Under the Apple Tree Read online

  They sat cross-legged on the floor of Tutlow’s room with the curtains drawn, and Artie lit the stub of a candle that his patriotic pal had stuck in the top of a Coke bottle. The secrecy was necessary because of the great new mission they were going to undertake.

  They were going to be counterspies.

  After Artie lit the candle he was kind of stumped.

  “Okay,” he whispered. “What do we do next?”

  “Well, if you look for enemy agents, what kind of people do you look for first?”

  “Pre-verts?” Artie guessed.

  “Well, maybe, but that’s not the first thing.”

  “What is, then?”

  “Foreigners,” Tutlow said in a hissing whisper.

  Artie slapped his hand on the side of his head for being such a dope he hadn’t thought of that right off.

  “So the first thing we do,” Tutlow continued, “is check on the movements and activities of foreigners right here in Town.”

  “Have we got any?” Artie asked.

  “I could name you three, and there may be even more. For all we know, there may be foreign spies among us posing as Americans. But anyway, there’s three real ones I can think of, using their own foreign names.”

  “You don’t mean old man Weiskopf at the dry goods store?”

  “He’s German, isn’t he?”

  “Yeah, but he’s Jewish, so he doesn’t count.”

  “I know Jews are real strange and they have these weird customs and all, but they still count.”

  “I mean they don’t count as Germans. The Germans go around killing Jewish people, it’s part of what they do in the War, so the Jewish people hate Germans as much as we do.”

  “Well, if you ask me, he’s still foreign, so you never can tell.”

  “If you ask me, he’s a nice guy. Besides, he’s too old for spying and sabotage.”

  “Okay, that still leaves two more foreigners right here in Town.”

  “Are you thinking of Mr. LaPettier, at the bank?”

  “He’s French. That’s Allies.”

  “I know that. I was just naming foreign guys.”

  “They got to be Axis guys.”

  Artie scratched his head real hard, then shrugged.

  “I give,” he said.

  “You forget about the LaBiancos?”

  “The LaBiancos! You crazy? Raymond LaBianco’s in the Navy. Besides, his folks were born here.”

  “Their ancestors still come from Italy, which is an Axis power. They still got relatives there, and in Wartime, you never know.”

  “The good Italians are on our side now anyway. It was just Mussolini that got them in with Hitler.”

  “For all we know, the LaBiancos over in Italy may be on Mussolini’s side.”

  “You don’t even know that. Anyway, I’m not spying on any LaBiancos.”

  “I didn’t mean we should. I just meant we got to count them as foreigners. Anyway, you haven’t even got to the prime suspect.”

  “I can’t think of any. Who?”

  Tutlow put his fingers at the outer corners of his eyes and pulled them upward, slanting.

  “So solly you forgot about Wu Sing Lee,” he said.

  “The Chinese Laundryman?”

  “Ah so.”

  “But the Chinese are on our side. They’re fighting the Japs!”

  Tutlow, still stretching his eyes into slants, leaned forward and raised his upper lip over his teeth, looking sort of like a gopher, but speaking in a sinister, Oriental accent.

  “How you know for sure Wu Sing Lee not actu-ry Japanese?”

  “’Cause they don’t have laundries. Chinese have laundries.”

  “How you know Wu Sing Lee not Japanese spy posing as Chinaman, using laundry to throw Amelicans off scent?”

  “What makes you think he is?”

  Tutlow took his hands from his eyes and let his upper lip down to normal, getting real serious now.

  “I don’t know for sure, but I know how we can find out. Lookit here.”

  Tutlow reached under his bed and pulled out his terrific War Scrapbook. Artie scooted over next to him, and tried to see the article he turned to by the secret light of the flickering candle. It was a clipping from Time magazine that was underlined in parts with a yellow crayon. The headline said, “How to Tell Your Friends From the Japs.”

  Tutlow pulled the scrapbook away from Artie and cleared his throat so he could read the important parts out loud. He made his voice real deep and serious, so it almost sounded something like H. V. Kaltenborn.

