"December6" - читать интересную книгу автора (Martin Cruz Smith - December 6)

5

BY FIVE IN THE MORNING Harry was shaved and out the door, leaving Michiko asleep.

Asakusa had the hollow sound and desultory look of an empty stage. Marquees that had pulsed with electric light were dark canopies. A couple of workmen engaged in hanging a loudspeaker from a streetlamp. A pair of geishas staggered home, face-white almost luminous in the morning twilight, their elaborate coifs lurching with every step. Holding hands, the women maneuvered around paving stones strewn with fish bones, toothpicks, lists of auspicious numbers and a pack of scrofulous dogs tugging a squid in opposite directions. One geisha hiccuped good morning to Harry, who was on his way to the car.

Harry often dressed in a casual kimono, but for breakfast at the Chrysanthemum Club, he wore a single-breasted suit because the club members, those captains of Japanese trade and finance, were expecting a true-blue American. He carried Hajime’s gun in a box wrapped in a furoshiki, the same sort of cloth he used to wrap Kato’s prints in. Harry was virtually at the garage when his sleeve was tugged by a boy in a sailor sweater. The boy was joined by a small woman who executed a bow of such respect that Harry was thrown into confusion until he smelled the smoke on her and realized he had reached the corner where the tailor’s shop had burned the night before. Where the shop had stood was a near void. A girl with a lantern sifted through the rubble of roof tiles and iron pans and the blackened body of a sewing machine. Harry saw no other indication that a family had inhabited the spot, not a sandal, photograph, workbench, bolt of cloth, not even a thimble. Nothing was left of the neighboring tattoo and eel shops, either. The entire corner of the block had been reduced to a wet black smudge.

In whispers, the tailor’s wife apologized to Harry for the inconvenience of the fire. Thanks to his generosity, they would be able to find a new shop and to help the people next door. All the time she talked, the boy tugged at Harry’s jacket.

This was the sort of conversation Harry hated. First, he was on the move. He had things to do. Second, this woman’s house had burned down, and she was thanking him for a few lousy yen, money that he had been on the way to gamble with. He looked around as if a magic exit sign might start flashing. To change the subject, he asked about the grandmother he had seen going off in an ambulance.

“She is much better, thank you. Thank you very much for asking. Grandmother also thanks you for your help. She also apologizes.”

“It was nothing, please.”

“One thing,” she said and hesitated.

“Yes?”

Harry wasn’t sure in the poor light, but he thought her face flushed. “My husband does not know about your help. He would not understand.”

About accepting money from a gaijin? Everyone knew that the entire point of the campaign in China was to free Asia of Western entanglements. Every patriotic man took this cause as his personal mission. Women were a little more intelligent.

“Ah,” Harry said.

“Very difficult.” She lowered her head.

“Well.”

“I am so sorry.”

“I understand.” But there was no mention of giving the money back, and Harry had to smile. “I’m sure you’re doing the right thing. I leave it all in your hands.”

“You are too kind.” Her relief was so naked that Harry was embarrassed all over again. “I will say a prayer for you.”

“Then we’re even.”

The boy kept tugging on Harry’s jacket pocket and saying “For you” until Harry pulled free.

TEN THOUSAND CUTTLEFISH, dried on lines, rattled in the dawn. A year before, the Tokyo fish market had been rich in red salmon, eels in silver coils, crabs the size of monsters, rockfish, monkfish, needlefish laid like cutlery on beds of ice and massive blue-skinned tuna. No more, not since marine gasoline was reserved for the navy. The fishing fleet had gone back to oars and sails, plying the coast instead of deeper water, and the general nature of the catch had changed to mounds of shellfish, clams and oysters, mussels and cockles, as if the boats had gone for stones instead of fish. Regular gas was as tight. The week before, Harry had seen farmers pushing a truck heaped with sweet potatoes. It seemed to him that in its effort to lead the world, the entire country had gone in reverse.

He found Taro aboard his boat. It wasn’t hard. Taro had been big even as a boy, as one of the faithful ronin who had hunted Harry down, and he was huge as a man, a sumo with a high forehead, topknot and tent-size kimono. An open firebox lit the fishing boat’s simple lines: the low gunwales, single oarlock, seining pole at the stern.

“Tanks are drained,” Taro said.

“What do you care?” Harry asked.

“You can run a taxi on charcoal, you can’t run a boat.” The boat had no wheelhouse, only a canvas shelter that Taro stooped under to trim lines and nets. “If my father could see this. Remember the time you came out with us and a shark got on board?”

“We jumped then.”

“We jumped high. Now they want us to go out and catch shark for shoe leather. Shoe leather! I won’t do it, Harry, not on my father’s boat.”

Harry hadn’t heard Taro be so filial before. He also hadn’t heard what was so urgent that Taro had to see him this early in the day. It was the same way sumos wrestled. Before the actual grappling, there might be ten minutes of glaring and stomping around the ring. Taro sat by the firebox, lit a cigarette and took a flask of sake from a tin pan on top of the box. He poured the sake into two cups that looked like doll china in his hands.

Harry squatted and tried to keep his pant cuffs clean. “It’s a little early.”

“Not for me,” Taro mumbled. “A good fisherman would be bringing in his catch by now. Fish, not shoe leather. Kampai!”

“Kampai!” Harry threw the cup back. The last thing he wanted was to match drinks with a sumo. Sumos trained on sake. It was a breach of their etiquette to turn down a drink. Also, there was something particularly abject about Taro this morning, like an ox on its knees.

“The fishing is pretty bad?” Harry asked.

Taro poured another. “The fish are there. Fish are everywhere, but it’s too far without gas. Even the bays are open.”

“All the bays?”

“That’s what they say.”

“Every bay?”

“Yes.”

“Hitokappu Bay?”

“Wide open.”

“Banzai!” Harry said. Hitokappu was where the Combined Fleet had gathered in November and then barely stirred for lack of fuel. If the warships left there but hadn’t appeared at any other bay in Japan, Harry wondered where an entire fleet had gone.

Taro tipped forward and became solemn. “Harry, remember Jiro?”

“Your brother? How could I forget?” Taro and Jiro were huge twins told apart by their names, meaning “firstborn” and “second.”

“He made your life miserable.”

“Not all the time,” Harry said. “We had some fun.”

“Picking pockets?”

“Yeah. Jiro was large like you. He did the bumping and I did the dipping.”

“He always had money when he was with you.” Taro fell silent, then said, “Jiro only helped pick pockets because the boat came to me. I was the older twin. If he’d been first, he would have been Taro and I would have been Jiro. That makes you think.” He squinted into the firebox. “You know what they say about twins. The parents must have been…you know…too much.”

True, Harry thought. Let a couple have twins and the neighborhood acted as if the parents were randy as dogs.

“Everyone sniggered except you, Harry. Everyone. That’s why he went bad, I’m convinced.”

“He was a little rough around the edges.”

“The police gave him a choice, the army or jail.”

“He always wanted to fight. He got his chance.”

“Harry, can I ask you for a favor?”

“It depends.”

“That’s always your answer, isn’t it?”

“It depends.”

Taro felt in his sleeve and came up with a telegram. He smoothed it out against his chest and gave it to Harry, who read it by the light of the fire. The telegram offered congratulations from the army and informed the recipient when the remains of Lance Corporal Kaga Jiro would arrive at Tokyo Station.

“Christ. It’s this afternoon.”

“It’s the first we heard that he was even hurt.”

“That’s tough, okay.”

“Go with me, Harry?”

“I can’t go with you. I’m not family.”

“Mother is too weak, it would kill her to go. I just can’t face Jiro alone.”

“A gaijin picking up Jiro? How is that going to look?”

Taro put the cup aside, swept the deck with a paw and knelt until he’d reached a deep kowtow. No one had ever given Harry a kowtow before, least of all a sumo. The circles Harry ran in, he’d hardly ever seen one kowtow, and now two big bows in a morning, how strange was that? Not to mention the pistol in his car.

“Get up,” Harry said.

From his facedown position, Taro’s whisper was muffled. “At least meet me afterward, Harry. I can’t face him alone, not yet.”

“No. Now get up.” Harry tugged at Taro’s sleeve.

Taro was deadweight. “Harry, please.”

“It’s a bad idea. You’re going to lie there all day?”

“Harry…”

Jesus Christ, Harry thought. The stupid brothers had hated each other from the day they were born, fifteen minutes apart, as Taro said.

“Shit,” Harry said in English. “That means yes.”

“Thank you, Harry.” Taro sat up, instantly relieved, and refilled Harry’s cup. “Thank you, Harry, much better.”

“At the ballroom.”

“The ballroom.”

They drank and admired the lightening sky. A boat slipped by, a shadow at the stern working the single oar. Harry, looking for small talk, said, “Let’s hope there won’t be many more heroes after Jiro. Who knows, maybe Japan will pull out of China.”

Taro asked, “Do you know how to catch an octopus? It’s the only interesting thing I learned from fishing.”

“You know, I’ve never tried.”

“You trick him. An octopus is so smart and shy, and he spends all his time in his cave. Hooks don’t work. Nets catch on the rocks. But the octopus is greedy, and he loves the color red. You tie a red rag around a pole and wave that rag down in the water, right outside the octopus’s cave, and he can’t resist. Out comes one tentacle at a time until he’s completely wrapped around that pole. You just lift him out, because he wants his red rag, and at the cost of his own life, he won’t let go. That’s Japan with China. We won’t let go.”

SATURDAY WAS A WORKDAY. Traffic drove on the left side of the street, mainly taxis and trams, some rickshaws running doctors to the hospital around a stationary line of army trucks, four-by-two Toyotas that were really Chevrolets in disguise. Harry’s own car was a low-slung Datsun built at Ford’s old plant in Yokohama. Ford and GM had both had what were called “screwdriver assembly plants” until the Japanese learned enough about mass production and booted them out. Few private cars were on the road, and most of them were powered by a charcoal furnace attached to the back in a system that was ingenious but virtually powerless; uphill, passengers pushed. Harry ran on black-market gas. He figured the day he drove a car powered by charcoal was the day he cashed in his chips.

On the passenger seat was the pistol. On the car radio, Japan Broadcasting offered its usual morning fare, an exercise program of jumping jacks. “One, two! One, two! One, two!” Workmen were hanging loudspeakers from lampposts so that the general population could benefit from the same instructions. “One, two! One, two!” Tokyo was on the move.

In fits and starts. Harry had given himself an hour to get to the Chrysanthemum Club, but convoys of army trucks brought all other traffic to a halt until police rerouted everyone miles around the far side of the palace. A rag-wagon horse expired outside the Diet building, then a bike transporting a six-foot stack of noodle trays went down in front of Harry’s car, and by the time he reached even the center of the city, he was forty minutes late. Usually he was entertained by Tokyo Station, the mixed bag of commuters in three-piece suits and farmers in cone-shaped hats of straw. He always enjoyed the secretly triumphant way salesgirls and switchboard operators twitched to work in their long tight skirts and little French hats. Today, however, everyone just seemed in Harry’s way. Yet he discovered that, at a certain level, he didn’t give a damn. Here he was at the acme of his business career, invited to dine with the Rockefellers and Carnegies of Japan, while Ishigami tracked him down like a crazed assassin. Not to mention Michiko’s suspicions. He needed a ship, he needed a train, he needed a plane and here he was riding the eight ball. And part of him couldn’t care less. It was the part that he didn’t see often. Occasionally it looked out of the mirror and asked, What’s the point of this game?

Behind the domes of Tokyo Station rose an eight-story imitation of Wall Street, a row of gray financial temples, the great banks of Japan. They stood side by side, the Ionic columns of Mitsubishi, Corinthian columns of Mitsui, tomblike doors of Sumitomo, all leading to the marble stairs and double brass doors of the Chrysanthemum Club with their famous crest of a Fuji mum within a ring. Harry tucked the Datsun behind a row of uniformed chauffeurs in Cadillacs and Packards. He might be almost an hour late, but he took the stairs one at a time, aware of the study he was receiving from bodyguards grouped on the stairs. They were retired detectives and off-duty police, chewing toothpicks or smoking cigarettes. Although the rate of political assassination had slowed, the army had made it clear it would eliminate anyone it suspected of less than white-hot patriotism, and if the atmosphere in Asakusa was frivolous, the air around the palace seemed weighted with dread and expectation. It had taken nothing less than the threat of war for the club to open its doors to Harry Niles, but once in, he found himself guided by a sort of butler dressed like a royal chamberlain. At the sixth floor, Harry was directed from the elevator to a door that was ajar to the sound of murmuring. Too late, he regretted the sake with Taro.

The worst thing was to look like a schoolboy late for class. Harry forced himself to slowly enter a dining room of a few hundred diners who fell silent at the sight of him. Palpable opprobrium and curiosity took aim, but Harry made a ninety-degree bow of apology and moved toward a head table where a conspicuously empty chair awaited him. Only when he had seated himself, made more apologies and drawn himself up to the table did he dare take in the room itself, its panels of precious woods, black persimmon and pale Yaku cedar, the blaze of chandeliers, the ornamental fires in the fireplaces at each end. The Chrysanthemum Club was the club of international trade, and it was, to some degree, an imitation of a London gentlemen’s club, yet unmistakably Japanese. Chrysanthemums stood in crystal vases, staff in swallow-tailed suits shuffled softly around with coffee and green tea, always bowing when they passed a larger than life-size oil portrait of the club’s royal sponsor, the emperor himself, a stooped, scholarly man regarding a globe with great intensity.

The diners had fallen on the last of their kippers and eggs. There were close to three hundred guests, Harry thought, not a bad muster considering how many foreigners had fled Tokyo. The Americans were an embassy attaché, a couple of Rotarians, a pair of forlorn managers from Standard Oil of New York and National City Bank, and Al DeGeorge, who never missed a free meal. The British side was led by First Secretary Arnold Beechum, a beefy sportsman with small eyes stuck on a dome of freckles. A blockade-runner must have come in, because the Germans were well represented. Naval officers in roguishly handsome sweaters and dress blues shared a table with beaming executives from Siemens and I. G. Farben who were already anticipating a vigorous postwar economy. Willie Staub had been seated at a second table with Ambassador Ott, who had looked sick since the recent arrest of his best friend as a Russian spy, and Meisinger, a Gestapo colonel with thinning hair and greasy jowls. Meisinger’s nickname was “The Butcher of Warsaw.” Willie appeared distressed, though how anyone could be unhappy schmoozing with the Butcher of Warsaw, Harry couldn’t imagine. Sharing a table, the Italians and Vichy French appeared locked in mutual Mediterranean contempt. Other Europeans and tame Chinese were scattered around the room, but most of Harry’s audience consisted of Japanese executives sweaty around the collar because they were misunderstood. Misunderstood at home by an army just as happy to gun down capitalists as Communists and misunderstood abroad by their former friends and trading partners. Hence the breakfast address by Harry Niles.

Harry felt like a burglar allowed to work with the lights on. He didn’t mind missing the eggs and toast; he preferred the unsullied chrysanthemum motif of the plate, the same design woven into the linen, engraved on water glasses, etched in silverware. His breakfast buddies at the head table were directors from IHI Engineering and NYK Shipping, the president of Nippon Air, an elderly chairman from the Yasuda Bank, all stiff as a row of bamboo sticks. On Harry’s left was the last empty chair, on his right a young vice president from Yoshitaki Lines so scared of Harry that he spilled his coffee. Members rose to make announcements; the club’s language was English as a nod to its international bent. Someone from the back of the room reported with regret the cancelation of a joint lunch with the American Club.

Harry was fine until the last chair was taken by a small man whose elegant pin-striped suit was contradicted by his cropped white hair, dark face and thick hands toughened with brine. It was Yoshitaki himself. Mitsubishi and Sumitomo had begun as samurai. Starting as a poor seaman, Yoshitaki had opened the Pacific for Japan shipping fifty years before by re-outfitting side-wheelers sold for scrap and facing down Chinese pirates and British gunboats. Now he was one of the wealthiest men in Japan and one of the best informed. If he didn’t know exactly where the Combined Fleet was, he certainly knew in what direction it sailed. He had eyes that seemed set on a far horizon or deep into another man’s soul, and he offered an expression of contempt so polite that Harry felt like a rotting fish.

Yoshitaki asked his vice president, “Do you observe the wall panels?”

“The wood is beautiful.”

“Without imperfection. Such trees must be pruned for two hundred years or more,” Yoshitaki said. “They must be diligently pruned and cleansed of alien infection. Allowing an alien infestation, a canker or a worm, is the greatest mistake a forester can make.”

Fuck you, too, Harry thought. As he reached for the water, he noticed the two directors abruptly sit up, their eyes wide. On Harry’s jacket sleeve was a large black beetle. Harry felt in his pocket and found a perforated cardboard box, wood shavings and string. The tailor’s son had slipped him a beetle. That was why the boy had said, “For you.”

It was a jet-black rhinoceros beetle with a sweeping upcurved horn. The beetle stepped from the sleeve to the table, shuffled its wing covers and started climbing a starched white napkin. One by one, the other guests at the head table focused on its progress, on Harry, back on the beetle. There weren’t many places in the world, he thought, where dropping big insects on the table was socially acceptable, and the Chrysanthemum Club probably wasn’t one of them. He felt Yoshitaki’s amusement in particular.

The beetle was a robust Minotaur, with no ill effects from the fire that Harry could see. While another report from the back of the room droned on, the beast conquered the napkin and went from guest to guest examining the silverware, chinning itself on the plates as the diners drew back. Finally, as if confused by freedom, the beetle wandered back within reach of Harry, who scooped up the insect gently, let it have a little exercise from hand to hand, placed it in the box with shavings and tied the box shut tight.

“Do you have any more surprises?” Yoshitaki asked.

“I hope not.”

“What a disappointment.”

Harry became aware that he was being introduced. The “well-known Western businessman, keen observer of the international scene and longtime friend of Japan,” that was him. He stood to a round of spotty applause. “Like raising Lazarus,” his father used to say about a stiff congregation. But the old man could do it, and if his father was good with a sermon, Harry had perfected the anti-sermon. He put Michiko and Ishigami out of his mind. He walked around the table, made eye contact with Beechum, DeGeorge, Ott, a Mitsui director here, a Datsun manager there, and let the moment draw until the last cough was extinguished.

When Harry had complete silence, he began. “Americans ask me, What does Japan want? Does Japan seek to rule the Asian mainland? Does Japan have a dream of world domination? The answer is of course not. On the other hand, Japan has real needs and real aims. What Japan wants is peace in a world of stability and prosperity. A world divided into three economic spheres with three natural leaders, Germany in Europe, America in the Western Hemisphere and Japan in Asia. The old order is falling. Like any collapsing building, the faster its ruins are swept up and carted away, the safer and better for everyone. The day when the white man ruled in Asia is over. Dying empires must give way to vigorous new ones.”

Harry detected a satisfied Japanese intake of breath, a susurrous pleasure that filled the room. Admittedly, in normal times the association was addressed by Nobel Prize academics, visiting business magnates or international publishers from Fortune or Time, not a moving picture rep . These were not normal times, however. The clever part of having someone like Harry talk was that he could say all those things that no well-brought-up Japanese would say to a Westerner. Harry could be disowned or discredited, but he’d say what he knew the Japanese wished they could.

“Japan has been patient. In the Great War, Japan was the staunch ally of Great Britain and the United States and secured the Pacific for its friends. For which service, all Japan asked was respect. Did Japan receive it? No. Instead, Britain and America did their best to lock the Japanese navy into an inferior status. Britain ended its friendship treaty with Japan, and the United States enacted racist immigration laws meant to insult the Japanese people. Japan had offered its hand in goodwill. In return it was slapped in the face.”

Harry picked out guests he recognized.

“Slapped.” He looked toward Beechum. “Japan has never understood this lack of sympathy from England. The Japanese ask, Why was it proper for one island nation to fatten on the lifeblood of peoples around the world and not proper for another nation to help its close neighbors develop a modern economy? Why is it a Christian duty for England to enslave Africa, India, Burma and Malaysia and not right for Japan to lead the peoples of Asia toward prosperity and independence? Take Hong Kong, for example. The truth is that England has no more legal claim on Hong Kong than Japan has on Scotland or Wales. It has no right, only might, which is why England boasts about the naval guns it has placed in Singapore. England claims to be keeping the peace, when in fact it is ruling the roost with eighteen-inch guns. Or desperately trying to.” The British table traded dark glances. Well, this was probably one of the few speeches in Japan they understood, Harry thought; the British community in Tokyo was famous for its ignorance of Japanese.

By then Harry had moved briskly on to Roy Hooper, the American attaché, a man with all the misplaced faith and optimism of a missionary. “Japan also asks its American friends, Why is a �Monroe Doctrine’ reason enough for you to declare an entire hemisphere your own private concern? What gives you the right to rush marines into Mexico or Cuba or the Panama Canal? Who gave you the right to seize Hawaii, thousands of miles away from the American mainland? How is it you can claim the right for all these invasions, but let Japan respond to provocations from a neighbor or help the people of Manchukuo liberate themselves from centuries of ignorance and exploitation and Japan is pilloried for so-called aggression and driven from the League of Nations? Why? Because there is one law for white men and another law for Japanese.”

Delivering this sort of speech was like grilling steak, Harry thought. You did one side, then the other. The main thing was to keep the coals hot.

“Nowhere is this lack of honesty or fairness more clear than in China. England says it is only protecting the rights of the Chinese. Is that so? Is this the same China that England conquered with repeating rifles, the same Chinese it slaughtered in Peking? The China that Britain enslaved to opium? The China that all of Europe carved up into colonies? The China of a very few rich and hundreds of millions wearing rags and surviving on scraps from the European table?” When Beechum’s pinkness darkened to red, Harry returned to Hooper. “Then there are the protests from America. America is different, America doesn’t want an empire, it only wants markets. America claims no properties in China, all it wants is free trade, an Open Door for export and import, a level playing field for innocent commercial interests. Which means different things in different places. In China it means that the banks of New York can buy Chinese war bonds and subsidize year after year of conflict and misery. In China it means a market for the cotton mills of South Carolina and Alabama. But in the United States it means a closed market to Japanese cotton, not to mention Japanese silk. Again, one law for the white man, another law for the Japanese.”

Hooper smiled sorrowfully and shook his head. His father had indeed been a missionary, and Hooper Jr. had banged a drum for the Salvation Army in the streets of Tokyo only to be attacked by the Buddhist Salvation Army, which young Harry had joined for the fights. Harry went on to list the resources and materials held back or embargoed from Japan by the United States and Britain: rubber, scrap iron, steel, aluminum, magnesium, copper, brass, zinc, nickel, tin, lead, wolfram, airplane parts and, foremost, oil. All in an attempt to starve the hardworking people of an island with no natural resources. Even in rice. The British held back jute so the Japanese couldn’t bag their own rice! As he rattled off statistics, Harry did sneak a sympathetic look at a pair of businessmen from Standard Oil and National City, marooned in Tokyo as first Washington froze Japanese assets and then Japan froze American. Whenever the two visited the Happy Paris, Harry stood them their first round of drinks.

“Japan may be the most beautiful and serene of nations, but it has virtually no natural resources. Its economy is based entirely on hard work and discipline. Facing a hostile encirclement by America, the British Empire and their allies in the Dutch East Indies, what choice does Japan have but to search for raw materials in its own natural sphere of Asia? Not to exploit its neighbors but to bring them the modernization, education, industry and medicine the West never did. That’s why when fellow Americans ask me what the Japanese want, I tell them that Japan wants justice and peace. I tell them that Japan wants Asia for Asians, and that it’s about time.”

Mission accomplished. The British and Americans sat silent and aghast while the Japanese broke into the most sincere applause Harry had ever received. After he finished and the meeting was declared over, a banker from Yasuda purred like an old cat. “A very interesting talk, very forceful but not necessarily inaccurate.”

“Not totally inaccurate, I hope,” Harry said. “Just a few thoughts that I wanted to share.”

Others at the table, however, hung back to gauge Yoshitaki’s reaction. The silence grew while the shipping magnate studied Harry up and down. Yoshitaki was so dark his eyebrows looked singed, and his concentration was so complete that he and Harry might have been the only two men in the hall.

“I must tell you, Mr. Niles, that I was opposed to having you speak here today. I was not opposed to the speech itself so much as opposed to you. I did not, in fact, hear anything I did not expect you to say. I simply felt that your very presence degraded the prestige of the Chrysanthemum Club. I felt you would say anything to advance yourself. You are a marginal creature, like a crab that feeds neither in the water nor on land but in the rocks between. And even after hearing you today, I find that all of that is still true. But I would have to admit, I can no longer say that in no way are you Japanese.”

Harry knew enough to be silent.

Yoshitaki said, “At the beginning of my career, I was at sea for years at a time, sometimes alone on virtual wrecks, no room for a dog or a cat, but I kept a beetle in a jar. One beetle for four years. Two ships went down under me, and I swam away with that jar each time. A good friend.”

“Did it have a name?” Harry asked.

“Napoleon.”

“A world conqueror of a beetle.”

“I liked to think so. And the name of your beetle?”

“Oishi,” Harry came up with.

“The faithful samurai? Very good.”

Those few words were enough. The sight of a legend like Yoshitaki conversing with Harry Niles in such a familiar manner had an immediate effect. As soon as Yoshitaki departed, other members queued to add their thanks for such an incisive, sympathetic analysis. Bankers who would have crossed the street to avoid him the day before proffered their business cards. Harry bowed, read each card with grave attention, placed it in a lacquered card case, bowed again, mumbling as humbly as possible.

The president of Nippon Air oozed tact and satisfaction, like a maître d’ leading a favored customer to the best table in the house. “As you know, on Monday, Nippon Air is reinstituting international flights to Hong Kong. We think this will help establish a sense of normality and confidence in the region. There will be press and photographers. Just an overnight at the Matsubara Hotel in Hong Kong and then a return. A number of your compatriots are asking to be on that flight, but you can appreciate how important it is that our foreign passengers be truly reliable friends of Japan.”

“I certainly do.” “Reliable” meant that the son of a bitch was smart enough to praise Japan on the way to Hong Kong and dumb enough to come back.

“I think you have alleviated any concerns about your reliability this morning.”

“Thank you.” Harry added a bow and held his breath.

“So,” the president of Nippon Air let his words fall to a whisper of snowflakes, “you might be able to make yourself available on Monday? Haneda Field at noon. We will be flying a new DC-3. No tickets necessary. I, personally, will put you on the passenger list. Does this please you?”

“It pleases me to have earned your trust.” Gone like a greased weasel, Harry thought.

Only when Mr. Nippon Air was done did other guests approach.

“How does it feel,” Beechum asked, “to be the most despised white man in Asia?”

“Pretty good this morning, thanks.”

“Your �fellow Americans’? I doubt you’ve been to America for a year in your entire life. A cute performance. That ought to buy the Happy Paris another month’s protection. You’re the sort that in England we would drag through the streets behind a horse.”

“Is that the England of bad food and good canings?”

The smell of Beechum’s bay rum was more intense the warmer he grew. Harry had never seen the man with so much spit and personality before. “You think your friends look so good against coolies. Just watch when the little yellow Johnnies go up against the guns in Singapore.”

“�Yellow Johnnies’? That doesn’t sound like diplomatic language to me.”

Beechum said, “I for one hope they do give it a go. This entire circus will be over in a week, and then where will you be?”

“The next circus, I suppose.”

“Not when we’re done with you. Because there will come a day,” Beechum promised. “There will come a day.”

Willie motioned that he would wait outside, but Meisinger, the Gestapo chief, shook Harry’s hand and went right to the point. “You didn’t mention Jews.”

“Didn’t I?”

“So-called refugees. You haven’t noticed them?”

“You know the truth? The truth is that in Japan, all Westerners look pretty much alike.”

“Impossible,” Meisinger said.

“Stick around.”

Well, that was probably not appreciated, Harry thought, but if you even pretended to be friendly to someone like Meisinger, you ended up with the Butcher of Warsaw singing the Horst Wessel song in the Happy Paris. Harry didn’t think he was willing to suffer that, and he knew Michiko wouldn’t.

“They’ve got a little list, Harry,” Hooper said as Meisinger marched away. The American attaché was a gangly, brush-cut man with a bow tie and an empathetic smile. “A speech for the Japanese? Are you totally nuts?”

“Who’s got a list?”

“Everyone’s got a list, Russians, British, Germans. We have a list. Not to mention the Japanese. You’ve made enemies everywhere.”

“Just throwing light on the international scene.”

“Fuel on the fire. Harry, what’s going to happen is going to happen. You and I can’t affect anything at this point, and unless you have some way of disappearing magically from the scene, I suggest you pull your head in. You’re still doing asset searches for the Japanese?”

“I might look through a dusty ledger or two.”

“It’s called colluding with the enemy.”

“Hoop, we’re not at war yet.”

“I hate that nickname. Anyway, if things do blow up in your face and you find yourself running for your life, I’m supposed to tell you not to come to the American embassy.”

“Have I ever gone to the embassy?”

“So you know. They don’t consider you American.”

“Hoop, I always knew that.”

Harry was feeling good, feeling great. Once again, his luck had come through. Who would have thought a beetle was the way to Yoshitaki’s heart? But had he transgressed in his speech? Had he crossed a certain unforgivable line? Didn’t matter, Harry was walking on air. By the time he made it to the street, Willie was waiting with DeGeorge, whose taxi wasn’t going anywhere soon. The driver poured fresh charcoal into the top of the furnace and cranked a fan.

“Like riding a fucking hibachi,” DeGeorge said.

“I wish the readers of The Christian Science Monitor could hear the language of their illustrious reporter,” Harry said.

“Last-minute plea for peace, my ass.”

“’Japan’s Business Leaders Friendly to America,’ I think that’s your headline right there.”

“A goddamn apology for war. It’s happening, isn’t it? I saw you talking to the head of Nippon Air. Any word about the plane to Hong Kong?”

“Why would he tell me?”

“I don’t know.” DeGeorge turned to Willie. “All I know is that Harry is Mr. Connected and Protected. One day we’re going to look around and Harry will be down the rabbit hole, and that’ll be one day too fucking late for the rest of us.”

“I never know if you use �fucking’ as an adverb or an adjective,” Harry said. “I guess that’s why you’re the Pulitzer Prize winner and I’m not.”

“Fuck you. I’m going to meet Beechum. Get the British embassy’s reaction to this defeatist bullshit.” DeGeorge gave his taxi a final glance and turned back to Harry. “Give me a ride?”

EARLY DECEMBER could produce days like this, spells of crystalline sunlight and the smell of citrus, smudged this winter by charcoal smoke. Willie sat in front with Harry and rolled down his window as they headed west along the turgid, pea-green moat that wrapped around the imperial castle. All traffic in the center of the city had to go around the palace. No street ran through it, subway under it or air route over it, and no nearby building could even be built high enough to look down on the divine presence, so the city revolved around a powerful absence, a flat green mountain, a hole, the idea of a hidden, undisturbed, jewel-like virtue. Even the castle presented a trick of perspective, the enormous, closely fitted stones made so low by the angle and length of the walls that imperial guards standing at the base, their rifles in white parade socks, looked like toy figures. All that was visible over the walls of the palace itself was a hint of curved eaves and tiled roofs behind a red tracery of maples. The moat was famous for its golden carp. As a boy, Harry would pay ten sen for a paper scoop at a goldfish tank and try to capture as many fish as possible before the paper fell apart, believing this established some sort of connection between himself and the Son of Heaven.

They passed a bus that had slowed so riders could remove their hats and bow in the direction of the emperor.

Willie said, “In spite of China, this seems quite wonderful to me. Serene, as you said.”

“Serene?” DeGeorge had a laugh like the scrape of a shovel. “Hey, they assassinated three prime ministers in sixteen years. Murder, incorporated, doesn’t have a record like the Japs, so �serene’ may not be the right word. Things are going to pop, the only question is when. The man who names the day just walks in and picks up that Pulitzer, right, Harry?”

“Could be.”

“They’re holding last-ditch negotiations in Washington that are going nowhere.” DeGeorge leaned forward to Willie’s ear. “Napoleon’s army ran on its stomach, armies today run on their gas tanks. April a year ago, the Japs bought three times their usual amount of oil from the States. Roosevelt made a big show of cutting the Japs off of East Coast oil and sending it to England. Didn’t matter, the Japs just bought all the oil on the West Coast. And aviation fuel? As much as we could sell. Not to mention steel and scrap iron. The Jap navy is built out of old Fords and Frigidaires. All the time, of course, FDR was starting to build three times as many tanks and battleships. Then, this July, we cut them off, no oil, no rubber, no steel, no nothing. There comes a certain point when the Japs are as strong as they’re going to get, and every day from then on they’re weaker. That’s when the shooting starts. I figure we’re there just about now.”

Harry stopped the car at the stone pillars and wrought-iron gates of what looked like a pocket version of Buckingham Palace, right down to a lion and unicorn in the center of the pediment. The Embassy of His Britannic Majesty had hedges and potted froufrou around the courtyard, where some staff had changed to cricket whites to toss a ball back and forth. Now, there was a stiff upper lip, playing fields of Eton and all that stuff, Harry thought.

DeGeorge swung out of the car and leaned in the window on Harry’s side. “I’d ask you in, Harry, but I don’t think you’d get past the door. I mean, the Japs have a point, everyone has a point. But I’m like you, I have newspapers to sell.”

“So you’re going to write that Beechum says I’m the lowest form of life on earth?”

“Nothing personal. I know you understand. What I’m worried about is Michiko. She reads something like this and she’ll cut my balls off.”

“Michiko is not a faithful reader of the Monitor.” Harry put the Datsun in gear. “She doesn’t even know you’re a reporter, she just thinks you’d paint your ass and screw apes for free sherry.”

“Well, fuck you, Harry,” DeGeorge shouted as the car drove off. “Just fuck you.”

“The Brits love it when you scream obscenities on their driveway,” Harry said to Willie. “They’ll ask DeGeorge back again and again.” He noticed that Willie still seemed unsettled, although they had just visited such a lovely embassy, and on the opposite side of the boulevard, the imperial moat continued along a landscape of maples russet and orange. “Sorry. I told you last night it probably wasn’t such a good idea for you to be seen with me.”

“I understand.”

“It’s not that I don’t enjoy seeing you, and I’m grateful for the warning about Ishigami, but I’m on kind of a schedule. Anyway, all good Germans should be getting out as fast as they can.”

“It’s not as simple as that.”

“What’s the problem? Short of money? Something personal?” Harry waited while Willie cleared his throat, then again: once too often. “Don’t tell me it’s a woman.”

“It is a woman.”

“Don’t tell me it’s a Chinese woman, you’re not that stupid. You know better. Willie, I will take silence as confession.” Harry glanced over. “Oh, boy.”

“It’s not what you think.”

“So far, I’m guessing pretty good. I thought you had a haus and hausfrau back in Berlin.”

“Dresden.”

“Good old Dresden, where they serve that beer and salted herring you’ve pined for for so long. Don’t complicate things, Willie. If you’re out of China and you’re alive, you’re ahead of the game.”

“She’s a teacher.”

“She could be Madame Curie for all the good that’s going to do either of you. She’s waiting for word from you? She’s safe in Shanghai? Hong Kong? I can get money to her if that’s the problem. You just get yourself back to Germany while you can.”

“I brought her with me.”

“That’s not the answer I hoped for. She has a transit visa?”

“No.”

“Then how did you bring her? She would have to be family. Willie, Willie, tell me you didn’t do it.”

“We’re married.”

Harry found his flask. “And the little dirndl back in Dresden?”

“She remarried a year ago. She got tired of waiting.”

“Apparently so did you.” Good Scotch was wasted on the headache Harry was developing. He had to get something to eat. “Willie, if you wanted a woman, you could have bought one in Shanghai for five dollars, ten dollars for a Russian. Want to be a saint about it? When you leave the country, you throw in a bonus hundred and you’ve earned your clean good-bye.”

“It’s not like that. She is a teacher. Harry, there are times I could kill you myself.”

“Ishigami’s got the corner on that. You’re going to take the new Mrs. Staub to Germany? I know you’re a fervent Nazi, but have you ever actually read Mein Kampf?”

“Of course I have. I have read all the führer’s works.”

“Did you happen to read the part about Asians being subhuman, or were you stuck with the special Asian edition of the book?”

“I don’t remember any derogatory reference to Asians.” Willie accepted the flask. He had that disappointed look again, Harry thought, the wounded Lohengrin.

“I’m just saying it’s possible that your bride may be a little uncomfortable residing among the master race.”

Willie said, “I came to you for advice because you also have such a relationship and it seems successful.”

“What relationship?”

“You and Michiko.”

“Michiko?”

“You seem to be together.”

Like two people with drawn knives, Harry thought. “In a sense. But our relationship is based on something more solid than love. It’s based on business, on the Happy Paris. She draws a crowd, I make money, I pay her.”

“It looks like much more than that.”

“That’s because you’re a romantic. You see things through rose-colored glasses. You think I live with Madame Butterfly and that the führer is a Boy Scout leader.”

“You seem to have a high opinion of the Japanese. I heard your speech. Today you said many good things about the Japanese people.”

“They’re not people,” Harry said, “they’re customers. Big difference.”

The palace grounds finally passed behind them, succeeded by an avenue of restaurants and souvenir shops that sold the military flag of a rising sun with sixteen rays. Over the trees to the left stood the cross-beams of an enormous torii gate.

“I’d like you to meet Iris,” Willie said.

“The Chinese schoolmistress Iris? No, thanks. The nicer she is, the less I want to meet her.”

“We’re staying at the Imperial Hotel. Colonel Meisinger says they have a good British tea there in the afternoon. Perhaps we could get together today. With Iris, that is, not Meisinger.”

“I’m a little busy.” If nothing else, Harry had an appointment in Yokohama on a project for the navy. “Were you listening to DeGeorge? There could be a war here before the end of the year.”

“Or maybe not. The British seem to think the Japanese will back down.”

“Beechum told you that?”

“He didn’t have to, I can see for myself. I know you think I am naive, but I was a plant manager in China for five years, and I understand industry. When I see cars and trucks running on charcoal, I know Japan is in no condition to wage war against a country with such a huge industrial base as the United States. The Japanese must understand that.”

“Sounds logical.”

“I hope so.”

Harry decided he had the time to pull over. “You need to see something else.”

The two got out of the car, and Harry led Willie on foot across the road and through a screen of evergreens toward the torii gate they had glimpsed before. No proportions were simpler than the two upright and two horizontal beams, especially those of a giant gate covered in a dull glow of bronze. Around the gate, yellow ginkgo leaves drifted to the ground. On the far side gleamed the gilded eaves of a large shrine, its interior obscured by a white banner with the royal sixteen-petal chrysanthemum design draped above the stairs. The banner breathed like a sail in a light breeze. White doves swooped in and out.

“The Yasukuni Shrine,” Harry said.

“What religion is this?”

“This is Japan. This is the heart. A friend and I used to pick pockets on the subway, then we’d come here and he’d dump his share in the offering box. One day we talked about what we were going to do when we grew up. I was going to be rich. He said what he wanted was to become a soldier so he could die for the emperor. And he got his wish. If you’re captured or surrender, you’re worse than dead, and you shame your family: but if you die fighting, you become a kind of a god, and this is your shrine, along with all the other loyal Japanese who died for their emperors. Since the fighting in China started, there are a hundred thousand new gods here. It used to be fun. There were wrestlers, jugglers, puppets, snake charmers.”

“It still seems popular.”

“Oh, it’s that.”

The shrine provided worship and entertainment. Farm couples reverently arrived in their best clothes and clogs to pray for dead sons, but the path was lined with stalls selling love charms, toy tanks, peanuts, waffles, paper cutouts of cranes, chrysanthemums, yin and yang. Students in uniforms and girls in sailor blouses snaked through the crowd. Soldiers hardly older than schoolboys gorged on sweet potatoes hot from a grill. What caught Willie’s eye were women circulating with white sashes.

