Quin?s Shanghai Circus

by Edward Whittemore

Perhaps because he’s a holy man and a holy man is supposed to guide, not teach. Or it might have been just a whim of his. In any case we followed the holy man’s directions and did what was expected of us.

  Quin shook Big Gobi by the shoulder and told him it was time to leave. As he stood Kikuchi-Lotmann noticed the cross hanging from his neck.

  That’s an old piece. Where did it come from?

  It was given to him in America, answered Quin.

  Once as a boy I saw a cross much like it. It belonged to Rabbi Lotmann’s twin brother, who apparently treasured it greatly. He always wore it hidden under his uniform, which was odd for a Japanese who wasn’t a Christian, who was an Ultranationalist in fact. It wouldn’t have gone well for him in the army if anyone had known about it.

  Who was he? said Quin.

  A very powerful General who was killed in China in 1937. He inherited the title of Baron Kikuchi when Lotmann became a Jew.

  THE POLICEMAN

  6

  As for where they go and why, we cannot be sure of such things. There are no tracks in such a barren waste. The sandstorms blow, the sun sinks, rivers disappear, and their camels are lost in darkness. Therefore the truth must be that the routes of such men are untraceable, their missions unknowable, their ultimate destinations as invisible as the wind.

  If the Son of Heaven is to continue to rule with integrity, we must defend our borders at all costs from such men.

  —A Han dynasty account of the caravans in the Gobi Desert

  THE YOUNG BODYGUARD WHOM Kikuchi-Lotmann called the student stood in a long line of people waiting for a movie theater to open. It was his day off and he didn’t have to be back at the dormitory until muster the following morning.

  All of the gangsters who worked for Kikuchi-Lotmann lived together in the company housing project, a large concrete block of windowless cubicles built around a central courtyard. Muster came at six o’clock, when a bugle sounded over the public address system. The gangsters fell in at attention in the courtyard and the roll was taken. A physical fitness expert then led them through a rigorous series of push-ups, pull-ups, and rope-skipping. The calisthenics ended at seven o’clock with the gangsters maneuvering around the courtyard in military fashion singing the company marching song, Kikuchi-Lotmann Enterprises Forever.

  The supreme present,

  Nothing compares to the present.

  Unless it’s the past.

  The lyrics were much too brief for the music, which one of the older employees claimed was similar to a tune he had heard in Singapore before the war, a song known at that time, there, as Roast Beef of Old England.

  Hato hated calisthenics and he hated the dormitory. He hated the young whore, a mental health specialist, who burst into his cubicle three times a week dressed as an elderly woman, her face lined with gray make-up to give her the semblance of age, her breasts taped down to appear flat, her belly daubed with green chalk, her legs painted with varicose veins. The young woman yanked him to his feet and pushed him away from the door. He had to spend an hour with her.

  Up against the wall, mother-fucker, she shouted as she charged.

  Hato didn’t have any special feelings about his mother, so the therapeutic effect of the session was lost on him. He would have preferred a girl who looked like a movie star.

  Hato’s father had made his living since the war selling gloves, hairpieces, and empty lipstick tubes that had formerly belonged to female movie stars. Most of these items were bought by girls who worked in massage parlors. The more select imports he auctioned off to industrialists, veterans of the Pacific war, who would pay high prices for anything that had belonged to an American star because America had won the war.

  He had begun his career almost by accident when the most famous blond star in America, later a suicide, visited the Imperial Hotel for a few days. On a whim Hato’s father bribed the maids to search the sheets each morning to see what they could find.

  When the movie star left he had two genuine pubic hairs in his possession. He framed the hairs under a magnifying glass together with a nude picture of the actress and auctioned off the display, realizing enough profit to set up a business importing less sensational items collected or stolen by maids and garbage men in Los Angeles.

  The house where Hato grew up was strewn with movie magazines used by his father to check the authenticity of the gloves, hairpieces, and empty lipstick tubes he imported. As a child Hato was given to spells of dizziness that caused his eyes to roll back in his head. While the spells were upon him he was in danger of biting his tongue.

