The Year of Counting Souls Read online

  “I think I could manage four or five bottles of whiskey,” Mori said.

  “Twenty bottles. Not just any whiskey. Scotch. I’m partial to Ben Nevis, if you can get it. Or Glenmorangie. That’s good, too.”

  Noguchi butchered the pronunciation of these Scottish brands, but it was clear he’d said them before and wasn’t just repeating what someone had told him were good scotch labels. Mori knew nothing about whiskey but assumed it was high quality and hard to come by.

  Mori clenched his teeth. “Twenty bottles of scotch. Now where is the Pinoy with the information?”

  Noguchi made a face that Mori supposed was satisfaction but looked like a man straining to move his bowels. “Why, he’s right here. Let him up, boys. It’s time to give him a breather.”

  “That’s him? That’s the informant? You almost drowned him!”

  “Oh, don’t get worked up—he’s fine. I was softening him for you, is all.”

  “I thought he approached you. I thought he was a willing informant. That he’s a—how do they say?—a Sakdal.”

  “Well, sure,” Noguchi said. “We pay the Sakdals for good information when they’ve got it. But this one was trying to extort us. Petty thugs and criminals, deep down that’s all they are.”

  Mori raised his eyebrows. “Extort? Was he asking for scotch?”

  “No, nothing like that,” Noguchi said, obviously missing the irony, although his two men didn’t. A slight smile passed between them behind the major’s back. “I offered twenty pesos. He said a hundred. I told him forty, but no more, and he swaggered off. So now he gets nothing except a free bath.”

  The young man wasn’t showing any swagger now. His head hung low on his bare chest, which heaved as if he’d never get enough air into his lungs. Perhaps the major was right: this one wouldn’t give Mori any trouble.

  “I’ll need an interrogation room.”

  “Easily done. He doesn’t speak Japanese, only a very little English and the local gibberish. I’ll lend you my translator.”

  “No need for that,” Mori said. “Lieutenant Fujiwara speaks Tagalog.”

  The interrogation room Major Noguchi gave the Kempeitai had been used to billet troops, and they’d left it filthy. Mori refused to work under such conditions, demanded that the major clean it up first. Soldiers hauled out tatami mats, bowls filled with half-eaten suppers squirming with maggots, and soiled clothing. Once that was done, the major sent in a pretty young Filipina to scrub the floor on her hands and knees. She didn’t look older than sixteen or seventeen, although it was hard to tell with these native girls. She might be twenty-five and the mother of three, for all Mori could tell.

  “I wonder if this is one of the ‘little brown things’ Noguchi was talking about,” Mori said to Fujiwara while the girl worked.

  “I believe so, sir,” Fujiwara said. “She looks very young.”

  “The lack of discipline in Noguchi’s troops is appalling, don’t you think?”

  “Quite appalling. He was rather insolent, too. His demand for liquor as the price for doing his duty . . . I was surprised you would do such a thing, sir.”

  “Who says that I will?” Mori asked. “Ah, here we are at last.”

  The woman left with her pail. The floor was still damp, and cobwebs hung in the corners. The windows were either broken or filthy. Mori supposed his brother would have had a poem or a saying from a Chinese philosopher about the matter, but for him it was clean enough.

  Fujiwara brought in the prisoner and put him in a chair. The young man was trembling and wouldn’t look at the two Japanese secret police.

  “Tell him what we need,” Mori said. “Advise him that there will be no second chances if he doesn’t answer truthfully.”

  Fujiwara had warned that his Tagalog wasn’t perfect, claimed that he frequently missed nuances or misunderstood, but every time the corporal spoke it seemed fluent to Mori’s ears.

  Then again, when Mori spoke in English, he couldn’t even hear his own Japanese accent, only knew that people in Hawaii had noted how curious it was that Sachihiro Mori, the older brother, spoke English perfectly, while Yoshiko, the younger, did not. Certain words gave him away. That had grated on him.

  The semi-drowning had softened the Sakdal and would-be extortionist. The man answered Fujiwara without hesitation. Indeed, he babbled on after every question, giving more information than had been requested.

