“You think they really are bigots?” asked Duffy, dropping her voice.
“Nah, they’re just ignorant. They haven’t read your book yet, Julia.”
“Hey, Jules,” said Natoli. “Here’s your favorite primitive, just back from the tundra.”
Lieutenant Commander Black, in a newly pressed uniform, threaded through the mess tables toward them. He smiled at Natoli and shook hands with Lieutenant Nguyen. He was past being surprised at finding little Asian women in military uniform. He turned toward Julia Duffy.
“I’ve got a few days’ liberty,” he told her. “And they gave me a room over at the Moana. I thought you might like to come into town for a swim. You can sneak through the barbed wire on the beach, if you know the way.”
“My word, Commander, that’s awfully forward of you,” she mocked gently.
Black wasn’t sure what to say next. He looked uncomfortable, like a man trapped in an exchange with somebody whose mind worked much faster than his own.
Julia turned the full wattage of her smile on him. “Lieutenant Commander Black, I do believe you will die of embarrassment right where you stand, if this goes on. Relax. I’d love to come over, as long as you can get Rosanna a room, as well. But right now, we’re helping Rachel with something. You want go strutting through Honolulu with your trophy bitches, you’ll have to lend us a hand first.”
Now Black really was embarrassed. He actually blushed, down to the roots of his thick, slicked-back hair. The six sailors from the Enterprise all froze, as though poleaxed. They openly gawked at the two civilians now.
“Oh my God, Julia,” Rosanna squealed happily. “You’re killing this poor guy. Just put him out of his fucking misery, would you. Listen, Daniel, my friend here—she’s toying with you like a cat plays with a mouse. My advice is, if you want her, don’t let her get away with it. Hit her with a club and drag her back to your cave. She’ll chain herself to your kitchen stove and start popping out bambinos before you know what’s happened.”
Black gave the impression he didn’t know whether to laugh or curse or tuck his tail between his legs and run like a dog. The three women were obviously enjoying themselves enormously at his expense.
“Maybe we should just parachute-drop you witches straight into Tokyo,” he said in the end. “A few days of your company, and the Japs would be begging us for mercy.”
“Not if they know how to treat a girl,” said Julia.
“Perhaps they could give me a few tips,” Black muttered, before addressing Rosanna. “Miss Natoli,” he said, “you were always invited, by the way. Admiral Spruance wants to talk to you both. It’s nothing heavy, a dinner and a talk. He’s just curious about the future, I guess.”
25
HICKAM FIELD, HAWAII, 0610 HOURS, 8 JUNE 1942
Slim Jim Davidson couldn’t believe how his luck had run hot and cold since the future had turned up to wreck the Astoria. First and most importantly, there was a chance he might live now. He’d been stunned to discover that he was supposed to die in a few weeks at the Battle of Savo Island. One of the crew on the Leyte Gulf had searched Fleetnet for him—Slim Jim was assiduous about learning the lingo—and had pulled his name out of a database of American war dead.
That was some powerfully spooky shit there.
“Guess you should be glad we turned up to kick your ass instead,” the guy had joked.
But Slim Jim hadn’t thought it was funny at all. It had landed him in a blue funk for two days. He’d only surfaced when Mohr had told him everyone off the Astoria would be moving ashore as soon as they hit Pearl. There was nowhere to berth them on the surviving ships. That got him to thinking on how he might fence the stuff he’d lifted from the Leyte Gulf, which got him to thinking about how much money he stood to make. Which, in turn, led him to the conclusion that if he made enough of the folding stuff he might be able to grease the right wheels and roll right on out of the firing line. Then he could land himself a position more befitting a man of his talents.
Once ashore, they had set up tents for temporary quarters. That had dampened his spirits some again. Pitched in a burned-out expanse of sugarcane stubble a mile or so from Hickam Field, they reminded him of his time on the road gang. But there was no work to be done, which suited him fine.
All he had to do was figure out how to get down to Hotel Street in Honolulu. Given a few hours down there, he was sure he’d be able to move this loot. Unfortunately they were all confined to camp indefinitely. Somebody told him it was because a couple of Japs from the future had got themselves whacked, but Slim Jim took that for bullshit. The navy had stuck him in this shithole with a moron for a roomy, because the navy had nothing better to do than make his sorry life even more miserable than it might be.
