"December 6" - читать интересную книгу автора (Smith Martin Cruz)

12

IT WAS ON an evening in April that Gen introduced Harry to the Magic Show. They had met at a new John Wayne movie and afterward strolled like cowboys in a marquee glow. Most naval officers were shorn like sheep, but Gen had managed to hang on to his hair, and in his panama hat, he exuded a style and confidence that made Harry want to hang back and applaud. Gen’s only problem was that he looked more like an actor playing a hero than a real hero. He had been assigned to Operations, and while another officer on the rise might have severed relations with as dubious a character as Harry, it wasn’t in Gen to be careful. Their relationship was too old, too strong, too complicated. Trust and distrust seesawed between them. Gen knew Harry too well, and that went both ways.

Gen consulted his watch from time to time, which meant nothing to Harry until they returned to the Happy Paris and Gen suggested the willow house across the street instead. Through the window slats of the Paris, Harry saw Michiko lean on the jukebox, waiting for him, mouthing some whispery song in a wreath of smoke. At the willow house, a lantern winked a more discreet welcome within an open gate.

“You’re kidding,” Harry said. “You’re drunk.”

“No.” And he wasn’t, Harry realized. Gen was sober. “I have a friend inside. You’d enjoy him.”

“At a geisha party?”

“No geishas. He wants to play cards.”

“There are games all over town.”

“He’s very private. You’d enjoy him. Just meet him, and if you’re not interested, you can leave. Five minutes, Harry.”

From the willow-house gate, a path of stones led across a lawn of moss to an entryway of polished cedar. Sure enough, Harry and Gen had barely left their shoes when, from behind paper panels slid shut, they heard the unmistakable sound of parties in progress: drunken toasts, the stumbling over musical pillows (a version of musical chairs) and the puns and feeble double entendres that passed for jokes. Rich drunks and simpering dolls, that was a geisha party so far as Harry was concerned. The cultural aspect fit into a thimble. The level of entertainment was prehistoric. One girl might sing like a lark, and the next one’s major talent might be tying a cherry stem with her tongue. The proprietor, hunchbacked from bowing, always greeted a customer at the front door. For once he was absent.

Gen led Harry to the room farthest from the street, traditionally the best and quietest accommodation. It was a room Harry sometimes escaped to from the Paris; in turn, he gave geishas a ride home when they were too tipsy to walk. A round window looked out on a softly illuminated garden of bonsai and ferns. A standing screen was decorated with gilded carp swimming across blue silk. There were no geishas now, however, only a short man in a threadbare kimono shuffling cards. He had a deeply lined, tanned and compact body, as if any more weight was baggage. His gray hair was shaved to the nub, and he was missing the middle and index fingers of his left hand. He didn’t rise to greet Harry or pretend to bow but seemed amiable and informal enough.

“I hear you play,” he told Harry.

“Deal them.”

The man dealt the cards facedown for five-card stud, and they played one on one with a one-yen ante just to make it interesting. The man was good; he had discipline, card memory, a sense of the changing odds, a natural poker face and, most important, an amused detachment that allowed him to take the loss or win of a hand as just deserts. It took until two in the morning for Harry to clean him out.

“You see, this is what I mean,” the man told Gen as Harry raked in the final pot. “You can start by putting in just one yen or one ship or one soldier and still lose everything if you don’t know when to leave the table. Leaving the table is not something Japanese are very good at.” He held up his hands for Harry. “Sometimes you even have to leave fingers on the table. I lost two fingers when my own gun blew up. But the geishas here are very nice. The usual charge for a manicure from a geisha is one yen. For me, just eighty sen.”

“Who were you shooting at?”

“Russians. It was war, it was perfectly legal.”

The songs and laughs from other rooms had died and disappeared. Quiet descended on the willow house. Gen had watched the entire poker game without saying a word or even stirring except to empty an ashtray or fetch tea. Everything the older man did, Gen followed with the attention and respect of an altar boy. “I am a terrible customer for geishas,” the man said. “I don’t drink, and I don’t have much to spend, but the geishas humor me nonetheless. I find the back room here restful.” He rubbed his head with embarrassment. “I tried to go home tonight, the first time I’ve been home in months, and I was locked out. My wife had taken the children on vacation, I suppose. So I came here with my loose change and some cards to make my fortune. Unfortunately, I ran into you, and now I have nothing at all.”