  The Filipino had apparently been working for the Americans before and during their defense of Baliuag, acting first as a spotter, then as a cargador, loading and unloading supplies. Naturally, he claimed to have been working for them under duress. Mori scoffed at this. A Sakdal had no loyalty. He’d work for anyone, anywhere, so long as it put silver in his palm.

  Fujiwara questioned him some more, then turned to his commanding officer. “He says there were two trucks that arrived before the battle carrying sick and wounded soldiers. One of the injured men was Japanese.”

  “What did he look like?” Mori asked.

  Fujiwara asked, but the prisoner had no good answer. He seemed to think that one Japanese soldier looked like another. But the man’s injuries had seemed consistent with a crash on the road, including a broken leg that had not yet been set, only splinted.

  “The Japanese was evacuated with the rest,” Fujiwara translated. “There was an argument—some of the Americans wanted to abandon him, others thought they had a responsibility.”

  Mori eyed the Filipino suspiciously. “I thought he spoke only a very little English. How did he pick up on that?”

  Fujiwara questioned some more. “He admits he speaks better English than he let on. He didn’t tell Noguchi at first so as to gain an advantage in haggling for money. Then Noguchi started torturing him, and it was too late.”

  “Do you believe it?”

  “I’m not sure, sir. I think he’s telling the truth, but you can never tell with these vermin.”

  Mori supposed he could speak in English to test the man, but he was reluctant to do so in front of Fujiwara. The adjutant didn’t know the extent of Mori’s contact with the language, or that he’d lived among the Americans for so many years—few people did. Mori was already walking beneath a cloud of suspicion and would be until he settled matters with his brother.

  “But here’s the interesting thing, sir. The hospital trucks weren’t evacuating to Bataan. Not right away, at least.”

  “What? Are you sure?”

  “Hai,” Fujiwara said with a nod. “He overheard an American officer speaking to one of the drivers. There’s apparently a hospital closer to here, in the mountains. And a back road to Bataan if they’re cut off from the highway.”

  Now that was interesting. The army was going to have a devil of a time rooting out the tens of thousands of Americans and Filipinos holed up on Bataan behind MacArthur’s defensive lines. The peninsula was rugged and hard to attack from either land or sea. But if Mori could get hold of his brother before he escaped—even better, if he could discover this back road to Bataan that cut down through the mountain passes . . .

  Mori now had his justification for finding his brother. Get to Sammy, take him prisoner while killing or capturing the injured Americans, then turn over his valuable information to the army.

  But could he be sure? What if the Sakdal was inventing the whole thing? Major Noguchi knew about Mori’s brother and might have let it slip to his prisoner. The prisoner, desperate to squirm out of the trap he was in, might have concocted a fantastic story to free himself.

  “Sir?” Fujiwara asked.

  “I’m half inclined to hire this man to lead us into the hills to find the missing soldier. Pay him a reasonable sum of money and see what happens.”

  “That sounds dangerous, sir.”

  “Of course. There’s all kinds of risk in it. We might spend the next two weeks romping pointlessly through the jungle, looking for something that doesn’t exist. But there’s no real choice—we have to hire someone.”

  “I supp
ose so,” Fujiwara said, his tone doubtful.

  “Several someones, in fact. They’ll all be crooks and traitors. And the mountains are dangerous, full of partisans, and will remain so until we can pacify the population. But you’re a clever man, Lieutenant. Surely you see the opportunity.”

  “In finding a back road to the American army on Bataan, sir? I do, sir. But . . .”

  “But what? Speak freely.”

  “I’m not so worried about the tromping through the jungle, sir,” Fujiwara said. He glanced at the Filipino, who stared dumbly at the wall while the two secret police spoke in Japanese. “I’m worried about outright treachery and ambush. This man worked for the Americans—how do you know he isn’t still loyal to them? The whole thing might be an act.”

  “Might be, but I doubt it.”

  “One thing is for certain,” the lieutenant said. “The prisoner is not loyal to us and never will be. Major Noguchi saw to that with his pointless brutality.”

