December 6 (V5.0)

by Martin Cruz Smith

  “I don’t know, either.”

  “Something to do with the navy?”

  “I wouldn’t know.”

  “The navy and magic, what would that be?”

  “Sorry, I can’t help you.”

  Shozo nodded. “You keep beetles, I understand.”

  “Yes.” Oishi, the samurai beetle, was in Harry’s car.

  “As a boy, I used to keep lizards. My favorites were the chameleons. It fascinated me how a chameleon could be so gray on a rock or green on a branch that it was practically invisible. Sometimes I’ll be following you on the street, and I lose you because you blend in so well. Then I remembered how easy it was to see the chameleons if I only changed their background. I was considering a different background for you. Have you ever been to jail?”

  “Not seriously.” Harry caught the shift to a new level.

  “A Japanese jail is serious. Tell me why I shouldn’t put you in.”

  “Well, to start with, I haven’t broken any laws.”

  Shozo smiled in an indulgent way. “Harry, you break laws all the time. Even if you didn’t, in Japan there are also crimes of thought or intent.”

  “I’m an American citizen, my thoughts don’t have to be pure.”

  “If all else fails, there’s paragraph eight.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Paragraph eight of the National Defense Act. Giving political or economic information to foreign agents brings a penalty of ten years in jail.”

  “What information, what agents?”

  “You know Tokyo too well. You know the sad situation of Japanese oil. You talk to diplomats and foreign correspondents. Some of them are certainly spies. You know members of the navy general staff.”

  “Is that what this is? Giving the navy a black eye by arresting me?”

  “Tell me about the Magic Show.”

  “I don’t know what it is.”

  “See, you don’t cooperate at all, not sincerely. I had decided after our visit to the dock in Yokohama that, considering how much you knew, it would simply be wiser to put you in a cell and forget about you. Frankly, I don’t think your embassy would raise much of a protest.”

  Harry caught a hesitation. “But…”

  “But today you surprised me. Generally everything you do is for profit, everything has an angle. Today, however, you went to Tokyo Station to see an ordinary army man, a sergeant, board his train. I can’t think of any advantage you gained by seeing him off. So I decided to treat you as a Japanese and give you one more opportunity to cooperate.”

  “He was an old friend.”

  “Apparently.”

  The tone of the engine changed as the river bus slowed and swung toward the strung lights of a dock. Harry scanned the waiting faces for the eager grin of Corporal Go. The corporal wasn’t there.

  Harry asked, “How is the accountant from Long Beach Oil?”

  Shozo closed his briefcase. “Kawamura? We still have a few questions for him. Now he claims that he and the American manager are innocent, that someone must have altered the books recently. Can you believe that? What we have discovered is that for any Japanese with the simplest training in calligraphy, the forgery of a Western handwriting is child’s play.”

  “Then I suppose you should look for a Japanese.”

  “Maybe so. Some kind of Japanese.”

  The businessman with the newspaper took the boy by the hand and slipped by to join the line forming in the cabin. He had left his newspaper on the bench, and Shozo pointed to a front-page photo of the special December Kabuki performance when actors performed without makeup. Their real faces looked sketched and unfinished compared to the richness of their kimonos and wigs.

  Shozo said, “How interesting it would be to see the real Harry Niles.”

  Harry was working on a rejoinder when the boat touched and tied up. Shozo joined the line and, along with every other passenger but Harry, made a quick hop-step onto the dock, where he turned to wave a friendly good-bye. In a second he was gone, replaced by boarding passengers.

  It was unclear to Harry when Shozo intended to carry through with his threat of arrest. The various police agencies were like different companies, competing one minute and cooperating the next. Shozo could trade Harry to the army for advantages down the line. The navy could protect him as long as he was on the outside. In prison, though, nothing but bad things happened.

  In the meantime, there was still the gun to be disposed of. Harry had the open area of the boat to himself, until the last second when a young policeman in smart brass buttons and billed cap claimed the seat opposite. He opened a book and squeezed by the bow lamp, lifting his eyes from time to time to fix Harry with a glittering hostility. Whether Shozo had ordered the policeman on board or not, it wasn’t a situation conducive to the drowning of a gun. Harry picked up the newspaper the businessman had left on the bench.

