“He claims, hai.” Fujita gestured to the guards. “Take him back.”
As usual, Fujita had two different men run the count that evening before supper. One reported the proper number of Americans, the other one Marine too few. Fujita lost his temper. He had all the Americans lie down so they couldn’t move without being instantly noticed. He used gestures to explain to them that they’d get shot if they were noticed. This time, the count came out three men light.
“Zakennayo!” Fujita shouted. “How long ago did they get away, and how big a start on us do they have?”
Those were both good questions. He had an answer for neither. Big, strong white men should have been conspicuous around Pingfan. Were the locals sheltering them from the Japanese? Another good question. Fujita wasn’t sure he had an answer for that one, either, but he could make a pretty good guess.
“We need to report this,” Senior Private Hayashi said regretfully.
“I know,” Fujita answered, more regretfully still. They’d catch it for allowing an escape, and catch it again for not noticing right away. But they couldn’t cover it up. Somebody’d blab. Even the American Marines might, to get their guards in trouble. “Zakennayo!” he yelled again, even louder this time.
Out of the frying pan, into the fire. That was how Peggy Druce thought of it, anyway. As soon as the people in Philadelphia discovered she really could stir folks up about the war, they sent her out to do it again and again.
After York, Lancaster. Red Roses instead of White. When she made that crack in Lancaster, somebody told her the two towns’ bush-league baseball teams actually did refight the War of the Roses every time they took the field against each other. She laughed, but later she wondered why. That showed more of a sense of history than was common in the United States.
Not in Europe. They had a sense of history there, all right. Everybody could give you all the reasons for the past 900-or sometimes 1,900-years that showed why he deserved to kick his neighbor in the teeth with a steel-toed jackboot. And his neighbor had reasons just as numerous and just as ancient for kicking him.
And the Japanese were responding to something ancient, too. For hundreds of years, Europeans and Americans had lorded it over the proud, ancient, weak empires in Asia. They’d had the warships and the guns and the military doctrine that let them do it. They’d had the arrogance that let them do it, too. What was that sign in the Shanghai park supposed to say? NO DOGS OR CHINSESE, that was it. Maybe the sign really was, or had been, there. Maybe it was just a story. Either way, it showed an attitude that was definitely there.
Now the Japs had licked the Russians twice. So they thought they were strong enough to swing the bat against the white men’s first team. The United States was going to have to throw a high hard one right at Hirohito’s head to convince them they weren’t ready for the big leagues yet.
Or maybe they were. The war news coming out of the Pacific was uniformly lousy. The Philippines were falling. A bomb from a Japanese plane was said to have blown General MacArthur into dog food. The Japs claimed that at the tops of their lungs. The USA said nothing one way or the other. Peggy’s time in Europe had made her sensitive to the nuances of propaganda. You didn’t talk about what you didn’t like.
By the same token, the American papers weren’t saying much about the way Japan was overrunning Malaya and the Dutch East Indies. You heard occasional stories about how heroic the handful of American ships in the area were. If you paid close attention and checked a map, you notice that fewer and fewer U.S. Navy vessels got mentioned by name. Even the survivors were reported as being heroic farther and farther south.
But how many people checked that closely? How many Americans knew off the tops of their heads whether Borneo was south of Java or the other way around? Peggy hadn’t, not till she looked, and she’d traveled a lot more than most folks. Timor? Sumbawa? Cerami? They sounded like the noises your stomach made after you ate bratwurst and sauerkraut. (At least it wasn’t Liberty Cabbage in this war. Then again, Germany still remained officially neutral toward the USA.)
Peggy didn’t blame the administration for minimizing failures and playing up whatever small successes it could find. If she had, she wouldn’t have gone to Reading, to Easton, to Scranton, to Altoona, to Williamsport… You did what you needed to do, and you tried not to tell too many lies while you were doing it. If you couldn’t help telling a lie, you tried not to make it a whopper.
She stuck to the principles she hoped the administration was also using. It worked. She got big hands everywhere she went. War bond sales at her rallies were bigger yet. So were contributions to the Democratic Party. An election was coming next year, after all. It seemed as if an election was always coming next year. If it wasn’t, it was coming this year instead.
The one place she didn’t go was Pittsburgh. The world had a North Pole and a South Pole. Pennsylvania, by contrast, had an East Pole and a West Pole. Philadelphia was bigger and older and richer and snootier than Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh was tougher and grittier-and if you didn’t believe it, all you had to do was ask anybody who came from there. Pittsburgh prided itself on coal and steel the way Philadelphia bragged about the Main Line. If Chicago hadn’t called itself the City of the Big Shoulders, Pittsburgh would have.
And so, even though Pittsburgh was a more reliably Democratic town than Philadelphia, Peggy wasn’t welcome there. She got an invitation from Wheeling, West Virginia, so she traveled through Pittsburgh going and coming back, but she didn’t get off the train there.
She also went to Erie. Pennsylvania’s only Great Lakes port, Erie cared nothing for either Philadelphia or Pittsburgh. It might have turned its back on both of them. It was a low, spacious city, with only one fourteen-story skyscraper projecting above the three- and four-story business buildings in the center of town.
She made her speech. It went over as well in Erie as it had anywhere else. It might even have gone better there than most places. A plump, prosperous fellow who sold real estate came up to her after she was done and spoke in tones of wonder: “I don’t recollect the last time Philadelphia remembered we were alive, much less did anything about it.”
“We’re all one state. We’re all one country. If a war doesn’t remind us of that, what will?” Peggy said.
“Well, I don’t know. My guess was that nothing would,” the real-estate man answered.
After he went away, a weather-beaten woman in her late sixties came up to Peggy and introduced herself as Matilda Jenkins. The name was as ordinary as she was. “You spoke very well,” she said, her voice almost painfully genteel. “No wonder you impressed my son so much.”
“Your son?” Peggy didn’t remember meeting anybody named Jenkins at one of her earlier rallies. But that might not prove anything; she didn’t have a pol’s photographic memory for names and faces.
“Yes, of course,” Mrs. Jenkins said-she wore a thin, plain gold band on the ring finger of her left hand. “My son Constantine, at the American embassy in Berlin. He thought you were the cat’s pajamas, he did.”
“Oh!” Peggy blurted. She felt herself blushing. She had no idea when she’d last done that. Now that she looked, she saw the resemblance. But the suave embassy undersecretary-so suave, she’d guessed he was queer-seemed more than an ocean removed from this mousy woman clinging so hard to lower-middle-class respectability. Something more than Oh! seemed called for. Peggy tried again: “How about that? He helped me a lot.” The second part was true, the first usually safe.
Matilda Jenkins beamed. “He said you knew what you wanted and how to go about getting it. Just listening to you, I can see that. He said you were mighty sweet, too. Constantine usually knows what he’s talking about, all right.”
“How about that?” Peggy repeated, this time through clenched teeth. Exactly how much about her had Constantine Jenkins told his mother? He wouldn’t have bragged about… that, would he? Not to his mother!