  “‘Those who know them best often rely on their facial characteristics to tell them apart: the Chinese expression is likely to be more placid, kindly, open; the Japanese more positive, dogmatic, arrogant. Japanese are nervous in conversation, laugh loudly at the wrong time.… Most Chinese avoid horn-rimmed spectacles.… Japs are likely to be stockier and broader-hipped.”

  Tutlow slammed the scrapbook decisively and looked up at Artie.

  “Well?” he asked, like he’d made his case.

  “I dunno,” Artie said. “I never paid much attention to Wu Sing Lee.”

  “In that case,” said Tutlow, “I guess we got our work cut out for us.”

  He blew out the candle and Artie felt a shiver go through him as he sat there in the darkened room, about to take on the mission of a Home Front counterspy.

  A high-pitched, tinkly bell sounded (like the kind that might be in a Japanese shrine!) as the two boys walked in the door of Wu Sing Lee’s Hand Laundry in a little alley off Main Street. Foreign odors, like tea and old seaweed, wafted in from the long, plain curtains that separated the back of the shop from the little counter and the shelves behind it with packages of laundry in the front, the only part of the place that customers could actually see. God only knew what mysterious rites were performed behind the curtains, where it was rumored that the lone Chinaman (if that was in fact his true nationality) not only washed and ironed the clothes but also slept, ate, and cooked his inscrutable Oriental meals.

  Wu Sing Lee came out from the back of the shop with such a swift, delicate movement that the curtains barely seemed to part, and it was impossible to even catch a glimpse of what lay behind them.

  “Help you please?” asked Wu Sing Lee with a kindly, open smile that was deceptively Chinese in nature.

  “Uh, yeah, I got this laundry here to be washed,” said Artie, placing a pillowcase full of dirty socks and underwear on the counter. His mother always did all their laundry, but Artie had scrounged around in the closet and found some old stuff left over from Camp Cho-Ko-Mo-Ko that she hadn’t discovered yet. While Wu Sing Lee took the bundle and handed a ticket to Artie, the crafty Tutlow, whistling “I’d Like to Get You on a Slow Boat to China,” slithered clear over the counter so his head and shoulders were hanging down on the other side of it, so he kind of reminded Artie of a horse caught on a fence. Actually, what he was doing was checking out the laundryman’s size to see if he was “stockier and broader-hipped” than Chinese people are supposed to be.

  “So when exactly will these be all done?” Artie said in a voice louder than normal, intended to keep Wu Sing’s attention away from Tutlow’s spying.

  “Today Monday, be wash Friday.”

  “Well, are you really positive about that?” Artie asked, testing him for one of the Japanese qualities.

  “Oh, sure, sure,” the man said.

  “Well, I have to be really positive, ’cause I’m going on this camping trip, with Boy Scout Troop Seventy-three, and we’re going up to Devil’s Toothpick, so I got to have all my socks and stuff.”

  “You have Friday,” Wu Sing said, still smiling.

  Tutlow crawled back from over the counter, and, pushing back his glasses that were falling from his nose, said suddenly to the laundryman: “You hear the one about why the chicken crossed the road?”

  “One about chicken?” Wu Sing asked.

  “To get to the other side!” Artie piped up, and he and Tutl
ow whooped and laughed, slapping their legs.

  Wu Sing stared at them, still smiling but looking definitely nervous.

  “Well, I’ll be back for the laundry Friday if you’re absolutely positive it’ll be done.”

  “Be wash, be wash,” Wu Sing said, sounding nervous, positive, and even dogmatic all at the same time.

  Artie was anxious to get out of there, but Warren stopped him at the door, to ask one final key question.

  “If you don’t mind my asking, sir,” he said to Wu Sing, “which do Chinese people really like better—chow mein or chop suey?”

  Wu Sing suddenly began to laugh. He was laughing so hard his eyes were squinting.

  “What’s so funny?” Tutlow asked.

  Wu Sing continued to laugh, like this serious question was some kind of great joke. Tutlow shot a glance at Artie, who nodded, realizing Wu Sing Lee was laughing loudly at the wrong time.

  The boys hurried out of the little shop, breaking into a run as they got to the sidewalk, knowing now the awful truth:

  Wu Sing Lee was a Jap.

