Your Turn, Mr. Moto

by John P. Marquand

  It dawned on me that I had gone much further than I had intended, beyond the bounds of reason or decorum, in my criticism. I had spoken in a maudlin way, when I would much better have kept my ill-regulated thoughts to myself. Now that the damage had been done, I was too proud to retract a single word, if my life had depended on it. If they wanted to judge me by what I said in my cups, I would let them judge me.

  Two Japanese army officers were staring at me fixedly. Also a short dark man with his hair cut after the Prussian fashion—a habit which so many Japanese have adopted—was seated at a table near me, regarding me with curiosity. He was dressed in a cutaway coat and wore tiny patent-leather shoes. There was a signet ring on his left hand. I saw him look down at this ring and back at me again. I remember thinking that he seemed like a Japanese trying to masquerade as a continental European and not succeeding very well. He raised his hand as I watched and beckoned to one of the clerks behind the desk. The clerk hurried to him and bowed. Then the clerk turned to me.

  “Perhaps you are tired, Mr. Lee?” the clerk said. “Will you have someone conduct you to your room?”

  Then I found myself being helped to my room, whether I liked it or not, by the clerk and the small man in the frock coat, one on each side of me.

  “It is too bad,” the small man said. “I am very, very sorry.”

  I did not know until later that it was Mr. Moto who was speaking to me. I still do not know his exact rank, but he was a gentleman, no matter what his race might be.

  “I am sorry,” said Mr. Moto again, “very, very sorry. You will be better after a little sleep, perhaps.”

  He spoke sharply to the hotel clerk and the man bowed in a way that made me realize even in my condition that Mr. Moto was a man of importance.

  “You may go now,” he said to the clerk, “and understand, this gentleman is to have anything he may want.”

  The door closed softly behind him and I found myself sitting on the edge of the bed, with little Mr. Moto standing attentively before me. I have never felt so much an alien, for the conviction was growing upon me that I was cut off from everything I had ever known before. I, a man without a country, was closed into one of the curiously furnished rooms of the Imperial Hotel with that Japanese who exactly fitted into the surroundings.

  I looked up to find him still gazing at me thoughtfully. I wondered what he wanted. I wished, with a sudden intensity, that he would go away.

  The furniture was of some light-colored unvarnished hard wood. There was a built-in dresser, showing an odd unsymmetrical arrangement of cubbyholes for clothing. There were several chairs with legs short enough to accommodate a low-statured race. A writing table was covered with hotel notices in both English and Japanese. Beside the bed was a pair of hotel slippers, reminding me that the Japanese spent a large portion of their life in changing from one set of footwear to another. I looked at the man again. I still wished he would go away.

  “May I help you to bed, perhaps?” he asked.

  “No,” I answered. “What’s your name?”

  He smiled deprecatingly. “Moto,” he replied. “That is my name, please, and I should be glad to assist you. I was once a valet to several American gentlemen in New York.” He knelt down and began to unlace my shoes. “Please,” he said, “thank you. America is a magnificent country.”

  “Maybe,” I said. “But it’s thrown me over flat, Mr. What’s-your-name.”

  “Moto,” he repeated patiently.

  “Well,” I said, “you’re not a valet here in Japan.”

  “No,” said Mr. Moto, “but Americans always interest me. I saw that you were not well and that your friends had left you.”

  “Listen, Mr. Moto,” I said, “when they can’t get anything more out of you, Americans always go away.”

  “It was not kind of them,” Mr. Moto said. “I am sorry.”

  “Mr. Moto,” I told him, “suppose you stop saying you’re sorry. What do you want with me?”

  “Only to assist you,” he explained. “You are a foreigner, a guest, in my country, who has met with misfortune. Everyone knows who you are, of course. We have a great respect for American aviators.” He drew in his breath with a peculiar little hiss. Even though he was dressed as a European and acted like one, he could not avoid some of the involuntary courtesies of his race. “I have seen you before. I think last night, in fact. I saw you dancing with a girl—a very beautiful girl with yellow hair. Was she not a Russian?”

