by Morris West
‘That’s the strange thing. I don’t think it festered at all. I think it just popped up one day like a genie out of a bottle and then wouldn’t go away. It wasn’t a confessor he needed, but an exorcist. I was the only one he knew who would recognise the haunting.’
‘So what are you going to do about the material?’
‘That’s why I got you out of bed, to have the benefit of your sage counsel. What would you do about it?’
‘A plea from a dying man? I’d do what he asked.’
‘You would?’
‘No question about it.’
‘Well now, let’s raise a question or two and, if you need another drink, take it. You can buy me a fresh bottle tomorrow. Our dead penitent leaves a wife. She’s an elderly lady, something of a scholar in her own right, a musicologist to wit. They have three children, two sons and a daughter, all professional people launched on their own careers. There are also two grandchildren, not to mention a small extended family and a tribe of acquaintances, ex-students and friends in one academic discipline or another. The fellow he wronged is dead long since, probably buried in unhallowed ground or tossed in some ossuary because the lease on his burial place has run out. So who profits from this great penitential revelation? Nobody but me. It would be an interesting little end-piece for my own scholarly career. But who gets hurt? The wife, the children, the grandchildren, all those other innocents who never heard of plagiarism, probably wouldn’t know it if they fell over it in the street. Am I going to be the one who inflicts the pain? No way in the world! Promises to a dying man? Rubbish! I sent him out in peace. He can claim no more rights over the living. I’m going to burn the stuff and you’re going to help me do it, right now.’
If you’ve ever tried to light a fire in a Bloomsbury grate with a high wind howling across the rooftops and the draft funnelling down the chimney instead of up it, you will need no description of the epilogue. By the time the last pages were consumed, we were sooty, dishevelled and a little drunk with Irish whiskey and our own exceeding charity. Of the pair of us, I think I was the happier, because I had one more pearl to add to the chaplet of memories of my mother. For the first time, it seemed that I could catch the tones of her voice and the light in her eyes as she framed the motto: ‘Religion is the good you do in the bad times.’ It gave me courage enough for my final encounter with Kenji Tanaka.
He received me with a smile, seated me and offered me coffee, which I declined. I handed him the faxed offer from Tanizaki. He glanced at it and nodded agreement.
‘Good! We’ll settle at that. I’ll deal with it as soon as I get back to Tokyo. I take it I treat with Tanizaki?’
‘That’s right. He’ll form a corporate group for the purchase. When do you leave?’
‘First JAL flight in the morning.’
‘No problems with the police?’
‘None. They have all the information I can give them. They still have no idea of the identity of the assailant or how entry was made into the suite.’
‘What arrangements have been made for Miko’s funeral?’
‘The body will be released today. My people are arranging to have it shipped to California, where her assistant and her family will arrange the obsequies, at our company expense. The possessions she left in Tokyo will be packed and sent on in due course.’
‘And that’s it?’
He seemed vaguely surprised by the question. ‘What else is there, for any of us? We drop out. The space we leave is cleared and made ready for the next occupant. It will happen to me very soon.’
‘Have you made any plans?’
‘For myself, yes. I have perhaps two weeks’ work in Tokyo. Then I shall go back to Nagano. My doctor will accompany me. He is a good friend, he has agreed to facilitate my exit. My son and adopted son will be with me. At one time I had thought …’ He shrugged off the unspoken thought. ‘But that was an idle wish. I am ashamed of it now. So, for you and me, Gil, today is goodbye.’
‘I have a farewell gift for you, Kenji.’
‘And I have none for you. I am ashamed.’
‘There is no need. We have been friends a long time. I believe we understand each other.’
I handed him the envelope containing Miko’s letter. He stared at it for a moment then, punctilious as always, asked: ‘May I read it now?’
‘Of course.’
I watched him as he read the note, once, twice and again. It was an eerie experience, like seeing living tissue turn to grey stone. When he had finished, he refolded the paper with meticulous care and slid it into the envelope. He asked: ‘Who else knows about this?’