  Artie was standing on top of the Odd Fellows Building, whose three stories made it the tallest structure on Main Street. He was wildly waving his semaphore flags above his head. The reason he was only flapping them back and forth instead of actually forming letters of the alphabet in semaphore code was that Warren Tutlow didn’t know semaphore, and he said they would lose precious spying time if he had to go to the trouble of learning, so when Artie spotted Wu Sing Lee coming out of his laundry he should just wave the flags back and forth above his head. Tutlow was up in a maple tree back of Main Street, watching Artie through a pair of Boy Scout binoculars.

  “Artie, what are you doing up there?”

  Darn it all, Caroline Spingarn’s telescopic eyes had picked out Artie from clear across Main Street where she was coming out of Damon’s Drugs.

  He shook his head back and forth as hard as he could, trying to signal her to keep her trap shut, but it didn’t work.

  Caroline cupped her hands to her mouth and called out louder.

  “Is there going be an Air Raid?” she shouted.

  Now several other people stopped on the street and looked up at Artie. Luckily, Wu Sing Lee had already walked into the bank, so he didn’t see Artie himself, though that was just luck after Caroline had drawn the whole world’s attention to him.

  “I’m just practicing!” Artie shouted back.

  “Just for Boy Scouts, or a real Air Raid?” Caroline called up at him.

  Artie could have croaked her. In the first place, everyone in Birney had pretty much forgot about Air Raids anymore. In the first summer of the War their whole part of the state had a blackout once to practice up in case of Air Raids, but it was called for 10:30 at night when all the farmers and most everyone else in towns like Birney had already turned off their lights and gone to sleep, so you really couldn’t tell if the blackout had even worked, except in bigger places like Moline. In the meantime, the Nazis had never tried to fly on the polar route from Norway to bomb Chicago and now the whole Luftwaffe was busy defending its own cities against the American Air Corps and the British who were striking back at them from bases in England.

  That just showed how much Caroline knew about what was going on in the War. Even if it had been a real Air Raid practice, the last thing a person should do was stand in Main Street and yell up at a Boy Scout carrying out Civil Defense duties on top of the Odd Fellows Building.

  Now a whole bunch of people had come out of shops and stores on Main Street to look up and see what was happening.

  “Better get down from there, boy,” some old guy in overalls yelled. “You ain’t got any net below.”

  Artie brought his arms down, put both semaphore flags in one hand, and headed for the fire escape. He didn’t want to get bawled out by anyone from the Odd Fellows Building about using their roof without permission, especially since his Dad wasn’t even a member of the Odd Fellows Lodge but belonged to the Moose. Besides, Artie would have had to make up a real whopper to cover up the secret truth that he was counterspying on a suspected Jap.

  By the time he climbed down from the top of the building to the street the crowd had broken up and everyone had gone on about their business, except for Caroline Spingarn.

  She was standing there balancing on one foot while she picked at a scab on her right knee. Artie thought she looked like the picture of a whooping crane in the seventh grade Science Studies book. Since the time she’d come out to visit him at Cho-Ko-Mo-Ko in the middle of the summer, Caroline had grown a couple of inches and her arms and legs stuck out like skinny poles from the little dresses she always wore that looked like they’d shrunk now. She was always falling down in the schoolyard or tripping over herself in the halls and the little bows and ribbons she wore in her hair looked silly now instead of cute. The worst part was that she kept following Artie around all the time and asking him stupid questions.

  “So what were you doing on top of the Odd Fellows Building?” she asked him, picking off a tiny piece of scab and holding it between her fingers like it was some kind of scientific specimen.

  “None of your beeswax,” Artie said, and started walking off down Main with a swift, military step.

  Caroline scrambled to catch up with him.

  “You’re not even nice anymore,” she whined. “Do you know that?”

  “I’m busy,” he said. “Don’t you know there’s a War on?”

  “That’s no excuse,” she said, “Why don’t we go have a Coke at Damon’s?”

  “Why don’t you go home and play with your paper dolls, Little Imogene?”

