Harry Turtledove - Days of Infamy

Almost all the bright, blinking neon signs were in English. One looked as good as another to Shimizu. “I’m going in here,” he said, pointing to one bigger and fancier than most. “Who’s coming with me?”

Only a couple of men from the squad hung back. “I want to start off with a woman,” one of them said. The other nodded.

“You’ll last longer if you do some drinking first,” Shimizu said. They shook their heads. Shimizu shrugged. “Suit yourselves, then. But if you aren’t back at the barracks when you’re supposed to be, you’ll wish those military policemen were beating on you. Have you got that?” He tried to sound fierce, and hoped he succeeded. He really was too easygoing to make a good noncom.

The bar was dark and cool inside, and already full of Japanese soldiers and sailors. The bartender was an Asian man. He spoke Japanese, but oddly; after a little while, Shimizu decided he had to be a Korean. “No, no whiskey, gomen nasai,” he said when the corporal asked. “Have sake, have sort of gin.”

“What do you mean, sort of?” Shimizu inquired.

“Made from fruit. Made from fruit here, understand. Is very good. Ichi-ban,” the bartender said.

A drink was one yen or twenty-five cents U.S. money-outrageously expensive, like everything else in Oahu. “Give me some of this gin,” Shimizu said. “I want something stronger than sake.” He dropped a U.S. quarter on the bar. The silver rang sweetly. The bartender set a shot in front of him.

He knocked it back. He had all he could do not to cough and lose face before his men. The stuff tasted like sweet paint thinner and kicked like a wild horse. It might have been a mortar bomb exploding in his stomach. He liked the warmth that flowed out from his middle afterwards, though.

His men followed his lead. The bartender poured them shots, too. Like Shimizu, they gulped them down. They weren’t so good at hiding what the stuff did to them. Some of them coughed. Senior Private Furusawa said, “My insides are on fire!” Private Wakuzawa seemed on the edge of choking to death. Somebody pounded his back till he could breathe easily again.

By then, Shimizu had recovered his equilibrium-and the use of his voice. He hardly wheezed at all as he laid down a new quarter and said, “Let me have another one.”

“The corporal’s a real man!” one of his soldiers said admiringly.

Shimizu drank the second shot as fast as the first. The stuff didn’t taste good enough to savor. It didn’t hurt so much going down as the first shot had. Maybe he’d got used to it. Or maybe the first assault had stunned his gullet. He managed a smile that looked as if he meant it. “Not so bad,” he said.

“If he can do it, so can we,” Furusawa declared. He put a yen on the bar. “Give me a refill, too.” The rest of the soldiers who’d come in with Shimizu followed suit. They also did better the second time around. Most of them did, anyway: even in the gloom inside the bar, it was easy to see how red Shiro Wakuzawa turned.

“Are you all right?” Shimizu asked him.

He nodded. “ Hai, Corporal- san.”

Another question occurred to Shimizu: “How much drinking have you done before this?”

“Some, Corporal- san,” Wakuzawa answered. Not much, Shimizu thought. He didn’t push any more, though. Sooner or later, the youngster had to get hardened. Why not now?

They all had another couple of drinks. Shimizu could feel the strong spirits mounting to his head. He didn’t want to get falling-down drunk or go-to-sleep drunk, not yet. Plenty of other things to do first. He gathered up his men. “Are you ready to stand in line now?” They nodded. He pointed to the door. “Then let’s go.”

Under the Americans, prostitution had been officially illegal, which didn’t mean there hadn’t been plenty of brothels on Hotel Street. It only meant they had to be called hotels. The Japanese were less hypocritical. They knew a young man needed to lie down with a woman every so often. They thought nothing of importing comfort women to serve soldiers in places where there weren’t many local girls (and they didn’t wonder, or even care, what the comfort women-usually Koreans-thought). Here in Honolulu, they didn’t have to worry about that.

“Senator Hotel.” Senior Private Furusawa spelled out the name of the place. The line of men waiting to get in stretched around the block. Some of them-most of them, in fact-had been drinking, too. Nobody got too unruly, though. Ferocious-looking military policemen kept an eye on things. You wouldn’t want them landing on you, not before you got what you were waiting for.

A soldier started singing. Everyone who knew the tune joined in. Shimizu hadn’t drunk enough to make them sound good. Some of the soldiers from his squad added to the racket. “You sound like cats with their tails stepped on,” he told them. They laughed, but they didn’t stop.

More men got in line behind Shimizu and his soldiers. The line moved forward one slow step at a time. He wished he’d had another drink or two. By the time he went in, he’d be half sobered up.

More military policemen waited inside, to make sure there was no trouble. A sign said 16 YEN, 4 DOLLARS, 5 MINUTES. Four dollars! He sighed. Almost a month’s pay for him. Two months’ pay for the most junior privates. No one walked out.

He gave his money to a gray-haired white woman who could have looked no more bored if she were dead. She wrote a number-203-on a scrap of paper and shoved it at him. “Is this the room I go to?” he asked. She shrugged-she must not have spoken Japanese. One of the military policemen nodded. Shimizu sighed again as he went up the stairs. He’d hoped to pick a woman for himself. No such luck.

When he found the cubicle with 203 above it, he knocked on the door. “ Hai? ” a woman called from within. The word was Japanese. He didn’t think the voice was. He opened the door and found he was right. She was a brassy blonde, somewhere a little past thirty, who lay naked on a narrow bed. “ Isogi! ” she told him-hurry up.

Five minutes, he reminded himself. Not even time to get undressed. Part of him wondered why he’d bothered to do this. But the rest of him knew. He dropped his pants, poised himself between her legs (the hair there was yellow, too, which he hadn’t thought about till that moment), and impaled her.

She didn’t help much. For all the expression on her face, he might have been delivering a package, not plundering her secret places. Because he’d gone without, he quickly spent himself anyway. As soon as he did, she pushed him off. She pointed to a bar of soap and an enameled metal basin of water. He washed himself, dried with a small, soggy towel, and did up his pants again. She jerked a thumb at the door. “ Sayonara.”

“ Sayonara,” he echoed, and left. A military policeman in the hallway pointed him towards another set of stairs at the far end. Down the hall he went, trying to ignore the noises from the numbered cubicles on either side. A minute earlier, he’d been making noises like that. He felt a strange mixture of afterglow and disgust.

These stairs led out to an alley behind the Senator Hotel. It smelled of piss and vomit. A military policeman standing near the exit said, “Move along, soldier.”

“Please, Sergeant- san, I came here with friends, and I’d like to wait for them,” Shimizu said. He was a corporal himself, not a miserable common soldier, and he spoke politely. The military policeman grudged him a nod.

Over the next five or ten minutes, the soldiers from Shimizu’s squad came out. Some of them came happy, others revolted, others both at once like Shimizu himself. “I don’t think I’ll do that again any time soon,” Shiro Wakuzawa said.