December 6

by Martin Cruz Smith

  Taro’s shoulders filled the gateway. Inside, a pathway climbed through a garden of evergreens to a large house ablaze with lights. A second path lit by stone lanterns ran even farther to a torii gate, a barracks and dojo and, finally, enveloped in a gauzy light, a ring of ancient pines that was the shrine itself.

  “Ready?” Harry asked. “I’m here to pay my respects to Saburo-san.”

  Taro didn’t move. “Sorry, Saburo’s not here.”

  Harry could see Saburo with a circle of devotees, enjoying a cigarette in the living room of the house. There were groups of men inside and outside the house, which wasn’t unusual for a man with Saburo’s following. He’d started off as a moneyless Japanese patriot in Manchuria seven years before but had had the prescience to hook up with an energetic army officer named Tojo. By the time Tojo and Saburo were done, the army and National Purity co-managed railroads, cotton mills, coal and iron mines throughout Manchuria in the name of imperial harmony. Tojo became a general and prime minister. Saburo returned to Tokyo and established academies, charities and shrines dedicated to his Society of National Purity.

  “What are you talking about?” Harry said.

  “He’s not here, Harry,” Tetsu said. He looked sick and miserable.

  “I just need Saburo’s ear for a second.”

  “I’m sorry, Harry,” Taro said.

  It would have been discourteous for Harry to point out the visible Saburo. Anyway, Harry was at a rare loss for words. He had invited his own friends along, and now they were blocking his way.

  “Tetsu, did you talk to Saburo about the donation?”

  “I mentioned it. He said it was unnecessary.”

  “I still want to talk to him. I could see one of his assistants.”

  Taro said, “It’s late, Harry. Everything is pretty much closed up.”

  Harry saw people bustling all over the grounds. “We talked about this. All I want is to leave this generous donation so someone will call the Foreign Office and free the exit papers for the bride of a German ally. A one-minute phone call.”

  “That would be difficult,” Tetsu said, meaning no.

  “Let me go to the shrine.”

  “Very difficult,” Taro said, meaning absolutely no.

  “Then suppose I try Saburo-san tomorrow.”

  Tetsu said, “I don’t know, Harry, he may be gone for days.”

  Taro folded his arms. Nothing but a truck could have dislodged him.

  “Then I hope he has a good trip,” Harry said. “Please tell Saburo-san that I stopped by.”

  “We’ll do that,” said Taro.

  “Sorry, Harry,” Tetsu said. “Really.”

  “I guess things are changing. Get that fever looked at.”

  “Thanks,” Tetsu said.

  Harry fumed all the way back to his car. Snubbed, as if Saburo hadn’t sold favors for years. Being turned away by friends, however, that brought acid to the craw. It was downright comical; he’d asked them to come, and they’d told him to go. So that’s what friends were for: betrayal. The hell with them. In two more days, Harry would be gone and Japan would be a speck in the Pacific Ocean. As for Willie and Iris, well, Harry had tried.

  He felt better by the time he reached Asakusa and parked the car. The theaters were bright with moviegoers wandering from Die Deutsche Wehrmacht to The Texas Rangers. Customers lined up at food stalls, the curious filled the peep shows and the side streets were strings of red lanterns and cozy bonhomie, the same as any weekend night. It would be odd, Harry decided, if he didn’t make an appearance at his own club, although he braced himself for an evening under the scrutiny of the Record Girl. Tonight he would tell Michiko that he was going. She must know, she had to have figured it out weeks ago. No doubt there were snakes who stood taller than Harry Niles, but to run out on her with no warning was too low even for him. He just had to make sure she didn’t get her hands on the gun.

  However, the Happy Paris was dark. The sign should have been bright, buzzing red. On a Saturday night, Harry expected to see a neon EiffelTower beckoning the thirsty of all races and creeds. He paid Tetsu good money not to be harassed, although he didn’t know what to expect from Tetsu anymore. Harry took a cautionary pause in the shadow of a doorway and watched a bicycle go by with a swaying stack of noodle boxes, followed by sailors, a chestnut vendor’s cart, businessmen who passed in high spirits and returned disappointed a few seconds later, complaining about jungle-music establishments that closed with no apologies or explanation.

