Broken Jewel - [World War II 05]

by David L. Robbins

  He waited in the center of the road. Carmen led the three soldiers to him. She thought of Tal and what could have been. Of Kenji as a good man. Yumi in safety, Hua in the grave. How many comfort women were there? Carmen would never know. Her family in Manila, would they be told she died in Anos? She had nothing to identify her, not even the Songu tag. The Tuck boy had it. She was sorry that his only memento of her should be that thing.

  Carmen wanted more life, but she would give the Japanese what they valued most. A good death.

  Nagata swept his arm across the village, the whole black panorama.

  “Aw-rr die.”

  He’d failed to kill the internees as he’d threatened, so had visited himself instead on Anos.

  Nagata pointed to the pavement in front of Carmen. He wanted her on her knees.

  She said, “No.”

  He flicked a finger at one of his soldiers. A rifle butt smashed into the back of her knee, buckling it. Carmen held herself up with one leg until it, too, was struck, harder and from the side. This knee exploded. She crumpled to the tarmac.

  Nagata leaned close, stinking of sweat. She could not rise; agony made her legs inert.

  He snarled, “Mikkokusha” Nagata batted together his fingers and thumb in a talking, biting gesture.

  He’d figured it out. She was an informant. Nagata had brought her to Anos to be killed in the road, in the heart of the murdered village, one more warning to other collaborators.

  “Hai,” she said.

  Nagata motioned for another of his guards. The short man stalked in front of Carmen. He glared down with hatred equal to Nagata’s.

  The soldier did not hesitate. He reared his rifle high, to drive the bayonet into Carmen’s chest. She held her breath, away from the stench of Nagata and Anos. She kept her eyes open, clenched her hands to stop them shaking, bared her teeth. She thought of her father, fighting at the train station to keep her. She tried to do him honor.

  The soldier stepped backward. The rifle over his head seemed suddenly too heavy and he stumbled under it, dropped it clattering on the road.

  Benito, the mop boy, the guerrilla in sneakers, stood behind the soldier. He yanked the bolo out of the man’s side as if out of a hewn tree. Freed from it, the soldier collapsed.

  Before Nagata or the other guards could raise their weapons, the boy swung again, hacking deep into the ribs of the closest soldier. This one dropped to his knees. Benito, in continuous motion, swept the bolo above his shoulders with two fists and swung the blade into the kneeling Japanese’s neck. The soldier’s head lolled off kilter, attached by little. His body tumbled, spraying blood.

  The remaining soldier fired from the hip. He shot once, twice, a third time. Each bullet hit Benito only steps away. The first stopped the boy’s charge at the soldier, the second knocked him back, the third felled him. Benito lay in the road between the two Japanese he’d killed.

  Nagata picked up the rifle from the first soldier Benito had chopped down. He stood over the boy and rammed the bayonet twice into his belly, leaving the rifle standing, the point buried in the dirt beneath.

  Nagata turned on Carmen holding the boys bolo. He examined the machete with a sound of disgust, not for the blood on the steel but the long knifes peasant design.

  He did not lift the bolo. He dropped it. The blade clanged on the pavement.

  The soldier raised his weapon. Nagata yanked the erect rifle out of Benito. Neither gun pointed at Carmen, but at a scream out of the darkness.

  ~ * ~

  Chapter Sixty-one

  T

  HE FIRST bullet struck Tal as he emerged from the shadows. The round grooved his hip but did not stop him. He ran at Nagata and the soldier, driven by fear, rage, now pain.

  At a dead sprint, he pointed the barrel of Benito’s rifle and fired. He couldn’t slow to aim. Nagata and the soldier had their rifles up and feet solid, shooting back. Tal would die where he stood.

  He screamed again, charging these men who’d killed Carmen and would die for it if he could reach them. He dodged once to throw off their sights, then fired another wild round. Nagata and the soldier did not shift a step in the road. Tal’s bullets flew nowhere close to them. They loosed another volley. Two rounds whizzed past his head. Tal closed the distance to thirty running, moonlit strides. In seconds he’d be close enough to empty the rifle at them and not miss.

  On the black tarmac around Nagata and the soldier, bodies lay scattered. Between them, someone kneeled. Someone living.

  She shrieked his name.

  She was not dead!

  Tal hesitated, confused and desperate. He slowed, to place his shots. He could not hit Carmen.

  Nagata and the soldier fired. One round zinged near Tal’s shoulder. The second pierced his calf below the furrow in his hip. The bullet knocked Tal’s leg from under him. He tripped, but caught himself on one knee. Focusing everything, Tal raised Benito’s rifle to his cheek. He found Nagata standing at the end of the gun and squeezed the trigger.

  The rifle kicked. Nagata held his ground, leveling his own gun barrel. With no time to better his aim, Tal pulled the trigger again, believing this might be his last living act. Tal sank backward, his leg no longer holding him up.

  Nagata spun around, struck. The soldier beside Nagata fired. The bullet tore through the meat of Tal’s left forearm and blazed across his chest. Benito’s rifle fell out of his hands.

  The soldier ran at Tal, rifle up, ready to finish him. Carmen screamed. “No!”

