Death in the Face

by Craig McDonald

  The first came the day before Thanksgiving when word reached Hawaii novelist Yukio Mishima had died in the most ghastly and public fashion imaginable—a failed military coup and an apparent ritual suicide to eclipse even the horror of Hemingway’s far more private, so-called “seppeku by shotgun” nine years previously.

  The ghastliness of Mishima’s death far outstripped Hector’s “murder-suicide” in New Mexico three years before.

  On November 25, Mishima and a small band of rightist coconspirators—members of a Mishima-formed private militia called Tatenokai, or “The Shield Society”—inveigled their way into the offices of the commandant of the Eastern-Self Defense Forces.

  The commandant was promptly taken hostage, lashed to a chair, then forced to listen as Mishima strode out onto the balcony of the Defense Force’s HQ to address a crowd of angry soldiers gathered below.

  Dressed in a severe military tunic, a white bandanna emblazoned with rising sun bound ’round his head, Mishima stood out above the crowd below and railed on for several minutes, waving and pointing with gloved hands. His speech had been calculated to impel the soldiers to join in his coup.

  If that was really the author’s aim, things went terribly wide of the mark.

  Mishima’s jaw-dropping actions drew the harshest scorn.

  The catcalls of the soldiers and the chop of overhead helicopters all but drowned out the ranting novelist’s last publicly voiced words.

  In terms of Yukio Mishima’s own literary long game, Hector figured the drowning out of his crazy speech had maybe been a favor.

  But then, after returning to the barricaded office of the captive commandant, Mishima dropped down onto the floor, and performed the unfathomable ancient act of ritual seppuku, slicing open his belly.

  As he crouched there agonizing and hunched over his pulsing, disgorging entrails, his co-conspirator and alleged lover, a young man named Masakatsu Morita, failed in his several bloody attempts to sever Mishima’s head with a cleanly executed sword stroke—the traditional and expected benevolent act of delivering the coup de grace that the Japanese called kaishakunin.

  Disgusted, another of the Shield conspirators—a tougher, more enigmatic young man named Hiroyasu Koga—deftly decapitated Mishima with a single stroke of the author’s samurai sword before turning the bloodied katana on the hapless Morita, who had subsequently also failed in the execution of his belly-cutting.

  (One native correspondent, as Hector read in a subsequent, translated news account, noted Morita had written Mishima in 1968, seeking admittance to the Shield Society and professing his patriotic commitment to die for Mishima, if that was deemed necessary. The two similarly possessed men, in accordance with the samurai tradition, had actually written “death poems” before embarking on their farcical, lethal coup.)

  Hector sighed: Writers as spies, martyrs and as would-be revolutionaries? And now as latter-day samurai?

  It was all juvenile insanity. . .wasn’t it?

  Contemplating the blood-and-thunder melodrama and waste of Mishima’s political stunt—not to mention his grisly suicide—Hector thought irresistibly of Byron and the British poet’s equally dubious efforts to bring about Greek independence.

  All that had been another bizarre and quixotic scheme orchestrated by a somewhat fey and delusional man of letters—a writer seemingly bent upon bending the weave and woof of history to the author’s idiosyncratic will.

  A writer proposes, Hector thought, and God coldly disposes.

  Byron, only thirty-six, died of sepsis. Mishima had been forty-five when he went to his highly personal Valhalla.

  A widely publicized and close-up photograph of Mishima’s severed head had burned itself into Hector’s brain. That sorry vision was quickly followed by a remembered image of Pancho Villa’s rotting damaged skull, then of a too-well-described revelation of Hem’s near headless body sprawling in the entryway of Ketchum Idaho home.

  Hector massaged his temples, trying to drive the bloody collage of severed heads and bloody torsos from his mind.

  After watching as much of the Mishima coverage on television as he could stomach—as well as having read countless, breathless newspaper accounts of the man’s last hours—Hector shook his head and deeply sighed again, staring for a long time out the window at the restless Pacific and wondering at all the waste and stupidity.