“Why is there so much excitement about sashes?”

“Thousand-stitch belts. You get one red stitch each from a thousand women. A soldier who wears one thinks he’s invulnerable, despite all evidence to the contrary. Pilots wear them, which saves a hundred pounds in armor plating.”

“Your friend had such a belt?”

“A big belt. His brother was a sumo.” Harry stopped at a stone basin, scooped the cold water to his lips and dropped coins into the alms box for a joss stick that he lit and planted in the brazier’s sand, pausing to let smoke envelop him. He clapped his hands, lowered his head and maintained a bow. When he straightened up, he asked Willie, “Would you want to fight people like this?”

Harry became aware of a dozen army officers in field uniforms with handguns and full-size samurai swords who had focused on him. Bodyguards, China vets with dark faces and narrow eyes. Usually this sort of scrutiny didn’t bother him, but just the reminder that Ishigami was in Tokyo made Harry feel the impulse to flee. Finally, the officers shifted their gaze and scanned the throng. Guarding whom? Children on their fathers’ shoulders were the first to point to a figure emerging from under the shrine’s billowing sheet. He wore white gloves and army drab, had three stars on his collar and carried his cap in his hands. A row of priests in white miters escorted him, but he had the stride of a man who knew the address of the gods perfectly well by himself.

“General Tojo,” Harry whispered.

“The prime minister?” Willie asked.

“Prime minister and minister of war, a tough parley to beat. He pays his respects most days. Well, he sent a lot of heroes here, he should show up.”

With his bowed legs, shaved head, mustache and spectacles, Tojo fit the bill of a cartoon Japanese. Harry remembered him from the geisha houses in Asakusa as a loudmouth with a big cigar. In fact, what always struck Harry was how un-Japanese Tojo was. Most Japanese strove so hard for modesty they could be virtually inarticulate, while the general had a paranoid’s talent for public ranting. On the other hand, his paranoia was well deserved. There were army officers ready to shoot Tojo because they thought he wasn’t warlike enough. No wonder he had bodyguards.

“A bad sign he’s here?” Willie asked.

“No, it’s normal. A bad sign would be Tojo playing Santa, that would be scary.”

“Do you think he was praying for peace?”

Harry gave the question consideration. “I think he was praying for oil.”

6

IT WAS HARD to save a nation of sixty million souls. The Japanese let in few missionaries, including only twenty Southern Baptists, and those with the proviso that they accommodate the state by proving useful as teachers or doctors. They lived in Western houses, ate Western food, learned just enough Japanese to limp through a hymn. They performed good deeds and played bridge and waited for mail from home. All year they looked forward to summer, to well-earned vacations in the cool of the mountains, backgammon on the lawn, rowing on highland lakes, and over time the fiery evangelism they had brought to Japan seemed more and more like some outmoded, slightly ridiculous apparel.

Not Roger and Harriet Niles. To them, evangelism was the pure and ardent task of preaching the Word of God. That was their calling, the reason they had come halfway around the world, and they refused to dilute their time by spending it in a classroom or vaccinating the poor. People derided them as “railroad preachers.” They traveled the country from Kagoshima in the south to snowbound Hokkaido, and anytime Roger could corner a group on a ferry or train, he would bring out his Bible and Harriet would translate his message in her halting Japanese. They even moved Harry and his uncle Orin from the safe embrace of the Methodists’ compound to the rough streets of Asakusa to be more authentic and closer to the population they were trying to reach.

Still, for all their sacrifices, preaching to the Japanese was like trying to cleave water. The Japanese would smile, bow and say anything to move a gaijin along. Or would accept Jesus as a mere backup to Buddha. The truth was that for all their efforts, while Christian missions gathered converts by the millions in China and Korea, missions in Japan were a failure. Not just Baptists, all missions. It was for Roger, however, a personal failure, a crown of thorns sharp with mockery. He and Harriet would return to Tokyo exhausted only to see Orin wasted by drink, and their son Harry a sort of amphibian, neither honest nor stupid, neither adult nor innocent, neither American nor Japanese.

Harry found his parents’ visits like sharing quarters with the hounds of hell. It was embarrassingly clear when the family attended services how little of Harry the congregation had seen. Harry had the Bible down, though. The wild-eyed revelations of Saint John the Divine were Scripture Harry had memorized as an insurance policy for whenever his father examined him about the condition of his soul or the imminence of Judgment Day. All the same, Harry’s every word and move were followed by eyes quick to catch any deviation from a norm that was alien to him. He didn’t remind Roger and Harriet of themselves. He preferred sandals to shoes, samurai to cowboys, raw fish to red meat. Harry didn’t bring home tow-haired friends to play with; he didn’t bring friends at all, because he wasn’t going to expose his parents to a gang that included the unwashed Kaga twins or a criminal-in-training like Tetsu. So Roger and Harriet were only too happy to accept an invitation to Fourth of July celebrations at the American embassy. The entire American community would be there. It would be like going home.

Came the Glorious Fourth, and the embassy garden was decorated with bunting and paper lanterns in red, white and blue. On the terraces, Japanese staff in kimonos with American-eagle crests set out tables of tea sandwiches, deviled eggs, cucumber salad, sweet pickles, angel food cake and lemonade. Adults followed a path edged in azaleas to join a champagne reception in the ambassador’s residence, a white clapboard house and porch that could have been found in Ohio. Outside, children were entertained by blindman’s buff and potato-sack races across the lawn.

“This is actually American territory, Harry,” Harriet said.

“We’re in Japan.”

“Yes,” Roger Niles said, “but legally an embassy is the territory of the country of the ambassador. The American ambassador runs things here.”

“The emperor rules all Japan.”

“Not here,” Roger said.

Harriet said, “You’re in America just as if you were standing at the Washington Monument. And look, American kids.”

Harry was miserable. All the other American children in Tokyo went to the American School. He didn’t know them and he didn’t want to know them. Dressed in a new suit and oxfords, he felt as if he were in disguise. Also, it was embarrassing to see how pleased his mother was to visit the embassy. She believed that the special events in life were like a sachet in a suitcase, it sweetened the clothes and didn’t make the luggage one bit heavier. Besides, after a year of traveling among strangers, it was a relief for her to be patriotic, to be an American among Americans. She squinted up to admire how the Stars and Stripes basked in the rays of descending sun. There were supposed to be fireworks in the evening and skits performed by the kids. What Harry was going to do, he wouldn’t say.

Except for Episcopalians, who were practically Catholic anyway, missionaries abstained from champagne and stayed outside by the lemonade. Baptist families joined a circle of Synod of Christ, Dutch Reformed and Methodists.

Roger Niles took the opportunity to ask the group, “You know what makes me sick?”

There was an uneasy pause. Niles had a reputation for zeal.

“What makes you sick, dear?” Harriet asked.

“The holier-than-thou act the China missions always pull. As if we were in league with the devil just because our call is in Japan.”

“True,” a Methodist minister named Hooper allowed. “We get it, too.”

“Well, I wouldn’t trade today for anything in China,” Harriet said. “What about you, Harry?”

“China is old and backward. Japan can help China back on its feet.” Harry had learned that at school.

“America can help China back on its feet,” Hooper said softly.

“Sometimes I think what Harry needs is a trip back home,” Roger said. “Would you like that, Harry, a good, long visit back home?”

“I am home.” Harry didn’t know much about Louisville, but he doubted that it measured up to Tokyo.

“Your real home,” Harriet said.

“Our folks have never seen Harry,” Roger told the others. “Harry, you have a lot of cousins you don’t even know.”

Harry had seen snapshots of them. The boys, slouching, buttoned to the neck, were always arrayed in ascending height before signs like RED MAN’S GORGE and STONEWALL JACKSON’S PLACE OF BIRTH. The girls had round eyes and dull, stringy hair just like the girls at the embassy.

A line of elderly Japanese guests cut through to reach the refreshments. Roger Niles said, “Look, they don’t even beg your pardon. Typical.”

Because they know you can’t speak Japanese, Harry thought, surprised by his own scorn. He’d heard his parents try.

“Maybe Harry needs to get out there and mix,” Hooper suggested. “My son would be happy to introduce him to the other boys.”

What Harry had planned to do was go along the river with Gen and catch fireflies they could sell to geisha houses at ten sen apiece for firefly lamps. It had rained in the morning, and a clear night after wet weather made fireflies rise so thick that a good catcher could fill a paper sack, both hands and his mouth with captive flies. Instead, a shorter boy in a baseball cap was leading him to a game of tug-of-war being refereed by two embassy clerks.

The boy gave Harry a skeptical examination. “My name is Roy, but my friends call me Hoop. What’s your name?”

“Oishi,” Harry said.

“Oishi? That doesn’t sound American.”

“Who said it was?” Still, Harry was amazed. “You never heard of the Forty-seven Ronin?”

“No. I’m going to recite �Casey at the Bat’ for entertainment. What are you going to do?”

“I’m going to disappear.”

The clerks each had fat cheeks and shiny, lubricated hair. They arranged tug-of-war teams on either side of the embassy’s reflecting pool, smaller boys to the middle of the rope, larger boys at the ends. When one side had the advantage, the other side was dragged into the water. Almost immediately Roy Hooper lost his baseball cap in the pool, and Harry’s oxfords were soaked. By his third time in the water, Harry saw by the smirks on their faces that the larger boys on each side were having fun pulling and giving way by turns, staying dry while boys in front got drenched. The same poorly concealed smile spread through the clerks, a collusion of the strong against the weak. Harry found the cap, filled it with scummy water, marched to the last on the rope, a robust boy in a Hawaiian shirt with a patch of beard on his chin, and stuffed the cap over his head. The boy hit Harry so hard he collapsed like an accordion, but he hung on to the boy’s arm and dragged him to the ground. When the boy got on top, Harry head-butted him and bit his nose.

“Fight fair!” The clerks pulled the two up.

The bigger boy swung at Harry who ducked under the punch, grabbed him by the shirt and threw him down to the ground. It was what Harry had trained to do at school for years.

“Dirty fighter, are you?” someone said as Harry was pulled off again, but he broke free and ran for the trees and azaleas that screened the lawn from the street. The clerks got a late jump, and by the time they reached the trees, Harry was halfway up a pine and out of their sight. Their footsteps tramped around the needles.

“A missionary kid, can you believe that?”

“Almost bit his nose off, Jesus!”

“Probably went over the wall, the little son of a bitch.”

Roger Niles’s voice joined in. “Do you know where my son went?”

“No, sir. But it’s getting dark and he could be anywhere now.”

“Harry? Harry?”

“I wouldn’t worry, sir. An American boy in Tokyo, where’s he going to go?”

“Harry?”

“Got to go set up the fireworks, sir.”

“Kind of a wild boy there, sir.”

Two pairs of footsteps retreated. Roger Niles tramped back and forth calling Harry’s name for another minute before he left. Harry heard one more set of steps slip between the trees, then his mother’s voice. “Harry, I know we don’t see you as much as we would like, but I do feel you are a special child, that you are protected like Moses was protected even in a frail cradle of reeds. That an angel watches over you and that you may seem a prince of Egypt when you are truly something even better. Could you come out now, Harry, wherever you are? For the love of your mother, could you do that, Harry?”

But Harry noticed that one branch of the tree he was in reached over the embassy wall to the garden next door, a rich man’s garden banked with willows and maples, fountains of artfully worn stones and, over a pool, a haze of flickering yellow-green lights. As soon as his mother was gone, Harry climbed out on the branch and dropped into the garden.

The back of the house was a long balcony of summer screens made of threaded reeds, none lit from within that Harry could see. He slid a panel open and automatically slipped off his wet shoes before moving onto the mats of a richly spare room with a painted scroll hanging by a cedar post. Red lacquered sake cups seemed to float on a low table as black as ink.

“What are you doing here?”

Harry jumped, but it was only Roy Hooper at the open panel. Harry was surprised but turned the question around. “What are you doing here?”

“Following you.”

“Then take off your shoes.”

Harry moved from room to room. The owner had to be very rich judging by the screens of gold leaf and shelves of fine china that glowed in the shadows. Harry rummaged until he found a large glass jar with a perforated lid in the kitchen and black cotton cloth in a linen drawer.

“Are you stealing?” Roy Hooper asked.

“Don’t be stupid. Just taking what I need.”

By the time they returned to the garden, they heard the machine-gun report of firecrackers from the embassy and saw the occasional rocket zip high enough to be seen above the wall, followed by homesick renditions of “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” and “Down by the Old Mill Stream.” Meanwhile, Harry and Roy Hooper caught fireflies.

Around the pond were maples, dwarf pines and pillows of moss where fireflies swarmed in luminescent clouds. The darker the evening grew, the easier they were to see. Fireflies spread like a pulsating carpet over the damp grass, congregated under a drooping mulberry, spangled the water. Roy Hooper would hold the jar while Harry caught a firefly with both hands and gently blew it through the mouth of the jar. Brooms were another good way to carry fireflies, and a broom could look like a jeweled fan but wouldn’t serve for this instance. Caught, fireflies flashed brighter in distress. Crushed, they emitted a burning green. In half an hour the glass jar was a glowing ball of captives, at least ten yen’s worth at a geisha house, and Harry wrapped it in the black cloth to carry back over the wall.

The entertainment had just concluded when Harry and Roy Hooper returned. A couple hundred guests were still gathered on the lawn in the red, white and blue illumination of lanterns. The diplomatic corps sat in chairs that had begun to settle and list in the soft turf. Babies slept in their fathers’ arms. A whiff of sulfur hung in the air.

“The prodigal sons,” announced the clerk functioning as master of ceremonies. “Too bad they missed out on all the fun.”

“They had sparklers,” Harriet told Harry. “You know how you love sparklers.”

“What have you got there?” Roger Niles asked. In the dark, despite its black cover, a faint halo surrounded the jar.

“Nothing.”

“It’s something worth making fools of us,” his father said. “Let’s see.”

“Let’s all see,” the clerk picked up.

Roy Hooper’s knees went soft as he felt the clamp of his father’s hand.

“I’m disappointed in you,” Reverend Hooper hissed.

“Or I’ll send you home to Louisville,” Roger told Harry under his breath. “I swear it.”

“It’s for the entertainment,” Harry said.

“The entertainment is over,” Roger said.

The clerk said, “One more act, that’s fine with us. Isn’t that fine, folks? This is a very different boy here. I bet he’s got real different entertainment.”

There was scattered applause in general, a snigger from the boy with a bandage on his nose. It was getting late. Most people wanted to go home. The ambassador yawned and fell into an expression of such boredom he could have been watching from the moon.

“Turn off the lamps,” said Harry. “Just for a minute?”

When the lanterns went dark, there was a reflexive whimper from the younger children. Harry unscrewed the lid, and the jar underlit his face.

“It’s a surprise,” he said.

Harry put his mouth to the jar. As he raised his head, a light rose from his lips, flashed and took wing. He took another breath from the jar and blew a green tracer bullet in the eye of a clerk, a deeper breath and poured a glowing machine-gun fusillade at the guests. Dipped into the jar to feed himself and blew until his fingers and lips were smeared with green fire. The ambassador tried to brush the luminescence off his sleeves, spreading it instead. Children squirmed from their parents, screamed and ran into the dark. For a brief moment before Roger Niles seized him, Harry ruled, marching with the roar of fireflies.

7

HARRY DROVE for half an hour under a dazzling sun from Tokyo to Yokohama Bay only to find waiting for him the familiar shadows of Shozo and Go, the same plainclothes police that had watched his apartment at night. In the daylight Sergeant Shozo had a droll smile belied by heavy knuckles hanging from his sleeve. Corporal Go was young, with the zeal of a guard dog pulling on a chain. They were with the accountant from Long Beach Oil.

Long Beach shared a black-stained dock with Standard Oil of New York and Rising Sun, which sounded Japanese but was actually Royal Dutch-Shell. Long Beach wasn’t much more than a small warehouse of corrugated steel, while Standard and Rising Sun fronted the water with miles of pipeline and acres of ten-thousand-barrel tanks. Didn’t matter. In the most important regard they were no different, because no American or Dutch company, big or small, had delivered oil to Japan since July, six months before.

“Please.” The accountant unlocked the warehouse door.

“I’m so curious,” Shozo told Harry. “All this time I have heard about your special connections to the navy. Now we’ll find out.”

It was winter inside. Harry could see his breath by the clerkish light of green-shaded lamps that hung over a glassed-in office area. Rolltop desks crowded between file cabinets, chalkboards with lists of ships and ports, framed prices and schedules that showed the delivery of Venezuela crude at fourteen cents a barrel. Everything was spick-and-span, as if the American managers might return at any second, probably tidier without them. Harry stopped at a poster of the tanker Tampico with her ports of call—Galveston, Long Beach, Yokohama—a route that was history now. A snapshot tacked next to it showed a group of men around a racehorse. The rest of the warehouse held a truck loaded with ships’ stores of canned foods gathering dust. Tucked around the truck were the wide-mouthed hoses that were usually laid straight on a dock, each hose dedicated to a different product: marine gas, dirty diesel, sweet crude and sour. Harry felt like the Big Bad Wolf asked into a house of straw.

The accountant’s name was Kawamura. He was about sixty years of age, with a long neck and more hair in his ears than on his head. Harry knew the type, the salaryman who was first to the office, last to leave, whose identity was his work and whose sole delight was a binge at New Year’s. He was Harry’s target, but Harry had not expected the participation of Shozo and Go. Kawamura trembled and kept his eyes down, the decision of a man who didn’t know which way to look.

Sergeant Shozo showed Harry a fountain pen. “Waterman, from my wife. I want to document this case. You have made my life and the life of Corporal Go so interesting.”

Harry preferred to be ignored. The Special Higher Police countered espionage, but they were also called Thought Police, responsible for detecting deviant ideas. Harry was riddled with deviant ideas. Like, how the hell had Shozo and Go heard about this meeting? How had they found Kawamura?

Shozo opened a notebook. “�Son of missionaries, born in Tokyo, grew up wild in Asakusa. Catching cats for shamisen skins. Running errands for prostitutes and dancers.’ I would have traded places with you in a minute. When my mother took me by the pleasure quarters, the girls would always tease me from their windows, and my mother would almost pull my arm out of its socket.”

“You must have been pulling the other way.”

“Very hard.” Shozo flipped a page. “Your parents had no idea what you were doing?”

“They could cover more ground without me. I stayed in Tokyo with an uncle who was drinking himself to death. I spoke Japanese. I sent the telegrams and collected the money for him. It was simpler that way.”

“You would have made a great criminal. Don’t you think so, Corporal?”

Go waved a pudgy fist at Harry. “All foreign correspondents are spies! All foreign reporters are spies! All foreigners are spies!”

Harry said, “No foreign resident has proven his usefulness to the Japanese government more than I have.”

“That’s what I was telling the corporal,” Shozo said. “On the face of it, no American has been more useful to Japan. For example, Japan has an unfortunate shortage of oil. For a time you had a company to create petroleum?”

“Synthetic petroleum.”

Shozo consulted his notes. “From pine sap. You persuaded Japanese banks during a time of national emergency to invest in pine sap?”

“That was one of a variety of approaches.”

“When people talk about you and oil, they whisper about a magic show. What would that magic show be?”

“I have no idea.”

“No idea?”

“None.”

“You also proposed getting motor oil from sardines.”

“It’s theoretically possible.”

“You have no scientific background?”

“Just business.”

“Making money. Better than cat skins, too. What is the saying, what is it they say in English? It’s very fitting.”

“There’s more than one way to skin a cat.”

“Yes!” Shozo’s mouth turned down into a smile. “That’s what they say. �More than one way to skin a cat’! That’s what you are, a cat skinner, an American cat skinner.”

Shozo’s voice was drowned by a reverberation that shook the walls, a rolling thunder that rose to full throttle and abruptly quit, leaving expectancy and silence until a man in a leather coat and goggles slapped open the door. With a dispatch bag over his shoulder, a broad, confident face and thick hair sculpted by the wind, he was an image off a war-bonds poster. He pulled off gloves and goggles as he entered. Gen always arrived as if he’d just returned from the front, and sometimes he had, because he was more than an aviator, he was in Naval Operations. He bowed to Shozo and Go, winked at Harry. If he was surprised by the presence of the Special Higher Police, he didn’t show it.

“Sorry to keep you waiting,” Gen said. “It’s been a busy day.”

“You seem to know Harry Niles,” Shozo said.

“Oh, I know Harry.” Gen shrugged his coat off of navy blues. The sight of a lieutenant’s stripes on the sleeve prompted Kawamura to give Gen an additional ninety-degree bow.

“I’m in the dark,” Shozo said. “I am told that Mr. Niles performs valuable services, but I can’t imagine what they are.”

“You’ll see.” From his dispatch bag Gen took a legal-size book of faded maroon that he laid on the desk and opened. “The ledger of Long Beach Oil. Fascinating reading.”

The entries were in India ink for English and blue for Japanese. As Kawamura stared down at the pages, he sweated despite the warehouse chill.

Gen explained to Shozo, “Kawamura is the accountant of Long Beach Oil. He finds himself in an unusual and uncomfortable position because Long Beach assets have been frozen by the Japanese government in retaliation for the freezing of Japanese assets and properties in the United States. The American managers of the company have gone back to the United States, leaving Kawamura, their senior Japanese employee, in a caretaker position, and he has carried out his duty to his employer faithfully.”

“And faithfully to the emperor,” Kawamura interjected.

“Of course.” Gen grinned at Harry.

As kids, Gen and Harry used to strut around Asakusa in dark glasses like hoods. One day they were getting their fortunes told in the temple when they heard a nasal buzzing overhead, looked up and saw a biplane come in low to waggle its wings over Buddha. Gen took off his dark glasses. The plane came by again, a silvery vision towing a sign that said EBISU BEER. It made Harry thirsty, but it changed Gen’s life. Determined to fly, he became a model student who headed to the Naval Academy and aviation, then the University of California at Berkeley, studying English. Gen actually put more time in at American schools than Harry, and at Berkeley, he had picked up a little American sis-boom-bah, which fitted him for the navy general staff. The army’s model was Germany, but navy comers tended to admire the British and the States and adopted a tradition of white gloves and ballroom manners. Somehow Gen Yoshimura had found the money to cover the costs that nagged at a student and officer. Harry thought there must have been some scrimping. With his poor-boy ambition and American style, Gen was a perfect amalgam.

“Let’s assume,” Gen told Kawamura, “that your employers were anxious as to how exactly the freeze of assets would be carried out here—whether there would be appropriation of their property, damage or misuse. By now they should be reassured that the Emergency Board for the Protection of Foreign Commercial Interests has the well-being of Long Beach Oil in mind. The freeze is an unhappy but temporary measure. It is a system that only works, however, when everyone cooperates, as most American companies have done.”

“Yes.” Kawamura tried to ignore Harry, as if not acknowledging a wolf would make it go away.

“But,” Gen said, “there have been exceptions. Unfortunately, some American companies have created Japanese subsidiaries in which they attempt to hide assets. In other cases, American companies underreport their assets or their activity. The more critical the commodity, the greater chance of inaccurate reporting. Yo-yos, for example, have been accurately accounted for. Oil has not.”

“I still don’t understand,” Kawamura said.

“Let’s take an example,” Harry said. “According to your own ledger, the tanker Sister Jane left California for Japan on May first with ten thousand barrels of oil. On May fifteenth, the Sister Jane arrived here and delivered one thousand barrels. It left the States with more oil than it delivered, ten times as much.”

Kawamura finally exploded. “What is an American doing here? Is he an expert on trade?”

Harry said, “I’m an expert on cooking the books. It’s the last item in the ledger. Read it.”

Kawamura put on spectacles to read the page. “Ah, well, this is all a misunderstanding, a simple error. The first number was written as ten thousand but later corrected to one thousand. One thousand barrels left Long Beach, one thousand arrived here. You can see there is even the initial P for Pomeroy, our branch manager, to show his correction. There was no attempt to disguise anything. I would never have allowed it.”

“I remember Pomeroy,” Harry said. “Lived right next to the racetrack. Pomeroy went home?”

“He is gone, yes.”

“To Long Beach?” Gen asked.

“Los Angeles.”

“He treated you well?” Harry asked.

“Always.”

“It’s quite an honor to be left in charge?” Gen asked.

“He trusts me, I think,” Kawamura said.

“He should,” Harry said. “You are obviously a stout defender of Long Beach Oil. But why the mistake? Why did a full ten thousand gallons of oil have to be corrected to a mere one thousand?”

“I don’t know. I am embarrassed that there should be even the suggestion of a discrepancy. I can assure you, however, that when a ship arrives, we measure the quantity of oil in each tank on the ship before it is pumped, and again at the storage tanks after.”

“How do they measure the oil on the ship?” Shozo asked.

“Tape and plumb bob,” Harry said.

“Japan depends on oil,” Gen said. “Japanese soldiers are giving their lives every day for oil.”

Harry said, “It’s hardly worth taking one thousand barrels across the Pacific. Did the Sister Jane stop on the way?”

“Only Hawaii,” Kawamura said.

“Hawaii?” Gen asked.

“There was a problem with a sick seaman, as I remember. The ship was only in dock two nights.”

“Tough luck for the seaman,” said Harry. “But maybe a stroke of good luck for the rest of the crew. Honolulu has a lot of hot spots. Do you think the captain gave the crew two days’ liberty?”

“I wouldn’t know.”

“Do you think maybe he pumped out nine thousand gallons of oil when the crew wasn’t around?” asked Gen.

“No.”

Harry said, “I’m just wondering why someone thought the Sister Jane left Long Beach with a lot of oil and ended up here with very little.”

“No one was cheated. Whether it was one thousand or ten thousand, that was what we sold, no more, no less.” Kawamura looked to Shozo for support, but the policeman’s expression was grim. Go had started to giggle, which even Harry found unnerving. “I’m sure Pomeroy would have a good explanation if he were here.”

“But he’s not here and you are,” Harry said. “I looked through the entire ledger, and in the twelve months before the freeze on deliveries, there were three other corrections for shortages of deliveries, totaling another thirty-six thousand barrels of oil that Japan desperately needed. You’ll find the �corrections’ on pages five, eleven and fifteen, a little smudged but definitely altered.” Kawamura flipped from page to page. This was like hunting rabbit, Harry thought. You didn’t chase rabbits, you lit a fire and they came to you if you showed them a safe way out. “Who actually had possession of this ledger, you or Pomeroy?”

“Pomeroy.”

Gen asked, “Who wrote down the number of barrels leaving Long Beach and arriving here?”

“Pomeroy.” Kawamura looked ready to pull his head in his collar if he could.

“You didn’t actually run the books on oil at all, did you?” Harry said. “That was the manager’s job. After all, you’re a financial man, not an oilman. What you were really in charge of was the branch budget, the payroll, dock fees, accounts payable. It must have been confusing to suddenly have to deal with customs, immigration, bills of lading. I doubt you ever would have noticed these barrel amounts.”

“I didn’t.”

“But thirty-six thousand barrels and nine thousand, that is forty-five thousand barrels of oil,” Shozo said. “Where did it go?”

“Good question,” Harry said. “I personally think that Kawamura here is an honest Japanese employee duped by the American manager Pomeroy, who is probably at the racetrack at Santa Anita even as we speak.”

Gen asked Shozo to take Kawamura outside.

“Let me.” Go gathered the accountant.

“Just a dupe,” Harry reminded the corporal.

“No Japanese should be duped,” Go shouted back as he dragged Kawamura through the door. “All Americans are spies!”

On his way out, Shozo said to Harry, “I take it back. You would have made a good policeman, too.”

The instant the door shut behind the sergeant, Gen slapped the desk. “God, that was fun.” He dropped into a chair and put his feet up. Sometimes Gen’s slovenliness struck Harry as virtually American. “I remember, as a kid, watching you do the change-from-a-hundred-yen-note scam, wondering how you always walked away with more money than you started.”

“It’s just how you count, forward or back. How did Shozo and Go know about this meeting?”

“I told them. It was for your protection. They were going to pick you up, so I had to show them how valuable you were.”

“You could have warned me.”

“No time. Everything’s happening so fast.”

“Like what?”

“Life.” Gen leaned forward to spear a cigarette from Harry. “Did I ever tell you how I got in with the C in C?” The commander in chief of the Combined Fleet was Admiral Yamamoto. Naval personnel reverently called him the C in C.

“No.”

“It was thanks to you. I was in the mess with some other officers, and suddenly the C in C himself was at the hatch asking whether anyone played poker. You know how it is with junior officers, one wrong answer can ruin a career. Guys played bridge, but no one was going to admit they gambled. Without even thinking, I said yes. He almost grabbed me by the neck to get me out of there, then I had to race to stay up with him to the senior mess, where there was a poker game of admirals and commanders, the C in C’s inner circle. One had to go, and they needed a fourth. It’s not much of a game without at least four players. The C in C gave me half of his own chips and said two things. First, that he didn’t trust any man who wasn’t willing to gamble. Second, that there was no point in playing except for money. That’s what you always say, too.”

“God’s truth. So, how did you do?”

“Won a little. The C in C asked where I learned to play poker like that. I said Cal. He learned at Harvard. Anyway, from then on, whenever they needed a fourth, they called on me.”

“Cal and Harvard? Wow, were you in the same fraternity? Both smoke briar pipes?”

“Come on, Harry.”

“In other words, you gave me no credit for teaching you the most valuable thing you ever learned.”

“Harry, you’re the ace I keep up my sleeve.”

“Shozo asked about the Magic Show.”

“Oh, he did? What did you say?”

“That I didn’t know what he was talking about. That’s what I always say.”

“Good. First the police know about it, then the army knows about it, then we’re all in the drink.” Gen pulled a folder tied with a red ribbon from the dispatch bag to signal a change in subject. He undid the ribbon and opened to a loose page that he stared at as if it were half in code: “This is the new total. With shortages of two hundred thousand gallons of oil from Petromar, and two hundred and forty thousand from Manzanita Oil added to Long Beach, altogether four hundred eighty-five thousand barrels of oil seem to have been diverted from Japan to Hawaii. There are enough tanks at Pearl Harbor to hold about four million gallons. We estimate they are already full. Where are they putting the extra oil that you have found? And if you found some, there is probably much more. There must be other tanks in Hawaii, and the only information we have on where they are is your story about an American contractor you met in Shanghai who claimed to have put reinforced tanks in a valley behind Waikiki.”

“He was drunk. We were in a bar. He could have made it up.”

“Why that story, though?”

“Gen, it’s all stories. Books were altered, so what? Books are always altered, and mistakes are always made. The same with Manzanita and Petromar. It’s fun to run Kawamura in circles, but we can’t prove anything. Let me ask you this, have your people ever found those mysterious tanks? Why stick them in a valley? When did they build railroad tracks or oil pipes or access roads? The man was drunk. We were at the Olympic Bar in Shanghai, longest bar in the world, ten languages going at the same time, with two Russian girls who didn’t understand a word, so I don’t even know why he was boasting. You’ve been to the Olympic, it’s a mob scene. I didn’t get his name or his company, and he didn’t draw a map on the back of a cocktail coaster. It’s all smoke, Gen.”

“It’s four hundred and eighty-five thousand gallons, Harry. At least.”

“I suppose it’s a lot of oil. But it’s just a story, that’s all.”

“If you could remember anything else. What he looked like?”

“He was fat and loud and drunk.”

“Anything else?”

“What I know, you know. The only way to prove it is to fly over every valley in Oahu. Until then it’s a rumor, a glass of fog. Why believe it at all?”

Gen released a smile with Pepsodent dazzle. “Because of the Magic Show. You nailed someone who had everyone else fooled.”

“All I said was I saw a magician in China. I could have been wrong.”

“You weren’t. And the place you met him was the Olympic Bar in Shanghai, the same place you met this contractor. So we can’t ignore anything you say happened there.”

“Has this been good for your career? Get you more attention from the C in C?”

“It hasn’t hurt.” Gen was still smiling. “And I take care of you in return.”

“Well, that’s what I want to talk about.” Harry mashed one cigarette and tapped out another. “You know what’s more important to me than spies?”

“What?”

“My neck.”

It took Gen a second. “What are you talking about?”

“Ishigami’s back from China. I don’t mind going over the company books from Long Beach Oil or Manzanita, you name it, anything to help an empire in need. Now I need some help. You do remember Ishigami?”

Gen’s smile went flat. “The name is familiar. He’s been in China, right?”

“Most of all, Nanking. His picture was in the paper yesterday. I’m surprised you missed it.”

Gen put the ledger and folder back together and returned them to the dispatch bag. “Nanking was four years ago. You’ll have to remind me what you were doing there. Or should I say, the scam?”

“For the Japanese government, looking for river tankers, trying to find them before they were scuttled. I was along in case there were any Americans on board. I might have liberated a car or two.”

“You just never give it a rest, do you, Harry? You can’t pull that around Ishigami.”

“Well, he holds a grudge, and now he’s after me. Call him off.”

Gen threw on his leather coat, slipped the dispatch bag over his shoulder, pulled on his gloves. “He’s in the army. The army and navy don’t even talk to each other. The army spies on me. They spy on the C in C. Anyway, I understand they brought Ishigami back to do propaganda. After all, he is a hero.”

“He’s homicidal.”

“Right now everybody’s tense. We’ll all be pulling together soon enough.”

“That old team spirit?”

“You got it. In the meantime, our job is to protect the C in C from the crazies.”

Harry followed Gen out the door to a Harley the size of a pony with a teardrop tank and low-slung fenders. There was something about the way Gen swung onto the bike, how he kicked the starter and twisted the throttle so that the bike ached to race away, that disquieted Harry.

“The C in C is a good gambler,” Harry had to shout over the sound.

“Better than you, Harry. He broke the bank at Monte Carlo. They say he could have been a professional gambler. He really considered it.”

Harry had heard the same stories. “Roulette is a tough game, okay. You don’t play other players, you play the house, and the house odds are inexorably against you. You know about odds?”

“I know the odds.” Gen slipped his goggles over his eyes. The glass spread his eyes like a mask.

“Do you? America outproduces Japan in oil by seven hundred to one. How do you like those odds?”

“That’s why it’s important to get all the oil we can.”

“Really? Do you think a few extra drops of oil in Hawaii make any difference?”

“Every drop makes a difference.”

Harry reached and turned the throttle down.

“No. Listen to me. What makes a difference is Standard Oil and Royal Shell. What makes a difference is a fountain, a flood of oil. Japan used to get ninety percent of its oil from America, sixty percent from Standard and Shell alone. That’s five million gallons a year. Japan hasn’t gotten one drop from Shell or America since June. Most of the oil in Japan goes to the navy, and the navy doesn’t have enough oil to complete an exercise at sea. Don’t ask how I know these things, you know they’re true. Cut off oil and everything will come to a stop. I would guess six months. If Japan goes to war, it has to win by then. The odds? Fifty to one. Worse than Monte Carlo. I know how Naval Operations works. A lot of the planning is done by junior officers like you. Tell them the damn odds.” No deal. Gen could have been a statue on a horse. “I’m only saying, let them know the odds. If there’s a war, it won’t be won with blood and sweat, it’ll be won by the side that has the oil, that’s all.” Still no reaction from Gen. “Okay, try this. Aviation fuel is eighty-nine octane, which the United States has an endless supply of. Japan doesn’t, so it designs the Zero, a wonderful fighter, to fly on piss. American planes will fly faster and farther not because of the pilots but because of the fuel. It won’t be a matter of courage or skill, it will just be better fuel.” Gen might have been stone. Not a word had penetrated.

“The difference is spirit and men,” Gen said.

“Right. By the way, remember Jiro from our gang in Asakusa, how much he wanted to die for the emperor? He made it. He’s in heaven now. I lit a stick for him today.”

“If he died for the emperor, I am happy for him.”

No American sis-boom-bah now, Harry thought. Just pure Japanese.

Gen milked the throttle again and seemed to regard his old friend from a great distance. “I’ll do what I can about Ishigami. You know, Harry, Nippon Air came to me about putting you on the plane to Hong Kong. I backed you up. You shouldn’t be spreading defeatist propaganda.”

“Just numbers, Gen, forget I mentioned them. I appreciate everything you did to get me on the plane.”

“When is it taking off?”

“Monday the eighth.”

“Two days. Okay, I’ll see about Ishigami. You stay out of trouble.”

Gen put the Harley into gear. His hair snapped back as the bike surged and chased its noise along the dock. Across the bay under Yokohama’s verdant bluff, Harry saw ships offloading the wealth of empire: bales of cotton from China, bags of rice from Thailand, sugar and sweet tropical fruits from semitropical Formosa and, from Manchuria—now the Japanese creation of Manchukuo—iron ore and lumber. A German blockade-runner, a gray freighter with a tarp over a forward gun, stood off by itself. The ships of Yoshitaki Lines were everywhere, there wasn’t enough waterfront to go around. Sampans and barges swarmed to other freighters anchored out, the barges loaded until they shipped water. Through the sheer physical effort of a single oarsman, a sampan could move a half-ton of goods. Along the Bund, stevedores in straw hats and padded jackets swung on hooks, clambered up nets and trotted with handcarts between railway cars, men in motion everywhere. The scene put Harry in mind of a drunk bingeing on his last full bottle. But the days when Yokohama swallowed a full measure of sweet Maracaibo crude or clean American diesel the color of honey, those days were gone.

ON THE WAY back to Tokyo, Harry drove by Haneda Field. In the far distance was a white tower and hangars. Harry was tempted to visit Nippon operations and see the plane they were flying to Hong Kong, a DC-3 with a full bar and sleeper seats, but he quelled the urge when soldiers appeared along the edge of the road, and decided it wouldn’t do for a gaijin to show too much interest in an airport. On the other side of the road, however, were ballplayers on a field. It was a small field with grassy slopes for bleachers and a little scoreboard beside a bottle-shaped sign for Asahi beer, but Harry recognized the team’s gray flannel uniforms with black and orange piping even from his car, and he rolled up to a clubhouse of cinder blocks painted green. The ticket window was shut. Harry walked through the turnstiles to the batting screen and joined a couple of reporters who were arguing over who was paid more money, Bob Feller or Satchel Paige. Feller was the biggest star in American baseball, but Paige sneaked around that fact by playing both the Negro league and winter ball.

The Tokyo Giants were taking advantage of the warm weather to hold an off-season workout. Not just for rookies; Harry spotted the home-run slugger Kawakami and the pitcher Sawamura, who once struck out Ruth, Foxx and Gehrig in a row. Japanese were fanatical about practice. Pitchers threw hundreds of pitches a day, which was probably why their arms wore out so soon. Especially with breaking pitches, a Japanese specialty. Every few minutes a fighter plane would pass overhead, towing its shadow across the diamond and up over the slope to the airfield across the road. Otherwise the scene was immaculately normal. One coach hit grounders to the infield, another lofted fly balls toward players stationed in front of the beer sign, pitchers lobbed the ball back and forth on the sidelines. Sawamura had lost two seasons to active duty in China and was resurrecting what had been the league’s best fastball. With each pitch, the catcher’s mitt produced a satisfying pop.

Harry was a Giants fan, and no one on the team ever had to pay for a drink at the Happy Paris. He liked practice almost as much as games. He found a meditative calm in the repetition of the infielders as they broke for the ball, fielded the good hop, set their feet and fired to first. They refused to backhand grounders or dive for liners, but otherwise they were as good as Americans. Also, they played honorable baseball: they would never slide with their spikes high to break up a double play or throw a knockdown pitch. During the season every game had an epic dimension; when the Giants lost, there was mourning throughout Tokyo, and an error on the field demanded an apology from a shamefaced player to his entire team. After games, writers raced back to the office on motorcycles to file their stories. Even at a winter workout like this, when Kawakami, “The King of Batting,” walked to the plate with his famous red bat—fashioned from a sacred tree in a secret forest—the writers studied every swing as if he were a great actor onstage. When he knocked a ball over the scoreboard, they oohed and aahed like children. The Japanese were crazy for home runs.

