According to her helper, Yasuko had shown very little response to the earthquake. “She calls me a murderer,” she remarked in passing. Aki lowered his head silently, embarrassed. He started to leave, but the nurse followed him out into the hallway. The week before the earthquake, she said, her voice muffled in tears, Mitsuru had dropped in to see her mother. One by one, she listed the gifts his sister had brought along that day: “Inari rice balls, potato salad, stewed figs…”
This woman is really grieving for her, Aki realized, touched.
“…and a music CD.”
Curious, Aki stepped back into his mother’s room and flipped through the CDs. Among them was the “Haydn Set,” performed by the Alban Berg Quartet. He had bought a copy for himself in Tokyo. Somehow this pleased him.
When he returned to the truck, Uchiyama recounted what he’d heard on the radio: boats for Tempozan were now leaving from Harborland at two-hour intervals. If Aki could get to the harbour, he’d be able to return to Tokyo.
“Route 2 and the other trunk roads are closed to ordinary traffic,” said Uchiyama, “and the branch roads are almost all blocked off. But I can take you there on my bike.”
Aki quickly agreed to the plan, thanking him.
As Uchiyama lifted the motorbike out of the back of his truck, Aki borrowed his cell phone to call Xu Liping. Xu assured him that Li Xing was well. She’d just gone back to Osaka by car, driven by Chen. Not to worry, she’d be fine. She’d get home on schedule.
At the harbour, Aki and Uchiyama shook hands. They had met in life under the most extraordinary, wrenching circumstances, and each expressed gratitude for the generosity of the other. And then they said goodbye.
At Tempozan, Aki transferred to a hydrofoil for the Kansai International Airport, and booked the next available flight to Tokyo. As his DC10 took off northward, it veered to the east. Aki looked down upon the streets of Osaka below. Which was Li Xing’s apartment? Wherever it was, she was there. The thought filled him with agitation. Being high in the air, with nothing between him and the ground below, only made it worse. At least he knew where Mitsuru was, small comfort though it was.
Although it was midwinter, floating in the sky over Kobe was a gigantic cumulonimbus cloud.
The next afternoon, a man introducing himself as head of the China Section in the Metropolitan Police Department’s Public Security Bureau called at the Huxley office. He wore a dark blue suit with a grey pocket handkerchief and a wide-striped necktie, and his hair gleamed with pomade. An overly fastidious look, one often affected by men of smaller than usual height. Aki had on an ordinary grey wool jacket, no tie.
“My name is Kudo. How do you do,” he said. In the pauses as he spoke, the left corner of the man’s mouth twitched slightly. He’d phoned Aki several times over the past week, but Aki had not been in.
“Oh, I see. You were in Kobe. Terrible thing, terrible. Who would ever have thought it? Were any of your relatives affected?”
Aki calmly brushed aside the question. “No, not really. So, how can I help you?”
“Very glad to hear that. I must say I was impressed by an article in the Korean paper, the Chosunilbo, which said: ‘The calm and orderly behaviour of the local inhabitants was impressive, with no looting whatsoever.’ You know what happened after the Great Tokyo Earthquake of 1923. Six thousand Koreans were murdered. Now…” He held his palms together as if in prayer, fingers to his lips, then exhaled on his fingertips. “You are acquainted with Zhang Liang at the Chinese consulate in Osaka?”
Aki set down his paper cup of coffee on his desk, and nodded.
“If you don’t mind, may I ask how well you know him?”
“Well, that’s hard to say… ” Aki mumbled, starting to fudge the answer. He then thought better of it. Why not hear the man out? After all, this was about Zhang Liang. “Let’s see, we get together once every few months – once every six months is more like it. He gives me a call and we go to a little place inside Tokyo Station and chat…”
Wait. Aki gave his visitor a good look. He’d thought there was something familiar about him. Now he remembered. That same little place inside Tokyo Station… the bar Camellia. Last November, Zhang had met him there, given him a packet of Big Red Robe tea, and shown him Li Xing’s photo. Seven or eight seats away from them at the bar had been a middle-aged man, getting rapidly sloshed. There had been something a bit forlorn about him. Seeing the wide stripes of red, blue, and white in his necktie, Aki had had the momentary illusion that he was Ma Zuqi from Shanghai Public Security.
