December 6

by Martin Cruz Smith

  “I told you,” Harry said. “The first was a card game.”

  “And last night?”

  “A con.” Harry spread the plans across a table. “No, more than that, it’s the most beautiful con I’ve ever seen. This is the mother lode, this is magic.”

  “That’s all you’re going to say?” Michiko asked.

  “My lips are sealed.”

  “I’m going out, Harry. I’m going to go spend all your money and then find a better lover.”

  “Hope he has a dick that rings like a bell.”

  “I’m not coming back.”

  “Have fun.”

  Gen shuddered as the door slammed behind her. “Kind of tough.”

  “No Shirley Temple,” Harry said. “Have you slept?”

  “I had coffee.” True enough, the officers of the Japanese navy started each day with coffee and scrambled eggs. Harry’s sympathy dried up.

  Besides the diagrams, Gen had had the water and oil tested. The water was two parts hydrogen, one part oxygen, and the oil was the equivalent of Rising Sun crude.

  “Imagine if we could produce that,” Gen said. “If we could get past the experimental stage. There were six bottles. Five bottles failed to change.”

  “Failure is important. Adds mystery and stalls for time. The navy might want to move to production, but production would entail real amounts of oil and a staff of genuine technicians. No, a con is much happier with endless, expensive research. How much is this costing the navy now?”

  “With gold water filters and electrical gear, ten thousand yen a week.”

  “That’s worth stringing out. And anytime the navy presses for results, Ito can play Camille and start to cough to death. If I were you, I would have the doctor’s handkerchief searched for a little vial of red liquid.”

  “You’re sure this is a hoax? He’s fooling real scientists.”

  “Well, I’ve been to the Universal back lot, and it looks like the doctor bought half of Frankenstein’s lab. The wands are called Jacob’s ladders, and the sphere is a Van de Graaff generator, wonderful for effects. The electricity is all static, perfectly harmless as long as you aren’t grounded. You better tell me more about Ito.”

  Ito had been born in Kyoto, but his family moved first to Malaya and then London, where he claimed to have studied chemistry and physics at university level and done research with British Petroleum. Who could say? Records from England were unavailable, burned by the Luftwaffe. Ito had recently returned to his homeland to study in solitude at CapeSata, the southern tip of Japan. There, on a cliff overlooking the restless sea, he had achieved insight into the very nature of atomic structure. Man could split the atom. New elements were being created all the time. Water and oil were different states of electrons in flux. Rather than take the slow, cautious route of academic publication, he offered his services directly to the nation. And the navy ate it up. How could they not? Harry thought. With a reliable source of oil, they could rule the Pacific. Without oil, the Combined Fleet would sooner or later sit in port, steel hulks covered in gull shit.

  “There are plenty of magicians in Asakusa. I’ll ask around,” Harry said.

  “No. This is secret, we’re not even supposed to mention his name.”

  “Then let me ask about the trick. I won’t mention oil.”

  Gen laid his arm across the table. “No, these are for you alone. No one else can see anything.”

  Harry knew that meant that no one else should know he was involved with a navy project.

  “Just you,” Gen insisted. “You think Ito is not a real scientist?”

  “I think I’ve seen him. It was years ago, at the Olympic Bar in Shanghai. I just noticed him out of the corner of my eye. He was working the tables. He was a close-up artist, card tricks, disappearing coins, and he was bald and dressed like a monk and looked completely different.”

  “That’s it? Someone you barely noticed in a bar years ago? Who looked different?”

  “And the cough and the bloody handkerchief when the British grabbed him for lifting wallets.”

  “Well, I think we have to be more exact than that.”

  Gen had listed the preparations of the experiment: the elaborate filling of the bottles with water, how witnesses marked the corks with private words or numbers that Ito didn’t even see before he inserted electrical wire, sealed the cork with molten wax and set the bottle in the tank of water. Gen had listed each of Ito’s steps: safety procedures of the goggles and mat, positioning of the copper wands and dialing in voltage at each to “orchestrate the electrical field.”

  “Does the transformation usually take one jolt?” Harry asked.

