Trouble Follows Me

1

IN FEBRUARY, 1945, Honolulu was a small blend of Los Angeles and prewar Shanghai, shaken up with the carnival end of a county fair, and poured out carelessly at the edge of the sea. Men in uniform, white, tan, khaki, grey, green, pullulated in the streets, looking for a place like home and not finding any.

We drove through town in Eric’s jeep from the Pearl Harbor side, past miles of gift and curio shops, bars and lunchrooms, Turkish baths, photographers’ studios, peep-shows. Be Photographed with a Hula Girl. Dispenser General of Alcoholic Beverages. Real American Hot Dogs. Dance of the Seven Veils Only Five Cents.

I had seen it before and it hadn’t changed, except that my year in the forward area made it seem more interesting and metropolitan. Still it was no substitute for Detroit.

“Where’s the drink you promised me?” I said to Eric.

The traffic ahead of us had been temporarily jammed by a Navy Yard bus taking on a load of sailors. Eric was scowling over the wheel. He was a fair-haired man of thirty, with the leanness and boyish quick gestures of twenty, and almost all of its hair. Since I had last seen him his collar had sprouted the double silver bars of a full lieutenant. I had noticed when I first met him in the Administration Building that afternoon that his mouth and eyes were still undecided between cynicism and sensibility.

The bus finally moved, like the key log in a log-jam, and the stream of traffic flowed on with our jeep nosing into the middle of it.

“I said how about that drink you promised me.”

“Hold your horses,” Eric said. “What are you, a dipsomaniac or something?”

“I haven’t had a drink since we left Guam. Before that I didn’t have one for three months. Does that make me a dipsomaniac?”

“Apparently. Don’t worry, there’ll be plenty left for you.”

“Doesn’t the bar in Honolulu House close at six?”

“Theoretically it does. But we’ve all got bottles. If the drinking stopped at six, what would be the use of a ship’s party?”

Honolulu House was a decaying mansion standing in its own grounds on the eastern outskirts of the city. A rich planter built it there between the mountains and the sea at the end of the nineteenth century, in the hope that his descendants would live there from generation to generation. When he died his sons and daughters moved back to the mainland, and the house degenerated by degrees into a club of uncertain membership.

It was a three-story frame structure with a wide verandah on four sides. When we arrived the garden of flowers which surrounded it was smouldering in a thin smoke of early twilight.

We parked the jeep at the rear and went into the basement bar. There was a blaze of light, noise and women. Two long tables ran half the length of the narrow brick-walled room to hold the whiskey bottles. We found two unoccupied chairs, and I took one while Eric started off to the bar for ice.

Before he got there he joined a group that was standing near the door. There was a small dark girl with curly black hair, a naval officer with a brown moustache and a Vandyke two shades lighter, a tall heavy man wearing a war correspondent’s insignia, and a blonde with her profile to me, five feet seven inches of it. When I saw her the room came into focus and began to revolve about her like a shining wheel.

Eric had his head close to the dark girl’s, and made no move to break away. I got up and joined the group, and Eric introduced me. The bearded man was Dr. Savo, surgeon of Eric’s destroyer. The brunette with the keen pert face was Sue Sholto. The war correspondent was Gene Halford. His thick jowls and the bald half of his head were darkened by a tan which only the tropics could have given him.

“You’ve heard of Mr. Halford,” Eric said. “He writes for two magazines, and ninety-seven newspapers, isn’t it, Gene?”

I hadn’t heard of him, but I politely said I had.

“Sam used to be a newspaperman in Detroit himself.”

“Is that a fact?” Halford said. I didn’t like the faintly patronizing note in his voice, and I didn’t like the fact that his left shoulder was behind the blonde girl’s right shoulder, like a Reserved sign.

Her name was Mary Thompson. Their shoulders disengaged when she moved to give me her hand. When she smiled her eyes changed from blue to aquamarine. “I’m glad to meet you, Mr. Drake.”

She was a tall blonde, but not the cornfed type. Her body was sleek and disciplined, so well made that she didn’t look big. There was in her face a fascinating combination of things I liked and things I didn’t understand. I wondered what I could do about it. A man like Halford with a million readers, even though he was forty and balding, had glamor. Gene Halford looked at her as if he knew it.

While I was groping for a gambit he ended the game. “Let’s go out and get leis,” he said to her. “There’s an old woman selling them on the corner.”

As they moved away, Mary Thompson gave me a smiling look which seemed to imply that she’d see me later. I got some ice at the bar and went back to the table where the bottles were. I made a little celibate ceremony out of mixing and drinking a double highball. I concentrated on the good sharp clean taste of the whiskey and soda, the feel of the ice against my teeth, the cold wet glass in the circle of my fingers. Then the small expanding glow in my stomach, spreading from there through my body like a blob of dye in a beaker of water, finally working into my brain, warming and coloring my perceptions.

The first stages of drunkenness are delicate, illusive and altruistic, like the first stages of love. I became very pleased with the bright disorderly room, the merry drunken laughter, the sweet chiding clink of ice in glasses, the confusion of shoptalk and woman-talk, war and love. What pleased me most was the fact that the room didn’t move back and forth, sideways and diagonally. It was the most lovably stable room I had sat in for a long time.

“How you doing, Sam?” Eric sat down beside me and poured himself a drink.

“I was just thinking that I like this room and everybody in it. Even the lieutenant commanders. Where’s your girl-friend?”

“Went up to the powder-room to do her hair. But she’s not my girl-friend.”

“I’m not likely to tell Helen about it. That girl likes you pretty well.”

“I know it,” he said. His mood, which was evident in his face, was an uncomfortable mixture of vanity and shame. Vanity because he had a pretty girl in love with him. Shame because he had a wife in Michigan and should know better. “If you ever did tell Helen, it’d be just too bad.”

“Why should I?”

“Anyway, there’s nothing to tell.” He shrugged his shoulders awkwardly, and his fair transparent skin showed a flush. “It seems funny that you’ll be seeing Helen in a week or two. I haven’t seen her for two years.”

“I’ll look her up when I get home. Anything special you want me to tell her?”

“Hell, tell her I’m healthy. And, of course, I love her. Tell her there’s no danger when we’re operating around Pearl like this. She never believes me when I write her that in letters.”

He finished his drink, very quickly I thought. I poured him another and filled my own glass.

“They’re at it again,” Eric said. “Always talking about the war.”

An ensign with wings, across the table from us, was telling a faded blonde how it felt to go in through ack-ack at five hundred feet. He said it didn’t feel so bad because you didn’t really believe it until afterwards. Now the real hell was night landings on a jeep carrier…

“It’s on everybody’s mind,” I said.

“But we’re not supposed to talk about it.” He had once had a one-week course in Washington on security, and it left its mark on him. “Past operations aren’t so bad, but when they talk about the big operation that’s coming up–”

“Now you’re doing it.”

“The hell I am.” But he colored. “If I was an enemy spy right here this afternoon–”

“You wouldn’t have been born in Toledo and you’d have funny little slant eyes and people would point the finger of scorn at you.”

“Don’t kid yourself. The Japs are willing to spend money, and there are Caucasians who like money better than anything else.”

“Say you were a spy and managed to crash an officers’ party and picked up some information. You could gloat over it in private, but I don’t see what else you could do with it. The leaks have been plugged since December 7 a long time ago.”

Sue Sholto appeared at the foot of the stairs and came across the room toward us. The movements of her small perfect body were birdlike and precise. I had the impression that she came back to Eric like a hawk to a wrist. We stood up and she sat down between Eric and me. He poured her a drink, and another for himself. Her brilliant dark eyes followed the movements of his hands, but he didn’t seem to notice.

He sipped his drink and said: “Maybe they have been plugged. But I’ll bet a smart operative could find a way.”

“What on earth are you talking about, Eric? You look silly when you get so solemn.”

“Sam doesn’t think there’s any way an enemy agent could get information out of these islands. What do you think? You work in a radio station. “

“That’s a funny question to ask a girl. I never thought of it. In spy stories they always have a secret transmitter hidden in the mountains, don’t they?”