“I warned you,” Gen said.

“You were right. I will listen to my junior officers in the future.” The man returned to Harry. “Where did I go wrong?”

“Nowhere special. You just didn’t have enough money, so you let me buy two pots, and then you had to be too aggressive. Then the losses snowballed.”

“That’s so true! You know, there were times when I seriously thought of leaving the sea and becoming a full-time gambler. Not cards. Roulette. I had a very encouraging experience once at Monte Carlo. Also I like dice.”

“We could try that.” Harry fished a pair from his jacket.

“Oh, I don’t I think I should play with someone who carries dice just in case.”

“I extend credit.”

“Even more dangerous. Lieutenant, your friend is as good as advertised.” The man rubbed his hands together. “Excellent!”

From his corner, Gen beamed with pride.

“Do you have a system?” the man asked Harry.

“No, I let the other man have a system, and I try to figure it out.”

“You bet on anything?”

“Cards, cars, dogs, horses, pigeons, about anything.”

“The lieutenant told me about the car race at Tamagawa.”

Tamagawa was a track on the way to Yokohama.

“They have good races,” Harry said. “Bentleys, Bugattis, Mercedeses.”

“Is it true that you entered a car with an airplane engine?”

“A Curtis thirteen-cylinder engine.”

“It stayed on the ground?”

“Barely, but it won.”

“That’s what matters. I wish I could have seen that.”

Gen said, “Some of the other competitors were upset.”

“Too bad,” the man said. “The losing side is always upset.” He returned to Harry. “But you are also a businessman with an interest in oil.”

“I help the government develop sources of oil,” Harry said.

“From…?”

“Shale, mostly, but also looking at alternative sources.”

“What does that mean?”

There was something about the man that suggested bullshit wouldn’t do. “Pine trees.”

The man grinned in wonder. “As a boy, I understand, you sold cat skins. I suppose you will be squeezing them for oil, too.”

“Let’s say Japan doesn’t have the usual sources of oil.”

“You don’t have to tell me.” The man’s smile folded. “I used to drink, a little. Then I encountered the most sobering sight in my life. It was a Texas oil field. Oil rigs as far as you could see in any direction. One Texas oil field that outproduced all of Japan. I visited assembly lines in Detroit and skyscrapers in New York City, but the last thing I see when I close my eyes at night is that oil field. Whenever I mention oil, the army says not to worry because we Japanese have Yamato spirit. Yamato spirit, Yamato spirit, that’s all the army knows. They say Japan is so different, so superior, we will necessarily win. You know, I have seen the cherry trees in Washington, and they are just as beautiful. The army talks about the incomparable Japanese character. Well, you can tell a lot about character and intelligence by how a man approaches a woman. A Japanese goes up to a woman and demands, ‘Give me a lay.’ Even a prostitute would say no. An American shows up with flowers and presents and gets what he wants. So much for moral superiority, and so much for results. The army can have Yamato spirit, give me oil.”

The man spoke with such intensity that it took Harry a moment to find the air to answer. “I can’t get you Texas.”

“No, I understand, but it seems to me that you have exactly the sort of skeptical eye and varied experience we need for a certain situation. You are unique. The lieutenant was right, you are just the man.”

Harry didn’t know how flattered to be. “For what?”

“Do you do card tricks?”

“I just play cards, I’m not a magician.”

“You know magicians?”

“Dozens. Magicians with doves, rabbits, scarves, saws, feats of mental telepathy, whatever you want.”

“Are you free tomorrow night?”

“For a magic show?”

The man developed a smile. “That’s the problem, we don’t know quite what it is. It’s magic or a miracle. I’m hoping you will tell us.”

A NAVY CAR with an anchor insignia picked Harry up at the Paris the following night. Gen was inside behind window curtains. He wore navy blues, and his easygoing manner of the previous evening was replaced by a somber mood.

“Where’s our friend with the cards?” Harry asked.

“He’ll be there. No names,” Gen warned Harry.

“Whatever you say.”

