10:23 p.m.

A siren kicked on. Ashida woke up. He rolled over and looked out the window.

L.A. went black. The Belmont bleachers vanished. Searchlights reared up and swooped.

The siren blare escalated. The fear moment passed. No Jap Zeros swooped.

Ashida dressed in the dark. He got an hour’s sleep. The morgue was a short walk. Nort Layman lived there and never slept.

He stepped into the hallway. Someone painted JAP! on his door. He got home at 8:30. It happened between then and now.

Ashida locked up and walked downstairs. The street was blackout black and searchlight yellow. He walked due east. The sirens sustained a high rev.

He thought of Goleta. He thought of cut-Jap eugenics and muckraking films. He passed the Hall of Justice. Night clerks perched on the roof and enjoyed the show.

He hit the morgue. Hearse drivers shot craps on the roof. A guy pissed over the edge.

The morgue ran ’round the clock. Ashida walked back to Nort Layman’s exam room. It featured disinfecting tables and body vaults. Nort added a couch and clothes rack.

Nort sat on the couch. A gurney played footrest. Ashida took the one chair.

“I hope you’re staying out of phone booths. I did the Shigeta autopsy. He was blown to shit. It feels like a race job, more than anything else.”

Ashida said, “Tell me why.”

Nort said, “His face was obliterated. I think the killer intended to make that statement, either consciously or unconsciously. He eradicated all external evidence of the man being Japanese.”

Ashida considered it. “Racial science, in a way. A malevolent form of eugenics.”

Nort shrugged. “You’ve got progressive eugenicists who want to build healthier people, and Nazi humps who want to wipe out the races they don’t like. The Shigeta deal interests me, though. It feels like a crime of opportunity, with a random victim. And I have a very strong hunch that the guy plugged Mr. Shigeta to impress someone.”

“Like a cat bringing a mouse home to its master?”

Nort lit a cigarette. “Exactly.”

Ashida said, “The Watanabes. We’re ten days in now.”

Nort pointed to a body vault. “I’ve been going through wound texts for days. Not only were the swords at the house too dull to have made the incisions, but no goddamn ceremonial sword in existence could have made them.”

Ashida said, “Let me extrapolate, please. You liked my theory that the killer had the Watanabes drink poison tea. It would account for that rare poison found in their livers. There’s that, and that knife that Captain Parker and I saw in Griffith Park, which significantly matched the faded wound on Ryoshi Watanabe, which—”

“—which could have been the weapon that killed the Watanabes, but not dipped in poison, the way the warlords did. Which could have been used, one blade at a time, to both kill the Watanabes and simulate hara-kiri.”

Ashida smiled. “Is it feasible?”

Nort smiled. “It’s feasible, working on possible. And, if I continue to suffer from insomnia, I’ll probably think up some new tests I can run.”

The all-clear sirens blew. Nort retracted his window shades. Outside lights flared.

They talked crime and science. Nort teethed on the Shigeta job. Ashida thought of Kay Lake. She called him before he sacked out. She talked up a planned Pershing Square rally. Comrade Claire booked a camera crew. It was their opening film salvo.

Crime and science. Eugenics. Nort brought up Dr. Lin Chung. Dr. Lin was a race man and nose-job provider. Ashida brought up Terry Lux and stayed mum on the cut job he saw. Nort disdained Dr. Terry. He went to med school with him. Terry pandered to rich dope fiends. Terry was tight with Ace Kwan. Terry knew the Dudster. Ace supplied opiate base for Terry’s dope cures. The Dudster mediated a southside dope trade. Some Armenian fucks peddled white horse under his flag.

They talked. They teethed. Biology and chemistry. Newfangled spectrographs. The sun popped to life. Nort dozed off in middiscourse. Ashida stood up.

Nort stirred. Nort said, “Stay out of phone booths.”

7:28 a.m.

The morgue left him woozy. Decay and pestilent vapors. He walked outside and sucked in fresh air.

Pershing Square was close. He cut through Little Tokyo and tallied padlocked shops. They ran about 68%. A fat man leaned out a window and hissed at him.

He hit Hill Street. Pershing Square was packed and 8:00 a.m. rowdy. A platform flanked the bronze J. J. Pershing. A microphone was wired to loudspeakers hooked into trees.

A hambone harangued a big crowd. Ashida joined the fray. He was skintight with the great L.A. unwashed.

