December 6

by Martin Cruz Smith

  “Thank you, Harry. You can call me Ryu. I must say, between you and me, I am happy to find such an attractive geisha as Michiko.”

  “She’s very dynamic.”

  “Just one geisha for the two of us. Michiko must be very popular.”

  “She has many sides,” Harry said.

  “Drink up!” Michiko said.

  “Banzai!” Ishigami led the charge and personally reloaded Harry’s cup. “You understand, Harry, I admire the fact that you do not flinch at the sight of a sword. That will come in handy.”

  “Thank you.” Harry refilled Ishigami’s cup in turn.

  Ishigami became more confidential. “Isn’t it curious how one person can make an impression in such a short time? One insult can change a life. In Nanking, from the time you drove up with your German friend to the time you drove away with my Chinese, how long do you think that took, five minutes? No more than ten. But I have thought about you every day since. I assumed for years you must have returned to America. Imagine my surprise to hear you hadn’t left at all. People in propaganda want me to tour the islands and sell war bonds. No, I came back for you.”

  “I’m flattered.”

  The room had become warm. Harry felt the sake insinuate itself through his veins. He became aware how Ishigami’s hands rested, fingers curved and clawlike. If Harry were to send some beast out to terrorize the countryside, Ishigami would be it. Samurais had evolved into soft men in Western suits, but Ishigami was a throwback, the real thing. Harry didn’t need a gun, he needed a machine gun.

  Michiko filled their cups again and went around the screen for a portable record player with a crank that she churned. The notes of a shamisen plinked out of the machine while Michiko posed with a closed fan pressed against her cheek. Harry couldn’t believe it. It was her Record Girl routine gone Oriental. She was still as ceramic in her pink tones and white, demure in winter-blue silk, producing her own faint music from the chains of bells and chimes that hung from her hair and stirred with every breath. There was no more artificial creation than a geisha, yet as art, a geisha did possess enormous appeal, half human, half loose-sleeved butterfly. As Michiko shifted, her collar revealed the nape of her neck, painted in a white W to suggest the outline of a woman’s sex. It was a geisha’s badge.

  The gramophone generated a scratchy song about a courtesan who had to buy a present for a lover on a rainy day. Michiko flinched from a threatening sky, tucked her fan into the loose sleeve of her kimono, opened an imaginary umbrella and not so much danced as enacted a series of movements and poses that mimicked a lovesick girl skipping around puddles, gracefully one moment and comically the next, and very different from the Record Girl who vamped in the Happy Paris to Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly. Harry’s life was on the line, but he was agape at Michiko when she finished.

  “Isn’t she good?” Ishigami beamed like an impresario.

  “She is unbelievable.”

  “We agree, excellent.”

  Michiko took the record player behind the screen and returned with bowls of crisply fried fishlings and flowers of red ginger. The food didn’t signify the saving presence of someone else in the willow house; fare for geisha parties generally came from restaurants. Was this a geisha party? Harry wondered. A murderer snacks with his victim, what sort of social event was that? Say it was a card game, Harry reminded himself. What did he know about the other player? A bastard son of a royal prince, right-wing fanatic, graduate of the military academy, Berlin attaché and a commander who had survived five years on the China front. In other words, intelligent, sophisticated and as brave as he was mad. He saw Ishigami sizing him up the same way, perhaps coming to a different conclusion. Harry had caught him off guard in Nanking. That wasn’t going to happen again.

  Ishigami spoke while he ate. “Five heads, Harry. You choose the first four.”

  “I choose?”

  “Why not? It’s been so long since I’ve been in Tokyo, I hardly know anyone anymore.”

  “You used to cut down Chinese left and right. Why change now?”

  “In China I had no choice. There were too many. It just went on, like fighting the sea. That’s why the Japanese fighting spirit is so important. That’s what makes us different. You wouldn’t understand. You’re a gambler, all you understand is odds and numbers.”

  “Because numbers are real. Spirit is a fantasy.”

  Ishigami peeked up from his bowl. “What odds would you give yourself right now?”

  “I see your point.”