  I cast back into my mind with difficulty, trying to remember the hazy events of the night before. For a longer while than I cared to remember days and nights were hazy. They were made up of afternoons of drinking at some bar, cocktails before dinner somewhere, and more drinks, and then oblivion. Then I remembered that there had been a girl, a nice girl. My embarrassment, as I recalled what had happened, made me speak of her casually, as though she belonged to a lower class, but I knew better, nevertheless.

  “Yellow hair?” I said. “Oh, yes, I met her somewhere. Yes, her name was Sonya. I don’t know her last name—one of those Russian names. We got on very well until—well, I wasn’t myself last night. She tossed me over when I made a pass at her. All right—what do I care? She might have known I didn’t mean anything by it. Everybody’s tossed me over!”

  “Please,” Mr. Moto said, inhaling through his teeth, “here are your pajamas.… You made a pass at her—I do not understand the phrase. Will you explain it, please?”

  “Haven’t you ever made a pass at anyone?” I inquired. “You might have, Mr. Moto. Since you’re so curious, I don’t mind telling you that I tried to kiss her in a taxicab. That’s making a pass. She made the driver stop and got out and left me flat. I’m sorry about it, if you care to know.”

  “How do you mean?” said Mr. Moto. “She left you flat?”

  “The way you see me now, Moto,” I said. “I’m much obliged to you, but I wish you’d go. I want to go to sleep. I want to forget I was ever born.”

  I must have been half asleep then, but it seemed to me I could remember Mr. Moto moving carefully about my room. I was in a stupor, I suppose, somewhere between sleep and waking, with the fumes of Japanese-made whisky curling like mist through my consciousness. I seemed to be in an airdrome, in the cockpit of a fighting plane, ready to take off over the Austrian lines. Then, for no good reason, I seemed to be sitting on the lowered top of an automobile, riding along Broadway with the air full of ticker tape and torn-up telephone directories. I could hear the crowd shouting and a man in a cutaway coat like Mr. Moto’s was making a speech. “America is very proud of you, Casey Lee,” he was saying. Plenty of people were proud of me in those days. They were proud to have me at Newport and Southampton. They were proud to have me examine new tri-motor planes. They were proud to have me autograph books. It only came to me later that they were proud to take my money. I wondered what had happened to those days. They had moved away from me into a series of speak-easies and club barrooms, leaving me finally—there was no use mincing matters—a broken-down adventurer. For no reason, I suppose, except because Mr. Moto’s question had made me remember her, I thought of that girl of the other night. She had been the best-looking girl in the room, and the best-looking girl had never been any too good for me. And who was this girl? A Russian émigrée, a spy perhaps; Japan was full of spies. At some time while these thoughts raced, I must have gone to sleep. Sleep was the closest thing to being dead, and I wished that I were dead.

  CHAPTER II

  I was awakened at 12.30 the next afternoon. I remember the time because I looked at my wrist watch. Someone was knocking on my door and the sound waked me. My door must have been unlocked, because one of the hotel boys was standing beside my bed when I opened my eyes. I had all the usual physical feelings of having been drunk the night before. My head was aching and my hands were shaking.

  “If you please, sir,” the boy was crying.

  I pointed a quivering finger toward my bureau, and observed, to my surprise, that my
room was in perfect order, my clothes neatly folded instead of being strewn, as they customarily were, in every direction. Then I remembered Mr. Moto, who said he had been a valet in America.

  “Wait a minute, boy,” I said. “Do you see that flask on the bureau?” It was an old leather-covered flask which I had carried ever since the war. “Pour me out a half tumbler of that quick!”

  “Please, sir—” said the boy again.

  “Do what I tell you!” I interrupted him. My nerves were jangling like discordant bells. “Pour it out and hand it here! Never mind a tumbler. Take the cup off the bottom and fill it up!”

