Somewhere West of Fiji

by Darrell Egbert

  “Why is Mr. Hoover interested in such goings on?” He paused for a few seconds for effect, and then proceeded to tell me his secret. “Because Harry Frankl, your naval friend that crashed on your island, is the scion to one of the biggest shipbuilding enterprises since the closure of Henry J. Kaiser. But more than that, his company’s sponsored new super-liners are planned to lead the industry in overseas transportation. They will be the mainstay of our supply to the rebuilding of the Orient.

  “We have had our eye on the lady you just met for months now. Why? Because she has notions of inheriting, then she plans to sell to interests representing some of the biggies like the burgeoning Japanese Matsuii Shipping Line. And whom do we suspect of controlling them, and eventually replacing the Mafia on our west-coast waterfront–that’s right, none other than the Yakuza. Recall the Japanese Officer who told you about them, before you said you pushed him into the drink. Well, he was right. They are alive and well, and starting to operate again world wide, having some 50,000 members and growing.”

  I stopped him. I was feeling uneasy and a bit claustrophobic: “Why are we meeting here of all places?” He moved over past the small table and took another seat on another of the small chairs. He opened up a small cabinet and there stashed out of sight was the largest short-wave radio I had ever seen.

  He explained: “This place is ideal and it fits me just fine. And the top of the tree is the end of the antennae. I can broadcast, single-side-band to any receiver in the world. And who is going to come messing around? No Yakuza agent, you can be sure. National Japanese don’t go crawling around children’s playhouses looking for things suspicious. And the first Mrs. Frankl wouldn’t be found dead out here. It also allows me to come and go as I please, anytime day or night.

  “Most of the agents working this particular assignment are of Japanese ancestry. We all come from Hawaii and we all speak and understand Japanese. We are in a position here to monitor all incoming calls to the main house and most radio traffic coming to this country from Japan. We knew about your telegram and your telephone calls.

  Mr. Allan Dulles and General William Donovan, along with Mr. Hoover of the FBI are in the process of converting the OSS into a national intelligence agency. He is recruiting people like my self and your captain friend. At some later date, I think we are going to transfer to this new outfit. All of us have special qualifications. Exactly what yours is, I haven’t been told. But I have been asked to feel you out about joining us. If you think you might be interested, here take my card. When you get back to the city call this number. By the way, leave your car in town. We will have somebody pick it up and destroy it. That’s right, destroy it–we want you to disappear for a while. We suspect you have been under surveillance by agents of this same Japanese society I told you about.

  “At first we thought they intended to do you in so you could not testify against General Tojo and others of Hirohito’s staff. But by the time you were admitted to the hospital, time had run out for Generals Yamashita and Tojo. They are two of the officers General MacArthur never pardoned; we hung their butts several months ago. Now it’s something else about you that interests them. And they are also interested in Joyce Frankl. Now her life is in danger, too.” He looked at me; almost waiting for the surprised look on my face that he knew was coming.

  “Let me put you a little further in the picture: Joyce Frankl is not dead. Yes she was in an accident where a number of teenagers were killed. But no it wasn’t her fault. You scared us when we heard you had been nosing around and had discovered she had epilepsy.

  “Where is she, you ask? She is in prison under an assumed name where we can keep an eye on her, and where she is not going to wander off and get herself killed. That’s what Mrs. Frankl wants and that’s what the Yakuza wants. But that’s not what Mr. Hoover and General Donovan wants. And what they want, they usually get.

  “She was tried in a closed court and sentenced to a lengthy term by a judge who was in the know, but who didn’t know she wasn’t drunk the night of the accident. When the time comes, we will intervene and have her released. But your showing up almost ruined our plan.

  “That’s about all you have to know for now. By the way, we don’t want you resurrecting her by going up and mooning around the prison trying to get in to see her. And another by the way, that ghost story about the two of you on the island–the one you told the medics–it’s the kind of thing Randolph Hearst pays big bucks for. His flagship newspaper, the San Francisco Chronicle, as you probably know, is referred to as ‘Yellow Journalism.’ This story of yours, with the overtones of Emerson and Coleridge poppycock is right up his alley. He’ll pay you big bucks, I’m sure. What ever you believe about that is your business. But we want you to cool it. We don’t want you bringing any further attention to yourself.

  “We want you to knock off seeing her sister, too, if you don’t mind. In fact, it’s counter-productive now that you know Joyce is alive–what do you want to spark the sister for when you might have a chance at the real thing if you play your cards right. Everybody but the judge and a few medics believe she is dead. We want to keep it that way for now, and I brought you here to tell you just that. We want you to get out of the area to save your life.

  “She, up at the house, is Harry Frankl’s stepmother and she is going to have you killed. Get away from her while you can. Leave her alone. Keep me informed where you are staying in New York. People at the number I gave you will get you situated and will give you instructions where to meet me. You keep in touch through them. And I’ll let you know when we take the wraps off this case. That’ll be when we can exchange the two Mrs. Frankl’s up at the state prison.

