The Corps I - Semper Fi Read online

  Except for a thick, perfectly trimmed mustache, Chatworth looked not unlike McCoy, but he spoke with the flat, nasal accent of Liverpool.

  "I thought I'd rather come here and take your money,"

  McCoy said.

  "Why not? Everybody else is," Detective Sergeant Chatworth said, grinning.

  The men at the table had nothing at all in common except that they met Piotr Muller's rigid standard of a decent poker player: Each could play the game well enough and each, at one time or another, had lost a good deal of money gracefully. PFC Kenneth McCoy was younger than any of them by at least a decade, and a quarter of a century younger than Muller. Neither he nor any of the others associated when they were not playing cards, nor were they friendly with any of the perhaps forty other more or less temporary residents of Shanghai who were welcome at Muller's table in the basement of the Cathay Mansions.

  There were no raised eyebrows when McCoy took off his blue blouse and revealed the Baby Fairbairn strapped to his arm. It was prudent, if technically illegal, to arm oneself when going out for a night on the town in Shanghai.

  McCoy hung his blouse on the back of his chair, unstrapped the knife and tucked it in a pocket of the blouse, then sat down and laid his gambling money on the table. Fifty dollars American that month had converted to just over four hundred yuan. He had before him four one-hundred-yuan notes, which were printed lavender and white in England and were each the size of a British five-pound banknote. He also had some change, including an American dollar bill.

  He made himself comfortable in the chair, and then watched as the hand in play was completed. When it was over, Muller nodded at him, and he reached for a fresh deck of cards, broke the seal, and went through them, finding and discarding the extra jokers. He then spread the cards out for the others to examine.

  Afterward, he gathered the cards together, shuffled, announced, "Straight poker," and dealt.

  Three hours later, there were twenty-odd lavender-and-white one-hundred-yuan notes in front of McCoy; the Sikh and the Foreign Legionnaire had gone bust; and it was between McCoy, Piotr Petrovich Muller, and Detective Sergeant Chatworth. A half hour after that, Muller examined the two cards he had drawn, threw his hand on the table, and pushed himself away from it.

  That left only McCoy and Detective Sergeant Chatworth.

  "I don't play two-handed poker," McCoy announced.

  "I'm willing to quit," Chatworth said, and tossed the just-collected deck into the wastebasket, where it joined a dozen other decks of cards.

  Stiff from three hours of little movement, McCoy stood up and stretched his arms over his head. He then strapped the Baby Fairbairn to his left arm, put his blouse on, and followed the others out of the storeroom.

  When he was back out on the street,. McCoy considered having his ashes hauled. It had been about a week, and it was time to take care of the urge. But he decided against it. For one thing, he had too much money with him. He hadn't counted it out to the last yuan, but he'd won a bunch-say at twelve dollars to the hundred-yuan note, a little better than $250. That was too much money to have in your pocket when visiting a whorehouse.

  Even if the Italian marines weren't on the warpath. The smart thing to do was go back to the billet. He put his hand up and flagged a rickshaw, and told the driver to take him down Ferry Road.

  Three blocks from the compound, he saw the Italian marines, hiding in an alley. There were four of them, in uniform. The uniforms were a mixture of army and navy-army breeches and navy middie blouses.

  I am minding my own business, McCoy told himself, and I am not carrying a bayonet, and I was not at the Little Club when this whole business started. With a little bit of luck, they will let me pass.

  They didn't say anything to him as the rickshaw pulled past the alley and there could no longer be any question that the rickshaw passenger was a Marine. So for a moment he thought they'd decided to wait for Marines who were looking for a

  fight.

  And then the rickshaw was turned over on its side. The rickshaw boy started to howl with fear and rage even before McCoy hit the ground, striking the elbow of his blouse on the filth of the street.

  McCoy sat up and looked around to see if there was someplace he could run. But the Italian marines had picked their spot well. There was no place to run to.

  Maybe I can talk to them, McCoy thought, tell them the fucking truth, I wasn't at the Little Club, I have no quarrel with them.

