The light was failing over Guam. From the window of the descending Clipper, Victor Henry glimpsed in the sunset glow the island’s mountain ridges and broken sea cliffs to the south, levelling northward to a jungle checkered with terraced fields. The shadowy light flattened perspectives; Guam was like a painted island on a Japanese screen. Sharp on the red horizon jutted the black lump of Rota, an island held by the Japanese.
The passengers were standing in a sweaty weary cluster outside the immigration shed in the twilight, when a gray car drove up, fluttering on its front fenders an American flag and a starry blue jack.
“Captain Henry?” The white-clad marine officer saluted and handed him an envelope, confidently picking out the Navy four-striper in a seersucker suit from among the ferry pilots and civilians. “Compliments of the governor, sir.”
The note was scrawled on cream-colored stationery crested in gold:
THE GOVERNOR OF GUAM
Clifton Norbert Tollever, Jr., Captain, U.S.N.
Hi, Pug—
Greetings to the world’s worst hearts player, and as long as it’s not Sunday, how’s for coming around for drinks, dinner, and a game?
Kip
Pug smiled at the tired joke about his minor Sabbath abstinence. “NG, Lieutenant. Sorry. By the time I check through here, go to the hotel, and get cleaned up and whatnot, it’ll be way past the governor’s dinner hour.”
“No, sir. Let me expedite this. The governor said I’m to bring you out to the palace, bags and all. He’ll give you a room to freshen up in.”
The gold loops on the starchy white shoulder of the governor’s aide conjured away difficulties. Victor Henry was entering the governor’s car within five minutes, leaving the other Clipper passengers behind, enviously staring.
Driving across the island in gathering darkness on a narrow winding tarred road, the lieutenant skillfully avoided some potholes but struck others with bone-jarring jolts.
“You folks short of road repair equipment?” Pug asked.
“Sir, the governor’s been cadging money from public works for gun emplacements and pillboxes. He says maybe he’ll hang for it, but his first duty is not to patch roads but to defend this island. Insofar as it can be defended.”
The headlights shone on green jungle and a few tilled fields most of the way. “Well, here’s the metropolis at last, sir.”
The car passed down a paved block of shuttered shops, and dimly lit bars with names like Sloppy Joe’s and The Bucket of Blood. Here lonesome-looking sailors meandered on the sidewalk, some with giggling brown girls in flimsy dresses. The car emerged on a broad, handsomely gardened square, formed by four stone structures in antique Spanish style: a cathedral, a long barracks, an immense jail, and an ornate building that the lieutenant called the Governor’s Palace.
Kip Tollever waved as Victor Henry mounted a broad staircase to the palace terrace. Wearing stiffly starched whites, he sat in a large carved Spanish armchair, in yellow light cast by a wrought-iron chandelier. Natives in shirt-sleeves and trousers stood before him.
“Sit you down, Pug!” He motioned at a chair beside him. “Welcome aboard. This won’t take long. Go ahead, Salas. What about the schoolchildren? Have they been drilling every day?”
It was a conference on defense preparations. Tollever addressed the Guamanians in English or Spanish, with condescending kindness. One or two spoke a queer dialect that the others translated. The men were taller than Filipinos, and very good-looking.
“Well, Pug Henry!” The governor lightly slapped his guest’s knee as the natives bowed and went off down the stairs. “Quite a surprise, seeing your name on the Clipper passenger list! That’s always the big news item on this island, you know. Kate used to fall on the list like a love letter twice a week, when she was still here. Well! What’s your pleasure? A drink, then a shower? Come on, let’s have just one. Where have you been? What brings you to our island paradise?”
They drank excellent rum punches there on the terrace, in tall curiously carved green glasses, and Pug talked about his travels. Tollever seemed far more interested in the Russian war than in Japan. His response to Pug’s remark that he had spent four days in Tokyo was, “Oh, really? Say, incidentally, you’ll stay overnight, won’t you? I’ll assign a boy to look after you. You’ll be very comfortable.”