Surprisingly enough, it was the moron, Moose Molloy Jr., who came to the rescue. Mohr had asked him to volunteer for a work detail, helping shift a bunch of gear that had belonged to some dead officers out of the Moana Hotel. There was certain to be heavy lifting involved, a Moose Jr. specialty.
“You gotta be fucking kidding me, Davidson,” the chief had said when Slim Jim had confronted him, eager to pitch in. “What, d’you take a round in the head or something? You forget what a lazy asshole you are?”
“Come on, Chief,” he’d pleaded. “I’m going outta my fucking nut in this cane field. We been here three days with nothing to do but scratch our balls. I just about scratched mine right off. It’s Montgomery all over again, Chief. You gotta let me outta this joint. Even working is better than this!”
No doubt Mohr knew he was being played, but he must’ve decided to let the bum have a bit of rope, see if he looped it around his scrawny neck and hung himself.
“Okay, Davidson, get on the bus with Moose and Barnes. And don’t let me find you pocketing the effects of any of them fine, dead, officers and gentlemen.”
Slim Jim managed to sound reasonably offended. “Stealing from the dead? That’s not my thing, Chief,” he said, as he hurried onto an old school bus, repainted in dun green for war service.
“No, bouncing checks off old ladies is more your style, dickwad,” Mohr grumbled.
The ride into Honolulu was brief, and Slim Jim couldn’t help but laugh at all the dumb jerks they left behind, running along, begging for a chance to get out of that hellhole of a field. They raised a cloud of black ash and dust as they trotted beside the bus. Mohr kept a close eye on his least favorite charge as they bounced and squeaked their way into town. But cops had been eyeballing Slim Jim for a lot longer than Eddie Mohr. He knew to keep himself clean, which meant staying in character. He regaled the men in the seats around him with the exploits from his previous visits to the body shops along River and Barretania Streets. Mohr eventually tired of his bullshit and tuned him out. Slim Jim kept it going all the way to the Moana.
“Would you look at this joint,” said Moose Jr., with real awe in his voice as they piled out in front of the hotel. Forty years old and fronting directly onto Waikiki Beach, the Moana had serviced some of the wealthiest tourists in the world before the war. Along with the Royal, it was one of the few grand structures in Honolulu. The coral reef that covered the floor of the bay had been smothered in sand dumped from barges in front of the Moana, so that the dainty feet of wealthy tourists wouldn’t be too badly cut up.
Ever since the Japanese raid in December, naval personnel had replaced the tourists, and barbed wire now ran along the beach, blocking access to the brilliant green water.
Slim Jim nudged Moose in the ribs. “What’d I tell you about officers, Moose?”
“To love, honor, and obey them,” said Mohr, punching Slim Jim in the back. “C’mon, Vladimir, the workers’ revolution can wait. We got barges to lift and bales to tote.”
The duty wasn’t excessively heavy. Mostly they had to ferry a lot of sea trunks and personal luggage out of the hotel and into a truck for transfer to graves registration. A couple of the former occupants did have some curious and inconvenient items, like the pil
ot who’d acquired an antique mahogany dining table on a tour of China and had somehow managed to carry it through two other postings. Moose, Slim Jim, and four other guys were needed to shift that baby.
As tempting as it would have been to pocket a curio here or there, Davidson knew not to tempt fate. Mohr had eyes in the back of his box-shaped head and he was a lay-down certainty to be watching like a hawk. No, Slim Jim was a patient crook, content to pretend he wanted nothing more than to escape the prison camp of the cane field. If he behaved himself and didn’t give the chief reason to get on his case, he might just get enough wiggle room to do some real business before long.
So he lifted and grunted and sweated with the others, grumbling occasionally, as was his style, complaining about officers who lived like royalty, and bullshitting about how he’d stayed in plenty of joints that’d make this place look like a flophouse. They finished up at 1730 with a few more hours of work to go. A strict curfew was in place from 1800, however, so Mohr herded them back onto the bus for the trip back to the cane field.
