December 6

by Martin Cruz Smith

  “Did your ears tickle?” Go hiked himself to see Harry in the rearview mirror.

  “No, they weren’t tickling.”

  “Because we were talking about you. Right, Sergeant? Talking about Harry Niles?”

  Shozo said, “The life you’ve led, Harry. The best of both worlds.”

  The sergeant had heard about Michiko. She might have disappeared, but Shozo and Go had found her dresses and kimonos and sequined jacket in the apartment. “‘Michiko Funabashi, the famous Record Girl, the woman with icy reserve,’” Shozo read from a notebook with the aid of a penlight. “‘The woman with icy reserve.’ She is your paramour?”

  “She works in the café below my apartment. Sometimes she stays at my place when the weather’s foul.”

  Shozo shook his head with wonder. “‘When the weather’s foul.’ Harry, you never disappoint. But the Record Girl was away tonight?”

  “As it turned out.”

  Harry thought that if being rousted was meant to frighten him, it wasn’t working. To him, Japanese police were Keystone Kops, with their work done for them. The yakuza maintained a rough sort of law and order and kept their hands off civilians, who in turn kept one another under constant surveillance. This was an entire population that loved to turn in bicycle thieves. The Japanese were so law-abiding by nature that crime was generally accompanied by a complete psychological breakdown. Japanese murderers loved to confess.

  Harry knew what would happen if he led Shozo to the willow house and showed him Al DeGeorge. A foreign correspondent executed samurai-style? That said “army” or “patriot,” and that meant “Don’t touch.” Harry could name Ishigami, and it still wouldn’t matter. The police would not rush to arrest a war hero who was related to the imperial family. They would interview the owners of the willow house, geishas and Ishigami’s fellow officers for months before they even dared, obliquely and with many bows, approach the colonel himself. And if in the end the army decided Ishigami was a homicidal maniac, they would send him back to China, where his talents had an outlet.

  However, the gaijin who accused a war hero of murder, who spread such subversive propaganda and disturbed social harmony, would find that things could happen very quickly, beginning with immediate detention and isolation. Harry would be lucky to see the surface of the earth again, let alone the last plane out of Tokyo.

  “Why are you up?” Harry asked. The sergeant and corporal were rumpled, as if they’d passed a sleepless night of their own.

  “Hoping to catch you by surprise,” Shozo said. “I admit it, it’s hard to catch an insomniac by surprise.”

  “What does the newspaper say?” Harry noticed one sticking out of the sergeant’s briefcase.

  Shozo opened it. “The morning edition. It says that in Singapore, the British have called off picnics and tennis parties. Doesn’t that seem to you to be a provocation?”

  “Putting tennis on a war footing?”

  “Yes.”

  “Cricket, maybe.” It probably wasn’t a great idea to wander in the jungle with a picnic hamper. The car kept heading north. Harry had expected them to take him downtown if they had questions. This was the opposite direction.

  “Another article says that American battleships are too big to pass through the Panama Canal. Is that true?”

  “I wouldn’t know. Sergeant, I’m flattered by the wide scope of knowledge you think I possess. Does your newspaper say anything about the talks in Washington?”

  “Going well. Roosevelt is backing down.”

  “Sounds like peace in our time.”

  The object was to get in sync with events, Harry thought. Go with the flow, avoid the rocks. Ishigami was one, Michiko was another. Harry focused on the prize. It sounded like the flight was still on.

  Shozo confided, “When I can’t sleep, I do jigsaw puzzles. I once had a five-hundred-piece puzzle of the Grand Canyon in America. It took me a week, but I so looked forward to seeing the complete sweep of this natural wonder. When I was done, however, I was missing a piece right in the center of the puzzle. The effect was ruined. I have to confess, I did something childish. In a fit of frustration, I threw the puzzle out the window, literally out the window and into the canal. I still remember seeing the pieces float away.”

  “Sounds like you were steaming,” Harry said.