  “Hmm, a good point. Torturing the man made him our enemy. He might very well look for a chance to shove a knife in our kidneys when we aren’t expecting it.”

  “So we’ll let him go and find another guide, sir?”

  “We’ll find another guide—there must be all manner of weasels in these parts who can show us the roads into the mountains—but we won’t let this one go.” Mori sighed. This may not be pointless brutality, but it still felt unnecessary. If only the major hadn’t bungled matters. “We can’t. He’s a talker, and we don’t want him talking about this. We have secrets to maintain, including from the major and his kind.”

  One of them being the secret of my brother.

  Mori didn’t say this last part aloud, of course. Instead he said, “We’ll say the prisoner was killed trying to escape. There’s no need to make it look like an accident—nobody will question us. Nobody even needs to believe it. Just shoot him, and we’ll be off.”

  “Yes, sir. Now, sir?”

  “Now, Lieutenant.”

  Mori turned toward the door, not needing to see the look of horror in the Sakdal’s eyes as he saw Fujiwara draw his pistol. No need to see the bloody mess, only brace himself for the gunshot in the close confines of the interrogation room.

  But the words were barely out of his mouth when the prisoner sprang from his chair and hurled himself at Lieutenant Fujiwara, whose hand had not yet drawn his weapon. Fujiwara could only throw up his arms as the prisoner barreled into him. The two of them flew to the ground, and the prisoner fumbled for Fujiwara’s pistol.

  You fool, Mori silently berated himself. He understood everything.

  Mori drew his guntō. It was a standard-issue officer’s sword, modeled on the old samurai weapons, and it felt long and deadly in his hand. Fujiwara was struggling for the gun, but his smaller opponent already had it and was turning it on its owner.

  Mori swung his sword from the shoulders, an angry grunt at his mouth. Angry with himself, angry with the treachery of this place. Angry with the war.

  The blade could have trimmed the hairs on the back of the Filipino’s neck, it was so sharp. Brought down with all of Mori’s strength, it nearly severed the man’s head. He fell down, and the gun skittered away across the floor.

  Mori was shaking as the enormity of his blunder sank in. He’d already known the man was a liar; the Sakdal had lied about his English ability when speaking with the major. Mori had accepted this without imagining that he might also have lied about his ability to speak Japanese, too. It was well known that these people were clever with languages, that many spoke four of them: a village dialect, Tagalog, English, and the Spanish that had once been common throughout the islands when the Spaniards held it as a colony. Surely some of them also spoke Japanese. And what kind of man would be the first to approach the Japanese army? Someone who was confident he could communicate.

  The Sakdal must have been listening to the entire conversation between the two Japanese. Weighing his options, cooperating so long as he thought the secret police would let him live. Maybe, in his more optimistic moments, he’d returned to scheming not just for his life, but for money.

  And then Mori had given his adjutant the order to execute the prisoner. The man had had nothing left to lose.

  Mori looked down at the dead body. A hysterical, nervous laugh threatened to come out, but he fought it down. He moved slowly, deliberately, as he removed a handkerchief and wiped off his blade. The handkerchief came away only a little bloodied. It had passed too swiftly through the man’s neck.

  Fujiwara shoved the body off himself and climbed up, spitting the Sakdal’s blood from his mouth and wiping at his face. He looked a mess.

  “I am all right,” Fujiwara said. “I am not injured.”

  “That is obvious enough.”

  “Sorry, sir. I was clumsy and careless.”

  “The error was mine.”

  A bowed head. “Thank you for saving my life, sir.”

  “There is one good thing to come of this,” Mori said. His hand trembled as he slid the sword back into its sheath. “We no longer need to lie about how the prisoner died. Killed trying to escape—for once, it is absolutely true.”

  Chapter Ten

  Louise helped Lieutenant Kozlowski and Dr. Claypool maintain their fiction for several days after arriving in Sanduga, but she worried that the secrecy would break down. As soon as the patients had all been stabilized, the less injured men began to clamor for an evacuation to Bataan.

