Snakeskin Shamisen (14 page)

This was all
kusai
, as smelly as fish skin left in a trash can on a summer day. Strange things were going on in this nursing home. It wasn’t Wishbone’s style to go MIA. He wasn’t a man who did well solo. His disappearance was an act of desperation. Whether it was Wishbone’s desperation or another’s, he was in trouble.

W
hen Mas went home, he disconnected the telephone. Since he had just spoken to Mari, it would be another two weeks before she’d call again.

It wasn’t worth it to continue with this investigation, Mas decided. This situation wasn’t black-and-white—it was full of grays. He couldn’t tell who was bad or good, guilty or innocent. He was standing squarely on one side, Isokichi Sanjo’s side, but what if it was the wrong side?

He felt bad for Randy Yamashiro, but realistically, what could he do? Mas was just a good-for-nothing gardener who didn’t even have a full lineup of customers. G. I. and Juanita had the degrees and licenses. They didn’t really need him. The next time they asked, Mas would politely beg off any more visits to
shamisen
instructors or Uchinanchu community leaders, he vowed, and then he went to sleep.

T
he next morning was peaceful. Mas didn’t bother to get up at the crack of dawn, and instead lingered in bed. He listened for the sparrows outside in the boxwood bush and could smell the edges of the sycamore tree’s leaves turning brown. He wondered what the next season, winter, would bring. Another El Niño, with the deluge of water that could melt a boulder and hillsides? Or would it be a sporadic sprinkling that would leave the ground hardened and lawns withered?

After twelve hours of being disconnected from the outside world, Mas finally felt strong enough to deal with outsiders again and plugged in his phone. If Juanita or G. I. called, he would just tell them he was too busy, too old, to take up his time going
gasa-gasa
over the murder of a man he barely knew. He didn’t have much time to practice his
kotowari
, his regrets, because the phone soon began to ring.

“I’ve been calling and calling you, Mas.” It was G. I.

Mas took a big breath, but before he could spit out his second thoughts, G. I. shocked him with this: “Homeland Security arrested Juanita’s father. A glitch in his permanent residency status. Doesn’t make sense.”

Antonio Gushiken, the mustachioed man who stood rail straight and somehow knew how to respect his grown daughter’s space. Mas knew that Juanita had been born in the U.S.; Mr. Gushiken must have been in this country for at least forty years.

“Now they’re saying that he illegally entered this country,” continued G. I. “But he was part of the prisoner-of-war exchange during World War Two. That’s how he and his parents came over. Later, the government made provisions for these Japanese Peruvians to stay, so I don’t understand why it’s a problem now.”

Mas had a clue. Something to do with Juanita’s run-in with Agent Lee. The line crackled, inciting a response from G. I.

“That damn noise—I bet they’ve been wiretapping your phone; they bugged Juanita’s. Better if you use a pay phone from now on.”

The telephone receiver grew slippery in Mas’s sweaty palm. Wiretapping, electronic bugs—these weren’t a part of his life.

“Juanita’s helping her mom with the restaurants. They don’t even know where her dad is being held. I got the best hotshot immigration lawyer working on the case. This is beyond me, Mas. We need the big guns.”

After getting off the phone, Mas just sat at the kitchen table, listening to the ticking of the wall clock. He was not a superstitious man. He believed that crop circles (and, yes, they even showed up in Japanese rice paddies) were created by teenagers with too much time on their hands, not by space aliens. He didn’t give much credence to secret societies, although he did once see a former customer leave his house in a silly red hat with a long yellow tassel to meet three other men in the same outrageous getup. But it all made sense now how Agent Lee had been one step ahead of him, at least in this last visit to Keiro. He had been listening to Mas’s conversations all along.

Juanita must be worried sick about her father. She was the type to take charge and put out fires before they got out of control. But this fire was much bigger than any one person could extinguish. The only way to stop it was to light another one, but then you faced the risk of the flames joining forces and swallowing you whole.

Mas felt his chest grow tighter as the clock continued its ticking. Years ago, he had had to throw away their old, defective clock and replaced it with a plastic one he’d gotten free at Santa Anita Racetrack. The face featured a jockey holding on to a racehorse, the image blurred as if they were going top speed. There were no numbers, so sometimes Mas was an hour off the real time.