“That’s out,” I said. “With the direction-finders we’ve got now, we’d put the finger on an illegal transmitter two hours after it opened up. The nearest Jap islands are a long way from here now. It takes a lot of power to reach them.”

“You wouldn’t have to reach the nearest Jap island,” Eric said. “There are Jap subs in these waters. They can surface at night. They could pick up a weak broadcast and relay it to Tokyo.”

“But we’d hear both broadcasts,” I said. “And naturally we’d put a stop to them. There are plenty of Japs here, and no doubt some of them are secretly loyal to the old country. But I still don’t see what they can do about it.”

“Do about what?” a hard deep voice said behind me. It was Gene Halford. He and Mary Thompson had come back, wearing yellow leis.

Eric and I stood up and they sat down with us, Mary between me and Halford. Her yellow garland made her eyes as bright blue as cornflowers. Her hair was fragrant and shining, like pull-taffy. Her linen suit had a clean smell.

Sue Sholto’s dark eyes were turned inward, looking at something behind drawn blinds in her mind. “We were talking about how the enemy could get secret information out of the islands.” She spoke as if with an effort.

“I suppose you could send a letter to a neutral country,” Mary said. “Using a code of course. You know, ‘Uncle Harry has a cold’ means ‘The Americans have a new battleship at Pearl Harbor.’”

“That’s pretty old hat,” I said. “Don’t forget we’ve got a pretty efficient censorship.”

Eric spoke meditatively. “I wonder if a small boat could get out to a Jap sub.”

“Not a chance,” I said. “You know the restrictions on boating around here better than I do.”

Halford’s muddy green eyes had been watching us alertly. Now he spread his thick hands on the table with a slapping sound that made my nerves wince. He had the air of a man who habitually took possession of situations, then bestowed them on the original owners as his personal gift.

“Aren’t we being just a little indiscreet?” he said heavily. “Inasmuch as there is a leak of information from Pearl Harbor?”

“There is?” I repeated idiotically.

“You’re in the Navy, men. I thought you knew. Public Relations and Censorship keep pounding into us correspondents that civilians mustn’t be allowed to know what the Navy knows. I never thought it might be the other way around.”

“Where did you get this information?” I asked.

“I have my sources. I know a good many things that I can’t print. For God’s sake keep your lips buttoned over that one.”

“My lips are well-buttoned. There’s a gap in yours where the wind blows through.”

A dark flush, darker in contrast with the clear yellow of his lei, mounted from his neck through his jowls, to his padded cheekbones. I wondered if I was going to have an opportunity to hit him. A year in the forward area sharpens your combative instincts and makes you want to hit people you don’t like.

But all he said was: “The original indiscretion was not mine, I believe.”

“Indiscretion, hell,” Eric said. “We were talking hypothetically.”

“Couldn’t we just go on talking hypothetically?” Sue said in a little-girl tone. “There wasn’t so much electricity in the air when it was hypothetical.”

“Let’s put it down as scuttlebutt,” I said. “It’s perfectly possible that Mr. Halford doesn’t know what he’s talking about.”

Halford gave me a malevolent look. But if he argued he’d have to insist that he had made a bad break. He didn’t argue.

“It’s getting terribly close in here,” Mary said brightly. “They’re serving supper at the buffet upstairs by now. I’m starved.”

We decided to have supper. I picked up one of our bottles, which was two parts empty, and brought it along. The manager, rigid in his dusty tuxedo like a guard in uniform, was standing at the head of the stairs. There was a smile of strained affability on his sallow Eurasian face.

“Please don’t handle the bottle quite so conspicuously, sir,” he said to me. “It’s after six, and we don’t want any trouble.”

“O.K., we’ll foil the revenooers.”

“I’ll take it,” Mary said. She put the bottle in her big straw handbag. Sue took Eric’s.

We found an empty table on the verandah on the side away from the street. The sea was barely visible from there. While I watched it night took a giant step down from the mountains and sucked up the last grey light from its surface.

The blonde girl was standing beside me.

I said abruptly: “Are you with Halford? If you are I’ll fade out.”

“I’m not. I barely know him.” She touched my arm lightly with her fingers. “Don’t fade out.”

Halford and Eric had gone to join the line at the buffet, and I followed them. Before Halford got there Mrs. Merriwell intercepted him and did me a service. Mrs. Merriwell was a lady of uncertain age, but not so very uncertain. Her hair was arranged in stiffly curled bangs which masked the wrinkles on her forehead. Nothing could mask the two harsh lines which drooped from her bleak nose to her brilliantly painted mouth. Her brown eyes were restless and shrill. The natural shrillness of her voice was softened by a South Carolina accent.

“Why, Gene Halford,” she said in pleased surprise. “I’ve been looking for you all afternoon.”

She looked expectantly at Eric and me, and Halford introduced us. Mrs. Merriwell was delighted, she was sure, and it certainly was a very authentic thrill for her to meet us-all. We-all lined up at the buffet where the wardroom stewards of Eric’s destroyer were serving supper. Mrs. Merriwell thought she would have a teensy bit of chicken salad, and perhaps a mite of a sandwich.

There was a look of stultified protest on Halford’s face, but he wasn’t drunk enough to shake her off. The four of us went back to the table on the verandah together. I carried Mary’s plate and sat beside her. We had a round of drinks which Eric poured under the table.

“Here’s to the old Dog-Dog,” Eric said. “How do you think the party’s going?”

For him, the party seemed to be going well. His light blue eyes glittered damply. He was turned towards Sue Sholto so that their knees must have been touching under the table.

“I like it fine,” I said, and looked at Mary.

Halford produced an appreciative grin from some reserve that Mrs. Merriwell had not yet touched.

“I think it’s lovely, simply lovely,” said Mrs. Merriwell. “All you handsome young men in your uniforms. The stewards in their white coats. You know, it reminds me of our old club, in the days before my dear deceased husband – But I mustn’t talk of that: I mustn’t even think of it.”

She lowered her eyes, saw her highball, and took a long swallow.

“It is a bit like the old South, isn’t it?” Eric leaned forward slightly, his face serious. “I often wonder whether it’s a good thing.”

“Whether what’s a good thing?” Sue said in her child’s voice. “What’s a good thing?”

“I have my doubts about our policy of concentrating Negroes in the menial jobs. This quarter I happen to be treasurer of our wardroom mess, and it’s partly my responsibility to supervise the stewards. I often think their morale would be higher, and they’d be more useful into the bargain, if they didn’t feel so darn limited.”

“I agree with you,” Mrs. Merriwell cried. “I thoroughly agree with you. Everyone should be given an equal chance, even niggers. Naturally they’ll never reach the position in life of a white man. But I say, give all an equal opportunity, unless, of course, they show they don’t deserve it.”

“How could a black man deserve the same things as an Anglo-Saxon?” Sue said quietly. There was a hostile and sardonic glitter in her dark eyes, but Mrs. Merriwell didn’t notice it.

“You know, sometimes I feel inclined to agree with you. There’s something so unpleasant about a black skin. And the way that big buck looked at me when he was serving my salad – It really gave me the shivers.”

“Hector Land?” Eric said. “The big bruiser with the broken nose?”

“Yes, that’s the one. Those radicals in Washington talk about social equality, and that’s all well and good, but I couldn’t bear to sit down at the same table with a nigger. I’d feel contaminated.”

“But you don’t mind eating food that they’ve prepared,” Sue said. “In fact you greatly enjoy the idea.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“I’m Jewish,” Sue said. Her eyes were burning black. Her voice was hard. She was quite drunk. “So I have some faint idea of what it feels like to be a Negro. Other things being equal, I prefer Negroes to whites. Especially unreconstructed Southern whites.”

“Well!” said Mrs. Merriwell. The word made a rushing sound in her mouth. She stood up with her unfinished plate in one hand and her highball in the other. “You said you wanted to talk to me privately, Gene. Are you coming?”

Halford got up unwillingly, murmured his excuse, and went into the house at her angry clicking heels.

