The Little Tokyo Informant

by Andrew Rosenheim

  ‘Gimme a week or two. Dedway’s between pictures – they wrapped on The Red Herring this morning. But I know he’s on the lot later this year, so I’ll arrange a tour for then.’

  ‘Good. Let me know.’ Now it was Nessheim’s turn to walk away and this time Cohan called out, ‘Hey, Nessheim!’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘No Dubin if there’s no Dedway.’

  He stopped for a grilled cheese and Coke on North Broadway. Between diner food and the meals he made for himself, he was getting awfully sick of sandwiches. That had been one good thing, perhaps the only good thing, about the boarding-house life he’d led in Chicago and D.C. – hot meals cooked by someone else.

  It took half a mile for him to spot that he was being followed. The tail was clever; it was a cab not a car and Nessheim might never have noticed if the driver hadn’t made a mistake. Nessheim was approaching MacArthur Park on Wilshire and he crossed Alvarado as the light turned red. Seconds later he heard a horn blast and looking in his mirror saw a taxi had sped up to cross the light too, just avoiding a collision with a Plymouth coming on from Alvarado. There was no fare sitting in the cab, so what was the driver’s rush?

  When Nessheim came out of the park he turned right onto Vermont Avenue without signalling and the cab cut across a lane in order to turn as well. Now he knew.

  He didn’t want company where he was going next. When he came to Sunset he turned left, wondering how to shake the tail. He pulled over by the kerb outside Albert’s Barber Shop, watching in his side-view mirror as the taxi kept coming, and took a deep breath waiting for it to pass. When it did the driver had his hand up against his ear, shielding his face. It was a man; that was about all Nessheim could tell.

  He got out of his car and walked until he came to the spinning barber pole and then slipped into Albert’s Barber Shop. He found Albert at the first chair, working with clippers on the neck of an old boy. He did a double take when he saw Nessheim. ‘Don’t tell me you’re here for another haircut,’ he said. ‘If you’re enlisting, the army cuts your hair for free.’

  ‘I need a shine,’ said Nessheim, walking through to the back. There Arthur put down his newspaper and stood as Nessheim hopped onto the chair and put his feet up on the two brass supports. His Florsheims were almost brand new and didn’t need a shine, but he had a bird’s-eye view of the sidewalk. He turned down Arthur’s offer of the paper and kept his eyes peeled on the front door as the old black man worked polish with a rag into his shoes.

  ‘I told you Williams was going to hit .400,’ Albert called out.

  ‘Sure you did,’ said Nessheim vaguely, his eyes intent on the street. Traffic was light and the cars were going by at a good clip. But he managed to spot the taxi, which had turned around and was heading back east on the far side of the street. This time the driver had his hand down and his head swivelled towards the barber shop. Nessheim tried focusing on the face, but the cab was going too fast to get a fix on anything.

  Arthur finished by buffing with a chamois rag until Nessheim’s shoes had a high shine. Nessheim paid him two bits and said goodbye to Albert, then moved quietly out the barber shop door. Standing on Sunset, he looked casually each way. Another cab came by, but it had a fare – an old lady with shopping piled on the back seat.

  He wondered if he was being spooked by the intruder in his house and the note he’d left behind. Let’s not get a persecution complex, he told himself. After all, he didn’t believe anyone other than Guttman cared that the Russian Mission in New York had wired money to somebody here in LA. But Osaka had attracted some other people’s interest – Ike, for one. Nessheim decided he’d tend to Guttman’s concern later on; for now, he was following his own instincts.

  16

  HE DROVE WEST on Sunset Boulevard, limning the bottom of the northern hills, passing the green sign for the Beverly Hills Hotel at the intersection with Crescent Drive, where he had turned to go to Buddy Pearl’s house. Parking on the eastern edge of the UCLA campus, he walked across a long new bridge with three Romanesque arches that were sunk deep into one of the regional arroyos, gulches which filled with racing water when the rains came late in the year, but were otherwise desert dry. Two logging trucks passed him, spewing dust, and ahead he could see construction workers laying the foundations for another university building. One day the campus would be stunning, he thought, perched on an elevated small plateau west of Beverly Hills with distant views of downtown LA.

