December 6 (V5.0)

by Martin Cruz Smith

  “So what are you saying?”

  “I’m just speculating. Whoever it was, what if they were after Michiko and killed the wrong woman? It could be someone who even knew Haruko. If he phoned her or saw her, and if he was a friend, she would have said where Michiko was. She would have even told him how Michiko stole her dress, probably even described it. She did to me.”

  “She liked to gossip.”

  “But then, after the call, she got up the nerve to go to the ballroom and get her dress back. No one expected that.”

  “She was a stupid girl.”

  “She was crazy about you.”

  The Rokku marquees, the fanciful swirls and fans and rays of colored lightbulbs, made a cold blaze in the night. Poster samurai hiked their swords. When Harry stopped, the drumming subsided. But a drunk tripped out of a sake stall into the middle of the pavement and collided with a vendor carrying a rack of candlelit paper lanterns. The lanterns caught fire as they rolled around the ground and chased the crowd, laughing, to either side so that Harry had a clear view of Gen’s Harley-Davidson idling at a low throb no more than fifty feet behind. Hajime sat on the bike and Ishigami in the sidecar, both in uniform, with the same regimental tab. It dawned on Harry rather late that Hajime had probably served under the colonel in China. Was that a smile on Ishigami’s lips or only patience?

  Harry was curious. “When did you tell the colonel about you and Hawaii?”

  “This morning. Can you imagine me being on the team that planned the raid?”

  “Sure, why not?”

  “I just wanted one accomplishment, Harry, that was all mine, not handed to me by you or Ishigami. It was top-secret. There was so much pressure from the top to confirm information that only you had.”

  “Why try to hurt Michiko?”

  “She was always in the way. I thought that if she was gone and I was the only one between you and Ishigami that you’d finally tell the truth about the oil tanks. I tried to carry out my assignment, please the colonel and save you, too. Do you understand the problem?”

  “That’s a balancing act,” Harry granted. He stepped on his cigarette. “So now what?”

  Gen’s tone became more certain. “Now there’s no problem.”

  Ishigami hadn’t blinked. It was like being watched by a Buddha. And as the crowd closed in and stamped out the fires, Harry ran. Gen paused a second on his dignity, which allowed Harry to bolt into a movie-house lobby as ornate as a Moorish palace and through the theater doors. On the screen, a Western stagecoach rolled across a black-and-white canyon of wind-sculpted rocks. Harry ran down the aisle and plunged through the emergency door into a back street of noodle shops.

  Behind, Gen came out of the emergency door. Harry pulled on his germ mask as he detoured into a pub, through the kitchen frying tofu and a narrow passage encrusted with fish bones to a backyard alley and the window of a prostitute who suggested, “Celebrate our victory. Be the first tonight.” Harry caught a glimpse over his shoulder of Gen jumping the garbage of the pub, getting closer. The drumming of the motorcycle swung ahead. The alley ended at a bamboo fence wound in dry vines. Harry climbed the fence and landed in a market of silk flowers and bonsai tied in straw ropes. A geisha started in surprise, leaving a whiff of face powder in the air. Gen soared over the fence. Harry turned through a food market, by trays of squid legs and satiny kelp, spilling a tower of rice tubs in Gen’s way. Harry got ahead enough to join the crowd at the shooting range, waiting their turn to fire an air rifle at enemy bombers already repainted from Chinese to American. Gen went by. Harry backtracked through the market and found Hajime waiting alone on the motorcycle. Ishigami was gone. There was no option left for Harry except a fence planted with nails. He tossed the knife over, spread his fingers between the nails and tried to swing himself up and across in one try. Didn’t quite, and landed on his back in a house garden with a row of red puncture marks across his shirt. At least there was a kimono drying on a rod. Lose some, win some. Harry pulled on the kimono as he walked through the house past an astonished maid, into another street of noodle shops and cafés with photos on the wall for choosing licensed women. With the power cut, shops made a murky glow, but Gen was a head taller than the crowd, and Harry picked him out from a block away. Harry turned and saw Hajime pull up to the other corner, and the maid came out of the doorway, looking in all directions. Harry tucked himself into a group around a printer’s stall doing a brisk business in maps of the Pacific. Because of the maid, Harry couldn’t stand still. With a map spread before his face, he took slow, abstracted steps toward Gen, who seemed content to shepherd Harry rather than chase him. Another group of men gathered around a chess club, everyone suddenly a military tactician. As the maid saw Harry, he ducked into the chess club and took the stairs, climbing over games in progress, and came out on a balcony that was a garden of flowerpots. A small, hairy dog came to life and yapped possessively. Harry stepped onto the one-story roof next door, walked across the tiles to a yet higher adjoining roof and caught his breath. Barking drifted below. With streetlamps dark and houses at half power, the city had the brooding glow of a volcano, not one that was subsiding but one about to blow. Harry crossed the roof and found a fire escape that let him down to a black sidewalk. As the counterweight swung the escape back up and out of reach, he heard the motorcycle coast up the street. The door behind Harry was padlocked, but the sash was old. He levered off the hasp with the knife, slipped inside and realized where he was.

