“In the eye of the beholder.”
“Well, you have a point there,” grunted the rewrite man. “I’ve been reading the stories those buzzards are filing, and it occurs to me that there is no more vicious bigot than a city intellectual contemplating someone to whom he feels intellectually or morally superior.”
“I reckon they’re in clover down here, then. I wouldn’t write that trash if I could.”
“Well, I might be able to help you out a bit when I do the rewrite. You need to do something to keep up with the nationals. Just a word to the wise, mind you, but I happen to know that your editor isn’t happy.”
There was a pause while Carl fought back the urge to tell him that he had a real mountain psychic trying to find out the facts of the case, but Nora had been right. That story would only give the syndicate journalists more lurid and colorful material to use against Wise County, and the thought of what they would do to Nora in print made him shudder. If Nora found out anything he would have to find a way to use it without involving her.
Glancing at his notes, Carl narrated the day’s events.
There was a sigh on the other end of the line. “First big assignment for you, isn’t it? Well, I’ll do what I can to pull your chestnuts out of the fire, but you’d better show us something soon. Those nationals may be sewer rats, but they know how to sell papers.”
Before he could reply, the rewrite man hung up. Resisting the urge to hit the wall with his fist, Carl walked back to the parlor and began to pull old copies of National Geographic out of Cousin Araby’s mahogany canterbury.
STIFLING A YAWN, Henry Jernigan tugged at his tie. Odd how exhausting it was just to sit in court all day, trying to pay attention to droning voices. When he left the courthouse, it was just past five o’clock but already dark outside. He edged through the departing crowd, and hurried across the side street to the inn.
In the hotel lobby, the aroma of roasting chickens from the kitchen mingled with stale cigarette smoke. Henry found them equally unappetizing. He wanted to go up to his room and sleep straight through until morning, but he knew that if he did miss dinner, he would wake up hungry in the middle of the night. He would go upstairs and wash up, and then come back down for the evening meal whether he felt like it or not. Perhaps his companions could charm him out of his reverie.
Forcing himself to smile at the clerk when he collected the room key from the front desk, he trudged upstairs to his room, trying to think of a way to make a passable feature story out of a court session in which nothing happened. And nothing was going to happen, either. At least he wasn’t naïf enough to believe in the possibility of confessional outbursts from the witness stand or eleventh-hour witnesses. No, the trial would grind its way to some anticlimactic whimper of a verdict, with no one being any the wiser about what really happened. The jury would decide the fate of the defendant, based as ever on their best guess or their innate prejudices, but it was the task of the journalist to turn humdrum reality into a story that made sense, a story worth reading.
He yawned again, and jiggled the key into the lock. Pushing open the door to his room, he shrugged off his coat, thinking that he might, after all, have time to put his feet up for a few minutes before dragging himself back down again to face the unappetizing boiled chicken. But ten paces into the room, Henry froze.
Despite his orders to the contrary, a log fire was roaring in the stone fireplace, and a few feet away the hearth rug had caught alight with sparks and had just begun to blaze.
Henry screamed.
HENRY
TOKYO, SEPTEMBER 1, 1923
The earthquake had struck at noon, and by early afternoon Henry thought that the crisis seemed to be over. By itself, an earthquake need not be a catastrophe. If you lived out in the country, then the earth would shake for a minute and you might run outside. You might even fall down. But then you got up and went on about your business.
Here, though, in a city with a million inhabitants and hundreds of complex new buildings that bore no resemblance to traditional Japanese architecture, the danger in an earthquake came in the aftermath, with broken pipes, and downed electrical wires, and falling masonry. And, of course, the fires. So, thinking back to the example of the insignificance of an earthquake in a rural area, people reasoned that the safest place to be in a large city was in a grassy open area, away from the hazards of metropolitan life. People flocked to the Imperial Palace Plaza, two square miles of greenery in front of the Emperor’s Palace. Residents of downtown, the Asakusa district, converged on Ueno Park, site of the city’s zoo and its art museum.
On the other side of the Sumida River, people in the Honjo and Fukugawa neighborhoods were directed to the open space near the river, former site of the Army Clothing Depot. The local chief of police had reached this logical conclusion about where to send people displaced by the disaster, and thousands had made their way to the open field, most of them calmly determined to make the best of it.
People brought clothes and possessions salvaged from their ruined houses. They brought blankets and baskets of food. By two o’clock the Army Clothing Depot field took on the air of a vast neighborhood picnic, as families sat together on their blankets, sharing a late lunch in the sunshine, and counting their blessings in having survived.
“You are safe now,” Henry told Ishi, knowing that this remark was tinged with his relief at having safely discharged the burden of caring for someone else’s child.
The child peered up at him through the fringe of dark hair that touched the top of her spectacles. “We must find my father and mother.”
Henry waved vaguely at the field beyond the fence, where thousands of people had turned the disaster into a family outing. “I’m sure they’re here somewhere. We just need to look for them.”
Ishi shook her head. “We cannot be sure that they reached here safely. The building may have fallen. And there are many fires.”
