Dragon Dance

by Peter Tasker

  Twenty minutes of yoga, a shower, some coffee and muesli. Only then did Martine switch on her computer and check her messages. There was nothing that caught her attention, except a few lines from Makoto.

  I will be back in Tokyo late tomorrow. Please meet me at the usual place as I have important things to tell you.

  Martine gazed guiltily at the screen. For the past few days she had been too busy to spare a thought for Makoto. And in fact she had something important to tell him too, something she certainly wasn’t going to discuss by phone or e-mail.

  She was just about to log off when another message appeared.

  Glamorous goddess.

  You must be in Shibuya at two o’clock this afternoon. I would prefer you to wear silky white panties with see-through panels.

  Pathetic, thought Martine. The guy really was stuck for ideas.

  [230] How many people do you need to start a revolution? A million? A hundred thousand? Ten thousand? No, the answer was around thirty. Reiko Matsubara had known this right from the start, when she was still a high school student attending demonstrations, throwing herself against the wall of riot police unarmed save for her nails and her teeth. In those days there were many who talked revolution in lectures and debates, who wrote revolution in magazines, who fucked revolution in grubby boarding house rooms. But so few were ready to live revolution, to die for revolution, to kill for revolution! Thirty people—that’s all you needed. Thirty who had ice in their blood and iron in their souls. Thirty who were so committed that they would spend decades working as doctors, teachers, and businessmen, and yet be ready for the call at any moment. Thirty who would never give up on the revolution, even if they had to wait until they were a hundred years old.

  Matsubara had tested hundreds, had tested them until they broke and ran back to the security of ordinary bourgeois lives. She had kept on testing until she found the comrades she needed. After that it had been a question of patience and survival. The tides of history would turn in the end, of that she had been certain.

  There were times when her dream had seemed like a distant ship disappearing into the night. Then she had thought of Lenin drifting through Europe, an exile with no resources except his pure revolutionary spirit. And that had been enough to turn the whole world upside down, to spread a new consciousness through the oppressed masses for generations to come. Sometimes she had conversations with Lenin in her head. She told him everything and he encouraged her, smiling like a father.

  There were other times when her dream had felt close enough to reach out and touch. But never had it been as close as today. This was the day for which Reiko Matsubara had been waiting all her life.

  Matsubara stowed the car in an automatic parking lot a few hundred yards from Shimbashi Station. Her daughter would travel by the Ginza line, and one of the others would be there too, wandering amongst the homeless with ragged clothes and a dirt-streaked face. That would be enough for security. Matsubara believed in simple, well-planned operations. The problems she had experienced always came from overelaboration, too many people doing too many things.

  Matsubara walked through the crowded station without a sideways glance. Only when she got to the noodle stand did her eyes stray over to the homeless man slumped against the wall, a jar of cheap saké in his trembling hand. The homeless man raised the jar to his mouth, a sign that he had seen nothing unusual. Matsubara glanced at the cluster of young women standing next to the newspaper kiosk, students and young office workers waiting for their boyfriends. In the middle was a tall, frizzy-haired girl, wearing the same style of [231] cut-off jeans and fluorescent T-shirt as the others. She had a phone pressed to her ear and was nodding her head—also a sign that nothing unusual had been sighted. Matsubara ordered a bowl of her favorite noodles, pork with chopped leeks. As she tilted the bowl to her mouth, she noticed a man approaching the noodle stand from the other side. He was thin, hollow-cheeked, and had the eyes of a fox.

  Mid-morning in Shibuya. The air was filled with the ever-present karaoke of the city—the wail of sirens, the blare of announcements and advertisements and warnings, bleeps and squawks from game arcades, jingles from fast-food joints, crazed marches from pachinko parlors. Huge crowds swept across the multiflow crossings, surged across the elevated walkways, disappeared into underground passages like iron filings pulled by a hidden magnet. Orange and green trains rattled across the bridges, windows packed with faces.