  Rains in Okinawa. Photos of people in boats, pigs on roofs, a sake merchant wading through a shop knee-deep in water as empty tubs floated by.

  Fashion news. Women were bringing in their outmoded Western dresses to exchange for useful coveralls made from wood fiber. A picture showed one woman admiring herself in a mirror as she added a flower to her hair.

  Sports. Sumo visited army camps to express their support for men in uniform. Joe Louis pummeled a white opponent.

  The policeman’s eyes darted up from his book at every move Harry made. Harry turned to a page of photographs headlined CHINA WELCOMES JAPAN. In Canton, Japanese troops were welcomed by singers and dancers to a floating restaurant. At a junction of Shanghai boulevards, a single Japanese traffic officer maintained good order for thousands of Chinese. On a country lane, Japanese troops handed out candies and received flowers in return. At the Nanking city wall, Chinese boys goose-stepped and waved the flag of the rising sun. The page turned a tint of pink, and Harry looked up at an approaching bridge where a convoy of trucks was crossing with the sound of striving, underpowered diesels. Their headlights were dark, but the way was washed in red by signal lamps beamed through red filters. The policeman at the bow paid no attention. Harry wondered why a convoy would move at night, although the usual answer was sheer military stupidity. The bridge was a red haze: red soldiers looked down from red trucks. Flatbed Toyotas carried red caissons and light tanks that looked like red teapots. Red horses trotted by, and then more troops, until the boat slipped beneath into a cave of reverberating black. Perhaps it was the bow lamp’s reflection on the piers or the trucks overhead, but Harry found himself back at the Nanking city wall and not in dry newsprint but in the full bloom of a summer night.

