December 6 (V5.0)

by Martin Cruz Smith

  She told Ishigami, “Now you sing.”

  “My voice is too poor.”

  “No, we heard you before. Besides, you are a hero, you shouldn’t be afraid. Something humorous.”

  Ishigami paused and then erupted into “Camptown ladies sing this song, doo-dah, doo-dah, Camptown racetrack five miles long, oh! doo-dah day…” The Japanese loved Stephen Foster. Harry didn’t understand why, but they had made Foster Japanese.

  Ishigami finished red-faced and pleased. Harry clapped dutifully. “Sake ready?”

  “Sing,” Michiko said. “Something humorous. No jazz.”

  Harry could smell the sake on the hot plate.

  “Sing,” Ishigami said.

  Harry shrugged. What came to him was his mother’s favorite song, one she used to sing over Harry like a desperate wish, a mournful tune that brought out the last hints of the Southern Baptist in his voice. “Amazing grace, how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me… “He let the song slowly unroll, as if carrying a body through the cemetery gates. “I once was lost… “Michiko looked at him through her geisha mask, rosebud lips tentatively open. “Was blind… “For a moment he was in church, the congregation standing and singing with hymnals open, all except his mother, who knew each hymn by heart. She leaned forward to send a smile down the pew to Harry. “But now I see.”

  Harry repeated the song in Japanese, and when he was done, he needed the sake badly, but Michiko only stared at him. Ishigami regarded him intently.

  “That was a good song,” Ishigami said. “That is how I feel. There comes a time when you feel you are carrying all the dead, all the soldiers who have followed you. They weigh so you can barely place one step in front of the other, and you see ahead of you an endless road of more bodies. I don’t know why I tell you, except that you surprise me.” He reflected for a moment. “It’s good to say things aloud. When I was young, my mother and I would go to the beach at Kamakura, and she would tell me to find a seashell to tell my problems to. Not only problems but ambitions, the foremost being to serve the emperor. And desires.”

  “And then?” Harry asked because Ishigami didn’t sound quite done.

  “Then my mother said to crush the shell so that no one else would hear.”

  “Makes sense.”

  “You know,” the colonel said, “at this moment I feel that I can tell you anything.”

  This did not bode well, thought Harry.

  “Your sake.” Michiko set the flask in front of Harry. “Time for you to pay your penalty.”

  The flask was scalding to the touch. All the better.

  “Harry? Harry, are you in there?” A voice came from the front of the willow house. “It’s Willie.”

  Willie Staub, doing his best to call softly. Harry heard the awkward scuffling of a gaijin removing his shoes. Ishigami took the sword from the table and motioned Harry to stay seated.

  “Harry?” Willie called. “DeGeorge said he was coming here to find you. Are you there?”

  “It’s late,” a woman told Willie.

  Iris, Harry thought. Although the hall was dimly lit and the screen to the room was shut. If they got to the end of the hall, however, they’d see the blood or feel it underfoot.

  “Harry? DeGeorge?”

  Feet padded closer. Even seated, Ishigami achieved perfect balance. He wouldn’t wait, Harry thought. As soon as Ishigami saw a shadow on the sliding screen, he would rise and, in the same motion, slice through the paper, step through and finish both.

  “Harry, please, are you there?” Willie asked.

  “There’s no one,” Iris said.

  “The house would be locked if no one were here.”

  “It’s a geisha house,” she said. “They may be…you know.”

  “DeGeorge said he would be here, inside or out. I just want to ask someone.”

  Heads two and three delivered right to Ishigami. So much for the sweet Nazi and his Oriental bride. Harry opened his mouth to warn them, and the tip of Ishigami’s sword was at his neck, like a thumb checking a pulse.

  “Answer your friends,” Ishigami whispered. “Call them here.”

  Harry remembered the drills in the schoolyard, being beaten with wooden staves. That wasn’t the real thing. The real thing was like being skewered like a martini olive on a toothpick. The Chinaman who shit his pants in Nanking? Harry felt for him now.

  “Call them.” Ishigami prodded Harry.