  The best way to deal with the seizures, he discovered, was to lie down at once on a couch covered with movie magazines and stuff whatever was close at hand into his mouth. Generally the nearest available object was either a glove or a hairpiece or an empty lipstick tube.

  Later he outgrew these attacks, but one or two of their ancillary aspects remained with him. When he went to the United States for graduate work in mathematics he found he was unable to fall asleep in a foreign country unless the bed was covered with the faces of several dozen actresses of that country. And if someone called him a Jap in the course of the day or made reference to his height, or to his grin or his lack of a grin, it was further necessary for him to fall asleep sucking a glove or a hairpiece or an empty lipstick tube in order to assure a full night’s sleep.

  The male students at the university in New York wore beards and long hair. Hato let his own hair grow and bought false sideburns and a false moustache to cover his lack of facial hair.

  The first weeks in New York were lonely ones. Toward the end of the third month, his hair now plausibly long, he broke out of his isolation and took a subway down to Chinatown. A chow mein restaurant there was said to have whores available. A woman approached him and he followed her to a hotel.

  The whore turned out to be different from Japanese whores. She would neither take off her clothes nor masturbate him. Calling him Jappy, she hauled up her skirt and told him to get busy.

  A few minutes later Hato was having trouble breathing. His sweat had loosened his false moustache, which was slowly slipping down over his mouth and sealing itself there.

  Hato tried to hurry, his head down so that he wouldn’t have to see the whore’s face or smell her breath. The added effort loosened his false sideburns, sliding them up and in until they were pasted over his eyes. Blind, unable to breathe, he had to leap off the whore just as he was about to have an orgasm.

  He staggered into a lamp. His sperm hit the lightbulb, he followed the lamp to the floor and cut his hand on the sticky slivers of glass. Somehow he managed to get to the bathroom and free his eyes and mouth under the hot water tap. When he came back the whore was gone, having taken not only his wallet but his shoes and socks as well so that he couldn’t follow her. Hato wrapped his sideburns and moustache around his bleeding hand and walked up the Bowery back to his room, too ashamed to be seen in the subway barefoot.

  During the next weeks Hato brooded over the loneliness of life in New York. He realized he needed a project to sustain him, and at last he found one. He decided to become the world’s leading authority on airplane disasters.

  Early in the morning he bought newspapers and clipped the articles that had to do with crashes. In the afternoon, after finishing his work, he bathed and changed into his kimono. From that time until midnight, his door locked, he worked on his shoebox files.

  First he typed the articles on filing cards, then retyped them on other cards to show where the various accounts agreed and disagreed. Lastly he prepared cards under several hundred categories to cross-reference the accident.

  His system was so meticulous that the crash of a small private plane could fill half a shoebox, a major disaster as many as eight shoeboxes.

  It was demanding work but Hato knew that someday experts from many countries would come to consult his files. His fame would spread, he would be asked to lecture and give his opinions on television.

  Nea
r the end of his second and last year of study Hato was invited to a dance sponsored by an evangelical church group. He found himself sitting next to a girl who was a cripple and also couldn’t dance. She invited him back to the same hall that following night for a religious discussion. Hato ate cookies and volunteered to proselytize for the group every day from late afternoon to midnight.

  The militant sect, of southern origin, provided him with a sign quoting from the Bible and a tambourine. Because he was in love with the crippled girl he was only too glad to stand on streetcorners in the Bowery waving the sign and shaking the tambourine while she sang psalms. He intended to marry her and take her back to Japan.

  A weekend came when the girl invited him to her home outside the city. The girl’s father watched him suspiciously, Hato grinned. The girl’s mother went into the kitchen and stayed there. The first meal at the house consisted of potato soup, potato pancakes, bread and bread pudding, and peppers stuffed with potatoes. Being accustomed to yogurt and a slice of raw fish for lunch, Hato was both dazed and nauseated. Several times during the meal he had to go to the bathroom to vomit noisily.

