December 6

by Martin Cruz Smith

  The entertainment had just concluded when Harry and Roy Hooper returned. A couple hundred guests were still gathered on the lawn in the red, white and blue illumination of lanterns. The diplomatic corps sat in chairs that had begun to settle and list in the soft turf. Babies slept in their fathers’ arms. A whiff of sulfur hung in the air.

  “The prodigal sons,” announced the clerk functioning as master of ceremonies. “Too bad they missed out on all the fun.”

  “They had sparklers,” Harriet told Harry. “You know how you love sparklers.”

  “What have you got there?” Roger Niles asked. In the dark, despite its black cover, a faint halo surrounded the jar.

  “Nothing.”

  “It’s something worth making fools of us,” his father said. “Let’s see.”

  “Let’s all see,” the clerk picked up.

  Roy Hooper’s knees went soft as he felt the clamp of his father’s hand.

  “I’m disappointed in you,” Reverend Hooper hissed.

  “Or I’ll send you home to Louisville,” Roger told Harry under his breath. “I swear it.”

  “It’s for the entertainment,” Harry said.

  “The entertainment is over,” Roger said.

  The clerk said, “One more act, that’s fine with us. Isn’t that fine, folks? This is a very different boy here. I bet he’s got real different entertainment.”

  There was scattered applause in general, a snigger from the boy with a bandage on his nose. It was getting late. Most people wanted to go home. The ambassador yawned and fell into an expression of such boredom he could have been watching from the moon.

  “Turn off the lamps,” said Harry. “Just for a minute?”

  When the lanterns went dark, there was a reflexive whimper from the younger children. Harry unscrewed the lid, and the jar underlit his face.

  “It’s a surprise,” he said.

  Harry put his mouth to the jar. As he raised his head, a light rose from his lips, flashed and took wing. He took another breath from the jar and blew a green tracer bullet in the eye of a clerk, a deeper breath and poured a glowing machine-gun fusillade at the guests. Dipped into the jar to feed himself and blew until his fingers and lips were smeared with green fire. The ambassador tried to brush the luminescence off his sleeves, spreading it instead. Children squirmed from their parents, screamed and ran into the dark. For a brief moment before Roger Niles seized him, Harry ruled, marching with the roar of fireflies.

  7

  HARRY DROVE for half an hour under a dazzling sun from Tokyo to YokohamaBay only to find waiting for him the familiar shadows of Shozo and Go, the same plainclothes police that had watched his apartment at night. In the daylight Sergeant Shozo had a droll smile belied by heavy knuckles hanging from his sleeve. Corporal Go was young, with the zeal of a guard dog pulling on a chain. They were with the accountant from Long Beach Oil.

  Long Beach shared a black-stained dock with Standard Oil of New York and Rising Sun, which sounded Japanese but was actually Royal Dutch-Shell. Long Beach wasn’t much more than a small warehouse of corrugated steel, while Standard and Rising Sun fronted the water with miles of pipeline and acres of ten-thousand-barrel tanks. Didn’t matter. In the most important regard they were no different, because no American or Dutch company, big or small, had delivered oil to Japan since July, six months before.

  “Please.” The accountant unlocked the warehouse door.

  “I’m so curious,” Shozo told Harry. “All this time I have heard about your special connections to the navy. Now we’ll find out.”

  It was winter inside. Harry could see his breath by the clerkish light of green-shaded lamps that hung over a glassed-in office area. Rolltop desks crowded between file cabinets, chalkboards with lists of ships and ports, framed prices and schedules that showed the delivery of Venezuela crude at fourteen cents a barrel. Everything was spick-and-span, as if the American managers might return at any second, probably tidier without them. Harry stopped at a poster of the tanker Tampico with her ports of call —Galveston, Long Beach, Yokohama— a route that was history now. A snapshot tacked next to it showed a group of men around a racehorse. The rest of the warehouse held a truck loaded with ships’ stores of canned foods gathering dust. Tucked around the truck were the wide-mouthed hoses that were usually laid straight on a dock, each hose dedicated to a different product: marine gas, dirty diesel, sweet crude and sour. Harry felt like the Big Bad Wolf asked into a house of straw.

