Selfer was still trying to sound upbeat, but it came off like a dad telling junior they were going on a fun trip but the truth was they were skipping town and a heap of unpaid tabs.
“When do I go?” Lett said.
“Now.”
Something about the way Selfer said it made Lett’s leg twitch with bad feeling. And if it was now, why hadn’t Selfer just knocked on his door instead of loitering around? And why not just send a runner over? Things were clearly troubling Selfer enough to make the man stall.
Lett had to find out more before he was going anywhere, let alone on a mission. But they couldn’t do it here, not where he lived, not out in the open. He ducked inside and pulled on the rest of his khakis, a field cap, and sunglasses. He also grabbed his musette bag with his dose.
“Follow me,” he told Selfer and started off.
Selfer shrugged but followed. Lett picked up the pace and followed a trail until they were far into the woods. They assumed patrol distance, single file with Lett five yards ahead of Selfer who had likely never marched like this since boot camp, if then. Craggy bark on knotty trees hung like flaking paint. An insect buzzed like a small electric motor seizing up. Lett eyed the perimeter for sentries. He saw none. Selfer, to his credit, was watching their backs. Lett reached a thicket of flowering shrubs and went down on one knee like a squad leader.
Selfer went down on a knee and tried a smile. “Look at us. Like we’re sneaking cigarettes behind the schoolhouse.” Lett didn’t smile. “All right,” Selfer added. “You want the latest score, is that it?”
“What do you know about a Japanese goon named Kodama?”
Selfer started. He shushed Lett, his index finger to his lips.
Lett saw what Selfer had spotted: a camp sentry was passing by some twenty yards away, head down, carbine bobbing on his shoulder, moving away from them.
It was Jock Quinn. They had him doing sentry work, and Jock probably saw it as a feather in his cap. Lett’s heart sunk a little.
They waited it out. “Very well,” Selfer said. “For your ears only?”
“None other.”
“First things first. One Edward Lansdale. I’ve been looking into him. He used to be attached to SCAP intelligence section, sure, but he was operating out of Manila and he got himself moving up real fast.”
“SCAP being MacArthur—”
“Shut it,” Selfer hissed. “Do not mention the general’s name. They do not get linked, see? Not anymore.”
“I see.”
“That Lansdale, he’s a real conniver. Let’s go further back. He wasn’t even in the war! Wrote advertising copy for the OSS out of San Francisco. Office of Strategic Services. Probably ran a nice tab at the Top of the Mark. When Washington disbanded the OSS, this conniver Lansdale got himself sent to the Pacific by the head of OSS Donovan, Donovan wanting his own boys in the right places.”
“So, just to be sure—Lansdale has never been a doctor.”
Selfer sneered. “That’s rich. No. He just knows what gets results.”
“Top of the Mark?”
“Forget it. Let’s just say his spoon is silver and we’re not talking plated. Ah, but these days Lansdale is making his own play. SCAP staff never liked him much because he’s sharp and slick, yet strange, I tell you, but now he’s got his own sponsors and they might have more pull. Hear he’s getting a new rank in the new US Air Force branch, just to keep all the players happy.”
He already has that, Lett wanted to say.
With a slight speeding of his heart, he realized that Selfer was confiding in him. To Selfer, he might even be something like an ally. And Lett wondered, with a shiver, just how much Selfer really knew about the big picture behind closed doors. The notion tightened his asshole with horror more than anything. What if Selfer was only a shinier version of himself here?
“What you’re saying is,” Lett said, “that he’s landed himself loads more free reign.”
“And how.” Selfer was holding out the chromium flask. Lett took it and sipped. He was expecting rum but it was Johnnie Walker, the good stuff. It went down all right.
“You’ve had this hip flask a long time,” Lett said, handing it back.
“It was my father’s.” Selfer shook his head. “I stole it from him.”
Saying that made Selfer put a Camel in his mouth that he didn’t light.
“Tell me something,” Selfer added. “How’s the treatment? Are you still feeling better?”
“As long as I take my dose,” Lett said.
“I’ll take that as a yes.”