  Afterward the girl’s father sat him down in the living room. He made an allusion to American nurses in Manila Bay. Hato grinned, still feeling ill. The father mentioned forced marches, death marches, sneak attacks, mass attacks, regimented ants, national guilt.

  Hato fell asleep, awakening a few hours later to a meal of boiled potatoes, baked potatoes, mashed and fried and roasted potatoes, potatoes colored to look like vegetables and shaped to look like meats. By the end of the weekend he knew that he would always hate all Americans and that marrying the crippled girl was out of the question.

  When he returned to Tokyo Hato decided to make a lot of money in order to go to Paris and become a movie director. The quickest way to make money was as a gangster. He was interviewed and eventually sat facing a small, rotund man who was rumored to be the director of an enormous criminal syndicate. In exchange for his loyalty, free room and board, and one day off a month, he was offered a substantial sum of money at the end of eight years of service. Hato accepted the offer, trimmed his hair, and bought a business suit.

  Working for a criminal syndicate in Japan, however, didn’t turn out to be what he had expected. Instead of kicking whores and pistol-whipping shopkeepers, his job consisted of carrying reports from a computer across the gangplank to Kikuchi-Lotmann’s houseboat. He stood rigidly at attention while his employer smoked a cigar, changed his necktie, mixed a salad dressing, poured himself a pink gin.

  Finally he was given instructions. He recrossed the gangplank and repeated the instructions to a programmer who fed them into a computer.

  Despite his advanced mathematical training, his fanatical desire for adventure, and his fanatical willingness to take risks, Hato had been hired for only one reason. He was extraordinarily familiar with world geography. Few people would have recognized all the names that appeared in Kikuchi-Lotmann’s reports, so vast were his enterprises. Hato never confused them, however, due entirely to his experience with the airplane clippings.

  In addition to crossing the gangplank he had only one other task, to accompany his employer periodically to the secret meetings he held with bereaved grandmothers. On these occasions he guarded the door while his employer and the grandmother discussed the details of a funeral.

  Kikuchi-Lotmann’s syndicate was the largest criminal organization in greater east Asia. In terms of gross criminal profits it was the third largest in the world. Yet despite his responsibilities he indulged himself in a very curious sideline known as the funeral racket, whereby he would provide a long procession of black limousines and thousands of mourners dressed in black for a man who died unloved and unmissed.

  The funeral procession might contain two limousines or many hundreds of limousines, depending on the amount of money paid. In the last limousine would be found the legitimate family, invariably small, presided over by a weeping, triumphant grandmother. The other family members would be unaware of the funeral’s fakery. Only the matriarch knew how large a part of her husband’s fortune she had used for this immensely expensive deception.

  As they drove through the crowds of mourners the grandmother pointed them out and pointed to the line of limousines ahead of them.

  Never forget, she said, the day your grandfather was cremated. Remember how he was loved and revered despite the money he made. Remember the thousands who came to do him homage.

  Her children nodded, her grandchildren nodded, the mourners returned to Kikuchi-Lotmann’s henchmen to collect their wages.

  Hato admired the cleverness of the racket. A whore had to spend at least a few minutes with a customer, everyone couldn’t take drugs all the time. But the funeral market had no limit, the number of ancestors to be revered was infinite. Hato intended to expose the operation in his first gangster movie. People would come from many countries to interview him. He would be asked to lecture and give his opinions on television.

  Paris. Eight years away.

  Hato stood in line thinking of the calisthenics he would have to do the next morning at six o’clock. At seven he would march around the courtyard singing a haiku. That night or the next night a young girl disguised in rags would break into his room and call him a mother-fucker.

  Hato grinned. There could be more to gangsterism than gangplanks and funerals. When the movie was over he would go talk to Kikuchi-Lotmann’s other bodyguard, the one who was called the policeman.

  He was a small man, as small as Mama, born to her parents the year they sold her to the brothel in Kobe, the year before the First World War broke out in Europe. His father beat him as regularly as he beat his wife until he was eaten by a dog one winter night.

