The Gentleman from Japan

by James Church

  Luis shook my hand gravely and gave me a small salute. “Safe flight, my friend. As my mother used to say, call when you find work.”

  Chapter Four

  After the plane landed in Barcelona, I hurried down the stairs to the taxi queue in front of the terminal. I kept my eyes open, but there was no one from the Inquisition waiting for me. The line for the taxis was short. In no more than two minutes I was in a cab, a burgundy Mercedes that was begging to be washed. The driver looked at me in his rearview mirror. “You are Japanese?” He spoke slowly in Spanish. When I didn’t reply, he repeated the question in English.

  “Some might say so,” I said. “Here’s the address. Can we get there a little before two o’clock?”

  The driver looked at the address and then at his watch. “Señor, even if I had to change two tires and replace the transmission, we’d be there before two. You are buying machinery? That’s a big factory where you’re going. My uncle used to work there. I did, too, for a couple of years.”

  As we pulled out of the airport onto the highway, I was looking out the window at the scenery and not paying attention to the driver. I’d been to Europe several times on Ministry business, but never this far west. There was something invigorating about the place. I watched a few plane trees go by on the side of the road, very nonchalant in the way they stood, nothing formal or self-conscious as sometimes happens on airport highways. Then I remembered it is never wise to ignore a taxi driver. Funny things happen to meters.

  “That towel on your meter,” I said, looking into the front seat. “Trying to keep the sun off it?”

  The driver shook his head. “Oy, señor, I’m sorry. It is a present for my grandmother. I meant to wrap it.”

  “Well, it won’t jump off the meter by itself. Maybe it would be happier on the front seat. Perhaps you should wash it before you give it to your grandmother.”

  The driver smiled into the mirror. “You are something,” he said. “I think we will be friends someday.”

  “The towel,” I said.

  “Of course, as you wish.” He removed the towel. The meter was at zero. “I never record trips to the factory,” he said, and watched me in the mirror.

  “You bring a lot of people up there?”

  “Recently, a lot of Japanese,” he said. “When I worked there, it was mostly Europeans who came onto the production line. But after a couple of years, I left when it got strange.”

  I leaned back against the seat and pretended to be uninterested. “Strange is a funny word, I always say. It sort of depends on who is using it. You worked there long?”

  “As I told you barely a minute ago, a couple of years.” I saw him purse his lips. “If you’d rather sleep, I can just listen to the radio.”

  “No, sorry, I’m a little distracted, arriving in a foreign country, and my being an Asian.”

  Now it was my turn to watch him in the mirror. His eyes narrowed. “So you are Japanese.”

  “I’m afraid so,” I said. “Apparently that displeases you.” I bowed my head. “The offense is mine.” I hoped this would not go on much longer. Pretending to be Japanese was not something I could do for more than a few minutes without hurting myself. On one trip, in Romania, I’d assumed Japanese identity for two days. I told the Ministry that if they ever made me do that again, I’d drink poison.

  “No, I’m not displeased,” the taxi driver said. “It’s a big world. Not everyone can be from Catalonia.”

  “If you don’t mind my asking, what was strange at the factory? My people are looking into this company, and if there is something strange about it, well, you know, that could be bad for business.” I reached for my wallet. “Of course, we are always prepared to compensate for information.”

  “I’ll tell you what was strange. You decide what it’s worth. If it’s worth nothing, that’s fine.”

  “Go on, I’m listening.”

  “The company used to operate like a family business. The factory’s been there a long time, more than two hundred years. Workers were treated well, they knew their jobs, and the owner looked out for them. When the workers took over for a few years during the civil war, the owner stayed and worked with them. Even during the worst days, even after Franco marched in and slaughtered people, the factory was considered a place of sanctuary.”

  “Your family?”

  “We lost many, but it’s done, it’s past. The city has built over the bad memories, most of them anyway. My uncle worked in the factory for almost forty years. He got me a job there, and I thought I’d be set for life.”

  “And then?”

