She lucked out of Manslaughter One. He lucked out of the internment. Their war efforts run parallel to their personal ambition.
Hideo fights the Fifth Column in Mexico. His Jap-toady work repulses him. That’s his only rub. It’s her rub, as well. The internment is a disgrace. Wendell Rice and George Kapek exemplify the injustice. J-town stands decimated. The Manzanar camp opens next month. Hideo Ashida dodged that bullet. Great shame undermines his great luck.
Hideo works in Baja. Her L.A. workload has now doubled. It’s all Japwerk and klubhaus job. Thad Brown ran three lineups at Newton Station. Lineup #1 featured jazz-club patrons. #2 featured “political types.” #3 featured uninterned Japs.
46th Street residents viewed fifty-odd men. No positive IDs resulted.
The Crash Squad meets daily at Lyman’s back room. Their APB turned Link Rockwell. Ensign Rockwell was ensconced at a Navy flight school in Florida. Jack Horrall declined to extradite. Young Link and Call-Me-Jack were tight with Martin Luther Mimms.
Jack wants to bury the klubhaus job. Dudley considers it insoluble. He wants to isolate klubhaus leads that point to the gold and shitcan the rest. She and Hideo want the gold and a unified solve. Dudley is currently pondering klubhaus countermeasures. Hideo told her that. The phone receiver froze in her hand.
Secret measures. Secret pleasures. Secret locales.
Dudley smoked opium. She asked Kay where. Kay said, “The basement at Kwan’s.”
She crashed the party there. Uncle Ace proved amenable. They’d met socially. Ace fed PD folks on the cuff.
He supplied the tar, the pipe, and the pallet. She joined twenty-odd Chinamen and DA McPherson’s colored girlfriend. The pallet was too short for her. She smoked opium and flew off someplace. She traveled in a gold rocket ship. Gold dust dropped from the clouds.
68
(Tijuana and Ensenada, 2/12–2/25/42)
He jumped rank. Major Melnick passed the word. He’s now First Lieutenant Hideo Ashida.
Silver outranks gold in the U.S. Army. He traded gold bars for silver. The bookie-front fiasco secured his promotion. Juan Pimentel moved up to captain. He replaced the late José Vasquez-Cruz. Vasquez-Cruz está muerto. La Juan is the new Baja Statie boss.
Who killed Vasquez-Cruz? His first thought was rival wetback and/or dope runners. The Mexican papers set him straight. Vasquez-Cruz was really Jorge Villareal-Caiz.
The ex-Communist. Once installed in Meyer Gelb’s cell. Linked to the Griffith Park fire. Linked to Dr. Saul Lesnick. Linked to Jean Staley. Linked to Tommy Glennon’s address book.
Consider this:
It’s January 8. Victor Trejo Caiz misbehaves. He’s Jorge’s brother. He foolishly draws down on Dudley Smith. Salvy Abascal slays him right there.
Dudley Liam Smith — ever present. Dudley Liam Smith — por vida.
Dudley instigates his promotion. Dudley recommends and vets Juan Pimentel. Note the design. Pimentel is fearsome and most competent. He’ll serve as Dudley’s enforcer. Wetbacks/heroin/the Jap-prisoner dodge. Dudley has plans for La Juan.
Dudley — por vida. All circuits terminate there. Dudley rules his thoughts. La Juan flits in counterpoint. All alliances reign under Dudley Smith’s command. Dudley indebts his underlings. Dudley corrupts and/or seduces. Ask Joan Conville. Ask Lieutenant Ashida himself.
They’ve been seduced and corrupted. They’ve become inexplicable friends. Comrades says it best. They’re rogue scientists held spellbound by one man.
Phone calls sustain their new kinship. There’s long stints of forensic and investigatory surmise. They interpret evidence across three case lines. They fondle gold objects as they talk.
They’ve reached conclusions. They agree. It’s not a single conspiracy. It feels like three conspiracies and random events interlocked. The conspiracies are imperfectly contrived and erratically enjoined. The klubhaus murders do not mark termination. All of it continues. The acquisition of the gold and the explication of all things past is the only permissible end.
He thinks that. Joan thinks that. They move from gold heist to fire to klubhaus to now — ceaselessly. They never-endingly probe evidence and indulge supposition. As per Tommy Glennon’s address book. As per the Baja pay phones listed. They indicate a new and revised Tommy G.
He’s more than Dudley’s snitch and a pro-Axis blowhard. He’s more than a rapist and wetback runner for Carlos Madrano. He’s more sinister than that. Consider this fact. Kyoho Hanamaka touched Tommy’s address book. He left a burn-scarred fingerprint.
The fourteen pay phones. Plus the coded slug calls. The bookie-front inferno blitzed that line of inquiry. No more code calls will be received. No more messages will pass through the front. They can’t trace Hanamaka and Tommy G. that way.
Where are they? Hanamaka’s a long-gone fugitive. Japs on the hoof draw heat. Tommy’s a disordered psychopath. Such fiends leave traces. No one has visited Hanamaka’s hideaway. Juan Pimentel continues to surveil it. No cars have tripped the photo-device wires. No license plates have been glimpsed. All this dizzies and confounds him.
He feels overmatched. Joan feels overmatched. The Jap and The Skirt. Sid Hudgens wrote them up that way.
He secured permission to visit L.A. and conduct field interviews. Dudley spoke to Major Melnick and got his okay. He’ll drive up on his days off. Lee Blanchard will bodyguard him.
He’s overmatched in L.A. and Baja. Dudley commands him in both locales. Dudley commands him domestically and commends him to voyeurize.
He lives in the Hotel del Norte. His suite adjoins Dudley and Claire’s. He hears them make love. He rarely hears words and often gleans impressions. He senses chaos.
Claire now appears gaunt. She accosted him in the lobby one morning. She said, “Do you know what Dudley’s capable of?”
He said, “Do you know the extent of my debt?”
Claire rarely speaks to him. The feral Joan Klein talks blue streaks. She spins teenage-girl tales. She’s expecting an “important package from the East.” Her comrades in New York will pass it on to her. She’ll deliver it to “the Maestro in L.A.”
Young Joan excels in puerile blather. One schoolgirl yarn stands out.
She’s “spot-tailed” Aunt Claire. She got that term from one of Uncle Dud’s soldiers. Aunt Claire had an affair with José Vasquez-Cruz. She saw them at it once. Vasquez-Cruz was really Villareal-Caiz. Somebody “slayed his greaser ass.” She got that term from one of Uncle Dud’s soldiers.
Spot-tails. Uncle Dud and Aunt Claire. Dudley Smith adopts and corrupts children.
Cruz-Caiz is dead. Dudley must have killed him. La Juan has replaced him. A second batch of Jap slaves will ship out on March 10. Manzanar opens its Jap-slave doors on March 25. Internment centers have sprung up regionwide. The Jap-slave diaspora now runs on overdrive.
His most pressing Army task is Jap-language translation. He gets Japs to rat other Japs. This Army task sickens him. His secret task thrills him. He tweaks Japs per gold-germane and three-case-germane topics.