(One)
Chen-chiang, China
1500 Hours 15 May 1941
While the Reverend Feller, Lieutenant Macklin, and “Mr.” Sessions ate in the “big” restaurant, and the Marine drivers at one of the tiny stalls, Ernie Zimmerman took the opportunity once again to carefully check the vehicles, paying particular attention to the tires. Changing a tire on a muddy road was bad enough, but changing one in the rain, at night, was a royal fucking pain in the ass.
Zimmerman found a couple of tires that looked as if they might blow, one on a truck, the other on one of the Studebaker sedans, and ordered them changed. McCoy and Zimmerman were watching a PFC remove the wheel of the car when Lieutenant Macklin and Sessions walked up to them.
“We about ready to roll, Sergeant?” Lieutenant Macklin asked.
“Aye, aye, sir,” Zimmerman said.
“Well, get everyone loaded up, please,” Macklin said. “We’d like a word with Corporal McCoy.”
“Aye, aye, sir,” Zimmerman said, and walked off toward the food stalls where the drivers were eating. Macklin and Sessions walked out of earshot of the driver changing the tire, and McCoy followed them.
“Under the circumstances, McCoy,” Sessions said, “I decided that it was necessary to make Lieutenant Macklin aware of my real purpose in being here.”
“Yes, sir,” McCoy said.
He was not annoyed, but neither was he surprised. Sessions was more than a little pissed about their conversation in Nanking; and it was clear that Sessions was about to put him in his place. As missionaries have no authority to order Marine corporals around, it was necessary to let Macklin know who he actually was. He had thus told Macklin that he was an officer on a secret mission, and now they were both thrilled about their importance in the scheme of things—and prepared to deal with a lowly corporal who was standing in the way of their doing their duty. Captain Banning had warned him this was likely to happen.
“And we’ve been looking at the map,” Sessions said. “Lieutenant Macklin thinks we can make it to Chiehshom before it gets dark. Do you agree with that?”
“Yes, sir,” McCoy said. “It’s a good place to spend the night. There’s a good hotel there.”
“So Lieutenant Macklin tells me,” Sessions said. “More importantly, McCoy, it’s not too far from Yenchi’eng, is it?”
McCoy’s eyebrows went up as he looked at him. The Japanese 11th Infantry Division was at Yenchi’eng.
“No, sir,” he said, “it’s not.”
“Have you ever been to Yenchi’eng, McCoy?” Sessions asked.
“Yes, sir,” McCoy said.
“Do you know how the divisional artillery of the 11th Japanese Infantry is equipped?”
“Yes, sir,” McCoy said. “They’ve got four batteries, they call it a regiment, of Model 94s. That’s a 37-mm antitank cannon, but the Japs use it as regular artillery because they can throw so much fire. And the Chinese have damned little to use for counterfire.”
“I want to check that out, McCoy,” Lieutenant Sessions said.
“Sir?”
“I want to find out if the 11th Division has been equipped with German PAK381cannon.”
“They haven’t,” McCoy said. “What they’ve got, Lieutenant, is maybe thirty-five Model 94s. Eight to a battery, plus spares.”
“You seem very sure of that, McCoy,” Lieutenant Macklin said.
“Yes, sir, I am.”
“You know the difference between the two cannon?” Macklin pursued, more than a little sarcastic.
“The PAK38 is bigger, with a larger shield and larger wheels than the Model 94,” McCoy said, on the edge of insolence, Lieutenant Macklin thought. “And it has a muzzle brake. They’re not hard to tell apart.”
“And you’re absolutely sure the 11th Division doesn’t have any of those cannon?” Sessions asked.
“I took some pictures of their artillery park a couple of weeks ago,” McCoy said. “That’s what they’ve got, Lieutenant. Thirty, maybe thirty-five 94s. Captain Banning sent the pictures to Washington.”
“But we have no way of knowing, do we, Corporal McCoy, whether or not the Japanese have received German cannon since your last visit? Without having another look?” Macklin asked sarcastically.
“We have people watching the docks, and the railroad, and the roads. If the 11th Division had gotten any new artillery, we’d have heard about it.”
“‘We’?” Macklin asked sarcastically.
“Captain Banning,” McCoy said, accepting the rebuke, “has people watching the docks and the railroads and the roads.”
“Under the circumstances—and after all, we are so close—I’m afraid I can’t just accept that,” Lieutenant Sessions said. “How long would you say it is by car from Chiehshom to Yenchi’eng?”
“If you drive down there, Lieutenant,” McCoy said, “they’re going to catch you, and you’ll find yourself being entertained by the Japs for a couple of days.”
“What do you mean by ‘entertained’?”
“They’ll take you on maneuvers,” McCoy said. “Walk you around in the swamps all night, feed you raw fish, that sort of thing.” He stopped, and then his mouth ran away with him: “Some of them have got a pretty good sense of humor. They had Lieutenant Macklin three days one time.”
“That’s quite enough, McCoy!” Macklin flared.
“Well then, we’ll just have to make sure they don’t catch us, won’t we?” Lieutenant Sessions said.
“Lieutenant, I’m not going to Yenchi’eng with you,” McCoy said. “I’m sorry.”
“How long did you say it will take us to drive from Chiehshom to Yenchi’eng, Corporal?” Sessions asked.
“It’s about a two-hour drive, maybe two and a half, with the roads like this.”