Henry sighed. He was no match for Ishi’s relentless logic. At least she wasn’t weeping and fearful, as a little girl her age might well be expected to do. And of course she was right. Many buildings had fallen, and, with the water mains broken, the fires were still raging throughout the city.
“All right,” he said. “Let’s go into the park and look for them, and if we cannot find them within an hour or so, then I will go out and look for them. But you must stay here, because it is not safe for you to be going through the streets while there are still fires. Especially not in those shoes. You could never run wearing them. So we search here first. All right?”
Ishi’s frown deepened, but since Henry’s logic was as sound as hers had been, she gave a quick nod and tugged at his hand, urging him on into the throng that was trying to gain entrance to the already overcrowded park.
For the next hour, they threaded their way past blanket picnics, stepping over crawling babies, edging past chess players, and stopping occasionally to bow and greet an acquaintance of Ishi’s from school. Henry saw no one that he recognized. As they walked across the field, Henry saw that vendors had come into the open area, selling karupisu, the summer milk and yogurt drink that Henry thought of as the equivalent of Philadelphia’s iced tea, and people here and there sat under large umbrellas, eating rice balls, singing songs, and here and there, some people prayed.
Mentally, Henry was composing a dispatch for the foreign newspapers: an eyewitness account of the Tokyo earthquake, noting with approval that the stoic calm and innate good manners of the people did not desert them in the face of disaster. The fires that always followed severe earthquakes were called Edo No Hana by the citizens of Tokyo: the Flowers of Edo. Henry respected their ability to see the beauty even in a force that might deprive them of everything. He had once seen a photographic enlargement of a microscope slide containing the 1918 influenza virus. He had stared for a long time at this image of the minute organism that had destroyed his world, and, while it reminded him of summer pleasure boats floating in a tranquil bay, he could not put aside hi
s loathing to find it beautiful.
Now the sky was obscured by a great white cloud that hung over the city, and in the distance black curtains of smoke and soaring pillars of flame leaped upward to meet it.
Henry mopped the sweat from his brow with a silk handkerchief. It was so hot in the park. The summer weather, the heat from the raging fires, and the body heat from the thousands of refugees congregated there made the field unbearably hot. He would have preferred to leave and take his chances elsewhere, but he could not risk Ishi’s safety. She was worried.
“No one has seen my parents.” She looked at him calmly, but there was a tremor in her voice. “I did not find any neighbors here.”
Henry opened his pocket watch. It was past two o’clock. Surely the worst was over. The fire brigades would have the conflagration under control soon, and then people could go home and begin the process of cleaning up the mess. He realized then that he had not spared a single thought all day for his own belongings. All he would really miss were the few family photographs he brought with him. Everything else could be replaced.
“I suppose I could go and look for them,” said Henry, whose relief at an excuse to leave the crush of people conflicted with his doubts about letting the child out of his sight. “Did you find someone here that you could stay with?”
Solemnly, Ishi nodded. “Friend from school. We will go to where her family is sitting, so that you can find me again.”
He allowed himself to be led back through the human obstacle course, and finally to the little square of fabric where Ishi’s school friend sat beside her mother, reading a book. Ishi explained the situation to the girl’s mother, and in his halting Japanese, Henry confirmed that he would go in search of her parents and that he would return soon. The woman bowed and nodded her assent.
Henry looked at his watch again. Half past two. “I’ll be back soon, Ishi,” he said in English, and she bowed, with the same solemn expression she had worn for most of the day.
Henry was able to slip away from the field while the police at the entrance were trying to contend with a new surge of refugees who were trying to get into a space already so crowded that barely a blade of grass was still visible. The smoke swirled through the streets like fog, making it hard to choose a clear path, and the heat made every step forward a struggle. The fallen buildings and the fires made it difficult for him to get his bearings, and he tried to remember what course would take him toward home. He felt a new breeze blowing in from the bay, but the air was no cooler than before. For an instant he thought that this fresh air was a blessing, and then he remembered the effect of wind upon fires. He quickened his step.
It only took a few minutes for Henry to realize that he was lost, and that the decision of where he would go would be determined by the wall of flames that he faced at every turn.
He stumbled along toward the waterfront, keeping close to the river with some vague idea of immersing himself in the water if the flames came too near, but when he got close enough to see the river, he saw that its surface was covered with oil, and that it, too, was burning. He quickened his pace now, hurrying toward the warehouses clustered around Tokyo Bay. He was nearly a mile from the Army Clothing Depot field, where he had left Ishi, when he heard a noise behind him, coming from the direction of the river. It was the rushing, thundering sound of a waterfall.
When he turned to see what was making the strange noise, he staggered back at the sight of a pillar of fire. An enormous tornado of swirling fire seemed to rise up from the surface of the river. It rose hundreds of feet into the air, as if it were being sucked upward by the cooler air currents above it.
Henry stared at this terrible apparition, transfixed. The small part of his brain that refused to acknowledge his peril was thinking of the Book of Exodus, of the pillar of fire that led the Israelites by night in their wanderings in the wilderness. He forced himself to observe the twisting cloud of fire, trying to fix the image in his mind so that he would be able to describe it later. When this ordeal was over, he would write an eyewitness account of the horrors, and he must keep calm so that he could remember it clearly. There wasn’t much time. He was sure that this phenomenon was as insubstantial as a bubble. Surely, within seconds the tornado of fire would collapse back into the river.
