The Gentleman from Japan

by James Church

  “Never thought about it. Maybe a few horsemen, but as a group, no. Why?”

  “You might not understand. If I’m farther west than the Mongols got, that’s something. I’m not so interested in the Romans.”

  “The Romans were everywhere, my friend. Have you looked at a map of ancient times?”

  “As a matter of fact, I’ve looked at plenty of maps. You Europeans give too much credit to the Romans. I once showed a map of the Mongol conquests to a Swiss businessman. He was in Pyongyang looking at factories, but something about him wasn’t right, so I was supposed to keep an eye on him.”

  “Really? Swiss? What kind of factories?”

  I didn’t like the question. What happened in Pyongyang wasn’t his business. And I sure as hell wasn’t going to tell them anything that might add to the file they apparently were keeping on me. “Dumplings,” I said. “He was looking at dumpling factories.”

  “Sure, everybody goes to a dumpling factory in Pyongyang.” He laughed. “That’s what I would want to see if I went there.”

  Rosalina would have tapped on the horn and given him a point. I decided he deserved it.

  “So what did this Swiss businessman who was not quite right say about the Mongols that annoyed you?”

  “He wasn’t impressed, as I recall. All he said was that the Romans were better.”

  “And you disagreed.”

  “Listen, the Romans may have thought they conquered the world, but there was a lot of the world they never saw. Europe is not the center of the universe, not even close.”

  “OK.” The taxi driver was surprisingly agreeable, nothing unctuous about it, just agreeable as if there was no reason not to agree, and disagreement would almost always be a waste of time. “That may be so. They may not have been everywhere, but they were here, and you can bet they enjoyed themselves.”

  “Did they get to Portugal?”

  “Dios mio! Of course! Why, did Luis tell you they hadn’t?”

  Who said anything about Luis? For some reason that bothered me. Even if he knew about the green van, he didn’t have to know Luis, or at least to know Luis by name. Surely they used different names for the operation. Rosalina wasn’t the woman’s real name. I doubted Vincente was the big man’s real name. The last time I talked to the driver, when I’d asked him if he knew Luis, he had ignored me, as if he didn’t know whom I was talking about.

  I already knew for sure the man wasn’t really a taxi driver, and that at least some of the story he’d told me when we first met was bogus. He was a more important part of Vincente’s operation than I’d first thought, seemed to know more about it than I did, and now appeared to know more, or was willing to talk about it more openly, than seemed to me to be wise. It was one thing for Vincente to brief me. He was in charge. But this driver didn’t necessarily know what I had learned, how much I was supposed to know, and how much had been withheld. That he openly admitted he knew Luis was only a single leaf on the tree, but it made me think the operation might be lashed together in ways that made it vulnerable.

  That led to only one conclusion. If the operation was vulnerable, so was I.

  I stopped to look in the window of a darkened candy shop. “Does anyone have lights around here? Very nice, very neat window display from what I can see. I wish they would be so tidy in China.”

  “What about Tokyo, that’s full of neat and tidy stores, isn’t it, Señor Tamada? And Kobe, they are neat there, as well?”

  “Do all cab drivers in this city know the names and history of their fares?”

  “No, but guides do. And since you contracted with me to give you a guided tour, I needed to know your name, which you graciously provided, and even something of your life—your hometown, for instance.”

  “In that case, no doubt you gave me some information about yourself.”

  “Very good. Please call me Salvador, Salvador Mercador. I am a licensed guide, having been born in a small town in Catalonia, its name will mean nothing to you, and graduated from the University of Barcelona with honors.” He bowed slightly. “Here’s a tiny guidebook of the city to make you look authentic. Put it in your coat pocket.”

  “I already have a guidebook. I don’t need two, do I?” The book was very light, even for something so small. I looked at this man, this Salvador.

  “It has a passport inside,” he said quietly, “your Japanese one. They decided after you left Portugal that it was a mistake for you not to have one. They put it together in a hurry, but it will do.”

  “‘It will do’ is a phrase usually meaning it’s fucked up but we can’t fix it.”