The bullshitting wasn’t nearly as loud or energetic on the way home. Talk turned to Midway, to curiosity and speculation.
“I heard they put a new heart in Smithy,” said a voice from the dark in the rear of the bus. “Like a fucking windup clock it is, I heard. All gears and wires.”
“Crap,” said someone else. “It’d rust in there.”
“No,” said Chief Mohr, “that one’s true. I visited Smithy myself on that big Marine Corps flattop they got. They split him right open, took out his old heart, and put in this new one, made of some kind of miracle plastic or something. Reckon it’ll be beating a hundred years after he’s gone.”
“I heard they all got machines inside them, that they can talk to each other without even speaking out loud.”
“No way.”
“Yep, and they can grow you new skin and muscles and stuff, if you get a piece shot out of you—”
“—or burned off.”
“That’s right. And they got that jelly they put on the burns. You seen that shit? It smells something terrible but I tell you what, guys got that stuff on them, it’s like they can’t feel a damn thing from those burns, and when it comes off they just patch you up with some o’ that skin they grow in a bucket. It’s like you never got burned.”
“What if they fucked it up, though. Gave you some nigger skin when you’re meant to get white. You’d be a sorry-looking piece of shit then, wouldn’t you? Like a zebra.”
“It wouldn’t take,” said Moose, quite earnestly, over the laughter. “You couldn’t put black on white. They’s two different types. Wouldn’t work—just like if you got the blood types wrong and mixed ’em. It’d kill you.”
Moose was particularly pleased with himself for that analogy. And for Moose, it was a decidedly sophisticated piece of reasoning.
“We coming back in tomorrow?” Slim Jim asked Mohr. “To finish the job?”
“I don’t know, Davidson. Could be that some of the others need a break, too.”
“Screw them,” someone called out, saving Slim Jim the trouble. “Those lazy bums didn’t put their hands up today. Why should they get a reward tomorrow?”
Mohr said he’d think about it.
“Hey,” said Slim Jim, “did anyone hear about the pill they got gives you a boner for three days straight?”
The next day the same sun that beat down with such malice in the burned-out cane field felt dappled and wonderful downtown in Honolulu. Slim Jim was so happy he had unknowingly slipped into his Downtown Strut. Davidson hadn’t had cause to break out the Strut since getting busted and press-ganged into the navy. But this morning, he felt like he was walking with the King.
They had finished work at the Moana by 1030 and Chief Mohr, in an unprecedented show of slack, had given them liberty for the rest of the day. They were free as birds until 1700 hours, when the bus would take them back to camp. Slim Jim had quickly shaken off Moose Molloy and headed straight for Hotel Street. It was said of this quarter of Old Honolulu that you were as much at risk here as storming a Japanese pillbox. If the cops didn’t get you, the crooks surely would. Dozens of booze barns and cathouses lined the narrow pavement. Bouncers and con men, vicious Kanaks, the Shore Patrol, syphilitic hookers, drunken sailors—there were a thousand ways to get into trouble down on Hotel Street.
Slim Jim Davidson felt right at home.
He had joined a long line outside one of the cheaper bordellos and remained there until he was certain Chief Mohr had disappeared into Wo Fats bar and grill. Then, pointedly mumbling about how a man could die of horniness in such a slow line, he stepped off, apparently determined to seek a quicker release.
Instead he walked down by the canal and into an old warehouse once run by the Dole Pineapple Company, but abandoned after a fire about a year ago. Picking his way through the charred debris, he stepped out onto a narrow and quiet back lane. Dogshit lay everywhere among broken glass and hundreds of discarded cigarette butts. Slim Jim stood and waited.
It took less than a minute. A dark calloused hand appeared at the edge of a sheet of corrugated iron a few yards down the alley. The thin metal sheet scraped on the ground as someone pulled it to one side. A giant slab-shouldered Maori with elaborate tattoos covering his whole face squeezed out of the gap. A long white scar ran from his right ear down across his throat, marring the intricate tattoo before disappearing into a filthy white T-shirt. The expression on his mangled face was murderous, until he straightened up and got a look at Slim Jim. At once he broke out in a wide grin, displaying at least three missing teeth.
