Harry Turtledove - End of the Beginning

“That’s right!” Jane said. “Oh, Lord, that’s just right!” Other comfort women also chimed in. The Chinese woman who’d been dragged into prostitution along with the haoles denounced Annabelle Chung as fiercely as any of them.

“I didn’t mean anything bad,” the madam said when something close to silence finally came. “I was just trying to get through it all, same as anybody else. I’m sorry.”

“You’re sorry you got caught,” Jane yelled. “You knew what they were doing to us, and you didn’t care.”

“That isn’t true,” Annabelle Chung protested.

But a fierce, rising cry drowned her out: “The gauntlet. The gauntlet! The gauntlet!” People made sure Jane and the other former comfort women had good spots. They hustled Annabelle Chung to the starting point. She didn’t want to go through. In her shoes, Jane wouldn’t have wanted to, either. A big man finally gave her a shove. After that, it was run or die.

People were harder on the madam than they had been on Smiling Sammy Little. That probably wasn’t fair; odds were he’d done more harm through the occupation than she had. But he’d been sneakier about it. He hadn’t been right out there pimping for the Japanese. Saying just what he had done was hard. With Annabelle Chung, nobody had any doubts about that.

She was already staggering by the time she got to Jane. Sticking out a foot was the easiest thing in the world. Annabelle Chung went down with a wail of despair. Jane yanked at her hair-yanked some of it out. She threw it aside and kicked the Chinese woman in the side of her head. Pain shot through her foot. She didn’t mind. It felt wonderful.

Annabelle Chung didn’t make it to the far end of the two lines. Once she fell, the comfort women converged on her. After they finished, she lay unmoving on the ground. Jane got a good look at her then.

Part of her wished she hadn’t; the sight wasn’t pretty. Even so… One of the other women said, “Not half what she had coming.” Jane nodded. She’d just helped maim or kill-more likely kill-somebody, and she wasn’t the least bit sorry. Maybe she should have been. Maybe she would be later. Not now, though. Oh, no. Not now.

A mynah bird hopping on the grass flew away before she got close. It was just a bird to her these days, not a potential supper. The same was true of zebra doves. The tame, foolish little birds would be everywhere again in a few years; the way they bred put rabbits to shame. She didn’t mind them. Their twittering swarms would help make Hawaii feel normal once more.

Normal? Jane laughed. What was normal after close to two years of hell? Did anybody on these islands have the slightest idea? Jane knew she didn’t, not any more.

From Hawaii’s worries, she soon came back to her own. What was she going to do about Fletch? That she didn’t disgust him still amazed her-she disgusted herself most of the time. Maybe he really did love her. How much did that matter? Enough, when she knew his flaws only too well?

Maybe. He wasn’t the same person he had been before December 7, 1941, any more than she was. She wasn’t the only one who’d gone through hell. He’d suffered longer than she had, if not in the same ways.

Did she want him back? Could she stand living with him? If she couldn’t, could she ever stand living with anybody again? Those were all good questions. One of these days soon, she needed good answers for them.

GET TING RESCUED WITH THREE HAOLES who vouched for him wasn’t enough to keep Kenzo Takahashi from being thrown into an internment camp behind barbed wire. He would have been angrier had he been more surprised. It was going to be open season on Japanese in Oahu for a while.

That was thanks to people like his own father. For Dad’s sake, Kenzo hoped he had got out of Honolulu on a submarine. He wasn’t in this camp. If he was still on Oahu, he’d get caught before long. God help him if he did. Better he was long gone, then. Even if he had collaborated, Kenzo didn’t want him strung up.

Hiroshi was alive. He’d been in the camp longer than Kenzo had. He walked with a stick and a limp-he’d got shot in the leg after the special naval landing forces dragooned him into hauling and carrying for them. The wound was healing. He tried to make light of it, saying, “Could have been worse.”

“Oh, yeah?” Kenzo said. “How?”

“They could have shot me in the head, or in the belly,” his brother answered. “I saw guys that happened to.” He grimaced. “Or the Marines could’ve finished me off when the Japanese soldiers fell back. This one bastard damn near did. I’m lying there bleeding, right, and he’s got this goddamn bayonet poised to stick me”-he gestured with his cane-“and when he finds out I speak English he wants to know who plays short for the Dodgers.”

“Pee Wee Reese,” Kenzo said automatically.

“Yeah, well, I got it right, too,” Hiroshi said, “but try coming up with it when you’ve just been shot and some maniac wants to stir your guts with a knife. If they gave you tests like that in school, people would study a hell of a lot harder.”

“I believe it.” Kenzo set a hand on his brother’s shoulder. “I’m glad you’re here.”

“I’m glad I’m anywhere,” Hiroshi said-with feeling.

Like just about everybody on Oahu, they ate rations out of cans. Because they’d done so much fishing, neither of them was as skinny as a lot of the Japanese in the camp. All the same, beef and pork-even beef and pork out of cans-tasted mighty good to Kenzo.

People knew who he and Hiroshi were. They knew who their father was. Some of them must have hoped blabbing to the authorities would win a ticket out of camp. Kenzo never found out whether it did.

He did know his name and Hiroshi’s got called at a morning lineup. When they stepped forward, they got hustled away for interrogation.

“Your father is Jiro Takahashi, the Japanese propagandist sometimes called ‘the Fisherman’?” asked a first lieutenant who couldn’t have been much older than Hiroshi.

“That’s right,” Kenzo said-no point denying the truth.

“Do you know his current whereabouts?” the lieutenant asked.

“No, sir,” Kenzo answered.

“We heard he was on a sub headed for Japan, but we can’t prove it,” Hiroshi added.

“Uh-huh.” The lieutenant wrote that down. “Do you have any way of demonstrating your own loyalty to the United States of America?”

Kenzo wondered if he wanted to be loyal to a country that didn’t want to believe he was, but only for a moment. He thought about mentioning Elsie, but figured that wouldn’t do him any good-it sure hadn’t yet. “That gunner we pulled out of the Pacific,” Hiroshi said. “What the heck was his name?”

Hope flowered in Kenzo. “Burleson. Burt Burleson,” he said, and felt as if he’d passed a test of his own. He and Hiroshi explained how they’d rescued the man from the flying boat and landed him somewhere near Ewa.

The lieutenant wrote that down, too. “We will investigate,” he said. “If we can’t confirm your story, it will be held against you.”

“Jesus Christ!” Kenzo said. “We don’t know what happened to this guy once he got off the sampan. For all we know, the Japanese grabbed him ten minutes later and he’s been dead for months.”

“For all I know, he never existed in the first place, and you’re making him up,” the lieutenant said coldly.

“We will investigate. In the meanwhile…”

In the meanwhile, they went back into the camp. Nobody wanted to have anything to do with them after that. People seemed to think collaboration was as catching as cholera. Why not? The U.S. military had the same attitude.

Eleven days later-Kenzo was keeping track-they got summoned at morning roll call again. Off they went, to be confronted by that same kid lieutenant. He looked as if he’d bitten down hard on a lemon.