  Harry crossed the street. The club’s neon sign was not damaged, as far as he could see, simply off. He unlocked the door and found the Happy Paris empty. No customers, no Kondo to mix drinks, no waitresses to serve them. Harry went to the small galley behind the bar and found fresh cold cuts wrapped in butcher paper resting in the icebox, so someone had taken deliveries earlier in the day. Kondo the bartender was so reliable it was hard to believe he’d abandon his post: he loved his Happy Paris uniform so much he wanted to be buried in it. Harry turned the lights on, off, on. Off. What was the point of opening alone?

  Michiko came to mind. Had she heard about the plane already? Considering her temper, he was surprised only that she didn’t burn the place down. He ran his hand over the smooth shoulders of the jukebox, looking for support, for his Record Girl, his black-widow spider. Harry pulled down the ladder stairs behind the bar and went up to his apartment. Nothing there was touched. His clothes and hers were still neatly laid in drawers, there were no bodies on the floor or notes in blood. He looked out the window and noticed that the willow house directly across was open for business, its polished gate ajar to a discreet candle glow. A willow suggested something yielding and feminine, the sort of tree that knelt by water to admire its own reflection.

  Harry returned to the Happy Paris and slipped into the narrow kitchen. Kondo used the cool space under the floorboards for pickling eggplant, ginger, melon. Harry shifted loose boards, moved pickle jars aside and pulled out a loosely buried cookie tin. Just enough light made its way from the street to see a picture of Tara on the lid. Framed by white plantation columns, Scarlett O’Hara wore a bustle skirt as big as a parachute. Harry lifted the lid. Inside the tin were separate envelopes of cash: $10,000 American, $5,000 in yen and even $1,000 in Chinese yuan. Traveling money. He added the pistol to the money, set the tin on the damp ground and replaced the boards. Things were moving so fast now that he felt light-headed as he stood.

  It was just him and the jukebox now. He selected “Any Old Time” and set the volume low. The intro was smooth, melodious, going nowhere in particular until Billie Holiday shyly chimed in, “Any old time you’re blue, you have our love to chase away the blues.” As if Michiko were with him, Harry took a solo turn around the record player. For some reason he was put in mind of Kato’s copy of the Moulin Rouge, the redheaded cancan dancer. Too bad they never had dancing at the Happy Paris, Harry thought, only the immobile, inscrutable Record Girl. The front door was open a crack, and figures on the street flickered by. Harry decided he needed something not so sad. Who needed love if they had wings? How many hours till takeoff? Thirty-six? Harry punched three, six. Behind glass the automatic arm lifted Shaw off the turntable and put on “Sing, Sing, Sing,” which Harry regarded as four minutes of pure inspiration, starting with Krupa’s native drums, then joined by a growl of brass and, diving boldly in, Goodman on clarinet. Because of Krupa, “Sing, Sing, Sing” had a manic force that usually made Harry think of Tarzan, conga lines, war canoes. Tonight was different. He imagined tanks rolling over trenches and flamethrowers lighting huts. A horn soloed and a temple turned to a poppy-red ball of fire. Krupa took over and machine guns chattered. Harry didn’t know how long he had listened before he stopped the record and noticed that a geisha stood at the front door, her matte-white face cocked to one side.

  “Niles-san?” she asked in a high voice.

  “Yes.”

  “Please.” The geisha bowed and motioned Harry to follow her. She was s
mall, a shimmer of silk in the dark.

  “Now?”

  She stayed bowed. “Yes, please.”

  Harry saw that she was trying to direct him to the willow house. “Who is there?”

  “A friend, please.”

  She showed no sign of straightening up, a social pressure that was like a soft nutcracker. Although a geisha party was the last thing Harry was in the mood for, people did not snub geishas in public. Also, this was not a smart time for a gaijin to offend anybody. Even if it was to make excuses, Harry had no choice but to go.

  “Okay.”

  “Thank you, thank you so much.”

