Woman with a Blue Pencil (13 page)

“Not where you started?” Czernicek interrupted, disgust entering his voice. “It was a sneak attack, Sumida. No declaration of war. Just a lazy Sunday morning, like any other. Our Navy boys peaceably sleeping. You understand?” He didn't wait for an answer. “And then Jap aircraft descend and within a couple of hours there are thousands of Americans dead, all of them blown up or drowned or gunned down or burned. It's a goddamn world war, Sumida, and in the periodicals room it's not where you start? Is your kind even human?”

“I had nothing to do with Pearl Harbor,” Sumida said.

“Yeah, well, it's going to have plenty to do with you,” Czernicek snapped.

Sumida knew he was right about that.

“You haven't noticed the soldiers deployed all over LA?” Czernicek continued, not waiting for an answer. “The Chavez Ravine Naval Base, Fort MacArthur in San Pedro, Camp Roberts up north . . . jumping. Meantime, hundreds of the most suspicious Japs, both men and women, are incarcerated on Terminal Island or in the city jail or the Hall of Justice jail or the county lockups or wherever we got space for them. There's even talk that preparations are being made to move all your kind into camps up in the desert. And I mean
all
.”

“I'm a loyal American,” Sumida said.

“Yeah, you are. Problem is, that's what they all say.”

“Maybe they're telling the truth,” Sumida observed.

“Most probably are,” Czernicek conceded. “But if even a handful . . . Well, better safe than sorry, right?”

Sumida said nothing.

“You know there's an eight p.m. curfew for Japs, right Sumida? You
do
know that.”

Sumida said nothing. He'd heard plenty of references to it but lacked details.

“You should have done a better job in the periodicals room,” Czernicek said.

“Whatever the circumstances, we're in this together, whether you like it or not,” Sumida said.

“You're right. I don't like it. But what we like or don't like doesn't seem to count for much in this world. Or, for that matter, in the last world either.” He leaned across the booth. “Go be a ‘detective' on your own for a few hours, Sumida. Figure out what you can. Meet me at eight o'clock back at my hotel, The Barclay on Fourth and Main. You know it?”

Sumida nodded. “What's your plan?”

Czernicek looked at his watch. “I've got a few things to look into. Some broads I know who'd never forget me, by God. Then, come six o'clock I'll go back to police headquarters. With a little luck, there'll be someone coming onto the evening shift who either recognizes me or is careless enough that I can slip past him and into my office. I still have the key. Well,
a
key. Whether it works anymore . . .” He stopped.

“What do you expect to find there?”

“Maybe I'll find some evidence of my life or some clue as to what kind of scam this is.”

Sumida suspected he'd simply find that the room was now someone else's office and had been for years. “You need my help?”

“How would you help?”

“A diversion.”

Czernicek laughed. “No, Sumida.” He spoke softly to insure no one could hear. “You're a Jap with California ID that matches up with
nothing
in the public record. You hear me? Look, you're no good to me being interrogated and then imprisoned and maybe executed as a spy.”

Sumida hadn't allowed himself to fully consider what the authorities would make of his predicament.

Czernicek stood and slipped his hand into his pocket, removing a ten dollar bill. He dropped it on the table. “Take it.”

Sumida looked at the money.

Unfortunately, he needed it. He took the sawbuck and slid out of the booth.

“I'll settle the bill for the pastrami up front,” Czernicek said, starting toward the cash register. “But I don't want you standing next to me, understand? People are starting to take note. Wait for me in the square.”

Sumida said nothing as he exited the diner.

It felt good to be in fresh air.

He crossed the street and sat at a wooden bench near the statue of General Pershing.

Excerpt from chapter eight of
The Orchid and the Secret Agent
, a novel by William Thorne

Metropolitan Modern Mysteries, Inc., New York, N.Y., 1945

. . . It was now forty minutes since the senator, the men from Military Intelligence, and the LAPD commander of counterintelligence had exited Mr. Barratt's office, apparently satisfied that Jimmy was up to the risky assignment (or, at least, that he was sufficiently insignificant to sacrifice for the war effort in the event the operation failed). Now, Jimmy and Mr. Barratt entered what looked like a windowless classroom (but for an absence of school desks) that was located even deeper than Mr. Barratt's office in the bunker-like complex.

“This is it,” Mr. Barratt said. “One of our code-breaking rooms.”

Three young men, all attired in short-sleeved white dress shirts and black ties, all of them bespectacled and thin as rails, stood one each at three wall-length blackboards. None turned toward Jimmy and Mr. Barratt. They hadn't even seemed to notice the pair's entrance. Instead, each silently studied strings of English words written on the blackboard before him. One stared at his board with his chin in his hand; another stared while scratching distractedly at his head; the third stared as he rattled coins in his pants pockets. In all, the effect was of three younger and more respectably coiffed Einsteins studying formulae.

“Gentlemen,” Mr. Barratt announced.

The three jumped, almost as one, startled by the sound of Mr. Barratt's voice.

“Sir!” they said, all snapping to attention (in a kind of sloppy, schoolboy fashion).

Mr. Barratt chuckled warmly. “I didn't mean to startle you, boys.”

“No problem, sir,” said one.

“Nor would I have interrupted your impressive and obviously focused attention on the work at hand,” Mr. Barratt said. “But I wanted to introduce you to Mr. Jimmy Park, who will be putting to use the results you gentlemen produce.”

The three nodded cursorily in the direction of Jimmy.

He wasn't what was on their minds.

“Yes, Mr. Barratt,” said one of the three. “We're
working
at producing results for you, sir.”

“But it's not coming easily,” said another.

“We think it's some kind of substitution code,” said the third. “Perhaps book based. But without the key it's difficult indeed. Number codes come so much simpler!”