  Then he saw the Italian marine advancing on him with a length of bicycle chain swinging in his hand. McCoy felt a little faint, and then tasted something foul in the back of his mouth.

  "I don't know who you're looking for," he said in Italian. "But it isn't me."

  The Italian marine replied that his mother fucked pigs and that he was going to mash his balls.

  The bicycle chain missed McCoy's leg, but before it struck the pavement with a frightening whistle, it came close enough to catch his trouser's leg and leave the imprint of the chain there. McCoy quickly slid sideward, taking the Baby Fairbairn from his sleeve as he got to his feet.

  The Italian marine told him his sister sucked Greek cocks and that he was going to take the knife away and stick it up his ass.

  McCoy sensed, rather than saw, that two other Italian marines were making their way behind him.

  The idea was that the two would grab him and hold him while the other one used the bicycle chain. The thing to do was to get past the Italian marine with the bicycle chain.

  He made a feinting motion with the knife, and the Italian marine backed up.

  It looked like it might work. And there was nothing else to do.

  He made another feinting move, a savage leap accompanied by as ferocious a roar as he could muster, at the exact moment that the Italian marine lunged at where McCoy's Baby Fairbairn had been.

  The tip of the Baby Fairbairn punctured the Italian marine's chest at the lower extremity of the ribs. McCoy felt it grate over a bone, and then immediately sink to the handguard. The knife was snatched from his hand as the Italian marine continued his plunge.

  The man grunted, fell, dropped the bicycle chain, rolled over, sat up, and started to pull the Baby Fairbairn from his abdomen. He gave it a hearty tug and it came out. A moment later, a stream of bright red blood as thick as the handle of a baseball bat erupted from his mouth. The Italian marine looked puzzled for a moment, and then fell to one side.

  Jesus Christ, I killed him!

  One of the three remaining Italian marines crossed himself and ran away. The other two advanced on McCoy, one of them frantically trying to work the action of a tiny automatic pistol.

  I can't run from that!

  McCoy picked up the Baby Fairbairn and advanced on the two Italian marines.

  He made it to the one with the gun and started to try to take it away from him, or at least to knock it out of his hand. The other one tried to help his friend. McCoy lashed out with the Baby Fairbairn again. The blade slashed the Italian's face, but that didn't discourage him. He got his arms around McCoy's arms and held him in a bear hug.

  The other one managed to work the action of his tiny pistol.

  McCoy remembered hearing that a.22 or a.25 will kill you just as dead as a.45, it just takes a little longer-say a week-to do it.

  With a strength that surprised him, he got his right arm free and swung it backward at the man who had been holding him. He felt it cut and strike something, something not anywhere as hard as the ribcage, but something. And it went in far enough so that he couldn't hang on to it when the man fell down.

  Then, free, he jumped at the man with the pistol. The pistol went off with a sharp crack, and he felt something strike his leg hard, like a kick from a very hard boot. And then he knocked the pistol from the Italian marine's hand and, when it clattered onto the cobblestones, dived after it.

  He picked it up and aimed it at the Italian marine. Then he followed his eyes. What he had done when he had swung his knife hand backward was sti
ck it in the man's groin. The man was now holding his groin with both hands. The handle of the Baby Fairbairn was sticking out between his fingers. The man was whimpering, and tears were on his face.

  Down the street, McCoy could hear the growl of the hand-cranked siren at the compound.

  This is going to fuck up my promotion, he thought. Goddamn these Italians.

  (Two)

  Captain Edward J. Banning, USMC, was S-2, the staff Intelligence Officer, of the 4th Marines. He was thirty-six years old, tall, thin, and starting to bald. And he had been a Marine since his graduation from the Citadel, the Military College of South Carolina: a second lieutenant for three years, a first lieutenant for eight years, and he'd worn the twin silver railroad tracks of a captain for four years.

  There were four staff officers. The S-1 (Personnel) and S-4 (Supply) were majors. The S-3 (Plans and Training) was a lieutenant colonel. As a captain, Banning was the junior staff officer. But he was a staff officer, and as such normally excused from most of the duties assigned to non-staff officers.

