Росс Томас - The Fools in Town Are on Our Side

“Pai said you shot the wrong man, Gerald,” I said. “That was your big mistake. You should have shot me instead.”

I learned to recite the alphabet and how to write a name in the Bridge House Apartments, which the Japanese had converted into a prison. The alphabet was the usual one, but the name was my new one, William Smalldane, firstborn son of the noted American correspondent, Gorman Smalldane.

The Japanese who arrested us on December 8 made Smalldane drive Tante Katerine’s Chrysler across Szechwan Road Bridge and into the Bridge House compound, which was located about two blocks from the central post office in the Hongkew section. During the drive Smalldane managed to slip me his two thousand-word story that never got filed. I dropped it on the floorboards and kicked it back under the front seat. They must never have found it. If they had, Smalldane probably would have been executed either as a top-grade spy or a small-time prophet.

There was a crowd of foreigners at Bridge House that morning, some of them half-dressed, all of them a little bewildered. They kept talking about Pearl Harbor, but it meant nothing to me. I was more interested in watching them empty their pockets onto a desk behind which sat two Japanese officers, a captain and a major.

“Get this straight, Lucifer,” Smalldane whispered to me. “You’re now William Smalldane. My only son. You got that? William Smalldane.”

“William Smalldane,” I said, reveling a little in the sound of it. Even then I didn’t care much for Lucifer. When we got to the major and the captain they made Smalldane empty his pockets. They placed the items in a brown envelope and then demanded that he remove his belt.

“The child,” the captain said. “Your son?”

“Yes,” Smalldane said.

“He must empty his pockets.”

I had quite a nice collection. A half-package of Lucky Strikes; a switchblade knife with a seven-inch blade; an empty spool; four dirty pictures; a lint-flaked piece of candied ginger; a chain to a bathtub stopper; a box of wax matches; an Indian head U.S. penny, dated 1902; a purple Crayola; and a Three Little Pigs and Big Bad Wolf pocket watch which didn’t run.

The Japanese captain listed everything, even the ginger, and then sealed it in an official envelope, except for the dirty pictures. He snickered at them and kept two for himself and gave the major the other two.

It was cold in Shanghai and I was wearing my treasured corduroy knickers with thick woolen socks; high-topped brown shoes; a flannel shirt; a woolen sweater; a plaid woolen lumberjack coat; a knitted red cap; and long underwear. Underneath all that I wore the handmade money belt that I had painstakingly fashioned out of an old pillowcase. It contained around $1,000 in American and British currency. The money was the proceeds from my drunk-rolling efforts and I always wore it, even to bed.

The Japanese officers produced another form and began asking Smalldane questions about where we were born, nationality, occupation, age, and length of residence in Shanghai. Smalldane answered everything and even volunteered information about his alleged ex-wife, and my new mother, who had died in what he claimed to have been the terrible San Francisco cholera epidemic of 1934. They seemed to believe him.

When they were through asking questions, they made Smalldane sign the form. Then they handed me the pen, but Smalldane took it away from me, shook his head sadly at the Japanese officers, and tapped his forehead in the universal gesture that means not quite bright. The Japanese nodded, almost in sympathy, I thought, and let Smalldane sign the form for me. They did, however, insist on fingerprinting us both.

We were turned over to a couple of Japanese guards who escorted us through a door that led to the ground floor of the former Bridge House Apartments. The ground floor was designed originally to house small shops, but it had been converted into cells whose thick doors were bolted with chains and locks and bars. The guards directed us to a Japanese sergeant who seemed to be the chief jailer. He sat behind a plain wooden desk. On the wall back of him were lists of what I guessed were names, written in Chinese and several other languages, or so Smalldane later told me.

“By God,” he said to me, “they’ve had it planned for months. All that time I spent digging and nobody even had a smell of this place.” He was, forever, the reporter. The jailer told him to shut up.

It was cold and the light was dim in Bridge House. The jailer looked at us carefully and then selected some keys from a bunch that must have weighed six pounds. He motioned for the guards to follow him and they prodded us down the hall to one of the cells. The jailer twisted keys in the two locks, slid back the bolt, undid some chains, and motioned us in. Then he clanged the door behind us. We weren’t alone. There were almost three-dozen other persons in the cell, which was eighteen feet long and twelve feet wide. Smalldane grabbed my hand and we managed to find a place near enough to a wall so that we could lean against it.

I counted the persons in the room. There were thirty-three of them, including eleven women. It was a cosmopolitan bunch: English, Americans, Chinese, one Korean, four Canadians, and a redheaded man who claimed to be a Mexican national, but remembering Tante Katerine’s admonition, I didn’t believe him. The Japanese didn’t either.

“Will somebody please tell me just what the hell happened at Pearl Harbor?” Smalldane said.

They told him, those who’d listened to the radio that morning of December 8, 1941, in Shanghai. It was December 7 at Pearl Harbor because of the international dateline. Others had heard that the Japanese had landed on the east coast of Malaya, which both depressed and elated Smalldane. “By God,” he said, “if I’d just filed last week I’d’ve had fifteen job offers today and I could’ve named the price.”

“Would it not present a formidable problem to report a war from the inside of a jail?” I said in my most logical French.

“Why don’t you take a nap?” Smalldane said. “A long one.”

The meals came twice a day, shoved through a twelve-inch aperture in the cell door. The first meal was a bowl of rice which contained the heads of three dried herrings. It was warm. The second meal was the same, except that it was cold. There was no third meal. Having been reared on much superior fare, I refused to eat the first day. Smalldane shrugged, reached for my bowl, and polished it off, fish heads and all. On the second day and thereafter I ate everything edible and some that was not.

The Japanese started coming for Smalldane after we had been in Bridge House a week. They led him away and when he came back, he came with bruises, and once with a black eye, and once with a tooth missing. A lower one on the left side.

“They think I’m the goddamned Scarlet Pimpernel of Shanghai,” he told me and when I said I didn’t know who the Scarlet Pimpernel was, he spent the next three or four days reciting the tale and improving on its dialogue. The other prisoners listened intently. They had nothing else to do.

Bridge House prison had either fifteen or sixteen cells which were solid, windowless walls on three sides. At the front of the cell large wooden bars, about six inches in diameter, were set a couple of inches apart. The door was wood, at least four inches thick, and there was a great deal of clanging and banging of chains and bars whenever it was opened. The sound haunted me for years.

A wooden box in the corner served as a toilet. Whenever the women used it, the men turned their backs or looked the other way. It was emptied by the Chinese prisoners at night. They often argued for the privilege since it at least got them out of the cell.