When he came back, his face was grim. “You can do nothing,” he said. “I can do nothing. No one can do anything. The occupying authorities have dealt with him.”
“Is he-dead?” Oscar didn’t want to say the word, or even think it.
Alfred Choi shook his head. “Not yet,” he said, which didn’t sound good.
Maybe he was trying to put on the squeeze. Oscar hoped so; that was better than the alternative. Picking his words with care, Oscar said, “I catch a lot of fish-more than I need, sometimes.”
“I have enough to eat, thank you,” Choi said. “I could take fish from you. I could, ah, string you along.” He used the slang self-consciously. “But since I have enough, I tell you straight out: I cannot do anything for your friend. Nobody can do anything for your friend. His case is pau.” The Hawaiian word for finished, in common use in the islands, sounded dreadfully final here.
“Could I talk to anybody else?” Oscar asked.
“Do you want the Kempeitai to talk to you?” Alfred Choi sounded abstractly curious, as if he didn’t give a damn one way or the other. He likely didn’t. It was no skin off his rather flat nose.
“I guess maybe not,” Oscar said reluctantly.
“I guess maybe not, too. This is wise.” The clerk pointed to the door. “You leave through the door you came in by.”
Oscar left through that door. Some of the people in the wider hall onto which SPECIAL CASES opened looked surprised anyone was allowed to leave. He decided he’d done everything he could possibly do for Charlie Kaapu. He wished he knew what Charlie had done, or what the Japs thought he’d done. And he wished he knew what they’d done to him.
THE MEMORY OF HALF-RAW, half-burnt pork was just that-a memory-for Jim Peterson these days. He was back to not so slowly starving on the usual Kalihi Valley rations, back to working himself to death too many inches at a time.
He stood in the rain for morning roll call. The Japs who did the counting had umbrellas, of course. The POWs? The mere idea was a joke. Peterson hoped the count would go smoothly. If it didn’t, the Japs would probably just send the whole gang of them into the tunnel without breakfast. Prisoners starving? So what? Time lost on the tunnel? A catastrophe!
Things seemed to be moving well enough when there was a commotion to the southwest. The Japanese had the escape route well blocked off. Every once in a while, a POW grew desperate enough to try it anyway. Those who did usually got caught. Then they served as object lessons for the others. Watching them tortured to death a little at a time had given Jim Peterson more than one of his many nightmares.
This wasn’t an escaped prisoner. These were new damned souls, come to take their places in hell. Along with his fellow sufferers, Peterson stared at the newcomers. “They aren’t soldiers,” somebody behind him said through the patter and plink of raindrops.
The man was obviously right. Instead of wearing tatters of khaki or Navy blue, they wore tatters of blue jeans and plaid or flowered shirts. Just because they were civilians didn’t mean they hadn’t seen their fair share of abuse and then some. They were bruised and battered and beaten. Quite a few of them limped. A lot of them had bloody mouths. They showed missing front teeth that obviously hadn’t been missing long.
One of the Japs herding them forward smashed a fellow who looked half Hawaiian in the head with a rifle butt for no reason Peterson could see. The man staggered and groaned, but stayed on his feet. Peterson thought that blow would have felled an elephant. But the Japs had also put him in places where you died if you went down. This looked like one of those places for the luckless prisoner.
Somebody not far away muttered, “Look how fat they are.”
They weren’t fat, not really. Not even the Japanese guards, with a couple of exceptions, were fat. But they had vastly more flesh on them than the filthy, bearded skeletons already laboring in the Kalihi Valley.
Shouts in Japanese went back and forth between the soldiers bringing in the new prisoners and the guards in charge of the men already there. Those guards seemed about as delighted to see the new arrivals as a housewife would have been to find more mice marching into her kitchen.
Peterson knew why, too, or at least one of the reasons why. “If this doesn’t fuck up the count…” he said morosely. Several men standing within earshot of him groaned. A Jap guard looked their way. They all pretended they hadn’t let out a peep. After a baleful stare right out of a gangster movie, the guard looked away.
By a minor-league miracle, the new prisoners didn’t foul up the count too badly. Shouting in fragmentary English, the Japs got them to line up in ranks of ten. That told the guards how many of them there were. Then the Japs went back to counting the POWs already there. They only needed to do it twice before the answer satisfied them.
Breakfast wouldn’t have been more than fifteen minutes late. To the Japs, that was fifteen minutes too long. Despite groans and curses from the POWs, they headed them off toward the tunnel mouth. Curses and groans didn’t count for much against fit men, fixed bayonets, and live ammunition.
The Japs drove the newcomers toward the mouth of the tunnel, too. The new fish didn’t complain. They didn’t know they were missing breakfast, and they didn’t know what the devil they were getting into, either. “Wonder what the hell they did to get sent here,” Peterson remarked.
“Must’ve been something juicy,” Gordy Braddon said. After a meditative moment, he added, “They’re the first batch of civilians ever came here. Japs must want ’em dead bad.”
“Yeah-same as us,” Peterson said tightly. Braddon nodded.
“What are we doing here?” asked the big half-Hawaiian guy the Jap had clouted with his rifle butt. Blood and rainwater ran down the side of his face. If he noticed, he didn’t let on.
“Digging a tunnel through the mountains.” Peterson found himself liking the newcomer’s coolness. He added his name and stuck out a hand.
“Jim,” the newcomer repeated, taking it. “I’m Charlie-Charlie Kaapu.” His grip was hard and firm.
Why not? He didn’t have beriberi taking bites out of his strength. Not yet, anyway. If he stayed here very long, he would.
“What did you do that made ’em love you well enough to send you to this garden spot?” Peterson asked.
“Some garden,” Charlie said, and laughed a loud, raucous laugh, the laugh of a man who couldn’t be beaten-or at least of a man who didn’t know he could. He went on, “They say I was spying for the United States.”
“Yeah? Were you?” Peterson didn’t ask the question. A fellow named Seymour Harper did. Peterson wasn’t the only one who suspected him of snitching to the Japs, though nobody’d ever been able to nail that down for sure.
A couple of men coughed. That was about as much warning as they could give the new guy without landing in trouble themselves. It wasn’t enough, not really. But Charlie Kaapu turned out not to need it. He started to shake his head, then grimaced and thought better of it. “Shit, no,” he answered. “What really happened was, this Jap major’s girlfriend thought I was better in bed than he was.” He laughed again, complacently. “You know these Japs ain’t nothin’ but a bunch of needle dicks. But she got mad at him one day and told him what she thought, and the motherfucker went and grabbed me-or he had the cops do it, anyway.”
Gordy Braddon said, “You had more fun getting here than we did, that’s for goddamn sure.” Peterson found himself nodding. He found himself smiling, too, and that wasn’t something he did every day, not in the Kalihi Valley it wasn’t.
Charlie was smiling, too, which only proved he’d just got here. “So how do we dig this stinking tunnel?” They rounded the last bend in the road in front of the tunnel mouth. Jungle no longer hid the hole in the mountainside or the sorry collection of hand tools in front of it. The tools would rust in the rain, but the Japs didn’t care. If a tool broke, that gave them one more excuse to take it out on a prisoner. Peterson pointed at the picks and shovels and crowbars. “Now you see it, Charlie-Devil’s Island, 1943.”