He got convictions, too, about as many as his boss. Joe Steele smiled whenever his name came up. Charlie wondered if the President saw something of his own young, ambitious self in that graceless, hard-charging lawyer.
It was going to be another election year. It got to be February 1948 before Charlie even remembered. He laughed at himself. Back in the day, Presidential races had been the biggest affairs in American politics. The only thing that would keep Joe Steele from winning a fifth term now was dying before November rolled around.
And that wouldn’t happen. Joe Steele had disposed of swarms of other men, but he showed no sign of being ready to meet the Grim Reaper himself.
XXIII
“Hup! Hup! Hup-hup-hup!” Mike watched the company of South Japanese troops parade. They wore mostly American uniforms, though their service caps were the short-billed Imperial Japanese style. Most of them were survivors from Hirohito’s army. Jobs were hard to come by in South Japan, especially for veterans. The American authorities discouraged employers from hiring them. So the newly formed Constitutional Guard-no one wanted to call it an army-had no trouble finding recruits.
But they weren’t good recruits. They knew what to do; it wasn’t as if they were going through basic. Giving a damn about doing it? That was a different story.
Mike turned to Dick Shirakawa. Dick was his interpreter, a California Jap who’d gone into a labor encampment after Pearl Harbor and eventually into a punishment brigade. His unit, full of Japs, had fought in Europe. The powers that be had figured ordinary American soldiers in the Pacific would shoot at them first and ask questions later. For once, Mike figured the powers that be got it right.
Like him, Dick had stayed in the Army after the war ended and got the P out from under his corporal’s stripes. Since he spoke the language, they’d decided he’d be most useful in Japan once the shooting stopped. Mike was glad to have him. His own bits of Japanese, while they helped him, weren’t enough to let him ride herd on these clowns.
“Ask ’em what’s eating them, will you?” he said to Shirakawa now. “They should make better soldiers than this.”
Dick palavered in Japanese with three or four guys who looked to have a few brain cells to rub together. They had to go back and forth for a while. Mike had learned that Jap notions of politeness involved telling you what they thought you wanted to hear, not what was really on their minds. You had to work past that if you were ever going to get anywhere. When Shirakawa turned away at last, his face wore a bemused expression.
“So what’s cookin’?” Mike asked him.
“Well, I found out how come they don’t take us serious,” the American Japanese said. “I found out, but I’m not sure I believe it.”
“Give.” Mike had already had some adventures of his own unscrewing the inscrutable.
“You know what the trouble is?” Dick said. “The trouble is, we’re too fucking nice. I shit you not, Sergeant. That’s what they tell me. Their own noncoms slugged them and kicked them whenever they pulled a rock. We don’t do any of that stuff, so the way it looks to them is, we don’t give a rat’s ass. To them, we’re just going through the motions. That’s all they think they need to do, too.”
“Fuck me.” Mike lit a cigarette. He’d imagined a lot of different troubles, but that wasn’t any of them. “You know what they sound like? They sound like a broad who’s only happy when her husband knocks her around, ’cause that’s how she knows he loves her. He cares enough to smack her one.”
Shirakawa nodded. “That’s about the size of it. What are we supposed to do? Our own brass would court-martial us-hell, they’d crucify us-if we treated these guys the way their sergeants did.”
“I’ll talk with Captain Armstrong about it, see what he thinks,” Mike said. “In the meantime, tell ’em it’s not our custom to beat the crap out of people who didn’t really earn it. Tell ’em that doesn’t make us soft, any more than surrendering or taking prisoners does. Remind ’em we won the war and they damn well didn’t, so our ways of doing things work, too.”
“I’ll try.” Shirakawa harangued the company in Japanese. Mike got maybe one word in ten; he never could have done it by himself. The Constitutional Guardsmen listened attentively. They bowed to the corporal and then, more deeply, to Mike. After that, they marched a little better, but not a lot better.
When Mike talked with Calvin Armstrong, the young officer nodded. “I’ve heard other reports like that,” he said, frowning. “I don’t know what to do about them. If we treat the Japs the way their old army did, aren’t we as bad as they were?”
“If we don’t treat ’em that way, will the new army-”
“The Constitutional Guard.”
“The Constitutional Guard. Right. Sorry. Will the goddamn Constitutional Guard be worth the paper it’s printed on? Is the idea to be nice to them or to get them so they’re able to fight?”
“I can’t order you to rough them up. My own superiors would land on me like a ton of bricks,” Armstrong said unhappily.
“Yes, sir. I understand that,” Mike said. “But I’ll tell you one thing.”
“What’s that?”
“The sorry bastards in the North Japanese Army, they don’t ever worry that the Russians telling ’em what to do are too fucking soft.”
Armstrong laughed what might have been the least mirthful laugh Mike had ever heard. “Boy, you’ve got that right,” he said. “The Red Army’s just about as dog-eat-dog as the Japs were.”
“They may be even worse,” Mike said. “Their officers have those NKVD bastards looking over their shoulder all the time.”
“Uh-huh.” Armstrong nodded. “Wouldn’t it be fun if the Jeebies kept an eye on our guys like that?”
“I never really thought about it, sir,” Mike answered. He liked Calvin Armstrong. He respected him. But he didn’t trust him enough to say anything bad about the GBI where the younger man could hear him. He didn’t want to wind up in a labor encampment again if Armstrong reported him. No, the Jeebies didn’t put political officers in U.S. Army units, or they hadn’t yet, anyhow. That didn’t mean they had no influence in the Army. Oh, no. It didn’t mean that at all.
* * *
Esther had got a call from the elementary school where Sarah and Pat went. She had to go in early and bring Pat home. He’d landed in trouble on the playground at lunchtime. Esther told Charlie the story over the phone, but he wanted to hear it from the criminal himself. Not every kindergarten kid could pull off a stunt like that.
“What happened, sport?” Charlie asked when he came back from the White House.
“Nothin’ much.” His son seemed not at all put out by landing in hot water.
“No? I heard you had kind of a fight.”
“Yeah, kind of.” Pat shrugged. No, it didn’t bother him.
“How come?”
Another shrug. “I had on this same shirt”-it was crimson cotton, just the thing for Washington’s warm spring-“and Melvin, he asked me, ‘Are you now or have you ever been a Red?’”
“And so?”
“And so I bopped him in the ol’ beezer,” Pat said, not without pride. “Everybody knows Red is a dirty name. But he got a bloody nose, and he started crying all over the place. I guess that’s why they sent me home.”
“‘Everybody knows Red is a dirty name,’” Esther echoed.
“When the five- and six-year-olds throw it at each other, you know it’s sunk in pretty deep, all right.” Charlie turned back to Pat. “From now on, don’t hit anybody unless he hits you first, okay?”
“Okay,” Pat said with no great enthusiasm.
“Promise?”
“Promise,” Pat said, more reluctantly yet. But Charlie and Esther had taught him that promises were important, and that if you made one you had to keep it. With any luck at all, this one would keep Pat from becoming the scourge of the schoolyard-or from getting his block knocked off if he goofed.