Passage (14 page)

“Sure they do. They just don’t rely on them. Evidence,” she said, waving the ISAS membership list, “that’s the ticket. Outside confirmation. Which is why I’m calling her references and why I want to interview her. But if it goes okay, I don’t see any reason why you shouldn’t go ahead as planned with her.”

She went back to her office and called Amelia’s references
and then Amelia and set up an interview. It took some doing. Amelia had classes and labs, and she really needed to study for this biochem exam she had coming up. Joanna finally got her to agree to one o’clock the next day.

She was pleased that rescheduling her had been so difficult. Her very lack of eagerness was evidence that she wasn’t a True Believer. Joanna checked her name against the Theosophical Society’s membership list and then started through the files of the other seven volunteers.

They looked promising. Ms. Coffey was a data systems manager, Mr. Sage a welder, Mrs. Haighton a community volunteer, Mr. Pearsall an insurance agent. None of their names, nor Ronald Kelso’s or Edward Wojakowski’s, showed up on any of the NDE sites. The only one she was worried about was Mrs. Troudtheim, who didn’t live in Denver.

“She lives out on the eastern plains,” she told Richard the next day, “near Deer Trail. The fact that she’d drive all that way—how far is it? sixty miles?—to be in a research project is a bit suspicious, but everything else about her checks out, and all the others look fine.” She looked at the clock. It said a quarter to one. “Amelia Tanaka should be here in a few minutes.”

“Good,” he said. “If you don’t turn up anything negative, I’d like to proceed with a session. I told the nurse to be on standby.”

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?”

“Surprise? Thunderbolt, is more like it. The U.S. of A. just sitting there, mindin’ her own business, and blam! No declaration of war, no warning, no nothin’. I’ll never forget it. It was a Sunday, and I was reading the funny papers. ‘The Katzenjammer Kids,’ I can still see it. I look up, and in comes
the lady from two doors down, all out of breath, and says, ‘The Japs just bombed Pearl Harbor!’ Well, none of us even knew where Pearl Harbor was, except my kid sister. She’d seen it in a newsreel at the movies the night before.
Desperadoes
, that’s what was playing. Randolph Scott. And the very next day, I went downtown to the navy recruiting center and signed up.”

He paused momentarily for breath, and Joanna said quickly, “Mr.—Ed, what made you volunteer for the project? How did you find out about it?”

“Saw a notice in the recreation center at Aspen Gardens. That’s where I live. And then when I came in and talked to the doc, I thought it sounded interesting.”

“Had you ever been involved in a research study here at the hospital before?”

“Nope. They put up notices all the time. Most of them you have to have some special thing wrong with you—hernias or can’t see good or something, and I didn’t, so I couldn’t be in ’em.”

“You said the project sounded interesting,” Joanna said. “Can you be more specific? Were you interested in near-death experiences?”

“I’d seen shows about ’em on TV.”

“And that was why you wanted to participate in the project?”

He shook his head. “I had more than enough near-death experiences in the war.” He winked. “Tunnels and lights, let me tell you, they’re nothing compared to seeing a Zero coming at you, and the machine gun you’re supposed to be firing jams. Those damned 1.1 millimeters, they were always sticking, and you had to have a gunner’s mate crawl underneath ’em with a hammer and unjam ’em. I remember one time Straight Holecek, we called him Straight ’cause he was always drawing to inside straights, well, anyway, he—”

No wonder Richard had been reluctant to have her question Mr. Wojakowski with Amelia coming in a few minutes. He’d moved around to stand behind Mr. Wojakowski. She glanced up at him, and he grinned at her.

“ . . . and just then a Zero dived straight at us, and Straight gives a yelp and drops his hammer right on my foot, and—”

“So if it wasn’t NDEs you were interested in, what was it about the project that interested you?” Joanna asked.