“That’s an insult she’ll never get over,” I said to Mary. “Who is she?”

“Secretary to one of the men at Hickam. She’s probably one of Halford’s sources.”

Eric’s angular face was very stiff, on the point of crumpling in anger or despair. “You shouldn’t talk like that,” he said to Sue. “She’ll tell everybody in town that you’re a nigger-lover.”

“I don’t give a damn,” she said in a high thin voice.

“Maybe I am.” His face reddened and grew pale in blotches. “Excuse me. How interesting.”

“And don’t try to snub me, either, my ambulating ego. Have you always confined yourself strictly to Mem Sahibs? Pray tell us about your amorous exploits, gentlemen.”

She was so evidently drunk that Eric decided he needn’t take her seriously. “You’re getting as tight as a tick, my girl. No more liquor for you. Can’t anyone, for God’s sake, think of an impersonal subject to talk about?”

“We were talking about love,” I said. “There’s nothing more impersonal than love. Everybody has it, shows the same symptoms, and does the same things about them.”

“Nonsense,” Mary said pleasantly. “Love is a highly individual art. A great many people aren’t even capable of it. From what you just said, I suspect you’re one of them.”

“From what you just said, I suspect you aren’t.”

An orchestra began to play in the ballroom. Sue told Eric that she would like to dance. They went away together in unconscious step, as if they knew each other very well and lived by the same fundamental rhythms. She was clinging a little blindly to his arm. As they passed through the door into the bright light, he looked down at her with anxious tenderness in the very set of his shoulders.

“Sue and Eric are old friends, aren’t they?” I said.

“For a year or so, I guess. He looks her up whenever he’s in port. She’s in love with him.”

“It’s funny he didn’t mention her to me before we got here.”

“No it isn’t. The affair isn’t going too well. Eric’s married, isn’t he?”

“Yes, I know his wife. She’s crazy about him. I think he’s gotten himself into a box.”

“Sue’s the one to be sorry for.” Her glance passed over my face swiftly. “Are you married?”

“No. It’d be quite safe to dance with me, I think.”

It was a six-piece scratch orchestra, but she danced so well that she made me feel expert and daring. Her high heels made her almost as tall as I was, and I had a chance to study her face. It was a Leonardo face, with full red lips, a straight and passionate nose, high delicate temples, and mutable eyes that altered with her mood in color, depth, and meaning. Her body was whalebone and plush. Her legs were a perfect rhyme.

After a couple of dances she said, “I have to go pretty soon.”

“Why?”

“I go on the air at nine-fifteen.”

“Say, you’re not the girl that announces the record programs?”

“Sue and I alternate. Have you heard us?”

“The last few nights I have, when we were coming in. No wonder I felt as if I’d known you before.”

“Don’t be irrelevant. I want to know what you think of the programs.”

“I liked them. I like your voice, too. It’s funny I didn’t recognize it.”

“It’s always different over the air.”

The music started again and we danced to it. I couldn’t see Sue and Eric on the floor.

“Any criticisms?” Mary said.

“No. Well, not enough Ellington. There’s never enough Ellington on any record program. Too much Don’t Fence Me In. I admire both Crosby and Cole Porter, but I can imagine a more fortunate marriage of their talents.”

“I know, but a lot of people like it. And the best Ellington aren’t so easy to get. I broke our Portrait of Bert Williams last week, and I almost sat right down and cried.”

“Pinch me somebody quick. The girl in the dream always liked Portrait of Bert Williams.”

“You wouldn’t like it if I pinched you. I’m a very intense pincher. What dream?”

“The dream I had. I’m a very intense dreamer. And it worked. The dream came real.”

She pulled back a little and looked levelly into my eyes. “You say it well. Have you been out a long time?”

“Just a year. It seemed like a long time. That’s why the dream was necessary.”

“Don’t make me feel like a necessity. Since I came out here I’ve learned how it feels to be something there’s a shortage of.”

“The last pack of cigarettes under the counter?”

“The scrap of meat thrown to the wolves. I’d rather feel like a human being.”

“There’s barely a trace of canine in my nature.”

She withdrew her eyes, and because I wanted them back I changed my tack:

“How long have you been out here?”

“Just a few months. Five and a half.”

“Are you from Ohio, Michigan, or Illinois?”

“Your ear’s pretty good. I lived in Cleveland. What time is it?”

“Eight-thirty.”

“I’ll have to leave at the end of this dance.”

“Let me drive you over. I can borrow Eric’s jeep.”

“That would be nice. I haven’t seen Eric or Sue for quite a while, though. Maybe they’re out in the garden.”

While Mary went upstairs to get her coat, I searched the first floor for Eric and Sue. They weren’t on the dance-floor, they weren’t in the darkened dining-room, though other couples were. I walked clear around the house on the verandah, but I couldn’t find them. The night was very dark. There was a full moon, but almost opaque clouds showed where it was only by a faint glow. Cascades of lights were twinkling far up the hills, but the dark clouds which squatted heavily and eternally on Oahu’s peaks loomed against the sky like a dismal fate.

I decided against searching the garden, because it would be embarrassing. There were soft voices among the flowers, and shadowy double shapes both vertical and horizontal.

When I found Eric eventually, he was by himself. He was sitting on an upturned wastebasket in a corner of the men’s head, nursing a dying bottle of bourbon. The damp glitter in his eyes had frozen into glassiness. His thin lips were loose and purplish. His torso was lax and wavering. There were individual drops of sweat oozing from his hairline onto his blank forehead. Once or twice I had seen men drunker, but they were not able to sit up.

“Sue’s gone away and left me,” he said in a muffled singsong. “She went away and left me all alone. She’s a hellish woman, Sam. Don’t ever get mixed up with those little dark babies. They’re deadly nightshade. You can’t get over ’em.”

I wasn’t enjoying the conversation, and didn’t want to keep Mary waiting. “Will you lend me your jeep? I should be back in an hour.”

He found the key after a laborious exploration of his clothes. “Take it away, Sam. I don’t know where you’re going and I don’t care.”

“You’d better go upstairs and lie down.”

“Don’t want to lie down. Sit here until the cows come home. Here with the writing on the wall. Lovely writing on the wall, expresses my sentiments.” He chanted several four-letter words. “There’s my sentiments. Bloody but unbowed. A jug of wine and thou beside me singing in the urinal.” He giggled.

I went away from his unhappy nonsense and got to the lobby in time to be waiting when Mary came downstairs. She looked a little pale and tense.

“Is Sue up there?”

“No. I thought she might be lying down in the powder-room. She drank too much before supper. But there’s nobody there.”

“She probably went home. Eric’s in bad condition. I found him in the john.”

“Perhaps she did. I’ll call from the studio.”

It was a five-minute drive to the broadcasting station. When we got there Mary left me on a folding chair in the darkened audience room, and went to phone. She came back in a minute and said in a worried voice:

“She isn’t at home, at least not yet. I hope she didn’t pass out somewhere.”

“She’ll turn up,” I said.

“I still have a few minutes before the broadcast. Would you like to look at the record library? Or would you rather stay and listen to them?”

She moved her head towards the glassed-in broadcasting room. Five or six Hawaiians wearing rather dirty leis were playing ukuleles, steel guitars, and a bull fiddle. The current tune was Blue Hawaii.

I said: “I think I can tear myself away from all this exotic glamor.”

She led me down a dark passageway to a door which she unlocked. She found the switch and turned on the lights in the record library. It was a high-ceilinged narrow room completely lined with shelves which were filled with records. She showed me the various sections: the classics, the semi-classics, the new popular hits, the stand-bys which never grow old, the transcribed programs from the big American chains, and a set of big discs on which complete Armed Services programs were recorded.

I saw a record I knew, took it off the shelf and handed it to her. “Play this.”

She put the record on a turntable. It was Fats Waller’s Ain’t Misbehavin’, the organ version. We stood together and listened to the lilting melancholy music which Waller had squeezed out of an organ in Paris years ago. I half-turned toward her, impelled by the powerful sexuality of the music. Perhaps she recognized my intention. She said in a brisk technical way:

“Any questions?”

