Pete McGill warily eyed his fellow Marine. He had to get along with Szulc. The number of Americans-and of leathernecks in particular-in Shanghai was too low to let what you thought about somebody show too much. But Pete hadn’t liked him or trusted him since he tried to say Vera was out for what she could get and that she hadn’t really fallen in love the way McGill had.
“You bet something’s cooking,” Max Weinstein said. “The proletariat is rising up against its imperialist oppressors.” How you could be a pinko and a Marine at the same time was beyond Pete, but Max managed. Pete didn’t know how good a pinko he was, but he made a damn good Marine, even if he drove other people nuts sometimes.
“Thank you, Josef Stalin,” Szulc said. Weinstein flipped him the bird. Ignoring it, Szulc went on, “Nah, what I heard was that the Chinamen were gonna make things hot for the Japs here in Shanghai.”
“That’s what I told you,” Max pointed out. “Whoever said Polacks were dumb knew what he was talking about.”
“Same guy who said sheenies were cheap, I bet,” Szulc said, which shut Max up with a snap. Into the sudden silence, Szulc continued, “What people are sweating about is, the Chinks’re gonna give white people the most grief, see if they can get us or England or France mad enough to jump on Japan.”
“You think that’s true?” Pete asked, interested in spite of himself.
“All I know is what I read in the newspapers.” Herman Szulc was about as far removed from Will Rogers as a human being could be. And none of this was in the Shanghai papers, whether in Chinese, English, French, German, Russian, or Japanese. Japan censored everything. Editors crossed the military government at their peril. For public consumption, everything in Shanghai was just fine.
Max tried again: “I believe it. We’re the ones who cause trouble around here, so we’re the ones the oppressed proletariat’s gonna go for. Only stands to reason.”
“ We’re the ones? White men are the ones?” Szulc said incredulously. “How about all the slanty-eyed shitheads who bow down to Hirohito?”
“They’re only imitating what the Europeans and Americans taught ’em,” Weinstein answered.
“We cause trouble? How about vaccination? How about newspapers?” Pete said.
“I think the first one was discovered here. I know goddamn well printing got invented here,” Max returned.
Pete couldn’t have said whether that was true or not. Max would bluff when he talked, the same way you’d bluff playing poker. Do it every so often and it helped your game. Do it too much and you looked like an asshole. But Pete had more cards to play: “Chinks didn’t invent steamboats or railroads or cars or movies or phones or planes or the stuff that goes with ’em. They didn’t invent your Commie bullshit, either. What’s-his-name-Groucho Marx-did.”
“Karl, for Chrissake.” That crack genuinely pained Max, where the rest rolled off his back. His ears turned pink. Thinking about Marx, Pete found that funny. The Jewish Marine went on, “The Chinese proletariat has the sense to see what a good thing Marxism-Leninism is-which is more than I can say for a couple of dumbfuck leathernecks.”
“More than a couple. You’re about the only Red Marine God ever made,” Pete said. “What are you doing in the Corps, anyway? Boring from within? Is that what they call it?”
“He’s boring, all right,” Herman Szulc said. They looked at each other in surprise-they weren’t used to agreeing.
Two days later, the Chinese bombed a movie theater full of Japanese soldiers. Maybe the Chinese had invented gunpowder, but a Swede came up with dynamite-Pete did happen to know that. As for who first found the idea of taking swarms of hostages and slaughtering them, well, it had to be as old as the hills.
The Japs were good at it, though. The flat cracks from firing squads’ rifles went on day and night. Soldiers didn’t just kill with rifles, either. They used swords and shovels and picks and iron bars and whatever else they could get their hands on. People who knew about the Rape of Nanking a few years earlier said this wasn’t so bad as that, but it sure wasn’t good.
Wailing and moaning and shrieking from the Chinese who made up the vast majority of the people in Shanghai filled the air. Everything at the American consulate went straight to the devil. It didn’t pass go. It didn’t collect two hundred dollars Mex. All the cooks and maids and laundry men and sweepers stayed home. You couldn’t blame them, not when they were liable to get murdered if they were dumb enough to show their faces on the street.
You didn’t have to be Chinese to buy a plot, either. A Japanese soldier bashed in two French businessmen’s brains with a spade and broke three ribs on another Frenchman before his friends could drag him off. The way Pete heard the story, the friends didn’t try very hard to stop him. He believed it; that sounded like the Japs he thought he knew and didn’t love.
“So now what’ll happen?” Pooch Puccinelli wondered out loud. “The Japanese government gonna pay France an indemnity, like they did with us after they blew up the fuckin’ Panay?”
“That’ll make the dead guys happy, all right. Fuckin’ A it will,” Pete said. He didn’t give a rat’s ass about a couple of Frenchmen. He was worried about Vera. He hadn’t been able to get word to her since the Japanese clamped down, and he hadn’t heard from her. He hadn’t heard that anything bad had happened to her dance hall, but he didn’t know that he would. For the time being, the Marines were confined to barracks. He’d never been so tempted to go AWOL.
Max Weinstein also didn’t sympathize with the dead Frenchmen, but he had different reasons: “You’re a capitalist, the only reason you come to China is to exploit the local workers and peasants. You do that, you deserve whatever happens to you, far as I’m concerned.”
“You’re a sweet old boy, Max-yeah, a real SOB,” Pooch said. “Wasn’t the Chinks who did for ’em, remember. It was the Japs.”
“They got it on account of they came out here. If they’d stayed home where they belonged, they wouldn’t have,” Max said stubbornly.
“No, the Nazis would’ve blown ’em up instead,” Pete put in.
“If you want to see everything that’s wrong with capitalism, and I mean everything, all you gotta do is look at Hitler’s Germany and the Moose’s Italy,” Weinstein said. “There it is, naked.”
“You start talking about naked, I don’t want to talk about Nazis,” Szulc said. “I want to talk about broads.”
“That’s ’cause you’re a dickhead,” Max told him. “You think with your dick, and now you’re talking with it, too.”
Had anybody said that to Pete, he would have tried to murder the guy. Herman Szulc puffed out his chest and looked proud of himself. “I’d sooner talk with my dick than with my Red asshole like you any day,” he said.
Max surged to his feet. “You stupid fuckin’ Polack-”
“Yeah, Yid?”
There they went again. Other Marines got between them. Everybody was as jumpy as a cat in a bar full of Dobermans. The Marines were only a symbolic presence in Shanghai, as they had been in Peking. The real action in these parts was between the Japs and the Chinese. When they started going at each other hammer and tongs, it reminded the Americans of their futility. Nobody liked having his uselessness exposed.
Pete wasn’t even sure he could protect his woman. If anything in the world felt worse than that, he didn’t know what it would be. Other Marines had had to keep him from going after Herman Szulc, too. Herman had a big mouth, and liked to hear himself talk. One of these days… But not yet. Not yet, dammit, Pete thought, not without regret.
Alistair Walsh had his own opinions about politics. He was the staunchest of Tories: a Winston Churchill supporter who put up with Neville Chamberlain only because he might be marginally better than whatever Labour put up to oppose him.
Of course, Walsh was also a soldier. He was actively discouraged from doing anything about his views. The last thing Britain wanted was Bonapartism, and soldiers doing anything about their political opinions seemed to the powers that be a long step in the wrong direction. And so, but for mouthing off in barracks and barrooms and foxholes, Walsh had stayed as politically innocent as his superiors could have wanted.