O’Hara looked at the decoded entries which Eliza had run off on the printer. On the second line of each of the three entries was the word ‘AMRAN.’
‘What’s AMRAN?’ O’Hara asked.
‘I dunno,’ the Magician said. Eliza just shrugged.
‘Can we find out from Izzy here?’
‘I’ll try Dow Jones.’
Half a dozen references popped tip immediately.
‘Bingo!’ cried the Magician. ‘Now we’re cookin’, man. Let’s scan the profile outline from the Wall Street Journal.’
‘What’s the date?’ O’Hara asked.
‘9 November.’
‘Pretty recent. Let’s see it.’
The outline flashed on the screen:
.—AMRAN Ltd Consortium formed 28 October 1979. Comprised of Intercon Oil Corp., American Petro Ltd, Hensell Oil Products Corp., Sunset Oil Intern’l Inc., The Alamo Oil Company, The Stone Corporation, Bridges Salvage Corp.
Objectives: Stronger market position, joint experimental ventures, consolidation of markets, increased financial strength. Chief Executive Officer: Alexander Lee Hooker, Gen of the Army (Ret); VP, Operations: Jesse W. Garvey, Gen, US Army (Ret); VP, Marketing: (Position vacant since death of Vice President Ralph Greentree, 1.3.80.) Chief Financing Institution: First Boston Common Bank. Home office: Tanabe, Japan.
‘I’ll be damned. I thought the Hook was dead. I haven’t heard anything about him in years,’ O’Hara said. ‘And their main base is in Japan.’
‘Where’s Tanabe?’ asked Eliza.
‘On the east coast of Honshu, about a hundred miles from Kyoto. Desolate goddamn place.’
‘Chameleon’s really got it in for AMRAN,’ said Eliza. ‘He’s killed most of the executives in the consortium. The Thoreau was owned by Sunset Oil. The guy who was killed on Maui had pictures from the Thoreau.’
‘Anybody wanna take bets on how old Ralphie Greentree died?’ said the Magician.
‘Just for the hell of it, Magician, check Alamo and see if they’ve had any recent deaths in the high echelons.’
The Magician asked for a profile on Alamo Oil. There it was, four lines down:
—David Fiske Thurman, Chairman of the Board, Alamo Oil Company, killed in single-car wreck, outskirts of Dallas, Texas, 4.8.77.
‘Try Ralph Greentree.’
—Ralph Greentree, former Executive Vice President of Alamo Oil Company and Marketing VP of AMRAN, drowned while vacationing in Honolulu, 1.3.80.
‘It’s getting better,’ O’Hara said. ‘Guess who was on Maui two days before that?’
‘Hinge,’ Eliza said.
‘Right. Greentree drowned three days after Hinge killed the man on Maui and lifted the film from the Thoreau. Honolulu’s a thirty-minute plane ride from Maui.’
‘What else?’
‘Try one more. Try this Stone Corp., see what we can find out.’
Izzy revealed the following:
—The Stone Corporation. Holding company in the power and energy field. Corporation’s widespread holdings are not a matter of public record, but are known to include nuclear power plants in Ga, NC, Ala, Fla and national and international oil-refining properties. Temporary Executive Officer, Melvin James, replacing C.L.K. Robertson III, who died in crash of private plane, 6.25.78.
‘Jesus,’ said the Magician, ‘I’d like to think some of these people actually died in accidents. But I’ve got serious doubts,’
‘How about this final entry?’ Eliza said. They bad overlooked the last paragraph of the outline:
Newest acquisition: merger with Japanese conglomerate, San-San. 5.10.79
‘What’s this San-San?’ Eliza said.
‘It’s a very powerful company over there,’ said O’Hara. ‘But I really don’t know much about it.’
‘I’ve had it,’ the Magician said.
He got up and stretched. Eliza slipped behind the keyboard, changed disks and started feeding the last few entries from Lavander’ s book into Izzy.
‘Don’t you ever get tired?’ the Magician asked in a somewhat annoyed tone.
‘It’s youth,’ O’Hara said.
Their energy had carried them for hours and now, suddenly, all three of them seemed to fall apart at once. They decided to take a break and let Izzy print out the remaining entries in Lavander’s book.
Eliza, spotting the entry as they were leaving for dinner, said, ‘O’Hara, better look at this.’
There it was, on the print-out, one of the last entries:
—Midas/lo 354,200/109, 12/lgr Ghawar/es 2bb/d 0-112.
The three of them hunched over the printer, staring at the entry for several seconds.
“Midas is lost...” O’Hara said.
‘What?’ said Eliza.
‘That’s what Danilov said, “Midas is lost.” Midas isn’t a person, it’s a company or place. Wonder what all these figures mean. And what is “Jo”? And “Gha’..var”?’
‘I haven’t seen another entry like this,’ Eliza said. ‘Usually you can tell what the figures mean.’
‘I’m too tired to figure out what anything means anymore,’ the Magician said. ‘I gotta get some shut-eye.’
‘Okay, let’s pack it in. Izzy can run the print-out on all this and we’ll take it with us.’
‘Take it with us where?’ asked Eliza.
‘Japan.’
‘Japan!’
‘Right. AMRAN’s in Japan. Hooker’s in Japan. Bridges was in Japan, Chameleon’s in Japan, San-San is in Japan. Obviously there’s only one place to be, so let’s all get some rest. The next stop is Tokyo.’
BOOK THREE
Any event, once it has occurred, can be made to appear inevitable by any competent journalist or historian.
—JOSEPH PULITZER
1
Etched in the golden tablets on the wall of the ancient Japanese temple of Oka-Ri, it is written: ‘The seasons change with the days, man’s memory changes with the yes. An English poet, centuries later, expressed the same thought more succinctly:
‘In the end, all history is memory and gossip.’
There were days when General Hooker would sit alone for hours in the darkness of his office, companioned only by the faulty machine in his chest, gleaning the troubled days of his past to conjure faltered memories. On the blackest of these days he could hear the thunder of cannon and the cry of bugles, but his mind’s eye saw only swirls of dust, clouding faded days of glory. Names and faces eluded him like ghosts at sunrise, and the names of places drifted in and out of his tick-tock solitude without streets, spires or parks.
Only Garvey knew and understood Hooker’s agony. It was Garvey alone who came to his aid when the old man sometimes cried aloud, calling the names of fallen comrades or forgotten battlefields.
‘Did you call, General?’ he would say.
And the general would repeat the name, and Garvey, his own memory blemished by time, would make up a face and an incident and a place to go with it, and Hooker, satisfied, would return to his uneasy reverie. He had been writing his memoirs for ten years and had amassed a gigantic manuscript. Editing it, sorting truth as reality from truth as Hooker wished it were, would have taken another decade, and so the manuscript was unpublishable.
There were rare occasions when the dust of yesteryear dissipated for an hour or so and Hooker would have a very clear vision of the past. These experiences were almost orgasmic for the old man. He would sit entranced, watching the moments play out through glazed and age-grayed eyes. And so, among the hundreds of handwritten pages of tainted facts, there was a handful of brilliantly re-created battle scenes and incredibly precise character studies. All the rest was imagination.
Hooker was not a prisoner of his past. Weeks might go by when he attended to business lucidly. But there were those days when he would awaken and tell Garvey, ‘Colonel, I’m going to work on my memoirs today,’ and he would disappear into the office and Garvey would cancel appointments, rearrange schedules, make the proper apologies, and carry out most of the business as usual. Two or three times during those days, Garvey would respond when Le heard Hooker calling out.