When the record was finished, I said: “I did a little broadcasting when I was in college. They used to be pretty strict about timing our scripts. How do you time record programs?”

“It’s easy enough with the one-disc programs. They’re already timed when we get them. And some of the ninety-sixes and hundred-and-twelves are standardized.”

“Ninety-sixes?”

“Ninety-six turns to a record. They go around ninety-six times. The ones that are specially made for broadcasting are standardized so that you can measure the time right on the record. They send us a little ruler with them, laid out in units of time instead of inches.”

“That means that the speed of the turntable must be standardized too.”

“That’s right. But the ordinary platters which Sue and I mostly use aren’t standardized. The grooving may even vary from one side to the other, depending on the kind of music.”

“I don’t get it.”

“Whether the music is high or low. It’d take too long to explain. You can always time a record by playing it ahead of time, of course. But often we just trust to luck. If we have to fill in at the end we can always let the theme-song run through twice instead of once. It isn’t as if we were on a national hookup.”

She glanced at an electric clock in a corner of the room. It was ten minutes after nine. “I’ve got to leave you now.”

“Can I help you carry the records, or anything?”

“Oh, no thanks. They’re already in by the mike. We’ve got a boy, a little Chinese, who takes them in in a cart.”

She turned out the lights, locked the door, and left me at the entrance to the soundproof room. I listened to the broadcast through the loudspeaker in the audience room. Her voice was deep for a woman, and steady, the only kind of female speaking voice that sounds well over the air. She went in for quietly kidding her audience, more by inflecting her voice than by what she said.

I gathered that she had fan-mail. Most of the records she played were requests. I began to compose a fan-letter to her in my head. Though her low voice flooded the room when she spoke, vibrating in every corner, she seemed very remote behind the plate-glass partition. Very remote and desirable. Before I had put into the letter all the things I wanted to say, the broadcast was over.

“All set to go back?” I said when she rejoined me. “It’s only half an hour till curfew.”

“I have a curfew pass, on account of the midnight broadcasts. I don’t want to go home till I make sure Sue is all right.”

“She’ll be all right. I may have to carry Eric up the gangplank, though.”

When we got back to Honolulu House the party was at its climax. One of the officers had joined the orchestra and was tearing off hot licks on a clarinet as high as a kite. A fat jiggling woman was dancing in the middle of the floor, snapping her fingers and letting out periodic squeals. A weaving ring of men and women, which included Halford and Mrs. Merriwell, was dancing around and around her. Two or three indefatigable couples were jitterbugging at their own end of the room, leaping and whirling in mad silent ecstasy. Other couples were leaving.

We found Eric lying stone cold, but snoring passionately, on a settee in the dining-room. The big Negro steward whom he had called Hector Land was hovering over him as if he thought something should be done but didn’t know what.

“Just leave him for now,” I said. “If he doesn’t come out of it in the next few minutes I’ll take him back to the ship.”

“Yessir. I just wanted to ask him if we could get any more ice. We’re all out of ice.”

“It doesn’t make any difference now, anyway. Have you seen Miss Sholto? The young lady who was with Mr. Swann at supper?”

“No, sir. I haven’t seen her all night. Maybe she’s out in the garden.”

“Shall we try the garden?” Mary said.

We went out the back door and stood on the verandah for a minute, letting our eyes get used to the darkness. I put my hand on her waist but she turned away out of my grasp.

“Don’t be premature,” she said seriously. “I came to this party to drink and dance, not to be made love to.”

“Premature is a good word. There’s a future in it.”

“Is there? You talk ahead of yourself. I like the way you talk, though.”

“Words used to be my business.”

“That’s the trouble. I don’t know whether there’s much connection between what you say and what you are. A lot of servicemen away from home have lost track of themselves. God, am I talking like a Sunday School teacher?”

“Go right ahead. A woman’s softening influence is just what I need.”

“It’s true of all of us, I guess. Not just servicemen. There aren’t many people I know that haven’t lost track of themselves.”

It was queer to be talked at that way by a blonde I was trying to make, but what she said struck home. Ever since I left Detroit I had felt dislocated, and after my ship went down it was worse. Sometimes I felt that all of us were adrift on a starless night, singing in the dark, full of fears and laughing them off with laughter which didn’t fool anyone.

On this side of the house the verandah was roofless. I looked up at the night sky hanging huge over the mountains. The somber clouds on the peaks parted for a moment and let the moon sail through, trailing a single bright star like a target sleeve.

“I think that’s what must have happened to Eric and Sue,” I said. “They thought it didn’t matter, and it turned into very bad medicine for both of them.”

“I wonder if she’ll ever be happy again,” Mary said.

I wasn’t listening. Something against the wall of the house had caught my eye, and I looked up and found Sue Sholto in the moonlight. Her head was cocked birdlike on one side as if she was waiting for the answer to a question, and her tongue protruded roguishly. Under her dangling feet were three yards of empty air. Her whole slight weight was supported by a yellow rope knotted under her ear. Her eyes were larger and blacker than they had been in life.

2

THE clouds came together again, blotting out the moon, like shadowy giants huddled in a conference of evil. But not before Mary had followed my look and seen what I saw.

“She’s killed herself,” she said in a high unnatural voice. “I was afraid something had happened to her.” She beat her clenched fists together with a dull futile sound. “I should have stayed with her.”

“Do you know what room that is? Nobody could reach her from here.” I gestured upward and my hand flew higher than I intended, out of my control. We looked up again. With the moon gone Sue Sholto was an obscure shadow hanging over us. Only her feet were visible in the light from below, stirring almost imperceptibly with the twist in the hemp. There was a hole in the toe of one of her stockings, and I could see the red polish shining on a toenail.

“I think it’s the ladies’ room, but I can’t be sure. It looks out the back.”

“Stay downstairs with the people,” I said. “I’ll go up.”

I found Lieutenant Savo, the ship’s doctor, on the dance floor. When I told him what I had seen his Vandyke wobbled once and set firmly. He was up the stairs ahead of me.

The ladies’ room was actually three rooms with interconnecting doors: a well-lighted dressing-room with mirrors and a dressing table, a washroom on one side of it, and on the other a dark little room containing nothing more than a few armchairs and a couch. Dr. Savo had attended a girl at a previous party in this room, and he explained that it was used only in case of sickness or alcoholic coma.

I found the light switch and saw that the room had been used for something else. The couch, wide, lumpy and chintz-covered, was jammed against the wall under the sill of the single window. Tied around its bowed walnut legs was the other end of the yellow rope which supported Sue Sholto. We drew her up through the open window and found that she was easy to lift. But in the harsh light cast by the obsolete ceiling chandelier she was not easy to look at. The noose under her ear was clumsily knotted but it had served its purpose. There was nothing left in her face which Eric Swann could have loved.

I went into the next room to get a towel to hide it. Mary was standing in the hall doorway, very pale and tall. “She’s dead, isn’t she?”

“Yes. Don’t come in.”

There were footsteps in the hall, and Eric appeared at her shoulder. His flesh was the color of a dead man’s and his eyes were set as if he had forgotten to blink them.

“Something’s happened to Sue,” he said.

Mary moved out of his way and he pushed me aside without knowing it. It would have been a thankless job to fight him for the sake of saving him nightmares. He said to the dead woman: “Darling, you shouldn’t have done it. I’d have done anything.”

Then he lay down on the floor beside her and hid his face in her hair, which flourished on the dusty rug like a black forest. A man’s dry crying is a poor imitation of a woman’s melodious weeping, but it is more terrible in its effect. His retching sobs opened another trapdoor in the bottom cellar of pity and horror. I shut the door on him so Mary wouldn’t see.

“Where did she get the rope?” I asked.

“There’s one in every upstairs room. Look.” She pointed to a hook beside the dressing-room windows where another yellow rope hung in a coil. I had an instinctive desire to take it away and burn it.

“What in God’s name do they leave things like that around for?”

“It’s a fire escape, the only one they have.”

“And I suppose they serve you hemlock with your dinner, just in case you want to take a sip or two between courses in the Socratic manner.”