  That same day, two more badly injured soldiers arrived, one a Filipino and the other an American. The so-called bamboo telegraph had carried news to Sanduga of a firefight in the lowlands and a pair of injured soldiers being hid by the locals. Kozlowski and the two truck drivers went down from the mountains to rescue them. The injured men were carried on litters for miles through the forests and mountains until they arrived in the village, where the doctor and his nurses set to work saving their lives. Lieutenant Kozlowski quashed talk of evacuation until they were ready to be moved.

  Occasional bits of news reached them in the mountains, and it was uniformly bad. The Japanese advanced on all fronts. MacArthur had completed his evacuation to Bataan, but no reinforcements had come to relieve him. No American naval forces had arrived.

  The two Filipino drivers disappeared one day. Louise didn’t know if they’d talked to the villagers about the back road and learned the truth or if they’d gone ahead to scout, but their desertion came as a blow and set the injured soldiers talking, as did additional rumors coming into the village. And soon enough the bamboo telegraph wasn’t their only source of information.

  Claypool forbade using the generator for anything but medical purposes and Kozlowski’s radio communications with the army, and the lieutenant was tight-lipped about what was happening in the war, but an enterprising young sailor put together a simple crystal radio, a so-called cat’s whisker receiver. He used a piece of galena—lead crystal—to receive the signal, a capacitor, a coil of copper wire to adjust the radio, and additional wire for the antenna. The crystal set didn’t need outside power but was powered by the radio signal itself. That limited its range.

  At first, they could only pick up the Voice of Freedom being broadcast by the US military from Corregidor, but someone else came up with the idea of making a generator powered by an old bicycle, mounted and stationary. This allowed them to receive weaker stations from farther away. At night, when the signals traveled farther, they could even hear the distant, thin sound of KGEI out of San Francisco, broadcasting on shortwave.

  Late on the afternoon of January 9, Louise came out of surgery to find several soldiers and nurses outside clustering around the radio. One of the men pedaled the bike. The signal came in and out of focus, with an excited correspondent on the other side reading war news in that strange announcer accent. There was something about German U-boats spotted off the Carolina coast, followed by news of the inexorable Japanese advance on British-held Singapore.

  Lieutenant Kozlowski stood a
few paces off beneath the corrugated-metal awning, his arms crossed and his expression serious. He caught Louise’s gaze and shook his head.

  The radio cut into static, and the men groaned. Miss Frankie stood with them, making worried comments to Maria Elena. The radio came back on after a few seconds.

  “. . . the Philippines, where our heroic boys continue their struggle against the Jap menace. Reports have the enemy crossing the Abucay Line onto the Bataan Peninsula.” The signal broke down again, then sputtered briefly to life. “Wainwright and MacArthur insist—”

  The signal died again. A voice came through the noise that sounded like a radio broadcast in Chinese, and then pure static.

  “What happened?” Frankie said. “Pedal harder!”

  “It ain’t the pedaling,” the sweating man on the bike grumbled as he kept at it. “Give it a try if you don’t believe me.”

  “That’s enough,” Kozlowski said. “Those of you who are well enough to pedal the radio or stand around shooting the breeze can make yourselves busy. The sun is going down, and I want some work out of you men before it’s dark. Understood?”

  “But sir,” one man protested, “what about Bataan? The Japs are gonna overrun the whole of it before our reinforcements arrive.”

  “You trust the news from the other side of the ocean?” Kozlowski said. “Bataan will hold. Don’t you worry.”

  “They can’t be that wrong,” another man said. “What about the Abucay Line? Is that wrong, too?”

  “Where is the Abucay Line?” Frankie asked, her voice high and nervous.

  “Bataan,” the man said. “Japs gotta cross it to get at MacArthur and Wainwright. And we gotta throw ’em back. Means the enemy is already trying to advance on the peninsula.”

  “Then we’re cut off!” Frankie said.

  “Miss Frankie, please,” Kozlowski told the nurse, tone exasperated.

  “We’re all going to die here!” Frankie’s voice rose even higher. “The Japs will find us, and since we didn’t surrender in time, they’re going to give it to us good. Oh, it’s fine for you men. We’re women, and you know what they’ll do to us, right, Louise? Tell them!”