“And you presumably can manage the road at night?”
“Sir, I’m sorry, but I’m not going to Yenchi’eng with you,” McCoy said.
“I didn’t ask you if you had volunteered, Corporal,” Lieutenant Sessions said reasonably. “The decision to go has been made by Lieutenant Macklin and myself. Your presence will lend your knowledge of the terrain to our enterprise. I don’t have to remind you, do I, that despite your special relationship with Captain Banning, you still remain subject to the orders of your superiors?”
“Lieutenant,” McCoy said, “you’re putting me on a spot.”
“The only spot you’ll be on,” Macklin flared, “is if you persist in your defiance.”
McCoy looked at him, shrugged, and took an envelope from his hip pocket. He extended it toward Sessions.
“I think you better take a look at this, Lieutenant,” he said.
“What is that?” Sessions asked.
“My orders, sir, in writing,” McCoy said. “Captain Banning said I wasn’t to give them to you unless I had to. I think I have to.”
Sessions took the envelope, tore it open, and unfolded the sheet of paper inside. He glanced at the sheet and then shook his head.
“What is it?” Lieutenant Macklin asked.
“It’s a set of letter orders,” Sessions said, and then read it aloud: ‘Headquarters, 4th Marines, Shanghai, 13 May 1941. Subject, Letter Orders. To Corporal Kenneth J. McCoy, Headquarters Company, First Battalion, 4th Marines. Your confidential orders concerning the period 14 May 1941 to 14 June 1941 have been issued to you verbally by Captain Edward Banning, USMC. You are reminded herewith that no officer or noncommissioned officer assigned or attached to the 4th Regiment, USMC, is authorized to amend or countermand your orders in any way.’” Sessions looked at Macklin. “Corporal McCoy’s letter orders are signed by the colonel.”
“Well, I’ll be damned,” Macklin said. “I never heard of such a thing.”
“Lieutenant,” McCoy said to Macklin. “I wish you’d read those orders.”
“Just what the hell do you mean by that?” Macklin snapped.
“With respect, sir,” McCoy said. “I’d like to burn them.”
“Go ahead and burn them,” Macklin said coldly.
Sessions handed the orders back to McCoy, who ripped the single sheet of paper into long strips, which he then carefully burned, one at a time, letting the wind blow the ashes and unburned stub from his fingers.
“I presume your ‘confidential verbal orders’ forbid you to go to Yenchi’eng?” Macklin asked, when he had finished.
“No, sir, except that Captain Banning said I was to use my own judgment if you wanted me to do something like that.”
“Then you have not been forbidden to go to Yenchi’eng? You’ve taken that decision yourself?” Sessions asked.
“That’s about the size of it, sir,” McCoy said.
A very self-confident young man, Sessions thought. Highly intelligent. He almost certainly believes in what he’s doing. So where does that leave us?
“I presume you have considered, Corporal,” Macklin said, icily, “that Lieutenant Sessions’s interest in the cannon of the 11th Division is not idle curiosity? That he has been sent here by Headquarters, USMC?”
“Yes, sir,” McCoy said. “Captain Banning told me all about that.”
“And you are apparently unimpressed by my decision that knowing that for sure is worth whatever risk is entailed in going to Yenchi’eng?” Macklin asked, coldly furious.
“I’m convinced there’s no way you could go there without getting caught,” McCoy said. “You have to go by road. The first checkpoint you pass, they’ll phone ahead to the Kempei-Tai, and that will be it.”
“There are ways of getting around checkposts and the Kempei-Tai,” Macklin said. “You have done so.”
“That was different,” McCoy said.
“That was different, sir,” Macklin corrected him.
“That was different, sir,” McCoy parroted.
“Well, then, perhaps you’d be good enough to tell Mr. Sessions and myself how you would go to Yenchi’eng.”
“If I told you that, it would look like I thought you could get away with it, Lieutenant,” McCoy said.
“So you refuse even to help us?” Macklin said, incredulously.
McCoy pretended he hadn’t heard the question.
“And I don’t see any point in taking the risk of going myself,” he said. “If they had any German cannon, I’d know about it.”
“Corporal,” Lieutenant Macklin said, icily sarcastic, “I stand in awe of your self-confidence.”
“Yes, sir,” McCoy said.
“You will, I hope, tell us what you can about the location of the artillery park?” Lieutenant Sessions asked conversationally. “How we can find it?”
“Aye, aye, sir,” McCoy said. “I hope you’ll make it clear to Captain Banning, sir, that I told you you’re going to get caught?”
“Oh, yes, Corporal McCoy,” Lieutenant Macklin said. “You can count on our relating this incident to Captain Banning in detail.”
(Two)
Chiehshom, Shantung Province, China
15 May 1941
The three classes of accommodation at the Hotel am See at Chiehshom had (in descending order) been originally intended for Europeans, European servants, and Chinese servants. On McCoy’s first couple of trips to and from Peking, all the enlisted Marines had been put up in the rooms set aside for European servants. But on the last couple of trips, like this one, the management had made quite a show of giving the noncoms “European” rooms—small ones, to be sure—in the main wing of the hotel.
McCoy realized that the proprietor had figured out that the sergeant, rather than the officer-in-charge, was the man who really decided (by speeding up or slowing down) where the convoy and its ten-man detail would stop for the night. That meant the sale of ten beds and twenty meals, plus whatever they all had to drink. There wasn’t all that much business anyway.
