HARRY WATCHED the street from his apartment while Michiko knelt by a mirror and candle to wipe her white face off. She had set the wig aside, and her own short hair was wrapped in gauze, exposing her ear, pink as a shell. Harry remembered Oharu awash in creams and tissues backstage at the Folies. As a kid he’d liked the way performers stripped themselves of one character and painted on another, one deception followed by the next. He wasn’t so sure how he felt about it now. Harry was always Harry Niles, blood washed off his knees, shaved now and dressed in a fresh suit, but essentially Harry, while Michiko was revealed in layers.
Harry asked, “Did you know what the colonel wanted?”
“He said he wanted to surprise you.”
“Surprise me? You didn’t know he wanted to kill me?”
“I thought there was a chance. I think a lot of people would kill you if they had the chance.” She said it flatly, as if stating a fact.
“Did he say where he was staying?”
“At the willow house. He’s rich. He rented the whole house for a week.”
“So he could be there, he could be anywhere.”
They had pulled up and tied the ladder stairs from the club, although Harry could still imagine the colonel climbing up a gutter or down from the roof, maybe squeezing through a tap. Harry had thought that lighting the Eiffel Tower might attract a late-night customer or two and provide some security in numbers. A stone knocked out the sign; it shorted amid a rain of glass. Harry had tried the phone; the line was dead. All he had was the gun, but with daylight he could go for the car.
There was, of course, the option of sending up enough hue and cry to draw the police. Except that it was no option at all. Nothing like involvement in a homicide to upset travel plans. Know what a mark is? Harry asked himself. A mark is a guy who can’t report a murder. He was a mark.
“Are you going to leave me?” Michiko asked.
Harry didn’t have the heart to tell her the truth, and he didn’t have the heart to lie. He kept his eyes on the street. “I don’t know. I don’t know how much future I have in Tokyo. Except for you. I have the feeling I’m not wanted.”
“Are you going with her?”
“Her?” Alice, of course. Harry dropped at least some deceit. “She doesn’t have any future here, either. No whites do.”
“But you’re from Asakusa.”
“Yes.”
“You’ll hate it anywhere else.”
“Yes.”
Harry didn’t ask why Michiko had saved his life. This was no fair-weather American girl, he thought, and no sweet all-day-sucker American-style love. Michiko’s was more of the pathological jump-into-a-volcano-together type. That didn’t change things. When Nippon Air rolled the DC-3 from its hangar, Harry intended to be the first man aboard, and expected to have Alice Beechum in the seat beside him.
“You do a good imitation of a geisha.” Harry couldn’t help himself.
“Did you consider the possibility that we both might lose our heads?”
“No.”
“You like being trapped here?”
“No. Yes.”
Figure that out, Harry thought. Since whiteface covered Michiko halfway to her shoulders, she dropped the kimono to her waist. She looked divided, warm breasts in contrast to a plaster face. Ishigami had done an expert job, adding the highlights of Chinese red to her cheeks, subtle shades of green and blue around her eyes. Ishigami, the Renaissance man. Of course, Japanese girls seemed boyish, boys like girls. What did Ishigami crave? Love, of course. Harry had cheated him of that not once but twice.
Across the street, the lantern at the willow house had flickered and gone out. No matter, DeGeorge would draw attention soon enough. In cool weather, two days, maybe three. Ishigami didn’t hide his work. Ishigami didn’t care. After four years of slaughter on the China front, one more truncated body wouldn’t make a big impression. All the colonel wanted was four more heads. He had a Zenlike equanimity about his goal. Even with Michiko’s knife to his throat, he wore a triumphant expression, as if he had finally solved the question of her true allegiance. Harry had figured out the answer at the same moment. Well, it was a matter of gratitude, wasn’t it? Harry had taken this skinny kid, this Red on the run, a geisha of all things, planted her by a jukebox and called her the Record Girl. Made her a hit. Well, you could do anything with Michiko. She was like chopsticks. With someone that smooth and slim, the limbs were almost interchangeable. Variable. Inexhaustible. An American girl would have cried, “Save me, Harry, save me!” Michiko had said, “Go.” So, the matter of loyalty was settled. At the same time, that was no real obligation on him. If she wanted him to survive, so did he. Harry appreciated what she had done, but he couldn’t drive from his mind the image of Ishigami painting her. She still hadn’t taken off the whiteface, as if it afforded protection.
