The Little Tokyo Informant

by Andrew Rosenheim

  He’d made it as far as the medical in the recruitment office in Fond du Lac, fifty miles from his Wisconsin hometown. He hadn’t told a soul he was trying to enlist other than Annie, for he’d learned by then just how far tentacles – Hoover’s, Tolson’s, even Guttman’s – could extend. There had been twenty minutes when he thought he’d made a successful swap from civvies to uniform. But then a recruiting sergeant had come in and pulled him out of the line; Nessheim remembered the odd looks of the other enlistees as he left the room. He’d been taken to an office where he found the same doctor who had cleared him thirty minutes before sitting with a full colonel. Fingering a folder on the desk in front of him, the doctor had said, ‘It seems you haven’t declared all your medical history.’

  Someone must have tipped off this doctor about the Chicago consultant who’d ended his football career; or about Nessheim’s stay in a New York hospital after he’d almost drowned in Long Island Sound.

  ‘Who’s been telling tales?’ he had asked mildly.

  ‘None of your business,’ the Colonel had snapped. Then, more softly, ‘Nice try, fella. But it’s no go. And the Bureau needs you anyway.’

  The Bureau, the goddamned Bureau. It wouldn’t be so bad if he were working in the field again, but his recurring dizzy spells – sole relic of that football injury – had put paid to that. He was a desk man now, confined to holding the hands of the phoney Count, doing the odd errand for Guttman, and pacifying the local SAC by keeping an eye on the pinkos who Hood thought were rife in the Hollywood ranks.

  He was thirty years old and what did he have to show for it? Momentary glory as an all-American football player, cut short by an injury that had lost him his scholarship. Pure chance had landed him a post under Melvin J. Purvis, the Chicago SAC, legendary pursuer of Dillinger. Purvis had encouraged him and helped him move from being a clerk to becoming an agent, against most odds and many regulations.

  But Purvis had made the mistake of becoming famous – which meant goodbye Melvin, once Hoover decided to move against the upstart. Along with all the other Purvis loyalists, Nessheim had been about to be bounced to the Butte office or its obscure equivalent when Harry Guttman had stepped in and turned him into an undercover agent – furtively, since it was against Hoover’s own proscriptions.

  He put a hand now against his side and felt the scarred ridge of skin that a bullet wound had left him as a souvenir. Twice he’d almost been killed working for Guttman, and he wondered if there was going to be a third time. Who was this stranger Mrs Delaware had reported seeing?

  He went inside, intending to take a shower. The doorbell rang as he was starting to undress. Mrs Delaware again? It didn’t seem likely. When he answered the door he found an old man standing at the top of the stairs wearing the blue uniform of Western Union. His eyes bulged when he saw Nessheim’s holstered Smith and Wesson.

  ‘Maybe I got the wrong place,’ the old man said.

  ‘Who are you looking for?’

  ‘James Nessheim,’ he said, looking down at the name on the envelope he held. His other hand was crippled, the fingers curled like a hook, hanging lifeless by his side.

  ‘That’s me.’ Nessheim took the envelope and signed for it. The old man said delivery was pre-paid, but seemed happy with the quarter Nessheim gave him on top. When he’d gone Nessheim went back inside and opened the envelope. Even by Guttman’s laconic standards the reply was short:

  FIND HIM.

  4

  IT WAS SATURDAY morning and Nessheim rose and showered, then put on a pale linen suit and the silk tie that a rich girlfriend had bought him in Chicago almost a decade before. He left the house and started his car, then went down the hill to Hollywood Boulevard. There was very little traffic at the weekend, though a small black Austin followed him down the hill and along the Boulevard. When he parked his car at the corner of Vine the Austin went right on by. He didn’t get a good look at the driver, though he was pretty sure it was a man. No hat, short hair.

