1 Oct 90—HONOLULU
Rita Macklin had spent the morning at Pearl Harbor where the dead ship Arizona rested in the shallow water. It was supposed to be one of the reasons for her trip. She had sold Mac on this story and another story and not told him the truth at all. It was not the first time she had lied to her editor at the magazine but it was the first time she had done it for this reason.
He had shared part of a secret.
She had tried to see it in the warm, still water of Pearl Harbor where the ship Arizona was in a shallow, wet grave, marked with a memorial to the bones of the sailors entombed inside. She was a reporter and watcher and she tried to see the past in the stillness of the present. It sometimes worked, to stand perfectly still and see the faces and hear the sounds of other times long dead. It is not true that you have to experience a thing to feel it because all the dead of all the battles never leave the battleground. They remain there as ghosts above the graves, waiting to touch the kindred spirits of the living.
In the afternoon, she met the man in the café of the Holiday Inn where she stayed off Waikiki Beach. His name was Ernie Funo, a Japanese-American whose parents had been interred in California in the first years of the war. He was as tall as she and powerfully built with thick, dark hair framing an open face with just the trace of a mocking smile on his lips. He worked as a stringer for the same magazine that employed Rita Macklin and he aspired to more. He knew his way around the islands and he knew some secrets that never show up in print. He knew about a man named Captain Peterson.
She slipped into a chair opposite him and waited for coffee. He had his in front of him, along with a copy of the New York Times turned to the crossword puzzle. He gave her a rueful smile because his head hurt. They had seen the nightlife of Honolulu the night before and it was much like the nightlife in other cities, where excess is turned into a cause for celebration.
“You look like a walking hangover,” she said. She liked him from the first. He was quick and he knew the things she wanted to know for herself.
“Cheerfulness at the beginning of the day signifies a bad end,” he said. The coffee came along with menus.
They ordered food. The waitress walked away and Funo looked at her and the mocking smile was back again, brushing against the hangover in his eyes.
“Peterson went out this morning.”
“Is that unusual?”
“He went out alone. His ship, Pequod, is a thirty-six-footer and he can handle it, but it’s odd. If he’s making a big drug pickup, he would take along some of the gang. But he went alone and that’s odd and it’s odd where he went.”
“Where was that?”
“I talked to a fellow named Jimmy Wong. A nice fellow except for his cocaine habit. I spent a hundred dollars to help supply him. From company funds.”
“Keep a receipt,” she said.
“Yes. But I don’t think the IRS will approve. Anyway. Jimmy was out this morning himself, he wouldn’t say why but I can guess. He was out ten miles and saw the Pequod going flat-out due west. Maybe Peterson is going to Japan.”
Japan. She kept the excitement out of her face by staring at the coffee as she carefully stirred it.
“What’s this really about, Rita?”
Exactly as Devereaux would say it. She had lied to Funo from the beginning because he wasn’t part of this, Mac wasn’t part of this, Devereaux would have said she wasn’t part of this.
“We’re going to do a major on the Asian drug trade. And Hawaii is part of it.”
“Peterson is a lowlife beginning to a big story.”
“Where was he going?”
“I don’t know.”
She glanced at him. He was waiting for something and so was she.
“You’ve got some idea.”
“Peterson is a smuggler and that means dope because that’s what people usually smuggle. But there have been other things smuggled.”
“What things?”
“I read five newspapers every day. It’s part of my job. At least, the way I see my job. I like the patterns in stories. You can tell things beyond the stories themselves if you read the patterns the right way. Do you know what I mean?”
“Yes. But I don’t read five newspapers.”
“Perhaps you have a more active life than I do. Look here. There was a story on the inside pages of the Times four days ago. A freighter blew up in the Sea of Japan called the Fujitsu. I was a little intrigued and I got a copy of the Asahi Shimbum for the next day and they made quite a story out of it, bigger than the Times’s first story. The ship had twenty in the crew and they recovered thirteen bodies. The ship went down in two hours and it belonged to Masatata Heavy Industries.”
“What’s that?”
“The usual conglomerate. They make bicycles and auto parts and everything between. The last five years, they’ve built an enormous R & D facility in Hokkaido in the north. Very secure. They even use some Tokyo gangsters for security, which shows they’re serious. The spokesman for Masatata says the ship contained computers.”
Computers. She held her breath and he noticed it and a small, knowing smile replaced the mocking smile. “This is about computers, isn’t it, Rita? You just didn’t want to tell me.”
“What was really on the ship that blew up?”
“Computers.” Funo shrugged. “I don’t know. I do know that the first ship on the scene arrived less than an hour after she went down. It was a Soviet trawler, the Novostok. But everyone was dead. The sea was rough.”
“There’s lifesaving equipment—”
“Exactly. But there wasn’t anything in the water. Not a raft, not a preserver. Everything went down. That makes it a mystery.”
“What’s the connection to Pequod and Peterson?”
Funo smiled then. “I have a friend named Toshibata at Shimbum in Tokyo and I called him. Very expensive call, I kept a receipt. I asked him some more because I like to watch things and anything about Japanese business makes news in America. He told me a second ship could have reached the Fujitsu before it went down. It was a freighter called the Northern Lights, it’s an American ship registered in the Bahamas but it works down the Aleutians this time of year to warm water. Does coasting and some transshipping to the warm-water Alaskan ports in winter like Haines. But I checked with the shipping desk at the Advertiser and they said the Northern Lights is headed due west for Hawaii. And the Lights has never put in at Hawaii. Do you see the connection?”
She shook her head. “Too many connections, Ernie. You’re dreaming up a story—”
He flushed then. “Not really. The Northern Lights has been involved in smuggling, too, in Alaskan waters. Boom, there’s an accident and boom, there’s a ship on the scene that heads for Hawaii and then, boom boom, a known local smuggler called Peterson goes out to meet it. What do you think?”
“None of this is in the newspapers.”
“What we know and what we print are different things sometimes, Rita.” He was smiling again. “I called Mifuno again just a little while ago and he said the word among the gangsters in Tokyo is that they’re going after the Northern Lights. Why? Did the Northern Lights pick up a waterlogged computer? Or is it something else?” He paused. “Tell what else it is, Rita.”
But she was thinking out loud. “Peterson will come back into Honolulu.”
“Yes.”
“And the shipping authorities—”
“The port police and DEA will take him apart. They’ll look for cocaine or even marijuana. Something that Peterson deals in. The port is very strung-out today, the dopies think Peterson was out getting medicine to make them feel better.”
“But they won’t find what they’re looking for,” Rita Macklin said.
“That’s what I think. And I’ll bet the Northern Lights turns north tomorrow after dropping off a package to a certain party in mid-ocean.”
“Back to Alaska.”
“Rita, we can meet Peterson when he comes in. Interview him and look around if you want. But you’ve got to tell me more than you told me because you’re not looking at Peterson for a drug-smuggling story.”
She bit her lip. It was a pretty gesture because she had a slight overbite and because she did this in the way of a woman who is thinking furiously beyond the present conversation.
“I can’t tell you anything, Ernie. If you have to back out, you have to back out, but this is about something else, something you don’t want to know anything about.”
It was something that Devereaux might have said.