‘Nobody.’
‘What are you going to do with it?’
‘Nothing. It’s my gift to you. Keep it.’
‘I may choose to destroy it.’
‘Your property. Your choice.’
I stood up, ready to take my leave. Tanaka obviously wanted to prolong the talk. He said: ‘You place me deeply in your debt. How can I possibly …’
‘All debts are cancelled, Kenji. We part here.’
He made a small gesture of surrender. ‘So be it then. I thank you. I wish you well.’
‘I hope you have a good journey, too.’
Then he said the one thing I had prayed he would not say. ‘Gil, my friend, please understand … ‘
I turned away and left him standing there, with the letter still in his hand. Had I lingered a moment I think I might have killed him.
Hard on the heels of anger came a surge of new emotion – of exultation in a liberty I had lost a long time and found again in strange and tragic circumstances. I had not understood how long and how stringently I had bound myself to manners and customs that were not my own, how often, like that other voyager, Lemuel Gulliver, I had found myself on an alien shore, tied down with gossamer threads, or clod-hopping through tiny alleys, or dwarfed by gigantesque figures whose commands echoed like thunder.
Now I was free. Free enough to juggle a man’s life in my hands and toss it back to him as the last tribute of a dead friendship, free enough to look at myself in the mirror and ask finally what more I wanted out of life and how much I was prepared to pay to get it. Kenji Tanaka had never been free. He had been born in fetters and had never struck them off. His only release would be the death he had contrived for himself.
Marta Boysen had been born to another kind of captivity, in an old city, in an old tradition of theatrical vagabondage, a framework of European scholarship which set the pupils in serfdom to the master and in the end pricked them to revolt, but left them small room for a change. I acknowledged her scholarship. I truly could not see myself accommodating to her moods, struggling always with the complicated logic of her divided psyche. Friends we could be, lovers no more and married never. Commonsense and decency demanded that I tell her so, face to face. With the high mood still on me, I decided to get it over and done with before she left the hospital, so that she could step out of the sickroom into a life of her own.
As we drove round to the clinic, I rehearsed my lines like an actor, testing the phrases, changing the emphasis, looking for the last felicities of expression. I should have known better. There are no felicities at the end of an affair. I had hardly begun to explain my untimely visit when Marta Boysen changed instantly into the Frau Professor Doktor, calm, imperious and dismissive.
‘No explanations are needed, Gil. We are good friends. I hope we shall remain so but it has become clear to both of us, I think, that we are quite unready and, indeed, incompatible, for a continued relationship. You are older than I, a very settled man with many career demands. I have not yet found a mode of activity or an emotional life that satisfies me. Best we recognise that now and spare each other a later pain. You do agree, don’t you?’
I agree.
‘Then let’s kiss and be friends and say no more about it.’
We did kiss and we were friends, but there was more to be said. Marta made me sit on the bed and imprisoned my hands in her own. S
he faced me with the blunt question:
‘Was Miko murdered?’
‘The police believe so.’
‘And you, Gil?’
‘I believe it, too.’
‘Who did it?’
‘Nobody knows. Nobody wants to know.’
‘That’s horrible!’
‘It’s also a matter of practical politics. In this city, at this time, with the rest of the world falling apart, nobody wants an international scandal. So take my advice. Don’t gossip, don’t speculate. Miko’s dead. Let her rest in peace.’
‘She knew she was going to die.’
‘How do you know?’
‘She wrote me a note from the hairdressers.’
‘May I see it?’
‘Here.’
She handed me a similar envelope to the one I had received. The note was much shorter.
My dearest Marta,
I feel terribly alone, threatened by every shadow. You tell me you want to be a straight. It is an ugly piece of jargon, but I understand it and I wish you luck and love. If you can’t, look at this sometimes and remember. Miko.
‘This’ was an old ivory netsuke: two courtesans making sapphic love together. It was exquisitely carved and the two tiny bodies seemed warm and writhing to the touch. Marta’s eyes never left my face. Her question was a challenge.
‘Don’t you think it’s beautiful?’
