“It’s from Fuji. The water in the carboys is from a sacred spring on Mount Fuji, it’s the only water Ito will use.”
“Sacred water?”
“Yes.”
Harry took a deep breath and raised his arms. “Praise the Lord! I feel my heart leap and the veils part. I hate to admit it, but I was starting to doubt myself. I’m sane again. Oh, it’s a scam, definitely a scam.”
“How?”
“I don’t know. I have no idea. Ito is a better magician than I am. I do know that for con games, holy water is the best kind. Now maybe you’ll let me talk to other magicians.”
“I can’t, Harry. You were my shot.”
In his rumpled whites, Gen looked like a laundry bag. He was the football hero stopped on the one-yard line, the movie star who’d lost his script, the aviator out of gas. He was no longer in the game, in the picture or in the air, and he couldn’t understand why. Handsome had gotten him only so far, which wasn’t far enough. Harry had seen it before, this capacity of Gen’s to lose all confidence, implode and go inert.
“Harry?” Michiko came in the door with Haruko. Both were in chic new outfits, hats and shoes, Haruko’s, Harry suspected, a copy of Michiko’s. “We were at Haruko’s for a day and a half, waiting for you to come looking for me.”
“And I was going to, as soon as Gen and I were done. I was very worried.”
Seeing Gen low raised Michiko’s spirits; she generally treated him as a usurper of Harry’s interest, and he treated her the same. She showed Harry a small blue pharmacy bottle of laudanum from her purse. “I have enough here that I will never have to think about you again.”
Harry didn’t take the threat seriously. Michiko was more the hand-grenade type. “Haruko’s was the first place I was going to look.”
“You could have called.”
“I should have. I’ve been thinking about you. I really have been. Missed you.” He turned the jukebox on low. The plastic canopy took on a pearly hue. An arm laid a disc on the turntable, and a needle slipped into a groove while Harry’s hand slid into the small of Michiko’s back. Blue moon, you saw me standing alone / Without a dream in my heart / Without a love of my own. She was one of the few Japanese girls who knew how to dance, knew that sinuous was better than stiff and that the hips should be involved just so. He touched a certain point between two vertebrae, and her head settled on his shoulder. “You look agonizingly beautiful, you really do.” Her right hand rested in his left, bottle and all, his thumb on the underside of her wrist.
When Haruko tried to get Gen to dance, he brushed her hand from his shoulder.
“Gen is feeling a little low.” Harry said.
“Gen is always low,” murmured Michiko.
Haruko said to Gen, “Maybe I can cheer you up. You can call me sometime. I have a phone.”
“Imagine that, her own phone. Haruko has an admirer at the telephone exchange,” Harry told Gen. “But she’s nuts about you, always has been.”
“What would cheer you up?” Haruko asked.
Gen said, “I’m just not in the mood.”
“When is he?” asked Michiko. “Gen, when are you in the mood? Are you ever in the mood, Gen?”
“Don’t pick on him.” Harry said.
“But I want to pick on him. What kind of lover are you, Gen?”
“Not your kind.”
“Definitely not, I’d say. Absolutely not.”
“Ssh.” Harry put his finger to Michiko’s lips and took up her hand again. You knew just what I was there for / You heard me saying a prayer for / Someone I really could care for.
He felt how cool and delicate her fingers were around the bottle and how nubby the surface of the bottle was. They took another turn around the jukebox, but Harry’s mind was already moving in a different direction.
“What now, Harry?” Michiko asked.
Harry had the pharmacy bottle. He set it beside the bottle of Scotch in front of Gen, so smartly that Haruko jumped.
“What do you see?” Harry asked.
Gen wrested his glare from Michiko and refocused. “Two bottles.”
“High-class Johnnie Walker bottle. Cheap blue bottle.”
“Yes.”
“Wake up, what’s the difference?”
“Smooth and clear. Blue and crude.”
Blue glass recycled from old sake bottles, Harry thought. Glass removed too fast from the blowpipe, a fact that could save Gen’s skin, to say nothing of his commission and fancy dress whites. “What makes it crude?”
“Bubbles.”
“Say it again, Lieutenant.”
Gen sat back. His chin and shoulders rose. “Bubbles.”
BUBBLES WERE the answer.
While there were no experiments, Gen had draftsmen secretly draw all four sides of each blue bottle in the water tank and in the examining room, taking care to pinpoint every bubble in the glass, a pattern that was each bottle’s “fingerprint.” At the next Magic Show, Dr. Ito transformed not one but two bottles of water into oil. However, when the sketches were compared, it was plain that, while the specially marked stoppers might be the same, the bottles containing oil were not-by the evidence of their own “prints”-the bottles of water originally placed in the tank. At which point, the guards confessed to being bribed for turning a blind eye and tried to shoot themselves with their own handguns. Gen got the credit for exposing the subterfuge, and Ito went off with the police.
The main thing was that Harry had learned how paranoid and crazy the navy was on the subject of oil. By December, eight months later, when he altered shipping ledgers in Yokohama and created a tank farm in Hawaii out of thin air, he figured the navy had only itself to blame.
13
OHARU WAS A perfect model, because her expression was as blank as paper. Kato would turn out a woodblock print of her posed by a teapot and brazier, an elegant kimono with a snow-circle pattern wrapped tight around her middle and loose at the neck, her hair piled in three tiers and pierced by a gilded comb and tortoiseshell pin. The first impression the print gave was of a woman lost in thought. The viewer noticed the striped shadows cast by the bars of a prostitute’s window. Steam spilling from the pot, suggestive of opportunities missed. In her sleeve, Oharu’s hand crushing an empty pack of Golden Bats. Only then would the viewer see by the context-not as in a single picture but almost as in the repeated images of a film-a woman whose pride had chased away her clients and now, at day’s end, the sun sinking into a red haze over the licensed quarter, had no prospects or cigarettes left when regrets were all too late.
Or not. The evening offered other patrons. The next print was of Oharu in a boat, surrounded by a constellation of fireflies that lit the water’s surface. She wore a fishnet-pattern kimono, and her hair was slightly disheveled, her mouth slack and tipsy. All that could be seen of the man she was with was a sleeve of army green. The sleeve of her kimono trailed as she stared at a reflection of the moon. In the faintly glimmering lights, she seemed to melt into the water, and the moon that floated in it could have been her own pale face. It was, the young Harry thought, the face of a woman who had surrendered everything.
But no, that was the next print. The model was not Oharu but Chizuko, the small dancer Harry had seen changing into a ballerina’s tutu on his first visit to backstage. Her hair, cut short as a schoolgirl’s, cupped her broad face. Kato had depicted her standing in the snow, dressed in a red, slightly soiled kimono, barefoot in stilted clogs, a paper peony in her hair and a rolled tatami mat slung across her back. The mat was the trademark of a “sparrow,” a prostitute with the coarsest sort of clientele. Although she was younger than Oharu, Chizuko’s eyes returned the viewer’s gaze with blunt directness. Her cheeks and her feet were flushed from the cold, and despite the snowflakes that swirled around her, Harry could feel her heat.