  “And then it all changed. Things started happening. Machines broke down where they had never broken down before. The computers were unreliable, and fed the wrong information into the precision equipment. Shipments were delayed or misrouted, so we had days when there was practically no work.”

  “You mind if I take a few notes?” I was searching for a scrap of paper in my pocket.

  He shook his head. “Just listen, OK? Paper floats away sometimes.”

  A careful man, I thought. “All right, then what?”

  “What I told you is not strange enough?”

  “Sure, it’s plenty strange. But I have a feeling there’s more.”

  “Yes, señor, there’s more. After a couple of months of breakdowns and disruptions, the different shops in the factory were walled off. We weren’t supposed to talk to each other, and we weren’t supposed to notice when visitors came through.”

  “Japanese?”

  “Some. They always went to the special section of the plant, to see the dumpling machines.”

  “Dumplings?”

  “I told you it was strange. It was. We didn’t know what they did in the special section. The technicians and machinists there were specially recruited from overseas and kept segregated. They were well paid, better than the rest of us.”

  “And then?”

  “The disruptions got worse. My uncle almost lost his arm when one of the machine tools went haywire. They told him it was his fault, but my uncle didn’t make mistakes. He was a craftsman. Someone had either tampered with the machine, or the computer program had been corrupted in dangerous ways, to cause injury. That was enough for me. I quit.”

  “They said good-bye and gave you a pat on the back?”

  “They gave me some money, enough for this cab, and told me to keep my mouth shut.”

  “Did you?”

  He looked in the mirror. “You and I never had this conversation.”

  “Why tell this to me? For all you know, I’m part of your problem.”

  “We’ll find out, won’t we?” He eased the cab onto an off-ramp that put us on a narrow secondary road that wound through hills and farmland. “The factory is around the next hill. You still want to go there?”

  “I don’t know why I shouldn’t. I’m not going to try to run a machine. Besides, I have an appointment to keep. Can you hang around to take me back to the airport?”

  “How will I know when you’re ready to leave?”

  “A puff of white smoke, isn’t that the signal?”

  He laughed. “Here’s my card. It has my phone number on it. Call and I’ll be at the front gate in less than three minutes. You can pay me for the round trip when we get back to the airport. You have a cell phone, don’t you?”

  2

  The guard at the front gate looked at my passport, took my picture with a small camera, and then had a short conversation on the phone. He hung up, frowned, and pointed to the metal detector. “Bag on belt,” he said. “You got change, keys, anything? In the basket.”

  He watched closely as I walked through the detector. Then he looked at the X-ray picture of my bag. “What’s in there?”

  “What do you think,” I said. “Look, I’m here for business. A lot of money is involved. If your company isn’t interested, I’ll just go home.”

  He scratched his neck. “I’m asking you, what’s in the bag? Just checking, that’s t
he procedure. You want to see my manual? You want to do my crummy job?” He dumped my keys on the floor. “Oops. So sorry.”

  “You going to pick those up? Or do I kick your sorry Slavic ass?” He wasn’t a Spaniard, that was for sure. And he probably wasn’t happy to be in Spain standing around all day with almost nothing to do taking orders from people who treated him with contempt and paid him less than he thought he was worth.

  The guard crossed his arms. “You and who else?” We stared at each other for a few seconds before he bent down and picked up the keys. “They said I should let you in, so that’s what I’ll do. Me? I don’t care who comes and goes. They don’t pay me enough to worry. I just like some respect, you get my thought?”

  I put two twenty-euro notes on the counter. “That’s as much respect as anyone gets from me,” I said.

  Three cameras on poles tracked me as I crossed the courtyard to the main door, heavily barred. When I was a meter away, the door opened, and another guard—an ugly fellow with a sallow face—watched intently as I stepped inside. On the other side of a thick glass partition, a wiry man in a perfectly cut gray suit stood with his hands behind his back. He nodded to a third guard, who hesitated. The man in the suit shouted something. The sound was muffled by the thick glass, but from the guard’s expression, I was sure it was not meant to be pleasant. The guard gestured toward his own badge, clipped to his shirt pocket. The man in the suit shouted again and raised a fist above his head. The guard shrugged and opened the door for me.

