December 6 (16 page)

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.”

G
EN 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 CapeSata, 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 MadisonSquareGarden. 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?”

T
HAT 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.