Dragon Dance

by Peter Tasker

  She glanced over at Kyo-san, who was still absorbed in the crossword.

  “Kyo-san, could you do some research for me? I’m interested in the educational backgrounds of the major political figures in the Nagasaki area. I’d like to know if any of them are graduates of the Morikawa school.”

  “That shouldn’t be a problem. I’ve got a friend working in the Diet library.”

  [222] “Thanks.”

  It didn’t take long, and the answer was just as Martine had suspected. The Diet member for the Nagasaki region was a graduate of the Morikawa school. Meaning that he had been one of the silent men in dark suits who had lined up behind Nozawa at the press conference in the Dome.

  The jigsaw pieces fitted together nicely, but there was still a gaping hole in the middle of the picture. What did this have to do with the Atami incident, supposedly the key to the whole puzzle? What was the link between Nozawa and Reiko Matsubara?

  Martine spent the rest of the morning searching the internet and calling radical lawyers, music business sources, and tabloid writers. Nobody had any idea what she was talking about. The last resort would be to call Gary Terashima at the US Embassy. Terashima’s people had detailed information on every significant political figure in every significant country in the world. They had financed the creation of Japan’s governing party half a century ago and had carefully nurtured the politicians who supported their interests and destroyed the ones who didn’t. But asking Terashima for a favor was a risky business. He would certainly demand favors in return, the kind of favors that were incompatible with journalistic independence.

  Martine was deep in thought when her phone rang. It was the security guard, Kawamoto, sounding even more nervous than she had earlier.

  “Meyer-san, I must talk with you as soon as possible.”

  “Did you tell them about the assassination threat?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “Are they going to cancel the speech in Shibuya tomorrow?”

  “I can’t talk now. Please come to our building right away.”

  The phone went dead. Strange behavior, thought Martine. Earlier Kawamoto had insisted on meeting outside, where none of her colleagues would see them together. Now she was asking Martine to come right into Nozawa’s headquarters, previously off-limits to all journalists, even to the tame “Nozawa press club” of writers from the mainstream Japanese media.

  Most Japanese politicians situated their offices within a convenient distance of the Diet building. That way they could snooze through debates in the daytime, then entertain powerful backers in Ginza nightclubs or scheme against rivals in the traditional restaurants of Akasaka. Nozawa, who rarely attended any Diet sessions and whose backers preferred to remain anonymous, had set up his office in the heart of the Harajuku fashion district. His recording studio was next door, linked by an underground passageway, and there was a helicopter pad on the roof. The street outside was always thronged with fans and stalls selling Nozawa kites, full-face Nozawa masks, and pint-sized Nozawa dolls that walked around strumming tiny guitars.

  [223] Martine squeezed her way through the crowd. The security people were obviously expecting her, and after a quick sweep of the metal detector they led her into an empty waiting room on the ground floor. Martine was not surprised by what happened next. The door opened and in walked Shimizu. Kawamoto was nowhere to be seen.

  “Thank you for the chocolates,” said Martine, bowing.

  But Shimizu was not smiling. In fact his face was like thunder.

  “It seems that your journalistic researches have exceeded the bounds of common sense, Meyer-san.”

  “I’m not sure I know what you mean,” said Martine innocently.

  “Yes, you do. Where did you get this information about the sensei’s speech tomorrow?”

  “I can’t reveal my source, I’m afraid. But you should take the warning seriously. You must cancel the speech.”

  “Certainly not. If we canceled the sensei’s activities every time some lunatic threatened him, we would never get anywhere.”

  “This isn’t a lunatic. This is a person who means exactly what he says.”

  “Let me be the judge of that. Give me the name of your source.”

  Martine stared at him in fascination. She had never seen Shimizu lose his cool before. She had never imagined he could lose his cool. Yet here he was, practically shaking with rage.

  “I can’t do that, as you of all people should know.”

  “In that case you should know what can happen to you. Bad things, Meyer-san, bad things. I have friends at InfoCorp, people in important positions. I could have you fired in a matter of days.”

