‘Punk rock.’
‘Oh, forget it. I’m just getting into disco.’
They got up to leave and Eliza remembered the ‘Midas’ notation in Lavander’s book. ‘One other thing, Ira, does the word “Ghawar” mean anything to you?’
He carried their trash to a basket and dropped it in. ‘The only Ghawar I know is in Saudi Arabia,’ he said.
‘Saudi Arabia?’
‘Sure. It’s the largest oil field in the world.’
The Kancho-uchi, headquarters of the secret service, was in a three-story building in an obscure corner of the government complex. O’Hara was escorted to the third floor by a young woman in a white suit. She was formal to the point of making him uncomfortable. Hadashi was waiting for him at the door of his office.
O’Hara had not seen Bin Hadashi for three years. The Japanese agent had changed little. He was in his early thirties, a tall man for a Japanese, slender, his hair cropped short. He was a cum laude graduate of Princeton.
‘Hey, Kazuo, where you been,’ Hadashi said with a broad smile. ‘I heard you were on the dodge. Your own man was trying to get you hit, hunh?’
Something like that.’
‘Some asshole.’
He led O’Hara into a small spotless office. There were no pictures on the walls, and the desk was empty except for the telephone and a can of apple juice.
‘He was never anything different,’ O’Hara agreed.
‘And then he called it off.’
‘Yeah.’
‘What an asshole. You still writing for a living?’
‘Trying. There’re easier ways of feeding yourself.’
‘What you snooping around here for? You want something, right?’
‘Just a little information.’
‘That’s the hardest thing to get around this place. You know how we Japanese are. Inscrutable bastards.’
‘The guy I’m looking for maybe the most inscrutable bastard of all. You ever hear of a Japanese agent calling himself Chameleon? This was back during the war.’
‘Which war, World War II?’
O’Hara nodded and held up two fingers.
‘This guy — Chameleon — was a spy, that it?’
‘He was head of some kind of special training section for Japanese agents.’
‘Never heard of him.’
‘Any old-timers around here who might know something?’ ‘You think this guy’s still alive?’
‘A hunch.’
‘Anybody that dates back that far— is either dead or retired.’
‘Then, how about somebody who’s retired? I just want to talk to somebody who remembers him.’
Hadashi pinched his nose a coup1e of times. ‘You buying lunch?’
‘A rich publisher back in the Stats is buying.’
‘In that case, I thought of a guy. And he’s right here in the building.’
‘Will he talk to me?’
‘He’ll talk to anybody who’ll listen’
They went down in the elevator— to the subbasement and walked through a grim, poorly lit subterranean tunnel to what
appeared to be the basement of the adjoining building. Steam
pipes hissed angrily overhead.
‘They must dislike this guy to put him down here.’
‘They’ve probably forgotten he’s here.’
They entered a large room which was divided by rows of steel shelves stuffed with file folders, books, logs, seemingly endless stacks of paper. The old man sat cross-legged on a tatami. He was sorting through file , using a brush and black
ink to log entries in calligraphy on ledger sheet. There was
no desk in the room, just the mat a.-id the old man and a very modem brass gooseneck lamp over his shoulder.
He was ancient, a shrunken memory of a man with wisps of white hair that flowed down almost to his shoulders. He had no eyebrows. He wore thick horn - rimmed glasses. His face was so wrinkled, only a prune could love it.
He finished the character he was drawing and looked up.
‘Ah, Hadashi-san, how nice of you to come by.’ His soft voice sounded like an echo of yesterday.
‘It is an honour, Kami-sama. I have brought you a small gift.’ He handed the man a package of Redman chewing tobacco.
‘The spirits will reward you at the proper time. Thank you, my friend.’
He immediately opened the package and stuffed a cluster of brown ringlets into his cheek.
‘This is my friend O’Hara, although he is known here as Kazuo. He has a question and I think only you can answer it.’
‘Ah, quite a distinction. You understand I am only a clerk. I have never been more than a clerk. I am the custodian of all this. Records that have been fed to a computer. Our history has been reduced to beeps on film. But these are true records. lam indexing them.’
‘How long have you been doing this?’ O’Hara asked.
‘Oh, I really don’t know. Ten years perhaps, and I am only a little way along. It takes a while, you understand, one tends to get interested in the files. I spend a lot of time reading. There’s no hurry. When I’m through they’ll just make me quit and go home and die.’
‘How long have you been clerk of the records?’
‘Since 1944. I was too old for the service.’ He paused to draw another character in his ledger. ‘All the records went through my hands. I have a good memory for small facts.’
‘Do you remember an agent called Chameleon?’
His eyes widened. He laid down the brush and leaned back, staring at the ceiling. ‘The Chameleon I am thinking of was a true chameleon. He changed colours constantly, so who can say what his true colour was.’
‘I am talking about the man whose code name was Chameleon.’
‘So am I. Nobody knows who he was. It is a secret that went with him to the gods.’
‘He’s dead, then?’
‘Since 1945. He died at Hiroshima. It was verified by your own intelligence people. It was in the records.’
‘What do you know about him?’
‘Only what was in the records. That he existed and that he died. Nothing more.’
‘So, the only proof that he is dead is that the Japanese secret service says so.’
‘Would they lie?’
O’Hara took out a slip of paper. It was the print-out from Izzy of the CIA report on Chameleon:
—Chameleon. N/O/I. Head of special Japanese training unit for intelligence agents. On list of war criminals, 1945-1950. Believed killed at Hiroshima, 8.6.45. Declared legally dead, 2.12.50.
‘Perhaps someone wanted to protect him. Why did it take the US Army Intelligence five years to verify his death?’
‘That you will have to ask Army Intelligence. But I don’t think they were at fault. They would have declared him dead long before that, except for one man.’
‘Who’s that?’
‘Your General Hooker. He was passionate in his desire to find Chameleon.’
‘Do you know why?’
‘I would rather not guess.’
‘How could a man in the military service conceal his identity from so many people?’
‘Perhaps that was one of his many colours. Perhaps he was not in the service. It is possible he was a civilian serving the Emperor. There were many like that.’
‘In which case the people who served under him would certainly know who he is.’
‘That is of no consequence, Kazuo. The records for that section were destroyed just before the war ended. They were kept with the unit at all times. I never saw them. I saw only the final report, closing an empty file.’
‘Did the section have a name?’
‘Yes — Chameleon. That is all, just Chameleon. They had their own headquarters in the south.’
‘Where?’
‘At Dragon’s Nest, a fortress in the mountains.’
‘And that’s all there is to know about Chameleon?’ The old man nodded slowly as he mulled the tobacco in his cheek. ‘There is nothing more to know. He was a chameleon and he died,’
Hadashi looked at O’Hara and shrugged. ‘Thank you, Kami-sama, you have been a great help.’
‘It was nothing. Next time ask me something difficult. I have little left to do but show off.’