Empire of the Sun - J. G. Ballard [126]
Price tapped the side of the truck with his rifle. In a mocking voice, he called out: ‘Shanghai Jim…’
‘Just a detour, Jim,’ Tulloch assured him boozily. ‘We’ll pick out a case of Scotch, and a few fur coats for the girls in the Nanking Road.’
‘I didn’t see any fur coats, Mr Tulloch, or any Scotch. Lots of chairs and dining tables.’
Lieutenant Price pushed Tulloch aside. ‘Dining tables? Do you think we came here to have lunch?’ He stared at the façade of the stadium, as if its shabby chalk challenged his own pallid skin.
Jim avoided the rifle barrel aimed at his head. ‘There were cupboards and wardrobes.’
‘Wardrobes?’ Tulloch swayed between them. ‘That could be it, Lieutenant.’
‘Right…’ Price calmed himself. He touched the cigarette burns on his chest, tapping out a secret code of pain and memory. ‘I told you the boy had his eyes open.’
The two men crossed the road and entered the parking lot. Price leaned against a trackless tank, and spat the prison phlegm from his lungs through an open hatch. Jim hung back among the lines of trucks, thinking of Mr Maxted. Was he still lying on the blood-stained grass? Having eaten so much, Jim felt guilty, and remembered that he might have sold his shoes. For all the looted cocktail bars it contained, the Olympic stadium seemed sombre and threatening, a place of omens. Here he had seen the afterglow of the atomic flash at Nagasaki. Its white glare still lay over the road of their death-march from Lunghua, the same pale light that he could see in the chalky façade of the stadium and in Lieutenant Price’s lime-pit skin.
Fanning away the flies with a copy of Life, Jim sat on the running board of a truck. He studied a photograph of American marines raising the flag on the summit of Mount Suribachi after their battle for Iwo Jima. The Americans in these magazines had fought an heroic war, closer to the comic books than Jim had read as a child. Even the dead were glamourized, the living’s idea of the dead…
Two Mustang fighters flew overhead, leading a Superfortress that lumbered in from the west, its bomb doors open, ready to scatter its Spam and Reader’s Digests across the empty fields. The engines drummed at the ground below Jim’s feet, shaking the lines of derelict vehicles.
Jim lowered the magazine, and noticed that armed men were running from the entrance tunnel of the stadium, their voices drowned in the noise of the aircraft. The Superfortress ambled through the sky, but the men scattered in panic from the tunnel, as if expecting the stadium to be bombed. A bearded European in the leather jacket of an American pilot raced across the parking lot, followed by two more men carrying shotguns. A bare-chested Chinese with a pistol belt around his black trousers scuttled along at a crouch, leading a group of coolies with bamboo staves.
Pursuing them through the tunnel was a platoon of Nationalist soldiers, rifles raised to the strong sunlight. They stopped to fire at the fleeing men, letting off a ragged volley of shots. Jim opened the door of the truck and climbed into the driving cabin. Fifty feet from the entrance tunnel Tulloch lay in the white dust that had fallen from the façade of the stadium. Lieutenant Price ran past him towards the line of trucks, his face like a lantern scanning the ground. Shaking off his bandages, he leapt the perimeter wall of the parking lot and plunged into the flooded paddy field beyond the road.
The Chinese officer fired a last pistol shot at Price’s splashing figure, then knelt in the stadium entrance. Rifles raised, his men approached the rusting vehicles. They made a token show of flushing out any wounded members of the raiding party, turned and retreated to the safety of the stadium. Tulloch lay dead in the sun, his blood leaking into the chalky dust.
Blue and scarlet parachutes were falling over Hungjao. Jim slid across the seat, opened the door on the