It didn’t matter. Harry knew the player’s name. Anyone who read a newspaper or saw newsreels knew the dour face and blunt manner of the commander in chief of the Combined Fleet. Although no names had been exchanged, Harry had recognized Yamamoto as soon as the admiral shuffled the deck of cards with the famous eight fingers instead of ten. Harry also understood that the meeting had been engineered for invisibility, at midnight in the back room of a willow house with no witnesses but the loyal acolyte Gen. Could Harry claim that he had even been introduced to Yamamoto? No. That was okay. A lot of people didn’t want to be associated with Harry.

Gen said, “This is a very sensitive situation.”

“You mean your career is on the line. Magic or miracle, what is that supposed to mean? The Great Man has looked me over and approved, but I’m still kept in the dark. Give me a clue.”

“You have to see it to believe it.”

“That’s a good clue. Are we talking about the resurrection? Water to wine? A burning bush?”

“On a par.”

“On a par? Wow. Like parting the sea and just marching where you want to go?”

“Sort of. This is very big, but…” Gen lowered his voice. “But there is also a risk of embarrassment.”

“Losing face?”

“Not face. Enormous, disastrous embarrassment.”

That sounded intriguing to Harry, but Gen shook his head to indicate the end of the conversation. South of the palace, the driver swung into an alley behind the Navy Ministry and stopped. Gen studied the shadows, then rushed Harry out of the car and down a flight of stairs as if delivering a prostitute. Inside, they followed a trail of dusty lights through a tunnel of steam and water pipes to a door that admitted them to a basement hall of office doors. Harry wondered who would be working at one in the morning. Someone was, judging by the sound of voices and haze of light down the hall. Gen went almost on tiptoe and, when they were nearly on top of the voices, slipped Harry though a door into what was more a tight space than a proper room, a catchall crammed with scales, sterilizing trays, bedpans. At eye level was an inset pane of glass.

Gen whispered, “On the other side, it’s a mirror. This used to be a medical clinic where we examined pilots. Sometimes that demanded discreet observation.”

Harry observed a room dominated by a metal table supporting a tank of water about eight feet wide and four feet high, a good-size aquarium that contained, instead of sand and fish, six bottles of blue glass. Each bottle was sealed and connected via an overhead electrical line to a battery big enough for a submarine. It had to be like moving a piano to get it in. V-shaped wands wrapped in copper wire stood around the tank, and over it hung a copper sphere. A small but impressive audience had been gathered: four navy officers, no grade less than a commander, and two unhappy civilians. Harry noticed a couple of petty officers with pistols standing at the door. He also saw Yamamoto, with so many rings around his sleeves they looked as if he had dipped his cuffs in gold. The uniform seemed to weigh on him, and his attention, like everyone else’s, was anxiously focused on a gaunt man in a white lab coat jotting numbers from a bank of gauges individually wired to the copper wands. Welder’s goggles hung around everyone’s neck. By Harry’s watch, five minutes elapsed before the man in the lab coat raised his head and declared. “Progress, definite progress.”

“Progress in what?” Harry asked Gen. “What is he doing?”

Gen couldn’t get the words out right away. “He’s making oil.”

“What do you mean?”

“He’s turning water into oil.”

Harry actually took a step back. He wasn’t dazzled by much, but this was blinding. “Water into oil?”

“You can smile, but I’ve seen him do it.”

“I don’t think even God tried that. Water and wine, yes; oil, no. You realize it’s impossible.”

“Opinion is divided,” Gen granted. “The program is secret.”

“I bet. What’s the researcher’s name?”

“Ito. Dr. Ito.”

While Ito adjusted controls, Gen explained what the doctor had explained to him, that the table of the elements was neither fixed nor limited and that through “electric remapping,” their atomic bonds could be broken and recombined. Ito was in the middle of mapping the transitional states of elements and, in recognition of the national need, had diverted his talents and discoveries toward the transformation of water into oil. From their faces, Harry saw who in the room bought it. At least one civilian was visibly suppressing professional outrage, but there were hopefuls and believers among the navy. And it wasn’t a bad show. Ito was dramatically thin, with lank hair overhanging a pale forehead and eyes hollow from lack of sleep. His coat was dirty, his hands filthy; everything about him spelled genius. He worked on the run in rubber overshoes, resetting dials, repositioning the copper wands, stopping only to cough in a tubercular way. In a hoarse voice, he said, “Perhaps that’s all for tonight.”