“Hello, Tui,” said Slim Jim. “Is Big Itchy ’round?”
“He’s so round we can’t hardly fit him through the door no more,” laughed Tui. “He’s still eating like a condemned man.”
“Still got a thirst that’d cast a shadow?”
“You bet.”
Slim Jim came forward, gingerly stepping around dozens of dog turds. He plucked a fifth of bourbon from his pocket.
“My compliments to the big guy,” he said. “Sorry it ain’t more.”
“Things are tight all over, Slim Jim,” said Tui as he beamed and slapped a huge meaty paw on the white man’s shoulder.
They climbed through the gap in the ramshackle wall, entering a small wrecker’s yard on the other side. Tui slid the iron sheet back into place and picked up the shotgun he’d placed by the entrance.
“You see any of the action at Midway?” asked Tui as they walked through the yard to the office.
“My friend, I was up to here in it,” said Davidson, tapping his chin with the back of his hand. “That’s why I’m here.”
“Is it true what they’re saying about these visitors?”
“Depends what they’re saying, brother.”
Tui’s glance was almost furtive, like he thought they were under surveillance.
“That they’re from the future, and they’ve got death rays and super-rockets and they take their women with them when they fight.”
Slim Jim laughed.
“That’s closer than I thought you’d get. Yeah. I’ve met them, been on one of their ships. I’ll tell you about it when we meet Big Itchy, but you ain’t gonna believe a word of it.”
“And the women. I heard they got women of all colors with them.”
“Damn, boy, you are well informed. Yeah, they do, but here’s the hell of it. The dames aren’t just traveling pieces of ass. The ship I was on? The captain was a nigger woman. And the officers had black dames and Asians. Mexicans, too. I tell you, it turns a man’s head. God only knows how they keep out of the sack when they’re supposed to be working.”
“You’re shitting me.”
“Not a word of it, brother. I brought some stuff. You’ll see.”
“The captain was a nigger you say,” mused Tui. “She the one got plugged on the beach, d’you think, with the Jap guy? Maybe the Klan did it. There’s a lot of southern boys on the island at the moment.�
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Slim Jim shrugged. In the last twenty-four hours he’d heard about forty-three different versions of what had happened to Captain Anderson. It wasn’t his problem, so he didn’t care. They arrived at the office, a creaking timber cabin with threadbare towels hung for curtains in the broken windows. Tui pulled up to a full stop.
In contrast to the state of the yard, the interior of the cabin was uncluttered, clean, and comfortable. It was spacious, seeming larger on the inside than it should be. In fact the cabin jutted a few yards into the adjoining property, a lumberyard, which also formed part of Big Itchy’s fiefdom.
On balance, as long as the Japs didn’t invade, Big Itchy figured the war was a bonus. It brought a flood of money into the islands and a huge amount of passing trade from the millions of servicemen in transit to Australia and the Solomons. They tended to be much better customers for Big Itchy’s operation than the toffee-nosed swells who’d arrived on the China Clipper before the war. On the other hand, the town was now full of guys who’d been trained to kill, and who weren’t at all interested in being stood over by Big Itchy’s musclemen. After Tui and the boys got the shit kicked out of them for the third or fourth time down on Hotel Street, Itchy had decided to beat a tactical retreat from the mugging business, concentrating instead on sly booze, broads, and a modest numbers racket.
Turned out these palookas would just give you all their money if you asked them nice and got them laid or drunk in return.
Big Itchy’s office was neatly stacked with the raw material of his operation: crates of stolen booze, cigarettes, and food. The girls never came here. They hardly ever got out of the flophouses. Slim Jim knew there was a safe buried in the floor beneath Itchy’s desk, and it was a sign of the trust he’d earned that the knowledge hadn’t cost him his life. Big Itchy kept every dollar he earned in that safe. He didn’t trust the banks. They were full of Jews.
“Aloha, Jimmy,” the 240-pound criminal rumbled from the chair that sat astride his fortune. “You’re alive. That’s good. The war over yet?”
“No, the war’s got a way to run yet.”
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