  Salvador pointed to a building, as if giving me some information. “If anyone is curious, you can say it’s newly issued, that’s why there are so few stamps. You were once in Finland, right? That’s what your file says. So we figured it was safe to put a Helsinki airport stamp in. The Finns don’t mind, they’re happy for visitors, even notional ones. You can come up with a story of what you saw, what you ate, the usual. The other stamp is for Malaysia. Shouldn’t be hard to produce a story for that. It’s very hot there. Maybe you stayed in your hotel the whole time so didn’t see much. You can mention the Indian cab drivers. Also spicy food. Oh, and you went to a factory there, something related to this current deal. You don’t have to say much, better if you don’t. Plead the need for security; be mysterious.”

  “Did you really work in that factory? You seemed to know the owner.”

  “Jobs are scarce for history majors, my friend. Besides, the factory had a glorious history, or it did until recently.”

  5

  We walked a few blocks in silence before Salvador resumed the conversation. “Let me explain, as every good guide should. At one point, in 1936 when the workers seized the factory, the one you’re going back to, they named it Fábrica Roja de Trotsky. It was not a very imaginative name, but they didn’t have much time to think about it, and anyway the name had to be voted on by all the workers, like everything else did. A lot of voting, a lot of speeches, a lot of excitement but not much getting done. Production went down as zeal went up. Some people who knew better warned them that Trotsky was on Stalin’s bad side and wouldn’t like the name, but most of the workers thought Stalin was bullshit and didn’t care. Trotsky had been here in Barcelona in 1916, and the workers thought he was a great friend of theirs. Actually, Trotsky didn’t see much of the city when he was here. Little did he know that the man who would murder him someday was here at the same time, though was only a child in 1916.”

  “Trotsky!” I stopped walking.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “The man follows me everywhere. I was once arrested and beaten because someone drew a straight line between Trotsky and a Kazakh woman I had bumped into. My shoulder still twinges when the weather changes.”

  “Because of the woman?”

  “No, because of the beating. I didn’t even know that Trotsky had been in Kazakhstan.”

  “Neither did I. But he was here in Barcelona, that I can tell you. It was only for a few days before he was put on a ship and sent away by the authorities, maybe at the behest of British intelligence, which thought he was nothing but trouble. British intelligence is sometimes effective.” He paused, but I left the bait on the hook, so he continued. “I often wonder, did he pass that young boy who would someday murder him? Maybe they went into the same candy store. Maybe the one we just passed.”

  I looked around and spotted a young Chinese woman standing in a dimly lit doorway across the street. “And who have we over there, do you think? An outpost of the Celestial Empire? What should we imagine she is doing here? A Chinese maiden, working for whom? To accomplish what task? Perhaps she is here to murder me.”

  “I hope not. What a mess that would be.” Salvador clapped me on the shoulder. “Just stick close.” We walked another block, where he stopped and pointed across the street. “Here we are. The Gaudí cathedral. The most wonderfully imagined building in creation.”

&nbs
p; The structure he pointed to took a moment to register in my brain. Even if it had been full sunlight, I would have had no idea what I was looking at. It defied description. It was, as far as I could tell, a waste of good resources. It made no sense at all in its lines—too many towers and too many angles. It looked like nothing nature would ever permit even in the worst of times. Evolution would have killed it off at birth. Against the night sky it crouched like a wounded beast.

  “Well,” said Salvador, “was I right?“

  “And they think we’re crazy,” I said softly. “If this thing were in my country, foreigners would fall down in hysterics and say it showed what fools we are. But here, you people worship it. It must be the Catalonian brain.”

  “Don’t speak.” Salvador held up his hand. “Silence! Just walk with me around the perimeter. Look at the shapes, look at the forms, look at how it encompasses space and reaches upwards. It is whimsical but serious at the same time, wouldn’t you say? It is like life itself. You can’t see many of the details right now, but all the better for you to understand the basic structure, the essence of its being.”

  “How long have they been wasting their time building this thing?”

