Nagumachi was doing his evening tea ceremony, as was his habit. Being a Japanese Macaque was a nervous business in 1943 Chicago, but Nagamuchi kept up the old traditions in any case, while trying not to run afoul of any anti-Japanese sentiment. Fortunately, most Americans were unaware that Macaques were connected with Japan. As for his fellow apes and monkeys, they were not much concerned with the wartime racially motivated propaganda, other than having a basic level of patriotism to hometown America. One human, after all, was pretty much like another! Primates were not deemed draftable, being considered "less than human" by the US military, and that had turned out to be convenient for them on the whole. (Chongo actually had received a draft notice, much to everyone's amusement, and it had taken him weeks to get it straightened out with the bureaucrats! It had either been a clerical error...or someone's idea of a practical joke.)

Chongo had in the meantime run down some Nazi spies with assistance from the redoutable police detective Lance Drecker and Kerchak the gorilla, former enforcer for the North Side Gorillas. Kerchak was rumoured to have volunteered for some kind of secret service job and had not been seen in town lately, while Chongo had been awarded some kind of citation by a grateful nation, but Nagumachi didn't know much about that story. Chongo had been close-mouthed about it for some reason.

Nagumachi sighed, thinking of his relatives in faraway Japan, a nation now reeling under a growing series of military setbacks in the South Pacific. Things could only get worse back home. Meanwhile he had a life to live, hopefully in relative peace...and a vampire to track down.

Nasty business.

As he finished his meditation Nagumachi noted that the sun was just vanishing below the horizon. Somewhere in that great metropolis Vlad the Inhaler was stirring...