That name had enough magic to calm people down. Marines who’d been to Hawaii before thought of Hotel Street. Those who hadn’t didn’t, but what they had in mind was something like Hotel Street. Honolulu was the Holy Grail. There were all sorts of incentives for throwing out the Japs, booze and pussy not the smallest among them.
“Where do we go now, sir?” someone asked Captain Bradford.
“I don’t have more orders yet,” the company commander answered. “We did this. Now we wait and see what happens next.” The men knew what to do about that. They settled themselves in the entrenchments they’d just won. Here and there, they heaved Japanese corpses out of them. They lit cigarettes. Some of them opened K-ration cans. As long as they weren’t going anywhere right away, they’d make themselves as comfortable as they could. Hurry up and wait was supposed to be an Army joke, but the Marines lived by it, too.
Dutch Wenzel came up to cadge a Camel from Les. “They don’t put cigars in the K-rats,” Wenzel said mournfully. “You still alive? Hadn’t seen you for a while, so I started to wonder.”
“Well, I was the last time I looked,” Dillon answered. “I wondered about you, too. Don’t see somebody for a coupla hours, you figure maybe he stopped one with his chest.”
“These Japs…” Wenzel bent close for a light, sucked in smoke, and held it as long as he could. Les wondered if he was going to finish that after he finally blew it out. Then he decided it didn’t matter.
Among the Marines, that was practically a complete sentence all by itself. Dutch exhaled a gray cloud and said, “You know, you can get damn near anything for cigarettes from the people here. They been without since they smoked the last of what they had. They go down on their knees to thank you if you give some away.”
“Yeah?” Les leered. “You get one of these gals to go down on her knees for you? I heard of being hung like a horse, but I never heard of being hung like a Camel.”
Wenzel made a horrible face, but he said, “I bet you could get sucked off for cigarettes, no shit. Tell you something-I think I’d rather get blown than lay most of these women. They’re so goddamn scrawny, it’d be like laying a ladder.”
Les nodded. All the civilians on Oahu were skinny. Even the Japs were skinny, and they’d had better rations than the locals. Just the same… “You’ve heard about the prisoners at that Opana place, and the ones our guys rescued down by Honolulu? Those poor mothers weren’t just skinny. They were fucking starving to death for real. Goddamn Japs have a lot to answer for.”
“Better believe it.” Dutch smoked the cigarette down to a butt. Then he took an alligator clip out of his pocket and went on smoking it even after it got too small to hold between his fingers. That was a good idea. Les reminded himself to scrounge his own clip off a radioman or a field-telephone operator or somebody else who messed around with wires. Wenzel went on, “There was supposed to be another camp somewhere, too, one where the Japs got even with guys who got their asses in a sling at the regular places. Scuttlebutt is, that one made the others look like a rest cure.”
“I heard something like that, too,” Les said. “You keep hoping that crap isn’t so. And then you find out it is, and that it’s worse than anybody said it was, on account of nobody would’ve believed it if they tried to say how bad it really was.”
Wenzel eyed the closest Japanese corpse. The Jap had taken one in the neck and one in the face. Either would have finished him. The one in the face had gone out through the back of his head and blown out most of his brains. Flies crawled over the blood-soaked grayish spatters. “He got it quick,” Dutch observed. “After what they did at Opana, I’d like to roast ’em all over a slow fire. Not half of what they oughta get, either.”
“Gonna be that kind of war, all right,” Les agreed mournfully. “Back in 1918, the Germans fought hard, but they fought pretty clean. So did we, even if”-he chuckled reminiscently-“their machine gunners had a lot of trouble surrendering. Those bastards thought they could bang away till you were right on top of ’em and then put up their hands. They had more accidents… But it’s all gonna be like that here, and we’re just starting out. Still a long way to Tokyo. Fuck, it’s still a long way to Midway.”
“Sir?” the radioman called to Captain Bradford.
The company commander listened and talked for a little while. Then he said, “Well, boys, we’ve got our orders now.” He waited for the expectant mutter to die away, then went on, “We’re going to do a left wheel and head for Honolulu with the rest of the guys moving south.”
“What the fuck?” Les muttered. He’d figured they would keep driving straight south. He said, “Sir, what about Pearl City and Pearl Harbor?”
“They’ll be taken care of, Sergeant, I promise,” Bradford said. “Only difference is, we won’t be the guys who do it.”
“Right,” Les said. Somebody somewhere way the hell up the chain of command had had himself a brainstorm. Whether it would end up being the good kind or the other kind-well, everybody would have to wait and see how that turned out. “Honolulu.” Dillon tasted the word. He’d been thinking about Hotel Street not long before. He wondered what was left of it. If the damn Nips didn’t shoot him first, he’d find out.
MINORU GENDA WAITED IN A HOTEL ROOM on Hotel Street. He’d brought his bicycle upstairs with him to the bare little cubicle. If he left it on the street, even chained to a lamppost, it would be gone by the time he came down. He’d paid too much for the room. He’d paid too much for the bottle of island gin he’d brought here, too. He shrugged. What did he have to do with his money now but spend it?
A knock on the door. He jumped up from the bed-the only furniture in the room but for a battered chest of drawers. Hotels on Hotel Street had only one thing in mind.
He opened the door. Queen Cynthia Laanui stood in the hallway. Probably the most recognizable woman in Hawaii, she’d taken pains not to be recognized. Her red hair was tucked up under a straw hat. Enormous sunglasses helped hide her face. She’d brought her bicycle upstairs, too. A cramped room with two bicycles in it amused Genda. Small things still could. Few big ones were amusing any more.
Queen Cynthia walked the bicycle in when Genda stood aside. He closed the door behind her and locked it. Then he took her in his arms. They kissed greedily. When they broke apart, she said, “It’s not going to work, is it?” She didn’t sound bitter-only very tired.
“No.” Genda wished he could lie to her. Back at Pearl Harbor, Japanese officers were still busy lying to one another. They kept on believing that if this went right, and if that went right, and if they caught the Americans napping here, they might still save Oahu. American officers must have danced that dance of delusion at the end of 1941 and the start of 1942. Before long, defeat stared them in the face even so. And it would stare the Japanese in the face, too. Genda went on, “We fight hard. We are brave. But, so sorry, we cannot win. The enemy is too strong.”
Saying something like that brought vast relief. His colleagues might have arrested him for telling the truth. If you didn’t look at something, they were convinced, it would go away. But being convinced didn’t make it true.
“What are we going to do, then?” Cynthia asked. “What can we do?”
What did we mean here? The Empire of Japan and the soon to be extinguished Kingdom of Hawaii? King Stanley and herself? Genda and herself? All of those at once? That last was Genda’s guess. He said, “We all do the best we can.” His answer was as ambiguous as her question.
She spotted the bottle on the chest of drawers. Two lithe strides took her to it. She yanked out the cork, swigged, and made a horrible face. “God, that’s nasty,” she said, coughing, and then drank again.
Genda took a pull, too. It was every bit as bad as Cynthia said it was. But the only thing worse than rotgut liquor was no liquor at all. “You have courage, not to try to get away,” he said.