that’s why I can’t go to your house, Ken, as much as I would really like to. What I’m going to do this afternoon is what I can to convince Howe that MacArthur is right about Inchon, and everybody else wrong. The trouble with doing that is Howe is likely to decide that I’m just one more MacArthur worshiper, and so inform the President.”
“Are you going to let me know what happens?”
“I won’t know,” Pickering said. “This is hold your breath and cross your fingers time.”
He pushed himself off the windowsill, walked to McCoy, and touched his shoulder.
“One bit of advice before you go to tell Ernie,” he said.
“Yes, sir?”
“From you, Ken.”
“Sir?”
“Do I tell Howe about Pick?”
McCoy thought that over for a full fifteen seconds.
“If you don’t, and he finds out, and he will find out, he’ll wonder what else you haven’t told him.”
“That’s what I’ve been thinking. I’ll tell him now, and then I’ll call my wife. Get out of here, Ken.”
[TWO]
NO. 7 SAKU-TUN DENENCHOFU, TOKYO, JAPAN 1330 3 AUGUST 1950
“Aunt Patricia,” Mrs. Ernestine McCoy said, “now, I want you to listen to me. . . .”
She was on the telephone, standing by the couch’s end table in the living room. Tears were running down her cheeks.
Captain Kenneth R. McCoy, in his shirtsleeves, was sitting on the couch, leaning over the coffee table, idly stirring a large ice cube in his drink with his finger, and looking at his wife.
She loved him, McCoy thought. Christ, I loved him. Goddamn it. Present tense. She loves him. I love him. We don’t know he’s dead.
“The only thing you would accomplish by coming here would be getting in the way,” Ernie went on. “If there’s anything that can be done, Uncle Flem and Ken will do it.”
The doorbell rang.
“Who the fuck is that?” McCoy exploded.
“Watch your mouth,” Ernie said, and then, a moment later, into the telephone: “Ken spilled his drink.”
“Shit!” McCoy said, softly.
The truth is, it doesn’t matter who rang the goddamn bell. Kon San was told “no visitors, nobody.”
He picked up his drink and took a healthy swallow.
The truth is, I don’t want this goddamn drink.
He heard the door open and close.
Kon San will now come in here and tell us it was the goddamned butcher or somebody, and she sent him away, and is there anything else we need?
The couch on which he was sitting faced away from the sliding door giving access to the foyer. He turned on it, so that when Kon San slid it open, he could signal her not to say anything and to go away.
Smile when you do that. She’s trying to be helpful.
The sliding door—of translucent parchment—slid open.
Kon San was standing there, a look of discomfort on her face. And so were Captain George F. Hart, USMCR, Master Gunner Ernest Zimmerman, USMC, and Lieutenant David R. Taylor, USNR.
Goddamn it, they didn’t take their shoes off! Ernie will blow a gasket!
And what the fuck are they doing here? Hart and Zimmerman want to help. But Taylor?
He got quickly to his feet, nodded at Ernie, put his finger over his lips to signal silence, and went to the door.
He grabbed Zimmerman by the arm and led him down the corridors to the foyer.
“Take off your goddamn shoes,” McCoy ordered, not pleasantly. “What the hell’s the matter with you? You know better!”
“Ken . . .” Zimmerman started.
McCoy cut him off with an angry finger in front of his lips.
The three removed their shoes and slipped their feet into slippers.
McCoy gestured for them to follow him, and led them through corridors to the kitchen.
“Ernie’s on the phone with Pick’s mother,” he said.
“I’m sorry about Pick, Ken,” Hart said.
“You could have told me that on the phone,” McCoy said. “Ernie’s pretty upset. They’re like brother and sister.”
“Yeah, I know,” Hart said. “I wouldn’t have come, but I thought this was important.”
“Taylor, a friend of ours is MIA.”
“General Pickering told me,” Taylor said. “Sorry.”
Then what the fuck are you doing here? What the fuck is wrong with Hart and Zimmerman, bringing you here?
“What’s important, George?” McCoy asked.
“He asked me,” Zimmerman said. “Hart did. We thought we should come.”
“To do what?”
Watch your goddamn temper. They’re just trying to be helpful.
“Lieutenant Taylor has some ideas about the islands in the Flying Fish Channel,” Hart said.
“Right now, I don’t give a rat’s ass about the islands in the Flying Fish Channel,” McCoy said.
“You better hear him out, Ken,” Zimmerman said.
McCoy, just in time, bit off what came to his lips—“Go fuck yourself”—and