“You’re kidding!”
“No I’m not. But the funny thing about it was that the Japs posted an honor guard at the grave. After that, every Jap guard, every Jap officer who passed the ‘shrine,’ saluted. Everyone. And at that time POW’s had to get up and bow if a Jap private came within seeing distance. If you didn’t, you got the thick end of a rifle butt around your head.”
“Doesn’t make sense. The garden and saluting.”
“It does to them. That’s the Oriental mind. To them that’s complete sense.”
“It sure as hell isn’t. Nohow!”
“That’s why I don’t like them,” Peter Marlowe said thoughtfully. “I’m afraid of them, because you’ve no yardstick to judge them. They don’t react the way they should. Never.”
“I don’t know about that. They know the value of a buck and you can trust them most times.”
“You mean in business?” Peter Marlowe laughed. “Well, I don’t know about that. But as far as the people themselves … Another thing I saw. In another camp in Java — they were always shifting us around there, not like in Singapore — it was also in Bandung. There was a Jap guard, one of the better ones. Didn’t pick on you like most of them. Well, this man, we used to call him Sunny because he was always smiling. Sunny loved dogs. And he always had half a dozen with him as he went around the camp. His favorite was a sheepdog — a bitch. One day the bitch had a litter of puppies, the cutest dogs you ever saw, and Sunny was just about the happiest Jap in the whole world, training the puppies, laughing and playing with them. When they could walk he made leads for them out of string and he’d walk around the camp with them in tow. One day he was pulling the pups around — one of them sat on its haunches. You know how pups are, they get tired, and they just sit. So Sunny dragged it a little way, then gave it a real jerk. The pup yelped but stuck its feet in.”
Peter Marlowe paused and made a cigarette. Then he continued. “Sunny took a firm grip on the string and started swinging the pup around his head on the end of the rope. He whirled it maybe a dozen times, laughing as though this was the greatest joke in the world. Then as the screaming pup gathered momentum, he gave it a final whirl and let go of the string. The pup must have gone fifty feet into the air. And when it fell on the iron-hard ground, it burst like a ripe tomato.”
“Bastard!”
After a moment Peter Marlowe said, “Sunny went over to the pup. He looked down at it, then burst into tears. One of our chaps got a spade and buried the remains and, all the time, Sunny tore at himself with grief. When the grave was smoothed over, he brushed away his tears, gave the man a pack of cigarettes, cursed him for five minutes, angrily shoved the butt of the rifle in the man’s groin, then bowed to the grave, bowed to the hurt man, and marched off, beaming happily, with the other pups and dogs.”
The King shook his head slowly. “Maybe he was just crazy. Syphilitic.”
“No, Sunny wasn’t. Japs seem to act like children — but they’ve men’s bodies and men’s strength. They just look at things as a child does. Their perspective is oblique — to us — and distorted.”
“I heard things were rough in Java, after the capitulation,” the King said to keep him talking. It had taken him almost an hour to get Peter Marlowe started and he wanted him to feel at home.
“In some ways. Of course in Singapore there were over a hundred thousand troops, so the Japs had to be a little careful. The chain of command still existed, and a lot of units were intact. The Japs were pressing hard in the drive to Australia, and didn’t care too much so long as the POW’s behaved themselves and got themselves organized into camps. Same thing in Sumatra and Java for a time. Their idea was to press on and take Australia, then we were all going to be sent down there as slaves.”
“You’re crazy,” said the King.
“Oh no. A Jap officer told me after I was picked up. But when their drive was stopped in New Guinea, they started cleaning up their lines. In Java there weren’t too many of us, so they could afford to be rough. They said we were without honor — the officers — because we had allowed ourselves to be captured. So they wouldn’t consider us POW’s. They cut off our hair and forbade us to wear officers’ insignia. Eventually they allowed us to ‘become’ officers again, though they never allowed us back our hair.” Peter Marlowe smiled. “How did you get here?”
“The usual foul-up. I was in an airstrip building outfit. In the Philippines. We had to get out of there in a hurry. The first ship we could get was heading here, so we took it. We figured Singapore’d be safe as Fort Knox. By the time we got here, the Japs were almost through Johore. There was a lastminute panic, and all the guys got on the last convoy out. Me, I thought that was a bad gamble, so I stayed. The convoy got blown out of the sea. I used my head — and I’m alive. Most times, only suckers get killed.”
“I don’t think I would have had the wisdom not to go — if I had had the opportunity,” Peter Marlowe said.
“You got to look after number one, Peter. No one else does.”
Peter Marlowe thought about that for a long time. Snatches of conversation fled through the night. Occasionally a burst of anger. Whispers. The constant clouds of mosquitoes. From afar there was the mournful call of ship-horn to ship-horn. The palms, etched against the dark sky, rustled. A dead frond fell away from the crest of a palm and crashed to the jungle bed.
Peter Marlowe broke the silence. “This friend of yours. He really goes to the village?”
The King looked into Peter Marlowe’s eyes. “You like to come?” he asked softly. “The next time I go?”
A faint smile twisted Peter Marlowe’s lips. “Yes…”
A mosquito buzzed the King’s ear with sudden crescendo. He jerked up, found his flashlight and searched the inside of the net. At length the mosquito settled on the curtain. Deftly, the King crushed it. Then he double-checked to make certain that there were no holes in the net, and lay back once again.
In a moment he dismissed all things from his mind. Sleep came quickly and peacefully to the King.
Peter Marlowe still lay awake on his bunk, scratching bedbug bites. Too many memories had been triggered by what the King had said …
He remembered the ship that had brought him and Mac and Larkin from Java a year ago.
The Japanese had ordered the Commandant of Bandung, one of the camps in Java, to provide a thousand men for a work party. The men were to be sent to another camp nearby for two weeks with good food — double rations — and cigarettes. Then they would be transferred to another place. Fine working conditions.
Many of the men had offered to go because of the two weeks. Some were ordered. Mac had volunteered himself, Larkin, and Peter Marlowe. “Never can tell, laddies,” he had reasoned when they had cursed him. “If we can get to a wee island, well, Peter and I know the language. Ay, an’ the place cannot be worse than here.”
So they had decided to change the evil they knew for the evil that was to come.
The ship was a tiny tramp steamer. At the foot of the gangway there were many guards and two Japanese dressed in white with white face masks. On their backs were large containers, and in their hands were spray guns which connected with the containers. All prisoners and their possessions were spray-sterilized against carrying Javanese microbes onto the clean ship.