Yamamoto said, “Doctor, would you please try one more time? It’s so important.”

Ito seemed to gather inner strength. “One more.”

He pulled on rubber gauntlets as he moved to an oversize switch. At his lead, everyone in the room pulled on goggles with smoked lenses, and Ito seemed to wait until the entire room had stopped breathing. Harry thought that only an audience brought up on Kabuki’s overheated posing would swallow Ito for a minute.

“Take your positions.”

There was a general shuffling onto a rubber mat. Before Harry figured out what that was about, Ito slapped the switch handle down and the tank water turned a vivid blue. As Ito turned up the voltage, white bolts of electricity ran up the two arms of the wands, flickered back and forth, joined hands from wand to wand, then arced the tank and shot up to the overhead sphere so that tank and table were domed by an electrical jellyfish that sizzled and popped and smelled of singed wool. Gen and Harry threw up their arms to shade their eyes from light that flooded the cubicle they were in. Ito cranked a transformer, and the protoplasm threatened to spread tentacles and float from the table. It was a view of the forces of the universe, an electrical cauldron, a glimpse of Creation itself. Waves rolled on an oscilloscope screen. Ito circled the tank with a small neon tube that lit, faded, glowed again. His long hair stood on end and twisted and wrestled first toward one wand and then the other. Electricity lapped like fire up his arms, yet Ito moved with the assurance of a sorcerer. When he threw the switch off, Harry felt half blinded. Those who had been in the room with the tank looked as shaken as survivors of a lightning bolt.

“Not bad,” Harry said. “Electrical arcs, sparks, everything but a hunchback running around with a bucket of brains.”

Yamamoto stepped off the mat and approached the tank. He laid on his hands, minus the two fingers he’d lost pursuing Russians. Yamamoto again ready to risk all. As if his touch were a signal, a bottle stirred. It leaned, lifted clear and steadily rose to the surface, where Ito caught it, snipped its wire and set it by a rack of test tubes. Of course, Ito didn’t unstop the bottle himself.

“Professor Mishima, you are such an eminent scientist. Would you do me the honor?”

The smaller, rounder civilian huffed. “This is ridiculous, this is not science.”

“Please,” Yamamoto said.

Mishima broke the wax seal with a penknife and poured the contents into a tube, reserving a last drop to roll around his fingertip and taste.

“What is it?” Ito asked as if they were the closest of colleagues.

The professor wiped his mouth. “Oil.”

“What was in the bottle originally?”

“Water.”

“Your conclusion?” Yamamoto asked.

“It’s preposterous. You cannot change water to oil with a little lightning, or else the oceans would be oil.”

Ito was unperturbed. “That is salt water. This is very different water.”

“You cannot defy the laws of nature.”

“We are rewriting the laws of nature.”

“Impossible…” The professor tried, but he had lost, trumped by a card from his own hand.

“Perhaps this is the Yamato spirit we have heard so much about,” Yamamoto said. “But, Dr. Ito, only one bottle out of six seems to have changed.”

“Yes, we need more research.”

The doctor went out of Harry’s range of vision for a minute and returned with a new bottle of water. With great scruple, he turned his back while a vice admiral wrote on a cork. Then Ito took the cork back, immediately stopped the bottle and lit a sealing candle, the flame a tiny footlight to his face while he turned the bottle to catch the dropping wax.

“We need production,” Yamamoto said.

“First research.”

“With a deadline,” the admiral insisted.

Ito excused himself to cough, and Harry saw the spots of red bloom in the doctor’s handkerchief. Ito was sickly enough to begin with, and all at once he seemed exhausted, as if the lightning had been drawn from his own being. A chair was found for him to sit on, while coughs racked his body. Yamamoto was forced to relent, but he raised his eyes directly toward the glass that Harry watched through.

“What do you think?” asked Gen.

“Wonderful,” Harry said. “Lightning bolts, levitation, transmigration. I loved it.”