  “Is that all?” asked Martine. With James Murphy on the scene, that was hardly a serious threat.

  Shimizu started talking fast, almost spluttering as the words rushed out of his mouth. “No, that’s not all! I know plenty of things about your life, far more than you realize. That boyfriend of yours who owns the brewery—did you know he signed a loan guarantee for one of his suppliers? If that supplier went bankrupt, he would be personally liable for everything. It would wipe out his entire net worth, which in itself is far less than you might think.”

  “Really,” said Martine evenly. She knew that the financial stresses were greater than Makoto let on. They had to be. In these economic conditions, just staying in business was a triumph.

  “And that son of his. He’s got some bad friends, you know, the kind that go places they shouldn’t and buy things they shouldn’t. Just imagine—if the police stopped him in the street and found something on him, what would happen? No exams, no university, nothing. All his life plans destroyed, before he even gets started.”

  [224] Shimizu paused to examine her reaction. Martine said nothing. Could Shimizu really arrange something like that, she wondered. Yes, of course he could. With Morikawa people working in the background, it would be easy. The thought was devastating. Ichiro was the most important thing in Makoto’s life, the one bright thing he had carried away safely from his marriage. If anything serious happened to Ichiro, Makoto would be crushed. It would turn him into an old man overnight.

  “You don’t believe me, Meyer-san? You don’t think I can do these things?”

  “Yes, I believe you.”

  “So are you going to tell me your source?”

  “No, I’m not,” said Martine, without a moment’s hesitation.

  They stared at each other across the table. Shimizu’s smirk was hardening into something closer to a sneer.

  “You don’t really mean that,” he rasped.

  “Of course I do. By the way, my source gave me some other interesting information. It concerns a hit-and-run incident in Nagasaki.”

  The reaction exceeded all of Martine’s expectations. Shimizu jerked upright in his chair, squeaking the legs against the polished wooden floor.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I’m talking about a twelve-year-old girl left to die at the side of the road. Maybe Nozawa’s next song should be called ‘The Lonesome Death of Junko Kawaguchi.’ ”

  Martine smiled brightly. Shimizu’s eyes bulged and he opened his mouth to say something, but no sound emerged. Martine got up and walked out of the door without a backward glance.

  She was sitting in a taxi checking the news on her palmtop computer when the message came through.

  Sweet angel,

  Tomorrow you must be ready to receive many important messages. Please keep your palmtop computer with you all the time, even when your golden body is naked in the bath.

  Sweet angel? Golden body, yet again? It looked as if her mystery admirer was running out of clichés.

  Ikebukuro in the evening. The safe daytime world of offices and shops and ordinary people going about their ordinary lives has faded from sight. In its [225] place is a shimmering neon labyrinth where you can lose yourself for a night or forever.

  This is not part of Japan. It is not part of anywhere. The currency is yen,
dollars, rubles, drugs, sex, and weapons. The street vendors gabble away in a mixture of Japanese, Malay, and English impenetrable to outsiders. In the smoky back alleys you can watch snake-charmers and fire-eaters and real sword fights in which the ground is soaked in the losers’ blood. You can buy forged passports and credit cards, ten-year-old refugee girls, a contract on the life of anyone you choose. Everything is available, at the lowest prices possible.

  Jake McCloskey moved purposefully through the seething crowd. A street vendor thrust a lamp made out of a human skull right in front of his face, but he ignored it. A transvestite double-act tried to hustle him into a salon, one grabbing each wrist. “Special service tonight,” crooned the voice in his ear. McCloskey replied with a vicious elbow jab, not even turning his head. He knew exactly where he was going. It was the same place he went every Tuesday evening.

