by Morris West
‘But Tanaka’s bought this one. I’ve bought it, Leibig’s bought it. Why?’
‘You and Leibig have bought it because you’re Middle Europeans. You know you can’t have a vacuum across Eurasia. Somehow the Soviets have to be kept working together in some sort of co-operative union. Otherwise the whole goddam cake will collapse – Mackinder, Kjellen, Haushofer weren’t all that far wrong.’
‘And you’re saying Tanaka is the only Japanese bright enough to read that equation?’
‘No. I don’t believe that, any more than you do. But I still don’t understand why he’s so totally isolated, and why he’s turned to the Yakuza and the Mafia as financial allies.’
Laszlo handed me my drink and raised his glass in a sardonic toast: ‘To the age of enlightenment.’
We drank, with ceremony and a certain recklessness. Laszlo set down his glass and made a flourish with a silk handkerchief, dabbing at his lips, drying his fingertips. I almost expected him to launch into a psalmody: ‘I will wash my hands among the blameless.’ Instead, he announced flatly: ‘I invest with Tanaka. I also invest with four other of his colleagues in the keiretsu. I use the same structures basically as they use in Japan: cross-holdings, shared counsel, shared risk. Therefore what I tell you now is what I know. Nobody, anywhere in the world, can run an international business without the intervention of the mobs: Yakuza, Mafia, the Corsicans, the Triads. I run a big fleet in the United States. I can’t keep a single truck on the road unless I’m paid up with the Teamsters. I can’t clear a container in Sydney or Melbourne unless the Painters and Dockers have a hand in it. Protection is the oldest racket in the world; it’s been going on since the first legionary held out his hand to the first pedlar coming through the gates of any city on the globe. I know this. You know it. We don’t approve of the system, but there’s no way we can argue with it and carry on legitimate trade at the same time. So, we play by the rules and pay the mulct. My haulage rates reflect their charges. Your books, a dozen eggs, a can of beans, cost that much more in the market. Are you reading me?’
‘I’m reading you loud and clear.’
‘Now let’s talk about Tanaka or any other Japanese investor in Australia or Indonesia or the Philippines. He makes cars, he sells computers, he buys hotels, whatever. That’s the straight-line operation. When you’re selling you’re in advertising, which is show business. When you run a hotel you deal with warm bodies, entertainment. You need a whole chain of support services to complete the circle, so that the money you fly in, flies back to you through the shops you own, the cars you rent, the liquor you dispense. That’s where all the mobs come in, to run the ancillary services you can’t manage, but on which you still depend. But it’s not all lost money. The mobs need to have at least half of it laundered. So they buy stock in the big investments, the airlines, the banks, the haulage lines and the hotels themselves. It’s as old as the notion of empire, Gil. The duke becomes a king by hiring mercenaries to topple the throne. Then he makes the mercenaries respectable with land grants and benefices. Nothing changes except the names and the mechanics. So I’m not surprised that Tanaka is calling on Hoshino for funds. That’s the daimyo and his samurai, the duke and his mercenary all over again. But Cubeddu and the South American coke money, that doesn’t fit. That can’t be laundered in the same washing machine.’
I had told him of my belief that Miko, the woman with a foot in both worlds, was involved in the transaction. I repeated the argument. He shook his head in puzzlement.
‘Only half right, Gil. Self-interest on her part, an insurance policy for Tanaka, these things I can see. The rest of it, no. It’s oil and water, Gil. One more thing. I can see Hoshino putting his money on trust with Tanaka. That’s basically where it is at this moment, since Tanaka is his principal banker. But Cubeddu and whoever’s running him, no way will they pass over control of their own funds.’
‘Tanaka keeps talking as though he’ll stage some last-minute coup that will reconcile him again with his peers.’
‘I wish to God I could read his mind. It could save us a lot of time and money.’
‘Carl Leibig and I have both threatened a walkout. He still won’t move from his position that it will be all right on the night.’
‘Let’s give it a week,’ said Pavel Laszlo. ‘A lot can happen in that time.’ He grinned like a calico cat and splashed more liquor into my glass. ‘Look how much happened to you, Gil. When this is over you will come to Hungary with me and …’
‘I know. You’ll find me a beautiful, caring woman.’