GEN BROUGHT DIAGRAMS to the Happy Paris at noon the following day. Michiko sorted records and watched sullenly, like a cat jealous of attention.

“You and Harry went with geishas again last night?” she asked Gen.

“I told you,” Harry said. “The first was a card game.”

“And last night?”

“A con.” Harry spread the plans across a table. “No, more than that, it’s the most beautiful con I’ve ever seen. This is the mother lode, this is magic.”

“That’s all you’re going to say?” Michiko asked.

“My lips are sealed.”

“I’m going out, Harry. I’m going to go spend all your money and then find a better lover.”

“Hope he has a dick that rings like a bell.”

“I’m not coming back.”

“Have fun.”

Gen shuddered as the door slammed behind her. “Kind of tough.”

“No Shirley Temple,” Harry said. “Have you slept?”

“I had coffee.” True enough, the officers of the Japanese navy started each day with coffee and scrambled eggs. Harry’s sympathy dried up.

Besides the diagrams, Gen had had the water and oil tested. The water was two parts hydrogen, one part oxygen, and the oil was the equivalent of Rising Sun crude.

“Imagine if we could produce that,” Gen said. “If we could get past the experimental stage. There were six bottles. Five bottles failed to change.”

“Failure is important. Adds mystery and stalls for time. The navy might want to move to production, but production would entail real amounts of oil and a staff of genuine technicians. No, a con is much happier with endless, expensive research. How much is this costing the navy now?”

“With gold water filters and electrical gear, ten thousand yen a week.”

“That’s worth stringing out. And anytime the navy presses for results, Ito can play Camille and start to cough to death. If I were you, I would have the doctor’s handkerchief searched for a little vial of red liquid.”

“You’re sure this is a hoax? He’s fooling real scientists.”

“Well, I’ve been to the Universal back lot, and it looks like the doctor bought half of Frankenstein’s lab. The wands are called Jacob’s ladders, and the sphere is a Van de Graaff generator, wonderful for effects. The electricity is all static, perfectly harmless as long as you aren’t grounded. You better tell me more about Ito.”

Ito had been born in Kyoto, but his family moved first to Malaya and then London, where he claimed to have studied chemistry and physics at university level and done research with British Petroleum. Who could say? Records from England were unavailable, burned by the Luftwaffe. Ito had recently returned to his homeland to study in solitude at Cape Sata, the southern tip of Japan. There, on a cliff overlooking the restless sea, he had achieved insight into the very nature of atomic structure. Man could split the atom. New elements were being created all the time. Water and oil were different states of electrons in flux. Rather than take the slow, cautious route of academic publication, he offered his services directly to the nation. And the navy ate it up. How could they not? Harry thought. With a reliable source of oil, they could rule the Pacific. Without oil, the Combined Fleet would sooner or later sit in port, steel hulks covered in gull shit.

“There are plenty of magicians in Asakusa. I’ll ask around,” Harry said.

“No. This is secret, we’re not even supposed to mention his name.”

“Then let me ask about the trick. I won’t mention oil.”

Gen laid his arm across the table. “No, these are for you alone. No one else can see anything.”

Harry knew that meant that no one else should know he was involved with a navy project.

“Just you,” Gen insisted. “You think Ito is not a real scientist?”

“I think I’ve seen him. It was years ago, at the Olympic Bar in Shanghai. I just noticed him out of the corner of my eye. He was working the tables. He was a close-up artist, card tricks, disappearing coins, and he was bald and dressed like a monk and looked completely different.”

“That’s it? Someone you barely noticed in a bar years ago? Who looked different?”

“And the cough and the bloody handkerchief when the British grabbed him for lifting wallets.”

“Well, I think we have to be more exact than that.”

Gen had listed the preparations of the experiment: the elaborate filling of the bottles with water, how witnesses marked the corks with private words or numbers that Ito didn’t even see before he inserted electrical wire, sealed the cork with molten wax and set the bottle in the tank of water. Gen had listed each of Ito’s steps: safety procedures of the goggles and mat, positioning of the copper wands and dialing in voltage at each to “orchestrate the electrical field.”

“Does the transformation usually take one jolt?” Harry asked.