The young man's two comrades nodded in agreement.

Mr. Barratt ignored the trio's extenuation. Instead, he turned to Jimmy. “These three gentlemen . . .” He indicated them singly. “William, Robert, and David, come to us from Cal Tech, where Albert Einstein taught for a few years. They are surely the best and brightest, and they have patriotically agreed to settle this difficult problem for us. And to do so
quickly
and without excuses of any kind because it is of the utmost importance. Isn't that a fine thing, Mr. Park?”

Jimmy nodded, though he knew the message wasn't really directed at him.

The problem was this:

While Mr. Barratt's organization held a high degree of confidence that the three murders of the night before had been intended, not as warnings to Jimmy Park but as a single, encrypted invitation for Jimmy to join the Orchid's nefarious organization, they had been unable to discern from the clues how Jimmy was to make contact with the Jap spy ring. Hence, the code breakers from Cal Tech. One life-sized photograph of each of the three blood-scrawled Japanese messages hung beside each of the three chalkboards.

“First, we brought in experts in Japanese calligraphy, which is far more complicated than I ever imagined, to examine the photographs,” Mr. Barratt explained. “They discerned that the order in which the strokes were made for each Japanese character was unconventional, even inaccurate.” He indicated the characters. “They may look like chicken scratches to me, but there's method to them. It turns out that when forming any word you don't just make the marks but you make them
in a proscribed order
.”

Naturally, Jimmy already knew this (being fluent in both spoken and written Japanese). But he nodded as if it were news.

Mr. Barratt continued, “So, our Japanese experts isolated the strokes that had been made out of order. Laying these strokes atop one another, our linguists managed to construct a single coherent character that, at first, we thought might be the secret message.”

“And?” Jimmy pressed.

Mr. Barratt sighed. “The character was the word for ‘horse's ass.'”

Unamused, Jimmy snapped angrily, “So this whole thing is a mere taunt?”

Mr. Barratt shook his head. “We still believe there's a real message hidden in there. One intended for you. So we're working from their English translations.”

The messages were scrawled in chalk, one on each of the blackboards:

“And so it begins for you, white devils.”

“We are watching your eyes, even as they fail to see us.”

“Accept your friend's life as a personal gift.”

The coin-rattling code breaker stepped toward Jimmy to explain. “Naturally, in accordance with Occam's Razor, we began with the simplest possibilities, simply scrambling the words in every possible order, coming up with a few interesting modernist poems along the way but nothing remotely suggestive of how you were to make contact with the Jap organization.”

“Next, we took the translated messages apart letter-by-letter,” said the chin-scratching code-breaker. “This entailed considerably more work, as the possibilities significantly increased, requiring our best efforts. Again, we concocted numerous alternate messages, but none seems directive.”

“Have you made a list of these messages?” Mr. Barratt asked.

“Yes, it's almost a hundred pages, typed single-spaced.”

“That doesn't seem so much, since we know what we're looking for,” Mr. Barratt observed.

“Do we?” the third code-breaker asked.

Mr. Barratt opened his palms in frustration. “A secret location of some kind. Is that so difficult?”

He waited, but none of the code breakers dared answer.

“Boys, your failing here is not an option,” Mr. Barratt said, calmly.

“Well, it may not be so simple as just scrambling or unscrambling letters,” the head-scratcher said.

“See, if it's a book replacement code cleverly disguised to look like three discreet and circumstantially appropriate messages, then we're in trouble, as we'll require the key if we're
ever
going to break it,” continued the coin-jiggler, daring to meet Mr. Barratt's gaze. “Desire alone will not be enough, sir. Even veiled threats won't work.”

“I'm not threatening you, boys,” Mr. Barratt said, threateningly.

The head scratching code-breaker looked at Jimmy. “Do you know what a book replacement code is?”

Jimmy nodded.

Among multiple variations, the most common book replacement code used particular pages from a particular edition of a book to act as the key to encoded messages. For example, if pages 265–290 of the first edition of
The Sun Also Rises
were the key, then the first letter of the coded message would correspond to that letter's first use on page 265, thereby revealing a word in the Hemingway text that was also the first word of the
de-coded
message. Subsequent letters in the coded message would refer to progressive instances in the book, indicating corresponding, de-coded words. To make such a code work also as coherent statements, such as the bloody threats written now on the blackboard, required true mastery. But without the key (the particular book and pages), there was no viable way to decode the secret message.

“Do any particular books come to mind, Jimmy?” Mr. Barratt asked.

Jimmy considered. He shook his head.

“Maybe books aren't his thing,” one of the code-breakers said.

“Don't underestimate Jimmy,” Mr. Barratt snapped in response. “He's an experienced operative.”

The three code-breakers turned from Mr. Barratt to Jimmy, giving him the once over, focusing with obvious disapproval on his sporty suit and fashionable Florsheims.

“Sometimes, experience alone won't do it,” one said.

“A little more Sherlock Holmes, a little less Sam Spade,” another added.

Jimmy smiled. “Give me a piece of chalk, boys.”

They handed one over.

Jimmy walked to the first chalkboard. He studied it. “You know, when I was playing baseball for my high school team in Glendale I used to steal the catcher's signs whenever I reached second base,” he said without turning around. “Then I'd relay the upcoming pitch to our batter and he'd invariably knock me in. But there was one team in our league whose catcher used signs I couldn't ever steal.” He remained facing the chalkboard as he continued. “How complicated
were
his signs, I wondered, frustrated. Until, that is, I realized his signs were not complicated at all. They'd been tricky to me only because they held no shred of trickery, except in my own mind. From that time forward, we never lost to that team again.”