Harry spied motion near a streetlamp, but it was a cat with tail intact, flown like a flag. In any other neighborhood, a snoop might have reported strange noises to the police. Not Asakusa, where the late-night carousing of drunks, whores and theatergoers was the norm. And when a detective did investigate the willow house, what would he see? Swordsmanship. A single slash on the bias that had opened DeGeorge from his breastbone to his bowels, and one clean stroke for his head. The detective would also see the telltale sideways spray of blood produced when an executioner flicked his blade to clean it. The idea that anyone but a Japanese could have carried out an execution so beautifully would be met with astonishment.
One down and four to go. But perhaps the game had changed from mere numbers, Harry thought. Maybe there was added value in a head Ishigami thought Harry cared about. Just as the colonel had cared for his aide-de-camp in Nanking. Would Ishigami settle on tit for tat, ear for an ear, head for a head? Or would he embellish? There were things a man could do to another man’s woman. They certainly did them in China. Maybe he already had.
“You and Ishigami were together all day. What did you do?”
“We talked.”
“You talked. You had tea, coffee, a couple of drinks?”
“We talked about my family.”
“Talked about family?”
She told Harry how her father failed twice, lost his shop in the Depression, grew rice only to be ruined by drought and, under threat of starvation for the entire family, sold his daughters one by one to the brothels and geisha houses of Osaka. One reason there were so many angry young soldiers in the army was because they had seen their sisters sold. Ishigami had appreciated that. Michiko added that she hadn’t only run away from the geisha house. She was proud to have robbed it first.
Harry was struck by how little he had known. How could he reconcile a fugitive geisha with the Record Girl from the Happy Paris? There had been hints of a certain internal tension. Living with her hadn’t been like keeping a canary. One night she had thrown a priceless bottle of Black Label at him. Another night she’d broken a Dorsey record and threatened to slice her wrists or his. Granted, in both cases he had just sauntered home from an evening with Alice Beechum; in both cases he and Michiko ended up in bed. He remembered every vertebra in her spine, the way her hair hung around her face, the ten little daggers at her fingertips. Lie down with cats and rise with scratches.
“You were with Ishigami how long? Five hours? Six? All you did was talk about family and then he painted you up like a geisha? The two of you did nothing else?”
“The two of us?”
“That’s what I said.”
Her voice went even flatter. “I wanted to save your life.”
A man couldn’t balk at the hurdles, Harry thought. He had to plunge forward. “What did the two of you do? What did that entail?”
“What do you mean?”
“You know what I mean. He did the geisha makeup. What else did he do?”
“Are you angry because I let Ishigami touch me?”
“Is that all he did? That satisfied him, just a touch?”
A silence stretched like a conversation in itself. Michiko stared at the whiteface in the mirror.
Harry said, “It doesn’t matter, but I just want to know what happened. You entertained the colonel. You kept him busy. You convinced him there was nothing between you and me. How did you do that?”
“If it doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter.”
“But it does matter. It must have been pretty good.”
“It didn’t matter. I’m back.”
She rose and handed him a cloth so that he could wipe the nape of her neck and erase the white sexual W. Harry as good as saw Ishigami’s fingerprints all over her, her neck a scene of intimacy he found himself afraid to touch. He hadn’t escaped Ishigami. Ishigami was in the room with them.
“Did he pay?” he heard himself ask.
“Harry.” She pulled up the kimono and sank to his feet, and he was amazed by how small she looked, a puddle of silk.
“Was it good?”
A few more questions, Harry thought, and she would disappear completely. Out the window he noticed the cat run from the streetlamp, chased by a shadow that developed into a black Datsun with the lights off.
THREE IN THE MORNING was the Thought Police’s favorite hour for hauling people in, a time when defenses were down and thoughts tended to be in sleepy disarray, so when Sergeant Shozo and Corporal Go pounded on the door, they were surprised to see Harry answer it dressed.
The police gave the apartment the once-over, but they were in a rush to haul him off, not conduct a lengthy search. Harry suggested following the policemen in his own car, but the sergeant said it wasn’t necessary. He moved to the back with Harry, who was free to figure out where they were headed. If they couldn’t catch him asleep, they could play another game that police around the world enjoyed, the ride with no clear destination in the dead of night. Harry’s mind was still on Michiko. While the policemen had stumbled up the stairs, she had slipped down the ladder to the club. Harry had told her to stay with the doors locked until daylight and go to Haruko’s to wait for his call. He had given her the gun. Michiko with a gun. That was a scary picture.