McCoy really liked to stay at the Hotel am See. The food was good and the place was spotless. And even the small rooms they gave the noncoms had enormous bathtubs with apparently limitless clean hot water. He would take a bath at night, a long soak, and then a shower in the morning. It was the only shower he’d had in China that made his skin sting with the pressure. All the others were like being rained on.
After settling into his room, McCoy had hoped to have dinner with Ernie Zimmerman and be gone from the dining room before the officers and the Fellers came down for dinner. That would give him a chance both to avoid Lieutenants Macklin and Sessions and to steel himself for another meeting with them that was scheduled for after dinner. They wanted him to go over their route to and from Yenchi’eng. As pissed as the both of them were with him, that was going to be bad enough without having dinner in the same room (where they didn’t think enlisted Marines had any right to be anyway) with them.
But Ernie Zimmerman got hung up somehow getting the other Marines bedded down and was ten minutes late. Zimmerman and McCoy had no sooner sat down in the dining room when the officers and the Fellers showed up. Mrs. Feller said something to the Reverend, and he came over and insisted that they all have dinner together.
McCoy thought the officers would be pissed. Eating in the same room with enlisted Marines was bad enough, but not as bad as having to share a table with them. But they weren’t. They were playing spy again, McCoy saw, and the dinner table gave them a stage for the playacting they thought was necessary.
“Mr.” Sessions announced that he had asked Lieutenant Macklin if it would be all right if they spent two nights in Chiehshom, instead of the one originally planned. The Christian & Missionary Alliance was considering opening another mission in Yenchi’eng, and they wanted to take advantage of being close to it to have a good look at it.
He’s a goddamned fool, McCoy thought. They’re all goddamned fools. They think they will look more innocent brazening it out, two missionaries and a Marine officer in fulluniform simply out for a ride looking for a new place to save souls. It will take the Japs about ten minutes to learn they’ve left here, and there will be a greeting party waiting for them long before they get anywhere near Yenchi’eng.
The only thing more dangerous than an officer convinced he’s doing what duty requires is two officers doing the same thing. Two officers and a missionary.
They would be back in Chiehshom by nightfall, Sessions said, and spending the extra day would give Sergeant Zimmerman and his men the chance to go over the vehicles and make sure everything was shipshape.
“You’re not going with them, Corporal McCoy,” Mrs. Feller asked, “to drive the car?”
“No, ma’am,” McCoy said. “I’m not going along.”
Ernie Zimmerman, uncomfortable in the presence of the officers, and fully aware there was some friction between them and McCoy, bolted down his food and pushed himself wordlessly away from the table.
McCoy went after him.
“Ernie, jack up one of the trucks and drop the drive shaft,” McCoy said.
“What the hell for?” Zimmerman demanded.
“Just do it, Ernie, please,” McCoy said.
“What are they up to?” Zimmerman asked.
“You heard it,” McCoy said.
“What was that bullshit anyway?”
“Just get somebody to drop a drive shaft, Ernie. And make sure one of the cars is gassed and ready to go,” McCoy said. Then he went to his room to mark the route the damned fools should take to Yenchi’eng.
When McCoy met with the three of them in Sessions’s room, they made no further attempt to get him to take them to Yenchi’eng. This surprised him until he realized they’d concluded that their brilliant inspiration of brazening it out was going to work, and they didn’t need him.
After they came back from successfully spying on the Japs, they’d be in a position to rack his ass with Banning for refusing to go with them. They would have been right all along, and he would have been nothing but an insolent enlisted man with the gall to challenge the wise judgment of his betters.
There was nothing he could do to stop them, of course, and (except for having one of the missionary trucks jacked up and the drive shaft dropped so that it might fool the Kempei-Tai watching the hotel) there was nothing he could do to help them either.
But he set his portable alarm clock for half-past four and went down to the courtyard to see them off. Mrs. Feller was there too, the nipples of her teats sticking up under her bathrobe and her blond hair, now unbraided, hanging down her back.
Jesus Christ, without her hair glued to her head, she’s a hell of a good-looking woman. I would give my left nut to get in the sack with her.
The officers and the missionary were a little carried away with the situation. They saw themselves, McCoy thought contemptuously, as patriots about to embark on a great espionage mission. McCoy had to temper his scorn, however, when Sessions took him aside and told him, dead serious, that no matter what happened today he wanted him to understand that he understood his position.
“This is one of those situations, Corporal, where we both must do what we believe is right. And I want you to know that I believe you thought long and hard about your obligations before you decided you couldn’t go with me.”
He’s not so much of a prick as a virgin.
“Good luck, Lieutenant,” McCoy said, and offered his hand.
What the hell, it didn’t cost anything to say that. And if Sessions means what he said, then on the off chance they don’t get bagged and Macklin tries to get me in trouble, maybe it’ll help.
As they walked back to the hotel, Mrs. Feller’s leg kept coming out of the flap of her bathrobe, and she kept trying to hold the robe closed. He remembered that all through dinner she had kept bumping her knee “accidentally” against his.
McCoy was now convinced she was just fucking around with him, getting some kind of sick kick out of trying to make him uncomfortable, the way some people get a sick kick out of teasing a dog. He intended to stay as far away from her as he could.
“Is there any interesting way you can think of to kill the time until they get back?” she asked, when they were inside the hotel.
She goddamned well knows there are two or three meanings I could put on that.