  Into this seething cauldron of human activity came word of the afternoon’s special event. Tsuyoshi Nozawa was to give his first public speech of the year, right here, in front of the station. The information was blaring from loudspeakers, and flashing up on giant video screens. Nozawa balloons were being handed out to children, and Nozawa fans and tissue packs to adults.

  Soon the police arrived, blocking off the traffic and yelling at people through megaphones. Banners were put up, spaces roped off. The noise got a little noisier, the heat a little hotter. Shibuya was buzzing with anticipation.

  With all the activity in front of the station, nobody had eyes for the happenings in a narrow backstreet a few hundred yards away. Nobody paid attention when a van drew up outside a shaky-looking, pencil-shaped building filled with nightclubs, pink salons, and mah-jongg clubs. Nobody gave a second thought when three workmen in overalls got out of the van and hauled a heavy box of equipment out of the back. Nobody thought it strange when they took the elevator to the top floor, which contained a massage salon that had gone bankrupt three months ago. And nobody thought it strange that when they reappeared fifteen minutes later only two men were carrying the box, which they swung one-handed into the back of the truck.

  Meanwhile, not far away, Tsuyoshi Nozawa sat gazing at himself in the mirror. On one side of his chair a makeup woman was rubbing linseed oil into his cheeks, giving them that special gloss that looked so good on camera. On the other side, a manicurist was adding the last touch of varnish to his nails. Already they had trimmed his eyebrows, extended his eyelashes, buffed up his lips with the cherry paste they used for kabuki actors. Before that, [232] Nozawa had spent two hours with his hairdresser, slicking his hair tight against his skull, creating a quiff that would flip down onto his forehead at the right moment in the speech. Before that, he had spent time with the acupuncturist, the aromatherapist, and his speech trainer. Today everything had to be perfect.

  Nozawa watched the man in the mirror lift his chin and narrow his gaze. No question, he looked handsome, strong, dynamic, scared of nothing, eager to embrace his destiny.

  And who was that man in the mirror? Nozawa saw him every day, and yet the man was still mysterious to him. The things he said and did were often baffling, aimed only at pleasing people he had never met and never would. The man in the mirror lived his whole life in the minds of others. In that sense he was unreal, a kind of ghost.

  Shimizu appeared beside him, also with slicked-back hair and glossy cheeks. He was wearing a dark suit with a yellow polka-dot tie.

  “How do you feel, sensei?”

  “Excellent,” said the man in the mirror. “Though I’m still not satisfied with the choice of costume.”

  “That’s a shame.”

  The man in the mirror tightened his jaw, copying the expression of grim determination used on the cover of the most recent CD.

  “Yes, it is. I still think my idea of a simple blue kimono with a brown belt is more appropriate. This outfit—it’s totally the wrong color for the occasion.”

  Nozawa turned and nodded at the white suit and white silk shirt hanging from a rail.

  Shimizu dropped his hands onto Nozawa’s shoulders and started to massage his neck muscles.

  “Don’t worry, sensei. For an occasion like today, the color white will suit you better than anything.”

  Martine took the Yamanote line to Shibuya. Squashed up in one corner, with a shopping bag rapping her knees and a rolled-up magazine pressed into her back, she checked her palmtop computer every two minutes. There was no messa
ge. At Shibuya Station the platform was more crowded than she had ever seen it before. People from all over the city—office-workers, housewives, students—were congregating to hear Nozawa speak.

  The crowd moved toward the exit like a slow viscous liquid. The mood was cheerful, politely excited. Martine wondered what would happen if there was a panic. How many people would die, crushed in the stampede down the [233] steps. She moved with the flow through the central passageway and out through the Hachiko exit, which was already packed with bodies. The police had sealed off the main road in front of the station and were directing people into the cordoned-off areas on either side. Up in the sky half-a-dozen press helicopters were buzzing around in circles.

  “Move along!” bellowed a young cop with a megaphone. “Get over to the other side.”

