Woman with a Blue Pencil

by Gordon McAlpine

  The fortune-teller’s storefront was as still as most of the others. It took Sumida a moment to notice that both the English letters and the Japanese characters for “fortune-teller,” 占い師, along with the old woman’s name (which eluded him just now) had been scratched off the big, black plate-glass window, which had never allowed passersby to catch a glimpse of the inside. He hoped the soothsayer was still there. Near the mail slot, he found the button and pressed.

  He heard a buzzing sound.

  Nothing, so he pressed again.

  After a moment, a second-floor window slid up and open directly above him. The old woman’s head poked out, straining around the heavy curtains. She looked down at Sumida’s upturned face, the tendons in her wrinkled neck stretched taut. Sumida thought of a turtle, which seemed apt, since one of her soothsaying techniques involved the use of a tortoise shell.

  He called up to her respectfully by her title, fortune-teller: ­“Uranaishi-san, I need your services.”

  She held his gaze for a moment, then looked right and left, surveying the dark street, which was deserted but for another old woman a few doors down who sat on her front steps shelling beans. The streetlamps remained off. A few cars passed, their headlights reduced to mere slits.

  “The white people do not allow my business anymore,” she said. Her English was good, but accented. “Too Japanese. Pagan. No trouble, please. Sorry.”

  “Wait!” he called up, before she could pull her head back inside. “My wife used to come to see you.” He held up the sawbuck. “I can pay you ten dollars.”

  She looked at the bill as he waved it.

  “You make trouble for me?” she asked.

  “No, Uranaishi-san.”

  She pulled her head inside and a minute or two later the front door locks turned. The door opened a crack. One of the old woman’s cataract-fogged eyes peeked through the gap. “No trouble for me?” she asked again.

  “That’s right.”

  “The police cause trouble.”

  “I’m not with the police,” he said to her in Japanese.

  Her exposed eye moved up and down, taking him in. “No, I guess you wouldn’t be,” she answered in English. She stepped back, opening the door just wide enough for him to slip in after her.

  Then she closed and locked the door behind him.

  Inside, the only light came from a pair of candles burning on a card table at the center of the room. Alongside the table were two metal folding chairs. Otherwise the room was empty of furnishings. Accompanying Kyoko here in the past, Sam had glanced through the doorway as she’d entered and seen that the room had boasted a tasteful, traditional décor, with rice paper walls providing privacy for readings, fine tatami floor coverings, and framed woodblock prints in the style of ukiyo-e, which were either authentic Edo period or damn good imitations. Now, the rice paper dividers were gone, the floors were cement, and the walls were bare. And the room smelled not of incense but of the broiled eel that was a staple in the neighborhood.

  “After Pearl Harbor, the white men came and took everything from my business, claiming I was a witch,” the old woman explained. Like her establishment, she too had lost any trappings of old-world dignity—where once she had greeted her customers in a traditional red kimono decorated with cranes, an elegant obi, and, for footwear, wooden geta, she now wore a housecoat and slippers that looked like they’d come mail order from Sears and Roebuck. Likewise, her once traditionally coiffed hair was now a bird’s nest of grey, tangled strands. “I said to the white men,” she continued, emphatically, ‘Look around, you fools! Do you see any foxes here? I am no kitsune-tsukai.’”

  Sumida knew from his study of art history that the fox was a common familiar of witches in Japanese mythology.

  “‘I am uranaishi, a fortune-teller,’ I said to them,” she continued. “But they admitted no difference. One of them wanted to beat me to death right here, ‘a soldier of God putting down a demon,’ he said. But the others reminded him that they’d come here to do Christian work. So they just destroyed or stole everything I owned.”

  “But you still live upstairs?”

  “Where else would I go, young man?”

  He looked at the folding table. “And you still do work for people?”

  She surveyed him silently, as if once more appraising the likelihood that he was here to hurt or arrest her. After a moment, she held out her wrinkled palm. “The ten dollars,” she said. “But, before you offer it to me, you must tell me why you’re doing so.”