  Royce Hall was at the hub of the projected campus and had the merit of being finished – a handsome ornate building with two high campaniles that looked like they belonged to an Italian church. Entering it he found the registrar’s office and got directions to the Political Science faculty, which was housed further along a large plaza of chewed-up, muddy grass that would presumably one day be lawn. Nessheim almost broke an ankle angling across it, then made it to the safety of some duckboards that led to a new brick building.

  He knocked at an obvious door in the corridor running off the building’s atrium and found a trio of giggling typists drinking coffee inside. They pointed him upstairs, resuming their giggling as he left. He followed students up the stairwell to the second floor, then found himself alone reaching the third, where a long corridor ran either way from the central landing. He picked a side and walked slowly, examining the little cards taped to each doorway. Four doors down he found the name he was looking for and knocked.

  ‘Come in,’ said a high-pitched voice. When Nessheim opened the door he was surprised to find a man his own age; he’d expected someone weighed down by wisdom and years. The man stood up from behind his desk: he was as tall as Nessheim, but skinnier, the gauntness of his frame evident even under his jacket, which he wore with a check plaid shirt and a brown tie. He looked like a lumber thinner who read books.

  ‘Professor Larson?’ Nessheim asked, somewhat surprised. It was what the card taped to the door had said.

  ‘Do you have an appointment?’ The man looked a little nervous.

  ‘No, I don’t.’

  ‘Are you taking 103?’ the man asked, flicking back his hair. It was sandy-coloured and ran over his ears. Nessheim figured Albert could do a lot for the guy.

  ‘I’m not a student,’ he said. ‘I’m with the FBI.’

  Larson sat down again. On the wall behind him hung a framed daguerreotype of a man in a frock coat and black bow tie. He had a moustache and long beard that dated him by at least half a century, never mind the black and white grain of the print.

  Larson said, ‘Usually you guys call ahead.’

  ‘Usually?’

  ‘This isn’t the first time someone from the Bureau’s come to see me.’

  ‘If you help me out, Professor, maybe it can be the last.’

  ‘I told your colleague everything he wanted to know. I’ve got nothing more to say about my time in Berkeley, and I won’t talk about other people there. And if there are complaints about my teaching, raise them with the Dean.’

  ‘I’m not here about any complaints,’ said Nessheim calmly. He pointed at the daguerreotype. ‘Nice picture.’

  ‘Some people think it must be one of my ancestors. Your colleague did.’

  ‘I doubt that you’re descended from Engels.’

  Larson looked impressed. ‘Is that part of your training at the FBI – you know, spot the Red?’

  ‘Nah,’ said Nessheim, shaking his head. ‘I’m from Wisconsin. We had a socialist governor.’

  ‘Hah.’ Larson laughed despite himself. ‘I’m from Minnesota myself. Where’d you go to college?’

  ‘Northwestern.’

  ‘What did you major in, Accounting?’ His smile only reinforced his patronising tone.

  ‘Political Science.’

  Larson looked at him more closely. ‘Did you know Professor Harrison?’

  ‘I wouldn’t say “know”, but I took his course on political philosophers.’ Pol Sci 330. Harrison had been brilliant. If Nessheim had ever had any latent disposition t
o political extremes – right or left – a semester of Harrison’s withering analysis had quashed it for good.

  ‘Really?’ asked Larson. ‘Then why are you persecuting the likes of me?’

  ‘Because I didn’t graduate.’

  Larson chuckled. ‘I was Harrison’s student at Berkeley. He didn’t approve of my politics, but he taught me a lot. God knows why he moved to Northwestern.’

  ‘Maybe he wanted a milder climate.’

  Larson laughed again. ‘Okay, so what do you want?’

  ‘I’d like some information about one of your former students.’

  ‘Don’t get your hopes up – I teach two hundred of them a year.’

  ‘It’s a guy named Osaka. Billy Osaka. I don’t know what course of yours he took.’

  Larson looked at him stonily and Nessheim saw this was one student the teacher remembered. But then, as Teitz has said, everybody knew Billy Osaka.

  Nessheim added, ‘He listed you as a reference on an application.’

  ‘He did? He never asked me,’ Larson said crossly.

  ‘So you do remember him.’

  ‘What was he applying for?’