“Don’t talk so much and for God’s sake don’t try to be funny,” Mary said wearily. “You hardly knew Sue, but I did.” Her neck drooped like a wilting flower’s stalk, and there was nothing I could do for her at all.

A petty officer wearing a black and yellow Shore Patrol armband came into the room with four or five people at his heels. Their faces were blankly eager. I thought of a pack of necrophagous jackals. Mrs. Merriwell was one of them, and the Eurasian manager, tense and stammering, was another.

The SP man, who was young and worried-looking, said: “My name’s Baker, sir. I understand there’s been a very bad accident.”

“Come into the next room. The value of publicity is sometimes over-estimated–”

“Accident nothing,” Mrs. Merriwell bayed. “I don’t believe it was suicide. That awful nigger was up in that very room. I saw him in the hallway coming out.”

“When was this?” Baker said. “And who are you talking about, Madam?”

“That horrible black steward, the one with the crumpled ears. He’d have frightened me out of my wits up here if I didn’t know how to handle niggers. I believe he raped that girl and hanged her to cover up.”

Baker looked at me and then at the door to the inner room. I nodded, and he opened the door wide enough to slip through. The door opened again a moment later and Eric came out awkwardly as if propelled from behind. He looked at the little crowd in the doorway like an amateur actor facing his first audience. I told them that if they had to wait it would have to be in the hall. Mary got up and moved out with them.

“What right have you, young man?” said Mrs. Merriwell. I shut the door in her face.

Eric sat down in front of the dressing table on a stool covered with cheap yellow lace. He examined his face in the mirror with profound intensity, as if he was seeing it for the first time. Grief has curious gestures, and this was one of them. His face didn’t please him, and he turned away.

“I don’t look so good,” he said tonelessly.

“No.”

“Why do you suppose she did it, Sam?”

“I don’t know, I hardly knew her.”

“Could she have killed herself because she loved me? I mean because I couldn’t marry her?”

“She could have. But if that’s true don’t ever let yourself be proud of it.”

“You’re pretty brass-tacks tonight,” Eric said, with a thin wire of self-pity running through his tone.

“I found her. If you helped to put her where I found her, I’ve got a grudge against you. If you didn’t, I’m sorry for you. I’m sorry for you anyway.”

“I’ll be all right tomorrow,” he said. But he said it as if he knew that certain kinds of pictures fade slowly even in sunlight.

Dr. Savo came out of the inner room with Baker, the petty officer, who looked a year or two older.

“There’s no sign of assault,” the doctor said. “There are a couple of bruises on her back, but she must have got them climbing out of the window, or swinging against the wall when she dropped. It’s funny nobody saw her or heard her. They usually go into pretty violent convulsions.”

“Thank you, sir,” Baker said. “I’ll have to call the civilian police, and I guess they’ll be holding an inquest on the body. I never had anything like this come up before. I’ve seen a couple of guys knocked out, but–”

“Forget it if you can,” Savo said. “That’s one thing I learned in medical school.”

There was a loud bickering noise in the hall, of several voices raised in argument. I opened the door and saw the Negro, Land, standing in the hallway surrounded by Mrs. Merriwell and her little group. He was directly under a ceiling light, and I had my first good look at him.

His ears were convoluted and frayed like black rosebuds after a hailstorm. His nose was broad and saddled, his eyes bright black slits between pads of dead tissue. It was an old boxer’s head, powerful and scarred as if it had once been used as a battering ram, set forward on a columnar neck as if it was ready to be used again. But there was no power in the posture of his body. His shoulders drooped forward and his belly heaved with his breathing. His wide hands were half-curled and turned to the light, which shone on the polished dark-pink palms. He looked like a frightened bear caught in a dog-pack.

“I didn’t have anything to do with it,” he was saying. “I didn’t even know she was up here. I swear to God I didn’t.”

“What were you doing up here?” said an aging lieutenant whose face drooped like a hound’s.

“I wasn’t up here, boss – sir. I never set eyes on the young lady.”

“I saw you,” Mrs. Merriwell said, apparently not for the first time. “I saw you coming out of that door. He killed her,” she said to the others, “I know he did. You can see that he’s guilty just to look at him.”

Land glanced at the ceiling, the whites of his eyes glaring.

His eyes shifted right and left, and stopped on me and Eric Swann standing in the doorway. His white steward’s coat was turning dark with sweat. He must have given himself up for lost, for he said to Eric:

“I was up here, Mr. Swann, I admit that–”

“You see?” said Mrs. Merriwell. “He admits it.” She looked at Eric triumphantly as if to say: You needed a lesson in race relations, my little man, and now, by God, you’re getting it. “Officer,” she said to Baker, “I demand that you arrest this man.”

“What were you doing up here?” Eric said.

“I was looking for a drink. I know I did wrong, but that’s all I was doing, looking for a drink.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I was looking for somebody’s bottle to take a drink out of. Sometimes some of the young ladies leave their bottles up here, and that’s what I was looking for. I didn’t find any, and then I heard somebody coming. I didn’t see Miss Sholto at all.”

“Come in here, Land,” Dr. Savo said from the room behind me. “I can settle one point anyway. I’ll ask the rest of you to leave the room, eh?”

“I wouldn’t stay alone with him, sir,” the manager said. “We wouldn’t want anything else to happen.”

“You wouldn’t, eh?” Savo said as he shut the door of the dressing-room.

Mary was standing behind Mrs. Merriwell, looking tired and wan. I moved to her side.

“That’s a ridiculous story,” Mrs. Merriwell was saying. “Looking for a bottle!”

“Sue had a bottle in there,” Mary said, and bit her lip as if she regretted saying it. More carrion for the jackals, I thought.

“Perhaps she did,” Mrs. Merriwell said. “Perhaps she invited the boy in there with her. You never can tell what a nigger-lover will do.”

Nor what Mrs. Merriwell will say, I thought. Eric looked at her with something like incredulity, but said nothing. Mary took hold of my arm, her fingers clenching painfully, and leaned her weight on me. For the first time in my life I began to see clearly what Dante saw, that hell is largely composed of conversations.

Dr. Savo opened the door and said briskly to Mrs. Merriwell: “What you suggest is out of the question. Shall I give you the physiological details?”

“Certainly not,” said Mrs. Merriwell. She lifted her nose and tremulously sniffed the air. “But I think some disciplinary action is called for. At best, he came up here to steal.”

“He’ll be taken care of,” Eric said. “Don’t worry.”

Mary’s grip on my arm had relaxed, but she said: “I’m very tired. Do you think I can get home now?”

“I imagine we’ll have to wait for the civilian police. After all, we were the ones.”

“That found her, you mean?”

“It’s after curfew, anyway. Before we can get back to Pearl we’ll have to get a pass.”

“You’ll be able to get it through the police.”

“It’s queer they haven’t come yet.”

I looked around for Baker but he had disappeared. Nearly everyone had left the second floor. But Hector Land was still in the dressing-room when I looked in. He was sitting incongruously on the little yellow stool with his knees spread and his arms hanging straight down between them. In his face only his eyes seemed alive, but they were bright and moving.

Eric was standing in front of the door to the inner room, staring at Land without seeing him. He was staring harder with eyes at the back of his head which could look through doors. Dr. Savo was watching him.

“You should go back to the ship and get some sleep,” he said to Eric. “You took an awful beating from the bottle before this happened.” Eric didn’t seem to hear him.

“What happened to Baker?” I said. “Did he go to call the police?”

“Right. They should be here now.”

Mary sat down in an armchair by the window, and I leaned on the arm between her and the coiled rope. She let her head rest against the back of the chair, and her full white throat looked very vulnerable. Nothing was said for what seemed a long time. Perhaps it was only four or five minutes, but the minutes had to chisel their way through stone.

Finally I heard the irregular rhythm of several pairs of feet on the stairs and in the hall. Baker came into the room with a native police sergeant in olive drab, and a man in grey civilian clothes and a panama hat. He introduced the civilian as Detective Cram.

