“For the record, commandant. On whose authority did this happen?”
“I did not issue the order. But I approved it. This is regrettable, but the responsibility lies with your people to obey the rules.”
“You had no right.”
“I have no need of right, Mr. Lucas.”
The guard put his bayonet against Lucas’s ribs. Lucas slapped the point away.
“We’ll be registering a complaint, commandant. In the harshest terms.”
“I expect no less than your condemnation.”
Lucas drew a long, noisy breath, containing his anger.
“It may seem trivial to you, commandant. But the war is ending. And when it does we’ll be very, very clear about the record. Trust that.”
Lucas headed for the door. Tal moved behind him.
“Mr. Tuck. You will stay.”
Lucas whirled. “You’ve got no business with him.”
The interpreter spoke without waiting for Toshiwara. “I strongly suggest that you have said enough.”
Lucas stared, livid. “Talbot, I’ll be right outside. With two thousand others.”
The guard walked Lucas out. Tal was left alone with Toshiwara, Nagata, and the translator.
“Mr. Tuck,” the commandant said, “your hand is bleeding.”
Tal opened his palm to look. He did not pull out the cloth to stanch the cuts but dropped his hand, letting it drip on Toshiwara’s floor.
“I’m all right. I’m better than Mr. Clemmons.”
“Yes, of course. The stalwart troublemaker. I am pleased Mr. Lucas brought you to my office. I have been meaning to come find you.”
“What do you want with me?”
“I have a few issues to take up. I asked Mr. Lucas to leave so you could answer without worry of punishment from your own people. I will not punish you. You may tell me honestly. Do you know where my rice bowl is?”
“No.”
“Are you no longer a thief?”
“I don’t know where it is.”
“But, are you a thief?”
Tal did not reply. Toshiwara aimed a finger at Tal’s tattered shorts.
“Let us see. Empty your pockets.”
Tal hesitated.
Again the interpreter prodded without the commandant. “Do as he asks. You do not have the luxury of refusing.”
Tal dug out the bloody handkerchief and set it on the desk next to Toshiwara’s officer’s cap. Beside it he laid the wooden Songu tag.
Nagata picked up the tag. He ran his thumb over the Japanese symbol. He set down the tag and raised a malevolent glare at Tal. Behind Nagata, the tall interpreter looked stricken. He continued translating.
“So you are still a thief,” the commandant said. “She does not belong to you, Mr. Tuck. She is the property of the emperor. So is the old woman you threatened to throw down the stairs. For that matter, so are you.”
“No, I’m not.”
“It does not depend on your choice. Just as the facts do not decide if the man who was killed was escaping or returning. It depends on the emperor. And I am the emperor’s voice in this camp. You may take your handkerchief. Leave the tag.”
Tal lifted the stained cloth.
“Commandant?”
“Nan desu ka?”
“You had Mr. Clemmons shot. You can go to hell.”
Nagata grunted. The interpreter scowled. “Mr. Tuck. I will not tell the major or Lieutenant Nagata of these words.”
“Don’t do me any favors.”
“That favor was not done for you.”
“Then let the commandant know if I find his rice bowl, I’ll give it back.”
The interpreter informed Toshiwara. The commandant replied.
“Thank you. Tell me why.”
“Because it’s worthless.”
Toshiwara listened, then laughed. “Good, young man. Good. That is a samurai’s insult. Now go. Continue your suffering. It agrees with you.”
“One last thing.”
Tal didn’t stop for a response. He leaned toward Toshiwara’s desk, to lay a bloodied finger on Carmen’s wooden tag. He pressed a scarlet dot in the center.
“That’s all I’m giving back. Understand?”
Tal spun away, shutting Toshiwara’s door on the translation.
~ * ~
Chapter Twenty-one
C
OMING UP the stairs at dawn, Carmen dropped her armful of laundry when she saw her tag on the board.
How long had it been there? She hadn’t left her room in two days. So many soldiers.
She scooped the linens off the steps and ran down her hall. Mama yelled from the landing for her to do her washing. Carmen ignored the old woman. Mama shouted there would be no breakfast. In her room, Carmen stood in the window for an hour, wishing the light to rise faster to see the boy.
At last he appeared under the dao tree, eating from a plate. She did not need him to look up and wave. He seemed unhurt.
The makipili woman. She must have told the Japanese. They took the tag away from the boy, and the old hag returned it to the board. But they did not beat him for it.
Tal had promised he would bring the tag to Carmen himself. Now he could not. She guessed at his anger over this, and, watching him under the great tree, believed he was brooding over how to make it right.
Papa arrived with a bowl of rice, a slice of bread, and a boiled egg.
“You did not make your mattress.”
“No.”
“Well, do it after you eat. We have soldiers waiting.”