  “I was livid. Then, two days later, I stepped on a mat and felt something underneath. It was the missing piece, the five-hundredth piece. It showed a man standing at the canyon rim and looking out, only now he looked out at nothing. The entire picture would have been complete if I had only waited. It was at a price, but I learned something, to be patient and not let go of anything. Sooner or later I will see how everything fits.”

  The headlights projected a film of the city, the street becoming a road with billboards and vacant lots, rice paddies and vegetable plots. The glint of railroad tracks whipped by. Shirts with outstretched arms loomed on drying rods. People said the Japanese treated paper with reverence, that nothing on paper was ever thrown away, but this was where Tokyo’s litter blew. Paper skated on the ground, collected against trees, kited in the air ahead of the car. Go aimed toward two tall smokestacks planted among black conifers, and Harry finally knew where he was being taken. Today was Sunday. Most people would head for a day at the movies, neighborhood fairs, family graves. He was headed to Sugamo Prison.

  THE PRISONER PROCESSING area had the white tiles, clothes bins and wooden tubs of a public bathhouse. Posters listed rules (NO SPEAKING, NO SIGNALING, NO DISRESPECT) and illustrated the difference between lice and crabs. Harry took it in with the bright attitude of a member of a blue-ribbon committee investigating penal conditions, even when two guards in Sam Browne belts relieved him of his belt, tie and shoelaces, and even though he knew that at any moment he might be stripped, scrubbed and inspected. He understood that it was never more important than when in a correction facility to maintain the air of a visitor. Besides, complaining was something done outside Sugamo. Inside, a man could be held for months, sometimes years, while his case was investigated for suspicion of crime. The one way an inmate could force a trial date was by confessing his guilt, and only then could he see a lawyer.

  Shozo and Go quick-marched Harry down a steel corridor. The middle was open to the floors above and below, with a grille to prevent anyone from cheating the law by jumping to his death. Sugamo seemed designed to transmit and magnify the sound of misery, and though the week had been relatively warm for December, Harry heard the coughs and spitting of tuberculosis, endemic in jails, and reminded himself that he had the protection of Gen and the very top of the Imperial Navy. He had to act like that. When a con man lost confidence, he was dead.

  “With all due respect, Sergeant, what is this all about?”

  “The truth.”

  “Okay, what do you want to know?”

  “Tell me about the Magic Show.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “See, Harry, that’s what I mean.”

  “All foreign correspondents are spies!” Go shoved Harry, who stumbled in his loose shoes as an inmate with a cone-shaped wicker basket over his head was led past. The basket was a dunce cap designed to prevent prisoners from seeing one another. Some spent years in Sugamo never seeing more than an inch ahead when they were out of their cells. A hall sign recommended, CULTIVATE YOUR SPIRITUAL NATURE. Well, this was the place.

  Cell 74 was a steel box six feet by twelve, with a sink and toilet and, instead of a window, frosted glass set in iron. All the space was taken up, however, by a man who was tied feet and hands over a wooden bench. His shirt was pulled up to his neck, his pants down to his knees, and his naked back and skinny buttocks were chopped meat. At the sight of Go, he began to shake. The corporal, delighted, picked up a stout cane of bamboo split to chew as it made contact, and slapped it down on the prisoner’s thighs. The man went rigid and screamed through strings of saliva, not loudly; his throat was too hoarse. Go squatted at h
is ear and shouted, “Death to all spies!”

  “This is a spy?” Harry asked Shozo.

  “Don’t you recognize him?”

  Not at first. Not with all the blood and vomit, the prisoner’s head upside down and his sparse hair wet, but when his eyes picked up Harry and widened with outrage, Harry remembered Kawamura, the fusty Long Beach Oil accountant.

  “You…you…” Kawamura choked.

  “He recognizes you, Harry,” Shozo said. “We’ve been talking to Kawamura about the discrepancies in the Long Beach ledger, all that oil that never came to Japan.”

  “He’s a dupe, I said so at Yokohama. He’s not responsible.”

