He would have known before, but he didn’t usually approach via the roof, without streetlamps or in such a hurry. The building itself was dark because the peep show, the Museum of Curiosities, had been closed by the police on suspicion of frivolity. Closed but not emptied. In the shadows Harry saw familiar forms. The Venus de Milo that was billed as an “exotic nude.” A stereopticon with views of belly dancers. Best of all, the freaks. The “mermaid” concocted of a flounder’s tail, papier-mâché body and horsehair wig. Siamese twins with the gaping jaws of lantern fish. With paste, paper and imagination, an artist could make anything. Harry’s stomach didn’t feel good. It felt cold. He sank to a sitting position, pulled off the germ mask and lit a cigarette to give himself a different focus than the pain. Between his kidneys and his stomach, he felt like he’d been run over by a thresher. What was this, Plan D or E? He hadn’t flown away on a silver plane, hadn’t stopped the war, had no more money. There was an old saying, that if after five minutes in a card game you don’t know who the mark is, it’s you. Harry admitted he didn’t even have a clue what the game was anymore. All he knew was that a creature concocted of fish scales and paper was hardly more patchwork than Harry Niles.
“Harry.” Gen stood with a gun at the end of the aisle and motioned Harry up. “Leave the knife.”
Hajime arrived by Gen’s side. “Maybe he has a gun. I’ll look.”
Harry said, “Hajime, Hajime, Hajime. Was that your idea to drop the gun on me? Pretty stupid.”
“‘Sergeant’ to you.” Hajime hit him on the side of the face and searched him. To Gen, Hajime reported, “No gun.”
“Guns aren’t Harry’s style. Harry trusts in luck.”
Harry spat out blood. “I’ve always been a lucky man.”
Gen smiled sadly, humoring the delusional. “Come on, Harry, it will be like old times.”
They left the peep show, Harry in the middle with a gun in his back, and turned not out to the street but up the stairs to a door with a sign that read, by the flame of Gen’s cigarette lighter, NO ENTRANCE. THIS DOOR IS LOCKED AT ALL TIMES. Gen had the key and led the way into a narrow room of vanity mirrors. Dirty slippers were piled by the door, tatty costumes hung from a rack, and although the Folies had been closed for a year, the changing room was still redolent with stale sweat, body powder and perfume. At that table, Oharu had first turned to the young Harry as he fell through the door. At that chair, Kato reigned as artist-king. Little Chizuko undressed behind that screen. The main difference was that the mirrors had been stripped of lightbulbs, and what had been a space full of color and life was a dusty coffin. No music, either. Music had always stolen up from the show. Harry remembered a burst of fanfare, light shining and dancers flying through the door.
“Decadence,” Hajime said.
“Fun,” Harry said. “It was the best place on earth.”
Gen said, “Long gone. Times have changed. Look at today, a Japanese task force goes undetected halfway across the Pacific and catches the American fleet like a row of ducks. Practically without resistance. Catches American planes parked on the ground and wipes them out. The greatest naval victory in the annals of war.” While he talked, Gen led Harry out the other door and down a spiral staircase to a backstage maze of ropes, trapdoors and sandbags. Rays of light from the front probed the painted flats of a barbershop, streetcar, battleship cannons, the palms of a tropical island, the playground of boyhood friends. Harry remembered the skits: the doctor routine, the cannibal scene, the bumblebee. And the chorus line’s top hats and kicks. The curtains framed a black abyss of orchestra seats. Ishigami was onstage, busy setting tatami mats in the subdued glow of footlights. A chair with a water pitcher, bowl and head box stood to one side. A belt and sword hung off the chair back. Harry couldn’t see past the lights. He wouldn’t have minded a full house, the Folies orchestra pumping out “Daisy, Daisy” and the chorus line crossing the stage on bikes. He tried to keep his eyes off the head box. Concentrating on Ishigami didn’t necessarily help. From the first day Harry had met him, the colonel had stayed essentially the same, the way a knife becomes more itself, both worn and sharp, by use. Harry missed Michiko. She would have evened the odds more than most. However, it was interesting to watch the interaction of the three men, awe for the colonel, adoration for Gen, acceptance for the loathsome Hajime. Harry was with them and not with them. They were going on, and Harry was definitely staying behind. Gen continued, “Despite the longest odds in history, we did it. The greatest gamble of all time, and we did it.” Harry was trying to think of some agreeable response when Gen sent him sprawling over the boards. Harry rolled over to find Gen’s gun dug into his cheek. Gen’s cap had fallen off, and his hair hung wildly down. “And it was worthless, worse than worthless.”
“What do you mean?”
Gen talked through his teeth. “We waited all day at Operations for the reports to come in from the task force, Harry. Now the reports are in. Now we know. The attack on Hawaii had three main targets: the battleships, the aircraft carriers and the oil. Those are the three legs of a navy. We sank the battleships. But the carriers were all out on exercises, we didn’t see a one. And the oil, Harry, the planes didn’t touch a tank. Instead, our planes went into the valleys looking for your secret tanks. Of course, they didn’t see any secret oil tanks because the tanks never existed.”
“I told you they didn’t.”
“You knew a hint would do. We couldn’t ignore what you said, Harry. It became an obsession. So, by the time the pilots realized there were no secret tanks of oil, their own fuel was low. They all returned to their carriers. All we needed was a single Zero to strafe the tanks sitting in plain view by the docks, and Pearl Harbor would burn until they didn’t have a drop of oil, not a drop in the whole Pacific. Instead, the Americans have their carriers and their oil. All they have to do is move some warships, and we will have achieved nothing. All the planning, the risk, the war for nothing.”
Harry looked over at Ishigami.
“It’s over,” the colonel said. “I could have told them. It will take years, but the war is lost.”
They were right, Harry thought. In the long term, Pearl Harbor was a Japanese disaster. They’d needed to grab three brass rings in one go-round of the carousel, and they had missed two.
The bitterness of years poured out of Gen. “I knew all your con games, and I still bit. Fictitious oil tanks. Fraudulent ledgers. What a sucker.”
Harry said, “I warned you.”
Ishigami placed his cap on the chair and drew his long Bizen sword as Gen pulled Harry up to all fours. Hajime sobbed. It was all going too fast, Harry thought. One minute they were kids rushing up the stairs, and the next they were men crawling onstage in the footlights.
“It was to stop the war,” Harry told the colonel. He tried it on Gen. “It was to keep the war from starting.”
“I believe you,” Ishigami said.
Gen weighted down Harry’s back. Suddenly the punctures in his stomach felt like mere pinpricks. Hajime aimed a gun at Harry in case he moved. Ishigami’s boots creaked as they took an executioner’s stance.
“A thousand yen says you need just one swing,” Harry said, because the last thing Harry needed now was two.