  The soldier bore in. He stopped close enough to kick Tal.

  Nagata shouted, “Yamete!” Huffing, the soldier stared down the length of his rifle and bayonet.

  Twenty steps away, Nagata bent to the road. When he stood, he held a glinting pinuti bolo.

  It was Benito’s. The boy must have been one of the bodies. The shots Tal heard were the guerrilla’s killing.

  Nagata lurched away from Carmen.

  “Tal.”

  Her voice passed Nagata, the crunch of his boots on the Anos road.

  Tal bled from six wounds. He fingered the holes in his calf, the pair in his forearm, and traced the gouges in his ribs and hip. Nothing hurt, and this amazed him.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  Nagata shuffled the last distance. The soldier backed off to give him room. Nagata turned the bolo in his hand, getting the feel of it. He laid down his rifle beside the one Tal dropped.

  Tal could not see her. Nagata stood between them.

  “Carmen,” he called. “Can you get up and run?”

  Nagata widened his stance. A bullet hole in his thigh oozed.

  “No,” she said.

  “It’s all right.” Tal dragged himself sideways; he wanted one look at her in the dim light. Nagata shook his head, at the vain effort to evade him.

  She sat like him in the road, twenty steps away. They were together; the Japanese had not kept them apart.

  He dug his good hand into his pocket for the Songu tag. Before Nagata could raise the bolo to stop him, he pitched the wooden tag. It slid on the road against Carmen’s leg.

  Tal had kept his promise.

  “Tuck-san.” Nagata lifted his chin, for Tal to do the same. Behind Nagata, the soldier urged his rifle forward, to make Tal comply.

  Nagata waited.

  Tal flipped him the bird. He raised his chin.

  Nagata grunted, putting both hands on the long knife. With the bolo at his waist, he halted.

  Nagata’s gaze snapped into the darkness behind Tal, to the border of shadow on the road.

  A shot cracked. The soldier, focused on Tal down the length of his rifle, jerked backward, lifting the gun. Three more shots barked in quick succession. The soldier reeled to the thud of bullets hitting his chest. Holes broke in his tunic. The rifle slipped from his hands, he went down on his back.

  Nagata let go of the bolo. On his bleeding leg, he was slow to bend for the dropped rifle. Tal scrabbled for it the same instant. The pain in his arm, q
uiet until now, burst open. Nagata tugged the gun away.

  The wounded interpreter staggered out of the shadows, clutching his pistol high above the sopping bandages, centered on Nagata’s back. Unbalanced, Nagata hoisted the rifle to swing it around.

  The interpreter’s gun clicked once, then twice. He stopped his approach, reaching the pistol at Nagata from ten strides away. The hammer clicked once more.

  Nagata faced him with puffed cheeks, out of danger. He shook his head at the interpreter.

  The two Japanese stared with weapons raised. The interpreter lowered his empty gun. As if Nagata willed it, the soldier tottered on his feet until he, too, fell to his knees.

  Nagata did not shoot. He took in the black ruins he had made, and the living three he’d mastered on the Anos road that he had left to kill.

  Dropping the rifle to his hip, Nagata shuffled forward, leading with the bayonet.

  The interpreter raised his head, white as the moon.

  Nagata stopped close. He laid the point of the bayonet against the interpreter’s bandaged chest. Nagata considered the kneeling, shuddering soldier.

  A gunshot made Tal cringe. The interpreter crumpled at the end of Nagata’s rifle. Nagata took one broken step then toppled, not to his knees but on his face.

  Tal swung to Carmen.

  The girl lay flat on the road with a dead soldier’s rifle steadied across Benitos body. Her cheek was pressed to the stock, her eye down the long barrel.

  Carmen lifted her gaze, surfacing from the gun. Somewhere in the ruins a dying flame crackled.

  She called, “Is he dead?”

  Tal drew his good leg; and arm under him. He pushed off to stand. Blood trickled from his left: hand. On his wounded calf, Tal limped to Nagata.

  Carmen’s shot had ripped into the small of the guard’s back. The bullet might have cut the man’s spine, might have gut shot him. With pain, Tal bent to pry the rifle from Nagata’s living grip.

  In the guttering silence of Anos, Tal raised the weapon. The back of Nagata’s head came up. His hand flexed to find the rifle gone. Tal set the three-sided bayonet tip between Nagata’s shoulders, behind where he guessed the man’s wicked heart would be. He pushed down, feeling nothing of the layers the bayonet passed through, surprised how little resistance a man’s flesh put up. Nagata shuddered when the bayonet was all the way in; this Tal felt through the rifle. He let the gun go and stepped back. The rifle tipped over but stood. Nagata’s gaze did not follow Tal’s dragging foot, and Tal the thief took one last thing from the Japanese.

  Gritting his teeth, Tal turned from Nagata to kneel beside the interpreter. He lifted the pistol out of the soldier’s vacant grip.

  In the dark, Carmen said, “His name is Kenji.”

  Kenji’s eyes were closed. His soaked wrapping rose barely and fell. He was alive.

  “Hey.”

  The interpreter wore his black hair long like Tal. The two had been the same height the times they’d stood near each other in the camp.