  He crossed the Boulevard and went into Albert’s Barber Shop. It had a spinning candy cane barber’s pole in front, and elaborate lettering traced on its wide front window: Men’s Hair Dressing, Toiletries and Shaves. He’d first gone there for a haircut soon after arriving the January before, and now made a habit of coming every Saturday morning for a shave. There were four barber chairs with mirrors on the wall facing them, which made the room seem larger than it was, an effect enhanced by a floor laid out in a chequerboard pattern of large black-and-white tiles. Against the other wall customers could sit and smoke cigars and read the papers in one of a line of comfortable red leather chairs, which had tin ashtrays sunk into their chrome arms. At the back of the shop were two coat-racks and a shoe-shine stand with two chairs – Arthur, the ‘shine boy’ (who looked about a hundred years old), sat on a low stool when he wasn’t making a show of slapping polish on or snapping his chamois rag. Today he was fiddling with the radio for the broadcast of the ball games starting three time zones later back East.

  It was less than a mile from the studio, but Nessheim had never seen anyone from the AMP in the barber shop. He liked the place: it seemed an oasis of calm after the hectic craziness of the Ink Well. You’d sit down and Albert would pump the chair up, then tilt it back until you were almost looking at the ceiling. He swathed your face with hot damp towels to soften your beard, lathered the cup of shaving cream, then applied the foaming soap with a soft badger brush that he’d dipped in hot water. You lay back with your eyes closed, sleepy and content to let the man take a lethal straight razor and shave you so close and so effortlessly (never even a nick) that when you stood up five minutes later your face was pink and smooth as a baby’s bottom. You handed over two bits and left the shop a new man, ready for the week ahead.

  It was quiet this morning and as Albert stroked the sudsy lather from his throat Nessheim listened to the Braves game, crackling through its various relays.

  ‘You think that Ted Williams will hit .400?’ Albert asked as he wiped away the remaining bits of soap with a towel.

  ‘Could do it,’ said Nessheim. ‘I’m a DiMaggio fan myself.’ Jolting Joe had hit in fifty-six straight games earlier that season; if Williams did hit .400 they were two records that looked likely to last a long time.

  ‘What a year,’ said Albert, wiping his razor between swipes.

  ‘Enjoy it while you can.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Next year those guys may be wearing a different uniform.’

  ‘Nah, the Sox would never trade –’ Albert stopped as he suddenly understood. ‘Don’t remind me. I got a boy who’s coming up to draft age.’

  Shaved and trimmed, Nessheim drove south, then east on Wilshire towards downtown, where even two miles away he could see City Hall, looming high above its neighbours, the sole building exempt from a city-wide height limit of 150 feet. He turned down Spring Street, and its heavy-set financial office buildings, plonked right in the flat bottom of the bowl which made up most of the city.

  He managed to park right outside the Federal Building, since only a few employees worked at the weekend in the Mussolini-style edifice. Inside only one elevator was working – a new automatic one. He took it to the eighth floor, where the guard at reception looked half-asleep as he pushed the sign-in book towards him. He walked down the corridor to the open space where most of the agents had their desks. Looking down he spied the Los Angeles River, swaddled in its new channel of cement, recently poured to control its tendency to flood – it had broken both banks earlier in the year.

  His office was a sawed-off desk tucked in one corner, and most of the time he arrived to find that someone had taken his chair. He averaged one visit every other week, so he couldn’t really complain. Now the room was almost empty. In a corner two agents were poring over a map they’d spread out on a desk; another agent, by the window, was on the phone, looking bored. He glanced up and Nessheim gave a casual wave and kept going towards the filing cabinets on the room’s no
rth wall. The long-term files were kept in a locked room down the hall, but more transient stuff, including recent reports from informants, were kept in the bank of three-drawer filing cabinets, next to the SAC’s office. Hood had given him a key only reluctantly, after Nessheim had pointed out that he couldn’t very well keep his files at home – nor at the studio, which, as Hood knew, was full of snooping pinkos.

  The SAC’s office door was open and he peered in; there was no sign of Hood. Not unusual for a weekend, since he was a big family man, his desk studded with framed photos of his wife and kids. He advised bachelor agents that they should get married if they wanted to advance at the Bureau.

  Nessheim went back to the filing cabinets and unlocked the middle filing cabinet. M, N, O – he pulled back the heavy letter tab and scrutinised the files behind it. Ockermann, Olley, Ormand, then the one he was looking for. He pulled out Osaka and walked back to his corner desk, grabbing a chair on the way. He wanted a coffee, but decided it could wait. Opening the file he took out its pages and read them very carefully.

