by Alisa Smith
He pointed at a high window, which was open. It did not look large enough for a man to squeeze through. Well, maybe this fellow Jefferson could. He was thin as a rail.
“He went out the window?” the nurse exclaimed. The man nodded, and returned to plunking his tuneless song. “Mary, mother of Joseph.” She dragged a chair to the window, stood on it to reach up, and patted around the sill. She pulled in a length of clothes tied together in a sort of rope. She gave an exasperated hiss of breath.
“I don’t understand,” she said. “He’d been doing so much better the last few days. Or we never would have let him out of the straightjacket.” She stared at my face, which must have betrayed my surprise—though thinking back on what I’d seen, I should have figured it out sooner. “You didn’t know this is the mental ward?” she asked.
“No.” Damn that Bill, why’d he leave that part out? I didn’t know I was retrieving a madman.
“Oh, goodness. This has never happened before.” The poor young nurse stepped down from her chair and picked up her metal clipboard again to make a note on it. Finished, she clutched it tightly to her chest. “This building wasn’t designed as a hospital, and we never thought of them leaving through that window. It’s so high up. And they’re usually pretty settled when we’ve got them on the morphine.”
She looked like she was going to cry. Back home, she’d probably never had more responsibility than soothing some kid with measles, and now she was supposed to manage hundreds of ex-prisoners, each damaged in unique and terrible ways. I reminded myself to stop wasting time on pity for this pretty young girl. I had to find Hughes.
“Maybe he’s still nearby.”
“Maybe,” she said, and I sprinted out the door. I wondered how quickly the Russians would be after him. Or had they already got him? Bill was going to blow a gasket.
To my surprise the nurse kept pace with me as I ran. She was a game one. This was less than convenient, but I didn’t have time to think of how to get rid of her. I’d take Hughes by force if need be, and I didn’t want her to see that. Well, I wasn’t such a tough guy. She’d probably seen worse if she worked in a mental ward, wrapping them up in straightjackets and such.
“Get the prince!” cheered the long-haired man, waving his fist in the air, as we ran down the hall.
Outside the main door, the midday heat punched the air right out of me, and I stopped to look left and right. My eye caught the flash of a bright orange robe and a gleam of metal. A man fell to the ground and a monk bent over the body. Smile, I guessed. The other man stayed unmoving. Dead, I guessed. Oh, Jesus.
“Guard!” the nurse yelled. She stared around in puzzlement. “Where’d he go?”
The dead man wasn’t in uniform, so it wasn’t him. Maybe the chief bought off the guard.
I didn’t have time to ponder. A new guy was running at Smile, and he tackled him. The nurse screamed. I didn’t know what to do. I wanted to help Smile, but I didn’t want anyone to guess I was with him. Plus, I didn’t want to get killed, if that was going around. Damn it. I supposed even a stranger would go help a monk. I started running toward them.
The nurse blew a whistle. Three short blasts.
The attacker knocked the gun from Smile’s hand, but it skidded far out of his reach. He kept his eyes on Smile and pulled out something from his jacket. I saw the flash of a blade.
I was no fighter, but maybe I could grab the gun off the ground while they were busy. I veered toward it. Smile rolled out of the man’s grip, leapt up and danced away, the man following close. He looked a regular sort of fellow in his khaki pants and blue long-sleeve shirt, but he must be one of these Russians, I thought. As far as I knew, they were the only other ones after Hughes.
From between the rows of wooden buildings two military police appeared, rifles at their chests. They trotted toward us, dust rising up in clouds from their pounding feet. I skidded to a halt. The sight of them froze everybody in a strange tableau, the brute’s arm raised, Smile poised in a fighter’s stance in his orange robes. A split second later, Smile and the other man scattered in different directions. Each had his own private reason for not wanting to be nabbed and questioned. The military police yelled into their radios and split up, each following one of the two fleeing men. I didn’t want anything to do with those soldiers either. They had guns, and it was time to vamoose. My driver was still waiting in the car, a discreet distance away on the dirt road. Bastard could have helped out. I jogged toward the car.
