Such talk might have been easier before the war. Now Kenzo asked, “You’ve seen dead people, haven’t you?”

“Yes.” She nodded and shuddered. Few people on Oahu hadn’t, these days. “Even so, though. They deserve it.”

“I guess so.” Kenzo wondered how he’d got to talking about killing people with a pretty girl. That wasn’t what he’d had in mind when he called on Elsie.

A white-haired lady wearing a broad-brimmed straw hat against the sun walked slowly through the shabby park. She looked at Elsie and Kenzo, sniffed, and stuck her nose in the air as she walked on.

“Sour old biddy,” Elsie said.

“You know her?” Kenzo asked.

“I’ve seen her. She doesn’t live too far from us.” Elsie’s sniff was a nasty imitation of the old woman’s.

“The next thing she likes after the turn of the century will be the first.”

“Oh. One of those. There are lots of older Japanese people like that, too,” Kenzo said.

Elsie started to say something. He thought he could guess what it was: that even old Japanese in Hawaii could like the way the war had gone. He would have had a hard time disagreeing with her, too. But she didn’t say it. Instead, very quietly, she started to cry. “It wasn’t supposed to be like this,” she said. Kenzo wondered what she meant by it. Everything, probably. “It wasn’t!”

“I know,” he said. “Hey, I know.” He slipped an arm around her. She clung to him as if he were a life preserver and sobbed into the hollow of his shoulder. “Hey,” Kenzo repeated. “Hey.” It wasn’t really a word, just a noise to show he was there.

After a while, Elsie gulped a couple of times and raised her head. Her eyes were red. The tears had made her mascara run and scored lines through the powder and rouge on her cheeks. She stared at Kenzo from a distance of about six inches. “Oh, hell,” she said. It was, as far as he could remember, the first time he’d ever heard her swear. She went on, “I must look like a raccoon.”

He’d only seen pictures of raccoons, and he didn’t care about them one way or the other. “You always look good to me,” he said seriously.

It was easy enough to say. To say seriously… That was something else. She noticed, too-he could tell. Her eyes widened. Then, careless of smeared makeup and runny mascara, she let her eyelids fall.

“Ken…” she whispered.

He kissed her. They’d kissed before, but never like this. Her arms were still around him. Now she squeezed him, too. Her lips tasted of salt. That only made them seem sweeter to him. Somewhere up in a tree, a Chinese thrush was singing. For a moment, Kenzo thought it was his own heart.

The kiss went on and on. Elsie made a little noise, half a purr, half a growl, down deep in her throat. Kenzo opened his eyes. The old haole lady was gone. Nobody seemed to be in the park but the two of them. Emboldened, he squeezed her breast through the thin cotton of her sun dress. She made that noise again, louder this time. Her hand came down on his, not to pull it away but to press him to her.

He set his other hand on her knee, just below the hem of her dress. Her legs drifted apart. But when he started to slide up the warm smoothness of her inner thigh, she gasped and twisted away. “No,” she said.

“I mean, we shouldn’t.”

“Why not?” Kenzo panted. “Who’s gonna know?”

“Somebody might nine months from now,” Elsie said. Kenzo didn’t worry about nine months from now. He didn’t worry about nine minutes from now, except about his chances of getting her down on the long grass. But she shook her head. “No,” she repeated. “It wouldn’t be right, and you wouldn’t respect me afterwards.”

“Sure I would.” Kenzo heard the whine in his own voice. How many men had said the same thing to women over the years? Millions-it had to be millions. How many had meant it? Maybe a few. Do I? he wondered. He wasn’t sure.

Elsie must have seen as much on his face. Tartly, she said, “If that’s all you want, you can probably get it for a fish down on Hotel Street.”

Kenzo’s ears heated. “It’s not all I want,” he mumbled, though he couldn’t deny he did want it. If he’d tried, the bulge in his trousers would have given him away.

He saw her eyeing the bulge, which only made his ears hotter still. But she let him down easy, saying, “Okay, Ken. I believe you. You’re a good friend, too.”

Too? he wondered. What was that supposed to mean? Did she mostly care about him as a friend? Or, besides caring for him as a friend, did part of her want to lie down on the grass with him? There was a lot of difference between the two-all the difference in the world. And he couldn’t ask. If you had to ask, the answer was always the one you least wanted to hear.

There were ways to find out besides asking, though. He kissed her again, and she didn’t pull away. But the kiss, while sweet, didn’t feel like bombs going off inside his head. “I wish-” he said, and then stopped.

“What?” Elsie asked.

“I wish none of this stuff had happened, but we were going together anyhow,” Kenzo said.

“That would be pretty good,” Elsie agreed.

Kenzo wondered if her folks would have let her go out with him if the Japanese hadn’t occupied Hawaii. But he had to admit to himself that maybe he wasn’t being fair. Elsie’s mom and dad had never had any trouble about the two of them studying together. On the other hand, studying and dating were two different things.

Now he was the one who kissed her with something close to desperation. Elsie gave back what he needed. It wasn’t fire, or not quite. It was fun, but it was reassuring, too.

He looked at her. “You’re something, you know that?” he said, and then, “I’m glad we’re friends, too.”

Her face lit up. At least half by accident, he’d said the right thing. “You’re all right, Ken,” she told him.

“Am I?” he said. But, coming from her, he believed it. From anybody else, he wouldn’t have. He knew that. He grinned-grinned like a fool, probably. “This is an awful nice park, you know that?” he blurted. Elsie nodded, much more seriously than the foolish thought deserved. Then they looked at each other and both started to laugh.

MINORU GENDA HAD HAD A COT INSTALLED in his office, not far from Iolani Palace. Before he took it over, it had belonged to a U.S. Navy officer. In Japan, it would have been large and luxurious even for a man of flag rank. Genda believed the previous occupant was a USN lieutenant. That spoke volumes about the wealth each country enjoyed.

The cot was U.S. issue, and considerably more comfortable than anything the Japanese military used. Genda smiled to himself. Quite a few Japanese recruits had never slept in a bed with legs till they joined the Army or Navy. He’d come from a good family. He hadn’t had that embarrassment, anyway.

Thanks to the cot, and to food he had sent in, he didn’t have to go back to his quarters nearly so often as he would have otherwise. That meant he could use the time he would have spent going back and forth for work. If he woke up in the middle of the night-and he often did-he didn’t have to lie there uselessly staring up at the ceiling. He could turn on a lamp and attack the paperwork that never stopped piling up or pore over a map, wondering how the Americans would try to be difficult next.

At the moment, the Yankees were doing what they could with submarines. They seemed to have stolen an idea from the U-boats that harried shipping in the Atlantic. If they could cut Hawaii off from resupply from Japan, the islands would be much easier to take back.

They weren’t as good at the job as the Germans. They didn’t have enough boats to send out wolf packs, and their torpedoes left a lot to be desired. But they were doing what they could, and it was plenty to pinch if not to strangle. Sending a few of their subs to the bottom would work wonders for Japanese morale.

It would-if anyone could figure out how to do it. So far, the Navy hadn’t had much luck, and the Army was starting to grumble. Petty Officer Mizuki’s idea of sending H8Ks up the track of an escaping enemy sub had produced an attack, but no oil slick or wreckage on the surface the next morning. Either the enemy boat got away clean or the anxious pilot had attacked something that wasn’t there. The Americans usually talked too much about their losses, but they weren’t admitting they’d had any lately.