Ah, so the drunkenness had been an act. He turned his attention again to what the man was saying.
“Zhang Liang is with the Ministry of State Security. Although I’m sure you know that.” As was only to be expected in someone in the China Section, Kudo was well versed in mainland affairs. He also knew all about the Chinese Communist Party’s espionage activities in postwar Japan. The various agencies he mentioned matched the names of those supposedly sponsored by Zhou Enlai that Aki had heard about from Xu Liping. “He’s connected to the Y Agency.”
“Do you know about the Shiratori incident?”
No matter what he was asked, Aki decided he would keep his comments vague and noncommittal. Anyway, though Kudo kept putting questions to him, he didn’t seem to be fishing for answers. Rather, he gave the impression that he was laying out all he knew and checking Aki’s reactions. The purpose of this visit remained to be seen.
“Shiratori incident?” Aki echoed.
In January 1952, on the streets of the northern city of Sapporo, Shiratori Kazuo, head of the Security Division of the Sapporo Police Department, was shot and killed. After determining that the crime was the work of a military organization within the JCP, the police apprehended eight suspects and placed five of them under arrest. The remaining three were thought to have fled to the mainland. The statute of limitations on the murder had already run out, but if the culprits had gone overseas, that law did not apply.
What was Kudo getting at? Aki broke his rule of giving nothing away. “Didn’t Zhou Enlai’s spy operations in Japan include the Y Agency?”
“That agency’s got nothing to do with Zhou Enlai.” The corner of Kudo’s mouth twitched.
Aki shrugged.
“Not Zhou Enlai. Zhang Liang.”
At this, Aki uncrossed his legs and sat up straight.
Kudo explained. Zhang’s appointment to Japan dated from mid-August of the year before last, but from around August or September of last year, his intelligence work had increased considerably. Compared with the activities of previous government operatives, he showed unprecedented initiative. Last autumn, he set up a new operation; it was called Y Agency. Why it was called that, no one knew.
This, moreover, was evidently something he undertook single-handedly, without any direction or permission from his superiors. Unlike previous spy operations in Japan, he focused on contacting and developing relations with conscientious professionals – young politicians, high-tech venture businessmen and Internet bond entrepreneurs, hedge fund managers, and senior members of foreign-owned think tanks.
“People very like yourself, in other words. Also, you’re a member of a committee that’s influential in determining government policy vis-à-vis China.”
Aki forced a smile. “I have many Chinese friends. Zhang Liang is one of them.”
“He’s using a great deal of money.”
“What if he is? What business is that of mine?” There was a bite to the way he said this.
“Yes, but you see – one wonders how he’s managed to get hold of such a large amount of money without his superiors knowing.”
If they’d gotten this far, Japanese public security officials were no slouches, thought Aki. They may have lacked the enthusiasm or resources to go after new information aggressively, but when it came to counterintelligence they did pretty well.
Just then, Aki’s phone rang. He decided to ignore it. Kudo got to his feet.
“You g
o ahead and take the call. I’ll let myself out. Thank you for your time.”
Aki stood up, too. The phone stopped ringing. Backing off, Kudo was attacked by a great sneeze that he tried, but failed, to suppress with his breast-pocket handkerchief.
“Excuse me. Ah, too early in the year. Way too soon yet for pollen.”
Aki smiled slightly and then, with a gleam in his eye, asked, “Anything else?”
“No, no, nothing else today. I just wanted to fill you in about Zhang Liang, that’s all.”
“Thank you. Tell me, Mr Kudo, how long have you been in the China Section?”
“Ten years, give or take.”
“That makes you an old hand. You’ve got Zhang under surveillance, but before him was a fellow named Cai Fang. Do you know him?”