  I had to take the little cup in both hands when he handed it to me, but once the liquor was inside me it steadied me. My head cleared, my hands quieted, my muscles were again in some sort of coordination. Then I recalled the last afternoon, and that my backers had left me flat. For a moment I had the impossible hope that they had reconsidered, that the boy was bringing me a cable, but his next words removed such illusions.

  “A lady is waiting for you, please,” the boy said. “She sent you this, please.” And he handed me a note.

  I tore open the envelope and read it. I remember the writing still, large, bold, and foreign.

  “Where are you? Don’t you remember you asked me for lunch? I am waiting. I am not used to be kept waiting. If you ever want to see me again, you had better hurry.”

  It was signed “Sonya.” I had not the slightest recollection of having asked her or anyone else to lunch, but I had enough pride not to wish her to think I had forgotten.

  “Run me a cold bath,” I said, “and tell the lady I’ll be out directly.”

  The cold bath did me good. When I stepped, out of it, I felt better and younger, for the cold water seemed to have washed out some of the lines around my eyes. In fact, I was surprised how well I looked, considering the life I had been leading. There were signs of that life in my face, but my body had resisted most of it, and my muscles were still hard. I looked at the scar on my left shoulder where an Austrian machine-gun bullet had shattered my collarbone, and at the long gash in my right calf which had been torn by a splinter when I had crashed behind the lines—but that was long ago.

  A girl was waiting for me outside—a pretty girl—which made me remember that I must still possess some attraction. I dressed carefully in a blue serge suit. I said to myself, “After all, Casey Lee, you’re still a man,” and I walked out into the lobby, cheerfully, because I knew that soon I could have another drink. I even recall humming that song we used to sing in the evenings when flying men gathered.

  “I’m Going to a Happy Land Where Everything is Bright, Where the Hangouts Grow on Bushes and We Stay Out Every Night.”

  The yellow stone had been transformed overnight, evidently for the arrival of some important guest. The pillars were decorated with artificial peach blossoms and crossed banners,—one the rising sun of Nippon and the other a flag which I did not know. There was a bustle of preparation in the lobby, engineered by khaki-clad army officers with boots and sabers, and men in cutaway coats holding silk hats, evidently from the government offices. All of them wore the same intent, worried expression which I had observed often among the Japanese, as though they were conscientiously determined that everything should be done with absolute correctness in the face of a critical world audience.

  I did not notice the excitement much, however, but looked instead for the girl whom I had forgotten that I had asked to lunch. As I sought her out among the Japanese and foreigners sitting at the little tables, I discovered I did not remember what she looked like very well. I could only remember that she was really beautiful and that she had yellow hair. I moved at once toward the only girl I could see who answered that description and I knew she was the one because she was looking at me. She was a tall girl, almost lanky. Her hair was reddish gold. Her eyes, dark blue, gave the combined impression of being both shrewd and seductive. Her lips were painted a deep red, and her hands were very long and slender. She was dressed in a white tailored suit. Although there was nothing specific in her appearance to betray it, I knew she was not American. She had the social poise and the adamantine quality of a more sophisticated world. I knew that girl had been about and had seen strange sights—many of them not pleasant—and that she could take care of herself, probably, in any situation. I knew that she was a Russian, because I had seen her type often enough during my short stay in the Orient. I had seen her sort at fine dinners and in cheap dance halls but there was a similarity to all nationals of her sort. They were all aloof, but all charming companions, able to be agreeable in any mood, able to give an adventurous sense of competence, and displaying at the same time their own sadness, for they were sad people who wandered without a country. I took her hand and bent over it, clicking my heels together, a trick I’d learned in Rome, and she smiled at me.

  “You are late,” she said. Except for a throaty catch in her voice, her English was perfect, and I imagine she would have done as well in half a dozen other languages. “Did you not remember you asked me for lunch?” She was looking half reproachful, half amused, but she patted the chair beside her and I sat down.

  “Will you forgive me if I tell you something?” I asked her. “I was under the impression, the only time we met, that you did not like me.”

  “But you would not care if I liked you or not?” she inquired. “Would you, Mr. Lee?”