Papa left under the black drape. Carmen ate, standing back from the window so the boy would not see her in the unlit room. She pretended to be an angel, sharing a meal with him from above invisibly, his protector.
The first of the day’s soldiers stepped under the curtain. Within the hour, the second and the third arrived, with more on the landing. Most were young, raw recruits who’d seen no combat, who only months ago were villagers. She squeezed the muscles around her vagina to make them peak quickly; none could last more than minutes. When they were done and she was gentle with them, she peeled away the bravery they pretended to standing in line waiting for her. Many were petrified, especially the bellicose ones, the chest thumpers, heavy boys with fat still on them from their mothers’ cooking or skinny peasants pared down by nerves. They believed that fear came when their scrotums shrank, so plucked at their sacks to stretch them and remain brave in appearance. The few who spoke some English, educated boys, were the most vulnerable. Alone with a Filipina after climax, they said what they could not to their comrades, that they questioned their oaths for death in the name of the emperor.
Using their fears like a penknife, Carmen whittled these boys down to their secrets. She memorized missions, unit names and numbers, dates, weapons, locations, routes. When each soldier stood from her legs, he stood a fuller man, regardless of how he’d performed; he’d had a woman, and for his while with her pictured himself grand and sacrificial. The instant each one departed, Carmen washed herself and imagined his bones picked clean. Between soldiers, she had five, sometimes ten minutes to herself, to contract and retake her own shape and mind, before she had to lie down again and become Songu for another.
Kenji arrived late, when he was not supposed to, the time for officers.
He had not paid and held no ticket. He removed his boots to sit on her tatami, his back against her wall, his crown above her windowsill. She sat opposite him. Carmen did not want him to stay. His stockings were worn at the toes. Were she a whore she might rub his feet.
Kenji shut his eyes. He seemed tired and careworn. Carmen resented this, that he should come to her looking for solace, bearing such need and worry.
She reached for the crimson knot at her waist. He sensed her movement and sat upright.
“What are you doing?”
She stilled her hands. “You do not want me, Kenji-sama?”
“No. I mean, yes, but not right now. Put on clothes, please.�
��
With no regard for her nakedness, Carmen slipped out of the robe into T-shirt and fatigues. She dumped the wash water out the window behind
Kenji and set the bowl upside down in the hall for Benito to see and come later for her report.
“Is that the signal?” Kenji asked.
“For what?”
“For your contact with the guerrillas. The mop boy?”
Carmen stood stock-still. Kenji continued.
“You don’t leave the shuho, so your contact must come to you. The new Filipino boy carries a bolo when he’s not mopping. It’s him.”
“You swore you wouldn’t tell.”
“I won’t. I have something for you to tell him.”
Carmen lifted the curtain to be sure the hall remained empty. She sat across from Kenji on the mattress.
“Yes?”
“I’m afraid for the camp.”
“What do you mean?”
“Do you know about the shooting today?”
Carmen had heard the shots while beneath the last soldier at sundown, but did not know what they’d meant. Kenji described the death of the American returning to the main gate.
“That’s not all,” he said. “Toshiwara’s furious. The camp ate his bull, stole his personal belongings, took half the food we left behind. When we came back, they were sleeping in our beds.”
“What did you expect?”
“They left the camp against orders.”
“Yumi and I went with them, to the village.”
Kenji paused, then pressed on. “Nagata’s cutting rations back to less than what they were before.”
“The American army will come.”
“They may not come soon enough.”
“What do you mean?”
“Palawan.”
A long, narrow island southwest of Luzon.
“What happened?”
Kenji rested his head against the wall once more. He explained.
One hundred and fifty American POWs were held on the island to build an airfield. In mid-December, an American convoy neared the shore, a fighter plane flew overhead. The guards forced their prisoners into several small air raid shelters. The bunkers were made of log roofs over shallow slits in the earth. The guards poured gasoline on the logs and into the pits, and set them afire. When the panicked prisoners emerged, clothes and hair burning, they were gunned down, clubbed, or bayoneted. A few dozen fought their way under the camps barbed-wire fence to scramble down a cliff to the beach. The guards hunted these escapees and killed all but a few who dived into the ocean to swim five miles to another island. Some of these Americans survived.
Carmen asked, “You think that could happen here?”
“Such a thing could happen everywhere. It wasn’t random. This was the result of a policy issued by the Imperial War Ministry. Prisoners of war are not to fall into the hands of the enemy. We’re to annihilate them and leave no trace. That’s what has been ordered.”
“That’s insane.”
“Insane? You say this? You’ve been kidnapped and raped.”
Kenji had never acknowledged these things, always glossing over them. It stunned Carmen to hear him, any Japanese, say it.