  Martine let herself be carried across the road to an area that had been cordoned off by the police. She was standing in a group of around eighty people, including mothers with bellowing babies, school kids in uniform, and the ever-present Nozawa look-alikes. She checked her palmtop computer. There was one new message.

  Blond queen,

  When you see this message, raise your left arm in the air.

  She raised her left arm in the air. The next message appeared within a matter of seconds.

  Goddess,

  Cross the street, turn left at the pachinko parlor, then find the building with the adult goods shop on the ground floor. Go to the mah-jongg club on the second floor. There is a present waiting for you on the table by the window.

  Martine spun around, scanning the sea of faces. There were people pouring out of the station, jamming the pedestrian walkways, filling up the roped-off areas. Any one of them could be a terrorist sympathizer enjoying his game of deception.

  Another message arrived on her screen.

  Do not delay.

  No “goddess” this time, nothing about her underwear. He was finally getting serious.

  Reiko Matsubara parked the van around the back of the fast-food restaurant off the No. 7 bypass. They went inside and ordered iced coffee and hamburgers. The fox-eyed man ate and drank ravenously, slurping his drink and [234] licking the gravy off his knife. As usual, he was uncommunicative. Matsubara watched him with irritation. He had obviously been instructed to give away nothing. He wouldn’t reveal how he had arrived in Japan, or even where he had stayed last night. This, she suspected, was the doing of the man from Shanghai. He was obsessed with keeping the different elements of the project separate. That way if anything went wrong the damage could be contained. As per his instructions, only Matsubara herself was allowed to report to him, and only Matsubara herself was allowed to accompany the fox-eyed man. The others—her trusted comrades for over three decades—had to keep in the background.

  When the fox-eyed man had guzzled the last of his ice cream, Matsubara paid the bill and they left. The van had gone and in its place were two brand-new motorbikes, helmets dangling from the handlebars. Matsubara eased herself into the saddle. The engine started the first time. She pulled down the visor, and let out the clutch.

  Riding a motorbike, feeling the rumble of the engine and the breeze tugging at her clothes, reminded Matsubara of her younger days. In Lebanon they had ridden motorbikes all the time. Her second husband had been blown to pieces on a motorbike, hit by a bazooka shell in a Mossad ambush. At his funeral she had sworn to continue the struggle as long as there was breath in her body. She had carried out that promise, never faltering once, no matter how many setbacks she endured, no matter how many colleagues she left behind on the way.

  Terrorists—that was what the capitalists called those who dedicated their lives to the revolutionary cause. It was a description that even now Matsubara found grimly amusing. What did they know of terror, the politicians who condemned it in press conferences, the writers who pontificated about it, the rich and comfortable who wagged their fingers and shook their heads? Could they even imagine the terror of a child prostitute living like a rat in the sewers of Ulan Bator, or a pollution-choked mother in Dacca giving birth to a deformed baby? Of course not! And yet they were happy to rain down destruction on the cities of the oppressed, to smash their poor ramshackle houses and hospitals and schools. This they did not call terror. They called it collateral damage, and the men responsible were feted as military heroes.

  But, as Matsubara had always known, the true heroes were the revolutionaries. There would be no parades for them, no medals—just hatred and contempt, even from their own families. Their whole lives would be spent on the run, not a moment of real peace, always on the lookout for a government agent with a gun in his pocket.

  That was the life that Matsubara had chosen. And she had chosen it not from hate, but from love. Love of the hundreds of millions who lived and [235] died in darkness, love of justice and freedom for all, not just the privileged minority. When she was a child her father had said she was too softhearted. She couldn’t bear to see living creatures in pain, not even insects. As a teenager the amount of suffering she heard about made her dizzy, driving her to the brink of suicide. She couldn’t bear the world as it was and so she dedicated herself to changing it.

