King Rat (12 page)

“I cover the rodents in the spring seminar,” Vexley said testily. “Disgusting beasts. Nothing about them to like. Nothing. Now you take the sulphur-bottom whale,” Vexley hastily launched off again. “Ah, now there’s the giant of all whales. Over a hundred feet long and it can weigh as much as a hundred and fifty tons. The biggest creature alive — that has ever lived — on earth. The most powerful animal in existence. And its mating habits,” Vexley added quickly, for he knew that a discussion of the sex life always kept the class awake.

“Its mating is marvelous. The male begin his titillation by blowing glorious clouds of spray. He pounds the water with his tail near the female, who waits with patient lust on the ocean’s surface. Then he will dive deep and soar up, out of the water, huge, vast, enormous, and crash back with thundering flukes, churning the water into foam, pounding at the surface.” He dropped his voice sensuously. “Then he slides up to the female and starts tickling her with his flippers…”

In spite of his anxiety about rats, even the King began to listen attentively.

“Then he will break off the seduction and dive again, leaving the female panting on the surface — leaving her perhaps for good.” Vexley made a dramatic pause. “But no. He doesn’t leave her. He disappears for perhaps an hour, into the depths of the ocean, gathering strength, and then he soars up once more and bursts clear of the water and falls like a clap of thunder in a monstrous cloud of spray. He whirls over and over on to his mate, hugging her tight with both flippers and has his mighty will of her to exhaustion.”

Vexley was exhausted, too, at the magnificence of the spectacle of mating giants. Ah, to be so lucky as to witness it, to be there, an insignificant human…

He rushed on: “Mating takes place about July, in warm waters. The baby weighs five tons at birth and is about thirty feet long.” His laugh was practiced. “Think of that.” There were polite smiles, and then Vexley came in with the clincher, always good for a deep chuckle. “And if you think of that and the size of the calf, just think about the whale’s jolly old John Thomas, what?” Again there were courteous smiles — the regular members had heard the story many times.

Vexley went on to describe how the calf is nursed for seven months by the mother, who supplies the calf with milk from two monstrous teats towards the ass end of her underside. “As you can no doubt imagine,” he said ecstatically, “prolonged suckling underwater has its problems.”

“Do rats suckle their young?” The King jumped in quickly.

“Yes,” the squadron leader said miserably. “Now about ambergris…”

The King sighed, beaten, and listened to Vexley expound about ambergris and sperm whales and toothed whales and white whales and goose-beaked whales and pygmy whales and beaked whales and narwhales and killer whales and humpback whales and bottle-nosed whales and whalebone whales and gray whales and right whales and finally bowhead whales. By this time all the class except Peter Marlowe and the King had left. When Vexley had finished, the King said simply:

“I want to know about rats.”

Vexley groaned. “Rats?”

“Have a cigarette,” said the King benignly.

“All right, you guys, sort yourselves out,” the King said. He waited until there was quiet in the hut and the lookout at the doorway was in position. “We got problems.”

“Grey?” asked Max.

“No. It’s about our farm.” The King turned to Peter Marlowe, who was sitting on the edge of a bed. “You tell ‘em, Peter.”

“Well,” began Peter Marlowe, “it seems that rats —“

“Tell ‘em it from the beginning.”

“All of it?”

“Sure. Spread the knowledge, then we can all figure angles.”

“All right. Well, we found Vexley. He told us, quote: ‘The Rattus norvegicus, or Norwegian rat - sometimes called the Mus decumanus—‘”

“What sort of talk is that?” Max asked.

“Latin, for Chrissake. Any fool knows that,” Tex said.

“You know Latin, Tex?” Max gaped at him.

“Hell no, but those crazy names’re always Latin —“

“For Chrissake, you guys,” the King said. “You want to know or don’t you?” Then he nodded for Peter Marlowe to continue.

“Well, anyway, Vexley described them in detail, hairy, no hair on the tail, weight up to four pounds, the usual is about two pounds in this part of the world. Rats mate promiscuously at any time —“

“What the hell does that mean?”

“The male’ll screw any female irrespective,” the King said impatiently, “and there ain’t no season.”

“Just like us, you mean?” Jones said agreeably.

