Blood Red Sun

by Mertz, Stephen

  “Have you considered, Uncle, that politicians, for all their failings, are better at running countries than generals? Our nation would not be in this situation today had the armed forces stayed out of politics. The military has abused its power. Your beloved generals have shown themselves to be cruel, arrogant, stupid. These are the men who brought the good name of Japan into disrepute around the world. This is what I feel. I spied upon you last night only out of personal concern, not for anyone else. This I swear to you.”

  “I want to believe you, Keiko. What happened would be difficult enough to accept if what you say is true, but were I to learn the other is true, I confess I do not know what measures I would feel compelled to take against you.”

  “Uncle, the coup you hoped for has failed. It can only be so or there would have been something broadcast on the radio.

  What you and those men were plotting will not materialize. I overheard you urging restraint in committing forces loyal to you. Surely you have had the opportunity to reconsider your position. Will you and your men concede defeat when the voice of our Emperor beseeches you to?”

  He produced a watch and chain. He regarded the watch.

  “In ten minutes His Majesty’s voice will be broadcast for the first time in history.” He pocketed the watch. “Come, Keiko. We will listen to it on the radio in my study.”

  He started to turn his back and walk away. She touched fingertips to his forearm.

  “Uncle, please. Let us resolve this now. It was you who taught me that one must endure well in any circumstance. You must accept what is happening. I do not want this to come between us.”

  He turned to peer searchingly into her eyes.

  “The samurai is taught that woman’s nature is inherently evil. ‘Woman is a creature with the look of an angel but a diabolical spirit in its innermost heart,’ ” he quoted. ” ‘Nothing is to be dreaded so much as a woman.’ I have told myself all my life that you were somehow different, Keiko. Now, I wonder.”

  She watched as he turned and walked away. He ordinarily would have offered his arm, made some conversational invitation.

  Nothing was ordinary anymore.

  His world, the traditions he was heir to were in transition after a thousand years. His world was falling apart.

  And so is mine, she told herself.

  She followed him inside.

  Chapter Twelve

  They were quarreling again.

  Tenney had dropped him off moments earlier in the unmarked sedan. Carla wanted the family car for errands that day and had dropped him off that morning at the precinct house.

  He gave a tired wave to Tenney and started across the street.

  “Tomorrow, Al. Bright and early.”

  “Bright and bleary,” Tenney punned.

  He shifted into gear and pulled away.

  Ballard watched the tail lights disappear around the corner down the block, and glanced at his watch. Four in the morning.

  He trudged past the coupe where Carla had parked it in front of the one-bedroom house they’d lived in throughout their seven years of marriage. He had been a cop for eight years.

  He’d never outgrown his earliest concepts of right and wrong. There were good, decent, hard-working people in this world who were too often victimized by the greedy, the ruthless, the immoral who resorted to any means necessary to take what was not theirs. Ballard felt that helping protect decent people from such spoilers and takers was important.

  He was an oldest son and his father, a successful attorney, had intended to provide him with an education in law, but that fell away along with everything else in the crash of ‘29, when he was nineteen. In short order he enrolled in the police academy.

  He pounded his share of pavement and waited until he made detective before asking Carla to marry him. They had known each other since high school. Had lusted for each other since high school, was more like it.

  Lust had always been the only common denominator between them, and now even that was gone, or seemed to be.

  She was waiting up for him in the living room, listening to one of her dance band shows on the radio. A half-empty bottle and a glass sat on the end table next to the couch. He could see that she was looped.

  The ten pounds and a few gray hairs she’d acquired over their years of marriage made her no less attractive to him, but at this moment he did not like what he saw. He went over and picked up the bottle and carried it back to the liquor shelf. He poured himself a shot of bourbon, threw it back, poured another, capped the bottle and replaced it on the shelf without looking at her.

  ‘We’ve got to talk, Johnny,” she said in that cloying voice she thought he liked.

  “I’ll buy that. You know I don’t like you hitting the sauce.”

  “That’s what we’ve got to talk about.” A drunken thickness slurred the words. “Johnny, I can’t tell you how much I worry about you when you’re out on the streets at night. I know that anytime the phone rings or there’s a knock on the door, it could be someone calling to tell me you’re lying dead in an alley somewhere and that you’ll never be coming home again. I worry my stomach into knots. I drink because sometimes that lets me forget why I worry.” Naked emotion knifed through the booze.

  “Carla, I’m sorry, honey. You have to understand how it is. You said you would.”

  “That was when you still kept up the pretence that you wanted a transfer to something else. That was three months ago, Johnny.”

  “I said I was going to get a transfer after we nailed Evelio.”

  “Three months, Johnny.”

  “Okay, okay, so it’s taking longer than we expected. What do you think Tenney and I were doing tonight?”

  “I don’t care what you and Tenney were doing. I don’t want you out on the street, Johnny. I want you home.”

  “This is taking a lot of time,” he conceded, “but it can’t be any other way, Carla, believe me. When we get the goods on Lou Evelio, we’ll have the man behind everything illegal that goes on in this city.”

