Expecting the playful kind of bowl that had been thrown for his good friend Horace, Tanaka was astonished. Tanaka had been a good secondary school cricketer, but he didn’t have Horace’s professional skill. And Sonny’s bowl was straight and fast. Somehow, Tanaka stonewalled the ball, but it didn’t go far, rolling infield toward the White Russian artist and architect Yuri “George” Vitalievitch Smirnoff, known for his caricatures of Imperial Japanese officials surreptitiously left at cafés and posted on street corners all over the city. Smirnoff had never played this absurd game in his entire life. The closest kind of game he knew was hockey, which he hadn’t played since he was a boy in Vladivostok. He fumbled and dropped the ball. Enrico Valtorta, Vicar Apostolic of Hong Kong, scooped it up and threw it underhanded to Vandeleur Grayburn. Tanaka and Ishiyama scored three runs before Grayburn hurled the ball to the catcher at the striker’s wicket, Edward Kerrison.

Horace had set the Japanese up well in spite of himself. Tanaka and Ishiyama needed just two more runs for a tie, three more to win. Ishiyama gave Tanaka his fiercest stare. Tanaka gazed back. It was not brotherhood, but it was acknowledgment. Sonny Maria hurled the ball, so hard and fast the air smoked in its wake. Miraculously, Tanaka hit it. A bright flame flared at the point of contact. Both bat and ball sizzled, and the smell of burnt wood and burnt leather assailed the nostrils of the fans. The ball sailed into the sky behind him, square leg, but unfortunately for Japan, Subadar Mengha Singh, Sikh fusilier with the 2/14th Punjab Regiment and top all-rounder for India against Lord Tennyson’s XI on their tour of India in 1937 and 1938, stood right in its path. He leapt up and whipped it out of the air in his wide, strong palm. The ball was still scorching hot, but Mengha Singh wasn’t a fusilier for nothing. He rolled to the ground and did a double somersault over his large left shoulder, but he did not let go of the burning ball.

The British fans went wild.

Noma was furious. Isogai was outraged. There was going to be hell to pay.

Cheung tallied the score and called it: “362 for Japan, 364 for Britain. Britain takes it.”

The teams burst from their cages. The players shook hands. When Horace greeted Sonny Maria, he asked, “Ever heard of a guy called ‘Ga-Chan’?”

Sonny beamed and winked at him, reached into his fruit hat, and plucked a plaster apple from it, which he placed in Horace’s hand. “Never, belo. But come look for me when this infernal war is over, if you want.”