“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?”