  McCloskey had been in Japan a long time, though he’d never planned it that way. Originally he’d come for a few weeks, a tousle-headed Midwesterner keen to experience a different culture. Then he got a job in an English language conversation school, and decided to stay longer. After all, speaking English was the only activity he was qualified to perform, and this was the only place on God’s earth where people would pay him such good money for it. And then you had the women. Back home Jake had never had much luck with women, they had always made him feel clumsy and tongue-tied. In comparison, Japan was a paradise. The women laughed at his jokes even if they didn’t understand them and told him he looked like a movie star. There was no need to say anything interesting. He just took them back to his tiny apartment, two at a time, three at a time, junior high school girls, twin sisters, whatever he wanted. They never complained, never mocked, never made him feel stupid and ugly.

  The years slipped by, until Jake no longer bothered counting. Paradise was getting stale, but there was nowhere else he fitted in, nowhere else he could pick up a good-looking woman with a few simple phrases. He married three times—all mistakes—drank too much and started snorting, smoking, and injecting anything that gave him a buzz. When he looked in the mirror he saw a different person, a paunchy middle-aged man with sallow cheeks and empty eyes. So he stopped looking in the mirror.

  Tonight Jake was in a hurry. He took a shortcut through the warren of alleys, coming out onto a major road whizzing with traffic. He turned left and trotted up the steps of a pedestrian bridge. There was the familiar figure standing in the middle of the bridge, elbows resting on the rail.

  [226] Jake trotted up the steps, then stopped and gaped at the man in surprise. He was the same build as Mo, and was even wearing the same kind of baggy combat trousers as Mo, but Jake had never seen him before in his life.

  “Who are you?”

  “Mo couldn’t make it tonight,” said the stranger, turning to face Jake.

  “But I just called him an hour ago.”

  “Something came up. He sent me instead.”

  Jake examined the man closely. He had been doing business with Mo for several months now, always the same place and same time. Mo was the best dealer he had ever used.

  “How do I know you’re not a cop?”

  “There are no cops round here. You should know that.”

  “All right. What have you got?”

  “Buddha Kiss, one hundred percent pure. That’s what you want, right?”

  “How much?”

  “Five thousand yen a gram.”

  Jake nodded. It was the usual product at the usual price. For ten thousand yen he could turn the world into a three-dimensional manga and himself into a superhero. Nothing he could do with a woman could ever compare to that sensation.

  “It’s down in the van. Come and check it out.”

  The stranger was pointing at a white van parked under the bridge on the other side of the road. Jake followed him down the stairs and climbed into the passenger seat. The stranger laid an attaché case on his lap and clicked it open.

  “You want a test, right?”

  The stranger gave him a straw, then took out a sachet and sprinkled some powder onto a piece of paper. Jake glanced nervously out the window. What they were doing was illegal, though the police would never dream of making an arrest in this area.

  “Go ahead.”

  Jake bent down and took a sniff. It was good-quality stuff, no mistake. Already, a dull warmth was spreading through his body, and the neon lights were pulsing slower and fuzzier.

  “Here, try some of this too.”

  The stranger was holding up a polythene bag with a black nozzle protruding from it. Before Jake had time to say anything, the stranger had squeezed the nozzle and an acrid spray went shooting into Jake’s nose.

  Jake pulled his head away. “Hey!” he yelled at the stranger. “What do you think you’re doing?”

  At least he wanted to yell, but something had happened to his throat. The [227] muscles seemed to have locked tight, turning his voice into a strangulated croak. The stranger put the nozzle under Jake’s nose and squeezed again. Then he opened the van door and stepped outside. His face was against the window now, watching calmly as Jake’s mouth made strange shapes and his arms and legs started to thrash about as if he were drowning.

  Jake McCloskey plunged though red water and black, through tunnels of pain and whirlpools of blinding light. The water thundered in his ears, ripped the hair from his scalp, sucked the marrow from his bones. He was down there for days, weeks, lifetimes, rolling and screaming, dying and being reborn. Then finally he glimpsed a face above him, a woman peering down at him with motherly concern.

  “He’s waking up,” he heard her say.

  “What shall we do?” There was a man standing just outside his field of vision.

