He noticed her now. With regret, he shook his head. “Sorry, dear. I have to get somewhere. Maybe I’ll come back.”
“Khorosho,” she said, so she knew a bit of Russian. She smiled after him as he left.
He stayed careful all the way to his place. He made sure he barred the door after he went inside. The opium was in a glass jar with a ground-glass stopper. His father had had dozens like it. He’d got this one in a junk shop. He stuck it in his pocket and left.
His hiding place wasn’t wonderful, but it would do: a hollow under half a brick in a blacksmith’s place that had been falling in on itself since before Harbin belonged to puppet Manchukuo. He didn’t think anyone saw him go in. He left through a hole in the side wall. It was three blocks to his shanty. That was far enough, he hoped, to keep secret policemen from coming here when they didn’t find anything in the place.
Of course, if they wanted him enough, they could plant their own opium and kill him on account of it. He couldn’t do anything about that. With luck, he was too unimportant for them to bother. He headed back to the teahouse. “Hello, sweetheart,” he said. “What do I call you?”
–
Bill Staley mooched away from yet another mail call with no card or letter from Marian. He wished she’d write. They had paper and pens in refugee camps…didn’t they?
Or maybe she had written, but the Air Force hadn’t figured out that he was in Japan, not at the field north of Pusan. One of the things he’d learned was that stuff could go south a million different ways. The poor sap for whom they went south wouldn’t know which. He’d just know the world was fubar’d.
The field outside of Fukuoka was more like a base behind the lines and less like a forward airstrip than the one his B-29 hadn’t been able to land at. The runways were paved. People slept in Quonset huts and prefab wooden barracks, not under canvas. A radar dish did spin to warn of trouble, but far fewer flak guns poked snouts toward the sky.
Hank McCutcheon noticed the same thing. “We’re back in the peacetime Air Force,” he said.
“Cripes, we’ve earned it,” Bill answered. “We came way too close to buying a plot on that last run to Pyongyang.”
“Place got bombed,” McCutcheon said. “That’s all Harrison and the other guys who give the orders care about. Lose some bomber crews? Hell, that’s just the cost of doing business, like new spark plugs on a delivery truck.”
“Cripes,” Bill said again, on a different note this time. “Man, I don’t like the idea of putting casualties on one side of the ledger.”
“That’s what those guys do. That’s what they’re supposed to do,” the pilot said. “They go, ‘if we can do this much damage and only lose that many men, then hey, it’s worth a shot.’ ”
“How many cities have we lost? How about the Russians?” Bill said. “Whoever was working the cost-benefit analysis, he should have taken off his shoes so he could get the decimal point straight.”
“Not like you’re wrong,” McCutcheon said. “But you were the one who reminded me a while ago that we haven’t exactly been washing our hands with Ivory. Some of those mushroom clouds, we raised the mushrooms.”
“Uh-huh. You try not to think about it. Sometimes I feel like Lady Macbeth just the same.”
“Planning that shit is the generals’ job. Doing it’s ours,” McCutcheon said. “The other choice is getting shot down. Bombing’s better.”
“Oh, yeah.” Bill nodded. “I don’t think I was ever so scared as I was on the last run over Pyongyang. How many Superforts did we lose that night?”
“Half a dozen,” McCutcheon said, as if Bill didn’t know that as well as he did. “And those two Twin Mustangs. And the airport down in the south. We didn’t pay cheap for anything. But we plastered the target, and I promise we hurt Kim Il-sung worse’n he hurt us.”
“Sure we did. We can blow up tons and tons of gooks. But they can only blow up one Bill Staley, and they came too goddamn close to doing it. I felt the goose walking over my grave.”
McCutcheon studied him the way he might have looked over a nose wheel with a slow leak, wondering whether he could take off on it. “Bill, old son, you think maybe you ought to sit out a few missions? You don’t sound like you’re in A-number-one shape right this minute.”
“I’m not eager any more-I’ll tell you that. I’ll go, though,” Bill said. “Yeah, I will. For whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou fliest, I will fly: thy crew shall be my crew, and thy Superfortress my Superfortress.”
He hadn’t thought he would-or could-go on butchering the Book of Ruth so long, but he got all the way through to the end of the passage. Hank McCutcheon eyed him with a mix of admiration and horror. “You’re crazy as a fucking bedbug, Staley, you know that?”
“Marian always tells me so, yeah,” Bill answered, not without pride. “ ’Course, she must be nuts herself, or she wouldn’t’ve married me.”
“I was gonna point that out in case you didn’t,” the pilot said. “Seriously, though, man, are you good to fly? I don’t want you in that seat if you aren’t up to doing the things you need to do.”
Bill examined himself as he would have examined the instrument panel in front of the copilot’s seat. Some of his internal dials didn’t register as they would have if everything were running smoothly, but none was in the red. “Like I said, I’m not gung-ho these days. I’ve been shot at in two wars, and it never was any fun. I’ve got a wife and a little girl Stateside, and I want to see them again. I’m an old copilot, but I’m not an old, bold copilot. So I can do it. You want me to jump up and down about doing it, that ain’t gonna happen.”
“I wanna watch animals jumping up and down, I don’t need you,” Hank McCutcheon said. “I can look at the fucking Jap monkeys instead. Ain’t they a kick in the nuts?”
“They’re something, all right,” Bill agreed. Most of the animals and birds and plants here didn’t look too different from the stuff back home. They weren’t identical, but you had to look twice to notice; the overall effect was similar. And then, in the middle of all that similarity-monkeys! He continued, “You could put ’em in uniform and they’d take over for our top brass without missing a beat. Nobody’d even notice.”
“Like hell, nobody would,” the pilot said. “The orders would start making more sense if the monkeys gave ’em.”
“Yeah, you’re right. And only a few of our generals have tails now, so people might spot that, too.”
Chain-link fencing kept unwanted humans away from the runways. It didn’t bother the Japanese macaques one bit. As Bill watched, a monkey swarmed up one side and down the other, grabbing the wire with hands and thumbish feet. Watching something the size of a dog climb nimbly as a squirrel told him he wasn’t in Kansas any more. The monkey steered clear of him and McCutcheon. They were wary around men, though not too afraid of them.
“Wonder what it’s after,” Bill said.
“Anything that isn’t nailed down,” McCutcheon replied. “And if it wants something that is, it’s liable to pry out the nails. Whatever else they are, the damn things are pests. If we had ’em back in the States, there’d be a bounty on ’em.”
“No kidding!” Bill said. Macaques raided garbage cans. They sneaked into kitchens and storerooms and stole food from them. They were like giant rats with hands that worked. Not long before the B-29s that bombed Pyongyang had to land here, one of them had swiped an MP’s.45. With its clever, curious fingers, the monkey managed to release the safety. That was its next to last mistake. It was pointing the pistol at itself when it found out what the trigger did….
“You don’t want to mess with ’em. Rile ’em up and they’ll bite your face off,” McCutcheon said.
That was also the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. A macaque could look amazingly manlike with its mouth closed. But when it yawned or screeched or did anything else with its mouth open, you saw that a man might be a monkey’s nephew, but he sure wasn’t a monkey’s son. The chompers in there would have made a coyote think twice.