  While they crossed the street, the girl chirped about what excellent Japanese he spoke, about such pleasant weather for December. She was vaguely familiar to Harry. He’d seen geisha go in and out of the willow house for the past two years. The problem was that the whole geisha presentation was a mask. Their faces were masks of white greasepaint under elaborate, top-heavy wigs with hairpins and tiny bells. They were wrapped in volumes of kimono and minced unnaturally in high wedge sandals. Every gesture and every note were pieces of acting, a doll-like combination of the innocent and erotic.

  Inside the willow-house gate, a walkway lit by stone lanterns led to a slatted door with saucers of salt on either side. Harry left his shoes in a foyer that was discreetly dim and followed the geisha down a hallway lit by standing lanterns. Usually an older man or a lady of the house welcomed a visitor to make sure of the privacy of the parties within. Harry saw no one, heard no one, although on either side were the screens of different rooms. At this hour on a Saturday night, each room should have been ringing with idiot hilarity. There was a parabola to geisha parties: first, the soulful plucking of the shamisen; second, sake-fueled parlor games; third, maudlin singing; fourth, collapse. The girl made not a sound, just a beeline to the end of the corridor where the best room was, as far from the street as possible. As the geisha bustled ahead, he had a good view of the seasonal blue of her kimono and the tinkling bells in her hair and the way the red inner collar revealed the nape of the neck. Every once in a while she would glance back, a painted simper on her red double-bow lips. It was like following a puppet until they reached the end of the hall, where she stumbled ever so slightly, and Harry saw the three pinpoint moles on her neck and felt the electrical charge of recognizing Michiko while his legs carried him forward.

  She slid open the screen to the last room. In the middle sat Ishigami in a white kimono at a low table of lacquered black. The colonel was darker than Harry remembered, flesh drawn taut around the skull, skin raw from a campaign in bitter weather, hair close-cropped and flecked with gray. The curve of an unsheathed sword lay across the table. Michiko gently pushed Harry to his knees.

  Ishigami’s eyes lit on Harry. He said, “You owe me five heads.”

  17

  THE SWORD LAY edge out, a sinuous temper line running from the tip of the blade to a long grip of braided silk. Harry wondered if it was the same sword he had seen employed in Nanking or in the demonstration of swordsmanship so many years before.

  “I should have recognized you in China,” Ishigami said. “Even if you were only a boy the first time I saw you, there is only one like you.”

  “Well, that can be a good thing or a bad thing.”

  “Not good for you. You were easy to find.”

  Harry hoped to hear someone else in the house, but Ishigami seemed to have paid for the absence of the owners. He could afford to; he drew a colonel’s pay and a stipend from the imperial household, and what did he have to spend it on in China? Harry had to give him credit, a lot of aristocrats devoted their time to tennis or whisking tea. Instead, Ishigami had been fighting in the never-ending China Incident for four years, five? A hero as indefatigable as that deserved an evening in an elegant willow house. The room’s single window was a latticed ring, the lights a pair of paper globes, the only decoration a painted screen of carp with gilded scales. The sword was within reach of either man, but the colonel was poised, a wolf over a bone. He wore a shorter sword tucked into his sash. Harry remembered the gun across the street. If he ran for it, Ishigami would slice him down before he was halfway down the hall.

  Although Ishigami demanded total concentration, Harry couldn’t keep his eyes off Michiko. With all her shuffling and tittering, the Record Girl did an unsettlingly good imitation of a geisha. He really didn’t know all of Michiko’s background; part had always been a mystery. Now he saw clues. A geisha’s face was painted white, her eyebrows and the outer corners of the eyes extended with red and black lines. Michiko also had the slightest shade of cherry blossom across her eyes and cheeks, and a hint of blue around the temples and the line of her jaw, the added color of a maiko, a younger apprentice geisha. So many bells tinkling from the wig and the incessant giggling were other earmarks of a maiko. She must have been both a young Commie and a geisha-in-training, an interesting combination. She made the whole outfit light up like a neon sign.

  “Five heads?” Harry asked.

  “Five. That was the number you cheated me of in Nanking.”

  “It was just a bet.”