  Salvador suddenly grabbed my arm. “Enough,” he said. “Let’s walk. Look at your watch, then take the map out and study it. There, very good, you see? It’s nearly dinnertime. Shall we head off?”

  6

  When we’d walked for about fifteen minutes, Salvador slowed his pace. He stopped once, ducked down a narrow passage, waited several seconds, and then resumed. He had long strides, but I had a lot of practice keeping up with foreigners with long strides so I stayed right on his heels. At last we emerged onto a broader road.

  “Here we are on the Avinguda del Paral.lel, a street that has seen better days.” He looked carefully both ways. “Early in the last century, it was a center of bohemian life. A distant relative on my mother’s side was much attracted to it, as were many young women of the time.”

  “Why did we rush away from that building?”

  He shook his head. “Nothing to worry about. Just something I noticed. Where was I?”

  Our abrupt departure combined with Rosalina’s warning did not strike me as nothing to worry about. “You frequently notice things in the night that scare you?”

  “Forget it.” The driver took another quick look up the street and then down. “An old lover, just someone I prefer not to run into. Painful memories.” He shot me a pained look.

  Amazing, what they thought I would believe. It wasn’t an old lover, that was for sure. I hadn’t seen anything, but I hadn’t been paying attention to the surroundings as I should have been. That was a mistake. All right, I vowed, no more gawking at the sights, no more distractions.

  “I think you were telling me about your relative,” I said.

  “Ah, yes. Early in the twentieth century. She was Cuban, had fiery blood, I guess. Her marriage was not to her liking, and she raised one of her sons to be a Communist.”

  It was clear Salvador was relieved I hadn’t pressed the point, though I was pretty sure he didn’t think I had accepted his story about an old lover.

  “Interesting,” I said. “We’ve had similar problems in my country.”

  As we walked along the street, I paused a few times to look in dark windows, hoping to get lucky and spot who might be following us. Dark windows are not the best for that, but there wasn’t much else on this gloomy street. “Not much to see,” I said. “Just old stores.”

  “Oh, there is if you use your imagination.” Salvador was suddenly animated, whether by the pictures of the past that ran through his mind or by something else I couldn’t tell. “Look hard enough and you’ll see cafés one after another filled with beautiful young women, poets sitting in the calm of dusk drinking until they can barely keep from sliding under the tables, dancers with long legs and burning eyes hurrying across the street to get to the theaters for the nightly performance.”

  “I should have known.” I shook my head. “You’re a romantic. That only happens in books. I’ll bet you there was murder, intrigue, and betrayal all around.”

  “Yes! Exactly! Something to stir the blood!”

  “Lucky Trotsky.”

  “No, Trotsky didn’t stay around long enough to enjoy it. He left on a ship.”

  “For Kazakhstan?”

  “No, for New York. Eventually he went to Mexico. A Russian agent drove a pickaxe into his skull.”

  “Someone from Barcelona, I gather.”

  “Yes, that boy.”

  I considered this. “And you have some connection with him?”

  “Why would you ask?”

  “A whim, perhaps. Or maybe because you are so focused on the story.”

  “It was a cousin, a distant cousin. The son of my great-great-aunt on my mother’s side.”

  “Your great-great-aunt, a woman whose marriage was not to her liking. Imagine, if her husband had pleased her, Trotsky might have died of old age, and the rest of us would have been left in peace.”

  7

  Service at the restaurant Salvador had picked for dinner was slow, but there were few customers, and no one followed us in. Someone could be lingering outside in the narrow, dark streets, but Salvador didn’t seem concerned. He ate a big dinner of roast octopus and fish stew, with a plate of grilled vegetables, half a loaf of bread, and most of a bottle of wine. I wasn’t hungry, but had a plate of chicken to be polite. I would have preferred pork, but it wasn’t on the menu. Salvador insisted we have dessert, an assortment of sweet tarts. I offered him mine, but he seemed offended, so I ate two of them.