Looking over my shoulder, Smile’s pistol gleamed where it lay in the dirt and I wondered if it could be evidence against us. Wouldn’t Bill have bought untraceable ones? Maybe even that hinted something to certain enemies. I couldn’t risk it. I checked the main door and the nurse wasn’t there. Now was my chance.
I ran back, scooped up the gun, and jumped in the car. We raced off, the wind in my face and the pistol grip gritty with sand in my palm, and it felt like old times in the gang, making a getaway after a bank job. The guy could really drive, I’d give him that.
Then I felt a pang as I thought of Smile out there, unaided. Well, at least the Russian went off some other way. Smile could handle himself.
Our car left by the main gate, where the Siamese police waved us through. The crooked cavalry was here. And just beside the road, a procession of hundreds of monks in orange, with yellow flags fluttering in the wind.
It was a beautiful sight. Bill had always arranged things with style.
* * *
BILL AND I met back on the train in our private compartment as planned—except for the fact that Link wasn’t with me. As I had predicted, Bill was in a rage. At least it wasn’t directed at me. “Hughes fucking bolted? What do I pay the chief for? We got to go see him.” Bill flipped down the table to scrawl a note, and pressed the buzzer angrily for the conductor. Bill told him to send the telegram right away, before we left the station in Nakom Paton.
“Smile must have got away okay,” I said, trying to soothe Bill as soon as we were alone. The train jolted and the engine sighed as it started on its way. “All those monks were pretty great, filling the road outside the hospital.” I’d been surprised at the sight of them in their masses, the orange robes blazing, the men all shaved as bald as Smile. Silver bowls gleamed in their hands, leaving one to think that Smile too must only have been holding a bowl, not a silenced pistol—that Smile was just an innocent monk in the wrong place at the wrong time, lost in a crowd of his fellows.
“My idea,” Bill said, looking pleased for a moment. My ploy had worked. “The chief paid them off so they’d have a procession. There’s crooked monks in this country too. That don’t bring Hughes back, though.” Bill slumped into the worn red velvet seat and closed his eyes. After about ten minutes they flipped open, sudden as a doll with those winky eyes. It startled me. “I bet he’s on his own. If the Russians had him, they wouldn’t have stuck around to fight Smile.”
“Agreed,” I said, though I wasn’t quite sure, and he closed his eyes again. I didn’t believe he was sleeping, since his breathing was not even, but I let him be for the rest of the journey. No use rousing his ill feelings against me. He could use his energy for scheming how to find Hughes instead. Quietly I shuffled some cards on my flip-down table and played solitaire.
By the time we got back to the palazzo a few hours later, there was a reply telegram from the chief, or at least a dinner invitation for the next day. “He better serve us T-bone steak,” Bill grumbled. “Don’t say anything about this problem, By God. Leave that to me. The chief can be touchy.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
AWOL IS THE BLOND
THE PLANE’S WING dipped toward the ocean as we turned, lowering in altitude. The Hawaiian Islands rose out of the blank Pacific and looked unnervingly like the Aleutians from this distance. Volcanos, accordioned mountain ridges, cliffs, and featureless green cloaking everything, wisped in clouds. Maybe it was a trick of perspective but the islands even trailed off in size, the largest closest by and
the outer islands increasingly smaller, also like the Aleutians, where nearly the last and smallest had been Shemya. It gave me an eerie feeling, as though I could not escape the place. But no, as the clouds shifted and parted, I could see there was no snow on any of the peaks. Even in the height of summer, not all the snow melted in Alaska. On the north faces, in the shadows, a perpetual cold remained. Of all the islands, only Shemya lost its snow cover because it had no mountains. On Shemya everything was featureless and laid bare, and there was nowhere to hide. I would have to hope for better shelter in Hawaii.
As the plane banked lower, the green resolved into heavy jungles, a riot of life. There was a glare of white along the coast, bright and shining, desolate and pure, like the curved blade of a knife. Why did my mind always ascribe a sinister appearance to things? It was a beach, for heaven’s sake, and no doubt very pleasant.