  “We want you to ride a bicycle for transportation. A car can be traced and a car can be followed. A bicycle running around town is almost invisible. Apply for a bicycle messenger job under an assumed name. Learn the ropes, how to travel around the way they do. You can make it across town about three times as fast as in an automobile, no parking problems and impossible to tail in heavy stop and go traffic.

  “Oh, and hey, by the way, there is no Yamashita’s gold. There might have been once but no more. We either have it or it is buried in the ocean. Might be it’s in one of those battery tunnels feeding the artillery at Corregidor, who knows? Mr. Hoover knows the story, I’m sure and he doesn’t want you mucking around. However, you’re to be advised that you will never see a nickel of it, and it is just going to get you in more trouble. Believe me, Mr. Hoover admires you and he wants to keep you alive.

  “The last thing we want is for the Yakuza to get wind of your plan to look for the gold. The Yakuza have had a major interest in it from the beginning. They are going to figure you have some kind of edge, some kind of local knowledge, and boy if they do will they ever come after you. So knock it off.

  “Why do we want your buddy Tash? We want him to work for us because we are afraid he might go to work for them. Right now, he is an unknown quantity as far as Mr. Hoover is concerned. He might be okay and he just might be ex Kempeitai police in drag. Until we’re sure, we want him to keep his job in the noodle joint. If things prove out in his favor, we’re going to need him. If Yakuza do move in, they are going to need house help. That’s where he comes in. He knows and agrees to help us. In the meantime, he is accruing brownie points with the Bureau. We have to ask you to break it off with him, though. You’re going to make him look suspicious. And if the Yakuza see the two of you drinking beer all buddy, buddy; they might come to think of him as a person of interest. They might kidnap him; maybe take him back to Japan, and if they do, you wouldn’t want to be him. So don’t waste time saying sayonara.”

  He emphasized the word with the correct Japanese pronunciation. I didn’t tell him I learned it as, “say sayonada,” along with “jigoku e ike, bakatadi” almost as early in life as any other words of importance.”

  Chapter 23

  A sort of taxi was waiting for me when next I gained the road. Sort of because I didn’t feel t
hat it was for hire. I was beginning to suspect this fledgling organization of General Donovan’s was not that fledgling.

  He drove me to the railroad station and then handed me a ticket for New York. Frank handed me a packet just before I climbed back over the fence. I figured it was a set of instructions that he knew nothing about, and in that I was right. It was a large sealed envelope telling me where to report when I got to town. Frank never knew, and I was instructed to keep my whereabouts to myself. Thus began my first day working for an organization that for a long time I never knew who they were.

  The address was an upscale boarding house that just happened to have two professional bicycle messengers staying there. When I saw their new Iver Johnson bicycles, I knew they were professionals. It came to me that I was to use these people to get me a job at their company doing the same thing.

  It also came to me that I was involved with some very intelligent people. They were all self-starters, expected to figure things out quickly and to act without asking questions. When I got to know more about the wartime OSS, I realized that’s why General Donovan hired the people he did. On his original team, as he called them, were writers, actors, mathematicians and physicists–a large percentage of who were women. Many of them were exceptionally attractive, which is not surprising when you consider they were first and last in the spy business.

  The people who formed this organization patterned it after the British networks MI-5 and MI-6, along with the code breaking divisions stationed at Bletchley Park, near London.

  I heard tell the coders started with a cadre of Oxford and Cambridge professors. They were looking for beginners in the business that first of all had to be extremely intelligent as well as innovative. They spent the first few weeks wandering through the “undergrounds.” When they saw somebody working a crossword puzzle, they handed them a card and without a word moved on to the next car.

  The card introduced the bearer as an agent of a government organization involved in highly classified work of great import to the national war effort. If they wanted a well paying position, requiring a great deal of intelligence, they were to contact the phone number listed below. If they chose to call, they were given an address and a date to report. From there they were tested with copies of future London Times crosswords. At first they settled on one hour as a requisite for hire, then when the ranks began to fill with qualified takers they lowered it to 15 minutes. When I heard this, I found it hard to believe. But considering the mental accomplishments that became common knowledge after the War, I changed my mind.

  General Donovan was not so much interested in the mentally gifted as he was in people who made a living using their imagination, hence the large number of professional writers and members of the theatre community that became his friend.

  ********

  I started out slow as a messenger. At first I was hopelessly out of condition. The first day it came to me why I was riding the bicycle. I was getting in shape and my mind was being re-conditioned to react to changing situations.

  Watching my two friends operate in traffic was something akin to watching a ballet. They would pump as fast as they could, and then coast by catching a ride on a passing stake truck or bus. It didn’t matter, it just had to be going their way and moving fast. When traffic slowed they abandoned their ride to weave in and out of stalled traffic to catch another hitch on the other side. They stopped at traffic signals and then slowly proceeded with pedestrians to the other side. They then came up to speed, and when it slowed again they moved almost at the same speed through the two lanes of slow traffic. As long as the traffic was moving and there was no danger of being cut off they moved as fast as they could go. When it stopped they continued on but at a slower speed, keeping alert for somebody who might open a car door for some reason.

