Perfidia

by James Ellroy

  We’re into ’40 now, Bill. Everyone knows the war is coming. Preston’s a straight-shooting guy, and he dispatches Jap-fluent Pierce and Jim to talk turkey to Japs who might want to prudently dump their property. The war’s coming, you’re fucked. You’ll be imprisoned, your houses and farms will be seized. You can’t win this one, Tojo. But we’ll kick back gelt to you while you’re in stir. Your options are to get royally fucked by Uncle Sam or to get prematurely exploited and covertly helped out by us. You and Dud have got most of this figured out, Bill. I’m sure of that. We get parkway Japs and farm Japs to sell out, but some refuse. We bring in Carlos Madrano and his wetback corps and start fucking up the land, so we can build parkway ramps and prison camps. Preston’s nonfascist conscience is assuaged, which is fiscally imperative. He’s the big construction fish in this pond of ours, and we want him happy. Sure, we love the Japs, but most of them aren’t tub-thumping fascists like we are. A buck is a buck, and we’re Americans first.

  Ideology and money make for strange bedfellows. Did you hear the one about the Jap prostitute who went broke because no one had a yen for her? What Preston needs now is an angle to sell his prison-camp-within-prison-camp scheme to our local fathers and the Feds. The autonomous, build-the-local-economy angle is a cinch for Fletch Bowron—but Preston needs a clincher for J. Edgar Hoover. You know who gives it to him? Saul Lesnick, who’s been off in eugenic dialogue with Pierce the P and a Chink doctor named Lin Chung.

  The clincher is eugenics. Get it, Bill? We house the best Japs, the smartest Japs, the sturdiest Japs, and study them to determine what makes them different from us. Lesnick concocted it. Hoover loved it. Hoover hates the Jews and the Reds, Lesnick’s a Jew Red and a Fed snitch, but populism ain’t nothing but the big shared agenda. Will it get down to torture studies and rewiring Jap brains to the paws of rabid wombats? You tell me, Bill. We’ll reconvene sometime in ’43 and discuss it.

  So, we all know the war’s coming. We’re all huddled up with our shortwave radios, except for Preston—who don’t know shortwave shit from Shinola. But Jim Larkin’s got his Jap-o-phile pal, Terry Lux, who’s got a king-size shortwave setup and did a nose job on one of Jimbo’s Jap girlfriends. Our plans are brewing. We’re going to destroy crops and topsoil and sell canned shrimp oil and glass to Jap canners who want to kill white Americans. I know you witnessed that raid at the shrimp boat, Bill. Our Collaborationist pals and warehouse pals got that one by you. You’re not really a detective, but I can tell you’re following me.

  It all came down to the radios, in the end. There’s Pierce, Jim, Terry, me. Jim teaches Terry Jap. We all follow the buildup for the war in Japanese. Ryoshi came through there. He knew all the coded Jap Navy frequencies.

  Our plans are percolating. Got a yen for glass-infused shrimp? You know who to see. Preston’s in the shadows. Terry’s glued to his radio and not much else, because he’s busy sucking up to society dope fiends. Ed Satterlee’s feeding us dope on the potential roundups. Pierce has got a plan to cut whores to look like movie stars, and Terry’s adroitly considering it. Pierce and Terry are bankrolling Collaborationist villages. It violates Jap loyalty codes, but America’s a democracy, as much as we don’t like it. The villagers are laundering money and hawking that good glass-packed shrimp. Meanwhile, all we have to do is tune in our radios for the latest coded military news, straight from Jap Navy sources. We’re still in 1940, Bill. And in walks a draconian character named Hikaru Tachibana.

  I was fond of Tachi, but the cocksucker was a straight-up Jap spy. The SaMo cops popped his yellow ass right outside of here, on Lincoln Boulevard. He had a little Minox spy camera on him, which served to get him slated for deportation. I bailed him out on the q.t. and made him my spy. I’d started to think that Ryoshi W. was a less than ardent fascist and was less than loyal to our little clique. He Jewed us up for more money than we wanted to pay for his house and farm, which sat poorly with us, because we’d eugenically elevated him to Sacred White Man Status and thought the world of him. I got Tachi a job on the Watanabe farm, sometime in mid-’40. He reported back and confirmed my suspicions that Ryoshi was indeed wishy-washy.

  You had to take everything Tachi said with more than a grain of salt, Bill. He was temperamental and fanciful, and a bigger jailbait jumper than me. He ran street whores and sold maryjane to high school kids, which is highly immoral for one who ascribes to samurai codes of honor. That stated, I let things simmer for a good long while, because we were all enjoying the Jap military buildup, engagingly available on our radio sets. That, and I was fond of Tachi. Until the summer of ’41, when we all figured out that he knocked up Nancy Watanabe.