  Nessheim paused, savouring the moment. ‘A part-time job with the Bureau.’ If Osaka was dead, letting this out wasn’t going to matter; if Billy were alive, Hood had made it clear he wasn’t going to be working for the Bureau again.

  ‘So what do you want to know?’

  ‘What was he like? Was he a good student?’

  ‘Yes,’ Larson replied simply. For a minute Nessheim thought that was all the man was going to say, but Larson went on: ‘He came to me in his sophomore year and asked if he could take a seminar I teach. It’s called “Democracy in America”, though personally I’d rather call it “The Lack Thereof”. Normally it’s limited to majors – that would be juniors and seniors – but I was impressed by his eagerness, so I let him enrol.’

  ‘Did he do well?’

  ‘Not at first. He struggled with the written work. It was okay, but he talked a lot smarter than he wrote. So we met once a week to go over his writing.’

  ‘Did it improve?’

  ‘Yes, a bit. He worked pretty hard, but he was always busy doing other things.’

  ‘What kind of things?’

  ‘He worked part-time on an English-language paper in Little Tokyo. He did shifts at various factories; those that would have Japanese workers anyway.’

  ‘Maybe he needed the money.’

  ‘Maybe. But he also played in a softball league and taught Japanese kids to swim. Anything but hit his books.’

  ‘What about politics? He must have been interested or he wouldn’t have taken your course.’

  ‘He was interested in a classic immigrant’s way. He wrote his thesis on Japanese arrivals here and their Americanisation.’

  ‘That seems normal enough.’

  Larson grew impatient. ‘Don’t you know the laws we have about the Japanese? They can’t own property any more, they can’t bring brides over from Japan, they’re subject to every kind of exploitation, and other than agriculture and fishing, most industries won’t employ them. It will take a lot more than efforts to assimilate for them to get their full rights.’

  ‘But Billy’s only half-Japanese.’

  ‘That’s more than enough. Look, Billy’s a charming guy and he seems to think that charm is enough. But it’s not. I told him he might do better going back to Hawaii. Most of the population is Japanese, so they can’t be kept out of professions the way they are here. He could have been whatever he wanted out there – maybe even a lawyer. But he wasn’t having any of it – it was the only time I ever saw him angry.’ Larson shook his head; he seemed exasperated on behalf of his former student.

  ‘So he wanted to stay here.’

  ‘Yes. He had a misplaced belief in the American Dream.’

  ‘When in fact a revolution is required?’

  ‘Mock me if you like.’

  Nessheim decided to leave ideology alone. ‘Did Billy ever talk about his family?’

  ‘Not much. He grew up in Hawaii. I know his father died when he was little. When his mother died he came over here. His grandmother was already in LA, I think.’

  Nessheim tried to sound wistful: ‘What I don’t get is why he left Hawaii. Like you say, life’s a lot better for the Japanese there.’

  Larson said, ‘I think he had a cousin – some guy who was like an older brother to him when they were growing up. The cousin came over here and he persuaded Billy to follow.’

  ‘Was this cousin called Osaka too?’

  ‘I haven’t the faintest idea.’

  ‘Did Billy ever talk about his girlfriends?’

  ‘Not much. There was one I remember, though. One he seemed to care about.’

  ‘Do you know this girlfriend’s name?’

  ‘Nope. She was Nisei, I know that, and she worked for a bank. And, Special Agent, that’s really all I have to say.’

  17

  CERTAIN LA MYSTERIES unravelled the longer Nessheim lived in the city. He had not realised for a long time that Sunset Boulevard traversed virtually the length of the city, ending up near Santa Monica, facing the ocean and, inevitably, the setting sun. He followed it down from UCLA, and although traffic was light the road itself was full of twists and turns and badly surfaced, so it took him an hour to reach Pacific Palisades. There he spent another futile twenty minutes trying to locate the address that Hanako Yukuri from the Satake Bank had supplied for the mysterious Mr Lyakhov, recipient of $25,000 from the Manhattan Savings Association.

  He finally found where Mr Lyakhov’s address might have been – ‘might have been’ being the operative phrase, since as near as Nessheim could make out it would have been sited, give or take a nine-iron, halfway along the 2nd fairway of the Riviera Country Club. So the address given to the Satake Bank was phoney.

