Genda laughed, too, and surprised himself when he did it. He bowed. “Your Majesty,” he said, and meant it more than he ever had before with either of the Hawaiian puppet monarchs. He surprised himself again by telling her about the freighters that had gone down in the channel between Kauai and Oahu.
“Oh, that, ” Queen Cynthia said, and he could not doubt she already knew about it. As if to confirm as much, she went on, “That story’s all over Honolulu-probably all over Oahu-by now. You couldn’t keep it a secret if you tried, not when people on the island could see the smoke.” She leaned forward a little, not to be provocative-she was provocative enough just standing there-but as a friend would in conversation with another friend. “Or is the secret part that it bothers you more than you want to let on?”
“Hai,” Genda said before he realized he should have answered, That’s none of your business.
Then-realization piled on realization-he saw that wouldn’t have helped, either. Only an immediate, convincing denial would have done him any good, and he couldn’t give her one.
“Is it so very bad?” she asked quietly.
He shook his head. He wanted to shake himself, like a dog shaking off cold water. “No, not so very bad,” he answered, and searched for words-not because his English was bad, but because he wanted to be most precise. “Things are not quite so good as we would like, your Majesty. This is honto-it is true. But we fight a war. Things in a war go exactly how we want almost never. Do you see?”
“Oh, yes. I’m not a child, Commander.”
Genda bowed once more, not trusting himself to speak. Cynthia Laanui might be a great many things, but a child she definitely was not. The flowered sun dress she wore left no possible doubt of that.
Just as he straightened, her nose wrinkled in amusement again. Only after that did her face politely go almost expressionless. She knows what I’m thinking. That alarmed Genda, who did not want his Japanese colleagues-let alone a gaijin woman-able to read him like that.
He occasionally visited officers’ brothels on and near Hotel Street. Like most of his countrymen, he was much more matter-of-fact about that than Americans were. What else was he supposed to do, here so far from home? But lying down with a whore was one thing. Lying down with a woman who might be interested in you for your own sake-that was something else again.
And what would lying down with a Queen be like?
Foolishness. Moonshine, he thought. Queen Cynthia Laanui hadn’t been much more than polite. If she was a friendly person, that didn’t mean she wanted to do anything but make conversation with him… did it?
She said, “Thanks for leveling with me.” She paused for a moment to make sure he understood, then went on, “Do please let me know what’s going on from here on out. Things will work out better for everybody if you do.”
“Do you think so?” Genda couldn’t have sounded more glum, more dubious, if he’d tried for a week. Queen Cynthia laughed once more, which only made his question seem gloomier than it had. “I’m not Mata Hari, Commander,” she said. “I’m not going to seduce your secrets out of you.” She cocked her head to one side. “Or should I?”
How am I supposed to answer that? Genda wondered frantically. He bowed again. That was safe, it was polite (almost reflexively so for him), and it bought him time to think. Having bought it, he knew he had better use it wisely. “Whatever your Majesty wishes, of course,” he murmured.
This time, Cynthia Laanui threw back her head and chortled. “Well, Commander, that proves one thing for sure,” she said, and her voice suddenly held no mirth at all. “You’ve never been a queen, or a king, either.”
“No, your Majesty, I never have,” he said, and fled Iolani Palace faster than the American fleet had fled before the triumphant Japanese earlier in the year.
KENZO AND HIROSHI TAKAHASHI took the Oshima Maru out of Kewalo Basin by themselves. Their father had another radio talk scheduled. His words would go back to Japan and all over the world. Kenzo wished more than anything else in the world that he would just keep quiet.
Whatever Kenzo wished, he wasn’t going to get it. “Dad likes being a celebrity,” he said bitterly. He was at the rudder, Hiroshi trimming the sails. They would trade off later. By now, dealing with the sampan’s rigging and the way she went under sail was second nature to both of them, though neither had known anything about handling a sailboat before Oahu ran out of diesel fuel even for fishermen. Baptism by total immersion, Kenzo thought: not an idea that would have occurred to him had his father stayed in Yamaguchi Prefecture instead of coming to Hawaii.
His brother only shrugged. “Dad’s made his choices. We’ve made ours. Right this minute, I have to say his look better.”
Another measure of the choices he and Kenzo had made was that they both used English. Some men even of their father’s generation had become fluent in it, but Jiro Takahashi remained at home only in Japanese. In English, he understood yes and no and thank you and most obscenities. Except for throwing in an occasional Oh, Jesus Christ! and the like, he didn’t speak any, though.
“We’re getting away,” Kenzo said. “Only thing is, I wish to God we didn’t have to come back again.”
Hiroshi chuckled. “Can’t very well sail to San Francisco from here.”
“I know.” Kenzo sounded as mournful as he felt. “I’ve thought about it. We might be able to catch enough fish to keep us going-we probably could. But she wouldn’t carry enough water to get us there.”
Now Hiroshi stared at him. “You have thought about it.”
“I said so, didn’t I?” Kenzo looked back over his shoulder. The faster Oahu receded behind him, the better he liked it. “I even went to the library to dope out which way the winds blow between here and there. But I’ll tell you what really put the kibosh on things for me.”
“Yeah?” his brother said.
“Yeah.” Kenzo nodded. “You know what they’re doing with the Japanese on the mainland, right? They’re throwing ’em into camps.” How Imperial Japanese propaganda here in Hawaii thundered about that! At first, Kenzo had thought it was a lie. By now, he was only too sure it was true. “The U.S. Navy would probably sink us the minute they spotted us-we’re Japs, right? The Japanese don’t want Japs who think they’re Americans, and neither do the Americans.”
A fairy tern, white as snow with big black eyes, glided along with the Oshima Maru. After a while, the bird perched at the top of the mast. “Damn hitch-hiker,” Hiroshi said.
“Yeah.” Kenzo left it there. Hiroshi hadn’t tried to tell him he was crazy or to say the Navy would treat them fine if it found them sailing northeast. Kenzo wished his brother would have. In that case, he might have been wrong. The way things were, he knew damn well he was right.
Land slowly slid under the horizon. When you traveled under sail, nothing happened in a hurry. But for the slap of waves against the hull and the sound of the wind in the sails and the lines, the Oshima Maru was ghost-quiet. It was as if time itself had been yanked back to some earlier, more patient century-and which one mattered very little. Men had been sailing like this for three thousand years, probably longer.
The tern flew away. A frigatebird-by comparison, almost as big as a light plane-soared by overhead. Its red throat sac was small now, not full of air and big as a kid’s balloon: the bird was looking for lunch instead of a mate. Frigatebirds were pirates. If they had their druthers, they let other birds do the hard work of diving into the sea, then robbed them of their catch.