  When they encountered a traffic jam, they were not reluctant to move over onto the sidewalk or to abandon the main thoroughfare for a connecting alley and a less travelled parallel. Anything to save time, and since they were paid by the message, the successful moneymakers knew all the tricks. I followed on, learning and getting into condition. All the time I was wondering if all new entry levels were going through this same program. If the company you worked for was satisfied, you were hired by the organization now being referred to as the “Company.”

  Three months after I started, I was given another envelope of instructions. I was to report to Company headquarters in the State Department building in Washington. I never went back to this same boardinghouse. I was told to bring a change of clothes, along with any cherished keepsakes. It was obvious I was not coming back. Nothing was left to indicate my identity or whereabouts. No forwarding addresses or goodbyes. I just left my bicycle, caught the train and silently left without fanfare.

  I stayed in Washington for a week. I was sworn in after taking a battery of tests, one of which was a personality-character exercise, and that was it. At the end of my final day, I was handed another now familiar packet. I opened it back at my hotel room. It instructed me to leave on the train departing in four hours. I hardly had time to pack and get to the station. Everything was planned for me with the object of confusing anybody who might be interested in finding out what I was doing or where I was going.

  On board the train, I discovered my new temporary home was the port of San Pedro in the Los Angeles area.

  Thinking about the why of things as the train picked up speed out of the station, I concluded that New York was not the center of action. If I was, indeed, to be part of a cell with the stated goal of taking out the Yakuza in the United States, and to gather the evidence needed to convict the elder Mrs. Frankl, then my work was going to be on the west coast.

  I remembered Frank the gardener’s words about the Yakuza penetrating the new shipping lines starting up in Japan. They were manufacturing super-tankers and super-cargo ships, replacing much smaller surplus ships made by American companies during the War. And one of the reasons these super-ships were not coming to New York is because they couldn’t get through the Panama Canal. They were never meant to go anyplace but between ports in Japan and ports on the west coast. And in that regard, the Yakuza intended seeing that they were going to carry concealed contraband, besides the manifested cargo. It was this contraband that the Company and Mr. Hoover suspected had the major interest of the first Mrs. Frankl. What kind of contraband are we talking about? High end, big profit contraband–opium and heroin and human trafficking of all kinds.

  And as soon as she gains control of Harry’s father’s business, she intends to merge with the Japanese. And she is going to have dibs on the illicit trade, because she is going to be one of the large investors in this cartel they are planning.

  And the first human to lose their life while in transit was going to make it a capital offense. It was going to happen, and Mrs. Frankl was going to be charged and convicted along with several of the Shogans of the Japanese mafia. Nobody told me this; I figured it out for myself. What I didn’t have figured out was my role in this scheme of things. But I wouldn’t have to wait long before a special messenger, handing me the expected envelope, contacted me.

  This time there was a significant amount of cash, in addition to back salary. The extra money was for a motor scooter of all things, and a pair of expensive war surplus military field glasses. I had graduated from an expensive Iver Johnson bicycle to an expensive top-of-the-line Vespa motor scooter. And the glasses told me I was going to be spying on something of importance.

  My instructions were to observe all new super-cargoes with the name Matsuii painted in bold letters amidships. There really wasn’t that many. But what there were was being financed by Mrs. Frankl with the expectation of many more.

  I was to determine which of the officers aboard was the captain. Then I was to follow him. By follow him, they meant to dog his footsteps noting everything of any consequence he did. I surmised that, since I was no professional at this, there was somebody else doing the same thing unbeknownst to me. A
s soon as I advised my contact that such a ship was headed for the harbor, the wheels were set into motion. But all I knew about it was the specific instructions I had received. How I went about doing it was my own business.

  I have to tell you that I spent a lot of time observing. And while I was observing I was thinking. And what was I thinking about? I was thinking about why the planners had me doing what I was doing. Can you see what they had in mind? Among other things they were training me to someday be a planner of future operations. Now that I was a full time, on the payroll spy, I was expected to learn and to perform.

  The Vespa was intended to get me around as incognito as was the bicycle in New York. In Japan, the large majority of the population travels by bicycle. Just above the bicycle class is the motorbikes, small Yamaha two cycle motorcycles, and then the more expensive imported Vespa motor scooters. Any Japanese intent on scouting out potential observers of his ship would, from force of habit, overlook me buzzing around. He would be looking for something much more pretentious, because of his preconceived idea about what an American spy would look like and how he or she would act. We would be expected to go first class. In Japan, a Vespa rider doesn’t go first class. Neither does one that travels by streetcar or bus. They travel as though they are second-class citizens, members of the multitudes of semi-skilled workers that have grown from the ashes that were once the large Japanese cities.

  I changed hotels about once a week. And I tried not to eat in the same restaurant more than twice in a month. I stayed away from bars or from contact with others bent on making friends. Casual acquaintances were all right but nobody that might be looking into who I was, how I made a living or what I was doing in my spare time.