One of the Giants ran off the field, leaving Sawamura no one to throw to, so he motioned Harry to pick up a loose glove. The pitcher had such a smooth motion and the ball came with such easy velocity that Harry’s hand stung with every catch, but he was damned if he was going to let it get by him or be distracted by a line of bombers coming out of the sun, practicing an approach in close formation. As the planes passed overhead, the gunners in their bubbles seemed near enough to shout to.

When Harry’s arm warmed, the ball went back and forth with more energy. A game of catch was a conversation in which nothing in particular need be said. Motion was all, motion and the elongation of time. Activity around the field—grounders, fly balls, the pitchers’ easygoing throws—took on the steady nature of a metronome. At the batting cage, Kawakami took a cut. The ball rose and hung, spotlit by the sun, as a fighter that had just taken off from Haneda came over the clubhouse. For a moment the ball and plane merged. Then the fighter passed, trailing a shadow that leaped the outfield fence. And the ball came down into a glove and the fielder threw it cleanly, on one hop, to home.

8

A FTER THE BATTLE at Ueno Park, Kato took Harry into his confidence more and more, allowing him into his studio and paying him to deliver finished work. Harry liked the studio for its sophisticated jumble of Greek statues, samurai armor, urns stuffed with props like umbrellas, swords and peacock feathers. Artfully out-of-focus photographs of French haystacks and cathedrals covered the walls, plaster casts of feet and hands weighted the cloths that covered works in progress. Whether his models posed in kimonos or without, Kato always wore a studio coat and beret because, as he said, “Professional decorum is never so essential as with a naked woman.”

Western art was for himself. For money, Kato produced purely Japanese woodblock prints. It was a transformation to Harry. Kato was no longer an imitation Frenchman fussing over a palette, he was a master who could capture the contours of a model with a seemingly continuous line of ink. The model herself was no longer a sallow, short-limbed version of a Parisian prostitute but a delicate courtesan wrapped in a silk kimono. Better yet for a boy like Harry, the process was a puzzle to be disassembled and put back together. Kato’s sketch went to a carver who sent back a close-grained cherry-wood keyblock and as many as ten other blocks carved for separate colors. Sometimes Kato sent the blocks to a printer, sometimes he did the printing himself. He printed one color a day, from light to dark—clamshell for white, red lead for tan, turmeric for yellow, redbud for pink, safflower for red, cochineal for crimson, dayflower for blue, lampblack for ebony—on soft mulberry paper. Kimonos were always a challenge, with their patterns of peacock eyes, russet leaves, cherry blossoms, peonies. The subtlest color of all, however, was skin, painted with the lightest pink to flatten the fibers of the paper. Layer by layer the colors coalesced into an image, the slattern into an innocent beauty, a swirl of lampblack for a teapot’s steam, a dusting of mica to suggest the night. Harry enjoyed the misdirection. Great artists like Hokusai or Kuniyoshi could each print a series called Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji, which were not pictures of Fuji but of life in Tokyo, of courtesans or fishermen or peddlers stumbling up a hill with a small, hazy Fuji floating serenely in the background.

Harry arrived once when Kato had gone for medicine and left the door unlocked. Harry was inside alone, stealing a smoke, when an ember fell from the cigarette and burned a drop cloth. He had to move a plaster cast to refold the cloth and hide the incriminating hole and, in doing so, uncovered a work in progress that he had not seen before: a courtesan in an elegant black-and-blue-striped kimono, her hair knotted and embellished with a tall white comb. What was different about this print was that she was in the pleated leather back of a large car, leaning to one side with a cigarette to accept a light from a male hand holding a lit match. The more Harry looked, the more he saw the artistry in the two sources of light, the match’s small ball of fire and the moon through the rear window of the car. How her twisted position revealed the line of her neck. How loose strands of hair and the kimono’s rumpled surface indicated a recent intimacy. What surprised him most was that the woman was Oharu.

Oharu was Harry’s best friend at the theater, his older sister and secret love. Harry had seen her only in chic skirts and French hats. He moved another cast to pull more of the drop cloth off. A second, almost finished print was of Oharu at a cherry-blossom party, wrapped in a maiden’s pink kimono and seated on a quilt covered with fallen pink and white blossoms. It would have been a portrait of innocence itself, except for the fact that the quilt was planted with bottles of sake and beer. Oharu slumped to the side, her eyes slitted with drink, a ukulele forgotten in her hands. Golden bees crawled over the blossoms, bottles, Oharu’s hair. A third print was so dark it took Harry a moment to understand it was a ballroom flecked by the reflections from a mirror ball on dancing couples, black figures on a blue floor, the only one identifiable, Oharu, in a red kimono waiting by the slanted light of a half-open door.

By now Harry couldn’t stop. He uncovered a stack of prints, a catalog of copulation, on every page a samurai or monk inserting his monstrously swollen erection into a woman experiencing such transport that her eyelids were closed and her teeth bit into cloth as if to stifle any outcry, while, under a kimono’s disarray, her legs splayed, the gaping bush lay exposed and her toes curled in ecstasy. The main thing so far as Harry was concerned was that the prints were antiques, not of Oharu.

“Interested?” Kato asked.

Harry hadn’t heard the artist return. There was no point in trying to hide the prints. “What are they?”

“Treasures. Instruction for a bride, entertainment for an old man, a charm a samurai would be proud to carry in his helmet. Now items of shame, victims of Western morality. You know, Harry, Westerners know so little about and seem to take so little pleasure in sex, it’s a wonder they propagate at all. Your father, of course, is the worst.”

“Why him?”

“Because he is a missionary and a missionary is a murderer, only he murders the soul. And he is smug about it. If it were up to your father, Japan would have no Shinto, no Buddha, no Son of Heaven and no sex. What would be left?”

“What about the pictures of Oharu? I like those.”

“You do? One moment you’re a snoop, the next you’re a connoisseur.”

“Could I buy one?”

“Buy?” Kato put the medicine down to cough, slowly open his cigarette case and regauge the conversation. “That’s different. I should treat you with more respect. These portraits of Oharu are not for any ordinary print run. They are one-of-a-kind, special collector’s editions.”

“I’ll pay over time.”

“It might take your lifetime. I don’t know of any missionary boy, even you, Harry, who can afford that. Which one were you thinking of?”

Harry scanned Oharu in the car, the cherry blossoms, the ballroom.

“The ballroom.”

“Ah, very telling, because she seems to be waiting, doesn’t she, hoping to dance. The room is so dark you might even be in it. You’d wait for the right dance, of course. She’s a little tall for you now, but in the fantasy she’s perfect, her ear to your cheek. That’s the charm, you know, of the ballroom dancer or café waitress. Not sex but conversation. Japanese men don’t talk to their wives. The most normal relationship they have is with their favorite waitress. How would you get that kind of money, Harry?”

Harry was truculent, devoid of ideas. “Some way.”

“That covers a lot of ground, all of it dishonest. I’ll have to think about that before you start robbing people in the streets. But, as an artist, I’ve never been more flattered.”

Harry was good with a knife and glue, and Kato found work for him after school at the Museum of Curiosities, helping the proprietor patch its half-human monsters. Harry especially liked the mermaids with their long horsehair and lacquered skin of papier-mâché, hideous fangs and sunken eyes, like the remains of a nightmare washed up on a beach. Harry earned more money when Kato entrusted him with the carving of censors’ seals for certain reproductions, fakes. Kato taught him how to trace old seals on translucent paper, transfer the paper to balsa and carve an exact copy that would add the stamp of authenticity.

“Who knows?” Kato said. “You may be an artist yet.”

“I can’t draw.”

“But you have a steady hand. Do you suppose that comes from picking pockets?”

“I’m not doing that so much anymore.”

“Go ahead. Artists steal all the time, that’s why taste is so important.”

One thing preyed on Harry’s mind. “You’re not going to hold it against me that my father is a missionary?”

“No. I’ve taken my revenge on him.”

“What kind?” Harry wondered how Kato could ever reach a zealot like Roger Niles.

“Ah, Harry, you’re revenge enough.”

9

A TEA CART WITH scones and cream, strudel and napoleons rattled around the lobby of the Imperial Hotel. The Imperial had been the safe haven of well-heeled tourists, especially Americans who were amplified, on-the-road versions of themselves, busy with backslaps and laughs that had boomed up to the lobby’s timbers. The Imperial had been designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, who piled brick and lava rock in a grandiose style suggestive of a Mayan temple. Harry thought the hotel, with its vaulting shadows and wintry drafts, was a proper set for Dracula. Still, it was sad to see the tea cart make its circuit around the lobby like a trolley car in an empty city.

Also, Harry owed the Imperial. He’d come back to Japan for a public relations job that fizzled and left him high and dry, with not even enough money for return passage, until the American All-Stars came to town. Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig and Lefty O’Doul led a tour by the world’s greatest ballplayers and their wives. Naturally, they stayed at the Imperial. Harry was stalking the lobby for a tourist who might need a knowledgeable guide when a receptionist came up all aflutter. Harry expected the heave-ho. Instead, the receptionist bowed and asked if he would please proceed to the pool garden. When Harry got there, he found an official welcome that was falling apart. On one side of the garden were the Japanese in formal cutaways and kimonos with stacks of boxes, on the other side was a straggling line of the All-Stars in baseball uniforms and their wives in furs. In the middle was a movie camera with an operator who spoke no English, which was just as well because every time his assistant tried to push Mrs. Ruth within camera range, she told him to keep his mitts off. The Babe had had a little brandy in his breakfast coffee and tried to nudge O’Doul into the water. When the Babe’s wife told him to stop acting like an ape, the Babe gave her a playful pop on the shoulder. Meanwhile, the Japanese hosts grew smaller, their eyes wider. The girls in kimonos inched back, ready to run. One of the wives, a marcelled blonde in a fox stole, yawned and spat a wad of gum into the pool, setting off a tussle among the goldfish.

Harry figured this was a classic case of nothing to lose. He stepped forward and announced in English, on behalf of the hotel, how honored the Imperial was by the presence of the All-Stars and their lovely wives, and responded in Japanese, on behalf of the players, how impressed they were by the warm hospitality of the famous Imperial Hotel. He spoke rapidly, no seam between English and Japanese, respectfully but with animation, easing each side toward the middle of the garden, directing the cameraman to start filming, interpreting speeches back and forth, signaling the Japanese girls it was safe to distribute gifts, a happi coat for each player and towels for their wives.

“Do I look wet?” Mrs. Ruth asked Mrs. Gehrig.

The Babe got in the mood, posed in his happi coat and pushed a dimple into his cheek. Before leaving the garden for the ballpark, he lit a huge Havana and asked Harry, “Kid, you want to make some change? My stepdaughter’s along. She’s cute and she likes to trip the light fantastic. Just keep your hand off her ass or I will feed you to the fucking goldfish.”

“Sounds good,” said Harry. He stuck with the All-Stars for the rest of their tour and, by the end, had been hired by the movie company to do promotion, which was the kind of work he had done in the States. From then on he felt a debt of gratitude to both the Babe and the Imperial.

Now he picked up a paper from the hotel newsstand for any word of Ishigami. Nothing. Found an article about the Giants’ midwinter practice and dedication to victory. Returned to the front page and read that the Germans had as good as taken Moscow, as they had for weeks. In America, Charles Lindbergh declared that there was “no danger to this country from without.” Tensions in Washington had eased, negotiations were back on track. Roosevelt was more conciliatory. According to Ripley’s Believe It or Not, most chimps were left-handed. All the stories sounded equally likely to Harry.

The bar was virtually empty. The only occupants Harry saw at first were German officers from the blockade-runner. It was a long run from Bordeaux, evading British cruisers or the torpedo of a submarine, twenty thousand miles not to fire a shot but to carry precious rubber to Germany, and there was something exhausted about the men and the way they sank into their schnapps. Of course, the Imperial was lucky to have them. Aside from troopships, international travel had come to a halt. Tokyo’s World Fair and Olympic Games had been canceled, luxury liners called home, embassy dependents ordered out. In the far corner Harry found Willie Staub with DeGeorge and Lady Beechum.

“Harry.” Alice Beechum offered her hand for a kiss. She was pink as a petit four offering a taste. Pink as a Gainsborough portrait, pinker than pink with an exuberant mass of ginger hair. On the Tokyo stage, actresses who played Europeans wore ginger wigs. Alice’s blue eyes and ginger hair were her very own, and Harry also remembered breasts with the tang of Chanel.

“Lady Alice. I saw your husband this morning.”

“Yes. He was so worked up when he got home, he was ready to strangle puppies. He told me he gave you quite the rocket. He was very proud. Then he went off to toss medicine balls or something with his pals.”

“You’re not a popular man at the British embassy, Harry,” DeGeorge said.

“I’ll slit my throat.”

“Get in line.”

Willie was sipping tea, but for everyone else at the table “tea” meant martinis or Mount Fujis, gin with a peak of frothed egg white. Harry wondered, would this be his social circle for the duration if he missed the plane? The expats of the Imperial bar? DeGeorge, who dripped acid like a wreck leaking oil?

Willie asked, “What would they do to you? You’d be enemy aliens, but there are conventions about this sort of thing. They wouldn’t put you in jail.”

“Or make us learn Japanese,” DeGeorge said. “I’d rather be behind bars.”

“This conversation is absolutely sparkling,” Alice Beechum told Harry. “But I was wondering, how is that little Michiko of yours?”

“Speaking of…” Willie said.

Harry’s heart sank when he followed Willie’s eyes to a young Chinese woman making her way toward the table. She wore a silk cheongsam with a pattern of peonies, her hair was twisted into a chignon set off by an ivory comb and her eyes were bright with hope. Harry had to say that she was a little chubby, a bad sign since it suggested that she was real and Willie truly loved her. She was, in short, a disastrous complication for a man who should be traveling light. The problem was that Germans were such romantics. Not as romantic as Japanese; the Japanese preferred sad endings and suicide. But what Willie needed after China was a Wanderjahr on a beach somewhere, or searching the desert for philosophy, anything but dragging some poor Chinese girl to Nazi Germany.

“Iris is a teacher,” Willie said after introductions. “We’re hoping she’ll be able to continue doing that in Germany.”

“I suppose that would be up to the local Gauleiter or Gruppenführer,” Harry said.

“Yes.”

“Have you tried the Mount Fuji?” DeGeorge asked Iris. “It was invented here.”

“Inventing alcoholic drinks is a major pastime of the expatriate community,” Harry said to her. “Where did you teach?”

“At a missionary school,” she said.

“Iris’s father is a Methodist minister,” Willie said. “Her mother went to Wesleyan College in the United States, and her oldest brother is a graduate of Yale.”

“Well, your English sounds better than mine,” Harry said. Even the cupped echoes of Iris’s Chinese intonation were charming.

“What university did you attend, Harry?” Willie asked.

“Bible college.”

“But you chose not to become a missionary?” Iris said.

“I did publicity for Paramount and Universal. Pretty much the same thing. Are you enjoying the hotel?”

“It doesn’t seem Japanese,” Iris said.

“Not at all. Like Valhalla with Oriental lamps. But the emperor is a major shareholder, and that makes it Japanese enough.”

“Earthquake-proof,” DeGeorge added. “That’s all this tourist needs to know.”

“How is Michiko?” Willie tried to steer the conversation.

“Yes,” Alice said, “we all want to know. Is Michiko doing a little flower arranging or is she whisking tea?”

“There’s a gal who could whisk the balls off a bulldog,” DeGeorge said.

“According to Willie, she has musical interests,” Iris said.

“Contemporary music,” Harry said.

“Iris plays the piano,” Willie said. “Mozart, Bach.”

“Michiko plays the record player. Basie, Beiderbecke.”

“That calls for another round.” DeGeorge summoned the waiter.

“Is there any news on the negotiations in Washington?” Willie asked.

“The U.S. wants Japan out of China. Japan wants to stay. It’s the old story of the monkey and the cookie jar. He can’t get his hand out without letting the cookie go, so he doesn’t get the cookie or his hand. Now, Harry may have a different version, he’s the number one defender of the Japanese.”

“I just think there were lots of hands already in that cookie jar. British, Russian and American.”

“You know what I hear, Harry? The Japs are selling the Chinese cigarettes laced with opium.”

“Well, the British once fought a war in China to sell opium. The Japanese are great admirers of the British.”

“He really is incorrigible,” Alice Beechum said.

“You never thought of being a missionary?” Iris asked.

“Maybe I should,” Harry said. “It’s a good racket. Missionaries stole Hawaii.”

“Not everybody sees it that way,” DeGeorge said.

“Because they read Time, published by the son of a China missionary. The American people are fed stories about Chiang Kai-shek as though he’s Washington at Valley Forge. The most sanctimonious lobby in the United States is China missionaries, and if we have a war, it will be due in good part to them.”

“You really have no sense of morality at all, do you, Harry?” DeGeorge said.

Iris bowed like a flower in the wind and changed the subject. “Michiko sounds very interesting. I so look forward to meeting her.”

“That depends on how long you’re going to be here, I suppose. Willie?”

“Perhaps for a while. The embassy is slow about giving us our papers.”

“Willie has his papers, but the embassy is holding back mine,” Iris said. “They say he should go, and I would follow.”

Willie said, “They’ll never give her papers once I go.”

“What’s their reason for stalling?”

“They claim that the background of any foreign applicant must be investigated for unhealthy political involvement. That’s natural, I understand. But there are no investigative German agencies in China, and it seems any such investigation would have to be carried out by Japanese authorities. Although Germany and Japan are allies, there seems to be a lack of cooperation.”

“Imagine that.”

“That’s why we’re turning to you, Harry. You have influence with the Japanese. I saw this morning at the Chrysanthemum Club how you swayed them. They might approve Iris for you. Then, if they sent an approval to the German embassy, something would happen. Otherwise, they may force me to go alone.”

“Why does Harry have influence with the Japanese, that’s what I want to know,” DeGeorge said.

Harry took the deep breath of a surgeon reluctant to cut. “Willie, your embassy gave you good advice. Get Iris someplace like Macao, then you go home to Germany and wait. According to the führer, the war will be over in a week or two.”

“What if it’s not?”

“Yes,” Alice Beechum said. “What if, for some unlikely reason, it’s not?”

“A year or two. True love can wait.”

Willie’s cheeks turned red. “Anything can happen. Harry, you have to help.”

“I didn’t get her into this. You could have had the honeymoon without the preacher. You could have had your fun and said good-bye. You could have left Iris in China with enough money to buy her safety.”

“I am not a prostitute.” Tears sprang down Iris’s face.

“Money is not just for prostitutes,” Harry said. “The Bible says, �For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.’ The Portuguese are a kind and worldly people, and they’re neutral. Portuguese Macao is probably the safest place on earth.”

“Harry Niles, marital adviser. Willie, let me explain,” Alice said. “If we were in England, Harry would help my marriage by being my corespondent, the �other man.’ We’d arrange compromising photos in bed. He’d be perfect because his reputation can’t get any blacker. He is the bar other villains measure themselves by.”

Harry said, “Aren’t you supposed to be at a meeting of �British Housewives Against the Huns’?”

“I’m kind of curious,” DeGeorge said and hunched closer to Willie. “Why would you even ask Harry Niles to help? When did Harry Niles lift a finger for his fellow man?”

Willie looked away.

“Seriously,” DeGeorge said, “how could you ask Harry?”

“In China…” Iris began.

“I don’t know,” Willie said.

“Hey, I’m a reporter,” DeGeorge said. “I smell something here, Willie. You knew Harry in China. ’Fess up.”

“Willie,” Harry said. They’d agreed not to talk about this.

“I heard Harry got in a tight spot in China,” DeGeorge said. “Was it stealing cars, or a scam like his pine-tree gasoline?”

“Don’t do it,” Harry told Willie.

“No, they think I’m a fool for asking you to help. I’ll tell them why.”

DeGeorge sat forward to share the joke. The martinis arrived, and Harry sank with one into his chair. Sometime or other he had to get some food.

Willie said, “I was manager of Deutsche-Fon in Nanking. We handled the telephone exchange and electrical power. By December it was clear that the Japanese army would attack because Nanking was the capital, and once it surrendered, everyone assumed that the war would be over. But the Chinese resisted more than was expected, and even when the city fell, the army wouldn’t surrender, which infuriated the Japanese, and they began executing people. They shot men in the back of the head or bayoneted them or beheaded them or drowned them individually and in groups. I have heard estimates of ten thousand to a hundred thousand dead. I personally would say many more. I had hundreds of Chinese employees I was responsible for, them and their families. I was not alone. There were twenty other Westerners left in Nanking, mainly German businessmen and American missionaries, and we created an international safety zone to protect Chinese whose homes had burned. I was elected head of the committee, a position I accepted because I was also head of the Nazi Party in Nanking and had to set a moral tone.

“The zone was only a few square kilometers, but soon we had three hundred thousand Chinese under our protection. Though, as I said, there were only twenty of us, so the protection was not very good. Every day the Japanese would come to take away women to rape. Some we saved, some we did not. The Japanese came for men to kill. They roped them together a hundred at a time. Some we saved, most we did not. Or they robbed them. The Japanese took jade, gold, rugs, watches, wooden spoons. Attacked safes with guns, grenades, acetylene torches. If they took a woman away to search, we knew we would never see her again. We saved who we could.

“We had to feed all these poor people. We transported bags of rice in my car, the roof of which I covered with a white sheet with a red cross, so that we wouldn’t be fired on, because cars were always being commandeered and the drivers killed. Every time we went for rice, someone would run from a house to tell us his wife or his daughter was being raped inside, would we help? I had a Nazi armband. With that as my authority, I stopped some incidents, but I was not always successful. One time when I was failing, our driver, one of the Americans, a new face, got out with me. Since he had a stethoscope, I assumed he was a doctor. He brushed a line of soldiers aside, pushed up the girl’s skirt, proceeded to examine her and spoke to the soldiers in Japanese. Apparently he convinced them the girl had a venereal disease. That was Harry. I don’t know where he got the stethoscope, I think he stole it. From then on, Harry was my driver.”

Harry studied the ceiling’s Gothic gloom, the crosspieces of concrete and lava rock. All they lacked were bats.

Willie went on, “Sometimes Harry and I would patrol in the car and load it with girls. Harry altered documents from the Japanese command so they seemed to give him the authority to prevent the spread of infection among the troops, which meant removing the women from their rapists. For added authority, he wore one of my armbands to pretend he was German, too.

“It wasn’t only women. We had a truck. Harry and I would load it with men taken from hiding and put on a top layer of the dead bodies in case we were stopped, which we often were. Harry would produce papers ordering us to remove bodies around the zone to prevent cholera or typhoid. He was excellent at creating official papers. The killing went on for weeks. When new Japanese recruits arrived, they were drilled in the use of the bayonet with live Chinese, to accustom them to blood. One officer, a Lieutenant Ishigami, became a kind of legend for beheading a hundred Chinese.”

“End of the story,” Harry said. “Willie, you’ve said enough.”

“Except that Ishigami came to the Happy Paris last night after you left.”

“Enough.”

Willie slid back in his chair. “Very well. Anyway, that’s part of what happened in Nanking and why I am perhaps not such a fool to think that Harry, the Harry Niles I knew in China, might possibly help us here.”

The table was quiet. Finally DeGeorge said, “Harry with a swastika on his arm? I can picture that.”

“No. Harry was heroic.”

“Maybe. You don’t speak any Japanese, you don’t really know what actually transpired, you know only what Harry told you. But Harry in a Nazi armband, that I can believe.”

“I’ll call some people about Iris,” Harry said.

“I would be forever grateful.” Willie jumped up to shake Harry’s hand. “At the War Ministry? Someone from the military police would be best. High up?”

“Well, people with influence.”

“Thank you,” Iris said. “You are just as Willie described.”

“Willie has a hell of an imagination.” Harry stood to leave. “Nice to meet you. Only, no more fairy tales.”

“You can’t stay?” Willie said.

“I’m off, too, to Matsuya’s for the necessities, soap, Scotch, cigarettes,” Alice said.

“Lady Beechum thinks there may be a war in a day or two,” said DeGeorge.

Harry said, “Your husband says, �The little yellow Johnnies don’t have the nerve.’”

“There you are.” She lifted a smile to Harry. “It’s men like Arnold who have put the British Empire where it is today.”

AN ENTIRELY DIFFERENT Hajime was at Tokyo Station. Gone was last night’s maudlin drunk and in his place was a sober Hajime in khaki, field cap and cape. The railroad platform was crowded with recruits, parents, friends, little brothers waving flags, sisters delivering thousand-stitch belts with all their protective powers. Some men were shipping out for the second time, but most were boys clumsy in their helmets and field packs with bedrolls and entrenching tools. Banners hung vertically from lamp poles announced, ONE HUNDRED MILLION ADVANCING LIKE A WALL OF FLAME!, the sort of wish some travelers could do without, Harry thought. A brass band produced a rendition of “My Old Kentucky Home” that shook dust from the station’s spidery skylights.

Hajime regarded the confusion with a veteran’s detachment. “Thanks for coming, Harry,” he said. “All you need is one friend to see you off, right?”

“I guess so.” Harry probably would not have come at all if it hadn’t been for Hajime’s gun. Harry gave it to him still boxed and wrapped as if handing over a farewell gift. Since its loss was punishable by death, Harry expected a little gratitude. Instead, Hajime demanded a smoke. Harry gave him a pack, and Hajime lit up with ostentatious ease.

“Thanks. Remember the days when we used to run around Asakusa? We ruled the roost, Harry. You and me and Gen, we ruled the roost.”

Hajime had done well by the army, however. Here he was in a crisply ironed uniform with a sergeant major’s tabs, a waxed and bristling mustache and thick spectacles that magnified his self-importance, no sign of the falling down drunk who had pissed on the street outside the Happy Paris the night before. He was still loathsome, but he had no family or friends, and Harry supposed that, after all, someone ought to see the son of a bitch off. It didn’t seem to matter to anyone on the platform that Harry wasn’t Japanese. In this crowd, with its blur of emotion, he seemed to blend in well enough.

“These kids think they’ve been through boot camp,” Hajime said. “Wait until I get my hands on them. Do you know why a soldier will charge a machine gun across an open field?”

“Why?”

“Because he’s more afraid of me.”

Which was true enough. Harry had heard plenty of stories about recruits considered too short or tall or slow or quick who had been beaten until their noses were split, teeth lost, eardrums burst. Supposedly it was a psychological approach, to create a rage that could be turned on the enemy. Rage and fear plus devotion to the emperor. Harry was always amazed how the army could take so many young scholars, gentle poets, honest farm boys and fishermen’s sons and turn them into killers. It took the hard work of men like Hajime.

“Well, I can see why you’re so eager to get back to China. Ever afraid of a bullet from your own men?”

“I never turn my back on them.”

The train was late. The crowd shifted to fill the platform without falling onto the tracks. Fathers sucked in their chins with pride while women seemed more ambivalent about sending off sons who looked young enough to be trading baseball cards. A man in a bowler asked Harry, “Would you be so kind?” and handed him a camera, a little spring-bellows Pearlette. Harry took a picture of the man with a young recruit who had a bright red face from ceremonial farewell cups of sake and a thousand-stitch belt tied like a scarf around his neck, a son who was obviously the measure of his father’s love.

“Remember �Forty-seven Ronin’?” Hajime said. “Remember how we let you in even though you weren’t Japanese?”

“I think you needed someone to chase.”

“We had a great gang. Then you and Gen started hanging around the theater and dumped the rest of us.”

“We grew up.”

“What was the name of that dancer you were so crazy about? Oharu? That was terrible about her.”

“What’s the point, Hajime?”

“The point is, I know how much you wanted to be Japanese, and now you see you’re not.”

“What are you talking about?”

“This. This army is only for real Japanese, that is why it is unstoppable. This is a pure army. No pretend Japanese here. You think you know everything, you always thought you were so clever. Soon enough there won’t be a white man left in Asia, and that includes you.”

Hajime’s voice rose with the approach of a locomotive drawing a train decked in red and white bunting. Flags flew on the engine’s steam domes and boiler front. Recruits who had already been gathered from other stations leaned out coach windows to shout over the explosion of air brakes, squeal of rails and renewed fervor of the band, which welcomed them with a popular song.

Bullets, tanks and bayonets

Bivouac with grass for a pillow.

My father, appearing in a dream,

Encourages me to die and come home.

“Hold this.” Hajime handed back the gun while he cleaned the lenses of his glasses. There was a rush to board because the train was running late. This was a city where people were physically packed into subways and onto buses. Harry let families shoulder by to the steps for leave-taking, mothers and fathers bowing to their soldier-sons with much trembling but no crying. Hajime set the glasses on his face and took a step backward up to the railroad car.

“Don’t forget this.” Harry stretched out an arm with the package.

“From me to you,” Hajime said. A smirk crept across his face as if this was a moment he had waited years for, a payback for ancient debts. The locomotive let off a snort of steam, aching to roll; Japanese engines were thoroughbreds, black and slim. At once, the press of bodies, enthusiasm and noise carried Hajime all the way up the steps of a coach that was rocking from the motion of soldiers finding seats.

“It’s yours,” Harry shouted.

The tide of embarkation, boys aching to leave good-byes behind, pushed Hajime into the car. “Too late,” he said, or something like that, his words overwhelmed by the noise of the band. The press grew greater, and the next time Harry saw Hajime was at an open window where families passed up last-second remembrances and boxes of food. Hajime pulled aside his cape to open his holster flap and show Harry another pistol, a full-size Nambu, already nestled there.

“Good luck, Harry,” Hajime mouthed through the window.

The train shuddered and began to slide along the platform. Harry tried to push forward to Hajime, but the wall of bodies and banners and flags was too dense to breach. The fervent waving of hands prevented Harry from even following Hajime’s coach by sight. The boys were going, hurtling toward destiny with lives that weighed less than a feather, with the bulletproof prayers of their loved ones, to open a whole new dawn for Asia. With such purity of spirit, how could they fail?

10

GAIJIN WERE FREAKS , and Harry’s parents were the biggest freaks of all. The pair of them preaching the gospel on a street corner was almost mortally embarrassing to Harry. First was the presumption of preaching at all before being asked. Second was his father’s total inability to speak Japanese. Third was his mother’s partial Japanese. Fourth was the fact that she spoke not women’s but men’s Japanese, full of bluster no decent woman would use. Fifth was the way she stood beside her husband instead of behind him. Sixth was their mysterious ignorance about how much and to whom to bow. Seventh was their loudness. Eighth was their clumsiness. Ninth was their color. Tenth was their size. Those were the Ten Sins of Gaijin, and every day Roger and Harriet Niles were guilty of each one. And if there was any contradiction between Harry’s condemnation of them and his own black reputation, it escaped him. Sundays were the worst. A Baptist church had no stained glass or popish carvings, only pews leading up to the choir organ and pastor’s pulpit and, in between, the satin curtain that veiled the baptismal well. The order of service was call to worship, Scripture, prayer and sermon leading to the testimonials of believers. Thus was the hand of Jesus made visible, His intervention and the redemption of a sinner followed by hymns translated and sung in Japanese in triumphant dissonant satisfaction. Or the service would include baptism, when the veil of purple satin was drawn aside for an immersion into water that cleansed the soul, a drama that, when he was in town, Roger Niles conducted with the theatrical vigor of the original John the Baptist. The entire congregation would lean forward and hold its breath, all transfixed except for two figures in the front row, Harry and his uncle Orin, who both smelled of mint, his uncle to cover the reek of whiskey, Harry to hide a taste for cigarettes. He would rather have been strolling with Kato and Oharu, taking in fresh air on the Rokku or, better yet, sharing a smoke in a movie house.

Oddly enough, Harry actually liked the painting of the river Jordan above the well. The artist had depicted Jesus in white robes and John in a lion skin, wading into azure water with the spirit descending from heaven in the form of a dove. Cedars and date palms fringed the riverbanks, and around the entire scene was a string of pearls. Harry found the scene calming, not the baptism itself but the slowly flowing river.

Kyoto had a river like that. The summer after Harry had met Kato, he and his parents had gone down to the old capital, which had a Baptist hospital and church. While the congregation attacked the hymns, Harry slipped out and wandered behind the church. There the river lay, brown-green water with torpid folds and ripples under a yellow haze. A branch trailed like an idle hand in the water. On a twig, two dragonflies touched tails of gold. Harry sat at the base of the tree to dig cigarettes from his shirt.

“Share?”

Harry looked up at an American girl, a couple of years younger, with tangled curly hair and a dusty sundress. She was plain, with a square jaw and broad teeth, but she had the most dazzling eyes Harry had ever seen, like the glass heel of a Coca-Cola bottle crushed into crystals. He lit her a cigarette just to see what she would do. She let out a sensual exhale and leaned against the tree.

“I know who you are. You’re Harry Niles, the wild boy. Everyone says your parents don’t have a real church.”

“You sure know a lot.”

“They even send you to a Japanese school.”

“Why not? I don’t want to be a snob. Anyway, my dad preaches in church when he’s in Tokyo. If you don’t like it, play somewhere else.”

She squatted next to him. Her shoes were cracked, and her elbows were scabby, but Harry recognized self-possession when he was next to it.

“I know why you’re here,” she said.

Harry didn’t know. It was just a trip to Kyoto, although the decision had come out of the blue. He shrugged. “Church business.” Sundays were always full of church business, fund and oversight committees, temperance leagues and spirit rallies. Sunday could be boring in infinite ways.

“The trial,” she said.

“A trial?”

“They call it a mission meeting, but it’s a trial, my dad says.”

“Someone stole the offering?” If there was something worth stealing, Harry wanted to know.

“Not really stealing,” she said.

“What?”

“Currency rates.”

That beat Harry. He frowned because he didn’t like looking stupid.

“What’s that?”

“It’s not illegal,” she said. She took a stick and scratched into the ground. “If you turn in dollars for Chinese yuan at this rate in Shanghai, then trade yuan for Japanese yen, and then come home and trade yen back to dollars, you can double your money.”

“That’s legal?”

“Um-hum.”

Harry stared at the numbers as if glimpsing an entire new alphabet. She wiped them out with her hand.

“Why’d you do that?”

“Missionaries aren’t supposed to trade money. Even if it’s for mission work or food for people. So they’re going to have a trial.”

She glanced across the river, and on the far bank, Harry saw a man walking alone with his head down among a shadowy copse of willows.

“Where’s your mom?”

“Dead. Of pneumonia.”

“So what are you going to do?”

“I think they’ll send us back to Florida. I’d just as soon stay.”

“Ever been?” Harry hadn’t been to the States yet.

“Yeah. All they say is �Say something in Japanese.’ They couldn’t find Japan on a map. They think you’re stuck up because they’re so stupid.”

“You have a pretty high opinion of yourself.”

She shrugged. They sat quietly for a while and watched the slow passage of the stream. Harry felt her brilliant eyes light on him and dart away.

“Can you swim?” she asked.

“Sure.” He was a good swimmer, which was fairly un-Japanese. The Japanese liked going to the beach and splashing in the waves as a group, but going for a swim was regarded as virtually antisocial.

She said, “If I stayed in Japan, I’d be a pearl diver. Ever see pearl divers?”

“Pictures.” They were bare-breasted girls who wore goggles.

“Here.” She took his hand and put a pearl in it. The pearl was milky blue, with a hole drilled in it. Harry guessed it had probably fallen off a strand. He could see her diving under a pew for it.

“What am I going to do with one pearl?”

“Do you want more? I can get more.”

Her eyes were so intense that Harry said, “No, one’s plenty.”

“Put it in your pocket.”

After he did so, she took his hand and slipped it under her dress and up her thigh, which was so skinny he felt the bone. She had no chest, no shape at all, but her eyes were so intense, so many blues and greens at one time, that Harry couldn’t take his hand away until a voice came over the water. “Abby? Abigail?” The man on the far bank was waving. She let Harry’s hand slide out and whispered, “I have to go.”

“Abby?” Harry said.

“Yes?” She swung her focus back to him.

“Double the money? Really?”

“Yes.”

“That’s great. Thanks.”

She stood, stepped on her cigarette and hesitated on the verge of something inexpressible.

“Hope your dad does okay,” Harry said.

She nodded. After she was gone, darting along the trees that fringed the river, her gaze still seemed to hover over Harry.

Harry lost the pearl almost immediately. He learned later that the church reprimanded Abby’s father but allowed him to remain. Harry heard the following year that Abby got pneumonia and died in Japan, just like her mother.

11

A GONDOLA SWUNG on a cable above the rooftop garden of the Matsuya department store. Sheathed in aluminum, streamlined and shining, the gondola looked like a spaceship from the future. The interior was more down-to-earth, with leather straps and wicker seats, but Harry and Alice Beechum had the craft to themselves and, from its porthole windows, a view of the Ginza’s wide avenues, willow trees, French cafés. The gondola floated eight stories above trolleys, noodle wagons, the buzz of motorcycles racing to different newspapers. Farther off were waves of blue roof tiles and the green ridge of the imperial palace; to the south, rising over charcoal smoke, the white cone of Fuji.

The rooftop garden offered the foot-weary shopper an amusement park high in the air. Spider monkeys flew from tree to tree within a huge wire mesh enclosure. Cages displayed macaws, peccaries, raccoons. Children pedaled cars around a track while their mothers contemplated bonsai gardens. The latest attraction was a tank of water fifty feet in diameter holding model warships of the Japanese and American navies. Boys gathered around naval cadets who manipulated radio controls that sent the two fleets around the tank, the Japanese chasing the American, the Rising Sun after the Stars and Stripes. Battleships the size of sharks led aircraft carriers, cruisers and destroyers, their screws churning up swells. Out of tinny loudspeakers poured a navy anthem: “Across the sea, a corpse floating in water / Across the mountains, a corpse in grass.” The Japanese ships began firing, each salvo of guns signaled by red lights in their barrels and black smoke spewing from the Americans in retreat.

Harry said, “You know, there’s hardly anything as satisfying as a rigged fight. An honest fight is just a brawl, a rigged fight is theater.”

“You always have the most individual opinions.” Alice sat back in her riding suit of green tweed, her head resting on the golden pillow of her hair. Maybe it was the English complexion that made tweed sensual, Harry thought. He couldn’t help but think of stiff woolen fibers pricking her delicate skin, her map of light freckles and the fine down on her arms and the nape of her neck. She was saying, “I did my best to blacken your reputation after you left the Imperial, but you have to stop your friend Willie from telling any more tales about Nanking.”

“He got carried away.”

“He’s going to get you killed with those stories. The Japanese have a different version of their victory in Nanking. Willie tells me that you’re also being stalked by a man with a sword, a Colonel Ishigami.”

“I can handle Ishigami.”

“Oh, well, then nothing to worry about. Do you remember the wonderful stage direction from Shakespeare, �Exit, pursued by a bear’? You seem to have any number of bears. So, tell me what happened. Quick, did you get on the plane?”

Harry grinned. From a furoshiki, he lifted out two glasses and a split of champagne that he’d picked up in the Matsuya food emporium.

“I didn’t just get on the plane. After this morning’s little talk, my friend from Nippon Air will personally tuck me into my seat.” He thumbed off the cork and caught the foam as it rose. Opening champagne in such close quarters was chancy, but for some occasions sake would not do. “I’m going to sit right next to you, Alice. We will wave good-bye to Tokyo together. I may even teach you poker on the way.”

“Harry, you’re the worst man I ever met.”

“Even I blush. Cheers,” Harry said as if laying down a winning hand. “Nippon Air to Hong Kong on Monday the eighth. BOAC out of Hong Kong to catch the Clipper in Manila, then Midway, Hawaii and California, in that order. Happy?”

“Ecstatic.”

“Sounds like smooth sailing to me.”