“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 his 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.
Go was infuriated for the sergeant’s sake. “You should be ashamed! An opportunity like that? To be treated right?”
“Back off,” Harry said. He’d had it with Corporal Go. “What confusion?” he asked Shozo. Although he was half in the maw of Sugamo Prison, this new element had his attention. Uncertainty, yes, but why confusion?
“Just a word,” said Shozo.
“A very particular word.” Harry tried to get around Go to the sergeant. “Who wants to know?”
“You don’t ask the questions. We ask the questions,” Go said and broke the cane across Harry’s back.
My mistake, Harry thought. Never provoke police, especially in jail. And never let violence get started. The pain radiated through Harry’s body from kidney level, and he slid down the wall to his knees.
“Are you all right, Harry?” Shozo stooped to ask.
“Sure.” It was a fluid situation, that much was clear. So far as Harry was concerned, Shozo’s push for a confession proved he didn’t have enough for an arrest. However, the Thought Police were capable of anything when antagonized. Harry had just pressed too hard.
“No hard feelings. No warning, sorry.” Go grinned with his upper teeth.
“Now, while you can, Harry, write your statement.”
“Can’t.” He couldn’t even stand.
“Then tell me about the tanks.”
“Don’t know.”
“The Magic Show.”
“No.”
“Lady Beechum. We know she’s a spy.”
A bugle call and the clamor of a bell were followed by a general coughing, a rustle of bodies on thin mats, a sickly chorus of hundreds in a mausoleum above and below. Time to contemplate a person’s spiritual nature, Harry thought. Time to call the bluff.
“I’m ready to go.”
Shozo helped Harry up. “Would you like some water? Tea? Last chance, Harry.” Shozo had the expression of a fireman removing a ladder from someone who refused to leave a burning building.
“No. May I go?”
“Of course.”
Shozo called a guard to return Harry to the processing area. On the way out, he passed a trustee in a patched kimono pasting rules up in the hall:
NO SPEAKING BETWEEN PRISONERS IS ALLOWED. NO SIGNALING BETWEEN PRISONERS IS ALLOWED. NO DISRESPECT TO WARDS OR GUARDS IS ALLOWED. NO REMOVAL OR DAMAGE OF THE CELL LIGHT IS ALLOWED. NO BLOCKING OR COVERING OF THE DOOR SIGHT IS ALLOWED. RISING IS AT 0600, INSPECTION AT 0630, EXERCISE AT 0900, LUNCH AT 1100, DINNER AT 1600, SLEEP AT 1900. HAIRCUTS TWICE A MONTH. SPECIAL ITEMS WILL BE AVAILABLE AT THE COMMISSARY. COMMENTS SHOULD BE DIRECTED ONLY TO THE PRISON GOVERNOR.
This time the rules were in English.
HARRY FOUND a train platform half a mile from the prison on a road between potato fields. Scarecrows whirled their arms at the rising sun, and Harry found cheer in the fact that his shirt wasn’t sticking to his back, which meant he had only a welt, not broken skin, a good sign, although the very fact that he construed a lack of blood a good sign was, he admitted, a bad sign indeed. He sucked on a cigarette to ease the pain and read the schedule plaque. There wasn’t much service on a Sunday. And prospects for the rest of the week? He felt the sun stretch his shadow back toward the high walls and chimneys of the prison.
Palm Springs, Palm Springs, Palm Springs, he repeated like a mantra. Alice, Alice, Alice. Sometimes a man sensed a deal falling apart. The blow with the cane was a bad sign through and through. He hadn’t been taken so unawares since school, when Gen once caught him with a wooden sword before Harry had his padding on. Someone in the navy had to be sniping at Gen for Shozo to know so much about oil. Worse than the hit, though, was remembering what he’d done to Michiko. She’d laid herself down to save his life, and he’d reacted like a saint stoning a slut.
A crow trudged up the road and shared a glance with Harry, one wiseguy to another. There was nothing he could do. On Sunday morning there was no traffic, not even a truck to bum a ride with.
The worst sign of all was what had earned Harry the welt on his back.
Confusion.
Harry’s whole story about secret oil tanks on Oahu was meant to cause uncertainty; that was the point of the fabrication. Uncertainty was a paralyzed state where cooler heads could prevail. Confusion was active, committed, a labeling of targets. Confusion was planes in the air.