‘Very beautiful.’
‘I prayed last night that wherever Miko is, she won’t be lonely.’
‘We can all use a prayer or two.’
‘I said one for you as well.’
‘And what did you ask for me?’
‘Peace at your coming, peace at your going. Your father taught it to me. He said it was the prayer of friends. We are friends aren’t we, Gil Langton?’
‘At last we are, Marta Boysen.’
I left the hospital a few minutes after four. The day was almost over and I was at a loose end, with nothing I needed or wanted to do. I looked in on the committees. Their discussions were tailing off into repetitive exchanges, because the same questions kept coming up, with the same dearth of answers. Nothing could be settled in Bangkok, because in Moscow the President was fighting to stop the Soviet empire exploding, like an overheated mill-saw, into lethal fragments.
I was sorry now I had postponed my dinner date with Siri. I debated taking some exercise in the pool or taking my ease in the hairdresser’s with a shave, manicure, pedicure and body massage thrown in for good measure. For once, virtue triumphed. I decided the exercise would do me more good than the pampering.
I counted off forty lengths of the big pool, then towelled myself and lay back on a lounger to watch the last poolside parade of the pretty girls and the predator males. It was a languid diversion which made no demands upon the mind and certainly no music on the heartstrings. Then Sir Pavel Laszlo, grotesque in a skimpy pair of swim-shorts, took possession of the lounger beside me.
‘People have been looking for you, Gil. I’m supposed to pass messages. Vannikov wants you to dine with him tonight in the Soviet Embassy.’
I let out a theatrical groan. ‘Not tonight, Josephine!’
‘Alternatively, Carl and I can offer you drinks at seven and Carl will take you to dinner if you wish.’
‘The drinks I’ll accept. I’d like to reserve judgment on the dinner. I’ve had a rough day, one way and another. I might settle for an early night with a good book.’
‘Safest diversion there is in Bangkok.’ Laszlo made no bones about the follies of promiscuity in the Orient. ‘Did you see Tanaka today?’
‘I saw him. My business with him is finished.’
‘He’s damn near finished himself.’
‘I know. He says he’s spending only a couple of weeks in Tokyo, then he’s going up to Nagano. He’s decided that’s where he wants to die.’
‘I wasn’t thinking of Tokyo.’ Laszlo glanced around furtively to make sure no one was eavesdropping, then he switched to Hungarian for extra safety. ‘He’s getting out of Bangkok by the skin of his teeth. It’s cost him the best part of a million dollars to buy his immunity and his exit.’
‘But the police had nothing on him.’
‘They had enough to put him in the griller, because of Miko’s murder and of his connection with Cubeddu and Hoshino.’
‘Why didn’t they?’
‘I’ve told you. Money. And monkey-shines with Hoshino’s local Yakuza connections.’
‘Have the police bothered you?’
‘Why should they?’
‘You’ve got connections of your own with Tanaka.’
Laszlo waved a pudgy hand, dismissing the subject as a trifle. ‘Some of ‘em are now embarrassing, others aren’t. I’ll try to unload the embarrassing ones as soon as the market hardens up.’
‘And when will that be?’
‘God only knows, Gil. The news gets blacker every day. War in the Gulf is almost certain now and that touches off a whole chain reaction, uncontrollable as a nuclear burnout. Look at me. I’m a refugee. I made a fortune in Australia; now I’m back trying to reconstruct the Europe I fled fifty years ago. As of today, that’s a débâcle, too. The latest news is that Gorbachev has sent the tanks and the gunners into Lithuania to take the radio station. People have been killed. The man must be going crazy! This conference of ours is only a metaphor for much bigger and bloodier messes. Tomorrow? Who dares even dream it? I have nightmares in which I see the bodybags being loaded into my planes and my trucks. Only today, I was thinking Tanaka might have the right idea. Give up the game. Sign out.’
‘And let the bastards inherit the earth?’