“Until it starts to rain, which should be about noon, you could fish, I suppose,” McCoy said. “They’ve got tackle. I’ve got to work on the trucks.”
“That doesn’t sound very exciting,” she said.
“I guess not,” he said, turning and walking away from her down the corridor to his room.
He didn’t see her at breakfast, and he ate with the Marines at lunch. They asked him where the officers and the Christer had gone, and how long that would keep them all in Chiehshom. Zimmerman had already told them he didn’t know, they said, or else he wouldn’t tell them. McCoy told them he didn’t know, either.
At half-past three, a boy came to his room and told him that Sergeant Zimmerman wanted to see him in the lobby. When McCoy went down, there were two Japanese soldiers with Zimmerman, a sergeant and a corporal. They were both large for Japanese, and they were wearing leather jackets and puttees. Goggles hung loosely from leather helmets. Motorcycle messengers.
They bowed to McCoy and then saluted, and he bowed back and returned the salute. Then Zimmerman gave him two envelopes, one addressed to him and the other to Mrs. Feller.
“This is addressed to you,” McCoy said.
“I can read,” Zimmerman said. “And they want me to sign for it. I thought I better ask you.”
One of the Japanese soldiers then handed McCoy some kind of a form to sign. He saw that it was just a message receipt form.
“Sign it,” he said to Zimmerman.
“What is it?”
“A confession that you eat babies for breakfast,” McCoy said.
Zimmerman, with obvious reluctance, carefully wrote his name on the form. He gave it to the Japanese sergeant, who bowed and saluted again, then marched out of the lobby with the other Japanese hopping along after him.
As he tore open the envelope and took out the message, McCoy heard their motorcycle engines start.
From what his note said, Lieutenant Macklin had obviously decided that the Japanese were going to read it before they delivered it:
Yenchi’eng
Sergeant Zimmerman:
The Reverend Mr. Feller, Mr. Sessions and I have accepted the kind invitation of the commanding general of the 11th Division of the Imperial Japanese Army to inspect the division.
I will send further orders as necessary.
R.B. Macklin 1/Lt. USMC
McCoy realized there was absolutely no “I Told You So” pleasure in his reaction. He felt sorry for them, and he felt a little sorry for himself. Sooner (if he could get through on the telephone now) or later, Captain Banning was going to eat his ass out for letting them get their asses in a crack.
“Well, what the hell does it say?” Zimmerman asked.
McCoy handed him the note.
“I figured it was something like that,” Zimmerman said. “How come you didn’t go? You knew they was going to get caught?”
McCoy shrugged.
“You figure the Japs’ll find out Sessions is an officer?”
“What makes you think he’s an officer?”
“Come on, McCoy,” Zimmerman said.
“Christ, for his sake, I hope not.”
“What do we do now?”
“We wait twenty-four, maybe forty-eight hours to see what the Japs do.”
“Then what?”
“Then I don’t know,” McCoy said. “There’s reason the guys have to hang around here, but I don’t want them getting shitfaced in case we need them.”
“Okay,” Zimmerman said. He walked out of the hotel lobby, and McCoy went up the wide stairs to the second floor and knocked on Mrs. Feller’s door.
When she opened it, her hair was up in braids again, and she was wearing a pale yellow dress just about covered with tiny little holes.
He handed her the letter addressed to her. She raised her eyebrows questioningly and then tore open the envelope.
Even with her hair up again, she still looks pretty good. And Christ, what teats!
When she had read the letter, she raised her eyes and looked at him, obviously expecting some comment from him.
“Nothing to be worried about,” he said. “They’ll show them marching troops and barracks, and feed them food they know they won’t like; and tonight they’ll probably try hard to get them drunk. But there’s no danger or anything like that. If there was, they wouldn’t have let them send the letters.”
“My husband doesn’t drink,” she said.
“He probably will tonight,” McCoy said.
She seemed to find that amusing, he saw.
“His letter says that you will look after me,” she said. “Are you going to look after me?”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said.
“Starting at dinner? I missed you at lunch.”
“I had something to do over lunch,” he said. “And I’m afraid I’ll be busy for dinner, too. If you’d like, I can ask Sergeant Zimmerman to have dinner with you.”
“That won’t be necessary,” she said coldly.
Fuck you, too, lady!
“Are you going to do anything about this?” she asked. “Notify someone what’s happened?”
“If I can get through on the phone,” McCoy said.
It turned out he couldn’t get through to Captain Banning in Shanghai, which didn’t surprise him—and was actually a relief. Getting your ass chewed out was one of those things the longer you put off, the better.
And then he realized there was a way he could avoid it entirely. He thought it over a minute and went looking for Ernie Zimmerman.
(Three)
The Hotel am See
Chiehshom, Shantung Province
0815 Hours 17 May 1941
McCoy had just finished a hard day and night in the country and was now lowering himself all the way into a full tub hot clean water when there was a knock at his door.
“Come back later,” he yelled in Chinese.
“It’s Ellen Feller,” she said.
“I’m in the bathtub.”
Her response to this was a heavy, angry-sounding pounding on the door.
“Wait a minute, wait a minute,” he called. “I’m coming.”
McCoy hoisted himself out of the tub, wrapped a towel around his waist, and walked dripping to the door.
The moment it was opened a crack, she pushed past him into the room. She was wearing her robe, and her hair was again unbraided and hanging nearly to her waist. When he came back she must have seen him from her window talking to Ernie Zimmerman in the courtyard, he decided.