  Never had she borne malice to anyone, not even to those she had killed—not even the arrogant young cop who had stumbled upon their training ground in 1971, nor the thuggish American marines dancing in the Hamburg disco, nor the CIA man in Greece, nor the Israeli consul in Holland. And so it would be in the case of the man to be killed today. Reiko Matsubara felt no hatred toward him, no emotion at all. In a world of so much human suffering his death would mean no more than the tears of a sparrow.

  She leaned forward over the handlebars. The two motorbikes thundered toward Shibuya.

  TWENTY-ONE

  Martine followed the instructions. She crossed the road, turned at the pachinko parlor, and found the adult goods shop. In the window was an inflatable doll, a blond woman on all fours wearing a leather G-string and an ecstatic expression. A stream of people passed by, hurrying toward the station, several glancing curiously at Martine. From the adult shop came the sound of a woozy cassette player. The music was “Typhoon of Love” by Tsuyoshi Nozawa.

  Martine passed through the beaded curtain hanging over the entrance and took the elevator to the second floor. The door of the mah-jongg club stood slightly ajar: inside was silence and darkness. She knocked once, then pushed the door open. The air-conditioner was chugging away, but the room was empty. Tenuous shafts of light filtering through the blinds revealed dust dancing in spirals, magazine racks, a couple of battered sofas. Over by the window was a table, on it a cup of coffee, still steaming, and a plate of her favorite brand of shortbread. Under the plate was a large foolscap envelope.

  Martine sat down and opened the envelope. A single black-and-white photo slid out onto the table. It was the same scene as that in the photo delivered by the bogus courier—the room with the Red Core Faction posters, the witchy woman in jeans and black turtleneck, the two men in helmets sitting cross-legged in front of her. Except this time the photo had been taken from a different angle. The woman was shown side on, and the face of one of the men was clearly visible beneath his helmet. He had a thin moustache and bangs flopping down to his eyebrows, but the facial expression was familiar. Martine held the photo to the light to be sure. Yes, there was no room for doubt. The man gazing at Reiko Matsubara with that expression of puppyish devotion was none other than Yasuo Shimizu.

  So that was it! The key really was the Atami incident, as she had been told. [237] She had assumed that Nozawa was involved in the incident somehow, that his involvement had been used against him by Shimizu and the rest of the Morikawa group. How wrong she had been: it was Shimizu who had been involved in the Atami incident. Follow it through, and what did one get? The probability that he had kept up secret contact with Matsubara’s group and that he had decided to use her to get rid of Nozawa. Martine felt like kicking herself for underestimating the man. In reality he was the fulcrum of everythin
g. He had close links with the Morikawa group. He had close links with the terrorists. And in a few hours’ time, he would be the acting leader of a political movement riding on an unstoppable wave of popular emotion. Martine checked her computer again. Another message had appeared.

  Princess,

  I hope the cookies are satisfactory. You must not move from there. You should watch the building exactly opposite. The biggest story of your life is about to unfold before your eyes.

  Martine stared through the gap in the curtain. On the other side of the street was a shaky-looking, pencil-shaped building, filled with pink salons, money lenders, and cheap karaoke clubs. Martine pulled up a chair and settled down to watch.

  She didn’t have to wait long. Fifteen minutes later a stocky middle-aged woman turned into the building. A few minutes later came a painfully skinny guy in a white shirt and jeans. Martine glanced at her watch. Nozawa’s speech was due to start in half an hour. These people were planning to assassinate him. There could no longer be any doubt.

  The enormity of the idea hit her all over again. But what could she do? Call the police? Martine had enough experience with the police to know that wouldn’t work, not at this late stage. There was no way she’d be able to convince them over the phone. There must be something she could do. Martine gazed at the wall, racking her brains for inspiration. And then she saw the alarm in the corner and the smoke detector in the ceiling. That was it! All these buildings had to have a fire alarm on every floor. If she could find out where they were and set them off, that would do the trick. The fire brigade would be there within ten minutes, and the assassins would have got cold feet by then. If she moved fast enough, there would be time to stop the assassination.