said, motioning with her thumb to the ceiling.

"Looks like you're doing a rushing business, eh?" They looked puzzled
and I explained: "Busy, eh?"

"Busy? No. No busy."

There is little work for them and neither Lola nor they care a whoop
whether or not you buy any of the shop's stock of twenty-eight shirts.
Lola herself pays little attention to the business from which she
obviously cannot earn enough to pay the rent, let alone keep herself
and her husband, pay two girls and a lookout.

The little shirt shop is a cubbyhole about nine feet square, its
wooden walls painted a pale, washed-out blue. A deck which cuts the
store's height in half, forms a little balcony which is covered by a
green and yellow print curtain stretched across it. To the right,
casually covered by another print curtain, is a red painted ladder by
which the deck is reached. On the deck, at the extreme left, where it
is not perceptible from the street or the shop, is another tiny ladder
which reaches to the ceiling.

If you stand on the ladder and press against the ceiling directly over
it, a well-oiled trap door will open soundlessly and lead you into
Lola's bedroom above the shop. In front of the window with the blue
curtain is a worn bed, the hard mattress neatly covered with a
counterpane. At the head of the mattress is a mended tear. It is in
this mattress that Lola hides photographs of extraordinary military
and naval importance. I saw four of them.

The charming little seamstress is one of the most capable of the
Japanese espionage agents operating in the Canal Zone area. Lola Osawa
is not her right name. She is Chiyo Morasawa, who arrived at Balboa
from Yokahama on the Japanese steamship "Anyo Maru" on May 24, 1929,
and promptly disappeared for almost a year. When she appeared again,
she was Lola Osawa, seamstress. She has been an active Japanese agent
for almost ten years, specializing in getting photographs of military
importance. Her husband, who entered Panama without a Panamanian visa
on his passport, is a reserve officer in the Japanese Navy. He lives
with Lola in the room above the shop, never does any work though he
passes as a merchant, and is always wandering around with a camera.
Occasionally he vanishes to Japan. His last trip was in 1935. At that
time he stayed there over a year.

To defend the ten-mile-wide and forty-six-mile-long strip of land,
lakes and canal which the Republic of Panama leased to the United
States