Passage

There was a knock on the door. “She’s early,” Joanna said, and went over to answer the door.

It was a short elderly man with faded red hair receding from a freckled forehead. “Is Doc Wright here?” he asked, leaning past Joanna to see into the lab. He spied Richard. “Hiya, Doc. I thought I’d stop by and check to see when my next session was. I’m one of Doc Wright’s guinea pigs.”

“Dr. Lander, this is Ed Wojakowski,” Richard said, coming over to the door. “Mr. Wojakowski, Dr. Lander’s going to be working with me on the project.”

“Call me Ed. Mr. Wojakowski’s my dad.” He winked at her.

Joanna thought of Greg Menotti having made the same joke. She wondered how old Mr. Wojakowski was. He looked at least seventy, and the project had specified volunteers aged twenty-one to sixty-five.

“I knew a Joanna once,” Mr. Wojakowski said, “back when I was in the navy, during World War II.”

World War II and the navy again, Joanna thought. First Mrs. Davenport and now Mr. Wojakowski. Did that mean she’d talked to him? Or had Mr. Mandrake talked to both of them? She hoped not — at this rate they’d be out of subjects in no time.

“She worked at the USO canteen in Honolulu,” Mr. Wojakowski was saying. “Nice-looking girl, not as pretty as you, though. Me and Stinky Johannson sneaked her on board one night to show her our Wildcat, and—”

“We haven’t scheduled your next session yet,” Richard said.

“Oh, okay, Doc,” Mr. Wojakowski said. “Just thought I’d check.”

“Since you’re here,” Joanna said, “would you mind if I asked you a few questions?” She turned to Richard. “Ms. Tanaka won’t be here for another fifteen minutes.”

“Sure,” Richard said, but he looked doubtful.

“Or we could schedule it for later.”

“No, now’s fine,” Richard said, and she wondered if she’d misread him. “Do you have time to answer a few questions, Mr. Wojakowski?”

“Ed,” he corrected. “You bet I got time. Now that I’m retired I got all the time in the world.”

“Yes, well,” Richard said, looking doubtful again, “we’ve got another interview scheduled for one.”

“I gotcha, Doc,” Mr. Wojakowski said. “Keep it short and sweet.” He turned back to Joanna. “Whaddya wanta know, Doc?”

Joanna looked at Richard, uncertain whether he really wanted her to proceed, but he nodded, so she offered Mr. Wojakowski a chair, thinking, We have to establish some kind of code for situations like this. “I just want to find out a little bit about you, Mr. Wojakowski, get to know you, since we’re going to be working together,” Joanna said, sitting down opposite him. “Your background, why you volunteered for the project.” She switched the recorder on.

“My background, huh? Well, I’ll tell ya, I’m an old navy man. Served on the USS Yorktown. Best ship in WWII till the Japs sank her. Sorry,” he said at her look, “that’s what we called ’em back then. The enemy, the Japanese.”

But she hadn’t been thinking about his use of the offensive word Japs. She’d been calculating his age. If he’d been in World War II, he had to be nearly eighty. “You say you served on the Yorktown?” she said, looking at his file. Name. Address. Social Security number. Why wasn’t his age listed? “That was a battleship, wasn’t it?” she said, stalling for time.

“Battleship!” he snorted. “Aircraft carrier. Best damn one in the Pacific. Sank four carriers at the Battle of Midway before a Jap sub got her. Torpedo. Got a destroyer that was standing in the way, too. The Hammann. Went down just like that. Dead before she even knew it. Two minutes. All hands.”

She still couldn’t find his age. Allergies to medications. Health history. He’d marked “no” to everything from high blood pressure to diabetes, and he looked spry and alert, but if he was eighty—

“…took the Yorktown a lot longer to sink,” he was saying. “Two whole days. Terrible thing to watch.”

Work history, references, person to contact in case of emergency, but no birthdate. By design?

“…the order to abandon ship, and the sailors all took off their shoes and lined them up on the deck. Hundreds and hundreds of pairs of shoes—”

“Mr. Wojakowski, I can’t find—”

“Ed,” he corrected, and then, as if he knew what she was going to ask next, “I joined the navy when I was thirteen. Lied about my age. Told ’em the hospital where they had my birth certificate had burned down. Not that they were checking things like that right after Pearl.” He looked challengingly at her. “You’re way too young to know what Pearl Harbor is, I s’pose.”

“The Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor?”