‘I’m too tired to figure out what anything means anymore,’ the Magician said. ‘I gotta get some shut-eye.’
‘Okay, let’s pack it in. Izzy can run the print-out on all this and we’ll take it with us.’
‘Take it with us where?’ asked Eliza.
‘Japan.’
‘Japan!’
‘Right. AMRAN’s in Japan. Hooker’s in Japan. Bridges was in Japan, Chameleon’s in Japan, San-San is in Japan. Obviously there’s only one place to be, so let’s all get some rest. The next stop is Tokyo.’
BOOK THREE
—JOSEPH PULITZER
1
Etched in the golden tablets on the wall of the ancient Japanese temple of Oka-Ri, it is written: ‘The seasons change with the days, man’s memory changes with the yes. An English poet, centuries later, expressed the same thought more succinctly:
‘In the end, all history is memory and gossip.’
There were days when General Hooker would sit alone for hours in the darkness of his office, companioned only by the faulty machine in his chest, gleaning the troubled days of his past to conjure faltered memories. On the blackest of these days he could hear the thunder of cannon and the cry of bugles, but his mind’s eye saw only swirls of dust, clouding faded days of glory. Names and faces eluded him like ghosts at sunrise, and the names of places drifted in and out of his tick-tock solitude without streets, spires or parks.
Only Garvey knew and understood Hooker’s agony. It was Garvey alone who came to his aid when the old man sometimes cried aloud, calling the names of fallen comrades or forgotten battlefields.
‘Did you call, General?’ he would say.
And the general would repeat the name, and Garvey, his own memory blemished by time, would make up a face and an incident and a place to go with it, and Hooker, satisfied, would return to his uneasy reverie. He had been writing his memoirs for ten years and had amassed a gigantic manuscript. Editing it, sorting truth as reality from truth as Hooker wished it were, would have taken another decade, and so the manuscript was unpublishable.
There were rare occasions when the dust of yesteryear dissipated for an hour or so and Hooker would have a very clear vision of the past. These experiences were almost orgasmic for the old man. He would sit entranced, watching the moments play out through glazed and age-grayed eyes. And so, among the hundreds of handwritten pages of tainted facts, there was a handful of brilliantly re-created battle scenes and incredibly precise character studies. All the rest was imagination.
Hooker was not a prisoner of his past. Weeks might go by when he attended to business lucidly. But there were those days when he would awaken and tell Garvey, ‘Colonel, I’m going to work on my memoirs today,’ and he would disappear into the office and Garvey would cancel appointments, rearrange schedules, make the proper apologies, and carry out most of the business as usual. Two or three times during those days, Garvey would respond when Le heard Hooker calling out.
This was just such a day, although Garvey had reminded him of his appointment with O’Hara later in the afternoon. Should he cancel?
‘No. That wouldn’t be prudent,’ Hooker said and winked. He was feeling good.
Hooker had been inside the office for a couple of hours when Garvey heard him cry out his most frequent refrain: ‘Bobby, where are yuh, Bobby?’
Garvey entered the large office.
‘You called, General?’
‘It’s Bobby again. At Bastine.’
Garvey remembered that day well. And he remembered the boy just as well.
Bastine. 9 March 1942. On that day Garvey began his three years as a prisoner of war at the notorious Suchi Barracks. Hooker was to escape to glory and eventually return to Bastine to free him. And Bobby vanished forever.
‘It’s all right, old man,’ Hooker said exuberantly, ‘I can recall it quite clearly, thank you.
He had stood that morning on the porch of the glistening white Officers’ Club building, pole-straight, his campaign hat and dark glasses covering most of his hawklike face, clean-shaven, showered and dressed in freshly washed and ironed khakis, waiting for the inevitable on what he knew would be the most humiliating day of his life.
He listened to the dull thump, thump of the big Japanese guns followed by the sighing 105s as they came in and then the sudden barn of the explosions.
The Japanese were twenty miles away and closing the gap fast. The Americans were in rout. For days, what was left of Hooker’s command had fought up the slender Bastine Peninsula, leaving dozens of dead for every mile