  “I want answers to questions,” he said, before extending the sawbuck.

  She took it. “Good.”

  “Is that part of the clairvoyant process?” he asked, attempting to allow no cynicism or even doubt into his voice. “My spelling out exactly what I want from you like that?”

  She shook her head. “Foolish boy. . . . It’s a legal defense against entrapment,” she answered. “Provided there are such things as legal defenses anymore. . . . Are there?”

  “Legal defenses?”

  She nodded. “I wouldn’t know as I don’t venture outside much anymore.”

  He considered. “Frankly, I don’t know either.”

  She motioned him toward the card table and folding chairs.

  “Thank you,” he said as he sat down, placing his palms on the cheap table.

  She sat opposite him. “Do not thank me unless you feel you have reason to do so after your reading.”

  “Fair enough,” he said.

  “Fairness, hah!” she laughed. “I hope that is not what you are here for. Fate is not fair. Just look around this room, for example. And look into your own heart, which has been wounded and worried so that it has brought you here, even as a nonbeliever.”

  He brightened. “You remember I was a nonbeliever? That it was my wife who came here and . . .”

  “No,” she interrupted. “I have never seen you before.”

  “Then how did you know I was a nonbeliever?” he asked.

  “Your face gives you away,” she answered, venturing a small smile. “One doesn’t have to be a uranaishi to see that. So this is my first advice to you: do not take up poker.”

  Great, he thought. Transparent. Not exactly an asset for a PI. He wanted to change the subject, to return to the matter at hand. “What technique will you use for your reading?” he asked.

  “I was once a practitioner of Bokusen,” she answered.

  “What is that?”

  “A way of determining the divine will,” she said. “And, in the process, of foretelling the future.”

  “How does it work?”

  “I heat a tortoise shell until it cracks, at which time I interpret the crack,” she said.

  Sumida knew she had used this technique with Kyoko.

  “But the white men took away everything,” she added. “Tortoise shells too.”

  “So where does that leave us?”

  “It leaves me here, stranded.”

  He said nothing.

  She leaned toward him. “If what you’re actually asking is what alternate technique I will use now that I have no tools, the answer is Tengenjutsu.”

  “Which is?”

  “Let me ask the questions, young man.”

  He waited.

  She looked at him for a long time, her milky eyes straining in the flickering light as if to discern some meaning from his face alone. He tried not to look away, but he failed to hold her gaze when their eyes met.

  “What is your birthday?” she asked.

  He told her.

  “That is incorrect.”

  He removed his wallet from his back pocket, placing it on the table. “I can show you my driver’s license.”

  She shook her head, then reached across the table and touched his hands. But only for a moment. . . .

  She pulled away from him as if she had touched a live wire.

  “You have no birthday,” she said, her voice betraying confusion, revulsion, and even fear.

 
“That’s impossible.”

  “You did not come here to learn your future,” she continued, her eyes widening. “No, you’ve come because you want me to tell you what kind of creature you are!”

  “Creature?” he muttered. “I just . . .”

  She held her palm up to silence him. Taking his wallet, she pulled all of its contents out and onto the card table, spreading the cards and IDs and little pieces of paper as if mixing up a pile of children’s pick-up sticks. “These are all worthless,” she said, almost to herself. “Like you, they have no origin in this world. They do not belong.” She brushed the empty leather wallet off the table, hard enough that it banged against the big, blackened window at the front of her ruined business. Then she ran her hands back and forth on the tabletop, scattering the cards and IDs. “Useless, all!”

  They fluttered around the table.

  Sumida did not move, shocked by her vehemence.

  When the cards and papers settled onto the cement floor, one card remained on the table: the business card from Dr. Shinoda, with the dental appointment written on the back.

  “This is the only reality you possess,” she said, indicating the card.

  With the name Henry Czernicek written on the back, it was actually the only document in his wallet that he knew for a fact was fraudulent.

  “That card is all you need,” she continued.