“Yes. I suppose so,” said Peter Marlowe. “Anyway, the male rat will mate at any season and the female can have up to twelve litters per year, around twelve per litter, but perhaps as many as fourteen. The young are born blind and helpless twenty-two days after contact.” He picked the word delicately. “The young open their eyes after fourteen to seventeen days and become sexually mature in two months. They cease breeding at about two years and are old at three years.”

“Holy cow!”’ Max said delightedly in the awed silence. “We sure as hell’ve problems. Why, if the young’ll breed in two months, and we get twelve - say for round figures ten a litter - figure it for yourself. Say we get ten young on Day One. Another ten on Day Thirty. By Day Sixty the first five pair’ve bred, and we get fifty. Day Ninety we got another five pairs breeding and another fifty. Day One-twenty, we got two-fifty plus another fifty and another fifty and a new batch of two-fifty. For Chrissake, that makes six-fifty in five months. The next month we got near six thousand five hundred —“

“Jesus, we got us a gold mine!” Miller said, scratching furiously.

“The hell we have,” the King said. “Not without some figuring. Number one, we can’t put ‘em all together. They’re cannibals. That means we got to separate the males and females except when we’re mating them. Another thing they’ll fight among themselves, all the time. So that means separating males from males and females from females.”

“So we separate them. What’s so tough about that?”

“Nothing, Max,” said the King patiently. “But we got to have cages and get the thing organized. It isn’t going to be easy.”

“Hell,” Tex said. “We can build a stock of cages, no sweat in that.”

“You think, Tex, we can keep the farm quiet? While we’re building up the stock?”

“Don’t see why not!”

“Oh, another thing,” the King said. He was feeling pleased with the men and more than pleased with the scheme. It was a business after his own heart — nothing to do except wait. “They’ll eat anything, alive or dead. Anything. So we’ve no logistics problem.”

“But they’re filthy creatures and they’ll stink to the skies,” Byron Jones III said. “We’ve enough stench around here as it is without putting more under our own hut. And rats are also plague carriers!”

“Maybe that’s a special type of rat, like a special mosquito carries malaria,” Dino said hopefully, his dark eyes roving the men.

“Rats can carry plague, sure,” the King said, shrugging. “And they carry a lot of human diseases. But that don’t mean nothing. We got a fortune in the making and all you bastards do is figure negatives! It’s un-American!”

“Well, Jesus, this plague bit. How do we know if they’ll be clean or not?” Miller said queasily.

The King laughed. “We asked Vexley that an’ he said, quote, ‘You’d find out soon enough. You’d be dead.’ Unquote. Hell, it’s just like chickens. Keep ‘em clean and feed ‘em good and you got good stock! Nothing to worry about.”

So they talked about the farm, its dangers and its potentials - and they could all appreciate the potentials - provided they didn’t have to eat the produce - and they discussed the problems connected with such a large-scale operation. Then Kurt came into the hut and in his hands was a squirming blanket.

“I got another,” he said sourly.

“You have?”

“Sure I have. While you bastards’re talkin’ I’m out doin’. It’s a bitch.” Kurt spat on the floor.

“How do you know?”

“I looked. I seed enough rats in the Merchant Marine to know. An’ the other’s a male. An’ I looked too.”

They all climbed under the hut and watched Kurt put Eve into the trench. Immediately the two rats stuck together viciously, and the men were hard put not to cheer. The first litter was on its way. The men voted that Kurt was to be in charge and Kurt was happy.

That way he knew he would get his share. Sure he’d look after the rats. Food was food. Kurt knew he was going to survive if any bastard did.

Twenty-two days later Eve gave birth. In the next cage, Adam tore at the wire netting to get at the living food and almost got through, but Tex spotted the rent just in time. Eve suckled the young. There were Cain and Abel and Grey and Alliluha; Beulah and Mabel and Junt and Princess and Little Princess and Big Mabel and Big Junt and Big Beulah. Naming the males was easy. But none of the men wanted their girls’ names or their sisters’ or their mothers’ names attached to the females. Even mother-in-law names were some other man’s passion or relation of the past. It had taken them three days to agree on Beulah and Mabel.

When the young were fifteen days old, they were put into separate cages. The King, Peter Marlowe, Tex and Max gave Eve until noon to recover, then put her back with Adam. The second litter was launched.

“Peter,” the King said benignly as they climbed through the trapdoor into the hut, “our fortune’s made.”

