Julia couldn't believe she'd been suckered into this. It wasn't like she had nothing else to do.
Car bombs and parcel bombs were still going off all over the country. The Japanese were on Oahu. She was overdue to download Rosanna's latest package. And the Times had finally agreed to give her a team to run a three-part investigation of Hoover's FBI.
But here she was, stuck on a platform in a town hall that had rats in the rafters, in some pissant burg in upstate New York, selling fucking war bonds. At least the turnout was healthy. The hall probably held about 150 people, but at least three times that had spilled out into the night, wrapped up in mufflers and heavy coats, listening to this circus over an antique PA system that lost about half of everything that was said. The whine of the feedback was giving her a headache.
She felt like gagging on the cigarette smoke, and couldn't believe that people would allow their children to breathe in the stuff. But dozens of kids were dotted throughout the audience, many of them dressed for bed in slippers, winter pajamas, and long woolen robes.
She'd originally agreed to do the gig because Ronald Reagan was supposed to be on stage, along with the monkey from Bedtime for Bonzo. Well, actually, it wasn't the real monkey, which probably hadn't been born yet. Bedtime was originally filmed in 1951. Instead, it had been telerecorded onto celluloid by Universal Studios, and it was one of the most popular movies of the year.
Now Reagan couldn't get in from the West Coast, what with all the terrorist bombings, so Edward Gargan, who played Policeman Bill in Bedtime, had been sent in his place.
But there was another reason Julia had been dragooned into this animal act, and he was sitting next to her on the hard wooden bench: Sergeant Snider, of the USMC. He was in line for a Medal of Honor, or at least a Silver Star, for his bravery on the Brisbane Line.
Julia didn't hold it against him, though. Snider was all right, and she couldn't begrudge him living off the publicity tit. He'd done more than his fair share, and he was never going to walk freely again, thanks to his wounds. It was just that she had better things to be doing than entertaining a room full of hicks in order to get them to fork over-what, ten or twenty bucks each for the war effort?
There was no getting out of it, though. Her chief of staff, Blundell, said that if she was going to be a "celebrity reporter," there were certain obligations that came with the job. She wasn't sure whether he was insulting her with that "celebrity" stuff. She knew there were plenty on the paper who resented it. Harold Denny, one of the other war correspondents, had told her to her face that she was "all surface, even at the core."
She'd punched him out.
Maybe that was why she'd been sent upstate. As punishment.
Her flexipad was set to silent mode, and it began to vibrate on her hip. She considered faking an emergency to take the call and escape, but before she could do that, Policeman Bill had finished up, and she was being called to the podium to tell her stories about how Sergeant Snider had saved the world.
Two hours later, the hall was emptying of people. She'd been signing autographs and answering questions and was actually starting to dig the whole thing. She took a particular delight in telling a couple of teenaged girls to forget about boys and to concentrate on their studies, and to see if they could get a copy of de Beauvoir's The Second Sex or Greer's The Female Eunuch from one of the mail-order companies that were springing up in the Zone.
Later on, she could remember Snider asking her if she wanted to get a cup of joe before she drove back to Manhattan, but she couldn't recall powering up the Ericsson and finding the message from Rosanna.
Except it wasn't from Rosanna. It was from a well-spoken Japanese Navy officer who identified himself in perfect English as Commander Jisaku Hidaka, interim military governor of Hawaii.
He was standing in a bare room.
Rosanna was seated in front of him, sobbing.
"Miss Duffy," he said. "You will relay this message to your leaders. Hawaii is under the control of the Imperial Japanese Navy. Your countrymen are being well treated. If there is any attempt to retake the island, however, every man and woman and child will be executed. This is not an empty threat."
And with that he drew his pistol and shot her friend in the head.
For the first time in her life, Julia Duffy fainted.