I’m fired, he thought.
Yesterday he had done wrong at the factory. Spouted the wrong kind of talk to Mr. Wyndam-Matson, who had a dished-in face with Socrates-type nose, diamond ring, gold fly zipper. In other words, a power. A throne. Frink’s thoughts wandered groggily.
Yes, he thought, and now they’ll blacklist me; my skill is no use—I have no trade. Fifteen years’ experience. Gone.
And now he would have to appear at the Laborers’ Justification Commission for a revision of his work category. Since he had never been able to make out Wyndam-Matson’s relationship to the pinocs–the puppet white government at Sacramento—he could not fathom his ex-employer’s power to sway the real authorities, the Japanese. The LJC was pinoc run. He would be facing four or five middle-aged plump white faces, on the order of Wyndam-Matson’s. If he failed to get justification there, he would make his way to one of the Import-Export Trade Missions which operated out of Tokyo, and which had offices throughout California, Oregon, Washington, and the parts of Nevada included in the Pacific States of America. But if he failed successfully to plead there…
Plans roamed his mind as he lay in bed gazing up at the ancient light fixture in the ceiling. He could for instance slip across into the Rocky Mountain States. But it was loosely banded to the PSA, and might extradite him. What about the South? His body recoiled. Ugh. Not that. As a white man he would have plenty of place, in fact more than he had here in the PSA. But… he did not want that kind of place.
And, worse, the South had a cat’s cradle of ties, economic, ideological, and god knew what, with the Reich. And Frank Frink was a Jew.
His original name was Frank Fink. He had been born on the East Coast, in New York, and in 1941 he had been drafted into the Army of the United States of America, right after the collapse of Russia. After the Japs had taken Hawaii he had been sent to the West Coast. When the war ended, there he was, on the Japanese side of the settlement line. And here he was today, fifteen years later.
In 1947, on Capitulation Day, he had more or less gone berserk. Hating the Japs as he did, he had vowed revenge; he had buried his Service weapons ten feet underground, in a basement, well-wrapped and oiled, for the day he and his buddies arose. However, time was the great healer, a fact he had not taken into account. When he thought of the idea now, the great blood bath, the purging of the pinocs and their masters, he felt as if were reviewing one of those stained yearbooks from his high school days, coming upon an account of his boyhood aspirations. Frank “Goldfish” Fink is going to be a paleontologist and vows to marry Norma Prout. Norma Prout was the class schones Mädchen, and he really had vowed to marry her. That was all so goddam long ago, like listening to Fred Allen or seeing a W. C. Fields movie. Since 1947 he had probably seen or talked to six hundred thousand Japanese, and the desire to do violence to any or all of them had simply never materialized, after the first few months. It just was not relevant any more.
But wait. There was one, a Mr. Omuro, who had bought control of a great area of rental property in downtown San Francisco, and who for a time had been Frank’s landlord. There was a bad apple, he thought. A shark who had never made repairs, had partitioned rooms smaller and smaller, raised rents… Omuro had gouged the poor, especially the nearly destitute jobless ex-servicemen during the depression years of the early ‘fifties. However, it had been one of the Japanese trade missions which had cut off Omuro’s head for his profiteering. And nowadays such a violation of the harsh, rigid, but just Japanese civil law was unheard of. It was a credit to the incorruptibility of the Jap occupation officials, especially those who had come in after the War Cabinet had fallen.