Alice shielded her eyes to watch a salesclerk down on the roof demonstrate a yo-yo. The yo-yo spun in place to Walk the Dog and snapped into orbit for Around the World. She asked, “What does Madame Butterfly think of you going?”

“Michiko? I’m telling her tonight. I have to give her a chance to make other arrangements. I’ll set her up financially.”

“Do you think that will make her happy?”

Harry thought that “happy” was not a word that really related to Michiko. “Happy” was fatuous, like a helium balloon. Michiko carried the threat of a larger pop. “I’ll explain things to her. I’ll say it’s time to go. I’ll wear armor plate.”

“That would probably be wise.” As the cable lurched, a thud came from within the furoshiki at Harry’s feet. “Did I speak too soon?”

Harry spread the cloth and lifted the lid of the cigar box so that Alice could see the pistol inside.

“That’s lovely. Harry, you’re aware that it’s illegal to own a handgun?”

“I got stuck with it. It’s an army pistol. A Baby Nambu.”

“Why would a soldier leave his gun with you?”

“It was a setup, he had his own.”

“If it was a setup, he’ll tell the police. Leave the gun with me. I have some degree of immunity, and once I get home, I’ll throw it in with Beechum’s collection. He has elephant guns, African spears, the lot.”

“No, but I’d appreciate it if you took the box.” He tucked the pistol into the back of his belt and tried to settle in his seat.

“Comfortable?” Alice asked.

“Been more.”

“What are you going to do with it? This is not Chicago, people don’t carry guns. You’re not thinking of using it on Ishigami, are you?”

“A foreigner shoot a war hero? That would be an interesting form of suicide.” He spied a soldier and a girl sharing cotton candy. Public displays of affection were frowned on, but exceptions were made for boys who were shipping out. “You know, this rooftop used to be the place for suicides. You should have been here. Lovers lined up to hold hands and jump two at a time. It caused some anxiety about shopping in the neighborhood. You came for a cute chapeau and ended up planted in the sidewalk by a pair of star-crossed lovers. The silver lining is, since the war, suicides are down.”

“Has Michiko ever suggested a double jump?”

“Well, she’s romantic that way.”

“Wasn’t there an American reporter last year who died after he fell from the first story of a police station? The police said he jumped.”

“He probably didn’t have many options.”

“Whereas you only have to hide a gun from police who are already following you.”

“I’ll get rid of it, don’t worry.” A gondola swung by in the opposite direction. Two little girls in red kimonos bowed from the passing car while Alice studied Harry as if from a distance rather than knee-to-knee.

“Harry, we had fun, didn’t we?”

“Lots of fun.” It was true. Alice was fun, and there was no danger with her of being murdered out of jealousy or pique. A man could sink with Alice under the billowing waves of her soft mattress and down-filled quilt with the assurance that he would come up alive. She was brilliant with the Japanese language, loved the way the “flute” found its way to the “precious pearl” and positions like “Cat and Mouse in One Hole.” Her sheets were so scented with Chanel it was like nesting in a rose. The only problem was that Michiko could detect Chanel from a block away. “And we’ll have more fun. Have you told Beechum?”

“Good Lord, no. He thinks I’m going for a lark and be back in a day. My brother owns a coffee plantation in Kenya. The whites there lead a life of stupid dissipation. You and I could go there, and no one would know the difference.”

“Pull a Duke of Windsor? You’d marry a common American?”

“I don’t propose to make an honest man out of you, no one could do that. I am only suggesting that there are people who disapprove of you. People at your own embassy. They could make things uncomfortable for you if you return home.”

“People have always disapproved of me. When people approve of me, you have my permission to shoot me in the head. I am not escaping here to hang out at a water hole in Africa. I want to show you Hollywood, Monterey, Big Sur.”

The gondola dipped by the monkey enclosure, where residents basked on branches. Nonetheless, Alice shivered. Harry noticed when she gave him back her empty glass how red her knuckles were. The tip of her nose was also red, which made her more endearing. She said, “Every day my maid searches the rubbish bin for incriminating evidence about me. She’s very sweet. She asked if I could leave something, anything she could give the police. I try to help her and stuff the bin with crossword puzzles. The police seem to find them extremely promising.”

“You won’t have any trouble keeping them happy.” Harry had seen her finish the crossword puzzle of The Times as quickly as she could write. She did crossword puzzles in four languages. Most of the day, she was a brainless thing who spent her life at the Ginza’s shops and smart cafés, but every morning she spent in the code room of the British embassy. Even Beechum didn’t know. Her husband thought she had volunteered as a coffee lady, which he thought a damn good sign.

“The Thought Police are after you, Harry. They aren’t going to stop you from taking off?”

“We’re working together. I’m thinking good thoughts now.”

“You told them about the Magic Show?”

“Not that.”

Her rosy cheeks drained of color. “You didn’t take them to Yokohama. Tell me you didn’t take them there.”

“They showed up. Maybe that will satisfy them I’m doing my part for the war effort.”

“What part is that?”

“Everyone contributes in their own fashion. You’re a genius. I’m a businessman, kind of.”

“You’re a gambler.”

“So is Yamamoto. He knows that no navy can go to war without a source of oil, and the closest source to Japan is Dutch Sumatra, thousands of miles away. Sinking the American Pacific fleet isn’t enough, because Roosevelt can move ships at full speed from the Atlantic. They’ll refuel at Pearl and start sinking the emperor’s sloppy little tankers. But if the Japanese knock out all the oil at Pearl first, that changes everything. It wouldn’t be hard. All you need is a Zero with a fifty-caliber gun to blow those tanks to kingdom come. Then the nearest fuel to Pearl Harbor is California, thousands of miles away. Every new drop would have to be brought by American tankers, which are in short supply because they’re fueling England and getting sunk on the North Atlantic route. The fleet at Pearl is replaceable. Wiping out the oil tanks would buy Japan one year, maybe two.”

“This is insane.” Alice closed her eyes. “First the gun, now this.”

“So all I’m doing is adding an element of caution.”

“You’re still altering company ledgers?”

“A little. It’s not like the books were locked up, not adequately. No one gets hurt, because the American managers the Japanese might blame are back in the States and out of reach. It’s a harmless ploy, if you will, to create the possibility in the Japanese mind that oil was delivered in a secretive manner to tanks they haven’t located. You know how meticulous and paranoid the Japanese are. This is the sort of thing that drives them crazy. They can’t be so sure an attack will actually locate and wipe out all the oil reserves in Hawaii. Yamamoto understands odds. If he doesn’t think he can nail both the fleet and the oil, he won’t touch Pearl. No Pearl, no war.”

“What happens when the Special Higher Police and the Japanese navy discover that you deluded them?”

“They won’t find that out unless they fly over every valley on Oahu. Anyway, the fact is, I have discouraged them about this piece of information. I tell them over and over how phony it sounds to me. The more I deny it, the more they believe. That’s when you know a sucker is hooked, when you can’t chase him away.”

“Is that it, they’ve swallowed the bait so deep? Then why get on the plane?”

“It’s a stupid gambler who doesn’t hedge his bet. Besides, you’ll be on it.”

“Harry, I despair.”

“Well, it’s worth a try.”

The porthole opened on pivots. Harry found cigarettes and lit one for her, too.

“Have you let Butterfly in on your little game?” Alice asked.

“No, she wouldn’t turn me in, but she might kill me.”

“You don’t find anything the least pathological about your relationship with her?”

Harry considered. “I’d say it keeps me sharp.”

“No doubt.” She looked down as a store clerk blew a cornet to announce a sale of balsa-and-paper gliders that hung like mayflies from a pole. “May I tell you something? I have been in and out of the embassy code room for two years now. We have sent London a steady stream of information that, I am now convinced, is flushed immediately into the Thames. We speak to the deaf. Yesterday we received a cable asking whether German pilots were flying for the Japanese. London doesn’t think the Japanese can fly planes. It’s a matter of eyesight, they say, and thick glasses. The Japanese are as bad; they don’t think Americans can fight. Harry, no amount of information, accurate or inaccurate, makes any difference now. What makes you suddenly want to be a hero? It’s perverse.”

He delivered what he thought was his most ingratiating smile. “Alice, I’m not going to be a hero. It’s not my style. Besides, heroes get caught, that’s what makes them so heroic. I don’t get caught.”

“Harry, everyone gets caught.”

“How about you?”

“I’m a diplomat’s wife. Once war starts, we’ll simply be exchanged for Japanese diplomats.”

“�Once’? That’s an interesting choice of word.” Harry took her hand and traced the lines of her palm as if they held a secret. “Lady Alice, is there something in the air? Do you know something I don’t?”

“I know when to quit. Harry, I hate it when you look at me like that. Sometimes you are very Japanese.”

“Is that so?”

“I think I finally have you figured out. I have your code, Harry. You’re like a crossword puzzle where every tenth word the answer is in Japanese. Maybe that explains Michiko.”

“Maybe.”

“And it wouldn’t matter if I did know something you didn’t. There’s nothing we can do about it now.”

“Who cares? We’ll be oiling each other in a cabana at the Beverly Hills Hotel. It’s not a safari, but it has its charms. Why are you smiling?”

“Harry, it’s a fantasy. You and I were not meant to be with anyone. It’s sheer incompatibility that keeps us together.”

“We’ll give it a shot.”

“Realistically, how long do you think we would last?”

“I give us six months.”

“Beechum will cut me off, I won’t have a penny.”

“Three months.”

“Will you drink heavily and beat me?”

“Like a gong.”

“Like a church bell, an American would say.”

“Backing out?”

“No. I would like you to do me a favor, however, and help your friend Willie before you go.”

“Willie and Iris? I already said I would. What do you care?”

“I like Willie’s stories. If you’re going to help him, do it fast.”

The gondola descended over the ice-cream stand and pedal-car track and a volley of exuberant cheers from the schoolboys watching the battle in the tank. If the naval engagement was ever in doubt, its outcome now was clear. The Japanese fleet plowed at full speed through the water, guns glowing from the fire of their shells, while the American fleet waddled in disorder, stacks pouring charcoal smoke that signified hits in the engine room. Some American warships were so enveloped by smoke that they seemed to be sinking. The scene suggested wholesale horror and confusion, men diving from the decks and trying to outswim burning oil or the suction of a great ship going under and overcrowded lifeboats circled by sharks. As Harry and Alice emerged from the gondola, he didn’t notice anyone in the crowd watching them. Everyone was too captivated by the battle in the tank. The excitement was so overwhelming that some boys couldn’t stand still. They ran with their arms out like torpedo planes or raised imaginary periscopes. The loudspeaker sang, “Across the sea, water-soaked corpses, we shall die by the side of our lord.” The children chanted, “Banzai! Banzai! Banzai!”

ALTHOUGH HARRY WANTED to ditch the gun, he assumed he was being followed. Just to see, he detoured through an arcade specializing in pets. The passageway rang with a mixed chorus of canaries, lovebirds, cockatoos and a nightingale that trilled from a shrouded cage. Kittens, their tails bobbed to prevent them from turning into goblins, mewed in a fruit box. A weasel slunk round and round in a basket. There was only one beetle dealer, with a lean wintertime stock.

“What you want is a stag beetle.” The dealer kept his hands in steady motion so that the beetle, a two-inch monster with antlers, walked from the back of one hand to the other. “There is no better investment in insects. A rhinoceros beetle like yours will drop dead after a single mating. What kind of champion is that? A stag beetle fattens off passion. No? Wait, I have more.” He indicated a cage with a six-inch mantis, a green stiletto. “Do you enjoy the educational sight of a wife eating her husband’s head? No?”

Harry didn’t enjoy that or the sight of two plainclothes police squatting by the fruit box to tease the kittens. Two cops on foot and probably two waiting in a car near his. Forget subtlety.

“Do you have trouble sleeping? Maybe you like the bucolic sound of crickets? I have crickets that are genuine songsters. No, you’re not a country boy. You’re Tokyo-bred, like me.” The beetle dealer kept the treadmill of his hands going while he looked Harry up and down. “Then it comes to this. If sports are your interest and you want your money back tenfold, a stag is your best bet.”

Harry bet on horses, not beetles, not since he was a kid. However, he bought a bamboo beetle cage with a bed of wood flakes. He was trying to leave town, and what did he have now, Harry thought. First a gun. Now a beetle. Terrific.

WHEN WESTERN DANCING was declared unpatriotic, a storage company run by yakuza took over the Asakusa Ballroom and covered its parquet floor with stacks of scenery and flats from the surrounding music halls and theaters. The yakuza specialized in the business of theatrical storage because it was a good excuse for men to hang around doing nothing. The ballroom had also become a refuge for the ne’er-do-wells of wartime society, out-of-work dance instructors practicing to the raspy tango of a gramophone, horseplayers with time on their hands since the racetracks were closed. A midday card game was going when Harry arrived. Taro sat holding a box of his brother’s ashes, and although the sumo filled a pair of chairs and was dressed in yards of rich kimono, he looked undone and deflated.

“All I can think of is my brother,” he told Harry.

“Have you eaten?”

“I couldn’t.”

“Jiro would like you to eat. I think Jiro would like me to eat, too.”

A boy was attending the cardplayers. Harry sent him for noodles from the kitchen next door. The cardplayers kept an eye on Taro and the box. Gamblers were superstitious. Not reverent but easily spooked. They didn’t like anything written in red, because red was the color of call-up notices from the army. They hated the color white because it suggested death, and here Taro had brought a white box with THE REMAINS OF KAGA JIRO written in brushstrokes down the side. A short man in a wasp-waisted suit arrived in a rush as if he’d been summoned. The cardplayers called him over, and seconds later he moved with bouncy strides toward Harry and Taro.

“Tetsu.” Harry gave his old friend a bow.

Tetsu had done well. Providentially too short for the five-foot requirement of the army, he had fulfilled his youthful aspiration to become a yakuza and ran the ballroom game. Not that it was so difficult. The games were raided by police in the same desultory spirit that licensed prostitutes were supposed to study ethics once a week.

“Harry, Taro, good to see you both. Let’s go get something to eat. You like Chinese?”

“The food’s coming,” Harry said.

“Jiro.” Taro indicated the wooden box.

Tetsu said, “I’m sorry. I mean, you must be so proud. Jiro’s ashes? Oh.” He bowed to the box. “All the same, we should go somewhere else. Harry, you understand. It’s Agawa, the old guy. He says the box is disturbing. He says he can’t even count his cards.”

Harry looked over at a player with a gristly neck.

Taro sighed. “Let’s go.”

“Wait. Agawa can play with a tango at his back, but he can’t play when the ashes of a hero are carried in?” Harry did not like to see the deceased slighted or a grieving brother, a sumo no less, diminished. “Hey, Agawa, do you know what tomorrow is?”

“I’m playing a hand, as you can see.”

“What’s tomorrow?”

“Sunday, as any fool knows.” Agawa shared a grin with his friends.

“The date?”

“December seventh.”

“A big day,” Harry said. “Maybe the biggest day in history.”

Agawa went on arranging the cards in his hand. “How is that?”

“Awhile back, a bishop figured out through a careful examination of the Bible that Noah’s flood began on December seventh, 2347 B.C. That’s two thousand three hundred and forty-seven years before the birth of Christ. Tomorrow is the anniversary. In fact, it’s the uh…”

When Harry started counting on his fingers, Agawa said, “The four thousand two hundred and eighty-eighth anniversary.”

“That’s right. Agawa-san, you have the quickest mind here. It sounds like you count just fine.”

Agawa put his cards down. “The entire thing is ridiculous. There was no Noah’s flood, not in Japan. The whole thing is a fairy tale.”

“Isn’t it amazing what people believe?” Harry said. “Fairy tales and superstitions, demons and ghosts. You’re a rational man, Agawa-san, and you wouldn’t mind that our friend Taro brought the ashes of his brother, do you? Thanks.”

Agawa grunted, which Harry took as not necessarily yes or no but at least not violent objection. Harry suspected that two Japanese didn’t need words at all, they could communicate perfectly well with grunts, grimaces, winces, frowns, inhales, exhales, eyes cast down and to the side, brows furrowed with concern or gathered in anger, not to even mention bows.

Tetsu was pleased. Like a traditional yakuza, he hated confrontation. He played with a cigarette lighter, which drew respectful attention to the fact that he missed the little finger of his left hand, had cut it off, actually, to atone for some shame he had brought on his boss. People didn’t know or care what the shame was. Sincere atonement was all. He said, “That was smooth, Harry.”

With the tension broken, the cardplayers came over to commiserate with Taro, acknowledging the white box with that inexpressible combination of pride and regret people felt for those who had sacrificed themselves for the emperor. At the same time they sized up Taro, all but squeezing his arms, because they were sumo fans. Betting on the semi-sacred sport of sumo was illegal except for members of sumo fan clubs, who were expected to be devotees wagering token sums. Naturally, everyone in the ballroom—including Harry—was a member of one sumo fan club or another, and during a tournament, they bet fortunes. It helped that sumo was eminently fixable, particularly now. Food was rationed even at sumo stables, and lower-ranked wrestlers had to survive on the scraps that top-ranked sumos left. Harry had seen young sumos famished after a morning’s workout, wandering the food stalls for handouts, as sad a sight as hippos browsing in a riverbed gone dry.

Goro joined them. He was elegantly dressed, a pickpocket who had married well and no longer dipped but couldn’t resist bad company. He prodded Tetsu. “Show them the latest.”

Tetsu pulled off his jacket and tie and dropped his shirt off his shoulders. His upper body, from his neck to his waist, was continuous tattoos, on his chest a Siberian tiger stepping into a pool defended by an octopus and on his back the image of a smiling Buddha, eyes closed, hands prayerfully together, ignoring monsters and dragons that swarmed on all sides. To Harry, Tetsu looked baptized not in water but in ink. When they were boys, Harry was the one who had accompanied Tetsu to his first tattoo session, performed by a drunk on a bench in Ueno Park with bamboo slivers instead of steel needles. Tetsu twisted now and pointed to his new addition, a goblin creeping around his kidney. The inks were sharp and fresh, the skin puffy and Tetsu’s face betrayed a sweat of tattoo fever.

Harry said, “That’s got to make an impression in the public baths.”

“And women.” Goro spoke like an expert. “Of a certain kind.”

“What do you think old Kato would have thought?” Tetsu asked Harry.

“He would have said you were a walking masterpiece.”

“Yeah? It’s good to see you and Taro. And Jiro, of course.” Tetsu pulled on his shirt. “We’re most of the old gang, four out of six, right? Then there’s Hajime, good riddance, and Gen, way up in the navy.”

Taro climbed out of his funk when the noodles arrived. You had to water a plant and feed a sumo, it was as simple as that, Harry thought. Taro again became a mountain of dignity delicately scented by the wax that stiffened his topknot. As he relaxed, the cardplayers pumped him for information about other sumos. Had this one lost a fingernail? Had that one jammed a toe? The dance instructors dropped the needle on a fresh record and traded places. They moved in silhouette, tangling and untangling their legs. Harry remembered that the first time Oharu had sneaked him into the ballroom, an imitation Rudy Vallee was singing through a megaphone. A dance cost three yen, and men bought a strip of tickets before they were admitted past a velvet rope to a floor where two hundred couples milled under the hypnotic spell of a mirror ball trying out the fox-trot, the waltz, the Bruce. Women in Western gowns sat demurely along the wall while men walked back and forth to exercise their scrutiny. Oharu led Harry up to an empty mezzanine, which had a view of the bandstand and an engineer in a cockpit over the entrance, alternating colored lights and the mirror ball. Reflections raced across the floor. Harry felt them flit across his face. He also noticed that few of the men actually knew how to dance.

“It’s just to hold a woman,” Oharu whispered. “She may be the only woman he’ll ever hold.”

“Except a whore,” Harry pointed out.

“Well, this is nicer. The girls are only paid by the number of tickets they turn in, so they have to be pleasing.”

“How come we’re the only ones up here?”

“The management closed it off. They don’t want the customers sitting, they want them dancing and buying more tickets. Besides, too many things can happen in the dark.”

“Like what?”

“Things. Sometimes a man forces himself on a woman.”

“If anyone tried that on you, I’d stop him.”

“I know you would.”

She had only to brush her lips gently against his cheek and he burned.

TETSU WAS EXPLAINING to Taro and the cardplayers that a small sumo had a natural advantage. “Smaller men have more spirit. It’s concentrated.”

While Tetsu was in an expansive mood, Harry drew him aside and raised the subject of Iris’s travel clearance. The problem was purely bureaucratic, as Harry described it, something that could be resolved in a minute by a phone call to the Foreign Ministry from a respected patriotic group like, say, National Purity. National Purity put patriotism into action, assassinating liberals and moderates, trimming and changing the nature of political discourse. National Purity touched high and low. The same superpatriots who were honored guests at the imperial palace used yakuza to extract protection money from businesses large and small. Harry kept the Happy Paris open not by doing anything as crass as handing money to a bagman, but with generous donations at the shrine of National Purity.

Harry said, “This time I want to meet our patriotic friend at National Purity in person so that I can explain the situation and ask his advice. Then he will make a call to the ministry. Very simple. This is for a German ally, after all. But I want you to go with me, so that when I vouch for the German, you can vouch for me.”

“I don’t know, Harry.”

“There’ll be a donation to your favorite shrine, too.”

“Oh.”

Harry set the time. He considered mentioning the gun. However, now that he’d brought up Iris, he didn’t want to queer the deal. A gun was a red flag; yakuza themselves rarely used guns, and for a civilian to unload one suggested major complications. Why would Hajime go to such trouble to foist a gun on him unless it had been involved in at least a triple homicide? Harry couldn’t forget Hajime smirking through the train window, letting his own gun peek from its holster.

Agawa walked over from the card game. He nodded toward the box next to Taro. “Is everything in there? I know someone who got a box that was empty.”

“Empty?” Taro was alarmed.

“Just saying. It was a shock to the family.”

“That would kill my mother.” Taro picked up the box tentatively. The box was wisteria wood sanded to a satin finish and tied with a white sash. He had carried it to the ballroom but hadn’t tested its heft before.

Agawa said, “There should be an official album of the unit Jiro fought in, along with photos of the emperor, the imperial standard, regimental banner and commanding officers, plus personal snapshots, a map and description of the circumstances in which he died and clippings of his fingernails and hair. And the ashes and pulverized bone, of course, in a stoppered container or a sack.”

“It sounds as if everything is in there.” Taro tipped the box one way and then the other.

“Better be sure,” Agawa said.

“I’m not ready for this, Harry,” Taro said. “I’m not prepared.”

“You’ll have to open it at home,” Agawa said.

Taro set the box on his lap and fumbled with the sash, his big fingers turned to rubber. He lifted the lid as if opening a tomb.

“Everything there?” Agawa asked.

Taro reached in and delicately sorted through the contents. “The album. The album and a little sack for ashes, but the sack is empty.” His face went as white as the box. “That’s all.”

“That’s outrageous,” Agawa said. “You should make a protest.”

“You don’t want to make a protest,” Harry said. “Let’s go.”

“This is going to kill your mother,” Agawa said.

“We’re going.” Harry put the lid back on and helped Taro to his feet.

While Tetsu carried the box, Harry got Taro to the ballroom foyer and set him on a chair, which he sagged over on both sides. Harry sent Tetsu back to keep anyone from following.

The chair trembled under Taro’s weight. He said, “I took the boat away from Jiro, and now I lost his ashes. I should have looked out for him. He was my little brother.”

“By fifteen minutes. He probably kicked you out, he was that sort of person.”

Taro hung his head. “Now to lose his ashes.”

“You didn’t lose Jiro’s ashes.”

“My mother will think so. She’ll tell everyone I deliberately lost them.”

“You didn’t.”

This was a perfect example, Harry thought, of how a tiny woman could make a sumo tread in fear. He looked around at the foyer’s dirty carpet, cloakroom alcove, clouded ashtrays, broken abacus and a cold potbellied stove. Harry opened the box and took out the empty sack.

“What are you doing, Harry?”

“Making things right.”

Before Taro could move, Harry opened the stove trap and, with the shuttle, transferred ash. One scoop half filled the bag. Harry drew the drawstring tight, deposited the sack in the box, wiped his fingers on his pants and knelt a little to bring his eyes directly to Taro’s.

“Now you have the ashes. Now your mother will have peace of mind. You will have peace of mind, too, because you will know that you have done everything possible to make her happy and allow her to pray for him. You have lost him, and now he is found. A good shepherd rejoices more in the one lost sheep he has found than in the hundred that never strayed.”

“You think so?”

“I’m sure of it.” Harry retied the sash and looped it over Taro’s head for carrying.

“I could kill Agawa. It’s good he asked, though.”

“Funny how things work out.”

“How can I thank you?”

“Now that you mention it, I’m presenting a donation to the head of National Purity, who is a famous sumo fan. Why don’t you come and set a patriotic tone?” He gave Taro the time and place. “I’ll be counting on you.”

“Sure, Harry. I’m sorry, I fell apart there for a minute.”

“No harm done. Ready?”

Taro rose to his feet, a full-size sumo again. They got out on the street, and with every step, he was steadier and more impressive, shoulders squared, expression solemn. Once on the Rokku, he and Harry parted ways. Watching Taro stride through the crowd, Harry felt not so much the pride of the good shepherd as he did the satisfaction of a butcher who managed at all times to keep his thumb on the scale.

12

IT WAS ON an evening in April that Gen introduced Harry to the Magic Show. They had met at a new John Wayne movie and afterward strolled like cowboys in a marquee glow. Most naval officers were shorn like sheep, but Gen had managed to hang on to his hair, and in his panama hat, he exuded a style and confidence that made Harry want to hang back and applaud. Gen’s only problem was that he looked more like an actor playing a hero than a real hero. He had been assigned to Operations, and while another officer on the rise might have severed relations with as dubious a character as Harry, it wasn’t in Gen to be careful. Their relationship was too old, too strong, too complicated. Trust and distrust seesawed between them. Gen knew Harry too well, and that went both ways.

Gen consulted his watch from time to time, which meant nothing to Harry until they returned to the Happy Paris and Gen suggested the willow house across the street instead. Through the window slats of the Paris, Harry saw Michiko lean on the jukebox, waiting for him, mouthing some whispery song in a wreath of smoke. At the willow house, a lantern winked a more discreet welcome within an open gate.

“You’re kidding,” Harry said. “You’re drunk.”

“No.” And he wasn’t, Harry realized. Gen was sober. “I have a friend inside. You’d enjoy him.”

“At a geisha party?”

“No geishas. He wants to play cards.”

“There are games all over town.”

“He’s very private. You’d enjoy him. Just meet him, and if you’re not interested, you can leave. Five minutes, Harry.”

From the willow-house gate, a path of stones led across a lawn of moss to an entryway of polished cedar. Sure enough, Harry and Gen had barely left their shoes when, from behind paper panels slid shut, they heard the unmistakable sound of parties in progress: drunken toasts, the stumbling over musical pillows (a version of musical chairs) and the puns and feeble double entendres that passed for jokes. Rich drunks and simpering dolls, that was a geisha party so far as Harry was concerned. The cultural aspect fit into a thimble. The level of entertainment was prehistoric. One girl might sing like a lark, and the next one’s major talent might be tying a cherry stem with her tongue. The proprietor, hunchbacked from bowing, always greeted a customer at the front door. For once he was absent.

Gen led Harry to the room farthest from the street, traditionally the best and quietest accommodation. It was a room Harry sometimes escaped to from the Paris; in turn, he gave geishas a ride home when they were too tipsy to walk. A round window looked out on a softly illuminated garden of bonsai and ferns. A standing screen was decorated with gilded carp swimming across blue silk. There were no geishas now, however, only a short man in a threadbare kimono shuffling cards. He had a deeply lined, tanned and compact body, as if any more weight was baggage. His gray hair was shaved to the nub, and he was missing the middle and index fingers of his left hand. He didn’t rise to greet Harry or pretend to bow but seemed amiable and informal enough.

“I hear you play,” he told Harry.

“Deal them.”

The man dealt the cards facedown for five-card stud, and they played one on one with a one-yen ante just to make it interesting. The man was good; he had discipline, card memory, a sense of the changing odds, a natural poker face and, most important, an amused detachment that allowed him to take the loss or win of a hand as just deserts. It took until two in the morning for Harry to clean him out.

“You see, this is what I mean,” the man told Gen as Harry raked in the final pot. “You can start by putting in just one yen or one ship or one soldier and still lose everything if you don’t know when to leave the table. Leaving the table is not something Japanese are very good at.” He held up his hands for Harry. “Sometimes you even have to leave fingers on the table. I lost two fingers when my own gun blew up. But the geishas here are very nice. The usual charge for a manicure from a geisha is one yen. For me, just eighty sen.”

“Who were you shooting at?”

“Russians. It was war, it was perfectly legal.”

The songs and laughs from other rooms had died and disappeared. Quiet descended on the willow house. Gen had watched the entire poker game without saying a word or even stirring except to empty an ashtray or fetch tea. Everything the older man did, Gen followed with the attention and respect of an altar boy. “I am a terrible customer for geishas,” the man said. “I don’t drink, and I don’t have much to spend, but the geishas humor me nonetheless. I find the back room here restful.” He rubbed his head with embarrassment. “I tried to go home tonight, the first time I’ve been home in months, and I was locked out. My wife had taken the children on vacation, I suppose. So I came here with my loose change and some cards to make my fortune. Unfortunately, I ran into you, and now I have nothing at all.”

“I warned you,” Gen said.

“You were right. I will listen to my junior officers in the future.” The man returned to Harry. “Where did I go wrong?”

“Nowhere special. You just didn’t have enough money, so you let me buy two pots, and then you had to be too aggressive. Then the losses snowballed.”

“That’s so true! You know, there were times when I seriously thought of leaving the sea and becoming a full-time gambler. Not cards. Roulette. I had a very encouraging experience once at Monte Carlo. Also I like dice.”

“We could try that.” Harry fished a pair from his jacket.

“Oh, I don’t I think I should play with someone who carries dice just in case.”

“I extend credit.”

“Even more dangerous. Lieutenant, your friend is as good as advertised.” The man rubbed his hands together. “Excellent!”

From his corner, Gen beamed with pride.

“Do you have a system?” the man asked Harry.

“No, I let the other man have a system, and I try to figure it out.”

“You bet on anything?”

“Cards, cars, dogs, horses, pigeons, about anything.”

“The lieutenant told me about the car race at Tamagawa.”

Tamagawa was a track on the way to Yokohama.

“They have good races,” Harry said. “Bentleys, Bugattis, Mercedeses.”

“Is it true that you entered a car with an airplane engine?”

“A Curtis thirteen-cylinder engine.”

“It stayed on the ground?”

“Barely, but it won.”

“That’s what matters. I wish I could have seen that.”

Gen said, “Some of the other competitors were upset.”

“Too bad,” the man said. “The losing side is always upset.” He returned to Harry. “But you are also a businessman with an interest in oil.”

“I help the government develop sources of oil,” Harry said.

“From…?”

“Shale, mostly, but also looking at alternative sources.”

“What does that mean?”

There was something about the man that suggested bullshit wouldn’t do. “Pine trees.”

The man grinned in wonder. “As a boy, I understand, you sold cat skins. I suppose you will be squeezing them for oil, too.”

“Let’s say Japan doesn’t have the usual sources of oil.”

“You don’t have to tell me.” The man’s smile folded. “I used to drink, a little. Then I encountered the most sobering sight in my life. It was a Texas oil field. Oil rigs as far as you could see in any direction. One Texas oil field that outproduced all of Japan. I visited assembly lines in Detroit and skyscrapers in New York City, but the last thing I see when I close my eyes at night is that oil field. Whenever I mention oil, the army says not to worry because we Japanese have Yamato spirit. Yamato spirit, Yamato spirit, that’s all the army knows. They say Japan is so different, so superior, we will necessarily win. You know, I have seen the cherry trees in Washington, and they are just as beautiful. The army talks about the incomparable Japanese character. Well, you can tell a lot about character and intelligence by how a man approaches a woman. A Japanese goes up to a woman and demands, �Give me a lay.’ Even a prostitute would say no. An American shows up with flowers and presents and gets what he wants. So much for moral superiority, and so much for results. The army can have Yamato spirit, give me oil.”

The man spoke with such intensity that it took Harry a moment to find the air to answer. “I can’t get you Texas.”

“No, I understand, but it seems to me that you have exactly the sort of skeptical eye and varied experience we need for a certain situation. You are unique. The lieutenant was right, you are just the man.”

Harry didn’t know how flattered to be. “For what?”

“Do you do card tricks?”

“I just play cards, I’m not a magician.”

“You know magicians?”

“Dozens. Magicians with doves, rabbits, scarves, saws, feats of mental telepathy, whatever you want.”

“Are you free tomorrow night?”

“For a magic show?”

The man developed a smile. “That’s the problem, we don’t know quite what it is. It’s magic or a miracle. I’m hoping you will tell us.”

A NAVY CAR with an anchor insignia picked Harry up at the Paris the following night. Gen was inside behind window curtains. He wore navy blues, and his easygoing manner of the previous evening was replaced by a somber mood.

“Where’s our friend with the cards?” Harry asked.

“He’ll be there. No names,” Gen warned Harry.

“Whatever you say.”

It didn’t matter. Harry knew the player’s name. Anyone who read a newspaper or saw newsreels knew the dour face and blunt manner of the commander in chief of the Combined Fleet. Although no names had been exchanged, Harry had recognized Yamamoto as soon as the admiral shuffled the deck of cards with the famous eight fingers instead of ten. Harry also understood that the meeting had been engineered for invisibility, at midnight in the back room of a willow house with no witnesses but the loyal acolyte Gen. Could Harry claim that he had even been introduced to Yamamoto? No. That was okay. A lot of people didn’t want to be associated with Harry.

Gen said, “This is a very sensitive situation.”

“You mean your career is on the line. Magic or miracle, what is that supposed to mean? The Great Man has looked me over and approved, but I’m still kept in the dark. Give me a clue.”

“You have to see it to believe it.”

“That’s a good clue. Are we talking about the resurrection? Water to wine? A burning bush?”

“On a par.”

“On a par? Wow. Like parting the sea and just marching where you want to go?”

“Sort of. This is very big, but…” Gen lowered his voice. “But there is also a risk of embarrassment.”

“Losing face?”

“Not face. Enormous, disastrous embarrassment.”

That sounded intriguing to Harry, but Gen shook his head to indicate the end of the conversation. South of the palace, the driver swung into an alley behind the Navy Ministry and stopped. Gen studied the shadows, then rushed Harry out of the car and down a flight of stairs as if delivering a prostitute. Inside, they followed a trail of dusty lights through a tunnel of steam and water pipes to a door that admitted them to a basement hall of office doors. Harry wondered who would be working at one in the morning. Someone was, judging by the sound of voices and haze of light down the hall. Gen went almost on tiptoe and, when they were nearly on top of the voices, slipped Harry though a door into what was more a tight space than a proper room, a catchall crammed with scales, sterilizing trays, bedpans. At eye level was an inset pane of glass.

Gen whispered, “On the other side, it’s a mirror. This used to be a medical clinic where we examined pilots. Sometimes that demanded discreet observation.”

Harry observed a room dominated by a metal table supporting a tank of water about eight feet wide and four feet high, a good-size aquarium that contained, instead of sand and fish, six bottles of blue glass. Each bottle was sealed and connected via an overhead electrical line to a battery big enough for a submarine. It had to be like moving a piano to get it in. V-shaped wands wrapped in copper wire stood around the tank, and over it hung a copper sphere. A small but impressive audience had been gathered: four navy officers, no grade less than a commander, and two unhappy civilians. Harry noticed a couple of petty officers with pistols standing at the door. He also saw Yamamoto, with so many rings around his sleeves they looked as if he had dipped his cuffs in gold. The uniform seemed to weigh on him, and his attention, like everyone else’s, was anxiously focused on a gaunt man in a white lab coat jotting numbers from a bank of gauges individually wired to the copper wands. Welder’s goggles hung around everyone’s neck. By Harry’s watch, five minutes elapsed before the man in the lab coat raised his head and declared. “Progress, definite progress.”

“Progress in what?” Harry asked Gen. “What is he doing?”

Gen couldn’t get the words out right away. “He’s making oil.”

“What do you mean?”

“He’s turning water into oil.”

Harry actually took a step back. He wasn’t dazzled by much, but this was blinding. “Water into oil?”

“You can smile, but I’ve seen him do it.”

“I don’t think even God tried that. Water and wine, yes; oil, no. You realize it’s impossible.”

“Opinion is divided,” Gen granted. “The program is secret.”

“I bet. What’s the researcher’s name?”

“Ito. Dr. Ito.”

While Ito adjusted controls, Gen explained what the doctor had explained to him, that the table of the elements was neither fixed nor limited and that through “electric remapping,” their atomic bonds could be broken and recombined. Ito was in the middle of mapping the transitional states of elements and, in recognition of the national need, had diverted his talents and discoveries toward the transformation of water into oil. From their faces, Harry saw who in the room bought it. At least one civilian was visibly suppressing professional outrage, but there were hopefuls and believers among the navy. And it wasn’t a bad show. Ito was dramatically thin, with lank hair overhanging a pale forehead and eyes hollow from lack of sleep. His coat was dirty, his hands filthy; everything about him spelled genius. He worked on the run in rubber overshoes, resetting dials, repositioning the copper wands, stopping only to cough in a tubercular way. In a hoarse voice, he said, “Perhaps that’s all for tonight.”

Yamamoto said, “Doctor, would you please try one more time? It’s so important.”

Ito seemed to gather inner strength. “One more.”

He pulled on rubber gauntlets as he moved to an oversize switch. At his lead, everyone in the room pulled on goggles with smoked lenses, and Ito seemed to wait until the entire room had stopped breathing. Harry thought that only an audience brought up on Kabuki’s overheated posing would swallow Ito for a minute.

“Take your positions.”

There was a general shuffling onto a rubber mat. Before Harry figured out what that was about, Ito slapped the switch handle down and the tank water turned a vivid blue. As Ito turned up the voltage, white bolts of electricity ran up the two arms of the wands, flickered back and forth, joined hands from wand to wand, then arced the tank and shot up to the overhead sphere so that tank and table were domed by an electrical jellyfish that sizzled and popped and smelled of singed wool. Gen and Harry threw up their arms to shade their eyes from light that flooded the cubicle they were in. Ito cranked a transformer, and the protoplasm threatened to spread tentacles and float from the table. It was a view of the forces of the universe, an electrical cauldron, a glimpse of Creation itself. Waves rolled on an oscilloscope screen. Ito circled the tank with a small neon tube that lit, faded, glowed again. His long hair stood on end and twisted and wrestled first toward one wand and then the other. Electricity lapped like fire up his arms, yet Ito moved with the assurance of a sorcerer. When he threw the switch off, Harry felt half blinded. Those who had been in the room with the tank looked as shaken as survivors of a lightning bolt.

“Not bad,” Harry said. “Electrical arcs, sparks, everything but a hunchback running around with a bucket of brains.”

Yamamoto stepped off the mat and approached the tank. He laid on his hands, minus the two fingers he’d lost pursuing Russians. Yamamoto again ready to risk all. As if his touch were a signal, a bottle stirred. It leaned, lifted clear and steadily rose to the surface, where Ito caught it, snipped its wire and set it by a rack of test tubes. Of course, Ito didn’t unstop the bottle himself.

“Professor Mishima, you are such an eminent scientist. Would you do me the honor?”

The smaller, rounder civilian huffed. “This is ridiculous, this is not science.”

“Please,” Yamamoto said.

Mishima broke the wax seal with a penknife and poured the contents into a tube, reserving a last drop to roll around his fingertip and taste.

“What is it?” Ito asked as if they were the closest of colleagues.

The professor wiped his mouth. “Oil.”

“What was in the bottle originally?”

“Water.”