“Well, Kip, thanks. I’d better bed down in the Pan Am Hotel. Takeoff depends on weather, and I don’t want to get left by that Clipper.”
“No problem.” Kip’s voice rang with magisterial authority. “They won’t leave without you. I’ll see to that.”
Pug found the palace depressing, for all the handsomely tiled spaces and rich dark furniture. Under the slow-turning fan the bed in his room was covered in gold-and-silver brocade. New nickel plumbing in the vast bathroom gushed wonderful hot water. But the silence! The Guamanian stewards in their snowy mess jackets stole around like spirits. He and the governor seemed to be the only white men here, for the marine lieutenant had driven off to the bars. From the other end of the palace, Pug could hear the clink of silver and china as he dressed.
In a sombrely magnificent Spanish dining room, at one end of a long gleaming black table, the two Americans ate a dinner made up wholly of frozen or canned stores from home. Kip Tollever maintained his gubernatorial dignity through the first course or two, asking polite questions about his old friends in Berlin and about the situation in Manila. But as he drank glass after glass of wine, the façade cracked, then fell apart. Soon he was expressing friendly envy of Pug and admitting that his assignment was dismal. The younger officers could go to the Bucket of Blood, or drink and play cards at the club. The governor had to sit it out alone in the palace. He slept badly. He missed his wife. But of course the women had had to go. If the Japs moved, Guam could not be held for a week. At Saipan and Tinian, a half hour away by air, Jap bombers lined the new air strips and big troop transports swung to their anchors. Guam had no military airfield.
As dessert was being served, four young officers in white appeared, led by the marine aide-de-camp.
“Well, well, here’s company,” said the governor. “These tender lads come in every night after dinner, Pug, and I educate them in the subtler mysteries of hearts. What do you say? Care for a game, or would you rather just shoot the breeze?”
Pug saw the youngsters’ faces light up at the mention of an alternative. Shading his voice toward lack of enthusiasm, he said, “Why, let’s play, I guess.”
The governor of Guam looked irresolutely from his visitor to the young officers. He held himself very straight, talking to his juniors; the thick gray hair, lean long-jawed face, and bright blue eyes should have made him formidable. Yet he seemed only tired and sad, hesitating over this small choice between habit and courtesy. The hearts game evidently was the high moment in the governor’s isolated days.
“Oh, what the hell,” Tollever said. “I don’t get to see a classmate very often, especially such a distinguished one. You young studs run along and amuse yourselves. See you tomorrow, same time.”
“Aye aye, sir,” said the marine officer, trying to sound disappointed. The four young officers vanished in a rapid tattoo of heels on tile.
Captain Tollever and Captain Henry sat long over brandy. What did Pug really think, Kip asked; would the Japs go, or was this buildup at Saipan just a bluff for the Washington talks? He had once served as attaché in Tokyo, but the Japs were an enigma to him. The wrong people had gotten in the saddle, that was the trouble. The army had gained the power to confirm or veto the minister of war. That meant the army brass could overthrow any cabinet it didn’t like. Ever since then Japan had been going hell-bent for conquest; but would they really attack the United States? Some Japanese he had known had been the finest imaginable people, friendly to the United States and very worried about their militarists; on the other hand, Clipper travellers had been telling him blood-freezing stories of Japanese cruelties in China, especially toward white people who fell into their hands.
“And have you ever read about what the Jap army did, Pug, when they captured Nanking in ‘37? We were so steamed up about their sinking the Panay, we hardly paid attention. Why, they ran amuck. They raped twenty thousand Chinese women, so help me, and butchered most of ’em afterward. I mean butchered—just that. Women’s thighs, heads, and tits, for God’s sake, were strewn in the streets! This is the truth, Pug. And they tied Chinamen together by the hundreds and mowed ’em down with machine guns. They hunted kids in the street and shot ’em like rabbits. They murdered maybe two hundred thousand civilians in a few days. All this is in official reports, Pug. It happened. I’ve had occasion to check into the facts, being somewhat personally interested, as you might say. And here I sit,” he went on, sloshing his fourth or fifth brandy into a shimmering balloon glass and rolling white eyeballs at his old classmate, here I sit, with no aircraft, no warships, no ground troops, just a few sailors and a few marines. The Navy should order me to evacuate, but oh no, the politicians wouldn’t stand for that! The same politicians who refused to vote the money to fortify the island. No, here well sit till they come. The fleet will never get here in time to save us.