She walked to his small window, turned, and glared at him.
“Close the door, or someone will see us in here,” she ordered.
In his junior year in St. Rose of Lima High, there had been a course in Musical Appreciation. They had studied Die Walküre then. That was what Mrs. Ellen Feller looked like now, McCoy thought, smiling. Obviously pissed off, she stood stiff and strident-looking, with her long hair flowing, her cheeks red, and her teats awesome even under her bathrobe—a goddamned Valkyrie.
“What are you smiling about?” she demanded furiously. Then, without waiting, demanded even more angrily, “And where have you been?”
“I don’t think that’s any of your business,” McCoy said.
“You’ve been laying up with some almond-eyed whore in the village,” she accused furiously. “You’ve been gone all night!”
“Don’t hand me any of your missionary crap,” McCoy said angrily. “Where I have been all night is none of your goddamned business. What did you do, come looking for me?”
He could tell from the look in her eyes that she had, indeed, come to his room looking for him.
“Why?” he asked. “What’s happened?”
She shook her head. “Nothing,” she said. “I just wondered where you were,” she added awkwardly.
McCoy was still angry. “So you could start playing games with me again?” he asked.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said automatically.
“You know goddamned well what I’m talking about,” he said.
“So that’s what you thought,” she said, after a moment.
“Go find some clown in the mission,” he said, warming to his subject, “if you get your kicks that way. Just leave people like me out of it.”
“How can you be so sure it was a game?” she asked.
“Huh!” McCoy snorted righteously.
“Maybe you should have considered the possibility that it wasn’t a game and that you didn’t have to go buy a woman,” she said. “Maybe what you need, Corporal Killer McCoy, is a little more self-confidence.”
“Jesus Christ!” he said.
“What’s your given name?” she asked.
“Ken, Kenneth,” he said without thinking. Then, “Why?”
“Because if I’m going to get in that bathtub with you and scrub the smell of your whore off you, I thought it would be nice to know your name.”
“There was no whore,” he said.
She looked intently at him and almost visibly decided he was telling the truth. She nodded her head.
“Then the bath can wait till later,” she said. “Lock the door.”
(Four)
Room 23
The Hotel Am See
Chiehshom, Shantung Province
1015 Hours 18 May 1941
“This is very nice,” Ellen Feller said, picking the camera up from the chest of drawers and turning to look at him. She was naked. “Very expensive.” That was a question.
“It’s a Leica,” he said. “It belongs to the Corps.”
She held it up and pretended to aim it.
“Pity we can’t use it,” she said. “I would like to have a memento of this. Of us.”
“For your husband to find,” he said.
She laughed and put the camera down. It had been practically nonstop screwing (with breaks only for meals and trips to make sure none of the Marines had gone off on a drunk someplace); but this was the first time either of them had mentioned her husband.
“It’s possible he could walk in any minute,” McCoy said. “And catch us like this.”
“You don’t have to worry about him,” she said. “But I wouldn’t want to get you in trouble with your officers. Are they really likely to come back soon?”
“Can’t tell. Why wouldn’t I have to worry about him?”
“You mean you couldn’t tell? Not even from the way he looked at you?”
“What are you saying, that he’s a fairy?”
She shrugged.
“Then why do you stay married to him?” he asked. “Why did you marry him in the first place?”
“That’s none of your business,” she said. She leaned against the chest of drawers and arched her back.
She inhaled and ran her fingers across the flat of her belly. And then she told him.
“When I was fourteen, my father had a religious experience,” she said. “Do you know what that means?”
“No,” he admitted.
“He accepted the Lord Jesus Christ as his personal saviour,” Ellen Feller said, evenly. “And brought his family, my mother and me, into the fold with him. She didn’t mind, I don’t suppose, although I suspect she’s a little uncomfortable with some of the brothers and sisters of the Christian & Missionary Alliance. And I just went along. Girls at that age are a little frightened of life anyway; and when the hellfire of eternity is presented as a reality, it’s not hard to accept the notion of being washed in the blood of the lamb.”
“Jesus Christ,” McCoy said.
“Yes,” Ellen said wryly. “Jesus Christ.”
She pushed herself off the chest of drawers and walked to the bed. Then she leaned over him and ran the balls of her fingers over his chest.
“So I passed through my high school years convinced that when I had nice thoughts about boys, it was Satan at work trying to get my soul.”
“I was a Catholic,” McCoy said. “They tried to tell us the same thing.”
“Did you believe it?” she asked.
“I wasn’t sure,” he said.
“I was,” she said. “And I went through college that way. It wasn’t hard. I was surrounded with them. Whenever anyone confessed any doubts, the others closed ranks around her. Or him. We prayed a lot, and avoided temptation. No drinking, no dancing, no smoking. No touching.”
She moved her hand to his groin and repeated, “No touching.”
“So how come you married him? Where did you meet him?”
“I was a senior in college,” she said. “The Christian & Missionary Alliance is, as you can imagine, big on missionaries; and he came looking for missionary recruits. Came from here, I mean. With slides of China and all the souls the Alliance was saving for Jesus. He told us all about the heathens and how they hungered for the Lord. Very impressive stuff.
“And then that summer, right after I graduated, he came to our church in Baltimore…I’m from Baltimore…to give his report to our church. My father is a pillar of our church, and he was important to my husband, because my father is pretty well off. He stayed with us while he was in Baltimore.”