‘I was thinking of two or three,’ said Laszlo amiably. ‘Hungary is full of beautiful women and they’re all looking for a man to get them out of the place. I don’t know why. I left with the seat out of my breeches. Now that I’ve set up business there, I’m coining money and even the president tells me what a patriot I am. He doesn’t want me living there, of course, just driving the gravy train.’
The more I saw of Pavel Laszlo the more I liked him. He was a living paradox – a romantic without illusions, a cynic without malice, at once a dreamer and a hard-nosed pragmatist. I was convinced that he and Boris Vannikov would get along together. I told him so. He shrugged.
‘I get along with anyone who doesn’t try to sell me rabbit for mink. If he’s prepared to bend some rules to get us started, we should return the compliment. I’m interested, by the way, to hear you’ve changed your opinion of Carl Leibig. I found him quite impressive.’
‘Impressive enough to handle half the deal alone? That’s what he’s proposing if there’s a split with Tanaka.’
‘Yes. I think he’s up to it. And the whole situation in Germany and Eastern Europe would favour him. But Tanaka still worries me. I’ve worked with him a long time.’
‘So have I.’
‘And I’ve never known him to go so far out on a limb before. Always he’s come to the table with every element in place.’
‘Hold on a moment. He’s got them in place now. The funds are on the table.’
‘But they’re the wrong elements, the wrong funds.’
‘Let’s drop it for a while.’
‘Why?’
‘Because we’re not thinking straight, or, rather, we are thinking straight, in a European mode.’
Suddenly he seemed to lose interest. He was an active man, easily bored with theories. He said: ‘Pamela, my public relations woman, arrives late tonight from Sydney. She’ll contact you in the morning. Just tell her what you want, she’ll do it. She’s long in the tooth but top of her class. And you don’t have to spell the words for her.’
He did not have to spell them for me either. The meeting was over. We both had our noses against the same brick wall. I thanked him for the drink and went back to my room to shower and dress for dinner. I called Eiko. She was very happy. She had just met a very nice young salesman from the Sanyo company. He had invited her to dinner; she would like to accept, unless of course I needed her services. I told her to enjoy herself, then went down to a solitary dinner on the riverside terrace.
It was not a quiet place. The restaurant was full. The barbecue on the other side of the pool was crowded. On the river, the longboats with their great six-cylinder engines were still roaring up and down, their screws churning the murky waters and the pools of yellow light from the buildings on either bank. Yet after a few minutes the sounds seemed to blend and subside into monotone, leaving the tired mind to range free in another space and another time. It was like looking into a diviner’s mirror, where images appeared and vanished, as if at the whim of some capricious conjuror.
There was the Feather Man, smiling and secretive, who had a ramshackle factory on the river front. To this place came a daily procession of peasants and housewives selling bales and baskets and cardboard boxes full of duck feathers. The feathers were dumped into a great engine which puffed and panted like an asthmatic giant, separating the heavy ones from the lightest which became the down for pillows and cushions.
Since there were a lot
of ducks in Asia and a lot of people plucking them, the Feather Man became very rich. He also had a ready-made intelligence service, a whole army of little men and women pedalling around the countryside collecting duck feathers. He had a factory in Vietnam, supported by a similar army of collectors, but during the Tet offensive the Vietcong had captured him and carted him away into the jungle for a year, lodging him in deep holes in the ground. I wanted to publish his story, but I could never get him to tell more than a tiny piece of it. Now it was too late, because he died as secretively as he had lived and it was many months before his friends even heard the news.
Then there was Jack Grindlay, expatriate journalist, who ran an English-language newspaper and lived like a Renaissance duke with a house full of young Thai men who, during one orgiastic night, stabbed him to death in his own living room.