  By the time we finished our meal there was no time for the Roman ruins, so we walked quickly back to the cab. Salvador motioned for me to stand to the side. From his pocket he took a small flashlight, which he used to inspect each wheel. Then he slid under the rear of the car. When he emerged he was holding a small black box. He indicated I should stay silent as he tossed it farther up the alley, over a wall that leaned toward the building it was meant to protect.

  “I was waiting for that to happen.” He motioned for me to follow. Fifteen meters up the alley was a black Mercedes taxi. He did a quick check under the hood; then we got in and backed up at a high rate of speed. “It was either going to be that or a parking ticket.” He spun the steering wheel and shifted into drive. The tires squealed, lights went on in several apartments overlooking the street, and we sped away. “Actually this was easier.” He turned to me and smiled. “Tickets are getting harder to fix.”

  As we headed out of the city, I thought I’d ask, since the answer probably had a bearing on my safety, “Who left you that present under the car? Friends of Gaudí? Old lover with a grudge? What is it this time? And don’t tell me not to worry. You said that they wouldn’t know you had picked me up at the factory last time.” I paused. “But then again, they’d know that you dropped me off.”

  “Yes and no. Don’t worry. It’s my problem, not yours. For now, they’re out one tracking device. And they won’t know this car. It’s a game they play.”

  “That’s supposed to be an answer?”

  “Take it for now. We can go into detail later.”

  While we raced past dark fields and an occasional house on the road up the mountain, Salvador didn’t say much. I used the silence to go over in my mind the different scenarios Vincente had laid out during the drive to Lisbon Airport a few hours ago.

  The first scenario, the most likely in his eyes—and the least likely in mine—was that things would proceed as if nothing untoward had happened. The reason I didn’t think this was likely was because two people had died just before I had disappeared into the woods on my first visit to the factory. It was hard to believe that everyone would have amnesia and welcome me back without the slightest ripple of suspicion that I had been involved.

  “It’s a matter of perspective,” Vincente had said when I looked unconvinced as he went through this scenario. “Turn things around for a mi
nute. Yuri shot the owner, whose time was nearly up anyway, and then you killed Yuri. Yuri was already suspected by José and his friends, and that you killed him puts you on the right side of the street.”

  “But I disappeared.”

  “Sure, but even more important, you are appearing again. And you’ll be carrying instructions to order more machines, though the terms will be tougher this time because of the delays in shipping the original order. These people want to protect themselves, they are intensely suspicious, but most of all they want money. You are their pot of gold. They’ll overlook a lot if they have to, as long as you don’t go over the line.”

  “What line? What if you’re wrong?”

  “I’m not wrong. And I have good reason to be sure that I’m not. Besides, do you think I’d send Rosalina into something if it had failure written all over it?”

  From what I’d seen, Rosalina wasn’t one to worry about failure. And I wasn’t worried about her; it was my skin that concerned me. “What is this magical line of safety I shouldn’t cross? They thought I was Japanese. I told them I was Korean. Is that over the line?”

  “Don’t worry about that. They don’t know the difference, and they don’t really care. I’m telling you, they care about getting paid. In fact, it’s good if they are confusing the two. Anything that gets them edgy or suspicious, you can tell them it’s because of Korean culture.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “Calm down, will you? Meaning whatever you want. Their heads are filled with nutty things about Asians. You can use that to your advantage.” Vincente gave me a sideways glance. “Listen, we can scrub this whole thing right now if you’re worried. I can’t have you walking in there with a shred of doubt hanging off your shoulder. They’ll sense it. In or out, let’s settle it right here. I have a backup waiting; it will delay things a day or so to work him into position, but he might even work better than you, now that I think of it.”

  “You have a backup. And this backup of yours has been fully briefed with the same care and precision that I was briefed, I suppose. Water bottle, phone numbers in underwear drawers—the whole brilliant scheme. Of course he’ll work better than me. A trained monkey would do better than me. Here, take this ridiculous passport. Give it to the monkey.” Vincente didn’t have a backup; that much was obvious from the way his jaw was set as he looked at the passport.