The night of the earthquake he thought the Devil was reaching up to claim him, but then he remembered he didn’t believe in the Devil or those above, and he went back to sleep.
Back home, Pepper had two dependable enemies: cops and bad luck. In the SOS, he found counterparts for them in command, whose harebrained operations were designed to destroy him, and in the jungle, with its random bloodthirst. Do the work, survive the day: He was used to living like this, and now everybody else had to play catch-up. Work and sleep. There were no brothels, no craps games worth a damn, nobody worth beating senseless. Nothing to do but complain, smoke reefer, and remove leeches from your balls. The leeches were out of myth. “Like being back home,” Pepper told his bunkmates as he put a Zippo to an especially large specimen. This was back when Pepper still told jokes. No one laughed because they were miserable or because they thought he was serious. Most of his unit was these dopey country boys.
He didn’t see combat, but did his first murder nonetheless. Thirty miles from Mongyu, a new deployment of native workers arrived, hardworking Burmese to replace the ones the jungle chewed up. Mostly they stuck to their own camp at quitting time, but there was one young man with delicate features who slunk around, ever underfoot. He wanted to learn English, he said. This gang of white officers used to taunt and waggle their tongues at him. He was not the first womanish man Pepper had seen—there was a place on Warren Street that catered to johns of that bent. The Burmese man only approached the white soldiers for practice, as if the colored grunts had a different language. （They did and they didn’t.） As the weeks went on, those officers kept on his case, lobbing kissy noises and jeers. The man just smiled and did a slow, servile nod, dipping his sad eyes from view.
There was no doubt who had beaten him so. One murky evening at the end of monsoon season Pepper went out to smoke some reefer by the Yard—that’s what they called the area for the broken-down bulldozers and cranes, as if it were a proper motor pool. No one around. No one was ever around when Pepper was put to the test, and he was not one to speak about things he said or did so what happened next joined the other items in his grim scrapbook. The man’s brains were spilled out in the mud when Pepper found him. Pants around his knees. If there’d been a hospital for native workers, he might have taken the man there. If anyone would’ve been held accountable, he might have reported it. White soldier calls someone a Jap spy, he can get away with anything.
Red bubbles on the Burmese nostrils wobbled and popped as he gurgled. Pepper fixed a palm to the man’s mouth and pinched closed the nose, then put a knee to his chest when he started to buck. Pepper’s hands were callused from the road work. He didn’t feel the man’s skin at all, like he was wearing thick rubber gloves.
You hear people say, “Oh, when our boy came back from the war, he was changed.” The war didn’t change Pepper, it completed him. He’d lose himself in different, darker caves and ditches when he returned to the States and started his career in earnest.
The rain washed the Burmese’s blood off his hands. In the barracks, Armed Forces Radio announced the score of the Dodger–Giants game eight thousand miles away. Back among normal people and their diversions. The normal world kept spinning when he was up to no good and he stepped back in like nothing happened. This Houdini trick.
The Dodgers were playing Cincinnati when he heard about Arthur.
He was at Donegal’s, up on Broadway. Friday night, three days after the heist. Everyone was hunkered and listening to the game. What kind of deviant rooted for the Dodgers on Giants turf? The Dodgers splitting Brooklyn for Los Angeles was a crime, and to cheer for the lost team meant you were an accomplice, but perpetrators and accomplices made up the majority of Donegal’s clientele. A tendency toward moral irregularity made you a regular. Pepper sat on a stool at the mahogany bar with the usual swindlers, thieves, and pimps. Kept his ears open for chatter about the Theresa job.
Banjo, an elderly hustler who claimed to be the first man to steal a car on the “Isle of Manhattan,” limped inside and announced that someone had bumped Arthur. The limp was courtesy of the robbery squad, who’d been disappointed that Banjo sicced his dog on them the last time they picked him up. It had been a crowbar-shaped disappointment.
Banjo placed his plaid beret over his heart in tribute to Arthur. The thief was known, with fans of his own among these Dodgers fans. Pour one out for the Jackie Robinson of safecracking. Pepper guzzled his beer and walked down to where the dead man had flopped. Eighth inning, six to one Dodgers.