“And made a play for you,” McCoy said. “Jesus, that feels good!”
She chuckled deep in her throat and bent over him and nipped his nipple with her teeth. He put his hand on her breast and dragged her down on top of him.
“Do you want to hear this, or not?” she asked.
“Yeah,” he said.
“It’s all right with me if you don’t,” she said.
“Finish it,” he said.
“What I thought I was getting was a life toiling in the Lord’s Vineyard,” Ellen went on. “With a man of God. Saving the heathen Chinese from eternal damnation. What he knew he was getting was a wife, and a wife who would not only put to rest unpleasant suspicions that had begun to crop up, but a wife whose father would more than likely be very generous to his mission…he had the mission in Wang-Tua, then…but probably to him personally.”
“When did you find out he was a faggot?” McCoy asked.
“We were married at nine o’clock in the morning,” she said. “At noon, we took the train to New York. And then from New York, we took the train to San Francisco. I decided that it was wrong of me to think that anything would happen on a railroad train. And we boarded the President Jefferson for Tientsin the same day we arrived in San Francisco.”
“And nothing happened on the ship?”
“Something happened on the ship,” Ellen said. “I was not surprised that I didn’t like it very much, and that it didn’t happen very often.”
“Then he can get it up?” McCoy asked.
“Not like this,” she said, squeezing him so hard that he yelped. “But he can, yes. I suspect he closes his eyes and pretends I’m a boy.”
“So why the hell did you stay married to him?”
“You just don’t understand. I just didn’t know. I was innocent. Ignorant.”
He snorted.
“Meaning I’m not innocent now?” she asked.
“No complaints,” McCoy said.
“There was somebody else, obviously.”
“Who?”
“None of your business,” she said, but then she told him: A newly ordained bachelor missionary with whom she’d been left alone a good deal when the Reverend Feller had been promoted to Assistant District Superintendent. They had been caught together. They had begged forgiveness. After prayerful consideration, the Reverend Feller had decided the way to handle the situation was to send the young missionary home, as “unsuited for missionary service,” which happened often. A church would be found for him at home. As a guarantee of impeccable Christian behavior in the future, there was a written confession of his sinful misbehavior left behind in the Reverend Feller’s safe.
McCoy was sure there’d been more than one “somebody else.” She had done things to him he hadn’t thought American women even knew about. Things that one missionary minister wouldn’t have taught her. But he could hardly expect her to provide him with a list of the guys she had screwed. She wasn’t like that. He was somewhat surprised to realize that he had come to like Ellen Feller.
“After that,” Ellen went on, “he never came near me. I thought he was either disgusted with me or was punishing me.”
“You still didn’t know he was queer?”
“I didn’t find out about that, believe it or not, until just before the Alliance called him home for consultation. That was the reason I didn’t go home with him.”
“How’d you find out?”
“I walked in on him,” she said, matter-of-factly.
He was aware that she’d stopped manipulating him and he had gone down. She still had her hand on him, though, possessively, and he liked that.
“What did he say?” McCoy asked.
“Nothing,” she said. “He didn’t even stop. So I just closed the door and left. Very civilized.”
“Why didn’t you leave him?” McCoy asked.
“It’s not that simple, my darling,” Ellen said.
McCoy liked when she called him “my darling,” even though it embarrassed him a little. He couldn’t remember anyone ever saying that to him before. It was a lot different from a whore calling him “honey” or “sweetheart” or “big boy.”
“Why not?” he asked.
“Well, there’s Jerry’s detailed, written confession, for one thing,” she said, as if explaining something that should have been self-evident.
“So what?”
“He would show it to my father.”
“So what? Tell your father he’s queer.”
“I wouldn’t be believed,” she said. “He’s a man of God. My father is very impressed with him. He would think I made the accusation in desperation, to excuse my own behavior.”
“Then fuck your father,” McCoy said.
Her eyebrows went up. “I know how you meant that,” she said.
“Jesus!” he said.
“I’m thirty years old,” she said. “I have no money. I can play every hymn in the hymnal from memory on the piano. I speak Chinese. Unless I could find a job as a Chinese-speaking piano player, I don’t know how I could support myself.”
Thirty years old? At first I thought she was older than that. Then I thought she was younger. Thirty is too old for me. What the hell am I thinking about? In a week, she’ll get on a ship, and that will be the last I’ll ever see her.
“Can you type?” McCoy asked. She nodded. “Then get a job as a typist, for Christ’s sake.”
“For my own sake, you mean,” she said. Then she added, mysteriously, “I have something else that might turn out. I won’t know until I get to the States.”
“Like a couple of thousand-year-old vases, for example?” McCoy asked. “Or some jade?”
Her face clouded, and she took her hand from his crotch and covered her mouth with it. “What did you do, look in the crates?”
“No. A stab in the dark,” McCoy said.
“My God, does anybody else know?”
“My officer thinks that’s the real reason your husband came back to China,” McCoy said. “He doesn’t believe the selfless patriot business.”
“I have three Ming dynasty vases and some jade my husband doesn’t know about,” Ellen said. “I thought I could sell them and use the money to get a start.”
“You probably can, if you can get them through customs,” McCoy said.
“Your…officer…isn’t going to say anything?”
“It’s none of his business,” he said.