  He picked it up. “A dental appointment?” he asked, testing her with sarcasm.

  She ignored his taunt. Her eyes bored into his. “All that is left for you is to do whatever it is you’re here to do.”

  “And what is that?”

  “I don’t know, but you do.”

  He put the dentist’s card in his shirt pocket. “But why is this happening? There has to be an explanation.”

  “Only fools seek for explanations.” She stood, holding out the ten-dollar bill he’d given her. “I’ve done nothing for you. Take back your money.”

  He shook his head. “You’ve been a great help.”

  “Take it!” she snapped, before dropping it on the table. “How can I have done something for you when there is no you?” Without further hesitation, she scrambled out of the room and up the stairs to her second-floor apartment. He heard her door close and a series of locks slip into place.

  He sat for a moment.

  He looked at the mess on the floor—the detritus of his wallet. He considered gathering it up again.

  But she was right.

  It was no use to him.

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

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

  . . . Jimmy settled in the passenger seat of the Cadillac, which Mr. Barratt steered south on Central Avenue, past the last of the bank buildings in the downtown district, and into one of the Negro neighborhoods. Here, the jazz clubs were as vibrant as any in the entire United States. Jimmy loved jazz. Big bands were his favorite: Tommy Dorsey, Glenn Miller, Wayne King, Freddie Martin, Sammy Kaye. . . . And he also appreciated the Negro musicians, beginning with Duke Ellington’s orchestra and including the edgy, experimental quartets and quintets who played the clubs that lined the half-dozen blocks through which Mr. Barratt drove the Cadillac now. Passing the Club Alabam, which Jimmy had visited once with Joe and a few of Joe’s more open-minded police colleagues, he wondered if he’d ever hear jazz again? Or any kind of music? After what Mr. Barratt had said a moment before, he considered it a long shot.

  “Are you listening to me, Jimmy?” Mr. Barratt asked from the driver’s seat.

  It was just the two of them in the car.

  “I heard what you said,” Jimmy replied. “I was just thinking about jazz.”

  “Jazz? Why?”

  Mr. Barratt had rendezvoused with Jimmy at eight o’clock a few miles north of this neighborhood in a pay parking lot near, of all places, the Little Tokyo enclave. Before that, Mr. Barratt had said over the telephone that there’d been a “minor change of plans,” which he’d explain to Jimmy on their drive down to the Pike Amusement Park in Long Beach. Jimmy had imagined that Mr. Barratt would employ a driver and perhaps a bodyguard. He’d been surprised the two of them were alone. Now, he understood why.

  “Jazz is an American art form,” Jimmy answered. “It’s one of a thousand things that this country can do unlike any other country in the world. One of a thousand reasons that a man should not hesitate to give his life for the USA.”

  Mr. Barratt kept his eyes fixed, concentrating on the barely sufficient glow cast by the car’s masked headlights on the avenue ahead. “I didn’t ask you to die for your country but to kill for it.”

  “I understand,” Jimmy said, though he suspected that he stood little chance of surviving the new mission.

  “Do you, Jimmy?”

  “I understand that it’s my place to follow orders.”

  “That’s not true, Jimmy,” Mr. Barratt answered, still staring straight ahead. “Orders are for the military. You’re a civilian. This is a democracy. You have the right to say no. What you’ve been doing for your government and country has been especially appreciated because you never had to do any of it. And that’s true of this mission as well. Doubly so. Just say the word and I’ll turn this car around.”

  “You know I’ll never say that word.”

  “Yes, I do know that,” Mr. Barratt admitted. “But it’s important to me that you understand why your mission’s changed. Look, after your dispatching of those bullying hooligans in the alley outside that diner . . . well, owing to the number of witnesses, even we couldn’t keep it out of the press.”

  “But I’m not a Jap,” Jimmy protested.

  “Yeah, tell that to the newspapers,” Mr. Barratt replied. “Have you seen the late edition?”

  Jimmy shook his head.