Cram took off his hat quickly and jerkily. He was a thin middle-sized, middle-aged man with a hair-trigger smile and frown. They alternated on his face but scarcely changed his expression of cynical curiosity. His mouth was thin, wide and knowing like a shark’s. In a blue polka-dotted bow-tie and a striped silk shirt he looked a little too dapper to be quite real.

“O.K.,” he said. “There’s been an accident. Show it to me.”

Savo took him into the inner room. When he came out there was no change in his face or voice.

“You were the one that found it, eh?” He pointed an eye at me. I said yes.

“Tell me about it.” I told him about it.

“So the young lady was with you on the back porch. O.K., I won’t ask what you were doing there.”

“We were looking for Sue,” Mary said stiffly.

“Friend of yours?”

“Yes. We worked in the same place.”

“You worked at the station with her, eh? Any suggestions as to why she committed suicide?”

“I didn’t know her that well. She didn’t say anything to me.”

“Maybe she wouldn’t have to say anything to you?”

“I don’t know,” Mary said.

“Who was with her?” He jerked a thumb towards the door behind him. His eyes picked out Eric. “You?”

“Yes.”

“Quarrel?”

“Yes.”

“How long had you known her?”

“A year, I guess.”

“Pretty well, eh?”

Eric’s grief had carried him beyond reticence. For the time being he was shocked into candor, almost a childish naïveté. “We were in love with each other,” he said.

“For Christ’s sake, then,” Cram said tonelessly, “why didn’t you get married? She’s no good to anybody now.”

“I am married.”

“I see. Congratulations. And the next thing you’ll ask me is can’t I hush this whole god-damn mess up for you.”

“I haven’t asked you anything,” Eric said. “But now I’ll ask you to go to hell.”

“Sure sure. Cooperation is all I get. Who’s this?” He looked at Land, who was still sitting by himself watching the rest of the room as if he expected it to close in on him suddenly without warning.

“Hector Land, sir. I’m a steward on Mr. Swann’s ship.”

“You own it, eh?” Cram said to Eric. “What’s he here for?”

“He came here to serve at the party.”

“Some woman accused him of murdering the girl,” Savo put in. “Raping her and murdering her. He didn’t.”

“How do you know?”

“I’m a doctor.”

“And I’m a cop, but I don’t know a god-damn thing. How do you know?”

“I examined both of them.” Savo glanced at Mary.

“I get it. Are those her shoes in there?”

“I could tell you,” Mary said.

“Go and get them,” Cram said to the sergeant. “They’re at the end of the couch under the window.”

They were black pumps, about size 4. Mary looked at them and said they were Sue’s.

“They were off when you found her, eh?”

“Yes,” I said. “She was in her stocking feet.”

“I guess she took them off to climb out of the window,” Cram said. “Well, I’ll see you all at the inquest.”

“When will that be?” I said.

“Tomorrow, if I can light a fire under a couple of comics downtown. Why?”

“I’m awaiting transportation to the mainland. I may get it tomorrow. Is there any chance of my signing a statement if the inquest isn’t held in time?”

“Can’t wait, eh? How the hell do I know? Everybody pushes me around. Craziest thing I ever did in my life was take off my army uniform.”

“You were in the army, eh?” I said. “Is that why you don’t like the navy?”

“I don’t like the army either. I was in the last war. You know, the easy war.”

“What you need is sleep, Inspector. Why don’t you go home and take it?”

“Can’t sleep. You’re a doctor,” he said to Savo. “What should I do if I can’t sleep?”

“Drink whiskey,” Savo said. “You wouldn’t be so nervous if you got drunk every few days.”

“I can’t get drunk, either. On the jump all the god-damn time. Anyway, at twenty-five dollars a bottle what would I be doing with whiskey on my salary?”

“Would you mind jumping somewhere and getting us curfew passes?” I said. “Or have you got one in your marsupial pouch?”

“A kangaroo, get it, sergeant?” Cram said.

“No, sir.”

“Let it pass. I can drive you out to the Navy Yard, I guess. After that you’re on your own.”

“What about Miss Thompson?”

“Live in town?”

“Yes,” Mary said. “Quite near here.”

“We’ll drop you.” He said to the sergeant, “You stay here. They’ll probably come for her soon.”

When we went downstairs there was nothing left of the party but overflowing ashtrays, empty and half-empty glasses which hung a sour smell in the air, chairs grouped here and there still in the attitudes of intimacy, emptiness and silence where there had been crowds, music and laughter. Everyone had gone home but Gene Halford, who was standing in the hall talking to the manager.

“I’m sorry to hear about this,” Halford said to me.

“We all are. Where are you spending the night?”

“I’ve been assigned to a BOQ out at the yard, but I haven’t figured out how I’m going to get there. I didn’t go on the bus because I thought I should wait for you.” Curiosity, excitement and pity mingled incongruously in his murky green eyes.

“What the hell, come with us,” Cram said viciously. “The wagon holds seven, and I’ll make everything right by joining the Drivers’ Association in the morning. My name’s Cram. Detective Cram.”

“Halford’s my name. Are you investigating this murder?”

“I wouldn’t know.”

“You’re a lucky man, Mr. Cram, to be able to feel so casual about things.”

“I mean I don’t know whether it’s a murder,” Cram snapped. “Do you?”

“When women commit suicide they don’t usually hang themselves,” Halford said dogmatically. “Unless of course they have a reason for wanting to look ugly after they die.” His eyes in quick malice flicked toward and away from Eric’s face. “Love isn’t stronger than death, but vanity is.”

Eric was too remote to be hurt, and didn’t hear him. His pale eyes were set like stones, mesmerized by the ruined body which he had seen on the floor, blinded to everything else by grief and shame.

“Hold your tongue,” I said to Halford, “or I’ll run a ring through it.”

His laughter was quite jolly and extremely hideous.

3

I WOKE UP and looked at my wristwatch, which said five o’clock. For a moment I lay tense and empty, waiting for the General Quarters bell to sound. Then I realized, but without relaxing, that I was in the upper bunk in Eric’s stateroom on a ship in Pearl Harbor, where no enemy would strike again for a very long time. But I did not relax. There are things more terrible to the imagination than Kamikaze planes, and my imagination had lain prostrate among those things all night.

I noticed that a light was burning in the cabin, and rolled over to the edge of the berth and looked down. Eric was sitting in the steel chair in front of the steel desk, his feet wide apart on the steel deck. He hadn’t undressed, and his sloping back looked immobile and infinitely tired, as if he had been sitting there all night.

But his voice was quite natural when he turned at the sound of my movement. “Go back to sleep, Sam, it’s pretty early. Does this light bother you?”

“No, but the idea of you sitting there bothers me. Why don’t you hit the sack?”

“I tried to but I couldn’t sleep.” He stood up and lit a cigarette quickly and steadily. His movements had the febrile vitality of confirmed and accepted insomnia. Watching him I had the feeling that sleep was a daily miracle, the fulfillment of a kind of faith given to idiots, children, and the blissfully drunk. And I knew that I couldn’t sleep any more either.

“Cuchulain the Hound of Ulster,” I said, “when tired out by wounds and battle, didn’t go and take a rest like ordinary people. He went off some place and exercised to beat the band.”

“Was it good for him?” Eric said. A smile shone strangely on his pale face.

“Eventually he went nuts.” I swung my legs over the edge of the berth and jumped down. Eric kicked the other chair in my direction and handed me a cigarette.

“If you’re concerned about me, you needn’t be,” he said. “I’m too goddamn selfish and practical to go nuts, or even be slightly indiscreet.”

“It strikes me you’ve achieved indiscretion at least. But if you think I battled my way out of the arms of Morpheus to discuss your personality, you’re wrong. I’d much rather tell you more about Cuchulain. Stevie Smith has a good verse about him–”

“Don’t digress. I was thinking about what happened to Sue.”

“All right,” I said. “We’ll talk about Sue Sholto. Then maybe in a couple of days or a couple of weeks we can get around to talking about your wife.”

“My wife has nothing to do with this,” he said monotonously, like a man repeating an incantation. “I hope to God she never hears of it.”