“No, it might take days before it takes effect, but once the bottles are in the tank, they can’t be touched. In fact, you’d be electrocuted if you tried. Besides, guards are in the examining room around the clock.”

“Why blue bottles?” They looked like medicine bottles to Harry.

“Ito says they filter harmful rays.”

“But you can’t see whether the contents are oil or water.”

“Yes, you can. That’s when the bottle rises.”

“Well, there’s your answer.”

“You don’t believe any of it?”

“Neither do you, or you wouldn’t have brought me in. Yamamoto can’t be fooled, not really.”

“But-”

“I know.” Harry had to smile. “It’s like the old joke. A woman brings her husband to the psychiatrist. She says, ‘Doctor, my husband is crazy. He thinks he’s a chicken.’ The psychiatrist says, ‘Leave him with me, I’ll cure him in a week.’ She says, ‘But we need the eggs.’ That’s the navy. You know this is crazy, but you need the oil.”

It occurred to Harry that Yamamoto had an especially good chance of coming out of the affair looking like a fruitcake. Since he was the sanest man in the navy, and the strongest opponent to war, the army would seize on anything to discredit him. Harry was not surprised that he’d had no more direct contact with the admiral. That was the beauty of using a gaijin; he could always be disavowed.

Gen had diagrammed the room like elevations. Along the east wall were medical cabinets, carboys of water, anatomical charts. North: cabinets, scale, door and transom, table of rubber boots, gloves and smoked goggles, eye chart and optical equipment. West: crutches, copper coils, VD chart, sink, instructions for winding cloth around the midriff to counteract the G-force of a tight turn. South: wheelchairs, cabinets, the observation mirror, more carboys and a row of bottles.

“But imagine,” Gen said. “Imagine if we could transform water into oil. Nothing could stop us, Harry. We could be a force for good, for progress.”

“Gen, not that it makes any difference to me, but I’ve seen progress. I’ve seen mounds of progress. I’ve seen the streets run with progress, I’ve seen progress shoved into pits and stacked to the sky and burned like logs. Progress is overrated.”

“But you’ll help?”

“What are friends for?”

Gen laid his head on a table and closed his eyes while Harry looked at the diagrams. With cons, the simplest answer was best, you didn’t have to go to Harvard to know that. Harry discounted Ito’s elaborate procedure of marking and sealing corks as hokum. As for the electric lights and bangs? A hell of a show. All that really mattered was the apparent change of water to oil in six blue bottles in a tank of water. Oil was lighter than water, which was why a bottle floated when its contents were supposedly transformed by Ito’s bolts of lightning. But a fine string could raise a bottle, and the change of contents could have taken place anytime. And not even six had to rise, all the con needed was one bottle to maintain excitement because this was an audience who wanted, in spite of its intelligence, to believe what a magician showed them. Houdini once made an elephant disappear in Madison Square Garden. He showed the crowd the elephant standing face out, then drew the curtain, and when he reopened it, the elephant was gone. All Houdini had done was stand the elephant sideways behind a drop of black velvet. As simple as that, because people wanted to believe.

There were other possibilities. The steadfast guards might be bribed. The irate Professor Mishima might have been a shill. That got complicated, however, and Harry focused more and more on Dr. Ito’s lab coat as the most likely source of the “blood” the doctor coughed up at will and as a blind for a last-minute switch. Between the fireworks and smoked goggles and his voluminous lab coat, Ito could switch a case of beer.

At four in the afternoon, Harry woke Gen. Kondo had started setting up the bar, briskly wiping glasses. From outside came the street calls of sake vendors and fortune-tellers.

“You can’t cheat an honest man.”

Gen sat up and rubbed his eyes. “What are you talking about?”

“You can’t cheat an honest man. Do you know what that means, college boy?”

“Yes,” Gen said.

“No, you don’t. It means an honest man can afford to be objective, he doesn’t care one way or the other, so he’s hard to fool. A mark, on the other hand, wants something for nothing. He wants the pea under the shell, his share of a lost wallet, a tip on a horse, oil for water. His objectivity is already blown, he’s bought in. And because the game itself is dishonest, he can’t go crying to the police when he’s cheated of what he hoped to steal. Or to God because you can’t change water into aviator fuel. Have you got some dress whites?”