Henry could feel the heat pushing against him like a paper wall, and the air was stifling, but he forced himself to concentrate on what he was seeing. It helped that Henry had always lived in his head rather than being fully in touch with his physical self. Now he retreated to his brain as if it were a distant observation post, oblivious to the bodily danger around him.
A tornado . . . made of fire. He had never heard of such a thing.
Later, when he had leisure to read as he recuperated from his burns, he learned that the Japanese had observed such a phenomenon before during the blooming of the Flowers of Edo. They called the swirling column of fire tatsumaki—dragon twist.
This reverie took place in a matter of seconds as he stood there, overwhelmed by the succession of disasters he had witnessed in the course of a few hours. An instant later the tornado rose higher above the river and began to surge forward, at a rate of perhaps seventy meters a second, sweeping up everything in its path—trees, carts, people—and sucking them up into the swirling flames. The column of fire moved slowly but steadily on, eastward, away from the river, like a dancer pirouetting across a blackened stage. Afterward, Henry could not remember any sound other than the waterfall roar of the fire tornado itself. He heard no screams.
He wondered how a thing suspended in the air could be consumed with fire, but he had barely a second to consider it, because an instant later the part of his mind that was not the detached observer registered the realization of the path of the fire tornado.
It spun steadily forward into the field that had once contained the Army Clothing Depot, but that now harbored tens of thousands of people who had fled the fires raging through the neighborhoods east of the river. They were packed so tightly into the open field with their salvaged furniture and their picnic lunches that there was barely room to move. There was nowhere to run. The flames from the burning buildings had now encircled the field, trapping the refugees within, directly in the path of the Dragon Twist.
He didn’t know how long he stood there, oblivious to the heat and smoke, watching the fire tornado sweep across the field in a silence punctuated only by the roar of the flames.
HE NEVER WROTE an account of the Great Kanto Earthquake or its fiery aftermath. His memories of his own escape from immolation were a tangle of faces and voices urging him toward the waterfront. More than once the fires nearly engulfed them, and he did not escape unscathed, but somehow he managed to find shelter in the basement of a waterfront warehouse bypassed by the path of the flames.
The next day, when the fires had burned themselves out and the survivors began to stumble out of their hiding places, Henry retraced his steps through the rubble to the field where the Army Clothing Depot had stood. The field was still piled high with bodies, some burned beyond recognition and some suffocated by the fire tornado without a mark on their bodies.
Finally a British official found him wandering around the ruins and took him back to the Imperial Hotel, where the American embassy had set up emergency headquarters. They sent him to one of the large homes on the hill overlooking the city, a district largely unscathed by the fire. After a few weeks his burns healed and the vacant stare left his eyes. But he found he could no longer bear to stay in the enchanted land he had loved so much, and the U.S. ambassador Cyrus E. Woods, a fellow Pennsylvanian, booked Henry’s passage home.
He would never return.
FOURTEEN
He carries his pain as he goes, leaving me empty. Like paired geese parting in the clouds.
—MATSUO BASH
We have to get out of here now!” Rose’s face was blotchy and her eyes were red.
Shade Baker stood in the doorway of his room staring at her, hoping that she ha
d been drinking but knowing better. How odd to see hard-as-nails Rose in floods of tears. He knew better than to suppose that this had anything to do with the Morton case. Trouble back home.
She stood in the hallway with a linen handkerchief balled in her fist, gasping for breath as if she had run all the way to his door. Shade had just finished washing up in order to join them downstairs for dinner when she knocked. He hoped that whatever crisis this was wouldn’t delay the meal for long. Eating too late in the evening interfered with his sleep.
Shade leaned over the threshold and looked up and down the hall, but Henry was nowhere to be seen. He opened the door a bit wider.
“Do you want to come in, Rose?”
“No time. I need you to go downstairs to the lounge and sit with Henry while I go back to his room and pack his suitcase.” Seeing Shade’s raised eyebrows, she recovered enough to give him a wry smile. “Save it for page three, Shade. I wasn’t bunking with Henry. He is in worse shape than I am. Some idiot hotel factotum lit a fire in his room, and some sparks caught the hearth rug alight.”
Shade stiffened. A real crisis then. He glanced back into his room, calculating how long it would take him to pack. “Are they evacuating the hotel now?”
“No. The crisis is over, except in Henry’s head. There was a slop jug in the room, and Henry simply dumped the contents on the rug. And then he stamped on it. He put out the flames in less than a minute. But you know how he is about fire. He’s utterly shattered. Says he won’t set foot in that room again. So I left him in the lounge and came to get you. I think he needs a drink. Or six. Can you see to him?”
“Sure, let me get my key.” He stared at her for a moment, and then dabbed at a stray tear on Rose’s cheek. “Is that what upset you so much?”
“No. Something else.” She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand, trying to sound calm. “Later, Shade.”
The Devil Amongst the Lawyers Page 28