Speakers huddled on the platform. That’s Dr. Fred Hiltz. He’s been in the papers per the Deutsches Haus raid. Hiltz chatted with Reynolds Loftis. Claire and Kay chatted with a colored man. Ashida made him off a Vice sheet. He was the local Burgermeister of the Negro Nazi League.

The ham was Gerald L. K. Smith. He was a Disciples of Christ cleric and noted Jew baiter. Ashida kept his head down and tried to blend in. Smith whipped up the crowd.

German atrocities have been overplayed. The Red Control Apparatus ladles on the boo-hoo. Hitler mollycoddles the Jews. He’s a heartwarming humanist. Join the Christian Nationalist Crusade. Derail the “Jew Deal” of President Franklin “Double-Cross” Rosenfeld. Write to P.O. Box 8992/Glendale, California. Purchase our informative tracts.

The crowd cheered. The crowd booed. The crowd tossed paper cups. A water-filled condom hit the platform and exploded. Gerald L. K. Smith hugged the Negro Nazi. They faced the crowd and Sieg Heil!ed.

More cheers. More boos. More water-balloon bombs. The crowd grew. Ashida got compressed. A skullcap man brushed by him and mouthed “Goddamn Jap.” He saw the film crew. They stood on benches at the back of the crowd.

Kay Lake walked to the microphone. She wore a police blue dress. The crowd simmered down. Ashida caught the gist.

Let her talk. She’s a girl. Feed us some shit we can work with, doll. We’re here to act up.

Ashida scanned the crowd. He saw Bill Parker back by the film crew. Parker stood on a trash can and leaned upside a tree. He wore civilian clothes. He had a high balcony view.

Kay placed her hands on the mike stand. Kay looked straight at the crowd.

“We live in a time of the vile act justified. Vile acts spawn immediate and reactive injustice. Such reaction is often obscured by righteous intent. The empathic bond of shared catastrophe creates an unshakable will to power that binds each and every one of us to a world outside of and most deeply within ourselves. We comport in this shared world at great moral peril, and understand that this is the moment that calls us to self-sacrifice. The name that we give to this moment is History, and that moment is now.”

She paused. Ashida read it. She’s catching her breath. She’s got them for one instant.

Kay said, “History afflicts both individuals and nations. History assumes the form of a mass debt that common people pay in blood. History is this moment, and at this moment we are charged to love and hate on a mass scale, as we act as individuals called to the best within ourselves, as we react to atrocity by euphemizing atrocity, for atrocity assumes forms both subtle and strident and obliterates everything within its path, and as individuals we are thus charged to the near-impossible task of enacting love that much more ruthlessly, and with a self-sacrifice that would have been unknowable had History not summoned us. At this moment, our options become do everything or do nothing.”

She paused. Ashida read it. She’s still got them. She knows they won’t hold off much—

Kay said, “War is the mass imprisonment of the individual will and the paradoxical liberation of the individual voice. Thus, self-sacrifice oft becomes the voicing of unpopular sentiment within more popular outrage. History is this moment. This moment must acknowledge the merger of the individual voice and our nation’s will to power, and bring it to a more specific moment of conscious and contrary statement. We must avenge the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor with the full assumption of our mass will to power, which will be in the end our individually enacted wills to fight and risk death. Because we are honorably called to that duty, we must honorably call ourselves to the recognition of the sordid fact that we are now perpetrating a blood libel on the honorable Japanese people of this city, that our best selves have been countermanded by fear and irrational hatred, and—”

Boos. Jeers. Catcalls.

Shouts, yells, shrieks.

Kay moved her lips. The crowd yelled over her. Lowlifes dumped the loudspeakers. Kay moved her lips. No sound came out.

She had no voice. They stole her voice. Somebody yelled, “JAP!” It was right up close to him. A man jumped in and hit him.

He pitched forward. He flailed and stayed upright. He heard Goddamn Jap! a million times.

A man hit him. A boy hit him. A girl kicked him. He raised his hands and covered his face. A woman yanked at his arms.

Ashida went down. People hit him and kicked him. He lost sight of Kay. People hit him. People kicked him. People spit on him. He felt beat-on and shit-on and fucked-up anesthetized.

Something hit the people.

They stopped. They stumbled. They tripped. They fell down themselves. Something hit them and made them run.

It’s hard to see. There’s blood in his eyes. It might be Scotty Bennett and Bill Parker. They’re hitting the people. They’re hitting them and kicking them and making them run.