  The accountant’s name was Kawamura. He was about sixty years of age, with a long neck and more hair in his ears than on his head. Harry knew the type, the salaryman who was first to the office, last to leave, whose identity was his work and whose sole delight was a binge at New Year’s. He was Harry’s target, but Harry had not expected the participation of Shozo and Go. Kawamura trembled and kept his eyes down, the decision of a man who didn’t know which way to look.

  Sergeant Shozo showed Harry a fountain pen. “Waterman, from my wife. I want to document this case. You have made my life and the life of Corporal Go so interesting.”

  Harry preferred to be ignored. The Special Higher Police countered espionage, but they were also called Thought Police, responsible for detecting deviant ideas. Harry was riddled with deviant ideas. Like, how the hell had Shozo and Go heard about this meeting? How had they found Kawamura?

  Shozo opened a notebook. “‘Son of missionaries, born in Tokyo, grew up wild in Asakusa. Catching cats for shamisen skins. Running errands for prostitutes and dancers.’ I would have traded places with you in a minute. When my mother took me by the pleasure quarters, the girls would always tease me from their windows, and my mother would almost pull my arm out of its socket.”

  “You must have been pulling the other way.”

  “Very hard.” Shozo flipped a page. “Your parents had no idea what you were doing?”

  “They could cover more ground without me. I stayed in Tokyo with an uncle who was drinking himself to death. I spoke Japanese. I sent the telegrams and collected the money for him. It was simpler that way.”

  “You would have made a great criminal. Don’t you think so, Corporal?”

  Go waved a pudgy fist at Harry. “All foreign correspondents are spies! All foreign reporters are spies! All foreigners are spies!”

  Harry said, “No foreign resident has proven his usefulness to the Japanese government more than I have.”

  “That’s what I was telling the corporal,” Shozo said. “On the face of it, no American has been more useful to Japan. For example, Japan has an unfortunate shortage of oil. For a time you had a company to create petroleum?”

  “Synthetic petroleum.”

  Shozo consulted his notes. “From pine sap. You persuaded Japanese banks during a time of national emergency to invest in pine sap?”

  “That was one of a variety of approaches.”

  “When people talk about you and oil, they whisper about a magic show. What would that magic show be?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “No idea?”

  “None.”

  “You also proposed getting motor oil from sardines.”

  “It’s theoretically possible.”

  “You have no scientific background?”

  “Just business.”

  “Making money. Better than cat skins, too. What is the saying, what is it they say in English? It’s very fitting.”

  “There’s more than one way to skin a cat.”

  “Yes!” Shozo’s mouth turned down into a smile. “That’s what they say. ‘More than one way to skin a cat’! That’s what you are, a cat skinner, an American cat skinner.”

  Shozo’s voice was drowned by a reverberation that shook the walls, a rolling thunder that rose to full throttle and abruptly quit, leaving expectancy and silence until a man in a leather coat and goggles slapped open the door. With a dispatch bag over his shoulder, a broad, confident face and thick hair sculpted by the wind, he was an image off a war-bonds poster. He
pulled off gloves and goggles as he entered. Gen always arrived as if he’d just returned from the front, and sometimes he had, because he was more than an aviator, he was in Naval Operations. He bowed to Shozo and Go, winked at Harry. If he was surprised by the presence of the Special Higher Police, he didn’t show it.

  “Sorry to keep you waiting,” Gen said. “It’s been a busy day.”

  “You seem to know Harry Niles,” Shozo said.

  “Oh, I know Harry.” Gen shrugged his coat off of navy blues. The sight of a lieutenant’s stripes on the sleeve prompted Kawamura to give Gen an additional ninety-degree bow.

  “I’m in the dark,” Shozo said. “I am told that Mr. Niles performs valuable services, but I can’t imagine what they are.”