“Pug, remember what the Lucky Bag said about me when we graduated? ‘Any one of Kip Tollever’s classmates would like to be in his shoes today, and even more, thirty years from today.’ Funny, isn’t it? Isn’t that the biggest laugh of all time? Come on, let’s have one more and listen to the midnight news from Tokyo.”
In the wood-panelled library, the governor manipulated the dials of a Navy receiver: a big black machine seven feet high that winked red, green, and yellow lights and emitted whistles and moans. A Japanese woman’s voice came through clearly. After recounting gigantic German victories around Moscow and predicting the early surrender of the Soviet Union, the voice went on in tones of glee to report a great uproar in the United States over the unmasking of Franklin Roosevelt’s secret war plans. The Chicago Tribune had obtained a document known as the Victory Program—Victor Henry sat up as the dulcet voice drawled “Vic-to-ly Plo-glam”—calling for an army of eight million men, a defensive war against Japan, and an all-out air attack on Germany from bases in England, to be followed by invasion of Europe in 1943. The newspaper, she announced, had patriotically printed the whole plan!
Roosevelt’s devilish schemes to drag America into war on the side of the colonialist plutocracies were now exposed; so the woman said. The American people were rising in anger. Congressmen were calling for impeachment of the White House deceiver. The White House was maintaining shameful silence, but the fairness and peaceful intent of the latest Japanese proposals—especially in the light of this secret warmongering Roosevelt plot—were being hailed throughout the United States. On and on the woman went, reading whole passages of the document from the Tribune. Pug recognized them. Some sentences were his own.
“What do you make of that, Pug? It’s a lot of poppycock, isn’t it?” Tollever yawned. “Some reporter got hold of a contingency staff study maybe, and blew it way up.”
“Sure. What else?”
Pug felt sick to the heart. If this could happen, the United States was infected bone-deep with decay. The Japs could grab the East Indies, even the Philippines; America would not fight. This betrayal of the highest national secret in a newspaper was a collapse of honor, it seemed to him, unlike anything in history. The only relieving aspect was that so bald and amazing was the treason, the Germans and the Japanese could probably not bring themselves to believe it, though of course they would make heavy propaganda of it.
“Time for me to go to bed.” Victor Henry shook his head and stood up.
“Hell, no, Pug. Sit down. How about an omelette, or something? My chef makes fine omelettes. In a half hour we’ll get the 8 A.M. news from San Francisco. This beast picks it up like it was next door. Let’s see if there’s anything to all this Chicago Tribune business. It’s always fun, checking Tokyo against San Francisco.”
Pug insisted on going back to the Pan American Hotel. The sense of doom enveloping him was thick enough without the added black misery emanating like a smell from the trapped governor of Guam, the faded hotshot of his Naval Academy class, maundering over his brandy. Tollever ordered up the omelettes all the same, and kept Victor Henry for another hour, talking about the old days in Manila when they had been next-door neighbors. His dread of loneliness was stark and terrible.
Sadly Tollever went at last to a telephone and summoned the marine officer, who arrived in the car in a few minutes. Four Guamanian stewards busied themselves with Pug’s valise and two handbags.
From the top of the palace stairway, Kip raised his voice. “Say, how about giving Kate a ring from Pearl? She’s back in our house in La Jolla. Tell her you saw me and that everything’s fine. She very interested in the Guam schools, you know. Tell her the enrollment’s way up for next term. And, you know, tell her I love her and all that stuff.”
“I sure will, Kip.”
“And say, you give my love to Rhoda, too. Will you? Of all the Navy wives I knew, she was the prettiest and the best—excepting my Kate, naturally.”
“I’ll tell her you said that, Kip,” Pug replied, chilled by Tollever’s use of the past tense about himself.
