Woman with a Blue Pencil

by Gordon McAlpine

  Sumida kept all this to himself for now.

  He suspected that Czernicek was not the sort of man with whom one could speculate about metaphysics, even in the midst of an inexplicable episode. And uninvited talk of the murder investigation (a contentious subject) would threaten this forced but useful partnership.

  “And another thing,” Czernicek continued, his frustration level increasing. “Along with everything else, I’m well aware of the suspicious ‘coincidence’ of our meeting this morning in the periodicals room.”

  Sumida looked at Czernicek. “I don’t think our meeting was such a coincidence. We found ourselves in roughly the same situation, displaced. So it seems to me reasonable that we’d think to go to the same resource for some kind of ‘catching-up.’”

  Czernicek turned to Sumida. “Our situation might be similar. But what gives you the idea we think alike?”

  Sumida said nothing.

  “You’re a dirty Jap,” Czernicek whispered.

  “I was born in this country, just like you,” Sumida answered.

  Czernicek laughed. “I was born in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. I came here as a kid. But I’m an American. A real one. And you’re still a Jap.”

  “Go to hell, Czernicek.”

  Czernicek shook his head, fatalistically. Then, with the tip of his index finger, he poked the side of Sumida’s head. “Hasn’t it occurred to you that we may already be in hell?”

  So, metaphysics wasn’t beyond Czernicek . . . But Sumida disagreed with his appraisal. “This isn’t hell.”

  Czernicek raised his chin. “How can you be so sure?”

  “Because there’re important things for us to do here.”

  Czernicek flashed his movie-star smile. “That’s why I like you, Sumida,” he said, slapping him on the shoulder. “Even with your squinty eyes and toothy grin and sneaky Oriental mind, you manage to hold out hope when there’s none. Like with the murder of your wife . . . No solution. So you became a private detective? Ha! One optimistic Jap is what you are.”

  “Keizoku wa chikara nari,” Sumida answered, knowing the Japanese would aggravate him. “It means ‘perseverance is power.’”

  “Spare me your Mr. Moto wise sayings,” Czernicek chortled bitterly. “And let me amend how I described you a minute ago: you’re not just one optimistic Jap, you’re a downright gullible one.”

  “If you think I’m a joke, then you should go your own way,” Sumida said. Though he knew that teaming with Czernicek was his best chance to figure out what was going on, he wouldn’t be continually insulted.

  Czernicek shook his head. “I need you like you need me. Christ, do you think I’d even be seen sitting here with you if I didn’t?”

  Sumida said nothing.

  “Did you read about Pearl Harbor in the periodicals room this morning?” Czernicek asked.

  Sumida shook his head. “That’s not where I started.” He’d started with the Times edition from the day after Kyoko’s body was found. “But I heard a radio report and picked up the gist . . .”

  “Not where you started?” Czernicek interrupted, disgust entering his voice. “It was a sneak attack, Sumida. No declaration of war. Just a lazy Sunday morning, like any other. Our Navy boys peaceably sleeping. You understand?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “And then Jap aircraft descend and within a couple of hours there are thousands of Americans dead, all of them blown up or drowned or gunned down or burned. It’s a goddamn world war, Sumida, and in the periodicals room it’s not where you start? Is your kind even human?”

  “I had nothing to do with Pearl Harbor,” Sumida said.

  “Yeah, well, it’s going to have plenty to do with you,” Czernicek snapped.

  Sumida knew he was right about that.

  “You haven’t noticed the soldiers deployed all over LA?” Czernicek continued, not waiting for an answer. “The Chavez Ravine Naval Base, Fort MacArthur in San Pedro, Camp Roberts up north . . . jumping. Meantime, hundreds of the most suspicious Japs, both men and women, are incarcerated on Terminal Island or in the city jail or the Hall of Justice jail or the county lockups or wherever we got space for them. There’s even talk that preparations are being made to move all your kind into camps up in the desert. And I mean all.”

  “I’m a loyal American,” Sumida said.