  Billy Osaka had been born in Honolulu, Hawaii, on March 19, 1916, son of Taro Osaka and Mary Osaka (née Mitchie). He had moved to the mainland in 1935 aged nineteen, where he attended UCLA for two years but left without a degree. His two references were teachers there – an English composition lecturer and an Associate Professor of Political Science – though neither had been consulted since Osaka’s work for the Bureau was occasional and hardly top secret.

  Billy had begun work as a stringer for the Japanese-American newspaper Rafu Shimpo in 1938, and was first approached by Special Agent Danforth in spring 1939 when fears of a Japanese invasion led the Bureau to start identifying fifth columnists within the Japanese-American community. Osaka had been asked to help identify subversives who might be working for Japanese intelligence, and to serve as a translator. He was put on a retainer of $10 a month, which suggested scepticism about his value; unsurprisingly many of Agent Danforth’s notes of their meetings recorded Osaka’s complaints that he wasn’t paid more.

  Not that his intelligence seemed to justify a pay rise: as Danforth noted, most of it was available from public sources. When the Japanese Ambassador Kichisabur Nomura had visited Southern California earlier in the year, he had been feted at a lunch by Japanese-Americans. Osaka had filed a confidential report saying the Ambassador had held meetings with two local Japanese-American dignitaries. Since both had been openly described in Rafu Shimpo as the organisers of a lunch in Nomura’s honour, Osaka’s disclosures were of limited value to say the least. Particularly since Osaka had written the Rafu Shimpo article.

  Nessheim checked that the address Osaka had most recently supplied was the same one in Boyle Heights which he had already visited. He was about to close the file when someone said, ‘Well, if it isn’t Clark Gable himself.’

  Nessheim looked up, to find Cohan standing across the desk, his pinched face looking like it had been caught in a trap. ‘Morning,’ he replied, hoping to limit their exchange. Cohan was the SAC’s deputy and Nessheim thought him the worst kind of gung-ho agent, happy to climb the career ladder by kissing the ass on the rung above him, while stepping on all the hands on the rung below. Cohan had got married in spring and spent his honeymoon in Washington; rumour had it that he had taken his new bride to visit the Bureau training facilities in Quantico. Rumour also had it that his wife was rich, which explained why Cohan lived on the edge of Beverly Hills.

  ‘What gives us the pleasure of your company at the weekend? I’m impressed.’

  Nessheim said, ‘I could ask the same of you. Why aren’t you home with your new bride? Something up?’

  Cohan said, ‘Nothing you need to worry your sweet buns about.’ But he couldn’t help boasting: ‘We got a spic drug ring in our sights. There’s a raid set for tonight and R.B.’s coming in to check we’re all prepared.’

  Nessheim wondered if R.B. Hood was going to lead the raid himself. He was a cautious man, but no coward – and traditionally SACs were first through the door. This added another subtler danger to the obvious one of getting plugged, since a successful raid always made the papers, and the publicity rarely sat well with the Director in D.C. Look at Purvis, after Dillinger’s death: his endorsement had been stencilled on half a million boxes of Wheaties. Within two years Hoover had driven him out of the Bureau.

  ‘When’s SAC due in?’ he started to ask, but then the man himself appeared. The agents called Hood ‘Dick Tracy’ behind his back, with respect if not affection. He was tall and ramrod straight and as prudish as a small-town minister, which made sense given that his father had been one in Kansas. Hood Junior didn’t smoke, drink or swear. His one concession to human weakness was a vanity about his appearance. Today he wore a khaki suit and a panama hat with a band the colour of smoke. He saw Nessheim and stopped. ‘Where’s your report?’

  ‘Sorry, boss,’ said Nessheim. He was damned if he’d call Hood ‘sir’, and Hood was never going to invite Nessheim to call him ‘R.B.’. ‘Something’s come up – one of my sources has blown. I can’t find him anywhere.’

  ‘Who is it?’

  ‘Billy Osaka.’