  He was truly dumbfounded that such an accomplished writer could undertake so bizarre a course of personal and public self-annihilation.

  But then, brooding more on it, Hector gradually remembered Hem’s crazy efforts to run his own guerilla unit in occupied Paris, which in turn evoked discomfiting memories of Hector’s equally dubious undertakings along similar lines, even as he, just like Hem, had traveled under the cloak of “war correspondent.”

  Point a finger, and you point three back at yourself—wasn’t that the old folk saying?

  But Hector, albeit under a different name, was still very much alive, and now well past such crazy gestures, he insisted to himself.

  Still, a quote by Mishima that figured in one of the accounts of the Japanese author’s death hung stubbornly in Hector’s head: “If we value so highly the dignity of life, how can we not also value the dignity of death? No death may be called futile.”

  In the end, Hector simply couldn’t agree with that point of view. After a few more hours lost to brooding, he pushed thoughts of Yukio Mishima and patriotic, fatalistic acts from his mind.

  After all, a holiday loomed.

  On Thanksgiving Day, Hector Lassiter celebrated and feasted with his growing, come-late-in-life family. They enjoyed a golden, sunny holiday together.

  But the sun and fun proved fleeting enough.

  The next morning, Hector received a phone call, just a few minutes after he had completed his daily session at the writing table.

  A familiar female voice—the British accent mellowed, but still very much present—said firmly, though affably, “I know who you really are, Beau. I don’t mean to use that against you, not at all. I’m not intent on sharing your secret with the world, so, Hector, please don’t hang up on me. I beg you to hear me out.”

  Before he could say anything, Haven Branch pushed on: “The world has changed so much, or at least that’s true of that place I thought meant so much to me, once. But that’s all changed as our Japanese writer friend’s death has made all too clear to me. Certainly you’ve changed, and I have, too. Things that once meant everything—or at least seemed to—mean comparatively little to me now. I see how fleeting a happy life can be. So I’m here on the big island, and I’m not alone. I’d like for us to meet a last time.”

  Haven hesitated and he could hear the uncertain smile in her voice as she got to the heart of the matter. “You see, Hector, there’s someone I’d very much like for you to meet. You will do that, won’t you? Just for an hour or so? I swear to you, I mean you and your family no harm. I’d just like you and this other person to spend some time together.”

  Hector’s mouth was dry; his palms damp. “This person I’m going to meet. . .?”

  “I think you well know who it is. But he won’t know how it is. That’s the one favor I ask of you. That’s the only condition I place upon you.” She took a breath and said, “Will you do that for me? Will you do that for him?”

  Hector said it from the heart. “Of course I will.”

  Hell, he was doing it every bit as much for himself.

  ***

  Maybe Haven had chosen the rendezvous site to twist the knife, or, given her long love of Japan, perhaps she wanted to give that “someone” context for the act that set Japan and America at war with one another nearly thirty years before.

  Either way, as scheduled, they met at the Pearl Harbor visitor’s center.

  Haven, still slender, still quite attractive, was standing by an anchor that had been recovered from the wreckage of the ruined U.S.S. Arizona.

  Hector looked around for a young boy or girl, but saw nobody that im
mediately fit the probable template he had in mind for Haven’s child. No, strike that: for their child. Him, Haven had said several times on the call, he remembered: We must have a boy, he thought.

  Haven’s wore her black hair a bit shorter and she had a dashing white streak that came off her right temple and fell in a kind of careless comma toward the still cleanly drawn line of her jaw.

  The dark eyes appraised him and said, “You look well, Hec. Years younger than a man of seventy. If I didn’t know the timelines, I’d put you in your mid-fifties.”

  He smiled and hugged her close. “You’re still a liar, but also still a beautiful fibber.”

  With his left hand—a glittering gold band on that ring finger—he presumed to lift her same hand to his face. The third-finger of her left hand was naked.

  “I’m really just better alone like that,” she said. “Far happier unattached.”

  He said, “But do you need money? Some kind of support for. . .?”