  By now it was after three o’clock. Traffic was bad and it took almost until four for Nessheim to return to the studio. There he found the Ink Well near-deserted and quiet. In his little office Teitz was alone and sat with his head on his desk, moaning gently.

  ‘I see you kept going last night,’ Nessheim said.

  Like a pond-bound frog, Teitz opened one eye. ‘It’s all Grenebaum’s fault. He told me he’d made a great find in West Hollywood. He didn’t tell me it was three different bars.’

  Hoping to see Lolly, Nessheim went along the corridor and peered in her office, but she wasn’t there. In his own office he shut the door. He needed to telegraph Guttman about the disparity between the fifty grand and the twenty-five grand acknowledged by the Satake Bank. It was too large a sum for a misunderstanding. But he also needed to sit and think.

  There was a tap on his door and Lolly came in. He stared at her, for something had changed. Then he saw that she was heavily made-up, with eyeliner and mascara and powder on her cheeks. Gone was the youthful farm girl look.

  ‘You’re back,’ she said cheerfully.

  ‘Yeah, I stuck my head in but you were nowhere to be seen.’

  ‘I was over in Studio Two,’ she said. He gave her a look and she laughed. ‘I was just watching a rehearsal for a minute, and then I saw my friend in Make-Up. Can’t you tell?’

  ‘I’d never have guessed.’

  She gave a snort. ‘Have you seen Teitz?’

  He nodded and Lolly said, ‘Looking at him makes me glad I got an early night.’

  He didn’t reply, for he wasn’t glad at all. Lolly said, ‘There was a phone call for you about an hour ago.’

  ‘Who was it?’

  ‘Don’t know. I told her to try your office at the Bureau. She sounded kind of foreign to me.’

  Lolly seemed more interested than jealous. The odds of getting her out to his place seemed to be receding; Nessheim decided to bide his time.

  Suddenly the door to his office opened and Pearl strode in. His entrance seemed characteristic – this was a no-knock kind of guy. But as Pearl would have been the first
to say, he owned the room.

  ‘Agent Nessheim,’ he said loudly, as if he wanted to confirm what he was looking at. But he seemed cheerful.

  ‘Mr Pearl,’ acknowledged Nessheim. ‘This is Lolly,’ he added, gesturing at the girl.

  ‘Great. Listen, doll, let me have a minute alone with Mr G-Man, okay?’

  ‘Yes, Mr Pearl,’ she said obediently and closed the door behind her as she left the room.

  Pearl stood by the big side window in a dark chocolate suit with thick stripes the colour of tailors’ chalk. As he looked at Studio Two he whistled tunelessly, clasping his hands behind his back and wiggling his sausage-like fingers. On his left pinkie he wore a thick gold ring, which had a centred ruby that glowed like a hungover eye.

  Nessheim broke the silence. ‘Thanks for having me out on Sunday,’ he said.

  ‘Sure,’ said Pearl, his back still to Nessheim as he continued to stare out the window. The Count was standing outside Studio Two now and to Nessheim’s consternation he saw Lolly approaching him. No, he was wrong; she was going back to Studio Two, though as she passed the Count he looked at her appreciatively and said something. Lolly laughed, but kept going. Good girl, thought Nessheim.

  To break the silence, Nessheim said, ‘I enjoyed meeting one of your friends.’

  ‘Who was that?’ asked Pearl dubiously, as if no one in his right mind would call his Sunday guests his friends.

  ‘Mo Dubin.’

  Pearl’s fingers stopped wriggling. He did a half-turn and eyed Nessheim, who added, ‘He said he was from Cleveland.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘He said you used to be partners there.’

  ‘Partners? Me and Mo?’ Pearl looked incredulous. ‘You got to be kidding.’

  ‘That’s what he said.’

  Pearl shrugged. ‘You know how it is,’ he said con-fidingly, accompanied by an undertone of demand. ‘Sometimes you have an old friend who’s on his uppers and you do your best to help him out. Between you and me and the lamp post, Mo got himself into a little hot water with the folks at Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. Not with the Bureau, I hasten to add,’ he said with a chuckle. Pearl waited for Nessheim to laugh too. He didn’t.