  He would have known before, but he didn’t usually approach via the roof, without streetlamps or in such a hurry. The building itself was dark because the peep show, the Museum of Curiosities, had been closed by the police on suspicion of frivolity. Closed but not emptied. In the shadows Harry saw familiar forms. The Venus de Milo that was billed as an “exotic nude.” A stereopticon with views of belly dancers. Best of all, the freaks. The “mermaid” concocted of a flounder’s tail, papier-mâché body and horsehair wig. Siamese twins with the gaping jaws of lantern fish. With paste, paper and imagination, an artist could make anything. Harry’s stomach didn’t feel good. It felt cold. He sank to a sitting position, pulled off the germ mask and lit a cigarette to give himself a different focus than the pain. Between his kidneys and his stomach, he felt like he’d been run over by a thresher. What was this, Plan D or E? He hadn’t flown away on a silver plane, hadn’t stopped the war, had no more money. There was an old saying, that if after five minutes in a card game you don’t know who the mark is, it’s you. Harry admitted he didn’t even have a clue what the game was anymore. All he knew was that a creature concocted of fish scales and paper was hardly more patchwork than Harry Niles.

  “Harry.” Gen stood with a gun at the end of the aisle and motioned Harry up. “Leave the knife.”

  Hajime arrived by Gen’s side. “Maybe he has a gun. I’ll look.”

  Harry said, “Hajime, Hajime, Hajime. Was that your idea to drop the gun on me? Pretty stupid.”

  “‘Sergeant’ to you.” Hajime hit him on the side of the face and searched him. To Gen, Hajime reported, “No gun.”

  “Guns aren’t Harry’s style. Harry trusts in luck.”

  Harry spat out blood. “I’ve always been a lucky man.”

  Gen smiled sadly, humoring the delusional. “Come on, Harry, it will be like old times.”

  They left the peep show, Harry in the middle with a gun in his back, and turned not out to the street but up the stairs to a door with a sign that read, by the flame of Gen’s cigarette lighter, NO ENTRANCE. THIS DOOR IS LOCKED AT ALL TIMES. Gen had the key and led the way into a narrow room of vanity mirrors. Dirty slippers were piled by the door, tatty costumes hung from a rack, and although the Folies had been closed for a year, the changing room was still redolent with stale sweat, body powder and perfume. At that table, Oharu had first turned to the young Harry as he fell through the door. At that chair, Kato reigned as artist-king. Little Chizuko undressed behind that screen. The main difference was that the mirrors had
been stripped of lightbulbs, and what had been a space full of color and life was a dusty coffin. No music, either. Music had always stolen up from the show. Harry remembered a burst of fanfare, light shining and dancers flying through the door.

  “Decadence,” Hajime said.

  “Fun,” Harry said. “It was the best place on earth.”