  “Yes. So, you choose. Friends, enemies, people on the street, it doesn’t matter to me, and, I suspect, it doesn’t matter to you.”

  Michiko said in an offhand way, “Maybe there is someone he cares about, maybe there’s a girl?”

  “Didn’t you have a friend named Gen?” Ishigami asked.

  Harry said, “I’m not going to choose anyone. I’m not going to do your work for you.”

  “Lazybones,” Michiko said.

  “We’ll do it this way,” Ishigami said. “We’ll go out in the street. The first four people you look at, I’ll kill.”

  “Innocent Japanese?”

  “No one is innocent. Are my men guilty? They’re dying.”

  “Gladly, for the emperor, I know.” That was always the propaganda.

  “No, as a matter of fact, hardly ever. Asking for their mother, yes. A trench of bloody boys apologizing to their mother and father, yes. I thought it would be different. I thought there would be purity and nobility in struggle. But China is the same as here, a giant black market with businessmen corrupting army commanders for spoils and war matériel. We take a town and lose ten, twenty, a hundred soldiers, and men just like you, Harry, show up like worms within the hour.”

  Which answered a question Harry hadn’t directly posed before: how was it that a heroic officer related to the imperial family was only a colonel after so many years in the field? Ishigami was a butcher, but plenty of butchers had flourished during the so-called China Incident. He was a fanatic, but fanatics had thrived. Was it his high moral code, his reluctance to batten off the slops of war, that had stalled his military career?

  “I tried to tell the emperor,” Ishigami said. Such an intimate mention of his name brought a bow from Michiko. The Record Girl would have laughed.

  “And?” Harry asked.

  “I wanted to inform him of how affairs really stood in China. One of the old housekeepers let me in. I found the emperor surrounded by aides and maps, and I was excited that he was concerning himself about the affairs in China. Then I saw that almost all the aides were from the navy, and none of the maps were of China. Just islands. I never had a chance to say a word.”

  “What islands?”

  “What could it possibly matter to you?” He motioned to Michiko. “Bring me the box.”

  Michiko shuffled behind the screen on her knees and returned with a white box tied in a white cloth, a scaled-down version of the box for a soldier’s ashes. Harry had seen only one like it, in a museum. It was a head box, designed to carry a singular trophy.

  “I had this made to order today,” Ishigami said. He raised the box and gave Harry an appraising look. “I think it will fit.”

  “On the map, was there a fleet track? From the west or north?”

  “Questions like that could have you arrested as a spy.”

  “How could that possibly matter if my head is in a box?”

  Ishigami set down the box and brushed its lid with his hand. “Harry, you never stop, do you?”

  “I’ll bet you.” Harry refilled Ishigami’s cup.

  “You’ll bet me again? Once I have your head, I’ll have your money, too.”

  “Forget the head. I have another thousand yen nearby. A simple wager of a thousand yen.”

  “What sort of bet is that? I could say anything.”

  “I trust you. I’ll bet the maps showed a chain of islands with a fleet launching station in the northwest and a central island with a southern har
bor.”

  Michiko sighed musically and said, “But there’s no bet, Harry. I know where that money is, in the Happy Paris under the floorboards. So, there’s nothing to bet with, is there?”

  Ishigami let out his breath. But he had held it, Harry thought. It sounded like Pearl to him.

  “Are you a spy?” Ishigami asked.

  Michiko laughed and hiccuped. “I am sorry. It’s just so funny. Harry a spy? Who would trust Harry?”

  Ishigami said, “I remember a boy who used to deliver woodblock prints to me. To see him, you would think he was an American lost in Tokyo, but he wasn’t lost at all. You knew too much, Harry, even then. Where do you keep all that information?”

  Harry avoided the obvious answer. He drained his cup and held it out. “Thanks, I will have more.”

  Ishigami wavered, his hand halfway between the jar and the sword. He seemed to shift in and out of focus, and Harry felt it wasn’t just the effect of the sake. There was something damaged and smudged about the colonel, like a photograph taken into battle too many times. Harry read a mood that was dangerously variable: exhausted, energized, amiable, mad. Talking to Ishigami was like walking in the dark while trapdoors opened and closed on all sides. Michiko busied herself slicing ginger with a small knife until the colonel snapped out of his reverie and they were back on friendly terms, then she refilled the cups. Pouring sake was a geisha’s primary concern.

