“How do they measure the oil on the ship?” Shozo asked.
“Tape and plumb bob,” Harry said.
“Japan depends on oil,” Gen said. “Japanese soldiers are giving their lives every day for oil.”
Harry said, “It’s hardly worth taking one thousand barrels across the Pacific. Did the Sister Jane stop on the way?”
“Only Hawaii,” Kawamura said.
“Hawaii?” Gen asked.
“There was a problem with a sick seaman, as I remember. The ship was only in dock two nights.”
“Tough luck for the seaman,” said Harry. “But maybe a stroke of good luck for the rest of the crew. Honolulu has a lot of hot spots. Do you think the captain gave the crew two days’ liberty?”
“I wouldn’t know.”
“Do you think maybe he pumped out nine thousand gallons of oil when the crew wasn’t around?” asked Gen.
“No.”
Harry said, “I’m just wondering why someone thought the Sister Jane left Long Beach with a lot of oil and ended up here with very little.”
“No one was cheated. Whether it was one thousand or ten thousand, that was what we sold, no more, no less.” Kawamura looked to Shozo for support, but the policeman’s expression was grim. Go had started to giggle, which even Harry found unnerving. “I’m sure Pomeroy would have a good explanation if he were here.”
“But he’s not here and you are,” Harry said. “I looked through the entire ledger, and in the twelve months before the freeze on deliveries, there were three other corrections for shortages of deliveries, totaling another thirty-six thousand barrels of oil that Japan desperately needed. You’ll find the ‘corrections’ on pages five, eleven and fifteen, a little smudged but definitely altered.” Kawamura flipped from page to page. This was like hunting rabbit, Harry thought. You didn’t chase rabbits, you lit a fire and they came to you if you showed them a safe way out. “Who actually had possession of this ledger, you or Pomeroy?”
“Pomeroy.”
Gen asked, “Who wrote down the number of barrels leaving Long Beach and arriving here?”
“Pomeroy.” Kawamura looked ready to pull his head in his collar if he could.
“You didn’t actually run the books on oil at all, did you?” Harry said. “That was the manager’s job. After all, you’re a financial man, not an oilman. What you were really in charge of was the branch budget, the payroll, dock fees, accounts payable. It must have been confusing to suddenly have to deal with customs, immigration, bills of lading. I doubt you ever would have noticed these barrel amounts.”
“I didn’t.”
“But thirty-six thousand barrels and nine thousand, that is forty-five thousand barrels of oil,” Shozo said. “Where did it go?”
“Good question,” Harry said. “I personally think that Kawamura here is an honest Japanese employee duped by the American manager Pomeroy, who is probably at the racetrack at Santa Anita even as we speak.”
Gen asked Shozo to take Kawamura outside.
“Let me.” Go gathered the accountant.
“Just a dupe,” Harry reminded the corporal.
“No Japanese should be duped,” Go shouted back as he dragged Kawamura through the door. “All Americans are spies!”
On his way out, Shozo said to Harry, “I take it back. You would have made a good policeman, too.”
The instant the door shut behind the sergeant, Gen slapped the desk. “God, that was fun.” He dropped into a chair and put his feet up. Sometimes Gen’s slovenliness struck Harry as virtually American. “I remember, as a kid, watching you do the change-from-a-hundred-yen-note scam, wondering how you always walked away with more money than you started.”
“It’s just how you count, forward or back. How did Shozo and Go know about this meeting?”
“I told them. It was for your protection. They were going to pick you up, so I had to show them how valuable you were.”
“You could have warned me.”
“No time. Everything’s happening so fast.”
“Like what?”
“Life.” Gen leaned forward to spear a cigarette from Harry. “Did I ever tell you how I got in with the C in C?” The commander in chief of the Combined Fleet was Admiral Yamamoto. Naval personnel reverently called him the C in C.
“No.”
“It was thanks to you. I was in the mess with some other officers, and suddenly the C in C himself was at the hatch asking whether anyone played poker. You know how it is with junior officers, one wrong answer can ruin a career. Guys played bridge, but no one was going to admit they gambled. Without even thinking, I said yes. He almost grabbed me by the neck to get me out of there, then I had to race to stay up with him to the senior mess, where there was a poker game of admirals and commanders, the C in C’s inner circle. One had to go, and they needed a fourth. It’s not much of a game without at least four players. The C in C gave me half of his own chips and said two things. First, that he didn’t trust any man who wasn’t willing to gamble. Second, that there was no point in playing except for money. That’s what you always say, too.”
“God’s truth. So, how did you do?”
“Won a little. The C in C asked where I learned to play poker like that. I said Cal. He learned at Harvard. Anyway, from then on, whenever they needed a fourth, they called on me.”
“Cal and Harvard? Wow, were you in the same fraternity? Both smoke briar pipes?”
“Come on, Harry.”
“In other words, you gave me no credit for teaching you the most valuable thing you ever learned.”
“Harry, you’re the ace I keep up my sleeve.”
“Shozo asked about the Magic Show.”
“Oh, he did? What did you say?”
“That I didn’t know what he was talking about. That’s what I always say.”
“Good. First the police know about it, then the army knows about it, then we’re all in the drink.” Gen pulled a folder tied with a red ribbon from the dispatch bag to signal a change in subject. He undid the ribbon and opened to a loose page that he stared at as if it were half in code: “This is the new total. With shortages of two hundred thousand gallons of oil from Petromar, and two hundred and forty thousand from Manzanita Oil added to Long Beach, altogether four hundred eighty-five thousand barrels of oil seem to have been diverted from Japan to Hawaii. There are enough tanks at Pearl Harbor to hold about four million gallons. We estimate they are already full. Where are they putting the extra oil that you have found? And if you found some, there is probably much more. There must be other tanks in Hawaii, and the only information we have on where they are is your story about an American contractor you met in Shanghai who claimed to have put reinforced tanks in a valley behind Waikiki.”
“He was drunk. We were in a bar. He could have made it up.”
“Why that story, though?”
“Gen, it’s all stories. Books were altered, so what? Books are always altered, and mistakes are always made. The same with Manzanita and Petromar. It’s fun to run Kawamura in circles, but we can’t prove anything. Let me ask you this, have your people ever found those mysterious tanks? Why stick them in a valley? When did they build railroad tracks or oil pipes or access roads? The man was drunk. We were at the Olympic Bar in Shanghai, longest bar in the world, ten languages going at the same time, with two Russian girls who didn’t understand a word, so I don’t even know why he was boasting. You’ve been to the Olympic, it’s a mob scene. I didn’t get his name or his company, and he didn’t draw a map on the back of a cocktail coaster. It’s all smoke, Gen.”
“It’s four hundred and eighty-five thousand gallons, Harry. At least.”
“I suppose it’s a lot of oil. But it’s just a story, that’s all.”