  “Welcome, señor.” The man in the gray suit extended his hand. “You are exactly on time.” His smile was poisonous.

  “And why not?” I shook his hand limply. It was better if his first impression was that I was a sack of flour. “You are the vice president in charge of foreign operations? I need to see the dumpling machines.”

  “Actually, the man you are looking for is out of the country at the moment. I am the vice chairman in charge of facilities and production. I’m fully empowered in his absence to deal with guests. Anything you would say to him, you can say to me.” He sneered as if he had told a joke but I was not supposed to understand the punch line.

  3

  Wherever I was when I woke up, it was dark and cold and very quiet. My head hurt a little, but not as much as my ribs. My tongue was so swollen it almost didn’t fit in my mouth. On closer inspection, I realized I was sitting on a dirt floor, with my back against a damp stone wall. I wasn’t tied up or handcuffed, details obviously considered unnecessary because I had no intention of trying to stand up. A door off to my left opened, and a light shone in my face. I looked around for my bag. It was gone.

  “Good, you’re awake. I was almost afraid those Slavic thugs had killed you.”

  “Uh.” My tongue wouldn’t allow much more than that.

  “You are probably thirsty.”

  “Uh.”

  It was the man in the gray suit. He sneered at me. “If I gave you something to drink right now, you’d drown. Your tongue will return to normal, pretty normal, anyway, in about twenty minutes. Ever had Novocain? It’s like that. Don’t get cute or you’ll bite your tongue off and not even know it.”

  “Uh.”

  “Good, now I’ll talk, you’ll listen. I’d ask who you are, but you can’t answer, not yet. But you might as well know, I am convinced you don’t belong here, you came under false pretenses, and you’ll be very lucky if one of our machines doesn’t accidentally rip you to shreds because of an errant computer program that someone, perhaps a friend of yours, has for some reason altered. You know anything about that?”

  “Uh-uh.”

  “I take it that means no. For some reason I am tempted to believe you, though I don’t know why. I also don’t know why you are carrying a phony passport and a tape recorder in the shape of a pencil.”

  I put my head back against the wall. Actually, I didn’t know why I had the pencil either. I silently cursed Luis.

  “It is very hard to see how you are going to get out of here alive, unless you answer all of my questions. And even then it is going to tax my ingenuity to figure out how to let you go, but I’m pretty smart and I actually do have a nice side to me.” He kicked my leg. “But you won’t get to see that until you cooperate. Understood?”

  There was a tingling on the side of my tongue, so I figured it was only a matter of time before I’d start repeating the one answer I knew for sure, “I don’t know.”

  “Would you like some water now? Or perhaps some orange juice?”

  I indicated I would. He stepped outside, making no effort to close the door. In a moment he was back with a glass of water. “Drink it slowly,” he said.

  Most of it dribbled out of my mouth onto my shirt. Not only was my tongue numb, but my lips were as well. They were rubbery and cold, and completely useless. I cursed Luis, cursed his forefathers, cursed the day I met him in Macau. From outside the room I could hear shouting and the sounds of a scuffle. A short man burst through the doorway. He did not look happy.

  “Gilipollas!” he roared. “Pollino!”

  I braced for what I figured would be more kicks, but the new man grabbed the no longer sneering fellow in gray by the scruff of the neck and threw him against the wall. Spanish ricocheted around the room. You didn’t have to know Spanish to be pretty sure it was vile. The man in the gray suit put his hands up as a supplicant and tried to scramble to his feet. The other man, smaller but with shoulders like a set of wooden blocks, threw him down again. Then he straightened his tie, composed himself, and turned to me.