  “Yeah, you are. Problem is, that’s what they all say.”

  “Maybe they’re telling the truth,” Sumida observed.

  “Most probably are,” Czernicek conceded. “But if even a handful . . . Well, better safe than sorry, right?”

  Sumida said nothing.

  “You know there’s an eight p.m. curfew for Japs, right Sumida? You do know that.”

  Sumida said nothing. He’d heard plenty of references to it but lacked details.

  “You should have done a better job in the periodicals room,” Czernicek said.

  “Whatever the circumstances, we’re in this together, whether you like it or not,” Sumida said.

  “You’re right. I don’t like it. But what we like or don’t like doesn’t seem to count for much in this world. Or, for that matter, in the last world either.” He leaned across the booth. “Go be a ‘detective’ on your own for a few hours, Sumida. Figure out what you can. Meet me at eight o’clock back at my hotel, The Barclay on Fourth and Main. You know it?”

  Sumida nodded. “What’s your plan?”

  Czernicek looked at his watch. “I’ve got a few things to look into. Some broads I know who’d never forget me, by God. Then, come six o’clock I’ll go back to police headquarters. With a little luck, there’ll be someone coming onto the evening shift who either recognizes me or is careless enough that I can slip past him and into my office. I still have the key. Well, a key. Whether it works anymore . . .” He stopped.

  “What do you expect to find there?”

  “Maybe I’ll find some evidence of my life or some clue as to what kind of scam this is.”

  Sumida suspected he’d simply find that the room was now someone else’s office and had been for years. “You need my help?”

  “How would you help?”

  “A diversion.”

  Czernicek laughed. “No, Sumida.” He spoke softly to insure no one could hear. “You’re a Jap with California ID that matches up with nothing in the public record. You hear me? Look, you’re no good to me being interrogated and then imprisoned and maybe executed as a spy.”

  Sumida hadn’t allowed himself to fully consider what the authorities would make of his predicament.

  Czernicek stood and slipped his hand into his pocket, removing a ten dollar bill. He dropped it on the table. “Take it.”

  Sumida looked at the money.

  Unfortunately, he needed it. He took the sawbuck and slid out of the booth.

  “I’ll settle the bill for the pastrami up front,” Czernicek said, starting toward the cash register. “But I don’t want you standing next to me, understand? People are starting to take note. Wait for me in the square.”

  Sumida said nothing as he exited the diner.

  It felt good to be in fresh air.

  He crossed the street and sat at a wooden bench near the statue of General Pershing.

  Excerpt from chapter eight of The Orchid and the Secret Agent, a novel by William Thorne

  Metropolitan Modern Mysteries, Inc., New York, N.Y., 1945

  . . . It was now forty minutes since the senator, the men from Military Intelligence, and the LAPD commander of counterintelligence had exited Mr. Barratt’s office, apparently satisfied that Jimmy was up to the risky assignment (or, at least, that he was sufficiently insignificant to sacrifice for the war effort in the event the operation failed). Now, Jimmy and Mr. Barratt entered what looked like a windowless classroom (but for an absence of school desks) that was located even deeper than Mr. Barratt’s office in the bunker-like complex.

  “This is it,” Mr. Barratt said. “One of our code-breaking rooms.”

  Three young men, all attired in short
-sleeved white dress shirts and black ties, all of them bespectacled and thin as rails, stood one each at three wall-length blackboards. None turned toward Jimmy and Mr. Barratt. They hadn’t even seemed to notice the pair’s entrance. Instead, each silently studied strings of English words written on the blackboard before him. One stared at his board with his chin in his hand; another stared while scratching distractedly at his head; the third stared as he rattled coins in his pants pockets. In all, the effect was of three younger and more respectably coiffed Einsteins studying formulae.

  “Gentlemen,” Mr. Barratt announced.

  The three jumped, almost as one, startled by the sound of Mr. Barratt’s voice.

  “Sir!” they said, all snapping to attention (in a kind of sloppy, schoolboy fashion).