“Of course. But even if we ever picked up anything compromising about him, we’d never take any hostile action in his case. Definitely not.”
“Right. Right, I see that,” nodded Aki.
His hand on the doorknob, Kudo started to let out another massive sneeze – but this time he just managed to whip out his handkerchief before exploding with a sound like a lump of meat going splat in a pan.
“You’ve always been one of my assignments, you know. Of my predecessors, the third to last was assigned to your father. He died over there, your father, didn’t he?”
29
It was nearly a week after the earthquake and the Awaji puppet performance that Aki finally went home. The pile of mail awaiting him contained an airmail letter from Shuichi in Moscow, postmarked 14th January, before he could have known about the Kobe disaster and Mitsuru’s death.
Greetings.
Sorry I haven’t written. I swear, I’m forgetting how to write Japanese…
Still wandering in a forest of paper. There are sixteen different archives in Moscow alone – communist archives affiliated with the former Marx-Lenin Institute, the Foreign Ministry, the KGB and other intelligence agencies; military documents from the Red Army and the Ministry of Internal Affairs; documents from the public prosecutor’s office and the police. Not to mention all the related archives in other branches of government.
I’m focusing my research on six of them. One is the Presidential Archive, which I told you about two years ago. It contains super top-secret documents, which Yeltsin kindly made publicly available. Nothing to do with glasnost; in order to shore up the power he grabbed from the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, he wanted to expose the Party’s past sins, that’s all. Then when he realized that records of his own past were in there too, he quickly made it off limits again. That’s the way it goes around here.
At the CPSU archives, which I commute to a lot, there are flocks of birds inside. Big ones, like crows. They all take off at once, dozens of them. A swirl of dust and they’re gone. We wait twenty or thirty minutes for the dust to settle, and then we dive back into the mounds of paper. There are hundreds of thousands of records relating to Japan and the Japanese Communist Party alone.
The files on Mao Zedong don’t interest me – a big yawn. Enough people are already busy poking holes in his mystique, anyway. The BBC interview with his personal physician was a scoop, though. Turns out Mao had an undescended testicle. Who’d have guessed? Takes someone who looked after him for twenty-two years to come up with a gem like that.
Zhou is a hell of a lot more interesting, any day. He came to Moscow off and on, before and after the war. Partly it was for treatment of a heart ailment, but also it was to confer with the Comintern, get instructions.
So there are a lot of documents here on Zhou. Makes perfect sense to me that Stalin and the Comintern’s spies had him marked. Sino-Soviet antagonism goes all the way back. Mark my words, all kinds of new information is going to emerge about Zhou’s youth, his days as a Shanghai spymaster, his role in the 1936 Xi’an Incident when Chiang Kai-shek was kidnapped, etc., etc.
By the way, I found something else pretty interesting. Actually, that’s why I’m writing. In one of the boxes from 1937 I found a note marked like this, in English capitals: “AIDE-MÉMOIRE OF ZHOU-EN-LAI HAN-LAN-GEN (ACTOR, JAPANESE).” Neither of the names was given in Chinese, so I could be wrong, but the first one must be Premier Zhou Enlai, and the second – especially because he’s identified as a Japanese actor – could easily be your father, who I think appeared in Huaying productions under that name. Han Langen would be the Pinyin spelling.
I spent a couple of days looking for anything else with the surname Han, but got nowhere. I did come across two more references to an “aide-mémoire,” though. One was dated June 1, 1946: “Lock up the aide-mémoire.” The other one was marked October 1955: “Destroy the aide-mémoire.”
What do you think? Stick an equal sign before the name Han Langen and it could mean that he was Zhou Enlai’s… what? Private secretary?
Then I had another thought. Hitchcock’s “The 39 Steps,” one of his early films from his British period, features a performance by a guy with a little moustache called “Mr Memory.” This guy’s famous for his ability to remember anything and everything, and he takes random questions from the audience. Things like, who was in the 1921 Derby? Bingo – Mr Memory gives all the names of the horses, in order, and the amount of money they each won.