The King had decided on the trapdoor because he knew that so many trips under the hut would excite curiosity. It was vital to the success of the farm that it should remain secret. Even Mac and Larkin knew nothing about it.

“Where’s everyone today?” Peter Marlowe asked, closing the trapdoor. Only Max was in the hut, lying on his bunk.

“Poor slobs got caught for a work party. Tex’s in hospital. The rest are out liberating.”

“Think I’ll go and liberate too. Give me something to think about.”

The King lowered his voice. “I got something for you to think about. Tomorrow night we’re going to the village.” Then he yelled to Max, “Hey Max, you know Prouty? The Aussie major? Up in Hut Eleven?”

“The old guy? Sure.”

“He’s not old. Can’t be more’n forty.”

“From where I’m at forty’s old as God. It’ll take me eighteen years to get that old.”

“You should be so lucky,” the King said. “Go see Prouty. Tell him I sent you.”

“And?”

“And nothing. Just go see him. And make sure Grey isn’t around - or any of his eyes.”

“On my way,” Max said reluctantly and left them alone.

Peter Marlowe was looking over the wire, seeking to the coast. “I was beginning to wonder if you’d changed your mind.”

“About taking you along?”

“Yes.”

“No need for you to worry, Peter.” The King got out the coffee and handed a mug to Peter Marlowe. “You want to have lunch with me?”

“I don’t know how the hell you do it,” Peter Marlowe grunted. “Everyone’s starving and you invite me to lunch.”

“I’m having some katchang idju.”

The King unlocked his black chest and took out the sack of little green beans and handed them to Peter Marlowe. “You like to fix them?”

As Peter Marlowe took them out to the tap to begin washing them, the King opened a can of bully and carefully eased the contents onto a plate.

Peter Marlowe came back with the beans. They were well washed and no husks floated in the clean water. Good, the King thought. Don’t have to tell Peter twice. And the aluminum container had exactly the right amount of water - six times the height of the beans.

He set it on the hot plate and added a large spoonful of sugar and two pinches of salt. Then he added half the can of bully. “Is it your birthday?” Peter Marlowe asked.

“Huh?”

“Katchang idju and bully, in one meal?”

“You just don’t live right.”

Peter Marlowe was tantalized by the aroma and the bubble of the stew. The last weeks had been rough. The discovery of the radio had hurt the camp. The Japanese Commandant had “regretfully” cut the camp’s rations due to “bad harvests,” so even the tiny desperation stocks of the units had gone. Miraculously, there had been no other repercussions. Except the cut in food.

In Peter Marlowe’s unit, the cut had hit Mac the worst. The cut and the uselessness of their water-bottled radio.

“Dammit,” Mac had sworn after weeks of trying to trace the trouble. “It’s nae use, laddies. Without taking the bleeding thing apart I canna do a thing. Everything seems correct. Without some tools an’ a battery of sorts, I canna find the fault.”

Then Larkin had somehow acquired a tiny battery and Mac had gathered his waning strength and gone back to testing, checking and rechecking. Yesterday, while he was testing, he had gasped and fainted, deep in a malarial coma. Peter Marlowe and Larkin had carried him up to the hospital and laid him on a bed. The doctor had said that it was just malaria, but with such a spleen, it could easily become very dangerous.

“What’s a matter, Peter?” the King asked, noticing his sudden gravity.

“Just thinking about Mac.”

“What about him?”

“We had to take him up to the hospital yesterday. He’s not so hot.”

“Malaria?”

“Mostly.”

“Huh?”

“Well, he’s got fever all right. But that’s not the main trouble. He goes through periods of terrible depression. Worry -about his wife and son.”

“All married guys’ve the same sweat.”

“Not quite like Mac,” Peter Marlowe said sadly. “You see, just before the Japs landed on Singapore, Mac put his wife and son on a ship in the last real convoy out. Then he and his unit took off for Java in a coastal junk. When he got to Java he heard the whole convoy had got shot out of the water or captured. No proof either way — only rumors. So he doesn’t know if they got through. Or if they’re dead. Or if they’re alive. And if they are — where they are. His son was just a baby — only four months old.”

“Well, now the kid’s three years and four months,” the King said confidently. “Rule Two: Don’t worry about nothing you can’t do nothing about.” He took a bottle of quinine out of his black box and counted out twenty tablets and gave them to Peter Marlowe. “Here. These’ll fix his malaria.”

