Росс Томас - The Fools in Town Are on Our Side

His downfall — at least a temporary one — came late in 1939. He had written a series of what he called “goddamned brilliant” features on Shanghai which had received unusually wide play in the U.S. He then came up with the idea of doing an exposé of Du Wei-sung, the opium king, and his connections with Chiang Kai-shek. He spent seven weeks of hard, intensive digging on the three-part series and mailed it to the States. The first one ran, the other two were killed, and UP fired Smalldane, supposedly at the insistence of Chiang himself, who then refused him accreditation to Chungking.

At Tante Katerine’s urging, Smalldane gave up his room at the American Club (she paid his considerable tab) and moved to Number 27. He made a couple of broadcasts a month for CBS, sold some harmless freelance stuff to North American Newspaper Alliance, and once to Liberty Magazine , and worked a few rather profitable deals on the black market. If Du Wei-sung knew that Smalldane was living rent-and-board free in one of the whorehouses that he protected, it didn’t seem to bother him, and the American got along famously with the Japanese’s number one boy, Major Dogshit. But then Smalldane got along famously with everyone most of the time, especially me.

It was a kind of hero worship, I suppose. He got me out of the brocade robe and into corduroy knickers. He taught me how to throw a baseball like a boy instead of a girl. He spent long hours lecturing me on the finer points and intricacies of football, although I’d never seen a game; he demonstrated (often) the making of a proper martini; extolled the merits of Franklin D. Roosevelt and the shortcomings of Wendell Willkie; described the sexual aberrations of Adolf Hitler; explained the fact that the earth was really round after all; and predicted the coming war between the United States and Japan in the Pacific, Of this, Smalldane was completely convinced.

Although Major Dogshit spoke no English and Smalldane spoke no Japanese, they communicated well enough in a mixture of French, Chinese, and graphic sign language. And it was in early November of 1941 that the major, well into his cups, gave Smalldane what could have been the biggest newsbeat in history. The major was paying his last visit to Number 27 and he was maudlin about it. He was distressed that he had to leave his great friend “Smardane” and his little friend “Rucifer.” But most distressing of all was that he had to give up his monthly stipend and free samples from Number 27 where, he assured us, he had spent the happiest days of his life. He liked Americans, he said, or at least that’s what we thought he said, and he did not want to fight them.

Smalldane asked what part of China he was being transferred to, but Major Dogshit wagged a finger at him and shook his head. Not China, he said. No more China. He was going South — far, far South. He was being assigned to a special force for intensive training. Then he giggled and mumbled something in French about not from the sea, but from the land. After that he passed out and Smalldane got one of the house boys to get him home.

Sitting there in what Tante Katerine referred to as Number 27’s “hospitality room,” which was really a medium-sized cocktail lounge where customers could look over the merchandise, Smalldane tried to figure it out. He got a map from his room and spread it over the table.

“Dogshit said South,” he said.

“Which way is that?” I asked.

“Straight down, you ignorant piece of filth,” he said to me in Cantonese.

“How could it be down on the map when it is that way where we now are?” I asked, pointing to my left, and since it was a most logical question, speaking in French.

“What’s that say right there?” Smalldane asked, jabbing his finger at the map’s compass.

“How should I know?” I said. “I am only eight years old and can neither read nor write.”

“Christ, I keep forgetting.”

“I can now do my multiplication tables up to fifteen,” I said. “You want to know what fifteen times fourteen is? It’s two hundred and ten.”

“Kate!” Smalldane roared at Tante Katerine who was across the room listening to the marital problems of a minor French official. She excused herself and came over to our table.

“When’re you going to teach him to read and write?” he said, jerking a thumb at me.

She shrugged. “He has plenty of time. Perhaps we’ll teach him next year. Or the next. You’re the expert writer. Why don’t you teach him?”

“Goddamn it, I will, starting right now!”

Tante Katerine shrugged and swayed back to her Frenchman and the problems that he was having with his wife. He was a regular customer who came to Number 27 more for advice than for sex.

“Here,” Smalldane said to me in a harsh tone. “What’s that word?” And he jabbed his forefinger at a dot on the map.

I looked carefully. “It’s a dot with a circle around it,” I said.

“Not the symbol, my little snot, the word! Don’t you even know the goddamned alphabet?”

“I am only a child of eight years and can—”

“Start learning right now,” Smalldane said. “That’s an S, that’s an I, that’s an N, and that’s a G. Now repeat them.”

“S-I-N-G,” I said promptly and then yawned on purpose. “There’s really not much to it, is there?”

“What does it spell , stupid?”

“I have no idea.”

“It spells sing. S-I-N-G. Sing.”

“Like a song,” I said.

“Like Singapore, you toad of a pimp.” Then he forgot about his tutorial ambitions and started running his finger down Indo-China. “Look,” he said to me because he had no other audience, “the Japs have already got Indo-China and they can jump off to Malaya and hit Singapore from the rear. South, Dogshit said. And I’ll bet seventeen dollars and thirty-eight cents that means Singapore from the land and not from the sea.” Smalldane was always betting $17.38 on something. I never knew why.

For the next four weeks he was out all day and half the night trying to confirm his theory. He borrowed money from Tante Katerine to get Japanese officers drunk and to bribe privates and non-coms to tell him what little they knew about troop movements. He spent hours in the Shanghai Club talking to its British members about Malaya and Singapore’s defenses. “Impregnable, old boy,” he would say to me, mocking their accent. “Absolutely impregnable.”

I didn’t know when or where he got what he thought was the last piece to his jigsaw, but he got it, and then spent three days writing a two thousand-word story. I still remember its lead. Smalldane read it to me at least six times:

JAPANESE IMPERIAL ARMY WILL INVADE EAST COAST MALAYA EARLY DECEMBER ETSTRIKE THROUGH JUNGLE AT SINGAPORES UNPROTECTED REAR UNIMPEACHABLE SOURCES REVEALED HERE TODAY

“You left out a few words, didn’t you?” I said, still completely vague about where Singapore was.

“They’ll put them back in in New York,” Smalldane said. “You want to go with me to file it?”

“Sure,” I said.

We borrowed Tante Katerine’s Airflow Chrysler and started to the Press Wireless office. It was the morning of December 8, 1941, and Japanese troops arrested us both before we got halfway there.

We flew first class from San Francisco to Swankerton and it was dull and fast as most air travel is now that they keep the jets up around thirty-five thousand or more where you can’t see anything.

After dinner the night before, Orcutt had asked us to stop by his suite. He was staying at the Fairmont on California and Mason and the suite probably didn’t cost him much more than $125 a day. He told Carol Thackerty to order him a cup of hot chocolate and anything that we wanted. Necessary and I asked for brandy; Carol Thackerty wanted nothing.