BY THE SAME AUTHOR
Fear Itself
The Tormenting of Lafayette Jackson
Hands On
Stillriver
Keeping Secrets
Without Prejudice
Copyright
This edition first published in hardcover in the United States in 2013
by The Overlook Press, Peter Mayer Publishers, Inc.
141 Wooster Street
New York, NY 10012
www.overlookpress.com
For bulk and special sales, please contact [email protected], or write us at the above address.
Copyright © 2013 by Andrew Rosenheim
First published in Great Britain in 2013 by Hutchinson
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.
ISBN 978-1-46830-840-2
For Laura and Sabrina
Contents
By the Same Author
Copyright
Dedication
Part One: Los Angeles Late September 1941
Chapter 1
Part Two: Washington, D.C. Late September 1941
Chapter 2
Part Three: Los Angeles End of September 1941
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Part Four: Washington, D.C. and New York Early October 1941
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Part Five: Los Angeles Mid-October 1941
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Part Six: Washington, D.C. Early November 1941
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Part Seven: Santa Barbara and Los Angeles Mid-November 1941
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Part Eight: Oahu and Molokai Late November 1941
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Part Nine: Los Angeles and San Francisco Late March 1942
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Acknowledgements
Part One
Los Angeles Late September 1941
1
BILLY OSAKA WAS missing.
He hadn’t punched in at Northrop near Hawthorne Airport where he worked the occasional night shift for extra dough – the airplane production lines had ramped up threefold in the last year. He hadn’t gone by the offices of Rafu Shimpo, the Japanese-American newspaper, not even to say he wasn’t filing that week. He hadn’t answered Nessheim’s knock on the flimsy door of his three-room railway apartment in Boyle Heights, and he hadn’t been seen by his neighbours – or those who spoke English at any rate. There’d been no sightings of him locally: at the drugstore on the corner or Curley’s bar, where Billy drank a beer now and then and sometimes cashed a cheque, or at the grocery store, where even Billy had been known to buy a quart of milk.
Normally Nessheim would not have been surprised. Billy was easygoing but also impetuous, like a classy thoroughbred who sometimes didn’t want to race. Once he’d disappeared for two weeks without letting Nessheim know where he was going; when he finally appeared he said he’d been up in Portland, helping out his cousin with the salmon catch. When Nessheim had looked sceptical, Billy had shrugged and admitted that he’d been touring the Sierra with a girl.
But this time was different. Three nights before, when Nessheim had gone home after a long day at the studio lot, he’d found an envelope slid under the front door of his rented ranch house above North Hollywood. Inside there was a note, written in thick pencil: Urgent. Meet me at the Blue Fedora at 5.30 tomorrow.
It’s important. Billy O.
But Billy Osaka hadn’t shown.
* * *
In the bleached morning sunlight of Los Angeles, Nessheim turned off Hollywood Boulevard and moved south on Argyle Avenue, wondering why Billy had wanted to see him so badly. He was only an occasional help to the Bureau, usually when a Japanese translator was required, and though he seemed to know everybody, the information Billy provided was never worth a lot. Raw ore rather than gold.
Nessheim slowed down and pulled into the lot of American Motion Pictures, driving through the flimsy gates, feeble imitations of the grander ones at MGM. He stopped at the barrier and Ernie the guard came out of his sentry box, gimpy on his pins. He had thinning hair and sloping shoulders and a handshake soft as pie. A retired cop from the Pasadena force who had come to California from Minnesota thirty years before, he got a kick out of talking to a fellow Midwesterner who still carried a gun.
‘You packing today?’ he asked with a smile.
‘Sure thing,’ said Nessheim.
‘I do miss my sidearm,’ Ernie said wistfully.
‘And it misses you,’ said Nessheim in what was an established routine. Ernie chuckled as if he’d never heard it before.
There was a sudden revving of an engine. Through the windscreen Nessheim saw a convertible speeding towards them down the lot. Nearing the barrier, it braked sharply and came to a halt on the other side of the sentry box. The car, a deluxe Packard coupé, was a vivid green chartreuse with whitewall tyres and too much chrome. Nessheim figured it belonged to one of the new actors. They would arrive like a rocket in a burst of vainglory; a month on the AMP studio’s factory-like production line usually brought them back down to earth.
From the car a male voice shouted: ‘Hurry up, Pops, and open the gate!’
‘Hold your horses, I’ll be there in a minute,’ Ernie said amiably.
‘I’ll push your horses right up your ass if you don’t get a move on!’
Ernie was old and slow and utterly harmless, and Nessheim leaned over to get a look at the speaker. He could make out the profile of a young man’s square-chinned face, a blue short-sleeved shirt and two hands drumming impatiently on the steering wheel.
‘Take it easy,’ Nessheim called out through the passenger side window.
‘Says who?’
‘Says me,’ said Nessheim.
‘Does Me want to have horses shoved up his ass too?’
