“There are plenty of magicians in Asakusa. I’ll ask around,” Harry said.

“No. This is secret, we’re not even supposed to mention his name.”

“Then let me ask about the trick. I won’t mention oil.”

Gen laid his arm across the table. “No, these are for you alone. No one else can see anything.”

Harry knew that meant that no one else should know he was involved with a navy project.

“Just you,” Gen insisted. “You think Ito is not a real scientist?”

“I think I’ve seen him. It was years ago, at the Olympic Bar in Shanghai. I just noticed him out of the corner of my eye. He was working the tables. He was a close-up artist, card tricks, disappearing coins, and he was bald and dressed like a monk and looked completely different.”

“That’s it? Someone you barely noticed in a bar years ago? Who looked different?”

“And the cough and the bloody handkerchief when the British grabbed him for lifting wallets.”

“Well, I think we have to be more exact than that.”

Gen had listed the preparations of the experiment: the elaborate filling of the bottles with water, how witnesses marked the corks with private words or numbers that Ito didn’t even see before he inserted electrical wire, sealed the cork with molten wax and set the bottle in the tank of water. Gen had listed each of Ito’s steps: safety procedures of the goggles and mat, positioning of the copper wands and dialing in voltage at each to “orchestrate the electrical field.”

“Does the transformation usually take one jolt?” Harry asked.

“No, it might take days before it takes effect, but once the bottles are in the tank, they can’t be touched. In fact, you’d be electrocuted if you tried. Besides, guards are in the examining room around the clock.”

“Why blue bottles?” They looked like medicine bottles to Harry.

“Ito says they filter harmful rays.”

“But you can’t see whether the contents are oil or water.”

“Yes, you can. That’s when the bottle rises.”

“Well, there’s your answer.”

“You don’t believe any of it?”

“Neither do you, or you wouldn’t have brought me in. Yamamoto can’t be fooled, not really.”

“But-”

“I know.” Harry had to smile. “It’s like the old joke. A woman brings her husband to the psychiatrist. She says, ‘Doctor, my husband is crazy. He thinks he’s a chicken.’ The psychiatrist says, ‘Leave him with me, I’ll cure him in a week.’ She says, ‘But we need the eggs.’ That’s the navy. You know this is crazy, but you need the oil.”

It occurred to Harry that Yamamoto had an especially good chance of coming out of the affair looking like a fruitcake. Since he was the sanest man in the navy, and the strongest opponent to war, the army would seize on anything to discredit him. Harry was not surprised that he’d had no more direct contact with the admiral. That was the beauty of using a gaijin; he could always be disavowed.

Gen had diagrammed the room like elevations. Along the east wall were medical cabinets, carboys of water, anatomical charts. North: cabinets, scale, door and transom, table of rubber boots, gloves and smoked goggles, eye chart and optical equipment. West: crutches, copper coils, VD chart, sink, instructions for winding cloth around the midriff to counteract the G-force of a tight turn. South: wheelchairs, cabinets, the observation mirror, more carboys and a row of bottles.

“But imagine,” Gen said. “Imagine if we could transform water into oil. Nothing could stop us, Harry. We could be a force for good, for progress.”

“Gen, not that it makes any difference to me, but I’ve seen progress. I’ve seen mounds of progress. I’ve seen the streets run with progress, I’ve seen progress shoved into pits and stacked to the sky and burned like logs. Progress is overrated.”

“But you’ll help?”

“What are friends for?”

Gen laid his head on a table and closed his eyes while Harry looked at the diagrams. With cons, the simplest answer was best, you didn’t have to go to Harvard to know that. Harry discounted Ito’s elaborate procedure of marking and sealing corks as hokum. As for the electric lights and bangs? A hell of a show. All that really mattered was the apparent change of water to oil in six blue bottles in a tank of water. Oil was lighter than water, which was why a bottle floated when its contents were supposedly transformed by Ito’s bolts of lightning. But a fine string could raise a bottle, and the change of contents could have taken place anytime. And not even six had to rise, all the con needed was one bottle to maintain excitement because this was an audience who wanted, in spite of its intelligence, to believe what a magician showed them. Houdini once made an elephant disappear in Madison Square Garden. He showed the crowd the elephant standing face out, then drew the curtain, and when he reopened it, the elephant was gone. All Houdini had done was stand the elephant sideways behind a drop of black velvet. As simple as that, because people wanted to believe.

There were other possibilities. The steadfast guards might be bribed. The irate Professor Mishima might have been a shill. That got complicated, however, and Harry focused more and more on Dr. Ito’s lab coat as the most likely source of the “blood” the doctor coughed up at will and as a blind for a last-minute switch. Between the fireworks and smoked goggles and his voluminous lab coat, Ito could switch a case of beer.

At four in the afternoon, Harry woke Gen. Kondo had started setting up the bar, briskly wiping glasses. From outside came the street calls of sake vendors and fortune-tellers.

“You can’t cheat an honest man.”

Gen sat up and rubbed his eyes. “What are you talking about?”

“You can’t cheat an honest man. Do you know what that means, college boy?”

“Yes,” Gen said.

“No, you don’t. It means an honest man can afford to be objective, he doesn’t care one way or the other, so he’s hard to fool. A mark, on the other hand, wants something for nothing. He wants the pea under the shell, his share of a lost wallet, a tip on a horse, oil for water. His objectivity is already blown, he’s bought in. And because the game itself is dishonest, he can’t go crying to the police when he’s cheated of what he hoped to steal. Or to God because you can’t change water into aviator fuel. Have you got some dress whites?”

THAT NIGHT, Harry alone slipped behind the observation mirror as Gen joined the band of witnesses. The group was entirely navy, which Harry took as a sign that scientific quibbles were on the verge of being totally ignored. With Yamamoto present, there was enough gold braid in the room for a bellpull. Only one officer was in dress whites, and that was Gen. All eyes, of course, were on Dr. Ito and the six blue bottles in the water tank.

The emaciated doctor looked as if he had spent the day under a mushroom. He did cast a spell. Officers who generally believed only in six-inch armor hung on every word. Harry concentrated on what Ito did: the restless stride around the tank, the long hands and deft fingers, the flapping laboratory coat. Everyone had pulled on dark goggles, and Ito was moving toward the switch when Gen begged to borrow his lab coat. “I’m concerned about sparks that might burn my jacket. It’s the only one I own. Would you mind very much?”

The senior officers were appalled, all but Yamamoto, who looked impartially curious.

Ito hesitated. He had the ability to write amazement on his face. “You need my lab coat?”

“Yes.” That was what Harry had told Gen to say.

“In that case.” Ito shrugged off the coat and handed it to Gen, then continued in shirtsleeves and threw the switch.

Luminous lines of energy filled the room, pulsing back and forth from wand to sphere over the blue bed of the water tank and the dark blue bottles that trembled within. As Ito modulated the voltage, the lines spread like a hypnotic sea of rolling waves, like the view, perhaps, from Sata, where he had first glimpsed the fluid forces of nature. When he shut off the power, one bottle had already risen to the surface. Ito scooped out the bottle and elected Gen to break the seal, verify the mark on the cork and identify the contents. Gen’s face burned with shame down to his white collar.