“McCoy—later, when I had come to know him well— told me it was self-defense. I believe him.”
“ ‘Had come to know him well’?” Pickering quoted.
“I went to the colonel and told him that not only had McCoy refused to plead guilty, but also that Fairbairn’s police were going to testify for him. Under those circumstances, there was no way the incident could be swept under the rug.”
“So there was no court-martial?”
“No court-martial. McCoy even got his knife back.”
“Was it a Fairbairn?”
“It was, and he’d gotten it the same way Fairbairn’s police got theirs, by proving he knew how to use it.”
“How did he get to know Fairbairn?”
“There was a high-stakes poker game every Friday night at the Metropol Hotel.”
“He was only a corporal,” Pickering said. “Major, I used to be a corporal. I never played poker with officers.”
“McCoy was a very unusual corporal,” Banning said, smiling, “as I quickly found out when he was assigned to me.”
“Assigned to you?”
“The colonel took pains to make it clear that there had better not be another incident involving Corporal Killer McCoy.”
“That’s why they called him ‘Killer’? Because he killed the Italian?”
“That was the beginning of it, I suppose, but it really stuck on him after he wiped out, practically by himself, a reinforced platoon of Chinese ‘bandits’ working for the Kempae Tai.” The Japanese secret police. “There were twenty bodies in that ’incident.’ ”
“How did that happen?”
“When he reported to me—and he didn’t like that; he liked being in the weapons company, where he planned to be a sergeant before his second hitch was up—I told him frankly that all I expected of him was to stay out of trouble until I could figure out something to do with him. He was obviously, I told him, not going to be of much use to me. I was the intelligence officer, and someone who didn’t speak Chinese or Japanese obviously couldn’t be of much use.”
“And he spoke some Chinese?”
“He told me he could read and write Cantonese and Mandarin, plus Japanese, plus French and German and even some Russian, but was having trouble with the Cyrillic alphabet.”
“And could he?”
“Natural flair for languages. Maybe natural is not the right word. Supernatural flair, maybe. Eerie flair.”
“So you put him to work?”
“I had to do so without letting the colonel know,” Banning said. “So what I did was send him on the regular truck convoys we ran between Shanghai and Peking, and other places. They took anywhere from five days to a couple of weeks. McCoy would disappear from the convoy for a few hours—or a few days—and have a look at what the Japs were up to. God, he was good at it!”
“And the Chinese ‘bandit’ incident?”
“The Kempae Tai would hire Chinese bandits to attack us whenever they thought they could get away with it. They particularly liked to attack the convoys. The Japs paid them, and what was on the trucks was theirs. They made the mistake of attacking one that McCoy was on. He and a buck sergeant named Zimmerman were waiting for them with Thompsons. And they were very good with Thompsons. The ‘bandits’ left twenty bodies behind them. McCoy and Zimmerman loaded them on trucks and took them to Peking. That, sir, is where ‘Killer’ got his name.”
Pickering had not yet told Banning that Lieutenants Pickering and McCoy were friends, but he had Pick in his mind as Banning spoke of Killer McCoy.
It meant, of course, that when Malcolm S. Pickering had been in his first year at Harvard, starting to work his way through the pro forma resistance to copulation of the nubile maidens of Wellesley, Sarah Lawrence, and other institutions of higher learning for the female offspring of the moneyed classes, McCoy had been a Marine in China; that when Pick had been earning a four-goal handicap on the polo fields at Ramapo Valley, Palm Beach, and Los Angeles, McCoy had been riding Mongolian ponies through the China countryside keeping an eye on the Imperial Japanese Army at a considerable risk to his life.
“How did he get to become an officer?”
“The Corps put out the word to recommend NCOs for Officer Candidate School. I thought McCoy would make a fine officer. The colonel saw sending him to the States as a good way to get him out of Shanghai. I think I was the only officer in the Marine Corps who thought he would get through officer training.”
“He had some trouble getting through,” Pickering said. “With some