  Aya learned Nancy was pregnant, and told Ryoshi. Ryoshi spilled it to Pierce and me. We figured it had to be Johnny, because Johnny was perved on Nancy and told Pierce that he used to Mickey Finn her and fuck her with rubbers on, because he didn’t want no mongoloid kids. Ryoshi beat on Johnny and determined that he wasn’t the daddy, so our suspicions fell on Huey Cressmeyer. Ryoshi braced Huey. Huey said a Mex-Jap Collaborationist bragged that he knocked up Nancy. Terry Lux blood-tested Nancy and Huey and exonerated Huey. We got suspicious of Tachi and had Terry test him. Terry matched Tachi’s blood type to Nancy’s zygote. The wages of sin are death, Bill. Johnny and I snuffed Tachi. We stabbed him with poison-dipped knives and dumped his yellow ass down a well hole at the farm.

  It was like this, Bill. I was in love with Nancy. Ryoshi had already sold her to me. She was pledged to be my concubine, but I hadn’t poked her yet. We were going to live together in Tokyo or L.A., depending on who won the war. Don’t look at me that way, Bill. I know she was sixteen, but I was going to wait, even though she was used goods already.

  We’re up to the fall of ’41, now. Our enterprises are progressing, and we’ve all got our own little schemes. Pierce is sloppy. He’s all over the shortwave frequencies, talking to his fascist chums, while I’ve got my own frequency here at the plant blocked by a dummy transistor. Pierce is coffee-klatching with Doc Lesnick every chance he gets, because they’re office mates. Eugenics, Bill. Lesnick’s a Nazi do-gooder in his soul, Jew or no Jew. He wants to build more effective human beings, and he knows that it entails lab work. He’s looking to build Übermenschen with jumbo nigger-size dicks, Jew brains, Jap cunning, Russian resistance to disease and Nordic good looks. I’m not shitting you, Bill—Lesnick let Pierce eavesdrop on his psychiatric sessions, and old Saul is always laying race science on his patients.

  So, this fall progresses. We’re glued to our radios, and we know the Japs are going to bomb Pearl Harbor. Pierce has got Office of Naval Intelligence and freight company connections, and he’s relaying info on ordnance shipments to the Jap Navy and our Collaborationist pals. The Jap Navy and the Collaborationists hate each other, but we don’t care—all we want is more destruction. Those sub attacks on those freighters up the coast? All over the papers? It’s all off Pierce the P’s intelligence. Those Japs who escaped from T.I.? Pierce supplied them with money, slugs for pay-phone drops, hideout leads, the megillah. He bankrolled their whole fucking escape, and those fuckers were headed down to hook up with a sub in Colonet, Mexico, when you cops took them out at Blood Alley.

  We’re reckless here, we’re cautious there. I’ve got my frequency blocked, but Pierce and Terry are all over the airwaves. I’m on the air, Jim’s on the air. He’s got a shortwave set stashed in a garage out near Terry’s farm in Malibu. Them pay phones are all working overtime, which was a security precaution I came up with myself. In the middle of all this prewar hoo-ha, I see that Ryoshi and Jimbo are getting cold feet about the war in general and Pearl in specific. I’m afraid that they’re going to rat out the attack, and fuck up world history for all fucking time. I’m sanguine, Bill. I’m laissez-faire. We’re going to war. If the Japs and Krauts win, great. Ditto the U.S.A. I’m spending time with Nancy. I want her to have the kid, so I can have a full-blood Jap son to bullshit, shoot guns and play catch with. Then she fucks me over and gets a scrape fr
om some beaner quack down in T.J. I decide that the whole family has to go, and ditto that Brit fucker Jim Larkin. It’s a two-tiered motive, Bill. There’s revenge for the abortion and my allegiance to the Jap war effort.

  I’m not sure when the Japs are going to hit Pearl, Bill. Frankly, I’ve spent this whole fall soused on sour mash and terpin hydrate. Saul Lesnick was peddling anesthetic dentists’ cocaine to Pierce, who was letting me dip my beak as much as I liked. I told Pierce the Watanabes had to go, and he agreed with me. He cooked up some poison tea that would get them all loopy before I brought down the blade, and powdered it all up in little sachets. I set the date for December 6, and I bought the swords at a curio shop on Alameda. But I forget to buy scabbards to complete the package of obfuscation. I was fuzzy that fateful day, Bill. I’d set the date, and I picked up radio tips that the Japs were going to tap Pearl the next morning. Jimbo told me he was taking the Cycleers on a jaunt to San Berdoo come Sunday dawn, so I decided to clear up all my business, go home, sleep it off, and be bright-eyed and bushy-tailed by the time the big news hit.