  “That’s very American of you to say, but you know better. Individually, Kawamura might not be responsible, but a Japanese takes on more responsibility than that. If one man steals in a company, the entire office is held accountable, and his whole family is shamed. Perhaps the American manager of Long Beach Oil altered the company books by himself before leaving Japan, but Kawamura is also responsible for not detecting those alterations.”

  Go tied on a rubber apron. “All gaijin are enemies of Japan!”

  “He sure knows that tune,” Harry said.

  “His favorite song,” Shozo agreed.

  “You’ve been talking to Kawamura all night?”

  “Yes, and it’s interesting how many times your name came up.”

  “I don’t know Kawamura, I never met him before yesterday.”

  “Have you ever been caned?”

  “No.”

  Shozo waited for more before saying, “Any other American brought to Sugamo would demand to call his embassy. Why don’t you?”

  “I respect Japanese authority. I don’t see any need to call my embassy.”

  “Not yet?”

  “No.”

  “You’re not their favorite American, are you?”

  “Because I’m a friend of Japan.”

  “Kawamura says he also respects Japanese authority. He says he accepts responsibility for whatever the American manager at Long Beach did before leaving Japan. But the more we talk, the more certain Kawamura is that the manager did not alter the books. Although you might expect the opposite, the more we beat Kawamura, the more he says that someone else must have altered the books afterward.”

  “He’s a loyal employee, that’s understandable.”

  “Kawamura says he had trouble unlocking the shed for us yesterday, because the lock had been forced open. He could end this painful interrogation anytime by simply admitting the manager’s guilt. We would give him medical care. Instead, he forces us to continue.”

  “Death to spies!” Go said.

  The cane whistled down on Kawamura, the bamboo spitting blood. The accountant seized up, mouth agape, eyes trying to escape their sockets.

  Shozo asked, “What do you think, Harry? Do you think the Long Beach ledgers were altered by the manager before he went home to America, or by someone else at a later date?”

  “How would I know?”

  “Is there anything you can tell me that would relieve the suffering of this poor man?”

  “I wish I could.”

  Kawamura twisted back toward Harry to glare. Go put Harry in mind of how chefs cut up fish alive. The man enjoyed his work.

  “Tell me about the Magic Show,” Shozo said.

  “I just have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “You altered the Long Beach books, Harry.”

  “No.”

  “How many books have you altered?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The ledgers from Petromar and Manzanita Oil. Did you change those, too?”

  There was no point in acting dumb about the oil-company names, Shozo obviously knew too much. Harry felt as if the prison were sinking into the earth and taking him with it.

  “I’ve been helping the navy. I’m a friend of the navy the same way I’m a friend of Japan.”

  “Helping to examine the books of American oil importers?”

  “That’s it.”

  “Setting a thief to catch a thief?”

  “Let’s say a skeptical eye.”

  “A thief who counterfeited official papers in Nanking to release Chinese agitators from Japanese authority. A gambler, an extortionist, a moneylender. Who do you think I’m going to believe, you or Kawamura?”

  “Me.”

  “You must be very good at cards, Harry. You don’t even blink, although I know everything about you.”

  Bullshit, Harry thought. Shozo had played Nanking like a man showing two queens, as if that proved he had a lady in the hole. Well, fuck you, to use an expression of the late Al DeGeorge. If Shozo knew instead of suspected, Harry would be on the rack in Kawamura’s place. Not that Shozo had to prove anything. Although Harry had navy connections, it was true anywhere in the world that possession was nine tenths of the law. Equally disturbing, it was also becoming clear that Shozo had his own connections in the navy. How else could he have come up with Petromar and Manzanita?

  Harry said, “I looked at the books of certain oil importers at the request of the Japanese navy. The navy seemed to think that I was helpful.”

  “More than helpful. You discovered much more than anyone expected.”

  “I wouldn’t know.”

  “Then I can tell you. You discovered hundreds of thousands of barrels of oil diverted from Japan to Hawaii, and no one else discovered any. And you alone know where that oil went.”

  “I wish I did.”

  Go flexed his wrists like a batter ready to hit the ball out of the park, shifted his weight from side to side and whipped the cane down. Taken by surprise, Kawamura lost the air in his lungs and turned blue.