Turns out he was hired by enemy spies bent on stealing revolutionary new technology from the Royal Air Force. Not one page of the documents was lost, but everything got stolen. He sneaked them out overnight and returned them in the morning. Nowadays you’d just run off a copy on a Xerox machine. Anyway, the whole formula went into Mr Memory’s head. Seeing that bit about Zhou Enlai’s aide-mémoire reminded me. If you’ve never seen the flick, go check it out.
If you ask me, there’s a good chance your dad’s still alive. There’s no record he was ever killed – and don’t forget, six years ago, that time you went to Shanghai, it was because Xie Han wrote you that he might be alive. If it’s true, that’s fantastic. I want first rights to an interview.
This has turned into one helluva long letter. Almost feels like I’m talking to you face to face. I’ll be here another year. I’ve found some fascinating material, and there’ll be more. With the Cold War over, more and more new facts will be coming out, and new books that’ll change how we view history. I’d like to write one myself if I can.
Of course, finding anything in this mountain of information comes down to sheer coincidence. But I’ll take my chances. Coincidences are taboo in fiction, they say, but real life contains more of them than you’ll find in any book. Coincidence rules.
As I wander through this forest of paper, sometimes out of nowhere I hear Mitsuru’s voice. I wish more than ever that I could see both of you. Take care, stay well.
30
Lock up the aide-mémoire. June 1, 1946.
Around that time, traitors’ trials were underway in the high courts of Nanjing, Jiangsu, Shanghai, Hebei, Tianjin, Ji’nan, Amoy, and elsewhere in China. In Shanghai High Court, Han Langen answered all the questions put by the prosecution and judge the same way: Wang le. I’ve forgotten. Was this somehow connected with that written order to lock away the aide-mémoire?
Destroy the aide-mémoire. October 1955.
That was the year Waki Tanehiko got a letter from a woman summoning him back to China, and had sailed off to Shanghai. Whether the letter was in fact sent by Zheng Pinru, none could say. The real Zheng was supposed to have been killed in February 1940. In the meantime, Waki had established a thriving trading company in Kobe, married, and fathered a child; for him to leave all that and smuggle himself back into China could only mean he was compelled to do so, either by the contents of the letter or by the identity of its sender. If he found out that Zheng, whom he’d thought was dead, was actually alive and had written to him, his behaviour made sense. But barely two months after leaving Japan, he was arrested in Beijing on the charge of spying.
Did this connect with the instruction of 1955? And whose instruction was it?
Aki recalled
what Xie Han had once told him: “Han Langen may have forgotten everything, but they hadn’t forgotten him, and they asked him – lured him – back.” “Who are ‘they’?” “The top level of Mango could have been mixed up in it. I can’t be sure, and even if I had some idea, in this country it’s impossible to name names…”
Xu Liping, meanwhile, had come up with the theory that in addition to the various spy rings overseen by Zhou, he’d had another – a private agency; let‘s call it Y Agency. It was one of that agency’s spy ships that had taken his father to the mainland. Thus the identity of the top-level figure whose name had also occurred to Xie Han, the figure whose name could not be named “in this country,” was pretty clear.
Aki put Shuichi’s letter back in the envelope. His friend had to be informed of Mitsuru’s death. He’d write to him. But first he was going to try to remember Hitchcock’s “The 39 Steps.” He’d seen it as a student.
He swivelled in his chair and murmured, “Mr Memory.” Little by little, the final scene came back to him. The man was on stage in the middle of a performance when he was shot by an associate. He was carried offstage and laid on the floor, dying.
“What was the secret formula you were taking out of the country?”
“Would it be all right, my telling you, sir? It was a big job to learn, the biggest job I ever tackled. I don’t want to throw it all away.” He then recited the complicated formula for building a new type of engine, ending, “This design will render the engine completely silent. Am I right, sir?”
“Quite right, old chap.”
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