Росс Томас - The Fools in Town Are on Our Side

Because the Hongkew section of Shanghai had been under Japanese military control since 1937, they had had no trouble in keeping Bridge House prison a secret. Before Pearl Harbor, I learned that it had been used to jail those Chinese who disappeared suddenly from either the French Concession or the International Settlement. Two of the Chinese in our cell told Smalldane that they had been there so long that they had forgotten what they were originally charged with.

Smalldane was the only foreigner that I ever knew the Japanese to beat, although the guards smacked the Chinese around regularly, often with one-by-four-inch planks that they liked to break over Chinese heads. Any Chinese head. It seemed to be a favorite form of exercise. We were treated casually enough for the first month, except for Smalldane, and then the word apparently came down and the Japanese got tough. There was absolutely no heat in the Bridge House cells and our only warmth came from huddling close together under thin, lice-infested blankets. Smalldane taught me how to kill lice by cracking them between my fingernails. You couldn’t just mash them to death. The Japanese guards laughed about the lice. When they weren’t laughing about that, they cackled over a Chinese prisoner whose right leg one of them had jabbed with a bayonet. The wound developed gangrene and the Chinese moaned and screamed a lot before he died.

The new crackdown ruled that prisoners couldn’t talk to each other, something that the Japanese didn’t enforce too stringently except when they had nothing better to do. But because more prisoners were daily being jammed into the cells, they forced us to sit in rows. That made it easier for them to conduct their head count every four hours. We sat, our knees drawn up to our chests, our heads bowed, facing in the general direction of Tokyo and, I suppose, Hirohito. As punishment, they made us sit Japanese fashion, which didn’t bother me too much, but which played hell with the circulation of the older prisoners. After six or seven hours of it, some couldn’t walk for days.

They searched each prisoner every two days or so. All but me. For some reason the guards didn’t think that a child would conceal anything. It wasn’t until we’d been in jail for a month that I told Smalldane about the money belt.

“You have what?” he said, and he must have said it in an incredulous whisper although I no longer remember.

“My money belt.”

“How much?” he said.

“What’s the British pound worth now?” said the rotten little money changer.

“Damn it, I don’t know, make it five dollars a pound.”

“Then I have twelve hundred and seventy-five dollars U.S.”

“Jesus,” Smalldane muttered and then slumped into a halfway comfortable position so that he could think about what use to make of the windfall.

On Christmas, 1941, Tante Katerine sent us a basket of food containing three roast chickens, cigarettes, brandy, tinned goods, including a plum pudding that she had scrounged somewhere, candy, nuts, and about four-dozen dainty sandwiches filled with pâté de foie gras. One of the Japanese guards pounded on the small opening of the cell door and yelled for the Smardane. When the Smardane made his way to the door, the guard displayed each item in the basket. Then he ripped off a chicken leg and chewed it noisily. Next he tried some of the candy. He liked that, too. Finally, he bit into one of the sandwiches, didn’t like the pâté, and spat it out. “Here,” he said and shoved the sandwiches at Smalldane, who brought them back to our row.

Smalldane wasn’t as interested in eating the sandwiches as he was in examining their filling. On the dozenth one that he opened, he found what he was looking for, a note from Tante Katerine.

“Well, it looks like we have Christmas dinner after all, Lucifer.” I shook my head and made a vague kind of gesture that took in the entire cell. We were all scruffy by then, dirty, cold, and incredibly hungry. Most of the prisoners sat or knelt huddled in their filthy blankets, their sunken eyes staring at the pile of sandwiches. The Chinese prisoners were the worst of all because they didn’t for a minute believe that they would share in our luck. They looked, then looked away, and then looked back again. They couldn’t help themselves.

“Aw, shit,” Smalldane said. He took four of the sandwiches and gave me the rest. “Here, Tiny Tim, it’s your last chance to play Scrooge.”

“Who’re they?” I said.

“Go pass out the sandwiches and I’ll tell you.”

I crawled around the filthy floor, passing out cute little pâté de fois gras Sandwiches which had all the crust carefully sliced off. Some said thank you. Others said Merry Christmas or God bless you. And still others just silently snatched the food from my hand and crammed it into their mouths.

“What’s the note from Tante Katerine say?” I asked Smalldane when I crawled back to our row.

“Read it yourself. But, hell, you can’t read. She says that a boat’s leaving for the States with foreign civilians that are going to be traded for Japanese civilians. You got that?”

I nodded.

“She’s trying to juice our way on to that boat. She’s gone to the Swiss Embassy, to Wu, to everybody she can think of. It’s cost her a packet. She mentioned how much, of course.”

I nodded again. “Of course. How much?”

“Six thousand American so far.”

I was impressed, not with the amount so much as with Tante Katerine’s willingness to part with a dollar that didn’t guarantee her a rapid return of at least eight percent compounded semi-annually. I started to cry. It was the first time I’d cried since I’d been in jail.

“What the fuck’s wrong with you?” Smalldane said.

“I want to go home,” I said.

“Your home’s in the States now, kid.”

“I don’t know anybody there,” I said between sobs, “I want to go home to Number Twenty-seven and Tante Katerine.”

Smalldane sighed and patted me on the shoulder. “You can’t anymore.”

“Why?”

“They closed it down today. That’s what Kate says. The whorehouse is no longer your home.”

When you’re eight years old and in jail and someone tells you that the only home you ever really remember no longer exists, it hits hard. I think I went into shock for a few moments and then I stopped crying and started to bawl — in earnest. Smalldane kept patting away on my shoulder, a little embarrassed. He nodded apologetically at the rest of the prisoners, some of whom nodded back, some sympathetically, some dully. But none complained. Finally, Smalldane got bored with my emotional exhibition, leaned over, and speaking Cantonese, whispered into my ear: “If you don’t silence yourself, my cowardly little turtle, I will sell you to the fat Japanese guard for the night. He has offered more than a fair price.”

I shut up.

“That’s better,” Smalldane said. “Now for your education. First the alphabet.”

It took me an hour to memorize the alphabet by rote and another hour to learn how to draw William Smalldane with my finger in the dirt and filth of the floor. I didn’t know which letter was which, but I could draw it fairly well after an hour.

“That’s my new name?”

“That’s it,” Smalldane said.

“Please, Gorman, could you teach me something else?”

“What?”

“Could you teach me how to draw Lucifer Clarence Dye?”

He smiled at me, a sad kind of a smile, I thought, then nodded and said, “Sure, kid. You might even need it again one of these days.”

They didn’t waste any time. The phone rang in my room in the Sycamore Hotel (Swankerton’s Oldest and Finest) before the bellhop got through showing me how the color television set worked. I gave him a dollar and a smile and nodded my goodbye as I picked up the green instrument and said hello.