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Things Change

The young Japanese man stood staring out the second story window of his hotel room. The whitewash on the wall lightly rubbing off on his shirtsleeves as he braced himself in the windowsill. In his hands, a small set of field binoculars aimed out towards the horizon, observing at the mechanical forest that surrounded the town of Tampico Mexico. Oil derricks, as far as the eye could see was all there was to distract the eye from the scene of dust and poverty that filled the surrounding streets of this frontier oil patch town on the Gulf of Mexico. While the man was observing the actions of the men working on the oil derricks and the coming and going of tanker ships in the harbor, he himself was being secretly observed from just across the street, in another hotel, by two men he had never met.

Special Agents Harry Thompson and Dave Ahrens, field agents for the US Bureau of Investigation had been assigned to keep an eye on the young man who had taken such an interest in the Mexican oil industry. Their charge was a young Japanese man, in his middle 20’s, stocky, but not fat. He lived modestly, traveling from town to town in the Mexican oil patch, staying a few days, and then moving on.

“He’s at it again” said Harry from behind his own binoculars, hidden by the window screen.

“Hmmm, well then it must be getting close to time for him to head downstairs to the poker tables then” replied Dave as he stood to get dressed.

For the past two weeks, day in day out, hour after hour, they kept notes, pictures, talked to a few people and on one occasion, entered his room in an attempt to find out information about the man they have been charged with the task of surveillance. After two weeks of watching the man they began to notice some patterns to his most telling habits. The man they were watching was a creature of the most exacting discipline. He awoke at the same time every day, ate breakfast in his room, took a walk and returned to his room, spent exactly 30 minutes observing from his window, then went downstairs and hailed a taxi for a ride around the town. Every day at the end of the day at this time, he took out his binoculars, wrote some notes and then wrote a letter to his brother, which was promptly and intercepted the next morning with the assistance of the local constabulary.

Unfortunately, the letter was in Japanese. To get around this little problem, Agents Thompson and Ahrens successfully managed to find and recruit a sailor fluent in Japanese from the American merchant fleet at harbor in Tampico bay.

“It’s a letter to his brother, talking about how cheap gas is here in Tampico” he said. “Small talk about the trip down, says he liked Texas, and found hitchhiking to be quite an adventure”.

“Is that all”? Harry asked.

“Yeah, that’s it, just small talk” he said as he flipped the letter across the desk to Harry.

“Well do me a favor would ya? Copy the letter down in English so we have something for the files” Dave asked the sailor. His name was Jimmy Ishigaki, he was a Japanese who grew up in Southern California but had some local trouble there and went to sea to avoid getting sent away for it.

“I’ll copy the whole thing in Japanese as well so you can have an original if that will help me get D.A. in Long Beach off my back”

“No problem Jimmy, you just let us handle the D.A. you get that letter translated, alright?” Harry added with a bang on the desk and a smile.

Jimmy grabbed a pencil and paper and began transcribing the letters, first in English then in Japanese.

“Harry, we’ve been following this guy for two weeks, and we still don’t know who he really is, or why he is here. This is not going to go over well with “you know who” and he is going to be here tomorrow to take a report from us on what we’ve been doing”. Dave said.

“ Look, we’ve done our job. We just give the old man the scoop when he gets here, go over our notes, hand over the files and then we get to head back to Washington. If they know something we don’t know, then that’s their problem, not ours. “

Jimmy stopped writing and looked at Dave with a smile.

“Just what are you looking at Jimmy?” Dave asked.

You guys say you don’t know who this guy is, and you say he plays poker every day at this time, every day, regular as the sunrise in the morning, right?

“Yeah, so?”

“So go play poker with the man! No better way to get to know someone than to play poker with him for 9 or 10 hours, right? Jimmy said with a shrug.

Dave and Harry looked at each other and recognized a good thing when they heard it. Not only could they keep an eye on their prey, they might learn something about him and they might just make a few bucks at it as well. Anything beat the hours of tedium that comes from field surveillance.

The next morning they stumbled out of the cantina from a night of gambling and Agents Thompson and Ahrens knew a great deal more about the man they had been trailing than they did the day before. For starters, they knew that he knew how to play poker, having successfully taken both the agents for all that they had. They also knew that he was missing two fingers on his left hand, but they didn’t know why. He said that he was a tourist visiting Mexico while on break from his studies at Harvard. The revelation of this incredible story made Harry shoot his beer out of his nose, amusing all at the table, including the man they had been sent to watch who let out a hearty laugh at the sight of this grown man acting like a fool. Just the idea of this Japanese chard shark sitting in a Mexican bar playing poker while professing to be Harvard material seemed utterly laughable to the Yale law school graduate, who was himself pretending to be a vacuum cleaner salesman as a cover story. He knew when his leg was being pulled, and Harry knew that this man was a fraud of some sort. What sort of fraud exactly, neither one of them could tell.

The next morning the knock at the door came, and their boss had finally arrived to take a briefing on what they had learned. Special Agents Thompson and Ahrens gave their report yet there wasn’t much to tell, so they embellished it as best they could to justify their time and effort.