  R.B. frowned. ‘I told you he was no good. It’s a waste of time worrying about him. You can’t trust the Japs. Their loyalty is to a different country, whatever they tell you.’ He paused. ‘By the way, there’s some Red shindig I want to know about. It’s raising funds for the Communist brethren in Moscow. You’d think it was a little late for that – too late if you read the papers. Still, it’s worth finding out who’s behind it. You have good sources – use them.’

  ‘Okay,’ said Nessheim, whose ‘sources’ amounted to gossip overheard in the Ink Well and Elsie’s Diner. It looked like he would have to go to the Writers for a Free World benefit after all. But there was a silver lining, he realised – he’d ask Lolly to go with him. Why not? he asked himself, since he was no longer spoken for.

  Hood went into his office and Nessheim put the Osaka file back, then walked to the other end of the floor, where the typists sat in an open bullpen. There was a small working library by the window and the view here was a spectacular one of the Santa Monica Mountains to the west and north. He could just make out the dip of Laurel Canyon.

  He found a Bureau Directory, wondering if there would be a field office in Hawaii – it was just a territory after all, not even a state. But it was listed, along with the SAC’s name: Robert Shivers. He found a piece of typing paper in the bullpen and wrote out his message in block capitals: INFORMATION REQUIRED ON LA INFORMANT BORN IN HAWAII NAME OF WILLIAM OSAKA. He gave Billy’s date of birth, his parents’ names, then asked for details of Osaka’s upbringing and education in Hawaii, any known addresses where he resided, any living relatives, and any criminal record. It was standard stuff, a Scoop search as it was called in the Bureau. He signed the sheet and stuck it in the Work Waiting basket.

  He left the building and got into the Dodge. Driving east, he crossed over the Los Angeles River on Olympic Boulevard and went past the Sears Roebuck Building, an immense concrete tower, one of nine depositories across the country. He’d grown up with the company’s catalogue, remembered how his mother would read through it in the evenings, carefully choosing those items she couldn’t find in the general store in Bremen.

  Boyle Heights was north according to the map so he swung left, entering a neighbourhood of small streets with shabby old houses and little bungalows, just east of the river. Boyle Avenue, the main street, was bustling with people. There were fruit and vegetable stalls, fresh produce piled high, and the array of small shops were almost all Mexican or Jewish. He crossed Fourth Street, then drove into the quiet residential neighbourhood on First Street, with its pale stucco houses and brick apartment buildings, a school and a Catholic church.

  He parked, took off his tie and left it on the passenger seat. He didn’t want to be taken for a bill collector, or a detective. As he approached the tall wood-frame house, a young woman came out and stood on the
porch. She wore baggy shorts, a pink shirt and bobby socks, the dress of a classic American girl, except that she was clearly Japanese. She looked upset, like she had been crying; seeing Nessheim she wiped her eyes, then quickly came down off the porch and cut across the front lawn, heading away from him. He watched her, but she didn’t turn around.

  He went upstairs to Billy’s apartment and knocked, but no one answered and he couldn’t hear any sound from inside. He tried the other upstairs apartment, but the couple he’d seen on his previous visit weren’t in, so he went downstairs and knocked at a door on the ground floor. An old Japanese lady answered the door, wearing a housecoat and oversized slippers that had fluffy balls on their toes.

  ‘Sorry to bother you,’ Nessheim began, then realised from her uncomprehending expression that she didn’t know English. He was about to make his excuses and go when a man’s voice called from inside the apartment.

  The old lady said something and seconds later a man appeared. He was Japanese, in thick, blue work pants and a T-shirt, and looked about ten years older than Nessheim. He was stockily built, with powerful arms. His hunched stance suggested he was a stoop labourer, days spent in back-breaking labour picking strawberries, melons, asparagus and squash, crouched down with a stem knife. ‘What do you want?’ the man demanded. A grain of rice hung off his upper lip and he wiped it off impatiently. His lack of any accent suggested that he was American-born.

  ‘I’m looking for Billy Osaka.’

  ‘You come round before?’

  Nessheim nodded. ‘I was looking for him then too.’