  “No, it might take days before it takes effect, but once the bottles are in the tank, they can’t be touched. In fact, you’d be electrocuted if you tried. Besides, guards are in the examining room around the clock.”

  “Why blue bottles?” They looked like medicine bottles to Harry.

  “Ito says they filter harmful rays.”

  “But you can’t see whether the contents are oil or water.”

  “Yes, you can. That’s when the bottle rises.”

  “Well, there’s your answer.”

  “You don’t believe any of it?”

  “Neither do you, or you wouldn’t have brought me in. Yamamoto can’t be fooled, not really.”

  “But—”

  “I know.” Harry had to smile. “It’s like the old joke. A woman brings her husband to the psychiatrist. She says, ‘Doctor, my husband is crazy. He thinks he’s a chicken.’ The psychiatrist says, ‘Leave him with me, I’ll cure him in a week.’ She says, ‘But we need the eggs.’ That’s the navy. You know this is crazy, but you need the oil.”

  It occurred to Harry that Yamamoto had an especially good chance of coming out of the affair looking like a fruitcake. Since he was the sanest man in the navy, and the strongest opponent to war, the army would seize on anything to discredit him. Harry was not surprised that he’d had no more direct contact with the admiral. That was the beauty of using a gaijin; he could always be disavowed.

  Gen had diagrammed the room like elevations. Along the east wall were medical cabinets, carboys of water, anatomical charts. North: cabinets, scale, door and transom, table of rubber boots, gloves and smoked goggles, eye chart and optical equipment. West: crutches, copper coils, VD chart, sink, instructions for winding cloth around the midriff to counteract the G-force of a tight turn. South: wheelchairs, cabinets, the observation mirror, more carboys and a row of bottles.

  “But imagine,” Gen said. “Imagine if we could transform water into oil. Nothing could stop us, Harry. We could be a force for good, for progress.”

  “Gen, not that it makes any difference to me, but I’ve seen progress. I’ve seen mounds of progress. I’ve seen the streets run with progress, I’ve seen progress shoved into pits and stacked to the sky and burned like logs. Progress is overrated.”

  “But you’ll help?”

  “What are friends for?”

  Gen laid his head on a table and closed his eyes while Harry looked at the diagrams. With cons, the simplest answer was best, you didn’t have to go to Harvard to know that. Harry discounted Ito’s elaborate procedure of marking and sealing corks as hokum. As for the electric lights and bangs? A hell of a show. All that really mattered was the apparent change of water to oil in six blue bottles in a tank of water. Oil was lighter than water, which was why a bottle floated when its contents were supposedly transformed by Ito’s bolts of lightning. But a fine string could raise a bottle, and the change of contents could have taken place anytime. And not even six had to rise, all the con needed was one bottle to maintain excitement because this was an audience who wanted, in spite of its intelligence, to believe what a magician showed them. Houdini once made an elephant disappear in MadisonSquareGarden. He showed the crowd the elephant standing face out, then drew the curtain, and when he reopened it, the elephant was gone. All Houdini had done was stand the elephant sideways b
ehind a drop of black velvet. As simple as that, because people wanted to believe.

  There were other possibilities. The steadfast guards might be bribed. The irate Professor Mishima might have been a shill. That got complicated, however, and Harry focused more and more on Dr. Ito’s lab coat as the most likely source of the “blood” the doctor coughed up at will and as a blind for a last-minute switch. Between the fireworks and smoked goggles and his voluminous lab coat, Ito could switch a case of beer.

  At four in the afternoon, Harry woke Gen. Kondo had started setting up the bar, briskly wiping glasses. From outside came the street calls of sake vendors and fortune-tellers.

  “You can’t cheat an honest man.”

  Gen sat up and rubbed his eyes. “What are you talking about?”

  “You can’t cheat an honest man. Do you know what that means, college boy?”

  “Yes,” Gen said.

  “No, you don’t. It means an honest man can afford to be objective, he doesn’t care one way or the other, so he’s hard to fool. A mark, on the other hand, wants something for nothing. He wants the pea under the shell, his share of a lost wallet, a tip on a horse, oil for water. His objectivity is already blown, he’s bought in. And because the game itself is dishonest, he can’t go crying to the police when he’s cheated of what he hoped to steal. Or to God because you can’t change water into aviator fuel. Have you got some dress whites?”

