Quicksilver (Nameless Detective) (20 page)

I curled my lip at him, tough-guy fashion. Then I reached out and flicked some imaginary lint off the front of his mauve jacket. The sudden movement made him flinch, which was what I’d intended. Both Clara and her father, whoever
they
were, would have enjoyed this. Hell, I was beginning to enjoy it a little myself.

“All right, Mixer,” I said. “Go on over to your desk and sit down. Don’t say anything; just do what you’re told.”

He obeyed. And sat stiffly in his chair, looking up at me with bright, nervous eyes.

“The first thing we’re going to get straight,” I said, “is why I’m here. I’m not working for the father of any woman named Clara; I’m working for Haruko Gage. Is that clear?”

“Haruko who? Oh, the Fujita girl. Yes.”

“So is it clear, or should I say it again?”

“No. I mean yes, it’s clear.”

“Good. Now do you remember why I’m working for Mrs. Gage?”

“Ah ... no, I ... no.”

“I didn’t think so. I’m working for her because she’s been getting anonymous presents in the mail—pieces of jewelry—and I’m trying to find out who’s sending them.”

“Oh. Yes. Anonymous presents.”

“Now you’ve got it. And I think the person responsible is connected to some Japanese guys named Tamura, Masaoka, and Hama., Those names ring any bells with you?”

He shook his head. His eyes were still bright and nervous, but there wasn’t any guile in them. Still, he was a screwball—and so was the person who had murdered those three Japanese. Screwballs, as any psychiatrist will tell you, can be cunning as hell when it comes to concealing things about themselves.

I asked him, “How about Chiyoko Wakasa? Do you know that name?”

“Is she another of my former students? I’m not very good with names; I deal with so many in my classes ...”

“Okay, forget it. What I want from you now is some information on the Japanese relocation camps during World War II.”

That surprised him. Or seemed to. He said, “You do?”

“Yes, I do. You teach California history; you ought to know something about them.”

“Of course I know something about them.” Now he sounded indignant, as if I had impugned his credentials as a teacher. “I know quite a bit about them, as a matter of fact.”

“Is that right?”

“Yes. I once wrote a paper on the wartime evacuation of Japanese-Americans. A fascinating study, from the historical point of view.”

“Sure. Unless you happened to be in one of the camps.”

“Oh, yes,” he said. “Tragic. Very tragic. Families uprooted, stripped of their possessions, shunted off to live in dreary tar-paper barracks behind barbed-wire fences.” He shook his head. “Tragic,” he said again, and he seemed to mean it.

I started to say something, but Mixer wasn’t finished yet. He seemed to be warming to the subject. “Politics, war-induced hysteria, racism—those were the three principle reasons behind the decision to relocate. The idea that all the Nisei and Issei in California were potential spies and saboteurs is ridiculous. Did the government decide to imprison American citizens of German or Italian descent? Of course not;
they
were white. Nor was there any mass evacuation of people of Japanese ancestry in the Hawaiian Islands, even though more of them lived there than here on the West Coast: 157,000 as compared to 120,000. What the Hawaiians did was to round up known dissidents and ship them to the mainland camps—a total of less than a thousand, or a mere one percent of the adult Japanese population. Were you aware of that?”

“No,” I said, “I wasn’t.”

“A gross miscarriage of justice,” Mixer said, and nodded his head emphatically.

“How many camps were there altogether?”

“Ten. Two in California, two in Arizona, two in Arkansas, and one each in Wyoming, Colorado, Idaho, and Utah.”

“The one I’m interested in was a California camp—Tule Lake.”

“The California camps were the worst,” Mixer said. “Tule Lake and Manzanar—woeful places. Barracks partitioned into one-room apartments twenty by twenty-five feet, each one occupied by eight to ten people. No furniture; just Army cots and bed ticking. Inadequate sanitation facilities, inadequate hospital facilities; insuffient food in most camps. And the allowances the people were given ... my God! Eight dollars a month for unskilled labor, twelve dollars for skilled labor, sixteen to nineteen dollars for professional work. And even then, the people didn’t start receiving their money until the War Relocation Board took control of the camps in the summer of 1942, three months after the first evacuation orders came out of Washington.”

Pretty grim stuff. I remembered feeling sympathy for the Japanese-Americans when it was happening; my family and a Nisei family had been friendly in the Noe Valley district where I grew up. But I’d forgotten about their plight as time passed, ignored the suffering and the injustice. Too many others had forgotten and ignored too, without any feeling of shame or culpability. It was only in recent years that some effort at reparation had been made—too little, too late, to too few of the survivors.

I said, “Tell me about Tule Lake. What kind of camp was it?”

“The worst of them,” Mixer said. “Isolated, with its own irrigated farm land so that it was self-supporting; but there were sixteen thousand people jammed into it, an uneasy mix of Pacific Coast farm workers and their families and recalcitrants from other camps and from Hawaii. It was also the official ‘Segregation Center,’ where the small percentage of Issei who requested repatriation to Japan and Nisei who renounced their American citizenship were sent.”

“It sounds pretty woeful, all right.”

“Yes. Boredom, fear, distrust, suspicion, greed—those were the everyday elements of life at Tule Lake.”

“Was there much crime, then?”

“My God, yes. Graft, theft, rape, assault, two murders. Not to mention countless disturbances. Members of the
Hokoku Seinen Dan
—young men who advocated renunciation and repatriation—used to blow bugles early in the morning and hold marches and generally terrorize the peaceful residents.”