They shared another slug from the flask.
“What about this goon Kodama?” Lett said.
“The Jap? Strike that—we don’t call them ‘Japs’ anymore, or ‘Nips.’ Some of them are our friends now.”
“He looked like a friend like an SS-Man does a traffic cop.”
Selfer just stared at the ground, like a dice player who’d just emptied his pockets.
“But you can’t talk about him,” Lett added.
“Hands are tied, Wendell. Your turn.”
“My turn how?”
“Kanani.”
“I wouldn’t say she’s an equivalent.”
“I didn’t say that. Have you told her?”
“About where I was? That what you mean? No.”
Selfer took a breath, looked around. “And Kanani wasn’t asking? Probing?”
“Snooping, you mean?”
“I mean.”
“No.”
Selfer squatted closer. “Listen. You think she’s all right? Someone to trust?”
“I do.”
Selfer nodded at that, taking notes in his mind, boxes checked. “Something for you, in any case—consider it a booby prize. I once heard that name Kanani keeps mentioning on the QT.”
“What name?”
“Come off it, Lett. Mae. Chinese, right? ‘Miss Mae,’ she calls her.”
“Oh. How? For what?”
“Overheard it in a meeting. Maybe I wasn’t supposed to be there. Never heard it again. Okay, learned enough? Good. You two just remember that. Now, time to follow me—I got a mission briefing to get you to.”
***
Lett got good steak and fresh eggs. He knew what that meant. Whenever troops got a special hot meal up on the line it meant they were being sent into one hell of a meat grinder. But this time Lett was a troop of one. He ate his special meal alone in a windowless room at the Main House while he was briefed on his assignment. To soften the blow, they threw fresh fruit into the bargain, mango and pineapple. Lett hadn’t touched the aromatic coffee, but when the dirty lowdown started to sink in, he gulped down the fine stuff to look alive and sharpen up and absorb each and every detail that may save him or fuck him.
Selfer himself led the briefing at first, just like old times. Selfer didn’t bother with upbeat now. Over the bamboo wallpaper hung maps of Honolulu on the island of Oahu. Lett was to enter the city and bring back someone Selfer called a “target person.”
Then Lansdale strode in, and Selfer stepped aside. That old boiling heat swelled inside Lett again, but he kept a lid on it. Lansdale’s jovial way cloaked what was an iron glove. Peppering his instructions with his upbeat sayings, Lansdale told Lett that if his target wasn’t cooperating, then Lett was to eliminate with the “merry utmost of unholy bias,” grinning all the while as if delivering an original limerick. This, Lansdale added, was the least they could do for all the civilians their target had helped the Japanese kill—for Lett’s target had sold out hundreds if not thousands of civilians in China and later in the Philippines. “They severed the heads of children,” Lansdale reminded Lett. But he sounded as if he were selling detergent on a radio show. On top of that, Lansdale was telling him to be prepared to kill someone for reasons that Lansdale, and only Lansdale, gave him—reasons Lett was to take as simple facts.
Selfer, meanwhile, played the diligent boy scout to Lansdale the frisky scoutmaster. It made Lett’s stomach turn
, but he shoveled the eggs in anyhow. His gut only turned further when he realized he felt something like empathy for Selfer, who kept his head lowered and his hands clasped in front of him like Lett imagined a man about to be beheaded by a samurai sword-wielding Japanese officer might do—all he had to do was kneel down and it was done. Lett listened to Lansdale, nodded, and glared at Selfer when he had the slightest chance, but Selfer wouldn’t return the gaze.
“Good luck, hero,” Lansdale said.
After he strode out, Lett glared all he wanted.
Selfer waited a moment before stepping over to him. “This will get you cured,” he said through clenched teeth. “It’ll be the test of your treatment. Your final stage. You succeed, you’re home free.”
“That’s good. You memorize that?”
“This is no time for jokes,” Selfer said.
“Who’s joking? You don’t like the sound of this, I can tell.”
“Just do it,” Selfer snapped, “and get back safe.”
“It all sounds so familiar. Sir.”