It was either four or five when Mas drove to Frank’s Liquor Store on Fair Oaks Avenue to use the beat-up pay phone outside on the sidewalk. He took out a couple of business cards from his wallet and propped them up in the graffiti-covered pay phone enclosure.

“Your phone not workin’, Mas?” Frank walked outside to rearrange his stacks of the
Los Angeles Times
, the L.A.
Sentinel
, and
La Opiñion
by his open door.

“Broke,” Mas said.

“Here, here, on me.” Frank stuffed a couple of coins into the slot and went back in his store to give Mas some privacy. Mas knew who he would be calling first.

“Alo here.” The detective’s voice was surprisingly loud over the phone.

“Hallo, Mas Arai.”

“Mr. Arai, how can I help you?”

“Findsu out the man with
shamisen
—Judge Edwin Parker.”

“Yes.”

What? Alo knew already?

“We got that information on the day of the murder. Anything else, Mr. Arai?”

Mas felt like a fool. What had taken him and Juanita days to uncover had already been in the hands of Detective Alo, a real professional. He thought about mentioning his having been followed by Agent Lee, but he wasn’t sure what the relationship was between the Torrance Police Department and Homeland Security. It would be better to wait on that revelation.

“Well, call if you happen to get a hold of any other information.”

Mas ended the call and considered going back home. But instead he stuck more coins in the pay phone.

At the third ring, she finally answered. “Hello.”

“Professor Genessee.” Mas was surprised how her name rolled off his tongue, as easily as ordering
hamachi
from his favorite sushi bar in Little Tokyo. “Itsu Mas Arai.”

“Mas, so nice to hear from you again. How can I help you?”

“Sumptin’ happen.” Mas could only manage to whisper.

Mas told Genessee a condensed version of events—from the Spam jackpot to the Hawaiian restaurant to the
shamisen
sensei, the Homeland Security agent, and the funny sound on his phone. And, of course, the arrest of Antonio Gushiken.

“I think your Mr. Gushiken may be in serious trouble.” The professor didn’t mince words. “After 9/11, everyone’s on high alert about immigrants.”

“Just a boy when he come ova,” Mas explained the little he knew. “The U.S. government the one who bring the family here in the first place.”

Genessee knew all about it: Japanese Peruvians who were taken to a camp in Crystal City, Texas, to be part of a prisoner-of-war exchange. Only the exchange was never totally completed, and even if it had happened, what purpose would it have served? Japan wasn’t home for these Peruvians, as much as it wasn’t home for Americans like Tug and Spoon. So then the leftover Peruvian folks were truly homeless. Peru didn’t want them, and neither did Japan or the United States. It was only after work by some lawyers that the Japanese Peruvians were allowed to stay in the States, Genessee explained.

“I hope your man has a good lawyer,” she added.

Mas nodded. Big guns, wasn’t that what G. I. had said? “Don’t wanna be too involve,” he inadvertently murmured.

“Mr. Arai, I think you’re already involved. You need to help Juanita. And her family. Isn’t that why you called me?”

Mas felt his face grow hot. He glanced at his image in the metal faceplate of the pay telephone. On the scuffed surface was a distorted tan swirl with two dark holes, his eyes, staring back at him. Why was he calling this woman, whom he barely knew? What about her seemed safe and strong, somebody who could point him in the right direction?

“Listen, Mr. Arai, I think I know of a place that can help you out.” She mentioned something about a library and then an address in South Central L.A.

South Central? What kind of help was the professor offering?

“It’s a private library—I’ve heard that records belonging to immigration attorneys in the fifties are stored there. I can even meet you there on Tuesday. Maybe we can find out information about this Isokichi Sanjo.”

When Mas hesitated, Genessee added, “What do you have to lose?”

My life, Mas thought, recollecting the daily reports of shootings in the area on the television news. But if the professor was not afraid, Mas wasn’t either.

O
n Tuesday morning, Mas went down the Harbor Freeway, but this time not as far as Gardena. He got off at the Florence exit, recalling the intersection where the 1992 riots had started. Hadn’t there been a Japanese man pulled out of a melee by a black man who turned out to be a TV actor?

He parked on the street, fed money into a parking meter, and approached a building with a long mural featuring a bunch of women—a bespectacled black woman in a suit and hat, a woman bent over a sewing machine, a woman wearing a hard hat with her arm raised. What kind of library was this? Mas wondered. Looked like a place for troublemakers, not researchers. But there, in front, wearing a dress that looked like it was made of Japanese batik cloth, was Genessee Howard.