“She will, though. You’ll tell her yourself, Eric. You’re the kind of a guy who’ll go to her for comfort, and she’s the kind of a woman who’ll give it to you. That’s why you married her, and that’s why you’ll never leave her.”

“Won’t I?” He smiled mirthlessly. “If I had known Sue would do what she did–”

“So you’ve got it all figured out. She killed herself because she couldn’t have you. There may be a good deal of vanity behind your theory, you know. You’ve got a strong feeling of guilt about the affair, and your rationalization of the guilt leads you to the conclusion that Sue killed herself for you. You feel guilty, therefore you are.”

“I appreciate your intentions. They’re good enough to pave hell with. But you can’t change facts with words.”

“What facts? You don’t know that Sue committed suicide. She may have been murdered. Halford thinks she was.”

“Murdered? Who would want to murder Sue?”

“I don’t know. Detective Cram doesn’t know. Do you?”

“It’s an incredible idea.” He had nerved himself to live with the idea of her suicide, but the suggestion of murder attacked him from an unexpected quarter, struck him in a new and vulnerable place.

“Murder is always incredible,” I said. “That’s why it’s a crime and punishable with death. But it happens. Maybe it happened last night.”

“You’re not taken in by that story about Hector Land, are you? That was evil nonsense. Land’s a queer duck, but sexual crime isn’t in his line at all.”

“The crime wasn’t sexual. Savo proved that. A queer duck in what way?”

“I don’t know much about him actually. I intend to find out more. But he’s been insubordinate on one or two occasions, been up for Captain’s Mast and gotten extra duty, and so on. From some things he’s said, I suspect he’s pretty strong on racial feeling. Nothing revolutionary or subversive, I don’t suppose, but he’s not a very soothing influence on the other stewards. I have an idea, too, that he’s one of the leading spirits behind the gambling pools that the black boys have–”

“Not just the black boys. I haven’t met a Navy man yet that didn’t gamble. Or an Army man, or a Marine.”

“I know, but you have to watch it, or it gets too big. There are a lot of things you have to watch, even if you can’t hope to enforce Navy Regs to the letter. Navy Regs says no gambling on USN ships, which we interpret to mean not too much gambling, and in the proper places at the proper times. I’m going to check up on everything Hector Land has done since he came aboard this ship.”

There was the slap-slap of slippers in the passage, and a shadow moved across the grey fireproof curtain which hung in the hatchway. Water gurgled in the scuttlebutt outside, and then the curtain was thrust aside to admit a tousled sandy head and a naked tanned shoulder. The head had a square face and small humorous eyes.

“Hello, Eric,” the head said in a Texas drawl, wiping its wet mouth with the hairy back of a hand. “Get up early to nurse your hangover?”

“Walked the floor with it all night. You haven’t met Will, have you, Sam? He’s our Communications Officer. Ensign Drake, Lieutenant Wolson.”

“Glad to know you, Drake. Communications Officer, Chief Censor, Public Relations Officer, general handyman, and convenient scapegoat. And the rest of the wardroom bitches like hell because I don’t stand deck watches in my spare time. I didn’t even get to the party last night – the Captain wanted to get off a message. Now he wants to get off another message, not that it couldn’t wait until we get to Diego–”

“It’s definite, then, is it?” Eric said. “We’re going to have our availability in San Diego?”

“It sure looks like it, but you never can tell in the Navy. Don’t spread it around, or a lot of people may be disappointed.”

“You didn’t miss much last night,” I said to Wolson. “The party started out with a bang but it ended up with a whimper.”

“I heard about that. It was tough on Eric. What’s the word on that deal? I heard you mention Hector Land before I looked in.”

“I’ve got to check up on him,” Eric said. “He was seen coming out of the room where – where the thing happened. I was convinced it was suicide, but now I’m not so sure.”

“You knew the girl, didn’t you?” Curiosity bubbled behind Wolson’s narrow impassive stare.

“She was a friend,” Eric said coldly.

On shipboard even more than on shore, you can’t afford to be too interested in the other fellow’s business or you risk making enemies. Wolson changed the subject:

“While you’re checking up on Land, you might ask him where he gets all the money he’s been sending home. He must have mailed his wife five hundred dollars in the last couple of months–”

“He did?” Eric stood up. “Have you got a record of that?”

“Naturally. We log all enclosures in the letters we censor, more to protect ourselves than anything else.”

“I’d like to see your book. It would take Land at least a year to save five hundred dollars out of his pay.”

“How about now? I’m going up to the Comm Office as soon as I get dressed.”

A few minutes later we followed Wolson up three ladders to the Communications Office, where he handed us his clothbound logbook. “You’ll have to pick out the entries yourself,” he said to Eric. “The Captain’s been calling for me again.”

Wolson hurried off to the Captain’s cabin, and Eric and I sat down with the book. He looked up the entries and I wrote them down in a column on a slip of paper. In twenty minutes we found the record of six enclosures in letters which Hector Land had sent to Mrs. Hector Land in Detroit. The entries, which were dated, extended over the last three months. Each was for approximately one hundred dollars, and the total was six hundred and twenty dollars.

“He didn’t save that out of his Navy pay,” Eric said. “He’s got another source of income.”

“Gambling?”

“Could be. He’d have to have a wonderful run of luck.”

“He could have won it all at once, in one glorious crapgame, and sent it home in installments to avoid suspicion.”

“That’s true. The dates correspond with the times we’ve been in port. We’ve been in and out of Pearl regularly for the last three months. We’ve been in for three or four days approximately every two weeks. Of course he had to send it off when we were in port, because you can’t mail letters at sea. I wonder where in hell he got his money.”

“Where’s Land now?”

“In his quarters, I suppose. He’s restricted to the ship until the next Captain’s Mast, and then he’ll probably get the brig.”

“For what?”

“He admitted himself that he went into that room to steal whiskey. Even if that’s the only thing he did, he’s in for it and he knows it.”

“I don’t suppose we’ll get anything out of him this morning,” I said. “Last night scared him stiff. But I think we should have a talk with him.”

“I think so too.”

We found Land in the wardroom helping another steward to set the tables for breakfast. He avoided looking at us and went on working as if we weren’t there. He worked quickly and intently as if he would willingly devote his whole life and all his faculties to the safe and homely task of unfolding tablecloths and arranging knives and forks and spoons.

When Eric called, “Land!” he straightened up and said, “Yessir,” still without looking at us. In the bright iron room his scarred black face and huge torso looked incongruous and lost, like a forest tree torn from its roots by a storm or a flood and lodged in an alien and fatal place.

“Come here and sit down,” Eric said. “I want to talk to you for a minute.”

He moved toward us quickly, and, after we had seated ourselves, sat down on the edge of a chair. “Yessir?”

“You’ve been sending a good deal of money home lately.”

“Not so much, sir. Just what I manage to save. My wife needs the money, sir.”

“No doubt she does. But that doesn’t explain where you’ve been getting it.”

“I saved it, sir. I hardly spend any money on myself at all. I send her all my pay, sir.”

“Where did you get six hundred and seventy dollars in the last three months? If you stall, I’ll know you’re lying.”

Land’s jaws moved convulsively, in labor with an answer, but no words came. Finally he said: “I made it, sir. I just made it.”

“How?”

“I made it gambling. I’m powerfully lucky with the dice, and I made that money gambling.”

“Who with?”

“Just with the boys. Anybody that wanted to play.”

“Men from this ship?”

“Yessir. Well, no, sir. Some of them was I guess. I don’t remember.”

“Think about it, and remember, Land. Because I’m going to check up on your story, and if you’re lying it’s going to be too bad for you. You’re in a pretty bad position as it is, and this gambling deal isn’t going to help.”

“Yessir,” Land said, the muscles of his face tense with repressed fear. “I made the money gambling. That’s the truth, and that’s why I’m telling you. I’m a lucky man at craps–”

“That’s what you said. Go out in the galley and see if there’s any chow for us. It’s nearly time for breakfast.”

Land rose as if a spring had been released under him, and almost ran into the galley.