Lett expected a dressing-down, spiteful words, something. But Selfer only dragged in a deep breath and sighed. He handed Lett a wallet with civilian ID in the name of one Wendell Lett, which Lett didn’t like, not at all, and he imagined it was their way of keeping him honest. But whose fault was that? After all, he had chosen all of this.
The next hour was filled with rushed preparations. Lett was sure to take his dose. A clerk in the quartermaster’s Quonset hut issued him his civilian clothes: linen trousers, rubber-soled sneakers for quiet, a lightweight driver’s cap and sunglasses for hiding his face, and a muted aloha shirt loose enough to conceal a holster. He got a Colt pistol, this one brand-new, feeling lighter somehow than the ones he’d held during the war. He knew Colts. He’d carried one on night patrols especially. Despite that, they had him report to an instructor on the training ground.
It was Jock Quinn. Lett almost didn’t recognize Jock striding up, his posture straighter than a flagpole and a voice like a snare drum in a way that could only be a Marine’s.
“Good morning,” Lett said.
“Morning,” Jock said. “Let’s get to it.”
Lett spared Jock the sick wisecracks. And Jock didn’t make small talk, joke, or even cuss. He made sure Lett remembered the weapon, had him take it apart, load it, arm it. Next Jock handed Lett a suppressor, which civilians called “silencers” in crime pictures. Lett didn’t know the suppressor. It was as long as the gun itself and not all that silent. It made a sharp crack, like branches being snapped, which sounded to Lett too much like trees busting. The suppressor was strapped to his leg, where it would stay. He told himself he wouldn’t have to use that piece any more than he would the gun.
“Get back safe, wherever they’re sending you,” Jock said.
“Amen to that,” Lett said.
22.
Late that afternoon, Lett entered Honolulu harbor on a fishing boat from the Big Island. They passed a clock tower bearing the word ALOHA. Once docked, Lett walked out to the main road as instructed and met a cab. The cabbie asked, “Where to, buddy?” and Lett replied, “Pacific Heights, friend.”
The cabbie had red hair under his cap and more eyes on Lett in the rearview mirror than on the road ahead. Lett happened to ask him where the red-light district was and cabbie said they already drove past it, down Hotel Street to the left—thus the neon lights Lett had seen out of the corner of his eye. That had once been Kanani’s world, Lett recalled, and her stepping-stone to The Preserve.
They drove down a street named Bishop and then up a road called Pali heading inland, the hills above town looming before them. Lett saw signs for grocers and drug stores, bars and churches, in Chinese and Japanese. Palm trees leaned his way as if to greet him, and they passed a cop wearing oversize white gloves directing traffic in the middle of the street from a booth topped with an umbrella. And yet, if Lett squinted, he could imagine his surroundings to be those of any small American city, something nearly foreign to him these days.
The cabbie was eyeing him through the rearview mirror. “You all right, Mac?”
“Sure I am. Sure.”
The cabbie drove him up a road that narrowed as it wound up into the hills, lined in stretches by black lava stones or overhanging ferns or both. Pacific Heights. It would have been expensive real estate in any mainland American city, but here many houses looked modest. After a couple bends the cabbie delivered Lett right to the address Lett had never uttered—that they never actually gave him. The cabbie passed slow, kept going, and dropped Lett off around the next bend up. He tipped his hat. “So long,” was all he said.
From the road, Lett had an expansive view of the city along the water far below, and beyond it a stretch of ocean beach named Waikiki and that giant volcanic rock of a hill—Diamond Head, it was called.
The target location was a modest stucco house with a flat roof. It sat atop an open carport that housed a nondescript Ford and was inundated with palms and long-leaf bushes as if the jungle were growing right over it, though Lett imagined it was intentional on a property like this. The lot was set into the hill and, sitting as it did on a turn, had no direct neighbors. Most blinds were shut, but the ones in the window next to the front door were cracked, just barely.
Lett walked up the steps and knocked. No one answered.
The target was supposed to be here. It was supposed to be a woman. She was supposed to be alone. Lansdale gave her the codename of Jade. She would answer to that.