“But what about you?”

“Got plenty. Think nothing of it.”

“I don’t understand why you’re so generous. You give us food and medicine. And what do we give you? Nothing. I don’t understand it.”

“You’re a friend.”

“Christ, I feel embarrassed accepting so much.”

“Hell with it. Here.” The King began spooning out the stew. Seven spoons for him and seven spoons for Peter Marlowe. There was about a quarter of the stew left in the mess can.

They ate the first three spoons quickly to allay the hunger, then finished the rest slowly, savoring its excellence.

“Want some more?” The King waited. How well do I know you, Peter? I know you could eat a ton more. But you won’t. Not if your life depended on it.

“No thanks. Full. To the brim.”

It’s good to know your friend, the King thought to himself. You’ve got to be careful. He took another spoonful. Not because he wanted it. He felt he had to or Peter Marlowe would be embarrassed. He ate it and put the rest aside.

“Fix me a smoke, will you?”

He tossed over the makings and turned away. He put the rest of the bully in the remains of the stew and mixed it up. Then he divided this into two mess kits and covered them and set them aside.

Peter Marlowe handed him the rolled cigarette.

“Make yourself one,” said the King.

“Thanks.”

“Jesus, Peter, don’t wait to be asked. Here, fill your box.”

He took the box out of Peter Marlowe’s hands and stuffed it full of the Three Kings tobacco.

“What’re you going to do about Three Kings? With Tex in hospital?” asked Peter Marlowe.

“Nothing.” The King exhaled. “That idea’s milked. The Aussies have found out the process and they’ve undercut us.”

“Oh, that’s too bad. How do you think they found out?”

The King smiled. “It was an in and out anyway.”

“I don’t understand.”

“In and out? You get in and out fast. A small investment for a quick profit. I was covered in the first two weeks.”

“But you said it would take you months to get back the money you put out.”

“That was a sales pitch. That was for outside consumption. A sales pitch is a gimmick. A way of making people believe something. People always want something for nothing. So you have to make ‘em believe they’re stealing from you, that you’re the sucker, that they — the buyers — are a helluva lot smarter than you. For example. Three Kings. The sales force, the first buyers, believed they were in my debt, they believed that if they worked hard for the first month, they could be my partners and coast forever after on my money. They thought I was a fool to give them such a break after the first month. But I knew that the process would leak and that the business wouldn’t last.”

“How did you know that?”

“Obvious. And I planned it that way. I leaked the process myself.”

“You what?”

“Sure. I traded the process for a little information.”

“Well, I can understand that. It was yours to do as you pleased. But what about all the people who were working, selling the tobacco?”

“What about them?”

“It seems that you sort of took advantage of them. You made them work for a month, more or less for nothing, and then pulled the rug from under them.”

“The hell I did. They made a few bucks out of it. They were playing me for a sucker and I just outsmarted them, that’s all. That’s business.” He lay back on the bed, amused at the naivete of Peter Marlowe.

Peter Marlowe frowned, trying to understand. “When anyone starts talking about business, I’m afraid I’m right out of my depth,” he said. “I feel such an idiot.”

“Listen. Before you’re very much older, you’ll be horse-trading with the best of them.” The King laughed.

“I doubt that.”

“You doing anything tonight? Oh, about an hour after dusk?”

“No, why?”

“Would you interpret for me?”

“Gladly. Who, a Malay?”

“A Korean.”

“Oh!” Then Peter Marlowe added, covering at once, “Certainly.”

The King had marked Peter Marlowe’s aversion but didn’t mind. A man’s a right to his opinions, he’d always said. And so long as those opinions didn’t conflict with his own purposes, well, that was all right too.

Max entered the hut and crumpled on his bunk. “Couldn’t find the son of a bitch for a goddam hour. Then I tracked him down in the vegetable patch. Jesus, with all that piss they use for fertilizer, that son-of-a-bitching place stinks like a Harlem brothel on a summer’s day.”

“You’re just the sort of bastard who’d use a Harlem brothel.”

The King’s snarl and the raw grate of his voice startled Peter Marlowe.

Max’s smile and fatigue vanished just as suddenly. “Jesus, I didn’t mean anything. It’s just a saying.”

“Then why pick on Harlem? You wanna say it stinks like a brothel, great. They all stink the same. No difference because one’s black and another’s white.” The King was hard and mean and the flesh on his face was tight and masklike.