  Willie and Iris opened shoji screens as they came. “Amazing Grace,” what a hell of a dirge to remember. Back in church. But then Harry saw Ishigami’s eyes twist backward as Michiko knelt behind the colonel, wrapped one hand around his forehead and, with the other, laid a chopping knife, the one she had cut ginger with, against the colonel’s throat.

  Harry smiled. Ishigami smiled. Michiko smiled.

  Harry thought Japan really was different.

  Willie’s voice was fainter, farther down the hall. “We had to look.”

  “We looked enough.” Iris was sounding like a wife. “We’ll come back tomorrow.”

  “I just worry about DeGeorge.”

  Don’t worry about DeGeorge, Harry thought. There was a second stumbling into shoes, discreet sounds of retreat along the path and the backfire of a car starting while the three in the back room sat like a family tied in an intimate dispute, waiting for the complete departure of intruders. Harry was still pinned to the sliding screen. At the same time, Ishigami was snug in Michiko’s grip, and Harry knew how fierce that could be. The situation reminded Harry of the church parable about people with short arms and long spoons who couldn’t feed themselves, only others, but with swords and a different moral: he needed a gun.

  Some of Michiko’s lipstick rubbed off on the colonel’s ear as she said, “Please be so kind as to put down your sword.”

  Ishigami said, “If nothing else, we have clarified relations between you and Harry. You lied. That’s all right, I thought you had.”

  She lifted his chin with the knife. Philosophically enough, Ishigami laid the sword on the floor, and Harry slid it to the far wall, then relieved Ishigami of his short sword, a beauty of nearly black steel, and did the same with it. Even without his swords, Ishigami didn’t appear disarmed enough. He was checked by Michiko’s knife but only slightly.

  Michiko said, “Run, Harry. Go.”

  “That’s right,” Ishigami said. “Run.”

  All Harry could think of was the gun under the floorboards across the street. No one could hold Ishigami with a knife or sword; that was like trying to hold him down with a paper clip.

  “Give me the knife,” Harry said to Michiko.

  “No, Harry. Go!”

  “I’ll go,” said Ishigami.

  With a deep inhale, he slowly rose, lifting Michiko to tiptoe. As she lost her balance, he shifted toward her and then out of her grip. Harry moved to block the way to the door. Instead, Ishigami ran at the side wall and burst through panels of wood and paper. One moment there was a wall, and then a garden Buddha looking in. Too late, Harry remembered the swords. A fist punched through the back wall, gathered the swords and disappeared. Harry folded the gilded screen as the tip of a sword appeared at the top of the last remaining wall and sliced the paper open. As Ishigami stepped through the flaps, Harry launched the screen, wisely not at the colonel’s head but at his feet.

  Without bothering with shoes, Harry and Michiko raced into the street. The Happy Paris was dark, the jukebox a moon among tables. Michiko locked the door while Harry got on his knees in the kitchen and slapped aside loose floorboards to root through pickle jars for the gun. “Camptown Races,” what a stupid song. A police investigation would really nix his travel plans. Was there room under the floorboards for DeGeorge? A jar slipped from Harry’s hands and broke. Bits of glass and brine swam around his knees as he dug out the cookie tin. Money spilled as he pried up the lid, found the Nambu, cocked a round into the breech and aimed at the door, at shutters, back to the door as if they were paper for Ishi
gami to step through.

  19

  HARRY WATCHED the street from his apartment while Michiko knelt by a mirror and candle to wipe her white face off. She had set the wig aside, and her own short hair was wrapped in gauze, exposing her ear, pink as a shell. Harry remembered Oharu awash in creams and tissues backstage at the Folies. As a kid he’d liked the way performers stripped themselves of one character and painted on another, one deception followed by the next. He wasn’t so sure how he felt about it now. Harry was always Harry Niles, blood washed off his knees, shaved now and dressed in a fresh suit, but essentially Harry, while Michiko was revealed in layers.

  Harry asked, “Did you know what the colonel wanted?”

  “He said he wanted to surprise you.”

  “Surprise me? You didn’t know he wanted to kill me?”

  “I thought there was a chance. I think a lot of people would kill you if they had the chance.” She said it flatly, as if stating a fact.

