Glorious Boy by Aimee Liu

Author:Aimee Liu
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Red Hen Press
Published: 2020-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

“Trouble,” Baird says.

They’re sitting across from each other in the Assistant Commissioner’s former bedroom, which the two of them now share. It’s preferable to waking, as each has done, to find one or another of the guards hovering above them in the dark. The reason for these nocturnal inspections remains a mystery. Baird guesses the men are just satisfying their curiosity, but the visits do cease after they move in together. Privacy, under the circumstances, assumes a negative dimension. Now they rarely leave this room except for tenko morning and night and their daily ration of rice and tea. Their sole diversion is the Andaman Shumbun, the local paper turned Japanese propaganda sheet, which is delivered as an irritant. The major reads it cover to cover.

Shep has been staring at the front page. Today is April 15, 1942. A prominent photograph of His Excellency Emperor of Japan announces Hirohito’s approaching birthday.

He looks up. “What is it?”

Baird stabs at a lesser article. “This fellow, Dipak Patel. They’ve given him a bloody medal and made him Chief Naval Intelligence Officer.” He shakes his head, and Shep sees the weight of exhaustion beneath the gray eyes, the strain around Baird’s mouth.

“I don’t think I know him.”

“You’re lucky.” Patel, Baird explains, managed a cinema hall in Bengal before he was convicted of murder and sent to the Cellular Jail in the early twenties. After a few years, he talked himself out on work release, married one of the female convicts and had a son. Later Baird made the mistake of employing him as a groundsman at his house in Rangachang. “A couple of years ago we caught him thieving, and it turned out he was smuggling knives and razors to his cronies in the prison. I testified against him. He’s a snake, that one, but a snake with a silver tongue. Just Buco’s type.”

“Baird.”

He looks up, and Shep notices a crack whiskering across one of his lenses.

“What were you doing down the hall this morning?”

Shep had awakened before dawn to find himself alone. There wasn’t a sound downstairs, and for one blinding moment he thought Baird had made a run for it. When he went out to investigate, he noticed the rear bedroom door, which normally hung open a crack, was shut tight. He didn’t dare open it, then didn’t dare ask the question, but couldn’t leave it alone.

His companion regards him with a steady, thoughtful gaze. “What did you see?”

Shep watches his voice. “I’m hardly likely to squeal on you.”

Baird removes his glasses and presses the heels of his hands against his eyes. “It’s no use, you know. All the careful plotting and planning. Reality’s overruled us. We can SOS till our hearts explode.”

Shep checks the hall, then looks out the window. Izumi, the only one of their guards who speaks any English, stands smoking with Buco’s aide de camp in the shade of the traveller’s palms out front. The morning heat is taking hold and the other guards are bound to be slumped half asleep in their sentry positions.

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