Harry Turtledove - Days of Infamy

“Well, I’m sure the consul will be glad to see you. Go on in,” the sentry said.

“Thanks,” Jiro said, and he did.

Secretaries and clerks exclaimed at the mahimahi. Jiro wondered how much fish Nagao Kita shared with them. That was something he couldn’t ask. It was the consul’s business, not his. He didn’t get to see Kita, either. “So sorry, Takahashi- san,” a clerk told him. “He’s in consultation with Army officers right now.”

“He’s come out before,” Jiro said.

“Not this time, I’m afraid. They’re… very serious, these Army men,” the clerk said. Jiro got the feeling he didn’t care for the Japanese officers at all. The fellow continued, “Morimura- san will take charge of the fish, though.”

“Ah.” Jiro brightened. “That will do.”

He liked the chancellor at the consulate. Tadashi Morimura was young to hold such a responsible post-he couldn’t have been more than thirty. He had a long face, handsome in a slightly horsey way, and had lost the first joint of his left index finger in some accident. “Thank you very much, Takahashi- san,” he said. “That is a very thoughtful gift for the honorable consul. I know he will be glad to have it.” He didn’t say anything about whether Kita would share, either.

“I am glad to be able to help. I know times are hard,” Jiro said.

“They will get better.” Morimura rose from behind his desk. He was of slightly above medium height, which made him several inches taller than Jiro, and wore a sharp Western-style suit. “I am going to put the- mahimahi, did you say? — in the icebox for now, to keep it fresh for Kita- san. Please don’t go-I’d like to talk for a little while.”

“Of course,” Jiro said. “It is a privilege to talk to such an important man.”

“You give me too much credit,” Morimura said with becoming modesty. “Please wait. I’ll be right back.” He was almost as good as his word. Maybe he has to make room in the icebox, Jiro thought as he sat in front of the desk. It’s a big fish. When Morimura came back, he offered Jiro a cigarette from a gold case.

“Thank you, Morimura- san.” Jiro bowed in his seat. He hadn’t tasted tobacco in a couple of weeks. He savored the first drag. “That’s very good.”

“Glad you like it. It’s the least I can do.” The younger man lit a cigarette, too. After blowing out a long plume of smoke, he asked, “Where did you catch such an interesting fish?”

“It was southwest of here, sir,” Jiro answered. “We sailed for about half a day-we had a nice strong breeze to take us along.”

“How many other sampans did you see while you were on the fishing grounds?”

“All told? Let me think.” Jiro puffed on the cigarette, smoking as slowly as he could to stretch out the pleasure. It did help him concentrate. “There were… five or six. Those were just the ones I could see, you understand. Bound to be plenty more out there.”

“Yes, I understand,” the consular official said. “Were they all sailing boats? Did you see any that had motors?”

“No, sir. Not one with a motor.” Jiro didn’t need to think about that. “Where would a boat with a motor get fuel?”

“Well, you never can tell,” Morimura replied-and what was that supposed to mean? “But I thank you very much for telling me what you saw… and for the mahimahi, too, of course. Kita- san will also be very grateful for the fish. I’ll be sure to tell him you were the one who brought it.”

He let Jiro finish the cigarette, then eased him out the door. Jiro scratched his head. Unless he was crazy, Morimura cared more about the sampans that he’d seen than about the lovely fish. Jiro wondered just what exactly the chancellor at the consulate did to earn his pay.

KAPIOLANI PARK WAS a big place. Before the Japs turned it into a POW camp, it had had plenty of trees-mostly pines. A lot of them had already come down to give the Americans firewood. Now, as a pair of prisoners banged away with axes, another pine swayed as if in a strong breeze.

Fletch Armitage stood in a good-sized crowd watching the amateur lumberjacks. It gave him something a little out of the ordinary. Two squads of Japanese soldiers also watched the tree-fellers-and the other prisoners. They were there to make sure the axes didn’t disappear into the camp after the job was done. None of the Americans got close to them. When other trees came down, everyone had seen that they had short fuses.

“No more shade,” a prisoner near Fletch said sadly. Fletch nodded, but his heart wasn’t in it. He liked shade as much as the next guy, but you didn’t have to have it in Hawaii, the way you would in a place where the sun could knock you dead. He was as pale as anybody in the camp, but even he could see that firewood counted for more. He wondered what the POWs would do when no more trees were left inside the barbed-wire perimeter.

A crackle like distant machine-gun fire snapped his attention back to the pine. “Timberrrr!” yelled one of the woodcutters-a cry he’d surely learned at the movies and not in the great north woods. Down came the tree, and slammed into the grass. Fletch wished it would have fallen on the Japs, but no such luck. They were too canny to let themselves get smashed.

The sergeant in charge of the guards collected the axes. Only after he had them both did he shout something in Japanese to his men. They chose volunteers-that was what it amounted to-and handed out saws. The POWs they’d picked went to work turning the fallen pine, which had to be sixty or seventy feet tall, into chunks of wood convenient for cooking food and boiling water. The guards watched these prisoners no less intently than they had the axemen. As far as they were concerned, saws were weapons, too.

Watching a fallen tree turned into firewood was less interesting than watching it fall in the first place. Along with most of the crowd, Fletch drifted away. If he hung around, there was always the chance that the Japs would find work for him, too. The Geneva Convention said officer prisoners genuinely had to volunteer to work, but the Japs hadn’t signed it and respected it only when they wanted to. They didn’t feed him well enough to make him feel like doing anything more than he had to.

“How’s it going, Lieutenant?” That was Arnie, the ersatz artilleryman who’d surrendered along with Fletch.

“What could be better? It’s the beachfront by Waikiki, right?” Fletch said. “I’m just waiting for the waitress to bring me another gin and tonic.”

Arnie grinned. He was skinnier than Fletch remembered. Of course, Fletch was probably skinnier than he remembered, too. He just didn’t get to see himself very often. Arnie said, “You got a good way of looking at things.”

“My ass,” Fletch told him. “If I had a good way of looking at things, I would have gone over the hill with Clancy and Dave.”

“Wonder what the hell happened to ’em,” Arnie said.

“Whatever it is, could it be worse than staying in the Royal Hawaiian here?” Fletch asked. He got another smile out of Arnie. Considering how things were in the camp, that was no mean feat.

But nobody was laughing a couple of days later. The guards started shouting for a lineup in the middle of the morning. That was out of the ordinary. By now, Fletch had learned to view anything out of the ordinary with suspicion. The Japs didn’t break routine to hand out lollipops.

He hoped there’d been an escape. Most of him hoped so, anyhow. People who left the perimeter on work details talked about “shooting squads”: groups of ten where, if one man ran, all the others got it in the neck. That was a brutally effective way to convince prisoners not to try to make a break-and to stop the ones who did want to try. There were no shooting squads inside the camp, though. If somebody’d dug a tunnel and sneaked off, more power to him.