  I looked at her thoughtfully and told the truth. “I’m not sure,” I said. “Mademoiselle—?” I stopped, because I could not remember her name.

  “Have you forgotten my name already?” she asked. “Karaloff. But you called me Sonya the other night.”

  “Perhaps,” I suggested, “it will be just as well if we forget the other night. Where would you care to go to lunch? And will you have a cocktail, Mademoiselle?”

  She smiled, white teeth, crimson lips, slightly slanting eyes. “Sonya,” she said.

  “You are very kind to me,” I answered, “—Sonya.”

  “Perhaps,” she said, “I wonder … I like you, Mr. Lee. I like brave men.”

  It seemed to me that there was a tinge of sarcasm in that last remark. The boy came, and she gave her order for a glass of sherry and I ordered a double Scotch. “Sonya,” I suggested, “suppose we leave out the brave stuff. I’d rather be a coward today, and I’m afraid of you, if you want the truth.”

  She laughed softly and leaned toward me, so near that I could catch the scent of gardenia in her hair. “Why,” she asked, “are you afraid?”

  “Just a peculiar intuition,” I said, and I meant it. “I shouldn’t like to be in love with you.”

  She laughed again. She had that way of making one seem scintillating even when one said nothing amusing. “You’re a funny man,” she said. “Why?”

  I finished my drink and watched her before I answered. It seemed to me that I had never seen such a mobile face as hers, and I suspected its mobility. First, she had been watchful and her eyes had been hard and shrewd. Now she seemed to have tossed away that watchfulness. “Because you’d make a fool out of me,” I said bluntly. “It’s been done before.”

  “Perhaps,” she said. She smiled at me and I could see gold lights dance behind the blue of her eyes. “Brave men are so apt to be children.”

  I cannot describe the way I felt. I seemed to be lost in the personality of that Russian girl, in spite of common sense and instinctive caution. “That doesn’t flatter me,” I said. “You probably come from a sophisticated world where people live on logic. You can’t help being beautiful, can you?”

  “Do you think I do?” she asked me—“Casey?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I wonder who you are, and I know that you won’t tell me.”

  Her eyes grew hard for a moment and again she had that look of someone who could go through anything untouched. She seemed about to make an indiscreet remark and then checked herself.

  “Perhaps I’m not what you think I am, altogether,” she said. “Are you
what I think you are, I wonder?”

  “Does it make any difference?” I asked her. It amused me to observe how deliberately she brought the curve of the conversation back to me.

  “Your country’s done a great deal for you,” she said. “You must love it very much.”

  I rose to her suggestion almost without thinking. “My country took me when I was a kid of eighteen,” I said. “I wasn’t a bad kid, either, Sonya. It jammed me into naval aviation and put me in a plane that wasn’t fit to fly. They killed a lot of my friends, those planes that shouldn’t have left the ground at flying school. Then my country sent me to the Italian Front, and when it unsettled me for any sort of useful living, it closed the door of the navy to me because I was just a kid without real officer’s training. And now it’s left me flat in Tokyo; that’s all my country’s done for me. I’d give up my nationality any time.”

  She opened her handbag and drew out one of those long Russian cigarettes. “You’re joking, aren’t you?” she asked.

  “No,” I said, “I was never more serious in my life.”

  When I leaned forward to light her cigarette, she bent over the match and rested her fingers on mine, it seemed to me longer than was necessary, but I did not mind the touch of her fingers. “A man without a country,” she said. Her voice was genuine and sad. “I’m sorry.”

  “Well,” I said, “I can take what’s coming to me.”

  “Casey,” she asked, “do you like Japan?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Japan’s a country that deals with facts sensibly. By the way—” My attention was caught again by the artificial peach blooms and the flags in the lobby. “What’s all the excitement here today?”

  “Don’t you read the papers?” She laughed. “It’s the delegation from Manchukuo come to call on the Emperor. Do you feel as the American State Department does about Japan’s adventure in Manchukuo?” That husky voice of hers was softly, playfully caressing, but her eyes were not.