“And the other officers? Do they know?”
“You’ve just seen how smart they are,” McCoy said.
“It left us alone, my darling,” she said.
“I like it when you say that,” McCoy said. She looked into his eyes and it made him uncomfortable. “And I like it when you put your hand on my balls.”
She stiffened. She didn’t like him to talk that way, he thought. But she shifted on the bed and cupped her hand on him again.
“I would like it, too, if you said that to me,” she whispered.
“Said what?”
“My darling.”
“My darling,” McCoy said, and flushed. It made him uncomfortable. “And I like to suck your teats,” he added almost defiantly.
She stiffened again, and he wondered why he said that, knowing it would piss her off.
“I like the thought but not the vocabulary,” she sighed. “Cows have teats, ladies have breasts.”
“Pardon me,” McCoy said.
“You’re forgiven,” she said.
“Move closer, so I can play with them,” McCoy said.
“Why, you wicked little boy, you,” she said, but she pushed herself closer to him, so that his hands and his mouth could reach her breast.
The “my darling” business was over, McCoy realized. First with relief, then with sadness.
She took her nipple from his mouth a moment later and kissed him lasciviously, then moved her head down his body. She was just straddling him when there was a knock at the door.
“Come back later,” McCoy called in Chinese.
“It’s Lieutenant Sessions, McCoy, open the door!”
Breathing heavily, Ellen reluctantly hauled herself off him and scurried around the room, picking up her clothing. McCoy watched her moves—lovely and graceful. She was the best-looking piece of ass he’d ever had, he had realized sometime during the last twenty-four hours. And the best.
He wondered how she was going to handle Sessions. She was not going to be able to holler rape, which was what usually happened when an American woman got caught fucking a Marine. Not only wouldn’t she be able to get away with it (how could she explain being in his room?); but she had called him ‘my darling’ and he knew somehow that she meant it. He meant more to her than a stiff prick. She was not going to cause him any trouble, and he knew he didn’t want to cause her any.
“Come on, Corporal, I have business with you!” Sessions called.
McCoy waited until she’d gone into the bathroom, then pushed himself out of the bed and went to the door, pulling on his shorts en route.
Lieutenant Sessions wore two days’ growth of beard, and his seersucker suit was badly soiled. The Japanese knew that it embarrassed Americans not to be clean-shaven, so razors were not made available. And there was evidence of an “accident” at a meal. McCoy was amused at the Japanese skill in embarrassing their unwanted guests (and so was Captain Banning), but it was apparent that Lieutenant Sessions was not.
“Sergeant Zimmerman said he had no idea where you were,” Sessions accused as he pushed past McCoy into the room.
McCoy didn’t reply.
“I presume that you have reported our detention by the Japanese to Shanghai?” Sessions asked.
“No, sir,” McCoy said.
“Why not, Corporal?” Sessions asked angrily.
“I thought I’d wait to see what the Japs decided to do,” McCoy said.
“You ‘thought you’d wait’?” Sessions quoted incredulously. “Good God! And it’s pretty clear, isn’t it, how you passed your time while you were waiting? What the hell have you been doing in here, McCoy? Conducting an orgy?”
McCoy didn’t reply.
“A round-the-clock orgy,” Sessions went on, looking at the debris, food trays, bottles of beer, and towels on the floor. He sniffed the air. “It smells like a whorehouse in here. Is she still here, for Christ’s sake?”
McCoy nodded.
“Goddamn it, Corporal, in my absence you were supposed to take charge, not conduct yourself like a PFC on payday. You are prepared to offer no excuse at all for not getting in touch with Shanghai and reporting what had happened to us?”
“I was trying not to make waves,” McCoy said.
“And what the hell is that supposed to mean?”
The bathroom door opened and Ellen Feller came into the room. She was in her bathrobe, and her hair fanned down her shoulders.
She looked directly at Lieutenant Sessions as she walked through the room and out the door.
“Well, that really does it,” Sessions said coldly, almost calmly, when she had gone. “Instead of doing your duty…Jesus Christ! I’m going to have your stripes for this, McCoy. I’d like to have you court-martialed!”
McCoy walked across the room to the chest of drawers and picked up the Leica camera.
“Goddamnit, Corporal, don’t you turn your back on me when I’m talking to you!” Sessions said furiously.
McCoy rewound the film, opened the camera, and slipped the film out. He held the small can of film between his thumb and index finger and turned to face Lieutenant Sessions.
“I hope you didn’t lose your temper like that in Yenchi’eng,” McCoy said. “So far as the Japs are concerned, you lose a lot of face when you lose your temper.”
“How dare you talk to me that way?” Sessions barked, both incredulous and furious.
“Lieutenant, as I see it, you have two choices,” McCoy said. “You can make a by-the-book report of what happened: That against my advice, you went to Yenchi’eng and got yourself caught, and that when you came back here, you found out that I hadn’t even reported that the Japs had you…”
“‘Had completely abandoned your obvious obligations’ would be a better way to put it,” Sessions interrupted.
“And had ‘completely abandoned my obvious obligations’” McCoy parroted.
“That’s Silent Insolence2 on top of everything else!” Sessions snapped.
“And that you found Mrs. Feller in my room,” McCoy said.
“What the hell were you thinking about in that connection?” Sessions fumed. “Good God, man, her husband is a missionary!”
“Who will say that his wife was in here reading the Bible to me,” McCoy said calmly. “He’s a faggot.”