  He took his turn, of course, as Officer of the Day, but that was about it. He was, for instance, never assigned as Inventory Officer to audit the accounts of the Officers' or NCO clubs or as Investigating Officer when there was an allegation of misbehavior involving the possibility of a court-martial of one of the enlisted men. Or any other detail of that sort. He was the S-2, and the colonel was very much aware that taking him from that duty to do something else did not make very good sense.

  So Banning had been surprised at first when he was summoned by the colonel and told that he would serve as Defense Counsel in the case of the United States of America versus PFC Kenneth J. McCoy, USMC. But he was a Marine officer, and when Marine officers are given an assignment, they say "aye, aye, sir" and set about doing what they have been ordered to do.

  "This one can't be swept under the table, Banning," the colonel said. "It's gone too far for that. It has to go by the book, with every 't' crossed and every Y dotted."

  "I understand, sir."

  "Major DeLaney will prosecute. I have ordered him to do his best to secure a conviction. I am now ordering you to do your best to secure an acquittal. The Italian Consul General has told us that he and Colonel Maggiani of the Italian marines will attend the court-martial. Do you get the picture?"

  "Yes, sir."

  The picture Banning got was that he was going to have to spend Christ alone knew how many hours preparing for this court-martial, participating in the court-martial itself, and then Christ alone knew how many hours after the trial, going through the appeal process.

  About half of the total would have to come from the time Banning would have normally spent with his hobby. His hobby was Ludmilla Zhivkov, whom he called 'Milla.'

  Milla was twenty-seven, raven-haired, long-legged and a White Russian. And he had recently begun to consider the possibility that he was in love with her.

  Banning was a Marine officer-even worse, a Marine intelligence officer-and Marine intelligence officers were not supposed to become emotionally involved with White Russian women. It had not been his intention to become emotionally involved with her. He had met her, more or less, on duty. There had been an advertisement in the Shanghai Post: "Russian Lady Offers Instruction in Russian Conversation." It had coincided with an unexpected bonus in his operating funds: two hundred dollars for Foreign Language Training.

  There were supposed to be fifteen thousand White Russian refugee women in Shanghai. They made their living as best they could, some successfully and some reduced to making it on their backs. He had somewhat cynically suspected that the Russian Lady offering Russian Conversation was doing so only because she was too old, or too ugly, to make it on her back.

  Milla had surprised him. She was a real beauty, and she was the first White Russian he'd met who was not at least a duchess. She was also devoutly religious, which meant that she was not going to become a whore unless it got down to that. Milla told him her father had operated, of all things, the Victor Phonograph store in St. Petersburg. They had come from Russia in 1921 with some American dollars, and it had been enough, with what jobs he had been able to find, to keep them while they waited for their names to work their way up the immigration waiting list for the United States.

  And then he had died, and she hadn't been able to make as much money as she had hoped, even working as a billing clerk in the Cathay Mansions Hotel and teaching Russian conversation. When he met her she was down to living in one room. The next step was to become somebody's mistress. After that she'd have to turn into a whore. Becoming a whore would keep her from going to the States.

  The first thing Banning had done was pay her the whole two hundred dollars up front. Then one thing had led to another, and they had gone to bed. Soon he had helped her get a larger place to live.

  But the ground rules established between them were clear: It was a friendly business relationship and never could be anything more. When he went home, that would be the end of it. She understood that. She had lived up to her end of the bargain. And she would, he believed, stick to it.

  Her powerful character, he sometimes thought, was one of the reasons he was afraid he was in love with her. And sometimes he wondered if she wasn't playing him like a fish (she was also the most intelligent woman he had ever known) and nobly living up to her end of the bargain because she had figured that was the one way to get him to break it.

  But what he nevertheless knew for sure was that if he married her, he could kiss his Marine career good-bye; and that he could not imagine life outside the Corps; and that he could not imagine life without Milla.

  For the first time in his life, Ed Banning did not know what the hell to do.