“Your conclusion?” Yamamoto asked.

“It’s preposterous. You cannot change water to oil with a little lightning, or else the oceans would be oil.”

Ito was unperturbed. “That is salt water. This is very different water.”

“You cannot defy the laws of nature.”

“We are rewriting the laws of nature.”

“Impossible…” The professor tried, but he had lost, trumped by a card from his own hand.

“Perhaps this is the Yamato spirit we have heard so much about,” Yamamoto said. “But, Dr. Ito, only one bottle out of six seems to have changed.”

“Yes, we need more research.”

The doctor went out of Harry’s range of vision for a minute and returned with a new bottle of water. With great scruple, he turned his back while a vice admiral wrote on a cork. Then Ito took the cork back, immediately stopped the bottle and lit a sealing candle, the flame a tiny footlight to his face while he turned the bottle to catch the dropping wax.

“We need production,” Yamamoto said.

“First research.”

“With a deadline,” the admiral insisted.

Ito excused himself to cough, and Harry saw the spots of red bloom in the doctor’s handkerchief. Ito was sickly enough to begin with, and all at once he seemed exhausted, as if the lightning had been drawn from his own being. A chair was found for him to sit on, while coughs racked his body. Yamamoto was forced to relent, but he raised his eyes directly toward the glass that Harry watched through.

“What do you think?” asked Gen.

“Wonderful,” Harry said. “Lightning bolts, levitation, transmigration. I loved it.”

GEN BROUGHT DIAGRAMS to the Happy Paris at noon the following day. Michiko sorted records and watched sullenly, like a cat jealous of attention.

“You and Harry went with geishas again last night?” she asked Gen.

“I told you,” Harry said. “The first was a card game.”

“And last night?”

“A con.” Harry spread the plans across a table. “No, more than that, it’s the most beautiful con I’ve ever seen. This is the mother lode, this is magic.”

“That’s all you’re going to say?” Michiko asked.

“My lips are sealed.”

“I’m going out, Harry. I’m going to go spend all your money and then find a better lover.”

“Hope he has a dick that rings like a bell.”

“I’m not coming back.”

“Have fun.”

Gen shuddered as the door slammed behind her. “Kind of tough.”

“No Shirley Temple,” Harry said. “Have you slept?”

“I had coffee.” True enough, the officers of the Japanese navy started each day with coffee and scrambled eggs. Harry’s sympathy dried up.

Besides the diagrams, Gen had had the water and oil tested. The water was two parts hydrogen, one part oxygen, and the oil was the equivalent of Rising Sun crude.

“Imagine if we could produce that,” Gen said. “If we could get past the experimental stage. There were six bottles. Five bottles failed to change.”

“Failure is important. Adds mystery and stalls for time. The navy might want to move to production, but production would entail real amounts of oil and a staff of genuine technicians. No, a con is much happier with endless, expensive research. How much is this costing the navy now?”

“With gold water filters and electrical gear, ten thousand yen a week.”

“That’s worth stringing out. And anytime the navy presses for results, Ito can play Camille and start to cough to death. If I were you, I would have the doctor’s handkerchief searched for a little vial of red liquid.”

“You’re sure this is a hoax? He’s fooling real scientists.”

“Well, I’ve been to the Universal back lot, and it looks like the doctor bought half of Frankenstein’s lab. The wands are called Jacob’s ladders, and the sphere is a Van de Graaff generator, wonderful for effects. The electricity is all static, perfectly harmless as long as you aren’t grounded. You better tell me more about Ito.”

Ito had been born in Kyoto, but his family moved first to Malaya and then London, where he claimed to have studied chemistry and physics at university level and done research with British Petroleum. Who could say? Records from England were unavailable, burned by the Luftwaffe. Ito had recently returned to his homeland to study in solitude at Cape Sata, the southern tip of Japan. There, on a cliff overlooking the restless sea, he had achieved insight into the very nature of atomic structure. Man could split the atom. New elements were being created all the time. Water and oil were different states of electrons in flux. Rather than take the slow, cautious route of academic publication, he offered his services directly to the nation. And the navy ate it up. How could they not? Harry thought. With a reliable source of oil, they could rule the Pacific. Without oil, the Combined Fleet would sooner or later sit in port, steel hulks covered in gull shit.

“There are plenty of magicians in Asakusa. I’ll ask around,” Harry said.

“No. This is secret, we’re not even supposed to mention his name.”

“Then let me ask about the trick. I won’t mention oil.”

Gen laid his arm across the table. “No, these are for you alone. No one else can see anything.”

Harry knew that meant that no one else should know he was involved with a navy project.

“Just you,” Gen insisted. “You think Ito is not a real scientist?”

“I think I’ve seen him. It was years ago, at the Olympic Bar in Shanghai. I just noticed him out of the corner of my eye. He was working the tables. He was a close-up artist, card tricks, disappearing coins, and he was bald and dressed like a monk and looked completely different.”

“That’s it? Someone you barely noticed in a bar years ago? Who looked different?”

“And the cough and the bloody handkerchief when the British grabbed him for lifting wallets.”

“Well, I think we have to be more exact than that.”

Gen had listed the preparations of the experiment: the elaborate filling of the bottles with water, how witnesses marked the corks with private words or numbers that Ito didn’t even see before he inserted electrical wire, sealed the cork with molten wax and set the bottle in the tank of water. Gen had listed each of Ito’s steps: safety procedures of the goggles and mat, positioning of the copper wands and dialing in voltage at each to “orchestrate the electrical field.”

“Does the transformation usually take one jolt?” Harry asked.

“No, it might take days before it takes effect, but once the bottles are in the tank, they can’t be touched. In fact, you’d be electrocuted if you tried. Besides, guards are in the examining room around the clock.”

“Why blue bottles?” They looked like medicine bottles to Harry.

“Ito says they filter harmful rays.”

“But you can’t see whether the contents are oil or water.”

“Yes, you can. That’s when the bottle rises.”

“Well, there’s your answer.”

“You don’t believe any of it?”

“Neither do you, or you wouldn’t have brought me in. Yamamoto can’t be fooled, not really.”

“But—”

“I know.” Harry had to smile. “It’s like the old joke. A woman brings her husband to the psychiatrist. She says, �Doctor, my husband is crazy. He thinks he’s a chicken.’ The psychiatrist says, �Leave him with me, I’ll cure him in a week.’ She says, �But we need the eggs.’ That’s the navy. You know this is crazy, but you need the oil.”

It occurred to Harry that Yamamoto had an especially good chance of coming out of the affair looking like a fruitcake. Since he was the sanest man in the navy, and the strongest opponent to war, the army would seize on anything to discredit him. Harry was not surprised that he’d had no more direct contact with the admiral. That was the beauty of using a gaijin; he could always be disavowed.

Gen had diagrammed the room like elevations. Along the east wall were medical cabinets, carboys of water, anatomical charts. North: cabinets, scale, door and transom, table of rubber boots, gloves and smoked goggles, eye chart and optical equipment. West: crutches, copper coils, VD chart, sink, instructions for winding cloth around the midriff to counteract the G-force of a tight turn. South: wheelchairs, cabinets, the observation mirror, more carboys and a row of bottles.

“But imagine,” Gen said. “Imagine if we could transform water into oil. Nothing could stop us, Harry. We could be a force for good, for progress.”

“Gen, not that it makes any difference to me, but I’ve seen progress. I’ve seen mounds of progress. I’ve seen the streets run with progress, I’ve seen progress shoved into pits and stacked to the sky and burned like logs. Progress is overrated.”

“But you’ll help?”

“What are friends for?”

Gen laid his head on a table and closed his eyes while Harry looked at the diagrams. With cons, the simplest answer was best, you didn’t have to go to Harvard to know that. Harry discounted Ito’s elaborate procedure of marking and sealing corks as hokum. As for the electric lights and bangs? A hell of a show. All that really mattered was the apparent change of water to oil in six blue bottles in a tank of water. Oil was lighter than water, which was why a bottle floated when its contents were supposedly transformed by Ito’s bolts of lightning. But a fine string could raise a bottle, and the change of contents could have taken place anytime. And not even six had to rise, all the con needed was one bottle to maintain excitement because this was an audience who wanted, in spite of its intelligence, to believe what a magician showed them. Houdini once made an elephant disappear in Madison Square Garden. He showed the crowd the elephant standing face out, then drew the curtain, and when he reopened it, the elephant was gone. All Houdini had done was stand the elephant sideways behind a drop of black velvet. As simple as that, because people wanted to believe.

There were other possibilities. The steadfast guards might be bribed. The irate Professor Mishima might have been a shill. That got complicated, however, and Harry focused more and more on Dr. Ito’s lab coat as the most likely source of the “blood” the doctor coughed up at will and as a blind for a last-minute switch. Between the fireworks and smoked goggles and his voluminous lab coat, Ito could switch a case of beer.

At four in the afternoon, Harry woke Gen. Kondo had started setting up the bar, briskly wiping glasses. From outside came the street calls of sake vendors and fortune-tellers.

“You can’t cheat an honest man.”

Gen sat up and rubbed his eyes. “What are you talking about?”

“You can’t cheat an honest man. Do you know what that means, college boy?”

“Yes,” Gen said.

“No, you don’t. It means an honest man can afford to be objective, he doesn’t care one way or the other, so he’s hard to fool. A mark, on the other hand, wants something for nothing. He wants the pea under the shell, his share of a lost wallet, a tip on a horse, oil for water. His objectivity is already blown, he’s bought in. And because the game itself is dishonest, he can’t go crying to the police when he’s cheated of what he hoped to steal. Or to God because you can’t change water into aviator fuel. Have you got some dress whites?”

THAT NIGHT, Harry alone slipped behind the observation mirror as Gen joined the band of witnesses. The group was entirely navy, which Harry took as a sign that scientific quibbles were on the verge of being totally ignored. With Yamamoto present, there was enough gold braid in the room for a bellpull. Only one officer was in dress whites, and that was Gen. All eyes, of course, were on Dr. Ito and the six blue bottles in the water tank.

The emaciated doctor looked as if he had spent the day under a mushroom. He did cast a spell. Officers who generally believed only in six-inch armor hung on every word. Harry concentrated on what Ito did: the restless stride around the tank, the long hands and deft fingers, the flapping laboratory coat. Everyone had pulled on dark goggles, and Ito was moving toward the switch when Gen begged to borrow his lab coat. “I’m concerned about sparks that might burn my jacket. It’s the only one I own. Would you mind very much?”

The senior officers were appalled, all but Yamamoto, who looked impartially curious.

Ito hesitated. He had the ability to write amazement on his face. “You need my lab coat?”

“Yes.” That was what Harry had told Gen to say.

“In that case.” Ito shrugged off the coat and handed it to Gen, then continued in shirtsleeves and threw the switch.

Luminous lines of energy filled the room, pulsing back and forth from wand to sphere over the blue bed of the water tank and the dark blue bottles that trembled within. As Ito modulated the voltage, the lines spread like a hypnotic sea of rolling waves, like the view, perhaps, from Sata, where he had first glimpsed the fluid forces of nature. When he shut off the power, one bottle had already risen to the surface. Ito scooped out the bottle and elected Gen to break the seal, verify the mark on the cork and identify the contents. Gen’s face burned with shame down to his white collar.

“It’s oil.”

“You’re positive?”

“Yes, Doctor.”

“Then may I have my coat?” As he pulled the coat on, Ito fell against the tank and began coughing up blood. He waved his hand like a swimmer going under. “No more experiments this week. I cannot proceed with such suspicion, the strain is too much.”

The C in C averted his eyes from the disgrace of his lieutenant.

AT THREE in the morning, Harry and Gen got back to the Happy Paris to salute the end of Gen’s career. Harry brought a bottle of Scotch from the bar while Gen smoked a cigarette as if he were chewing on a nail.

“Sorry, Gen. I guess it wasn’t the lab coat.”

“Wasn’t the coat? Wasn’t the coat? Harry, you’ve ruined me. I can’t face those officers tomorrow.”

“Technically speaking, tomorrow is today. Banzai!” Harry raised his glass.

“Banzai!” Gen threw the drink back. “One commander said I had embarrassed the entire navy. He suggested a letter of resignation.”

“You were doing what Yamamoto asked you to do.”

“No. I was doing what you told me to do. How could you be so sure about the coat?”

“It seemed logical. I figured, forget the light show, he’s just switching bottles.”

“We mark the cork. It’s the same cork when we put the bottle into the water and when we pull it out, so it’s the same bottle. Now what?”

“I don’t know, I’m not a scientist. Maybe he’s really doing it.”

“Water to oil?”

“What do I know? Scientists are doing all sorts of stuff, synthetic this and that. I guess you have a real Einstein on your hands.”

“A Japanese Einstein.” Gen laughed. “And I’ll go down in history as a fool.”

“You and me.”

“Harry, you won’t go down in history at all. How could you say take away his lab coat? You gambled, and I’m the one who paid. If I were a samurai, I’d kill myself. No, I’d kill you first. If I had a gun, I’d shoot you right now.”

“Water to oil. One of the pivotal moments in science, like the first electric bulb, that’s exciting.”

“And now you say he’s really doing it.”

“It looks that way. He puts water in a bottle and takes oil out.”

“I know, I was there.”

Now that Harry thought about it, he himself wasn’t, not for everything. Ito had moved out of Harry’s vision to fill the bottle. “He didn’t use the sink tap. Where did he get the water?”

“He siphoned it.”

“Why? A sink is easier.” Harry remembered the diagrams of the room and the big glass carboys of water. “That’s a lot of effort when a sink is right there. It’s distilled water? Filtered water?”

“It’s from Fuji. The water in the carboys is from a sacred spring on Mount Fuji, it’s the only water Ito will use.”

“Sacred water?”

“Yes.”

Harry took a deep breath and raised his arms. “Praise the Lord! I feel my heart leap and the veils part. I hate to admit it, but I was starting to doubt myself. I’m sane again. Oh, it’s a scam, definitely a scam.”

“How?”

“I don’t know. I have no idea. Ito is a better magician than I am. I do know that for con games, holy water is the best kind. Now maybe you’ll let me talk to other magicians.”

“I can’t, Harry. You were my shot.”

In his rumpled whites, Gen looked like a laundry bag. He was the football hero stopped on the one-yard line, the movie star who’d lost his script, the aviator out of gas. He was no longer in the game, in the picture or in the air, and he couldn’t understand why. Handsome had gotten him only so far, which wasn’t far enough. Harry had seen it before, this capacity of Gen’s to lose all confidence, implode and go inert.

“Harry?” Michiko came in the door with Haruko. Both were in chic new outfits, hats and shoes, Haruko’s, Harry suspected, a copy of Michiko’s. “We were at Haruko’s for a day and a half, waiting for you to come looking for me.”

“And I was going to, as soon as Gen and I were done. I was very worried.”

Seeing Gen low raised Michiko’s spirits; she generally treated him as a usurper of Harry’s interest, and he treated her the same. She showed Harry a small blue pharmacy bottle of laudanum from her purse. “I have enough here that I will never have to think about you again.”

Harry didn’t take the threat seriously. Michiko was more the hand-grenade type. “Haruko’s was the first place I was going to look.”

“You could have called.”

“I should have. I’ve been thinking about you. I really have been. Missed you.” He turned the jukebox on low. The plastic canopy took on a pearly hue. An arm laid a disc on the turntable, and a needle slipped into a groove while Harry’s hand slid into the small of Michiko’s back. Blue moon, you saw me standing alone / Without a dream in my heart / Without a love of my own. She was one of the few Japanese girls who knew how to dance, knew that sinuous was better than stiff and that the hips should be involved just so. He touched a certain point between two vertebrae, and her head settled on his shoulder. “You look agonizingly beautiful, you really do.” Her right hand rested in his left, bottle and all, his thumb on the underside of her wrist.

When Haruko tried to get Gen to dance, he brushed her hand from his shoulder.

“Gen is feeling a little low.” Harry said.

“Gen is always low,” murmured Michiko.

Haruko said to Gen, “Maybe I can cheer you up. You can call me sometime. I have a phone.”

“Imagine that, her own phone. Haruko has an admirer at the telephone exchange,” Harry told Gen. “But she’s nuts about you, always has been.”

“What would cheer you up?” Haruko asked.

Gen said, “I’m just not in the mood.”

“When is he?” asked Michiko. “Gen, when are you in the mood? Are you ever in the mood, Gen?”

“Don’t pick on him.” Harry said.

“But I want to pick on him. What kind of lover are you, Gen?”

“Not your kind.”

“Definitely not, I’d say. Absolutely not.”

“Ssh.” Harry put his finger to Michiko’s lips and took up her hand again. You knew just what I was there for / You heard me saying a prayer for / Someone I really could care for.

He felt how cool and delicate her fingers were around the bottle and how nubby the surface of the bottle was. They took another turn around the jukebox, but Harry’s mind was already moving in a different direction.

“What now, Harry?” Michiko asked.

Harry had the pharmacy bottle. He set it beside the bottle of Scotch in front of Gen, so smartly that Haruko jumped.

“What do you see?” Harry asked.

Gen wrested his glare from Michiko and refocused. “Two bottles.”

“High-class Johnnie Walker bottle. Cheap blue bottle.”

“Yes.”

“Wake up, what’s the difference?”

“Smooth and clear. Blue and crude.”

Blue glass recycled from old sake bottles, Harry thought. Glass removed too fast from the blowpipe, a fact that could save Gen’s skin, to say nothing of his commission and fancy dress whites. “What makes it crude?”

“Bubbles.”

“Say it again, Lieutenant.”

Gen sat back. His chin and shoulders rose. “Bubbles.”

•     вЂў     вЂў

BUBBLES WERE the answer.

While there were no experiments, Gen had draftsmen secretly draw all four sides of each blue bottle in the water tank and in the examining room, taking care to pinpoint every bubble in the glass, a pattern that was each bottle’s “fingerprint.” At the next Magic Show, Dr. Ito transformed not one but two bottles of water into oil. However, when the sketches were compared, it was plain that, while the specially marked stoppers might be the same, the bottles containing oil were not—by the evidence of their own “prints”—the bottles of water originally placed in the tank. At which point, the guards confessed to being bribed for turning a blind eye and tried to shoot themselves with their own handguns. Gen got the credit for exposing the subterfuge, and Ito went off with the police.

The main thing was that Harry had learned how paranoid and crazy the navy was on the subject of oil. By December, eight months later, when he altered shipping ledgers in Yokohama and created a tank farm in Hawaii out of thin air, he figured the navy had only itself to blame.

13

OHARU WAS A perfect model, because her expression was as blank as paper. Kato would turn out a woodblock print of her posed by a teapot and brazier, an elegant kimono with a snow-circle pattern wrapped tight around her middle and loose at the neck, her hair piled in three tiers and pierced by a gilded comb and tortoiseshell pin. The first impression the print gave was of a woman lost in thought. The viewer noticed the striped shadows cast by the bars of a prostitute’s window. Steam spilling from the pot, suggestive of opportunities missed. In her sleeve, Oharu’s hand crushing an empty pack of Golden Bats. Only then would the viewer see by the context—not as in a single picture but almost as in the repeated images of a film—a woman whose pride had chased away her clients and now, at day’s end, the sun sinking into a red haze over the licensed quarter, had no prospects or cigarettes left when regrets were all too late.

Or not. The evening offered other patrons. The next print was of Oharu in a boat, surrounded by a constellation of fireflies that lit the water’s surface. She wore a fishnet-pattern kimono, and her hair was slightly disheveled, her mouth slack and tipsy. All that could be seen of the man she was with was a sleeve of army green. The sleeve of her kimono trailed as she stared at a reflection of the moon. In the faintly glimmering lights, she seemed to melt into the water, and the moon that floated in it could have been her own pale face. It was, the young Harry thought, the face of a woman who had surrendered everything.

But no, that was the next print. The model was not Oharu but Chizuko, the small dancer Harry had seen changing into a ballerina’s tutu on his first visit to backstage. Her hair, cut short as a schoolgirl’s, cupped her broad face. Kato had depicted her standing in the snow, dressed in a red, slightly soiled kimono, barefoot in stilted clogs, a paper peony in her hair and a rolled tatami mat slung across her back. The mat was the trademark of a “sparrow,” a prostitute with the coarsest sort of clientele. Although she was younger than Oharu, Chizuko’s eyes returned the viewer’s gaze with blunt directness. Her cheeks and her feet were flushed from the cold, and despite the snowflakes that swirled around her, Harry could feel her heat.

“You take them too seriously,” Kato said. He and Harry were wrapping up the prints amid the drop cloths, paints and easels of his studio.

“They’re only pictures. Oharu attracts one sort of customer and Chizuko another, they have different appeals. The customer tells me what he wants to see, and that’s what I give him. A good lesson for you, Harry, give the customer what he wants.”

“But the print of Chizuko isn’t like the others. There’s only one copy. You ordered the printer to smash the blocks.”

“That’s my agreement with the customer. It’s a very private issue. That’s why it’s important that you exercise discretion when you deliver it. You understand discretion, don’t you, Harry?”

On this particular run, Gen went along. At his insistence, they stopped at a teahouse so he could see the prints. He had been as infatuated with Chizuko as Harry was with Oharu, and the image of her as the lowest form of prostitute had the same impact it had for Harry.

Harry explained, “It’s just a picture, Kato says. It doesn’t mean anything.”

Gen wanted to tear the print in half but settled for watching Harry deliver it to a ground-floor apartment with pots of bamboo at the entryway. The door was opened by a tall, handsome man wearing a boater, white shirt and slacks as if about to go rowing in spite of the cold weather. He took delivery without a word, but Harry recognized him as the army officer who had been with Chizuko to the movie house.

“Did he invite you in?” Kato asked when Harry returned.

“No.”

“Good. If he ever does ask you in, think up some excuse.”

“Why?”

“Because I don’t think you’d do, Harry.” Kato stepped back from his painting, a view of the Seine, to glance at Harry. “You’re not beautiful enough.”

Harry’s interest was piqued. From the occasional word dropped by Kato or Chizuko, Harry learned the customer was a rich idler, an army officer, a noble, a self-made man. Kato tended to denigrate while Chizuko embellished. Whichever, the customer ordered an unusual number of prints. A tank rolling through shell bursts. Fabled swordsmen dicing up bandits, tigers, whales. Others more macabre: a treetop swarm of winged monkeys. A woman crucifying her lover in the dark of a cave. A demon suspending a pregnant woman upside down the better to remove her liver.

Kato put more and more trust in Harry. He could send Harry to the printer to bring back a fan print, mirror print or indigo, secure in the knowledge that Harry would select the right one. Besides, on rainy winter days or during Tokyo’s humid summer, it was much easier to have the boy run errands while Kato devoted his time to copies of Degas, Renoir, Monet. Kato produced his imitations for himself, not for sale. Harry would return to see Kato squeezing tubes of oil paints, glossy worms of cadmium yellow, ocher and carnelian that he daubed onto the canvas. Harry was a boy off the street, how could he tell the artist that his Japanese prints had grace and life and definition and that his French art was mud and that French flowers looked like frosting? In the meanest Japanese portrait was the dignity of a straw hat, umbrella, kimono. In comparison, French nudes looked stripped and awkward, with thick hams of pink and green. Also, French artists always seemed to be slumming. In Japanese prints, prostitutes were appreciated like royalty and heroes were made from actors, wastrels and gamblers.

Kato paused in midstroke. He was painting a blue cathedral. Blue speckled his hands, shoes, beret.

“Do you plan to be a missionary, Harry?”

“No.”

“If you stay in Japan, you should think about becoming a professional gambler. It suits your personality, and the Japanese are almost as fond of gamblers as they are of samurai. I’ll get you some dice.”

“I have dice.”

“See, you’re halfway there. Tell me about your parents. Why the American compulsion to make everyone else like them? And their Japanese? They don’t understand that Japanese is spoken best when it’s not spoken at all. You understand, Harry, because you are a thief, and thieves are good observers. You’ll never be Japanese, but I would bet that in a dark room you could fool anyone.”

It was true. On sultry August evenings, Harry would go walking with Oharu between shows and entertain her by imitating vendors, beating an empty sake tub like a drum and calling in a high-pitched, nasal voice, “Clogs mended, clogs mended!” or blowing a toy bugle and singing, “Tofu! Soft-as-a-baby’s-bottom tofu!” Up and down the street, housewives appeared at their doors with money in their hands. Oharu covered her laugh with her hand until she and Harry turned the corner to the theaters of the Rokku, their dominion, their part of Asakusa. Posters of the latest Hollywood epics lined the way, but what Harry liked most was the reflection in the poster case of him and Oharu strolling by, her sinuous skirt against a background of mincing kimonos, her half-moon eyebrows blandly taking in the world, her hand on Harry’s arm as if they were the Rokku’s crème de la crème. Fantasies of how he might become Oharu’s paramour and protector flitted through Harry’s mind all the time. If he could make her laugh, he could make her love him. If he rescued her from some sort of danger, then she would look at him in a whole new light. But she was fearless and needed rescuing from no one, and he understood that part of his attraction for Oharu was that she couldn’t take him seriously.

Kato had given Harry a print to deliver when Oharu asked him to see a matinee of a Chaplin film with her. Gen knew the address and took the print in Harry’s stead. The film was hilarious, Charlie in a department store, running down the up escalator and up the down escalator while the Movie Man sat before the screen and delivered a thoroughly superfluous “Up, up, up! Down, down, down!” Oharu rested her hand lightly on Harry’s, and throughout the film, he stole glances at it and debated whether to turn his hand and hold hers or put his lips to the pale column of her throat. He did neither. Decorum was strictly maintained in movie houses. Where aisles were lit, ushers were required to wear underpants, and houselights were never dim enough to encourage physical intimacies in the audience. What stopped Harry, however, wasn’t rules but fear. He was contemptuous of cowards and didn’t understand the paralysis that came over him around Oharu. He could tease and joke with her, but anything serious caught in his throat.

It wasn’t until Oharu left to change for her own show at the Folies that Harry realized Gen had not returned to the movie as they’d agreed. Hours had passed. By virtue of his height and looks, Gen usually stood out, but Harry didn’t find him on the Rokku, in Asakusa Park or on the temple grounds. He visited Gen’s house, the card game at the aquarium, their favorite café. Gen wasn’t anywhere. Kato had expected Harry to deliver the print, and Harry had never let him down before.

Finally Harry took a tram across town to the customer’s address, the same place he had delivered the print of Chizuko, a wooden row house that had been taken over and consolidated by someone with money. The customer answered Harry’s knock wearing an airy summer kimono. He was in his mid-twenties, broad-shouldered with muscular calves, built all of a piece like a bear. Handsome was too pretty a word. Domineering with black-rimmed gray eyes under heavy brows, a man with the gravitational pull of a larger planet.

His attention wandered down to Harry. “You’re Gen’s friend. You’ve been here before.”

“Yes. I am so sorry to bother you, excuse me, but would you do me the favor of telling me when Gen left?”

The customer scanned the street once more before he gestured for Harry to remove his shoes and enter. Harry followed to what were very much man’s quarters, a room dominated by a sea captain’s desk and Persian rug. Any middle-class house had a European room, but this seemed to be the real thing. A boar’s head was mounted by a selection of Kato’s demon prints, a satin bed of medals and an officer’s tunic with a shoulder torn off and stained a rust color. The dial of a radio glowed in the corner, although the music, a lied, was turned to a whisper. On the opposite wall were Kato’s battlefield prints and a ladder of European sabers and Japanese swords. A Westminster clock ticked on the mantel. Oriental pillows were strewn around a low Moorish table set with cognac and dates. Gen lay on a pillow on his side, his eyes swimming but with a curious pride that played around his lips.

The customer sank into an armchair. He said, “Gen is interested in the military life. I was telling him all about it.”

In Japanese, the brushstrokes of a single character could define a writer’s class and education. The casually rich room, the few words from the customer, their intonation at once formal and negligent, suggested the royal Peers’ School, university, travel abroad. In an army officer’s case, that would have been Berlin.

“We’re wasting your time,” Harry said and hoped Gen would get to his feet.

“Not a bit. Gen has a great deal of promise.”

“He delivered the print?”

The customer gave thought to his answer. “Yes, he delivered the print, and we fell into conversation. You’re not Japanese at all, are you?”

“No, sir.”

“Ah.” He bestowed a smile on Gen, who lit as if a lamp had been turned his way. The customer stretched out his bare feet and considered Harry. The smell of fresh sweat hung in the air, along with a leathery scent of cigars. In one corner, a dummy in a kendo mask and armor held a wooden stave. Harry noticed murky photographs of equestrian events, an engraved trophy for something, a gilded citation in German and a side table holding a vase with a single white chrysanthemum. The customer seemed to have accomplished a great deal for his young age. There was a restlessness about him that suggested a coil under pressure. What Harry could see of the rest of the apartment was a thoroughly Japanese arrangement of screens and mats, but this European parlor had the personal shadows of a lair. The customer suddenly heaved himself out of his chair and asked Harry, “What do you know about swords?”

“The sword is the soul of the samurai.”

“Quite right. And the samurai is the sword of the emperor. Try this. One hand.” The customer lifted from its mount not a Japanese sword but a Western saber with blood channels and a rounded guard. With only one hand, Harry could barely hold its weight. “Meant for horseback, really. The rider impales a man on foot, and the force of the horse’s charge throws the victim over the rider’s shoulder. Very mechanical. It even feels like a piece of machinery, doesn’t it?”

“Yes.” In Harry’s hands, the saber felt like a giant wrench.

“I will give the Germans this. When they fence, they hack at each other until they’re bloody, they don’t back down. The scars are most impressive.”

“But they don’t perform seppuku, do they?” Gen said.

“No, it is strictly Japanese to take one’s life by cutting the stomach open. It’s an honor that has unfortunately become degraded. Today someone barely pricks his stomach before a friend cuts off his head.”

“Have you ever seen it?” Gen asked.

The customer didn’t answer directly. “Even the beheading is sloppy. You have to cut through the neck, not at it. It helps to shout.”

I’ll bet, thought Harry.

“You take kendo at school?” the customer asked.

“Yes,” said Harry.

“Who is the best swordsman?”

“Gen.”

“I’m not surprised. He is a model of youth.”

“Harry is usually a target,” Gen said.

“A target, if he’s brave, can learn more than anyone else,” the customer said. His breath was sweet from cognac. He ran his hand from Harry’s shoulder blades to the base of his spine. “Stronger than you look. Now try this.” He took the saber from Harry and replaced it with a samurai sword. The blade was narrow and tapered, its length marked by a wavy temper line between the steel of the edge and a darker, softer iron core. Although it was longer than the saber, and its grip was stripped to show the maker’s signature stamped into the bare tang, the sword was a two-handed weapon that Harry held comfortably. Even still, it seemed in motion. “A blade of the Bizen school, the edge as sharp as a razor. The first so-called reform of Japan after the West forced its way in was to forbid samurai from carrying their swords. Thousands of swords were melted down to make bookends, souls turned into knickknacks and souvenirs. Hold it lightly, as lightly as you should hold your life.” The customer squared Harry’s shoulders and hips, hands like a sculptor’s molding clay. When Harry twitched the man’s hand off, he took Harry by the head and aimed his attention to the sword. “Do you know how a blade is made so fine and so hard? The metal is beaten and folded and beaten a hundred times, and then a hundred times more, and then another hundred, the same way a man is made into a soldier. That is why a Japanese soldier can march in his sleep, can stand at attention while the ice forms on his face. The sword is worn with its blade up so that the act of drawing becomes the act of attack. The curve of the blade puts the sword as it’s drawn at the most efficient angle to strike an enemy. Every parry carries within it a thrust. That is the Yamato spirit. Hold the sword straight out. You take bayonet, too?”

“We drill at school,” Gen said. “We train on Harry.”

The customer asked Harry, “They train on you, yet you’re still here? You have the quality of durability, if nothing else. Perhaps you have the makings of a soldier after all. But I saw you once in a movie house. You seemed more interested in women.”

“He’s in love with Oharu,” Gen said.

“Is that true?” the customer asked Harry. “Are you in love with a woman?”

Harry felt the color in his cheeks betray him. Held straight out, the sword trembled.

“It’s one thing to have a woman,” the customer said. “It’s another to be in love with a woman. To love a weaker person, what does that do for you? To mix inferior steel in a sword, does that make the sword weaker or stronger? Weaker…or…stronger?” He pulled back his sleeve and placed the inside of his wrist under the sword. Harry tried to hold the sword up, if not still, but his shoulders ached; the blade grew heavier and began to dip. Gen got to his knees to see. The blade’s edge just touched the customer’s skin, and a drop of blood circled his wrist. He didn’t flinch. He said, “True love can only exist between equals.”

As Harry let the blade fall, the customer neatly slipped his hand out of the way, took the sword and stepped back for more room. Sword at the perpendicular, he took a position of balance, knees slightly bent, looking right, left, making a complete turn, the blade slicing down, then on a horizontal arc, his kimono swirling around marble-smooth, muscular legs in the sort of dancelike move Harry had seen on the Kabuki stage and in samurai films, but never before with such a sense of ease and genuine menace, of an animal casually indulging in the briefest display of its claws. Harry knew in that instant the difference between being inside and outside the cage of a bear. The customer finished with a snap of the sword called “the flipping off of blood,” slipped the blade under his arm as if sheathing it and bowed to Harry.

“Excuse me, that was impolite. Worse, it was melodramatic.”

“No, it was wonderful,” Gen said. “It was the real thing.”

“Not yet,” the customer said, “but in time we will see the real thing. It is unavoidable.”

“He’s with the Kwantung army,” Gen told Harry. “That means Manchuria. They’ll see action there.”

“We should be going,” Harry said. “Let’s go, Gen.”

Gen said, “It would be rude to leave.”

The customer replaced the sword on the wall. He drew Gen up by the hand. “No, your friend is right, and there are more important things I’m supposed to be doing than entertaining every urchin who comes off the street.”

“Can I come again?”

“Perhaps you’ll deliver another print.”

“You’ve been very kind.” Harry tugged Gen toward the door.

Gen moved stiffly, reluctantly slipping his feet into his geta. The customer seemed to dismiss the two boys without as much as a nod, but as they stepped over the threshold, he told them to wait, went to the vase and bestowed on Gen the single chrysanthemum. Gen accepted the flower as if it were a sword itself, and although his thick black hair fell forward when he bowed, Harry saw a violet blush of pleasure spread across his cheeks.

HARRY FOUND KATO at the Folies, in the balcony with the manager watching a final act called “Amusing Violin.” The manager wore a greasy boater and snickered through an overbite stained from cigarettes and tea. He and Harry had never gotten along since the day Harry first stumbled into the dressing room. Onstage, a comic musician playing “The Flight of the Bumblebee” was afflicted with a rubbery bow and ridiculously overlong European tails that flopped around his feet. His bow caught in the strings, flew offstage like an arrow and was retrieved by Oharu in a skimpy one-piece and net stockings. She handed the sagging bow to the comedian. As he watched her stride away, his bow stiffened. The manager laughed in and out like a donkey.

Kato said to Harry, “I hear you let Gen deliver the print to the customer. I told you that only you should take it.”

“Nothing happened. He seemed to like Gen more than me.”

“Why not? Gen is a far more attractive boy than you. You are a mongrel, and Gen is the ideal.”

Flustered by Oharu, the comedian reached into his violin case and brought out a fan to cool himself. Not enough. He brought out an electric fan with a long cord and asked a musician in the orchestra pit to plug it in. The comedian directed its breeze up and down his body and along the bow.

“Tell me exactly what happened,” Kato said.

Harry recounted the scene at the customer’s house. Meanwhile, onstage, the comedian started “The Bumblebee” again but noticed a piece of paper drifting by and, in the midst of playing, speared it with his bow. It was sticky paper. It stuck to his bow, his shoe, his hand, finally to his forehead, and he played while blowing the paper up from his eyes. The audience around Harry laughed so hard they stuffed handkerchiefs into their mouths.

“This is great stuff,” the manager said.

Kato said, “He gave Gen a white chrysanthemum?”

“A gift.”

“And the customer, Harry. Tell me again, did he introduce himself?”

“No.”

“Then I will tell you. His name is Ishigami. Lieutenant Ishigami is a rising man in the army. He is the natural son of a royal prince, no one is quite sure who, so he has the protection of the court and a stipend from the imperial household. He could have gone into banking or writing poetry, instead he chose the army. He joined the Kwantung army so that he would be sure to come under fire from bandits or Russians or Chinese, and he acquitted himself so well that admirers call him a virtual samurai. So you might ask why he is here in Tokyo. Because, Harry, Ishigami is in disgrace. A board of inquiry is looking into the accusation that he is one of a circle of junior army officers agitating against the civilian government. Ishigami says his allegiance is to the emperor, not to politicians. This has made him even more popular with the army, and with patriotic groups in general, but while the board of inquiry meets, he is forced to lie low and waste his time with the likes of you and me and, apparently, your friend Gen. That’s why I wanted to send you. Ishigami wouldn’t touch you. You’re not his type.”

“What do you mean?”

The manager leaned over. “He means that a white chrysanthemum isn’t just a flower. It represents a boy’s tight little asshole. You didn’t know that, Harry? So I guess you don’t know everything after all. There is a certain kind of samurai, and there always has been. Don’t take it seriously, it’s just sex.”

The bow flew offstage again. Again Oharu retrieved it and peeled the paper from the comedian’s forehead. She had a languid way of strolling off forever. Harry felt a proprietary claim on those legs, those long flanks to which he had administered so many vitamin shots. The comic lectured his stiffening bow, but the bow tried to follow her, dragging him across the stage.

Harry was angry and confused. “Not Gen.”

“Why not?” the manager said. “Gen is a poor boy. Ishigami is a hero. His attention is worth seeking. All Gen has to offer is his beauty. If it means pulling down his pants, why not?”

“Gen’s not that way.”

“What way?” Kato said. “Up, down? Right, left? How would you know?” For the first time, Kato turned his eyes to Harry, who could see what a foul humor he was in. “You shouldn’t have let Gen take the package, Harry. You should have done as I told you.”

“I didn’t think it would make any difference.”

“Obviously it did.”

“I always made the deliveries. Gen wanted a turn.”

“Gen would do anything you do. He admires you. He also resents you. You are the stray dog that won favor, which I think made Gen all the more susceptible to attention from Ishigami. Gen has changed now, thanks to you. Not that part of Gen wasn’t that way. In the end, it’s all a matter of taste, and who are we to be judges, right, Harry? Well, I suppose we all admire you, you’re the best example of a survivor we’ve ever seen. That first day when they chased you up the stairway to the dressing room, I said to myself, Here is a fish that could live in a tree if it had to. I got very fond of you. I got too close.”

“What do you mean?”

Kato went back to watching the show. “I don’t think I’ll be using you anymore, Harry, that was a mistake. You should spend more time with your family. Won’t you be going back to America soon?”

“I’ve never been there.”

“Well, you should get ready.”

Apart from movies and music, America didn’t interest Harry. In Tokyo he ran his own life, and he suspected that once in the States, he would be supervised to the point of suffocation by his parents, church people, aunts and uncles and ignorant cousins. Tokyo was the world’s center of color, beauty, life. What was Kentucky? He had seen films with hillbillies sitting around cracker barrels, boots up, aiming tobacco juice at spittoons. Was that him? How many times had he looked into a mirror and hoped to find himself magically given a new body of smooth skin, straight black hair and properly narrowed eyes? It almost had to happen.

“I’ll make up for it,” Harry said. “I’ll deliver everything myself.”

“Not anymore, Harry. Don’t come around.”

Harry tried to catch a tease in Kato’s eye. “You’re kidding.”

Kato ignored him.

Harry tried a different tone of voice. “I’m sorry about Gen. I shouldn’t have let him take it.”

“Too late.”

“I could lay off for a while.”