  “It was a humiliation. I have thought about Nanking many times.” Ishigami took a deep breath of tightly controlled emotion. There was an exhausted, even emaciated quality to the colonel, yet he still gave an impression of great strength. If the Grim Reaper wore a kimono, he would be Ishigami. This was not the smooth exit from Tokyo Harry had planned. “Do you know I am a hero? Two Orders of the Golden Kite, fifth and second class.”

  Congratulations, you stupid fuck. Harry thought. He tried to catch Michiko’s eye and wondered, What are you doing?

  Ishigami went on. “Five years in China and the only dishonorable moment was Nanking.”

  As Harry remembered, a hundred thousand or more Chinese had been slaughtered in Nanking. He was curious— which dishonorable moment was the colonel thinking about? “War is war. Things happen.”

  “This was not war, this was a demonstration.”

  “Oh, that? At the city wall? That looked like an execution to me. I remember ten Chinese: a clerk, a pair of chubby businessmen, a man in pajamas, a coolie, a kid.”

  “You remember it well.”

  “It made an impression.”

  Ishigami never took his eyes off Harry. “It was meant to. There was resistance, an attack on Japanese soldiers. We lost one. I was demonstrating to our men that for every one we lost, the other side would lose ten. It didn’t matter whether the ones we executed were exactly the guilty parties, it was a matter of morale.”

  “Of course.” Harry knew how important it was for the Japanese soldier to nourish his fighting spirit.

  “That is why your interference was so unforgivable. One moment you and your German friend arrived at the demonstration, and the next you were wagering with the imperial army, offering ten yen to each man, muddying their pride with greed.”

  “As I recall, the troops seemed pretty interested.”

  “They were just soldiers, ten yen was a lot to them. Then the sly part: to offer money not only to me, a lieutenant, but the same amount to my aide, a mere corporal, just for washing the blade. Insult upon insult.”

  “Just feeling things out. It’s like any game. You find the chump.”

  Michiko said in breathless geisha fashion, “Harry treats everything like a game of cards. Nothing is serious.”

  “You succeeded,” Ishigami told Harry. “My aide was too shy to say no, but he felt so much shame over your wager that he could not carry out his function.” Ishigami seemed to look directly through Harry. His eyes sparkled, and tears fell down his cheeks. It was as unlikely as seeing a stone weep. “Such a simple boy. I lost my temper.” His voice became husky. “I would like to hear you apologize. I have waited years to hear you apologize.”

  Harry remembered that a soft answer turned away wrath. He knelt and placed his hands on the floor in a deep kowtow. “I am very sorry about your aide-de-camp and sincerely
regret if he suffered as a consequence.”

  “I have waited four years to hear that.” Ishigami lifted the sword from a sitting position like a man on horseback, and Harry wondered just how high his head would jump. If ever there was a man meant for an instrument, it was Ishigami and a sword; together they divided the living and the dead. Harry touched his forehead to the mat and stole a look at Michiko. Her expression was so cold and distant that she gave Harry the sweats. But Harry had the colonel down as a scrupulous scorekeeper. He had said Harry owed him five heads, and Harry figured the only way to achieve proper payback was if Ishigami saved him for last. Cut off Harry’s first and the debt was as good as canceled at the start. Ishigami relaxed. His rage faded into something like a smile. He set his sword down by his side and said, “I like games, too.” He added in an expansive tone to Michiko, “Sake!”

  Michiko came out from behind the screen with a tray of ceramic sake jars and cups and fan-shaped bowls of ginkgo nuts. “All that arguing must make you thirsty, no?”

  “Starved,” Ishigami said.

  “That’s better.” Michiko knelt to pour.

  “Kampai!” The three raised their cups and drank. The sake was hot and aromatic. At once Michiko refilled the men’s cups. Ishigami refilled hers. He seemed relaxed, even pleased, as if Harry had passed a test for cowardice and depravity.

  “Your name again?” the colonel asked Michiko.

  “Michiko,” she got out between titters.

  “Nice.” Ishigami leaned across the table. “Do you mind if I call you Harry?”

  “Go ahead.”