  The father had collapsed in a snow drift on the way home from a drinking bout. A dog found him and sniffed his hot breath. Like every other creature in the Tohoku that winter, the dog was starving. Soon he was not only sniffing the hot breath but chewing it, chewing the lips and tongue that went with it.

  All the peasants in the neighborhood had been ordered to line the road the next day at first light, to show their respect for their landowner who was expected to drive past sometime during the morning. The policeman’s father was found with a large part of his face gone. He was carried home and treated, but his wife and son were told to wait beside the road until the aristocrat drove by. Thereafter the policeman’s father wore a cotton surgical mask and stopped beating his family.

  The dreaded Tohoku district was forever given to gray skies and winds and blizzards from Siberia. Half of the family’s crop of mulberry leaves had to be turned over as payment for use of the land. With the other half they paid their taxes and tried to subsist.

  Their plot of mulberry trees was an hour’s walk from the hut where they lived. Centuries ago the hills had been terraced, which gave the Tohoku the look of a land of giants. But for a peasant family such as the policeman’s the giant steps went nowhere.

  When he was eight years old the silk market in America collapsed once again. As before, his father blamed the catastrophe on his wife because she was an Ainu and had Caucasian blood. Unable to bear the hatred in his eyes any longer, she finally broke the ice in a rice paddy and drowned herself in three inches of water.

  The policeman’s father died of stomach cancer, arthritis, and advanced tuberculosis in 1931, the year the Japanese seized Manchuria after one of their railroads was blown up there, apparently by Chinese patriots. In retaliation the international city of Shanghai boycotted all goods of Japanese manufacture, an act that many Japanese army officers found outrageously insolent. That same year the policeman enlisted in the army to escape the misery of the Tohoku.

  From the very beginning he liked his new life. The routine was easy enough, he worked hard and did what he was told. At the end of training he was rewarded with an assignment to a Kempeitai unit in Korea.

  The country was as poor as the Tohoku, but now the Koreans were the tenant farmers and
he was one of the landlords and tax-collectors. The main work of his unit was the interrogation of peasants suspected of withholding rice. While trying to break the peasants, beating them when necessary, he experienced a sense of accomplishment that was new to him. For the first time in his life he learned to smile.

  An inexplicable event occurred soon after he was promoted to corporal. He and some other corporals got drunk one night and the talk turned to women. There were no whores in the village where they had arrived that day, but the policeman boasted he could find one anyway. He went away laughing, leaving his friends laughing behind him.

  The next day an officer called them in. A village elder had been clubbed while protecting his daughter. It was not the way for a member of the Imperial Army to act with monkeys of an inferior race. The guilty one was ordered to admit his breach of discipline.

  The policeman stood stonily at attention, expecting the other corporals to do the same. But to his astonishment he saw them stepping forward one by one to denounce him.

  It was spring. Tiny green shoots were just reaching above the water in the rice paddies. The three months of latrine duty meant nothing to him but the betrayal by his fellow corporals, the men he had thought were his comrades, influenced him so profoundly he was never able to trust anyone again, even to the point where the only sexual act of which he was capable thereafter was one involving a dead person, performed with an instrument so that his own body would have no contact with the corpse.

  From Korea he was transferred to Manchuria, to the unit of a captain in Mukden who always wore civilian clothes. Although the Captain could read, he was also a peasant from the Tohoku and didn’t despise the policeman just because he was illiterate. It was from the Captain he learned that the bombing of the railroad in Manchuria the year before, the incident that led to the Japanese seizure of Manchuria, had not been the work of Chinese patriots but of the Kempeitai itself.

  The Captain was the protégé of a Kempeitai general then stationed in Tokyo. To provide the General with information he wanted on various factions in the army, thereby increasing the General’s maneuvering power over his fellow officers, the policeman was asked to steal documents from certain units near Mukden. The policeman was so successful in his assignments the Captain took him with him when he flew to Shanghai on a secret mission in January 1932.