  “Did he say where he was staying?”

  “At the willow house. He’s rich. He rented the whole house for a week.”

  “So he could be there, he could be anywhere.”

  They had pulled up and tied the ladder stairs from the club, although Harry could still imagine the colonel climbing up a gutter or down from the roof, maybe squeezing through a tap. Harry had thought that lighting the EiffelTower might attract a late-night customer or two and provide some security in numbers. A stone knocked out the sign; it shorted amid a rain of glass. Harry had tried the phone; the line was dead. All he had was the gun, but with daylight he could go for the car.

  There was, of course, the option of sending up enough hue and cry to draw the police. Except that it was no option at all. Nothing like involvement in a homicide to upset travel plans. Know what a mark is? Harry asked himself. A mark is a guy who can’t report a murder. He was a mark.

  “Are you going to leave me?” Michiko asked.

  Harry didn’t have the heart to tell her the truth, and he didn’t have the heart to lie. He kept his eyes on the street. “I don’t know. I don’t know how much future I have in Tokyo. Except for you. I have the feeling I’m not wanted.”

  “Are you going with her?”

  “Her?” Alice, of course. Harry dropped at least some deceit. “She doesn’t have any future here, either. No whites do.”

  “But you’re from Asakusa.”

  “Yes.”

  “You’ll hate it anywhere else.”

  “Yes.”

  Harry didn’t ask why Michiko had saved his life. This was no fair-weather American girl, he thought, and no sweet all-day-sucker American-style love. Michiko’s was more of the pathological jump-into-a-volcano-together type. That didn’t change things. When Nippon Air rolled the DC-3 from its hangar, Harry intended to be the first man aboard, and expected to have Alice Beechum in the seat beside him.

  “You do a good imitation of a geisha.” Harry couldn’t help himself.

  “Did you consider the possibility that we both might lose our heads?”

  “No.”

  “You like being trapped here?”

  “No. Yes.”

  Figure that out, Harry thought. Since whiteface covered Michiko halfway to her shoulders, she dropped the kimono to her waist. She looked divided, warm breasts in contrast to a plaster face. Ishigami had done an expert job, adding the highlights of Chinese red to her cheeks, subtle shades of green and blue around her eyes. Ishigami, the Renaissance man. Of course, Japanese girls seemed boyish, boys like girls. What did Ishigami crave? Love, of course. Harry had cheated him of that not once but twice.

  Across the street, the lantern at the willow house had flickered and gone out. No matter, DeGeorge would draw attention soon enough. In cool weather, two days, maybe three. Ishigami didn’t hide his work. Ishigami didn’t care. After four years of slaughter on the China front, one more truncated body wouldn’t make a big impression. All the colonel wanted was four more heads. He had a Zenlike equanimity about his goal. Even with Michiko’s knife to his throat, he wore a triumphant expression, as if he had finally solved the question of her true allegiance. Harry had figured out the answer at the same moment. Well, it was a matter of gratitude, wasn’t it? Harry had taken this skinny kid, this Red on the run, a geisha of all things, planted her by a jukebox and called her the Record Girl. Made her a hit. Well, you could do anything with Michiko. She was like chopsticks. With someone that smooth and slim, the limbs were almost interchangeable. Variable. Inexhaustible. An American girl would have cried, “Save me, Harry, save me!” Michiko had said, “Go.” So, the matter of loyalty was settled. At the same time, that was no real obligation on him. If she wanted him to survive, so did he. Harry appreciated what she had done, but he couldn’t drive from his mind the image of Ishigami painting her. She still hadn’t taken off the whiteface, as if it afforded protection.

  Harry spied motion near a streetlamp, but it was a cat with tail intact, flown like a flag. In any other neighborhood, a snoop might have reported strange noises to the police. Not Asakusa, where the late-night carousing of drunks, whores and theatergoers was the norm. And when a detective did investigate the willow house, what would he see? Swordsmanship. A single slash on the bias that had opened DeGeorge from his breastbone to his bowels, and one clean stroke for his head. The detective would also see the telltale sideways spray of blood produced when an executioner flicked his blade to clean it. The idea that anyone but a Japanese could have carried out an execution so beautifully would be met with astonishment.

