Before anything else could happen, the clock in the tower of the new Customs House chimed the hour. Pete checked his watch. It was a few minutes fast, so he adjusted it. "Hurray for Big Ching," he said. It wasn't Big Ben, but it was halfway around the world from London.
"Lottery ticket?" a woman screeched in the Marines' faces.
"No wantchee," Pete said, shaking his head. He'd picked up a bit of pidgin English since coming to Shanghai. It wasn't used much in Peking. There, the locals either knew English or, much more often, they didn't. Here, pidgin seemed a halfway house between English and Chinese. People who'd been here longer than he had said it held bits of Portuguese, too, and a mostly Chinese way of putting words together.
"My no savvy," the woman said.
"You savvy plenty good," Koenig told her. "Get lost." That wasn't proper pidgin, but she understood it anyhow. She said something in Chinese that sounded like a cat getting its tail stepped on. Koenig only laughed. "Good thing I don't know what that meant, or I'd have to do something about it," he said.
Then the woman spoke two words of perfectly clear English-"Fuck you!"-and accompanied them with the appropriate gesture. Pete wondered whether she'd learned that from a leatherneck or an English Marine. She'd got it down solid, wherever she'd found it.
And Larry Koenig went nuts. "No slanty-eyed cunt's gonna give me the finger!" he yelled, and started after her with intent to maim, or maybe to murder. Pete and Herman Szulc looked at each other for a split second. Then they both grabbed the sergeant and held on for dear life.
"Take it easy, man!" Pete said. "You'll set all the Chinks off!" Sure enough, the small, golden-skinned men and women were pointing and giggling at the spectacle of two white men trying to hold back a third.
"Like I give a shit! Let me go, goddammit!" Koenig tried something Pete had last seen from a dirty-fighting coach before he went overseas.
He still remembered what to do about it-remembered without thinking, the knowledge literally beaten into him. He jerked, twisted… and Koenig gasped in pain. "I'll break your wrist if you try any more of that," Pete said, and the other man had to know he meant it. "Now calm down, okay?"
What Koenig said then would have made a Marine sergeant blush-except he was one. "C'mon, man-take an even strain," Szulc advised, also not letting go. "Just an old Chinese broad. She's gone now anyway." So she was; the crowd had swallowed her up.
"I'll find her. I'll wring her scrawny neck when I do, too," Koenig ground out. He surged against the Marines who held him-but he didn't try anything else cute.
"You and McGill've been in China too long. You're both going Asiatic yourself," Szulc opined. "You want to clobber this gal for nothing, and he's all mushy over that gold-digging taxi dancer. This place'll drive anybody nuts if he stays long enough."
If Pete hadn't been hanging on to Koenig for all he was worth, he would have taken a swing at Szulc himself. Then the Chinese would have been treated to the spectacle of three Americans, each trying to beat the crap out of the other two. Even Japanese soldiers would have laughed at that. When the people who hated you fought among themselves, how could you lose?
Simple. You couldn't. And so Pete didn't clobber Herman Szulc, no matter how much Herman deserved it. And Koenig did eventually calm down-enough so they could let go of him, anyhow. And they walked on through Shanghai just as if it were their town after all. NORTH. The front faced north. To Hideki Fujita, that meant one thing and one thing only: the Kwantung Army stood firmly astride the Trans-Siberian Railway. If the Russians wanted to do anything about it, they would have to come to the Japanese. He didn't think they would have an easy time doing that. His own countrymen had attacked the railroad in other places, too. Japanese radio claimed all kinds of breakthroughs against the Red Army, but Fujita had seen enough to understand that not everything the radio said was exactly true. You needed to impress the foreigners who were bound to be listening.
He did know what was happening behind him. Japanese engineers were systematically tearing up the railroad track and mining the ground on which it had lain. The Russians wouldn't have an easy time putting the Trans-Siberian Railway back together even if they did drive off the Kwantung Army.
And, without the railroad, Vladivostok would starve. Bombers from Japanese aircraft carriers and from bases in Manchukuo already pounded the town. The Russians were hunkering down for a siege. Well, they'd done the same thing at Port Arthur. It hadn't saved them then. Fujita didn't think it would save them now.
He pictured a map in his mind. Would the Emperor take Vladivostok for Japan, or would he say it was territory redeemed for Manchukuo? It didn't really matter one way or the other. Japanese influence would predominate no matter which flag flew there.
Then Russian artillery opened up. The Reds hadn't gone away, even if Fujita wished they would have. He cocked his head to one side, gauging the flight of the shells by the way they snarled through the air. He relaxed. Nothing aimed at him-not this time.
He lit an Aeroplane. Smoke helped when you couldn't take a drink. Everything around you seemed a little less important while you had a cigarette going. It was as if… as if you were laying down a smoke screen against the outside world.
He liked that well enough to say it out loud. Shinjiro Hayashi grinned and dipped his head. "Oh, very good, Sergeant-san!" he said.
If Hayashi, with his education, appreciated the joke, that meant it was a good one… didn't it? Fujita wished he wouldn't have had the afterthought. He remembered the days when he was a private himself. Any stupid joke the sergeant cracked was funny, for no other reason than that he was a sergeant. If you didn't laugh, he'd thump you like a drum. Of course sergeants slapped privates around; that was what privates were for. If you didn't keep your sergeant greased, the army would get even more miserable than it already was for a private.
Now Fujita had a thin gold stripe and two stars on his red collar tabs. Now he was the one who expected the sorry bastards under him to laugh at whatever came out of his mouth. And they did. Oh, they did. They knew where their rice came from, all right. But that meant he couldn't trust them. They would laugh even if he said something stupid-no, especially if he said something stupid. He remembered doing that. What was sweeter than laughing at a puffed-up sergeant who was playing the fool and didn't even know it?
Nothing, for a private. All the more reason for a sergeant to watch himself. Privates were unreliable, officers thought they were little tin gods… You had to take care of yourself. Nobody would do it for you.
That also applied when the Russians came. Some of the people you led wouldn't be sorry to see you dead. If they got the chance to arrange that in a way that wouldn't land them in trouble, they were liable to do it.
Those were thoughts Fujita wished he hadn't had when Lieutenant Hanafusa came up to him and said, "You've done well since you got here, Sergeant. I wondered about you, because you didn't have much experience fighting in forests. But nobody can say you haven't picked it up in a hurry."
"Thank you very much, sir." Fujita wondered what Hanafusa had in mind. He also wondered if he would have done better to stay on Manchukuo's Mongolian frontier, where only sandstorms kept you from seeing for kilometers every which way and where any tree was a prodigy.
And so he heard the platoon commander's next words with a mournful lack of surprise: "We need some prisoners for interrogation. Take your squad forward and get me a couple. Try not to make too much of a fuss while you're doing it."
"Yes, sir," Fujita said-the only thing he could say. He did ask, "Right now, sir, or may we wait till after dark?"