  Gen said, “Long gone. Times have changed. Look at today, a Japanese task force goes undetected halfway across the Pacific and catches the American fleet like a row of ducks. Practically without resistance. Catches American planes parked on the ground and wipes them out. The greatest naval victory in the annals of war.” While he talked, Gen led Harry out the other door and down a spiral staircase to a backstage maze of ropes, trapdoors and sandbags. Rays of light from the front probed the painted flats of a barbershop, streetcar, battleship cannons, the palms of a tropical island, the playground of boyhood friends. Harry remembered the skits: the doctor routine, the cannibal scene, the bumblebee. And the chorus line’s top hats and kicks. The curtains framed a black abyss of orchestra seats. Ishigami was onstage, busy setting tatami mats in the subdued glow of footlights. A chair with a water pitcher, bowl and head box stood to one side. A belt and sword hung off the chair back. Harry couldn’t see past the lights. He wouldn’t have minded a full house, the Folies orchestra pumping out “Daisy, Daisy” and the chorus line crossing the stage on bikes. He tried to keep his eyes off the head box. Concentrating on Ishigami didn’t necessarily help. From the first day Harry had met him, the colonel had stayed essentially the same, the way a knife becomes more itself, both worn and sharp, by use. Harry missed Michiko. She would have evened the odds more than most. However, it was interesting to watch the interaction of the three men, awe for the colonel, adoration for Gen, acceptance for the loathsome Hajime. Harry was with them and not with them. They were going on, and Harry was definitely staying behind. Gen continued, “Despite the longest odds in history, we did it. The greatest gamble of all time, and we did it.” Harry was trying to think of some agreeable response when Gen sent him sprawling over the boards. Harry rolled over to find Gen’s gun dug into his cheek. Gen’s cap had fallen off, and his hair hung wildly down. “And it was worthless, worse than worthless.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Gen talked through his teeth. “We waited all day at Operations for the reports to come in from the task force, Harry. Now the reports are in. Now we know. The attack on Hawaii had three main targets: the battleships, the aircraft carriers and the oil. Those are the three legs of a navy. We sank the battleships. But the carriers were all out on exercises, we didn’t see a one. And the oil, Harry, the planes didn’t touch a tank. Instead, our planes went into the valleys looking for your secret tanks. Of course, they didn’t see any secret oil tanks because the tanks never existed.”

  “I told you they didn’t.”

  “You knew a hint would do. We couldn’t ignore what you said, Harry. It became an obsession. So, by the time the pilots realized there were no secret tanks of oil, their own fuel was low. They all returned to their carriers. All we needed was a single Zero to strafe the tanks sitting in plain view by the docks, and Pearl Harbor would burn until they didn’t have a drop of oil, not a drop in the whole Pacific. Instead, the Americans have their carriers and their oil. All they have to do is move some warships, and we will have achieved nothing. All the planning, the risk, the war for nothing.”

  Harry looked over at Ishigami.

  “It’s over,” the colonel said. “I could have told them. It will take years, but the war is lost.”

  They were right, Harry thought. In the long term, Pearl Harbor was a Japanese disaster. They’d needed to grab three brass rings in one go-round of the carousel, and they had missed two.

  The bitterness of years poured out of Gen. “I knew all your con games, and I still bit. Fictitious oil tanks. Fraudulent ledgers. What a sucker.”

  Harry said, “I warned you.”

  Ishigami placed his cap on the chair and drew his long Bizen sword as Gen pulled Harry up to all fours. Hajime sobbed. It was all going too fast, Harry thought. One minute they were kids rushing up the stairs, and the next they were men crawling onstage in the footlights.

  “It was to stop the war,” Harry told the colonel. He tried it on Gen. “It was to keep the war from starting.”

  “I believe you,” Ishigami said.

  Gen weighted down Harry’s back. Suddenly the punctures in his stomach felt like mere pinpricks. Hajime aimed a gun at Harry in case he moved. Ishigami’s boots creaked as they took an executioner’s stance.

  “A thousand yen says you need just one swing,” Harry said, because the last thing Harry needed now was two.

  “Remember that song ‘Amazing Grace’?” Ishigami asked. “That was a good song. Fill your mind with that.”

  Instead, Harry sensed every hair on his head stand. He rocked to the pumping of his heart, an engine trying to wrest itself off its moorings. His head, his hands, his legs, every organ wanted to divest itself of any association with a target named Harry. He heard the colonel’s explosive grunt and the furious whisper of the blade and sudden impact.