  That’s who Caroline really reminded him of these days—Little Imogene, the bratty kid in the funny papers.

  “Did I hear you right, Artie Garber?”

  “If you didn’t, I’ll make it as plain as the nose on your face. You’re getting to be a real pest, Caroline Spingarn.”

  Blotches of red came out on Caroline’s pale, squinting face.

  “You’ll be sorry you ever said that, Artie Garber.”

  “Oh, go fly a kite.”

  Caroline burst out crying and ran, her knees knocking together and arms flying crazily.

  For a moment, Artie had a panicky feeling that she might really try to do something to make him sorry. But he realized that was crazy. What could she do? She was only a girl.…

  Back up in Tutlow’s bedroom with the curtains drawn and the candle flickering from the Coke bottle, Artie complained that Caroline was worse than a “counter-counterspy.”

  “She can’t help it,” Tutlow said. “She’s just a girl.”

  “Well, I’m through with girls for the Duration. I swear on my oath as a counterspy.”

  “Never mind,” Tutlow said. “We got the info we need anyway. Wu Sing leaves his laundry every day at noon to go to the bank, which takes about ten minutes, and again he closes up at six and walks around and around the Bandstand in the Town Square.”

  “That sure is suspicious,” Artie said. “You think we ought to check underneath the Bandstand for hidden explosives?”

  “Maybe he’s only taking his constitutional,” Tutlow said. “Anyway, the first thing we got to do is, while Wu Sing is out going around the Bandstand, we ought to get into that hidden back room of his and search for evidence.”

  “You mean break into the laundry?”

  “It’s not ‘breaking in’ if it’s counterspy work.”

  “How do we get inside, though?”

  “There’s got to be something for opening doors on the Official Scout jackknife.”

  There was. It might not have been intended on purpose for jimmying doors open, but one of the terrific metal gougers that pulled out of the belly of the jackknife slipped right under the simple latch on the back door of the laundry and flipped it up and open.

  The boys quickly slipped inside, pulling the door shut behind them. It was dark, and smelled heavily of starch and foreign stuff. Tutlow struck a m
atch, and in the eerie, wavering glow, Artie could make out a table, some shelves with little bowls and glasses and tiny teacups without handles. There was also, to his amazement, a Betty Grable pinup calendar. Did it mean Wu Sing was trying to pretend to be American, or did he look at Betty Grable while lying at night on his narrow little cot and beat off, Oriental style? Or did Orientals even beat off? Maybe the Chinese did and the Japanese didn’t, or vice versa, and it was one way of telling them apart, but the article about telling them apart didn’t go into stuff about sex.

  “Eureka!” Tutlow said in a loud whisper.

  He had gone to the table and pulled out the one drawer in it. Artie hurried over to look, expecting to see some kind of bullets or homemade bomb parts. Instead, there were stacks of little papers with Chinese (or Japanese) writing on them. Tutlow started stuffing them into his pockets.

  “Hurry,” he said, “get all you can.”

  Artie picked up one of the little papers and looked at it by the light of the match.

  “I think it’s just laundry tickets,” he said.

  “That’s what he wants you to think, dumbo. It might be Japanese code about troop movements, or Home Front morale or something.”

  Artie dutifully grabbed a bunch of the papers and shoved them in his pockets.

  “Okay, we better scram,” he said.

  He was getting the heebie-jeebies thinking about the treacherous Wu Sing bursting in on them, shooting out his arms and legs in some complicated jujitsu movement, and knocking out Artie and Tutlow at the same time. When they woke, they’d be bound and gagged and have little slivers of bamboo under their fingernails, all ready to be lit by the fiendish Jap agent.

  “First, I got a surprise for this yellow-bellied Son of the Rising Sun,” said Tutlow.

  He waved out the match just as it was about to burn down to his fingers, quickly lit another one, and pulled from his coat pocket something that looked like a homemade firecracker.

  “What the heck is that?” Artie asked.

  “Stink bomb,” Tutlow said. “Made it with my chemistry set.”

  Tutlow started to light the thing and Artie grabbed his arm.

  “That’s not fair,” he said.

  “Huh?”