  Kerosene-soaked torches ringed ten Chinese kneeling on the ground, their hands bound but no blindfolds. They had been walked for some distance, tranquilized by helplessness, eyes cast down, expressions slack. Two were obviously soldiers caught trying to escape in the general exodus from the city; they had succeeded in obtaining civilian clothes but not in erasing telltale rifle calluses from their hands. A third was a shop clerk in an apron speckled with blood from his nose. Another was an old man with a twitching mole. The fifth, Harry guessed, was a lawyer in a torn pin-striped suit; he looked like a busted mattress. Next, a coolie who was little more than a starved frame in a loincloth, then a man in a long nightshirt, as if he had been roused from bed, and a fat man —a merchant or a pawnbroker— with almost no neck. Finally, a man with eyes and mouth pressed shut, already braced for the blade; and a boy, maybe thirteen, who stank with fear. Over all ten of them lay an ocher dust daubed with blood. Perhaps a hundred soldiers gathered as ad hoc witnesses, and another fifty with more torches stood on the wall. It was the blaze on the rampart that had drawn Harry and Willie. The city was a landscape of ruin and fire, and it was sometimes difficult to tell whether violence was past, present or imminent, but Harry and Willie had long since lost their sense of personal safety. There was no personal safety, there was only bluff. Willie was a good leader because he demonstrated moral assurance
on a Wagnerian scale. All the same, when he and Harry drove toward the wall, soldiers made way with smirks of disdain. The Japanese had contempt for the international safety zone to begin with, and one of the open secrets of the war was that the Chinese enemy had German advisers —in fact, German, Russian and American advisers— helping them resist the Japanese. A swastika on a truck could be a safeguard one moment and a target the next, especially at night. As the truck nosed its way closer to the scene, the soldiers on the wall whipped their torches all the faster. When Harry braked to a stop, a sergeant jumped on the truck’s running board and shouted in his face, “Ten heads in ten strokes in under a minute! See for yourself!” As Harry and Willie got out, the soldiers eagerly pushed them forward, making them derisively honored guests. In the middle of the turmoil, a man gathered himself with the intensity of a sumo scattering salt around a ring, and Harry recognized Ishigami at once, by motion as much as looks. Ishigami had stripped to a white loincloth that accented the darkness of his face and hands and the alabaster smoothness of his body. Close up, he had sturdy legs, a long torso banded with muscle, wide shoulders and forearms thickened by hours of fencing and tiger-striped with scars. His hair was long, tied in a bun. A tub of water stood by for him to wash with when he was done and a fresh uniform for him to wear, but at the moment his mind was on his sword, and he rubbed the blade with oil of cloves that lent his hands a sharp-sweet scent. The lieutenant’s orderly was a young corporal with doelike features, long hands and wrists, lips full of anxiety. Harry wondered whether the corporal had ever seen combat, or had Ishigami protected him from harm? The orderly murmured something to Ishigami, enough for Harry to catch a country boy’s soft zu-zu accent. Ishigami glanced up, but Harry doubted there was any chance the lieutenant would connect Harry with the boy he had been fourteen years before. Ishigami wiped the blade clean, the sword weightless in his hands. Harry believed that Ishigami could probably take ten heads in ten seconds if he just waded in, but the lieutenant was a man of ritual. He positioned the orderly at his back with a bucket and ladle, practiced his approach from back to front so the kneeling men would hear only his progress. Satisfied, Ishigami returned to his starting point and took a balanced pose, breathing regulated, chin tucked in. A sergeant stepped forward with a pocket watch. Ishigami lifted his sword perpendicular to his shoulders, a silvery baton calling an orchestra to silence, all but the drone of flies. The sergeant with the watch raised his arm. There was a little respectful, preliminary coughing. The Chinese were motionless, leaning submissively, tilted toward their fate. Why no blindfolds? Harry wondered. For some reason, a white chrysanthemum came to mind. Harry took in Ishigami, the orderly, the sergeant with the stopwatch and the crowding circle in a more professional way, as if he had joined a game in progress and had maybe a second to find the chump, the weak link. He dug into his jacket and came out with a wad of money that he flourished next to a torch. “A hundred yen, a hundred yen each,” Harry declared, “to Lieutenant Ishigami and his orderly, and ten yen to every soldier present if the lieutenant can take ten heads in under thirty seconds. Or let the surviving Chinese go.” It was an offer that Ishigami, alone, would have despised, but the sight of the money and the sound of the offer had already inspired a cheer that spread to the heights of the wall. Here was an American crazy enough to practically burn his money. How at that point could a hero deny such a windfall to so many comrades? “Money,” Harry told Ishigami, “makes things more interesting.” Ishigami seemed interrupted at the top of a dive. He looked at Harry to determine if he was real or apparition. “Disappoint a lot of people,” Harry said. Ishigami’s eyes shone, taking in the ring of torches and enthusiastic soldiers. “Done?” Harry asked. Ishigami seemed to decide that it didn’t matter what Harry was. He nodded. Done. As he raised the sword again, cords of muscle played across his chest. His hands rotated in to the top of the grip to deliver the power of his palms through the blade. Thirty seconds. The first Chinese was the most difficult one, the merchant with the fat, sweaty neck. How many bolts of silk or tins of tea or bars of soap had passed across his shop counter? How many pipes of tobacco or plates of crispy duck enjoyed? How many women lain with, lied to, regretted? No matter, it all came to this, a balmy night in the Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere when the most he could hope for was a clean cut rather than a hatchet job. Behind the man’s left shoulder, Ishigami seemed absolutely balanced, sword motionless, his eyes focused an inch above the collar. The lieutenant’s hand began to drop, and already the merchant’s head was on the ground, separated from the body, which, still upright, jetted blood. A general expulsion of breath went round, an expression of awe as if each soldier had felt a phantom impact of the decapitation. Ishigami flicked blood off and held out the sword so that the orderly could ladle water on the blade, one side and then the other, to wash off bone and gristle. With three steps, Ishigami set himself behind one of the soldiers caught escaping, a man who knew enough to stretch his neck. Ishigami took his head off as if removing a sausage end; it dropped neatly between the dead man’s knees like a bowl to catch the blood. Two heads in four seconds; Ishigami was doing well. The orderly, however, moved stiffly. The light of the torches was shifting and uncertain. A hundred yen was a staggering amount. When Ishigami held out his sword to rinse, the orderly missed and had to scoop water on the blade a second time. Worse, he failed to make way for the back-swing, which plucked the ear off the side of his head and threw the lieutenant’s timing off. Ishigami only scalped the next man and had to swing a second time. When he held out his sword for water, it took him valuable seconds to realize that his orderly was too busy searching the ground for his ear to mind the ladle. It was a distraction. Ishigami looked at Harry. More precious seconds passed. Ishigami went back to work. He severed the head of the old man, mole and all. The coolie’s head flew into the air like a hat tossed at graduation, and then Harry called out, “Time!” Five Chinese —deserter, clerk, lawyer, man in his nightshirt, boy— were still alive. Behind them spread soaked earth, soaked bodies, dusty heads, insect spirals, Ishigami bloody to his waist, sweaty with clots of blood, strands of hair loose from his exertions, the long arc of the sword bright red. The survivors seemed the last to realize they were alive. Harry and Willie had to lift them to their feet and drag as much as guide them toward the truck. When soldiers blocked the way, Ishigami ordered them to step aside. A wager was a wager. The last to be saved was the boy, who cried, shit and pissed, every sphincter open as Harry threw him over the tailgate. “Don’t look back.” Harry told Willie as they got in front. “This is loss of face, great loss, so just look ahead.” Ishigami called after Harry, “How do you know my name?” Harry played deaf. “Who are you?” Ishigami shouted again. Harry ignored him, put the truck in gear and eased away from the soldiers until he dared glance in his rearview mirror and saw Ishigami turn, press the orderly to his knees and push down his head. All this Harry remembered not in sequence but as a single spherical moment, a special lens to see through…