“Stay away for good. I’m bored with you, Harry. You are no longer amusing.”

Harry lost his breath from the swiftness of his demotion from Kato’s favorite pet and confidant to…nothing, as if on a whim the artist had erased him from a picture.

Kato added, “No backstage visits, either. Stay away from Oharu.”

“Oharu and I—”

“Oharu is no longer a friend of yours. Stay away from her.”

The manager leaned across Kato to twist the knife himself. “No backstage, no girls. In fact, forget the whole theater. I’ll have you tossed out the next time I see you in here.”

“You can’t stop me,” Harry said.

“See,” the manager said. “A Japanese boy would have been genuinely contrite.”

“East is East and West is West, Harry,” Kato said. “You were a guest, and now it’s time for you to go.”

The manager tugged on Kato’s sleeve. “Oh, this is the finale I wanted you to see.”

Kato smiled as Oharu returned with a large bee she attached to the tip of the comedian’s bow. The bee buzzed menacingly. The comedian tried to shake off the bee one moment and fence with it the next while, all the time, incredibly, he went on playing, coattails wrapped around him in his passion, faster and faster and faster until he dropped to the stage like a dead man and the bow dropped from fatigue.

“Wait,” the manager said.

Oharu returned with a sun flag she placed in the comedian’s hand, and at once he was revived and on his feet. The curtains opened, and the entire cast of the revue—actors, chorus girls, acrobats, ventriloquists and magicians—stepped forward for a final bow, each one waving a flag. Behind them rose a battleship, an elaborate prop with triple-barreled guns and a flying bridge with more chorus girls and lines trimmed in pennants. Gun barrels boomed. Smoke rings shot from the muzzles and floated toward the balcony.

Kato turned on the manager. “When did you put this in the show? What does this militaristic garbage have to do with the music hall?”

“It’s not military, it’s patriotic.”

“It’s supreme stupidity. You’re playing to the worst instincts in people.”

The manager shrugged. “People love it.”

Harry hadn’t cried for years—with dry eyes he had survived bruises, the absence of parents, the death of pets—but now his eyes stung. Through a blur, he watched a smoke ring float by out of reach.

14

HARRY TOOK A river bus, intending to drop the gun in the water somewhere between downtown and Asakusa. The boat was narrow and the cabin crowded with shaggy students, a straw-hat brigade of young salarymen, a go hustler with his board, housewives with mesh bags of winter melon, children carrying smaller children. Harry braved the evening chill and rode in the forward open area, alone except for a businessman reading a newspaper by the lamp on the bow and a boy rolling a toy tank that sprayed sparks on the deck.

The night sky was a deep blue edged by the softest light of any major city in the world, light that escaped from paper windows and sliding doors or was the tear-shaped light of streetlamps along the banks of the Sumida. At this distance from the Ginza, there were no office buildings to blot out the view, only occasional spikes of neon like the Ebisu Beer tower or the giant illuminated clock of Ueno Station, otherwise only a steady churn behind the backs of obscure one- and two-story houses. Half-seen figures wrung clothes on balconies that overhung the water. A muted glow of patched windows gave way to a bright corner with a streetlamp, neighborhood pump, the calls of children around a street musician, which in turn gave way to the next stretch of blind windows, music swallowed as quickly as it had emerged. The only river traffic was other river buses or barges that eased in and out of canals. Harry intended to tell Michiko tonight. He’d garb his betrayal with small decencies, like leaving her the apartment and the income from the Happy Paris. That was what she was cut out for, anyway, a tough little mama-san. It was a better deal for her, she’d have to see that. He slipped his hand through the rail and let his fingers trail in icy water. He was reaching for the gun when a passenger came out of the cabin, apologized to the boy for trespassing on the battleground of the toy tank and sat next to Harry. It was Sergeant Shozo of the Special Higher Police with a briefcase, the picture of a man headed home from a hard day’s work.

“I thought it was you,” he told Harry. “I was just saying to myself that looked like Harry Niles, and it’s you. But you have a car, why are you going by boat?”

“It’s a change.”

“Yes, I know what you mean. I always enjoy the river.” He settled into a contemplative pose while Harry tucked the gun more out of sight. “But how are you getting back to your car?”

“Boat, I suppose. Maybe swim.”

“If you flew, I wouldn’t be surprised.” Shozo produced a broad smile. He leaned against the rail to take in the opposite embankment, a dark ridge edged in branches. “Cherry trees. I brought my son here last year when they were in bloom. We had just seen Tarzan. All he wanted to do was climb the trees. Eight years old.” Shozo shook his head.

“Did you like the movie?” Harry asked.

“Very much. A little racist but highly entertaining. Do you agree?”

“Terrific movie. Big boy in leather skivvies. Upper-class girl. They meet cute in the jungle, build a house in the trees and adopt a chimp. It’s got everything.”

“When you put it that way, yes. What I found interesting about Tarzan was his desire first to be an ape and then the recognition that he is different, setting off great psychological tension, it seems to me. What are your thoughts?”

“I’m sure Tarzan was torn.”

“How was it for you when you returned to your home in the United States?”

“Well, it wasn’t my home. My home was here.”

“Yes. That must have been difficult.”

“People adjust.”

Shozo nodded sympathetically. “I’m curious. When you went back, what struck you most?”

Harry thought about it. “Dirty floors.”

“Fascinating.”

“Sour tea.”

“Yes?”

“Dullness.” No banners, no color, no design.

“I want to get this down.” The sergeant opened his briefcase to take out a notebook. He unscrewed the cap of his fountain pen. “I was wondering, what did you do on your return?”

“Is this an official interrogation?”

“No, I don’t think so. Do you?”

Harry did not like the trend of the conversation. Shozo was proving to have an easygoing slyness that would have served well in a card game.

A tugboat pushed by towing a coal barge. A man sitting on the coal waved the orange arc of a cigarette.

Harry finally said, “A little schooling. I was remiss on my American history and the war between the states. A short spell in Bible college and then I was on my own. Pumped gas in Kentucky, set up beach chairs in Florida, water-skied.”

“Odds and ends. Mostly gambling?”

“Gambling was more steady.”

Shozo smiled as if sharing the adventure. “Then you headed for California? For a young man like you, a free spirit, that must have been a logical destination.” He flipped a couple of pages. “Hollywood.”

“Lifeguard, pool boy, record rep. Selling records and sheet music to music stores, getting the music played on radio.”

“But still mainly gambling?”

“Gambling was a way to meet people. Being a record rep, I met mostly cowboys with guitars. A lot of movie people play cards. Losing money helps them relax. I played my way into a job at Paramount in promotion.”

“You didn’t have any higher education in business?”

“No one in the movies has a higher education in anything. Education is the last thing you want.”

“Three years at Paramount?”

“Three years of taking ingenues and wonder dogs to opening nights. Then I got an offer from another studio to open a branch here. I flew the Clipper to Manila and took the first boat from there. By the time I landed at Yokohama, the studio had folded and the job was gone.”

“But you stayed,” Shozo said.

“I found employment.”

“You’ve done well.” The sergeant reflected. “I find fulfillment in my own work. Not the counterespionage, that’s largely mechanical. Detection and apprehension, any police can do that. What makes the work of the Special Higher Police—”

“The Thought Police.”

“Thought Police, yes, is that we deal in a realm apart from ordinary crimes. We anticipate crimes. Say a man is mentally ill or Communist, isn’t it better to catch him before he physically harms anyone else? Some people are not even aware of the dangerous ideas they carry. They are like innocent bearers of typhoid. Shouldn’t they be isolated for the general health?”

“Then you cure them?”

“Yes and no. A gaijin is as riddled with deviant ideas as a dog with ticks. He isn’t worth the time. Japanese are, by nature, healthier. We sit with them, talk with them, listen patiently to them. You know the saying that each man has a book? I believe that each man has a confession. It’s a purgative process, a cleansing. I don’t know why women tend to be more incorrigible, but every man has written a confession that is heartbreaking in its sincerity. I was wondering where you would fall in that range. If you were Japanese enough to be worth the effort.”

Moths spun around the lamp and landed on the businessman’s newspaper. He read, shook the paper, read. Harry’s eye was caught by an ad with a sleek black train muscling its way through the night: THE ASIA EXPRESS: TOUR MANCHUKUO IN COMFORT. Right now it sounded like a good idea to Harry.

Shozo asked, “What was the Magic Show? It comes up when your name is mentioned, but no one seems to know what it was.”

“I don’t know, either.”

“Something to do with the navy?”

“I wouldn’t know.”

“The navy and magic, what would that be?”

“Sorry, I can’t help you.”

Shozo nodded. “You keep beetles, I understand.”

“Yes.” Oishi, the samurai beetle, was in Harry’s car.

“As a boy, I used to keep lizards. My favorites were the chameleons. It fascinated me how a chameleon could be so gray on a rock or green on a branch that it was practically invisible. Sometimes I’ll be following you on the street, and I lose you because you blend in so well. Then I remembered how easy it was to see the chameleons if I only changed their background. I was considering a different background for you. Have you ever been to jail?”

“Not seriously.” Harry caught the shift to a new level.

“A Japanese jail is serious. Tell me why I shouldn’t put you in.”

“Well, to start with, I haven’t broken any laws.”

Shozo smiled in an indulgent way. “Harry, you break laws all the time. Even if you didn’t, in Japan there are also crimes of thought or intent.”

“I’m an American citizen, my thoughts don’t have to be pure.”

“If all else fails, there’s paragraph eight.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Paragraph eight of the National Defense Act. Giving political or economic information to foreign agents brings a penalty of ten years in jail.”

“What information, what agents?”

“You know Tokyo too well. You know the sad situation of Japanese oil. You talk to diplomats and foreign correspondents. Some of them are certainly spies. You know members of the navy general staff.”

“Is that what this is? Giving the navy a black eye by arresting me?”

“Tell me about the Magic Show.”

“I don’t know what it is.”

“See, you don’t cooperate at all, not sincerely. I had decided after our visit to the dock in Yokohama that, considering how much you knew, it would simply be wiser to put you in a cell and forget about you. Frankly, I don’t think your embassy would raise much of a protest.”

Harry caught a hesitation. “But…”

“But today you surprised me. Generally everything you do is for profit, everything has an angle. Today, however, you went to Tokyo Station to see an ordinary army man, a sergeant, board his train. I can’t think of any advantage you gained by seeing him off. So I decided to treat you as a Japanese and give you one more opportunity to cooperate.”

“He was an old friend.”

“Apparently.”

The tone of the engine changed as the river bus slowed and swung toward the strung lights of a dock. Harry scanned the waiting faces for the eager grin of Corporal Go. The corporal wasn’t there.

Harry asked, “How is the accountant from Long Beach Oil?”

Shozo closed his briefcase. “Kawamura? We still have a few questions for him. Now he claims that he and the American manager are innocent, that someone must have altered the books recently. Can you believe that? What we have discovered is that for any Japanese with the simplest training in calligraphy, the forgery of a Western handwriting is child’s play.”

“Then I suppose you should look for a Japanese.”

“Maybe so. Some kind of Japanese.”

The businessman with the newspaper took the boy by the hand and slipped by to join the line forming in the cabin. He had left his newspaper on the bench, and Shozo pointed to a front-page photo of the special December Kabuki performance when actors performed without makeup. Their real faces looked sketched and unfinished compared to the richness of their kimonos and wigs.

Shozo said, “How interesting it would be to see the real Harry Niles.”

Harry was working on a rejoinder when the boat touched and tied up. Shozo joined the line and, along with every other passenger but Harry, made a quick hop-step onto the dock, where he turned to wave a friendly good-bye. In a second he was gone, replaced by boarding passengers.

It was unclear to Harry when Shozo intended to carry through with his threat of arrest. The various police agencies were like different companies, competing one minute and cooperating the next. Shozo could trade Harry to the army for advantages down the line. The navy could protect him as long as he was on the outside. In prison, though, nothing but bad things happened.

In the meantime, there was still the gun to be disposed of. Harry had the open area of the boat to himself, until the last second when a young policeman in smart brass buttons and billed cap claimed the seat opposite. He opened a book and squeezed by the bow lamp, lifting his eyes from time to time to fix Harry with a glittering hostility. Whether Shozo had ordered the policeman on board or not, it wasn’t a situation conducive to the drowning of a gun. Harry picked up the newspaper the businessman had left on the bench.

Rains in Okinawa. Photos of people in boats, pigs on roofs, a sake merchant wading through a shop knee-deep in water as empty tubs floated by.

Fashion news. Women were bringing in their outmoded Western dresses to exchange for useful coveralls made from wood fiber. A picture showed one woman admiring herself in a mirror as she added a flower to her hair.

Sports. Sumo visited army camps to express their support for men in uniform. Joe Louis pummeled a white opponent.

The policeman’s eyes darted up from his book at every move Harry made. Harry turned to a page of photographs headlined CHINA WELCOMES JAPAN. In Canton, Japanese troops were welcomed by singers and dancers to a floating restaurant. At a junction of Shanghai boulevards, a single Japanese traffic officer maintained good order for thousands of Chinese. On a country lane, Japanese troops handed out candies and received flowers in return. At the Nanking city wall, Chinese boys goose-stepped and waved the flag of the rising sun. The page turned a tint of pink, and Harry looked up at an approaching bridge where a convoy of trucks was crossing with the sound of striving, underpowered diesels. Their headlights were dark, but the way was washed in red by signal lamps beamed through red filters. The policeman at the bow paid no attention. Harry wondered why a convoy would move at night, although the usual answer was sheer military stupidity. The bridge was a red haze: red soldiers looked down from red trucks. Flatbed Toyotas carried red caissons and light tanks that looked like red teapots. Red horses trotted by, and then more troops, until the boat slipped beneath into a cave of reverberating black. Perhaps it was the bow lamp’s reflection on the piers or the trucks overhead, but Harry found himself back at the Nanking city wall and not in dry newsprint but in the full bloom of a summer night.

Kerosene-soaked torches ringed ten Chinese kneeling on the ground, their hands bound but no blindfolds. They had been walked for some distance, tranquilized by helplessness, eyes cast down, expressions slack. Two were obviously soldiers caught trying to escape in the general exodus from the city; they had succeeded in obtaining civilian clothes but not in erasing telltale rifle calluses from their hands. A third was a shop clerk in an apron speckled with blood from his nose. Another was an old man with a twitching mole. The fifth, Harry guessed, was a lawyer in a torn pin-striped suit; he looked like a busted mattress. Next, a coolie who was little more than a starved frame in a loincloth, then a man in a long nightshirt, as if he had been roused from bed, and a fat man—a merchant or a pawnbroker—with almost no neck. Finally, a man with eyes and mouth pressed shut, already braced for the blade; and a boy, maybe thirteen, who stank with fear. Over all ten of them lay an ocher dust daubed with blood. Perhaps a hundred soldiers gathered as ad hoc witnesses, and another fifty with more torches stood on the wall. It was the blaze on the rampart that had drawn Harry and Willie. The city was a landscape of ruin and fire, and it was sometimes difficult to tell whether violence was past, present or imminent, but Harry and Willie had long since lost their sense of personal safety. There was no personal safety, there was only bluff. Willie was a good leader because he demonstrated moral assurance on a Wagnerian scale. All the same, when he and Harry drove toward the wall, soldiers made way with smirks of disdain. The Japanese had contempt for the international safety zone to begin with, and one of the open secrets of the war was that the Chinese enemy had German advisers—in fact, German, Russian and American advisers—helping them resist the Japanese. A swastika on a truck could be a safeguard one moment and a target the next, especially at night. As the truck nosed its way closer to the scene, the soldiers on the wall whipped their torches all the faster. When Harry braked to a stop, a sergeant jumped on the truck’s running board and shouted in his face, “Ten heads in ten strokes in under a minute! See for yourself!” As Harry and Willie got out, the soldiers eagerly pushed them forward, making them derisively honored guests. In the middle of the turmoil, a man gathered himself with the intensity of a sumo scattering salt around a ring, and Harry recognized Ishigami at once, by motion as much as looks. Ishigami had stripped to a white loincloth that accented the darkness of his face and hands and the alabaster smoothness of his body. Close up, he had sturdy legs, a long torso banded with muscle, wide shoulders and forearms thickened by hours of fencing and tiger-striped with scars. His hair was long, tied in a bun. A tub of water stood by for him to wash with when he was done and a fresh uniform for him to wear, but at the moment his mind was on his sword, and he rubbed the blade with oil of cloves that lent his hands a sharp-sweet scent. The lieutenant’s orderly was a young corporal with doelike features, long hands and wrists, lips full of anxiety. Harry wondered whether the corporal had ever seen combat, or had Ishigami protected him from harm? The orderly murmured something to Ishigami, enough for Harry to catch a country boy’s soft zu-zu accent. Ishigami glanced up, but Harry doubted there was any chance the lieutenant would connect Harry with the boy he had been fourteen years before. Ishigami wiped the blade clean, the sword weightless in his hands. Harry believed that Ishigami could probably take ten heads in ten seconds if he just waded in, but the lieutenant was a man of ritual. He positioned the orderly at his back with a bucket and ladle, practiced his approach from back to front so the kneeling men would hear only his progress. Satisfied, Ishigami returned to his starting point and took a balanced pose, breathing regulated, chin tucked in. A sergeant stepped forward with a pocket watch. Ishigami lifted his sword perpendicular to his shoulders, a silvery baton calling an orchestra to silence, all but the drone of flies. The sergeant with the watch raised his arm. There was a little respectful, preliminary coughing. The Chinese were motionless, leaning submissively, tilted toward their fate. Why no blindfolds? Harry wondered. For some reason, a white chrysanthemum came to mind. Harry took in Ishigami, the orderly, the sergeant with the stopwatch and the crowding circle in a more professional way, as if he had joined a game in progress and had maybe a second to find the chump, the weak link. He dug into his jacket and came out with a wad of money that he flourished next to a torch. “A hundred yen, a hundred yen each,” Harry declared, “to Lieutenant Ishigami and his orderly, and ten yen to every soldier present if the lieutenant can take ten heads in under thirty seconds. Or let the surviving Chinese go.” It was an offer that Ishigami, alone, would have despised, but the sight of the money and the sound of the offer had already inspired a cheer that spread to the heights of the wall. Here was an American crazy enough to practically burn his money. How at that point could a hero deny such a windfall to so many comrades? “Money,” Harry told Ishigami, “makes things more interesting.” Ishigami seemed interrupted at the top of a dive. He looked at Harry to determine if he was real or apparition. “Disappoint a lot of people,” Harry said. Ishigami’s eyes shone, taking in the ring of torches and enthusiastic soldiers. “Done?” Harry asked. Ishigami seemed to decide that it didn’t matter what Harry was. He nodded. Done. As he raised the sword again, cords of muscle played across his chest. His hands rotated in to the top of the grip to deliver the power of his palms through the blade. Thirty seconds. The first Chinese was the most difficult one, the merchant with the fat, sweaty neck. How many bolts of silk or tins of tea or bars of soap had passed across his shop counter? How many pipes of tobacco or plates of crispy duck enjoyed? How many women lain with, lied to, regretted? No matter, it all came to this, a balmy night in the Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere when the most he could hope for was a clean cut rather than a hatchet job. Behind the man’s left shoulder, Ishigami seemed absolutely balanced, sword motionless, his eyes focused an inch above the collar. The lieutenant’s hand began to drop, and already the merchant’s head was on the ground, separated from the body, which, still upright, jetted blood. A general expulsion of breath went round, an expression of awe as if each soldier had felt a phantom impact of the decapitation. Ishigami flicked blood off and held out the sword so that the orderly could ladle water on the blade, one side and then the other, to wash off bone and gristle. With three steps, Ishigami set himself behind one of the soldiers caught escaping, a man who knew enough to stretch his neck. Ishigami took his head off as if removing a sausage end; it dropped neatly between the dead man’s knees like a bowl to catch the blood. Two heads in four seconds; Ishigami was doing well. The orderly, however, moved stiffly. The light of the torches was shifting and uncertain. A hundred yen was a staggering amount. When Ishigami held out his sword to rinse, the orderly missed and had to scoop water on the blade a second time. Worse, he failed to make way for the back-swing, which plucked the ear off the side of his head and threw the lieutenant’s timing off. Ishigami only scalped the next man and had to swing a second time. When he held out his sword for water, it took him valuable seconds to realize that his orderly was too busy searching the ground for his ear to mind the ladle. It was a distraction. Ishigami looked at Harry. More precious seconds passed. Ishigami went back to work. He severed the head of the old man, mole and all. The coolie’s head flew into the air like a hat tossed at graduation, and then Harry called out, “Time!” Five Chinese—deserter, clerk, lawyer, man in his nightshirt, boy—were still alive. Behind them spread soaked earth, soaked bodies, dusty heads, insect spirals, Ishigami bloody to his waist, sweaty with clots of blood, strands of hair loose from his exertions, the long arc of the sword bright red. The survivors seemed the last to realize they were alive. Harry and Willie had to lift them to their feet and drag as much as guide them toward the truck. When soldiers blocked the way, Ishigami ordered them to step aside. A wager was a wager. The last to be saved was the boy, who cried, shit and pissed, every sphincter open as Harry threw him over the tailgate. “Don’t look back.” Harry told Willie as they got in front. “This is loss of face, great loss, so just look ahead.” Ishigami called after Harry, “How do you know my name?” Harry played deaf. “Who are you?” Ishigami shouted again. Harry ignored him, put the truck in gear and eased away from the soldiers until he dared glance in his rearview mirror and saw Ishigami turn, press the orderly to his knees and push down his head. All this Harry remembered not in sequence but as a single spherical moment, a special lens to see through…

The river bus approached its dock. Somehow twenty minutes had passed in a second. As the boat slowed to a muffled impact, people in the cabin gathered their packages and children and rose from their seats. Harry knew he couldn’t stay on for a third ride; the policeman already gestured with his book for Harry to rise and join the other passengers disembarking. When he pushed Harry, the gun almost dropped from Harry’s belt. Instead, the policeman’s book fell on the deck, open to a print of two lovers, the woman’s legs elevated to display the nest of her sex and the darkened, swollen length of his. The boat rocked gently. The bow lamp swung from side to side. The policeman snatched up the book and shouted, “This is art.”

As if Harry were a man to disagree.

15

KATO HAD AFFECTIONATELY called Harry his “ape,” his “imp,” his “fearless boy”; he couldn’t dump Harry over one mistake. The trick, Harry thought, was to find Kato, plead his case and then wheedle his way back into Kato’s good graces. Never mind that a humid day had led to a night of heavy rain. Harry darted from dripping eave to dripping eave on his way to the music hall.

The Folies was shut, front doors and back. Harry went around to the bright marquees of the Rokku and, drenched by the rain, ran from movie house to movie house, squandering money on tickets and breathlessly running up and down aisles in search of Kato. There was no sight of him there or in the food stalls along the street, and when the movie marquees went dark, the entire Rokku plunged into black. Harry would have tried finding Oharu, but he realized that he didn’t know where she lived. Off the Rokku, the entire city was snuffing lamps and drawing windows shut. The last street vendors retreated with the clatter of clogs on stone, the last red lanterns of the taverns died. At midnight anyone caught on the street without a good excuse would be taken to a police box. Uncle Orin would be summoned, there would be a scene. Yet Harry would not give up. He was sure that Kato had not gone home because the artist had brought a sketchpad to the music hall.

Gone where? Harry splashed to the brothels Kato favored, peeking in doors for the sight of his clogs or umbrella, but Kato had disappeared. Harry’s clothes were a wet second skin. He trudged across the Asakusa temple and through the garden to the relative shelter of the temple gate. Looking up at the lantern of the gate, he remembered views of the same giant lantern in a series of Kato’s prints, with the same row of souvenir shops leading to the same broad avenue. A View from the Green House, the prints had said. Usually that sort of picture included a veranda with courtesans or geishas. These didn’t. Harry couldn’t think of a brothel that had exactly such a view. For lack of any other idea, he set off to find what house did.

He moved in the shadows, watching for rickshaws or the shuttered lanterns of police until he reached a two-story house that seemed shut tight. It was sheathed in copper tiles green as dragon scales and Chinese eaves curled like tails. A shimmer of water over tiles gave the house the illusion of shifting life. On either side, an umbrella store and a bicycle repair shop appeared to cringe at the proximity of such a fearsome neighbor. The upper windows were closed to the rain. On the front doors and gate were padlocks the size of horseshoes, and the front window was locked and covered by bamboo grown wild in pots. Harry sank as far into the doorway as he could get, soaked and defeated. Resting his head against the door, he heard the faintest possible plucking of a shamisen, like the idle sound of overflowing water. No one simply passing by would have noticed.

Harry threw his clogs over the gate. Using the gate’s copper bosses for handholds, he scaled the top and went after, landing on a cushion of moss. The house was larger than it had appeared from the street, with a side garden not of flowers and trees but of large stones set among raked pebbles. In a brief illumination of lightning, Harry saw the garden as it was meant to be contemplated, as small islands in a sea of perfect waves. The pebbles chattered in the rain. Harry was so wet the downpour no longer made any difference to him.

In August, Tokyo yearned for breezes. The outer screens of a long veranda were removed, and inner screens that were nothing more than frames of paper were left half open to the night air. In the front room, Kato sat in a kimono and beret, sketchpad on his knees, working by the overhead light of a paper lantern. At first Harry thought that Kato saw him, too, before he realized that between the artist’s concentration and the lantern’s muted glow, anything in the garden was virtually invisible. A brilliantly quick artist, Kato drew fluid contours and penciled notes in the margin for color and shade. The interior dividers seemed to be open so that Kato’s eye could run the entire length of the house, although what Kato saw Harry couldn’t.

Careful to stay on the moss that trimmed the stones, Harry moved past the front room to the second. The veranda was hardwood polished to a black sheen. A chain led rainwater from the roof to the ground. Although the screens of the second room were dark and shut, it was where the sound of the shamisen emanated from. Harry admired how Kato had arranged matters, the artist with a bare minimum of light, an unseen musician in a middle room creating ambience and then, at a distance, the artist’s model bathed in light.

Not quite bathed. The screens were wide open to the garden, and Harry saw inside the third room a shallow light of candles around a canopy of mosquito netting draped from the ceiling. Outside a corner of the netting lay a bowl, a fan and a mosquito coil with wispy smoke. The netting was a gauzy green shadow. Within it, Harry could see two heads and the glint of a gold kimono. He was sure they couldn’t see him.

At a word from Kato, the figures began to shift. One climbed behind the other, and Harry heard breathing mix with the notes of the shamisen. The canopy shifted like a skirt from side to side. While the netting moved, a slim hand pulled up the green mesh on Harry’s side, and Oharu looked out. She was on all fours, her kimono bunched between her shoulders and her hips. One moon-white breast spilled out. The kimono was a peacock pattern, green on gold with an undone purple sash. Harry could imagine Kato jotting down the colors, indicating inks. In her sleeve, Oharu found a pack of cigarettes and matches. The other figure stuck his head out; it was the gaptoothed comedian, the amusing violinist. She lit a cigarette even while he pushed into her. The bowl was an ashtray. Veins bulged on the comedian’s neck as his face reddened and his eyes squeezed shut. Oharu showed no emotion beyond mild impatience and irritation. The forehead above her rounded brows stayed porcelain-smooth. Kato said something. Oharu stretched out on her side and loosened her kimono more to show her legs and black stripe of pubic hair and the man behind her still plugged in, grinding his dark balls between her thighs, his fingers on her throat.

Harry stumbled back onto the pebbles. Oharu looked up at the sound as a bolt of lightning wandered from the main storm and exploded overhead, revealing everything in the garden—rocks, rake lines, Harry with his hand across his mouth—in the white of a photographer’s bulb.

Harry ran. He clambered over the gate and landed with knees pumping. He wasn’t so much aware of his route as of houses and shops flying by. A policeman shouted, but Harry easily outstripped him, racing through a narrow alley and around the reek of a night-soil wagon. Over a wall, scattering cats, pounding through the overflow of gutters until he turned the corner to a street of one-story wooden houses that seemed to sink in the rain. In the middle of the block were the bleak accommodations he shared with his uncle. He rushed in the front door and threw himself on a mat. The house was essentially a single room. A kitchen area with a stone sink and gas stove was tucked in back with a water closet and a narrow bath. Orin Niles was out, which was a mercy. Usually Harry cursed the lack of ventilation, but now he wanted the room warm and dark, and he hung on to the sweet smell of the tatami.

When he started shivering, he stripped down to his wet shirt and underpants and curled up between two quilts. His uncle’s space was a narrow mattress on the other side. Orin could be found in bed most days, drying out. If he was out this late, the drought was over and he’d spend the night at a sailors’ bar in Yokohama, sitting in a haze of laudanum and rye. The housekeeper lived apart with her own family. Harry was alone.

His domain: the mats, the rats that lived in the tiles of the roof, a shelf of schoolbooks, a stack of baseball cards, a cigar box with playing cards and dice, a beetle named Oishi in a bamboo cage, his parents’ print of the child Christ confounding Pharisees, his print of Japanese warships sinking the Russian fleet, his money wrapped in oilcloth and hidden under floorboards. He turned his back on his earthly possessions and laid his face toward the wall.

“Harry? Harry, are you in there?”

There was a scratch at the door. It opened, letting in a moment of air and the sound of rain on macadam, and slid shut again.

“This place is almost impossible to find. You forgot your clogs.”

“Leave them,” Harry muttered and pulled his quilt tighter. He didn’t need to see Oharu in the dark, taking in his shabby port in a storm, condescending to her little errand. He hated her. He’d left his clogs in the garden of the green house. He hated his clogs, too.

“I’m sorry, Harry. It was just sex.”

Exactly what the Folies manager had said about Gen. Everyone mouthed the same hypocrisy. He didn’t dignify her with a reply.

“Do you want me to go, Harry?”

Silence was good enough. That had to be clear to the stupidest person in the world. He hadn’t heard her slip off her shoes or fold an umbrella, so she obviously wasn’t sincere.

“It was just for money, Harry, it didn’t mean anything. I am very sorry.”

There was one drip in particular that Harry heard right on the other side of the wall, a steady tapping on the ground outside. Oharu stirred. At any second Harry expected to hear the door slap shut behind her.

“You’re still wet.” Oharu felt his hair. “You must be soaked.”

“It meant enough.”

“You’re right, Harry, it did. I am so sorry. But you’re shivering.” Her hand slid down to his neck. “You’re wet all the way through.”

“How could you do it?”

“I’m getting by, Harry. Doing what a modern girl has to do. You have to take those wet clothes off. We have to dry you.”

“No.” The last thing Harry was going to do was undress in front of her.

“You’re sure?”

“Yes.”

“Then we’ll warm you.”

Harry still had his face to the wall. He heard silk slip over skin, and then he felt Oharu crawl under the quilt with him. She was so warm it was like being by a fire.

“So cold and uncomfortable, Harry. You’re sure you don’t want to get dry?”

“I’m sure.”

She cupped herself around him, her hips against his, her breasts against his back, her breath on his neck.

“It gives me gooseflesh. Feel my skin, Harry.”

She took his hand and ran it lightly up and down her leg. She had muscular dancer’s legs.

“Like a goose, right, Harry?”

Harry’s damp back had made her breasts stiffen. He felt himself grow hard and held his breath.

“That’s all I am, a goose, a silly girl. Can you forgive me?”

He let his hand spread on her leg as if he were touching a temple column of cool marble. He was angry with her. At the same time, he was afraid that if he turned toward her, she would disappear.

“I want to give you something, Harry. It’s not worth anything, don’t fool yourself, but it’s all I have to give.” She slid her hand down his stomach. “I think you’re ready for it.”

Harry swallowed because a mere second touch might set him off. He was no longer chilled at all, he burned like a coal. She turned him toward her and the small blue eye of the lamp and pulled his head down to her breast. The tip stiffened more in his mouth. She lifted herself and led his hand between her legs.

“Softer, even softer, even softer.”

He felt the crispness of the hair there and the heat unfolding at his fingertips.

“You’re going to be a good lover, Harry. You’re going to care.”

She smiled proudly, the best smile he’d had in his life. Oharu led him in. It was for Harry the closest to heaven he’d ever been, and he’d barely touched bottom when he came and clung to Oharu like a boy on a raft. When his heart stopped pounding, he looked up and saw she was still smiling.

“That was a little fast,” Harry said.

“No, for a first time that was perfect. My Harry, my wild boy, what will we do with you?”

“I don’t know.”

Harry did know that his knowledge of the world had just doubled, as if the moon shone not as brightly as the sun but as fully in a softer way, as if he could see his body by her light. She changed the nature and purpose of skin, of hands, of mouth. The scent of Oharu stayed on him like salt on a swimmer. Many things made more sense now than they had ten minutes before. An equal number of things no longer made any sense at all. For example, he was already hard again.

“I should be going,” Oharu said.

“Don’t go,” said Harry.

Oharu smoothed his hair from his forehead. Between her own rounded eyebrows lay one wrinkle of concern, and she studied his face as if coming to a fateful conclusion. She had him sit up and peeled off the rest of his damp clothes. She showed him how to kiss Japanese-style with the tip of the tongue, and French-style, with an open mouth. On his own inspiration, he slid behind her to kiss the nape of her neck, the soft weight of her breasts, their softer aureoles, while she took his hand as she had before. This time where his hand went his mouth followed. He felt a moment of hesitation in her before she lifted herself to him and caressed his head. A groan came from deep inside her, and Harry lifted his eyes in time to see her put a cloth between her teeth. As her eyes rolled back and her hips moved against him, Harry thought, this is for real, this time she means it, I did this for her. She raked him up onto her, and as he entered, he heard an electric crack of lightning that rolled down his spine and limbs and nailed him deep, deep inside her.

Followed by a profound sleep with Harry folded around Oharu as if they were riding with their eyes closed slowly through the rain, the heart’s rhythm like a black horse. A faint electric haze lay in all directions. They rode through high grass soughing in the wind.

•     вЂў     вЂў

“OH MY GOD, he’s with a whore!”

Harry sat up, blinded by lights. He saw Oharu cover herself with her arms.

“My son is with a whore!” Harriet Niles said again.

Roger Niles grabbed Oharu by the hair and shook her. “Who are you?”

“She’s a friend,” Harry said.

On her knees, Oharu tried to gather her dress. She said, “So sorry, so sorry.”

“She can speak for herself,” Roger Niles said.

“That’s all the English she knows. She doesn’t speak English, and you don’t speak Japanese.”

Harry didn’t see his father’s slap coming. It bowled him to the wall with his ears ringing, but at least it got him out of the direct glare of the lanterns and he could see his parents in their wet capes, umbrellas and galoshes. Behind them hovered his uncle Orin in a drowned hat, luggage still in hand, disaster in his eyes. Obviously he had met Harry’s parents at the train station, and this was their homecoming. Harry lying with Oharu. Orin, in loco parentis, did seem chagrined.

“What is a whore doing in our house?” Harriet asked.

“That’s rather self-evident, dear,” Roger said. He pulled Oharu up by her hair and thrust her toward the door. “Get out.”

Oharu bowed. “So sorry.”

“If she says that one more time, I’m going to scream,” Harriet said.

“It’s raining,” Harry said.

“So it is, Harry,” his father said. “So your whore might have to run down the street naked and get her bottom wet.”

“The neighbors,” Harriet said.

“Get dressed.” Roger threw Oharu’s clothes at her. She looked small and humiliated to Harry, her eyes darting this way and that as she dressed in disarray. Roger turned on Harry. “As for you, do you know why the surprise visit? Because we have been informed by the mission board that you have been sending your uncle Orin to China to make money off the currency exchange. We come here to spread the word of God, and you have found every conceivable way to spread corruption. It’s like having a viper for a son.”

“I’m sorry,” Harry told Oharu in Japanese. “It’s not your fault. Thank you for everything. Thank Kato, too.”

Roger Niles put his whole weight into a roundhouse slap. Harry took half a step back. He’d received as bad from the school drillmaster.

“I’m talking to you,” Roger said. “My mission here is over. You have destroyed it. You have broken your mother’s heart, you have abused our trust, and I see not one sign of repentance.”

“Good-bye,” Harry told Oharu.

“God damn it.” Roger undid his belt. “Turn around.”

“Go to hell,” said Harry.

Roger Niles gathered both ends of the belt in his hand as a whip and laid into Harry. A white welt edged in red curled from his ribs to his neck. Harry gasped but otherwise said nothing. Oharu ran as soon as she was in her shoes. Staggering from fury and frustration, Roger raised the cry, “All the way to Japan around the world for this. Like whipping a stone.” He whipped until Harry was crisscrossed with welts, until Harriet and even the derelict Orin hung on to Roger’s arm and consoled him as family must have once consoled the father of the prodigal son.

THE NILES FAMILY left two days later on a Colombian freighter bound from Yokohama to Panama and a connection to the States. To keep Harry’s condition secret, they stayed almost entirely in their cabin, and as no one in the family spoke Spanish, it wasn’t until they saw American newspapers in the Canal Zone that they read about the earthquake in Japan. While the Nileses had been at sea, 120,000 Japanese had died in Tokyo in three days of shaking and fire. Except for the Imperial Hotel and Tokyo Station, hardly a building was left standing. The updraft of the fire was so intense it lifted people high into the air, where they burst into flame. American observers said it was the end of Tokyo as a modern city and that it would take the Japanese fifty years to recover.

Over the next few years, Harry wrote everyone in Tokyo he could think of. Finally Gen answered as a project for high school, where he was studying English. All the old gang, the five samurai, had miraculously survived, most by crowding into the Asakusa temple grounds as the fire swirled around them. Kato, however, had died while retrieving paintings; his building collapsed on his last trip in. The little dancer Chizuko was killed by rioters who took her for Korean; mobs who blamed Koreans for everything blamed them for the fires and killed a thousand for revenge. She had looked vaguely Korean, Gen added. Oharu had simply disappeared. A lot of people disappeared.

16

AS HARRY DROVE , he learned on the radio that the evening English lesson had been replaced by German.

Ist Hans in seinem Wanderjahr?

Ja, Hans ist in seinem Wanderjahr. Er ist in Paris.

Harry wondered where that madcap Hans would turn up next. Moscow? London? Where would Harry be? At ten thousand feet on the Hong Kong Clipper, a flying boat en route to Manila, Midway, Honolulu and America, Home of the Free, the Chrysler Airflow, the platinum blonde. He’d give Alice Beechum an inside tour of the movie studio, introduce her to her favorite stars, take in Tijuana and Santa Anita.

The radio said, “And now that popular tune �Neighborhood Association.’” After a space of a few seconds, a lively voice began, “A knock on the door from friendly neighbors saying, �Watch out for foreign spies!’”

Well, that was catchy, too, Harry thought.

When Harry was a kid, he found it odd that his parents and other missionary adults had trouble speaking Japanese. Some missionaries were sent home with what was called “Japan head,” an overloading of the brain. The problem, Harry came to understand, was that Japanese did not translate into English or vice versa. Basic words had no equivalents or meant different things. What was warm and expansive in English was presumptuous in Japanese. What was respectful in Japanese was craven in English. To Americans, a whore was a whore unless she was willing to be rescued; to the Japanese, a girl sold by her family to a brothel was a model daughter. Japanese said yes when they meant no because other Japanese knew when yes meant no. Americans cursed and vilified an endless number of fuckers, assholes, bastards, bootlickers, et cetera, et cetera. With shading and intonation, Japanese made one word, “Fool!” express them all. Harry learned this naturally. Now he was about to unlearn, simplify, drop his Japanese side and be 100 percent red-white-and-blue American. He had wired $85,000 to New York the day before Japan froze American assets. If that didn’t make him American, what the hell did?