  “How long have you really known the colonel?” Harry asked her.

  “One day,” Michiko said. “Sometimes one day is enough, sometimes a year is too long.”

  “I wanted to take care of you in your own club,” Ishigami said. He smiled as if appreciating an earthy joke. “But she wants to take over the establishment when you’re dead, and it’s not good to start with a bloody floor, so she convinced me she could bring you here.”

  “Such an ambitious girl. I never knew,” said Harry.

  “Oh, Harry, there’s so much you don’t know.” Michiko hid her laugh behind her hand again.

  Harry remembered how Kato had said that geisha covered their laugh to hide their teeth, which were bound to look yellow next to their white face paint, although Harry would have been happy to see any sign of the Michiko he thought he’d known.

  They played jan-ken-pon —two-fingered scissors cut paper, open paper wrapped rock, fisted rock broke scissors— and the loser drank. It was a favorite geisha party game, and Harry and Ishigami drank twice as much as Michiko. With too much sake in him, Harry found himself staring at this new, illuminated woman. He couldn’t help but think of her hidden self, the softer whiteness of her skin, the tiny moles at the base of her neck, the way her spine sank into the swell of her ass. Between cups of sake, he thought he could almost taste her mouth. This painted outer self didn’t so much disguise the Michiko he’d known as split her into two versions.

  “Rock breaks scissors!” Michiko clapped for herself and poured Harry another cup.

  “If you want the Happy Paris, you can have it. You don’t have to kill me for it.”

  “Don’t be a sore loser,” Michiko said.

  “Drink up,” Ishigami said.

  “Why are you doing this?” Harry asked Michiko.

  She smiled as she refilled his cup. “Because you were leaving, Harry.”

  “I would have left you everything.”

  “But I didn’t want to be given, Harry, I wanted to take.” She laughed as if explaining something simple to a child. “If I take it, it’s mine. If you give it, it’s always yours. That’s at the heart of the Marxist struggle.”

  “She’s a Red, you knew that?” Harry asked Ishigami.

  “Asia is the same way,” Ishigami said. “We can’t wait for the white man to give us what’s ours. We have to take it. One, two…”

  “Three.” Michiko squealed with delight as she threw paper to Ishigami’s fist. “You drink.”

  “It’s a shell game, the way she plays,” Harry said. He caught a glance from her that told him she could have beaten him at any game he chose. Who had he been living with the past two years? In his vanity, he had supposed she’d cared for him in at least a possessive mother-serpent sort of way. He had never spent more time with anyone and never been so wrong. It hurt a man’s self-confidence. The way only the pads of her lips were painted gave her a smile within a smile, as if she had one for Harry and another for Ishigami.

  “Who did your makeup?” Harry asked. Even the most experienced geisha needed help with all the powders— vermillion, gold and pale blue— and brushes— wide and flat-handled for base glue and paint, sable brushes for the eyebrows— and the wig, a sculpted mass of human hair. Especially for painting the intimate design on the nape of the neck. Simply putting on a kimono, with all its hidden strings and tightly wrapped obi, demanded the hands of someone else. “Is someone else here?”

  “No.”

  “Somebody helped.”

  Michiko ducked Harry’s eyes while Ishigami lit a Lucky. Harry finally noticed flecks of white on the tips of the colonel’s fingers, the same way paint used to stick to Kato’s hands no matter how hard he washed. This time Ishigami was the artist. Information came in vivid images: Ishigami applying white primer to Michiko’s skin, brushing red powder on her cheeks, binding her hair with strips of gauze and setting the crown of her wig. Which were skills learned only through long practice. Ishigami blew aside smoke and offered Harry a gaze that held a whole catalog of images. Of tracers spraying the night sky. Of an officer’s tent sagging under pillows of snow. Inside, the tent was lit by a kerosene lamp, and an aide with narrow shoulders and a long gentle face held still as he was painted, his eyelids outlined in black, his lips budded red. The officer fixed a wig on the boy with strings and gum, brushed the bells in the hair to make them sing. Well, Harry thought, gender had always been a slippery item in Japan. The first geisha had been men, and sex between samurai had been virtually Greek.