  “Lou Evelio, Lou Evelio,” she sing -songed. “I can’t stand to hear that man’s name anymore. I would gladly kill Lou Evelio myself if it would get him out of our lives. I think I would almost prefer finding out that you were seeing another woman instead of the way things have been going between us.”

  “Carla, you know there isn’t anyone else.”

  There wasn’t. No woman had ever made his hormones jump to attention the way his wife did. But lately …

  A funny, deep look he did not understand flashed in her eyes, then disappeared.

  “I know there’s no one else,” she said. “But, Johnny, this thing with Evelio. It’s become an obsession with you.”

  She was right about that. His childhood impressions of right and wrong and good and evil in this world had only been confirmed and more deeply ingrained during his years patrolling the streets. Day in and day out he saw good, hard-working people exploited and intimidated by thieves, dope dealers, pimps, con artists of every stripe, murderers, and his blood boiled to know that he could only deal with it, any of it, on a small scale.

  His promotion to plainclothes had changed all that. He was able to go after some of the real causes of all the suffering and misery, though it took some years more before he became aware of the importance, the culpability—hell, the very existence—of Louis Evelio. He had managed to keep a respectable name for himself thanks to a well publicized camaraderie with the elite of Chicago’s ruling class and several not-so-well - known alliances with the mobsters who ran the city’s underworld.

  Evelio was one of the big guys. The biggest. He supplied the start-up capital for new rackets and expansion, while raking in a healthy cut of every illegal activity in the city in return. He was as dirty as the hoods themselves.

  Lately, very much on their own, Ballard and Al Tenney had, through a combination of informants, wire taps, luck, and old-fashioned, monotonous police work in City Hall, gotten closer than anyone ever had in gett
ing the real goods on Evelio; legal proof that would hold up even in a court of law.

  Maybe it had become an obsession, but they were closer than anyone had ever dreamed of getting, even the Feds. Two city detectives were that close to bringing in Lou Evelio.

  “It won’t be much longer, Carla,” he told her. “I promise.”

  “John Ballard, I can’t go on living like this. The worry, the nights alone without you. Do you remember the last time we made love? It’s been more than a month.”

  Her sudden bold intimacy caught him off guard. He lost his voice for a moment.

  Everything she said was true. At first he had assumed the seemingly mutual lack of interest in their bedroom to be nothing more than a normal lag in ardor as he supposed any longstanding couple might experience from time to time. You couldn’t expect a person to feel like jumping in the sack every spare second he had, he told himself, and for a while life had continued with little change, except that the days became weeks and the weeks had grown to more than a month and neither of them had spoken of it until now.

  He cleared his throat, feeling himself losing ground here. “Honey, listen, I don’t know what to say.”

  “Well, I know what to say. You’re using this Evelio thing as an excuse not to make love with me and I want to know why.”

  “Carla, that isn’t true.”

  “It’s not too late, Johnny. Why don’t you just go in tomorrow and tell them you want off the Evelio case?”

  “You know it’s not that easy.”

  “You’ve had vacation time coming for more than a year now. Why don’t we go up to Michigan or Wisconsin, get away from the city for a few days, how does that sound, Johnny? Remember our honeymoon? That cabin in the north woods with just the two of us?”

  Right then something clicked to the surface of his mind. The hurting in her voice. The way she held her eyes downcast. “Where did you go with the car this afternoon?”

  “Johnny, what do you mean?”

  “Why are you so anxious for us to go on a trip all of a sudden?”

  “Because I want to save our marriage.”

  “I didn’t know things had gotten that bad between us.”

  “Well, they have … they have.”

  “Answer my question. Where did you take the car today? You weren’t running errands, were you?”

  “You already know,” she said. “I can see it in your eyes. I hear it in your voice.”

  “My God, you’ve taken a lover!”

  “No.” She shook her head. “It never went that far. This afternoon was the last time I’ll see him. I told him so and I meant it.”

  ‘Who is he? Where do you know him from?”

  “It doesn’t matter. I told you I’ll never see him again.”

  She picked up the empty whiskey glass from the end table and walked across the room, away from him.

  That’s when the quarreling really began.

  “God damn!” he snarled. “I’ve been out busting my backside sixty hours a week to buy us groceries and put a roof over our heads and clothes on your back and you’re out running around on me.”

  “I was tempted, Johnny, okay? Nothing happened, nothing will happen. Maybe you have some responsibility in this too, have you thought about that? Maybe you’d better set things right around here before it’s too late.”

  Rage and humiliation surged through him. His emotions flared.

  “You’ve got some gall. Out chasing around with another man and issuing me ultimatums. By rights I should throw you out in the gutter where you belong.”

  “A vacation might be nicer, Johnny. Let’s not throw this away.”

  “Maybe you already have, Carla, from the minute you started cheating on me.”

  “Well then, the hell with you and your goddamn dream house!” she erupted, every bit of the pent-up pressure pouring from her at once. “Maybe I’ll tell my friend I changed my mind!”

  She threw her glass at the opposite wall. It hit, bounced off, and before it landed on the carpet, she was storming to the closet and angrily pulling on her coat.

