke into Dave’s ear. “The way we’re burning fuel, we’ve got less than an hour.” He tapped the main fuel-level indicator. The phosphorescent needle jumped, then settled again just above the 100 mark. “You gotta find us a place to land. Or we’ll have to bail.”
“Tell me something I don’t know.”
He had to keep a clear head, in spite of the fear that was getting a chokehold on him. Jumping out of a perfectly good airplane in a raging storm wasn’t something he was mentally prepared for. Especially this close to Japanese territory. Neither was leaving a $100,000 piece of advanced Army equipment to fly itself into the ground. This war was supposed to bring him home a hero, not make him a downed pilot on the run.
He yelled over his shoulder, “You’re sure this is the spot, Vitty?”
“Sure as I can be, in this soup.”
He glanced at the fuel gauge and swore. “This just keeps getting better. We’ll circle the area for another ten minutes.”
Watt gave him a grim nod.
Dave flew them in widening circles, but no lights broke the blackness below. No sign of the expected airstrip. He watched the final seconds tick away, then shot his assessment at Watt. “I can’t see a thing through these clouds, and I don’t know what went wrong, but clearly no one’s looking for us. We can’t spend any more fuel searching for Lishui. I’m moving to Plan B.” He banked left. “We’d better hope this will shake us loose from this storm. Then we find a flat spot to land this bird.”
Vitiollo was out of his headset and between them before Dave finished. “I still say you should bear south, sir. Give them Japs at Nanchang a wide berth.”
Dave felt Watt’s eyes on him, but they’d had this discussion. He saw no reason to revisit his decision. Watt was always a little too ready to play to the guys in the back. Hard to believe the man was still so resentful Dave had outscored him in flight school and beaten him out for the left seat. “Let me see that chart.”
Vitty gave the chart a couple of deft folds and handed it to him. “We’re about here.” He trained his flashlight on the spot.
The chart confirmed what he already knew. “Look, if we head south, the coast angles toward us. We’ll never get out of this weather pattern if we hug the coast.”
Vitiollo inhaled sharply. “But if we go west we’ll have to get halfway to Chungking, here, if we want to get clear of the Japs. No way we’re gonna make that.”
Why do I always have to spell things out—twice? Dave forced himself to adopt his most reasonable tone. “If I can’t see to land the plane, we’re not going to have to worry about any stinking Japs. And I still don’t like the looks of the terrain to the south. Those peaks run right up to the coast.”
Vitty’s voice rose. “Look. If you keep on due west, you’ll fly us right through their front door.”
“Thank you for your opinion, Second Lieutenant.” Dave turned to his instrument panel. “That’s all.”
Vitiollo stood behind them for a moment. He turned and moved to his station. Dave caught some mumbled swearing and heard the man’s fist thud into the padded fuselage wall as he went.
“Watch yourself, Vitiollo.” Watt kept an eye on the man until he resumed his maydays. He leaned toward Dave. “Vitty’s right, Dave. I vote—”
“Vote? Since when is this a democracy?”
Watt’s voice was forceful but even. “Better dead than captured. That’s what we agreed at Eglin, if I may remind you. It’s all our lives at stake here, Delham.”
“You think I don’t know that?” Their eyes locked for a moment. �
��Didn’t you see? There’s an open-looking patch to the west of where our prize navigator seems to think we are. I believe that’s my best chance of getting us out of the sky in one piece, and that’s where I’m taking us.”
Watt glared. “Who named you Sky God?”
“The Army did. Except they call it ‘commanding officer.’” He firmed his grip on the yoke. “For the love of Pete, Watt, I wish we had better options. Like that airfield we can’t seem to find.”
None of the choices were good. But he felt in his gut that if he headed south like Vitty wanted, it would be the death warrant for Payback. If he headed west, with a little luck he could bring the plane down safely. That had to be their best chance of getting on to Chungking.
He scanned the instruments. “Wanna make yourself useful? You’re a religious man. Ask that God of yours for a break in these clouds. And some flat terrain.”
Watt shot him a glare. “That’s your best idea today.” He bowed his head, lips moving in prayer.
Dave snorted and continued his instrument scan.
Thursday, December 23, 1948
Osaka, Japan
The train rattled toward Miyako’s station. She stared out the window. The occasional streetlight diffused pallid light over a landscape she saw everywhere now—block after block of shanties thrown up from the rubble. Makeshift slums invaded Osaka like cancer, thanks to this Delham and the thousands of enemy bombers who followed him.
The brochure gave those enemies a single face. Delham’s face.
She left the train at Sakai Station and covered the eight blocks home at her briskest walk.
The building where she’d rented a room for the past few months had been a modest hotel before the war. Now it was home to a dozen families.
Most nights, she would climb the stairs softly, take off her shoes outside their door, and slip in, hoping to find Papa-san asleep. She preferred to slide into a simple old cotton kimono before she woke him. She relished the chance to get out of her street clothes. Get rid of the smell of the men. She hated carrying her clients’ filth around their room. Hated it as much as anything that happened on those stained mattresses on the nights she trolled the streets.
The Plum Blooms in Winter Page 3