  “Can you hear me?”

  Kenji’s lips moved but did not meet to form a word.

  Tal touched a fingertip to the bloody wrap. His own bullet had done this. He’d killed this man after all.

  Tal looked at the village in ashes, the bodies in the road, the raped virgin girl he and this Japanese both loved. The things, he thought, a fella will do.

  “Pal, I’m sorry we met.” Tal brushed a strand of hair off Kenji’s brow.

  The soldier’s mouth widened. He did not speak but loosed a long, draining breath. Kenji sagged into the Anos road.

  Tal made his way back to Carmen, pistol and bolo in hand. She could stand on one leg; the other knee was excruciating. Benito lay on the tarmac framed between his two kills. Tal left the rifle Carmen had steadied across the guerrilla boy’s mangled chest. He set the bolo beside the gun.

  Together, hopping and walking, blended into one by their injuries, Tal and Carmen left the bodies and ruins of Anos. Nearing the boat, Carmen faltered. Tal lifted her in his arms.

  On the starry bay, they sailed ahead of a breeze that blew away from Los Baños. Carmen ripped Tal’s shirt into strips to bind his forearm and leg. When they were far from land, Tal dropped Kenji’s pistol into the water.

  ~ * ~

  In revenge there is something which satisfies ones sense of justice. ... Our sense of revenge is as exact as our mathematical faculty, and until both terms of the equation are satisfied we cannot get over the sense of something left undone.

  —Inazo Nitobe,

  Bushido: The Soul of Japan, 1905

  §

  July, golf

  ~ * ~

  Chapter Sixty-two

  F

  OR HER size, Yumi had good length off the tee. She combined that with a light touch around the greens and was a born putter. Remy intended to get her lessons soon.

  Her first drive this morning found the fairway.

  Tal followed with a hard slice. Carmen’s ball disappeared in the tall grass out of bounds. Remy topped his drive; it rolled straight to stop behind Yumi’s.

  “You still weakling,” Yumi said, needling Remy with a poke.

  The little girl was the only one of the four who hadn’t spent weeks in a hospital: Carmen after knee surgery, Tal and Remy for bullet holes, malnutrition, and parasites. Yumi’s game was ahead of theirs.

  They shouldered their bags. Tal and Carmen split up to opposite sides of the fairway. Yumi and Remy walked together.

  Remy brought his son and the girls here once a week, a few miles outside the city. Golf was good for Carmen’s knee, Tal’s calf, Remy’s lung. Yumi loved the gay outfits.

  A work detail of Japanese POWs in coolie hats labored alongside the fairway. Some dragged rakes to clear the grounds of shell casings. Others carried away rubble from the blown-up fuel dump and antiaircraft battery the Japanese had kept here. The rest of the prisoners laid sod to help restore Wack Wack Golf Course to its original condition.

  The renovation of the course progressed slowly, from a shortage of manpower. Months ago, Remy and the internees watched the night sky shiver over Manila, cheering the bashing the Americans were giving the Japanese. When MacArthur finally liberated the capital in March, the butcher’s bill of the Japanese defense of the city came due. One in seven citizens of Manila lay dead, a hundred thousand killed by bombs, crossfire, street fighting, and a surge of mean-spirited murder from the last Japanese holdouts. The surviving Manileños were busy picking up the pieces and mourning.

  Few Japanese had surrendered. At Iwo Jima, Okinawa, Rangoon, across the entire Pacific War, they died in the futile defense of lost islands, in banzai and kamikaze attacks, in droves. The number of POWs the U.S. Army could put to work at Wack Wack was low.

  Carmen’s ball lay farthest away. She swung first, punching back into the fairway. Tal tried to hack his way out of trouble. He left his shot in the opposite rough near the prisoners. Carmen came to stand with Yumi and Remy in the fairway. They waited for Tal to reach his ball.

  “Just put it in play,” Carmen called while the boy crossed in front of them.

  Tal grumbled and kept walking. Yumi pointed to her shot for Carmen to see how she’d outdriven Remy by ten yards. Remy thought both girls beautiful. Carmen looked like her mother, whom Remy had met for the first time in April, at the funeral of one of Carmen’s uncles. No body had been found—the family buried a picture of the man. Carmen had stood in a cast, Tal with a cane, Remy in a sling, Yumi in bright yellow.

  Most of the internees from Los Baños and Santo Tomas had left the Philippines, returning to their nations after losing homes, jobs, and fortunes. Many missionaries stayed behind with more work to do now than before the war. Remy and Tal chose to remain in ruined Manila. The boy and Carmen were set to marry. Remy’s trade, gambling, did not go down in rubble with the city. Manila was lousy with Americans flooding in to remake the place, military to occupy it, with no other forms of entertainment.

  Remy’s luck was ba
ck in the pink. He’d been right, it had turned against him, the tenth game tipped him off. Tal was supposed to die when that Japanese shot at him in Carmen’s hallway. When Remy stepped in front of the bullet, he beat his luck. He turned it around.

  Yumi was going to stay with Remy. As soon as the American School was repaired, she would attend. Remy, like any father, feared the day she began dating.