“These men,” he said, aiming a thumb at the camp behind him, “all of us, were raised to worship the emperor. The guards at Palawan and in all the camps, none are frontline soldiers anymore. We’re too old, damaged, or ignorant. Camp guards don’t have the chance to die in combat for the emperor. Japan’s losing the war. The Americans are getting closer, and these men have only got one chance for honor. That means killing the emperor’s enemies before they die themselves. Any enemy. Unarmed men, women, and children. It’s not insanity. It’s not even brutal. It’s a lifetime of believing.”
Kenji aimed a finger beyond the curtain, to the upturned bowl. “Tell this to the guerrillas. It could happen here. Nagata wants it to happen, even if he does it by starving them. Toshiwara’s too weak-willed to do anything about it. The rest of the guards just follow orders. Palawan was the first in the Philippines. It won’t be the last.”
Carmen set a hand on his stockinged foot. “What will you do, Kenji-sama?”
“I won’t be able to stop it. All I can do is tell you what I find out and protect you the best I can.”
“And Yumi?”
“Whatever I can do, yes.”
“Thank you.”
“Hand me my boots.”
Kenji slid his feet into the boots and worked the high laces. He stood. Carmen kept her seat, cross-legged.
“One more thing.”
“Yes?”
“The Tuck boy. The American thief.”
Carmen caught her breath. How did Kenji know of Tal? Had he done something to the boy? Carmen rocked to her knees.
“What about him?”
“I saved him today from another beating, maybe worse”.
Kenji told her about the aftermath of the shooting. The boy Tuck had been taken to the commandant’s office as a witness. The Songu tag had been in his pocket. He described the boy’s flash of anger, and his own refusal to translate Tucks curse to Toshiwara and Nagata.
Kenji asked, “How did he get the tag? Is he a friend?”
“He was one of the boys I walked to Anos with. I gave him the tag as a gift.”
“He threatened to throw the old shuho woman down the stairs?”
“Yes.”
“He’s one of the troublemakers.”
“I know.”
“It was a dangerous gift, Carmen. For you both. Nagata is uncontrollable. You need to be more careful, especially now after what I’ve told you. I can’t protect Tuck otherwise. Or you.”
“Of course, Kenji-sama. I understand.”
She eased off her haunches to watch him leave under the curtain. She would wait for Benito to see the upside-down bowl, then whisper to the guerrilla what she’d wrung from this long day, especially from Kenji.
She would ask Benito to get the Tuck boy a message from her. “Be ready to leave the camp. I will warn you.”
Before Palawan could come here.
~ * ~
Chapter Twenty-two
R
EMY SAT in the garage among the tools.
He’d need to shape this coffin longer than the others. He had enough bamboo and hemp. What he lacked was the heart to begin.
Five caskets in ten days. First Clem. Four days later, a woman died of heart failure. Two days ago, a pair of older fellows succumbed to beriberi.
Clem bore six bullet holes in his chest. Doc Lockett had cleaned him up as best he could, but a good swabbing and a fresh shirt did little to wipe away murder. . It took the Japanese all six rounds to put the redheaded Scot down. The beriberi corpses had been oddly disturbing, bloated faces above caved chests and exaggerated joints. They looked like melted dolls. The old woman’s body had simply aged and faded to gray when her unnourished heart shut down. Doc Lockett made it clear that the cause of death was malnutrition. They’d be alive if they’d had sufficient bread, meat, green vegetables, milk. The camp’s diet of mainly white rice, containing little thiamine, would kill all the internees given enough time.
A thousand attended the first funeral, even though the woman, Mrs. Bemmel, had been unpopular in the camp. She’d been one of the mahjong set in Manila, harsh to her servants, dishonest and gossipy. The crowd didn’t mourn her demise so much as the anticipation of their own. Every day, the reaper seemed to cut a little deeper into Los Baños.
The funerals for the pair of men, Utley, a road engineer, and Cairn, a Canadian trainer of polo ponies, were held yesterday, January 27. The crowd for their back-to-back services surpassed that for Mrs. Bemmel. When Remy was done with the men’s caskets, he had enough leftover bamboo to fashion one more coffin. After the burials and supper, he walked to the infirmary to see if anyone was feeling sufficiently poorly. At the moment, no one lay at deaths door, according to Lockett. “Build it anyway,” the doctor said.
Remy saw Naga
ta’s hand in all this as surely as he saw his own in the making of the caskets. Two weeks ago, when the two teen boys returned to camp in broad daylight, Toshiwara let them off with a slap on the wrist. Then the youngsters in the tree cheering for the American planes; the commandant didn’t punish them, either. After that, poor Clem. The guards wouldn’t have gunned him down just yards from the gate without instructions. Even Toshiwara told Tal he hadn’t issued the order, but had okayed it.
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