Not yet, though. On the banks of the Tama River, south of the palace, stood the villas of patriots who had done well by the war. There Harry arrived with his donation for the shrine of National Purity, ten thousand yen in a furoshiki cloth bag. Tetsu and Taro were already waiting at the gate. What more fitting entourage for modern Japan, Harry thought, than a sumo in a formal black Japanese jacket and a yakuza sweaty with tattoo fever? Actually, both looked uneasy as Harry approached.

Taro’s shoulders filled the gateway. Inside, a pathway climbed through a garden of evergreens to a large house ablaze with lights. A second path lit by stone lanterns ran even farther to a torii gate, a barracks and dojo and, finally, enveloped in a gauzy light, a ring of ancient pines that was the shrine itself.

“Ready?” Harry asked. “I’m here to pay my respects to Saburo-san.”

Taro didn’t move. “Sorry, Saburo’s not here.”

Harry could see Saburo with a circle of devotees, enjoying a cigarette in the living room of the house. There were groups of men inside and outside the house, which wasn’t unusual for a man with Saburo’s following. He’d started off as a moneyless Japanese patriot in Manchuria seven years before but had had the prescience to hook up with an energetic army officer named Tojo. By the time Tojo and Saburo were done, the army and National Purity comanaged railroads, cotton mills, coal and iron mines throughout Manchuria in the name of imperial harmony. Tojo became a general and prime minister. Saburo returned to Tokyo and established academies, charities and shrines dedicated to his Society of National Purity.

“What are you talking about?” Harry said.

“He’s not here, Harry,” Tetsu said. He looked sick and miserable.

“I just need Saburo’s ear for a second.”

“I’m sorry, Harry,” Taro said.

It would have been discourteous for Harry to point out the visible Saburo. Anyway, Harry was at a rare loss for words. He had invited his own friends along, and now they were blocking his way.

“Tetsu, did you talk to Saburo about the donation?”

“I mentioned it. He said it was unnecessary.”

“I still want to talk to him. I could see one of his assistants.”

Taro said, “It’s late, Harry. Everything is pretty much closed up.”

Harry saw people bustling all over the grounds. “We talked about this. All I want is to leave this generous donation so someone will call the Foreign Office and free the exit papers for the bride of a German ally. A one-minute phone call.”

“That would be difficult,” Tetsu said, meaning no.

“Let me go to the shrine.”

“Very difficult,” Taro said, meaning absolutely no.

“Then suppose I try Saburo-san tomorrow.”

Tetsu said, “I don’t know, Harry, he may be gone for days.”

Taro folded his arms. Nothing but a truck could have dislodged him.

“Then I hope he has a good trip,” Harry said. “Please tell Saburo-san that I stopped by.”

“We’ll do that,” said Taro.

“Sorry, Harry,” Tetsu said. “Really.”

“I guess things are changing. Get that fever looked at.”

“Thanks,” Tetsu said.

Harry fumed all the way back to his car. Snubbed, as if Saburo hadn’t sold favors for years. Being turned away by friends, however, that brought acid to the craw. It was downright comical; he’d asked them to come, and they’d told him to go. So that’s what friends were for: betrayal. The hell with them. In two more days, Harry would be gone and Japan would be a speck in the Pacific Ocean. As for Willie and Iris, well, Harry had tried.

He felt better by the time he reached Asakusa and parked the car. The theaters were bright with moviegoers wandering from Die Deutsche Wehrmacht to The Texas Rangers. Customers lined up at food stalls, the curious filled the peep shows and the side streets were strings of red lanterns and cozy bonhomie, the same as any weekend night. It would be odd, Harry decided, if he didn’t make an appearance at his own club, although he braced himself for an evening under the scrutiny of the Record Girl. Tonight he would tell Michiko that he was going. She must know, she had to have figured it out weeks ago. No doubt there were snakes who stood taller than Harry Niles, but to run out on her with no warning was too low even for him. He just had to make sure she didn’t get her hands on the gun.

However, the Happy Paris was dark. The sign should have been bright, buzzing red. On a Saturday night, Harry expected to see a neon Eiffel Tower beckoning the thirsty of all races and creeds. He paid Tetsu good money not to be harassed, although he didn’t know what to expect from Tetsu anymore. Harry took a cautionary pause in the shadow of a doorway and watched a bicycle go by with a swaying stack of noodle boxes, followed by sailors, a chestnut vendor’s cart, businessmen who passed in high spirits and returned disappointed a few seconds later, complaining about jungle-music establishments that closed with no apologies or explanation.

Harry crossed the street. The club’s neon sign was not damaged, as far as he could see, simply off. He unlocked the door and found the Happy Paris empty. No customers, no Kondo to mix drinks, no waitresses to serve them. Harry went to the small galley behind the bar and found fresh cold cuts wrapped in butcher paper resting in the icebox, so someone had taken deliveries earlier in the day. Kondo the bartender was so reliable it was hard to believe he’d abandon his post: he loved his Happy Paris uniform so much he wanted to be buried in it. Harry turned the lights on, off, on. Off. What was the point of opening alone?

Michiko came to mind. Had she heard about the plane already? Considering her temper, he was surprised only that she didn’t burn the place down. He ran his hand over the smooth shoulders of the jukebox, looking for support, for his Record Girl, his black-widow spider. Harry pulled down the ladder stairs behind the bar and went up to his apartment. Nothing there was touched. His clothes and hers were still neatly laid in drawers, there were no bodies on the floor or notes in blood. He looked out the window and noticed that the willow house directly across was open for business, its polished gate ajar to a discreet candle glow. A willow suggested something yielding and feminine, the sort of tree that knelt by water to admire its own reflection.

Harry returned to the Happy Paris and slipped into the narrow kitchen. Kondo used the cool space under the floorboards for pickling eggplant, ginger, melon. Harry shifted loose boards, moved pickle jars aside and pulled out a loosely buried cookie tin. Just enough light made its way from the street to see a picture of Tara on the lid. Framed by white plantation columns, Scarlett O’Hara wore a bustle skirt as big as a parachute. Harry lifted the lid. Inside the tin were separate envelopes of cash: $10,000 American, $5,000 in yen and even $1,000 in Chinese yuan. Traveling money. He added the pistol to the money, set the tin on the damp ground and replaced the boards. Things were moving so fast now that he felt light-headed as he stood.

It was just him and the jukebox now. He selected “Any Old Time” and set the volume low. The intro was smooth, melodious, going nowhere in particular until Billie Holiday shyly chimed in, “Any old time you’re blue, you have our love to chase away the blues.” As if Michiko were with him, Harry took a solo turn around the record player. For some reason he was put in mind of Kato’s copy of the Moulin Rouge, the redheaded cancan dancer. Too bad they never had dancing at the Happy Paris, Harry thought, only the immobile, inscrutable Record Girl. The front door was open a crack, and figures on the street flickered by. Harry decided he needed something not so sad. Who needed love if they had wings? How many hours till takeoff? Thirty-six? Harry punched three, six. Behind glass the automatic arm lifted Shaw off the turntable and put on “Sing, Sing, Sing,” which Harry regarded as four minutes of pure inspiration, starting with Krupa’s native drums, then joined by a growl of brass and, diving boldly in, Goodman on clarinet. Because of Krupa, “Sing, Sing, Sing” had a manic force that usually made Harry think of Tarzan, conga lines, war canoes. Tonight was different. He imagined tanks rolling over trenches and flamethrowers lighting huts. A horn soloed and a temple turned to a poppy-red ball of fire. Krupa took over and machine guns chattered. Harry didn’t know how long he had listened before he stopped the record and noticed that a geisha stood at the front door, her matte-white face cocked to one side.

“Niles-san?” she asked in a high voice.

“Yes.”

“Please.” The geisha bowed and motioned Harry to follow her. She was small, a shimmer of silk in the dark.

“Now?”

She stayed bowed. “Yes, please.”

Harry saw that she was trying to direct him to the willow house. “Who is there?”

“A friend, please.”

She showed no sign of straightening up, a social pressure that was like a soft nutcracker. Although a geisha party was the last thing Harry was in the mood for, people did not snub geishas in public. Also, this was not a smart time for a gaijin to offend anybody. Even if it was to make excuses, Harry had no choice but to go.

“Okay.”

“Thank you, thank you so much.”

While they crossed the street, the girl chirped about what excellent Japanese he spoke, about such pleasant weather for December. She was vaguely familiar to Harry. He’d seen geisha go in and out of the willow house for the past two years. The problem was that the whole geisha presentation was a mask. Their faces were masks of white greasepaint under elaborate, top-heavy wigs with hairpins and tiny bells. They were wrapped in volumes of kimono and minced unnaturally in high wedge sandals. Every gesture and every note were pieces of acting, a doll-like combination of the innocent and erotic.

Inside the willow-house gate, a walkway lit by stone lanterns led to a slatted door with saucers of salt on either side. Harry left his shoes in a foyer that was discreetly dim and followed the geisha down a hallway lit by standing lanterns. Usually an older man or a lady of the house welcomed a visitor to make sure of the privacy of the parties within. Harry saw no one, heard no one, although on either side were the screens of different rooms. At this hour on a Saturday night, each room should have been ringing with idiot hilarity. There was a parabola to geisha parties: first, the soulful plucking of the shamisen; second, sake-fueled parlor games; third, maudlin singing; fourth, collapse. The girl made not a sound, just a beeline to the end of the corridor where the best room was, as far from the street as possible. As the geisha bustled ahead, he had a good view of the seasonal blue of her kimono and the tinkling bells in her hair and the way the red inner collar revealed the nape of the neck. Every once in a while she would glance back, a painted simper on her red double-bow lips. It was like following a puppet until they reached the end of the hall, where she stumbled ever so slightly, and Harry saw the three pinpoint moles on her neck and felt the electrical charge of recognizing Michiko while his legs carried him forward.

She slid open the screen to the last room. In the middle sat Ishigami in a white kimono at a low table of lacquered black. The colonel was darker than Harry remembered, flesh drawn taut around the skull, skin raw from a campaign in bitter weather, hair close-cropped and flecked with gray. The curve of an unsheathed sword lay across the table. Michiko gently pushed Harry to his knees.

Ishigami’s eyes lit on Harry. He said, “You owe me five heads.”

17

THE SWORD LAY edge out, a sinuous temper line running from the tip of the blade to a long grip of braided silk. Harry wondered if it was the same sword he had seen employed in Nanking or in the demonstration of swordsmanship so many years before.

“I should have recognized you in China,” Ishigami said. “Even if you were only a boy the first time I saw you, there is only one like you.”

“Well, that can be a good thing or a bad thing.”

“Not good for you. You were easy to find.”

Harry hoped to hear someone else in the house, but Ishigami seemed to have paid for the absence of the owners. He could afford to; he drew a colonel’s pay and a stipend from the imperial household, and what did he have to spend it on in China? Harry had to give him credit, a lot of aristocrats devoted their time to tennis or whisking tea. Instead, Ishigami had been fighting in the never-ending China Incident for four years, five? A hero as indefatigable as that deserved an evening in an elegant willow house. The room’s single window was a latticed ring, the lights a pair of paper globes, the only decoration a painted screen of carp with gilded scales. The sword was within reach of either man, but the colonel was poised, a wolf over a bone. He wore a shorter sword tucked into his sash. Harry remembered the gun across the street. If he ran for it, Ishigami would slice him down before he was halfway down the hall.

           Although Ishigami demanded total concentration, Harry couldn’t keep his eyes off Michiko. With all her shuffling and tittering, the Record Girl did an unsettlingly good imitation of a geisha. He really didn’t know all of Michiko’s background; part had always been a mystery. Now he saw clues. A geisha’s face was painted white, her eyebrows and the outer corners of the eyes extended with red and black lines. Michiko also had the slightest shade of cherry blossom across her eyes and cheeks, and a hint of blue around the temples and the line of her jaw, the added color of a maiko, a younger apprentice geisha. So many bells tinkling from the wig and the incessant giggling were other earmarks of a maiko. She must have been both a young Commie and a geisha-in-training, an interesting combination. She made the whole outfit light up like a neon sign.

“Five heads?” Harry asked.

“Five. That was the number you cheated me of in Nanking.”

“It was just a bet.”

“It was a humiliation. I have thought about Nanking many times.” Ishigami took a deep breath of tightly controlled emotion. There was an exhausted, even emaciated quality to the colonel, yet he still gave an impression of great strength. If the Grim Reaper wore a kimono, he would be Ishigami. This was not the smooth exit from Tokyo Harry had planned. “Do you know I am a hero? Two Orders of the Golden Kite, fifth and second class.”

Congratulations, you stupid fuck. Harry thought. He tried to catch Michiko’s eye and wondered, What are you doing?

Ishigami went on. “Five years in China and the only dishonorable moment was Nanking.”

As Harry remembered, a hundred thousand or more Chinese had been slaughtered in Nanking. He was curious—which dishonorable moment was the colonel thinking about? “War is war. Things happen.”

“This was not war, this was a demonstration.”

“Oh, that? At the city wall? That looked like an execution to me. I remember ten Chinese: a clerk, a pair of chubby businessmen, a man in pajamas, a coolie, a kid.”

“You remember it well.”

“It made an impression.”

Ishigami never took his eyes off Harry. “It was meant to. There was resistance, an attack on Japanese soldiers. We lost one. I was demonstrating to our men that for every one we lost, the other side would lose ten. It didn’t matter whether the ones we executed were exactly the guilty parties, it was a matter of morale.”

“Of course.” Harry knew how important it was for the Japanese soldier to nourish his fighting spirit.

“That is why your interference was so unforgivable. One moment you and your German friend arrived at the demonstration, and the next you were wagering with the imperial army, offering ten yen to each man, muddying their pride with greed.”

“As I recall, the troops seemed pretty interested.”

“They were just soldiers, ten yen was a lot to them. Then the sly part: to offer money not only to me, a lieutenant, but the same amount to my aide, a mere corporal, just for washing the blade. Insult upon insult.”

“Just feeling things out. It’s like any game. You find the chump.”

Michiko said in breathless geisha fashion, “Harry treats everything like a game of cards. Nothing is serious.”

“You succeeded,” Ishigami told Harry. “My aide was too shy to say no, but he felt so much shame over your wager that he could not carry out his function.” Ishigami seemed to look directly through Harry. His eyes sparkled, and tears fell down his cheeks. It was as unlikely as seeing a stone weep. “Such a simple boy. I lost my temper.” His voice became husky. “I would like to hear you apologize. I have waited years to hear you apologize.”

Harry remembered that a soft answer turned away wrath. He knelt and placed his hands on the floor in a deep kowtow. “I am very sorry about your aide-de-camp and sincerely regret if he suffered as a consequence.”

“I have waited four years to hear that.” Ishigami lifted the sword from a sitting position like a man on horseback, and Harry wondered just how high his head would jump. If ever there was a man meant for an instrument, it was Ishigami and a sword; together they divided the living and the dead. Harry touched his forehead to the mat and stole a look at Michiko. Her expression was so cold and distant that she gave Harry the sweats. But Harry had the colonel down as a scrupulous scorekeeper. He had said Harry owed him five heads, and Harry figured the only way to achieve proper payback was if Ishigami saved him for last. Cut off Harry’s first and the debt was as good as canceled at the start. Ishigami relaxed. His rage faded into something like a smile. He set his sword down by his side and said, “I like games, too.” He added in an expansive tone to Michiko, “Sake!”

Michiko came out from behind the screen with a tray of ceramic sake jars and cups and fan-shaped bowls of ginkgo nuts. “All that arguing must make you thirsty, no?”

“Starved,” Ishigami said.

“That’s better.” Michiko knelt to pour.

“Kampai!” The three raised their cups and drank. The sake was hot and aromatic. At once Michiko refilled the men’s cups. Ishigami refilled hers. He seemed relaxed, even pleased, as if Harry had passed a test for cowardice and depravity.

“Your name again?” the colonel asked Michiko.

“Michiko,” she got out between titters.

“Nice.” Ishigami leaned across the table. “Do you mind if I call you Harry?”

“Go ahead.”

“Thank you, Harry. You can call me Ryu. I must say, between you and me, I am happy to find such an attractive geisha as Michiko.”

“She’s very dynamic.”

“Just one geisha for the two of us. Michiko must be very popular.”

“She has many sides,” Harry said.

“Drink up!” Michiko said.

“Banzai!” Ishigami led the charge and personally reloaded Harry’s cup. “You understand, Harry, I admire the fact that you do not flinch at the sight of a sword. That will come in handy.”

“Thank you.” Harry refilled Ishigami’s cup in turn.

Ishigami became more confidential. “Isn’t it curious how one person can make an impression in such a short time? One insult can change a life. In Nanking, from the time you drove up with your German friend to the time you drove away with my Chinese, how long do you think that took, five minutes? No more than ten. But I have thought about you every day since. I assumed for years you must have returned to America. Imagine my surprise to hear you hadn’t left at all. People in propaganda want me to tour the islands and sell war bonds. No, I came back for you.”

“I’m flattered.”

The room had become warm. Harry felt the sake insinuate itself through his veins. He became aware how Ishigami’s hands rested, fingers curved and clawlike. If Harry were to send some beast out to terrorize the countryside, Ishigami would be it. Samurais had evolved into soft men in Western suits, but Ishigami was a throwback, the real thing. Harry didn’t need a gun, he needed a machine gun.

Michiko filled their cups again and went around the screen for a portable record player with a crank that she churned. The notes of a shamisen plinked out of the machine while Michiko posed with a closed fan pressed against her cheek. Harry couldn’t believe it. It was her Record Girl routine gone Oriental. She was still as ceramic in her pink tones and white, demure in winter-blue silk, producing her own faint music from the chains of bells and chimes that hung from her hair and stirred with every breath. There was no more artificial creation than a geisha, yet as art, a geisha did possess enormous appeal, half human, half loose-sleeved butterfly. As Michiko shifted, her collar revealed the nape of her neck, painted in a white W to suggest the outline of a woman’s sex. It was a geisha’s badge.

The gramophone generated a scratchy song about a courtesan who had to buy a present for a lover on a rainy day. Michiko flinched from a threatening sky, tucked her fan into the loose sleeve of her kimono, opened an imaginary umbrella and not so much danced as enacted a series of movements and poses that mimicked a lovesick girl skipping around puddles, gracefully one moment and comically the next, and very different from the Record Girl who vamped in the Happy Paris to Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly. Harry’s life was on the line, but he was agape at Michiko when she finished.

“Isn’t she good?” Ishigami beamed like an impresario.

“She is unbelievable.”

“We agree, excellent.”

Michiko took the record player behind the screen and returned with bowls of crisply fried fishlings and flowers of red ginger. The food didn’t signify the saving presence of someone else in the willow house; fare for geisha parties generally came from restaurants. Was this a geisha party? Harry wondered. A murderer snacks with his victim, what sort of social event was that? Say it was a card game, Harry reminded himself. What did he know about the other player? A bastard son of a royal prince, right-wing fanatic, graduate of the military academy, Berlin attaché and a commander who had survived five years on the China front. In other words, intelligent, sophisticated and as brave as he was mad. He saw Ishigami sizing him up the same way, perhaps coming to a different conclusion. Harry had caught him off guard in Nanking. That wasn’t going to happen again.

Ishigami spoke while he ate. “Five heads, Harry. You choose the first four.”

“I choose?”

“Why not? It’s been so long since I’ve been in Tokyo, I hardly know anyone anymore.”

“You used to cut down Chinese left and right. Why change now?”

“In China I had no choice. There were too many. It just went on, like fighting the sea. That’s why the Japanese fighting spirit is so important. That’s what makes us different. You wouldn’t understand. You’re a gambler, all you understand is odds and numbers.”

“Because numbers are real. Spirit is a fantasy.”

Ishigami peeked up from his bowl. “What odds would you give yourself right now?”

“I see your point.”

“Yes. So, you choose. Friends, enemies, people on the street, it doesn’t matter to me, and, I suspect, it doesn’t matter to you.”

Michiko said in an offhand way, “Maybe there is someone he cares about, maybe there’s a girl?”

“Didn’t you have a friend named Gen?” Ishigami asked.

Harry said, “I’m not going to choose anyone. I’m not going to do your work for you.”

“Lazybones,” Michiko said.

“We’ll do it this way,” Ishigami said. “We’ll go out in the street. The first four people you look at, I’ll kill.”

“Innocent Japanese?”

“No one is innocent. Are my men guilty? They’re dying.”

“Gladly, for the emperor, I know.” That was always the propaganda.

“No, as a matter of fact, hardly ever. Asking for their mother, yes. A trench of bloody boys apologizing to their mother and father, yes. I thought it would be different. I thought there would be purity and nobility in struggle. But China is the same as here, a giant black market with businessmen corrupting army commanders for spoils and war matériel. We take a town and lose ten, twenty, a hundred soldiers, and men just like you, Harry, show up like worms within the hour.”

Which answered a question Harry hadn’t directly posed before: how was it that a heroic officer related to the imperial family was only a colonel after so many years in the field? Ishigami was a butcher, but plenty of butchers had flourished during the so-called China Incident. He was a fanatic, but fanatics had thrived. Was it his high moral code, his reluctance to batten off the slops of war, that had stalled his military career?

“I tried to tell the emperor,” Ishigami said. Such an intimate mention of his name brought a bow from Michiko. The Record Girl would have laughed.

“And?” Harry asked.

“I wanted to inform him of how affairs really stood in China. One of the old housekeepers let me in. I found the emperor surrounded by aides and maps, and I was excited that he was concerning himself about the affairs in China. Then I saw that almost all the aides were from the navy, and none of the maps were of China. Just islands. I never had a chance to say a word.”

“What islands?”

“What could it possibly matter to you?” He motioned to Michiko. “Bring me the box.”

Michiko shuffled behind the screen on her knees and returned with a white box tied in a white cloth, a scaled-down version of the box for a soldier’s ashes. Harry had seen only one like it, in a museum. It was a head box, designed to carry a singular trophy.

“I had this made to order today,” Ishigami said. He raised the box and gave Harry an appraising look. “I think it will fit.”

“On the map, was there a fleet track? From the west or north?”

“Questions like that could have you arrested as a spy.”

“How could that possibly matter if my head is in a box?”

Ishigami set down the box and brushed its lid with his hand. “Harry, you never stop, do you?”

“I’ll bet you.” Harry refilled Ishigami’s cup.

“You’ll bet me again? Once I have your head, I’ll have your money, too.”

“Forget the head. I have another thousand yen nearby. A simple wager of a thousand yen.”

“What sort of bet is that? I could say anything.”

“I trust you. I’ll bet the maps showed a chain of islands with a fleet launching station in the northwest and a central island with a southern harbor.”

Michiko sighed musically and said, “But there’s no bet, Harry. I know where that money is, in the Happy Paris under the floorboards. So, there’s nothing to bet with, is there?”

Ishigami let out his breath. But he had held it, Harry thought. It sounded like Pearl to him.

“Are you a spy?” Ishigami asked.

Michiko laughed and hiccuped. “I am sorry. It’s just so funny. Harry a spy? Who would trust Harry?”

Ishigami said, “I remember a boy who used to deliver woodblock prints to me. To see him, you would think he was an American lost in Tokyo, but he wasn’t lost at all. You knew too much, Harry, even then. Where do you keep all that information?”

Harry avoided the obvious answer. He drained his cup and held it out. “Thanks, I will have more.”

Ishigami wavered, his hand halfway between the jar and the sword. He seemed to shift in and out of focus, and Harry felt it wasn’t just the effect of the sake. There was something damaged and smudged about the colonel, like a photograph taken into battle too many times. Harry read a mood that was dangerously variable: exhausted, energized, amiable, mad. Talking to Ishigami was like walking in the dark while trapdoors opened and closed on all sides. Michiko busied herself slicing ginger with a small knife until the colonel snapped out of his reverie and they were back on friendly terms, then she refilled the cups. Pouring sake was a geisha’s primary concern.

“How long have you really known the colonel?” Harry asked her.

“One day,” Michiko said. “Sometimes one day is enough, sometimes a year is too long.”

“I wanted to take care of you in your own club,” Ishigami said. He smiled as if appreciating an earthy joke. “But she wants to take over the establishment when you’re dead, and it’s not good to start with a bloody floor, so she convinced me she could bring you here.”

“Such an ambitious girl. I never knew,” said Harry.

“Oh, Harry, there’s so much you don’t know.” Michiko hid her laugh behind her hand again.

Harry remembered how Kato had said that geisha covered their laugh to hide their teeth, which were bound to look yellow next to their white face paint, although Harry would have been happy to see any sign of the Michiko he thought he’d known.

They played jan-ken-pon—two-fingered scissors cut paper, open paper wrapped rock, fisted rock broke scissors—and the loser drank. It was a favorite geisha party game, and Harry and Ishigami drank twice as much as Michiko. With too much sake in him, Harry found himself staring at this new, illuminated woman. He couldn’t help but think of her hidden self, the softer whiteness of her skin, the tiny moles at the base of her neck, the way her spine sank into the swell of her ass. Between cups of sake, he thought he could almost taste her mouth. This painted outer self didn’t so much disguise the Michiko he’d known as split her into two versions.

“Rock breaks scissors!” Michiko clapped for herself and poured Harry another cup.

“If you want the Happy Paris, you can have it. You don’t have to kill me for it.”

“Don’t be a sore loser,” Michiko said.

“Drink up,” Ishigami said.

“Why are you doing this?” Harry asked Michiko.

She smiled as she refilled his cup. “Because you were leaving, Harry.”

“I would have left you everything.”

“But I didn’t want to be given, Harry, I wanted to take.” She laughed as if explaining something simple to a child. “If I take it, it’s mine. If you give it, it’s always yours. That’s at the heart of the Marxist struggle.”

“She’s a Red, you knew that?” Harry asked Ishigami.

“Asia is the same way,” Ishigami said. “We can’t wait for the white man to give us what’s ours. We have to take it. One, two…”

“Three.” Michiko squealed with delight as she threw paper to Ishigami’s fist. “You drink.”

“It’s a shell game, the way she plays,” Harry said. He caught a glance from her that told him she could have beaten him at any game he chose. Who had he been living with the past two years? In his vanity, he had supposed she’d cared for him in at least a possessive mother-serpent sort of way. He had never spent more time with anyone and never been so wrong. It hurt a man’s self-confidence. The way only the pads of her lips were painted gave her a smile within a smile, as if she had one for Harry and another for Ishigami.

“Who did your makeup?” Harry asked. Even the most experienced geisha needed help with all the powders—vermillion, gold and pale blue—and brushes—wide and flat-handled for base glue and paint, sable brushes for the eyebrows—and the wig, a sculpted mass of human hair. Especially for painting the intimate design on the nape of the neck. Simply putting on a kimono, with all its hidden strings and tightly wrapped obi, demanded the hands of someone else. “Is someone else here?”

“No.”

“Somebody helped.”

Michiko ducked Harry’s eyes while Ishigami lit a Lucky. Harry finally noticed flecks of white on the tips of the colonel’s fingers, the same way paint used to stick to Kato’s hands no matter how hard he washed. This time Ishigami was the artist. Information came in vivid images: Ishigami applying white primer to Michiko’s skin, brushing red powder on her cheeks, binding her hair with strips of gauze and setting the crown of her wig. Which were skills learned only through long practice. Ishigami blew aside smoke and offered Harry a gaze that held a whole catalog of images. Of tracers spraying the night sky. Of an officer’s tent sagging under pillows of snow. Inside, the tent was lit by a kerosene lamp, and an aide with narrow shoulders and a long gentle face held still as he was painted, his eyelids outlined in black, his lips budded red. The officer fixed a wig on the boy with strings and gum, brushed the bells in the hair to make them sing. Well, Harry thought, gender had always been a slippery item in Japan. The first geisha had been men, and sex between samurai had been virtually Greek.

Ishigami became confidential. “You must be brutally honest to achieve beauty. The eye that seemed bewitching can become as stupid as a cow’s. The chin that was handsome becomes heavy, the feet and hands too large, the neck too crooked. You must erase the flaws. You lengthen the eye, shade the chin, train the hands and feet. An effect of the moment, but that’s all you need.”

Harry remembered the first time he had dressed Michiko in her Record Girl suit of top hat, sequined jacket and long black stockings. And the underkimono of red silk she slept in, was that her idea or his? Meanwhile he said, “What I hear is, there’s lead in the paint. People who paint geishas sooner or later go insane.”

“It has that effect.” Ishigami’s voice tailed off, and his gaze dropped to the head box, which smelled of freshly cut and sanded wood. The mood was changing again, losing a little effervescence. They were sliding back into China, Harry thought, back to Nanking, as if his life were on a tether tied to one spot. He even had a brief picture of Ishigami carrying out the execution as before, this time aided by Michiko, who looked likely to start off as Butterfly and end as Salome.

“The emperor,” Harry prompted Ishigami, “when you saw him, did he say anything?”

“The emperor asked the aides how long a Pacific war would take. They said three months. He reminded them that the army had told him four years ago that a war in China would take three months. The problem is, we have won decisive battle after decisive battle, and nothing is decided. There are just more Chinese. Now we would lose too much face to leave. It would be better to lose to anyone other than China.”

“There’s always the option of sanity, declaring yourself winners and coming home.”

“It would be defeat. From then on, the hands of America and England would be around our neck. They could cut off our oil anytime, and we would be beggars. Better a truly decisive stroke than slow strangulation, don’t you agree?”

Everything seemed to be coming back to the sword shining by Ishigami’s side.

“How does the emperor feel?”

“The army will decide for the emperor’s sake.”

How will they do that, Harry started to ask, when Ishigami held up his hand for silence. Harry heard nothing to begin with, then a door shutting at the front of the hallway.

“These fucking shoes and laces, every time I go in a fucking house. Off and on, off and on. Harry! Harry, are you in there? Why isn’t the Happy Paris open? Is there a mama-san in the house? Harry? Anybody home?”

“An American correspondent named DeGeorge,” Michiko whispered to Ishigami.

DeGeorge sounded drunk, as if lurching into the sides of the corridor with every step. Harry could picture the man’s red nose and dirty gray suit. Go away, he thought.

“Harry Niles is here,” Ishigami said loudly. He smiled at his own English. “Come see Harry.”

“Where?” DeGeorge’s voice shouted. “I filed a story on your little speech. The censor killed it. What are you, hiding? Playing cards?”

“Come see Harry,” Ishigami said.

From the sound of it, DeGeorge slid open each door as he progressed up the hall, stumbling around in stocking feet. “Jesus, you hired the whole place? Having a private party, are we?” The heavy steps paused at the closed door behind Harry, who could almost feel the bulk of DeGeorge leaning into the shoji. “This must be the place.”

Harry turned and said, “Run! Get out of here!”

“Knockee-knockee.”

The door slid open. Al DeGeorge pushed through a leer that changed to a quizzical expression as Ishigami stepped over the table with sword cocked and sliced the correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor diagonally from his shoulder to his hip. Holding himself together with his hands, DeGeorge tried to go in reverse. Ishigami followed, poking him with the tip of the sword as if steering a pig into a sty to a room with more space to swing. DeGeorge was out of sight, but Harry heard him, a reporter to the last, ask a plaintive “Why?”

The answer was a sound like scissors closing, weight dropping in a heap and something rolling underfoot. Harry endured a sensation like falling from a window and not yet hitting the ground. Michiko maintained perfect geisha poise.

Ishigami returned, stepping fastidiously around the bloody mat at the threshold and sliding the door shut.

He said, “That’s one.”

18

THERE WAS AN ETIQUETTE to geisha parties: no groping, no show of money, no sake once rice was served, although the rules were often violated by wartime profiteers who knew no better. Ishigami was a gentleman of the old school, who fueled on nothing but high-octane sake. Screw the rice. Anyway, who was sleepy? Not Ishigami, who sat in a white kimono spotted with blood and tended his sword with an oily rag.

Ishigami seemed to swell and fill the room. Perhaps because every sense of Harry’s was sensitized, Ishigami was magnified, every pore of his hatchet face, the blue cap of his cropped hair, the black wires of his brows and lashes, the dark mirrors of his eyes, not to mention the smell of salty sweat tinged by background accents of incense and blood. Harry noticed the checkmarks of fragmentation grenades on the colonel’s scalp, a notched ear, the way his neck swelled like a forearm when he leaned back. He studied how Ishigami’s hands curled around the handle of the sword the way a baseball glove would fit around a ball. Harry had to wonder whether Ishigami had soaked his hands and sword in neat’s-foot oil for a better grip. He noted the white kimono, which suggested a sense of ceremony and dedication to a task. He also noticed how little air was in the room, as if he and Ishigami had labored to the thin atmosphere of a mountain peak.

          The problem was that Ishigami was smart, moral and psychotic, the worst possible combination. He couldn’t be gulled, bought or reasoned with. The last option was to kill him, and Harry couldn’t imagine accomplishing that without the gun he had just buried under the floorboards across the street. There was Ishigami’s own sword, but the colonel was just waiting for Harry to try.

Meanwhile, there were other plates to keep spinning. For example, the DC-3 being readied in its hangar at Haneda Field. DC-3s were built on license by Nakajima Aircraft, which also built excellent bombers. A crew would work around the clock to make sure the plane shone like a silver spoon on Monday. Harry anticipated speeches at the foot of the ramp from the Foreign Ministry and Nippon Air, appropriate remarks from passengers about the glowing future of the Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere, bouquets, bon voyages, bows all around. Thirty-six hours from now. None of this would include him if he were involved in a homicide, let alone if he were dead.

The other fly in the soup, so to speak, was Hawaii. Harry thought he had helped discourage any adventure in that direction with the phony oil-tank farm. Now, however, Ishigami said he had found the emperor perusing sea charts and maps. A sea chart was for locating a point in the ocean. A map was for finding Pearl Harbor and Battleship Row. Maybe His Majesty was being consulted, but he had about as much influence as the Indian on the hood of a Pontiac. It seemed impossible for the Japanese fleet to get close enough to attack Pearl, but after all, Yamamoto was the man who broke the bank at Monte Carlo. And his fleet was missing. However, if Harry had to bet, he’d say a raid on Pearl was no more than fifty-fifty, and not until he had winged his way back to California, assuming he survived the night.

He pictured the fatally surprised DeGeorge while Michiko laughed and chattered on. Lady Macbeth could learn from Michiko, Harry thought. No craven “Out, damned spot!” from this girl. With her long-sleeved kimono, elaborate wig and her face flattened by matte white, the geisha Michiko was a dangerous two-dimensional version of herself. Over time, the getup actually looked less bizarre and more like Michiko’s true face. He couldn’t believe he had slept with this woman, known her literally inside out, taught her the difference between an upbeat and down. At least he had never said “I love you,” he’d never been that big a fool. Between Ishigami and Michiko, Harry felt as if he had wandered into a samurai drama.

And the sword? Harry had once attempted counterfeiting swords. In fact, his first impulse when he got his hands on a welding torch was to attach an ordinary blade to a tang signed by a famous swordsmith, so he had an eye. Ishigami’s long sword had the unusual length, smoky temper line and elegant sweep of a Bizen. All Harry could see of the short sword tucked into the colonel’s kimono sash was a worn leather handle. Well, it was good to see these old beauties used instead of being hung on a wall. Think of a sword that had been chopping heads for four hundred years. It took your breath away.

Michiko clapped her hands. “Let’s do some haiku. I’ll go first.”

Haiku, that should pick up the party. Harry thought it had lost its festive air.

Michiko poured more sake, sat back on her heels and began:

“The world was born when the

Goddess Izanami

Spoke the first word.”

“That’s it?” Harry asked.

“That’s it. Five syllables, seven syllables, five. Haiku.”

In spite of themselves, Harry and Ishigami shared a glance of amusement.

“That’s not it,” Harry said. “There’s much more to haiku.”

Ishigami agreed. “Haiku contains a word that evokes the season. You use the word �winter,’ or you suggest it with �icicles,’ or �spring’ or �cherry blossoms.’ Your poem doesn’t have either.”

Michiko shrugged in a pretty way. “Because in the beginning there were no seasons.”

“More importantly,” Ishigami said, “you have the story wrong. When the goddess Izanami and the god Izanagi came down from heaven to create the islands of Japan, yes, Izanami spoke first, saying, �What a nice man you are.’ But Izanagi was offended, because a man should speak first, so nothing was created. Then Izanagi spoke, saying, �What a beautiful lady you are,’ and only then did they create the islands of Japan.”

Michiko pouted. “Like any man. It’s obvious he never would have said a word if she hadn’t gone first. And then he takes the credit.”

“That is why women should never be allowed to write poetry,” Ishigami told Harry. “They want the first word and the last.”

She laughed, and the bells in her hair rang softly. She told Ishigami, “Now you go.”

“Harry?” Ishigami offered to wait.

“No, please.” Harry hated to break up the flirtation between Michiko and the colonel. There were moments when he felt as if Ishigami and Michiko were enjoying a picnic on his grave.

Ishigami thought for a moment. “This is a favorite of mine.”

“This will be very good,” Michiko said.

“Can’t wait,” said Harry.

Ishigami stopped oiling the sword.

“They call this flower white peony

Yes, but

A little red.”

Michiko clapped, eyes bright. “The petals are like that. It makes me think of a white kimono edged in red.”

“Harry, you seem to know something about haiku. What does it make you think of?” Ishigami asked.

“Round shoulders and blood.” What else? Like florists said in the States, “Say it with flowers.”

“Yes.” Ishigami picked out a fresh cloth to clean the blade. “You and I, Harry, we seem to be on the same wavelength.”

“Women just don’t understand.”

“England has poetry, Shakespeare and Donne. Is there poetry in America?”

“It’s different.”

“I would think so. It takes history to be distilled into poetry.”

“No, there’s poetry everywhere you go.”

“Such as?”

“Such as:

“His face was smooth

And cool as ice

And oh! Louise!

He smelled

So nice

Burma-Shave.”

Harry even remembered seeing the ad outside Palm Springs. He had been driving an ingenue to have her nose bobbed, hair dyed and teeth aligned. The girl sobbed the whole ride. She’d planned to be a nun, for God’s sake. In Palm Springs, Harry put her on a bus bound for Iowa City, called the producer and said she skipped. One week later, she was back at the studio begging and worse for a second chance, and Harry had to drive her down all over again. That was when he decided to get out of L.A. Now, admittedly, he was reviewing his life choices. Palm Springs was pretty nice in December.

“Or,” Harry said:

“The answer to

A maiden’s prayer

Is not a chin

Of stubby hair

Burma-Shave.”

“Commercial haiku,” Ishigami said. “Now that is American.”

“Whatever makes the cash register ring,” said Harry. Such an amiable conversation, he thought, if only he ignored the blood on Ishigami’s kimono. It was typical of the colonel that he’d spared his uniform. Thinking about the uniform, Harry asked, “You’re in the Third Regiment? The Tokyo regiment, is that what you’re in?”

“A good regiment. Kyushu boys are known for recklessness, and Osaka boys aren’t quite reckless enough. Tokyo boys are just right.”

“To Tokyo boys.” Harry raised his cup.

“Tokyo boys!”

“Tokyo!”

For a party that was essentially an execution, this was pretty good, Harry thought. Except his legs ached. Since he was used to sitting on his heels, he realized that the only thing his legs could have ached from was fear. From the waist down, he was scared to death. Ishigami wore a look of satisfaction. Once, when Harry was sick in bed as a boy, he had watched a cat play with a mouse for hours, holding it by its tail, flipping it in the air, gnawing gently. Harry had feverish dreams about the mouse for days. He added that picture to his memory of the Chinese prisoners in Nanking. It would be nice to be rescued. For once Harry even missed Shozo and Go. The Thought Police had been watching him for days, and now they were—dare he say it?—thoughtlessly gone. Doing what? Didn’t matter. Harry had squirmed out of tight spots all his life, and he would get out of this one. There were ways. For example: when in doubt, flatter.

“What would you have told the emperor if you had been able to see him alone?” he asked.

“I would have told him about parasites like you.”

“Besides me, what else?”