“Take it easy. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean nothin’.”

Max had forgotten that the King was touchy about talking crossways about Negroes. Jesus, when you live in New York, you got Harlem with you, whichever way you look at it. And there are brothels there, an’ a piece of colored tail’s goddam good once in a while. All the same, he thought bitterly, I’m goddamned if I know why he’s so goddam touchy about nigs.

“I didn’t mean nothin’,” Max said again, trying hard to keep his eyes off the food. He had smelled it all the way up to the hut. “I tracked him down and told him what you said.”

“So?”

“He, er, gave me something for you,” Max said and looked at Peter Marlowe.

“Well, hand it over for Chrissake!”

Max waited patiently while the King looked at the watch closely, wound it up and held it close to his ear.

“What do you want, Max?”

“Nothin’. Er, you like me to wash up for you?”

“Yeah. Do that, then get to hell out of here.”

“Sure.”

Max collected the dirty dishes and meekly took them outside, telling himself by Jesus one day he’d get the King. Peter Marlowe said nothing. Strange, he thought. Strange and wild. The King’s got a temper. A temper is valuable but most times dangerous. If you go on a mission it’s important to know the value of your wing-man. On a hairy mission, like the village, perhaps, it’s wise to be sure who guards your back.

The King carefully unscrewed the back of the watch. It was a waterproof, stainless steel.

“Uh-huh!” the King said. “I thought so.”

“What?”

“It’s a phony. Look.”

Peter Marlowe examined the watch carefully. “It looks all right to me.”

“Sure it is. But it’s not what it’s supposed to be. An Omega. The case is good but the insides are old. Some bastard has substituted the guts.”

The King screwed the case back on, then tossed it up in his hand speculatively. “Y’see Peter. Just what I was telling you. You got to be careful. Now, say I sell this as an Omega and don’t know it’s a fake, then I could be in real trouble. But so long as I know in advance, then I can cover myself. You can’t be too careful.”

He smiled. “Let’s have another cup of Joe, business is looking up.”

His smile faded as Max returned with the cleaned mess cans and put them away. Max didn’t say anything, just nodded obsequiously and then went out again.

“Son of a bitch,” the King said.

Grey had not yet recovered from the day Yoshima had found the radio. As he walked up the broken path towards the supply hut he brooded about the new duties imposed on him by the Camp Commandant in front of Yoshima and later elaborated by Colonel Smedly-Taylor. Grey knew that although officially he was to carry out the new orders, actually he was to keep his eyes shut and do nothing. Mother of God, he thought, whatever I do, I’m wrong.

Grey felt a spasm building in his stomach. He stopped as it came and passed. It wasn’t dysentery, only diarrhea; and the slight fever on him wasn’t malaria, only a touch of dengue, a slighter but more insidious fever which came and went by whim. He was very hungry. He had no stocks of food, no last can and no money to buy any with. He had to subsist on rations with no extras, and the rations were not enough, not enough.

When I get out, he thought, I swear by God that I’ll never be hungry again. I’ll have a thousand eggs and a ton of meat and sugar and coffee and tea and fish. We’ll cook all day, Trina and I, and when we’re not cooking or eating we’ll be making love. Love? No, just making pain. Trina, that bitch, with her “I’m too tired” or “I’ve got a headache” or “For the love of God, what, again?” or “All right, I suppose I’ll have to” or “We can make love now, if you want to” or “Can’t you leave me in peace for once,” when it wasn’t so often and most times he had restrained himself and suffered, or the angry “Oh, all right,” and then the light would be snapped on and she would get out of bed and storm off to the bathroom to “get ready” and he would only see the glory of her body through the sheer fabric until the door had closed and then he would wait and wait and wait until the bathroom light was snapped off and she came back into their room. It always took an eternity for her to cross from the door to the bed and he saw only the pure beauty of her under the silk and felt only the cold in her eyes as she watched him and he could not meet her eyes and loathed himself. Then she would be beside him and soon it would be silently over and she would get up and go to the bathroom and clean herself as though his love was dirt, and the water would run and when she came back she would be freshly perfumed and he loathed himself afresh, unsatisfied, for taking her when she didn’t want to be taken. It had always been thus. In their six months of married life — twenty-one days of leave, being together — they had made pain nine times. And never once had he touched her.