THAT NIGHT, Harry alone slipped behind the observation mirror as Gen joined the band of witnesses. The group was entirely navy, which Harry took as a sign that scientific quibbles were on the verge of being totally ignored. With Yamamoto present, there was enough gold braid in the room for a bellpull. Only one officer was in dress whites, and that was Gen. All eyes, of course, were on Dr. Ito and the six blue bottles in the water tank.

The emaciated doctor looked as if he had spent the day under a mushroom. He did cast a spell. Officers who generally believed only in six-inch armor hung on every word. Harry concentrated on what Ito did: the restless stride around the tank, the long hands and deft fingers, the flapping laboratory coat. Everyone had pulled on dark goggles, and Ito was moving toward the switch when Gen begged to borrow his lab coat. “I’m concerned about sparks that might burn my jacket. It’s the only one I own. Would you mind very much?”

The senior officers were appalled, all but Yamamoto, who looked impartially curious.

Ito hesitated. He had the ability to write amazement on his face. “You need my lab coat?”

“Yes.” That was what Harry had told Gen to say.

“In that case.” Ito shrugged off the coat and handed it to Gen, then continued in shirtsleeves and threw the switch.

Luminous lines of energy filled the room, pulsing back and forth from wand to sphere over the blue bed of the water tank and the dark blue bottles that trembled within. As Ito modulated the voltage, the lines spread like a hypnotic sea of rolling waves, like the view, perhaps, from Sata, where he had first glimpsed the fluid forces of nature. When he shut off the power, one bottle had already risen to the surface. Ito scooped out the bottle and elected Gen to break the seal, verify the mark on the cork and identify the contents. Gen’s face burned with shame down to his white collar.

“It’s oil.”

“You’re positive?”

“Yes, Doctor.”

“Then may I have my coat?” As he pulled the coat on, Ito fell against the tank and began coughing up blood. He waved his hand like a swimmer going under. “No more experiments this week. I cannot proceed with such suspicion, the strain is too much.”

The C in C averted his eyes from the disgrace of his lieutenant.

AT THREE in the morning, Harry and Gen got back to the Happy Paris to salute the end of Gen’s career. Harry brought a bottle of Scotch from the bar while Gen smoked a cigarette as if he were chewing on a nail.

“Sorry, Gen. I guess it wasn’t the lab coat.”

“Wasn’t the coat? Wasn’t the coat? Harry, you’ve ruined me. I can’t face those officers tomorrow.”

“Technically speaking, tomorrow is today. Banzai!” Harry raised his glass.

“Banzai!” Gen threw the drink back. “One commander said I had embarrassed the entire navy. He suggested a letter of resignation.”

“You were doing what Yamamoto asked you to do.”

“No. I was doing what you told me to do. How could you be so sure about the coat?”

“It seemed logical. I figured, forget the light show, he’s just switching bottles.”

“We mark the cork. It’s the same cork when we put the bottle into the water and when we pull it out, so it’s the same bottle. Now what?”

“I don’t know, I’m not a scientist. Maybe he’s really doing it.”

“Water to oil?”

“What do I know? Scientists are doing all sorts of stuff, synthetic this and that. I guess you have a real Einstein on your hands.”

“A Japanese Einstein.” Gen laughed. “And I’ll go down in history as a fool.”

“You and me.”

“Harry, you won’t go down in history at all. How could you say take away his lab coat? You gambled, and I’m the one who paid. If I were a samurai, I’d kill myself. No, I’d kill you first. If I had a gun, I’d shoot you right now.”

“Water to oil. One of the pivotal moments in science, like the first electric bulb, that’s exciting.”

“And now you say he’s really doing it.”

“It looks that way. He puts water in a bottle and takes oil out.”

“I know, I was there.”

Now that Harry thought about it, he himself wasn’t, not for everything. Ito had moved out of Harry’s vision to fill the bottle. “He didn’t use the sink tap. Where did he get the water?”

“He siphoned it.”

“Why? A sink is easier.” Harry remembered the diagrams of the room and the big glass carboys of water. “That’s a lot of effort when a sink is right there. It’s distilled water? Filtered water?”

“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.