Maybe she was sleeping? Lett knocked again, got nothing. He went around back, through a snug backyard that was secluded like a jungle ridge. He stood at the rear door to the kitchen. The blinds were shut.
The door opened. Lett recognized Jade from the photo Lansdale showed him. She looked Chinese, about forty, thick mop of black hair, wide shiny cheeks. She could’ve been anything from a schoolteacher to a simple, happy merchant. She wore blue pajamas.
“Jade,” Lett stated.
Her eyes drooped a split second. “Please, enter.”
She walked Lett through the kitchen into a front room, Lett eyeing a hallway but hearing nothing, seeing nothing. It smelled like nothing apart from a whiff of something fried hours ago. Shadows filled the room, sliced by orange rays of light coming through the barely open blinds. Inside, even in the front room, no one could see them from the street. It was too high up.
Lett had his Colt pistol out.
“Do not worry,” she said. “No one else here.”
Lett held the pistol at his hip, pointed down, finger off the trigger and on the slide for the woman to see. He wouldn’t bother with the suppressor.
“There’s a boat waiting for us,” he said. “I’m to bring you back.” He spoke his words slowly in case she didn’t understand. He sounded motorized this way, like some movie hit man; it couldn’t be helped.
“Oh,” she said, “I see.” Her face had hardened. She spoke good enough English. “They tell you what I did?” she said. “I do many bad thing, many, many. But not what they tell you.”
“They don’t tell me anything. They tell me to do a job.” Lett thought of the tunnels below camp now as he spoke.
“Sure, Joe. You their messenger man.”
“Don’t call me Joe.”
“I didn’t kill people. I was liaison for them. Middleman, you call it. Drugs. Treasures.”
“For who?” Lett blurted. Of course, he wasn’t supposed to ask questions.
“The Japanese. Imperial Army. You ever hear of Golden Lily?”
“No, and I don’t want to. Let’s go. Get a robe on or your clothes, your choice.”
“Wait. Please . . .” She lowered to her knees.
“Don’t do that. You won’t like where it leads.” Lett stood inside a shadow. From there he tried to sound tough, but his voice creaked.
“I won’t go with you,” she said. “They send you here to kill me. Yes? If I don’t go?”
“You got about one minute.”<
br />
Lett’s instructions were to make her drive the two of them down to the harbor in her car, the modest two-door Ford in the carport. But his stomach prickled, as if threads were being yanked through it by needles. Finally, he said, “We go in your car. We get your car keys.”
“You hear of the name Kodama?”
“No.”
“Lansdale?”
“No.”
“Frankie Baptiste?”
“Shut up. Shut your trap, will you?” Lett bounded out of the shadow and towered over her, again acting just like a hit man.
“They send you here to kill me, only kill me. Because they know I won’t go. They give you order. I no come, so I die. So kill.” She gritted her teeth and bared them to Lett.
Lett took a deep breath. He put on a grimace, tried to make it form a smile. “You’re stalling. You’re good, but you’re stalling all the same. It’s not going to work.”
“They don’t need me,” she muttered. “Why go through middleman when they can get direct from source? That sounds like Lansdale, does it not?”
“It’s not going to work,” Lett repeated.
“Just listen. You know why? Why they send you?”
He lied: “Here’s what I do know: If I don’t bring you back, I don’t get paid. I like to get paid.”
“What you don’t know? The men who own you, they have their own intelligence plan, they worse than any OSS or what come next now. Secret fund. You know about it?” She was the one grimacing now.
Lett glared. He heard himself say, “What do you know about it?”
“Too much. There is a certain person they want to die. They plan to assassinate.”
“Stop it. You’re stalling again. Get up off your knees.”
“Please, listen. They plan to assassinate . . . one very important man. I cannot say his name.” She gasped as if she’d just uttered the name by accident.
“And then what?” Lett said.
“What else? Big confusion. They use the chaos. The people weak. They take over.” She was whispering now.
“Take over what?”
She held up a finger. “No. I tell too much.” She jumped up, but Lett waved his gun and she stayed in her spot.
The Preserve Page 18