  The river bus approached its dock. Somehow twenty minutes had passed in a second. As the boat slowed to a muffled impact, people in the cabin gathered their packages and children and rose from their seats. Harry knew he couldn’t stay on for a third ride; the policeman already gestured with his book for Harry to rise and join the other passengers disembarking. When he pushed Harry, the gun almost dropped from Harry’s belt. Instead, the policeman’s book fell on the deck, open to a print of two lovers, the woman’s legs elevated to display the nest of her sex and the darkened, swollen length of his. The boat rocked gently. The bow lamp swung from side to side. The policeman snatched up the book and shouted, “This is art.”

  As if Harry were a man to disagree.

  15

  KATO HAD AFFECTIONATELY called Harry his “ape,” his “imp,” his “fearless boy”; he couldn’t dump Harry over one mistake. The trick, Harry thought, was to find Kato, plead his case and then wheedle his way back into Kato’s good graces. Never mind that a humid day had led to a
night of heavy rain. Harry darted from dripping eave to dripping eave on his way to the music hall.

  The Folies was shut, front doors and back. Harry went around to the bright marquees of the Rokku and, drenched by the rain, ran from movie house to movie house, squandering money on tickets and breathlessly running up and down aisles in search of Kato. There was no sight of him there or in the food stalls along the street, and when the movie marquees went dark, the entire Rokku plunged into black. Harry would have tried finding Oharu, but he realized that he didn’t know where she lived. Off the Rokku, the entire city was snuffing lamps and drawing windows shut. The

  last street

  vendors retreated with the clatter of clogs on stone, the last red lanterns of the taverns died. At midnight anyone caught on the street without a good excuse would be taken to a police box. Uncle Orin would be summoned, there would be a scene. Yet Harry would not give up. He was sure that Kato had not gone home because the artist had brought a sketchpad to the music hall.

  Gone where? Harry splashed to the brothels Kato favored, peeking in doors for the sight of his clogs or umbrella, but Kato had disappeared. Harry’s clothes were a wet second skin. He trudged across the Asakusa temple and through the garden to the relative shelter of the temple gate. Looking up at the lantern of the gate, he remembered views of the same giant lantern in a series of Kato’s prints, with the same row of souvenir shops leading to the same broad avenue. A View from the Green House, the prints had said. Usually that sort of picture included a veranda with courtesans or geishas. These didn’t. Harry couldn’t think of a brothel that had exactly such a view. For lack of any other idea, he set off to find what house did.

  He moved in the shadows, watching for rickshaws or the shuttered lanterns of police until he reached a two-story house that seemed shut tight. It was sheathed in copper tiles green as dragon scales and Chinese eaves curled like tails. A shimmer of water over tiles gave the house the illusion of shifting life. On either side, an umbrella store and a bicycle repair shop appeared to cringe at the proximity of such a fearsome neighbor. The upper windows were closed to the rain. On the front doors and gate were padlocks the size of horseshoes, and the front window was locked and covered by bamboo grown wild in pots. Harry sank as far into the doorway as he could get, soaked and defeated. Resting his head against the door, he heard the faintest possible plucking of a shamisen, like the idle sound of overflowing water. No one simply passing by would have noticed.