Nessheim was usually slow to anger, but this guy had jump-started the process. He opened his door and got out to confront him, but just as he stood upright again the other driver accelerated. His car was so close to the wooden barrier that at first it bent slowly back like a hunting bow, then suddenly snapped like a toothpick. The car surged through. As it sped out the gates, the driver extended his middle finger in farewell.
Nessheim looked at Ernie. ‘Who the hell was that?’
Ernie shrugged. ‘Some smart-ass kid. He parked in Mr Pearl’s place, but when I asked Rose said it was okay.’ Rose was Pearl’s secretary.
‘Well, Pearl’s the boss.’ Nessheim pointed to the ragged wooden stub, all that was left of the exit barrier. ‘Though I don’t think he’s going to be happy about that.’
He waited while
Ernie lifted the entry bar, then drove into the studio grounds. He went past the long windowless wall of Studio One, then by the executive offices. They were housed in a three-storied stucco building with wide gables and two decorative but entirely redundant chimneys. In front there was a short strip of carefully tended lawn and a row of small palm trees, planted the spring before. In the distance, at the back of the lot, sat Studio Two, recently built to help the fledgling studio’s push into A-movies. It was immense, the size of an airplane hangar: sixty feet high and a football field long, with vast doors that slid open on tracks.
Its sheer size made it easy to overlook the low-slung building that ran between it and the executives offices, and was more like a Nissen hut than a proper building: single-storey, it had a foundation of concrete blocks supporting painted walls of metal sheets and a slanted tin roof. Here worked the studio’s roster of writers, as well as Nessheim. If you could call it work.
Parking in front, he paused at the entrance to let a workman come out first. He was carrying a stuffed armchair and Nessheim watched as he dumped it uncere-moniously on the pavement outside, where it would sit until the owner, some writer whose contract hadn’t been renewed, came to collect it. Nessheim had seen it happen often enough: there was a high turnover among the scriptwriting ranks. As Teitz, a longterm survivor, had remarked, the bad ones got canned and the good ones left for better places to work.
Nessheim walked down the thin central corridor which a resident wit had nicknamed the Ink Well. It split the offices, from which he heard the sporadic clack of typewriters and the more consistent noise of people talking. He stopped halfway down at an open door. Looking in, he saw that Lolly Baker, the single secretary for the entire roster, wasn’t there – otherwise half the writers would have been there too, gathered around the coffee urn, flirting with her. Less than fifty yards away in either of the two studio sound buildings, there were women galore – chorines and showgirls, child star wannabes and romantic heroines, secretaries and make-up artists and assistants – but since the writers were banned from going on set, these women might as well have been a mile away.
The writers occupied tiny cubicle-sized offices and were made to double up, working in conditions so cramped that one of them had once complained he had to go outside just to change his mind. By contrast, Nessheim’s room at end of the corridor was embarrassingly spacious. Entering it, he closed the door behind him. He took off his suit jacket and hung it and his gun and holster from the hook on the back of the door. He didn’t like taking his gun with him to work, but when he’d asked if he could go without it, the answer had been a flat no. R.B. Hood, the Special Agent in Charge of the LA Field Office, was a stickler for Bureau regulations, and he liked making Nessheim toe the line.
Nessheim sat down and looked out the window, where he saw a man in a clown suit trying to pull a donkey with a rope through the open doors of Studio Two. Mornings inside Two were currently occupied by the filming of a family farm picture, set in the Civil War, intended to replicate the success of Gone with the Wind. There were only two problems with this plan: every other studio was doing the same thing, and every other studio was doing it in colour – which AMP’s budget didn’t run to. In the afternoon the main sound stage was used for The Red Herring. Nessheim would be there in his role as adviser, ostensibly to ensure the accuracy of its depiction of FBI men at work. The truth was, though, that accuracy was not his real priority. You’re just there to make sure the movie makes the Bureau look good. Tolson himself had said this when he’d agreed to move to LA.
There was a tap on the door. He sat up straight as it swung open.
‘Gee, did I startle you?’ It was Lolly. ‘You looked a million miles away. What’s her name?’
He laughed. ‘Billy Osaka – sound like a girl to you?’
‘Sounds like a Jap.’
‘He is, sort of.’ Billy’s dad had been Japanese all right and Billy had inherited his Oriental colouring, and spiky dark hair. But he was tall, over six feet, as tall as Nessheim, with high cheekbones and a jaw and dark-blue eyes he himself attributed to his dead Irish mother.
‘I don’t like Japs,’ Lolly said without malice.
‘Yeah, but I bet you’d like Billy.’ He knew that women admired the kid’s striking looks and liked his easy, cheerful manner. ‘Say, do you know who owns a new green convertible?’
‘No, but I’d like to.’