  “Gomen, or whatever,” he said. “May I assist you in standing? Pay no attention to this bobo.” He turned and kicked the man on the ground twice. “He is an idiot, from a family of idiots. He was recommended to me by a horse’s ass who I will deal with when the time comes. This one”—he kicked the man on the ground yet again—“he has shit in the milk one too many times, and I’ll see to it that he regrets the day his mother, a great fat whore who sleeps with goats, conceived him.”

  The man on the ground whimpered and covered his face. My lips buzzed with feeling. I realized I could probably talk again but, considering the performance I’d just witnessed, decided to stick to grunts for a couple more minutes.

  “The first thing we will do is to get you comfortable, new clothes, a shower, whatever you wish. You are my guest. For lunch, if you would like to gnaw on the heart of this donkey, I will gladly oblige.”

  The man on the floor curled up in the corner.

  “Jackass! Get out, I can’t stand the sight of you!” He turned and called out the door in Russian, “Come and collect this garbage.”

  The guard from the first entry point, the one who had dropped my keys, came into the room. He came toward me with a smile on his face, until the short man grabbed his shoulder and spun him around. “Another idiot! It has rained idiots on us. By the holy saints, have the burros taken over the world? Not him, you fool, that one, in the corner. Take him to his office and keep him there. If he tries to get out, break his neck.”

  The little man took a handkerchief out of his pocket and mopped his face. “You won’t believe it, but this isn’t how we normally conduct our business.” He reached into another pocket and pulled out a tiny silver box. “Pills,” he explained and put two in his mouth. “Is it any wonder I need pills? I should have retired years ago, but no. They told me I was needed, that my experience was irreplaceable. Ha! Did I believe them?”

  I grunted.

  “Yes, you’re right. Of course I did. Fool that I am. Are you a fool, too?”

  I pointed at my tongue.

  “Well, we all say stupid things sometimes. I could cut out your tongue and you wouldn’t have to worry anymore. Shall we try it?”

  I shook my head.

  “That was a joke. Don’t worry. You are my guest. Here, now, stand up, and let’s get you to someplace more comfortable than this.”

  4

  After cleaning up and changing into a pair of trousers and a
new shirt, both of which fit reasonably well, I was escorted to a dining room with a high ceiling and a long wooden table at which, on either side, were eight ornately carved chairs. There was a long runner down the center of the table. Squarely in the middle was an iron candleholder holding four fat candles. Three of the walls were paneled. One was mostly taken up with a gigantic fireplace. The two others were hung with massive, dark portraits of men with angry eyes and gaunt faces. The final wall, rough plaster painted the color of a diseased lemon, was decorated with crossed sabers and an ancient rifle. In front of the fireplace was a multicolored rug, but the rest of the floor was nothing but bare, wide oak planks that had been worn smooth from years of use. Seated at the far end of the table was the short man with the big shoulders. He had changed to a white linen shirt with a brown silk tie and a pair of rust-colored trousers.

  “Welcome, irrashaimase, or whatever.” He stood when I entered but otherwise made no effort to come toward me. “Please, sit here, next to me. If you are on the other end of the table, we will have to shout, which I find irritating. Are you feeling well?”

  “I’m fine.” My ribs ached and I had bruises on my thigh, but there was no sense detailing the damage at the moment. “Quite a room.” I looked around. “Your relatives?” I pointed at one of the pictures.

  The man shook his head. “No. They are friends of the family killed in the Inquisition. That was hundreds of years ago, or do you know our history?” He indicated I should sit, which I did. He pressed a bell, and a butler with big hands and a nose that looked like it had met a large truck appeared. “Get the wine, Yuri, the special bottle that’s in the locked cabinet. Here is the key. And be careful.”

  When the butler returned with the bottle, the man sighed. “Maybe you uncork wine with your teeth in your country, Yuri. We do not. Give me back the key, then find the corkscrew. After that, leave us alone until I ring again.” He looked at me. “We’ll start with the soup. I assume you like soup.”

  “It depends,” I said. “I do not like it too spicy, and never with cream. I don’t suppose you have anything with seaweed?”