Bill Pronzini - Quicksilver

His first reaction to my entrance was an annoyed glare. Then he recognized me, and the look metamorphosed into one of persecution. His long scrawny neck seemed to extend out of his shirt collar like a fox’s out of a burrow; his face immediately began to stain the same color as his hair.

“You!” he said. He dropped the pen he’d been scribbling with and bounced up to his feet. “What do you want this time? Why can’t you leave me alone?”

“Take it easy, Mr. Mixer. All I want-”

“For God’s sake!” he said. He came bounding out from behind the desk, dislodging one of the piles of his books in his hurry. The books made a series of thumping noises on the floor, but Mixer didn’t notice; he was already at the door. He poked his head out into the hallway, then retracted it and shut the door and locked it. When he turned to face me he was panting a little. He looked as if he were on the run from a pack of hounds.

“Why don’t you believe me?” he whispered.

“What?”

“I tell you, I never touched her.”

“Touched who?”

“Clara. An intellectual relationship is all we had.”

I was not going to play any more pattycake with him. I took a couple of steps in his direction and waggled a finger under his nose. He cowered back against the door, looking horrified, as if he thought I might be planning to turn him into fox soup.

“Listen, Mixer,” I said, “we’re going to have a talk-a nice, rational talk for a change. No more screwball stuff. You understand?”

“Screwball? Are you insinuating that I-?”

“Shut up,” I said.

He shut up. Just like Artie Gage when Haruko spoke or gave him a look. It seemed I had finally discovered the secret of how to deal with the Mad Lecher.

I curled my lip at him, tough-guy fashion. Then I reached out and flicked some imaginary lint off the front of his mauve jacket. The sudden movement made him flinch, which was what I’d intended. Both Clara and her father, whoever they were, would have enjoyed this. Hell, I was beginning to enjoy it a little myself.

“All right, Mixer,” I said. “Go on over to your desk and sit down. Don’t say anything; just do what you’re told.”

He obeyed. And sat stiffly in his chair, looking up at me with bright, nervous eyes.

“The first thing we’re going to get straight,” I said, “is why I’m here. I’m not working for the father of any woman named Clara; I’m working for Haruko Gage. Is that clear?”

“Haruko who? Oh, the Fujita girl. Yes.”

“So is it clear, or should I say it again?”

“No. I mean yes, it’s clear.”

“Good. Now do you remember why I’m working for Mrs. Gage?”

“Ah… no, I… no.”

“I didn’t think so. I’m working for her because she’s been getting anonymous presents in the mail-pieces of jewelry-and I’m trying to find out who’s sending them.”

“Oh. Yes. Anonymous presents.”

“Now you’ve got it. And I think the person responsible is connected to some Japanese guys named Tamura, Masaoka, and Hama., Those names ring any bells with you?”

He shook his head. His eyes were still bright and nervous, but there wasn’t any guile in them. Still, he was a screwball-and so was the person who had murdered those three Japanese. Screwballs, as any psychiatrist will tell you, can be cunning as hell when it comes to concealing things about themselves.

I asked him, “How about Chiyoko Wakasa? Do you know that name?”

“Is she another of my former students? I’m not very good with names; I deal with so many in my classes…”

“Okay, forget it. What I want from you now is some information on the Japanese relocation camps during World War II.”

That surprised him. Or seemed to. He said, “You do?”

“Yes, I do. You teach California history; you ought to know something about them.”

“Of course I know something about them.” Now he sounded indignant, as if I had impugned his credentials as a teacher. “I know quite a bit about them, as a matter of fact.”

“Is that right?”

“Yes. I once wrote a paper on the wartime evacuation of Japanese-Americans. A fascinating study, from the historical point of view.”

“Sure. Unless you happened to be in one of the camps.”

“Oh, yes,” he said. “Tragic. Very tragic. Families uprooted, stripped of their possessions, shunted off to live in dreary tar-paper barracks behind barbed-wire fences.” He shook his head. “Tragic,” he said again, and he seemed to mean it.

I started to say something, but Mixer wasn’t finished yet. He seemed to be warming to the subject. “Politics, war-induced hysteria, racism-those were the three principle reasons behind the decision to relocate. The idea that all the Nisei and Issei in California were potential spies and saboteurs is ridiculous. Did the government decide to imprison American citizens of German or Italian descent? Of course not; they were white. Nor was there any mass evacuation of people of Japanese ancestry in the Hawaiian Islands, even though more of them lived there than here on the West Coast: 157,000 as compared to 120,000. What the Hawaiians did was to round up known dissidents and ship them to the mainland camps-a total of less than a thousand, or a mere one percent of the adult Japanese population. Were you aware of that?”

“No,” I said, “I wasn’t.”

“A gross miscarriage of justice,” Mixer said, and nodded his head emphatically.

“How many camps were there altogether?”

“Ten. Two in California, two in Arizona, two in Arkansas, and one each in Wyoming, Colorado, Idaho, and Utah.”

“The one I’m interested in was a California camp-Tule Lake.”

“The California camps were the worst,” Mixer said. “Tule Lake and Manzanar-woeful places. Barracks partitioned into one-room apartments twenty by twenty-five feet, each one occupied by eight to ten people. No furniture; just Army cots and bed ticking. Inadequate sanitation facilities, inadequate hospital facilities; insuffient food in most camps. And the allowances the people were given… my God! Eight dollars a month for unskilled labor, twelve dollars for skilled labor, sixteen to nineteen dollars for professional work. And even then, the people didn’t start receiving their money until the War Relocation Board took control of the camps in the summer of 1942, three months after the first evacuation orders came out of Washington.”

Pretty grim stuff. I remembered feeling sympathy for the Japanese-Americans when it was happening; my family and a Nisei family had been friendly in the Noe Valley district where I grew up. But I’d forgotten about their plight as time passed, ignored the suffering and the injustice. Too many others had forgotten and ignored too, without any feeling of shame or culpability. It was only in recent years that some effort at reparation had been made-too little, too late, to too few of the survivors.

I said, “Tell me about Tule Lake. What kind of camp was it?”

“The worst of them,” Mixer said. “Isolated, with its own irrigated farm land so that it was self-supporting; but there were sixteen thousand people jammed into it, an uneasy mix of Pacific Coast farm workers and their families and recalcitrants from other camps and from Hawaii. It was also the official ‘Segregation Center,’ where the small percentage of Issei who requested repatriation to Japan and Nisei who renounced their American citizenship were sent.”

“It sounds pretty woeful, all right.”

“Yes. Boredom, fear, distrust, suspicion, greed-those were the everyday elements of life at Tule Lake.”

“Was there much crime, then?”

“My God, yes. Graft, theft, rape, assault, two murders. Not to mention countless disturbances. Members of the Hokoku Seinen Dan — young men who advocated renunciation and repatriation-used to blow bugles early in the morning and hold marches and generally terrorize the peaceful residents.”