“Do you think he’s telling the truth?”

“How should I know?” Eric said a little snappily. “A black never tells the truth to a white if he can think of anything better. He’s got too much to lose.”

A loudspeaker on the bulkhead began to rasp: “Lieutenant Swann please lay down to the quarterdeck for a telephone call. Telephone call on the quarterdeck for–”

“It’s probably the police,” Eric said wearily. “What was that detective’s name?”

“Cram.”

It was Detective Cram calling from Honolulu. He wanted to get formal statements from Eric and me, concerning the circumstances of Sue Sholto’s death and my discovery of the body.

“He wants to talk to you,” Eric said when he had told me this.

I took the receiver and said, “Drake speaking.”

“This is Cram. Can you come over to police headquarters this morning? I want to get your story straight.”

“Yes, but I have to report in at the Transport Office first. I may have to leave on pretty short notice.”

“Yeah, I know. We’re going to have the inquest this afternoon. You’ll have to be there, also Lieutenant Swann.”

“We’ll be there. Are there any new developments?”

“No, but the coroner has his doubts about it being a suicide. The trouble is, we’ve got no lead. Anybody could have done it, including the deceased. The whole thing’s wide open, and I don’t know how we’re going to get it closed. Do you?”

“No.”

“Well, we’ll talk about it when you come over to my office. Nine o’clock suit you?”

“Right.”

We talked about it for nearly two hours behind the Venetian blinds in Cram’s office, and got nowhere. Sue Sholto could have been killed by Land, by Eric, by me, by Gene Halford, by Mary Thompson, by Mrs. Merriwell, by Dr. Savo, by any one of a hundred people. No one who was at the party could account for his actions continuously, and there wasn’t even any reason for limiting the field of suspects to those who had attended the party. Honolulu House had been wide open to anyone all evening.

The stubborn fact that always stymied us, the blind alley where each new idea led, was that no one had any apparent reason for killing Sue. Eric and Mary were the only ones with whom Sue had had any personal relations, so far as we knew, and neither of them seemed an eligible suspect. I was not surprised that the upshot of the inquest, like the conclusion of our morning’s talk, was the verdict that Sue Sholto had died by her own hand.

During the inquest, which was repetitious, dull, and obscure, I watched Mary. She was the only object in the bare, sweltering room on which the eyes could rest without effort. She showed the effects of her friend’s death, of course; in the luminous pallor of her skin, the mournful directness of her gaze, the intense stillness of her hands when she gave her testimony. Once or twice her voice broke when she described Sue’s usual gaiety, contrasting with her sudden and unaccountable depression the night before.

“Yet I didn’t think it was a suicidal depression,” Mary said in answer to the Coroner’s question. “Sue was deeply emotional, passionate, but she never gave way to anything like – such black despair.” Her eyes grew dark with horror of the image that her imagination saw: a lithe body twisted and limp, a bright face become sodden and blue, a discontent with life so great that it preferred nothing. Mary had difficulty in speaking, and the Coroner excused her from the witness stand.

When the inquest was over Mary was the first to leave the room, walking quickly and blindly to the door. But when I made my way to the hall she was there waiting for me.

“I hoped I’d have a chance to talk to you before you left,” she said.

“I was going to call you if we didn’t. I go out tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow? That’s very soon.”

“Not too soon for me. Hawaii’s going to have a funny taste for me from now on.”

“For me too. I’m beginning to feel that nothing good can happen here. There’s something ominous and antihuman about those mountains, and the clouds, and the bright green sea, and a climate that’s too good all the time.”

“Something good can happen here.” I was impressed by her feelings but unwilling to be carried away by them. “If you’ll have dinner with me.”

“I’m afraid I’m not very cheerful company. But I’d like to.”

“I think we should try to forget the whole business for a while. What do you say to driving up to the north shore for a swim? I can get a jeep from the Transportation Center.”

“I’d have to go home and change, and get my swimming-suit.”

When I picked her up she had changed to white linen, and a bandana for her hair. Then we drove across the island. It was warmer inland, but the wind blew freshly in the open sides of the jeep and whipped the color into her cheeks. The air was suffused with light, the tender green of the young pineapple shoots was like a whispered promise in the fields, the palmtrunks rose straight towards the sun like a high song. But here and there along the road, more frequently as we went higher, there were ribs and boulders of volcanic rock, as if hell had thrust a shoulder through the earth.

By tacit agreement we avoided talking of Sue’s death. In fact we did very little talking at all, saving our breath for swimming and running. There was no reef to break the surf, and it came into the white beach high and strong, as hard to ride and as exciting as a mettlesome horse. Mary was like a porpoise in the waves. She forgot her earlier depression, and lived in her senses like a young animal.

When we were tired out we lay in the clean coarse sand, and she slept while I watched her. I watched her smooth shoulders, her honey-colored hair curled in the nape of her neck, her round arms, her long brown thighs, the delicate decline and fullness of her back and buttocks. I didn’t touch her or speak to her, but I memorized her body.

Only after night fell was there a recurrence of her unhappy mood. We were walking on the beach below the inn where we had eaten dinner. The evening breeze was beginning to blow in from the disappearing sea. The half-visible breakers, approaching and receding, kept up a muttering which rose and fell like a sad native chant.

“I’m cold,” Mary said. She shivered slightly against my arm. “And I’m afraid.”

“What you need is another drink. Or maybe two.”

“Ten would do the trick, I guess. But that would only postpone it until tomorrow.”

“Postpone what?”

“The way I feel. I feel awfully bleak and desolate, and frightened. I hate this island, Sam. I have a feeling that something terrible will happen if I stay here.”

“Something terrible has happened, but not to you. It’s a selfish way to look at it, but I’ve seen men die, and the pity and terror are always alleviated by the fact that it isn’t one’s self. The war develops scar tissue in everyone’s sensibilities.”

“Surely the war has nothing to do with this. Has it?”

“I was explaining my point of view. But I don’t know. Remember what Gene Halford said about enemy agents in these islands? It was about then that Sue’s mood changed, and soon after that she – she died. It’s barely possible, isn’t it, that there’s a connection?”

“Don’t say that, please. You’re frightening me more.” We were standing facing each other now, all by ourselves in a remote corner of the dim and deserted beach. I moved closer to look into her face. Her eyes were dark as the night sky, and her mouth was an anguished dark-red gash, tremulous and pitiable.

“Why are you afraid?” I said. “I don’t get it. Unless you had the same idea.”

“What idea?”

“The idea that Sue’s death was connected with the war. Did you?”

“No, not exactly. But we worked in the same place, and did the same things. If she was killed, whoever, or whatever, killed her may try to kill me too. I know I must sound childish, but I’m afraid.”

“That’s what you said before, but I don’t see any reason for it. Unless you know more about it than I do?”

“No, I don’t. I don’t. That’s what makes it so terrible. The whole thing has no reason to it.”

“All right, if you’re afraid, why don’t you leave the island? Go back to your folks in the States. Oahu gets some people down, and you seem to be one of them.”

“I am going,” she said softly and firmly. “I couldn’t go on in the station without Sue, anyway. I resigned this morning.”

“It’ll be a blow to the station to lose both of you at once.”

“Do you think I’m a welcher?”

“Hell,” I said. “People have to work out their own lives. If Oahu frightens you, obviously you have to leave it.”

Far down the shore to our left as we turned seaward there was the chatter and crash of guns. Mary moved against me and I put my arm around her shoulders, feeling the tiny vibration of the nerves throughout her body.

“It’s nothing,” I said. “They have anti-aircraft practice out here nearly every night.”

The tracers were rising into the sky like luminous juggler’s balls in gentle and terrific flight. The tempo of the guns increased, rising in a raucous crescendo. The long white gaze of searchlights began to scan the empty blackness, crossing and intertwining like desperate searching fingers.

Mary turned inwards to me as my other arm went around her waist. “Kiss me,” she said.

We stood interlocked, dizzy and warm, under the zebra-striped sky, until the sound of the guns and the beating of our hearts were a single clamor.