I remember old Charley Takeuchi telling me that Kazuo Hama had blown bugles before dawn. I asked Mixer, “Was it only the
Hokoku
members who blew horns?”

“No. Other young men did it too.”

So Kazuo Hama may or may not have been a dissident during his stay at Tule Lake; ditto Simon Tamura and Sanjiro Masaoka. But even if they had been dissidents, I couldn’t see any connection between that and their being killed forty years later; or between that and their jewelry being sent to Haruko Gage.

“Those two camp murders you mentioned,” I said. “Were they both solved?”

“One was. The other, no.”

“Who was the victim of the unsolved one?”

“The general manager of the camp cooperative, a man named ... I believe it was Noma, Takeo Noma. He was stabbed to death. The theory at the time, which seems probable, is that he was killed because he was an
inu
.”

“What’s an
inu?
”

“Literally, the word means dog. In the camps it meant an informer, a cheat, a traitor. Noma was hated by nearly everyone at Tule Lake; they considered his death a blessing.”

“There were no leads to who killed him?”

“Several leads. And several men were put into the stockade—the probable killers, in fact. But none was ever indicted; the evidence was too circumstantial.”

“I don’t suppose you remember the names of those men?”

“Not offhand. Do you want me to look them up?”

“If you can do it here and now.”

He nodded, got out of his chair and went to one of the wall shelves and began rummaging through the books there. He picked one out and thumbed through it; put it back and found another and thumbed through that until he located the list of names. He read them off to me, close to a dozen of them.

No Hama. No Tamura. No Masaoka. No Wakasa. And no Fujita.

Zip.

Mixer put the book away, adjusted his mauve jacket and his yellow shirt cuffs in a way that suggested a fox preening itself, and made a small production out of consulting his watch. “Is there anything else you want to know?” he said. “I have an eleven o’clock class.”

“That should do it.”

“Should I expect you to bother me again?”

“Why? Don’t you like my company?”

“Frankly, no.” The persecuted look came back into his eyes. “I’m a peaceful man. I hate violence.”

“I don’t remember getting violent with you.”

“You would have if I hadn’t told you what you wanted to know.”

“Well, you know how it is with us private eyes,” I said. “We like to talk tough and beat up on people once in a while. Just so we don’t get rusty.”

He looked at me as if he were afraid I might jump him after all. “I’m a peaceful man,” he said again.

“Sure you are. A lover, not a fighter.”

“I don’t know what you mean by that.”

“Yes you do.” I moved over to the door and unlocked it and opened it up. “Tell Darlene her father’s looking forward to those home movies you took the other day.”

“What?” he said. “
What
?”

I went out and shut the door softly behind me.

There were public telephone booths on the main floor of Batmale Hall, and I used one of them to look up the number of the Slim-Taper Shirt Company and then to dial it. Somebody at Slim-Taper went and got Eberhardt for me, but the three of us might have saved the effort it took. Jack Logan had been up to his ears in a drug-related triple homicide in Visitacion Valley, Eberhardt said, and not inclined to spend any time at all checking out either jewelry or deaths in Princeton and Petaluma. Besides, the Tamura killing was McFate’s case—we should go talk to McFate.

Yeah.

I told Eberhardt I would see him later and rang off. It was all up to me now, like it or not.

Another call to the DMV. Fletcher, had the list ready for me: eight Wakasas with California driver’s licenses, none of them named Michio; three in the Bay Area, one in Fresno, one in Eureka, one in Vacaville, and two in Southern California. Of the three locals, two lived in Oakland and one in Palo Alto. I wrote down all the names and addresses, thanked Fletcher, again, assured him I wouldn’t bother him any more for a while, and rang off.

I still had two hours until my meeting with Haruko Gage, and as I crossed the campus I decided to go home and use the time to telephone Wakasas. But I changed my mind when I came out on Phelan Avenue and again confronted the white Ford and the two
kobun
sitting inside it. Enough was enough. The Wakasa telephoning would have to wait a while.

The time had come for me to deal with the Yakuza, one way or another.

The Kara Maru Restaurant was on China Basin Boulevard a block or so off Third Street, tucked up between Pier 52 and a marine salvage company. It had once been a small ocean-going freighter and it still looked seaworthy; or it would have except for the canopied gangplank that led up to it from the wharfside, the silk banner proclaiming its name in English letters and Japanese ideographs, and the big sign in front that said you could get lunch, dinner, and cocktails every day except Sunday.

There was a parking area off to one side, mostly empty this early in the day, and I put my car into one of the slots. The white Ford stopped back on the street, alongside the long Pier 52 shed. When I got out I could see the two of them through the Ford’s windshield; if they were surprised that I’d led them here, you couldn’t tell it from their actions or their expressions.

It was cold this close to the Bay, and cold inside the Kara Maru, too, despite the unit heaters that had been mounted on the bulkheads. Cold and damp and a little musty, like an empty cargo hold or a shore cottage that has been closed up for several months. Creaks and groans from mooring hawsers and old caulked joints. A suggestion of movement underfoot, although the boat was tightly anchored to the wharf to keep it steady and its customers from throwing up on each other in bad weather. Teakwood tables and chairs, big soft-cushioned ship’s couches in the bar lounge and restaurant booths, and lots of highly polished brass fittings—nautical clocks, compasses, sextants, and the like—to complete the decor.