  “You’ll see.” From his dispatch bag Gen took a legal-size book of faded maroon that he laid on the desk and opened. “The ledger of Long Beach Oil. Fascinating reading.”

  The entries were in India ink for English and blue for Japanese. As Kawamura stared down at the pages, he sweated despite the warehouse chill.

  Gen explained to Shozo, “Kawamura is the accountant of Long Beach Oil. He finds himself in an unusual and uncomfortable position because Long Beach assets have been frozen by the Japanese government in retaliation for the freezing of Japanese assets and properties in the United States. The American managers of the company have gone back to the United States, leaving Kawamura, their senior Japanese employee, in a caretaker position, and he has carried out his duty to his employer faithfully.”

  “And faithfully to the emperor,” Kawamura interjected.

  “Of course.” Gen grinned at Harry.

  As kids, Gen and Harry used to strut around Asakusa in dark glasses like hoods. One day they were getting their fortunes told in the temple when they heard a nasal buzzing overhead, looked up and saw a biplane come in low to waggle its wings over Buddha. Gen took off his dark glasses. The plane came by again, a silvery vision towing a sign that said EBISU BEER. It made Harry thirsty, but it changed Gen’s life. Determined to fly, he became a model student who headed to the NavalAcademy and aviation, then the University of California at Berkeley, studying English. Gen actually put more time in at American schools than Harry, and at Berkeley, he had picked up a little American sis-boom-bah, which fitted him for the navy general staff. The army’s model was Germany, but navy comers tended to admire the British and the States and adopted a tradition of white gloves and ballroom manners. Somehow Gen Yoshimura had found the money to cover the costs that nagged at a student and officer. Harry thought there must have been some scrimping. With his poor-boy ambition and American style, Gen was a perfect amalgam.

  “Let’s assume,” Gen told Kawamura, “that your employers were anxious as to how exactly the freeze of assets would be carried out here —whether there would be appropriation of their property, damage or misuse. By now they should be reassured that the Emergency Board for the Protection of Foreign Commercial Interests has the well-being of Long Beach Oil in mind. The freeze is an unhappy but temporary measure. It is a system that only works, however, when everyone cooperates, as most American companies have done.”

  “Yes.” Kawamura tried to ignore Harry, as if not acknowledging a wolf would make it go away.

  “But,” Gen said, “there have been exceptions. Unfortunately, some American companies have created Japanese subsidiaries in which they attempt to hide assets. In other cases, American companies underreport their assets or their activity. The more critical the commodity, the greater chance of inaccurate reporting. Yo-yos, for example, have been accurately accounted for. Oil has not.”

  “I still don’t understand,” Kawamura said.

  “Let’s take an example,” Harry said. “According to your own ledger, the tanker Sister Jane left California for Japan on May first with ten thousand barrels of oil. On May fifteenth, the Sister Jane arrived here and delivered one thousand barrels. It left the States with more oil than it delivered, ten times as much.”

  Kawamura finally exploded. “What is an American doing here? Is he an expert on trade?”

  Harry said, “I’m an expert on cooking the books. It’s the last item in the ledger. Read it.”

  Kawamura put on spectacles to read the page. “Ah, well, this is all a misunderstanding, a simple error. The first number was written as ten thousand but later corrected to one thousand. One thousand barrels left Long Beach, one thousand arrived here. You can see there is even the initial P for Pomeroy, our branch manager, to show his correction. There was no attempt to disguise anything. I would never have allowed it.”

  “I remember Pomeroy,” Harry said. “Lived right next to the racetrack. Pomeroy went home?”

  “He is gone, yes.”

  “To Long Beach?” Gen asked.

  “Los Angeles.”

  “He treated you well?” Harry asked.

  “Always.”

  “It’s quite an honor to be left in charge?” Gen asked.

  “He trusts me, I think,” Kawamura said.