  She shook her head. “We’re perfectly fine. “I’m a journalist, now.” She hastened to add, “But not the kind that spies or lives life with an eye to how it might read later.”

  “That’s good,” Hector said softly. “But the child—what does he or she think became of their father?”

  “The story given is the father died in a senseless act of violence for which he was not himself responsible,” she said. “A crime victim, of sorts. It’s even true, in some ways.”

  That landed like a kind of gut punch, but Hector just nodded and said, “Right.”

  The balmy wind—it was in the low eighties this day after Thanksgiving—fingered her hair. Brushing it back from her dewy forehead, she said, “Of all the places on this earth where you might have settled down, why did you choose here to make your second life, Hec? Or do you prefer that I call you Beau?”

  Hector followed her lead to a bench looking out on the harbor. He sat down beside her. He said, “Deep down, I’m still Hector Lassiter, and those closest to me still call me by that name. It’s who I really am, of course. Who I’ll always be, and to the bone.”

  He looked around and said, “As to this place? I’ve always favored islands. This is like Key West only with elbowroom. Tell me, are you still Haven Branch?”

  “Still. Quietly. Like you, most probably think me dead. Everyone—MI5, the Black Dragons—they’ve moved on, it appears, and I’m now left alone.”

  He couldn’t help himself anymore—the curiosity was eating him alive. Hector said, “The child—a boy or a girl?”

  “We have a son,” she said proudly. “He’s a splendidly handsome blend of us. He has your eyes and your face, but with darker hair—the blackest hair, like mine. But the resemblance to you is strongest, hence this fiction that you’re distant blood.” She frowned. “Well, I guess fiction isn’t the right word for it. Not at all.”

  He said thickly, “So as part of this lie agreed to, I should be a Branch?”

  She shook her head, a somber look of reflection taking her. “No. I’m out of the espionage game—all the way out, but other things can happen in this sorry world, as you well know. Some illness, or some stupid traffic accident could strike. If he should ever find himself alone or in need, I’d like him to have some way to find you—his one known relative. If he ever feels compelled to reach out. It must be on his terms. I’m firm on that, Hector.”

  Still not thinking particularly logically, tantalized by the prospect of this son he’d soon meet, Hector muttered, “So then I should be Hector Lassiter this one last time?”

  “Lord, no,” Haven said, looking truly appalled. “Surely you know how it is now regarding that person, even though it’s just been a few years since he died?”

  She said it almost as if Hector Lassiter really was somebody else. “You know what I mean by all that,” she said, waving a hand.

  He wasn’t sure that he did know what she meant by all that. So Hector asked her to elaborate.

  Haven took his hand and cradled it on her lap. She said, “Deep down, I’m sure that you do know what I mean. I’m talking about all that business that was dragging you down—the fallout from using yourself as a character in your later books, for one thing. The man who lives what he writes and writes what he lives. There’s a whole generation coming up—Heath’s generation, and, yes, that’s his first name—young people who already believe or are erroneously taught that Hector Lassiter is and always was a fictional character. It’s kind of perfect in its way if you can step back from it and see it in a certain light. My God, Hector, you’re actually passing into the mist of your own myths. You essentially wrote yourself out of your own life and straight into pop-culture legend.”

  Hector had nothing to say to that, not in agreement or in rebuttal. His mind was still very much elsewhere. He repeated, “Our boy’s name is Heath?”

  “I told you at our start how much I loved that name, and its inspiration. And it’s a small connection to the ‘real’ you, of course. It was really the only name I considered for our boy.”

  His mind racing, still grappling with all of it, Hector echoed a joke of hers from long ago. He said, “Heath Branch. Haven Branch. At least it makes the monogramming of towels that much easier.”

  She squeezed his hand. “You should know he already shows flickers of having some ambitions as a writer. I think he has a real talent for it. Heath tells me these wild stories he makes up to try and put himself to sleep. They really only excite him to terrible wakefulness. But I desperately want him to be an author who just writes—not one who plays spy or sees a life of action as a means to feed his muse.”