‘According to the press, they already own it – and I’m one of ’em!’ He gave a long, spluttering laugh. ‘They’re right, too. I am a bastard, but at least I’m a constructive one. I build things, I don’t blow ‘em up. I run a tourist industry, for Christ’s sake! I provide the fullest service in the world for human generation, from conception in the honeymoon suite to a kindergarten for the kids on a reef resort. What are you drinking?’
‘Bourbon on the rocks.’
‘Let me buy you another. I’ll have one myself. I need a drink to cry into.’
I might have known that if he was buying me a drink I would end up paying for it, one way or another. On Laszlo’s tours, there was no such thing as a free lunch. He did, however, have a little surprise for me.
‘Now that this little circus is folding its tents, what are you going to do, Gil?’
‘Attend to my own business for a change. I’ve got to make my annual round of the companies. I’ll complete the circuit, visit my kids in England and the US, then head back home. I’ve got more than enough to keep me off the streets.’
‘What would it take to put you back on the streets for a while?’
‘Meaning what, Pavel?’
‘It’s too early to be specific, but let me try to draw a picture for you. Right now, everyone’s talking war. Everyone has the same picture of it, because it’s the picture they get on television: the ravaged battlefields, mutilated bodies, the battle-weary men, defeated even in victory, the long lines of bodybags with the chaplain consigning them to the earth and to their Maker. But that’s only part of it, Gil. The other part is a vast tide of refugees, displaced by war or famine or tribal retribution, ebbing and flowing across the continents. That’s the horror I remember; and it lasts much longer than the war, its wounded take much, much longer to heal. There are teams in the field all the time: United Nations, Red Cross, Save the Children, Oxfam. Their work is heroic, but it’s like trying to stem Niagara Falls with sandbags. We need an enormous effort to co-ordinate resources, break down cultural barriers, silence the clamour of the Tower of Babel, so that the voice of reason and compassion can be heard. You’ve got the talent for it, Gil. You’ve got the languages and the background of history and culture. You’ve got the organisation, too. That publishing group of yours can be a powerhouse for a cause like this. If I can
show you that there is a new starting point and there is a clear focus and there are funds and you wouldn’t just be flailing around in a vacuum, would you be willing to think about it?’
‘Think about it, yes. But no promises, no commitments.’
‘Understood, of course. Perhaps on this trip you could make time to talk to some people in Switzerland and London.’
‘Pavel! You’re hustling me.’
He was, too. He could talk the birds out of the trees and blood out of dead rocks; but at the heart of every dream he conjured up was a solid commercial nut, with ‘Profit’ engraved on it. Also, like every hustler, he could read thoughts and faces. He began to take the pressure off me.
‘I’m talking too much. I always do. I sell too hard? It’s because I’m obsessed with time, intolerant of those who waste it. Enough! You will simply send me your itinerary and I’ll arrange the appointments. Agreed?’
‘I’ll think about it, but there’s a condition.’
What’s that?’
‘Answer some questions for me.’
‘If I can, sure.’
‘Do you know who killed Miko?’
He did not hesitate for a moment. ‘Yes.’
‘Who was it?’
‘Hoshino.’
‘How do you know that?’
‘I called to see Tanaka about seven. We had a short conversation. I left. Hoshino passed me in the corridor. He was going to see Tanaka.’
‘Why didn’t you tell the police?’
‘Two very good reasons. Nobody asked me and I assumed Tanaka had accounted for his own movements. It was only afterwards that I began to speculate but, as you know, Gil, speculation isn’t proof and in Asia no one is invited to meddle in police business.’
‘So why try to dazzle me with all that rhetoric about tides of refugees and the aftermath of conflict?’
‘Because it’s true. It’s going to happen. It’s a theme that even here runs through all our debates. Look, Gil. Not all of me is a bazaar huckster. I have memories and I have nightmares, even now. I’ve got a conscience buried under all this blubber.’
‘I know, Pavel. I’m sorry. I never liked Miko. She managed to foul up a few passages in my life as well as her own. But she’s dead, and the men who conspired to kill her are home free. We let ‘em go, both of us!’