  THAT NIGHT, Harry alone slipped behind the observation mirror as Gen joined the band of witnesses. The group was entirely navy, which Harry took as a sign that scientific quibbles were on the verge of being totally ignored. With Yamamoto present, there was enough gold braid in the room for a bellpull. Only one officer was in dress whites, and that was Gen. All eyes, of course, were on Dr. Ito and the six blue bottles in the water tank.

  The emaciated doctor looked as if he had spent the day under a mushroom. He did cast a spell. Officers who generally believed only in six-inch armor hung on every word. Harry concentrated on what Ito did: the restless stride around the tank, the long hands and deft fingers, the flapping laboratory coat. Everyone had pulled on dark goggles, and Ito was moving toward the switch when Gen begged to borrow his lab coat. “I’m concerned about sparks that might burn my jacket. It’s the only one I own. Would you mind very much?”

  The senior officers were appalled, all but Yamamoto, who looked impartially curious.

  Ito hesitated. He had the ability to write amazement on his face. “You need my lab coat?”

  “Yes.” That was what Harry had told Gen to say.

  “In that case.” Ito shrugged off the coat and handed it to Gen, then continued in shirtsleeves and threw the switch.

  Luminous lines of energy filled the room, pulsing back and forth from wand to sphere over the blue bed of the water tank and the dark blue bottles that trembled within. As Ito modulated the voltage, the lines spread like a hypnotic sea of rolling waves, like the view, perhaps, from Sata, where he had first glimpsed the fluid forces of nature. When he shut off the power, one bottle had already risen to the surface. Ito scooped out the bottle and elected Gen to break the seal, verify the mark on the cork and identify the contents. Gen’s face burned with shame down to his white collar.

  “It’s oil.”

  “You’re positive?”

  “Yes, Doctor.”

  “Then may I have my coat?” As he pulled the coat on, Ito fell against the tank and began coughing up blood. He waved his hand like a swimmer going under. “No more experiments this week. I cannot proceed with such suspicion, the strain is too much.”

  The C in C averted his eyes from the disgrace of his lieutenant.

  AT THREE in the morning, Harry and Gen got back to the Happy Paris to salute the end of Gen’s career. Harry brought a bottle of Scotch from the bar while Gen smoked a cigarette as if he were chewing on a nail.

  “Sorry, Gen. I guess it wasn’t the lab coat.”

  “Wasn’t the coat? Wasn’t the coat? Harry, you’ve ruined me. I can’t face those officers tomorrow.”

  “Technically speaking, tomorrow is today. Banzai!” Harry raised his glass.

  “Banzai!” Gen threw the drink back. “One commander said I had embarrassed the entire navy. He suggested a letter of resignation.”

  “You were doing what Yamamoto asked you to do.”

  “No. I was doing what you told me to do. How could you be so sure about the coat?”

  “It seemed logical. I figured, forget the light show, he’s just switching bottles.”

  “We mark the cork. It’s the same cork when we put the bottle into the water and when we pull it out, so it’s the same bottle. Now what?”

  “I don’t know, I’m not a scientist. Maybe he’s really doing it.”

  “Water to oil?”

  “What do I know? Scientists are doing all sorts of stuff, synthetic this and that. I guess you have a real Einstein on your hands.”

  “A Japanese Einstein.” Gen laughed. “And I’ll go down in history as a fool.”

  “You and me.”

  “Harry, you won’t go down in history at all. How could you say take away his lab coat? You gambled, and I’m the one who paid. If I were a samurai, I’d kill myself. No, I’d kill you first. If I had a gun, I’d shoot you right now.”

  “Water to oil. One of the pivotal moments in science, like the first electric bulb, that’s exciting.”

  “And now you say he’s really doing it.”

  “It looks that way. He puts water in a bottle and takes oil out.”

  “I know, I was there.”

  Now that Harry thought about it, he himself wasn’t, not for everything. Ito had moved out of Harry’s vision to fill the bottle. “He didn’t use the sink tap. Where did he get the water?”