  “‘Mysterious Jap Spy Bests America’s Youth,’” Mr. Barratt quoted. “Six unconscious college boys, four of whom play offensive line for UCLA . . . All this right in downtown LA. . . . If this city wasn’t on the verge of panic before, it is now. Our citizens need reassurance. Just imagine if word had leaked about the three bloody murders! That’s why there was little or no opposition among the leadership, who gathered again at my office in just the last hour, to changing your mission from one of infiltration to assassination. The truth is, I don’t think our Military Intelligence colleagues realized quite how proficient you are at . . . well, violence. And so it was decided that stopping this Orchid right now, before she kills again, is more important than your infiltrating her organization to play the long game.”

  Jimmy looked out his side window. The wood-frame houses along Central Avenue spilled soft yellow light. Families inside . . . Assassination is different than giving a beating, he thought. But he didn’t say it. He thought of the Tennyson poem. His was not to question why . . . “I understand the mission, sir.”

  Mr. Barratt said nothing, but waited to hear more.

  “I’m sure you considered sending military into the Pike tonight to get her,” Jimmy said.

  “Sure, we considered it. But the use of massive force poses problems. First, we don’t know that the Orchid will actually be at the fortune-teller booth. That location could just be a contact point for a subsequent location, so our showing up in force might only result in the arrest of a minor underling while serving to tip off the Orchid to our pursuit. No, we need you to play along as necessary to get close to the Orchid.”

  “To kill her,” Jimmy muttered.

  “Yes.”

  Jimmy understood.

  “It’s possible, even probable, that they’ll search and disarm you when you enter her presence,” Mr. Barratt said. “But among the many reasons we chose you for this operation is your capacity to put your Taekwondo to swift and deadly purpose.”

  Yes, that was something Jimmy could do, but he stayed silent.

  “You’re disturbed,” Mr. Barratt observed, sympathetically.

  “It’s jus
t new to me,” Jimmy admitted. “I’m a PI, and I’ve gone undercover plenty against the Yakuza and the Tong. I’ve defended myself when I was called to do so. Yeah, I’ve killed bad guys before. Quite a few. But assassination? That just takes me a minute or two to get used to.”

  “I understand,” Mr. Barratt said.

  “Thank you.”

  “Look, we’ve still got a ways to go before we get to Long Beach, right? If you’re not comfortable with this reassignment by then, we’ll call it off.”

  Jimmy didn’t even dignify the offer with an answer. Of course he wouldn’t be comfortable with the idea of assassination by the time they got to Long Beach. But neither would he say no to his country, especially when the threat against its citizens was so real, so vile. Everything Mr. Barratt had said about the Orchid was true. She had to be stopped, now. What difference did his state-of-mind make? Not a hill of beans. So he reached for the radio, clicking it on. “Let’s find some jazz,” he said to Mr. Barratt.

  “You choose the station, Jimmy.”

  Excerpt from a letter March 1, 1943:

  . . . appreciate his thoughtful moments. But having Jimmy visit his family in Glendale, after leaving the diner in downtown LA, to wrestle with his conscience over his new assignment to assassinate the Orchid, slows the action considerably. Your reader is going to be quite anxious by this point to get to the amusement park, so I think it neither advisable nor necessary that we visit Jimmy’s boyhood home or meet his father, however wise the old man’s counsel.

  Actually, I suspect some of Jimmy’s soul searching in his “homecoming” chapters is far more reflective of your character, my sensitive friend, than his. For example, when he says, “I set out to do good things, to speak for the quiet, little man whose voice is otherwise nothing more than the mere droning of a gnat in the face of the powers-that-be,” I can’t help but think of the reservations you’ve expressed to me about the direction your book has taken since the outbreak of the war, your yearning to write the unpublishable Sumida story instead of what is commercially and politically viable. And I also know that with the recent passing of your own father, God rest his soul, you may have indulged in some understandable role-playing, allowing Jimmy to voice concerns with his father that you’d like to voice with yours. All very understandable.