  Mr. Barratt chuckled warmly. “I didn’t mean to startle you, boys.”

  “No problem, sir,” said one.

  “Nor would I have interrupted your impressive and obviously focused attention on the work at hand,” Mr. Barratt said. “But I wanted to introduce you to Mr. Jimmy Park, who will be putting to use the results you gentlemen produce.”

  The three nodded cursorily in the direction of Jimmy.

  He wasn’t what was on their minds.

  “Yes, Mr. Barratt,” said one of the three. “We’re working at producing results for you, sir.”

  “But it’s not coming easily,” said another.

  “We think it’s some kind of substitution code,” said the third. “Perhaps book based. But without the key it’s difficult indeed. Number codes come so much simpler!”

  The young man’s two comrades nodded in agreement.

  Mr. Barratt ignored the trio’s extenuation. Instead, he turned to Jimmy. “These three gentlemen . . .” He indicated them singly. “William, Robert, and David, come to us from Cal Tech, where Albert Einstein taught for a few years. They are surely the best and brightest, and they have patriotically agreed to settle this difficult problem for us. And to do so quickly and without excuses of any kind because it is of the utmost importance. Isn’t that a fine thing, Mr. Park?”

  Jimmy nodded, though he knew the message wasn’t really directed at him.

  The problem was this:

  While Mr. Barratt’s organization held a high degree of confidence that the three murders of the night before had been intended, not as warnings to Jimmy Park but as a single, encrypted invitation for Jimmy to join the Orchid’s nefarious organization, they had been unable to discern from the clues how Jimmy was to make contact with the Jap spy ring. Hence, the code breakers from Cal Tech. One life-sized photograph of each of the three blood-scrawled Japanese messages hung beside each of the three chalkboards.

  “First, we brought in experts in Japanese calligraphy, which is far more complicated than I ever imagined, to examine the photographs,” Mr. Barratt explained. “They discerned that the order in which the strokes were made for each Japanese character was unconventional, even inaccurate.” He indicated the characters. “They may look like chicken scratches to me, but there’s method to them. It turns out that when forming any word you don’t just make the marks but you make them in a proscribed order.”

  Naturally, Jimmy already knew this (being fluent in both spoken and written Japanese). But he nodded as if it were news.

  Mr. Barratt continued, “So, our Japanese experts isolated the strokes that had been made out of order. Laying these strokes atop one another, our linguists managed to construct a single coherent character that, at first, we thought might be the secret message.”

  “And?” Jimmy pressed.

  Mr. Barratt sighed. “The character was the word for ‘horse’s ass.’”

  Unamused, Jimmy snapped angrily, “So this whole thing is a mere taunt?”

  Mr. Barratt shook his head. “We still believe there’s a real message hidden in there. One intended for you. So we’re working from their English translations.”

  The messages were scrawled in chalk, one on each of the blackboards:

  “And so it begins for you, white devils.”

  “We are watching your eyes, even as they fail to see us.”

  “Accept your friend’s life as a personal gift.”

  The coin-rattling code breaker stepped toward Jimmy to explain. “Naturally, in accordance with Occam’s Razor, we began with the simplest possibilities, simply scrambling the words in every possible order, coming up with a few interesting modernist poems along the way but nothing remotely suggestive of how you were to make contact with the Jap organization.”

  “Next, we took the translated messages apart letter-by-letter,” said the chin-scratching code-breaker. “This entailed considerably more work, as the possibilities significantly increased, requiring our best efforts. Again, we concocted numerous alternate messages, but none seems directive.”

  “Have you made a list of these messages?” Mr. Barratt asked.

  “Yes, it’s almost a hundred pages, typed single-spaced.”

  “That doesn’t seem so much, since we know what we’re looking for,” Mr. Barratt observed.

  “Do we?” the third code-breaker asked.

  Mr. Barratt opened his palms in frustration. “A secret location of some kind. Is that so difficult?”

  He waited, but none of the code breakers dared answer.

  “Boys, your failing here is not an option,” Mr. Barratt said, calmly.