  He thought briefly, strangely, of how attractive she still was to him even in her anger, especially in her anger, her rage like her passion, close to the surface. It ignited him.

  She grabbed her purse and had her hand on the doorknob when something made him say, “Carla, wait.”

  She glared back at him.

  “For what?”

  “I’m . . sorry,” he said with difficulty. Emotions rioted in his brain. His throat was dry. “I wallow in filth all day.” He had difficulty finding the right words. He was not sure what he was trying to say. She was seeing another man! “Maybe it’s crazy, but … I feel dirty all the time, like if I touch you I’ll make you dirty and I don’t want to do that to you, honey. I know it’s nuts.”

  “We’ve grown apart, Johnny,” she said, sounding almost sober. “Living together under one roof, sleeping in the same bed … we’ve grown apart.”

  She hadn’t taken her hand from the doorknob.

  “You said we could work on it,” he said, trying to keep the sudden desperation he felt from showing in his voice. “So let’s work on it.”

  “Not tonight, Johnny.”

  “What do you mean, not tonight?”

  “I mean tomorrow we can work on it, talk about it. Tonight I think we need a break from each other, maybe just for one night.”

  She opened the door to leave. His frayed nerves flared. A wave of jealousy hit him.

  “You don’t know what you want, that’s your problem!” he heard himself shout. “You don’t know if you should spend the night with your husband or one of your men friends!” He had no control over the words spewing out of him. “Well, I’ll tell you what, you bitch, you can take as long a break from me as you want, how does that sound? You don’t ever have to come back!”

  She said in a quiet voice, “Maybe I won’t,” and she was gone, slamming the door on her way out.

  He started after her impulsively.

  The telephone rang. He paused, cursed, went over and caught it on the third ring.

  “John, you okay?” It was Captain Harrelson.

  Ballard stood there with the telephone receiver in his hand, trying to get a rein on his emotions, his temples pounding. Harrelson sounded worked up.

  “Yeah, I’m fine, skipper. What’s wrong?”

  “It’s Tenney. He just walked into an ambush outside his house. Two guys with Tommy guns, for Chrissake. Were you birds still trying to pin a rap on Evello? I told you nix on that. It looks like Evello is hitting back, and I’d say you’re next.”

  Ballard whirled toward the front door without replying, throwing the receiver aside, shouting Carla’s name. He heard the hollow thump of a closing car door outside. He gained the door and threw it open.

  She had the headlights on. She always turned on the headlights before she switched on the ignition.

  He stormed from the house screaming her name at the top of his lungs.

  “Carla!”

  The car, the night, the world exploded into a bursting fireball, a blossoming, blinding, deafening conflagration.

  The heat and power of it flung him from his feet, his scream lost in the awful thunderclap of sound.

  He awakened with a gasp like a man reaching the surface after having been submerged underwater for too long, the abrupt return to reality a jarring jolt that lurched him into a sitting position, and for that first instant all he could hear was his own ragged breathing and all he could feel was his body coated with sweat.

  Someone was shaking him awake.

  “Hey, Sarge. Hey. Snap out of it.”

  Then the old combat instincts took over and he was wide awake with a full awareness of where he was.

  The narrow cell.

  The dream became what it was, not reality but submerged mental images of what happened five years ago coming back to haunt him, tentacles from the past that would never let him go.

  Hanklin was
shaking him, crouched in the narrow space next to the cot. Mischkie leaned against a wall opposite the open cell door, a cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth.

  “You were having a nightmare, Sarge.”

  “What the hell do you call this? Tell me you guys are here to spring me.” Ballard sat up.

  “We’re here to spring you, Sarge,” Hanklin grinned. “Carried the orders over from General MacArthur and dropped them off out front not one minute ago.”

  “On your feet, Sarge,” said Mischkie. “No offense, but you look like hell and you don’t smell so good either.”

  “No argument there,” said Ballard, coming to his feet. “What the hell’s been going on while I was in dreamland?”

  “The general says you’re to shower up and catch a good twenty-four hours of shut-eye,” Hanklin told him. “He wants you in his office tomorrow morning at 0800 hours.”

  Ballard buttoned up the fatigue shirt he’d been using for a pillow.

  “You talked the general into turning me loose?”

  “Not us,” said Mischkie. “That’s why we went there, but he already had the idea when we showed up. We just ran the orders over.”

  “The general says he’s got plans for you,” Hanklin grinned. “I reckon in this particular case, ‘you’ means us.”

  “Did he say what’s up?”

  “Uh-uh. Guess that must be one of the things you’re going to find out tomorrow morning at 0800.”

  They left the brig, stepping into the blistering sunshine that almost felt comfortable to Ballard after the airless confines of the cell.

  “What about Goro?”

  Mischkie nodded back toward the Quonset. “His own special cell and everything. They’re pulling him out to Manila sometime today. He cooperated fully.”

  “Anything else I should know?”

  “Something’s in the air,” Hanklin said in a lowered voice. “Scuttlebutt is that the Japs are about to announce they’re throwing in the towel. No one’s talking around the headshed, just rumors.”

  “And what about the reason I had to sit and rot in this shitpit? What about Corbin?”