“Good hunting with the California, Pug.” Tollever stood watching as the car left, a white straight mark in the warm night.
The Clipper took off from Guam at dawn.
59
ON the day that Victor Henry left Manila, the Japanese embassy in Rome gave an unexpected party for Japanese and American newspaper correspondents. The purpose seemed to be a show of cordiality to counteract all the war talk. A New York Times man asked Natalie to come along. She had never before left her baby in the evening; none of her clothes fitted her; and she did not like the man much. But she accepted, and hastily got a seamstress to let out her largest dress. On leaving the hotel she gave to a motherly chambermaid an enormous list of written instructions for bathing and feeding him, which made the woman smile. The rumors of war in the Pacific were eating away Natalie’s nerves, and she hoped to learn something concrete at the party.
She came back with a strange tale. Among the American guests had been Herb Rose, a film distributor who maintained his office in Rome. Herb had somewhat enlivened the cold, stiff, pointless party by speaking Japanese; it turned out that he had managed a similar office in Tokyo. Herb was a tall good-looking California Jew, who used the best Roman tailors, conversed easily in Italian, and seemed a most urbane man until he started talking English. Then he sounded all show business: wise-cracking, sharp, and a bit crude.
This Herb Rose, who was booked to leave for Lisbon on the same plane as Natalie and her uncle, had approached her at the party and walked her off to a corner. In a few quiet nervous sentences, he had told her to go to Saint Peter’s with her uncle the following morning at nine o’clock, and stand near Michelangelo’s Pietà statue. They would be offered a chance to get out of Italy fast, he said, via Palestine. War between America and Japan was coming in days or hours, Herb believed; he was departing that way himself and forgoing the Lisbon plane ticket. He would tell her no more. He begged her to drop the subject and not to discuss it inside the walls of the hotel. When she returned from the party she recounted all this to her uncle, while walking on the Via Veneto in a cold drizzle. Aaron’s reaction was skeptical, but he agreed that they had better go to Saint Peter’s.
He was in a testy mood next morning. He liked to rise at dawn and work till eleven. Sleep put an edge on his mind, he claimed, that lasted only a few hours, and to spend a morning on such a farfetched errand was a great waste. Also, the chill damp in the unheated hotel had given him a fresh cold. Hands jammed in his overcoat pockets, blue muffler wound around his neck, head drooping in a rain-stiffened old gray felt hat, he walked draggily beside his niece down the Via Veneto to the taxi stand, like a child being marched to school. “Palestine!” he grumbled. “Why, that’s a more dangerous place than Italy.”
&nb
sp; “Not according to Herb. He says the thing is to get out of here at once, by hook or by crook. Herb thinks the whole world will be at war practically overnight, and then we’ll never get out.”
“But Herbert’s leaving illegally, isn’t he? His exit visa is for Lisbon, not Palestine. Now that’s risky. When you’re in a touch-and-go situation like this, the first principle is not to give the authorities the slightest excuse”—Jastrow waved a stiff admonitory finger—“to act against you. Obey orders, keep your papers straight, your head down, your spirits up, and your money in cash. That is our old race wisdom. And above all, stay within the law.” He sneezed several times, and wiped his nose and eyes. “I have always abominated the weather of Rome. I think this is a wild goose chase. Palestine! You’d be getting even further from Byron, and I from civilization. It’s a hellhole, Natalie, a desert full of flies, Arabs, and disease. Angry Arabs, who periodically riot and murder. I planned a trip there when I was writing the Paul book. But I cancelled out once I’d made a few inquiries. I went to Greece instead.”
There was a long queue at the taxi stand, and few taxis; they did not reach Saint Peter’s until after nine. As they hurried out of the sunshine into the cathedral, the temperature dropped several degrees. Jastrow sneezed, wound the muffler tighter around his neck, and turned up his collar. Saint Peter’s was quiet, almost empty, and very gloomy. Here and there black-shawled women prayed by pale flickering candles, groups of schoolchildren followed vergers, and tourist parties listened to guides, but these were all lost in the grand expanse.