  Banning went by the orderly room of "D" Company, First Battalion and read through PFC Kenneth J. McCoy's records slowly and thoroughly. He talked to his company commander, his platoon leader, his platoon sergeant, his section leader and his bunk mate.

  The picture they painted of McCoy was the one reflected by his records. He had joined the Corps right out of high school (in fact, several months before; his high school diploma had come to him while he was at Parris Island and was entered into his record then), had served for three months with the Fleet Marine Force at San Diego, and then been shipped to the 4th Marines in Shanghai, where they'd made him an assistant gunner on a water-cooled.30-caliber Browning machine gun.

  He had by and large kept out of trouble since arriving in China. And he got along all right with his corporal and his sergeant, who both described him as "a good man."

  But there were several things out of the ordinary: He didn't have a Chinese girl, for one thing. But he had had a Chinese girl, so there didn't seem to be reason to suspect he was queer. He didn't have a buddy, either, which was unusual.

  But some men were by nature loners, himself included, and this McCoy seemed to be another of them. There was nothing wrong with that, it was just a little unusual.

  What was most unusual, though, was his skill as a typist and his language ability. Banning was a little chagrined to discover that Dog Company had a natural linguist who could type seventy-five words a minute assigned to a machine gun. If he had known that, PFC McCoy would have found himself assigned to headquarters company. Skilled typists were in short supply, but not nearly as short supply as people who could read and write French and Italian and Chinese.

  Banning decided that McCoy, more than likely with the connivance of his first and gunnery sergeants, had wanted these skills kept a secret. Gunnery sergeants were concerned with having good men on the machine guns and cared very little for the personnel problems of the chairwarmers at regimental headquarters. And McCoy himself was probably one of those kids who did not want to be a clerk.

  When he was convinced he had learned all he could about PFC Kenneth J. McCoy from his service records and those around him, Captain Banning went to the infirmary to see the accused face-to-face.

  McCoy's medical records showed that he had bee
n admitted to the dispensary at 2310 hours 2 January 1941 suffering cuts and abrasions and a penetrating wound of the upper right thigh possibly caused by a small-caliber bullet. A surgical procedure at 0930 hours 3 January 1941 had removed a lead-and-brass object, tentatively identified as a.25-caliber bullet, from the thigh. The prognosis was complete recovery, with return to full duty status in ten to fifteen days.

  Captain Banning found PFC McCoy in a two-bed infirmary room. He was sitting in a chair by the window, using the windowsill as a desk while he worked the crossword puzzle in the Shanghai Post. An issue cane was hanging from the windowsill.

  "As you were!" Banning barked, when McCoy saw him and started to rise. "Keep your seat!"

  Banning could not remember ever having seen McCoy before, which was not that unusual. There were a number of young privates and PFCs in the 4th Marines who looked very much like PFC McCoy.

  Captain Banning introduced himself and told McCoy he had been appointed his defense counsel. Then he made sure that McCoy understood his predicament. He told it as he saw it, that he didn't think there was any chance that McCoy would be found guilty of first-degree murder, which required serious elements such as previous intent, but that it was very likely that he would be found guilty of what was known as a "lesser included offense."

  There was no question that there were two dead Italian marines or that McCoy had killed them. Neither was there any question that they had been killed with his knife. Banning then explained that while authority might-and did-look away at the illegal carrying of a concealed deadly weapon so long as nothing happened, when something did happen, the offense could no longer be ignored.

  There were two lesser included offenses, Banning continued: "Manslaughter," which was the illegal taking of human life, and "Negligent Homicide," which meant killing somebody by carelessness.

  "I haven't discussed this with Major DeLaney, who will serve as prosecutor, McCoy," Captain Banning said. "Because I wanted to talk to you first. But this possibility exists: When you come to trial, you have the option of pleading guilty to a lesser included offense. I feel reasonably sure that Major DeLaney would have no objection if you pleaded guilty to manslaughter, and perhaps I could persuade him to accept a plea of guilty to involuntary manslaughter."