In Honolulu I would finally meet the man who would take me to the Far East, though I did not even know what country. It might be Burma, where Link disappeared, but the Japanese could have shipped him anywhere. The mystery was frustrating, but secrecy was warranted. Miss Maggie would certainly want to find him, and apparently the Russians did too. Perhaps they believed a traitor could be turned to their own purposes.
It had taken days to get this far, and I tried not to count them down against my thirty days’ leave. After Anchorage, where I watched a movie at the cinema and drank a bottle of wine in my room alone, there were stopovers in Seattle and Los Angeles. I sighed to myself and twirled my thin silver bracelet. It was etched with indigenous Tlinkit designs, eyes within eyes. Being in Seattle had brought back painful memories of Bill, after all the time we spent together there. We had had wonderful nights in the So Different speakeasy and the black-tie Bergonian restaurant. Then there was the bitter year in the mansion on Capitol Hill, when everything unravelled. Even then, I had continued to love him.
At the Seattle airstrip, I had stood waiting for porters to bring my luggage, my arctic parka slung over my arm in the unaccustomed warmth of the south, though all the locals were bundled up. All around me families reunited as the military continued to shed personnel. I, of course, had no one to welcome me.
The stewardess announced Honolulu over the loudspeaker. I realized I’d been crushing my bracelet into my arm and let go of it. From my seat near the front I was one of the first to leave the aeroplane. I was finally in a place where I could start to make things right. Sunshine, I thought with sudden joy as I climbed down the folding metal stairs onto the runway. I’d been three years in the North—too long. The balmy air caressed my skin as I strode across the tarmac. Despite my hurry, I had to stop when a native woman stood in front of me holding loops of flower necklaces, which she put over the heads of the passengers as we walked past. I fingered the fuchsia flowers, soft as velvet, though as I did so one fell off and was crushed under my heel. Well, I was not sentimental, and in the terminal I tossed the rest of the garland in a trash can. No sense in marking myself as a new arrival when I got into town. I hailed a cab.
With its plain brick buildings, Honolulu was trying hard to act like an American town, but at the end of the main street a mountain rose up, filling the view with tropical splendour. The street was lined with shops and it seemed like every other store sold shoes. I realized that the ones I brought with me were no good for the tropics. I went into a shop called McInerney’s that looked a cut above, and I bought some strappy cream sandals. When I stepped out, well pleased, I noticed a man standing against a lamppost reading a newspaper. He had been there when I entered the shop. I’d been careful in Anchorage and was sure I hadn’t been followed by the men in the aeroplane from Shemya, or anyone else. In the Los Angeles terminal, I’d worried that a man in a brown business suit looked like Tex, but then I reminded myself that Tex had looked the same as the base mechanic sitting next to him on the Liberator. Generic, but that was no comfort. It would be a good quality in a spy. In the end, the man left the terminal without a backward glance. People following you never leave first—I was pretty sure about that much from Camp X.
I walked up the street half a block, paused at the window of Mercie Gordon’s Beauty Salon, and looked in the reflection. The man had started walking in my direction. His shoes clicked on the pavement like Morse code, sending out a warning. I had to lose him because I was reaching the point of no return. Honolulu was where I would officially go AWOL.
I took a deep breath to calm myself. Since I was at a salon I might as well get my hair done. He could cool his heels, and it would give me time to think how to shake him. Now that I was on the last stage of my journey to the Far East, I wondered how I would look to people who hadn’t seen me in years. I knew that my mouth was set more grimly than before, and there were some furrows in my brow. Passing the age of thirty brought no great joy. I needed to spruce myself up. A bell jangled as I walked in the door, and a plump woman with a formidable updo ushered me to a chair.
“Nothing with pins,” I said. “Something a bit softer, like Lauren Bacall.”
“Have you ever considered going blond?” she asked. “It would suit you.”
I had not planned a new colour but perhaps it was time for me to stop hiding as a brunette, as I had done since I left the Clockwork Gang. As a girl I had been a natural honey blond, and had kept it up with lemon juice rinses in the sun.
“All right, do it. But not too blond-blond.”
