Shanghai had seen better days. Pete McGill snorted when that piece of brilliance crossed his mind. It was a good thing he was a Marine corporal. He made a fine leatherneck. If he'd gone into the detective racket instead, his deductions wouldn't have put Sherlock Holmes out of business any time soon.

Of course Shanghai had seen better days. He couldn't think of one spot in China that hadn't seen better days, better years, probably better centuries. Peking, where he'd been stationed till just a little while before, sure as hell wasn't the same since the Japs occupied it.

Japan occupied Shanghai, too. The Japanese had dominated the area since the early 1930s, and threw the Chinese out in November '37, a year and a half ago now. The battle, not far outside of town, was supposed to have cost 300,000 Chinese casualties and 40,000 Japanese. The ratio said a lot about the quality of the two armies involved. That the Chinese stayed in the fight after taking such losses again and again said how much they hated the Japs.

The USA had pulled most of its Marines out of Peking to help protect Americans in Shanghai, who were far more numerous than in the former capital. That was what the United States loudly proclaimed, anyhow. If you read between the lines, you saw that Marines in Peking were trapped. If trouble with Japan flared up, the garrison at the U.S. Legation would have to be written off. Shanghai was a port. Troops here had some kind of chance of getting on a ship and heading for Hong Kong or Manila or… somewhere.

McGill didn't worry about it. Worrying about foreign policy wasn't in a corporal's job description. He worried about making sergeant one of these days. He worried about the twenty bucks U.S. he'd lost in a poker game on the train down from Peking. He worried about finding a good, cheap whorehouse; he hadn't much cared for the couple of places he'd visited here. Till he found some suckers and won back what he'd lost-how often did you run into four sixes, for crying out loud?-cheap came first.