  So, I drive to Highland Park, but I get cold feet en route. I stop at a pay phone on Figueroa, call Pierce and get him to buck me up. ‘Can you come over and watch, pal? Just for the eugenics of it?’ Pierce turned me down, because he had tickets for that Bruin-Trojan game at the Coliseum, but he told me to call Saul Lesnick, because the old Yid might gas on multiple seppuku. So I called Saul, and he said he’d try to make it, and I drove up to the fucking Watanabe house in more than a bit of a blur. Lucky for me, the family was all in and receptive to a nice bowl of “special” tea, supplied by their white Kamerad, Jungle Jim Davis. I was blurry, they got blurry. The tea induced nausea, and they puked all over their clothes. I made them change clothes, which they did in this giddy blur they were in. I told Ryoshi to write that “looming apocalypse” note in kanji on the wall, meaning this boding internment. Ryoshi does it, and then Saul Lesnick and Lin Chung show up at the back door, and I almost shit my britches, because I’d forgotten that I’d called Saul, and now he’s brought his Chink pal with him, so they can watch ex–Los Angeles Police Chief James Edgar “Two-Gun” Davis commit multiple Murder One.

  But Saul and Lin were cagey, which I appreciated. They left their cars down on Figueroa and walked up by the parkway fence, so nobody saw them. They told me it took a while to get up their gumption for the show, so they stood by the fence, smoked some cigarettes and thought, Well, this is one we can’t miss.

  Ryoshi, Aya and the kids were so zorched that they hardly noticed Saul and Lin, who came to scientifically view this whole episode and catalogue it from their divergent perspectives. So I say “Excuse me,” run out to the car and get the swords, all wrapped up in a blanket. Saul and Lin are watching real close, and they take their shoes off, because they’ve got some cocka-mamy notion about leaving shoe prints. The closer I get to it, the blurrier it gets. But I make them lay down on the living room floor, and I pull out my feudal knife and gut them, belly to sternum. They convulse and die, and there’s blood everywhere, and Saul steps in it, gets his socks wet, takes them off, and runs upstairs in a tizzy. I wiped blood on the swords and laid them on the bodies, but I forgot the scabbards and all the Jap ritual shit that it takes to convincingly depict seppuku. Lin Chung held his mud, observed, and asked me questions about my mental state, which pissed me off, because he wasn’t that Jew Red Sigmund Freud and I wasn’t some neurasthenic woman. I told Lin and Saul to scoot and leave me alone, so they scrammed out the back door. I washed the puked-on clothes and hung them up to dry, and I tried to find Ryoshi’s shortwave cache, but I fucking didn’t find shit. I just stared at the bodies, talked to them, cleaned myself up and walked out the door under cover of nightfall. It’s all real blurry, Bill. I take a snooze, wake up, drive out to that traffic call and schmooze with you, right there on Wilshire and Barrington. I go from a jaw with my old pal Bill Parker and drive out to Valley Boulevard, where I mow down my old pal Jim Larkin. Then I go home to sleep it all off, and my wife wakes me up and says, “Jim, the Japs bombed Pearl Harbor.”

  So, the PD gets the case. Dudley Smith’s the lead, and he’s the single smartest white man on earth—he’s right up there with you. I’m holding my breath now. Then Dud gets wise to the land grab, then Pierce and Terry’s movie-star-cut-job scheme takes flight with them, then Dud and Ace Kwan cook up their own bunch of like-minded schemes, which Lin Chung rats out to Pierce. Then Dud spills the schemes to Terry, and Terry extrapolates and goes wild with them and gets on his radio to the Jap Navy—we can move Japs in to work the old Fifth Column and all of white L.A. will think that they’re Chink. Before you know it, Dud and Ace are in a bidding war with Lin Chung, and you’re knocking on my door, because I was drunk and lazy and called my home phone from one of our own tub-thumping fascist pay phones.

  Davis stopped. He was pale. He verged on green.

  Ten million pins dropped. Parker unloaded the guns on the floor.

  Davis said, “I’ve got congestive heart disease, Bill. I won’t live to Armistice Day, whoever wins the war. I wouldn’t make it through the legal proceedings and up to the gas chamber in my own lifetime.”

  Parker said, “Are you lucid, Jim? Do you see things that aren’t there? Do you talk to people who aren’t in the room with you?”