Mercie Gordon, for a name tag announced it was the proprietor herself, wheeled out a cart and painted some gloop onto my hair. The smell of bleach burned in my nose. Instead of observing my own image in the glass, which I never liked to do anyway, I watched the street behind me. There were a lot of buses.
“Which bus goes to the docks?” I asked.
“Be careful of those sailors, honey,” she said, painting more strands of my hair.
“Not the navy docks. The public marina.” I didn’t know exactly where to go, but there was no way Bill’s plan would put me under military eyes.
“There’s a couple yacht clubs at Waikiki. Number 10 bus.”
I watched the street in the mirror until a number 10 went by and checked the clock. It was 3:10 by the hands, which seemed strange to me after years of using the twenty-four-hour military system. I couldn’t see the man lingering outside, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t there. I only had a limited slice of vision. Mercie put a vinyl cap on my head and left me a while as she waited for the bleach to set. She started to cut the hair of another customer.
Once I’d seen the next Waikiki bus go by at 3:20, I knew its schedule. Every ten minutes on the ten. I couldn’t help but think now of the people it would carry me toward. Link, whose forgiveness I had to hopelessly seek, and Bill, whose apology I would never receive. I was sure he would try to blame me as always. How could he ever expect I’d get a pardon for him? He was a notorious criminal and no sane politician would ever give him one.
My soaked head felt cold underneath the cap and time crawled. Why was I going on this doomed mission, anyway? I suppose the same reason knights have always gone into battle. Because I had honour, and more than that, I wanted other people to know it.
Finally, Mercie told me it was time to wash out my hair. I tipped back my head and tried to enjoy the feeling of her rubbing my scalp with shampoo. Pretty scents rose from the sink, lavender and verbena, I thought, scents from before the war. Seating me again, Mercie combed my hair and set it in curlers. In the mirror I caught a glimpse of the man across the street. So he was still waiting. I marked the spot where people got on the bus, so I could run for it. Mercie escorted me to the dryer, where she lowered the huge celluloid half-sphere over my head.
A half hour later Mercie touched my elbow to retrieve me. I sat back in the chair by the mirror as she pulled the curlers from my hair and brushed it out. As she gently adjusted the ends that hit my shoulders, she told me I looked stunning. She knew where her bread was buttered. Though I did not quite believe her it lifted my mood, and I felt more el
egant than I had in a long while. There had been no salon on Shemya, the place being designed for men. We few ladies had to take turns doing each other’s hair and the results were sometimes a little strange.
I made small talk until the clock showed 4:19. I stepped out onto the sidewalk, which was busy with uniformed sailors despite the general demobilization. After Pearl Harbor, the US government wasn’t about to close down this base. The hubbub suited me perfectly. Shouldering through a knot of men, I ran for the bus signed “Waikiki” as it was just pulling away from the curb. I waved and it lurched to a stop. I jumped aboard, the door slamming behind me. “Thanks,” I breathed, and dropped a dime in the box by the driver.
Settling onto a blue vinyl seat, I glanced out the window, where the persistent newspaper reader was left behind on the sidewalk. I felt smug as the bus roared down the street. Sayonara, sucker, as they said in the war.
The last sight I had of him, he was walking toward a payphone. Damn. I had a brief thought that maybe he was Bill’s man. Had I mucked things up? But Bill wouldn’t need to have me followed, because he’d know I was going to the docks. If there was any chance he belonged to Miss Maggie, I needed to shake him.
As the bus left downtown, the view gave way to palm trees and explosions of bright flowers everywhere. Frangipani, I thought suddenly. Is that what that was? I liked the word, anyhow. It sounded fresh and new, like I wanted my life to be.
Most of the passengers were gone by the time the bus reached the Hawaii Yacht Club, where I rang the bell to get off. The boats were large and shiny, looking ready for long voyages. But the locked gangway to the dock was hung with a sign, Private, Members Only. This was no good. I needed public docks to find the lowlifes Bill had always favoured. I paused at the intersection, where there was a small grocery store, to read the signs. A motley row of bored-looking men sat on the store’s porch, sipping sodas or smoking. An older Black man stood up, stubbing out his cigarette, drawing my eye. He stared at me and I stared right back at him—he looked familiar.