  “Well, it may not be so simple as just scrambling or unscrambling letters,” the head-scratcher said.

  “See, if it’s a book replacement code cleverly disguised to look like three discreet and circumstantially appropriate messages, then we’re in trouble, as we’ll require the key if we’re ever going to break it,” continued the coin-jiggler, daring to meet Mr. Barratt’s gaze. “Desire alone will not be enough, sir. Even veiled threats won’t work.”

  “I’m not threatening you, boys,” Mr. Barratt said, threateningly.

  The head scratching code-breaker looked at Jimmy. “Do you know what a book replacement code is?”

  Jimmy nodded.

  Among multiple variations, the most common book replacement code used particular pages from a particular edition of a book to act as the key to encoded messages. For example, if pages 265–290 of the first edition of The Sun Also Rises were the key, then the first letter of the coded message would correspond to that letter’s first use on page 265, thereby revealing a word in the Hemingway text that was also the first word of the de-coded message. Subsequent letters in the coded message would refer to progressive instances in the book, indicating corresponding, de-coded words. To make such a code work also as coherent statements, such as the bloody threats written now on the blackboard, required true mastery. But without the key (the particular book and pages), there was no viable way to decode the secret message.

  “Do any particular books come to mind, Jimmy?” Mr. Barratt asked.

  Jimmy considered. He shook his head.

  “Maybe books aren’t his thing,” one of the code-breakers said.

  “Don’t underestimate Jimmy,” Mr. Barratt snapped in response. “He’s an experienced operative.”

  The three code-breakers turned from Mr. Barratt to Jimmy, giving him the once over, focusing with obvious disapproval on his sporty suit and fashionable Florsheims.

  “Sometimes, experience alone won’t do it,” one said.

  “A little more Sherlock Holmes, a little less Sam Spade,” another added.

  Jimmy smiled. “Give me a piece of chalk, boys.”

  They handed one over.

  Jimmy walked to the first chalkboard. He studied it. “You know, when I was playing baseball for my high school team in Glendale I used to steal the catcher’s signs whenever I reached second base,” he said without turning around. “Then I’d relay the upcoming pitch to our batter and he’d invariably knock me in. But there was one team in our league whose catcher used signs I couldn’t ever steal.” He remained facing the chalkboard as he continued. “How complicated were his
signs, I wondered, frustrated. Until, that is, I realized his signs were not complicated at all. They’d been tricky to me only because they held no shred of trickery, except in my own mind. From that time forward, we never lost to that team again.”

  “Too bad we’re not playing baseball,” one of the code-breakers commented.

  Jimmy said nothing but wrote the word, “Pike” above the quote that read, “And so it begins for you, white devils.”

  He moved to the second chalkboard and wrote the word, “Gypsy” above the quote that read, “We are watching your eyes, even as they fail to see us.”

  At the third chalkboard he wrote, “Fortuna” above the words “Accept your friend’s life as a personal gift.”

  “The victims,” Mr. Barratt observed.

  Jimmy turned. “The messages in blood mean nothing. They were merely intended to tie the crimes together and maybe to give a little poke with that ‘horse’s ass’ business. And their translations are equally useless. All that really matters is the names of the victims.”

  “Pike . . .”

  “Gypsy . . .”

  “Fortuna . . .” muttered the three code-breakers.

  “Isn’t it obvious?” Jimmy inquired.

  Mr. Barratt broke into a wide grin. He had it.

  “A Gypsy fortune-teller named Pike?” one of the code-breakers ventured.

  “Almost,” Jimmy said. “Have any of you heard of ‘The Pike,’ an amusement park in Long Beach?”

  “With the big roller coaster?” asked another of the code-breakers.

  Jimmy nodded. “The Gypsy fortune-teller at the Pike.”

  The three young men from Cal Tech threw their arms open. “How could we have missed it?”

  “Because it was too simple,” Jimmy said, humbly. “You boys are purebred racing greyhounds and I’m just a dog with a nose for the obvious.”

  They looked at him with new respect.