  “He should,” Harry said. “You are obviously a stout defender of Long Beach Oil. But why the mistake? Why did a full ten thousand gallons of oil have to be corrected to a mere one thousand?”

  “I don’t know. I am embarrassed that there should be even the suggestion of a discrepancy. I can assure you, however, that when a ship arrives, we measure the quantity of oil in each tank on the ship before it is pumped, and again at the storage tanks after.”

  “How do they measure the oil on the ship?” Shozo asked.

  “Tape and plumb bob,” Harry said.

  “Japan depends on oil,” Gen said. “Japanese soldiers are giving their lives every day for oil.”

  Harry said, “It’s hardly worth taking one thousand barrels across the Pacific. Did the Sister Jane stop on the way?”

  “Only Hawaii,” Kawamura said.

  “Hawaii?” Gen asked.

  “There was a problem with a sick seaman, as I remember. The ship was only in dock two nights.”

  “Tough luck for the seaman,” said Harry. “But maybe a stroke of good luck for the rest of the crew. Honolulu has a lot of hot spots. Do you think the captain gave the crew two days’ liberty?”

  “I wouldn’t know.”

  “Do you think maybe he pumped out nine thousand gallons of oil when the crew wasn’t around?” asked Gen.

  “No.”

  Harry said, “I’m just wondering why someone thought the Sister Jane left Long Beach with a lot of oil and ended up here with very little.”

  “No one was cheated. Whether it was one thousand or ten thousand, that was what we sold, no more, no less.” Kawamura looked to Shozo for support, but the policeman’s expression was grim. Go had started to giggle, which even Harry found unnerving. “I’m sure Pomeroy would have a good explanation if he were here.”

  “But he’s not here and you are,” Harry said. “I looked through the entire ledger, and in the twelve months before the freeze on deliveries, there were three other corrections for shortages of deliveries, totaling another thirty-six thousand barrels of oil that Japan desperately needed. You’ll find the ‘corrections’ on pages five, eleven and fifteen, a little smudged but definitely altered.” Kawamura flipped from page to page. This was like hunting rabbit, Harry thought. You didn’t chase rabbits, you lit a fire and they came to you if you showed them a safe way out. “Who actually had possession of this ledger, you or Pomeroy?”

  “Pomeroy.”

  Gen asked, “Who wrote down the number of barrels leaving Long Beach and arriving here?”

  “Pomeroy.” Kawamura looked ready to pull his head in his collar if he could.

  “You didn’t actually run the books on oil at all, did you?” Harry said. “That was the manager’s job. After all, you’re a financial man, not an oilman. What you were really in charge of was the branch budget, the payroll, dock fees, accounts payable. It must have been confusing to suddenly have to deal with customs, immigration, bills of lading. I doubt you
ever would have noticed these barrel amounts.”

  “I didn’t.”

  “But thirty-six thousand barrels and nine thousand, that is forty-five thousand barrels of oil,” Shozo said. “Where did it go?”

  “Good question,” Harry said. “I personally think that Kawamura here is an honest Japanese employee duped by the American manager Pomeroy, who is probably at the racetrack at Santa Anita even as we speak.”

  Gen asked Shozo to take Kawamura outside.

  “Let me.” Go gathered the accountant.

  “Just a dupe,” Harry reminded the corporal.

  “No Japanese should be duped,” Go shouted back as he dragged Kawamura through the door. “All Americans are spies!”

  On his way out, Shozo said to Harry, “I take it back. You would have made a good policeman, too.”

  The instant the door shut behind the sergeant, Gen slapped the desk. “God, that was fun.” He dropped into a chair and put his feet up. Sometimes Gen’s slovenliness struck Harry as virtually American. “I remember, as a kid, watching you do the change-from-a-hundred-yen-note scam, wondering how you always walked away with more money than you started.”

  “It’s just how you count, forward or back. How did Shozo and Go know about this meeting?”

  “I told them. It was for your protection. They were going to pick you up, so I had to show them how valuable you were.”

  “You could have warned me.”