I recalled snatches of some very long and very exotic dinner parties at the house of Jim Thompson, called the silk king of Thailand, who went for a holiday with friends to the Cameron Highlands in 1967 and simply disappeared from human ken. He, too, had been in the game of secrets. He, too, had made many friends and many enemies and I for one had never been able to believe the myth that he had gone out walking and fallen into a tiger trap. His life, what was public in it at least, had been elegantly recorded in a book which had become compulsory reading for every visitor to Thailand. But when I as a publisher applied through my New York lawyers for access to Jim Thompson’s military records, I was met with a blank wall of silence. My most vivid recollection was of a moment when I caught him unawares, with his white cockatoo perched on his shoulder, staring out the window at the weavers in their house across the klong. He looked tired and sad and infinitely weary. Then another image imposed itself on that handsome, ravaged face: the stone visage of the Lord Buddha, calm, passionless, sublimely indifferent to the petty preoccupations of human affairs.
I poured the last of the wine and, while I was waiting for coffee, walked over to the stone balustrade and stood staring out across the river to the buildings on the farther bank with the tufted trees between them.
The tide was coming in now, the matted islands of lily plants and river weed were floating upstream instead of down. The restaurant boats were cruising slowly against the current, their feasting passengers like actors on a movie screen. The deep-buried grief stirred again as I remembered the first night I had taken my wife to dine on the river, with half a dozen friends for company and a gypsy fiddler hired for the night from Bangkok’s only Hungarian restaurant. That dream, too, was shattered when a waft of familiar perfume enclosed me and Miko’s voice mocked me softly.
‘Mind if I join you?’
This was Bangkok, where good mannered detachment, choei choei, was required of everyone. So I bade her welcome and led her back to the table for coffee. She was dressed Western style and she was speaking English with the familiar West Coast intonation. She was still beautiful, but somehow too ordinary, too familiar to be associated with all the current dramas of our lives. I asked her: What are you doing here? You’re not expected until tomorrow.’
‘I know, but Kenji asked me to come ahead and check the arrangements. I took the flight after yours on JAL. Kenji and Carl Leibig arrive tomorrow with their staff. As you probably know, Marta’s travelling with them.’
I did not know, but I chose not to say so. Instead, I told her that Laszlo had already arrived and that we had talked. She nodded indifferently.
‘You and I have to talk, Gil. Kenji ordered me to explain certain things. Others I want you to hear from me.’
‘Which do you want to tell me first?’
‘Mine.’
I laid my palms together and bowed my head in a parody of respectful submission. ‘I’m here. I’m listening.’
‘Years ago, I bore Kenji a son. The child was stillborn.’
‘I knew that, Kenji told me.’
‘What you do not know is that my son could have become the head of the House of Tanaka.’
‘You will have to explain that a little.’
‘It is not a question of inheritance. Kenji’s family are all fully provided for. There is nothing I could have done, or would do in the future, to challenge or upset those arrangements. This is a question of succession. Kenji’s son has neither taste nor talent for the business. He is a biologist, a brilliant researcher in human genetics. Kenji is rightly proud of him but, in fact, he is without a family successor in the business. Do you know the meaning of the Japanese word ie?’
I knew it, but it was a concept difficult to convey in a European frame of reference. It described a social unit, a corporate family, a household continuum whose identity, relationships and responsibilities must be continued, if not by natural birthright, then by co-option, adoption, the creation of another kind of relationship, sometimes more binding than the natural one. Thus, in the old days a peasant boy could be adopted by the noble family under whose roof he lived. He could even supplant the legitimate son who had left the ie and no longer had accepted responsibilities within it. Slowly, I was beginning to see a new contour to the relationship between Miko and Tanaka. It disposed me to be more gentle with her, if no less cautious.
‘That’s sad; for him and for you.’
She shook her head. She refused to acknowledge sadness. ‘It changed things. I could not commit myself to another pregnancy. Kenji was left with his problem of succession.’
‘Which is now more urgent than ever before.’
‘It is critical. I have one new complication, with his health. He refuses to discuss it even with me. All I know is that he is a very sick man.’
‘And your problem?’
‘Is myself: what I am, what I do, today and tomorrow.’
‘You seem to have solved part of it at least.’
‘How so?’
‘With Marta. I heard you were celebrating – what was it? – “the coming together of two hearts”.’
Her reaction was swift and angry. ‘Do you listen at keyholes too?’
‘No. Little birds tell me fairytales.’
‘Marta is not a solution. She is a diversion.’
‘I hope you explained that to her.’