“I told you I served on the
Yorktown,”
he said, “and let me tell you, she was a great ship. Brand-new and bright as a button, and real bunks to sleep in. She even had a soda fountain. You could go in there and order a chocolate malted or a cherry phosphate, just like the drugstore back home.” He smiled reminiscently. “Well, after we hit Rabaul, they put Old Yorky, that’s what we called her, on patrol duty down in the Coral Sea, and for six weeks we just sat there, playing acey-deucey and bettin’ on whose toenails’d grow the fastest.”

Joanna wondered what this had to do with why he had volunteered. She had a sneaking suspicion there was no connection at all, that he simply used any opening anybody gave him to talk about the war, and if she didn’t stop him, he’d go right on through the Battle of Midway.

“Mr. Wojakowski,” she said. “You were going to tell me why you volunteered for this project.”

“I am,” he said. “Well, so anyway, we’re sitting there twiddling our thumbs, and by the end of a week we were bored as hell and couldn’t
wait
for the Japs to dive-bomb us. At least it’d be something to do. Speaking of dive-bombing, did I ever tell you about what Jo-Jo Powers did at Coral Sea? The first time out his squadron doesn’t hit anything, all their torpedoes miss, and so he’s getting ready for his second run, and he says, ‘I’m going to hit that flight deck if I have to lay my bomb on it myself,’ and—”

“Mr. Wojakowski,” Joanna said firmly. “Your reason for volunteering.”

“You ever been over to Aspen Gardens?”

She shook her head.

“You’re lucky. It’s just like being on patrol duty in the Coral Sea, only without the acey-deucey. So I thought I’d come on over and do something interesting.”

Which was an excellent reason. “Have you ever had a near-death experience yourself, Mr. Wojakowski?”

“Not till the doc put me in that doughnut thing all hooked up like Frankenstein. I’d always thought that tunnel and light and seeing Jesus stuff was all a bunch of hooey, but, sure
enough, there I was in a tunnel. No Jesus, though. I still say that’s a bunch of hooey. I saw too much stuff in the war to put much stock in religion. One time, at Coral Sea—”

She let him ramble on, satisfied that he wasn’t one of Mr. Mandrake’s spies. It was clear the real reason he’d volunteered was to have somebody new to tell his war stories to. And if Mr. Mandrake tries to pump him, it’ll serve him right, she thought, smiling to herself. He’ll get the whole history of the war in the Pacific. And if Amelia didn’t get here soon, she would, too. She glanced at the clock. It was nearly two. Where was she?

Joanna’s pager beeped. “Excuse me,” Joanna said and made a point of pulling it out of her pocket and looking at it. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’ve got a call I’ve got to take.”

“Sure, Doc,” he said, looking disappointed. “Those are great little gizmos. Wish we’d had ’em back in WWII. It sure woulda helped the time we—”

“We’ll call you as soon as we’ve finished setting up the schedule,” Joanna said, escorting him firmly across the lab to the door with him still talking. She opened the door. “We should know in a day or two.”

“Anytime’s fine. I got all the time in the world,” he said, and Joanna felt suddenly remorseful.

“Ed,” she said, “you never finished telling me about the dive-bomber, the one who said he’d hit the flight deck if he had to lay the bomb on there himself. What happened to him?”

“You mean Jo-Jo?” he asked. “Well, I’ll tell ya. He said he’d sink that carrier if it was the last thing he ever did, and he did it, too. It was a sight to see, him coming in straight at the
Shokaku
, his tail on fire, Zeroes all around him. But he did just what he said he was gonna do, laid that bomb right on her flight deck, even though he couldn’ta been more than two hundred feet above that deck when he dropped it, and then, wham! his bomber crashed into the ocean.”

“Oh—” Joanna said.

“But he did it, even if he was already dead when that bomb went off. He still did it.”

I
T TOOK ANOTHER
twenty minutes and two more stories about the
Yorktown
to get rid of Mr. Wojakowski. “My gosh,” Joanna said, leaning against the door she had finally managed to shut behind him, “he’s harder to get away from than Maisie.”