King Rat

“I’ll report your impertinence to General Shima.”

“Please do so. Then ask him who gave the order that each man in camp should catch twenty flies a day, that they are to be collected and counted and delivered daily to your office personally by me.”

“You senior officers are always whining about the dysenteric death rate. Flies spread dysentery—”

“You don’t have to remind me about flies or death rate,” Smedly-Taylor said harshly. “Give us chemicals, and permission to enforce hygiene in the surrounding areas, and we’ll have the whole of Singapore Island under control.”

“Prisoners are not entitled …”

“Your dysenteric rate is uneconomic. Your malaria rate is high. Before you came here Singapore was malaria-free.”

“Perhaps. But we conquered you in your thousands and we captured you in your thousands. No man of honor would allow himself to be captured. You are all animals and should be treated as such.”

“I understand that quite a few Japanese prisoners are being taken in the Pacific.”

“Where did you get that information?”

“Rumors, Captain Yoshima. You know how it is. Obviously incorrect. And incorrect that the Japanese fleets are no longer on the seas, or that Japan is being bombed, or that the Americans have captured Guadalcanal, Guam and Rabaul and Okinawa, and are presently poised for an attack on the Japanese mainland—”

“Lies!” Yoshima’s hand was on the samurai sword at his waist and he jerked it an inch out of the scabbard. “Lies! The Imperial Japanese Army is winning the war and will soon have dominated Australia and America. New Guinea is in our hands and a Japanese armada is at this very moment off Sydney.”

“Of course.” Smedly-Taylor turned his back on Yoshima and looked down the length of the hut. White faces stared back at him. “Everyone outside, please,” he said quietly.

His order was silently obeyed.

When the hut was empty, he turned back to Yoshima. “Please make your search.”

“And if I find the radio?”

“That is in the hands of God.”

Suddenly Smedly-Taylor felt the weight of his fifty-four years. He shuddered under the responsibility of his burden, for though he was glad to serve, and glad to be here in a time of need, and glad to do his duty, now he had to find the traitor. When he found the traitor he would have to punish him. Such a man deserved to die, as Daven would die if the wireless was found. Pray God it is not found, he thought despairingly, it’s our only link with sanity. If there is a God in heaven, let it not be found! Please.

But Smedly-Taylor knew that Yoshima was right about one thing. He should have had the courage to die like a soldier—on the battlefield or in escape. Alive, the cancer of memory ate him—the memory that greed, power lust, and bungling had caused the rape of the East, and countless hundred thousand useless deaths.

But then, he thought, if I had died, what of my darling Maisie, and John—my Lancer son—and Percy—my Air Force son—and Trudy, married so young and pregnant so young and widowed so young, what of them? Never to see or touch them, or feel the warmth of home again.

“That is in the hands of God,” he said again, but, like him, the words were old and very sad.

Yoshima snapped orders at the four guards. They pulled the bunks from the corners of the hut and made a clearing. Then they pulled Daven’s bunk into the clearing. Yoshima went into the corner and began to peer at the rafters, at the atap thatch, and at the rough boards beneath. His search was careful, but Smedly-Taylor suddenly realized that this was only for his benefit—that the hiding place was known.

He remembered the night months upon months ago when they had come to him. “It’s on your own heads,” he had said. “If you get caught, you get caught, and that’s the end of it. I can do nothing to help you—nothing.” He had singled out Daven and Cox and said quietly: “If the wireless is discovered—try not to implicate the others. You must try for a little while. Then you are to say that I authorized this wireless. I ordered you to do it.” Then he had dismissed them and blessed them in his own way and wished them luck.

The Camp Commandant’s wife was lying amid the rubble of the tenement building in Notting Hill Gate, London, under a lowering rain. It was a tenement because she had no money. It was a rubble because a V2 had silent-swooped and laid it to waste.