  Davis said, “That’s you, Bill. That’s not me. And nix on the loony bin. I’m not The Werewolf, and I won’t go that route. There’s only two ways we can play this. The first is Captain William H. Parker, the former adjutant and lackey of widely defamed former L.A. Police Chief Jim Davis, walks ex-Chief Davis out of here in handcuffs and hands him over to the DA. It’s the first month of a staggering world conflict, and ex-Chief Davis is justly accused of hideously butchering four Japs, two of them women. It’s the most sensational news story of the century, whatever prestige the L.A. Police Department has accrued since ex-Chief Davis was ousted is now squandered, and ex-Chief Davis’ tenure as Chief is microscopically scrutinized. This fact is widely publicized. Ex-Chief Davis’ hatchet man was a liquored-up papist prig named Bill Parker, a ruthless man of overweening ambition who sacrifices his fatuous ideals at the slightest hint of personal or professional advancement. Bill Parker is the largest subsidiary casualty of Jim Davis’ Murder One indictments. While on trial, the flamboyant Davis indicts the Los Angeles Police Department with the breathtaking clarity of a man who has seen and done it all, and with men who still serve on that police department. You will go first, Bill. I have an affidavit that your brutalized ex-wife signed. Jack Horrall goes next. I have a wire recording of Brenda Allen giving him a blow job. I had the private room of Mike Lyman’s wired all the time I was Chief. You go, Thad Brown goes. There’ll be a nigger Chief from the Belgian Congo by the time I’m through. It comes down to this, Bill. If you take me in, I’ll fuck you and the L.A. Police Department up the ass so hard that they’ll hear the screams in Tokyo and Berlin. Here’s your second option, Bill. You walk out of here, now. You say a few prayers to your evil, cocksucking God of papal Rome, then you jerk off while you look at yourself in the mirror and lust for a few college girls that you don’t have the nuts to move on. Do you read me, papa-san? I killed four Japs the day before Pearl Harbor, and burning me for it costs more than it’s worth. I’m sitting here fat and sassy, because I’ve got history on my side.”

  Parker stood up.

  Davis said, “Shoo, Bill.”

  Parker walked out into the rain.

  9:32 a.m.

  Teatime. Service for three.

  Ace Kwan catered the do. They relaxed in Dudley’s cubicle. His tea was bennie-laced. Beth’s and Tommy’s was not. Tommy read the Braille-version Herald. GRAND JURY INDICTS WEREWOLF! wowed him.

  Beth ate almond cookies. Dudley smoked and bennie-twirled. They perused catalogues. Phelps-Terkel offered custom-made uniforms. Bullock’s Wilshire hawked their women’s line.

  Beth said, “Blue is Claire’s color, but it’s not a winter shade. Mexico won’t be to
o cold, so she should favor dresses over suits.”

  He couldn’t shake Mexico. His losses felt victorious. Hideo was revelatory.

  Tommy said, “Can I get a picture with The Werewolf, Uncle Dud? I won’t be able to see it, but my pals at work will think it’s swell.”

  Such goodness. Such gratitude.

  Dudley said, “Of course, lad. I’ll arrange it immediately.”

  Call-Me-Jack walked up. He was pale. He verged on green.

  “Carlos Madrano’s muerto. His car blew up on the coast road south of Ensenada. I just saw the Teletype. There’s some kind of Jap angle on it.”

  Dudley said, “I’ll miss him. He was quite the grand fascist.”

  9:35 a.m.

  Littell said, “We don’t know where you’ll be sent, but it won’t be until late February. In the meantime, Dudley Smith’s arranged some sweet digs for you and your family. He got you a three-bedroom suite at the Biltmore, all on the cuff. Mike Breuning’s brothers will work your farm until you get out. You’ll keep drawing a paycheck and get your old job back. Dudley squared it with Jack Horrall.”

  They stood on the fire escape. Ashida scanned the living room. Akira packed boxes. Mariko dozed on the couch.

  Somebody whistled, due east. Ashida tracked it. Elmer Jackson prowled a neighboring rooftop. He waved his shotgun.

  He yelled, “Hey, Hideo!”

  Ashida yelled, “Hey, Elmer!”

  Ashida thought, I’M AN AMERICAN.

  9:42 a.m.

  Brenda supplied the address, but stopped short of an introduction. It would have been embarrassing. The husband ordered boys from a “Tomcat” service run by one of Brenda’s friends. It was L.A. Everyone knew someone big—and primarily within illicit context. I had one name to drop. She’d take the bait or she wouldn’t. I walked up to the door and rang the bell.