  “He siphoned it.”

  “Why? A sink is easier.” Harry remembered the diagrams of the room and the big glass carboys of water. “That’s a lot of effort when a sink is right there. It’s distilled water? Filtered water?”

  “It’s from Fuji. The water in the carboys is from a sacred spring on Mount Fuji, it’s the only water Ito will use.”

  “Sacred water?”

  “Yes.”

  Harry took a deep breath and raised his arms. “Praise the Lord! I feel my heart leap and the veils part. I hate to admit it, but I was starting to doubt myself. I’m sane again. Oh, it’s a scam, definitely a scam.”

  “How?”

  “I don’t know. I have no idea. Ito is a better magician than I am. I do know that for con games, holy water is the best kind. Now maybe you’ll let me talk to other magicians.”

  “I can’t, Harry. You were my shot.”

  In his rumpled whites, Gen looked like a laundry bag. He was the football hero stopped on the one-yard line, the movie star who’d lost his script, the aviator out of gas. He was no longer in the game, in the picture or in the air, and he couldn’t understand why. Handsome had gotten him only so far, which wasn’t far enough. Harry had seen it before, this capacity of Gen’s to lose all confidence, implode and go inert.

  “Harry?” Michiko came in the door with Haruko. Both were in chic new outfits, hats and shoes, Haruko’s, Harry suspected, a copy of Michiko’s. “We were at Haruko’s for a day and a half, waiting for you to come looking for me.”

  “And I was going to, as soon as Gen and I were done. I was very worried.”

  Seeing Gen low raised Michiko’s spirits; she generally treated him as a usurper of Harry’s interest, and he treated her the same. She showed Harry a small blue pharmacy bottle of laudanum from her purse. “I have enough here that I will never have to think about you again.”

  Harry didn’t take the threat seriously. Michiko was more the hand-grenade type. “Haruko’s was the first place I was going to look.”

  “You could have called.”

  “I should have. I’ve been thinking about you. I really have been. Missed you.” He turned the jukebox on low. The plastic canopy took on a pearly hue. An arm laid
a disc on the turntable, and a needle slipped into a groove while Harry’s hand slid into the small of Michiko’s back. Blue moon, you saw me standing alone / Without a dream in my heart / Without a love of my own. She was one of the few Japanese girls who knew how to dance, knew that sinuous was better than stiff and that the hips should be involved just so. He touched a certain point between two vertebrae, and her head settled on his shoulder. “You look agonizingly beautiful, you really do.” Her right hand rested in his left, bottle and all, his thumb on the underside of her wrist.

  When Haruko tried to get Gen to dance, he brushed her hand from his shoulder.

  “Gen is feeling a little low.” Harry said.

  “Gen is always low,” murmured Michiko.

  Haruko said to Gen, “Maybe I can cheer you up. You can call me sometime. I have a phone.”

  “Imagine that, her own phone. Haruko has an admirer at the telephone exchange,” Harry told Gen. “But she’s nuts about you, always has been.”

  “What would cheer you up?” Haruko asked.

  Gen said, “I’m just not in the mood.”

  “When is he?” asked Michiko. “Gen, when are you in the mood? Are you ever in the mood, Gen?”

  “Don’t pick on him.” Harry said.

  “But I want to pick on him. What kind of lover are you, Gen?”

  “Not your kind.”

  “Definitely not, I’d say. Absolutely not.”

  “Ssh.” Harry put his finger to Michiko’s lips and took up her hand again. You knew just what I was there for / You heard me saying a prayer for / Someone I really could care for.

  He felt how cool and delicate her fingers were around the bottle and how nubby the surface of the bottle was. They took another turn around the jukebox, but Harry’s mind was already moving in a different direction.

  “What now, Harry?” Michiko asked.

  Harry had the pharmacy bottle. He set it beside the bottle of Scotch in front of Gen, so smartly that Haruko jumped.

  “What do you see?” Harry asked.

  Gen wrested his glare from Michiko and refocused. “Two bottles.”

  “High-class Johnnie Walker bottle. Cheap blue bottle.”