Whispers In A Tokyo Station Sub-Basement

Living in Tokyo. 1982. Feeding my family by teaching English. I hated teaching English so much I hated my life, so I decided to change it. My life, I mean; teaching English would never get better. I searched the Tokyo yellow-pages, and found "Private Detectives.” There were four or five Japanese names, and then: Jack Torrance Investigations: Offices in Hong Kong, Tokyo and California. So I called and arranged to meet the man himself in a Tokyo Station restaurant at 7:30, Saturday evening. We exchanged brief descriptions and hung up. I got there at 7:15.  I figured if I was going to get a new job, I shouldn't be late.

The restaurant was a run-down place in a sub-basement. Every few minutes a train would hammer by, shaking the walls and floor. You bought meal tickets at the front, handed them to white-jacketed snot-nosed young waiters with curly permanents, and three waiters brought your food: little old Japanese men in tuxedos with brilliantined hair. It looked like a very neglected hotel dining room, peopled by desiccated elderly men and women, the latter with hectic blooms of rouge and lipstick on otherwise pallid faces.

I scanned the place, and there was no Jack Torrance. He said on the phone he was 6 feet, 190 pounds, fit, slightly balding. "You'll know me." I'm rather nearsighted, and could see in blurry vision a white man on the other side of the room. Didn't seem to fit the description, but who knows. So, I went across the room and I could see he was a seedy, badly-shaven little guy, balding with a fringe of white hair. He looked up at me with a sneer. "Yeah?"

“Are you Jack Torrance? I’m supposed to meet him here.”

He said, “You know Jack? Well, if you’re meeting him, we’ll probably be talking together later tonight.” And he waved his hand in dismissal. I went back to my table.

Eight o'clock arrives, but no detective, so I went up to order some dinner from the front. The little seedy man, the kind whose nickname is always  "Whispers" or "Pittsburgh Phil" in B movies, sidled up to me and said, “You say you know Jack . . .”

I replied, “I didn’t say that.”

He sneered, “But you said you’re going to meet him.”

“Yeah, I called him on the phone.”

“Just why did you do that?”

“Why don’t you find that out later. . .” and looked at him, deadpan.

He couldn't hold eye contact for very long, just said, “Oh . . .” and scuttled back to his seat.

So, I got my chicken cutlet, and just then, into the room came . . . JACK TORRANCE. PRIVATE EYE. He was wearing a black raincoat, and a wide-brimmed hat with a one- inch crown slouched over one eye, walking with a silver-headed cane, and smoking a long stemmed pipe. I pressed my lips together tightly, thinking, “I will not laugh. No matter what, it would be unkind. I will not laugh.”

He approached my table, growled, "You Ellis?", and sat down at the table with a significant nod, saying, “I really don’t like to sit with my back to the room. It’s an old habit. But I'm always prepared.” Then he pulled a length of black silk from under his coat, and dropped it on the table, rattling with a metallic sound.  “You know what this is? Looks like nothing, right? Just some cloth.”

I said, “Yeah, it's a double-weighted chain, generically called a ryofundo or kusarifundo.  But when encased in  a silk bag, that would be a manrikigusari of Masaki-ryu.” He blinked in surprise, said, “Oh. You know.” And he picked it up and stuffed it in his pocket with a crestfallen look.

He took off his black coat, and underneath was an overweight, pudgy, balding ex-LA hotel dick in a dirty tweed suit and grey once-white shirt, smelling like stale hopes and cheap cigarettes. He was a romantic slob, but to give him credit, he knew it. He pulled out a business card, his name framed by an illustration, and he said, “Jack of clubs. That’s a blackjack. Some of my friends call me Black Jack,” and then he paused, looked a little thoughtful and said, “I guess that borders on the ridiculous . . .” Then he told me that he had no money, could I stand him for dinner tonight, he’d just been licensed in Japan and he’d had exactly one case, but he thought it was a wide-open market. He said, “The art of the detective is not truth, is not justice, it’s negotiation” He said his specialties were debt collection, bail skippers, courier service, body guarding, etc etc etc.”

I remained mostly silent, so he filled the air all by himself. He told me about the best job in his life, being a hotel detective, that this was his main experience in the field, and then he confessed that his great detective name, Jack Torrance, was a new assumed identity. He was in the process of legally changing it, and he showed me a card with another name, one without panache. He further confessed (I wasn't asking, this was all spontaneous) that his international agency was, in fact, his rented room. He had just incorporated in Hong Kong, so he could legally call himself “international.” And the California address was really his mother’s motel address in Torrance, CA. “And that's how I got my name."

I asked him why he was telling me all this and he replied, "I just wanted to be absolutely honest with you.”

He suggested that we become partners, half-heartedly, because he was smart enough to tell I wasn't interested. I told him to give me a call if he had any work for me, not that I would take it, and walked out to catch the train home. Of course, he never called.

He was such a marginal man; he seemed so lost. In resurrecting this memory, I looked him up on the web, and found he died in 2009. He'd served in the Korean war, left kids and grandkids behind, and returned to LA and became Jaac Mandrake, stage magician. People survive. And everyone has a story that is bigger than the memories they leave. And now I wonder, what would I have talked about with “Whispers” if I’d stayed in the sub-basement any longer.

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