Their boss sat patiently across from both his agents, hanging his hat casually across his tip of his outstreched shoe as an impromptu hat rack while gripping the arms of the chair with both hands, all while tapping his fingers lightly in contempt at the idea of having been sent all the way down to take a report that could just as easily been telegraphed or mailed. But the Deputy Director, his boss, had insisted that there be no transmission of information that could be intercepted. “Meet personally with our men, take a report and then report back to me on the actions of this individual” said the Deputy Director.

Deputy Director J. Edgar Hoover was a most demanding supervisor and was not a boss to be trifled with.

Thompson and Ahrens ran down the report of their surveillance. Their quarry was a young Japanese man of undetermined means, traveling through the backcountry of Mexico and Texas. He took an interest in the oil industry, but did not meet with any known enemy agents and mostly kept to himself. His letters had been intercepted and translated, but they revealed nothing of value and did not appear to be coded in any way.

Agent Ahrens handed their boss the surveillance logs that documented the observed behavior of the man they had been following for a little over a month. Their boss flipped through the pages of notes and added with a grunt and a snicker. “Well, I like him, I wish I could get the railroad to keep their schedule with the reliability this guy does. So tell me, any surprises?”

Ahrens and Thompson looked at each other and then looked away sheepishly.

“ Ok, let me have it” the boss said leaning forward with a groan, knowing that something was up between the two men.

“Well, he’s a hell of a poker player” volunteered Harry.

The blood ran out of the face of their boss as Dave just shook his head from side to side at Harry’s uncomfortable revelation.

“You’re not telling me that you played poker with a subject of surveillance, are you? Tell me I don’t have to report that to the Deputy Director, you know how he is about the subject of “Vice”.

“Well, no, that’s not what we are telling you, we didn’t actually include that part in the report.” Said Dave, wondering if Jimmy Ishigakis “great idea” might just cost him his career.

“ Oh I feel better now, you left out information to save me trouble. That’s fine, that’s perfect”. It wasn’t much. But they knew that it was just enough room to keep their boss out of trouble.

“Anything else? He plays poker, he likes oil derricks, he writes his brother, does that about sum it all up? the boss asked of his two agents.

Dave ran through the basics of what they had learned, “That’s about it. He uses the same alias at every hotel, and he sticks to it in casual conversation. He never eats in the hotels or restaurants, eats breads and fruits in his room alone. He is missing two fingers on his left hand. His story is that he is a Harvard student on leave and doing a bit of travel. He says his name is Isoroku Takano and that’s the alias he uses everywhere he goes, never changes it.

Their boss suddenly perked up at hearing that final bit of information. “Well that’s interesting. He says his name is Takano, eh?” the boss said in response.

“Yeah, does that mean something to you?” Dave said puzzled by the reaction.

“Fellas, I’m going to let you in on what I know. This guy is a Harvard man, and he is a hell of a poker player. But here’s something you didn’t know. He’s a Japanese Naval Officer, who is part of a foreign students program at Harvard. Oh and his name is not Takano, it’s Yamamoto. Isoroku Yamamoto. And those two fingers he’s missing, he lost in the battle of Tsushima against the Russians in 1905. “

“So what’s he doing down here in Mexico looking at oil derricks? Dave asked.

The boss looked to each of his men, pointing at them accusingly and said “That’s exactly what we sent you here to find out”.

“Why would a Japanese Naval officer hitchhike across America and go live in 3rd rate hotels in Mexico? Japan is at peace with the US, why take on a spying operation when he could just ask for this information and get it just as easy. It just doesn’t make any sense ” Dave asked to anyone and no one at the same time. Just talking out loud about ideas that had been running through his mind in the wee hours of this surveillance.

Putting his hand on Daves shoulder, the boss tried to explain the long term view of the world. “Dave, try to remember that things change. Right now the world is at peace, but who knows what the next 5 or 10 years might bring. Things are going pretty well right now, but who knows at the 1930’s or the 40’s are going to look like. Mr.Yamamato might just be the kind of man who is patient enough to wait for the right moment to come along to make all this information he’s gathering pay off in some way. “

Dave Ahrens, Agent for the US Bureau of Investigation, considered the implications of the idea that their may be more to the man they had played poker with just the other night and wondered what the future might bring and what role their target might have in it. It seemed improbable that this little man so far out of his element could be of any use as an agent or spy to any country. After all he thought "If he were at risk of being a spy, why would Harvard let him into the country in the first place"?

After their business was concluded, Agents Thompson and Ahrens stood in the dirt street outside the ramshackle cantina that had been their base for two weeks, shook hands and waved goodbye to their boss. With their logs and reports tucked into his briefcase for a report to the Deputy Director on the whereabouts and actions of one Isoroku Yamamoto and his movements through Mexico, with the unfortunate part about the poker playing session with the bureaus agents discreetly left out of the final report, saving him hours of high minded speechifying from the pious deputy leader of the Bureau.

Isoroku Yamamoto, Harvard student and Japanese Naval officer observed the comings and goings around the oil derricks on the horizon from his hotel window, counting the number of trucks, the number of workers, and the size and type of ships that entered and left the harbor at Tampico. Out of the corner of his eye he saw three American men waving to each other on the street below, two of the men he had played poker with just the other night who gave an improbable story of being "vacuum cleaner salesman".

He wondered who they really were, and what they were really doing in Mexico.

Posted @ March 31, 2006 12:21 AM | Gentlemans Game

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