  Harry opened his eyes to find his head still on his shoulders. Gen’s wasn’t. It had rolled almost off the apron of the stage. His body, in its long leather coat and gloves, poured blood that drained, with the rake of the stage, into the pit. Ishigami flicked blood from the blade, retrieved the head and delicately washed it in the bowl. Harry couldn’t find at first the proper word for Gen’s expression. Melancholy, perhaps. A son of Asakusa born with nothing but beauty, a poor boy who had to bet his all, time and again, to advance, a prey for wrong companions. Ishigami closed Gen’s eyes, smoothed his hair and toweled his face, kissed his cheek and set him in the head box.

  “Why him?” Harry asked.

  “After such an error in judgment? Such dishonor? An officer has no choice.”

  “People think it was a great victory.”

  “People will learn otherwise. Who could live with that?”

  Ishigami wiped his sword until the blade showed its distinctive swirling line of black and white. Hajime dropped to his knees and removed his cap. Vile little Hajime closed his eyes.

  “Wait!” Harry said.

  Ishigami raised his sword, took three sideways steps and sliced off Hajime’s head. Hajime’s eyeglasses shot into the orchestra pit while his body slumped, one arm cradling his head, the gun loose.

  “Jesus,” Harry said.

  The colonel flicked the sword, spraying the floor. This was a new medium of art, Harry thought; there was blood everywhere. He didn’t dare move.

  “Credit where credit is due,” Ishigami said.

  “I’m not a spy.”

  “You’re not a spy, you’re only Harry Niles, and that is dangerous enough. Oil? That’s your weapon.”

  “A lot of modern things run on oil. Gasoline, lubricants, aviator fuel.”

  “Please, you remind me of your commercial poetry. Burma Shave.”

  “Exactly.”

  “See, you are never what you seem to be. I remember the first time I met you, you were just a boy. I thought you were like a trained monkey. At Nanking, years later, I took you for a profiteer, a cheat. You cheated me of five heads. Six, actually.”

  Including the aide-de-camp, Harry thought. He said nothing. A conversation with Ishigami was like sharing a high wire with a lunatic; the slightest misstep would be fatal.

  “It wasn’t until the willow house that I began to see what you really were. Now I am put in mind of the ‘Forty-seven Ronin,’ the samurai who hid behind a mask of gambling and drink. That’s what you are, a true ronin. That’s the secret.”

  “What secret?”

  “I told you at the willow house what my mother said about telling a secret to a seashell?”

  “And then crushing it?” Harry could picture the young illegitimate Ishigami standing on a beach, getting this wisdom from a woman who could never name the man sh
e slept with. For some reason, Harry also thought of his father at the stern of the ship that carried the Niles family back to the States. His father had found the Fifty Views of Fuji, the damning evidence Kato had sketched of Harry’s life on the streets of Asakusa, the pilfering, brawling, utter joy. Roger Niles balled up each page and threw them to the gulls that dipped and tilted in the breeze behind the ship.

  “Yes. You’re not what I expected, Harry.”

  “Who is?” Well, Harry thought, he could be killed on the floor or on his feet, so he got up. “Now we’re done?”

  “Almost.”

  Ishigami gave the sword a final brief inspection before handing it to Harry by its grip of braided leather. The blade trembled in an unfamiliar hand. The colonel sank to his knees. It was like watching a statue climb down from its pedestal.

  “Oh, no,” Harry said.

  “Do me the honor. It would be shameful if I didn’t follow my own men.” Ishigami unbuttoned the top of his tunic and rolled the collar back, unveiling the contrast between his brown neck and broad white shoulders. “Seppuku is too honorable an end for such failure. Sometimes the sword is more sincere.”

  “You’d rather lose your head than lose face? What about the war?”

  “As a soldier, I never expected to live out the war. The war is over.” Ishigami dismissed it like an episode in history already passed. He clasped his hands behind his back and lowered his head, scalp shining through the stubble. “It is less dishonor to be beheaded by a friend. You are the one gaijin who understands.”

  “Well, the war is young.” Harry considered the outstretched neck. “Sorry, I won’t do it.”

  “You’d be doing me a favor.”

  “I know, but I have to go with the numbers. Three men, their heads lopped off, indicates the help of a fourth. Two men beheaded and a third a suicide by gunshot, that’s a believable parlay.”

  “Harry Niles is still Harry Niles.”

  “That’s right.”

  “That’s your only reason?”

  “Part of the reason.”