‘She explained it to me. She said she hated closed doors, closed minds, closed hearts. She had to open them all, even if what she found inside was ugly. She said she had tried to tell you this, but you refused to understand.’
‘I understood very well. I simply declined to live with it.’
‘Or forgive and forget when it’s over? Treat it like water-business: tonight enjoyed, tomorrow forgotten? Besides, what do you expect at your age? A certified virgin?’
‘A private loving – and a tranquil one.’
‘I wish you luck.’
I, too, was beginning to be angry; but the languid delta magic still held, mai pen rai. In a couple of weeks all this would be over and I would move on about my own business. I asked the waitress to bring mineral water and clean glasses. Then I tried to reason with Miko.
‘I don’t know why you’re pushing this argument so hard. Marta and I are yesterday’s lovers. For the next two weeks, we still have to work together as colleagues. With a little time and distance between us, we might even be friends again. So may we leave it at that, please.’
‘Very well. Let’s talk about you and me.’
‘What’s to say?’
‘Why, suddenly, are we enemies?’
‘Are we?’
‘We should not play games, Gil. It’s a small world. Things move fast. Thursday evening you and Max Wylie went to see Marta. The same evening in Los Angeles, which is eighteen hours behind Tokyo, two Federal agents visited my house in Holmby Hills and began questioning my assistant about my business affairs. She called my lawyer, who will protect my interests until I get back. How would you read that, Gil?’
‘How does Tanaka read it?’
‘He refuses to be concerned. He shrugs and says “You have done nothing wrong. They ask questions. You answer tru
thfully. The story will end there.”’
‘He’s right.’
‘He’s not. There’s the small matter of fees I’ve accepted for contacts and introductions and a million dollars in escrow to be paid to me if Domenico Cubeddu’s company becomes part of the Tanaka/Leibig consortium.’
‘Does Tanaka know about that?’
‘We have always had an understanding about it.’
‘Japanese style, of course. You don’t tell. He doesn’t know. You both understand.’
‘You really are a bastard, Gil.’
‘Good. That’s the beginning of wisdom. Now let’s take step two. I’m a lot easier to deal with than the Drug Enforcement Authority. I have commitments and loyalties to Tanaka. He wants you to talk to me. Do it. Tell me all about Domenico Cubeddu.’
‘It’s a long story.’
‘I’d like Laszlo to hear it too.’
‘Why, for God’s sake?’
‘Because he’s older and shrewder than I am and he’s a stronger ally than I can ever be and you’ll trust him more because you didn’t seduce his girl. Let’s walk up to the foyer and we’ll call his room.’
Sir Pavel Laszlo was not overly pleased by the call. The heat and the humidity were getting to him as they always did. He had just had a bath and he was sitting in his undershorts and dressing gown, reading a thriller. He was damned if he was going to get dressed again – even for the Queen of England. Nonetheless, he was too good a businessman to pass up inside information so, strictly on a take-me-as-I-am, don’t-hang-about and I-hope-to-God-this-is-worth-the-energy basis, he consented to receive us. He brightened a little when he saw Miko, then composed his chubby features into an inquisitor’s scowl as he began to question her about Domenico Cubeddu. Her answers were brisk and clear.
‘First you have to understand that I do not work exclusively for the Tanaka Group. I supply services to many others. One of the services is preliminary research into business projects, particularly into the people who may be useful contacts, experts in various sectors. One of the subjects always under review is new timber resources. Japan is constantly criticised for over-logging in Indonesia, Brazil, the Philippines and other places. The demand is large and constant. I was asked by the Tanaka Group to find out all I could about untapped resources in South American republics. Colombia was one area of research, because it does have big stands of commercial timber: brazilwood, mahogany, walnut and the like. The other side of the picture, of course, is that the country is run by the drug barons who control the cocaine traffic into the United States. However, Japanese businessmen are very good at distancing themselves from local troublemakers. They make it very clear that they come to do business, not meddle in local affairs. When I thought I had enough information I suggested Kenji send down a couple of his experts to speak to the government and see what concessions might be made available to us. They came, they went, they reported back to Kenji. Detailed studies were set in motion. Then one day I had a telephone call from the Palermitan Banking Corporation, the President, no less, Mr Domenico Cubeddu.’