Surprise flashed over Sessions’s face.
“She is a married woman, and you damned well knew she was,” Sessions said, somewhat lamely. This confrontation was not going at all the way he had expected it would.
“The other choice you and Lieutenant Macklin have,” McCoy said, “is to report that you have proof the Japs don’t have any German PAK38 50-mm cannons, at least not in the 11th Division.”
That caught Sessions by surprise.
“What are you talking about?” he asked. “What proof?”
“If they had German cannon, they would have turned in their Model 94s,” McCoy said. “They didn’t.” He held up the can of film. “I took these at first light yesterday morning,” he said. “I was lucky: The Japs were up before daylight lining them up and taking the covers off. Probably weekly maintenance, something like that.”
It took Sessions a moment to frame his thoughts.
“So you went yourself. And of course didn’t get caught. That was very resourceful of you, McCoy,” he said.
McCoy shrugged.
“How the hell did you do it?” Sessions asked.
“The German’s got a truck,” he said.
“German? Oh, you mean the man who owns the hotel?”
McCoy nodded.
“You just borrowed his truck and drove into Yenchi’eng, that’s it?”
“Not exactly,” McCoy said. “I went into Yenchi’eng last night. On a bicycle. I told the boy who drives the German’s truck there was a hundred yuan in it for him if he picked me up at a certain place on the road at half-past six yesterday morning.”
“And then he just brought you back?”
“No, we had to go into town first. He picks up stuff—vegetables mostly, sometimes a pig and chickens. I had to go in with him.”
“How did you keep from being seen?”
“I didn’t,” McCoy said. “When I’m around the Japs, I play like I’m an Italian.”
“How do you do that? Do you speak Italian?”
McCoy nodded.
“Christ, you’re amazing, McCoy!” Sessions said.
“It was stupid, me going in there like that,” McCoy said. “I should have known better.”
“Why did you go?” Sessions asked.
“You acted like it was important,” McCoy said. “Anyway, it’s done. And if you were to tell Captain Banning that you and Macklin and the Reverend were making a diversion, that you knew I was going to Yenchi’eng, I wouldn’t say anything,” McCoy said.
“You’re not, I hope, suggesting, McCoy, that I submit a patently dishonest report,” Sessions said.
“Rule one, doing what we’re doing,” McCoy said, “is don’t make waves. Either with the Corps or with the people you’re watching. You tell them what really happened, you’re going to look like a…”
The next word in that sentence was clearly going be “horse’s ass,” Sessions thought. He stopped himself just in time from saying, “How dare you talk to me that way?”
A small voice in the back of his skull told him quietly but surely that he had indeed made a horse’s ass of himself already—in China ten days and already grabbed by the Japanese doing something he had been told not to do, and digging himself in still deeper every time he opened his mouth.
He had been a Marine eleven years. Never before had an enlisted man—not even a Master Gunnery Sergeant when he had been a wet-behind-the-ears shavetail—talked to him the way this twenty-one-year-old corporal was talking to him now.
And the small voice in the back of his skull told him McCoy was not insolent. Inferiors are insolent to superiors. McCoy was tolerantly contemptuous, as superiors are to inferiors. And the painful truth seemed to be that he had given him every right to do so.
He had been informed—and had pretended to understand—that he would have to learn to expect the unexpected. And he hadn’t. Because he was a thirty-two-year-old officer, he had presumed that he knew more than a twenty-one-year-old enlisted man.
If he followed the book—the code of conduct expected of an officer and a gentleman, especially one who wore an Annapolis ring—he would immediately grab a telephone and formally report to Captain Banning that—against McCoy’s advice—he had taken the Reverend Feller and Lieutenant Macklin to Yenchi’eng, been detained by the Japanese, had a pot of some greasy rice substance dumped in his lap, and then had returned to find that not only was Corporal McCoy fornicating with the missionary’s wife (conduct prejudicial to good military order and discipline) but was silently insolent to boot. And that he just incidentally happened to have a roll of 35-mm film of the 11th Japanese Division’s artillery park.
“I need a bath, a shave, and a clean uniform, Corporal,” Lieutenant Sessions said. “We’ll settle this later.”
“Aye, aye, sir.”
“I’d like to get started again first thing in the morning,” Sessions went on. “Will there be any problems about that?”
“No, sir,” McCoy said. “Now that you’re back, we can move anytime you want to.”
Sessions realized he was still making an ass of himself and that he had to do something about it.
“What I intend to do when we get somewhere with secure communications, Corporal McCoy,” he said, “is advise Captain Banning that I went to Yenchi’eng against your advice and was detained by the Japanese. I will tell him of your commendable initiative in getting the film of the Japanese artillery park. I can see no point in discussing your personal life. I would be grateful, when you make your own report, if you would go easy on how I stormed in here and showed my ass.”
“I hadn’t planned to say anything about that, sir,” McCoy said.
“And I’m sure,” Sessions said, searching for some clever way to phrase it, “that…you will not permit your romantic affairs to in any way cast a shadow on the Corps’ well-known reputation for chastity outside marriage.”
“No, sir,” McCoy said, chuckling. “I’ll be very careful about that, sir.” And then he added: “I’d be grateful if you didn’t tell Lieutenant Macklin about Mrs. Feller.”
Sessions nodded. “Thank you, McCoy,” he said, then turned and walked out of the room.