  Hector wasn’t convinced it could ever work that way for any writer—life was always fodder, in the end, and one chased sensation and experience to fuel the fiction. Surely they all did that. Wives, children and friends too-often became collateral damage to that terrible impulse in an author.

  But he didn’t offer that opinion now.

  She smiled and said, “John Butler Yeats—you know, the Irish poet’s father? Well, he once said that in his son William’s a-birthing, he’d given ‘a tongue to the sea cliffs.’ In having a child with you, I feel like maybe I’ve done the same for the East.” A shrug and a smile. “I suppose time will tell.

  “So, to your earlier question—regarding how I’ll introduce you—you’ll be the man you are now, the writer who writes one way and lives in quite another fashion,” Haven said. “You’ll be Beau Devlin to him, in other words.”

  A funny smile. “How do you think Brinke would have felt about your taking her name?”

  “She’d be fully in favor,” he said. “I think Hem might even have suggested it once.” Hector changed the subject to one much more to his interest. “So you’re both living somewhere in Japan, I take it?”

  “Somewhere, yes. But we travel, and widely. I’m more of a feature journalist—I write a lot of travel pieces—and Heath can frequently come along. For one so young, his passport is already a delirious shambles of customs stampings. That said, I’m not sure how much longer we’ll stay in Japan. It’s sadly becoming more Western every day. Mishima was right in so many ways. Japan is losing its soul.”

  “Maybe, but Mishima was a kind of philosophical Luddite in other, key ways,” Hector said firmly. “I’d say he was an anachronism with all that samurai stuff and becoming so enthralled with the ancient and increasingly irrelevant Bushido Code. Would be a little like me running around the United States like some itinerant soldier of fortune, beholden to no one, packing a six-gun and living by some creaky old version of a cowboy’s code as I imposed my singular will on the world.”

  The unconscious irony of that assertion swiftly and soundly swamped Hector.

  Hell, that had been his life, in some sorry-ass ways, at least until 1967 or thereabouts. And, hell, he still had his Colt Peacemaker after all, well-oiled and always loaded, but currently safely tucked away back at his Oahu spread because Hector Lassiter had lingering enemies and couldn’t they, just as Haven Branch h
ad now done, one day find him?

  Haven had the grace to pass over Hector’s dubious dismissal of Mishima.

  She said, “You know, I never got to extend my condolences to you about poor Ian. If only he’d been able to live differently, how many more books—Bonds or otherwise—might we have had?”

  Indeed. How many? The same could be asked of Hem, of course. And of Mishima. None of those three writers were prepared—perhaps they were simply not equipped—to be old men, Hector thought.

  He said, “Ian took pride in the concept of one day dying from living too much. I think he actually wrote that into some or another Bond.”

  She squeezed his hand again. “For what it’s worth—I mean having it come from the likes of me—I believe you were right to kill yourself, darling. I think it actually saved your life.”

  “So do I,” Hector said nakedly. “I’d be on the wrong side of the sod now if I kept being that man, that other writer.”

  Her expression suddenly changed. “And here he comes. He’s a wonder, isn’t he?”

  Hector turned eagerly, squinting into the sunlight. He agreed the boy was a marvel, even silhouetted as he was by the sun—for the moment, an indistinct but compelling figure to Hector.

  Haven pulled a paperback from her purse. It was one of his novels written under his Beau Devlin byline. “I’m going to return to reading this,” she said. “It’s really wonderful by the way, yet so different from what came before. But you know that. You two take your time, get to know each other as you can.”

  Standing before him, the boy reminded Hector of the few pictures he still had around somewhere of himself as a child.

  Heath was wearing shorts and a dark blue T-shirt. His black hair was worn in bangs and he a familiar cowlick twisted in unruly defiance above his pale blue right eye. He was tanned and fit. He moved with a kind of natural athletic grace. In either hand, the boy held a fishing pole.

  Hector introduced himself as Beau. The boy focused on Hector’s pale blue eyes—the twins of the eyes the boy saw every time he looked in a mirror—and said, “We’re related, mommy said, but I don’t know how. I don’t think mommy has brothers.”