“Had any problems finding the place?”

Mas shook his head. Genessee was wearing new earrings this time, simple pearls that made her earlobes look like open oysters. Instead of a purse or briefcase, she carried a large straw handbag.

The metal folding security gate had been pushed aside to make way for visitors. The tint on the locked glass door was too dark for Mas to see inside. Genessee went straight for the black doorbell on the frame of the door. It was obvious that she had been there before.

A large woman wearing a Mexican-style embroidered shirt opened the door and gestured for them to come in. Her salt-and-pepper hair was all mussed up—definitely a look of an
asanebo
, a late riser who had just rolled out of bed to come to work.

The cavernous room felt a bit dreary, as if it had been drizzling inside. A few colorful posters punctuated the stark walls, but what took center stage were rows of bookcases filled with books of every size—yellowed tomes as solid as bricks, flimsy booklets as thin as mud flaps on a truck, and new paperbacks that glistened with hope and expectation. The whole place smelled like old paper, and Mas felt his body growing itchy, as if silverfish had gotten underneath his clothes.

Mas’s eyes attempted to adjust to the dimness. How could anybody read in here? The professor, meanwhile, had been talking to the bedhead-haired librarian, who nodded and disappeared in some stacks. The professor set her straw bag on a fake wood table and pulled out a laptop computer and a yellow legal pad. She handed the pad and a pencil to Mas. “We’re not supposed to use ink,” she said to Mas, who let the pencil slip through his fingers. Now what was the professor expecting him to do? Mas preferred reseeding someone’s lawn to anything dealing with books and writing. But he needed to be strong and keep all his petty
monku
locked up inside, he told himself. Juanita and her father were in trouble, in need of any kind of break. So when the librarian emerged with a box full of files, Mas did not say one word of complaint.

“These files have been popular lately,” the librarian said. The front of the box was marked
AMERICANS TO PROTECT IMMIGRANTS COMMITTEE FILES, 1952–1960
.

“What do you mean?” Genessee asked.

“Well, no one’s asked for them in years, and all of sudden, we’ve received three—well, four—requests, counting yours, over the past couple of weeks.”

“Who’s asked for them?”

The librarian denied the professor’s request. “You know, Genessee, that that information is confidential. You wouldn’t want me to be telling other people what you’ve been up to, right?”

They went through file by file, paper by paper. There were newspaper articles from the fifties, legal documents, and finally correspondence. Letters from people Mas had never heard of, written to people he had never heard of. The pages of Mas’s legal pad remained empty, and his eyes began to slide shut. Before his forehead hit the table, Mas heard the professor’s voice: “I think I’ve found something.”

Mas wiped the drool off the sides of his mouth and pushed his reading glasses back over his eyes. “
Nani
?”

“Isokichi Sanjo, wasn’t that his name?” The professor traced a section of a letter with her smooth index finger. She sounded out the name: “I-so-ki-chi San-jo.”

“Yah, datsu him,” Mas said, looking over Genessee’s arm. It was some kind of mimeographed letter. Dated 1953.

“I guess he was among immigrants arrested for their affiliations with the Communist Party in the thirties.”

Communists—
aka
, that’s what Gushi-mama had told them. But it didn’t make sense. If the letter was dated 1953, what did that have to do with something from the thirties?

“It was the height of the Red scare. The McCarran-Walter Act enabled the government to deport ‘undesirable’ aliens, which was open to interpretation, let me tell you. Some of the deported had even fought for the Allied Forces during World War Two. But on the flip side, the act was the same legislation that allowed Issei to finally get naturalized. So most Japanese Americans view it as being beneficial.”

Mas nodded. He did recall photographs in
The Rafu Shimpo
of Japanese men in suits and felt hats and their wives in dresses and sturdy black shoes raising their right hands to take oaths to be Americans. Just like Gushi-mama, these folks couldn’t wait to pledge allegiance to the country where they had spent most or all of their adult lives. Didn’t matter that three years of it might have been behind barbed wire. Didn’t matter that the government had forced them to leave their strawberry and lettuce fields ready to be harvested. Their love for America was deep; it went far beyond material possessions. It was wrapped up in their children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren. They didn’t care about severing ties to the past, because they wanted to hold on to the future.