  Help me, Jake wanted to shout, what you should do is help me! But he couldn’t shout because there was a cloth stuffed into his mouth and he couldn’t move because he was tied to a chair. His head felt heavy with pain.

  The woman’s face loomed in front of him again. She was wearing gold-rimmed glasses, and the eyes behind them were calm and serious.

  “He’s sweating too much. Turn down the temperature.”

  She reached out with a cloth and mopped Jake’s face and neck.

  “I’d better check the heartbeat,” said the male voice.

  Jake gasped as the cold metal of the stethoscope pressed against his chest. Any sensation was pain. Looking over the woman’s shoulder he saw a closed door, a concrete wall, a bare lightbulb hanging from a tangle of wires. He heard traffic rumbling somewhere overhead. Who were these people? Why had they brought him here?

  “It’s normal.”

  The woman glanced at her watch. “It’s time to give him another shot. Be careful with the needle.”

  The man stepped forward. Jake watched, fascinated, as the gleaming hypodermic slid into his arm. He didn’t feel a thing. They must be doctors, he thought as the black waters rushed over him and his eyelids fluttered shut.

  TWENTY

  Martine was woken by the ringing of the phone. She glanced blearily at the clock. Five-thirty. Who on earth would call at this time? It was Kawamoto, just about to start her traditional ethics class. Her voice was trembling with indignation.

  “He refused, Meyer-san! Can you believe it? I begged him to listen, but he just sat there smiling.”

  “Calm down, calm down. Who refused what?”

  “I mean Shimizu-san. He refused to cancel the Shibuya speech. He said he couldn’t because it was the starting point of the political campaign.”

  “Really?”

  It had been obvious from yesterday’s confrontation that Shimizu had no intention of canceling the speech. The protests of a junior security guard were hardly likely to disrupt a plan in which so much was invested.

  “I wonder if he cares about the sensei at all,” wailed Kawamoto. “He’s not a true believer. He’s just using the sense! to further his own ambitions.”

  If only she knew, thought Martine. The reality was much worse. With Nozawa out
of the way, Shimizu would become head of the National Regeneration Party, which would become nothing more than the political arm of the Morikawa school.

  “You did your best.”

  “My best wasn’t good enough. If anything happens to the sensei today, my life will be worthless.”

  “Don’t say that.”

  “It’s true. Without Nozawa-sensei, I’m nothing. This whole world is nothing. Who would want to live in such a place?”

  Kawamoto’s voice dissolved into sobs and the line went dead. Martine put down the phone, now totally awake and totally depressed. This girl was the [229] kind who really would kill herself. And how many others like her were there? Thousands, probably tens of thousands—all ordinary, decent people on the surface, but with a strange vacuum at the core of their being. In former times that emptiness would have been filled by a religion or an ideology. In today’s world there was only Nozawa.

  And even after Nozawa himself was dead, the Nozawa brand would still be there. Martine recalled Kaneda, Shimizu’s rival management consultant, pointing out the flaws in the brand crossover strategy. There would be a short-term benefit, he had explained, but without a new emotional bond with the public it would quickly fade away. Well, Nozawa’s death would instantly solve that problem. A new emotional bond would be created that was far more intense than the old one. Nozawa would be like Elvis Presley, JFK, and Yukio Mishima all rolled into one—a martyr, a god, a brand beyond comparison. Then whatever the Morikawa school wanted—a Japanese Star Wars program, bioweapons research, robot warfare capability—could be presented as part of Nozawa’s dream. Nobody would dare oppose it.

  Martine went to the window and peered through the curtains. The tints of dawn had almost disappeared. The last of the late-night girls were trooping toward the subway station, already anomalous in their microskirts, hot pants, and full-body tattoos. Cicadas, crows, taxi drivers, delivery boys, joggers, school kids on their way to cram school—all were well into their early morning routine. It was hard to imagine that by the time the sun set that evening the city would be a different place, the minds of its inhabitants irreversibly transformed by a single terrible event.