Shozo opened a notebook. “‘Son of missionaries, born in Tokyo, grew up wild in Asakusa. Catching cats for shamisen skins. Running errands for prostitutes and dancers.’ I would have traded places with you in a minute. When my mother took me by the pleasure quarters, the girls would always tease me from their windows, and my mother would almost pull my arm out of its socket.”
“You must have been pulling the other way.”
“Very hard.” Shozo flipped a page. “Your parents had no idea what you were doing?”
“They could cover more ground without me. I stayed in Tokyo with an uncle who was drinking himself to death. I spoke Japanese. I sent the telegrams and collected the money for him. It was simpler that way.”
“You would have made a great criminal. Don’t you think so, Corporal?”
Go waved a pudgy fist at Harry. “All foreign correspondents are spies! All foreign reporters are spies! All foreigners are spies!”
Harry said, “No foreign resident has proven his usefulness to the Japanese government more than I have.”
“That’s what I was telling the corporal,” Shozo said. “On the face of it, no American has been more useful to Japan. For example, Japan has an unfortunate shortage of oil. For a time you had a company to create petroleum?”
“Synthetic petroleum.”
Shozo consulted his notes. “From pine sap. You persuaded Japanese banks during a time of national emergency to invest in pine sap?”
“That was one of a variety of approaches.”
“When people talk about you and oil, they whisper about a magic show. What would that magic show be?”
“I have no idea.”
“No idea?”
“None.”
“You also proposed getting motor oil from sardines.”
“It’s theoretically possible.”
“You have no scientific background?”
“Just business.”
“Making money. Better than cat skins, too. What is the saying, what is it they say in English? It’s very fitting.”
“There’s more than one way to skin a cat.”
“Yes!” Shozo’s mouth turned down into a smile. “That’s what they say. ‘More than one way to skin a cat’! That’s what you are, a cat skinner, an American cat skinner.”
Shozo’s voice was drowned by a reverberation that shook the walls, a rolling thunder that rose to full throttle and abruptly quit, leaving expectancy and silence until a man in a leather coat and goggles slapped open the door. With a dispatch bag over his shoulder, a broad, confident face and thick hair sculpted by the wind, he was an image off a war-bonds poster. He pulled off gloves and goggles as he entered. Gen always arrived as if he’d just returned from the front, and sometimes he had, because he was more than an aviator, he was in Naval Operations. He bowed to Shozo and Go, winked at Harry. If he was surprised by the presence of the Special Higher Police, he didn’t show it.
“Sorry to keep you waiting,” Gen said. “It’s been a busy day.”
“You seem to know Harry Niles,” Shozo said.
“Oh, I know Harry.” Gen shrugged his coat off of navy blues. The sight of a lieutenant’s stripes on the sleeve prompted Kawamura to give Gen an additional ninety-degree bow.
“I’m in the dark,” Shozo said. “I am told that Mr. Niles performs valuable services, but I can’t imagine what they are.”
“You’ll see.” From his dispatch bag Gen took a legal-size book of faded maroon that he laid on the desk and opened. “The ledger of Long Beach Oil. Fascinating reading.”
The entries were in India ink for English and blue for Japanese. As Kawamura stared down at the pages, he sweated despite the warehouse chill.
Gen explained to Shozo, “Kawamura is the accountant of Long Beach Oil. He finds himself in an unusual and uncomfortable position because Long Beach assets have been frozen by the Japanese government in retaliation for the freezing of Japanese assets and properties in the United States. The American managers of the company have gone back to the United States, leaving Kawamura, their senior Japanese employee, in a caretaker position, and he has carried out his duty to his employer faithfully.”
“And faithfully to the emperor,” Kawamura interjected.
“Of course.” Gen grinned at Harry.
As kids, Gen and Harry used to strut around Asakusa in dark glasses like hoods. One day they were getting their fortunes told in the temple when they heard a nasal buzzing overhead, looked up and saw a biplane come in low to waggle its wings over Buddha. Gen took off his dark glasses. The plane came by again, a silvery vision towing a sign that said EBISU BEER. It made Harry thirsty, but it changed Gen’s life. Determined to fly, he became a model student who headed to the Naval Academy and aviation, then the University of California at Berkeley, studying English. Gen actually put more time in at American schools than Harry, and at Berkeley, he had picked up a little American sis-boom-bah, which fitted him for the navy general staff. The army’s model was Germany, but navy comers tended to admire the British and the States and adopted a tradition of white gloves and ballroom manners. Somehow Gen Yoshimura had found the money to cover the costs that nagged at a student and officer. Harry thought there must have been some scrimping. With his poor-boy ambition and American style, Gen was a perfect amalgam.
“Let’s assume,” Gen told Kawamura, “that your employers were anxious as to how exactly the freeze of assets would be carried out here-whether there would be appropriation of their property, damage or misuse. By now they should be reassured that the Emergency Board for the Protection of Foreign Commercial Interests has the well-being of Long Beach Oil in mind. The freeze is an unhappy but temporary measure. It is a system that only works, however, when everyone cooperates, as most American companies have done.”
“Yes.” Kawamura tried to ignore Harry, as if not acknowledging a wolf would make it go away.
“But,” Gen said, “there have been exceptions. Unfortunately, some American companies have created Japanese subsidiaries in which they attempt to hide assets. In other cases, American companies underreport their assets or their activity. The more critical the commodity, the greater chance of inaccurate reporting. Yo-yos, for example, have been accurately accounted for. Oil has not.”
“I still don’t understand,” Kawamura said.
“Let’s take an example,” Harry said. “According to your own ledger, the tanker Sister Jane left California for Japan on May first with ten thousand barrels of oil. On May fifteenth, the Sister Jane arrived here and delivered one thousand barrels. It left the States with more oil than it delivered, ten times as much.”
Kawamura finally exploded. “What is an American doing here? Is he an expert on trade?”
Harry said, “I’m an expert on cooking the books. It’s the last item in the ledger. Read it.”
Kawamura put on spectacles to read the page. “Ah, well, this is all a misunderstanding, a simple error. The first number was written as ten thousand but later corrected to one thousand. One thousand barrels left Long Beach, one thousand arrived here. You can see there is even the initial P for Pomeroy, our branch manager, to show his correction. There was no attempt to disguise anything. I would never have allowed it.”
“I remember Pomeroy,” Harry said. “Lived right next to the racetrack. Pomeroy went home?”
“He is gone, yes.”
“To Long Beach?” Gen asked.
“Los Angeles.”
“He treated you well?” Harry asked.
“Always.”
“It’s quite an honor to be left in charge?” Gen asked.
“He trusts me, I think,” Kawamura said.
“He should,” Harry said. “You are obviously a stout defender of Long Beach Oil. But why the mistake? Why did a full ten thousand gallons of oil have to be corrected to a mere one thousand?”
“I don’t know. I am embarrassed that there should be even the suggestion of a discrepancy. I can assure you, however, that when a ship arrives, we measure the quantity of oil in each tank on the ship before it is pumped, and again at the storage tanks after.”