Woman with a Blue Pencil (11 page)

“
Of course
there's no record of the existence of the Orchid!” Mr. Barratt snapped, slapping his palm on the table. “But that doesn't mean she's not the woman behind this brutal syndicate, whatever your Army Intelligence agent reports!”

Jimmy sat at Mr. Barratt's right, a position of honor.

What Jimmy had done to deserve such a position was a mystery to him—unless it had more to do with what he was about to be asked to do.

That worried him a bit. But he'd volunteered to do anything to help the cause.

He looked around the table.

Filling out the places were a Marine Corps colonel, a Naval Intelligence officer, an air corps colonel, two FBI supervisors, representatives from the State, Treasury, and War Departments, the police commander in charge of counterintelligence for the city of Los Angeles, Barrett, General Stark, and a United States senator.

“Look, just because you've got the President's ear doesn't mean you can talk to me with that tone, Barratt,” General Stark answered.

“That's Mr. Barratt to you, General.”

The general ignored him. “Your ‘secret' Secret Service, or whatever you want to call it, may prove an effective way to pull intelligence from our various agencies together, but that doesn't mean the intelligence your people gather is better than what we get. And so I want to know how you learned this dragon lady's known as the Orchid when none of the rest of us has been able to find any such evidence.”

The others at the table turned to Mr. Barratt, who took a long, slow breath. “We also suspect that she may have a personal bodyguard, likely a martial arts expert of unsurpassed skill whose face has never been seen by anyone who lived to describe it. We've managed to compile no facts about him, beyond his being known as
Fantomu
, which translates as ‘Phantom.'”

“Damn it man, stay on this ‘Dragon Lady,'” the general insisted. “Codename Orchid. This is about intelligence sharing, right?”

Most of the other men at the table nodded, silently.

“Do you know what
seppuku
is, General Stark?” Mr. Barratt asked, calmly.

“It means ‘suicide' in Japanese,” General Stark answered.

“Not quite so simple,” Mr. Barratt responded. “It is a
form
of suicide, highly ritualized and dating back to the days of the Samurai warriors. Considered an honorable way to end one's own life, it involves self-disembowelment with a short knife called a
tanto
, which is ripped across the lower gut. Usually, the practitioner of
seppuku
has a ‘second' who, after the intestines spill into the open, uses a sword to decapitate the suicide, relieving him of his suffering.”

“I didn't come here for lessons in Jap culture,” General Stark responded. “And you're not answering my question!”

“Please, gentlemen,” the senator said, holding his open palms in the air. “We're all on the same side here.” He turned to Mr. Barratt. “Continue as you see fit, but do not neglect the general's question.”

“As you wish,” Mr. Barratt said.

Jimmy felt his face grow hot with the tension and sense of high stakes in the room.

“Our last agent infiltrated the Orchid's organization for less than a single day,” Mr. Barratt said, his voice steady. “Unfortunately, he was found out and, we can assume from the remaining evidence, that he was offered the choice between torture and
seppuku
. I don't have to tell you how gifted the Japanese are at inflicting torture. So, naturally, he chose
seppuku
. His body, discovered last week in a downtown warehouse near Saint Vibiana's, indicates that he indeed sliced deeply across his own belly from hip bone to hip bone. But the Jap bastards denied him the sword, leaving him instead to die a slow, painful death, gagged and bound at the feet, alone in a pitch-dark room. But they underestimated our man, who, after all, was an American and capable of a strength of spirit that they could not imagine. In his final moments he used his own blood and guts, and I mean that quite literally, to write the ‘The Orchid,' on his own bare chest. And that, General Stark and distinguished gentlemen, is how we came to know the name of our nemesis.”

The men around the table sat silent.

Even General Stark wiped at a line of sweat on his forehead.

“And so, thanks to this patriot, we know more now than we knew before,” the senator observed. “She is the Orchid, for whom no records exist.”

“Yes,” Mr. Barratt said.

“Fine, but without records what use is that to us?” the senator pressed. “You've discerned assumed names. So what? The question remains, what are we going to do about it now?”

Mr. Barratt turned to Jimmy. “We have a new way in.”

“Jimmy Park . . .” the Marine Corps colonel muttered, doubtfully.

“If you have doubts, please express them directly,” Mr. Barratt requested of the colonel.

The Marine looked directly at Jimmy and shook his head disdainfully. “An Oriental is going to come through for our nation where the best of Army and Navy Intelligence have failed? No offense, young man, but I have my doubts.”

Jimmy straightened in his chair, speaking for the first time. “As a matter of fact, sir, I
will
come through for our nation.”

“I wish I could believe you,” the Marine Corps colonel said.

Jimmy nodded as if sympathizing. Then he smiled. After a moment, he pushed back his chair and stood.

The distinguished contingent watched silently.

Jimmy crossed the paneled room to Mr. Barratt's desk. He reached for the beautiful but deadly Cymbidium orchid that Barratt had said he kept as a reminder of his nemesis. Jimmy grabbed the stem up near the purple bloom and snapped it off. Returning to the table, he dropped the bloom onto the table.

“This is how I will deliver her up, gentlemen.”

Excerpt from a letter dated October 16, 1942:

. . . you've figured out by now that I consider the selection of names for characters to be an integral part of characterization (not
everything
, of course, but not “nothing” either). However, while I found your scene with the gathered Intelligence officers in Mr. Barratt's office to be riveting, I must admit to having been distracted by the multitude of names you introduced. As a result, I've taken my blue pencil to the manuscript, eliminating most of the names. I think that with the exception of the Army general, Mr. Barratt's most vocal challenger, all the others gathered around that conference table are just as well referred to simply by their titles. Additionally, I think that since we're in Jimmy's POV these cuts are further justified, as he'd not catch
every
name but would surely be aware of their powerful positions.