Lolly stood there smiling in her gawky but attractive way. She wore a cotton dress, eggshell blue with white polka dots that didn’t line up where the side hems met. Nessheim figured Lolly must have made it herself. She was tallish, maybe five foot seven, with a pretty face framed with blonde ringlets the size of silver dollars. Together with pale blue eyes and a good figure, the effect was striking – if Lolly’s looks might go in ten years’ time, their allure was immediate enough to make anyone forget about the passage of time.
Like any girl who’d moved to LA, Lolly wanted to be in the pictures, though she didn’t talk about it much, since when she opened her mouth her Hollywood prospects receded. The sight wasn’t appalling, but it wasn’t that good either: her two front teeth overlapped like the X of a railroad crossing sign.
Finally she recalled the purpose of her visit. ‘Mr Pearl’s office called.’
‘What about?’ Nessheim asked mildly.
‘You’re invited to lunch at his house on Sunday.’
Nessheim stifled a groan. In nine months at the studio he hadn’t broken bread with the owner, and he saw no reason to spoil an unblemished record.
‘Here’s the address,’ said Lolly, putting a slip on his desk. ‘Rose says don’t dress up, and bring your trunks if the weather’s nice. She says he’s got a humdinger of a pool. Even Johnny Weissmuller’s swum there.’
‘I bet,’ he said, wondering if there was any way to get out of it.
He noticed that despite having delivered her message, Lolly wasn’t going anywhere. She stood in front of him, nervous as a filly. ‘You’ve got another invite,’ she said, pointing to his desk.
On one corner he noticed something new – a card the size of a jumbo postcard. He held it up and read:
Help Your Comrades in Arms
You are invited to an evening of entertainment and education to help support our Soviet brothers in their struggle against the Nazi enemy.
Monday October 13 at 8 p.m.
The Arabia Ballroom Cash Bar
All proceeds to Help the Soviets Fund
Organized by Writers for a Free World
‘This is for me?’ he asked. Lolly nodded and he looked at the invitation again. ‘Who are the Writers for a Free World?’ He wondered if there were writers against a free world. Presumably Goebbels had some on his staff.
Lolly shrugged. ‘I think they’re Guild guys, but they’d get in trouble if they used the Guild name for this.’
‘You bet they would. Who sent it?’
‘Waverley.’
‘He did?’
Lolly said, ‘Teitz told me Waverley used to make fifteen hundred a week when he was at MGM. Could that be true?’
‘Probably.’ John Waverley had an ear for dialogue and a sense of pace that had once put him in the top drawer of screenwriters. A tall, good-looking man with a wave of hair he swept back as if it were an inheritance, he came from a high-toned family out East. He had a natural grace (just bordering on hauteur) that had once inspired awe in studio owners, immigrants virtually to a man. But politics had proved his Achilles heel. He had joined the Party early and had worked hard to radicalise his fellow writers; when, briefly, the Guild had been broken, Waverley had been a prominent casualty of the victors’ hit list. Thereafter he had found work only on the most humiliating terms – and finally ended up at AMP, content to work on the company’s second-rate productions for second-rate pay as long as he was left alone to continue the struggle for a better world. Which for Waverley meant a Communist world.
Nessheim pointed to the invitation. ‘Are you g
oing to this thing?’
Lolly flushed. ‘I don’t know.’ Flustered, she pointed wildly at the Ink Well corridor. ‘Half those guys have asked me.’
‘I bet they have, Lolly. You’re a good-looking girl, despite your age …’
‘I’m twenty next May,’ she protested.
‘That’s what I mean,’ teased Nessheim. ‘You’re getting a bit long in the tooth. You ought to take one of these guys’ offers before it’s too late.’
Her face swung from outrage to hurt; for a terrible moment Nessheim thought she was going to cry. So much for banter, he thought.
‘I better get going,’ Lolly said. ‘Don’t forget about Mr Pearl’s invitation.’
When she’d gone he looked out the window again. The donkey was still there, but now two grips had come out from Studio Two to help pull the recalcitrant animal inside. The donkey had its feet braced in the dust and would not budge. There seemed something admirable about its refusal.
He knew he should go to the benefit, yet Nessheim could think of nothing more dire than an evening of Communist propaganda disguised as entertainment, even if Lolly seemed to want him to take her there. He thought about how good she looked in her thinning cotton dress – and how young, for all her nineteen years. If he took her out, and maybe took her in, he’d feel like a creep. Thank God he was spoken for.
There was a knock on the door, but this time it didn’t open.
‘Come in!’ he called impatiently, wondering who was being so polite. The door finally opened and a woman peered in. She wore a forget-me-not-blue linen jacket and skirt and looked out of place in the studio – more like a businessman’s wife than an actress.
‘Are you John Waverley?’ She had an accent Nessheim couldn’t place.
‘You’ve come too far. He’s two doors down – on the left of course.’
‘Naturally,’ she said with an amused smile. ‘Many thanks – I am sorry to disturb you.’ She stared at him with deep-set eyes the colour of chocolate.
‘No big deal. I wasn’t up to much.’
The Little Tokyo Informant Page 1
