King Rat

Next week they’ll let you write a letter. Or maybe they’ll let you visit. The Camp Commandant’s always asking for a list of the women and children. Don’t worry, they’re safe.” Peter Marlowe left him slobbering his rice into his face, and took his own rice and went down to the bungalow.

“Hello, cobber,” Larkin said. “You been up to see Mac?”

“Yes. He looks fine. He even started getting ruffled about his age.”

“It’ll be good to get old Mac back.” Larkin reached under his mattress and brought out a spare mess can. “Got a surprise!” He opened the mess can and revealed a two-inch square of brownish puttylike substance.

“By all that’s holy! Blachang! Where the devil did you get it?”

“Scrounged it, of course.”

“You’re a genius, Colonel. Funny, I didn’t smell it.” Peter Marlowe leaned over and took a tiny piece of the blachang. “This’ll last us a couple of weeks.”

Blachang was a native delicacy, easy to make. When the season was right, you went to the shore and netted the myriads of tiny sea creatures that hovered in the surf. You buried them in a pit lined with seaweed, then covered it with more seaweed and forgot about it for two months.

When you opened the pit, the fishes had decayed into a stinking paste, the stench of which would blow your head off and destroy your sense of smell for a week. Holding your breath, you scooped up the paste and fried it. But you had to stay to windward or you’d suffocate. When it cooled, you shaped it into blocks and sold it for a fortune. Prewar, ten cents a cube. Now maybe ten dollars a sliver. Why a delicacy? It was pure protein. And a tiny fraction would flavor a whole bowl of rice. Of course you could easily get dysentery from it. But if it’d been aged right and cooked right and hadn’t been touched by flies, it was all right.

But you never asked. You just said, “Colonel, you’re a genius” and spooned it into your rice and enjoyed it.

“Take some up to Mac, eh?”

“Good idea. But he’s sure to complain it’s not cooked enough.”

“Old Mac’d complain if it was cooked to perfection—” Larkin stopped. “Hey, Johnny” he called to the tall man walking past, leading a scrawny mongrel on a tether. “Would you like some blachang, cobber?”

“Would I?”

They gave him a portion on a banana leaf and talked of the weather and asked how the dog was. John Hawkins loved his dog above all things. He shared his food with it—astonishing the things a dog would eat—and it slept on his bunk. Rover was a good friend. Made a man feel civilized.

“Would you like some bridge tonight? I’ll bring a fourth,” Hawkins said.

“Can’t tonight,” Peter Marlowe said, maiming flies.

“I can get Gordon, next door,” suggested Larkin.

“Great. After dinner?”

“Good-oh, see you then.”

“Thanks for the blachang” Hawkins said as he left, Rover yapping happily beside him.

“How the hell he gets enough to feed himself and that dingo, damned if I know,” Larkin said. “Or kept him out of some bugger’s billy can for that matter!”

Peter Marlowe stirred his rice, mixing the blachang carefully. He wanted very much to share the secret of his trip tonight with Larkin. But he knew it was too dangerous.

Grace Ewart clung to life with the tenacity of her heritage, the tenacity that had spawned her forebears through the years, keeping them alive through the evils and degradations that people call history and Industrial Revolution. Grace Ewart grew up in Birmingham, in the Black Country. It was called the Black Country because the soot and touchable-smoke from the furnaces and factories settled on the landscape and roofs and walls and inside the houses of the seething mass of slums that stretch north, town joined to town and to Manchester and beyond. From the Black Country came the industrial wealth of England—knives, guns, capital equipment, buttons, toys, grenades, chemicals, plates and cups and saucers and pottery, glass, everything and anything. A busy hive of ants laboring on the produce of the world. Chains and ships and airplanes and guns and explosives and now all the war tools, little and big.

Grace Ewart’s forebears—the Tumbolds—had always lived and died in the Black Country. They were proud of their heritage in pottery. Tumbolds had always been in pottery. Her father was a foreman, like his father before him. And his father before him. Old Bert Tumbold, her father, had said many times, “You listen, Grace, me girl. Wun day, your son’ll be in the shop, an’ a good life it is.” Bert had disapproved greatly of Harold Ewart. “Don’t hold with them white collar workers, nothin’ but pansies, I’ll be bound.”