  Ishigami became confidential. “You must be brutally honest to achieve beauty. The eye that seemed bewitching can become as stupid as a cow’s. The chin that was handsome becomes heavy, the feet and hands too large, the neck too crooked. You must erase the flaws. You lengthen the eye, shade the chin, train the hands and feet. An effect of the moment, but that’s all you need.”

  Harry remembered the first time he had dressed Michiko in her Record Girl suit of top hat, sequined jacket and long black stockings. And the underkimono of red silk she slept in, was that her idea or his? Meanwhile he said, “What I hear is, there’s lead in the paint. People who paint geishas sooner or later go insane.”

  “It has that effect.” Ishigami’s voice tailed off, and his gaze dropped to the head box, which smelled of freshly cut and sanded wood. The mood was changing again, losing a little effervescence. They were sliding back into China, Harry thought, back to Nanking, as if his life were on a tether tied to one spot. He even had a brief picture of Ishigami carrying out the execution as before, this time aided by Michiko, who looked likely to start off as Butterfly and end as Salome.

  “The emperor,” Harry prompted Ishigami, “when you saw him, did he say anything?”

  “The emperor asked the aides how long a Pacific war would take. They said three months. He reminded them that the army had told him four years ago that a war in China would take three months. The problem is, we have won decisive battle after decisive battle, and nothing is decided. There are just more Chinese. Now we would lose too much face to leave. It would be better to lose to anyone other than China.”

  “There’s always the option of sanity, declaring yourself winners and coming home.”

  “It would be defeat. From then on, the hands of America and England would be around our neck. They could cut off our oil anytime, and we would be beggars. Better a truly decisive stroke than slow strangulation, don’t you agree?”

  Everything seemed to be coming back to the sword shining by Ishigami’s side.

  “How does the emperor feel?”

  “The arm
y will decide for the emperor’s sake.”

  How will they do that, Harry started to ask, when Ishigami held up his hand for silence. Harry heard nothing to begin with, then a door shutting at the front of the hallway.

  “These fucking shoes and laces, every time I go in a fucking house. Off and on, off and on. Harry! Harry, are you in there? Why isn’t the Happy Paris open? Is there a mama-san in the house? Harry? Anybody home?”

  “An American correspondent named DeGeorge,” Michiko whispered to Ishigami.

  DeGeorge sounded drunk, as if lurching into the sides of the corridor with every step. Harry could picture the man’s red nose and dirty gray suit. Go away, he thought.

  “Harry Niles is here,” Ishigami said loudly. He smiled at his own English. “Come see Harry.”

  “Where?” DeGeorge’s voice shouted. “I filed a story on your little speech. The censor killed it. What are you, hiding? Playing cards?”

  “Come see Harry,” Ishigami said.

  From the sound of it, DeGeorge slid open each door as he progressed up the hall, stumbling around in stocking feet. “Jesus, you hired the whole place? Having a private party, are we?” The heavy steps paused at the closed door behind Harry, who could almost feel the bulk of DeGeorge leaning into the shoji. “This must be the place.”

  Harry turned and said, “Run! Get out of here!”

  “Knockee-knockee.”

  The door slid open. Al DeGeorge pushed through a leer that changed to a quizzical expression as Ishigami stepped over the table with sword cocked and sliced the correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor diagonally from his shoulder to his hip. Holding himself together with his hands, DeGeorge tried to go in reverse. Ishigami followed, poking him with the tip of the sword as if steering a pig into a sty to a room with more space to swing. DeGeorge was out of sight, but Harry heard him, a reporter to the last, ask a plaintive “Why?”

  The answer was a sound like scissors closing, weight dropping in a heap and something rolling underfoot. Harry endured a sensation like falling from a window and not yet hitting the ground. Michiko maintained perfect geisha poise.

  Ishigami returned, stepping fastidiously around the bloody mat at the threshold and sliding the door shut.