  One down and four to go. But perhaps the game had changed from mere numbers, Harry thought. Maybe there was added value in a head Ishigami thought Harry cared about. Just as the colonel had cared for his aide-de-camp in Nanking. Would Ishigami settle on tit for tat, ear for an ear, head for a head? Or would he embellish? There were things a man could do to another man’s woman. They certainly did them in China. Maybe he already had.

  “You and Ishigami were together all day. What did you do?”

  “We talked.”

  “You talked. You had tea, coffee, a couple of drinks?”

  “We talked about my family.”

  “Talked about family?”

  She told Harry how her father failed twice, lost his shop in the Depression, grew rice only to be ruined by drought and, under threat of starvation for the entire family, sold his daughters one by one to the brothels and geisha houses of Osaka. One reason there were so many angry young soldiers in the army was because they had seen their sisters sold. Ishigami had appreciated that. Michiko added that she hadn’t only run away from the geisha house. She was proud to have robbed it first.

  Harry was struck by how little he had known. How could he reconcile a fugitive geisha with the Record Girl from the Happy Paris? There had been hints of a certain internal tension. Living with her hadn’t been like keeping a canary. One night she had thrown a priceless bottle of Black Label at him. Another night she’d broken a Dorsey record and threatened to slice her wrists or his. Granted, in both cases he had just sauntered home from an evening with Alice Beechum; in both cases he and Michiko ended up in bed. He remembered every vertebra in her spine, the way her hair hung around her face, the ten little daggers at her fingertips. Lie down with cats and rise with scratches.

  “You were with Ishigami how long? Five hours? Six? All you did was talk about family and then he painted you up like a geisha? The two of you did nothing else?”

  “The two of us?”

  “That’s what I said.”

  Her voice went even flatter. “I wanted to save your life.”

  A man couldn’t balk at the hurdles, Harry thought. He had to plunge forward. “What did the two of you do? What did that entail?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You know what I mean. He did the geisha makeup. What else did he do?”

  “Are you angry because I let Ishigami touch me?”

  “Is that all he did? That satisfied him, just a touch?” />
  A silence stretched like a conversation in itself. Michiko stared at the whiteface in the mirror.

  Harry said, “It doesn’t matter, but I just want to know what happened. You entertained the colonel. You kept him busy. You convinced him there was nothing between you and me. How did you do that?”

  “If it doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter.”

  “But it does matter. It must have been pretty good.”

  “It didn’t matter. I’m back.”

  She rose and handed him a cloth so that he could wipe the nape of her neck and erase the white sexual W. Harry as good as saw Ishigami’s fingerprints all over her, her neck a scene of intimacy he found himself afraid to touch. He hadn’t escaped Ishigami. Ishigami was in the room with them.

  “Did he pay?” he heard himself ask.

  “Harry.” She pulled up the kimono and sank to his feet, and he was amazed by how small she looked, a puddle of silk.

  “Was it good?”

  A few more questions, Harry thought, and she would disappear completely. Out the window he noticed the cat run from the streetlamp, chased by a shadow that developed into a black Datsun with the lights off.

  THREE IN THE MORNING was the Thought Police’s favorite hour for hauling people in, a time when defenses were down and thoughts tended to be in sleepy disarray, so when Sergeant Shozo and Corporal Go pounded on the door, they were surprised to see Harry answer it dressed.

  The police gave the apartment the once-over, but they were in a rush to haul him off, not conduct a lengthy search. Harry suggested following the policemen in his own car, but the sergeant said it wasn’t necessary. He moved to the back with Harry, who was free to figure out where they were headed. If they couldn’t catch him asleep, they could play another game that police around the world enjoyed, the ride with no clear destination in the dead of night. Harry’s mind was still on Michiko. While the policemen had stumbled up the stairs, she had slipped down the ladder to the club. Harry had told her to stay with the doors locked until daylight and go to Haruko’s to wait for his call. He had given her the gun. Michiko with a gun. That was a scary picture.