On another note, I noticed the name you gave to the Marine colonel in your draft was “Czernicek.” Of course, there's no reference to his first name being “Henry.” Nonetheless, while the name “Henry Czernicek” worked well in your initial (now discarded) synopsis and opening chapters as a murderous LAPD officer, I didn't like seeing it used again in another context. I have a pet peeve about discarded characters' names being interchangeable with other, subsequent characters. You may think of it as my personal quirk. Don't get me wrong. I love that you recycled some elements of your original concept into this draft, such as the location of the bungalow in Echo Park, the '37 Dodge, and even a few characters, such as Tony Fortuna. And I don't mind that you used the same description, literally word-for-word, of the Orchid's appearance as you used to describe poor Kyoko Sumida in the first chapter of your abandoned Japanese-hero novel. It's a pretty face you sketch for us, no doubt. Obviously, you're attracted to a particular, if conventional, kind of beauty. No problem. But I draw the line at reassigning to this work the names of characters
cut
from the original manuscript, as I believe it demonstrates a lack of specificity of imagination for your current characters.

In any case, you keep creating at your end and know that I anxiously await your next chapters, blue pencil poised and ready!

Warmly,

Maxine Wakefield

Maxine Wakefield,

Associate Editor,
Metropolitan Modern Mysteries, Inc.

THE REVISED—CHAPTER FIVE

Can Providence have worked in any way other than to have placed a single good man and a single unrepentant villain at Christ's sides, reverse images of each other, bound together on Golgotha by their isolation from the world they had known before?

—Sister Aimee Semple McPherson

“Have you eaten lunch?” Henry Czernicek asked Sumida as they emerged from the library onto Fifth Street.

“No.”

“Hungry?”

The last thing Sumida remembered eating was a homemade dinner of fried eggs with toast before leaving his house to see
The Maltese Falcon
at the Rialto Movie House. Was that early last night? Or was it almost two months ago? In either case, eating hadn't occurred to him in the interim. But now, with Czernicek at his side, he felt better. That one person recognized him, and an LAPD detective at that, was a world of difference from being recognizable to
no one
. He felt almost cheerful. “I could stand to eat a sandwich,” he answered.

“I know a good diner a couple of blocks away, just on the other side of Pershing Square near that Italian fruit stand,” Czernicek said, starting in that direction.

Sumida caught up.

“Funny, you and me again,” Czernicek continued as they neared the Biltmore Hotel, which was bustling with men in uniform, and continued on past the Philharmonic Hall, where Sumida had once taken Kyoko to see Vladimir Horowitz.

“Yeah, funny. Or something,” Sumida answered.

Their parting a few months before had not been friendly. Sam had believed, initially, that the LAPD would devote whatever manpower and effort was necessary to solve the murder of his wife. But he'd been naïve. After the investigation ruled out the most likely suspect—Sam himself—the department had seemed to lose interest. That was just a few days after the crime, when real police work would be necessary. Subsequently, the LAPD managed only to dig up a few sordid details about the last months of Sam and Kyoko's marriage. She'd been seen in various downtown hotels with a Caucasian man, though none of the front desk clerks at the hotels could offer any descriptions of the man. Sumida had been under the impression that this was the sort of information cops beat out of uncooperative witnesses, “helping” them to remember. But there were no beatings—no one even taken to the station. So there were no artist's renderings of the Caucasian lover displayed in newspapers as part of a dragnet. Czernicek himself pointed out to Sumida that even if they tracked down the man she'd been seeing they still might not have the actual murderer. A lead, perhaps . . . But most leads go nowhere. And when, three weeks into the investigation, the case had slipped so far down the list of active investigations that Sam no longer got his phone calls put through or returned, he waited one day outside Central Station for Czernicek and confronted the much-bigger man, offering a list of grievances that arose as much from his broken heart as from his disillusionment with the shoddy police work. Czernicek admitted then that finding the killers of Japs or Chinks was only a little higher up the list of police priorities than finding the killers of Mexicans or Negroes. Sam took a swing, which the plainclothesman sidestepped. Czernicek had laughed and said he could put Sam behind bars for attempting to assault an officer but would settle instead for Sumida's agreement to spare the department his demands and move on with his life, accepting that
most crimes are never solved
. That's when Sam had emptied his bank account to hire the first of a string of equally ineffective PIs. He hadn't seen Czernicek again.

Until today.

And now they were lunching together. Funny . . .

Funnier yet was that Czernicek was the only acquaintance Sumida had in the world. Ha-ha.

“Get the pastrami,” Czernicek said, after they'd taken seats at the booth farthest from the counter, cash register, and crowd.

The waitress, a nineteen or twenty-year-old looker in a hairnet and mustard-stained uniform, followed on their heels, stopping at their booth with one fist placed coquettishly against her hip. “Sorry, but we don't serve Japs.”

Sumida looked away.

“This man's name is Chan,” Czernicek said. “He's Chinese.”

She looked doubtful.

Czernicek removed his badge from his suit jacket pocket and showed it to her. “You can trust me, little flower.”

“Oh, well that's okay then.” She removed her order pad from a big pocket on her uniform and a pencil from within her nest of blonde hair. “What can I get for you and your
friend
, Officer?”

“My friend's first name is Charlie,” Czernicek said.