  “You cheated,” Harry told the corporal. “You didn’t ask him a question, you just hit him. You’re supposed to ask a question first.”

  Go shrugged as if the omission were negligible.

  “Ask next time,” Harry said. “Give him a chance.”

  “Relax, Harry. Harry Niles, humanitarian,” Shozo said. He offered Harry a Japanese-made Cherry, a cigarette of sweepings, which Harry accepted to stay on a polite footing. “Men have been looking for those secret oil tanks in Hawaii that you talked about. They can’t find them.”

  “Because the tanks probably don’t exist. I don’t think they exist. I met a drunk at a bar in Shanghai who said he helped put in some tanks in Oahu. I think he was lying, but I had to report it. Now you know as much as anyone else.”

  “It’s important to know about those tanks.”

  “I doubt they exist.”

  “But they would be a wise precaution for the American navy?”

  “I suppose.”

  Kawamura passed out, hair pasted to his face.

  Shozo said, “We wouldn’t worry about those tanks except for your report. Why should the Japanese navy take the word of a gaijin?”

  “I’m not the enemy. There’s no war yet.” Harry caught a smirk on Go’s face. “Look, your navy asked me to do a job and I did, although I was not paid and my efforts on behalf of Japan were not appreciated by other Americans.”

  “It’s confusing. The five-hundredth piece of the puzzle is still missing. Why would you concoct a story about missing oil or secret tanks in Hawaii? What is in it for Harry Niles?” Shozo paused to watch Go twist his chubby fingers into Kawamura’s hair and force his head into a pail of water. The accountant came up blubbering. “My suspicion,” Shozo said, “is that we have the wrong Harry Niles.”

  “How is that?” Harry asked.

  “When we went into your apartment, do you know what struck me? I thought, Harry’s home is more Japanese than mine. It’s true. My wife and I have two rooms, and one is entirely Western. We have the usual middle-class pretensions, a Western table, tasseled lamps. A piano. Except for your gramophone and records, your rooms are entirely Japanese. A simple shrine, a hanging scroll of Fuji, straw mats. A low table of fine lacquer. A typewriter but also a brush and inkstone
. A tea set. A vase with a single flower. I said to myself, This is the real Harry. There is the Harry who lives for money and the Harry who takes time to see a soldier off to the front. On the outside is the vulgar American, but inside is someone else. The American would never stand up to the Japanese army in Nanking, but the someone inside would.”

  “There were plenty of Americans who rescued people in Nanking.”

  “But they were priests and ministers. Is that what you are, a religious man? I don’t think so. You know the expression ‘Every man has three hearts’? One he shows the world, one he shows his friends and one he shows no one else at all. I think that’s the case with you. I think that deep within you is an honorable part that is Japanese. That’s the part of you that so dislikes being responsible for the beating of another man.”

  “Sergeant Shozo, it sounds as if there is part of you that doesn’t like to do the beating.”

  “Harry, you’re too sly, too sly. But I do believe in the value of confession. My work is done only when a criminal sincerely analyzes and confesses his crimes. I have something for you. Remember how we talked on the boat about the truth, how it wasn’t even worth taking the confession of a gaijin because it would be so insincere. Can I treat you like a Japanese, Harry, treat you honorably? Do I dare do that?” From his briefcase, Shozo brought a school composition book, to which he added his own uncapped Waterman pen, the present from his wife. The stiff cover of the book read “The Statement of Harry Niles.” Harry opened it. The pages were blank except for ruled vertical lines and the smell of schooldays. “Can you be honest, Harry? How many company ledgers did you alter?”

  Harry knew what Shozo meant. Kawamura had been treated like a Japanese, and look at him. Hamburger. But Harry understood the sincerity of the option, and it took him a second to say, “Not any.”

  “Are there any secret oil tanks in Hawaii?

  “I have no idea.”

  “Or did you just make them up to cause confusion?”

  “What confusion?”

  Shozo sighed as if a prized student had failed.