“That his troops were ready to carry out any mission and overcome any enemy, but that our real enemy on the mainland was not China but Russia, who is happy to see us waste our blood against the Chinese. I would have said we are no longer at war with any aim but to assure obscene profits for Mitsubishi, Mitsui and Datsun as we buy their tanks and guns. I would have told him that the army with the purest ideals in the world has become an opium broker. I would have said that I no longer recognize the army I have served in for twenty years. I no longer recognize myself.”

That wasn’t what Harry had expected. Insight and feelings, they always stun us coming from another human being, Harry thought. Especially from a murderer.

“You’re against the war?”

“No, but I am for a war with honor.”

“Against both the Bolsheviks and the capitalists?”

“Yes.”

“Against the workers and the owners? At what point does this touch on reality?”

“Japanese reality is different.”

Harry had heard that the moon was different in Japan, the cherry trees were different, the seasons were different, the mountains were different, the rice was different. Add them all up and he supposed that reality itself was different. Japanese swords were different.

“Okay.”

“Japanese are different because they live for an ideal, for the veneration of the emperor. Without the ideal, we do not deserve an empire. The idea that Izanami and Izanagi came down from heaven is ridiculous, of course. That the emperor is a living god is a myth. But it is a transformative myth that makes every Japanese godlike. It is an ideal, an ambition that lifts us to heaven.”

“Too much ambition. There’s a war memorial at Kyoto of forty thousand Korean ears. Has to look like chopped squid. You have to be really ambitious to collect forty thousand ears.”

“It’s a start.”

“It’s the cult of the sword. Yamato spirit. The need of attack.”

“Always attack, that’s true.”

Harry was aware of being a little drunk, but he also felt he was on to something. “Ten Japanese against one enemy, attack. One Japanese against ten enemies, attack.”

“The element of surprise is decisive.”

“Always close combat.”

“The closer the better,” Ishigami agreed.

“Bayonet work.”

“A man with a sword is worth ten rifles. War is spiritual. What is your ideal, Harry?”

“Decent odds and an honest game, I ask nothing more. What would you say my chances are of cutting cards to an ace ten times in a row? If I do it, you let me go, and I’ll even dispose of the body in the other room. You have a brilliant military record and a great future ahead of you. Don’t throw them both away for vengeance on some lowlife like me. Remember your obligations. The army needs you in China. The emperor needs you in China. Ten cards. That’s fate.”

Ishigami touched his sword. “This is fate.”

“So serious, you two. Like a pair of monks.” Michiko frowned at them. “We should sing silly songs. Anyone serious is too sober.”

Harry wished he could see some drunkenness or inattention on Ishigami’s part, but the colonel seemed to burn off alcohol like a spirit lamp. He also seemed willing to indulge Michiko. Geisha had that talent.

“Well, what shall we sing?” Ishigami asked.

Michiko said, “I have just the song. And to make it interesting, as Harry often says, there will be a little wager. Whoever fails to sing the chorus in one breath must drink his sake in one swallow.”

“What if we don’t know the song?” Harry asked.

“Oh, you will know it,” she said. “But I will go first to make it easy for you.”

She sat up straighter and began,

“This is the song of the frog

I can hear the sound of it…”

With even the first words, memory flooded back. This was one of the first songs learned by all Japanese children. Harry remembered being in kindergarten, seated next to the open window on a rainy day, picking at the elbow of his sweater and looking wistfully out at a canal while the entire classroom sang in a round,

“Croak…croak…croak…croak.

Croakcroakcroakcroakcroakcroakcroakcroakcroakcroak.”

Michiko finished like a cat with cream on its whiskers, and Ishigami picked up the song. Did they sing this childish round at the Peers’ School, too? Harry wondered. At the most exclusive school on earth, set on the imperial palace grounds, had the young Ishigami’s eyes wandered to the moat? Apparently so, because he sang with gusto, imparting animation to the call of the frog:

“Croakcroakcroakcroakcroakcroakcroakcroakcroakcroak.”

It was funny, it was undeniably silly. It was a geisha party with a macabre hilarity built out of Michiko’s laughs, Ishigami’s baritone frog, the sheer innocence of the song, the unsheathed sword on the table and the invisible DeGeorge in the next room.

“Your turn, Harry,” Michiko said.

Harry cleared his throat. He wasn’t going to wait any longer, because sooner or later Ishigami was going to kill him, either in the house or in the street. He would come up one “croak” short, lift his cup and throw his hot sake in Ishigami’s eyes. He figured the odds of snatching the sword first were about even. Of prevailing with the long sword against Ishigami’s short sword—realistically, factoring in skill—about four to one against. Not the best odds. Like a game of Fifty-two Pickup, it was going to be messy. Ishigami liked attack, surprise, close work? Harry would try to give it to him. The question was what Michiko would do.

Harry had a tenor that he roughed up when he sang along with Fats or Louie, but it fit nicely to a child’s tune. “I hear the song of the frog…” He reminded himself to stay relaxed; Ishigami would sense a tensing of the shoulders.

        “Croakcroakcroakcroakcroakcroakcroakcroakcroak.”

“That was only nine croaks,” Michiko said.

“Ten,” Harry protested.

“Nine. You lose,” said Ishigami.

“I counted ten,” Harry said.

“Nine!” Both Michiko and Ishigami shouted Harry down.

“Drink up, that’s your penalty,” Michiko said, but when she went to fill his cup, the sake flask was empty. “A second.”

“Cold sake is fine,” Harry said.

“No, no, it’s not such good sake, it’s better hot.”

Ishigami gathered his sword. “Maybe Harry and I should go now. We will see who we meet in the street.”

“No,” Michiko insisted. “Harry has to pay. I have the sake on a hot plate. It will be ready in a minute.” She returned to the table and smiled like a doll. “That was fun. We should sing some more. Please?”

“Very well,” Ishigami said.

“Sure,” said Harry.

From her knees, Michiko sang a ditty about a virgin learning “The Forty-eight Positions,” suggesting with her fingers the more complicated ones. She acted a scene between a beauty and a flea. It was all puerile and inane. What was most maddening to Harry was how attractive Michiko was. He noticed where perspiration had eroded the white paint behind her ear. No one ever touched a geisha’s face, that would be like smearing a painting, but he felt the impulse to pull her mouth down to his and taste the red bud of her lip. Geisha wore nothing underneath the kimono. Harry wanted to slip his hand through the folds of her ice-blue kimono and raise his hand between the two columns of her legs to listen to the sound of the bells in her hair.

She told Ishigami, “Now you sing.”

“My voice is too poor.”

“No, we heard you before. Besides, you are a hero, you shouldn’t be afraid. Something humorous.”

Ishigami paused and then erupted into “Camptown ladies sing this song, doo-dah, doo-dah, Camptown racetrack five miles long, oh! doo-dah day…” The Japanese loved Stephen Foster. Harry didn’t understand why, but they had made Foster Japanese.

Ishigami finished red-faced and pleased. Harry clapped dutifully. “Sake ready?”

“Sing,” Michiko said. “Something humorous. No jazz.”

Harry could smell the sake on the hot plate.

“Sing,” Ishigami said.

Harry shrugged. What came to him was his mother’s favorite song, one she used to sing over Harry like a desperate wish, a mournful tune that brought out the last hints of the Southern Baptist in his voice. “Amazing grace, how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me… “He let the song slowly unroll, as if carrying a body through the cemetery gates. “I once was lost…“Michiko looked at him through her geisha mask, rosebud lips tentatively open. “Was blind…“For a moment he was in church, the congregation standing and singing with hymnals open, all except his mother, who knew each hymn by heart. She leaned forward to send a smile down the pew to Harry. “But now I see.”

Harry repeated the song in Japanese, and when he was done, he needed the sake badly, but Michiko only stared at him. Ishigami regarded him intently.

“That was a good song,” Ishigami said. “That is how I feel. There comes a time when you feel you are carrying all the dead, all the soldiers who have followed you. They weigh so you can barely place one step in front of the other, and you see ahead of you an endless road of more bodies. I don’t know why I tell you, except that you surprise me.” He reflected for a moment. “It’s good to say things aloud. When I was young, my mother and I would go to the beach at Kamakura, and she would tell me to find a seashell to tell my problems to. Not only problems but ambitions, the foremost being to serve the emperor. And desires.”

“And then?” Harry asked because Ishigami didn’t sound quite done.

“Then my mother said to crush the shell so that no one else would hear.”

“Makes sense.”

“You know,” the colonel said, “at this moment I feel that I can tell you anything.”

This did not bode well, thought Harry.

“Your sake.” Michiko set the flask in front of Harry. “Time for you to pay your penalty.”

The flask was scalding to the touch. All the better.

“Harry? Harry, are you in there?” A voice came from the front of the willow house. “It’s Willie.”

Willie Staub, doing his best to call softly. Harry heard the awkward scuffling of a gaijin removing his shoes. Ishigami took the sword from the table and motioned Harry to stay seated.

“Harry?” Willie called. “DeGeorge said he was coming here to find you. Are you there?”

“It’s late,” a woman told Willie.

Iris, Harry thought. Although the hall was dimly lit and the screen to the room was shut. If they got to the end of the hall, however, they’d see the blood or feel it underfoot.

“Harry? DeGeorge?”

Feet padded closer. Even seated, Ishigami achieved perfect balance. He wouldn’t wait, Harry thought. As soon as Ishigami saw a shadow on the sliding screen, he would rise and, in the same motion, slice through the paper, step through and finish both.

“Harry, please, are you there?” Willie asked.

“There’s no one,” Iris said.

“The house would be locked if no one were here.”

“It’s a geisha house,” she said. “They may be…you know.”

“DeGeorge said he would be here, inside or out. I just want to ask someone.”

Heads two and three delivered right to Ishigami. So much for the sweet Nazi and his Oriental bride. Harry opened his mouth to warn them, and the tip of Ishigami’s sword was at his neck, like a thumb checking a pulse.

“Answer your friends,” Ishigami whispered. “Call them here.”

Harry remembered the drills in the schoolyard, being beaten with wooden staves. That wasn’t the real thing. The real thing was like being skewered like a martini olive on a toothpick. The Chinaman who shit his pants in Nanking? Harry felt for him now.

“Call them.” Ishigami prodded Harry.

Willie and Iris opened shoji screens as they came. “Amazing Grace,” what a hell of a dirge to remember. Back in church. But then Harry saw Ishigami’s eyes twist backward as Michiko knelt behind the colonel, wrapped one hand around his forehead and, with the other, laid a chopping knife, the one she had cut ginger with, against the colonel’s throat.

Harry smiled. Ishigami smiled. Michiko smiled.

Harry thought Japan really was different.

Willie’s voice was fainter, farther down the hall. “We had to look.”

“We looked enough.” Iris was sounding like a wife. “We’ll come back tomorrow.”

“I just worry about DeGeorge.”

Don’t worry about DeGeorge, Harry thought. There was a second stumbling into shoes, discreet sounds of retreat along the path and the backfire of a car starting while the three in the back room sat like a family tied in an intimate dispute, waiting for the complete departure of intruders. Harry was still pinned to the sliding screen. At the same time, Ishigami was snug in Michiko’s grip, and Harry knew how fierce that could be. The situation reminded Harry of the church parable about people with short arms and long spoons who couldn’t feed themselves, only others, but with swords and a different moral: he needed a gun.

Some of Michiko’s lipstick rubbed off on the colonel’s ear as she said, “Please be so kind as to put down your sword.”

Ishigami said, “If nothing else, we have clarified relations between you and Harry. You lied. That’s all right, I thought you had.”

She lifted his chin with the knife. Philosophically enough, Ishigami laid the sword on the floor, and Harry slid it to the far wall, then relieved Ishigami of his short sword, a beauty of nearly black steel, and did the same with it. Even without his swords, Ishigami didn’t appear disarmed enough. He was checked by Michiko’s knife but only slightly.

Michiko said, “Run, Harry. Go.”

“That’s right,” Ishigami said. “Run.”

All Harry could think of was the gun under the floorboards across the street. No one could hold Ishigami with a knife or sword; that was like trying to hold him down with a paper clip.

“Give me the knife,” Harry said to Michiko.

“No, Harry. Go!”

“I’ll go,” said Ishigami.

With a deep inhale, he slowly rose, lifting Michiko to tiptoe. As she lost her balance, he shifted toward her and then out of her grip. Harry moved to block the way to the door. Instead, Ishigami ran at the side wall and burst through panels of wood and paper. One moment there was a wall, and then a garden Buddha looking in. Too late, Harry remembered the swords. A fist punched through the back wall, gathered the swords and disappeared. Harry folded the gilded screen as the tip of a sword appeared at the top of the last remaining wall and sliced the paper open. As Ishigami stepped through the flaps, Harry launched the screen, wisely not at the colonel’s head but at his feet.

Without bothering with shoes, Harry and Michiko raced into the street. The Happy Paris was dark, the jukebox a moon among tables. Michiko locked the door while Harry got on his knees in the kitchen and slapped aside loose floorboards to root through pickle jars for the gun. “Camptown Races,” what a stupid song. A police investigation would really nix his travel plans. Was there room under the floorboards for DeGeorge? A jar slipped from Harry’s hands and broke. Bits of glass and brine swam around his knees as he dug out the cookie tin. Money spilled as he pried up the lid, found the Nambu, cocked a round into the breech and aimed at the door, at shutters, back to the door as if they were paper for Ishigami to step through.

19

HARRY WATCHED the street from his apartment while Michiko knelt by a mirror and candle to wipe her white face off. She had set the wig aside, and her own short hair was wrapped in gauze, exposing her ear, pink as a shell. Harry remembered Oharu awash in creams and tissues backstage at the Folies. As a kid he’d liked the way performers stripped themselves of one character and painted on another, one deception followed by the next. He wasn’t so sure how he felt about it now. Harry was always Harry Niles, blood washed off his knees, shaved now and dressed in a fresh suit, but essentially Harry, while Michiko was revealed in layers.

Harry asked, “Did you know what the colonel wanted?”

“He said he wanted to surprise you.”

“Surprise me? You didn’t know he wanted to kill me?”

“I thought there was a chance. I think a lot of people would kill you if they had the chance.” She said it flatly, as if stating a fact.

“Did he say where he was staying?”

“At the willow house. He’s rich. He rented the whole house for a week.”

“So he could be there, he could be anywhere.”

They had pulled up and tied the ladder stairs from the club, although Harry could still imagine the colonel climbing up a gutter or down from the roof, maybe squeezing through a tap. Harry had thought that lighting the Eiffel Tower might attract a late-night customer or two and provide some security in numbers. A stone knocked out the sign; it shorted amid a rain of glass. Harry had tried the phone; the line was dead. All he had was the gun, but with daylight he could go for the car.

There was, of course, the option of sending up enough hue and cry to draw the police. Except that it was no option at all. Nothing like involvement in a homicide to upset travel plans. Know what a mark is? Harry asked himself. A mark is a guy who can’t report a murder. He was a mark.

“Are you going to leave me?” Michiko asked.

Harry didn’t have the heart to tell her the truth, and he didn’t have the heart to lie. He kept his eyes on the street. “I don’t know. I don’t know how much future I have in Tokyo. Except for you. I have the feeling I’m not wanted.”

“Are you going with her?”

“Her?” Alice, of course. Harry dropped at least some deceit. “She doesn’t have any future here, either. No whites do.”

“But you’re from Asakusa.”

“Yes.”

“You’ll hate it anywhere else.”

“Yes.”

Harry didn’t ask why Michiko had saved his life. This was no fair-weather American girl, he thought, and no sweet all-day-sucker American-style love. Michiko’s was more of the pathological jump-into-a-volcano-together type. That didn’t change things. When Nippon Air rolled the DC-3 from its hangar, Harry intended to be the first man aboard, and expected to have Alice Beechum in the seat beside him.

“You do a good imitation of a geisha.” Harry couldn’t help himself.

“Did you consider the possibility that we both might lose our heads?”

“No.”

“You like being trapped here?”

“No. Yes.”

Figure that out, Harry thought. Since whiteface covered Michiko halfway to her shoulders, she dropped the kimono to her waist. She looked divided, warm breasts in contrast to a plaster face. Ishigami had done an expert job, adding the highlights of Chinese red to her cheeks, subtle shades of green and blue around her eyes. Ishigami, the Renaissance man. Of course, Japanese girls seemed boyish, boys like girls. What did Ishigami crave? Love, of course. Harry had cheated him of that not once but twice.

Across the street, the lantern at the willow house had flickered and gone out. No matter, DeGeorge would draw attention soon enough. In cool weather, two days, maybe three. Ishigami didn’t hide his work. Ishigami didn’t care. After four years of slaughter on the China front, one more truncated body wouldn’t make a big impression. All the colonel wanted was four more heads. He had a Zenlike equanimity about his goal. Even with Michiko’s knife to his throat, he wore a triumphant expression, as if he had finally solved the question of her true allegiance. Harry had figured out the answer at the same moment. Well, it was a matter of gratitude, wasn’t it? Harry had taken this skinny kid, this Red on the run, a geisha of all things, planted her by a jukebox and called her the Record Girl. Made her a hit. Well, you could do anything with Michiko. She was like chopsticks. With someone that smooth and slim, the limbs were almost interchangeable. Variable. Inexhaustible. An American girl would have cried, “Save me, Harry, save me!” Michiko had said, “Go.” So, the matter of loyalty was settled. At the same time, that was no real obligation on him. If she wanted him to survive, so did he. Harry appreciated what she had done, but he couldn’t drive from his mind the image of Ishigami painting her. She still hadn’t taken off the whiteface, as if it afforded protection.

Harry spied motion near a streetlamp, but it was a cat with tail intact, flown like a flag. In any other neighborhood, a snoop might have reported strange noises to the police. Not Asakusa, where the late-night carousing of drunks, whores and theatergoers was the norm. And when a detective did investigate the willow house, what would he see? Swordsmanship. A single slash on the bias that had opened DeGeorge from his breastbone to his bowels, and one clean stroke for his head. The detective would also see the telltale sideways spray of blood produced when an executioner flicked his blade to clean it. The idea that anyone but a Japanese could have carried out an execution so beautifully would be met with astonishment.

One down and four to go. But perhaps the game had changed from mere numbers, Harry thought. Maybe there was added value in a head Ishigami thought Harry cared about. Just as the colonel had cared for his aide-de-camp in Nanking. Would Ishigami settle on tit for tat, ear for an ear, head for a head? Or would he embellish? There were things a man could do to another man’s woman. They certainly did them in China. Maybe he already had.

“You and Ishigami were together all day. What did you do?”

“We talked.”

“You talked. You had tea, coffee, a couple of drinks?”

“We talked about my family.”

“Talked about family?”

She told Harry how her father failed twice, lost his shop in the Depression, grew rice only to be ruined by drought and, under threat of starvation for the entire family, sold his daughters one by one to the brothels and geisha houses of Osaka. One reason there were so many angry young soldiers in the army was because they had seen their sisters sold. Ishigami had appreciated that. Michiko added that she hadn’t only run away from the geisha house. She was proud to have robbed it first.

Harry was struck by how little he had known. How could he reconcile a fugitive geisha with the Record Girl from the Happy Paris? There had been hints of a certain internal tension. Living with her hadn’t been like keeping a canary. One night she had thrown a priceless bottle of Black Label at him. Another night she’d broken a Dorsey record and threatened to slice her wrists or his. Granted, in both cases he had just sauntered home from an evening with Alice Beechum; in both cases he and Michiko ended up in bed. He remembered every vertebra in her spine, the way her hair hung around her face, the ten little daggers at her fingertips. Lie down with cats and rise with scratches.

“You were with Ishigami how long? Five hours? Six? All you did was talk about family and then he painted you up like a geisha? The two of you did nothing else?”

“The two of us?”

“That’s what I said.”

Her voice went even flatter. “I wanted to save your life.”

A man couldn’t balk at the hurdles, Harry thought. He had to plunge forward. “What did the two of you do? What did that entail?”

“What do you mean?”

“You know what I mean. He did the geisha makeup. What else did he do?”

“Are you angry because I let Ishigami touch me?”

“Is that all he did? That satisfied him, just a touch?”

A silence stretched like a conversation in itself. Michiko stared at the whiteface in the mirror.

Harry said, “It doesn’t matter, but I just want to know what happened. You entertained the colonel. You kept him busy. You convinced him there was nothing between you and me. How did you do that?”

“If it doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter.”

“But it does matter. It must have been pretty good.”

“It didn’t matter. I’m back.”

She rose and handed him a cloth so that he could wipe the nape of her neck and erase the white sexual W. Harry as good as saw Ishigami’s fingerprints all over her, her neck a scene of intimacy he found himself afraid to touch. He hadn’t escaped Ishigami. Ishigami was in the room with them.

“Did he pay?” he heard himself ask.

“Harry.” She pulled up the kimono and sank to his feet, and he was amazed by how small she looked, a puddle of silk.

“Was it good?”

A few more questions, Harry thought, and she would disappear completely. Out the window he noticed the cat run from the streetlamp, chased by a shadow that developed into a black Datsun with the lights off.

THREE IN THE MORNING was the Thought Police’s favorite hour for hauling people in, a time when defenses were down and thoughts tended to be in sleepy disarray, so when Sergeant Shozo and Corporal Go pounded on the door, they were surprised to see Harry answer it dressed.

The police gave the apartment the once-over, but they were in a rush to haul him off, not conduct a lengthy search. Harry suggested following the policemen in his own car, but the sergeant said it wasn’t necessary. He moved to the back with Harry, who was free to figure out where they were headed. If they couldn’t catch him asleep, they could play another game that police around the world enjoyed, the ride with no clear destination in the dead of night. Harry’s mind was still on Michiko. While the policemen had stumbled up the stairs, she had slipped down the ladder to the club. Harry had told her to stay with the doors locked until daylight and go to Haruko’s to wait for his call. He had given her the gun. Michiko with a gun. That was a scary picture.

“Did your ears tickle?” Go hiked himself to see Harry in the rearview mirror.

“No, they weren’t tickling.”

“Because we were talking about you. Right, Sergeant? Talking about Harry Niles?”

Shozo said, “The life you’ve led, Harry. The best of both worlds.”

The sergeant had heard about Michiko. She might have disappeared, but Shozo and Go had found her dresses and kimonos and sequined jacket in the apartment. “�Michiko Funabashi, the famous Record Girl, the woman with icy reserve,’” Shozo read from a notebook with the aid of a penlight. “�The woman with icy reserve.’ She is your paramour?”

“She works in the café below my apartment. Sometimes she stays at my place when the weather’s foul.”

Shozo shook his head with wonder. “�When the weather’s foul.’ Harry, you never disappoint. But the Record Girl was away tonight?”

“As it turned out.”

Harry thought that if being rousted was meant to frighten him, it wasn’t working. To him, Japanese police were Keystone Kops, with their work done for them. The yakuza maintained a rough sort of law and order and kept their hands off civilians, who in turn kept one another under constant surveillance. This was an entire population that loved to turn in bicycle thieves. The Japanese were so law-abiding by nature that crime was generally accompanied by a complete psychological breakdown. Japanese murderers loved to confess.

Harry knew what would happen if he led Shozo to the willow house and showed him Al DeGeorge. A foreign correspondent executed samurai-style? That said “army” or “patriot,” and that meant “Don’t touch.” Harry could name Ishigami, and it still wouldn’t matter. The police would not rush to arrest a war hero who was related to the imperial family. They would interview the owners of the willow house, geishas and Ishigami’s fellow officers for months before they even dared, obliquely and with many bows, approach the colonel himself. And if in the end the army decided Ishigami was a homicidal maniac, they would send him back to China, where his talents had an outlet.

However, the gaijin who accused a war hero of murder, who spread such subversive propaganda and disturbed social harmony, would find that things could happen very quickly, beginning with immediate detention and isolation. Harry would be lucky to see the surface of the earth again, let alone the last plane out of Tokyo.

“Why are you up?” Harry asked. The sergeant and corporal were rumpled, as if they’d passed a sleepless night of their own.

“Hoping to catch you by surprise,” Shozo said. “I admit it, it’s hard to catch an insomniac by surprise.”

“What does the newspaper say?” Harry noticed one sticking out of the sergeant’s briefcase.

Shozo opened it. “The morning edition. It says that in Singapore, the British have called off picnics and tennis parties. Doesn’t that seem to you to be a provocation?”

“Putting tennis on a war footing?”

“Yes.”

“Cricket, maybe.” It probably wasn’t a great idea to wander in the jungle with a picnic hamper. The car kept heading north. Harry had expected them to take him downtown if they had questions. This was the opposite direction.

“Another article says that American battleships are too big to pass through the Panama Canal. Is that true?”

“I wouldn’t know. Sergeant, I’m flattered by the wide scope of knowledge you think I possess. Does your newspaper say anything about the talks in Washington?”

“Going well. Roosevelt is backing down.”

“Sounds like peace in our time.”

The object was to get in sync with events, Harry thought. Go with the flow, avoid the rocks. Ishigami was one, Michiko was another. Harry focused on the prize. It sounded like the flight was still on.

Shozo confided, “When I can’t sleep, I do jigsaw puzzles. I once had a five-hundred-piece puzzle of the Grand Canyon in America. It took me a week, but I so looked forward to seeing the complete sweep of this natural wonder. When I was done, however, I was missing a piece right in the center of the puzzle. The effect was ruined. I have to confess, I did something childish. In a fit of frustration, I threw the puzzle out the window, literally out the window and into the canal. I still remember seeing the pieces float away.”

“Sounds like you were steaming,” Harry said.

“I was livid. Then, two days later, I stepped on a mat and felt something underneath. It was the missing piece, the five-hundredth piece. It showed a man standing at the canyon rim and looking out, only now he looked out at nothing. The entire picture would have been complete if I had only waited. It was at a price, but I learned something, to be patient and not let go of anything. Sooner or later I will see how everything fits.”

The headlights projected a film of the city, the street becoming a road with billboards and vacant lots, rice paddies and vegetable plots. The glint of railroad tracks whipped by. Shirts with outstretched arms loomed on drying rods. People said the Japanese treated paper with reverence, that nothing on paper was ever thrown away, but this was where Tokyo’s litter blew. Paper skated on the ground, collected against trees, kited in the air ahead of the car. Go aimed toward two tall smokestacks planted among black conifers, and Harry finally knew where he was being taken. Today was Sunday. Most people would head for a day at the movies, neighborhood fairs, family graves. He was headed to Sugamo Prison.

THE PRISONER PROCESSING area had the white tiles, clothes bins and wooden tubs of a public bathhouse. Posters listed rules (NO SPEAKING, NO SIGNALING, NO DISRESPECT) and illustrated the difference between lice and crabs. Harry took it in with the bright attitude of a member of a blue-ribbon committee investigating penal conditions, even when two guards in Sam Browne belts relieved him of his belt, tie and shoelaces, and even though he knew that at any moment he might be stripped, scrubbed and inspected. He understood that it was never more important than when in a correction facility to maintain the air of a visitor. Besides, complaining was something done outside Sugamo. Inside, a man could be held for months, sometimes years, while his case was investigated for suspicion of crime. The one way an inmate could force a trial date was by confessing his guilt, and only then could he see a lawyer.

Shozo and Go quick-marched Harry down a steel corridor. The middle was open to the floors above and below, with a grille to prevent anyone from cheating the law by jumping to his death. Sugamo seemed designed to transmit and magnify the sound of misery, and though the week had been relatively warm for December, Harry heard the coughs and spitting of tuberculosis, endemic in jails, and reminded himself that he had the protection of Gen and the very top of the Imperial Navy. He had to act like that. When a con man lost confidence, he was dead.

“With all due respect, Sergeant, what is this all about?”

“The truth.”

“Okay, what do you want to know?”

“Tell me about the Magic Show.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“See, Harry, that’s what I mean.”

“All foreign correspondents are spies!” Go shoved Harry, who stumbled in his loose shoes as an inmate with a cone-shaped wicker basket over his head was led past. The basket was a dunce cap designed to prevent prisoners from seeing one another. Some spent years in Sugamo never seeing more than an inch ahead when they were out of their cells. A hall sign recommended, CULTIVATE YOUR SPIRITUAL NATURE. Well, this was the place.

Cell 74 was a steel box six feet by twelve, with a sink and toilet and, instead of a window, frosted glass set in iron. All the space was taken up, however, by a man who was tied feet and hands over a wooden bench. His shirt was pulled up to his neck, his pants down to his knees, and his naked back and skinny buttocks were chopped meat. At the sight of Go, he began to shake. The corporal, delighted, picked up a stout cane of bamboo split to chew as it made contact, and slapped it down on the prisoner’s thighs. The man went rigid and screamed through strings of saliva, not loudly; his throat was too hoarse. Go squatted at his ear and shouted, “Death to all spies!”

“This is a spy?” Harry asked Shozo.

“Don’t you recognize him?”

Not at first. Not with all the blood and vomit, the prisoner’s head upside down and his sparse hair wet, but when his eyes picked up Harry and widened with outrage, Harry remembered Kawamura, the fusty Long Beach Oil accountant.

“You…you…” Kawamura choked.

“He recognizes you, Harry,” Shozo said. “We’ve been talking to Kawamura about the discrepancies in the Long Beach ledger, all that oil that never came to Japan.”

“He’s a dupe, I said so at Yokohama. He’s not responsible.”

“That’s very American of you to say, but you know better. Individually, Kawamura might not be responsible, but a Japanese takes on more responsibility than that. If one man steals in a company, the entire office is held accountable, and his whole family is shamed. Perhaps the American manager of Long Beach Oil altered the company books by himself before leaving Japan, but Kawamura is also responsible for not detecting those alterations.”

Go tied on a rubber apron. “All gaijin are enemies of Japan!”

“He sure knows that tune,” Harry said.

“His favorite song,” Shozo agreed.

“You’ve been talking to Kawamura all night?”

“Yes, and it’s interesting how many times your name came up.”

“I don’t know Kawamura, I never met him before yesterday.”

“Have you ever been caned?”

“No.”

Shozo waited for more before saying, “Any other American brought to Sugamo would demand to call his embassy. Why don’t you?”

“I respect Japanese authority. I don’t see any need to call my embassy.”

“Not yet?”

“No.”

“You’re not their favorite American, are you?”

“Because I’m a friend of Japan.”

“Kawamura says he also respects Japanese authority. He says he accepts responsibility for whatever the American manager at Long Beach did before leaving Japan. But the more we talk, the more certain Kawamura is that the manager did not alter the books. Although you might expect the opposite, the more we beat Kawamura, the more he says that someone else must have altered the books afterward.”

“He’s a loyal employee, that’s understandable.”

“Kawamura says he had trouble unlocking the shed for us yesterday, because the lock had been forced open. He could end this painful interrogation anytime by simply admitting the manager’s guilt. We would give him medical care. Instead, he forces us to continue.”

“Death to spies!” Go said.

The cane whistled down on Kawamura, the bamboo spitting blood. The accountant seized up, mouth agape, eyes trying to escape their sockets.

Shozo asked, “What do you think, Harry? Do you think the Long Beach ledgers were altered by the manager before he went home to America, or by someone else at a later date?”

“How would I know?”

“Is there anything you can tell me that would relieve the suffering of this poor man?”

“I wish I could.”

Kawamura twisted back toward Harry to glare. Go put Harry in mind of how chefs cut up fish alive. The man enjoyed his work.

“Tell me about the Magic Show,” Shozo said.

“I just have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“You altered the Long Beach books, Harry.”

“No.”

“How many books have you altered?”

“What do you mean?”

“The ledgers from Petromar and Manzanita Oil. Did you change those, too?”

There was no point in acting dumb about the oil-company names, Shozo obviously knew too much. Harry felt as if the prison were sinking into the earth and taking him with it.

“I’ve been helping the navy. I’m a friend of the navy the same way I’m a friend of Japan.”

“Helping to examine the books of American oil importers?”

“That’s it.”

“Setting a thief to catch a thief?”

“Let’s say a skeptical eye.”

“A thief who counterfeited official papers in Nanking to release Chinese agitators from Japanese authority. A gambler, an extortionist, a moneylender. Who do you think I’m going to believe, you or Kawamura?”

“Me.”

“You must be very good at cards, Harry. You don’t even blink, although I know everything about you.”

Bullshit, Harry thought. Shozo had played Nanking like a man showing two queens, as if that proved he had a lady in the hole. Well, fuck you, to use an expression of the late Al DeGeorge. If Shozo knew instead of suspected, Harry would be on the rack in Kawamura’s place. Not that Shozo had to prove anything. Although Harry had navy connections, it was true anywhere in the world that possession was nine tenths of the law. Equally disturbing, it was also becoming clear that Shozo had his own connections in the navy. How else could he have come up with Petromar and Manzanita?

Harry said, “I looked at the books of certain oil importers at the request of the Japanese navy. The navy seemed to think that I was helpful.”

“More than helpful. You discovered much more than anyone expected.”

“I wouldn’t know.”

“Then I can tell you. You discovered hundreds of thousands of barrels of oil diverted from Japan to Hawaii, and no one else discovered any. And you alone know where that oil went.”

“I wish I did.”

Go flexed his wrists like a batter ready to hit the ball out of the park, shifted his weight from side to side and whipped the cane down. Taken by surprise, Kawamura lost the air in his lungs and turned blue.

“You cheated,” Harry told the corporal. “You didn’t ask him a question, you just hit him. You’re supposed to ask a question first.”

Go shrugged as if the omission were negligible.

“Ask next time,” Harry said. “Give him a chance.”

“Relax, Harry. Harry Niles, humanitarian,” Shozo said. He offered Harry a Japanese-made Cherry, a cigarette of sweepings, which Harry accepted to stay on a polite footing. “Men have been looking for those secret oil tanks in Hawaii that you talked about. They can’t find them.”

“Because the tanks probably don’t exist. I don’t think they exist. I met a drunk at a bar in Shanghai who said he helped put in some tanks in Oahu. I think he was lying, but I had to report it. Now you know as much as anyone else.”

“It’s important to know about those tanks.”

“I doubt they exist.”

“But they would be a wise precaution for the American navy?”

“I suppose.”

Kawamura passed out, hair pasted to his face.

Shozo said, “We wouldn’t worry about those tanks except for your report. Why should the Japanese navy take the word of a gaijin?”

“I’m not the enemy. There’s no war yet.” Harry caught a smirk on Go’s face. “Look, your navy asked me to do a job and I did, although I was not paid and my efforts on behalf of Japan were not appreciated by other Americans.”

“It’s confusing. The five-hundredth piece of the puzzle is still missing. Why would you concoct a story about missing oil or secret tanks in Hawaii? What is in it for Harry Niles?” Shozo paused to watch Go twist his chubby fingers into Kawamura’s hair and force his head into a pail of water. The accountant came up blubbering. “My suspicion,” Shozo said, “is that we have the wrong Harry Niles.”

“How is that?” Harry asked.

“When we went into your apartment, do you know what struck me? I thought, Harry’s home is more Japanese than mine. It’s true. My wife and I have two rooms, and one is entirely Western. We have the usual middle-class pretensions, a Western table, tasseled lamps. A piano. Except for your gramophone and records, your rooms are entirely Japanese. A simple shrine, a hanging scroll of Fuji, straw mats. A low table of fine lacquer. A typewriter but also a brush and inkstone. A tea set. A vase with a single flower. I said to myself, This is the real Harry. There is the Harry who lives for money and the Harry who takes time to see a soldier off to the front. On the outside is the vulgar American, but inside is someone else. The American would never stand up to the Japanese army in Nanking, but the someone inside would.”

“There were plenty of Americans who rescued people in Nanking.”

“But they were priests and ministers. Is that what you are, a religious man? I don’t think so. You know the expression �Every man has three hearts’? One he shows the world, one he shows his friends and one he shows no one else at all. I think that’s the case with you. I think that deep within you is an honorable part that is Japanese. That’s the part of you that so dislikes being responsible for the beating of another man.”

“Sergeant Shozo, it sounds as if there is part of you that doesn’t like to do the beating.”

“Harry, you’re too sly, too sly. But I do believe in the value of confession. My work is done only when a criminal sincerely analyzes and confesses his crimes. I have something for you. Remember how we talked on the boat about the truth, how it wasn’t even worth taking the confession of a gaijin because it would be so insincere. Can I treat you like a Japanese, Harry, treat you honorably? Do I dare do that?” From his briefcase, Shozo brought a school composition book, to which he added his own uncapped Waterman pen, the present from his wife. The stiff cover of the book read “The Statement of Harry Niles.” Harry opened it. The pages were blank except for ruled vertical lines and the smell of schooldays. “Can you be honest, Harry? How many company ledgers did you alter?”

Harry knew what Shozo meant. Kawamura had been treated like a Japanese, and look at him. Hamburger. But Harry understood the sincerity of the option, and it took him a second to say, “Not any.”

“Are there any secret oil tanks in Hawaii?

“I have no idea.”

“Or did you just make them up to cause confusion?”

“What confusion?”

Shozo sighed as if a prized student had failed.

Go was infuriated for the sergeant’s sake. “You should be ashamed! An opportunity like that? To be treated right?”

“Back off,” Harry said. He’d had it with Corporal Go. “What confusion?” he asked Shozo. Although he was half in the maw of Sugamo Prison, this new element had his attention. Uncertainty, yes, but why confusion?

“Just a word,” said Shozo.

“A very particular word.” Harry tried to get around Go to the sergeant. “Who wants to know?”

“You don’t ask the questions. We ask the questions,” Go said and broke the cane across Harry’s back.

My mistake, Harry thought. Never provoke police, especially in jail. And never let violence get started. The pain radiated through Harry’s body from kidney level, and he slid down the wall to his knees.

“Are you all right, Harry?” Shozo stooped to ask.

“Sure.” It was a fluid situation, that much was clear. So far as Harry was concerned, Shozo’s push for a confession proved he didn’t have enough for an arrest. However, the Thought Police were capable of anything when antagonized. Harry had just pressed too hard.

“No hard feelings. No warning, sorry.” Go grinned with his upper teeth.

“Now, while you can, Harry, write your statement.”

“Can’t.” He couldn’t even stand.

“Then tell me about the tanks.”

“Don’t know.”

“The Magic Show.”

“No.”

“Lady Beechum. We know she’s a spy.”

A bugle call and the clamor of a bell were followed by a general coughing, a rustle of bodies on thin mats, a sickly chorus of hundreds in a mausoleum above and below. Time to contemplate a person’s spiritual nature, Harry thought. Time to call the bluff.

“I’m ready to go.”

Shozo helped Harry up. “Would you like some water? Tea? Last chance, Harry.” Shozo had the expression of a fireman removing a ladder from someone who refused to leave a burning building.

“No. May I go?”

“Of course.”

Shozo called a guard to return Harry to the processing area. On the way out, he passed a trustee in a patched kimono pasting rules up in the hall:

NO SPEAKING BETWEEN PRISONERS IS ALLOWED. NO SIGNALING BETWEEN PRISONERS IS ALLOWED. NO DISRESPECT TO WARDS OR GUARDS IS ALLOWED. NO REMOVAL OR DAMAGE OF THE CELL LIGHT IS ALLOWED. NO BLOCKING OR COVERING OF THE DOOR SIGHT IS ALLOWED. RISING IS AT 0600, INSPECTION AT 0630, EXERCISE AT 0900, LUNCH AT 1100, DINNER AT 1600, SLEEP AT 1900. HAIRCUTS TWICE A MONTH. SPECIAL ITEMS WILL BE AVAILABLE AT THE COMMISSARY. COMMENTS SHOULD BE DIRECTED ONLY TO THE PRISON GOVERNOR.

This time the rules were in English.

•     вЂў     вЂў

HARRY FOUND a train platform half a mile from the prison on a road between potato fields. Scarecrows whirled their arms at the rising sun, and Harry found cheer in the fact that his shirt wasn’t sticking to his back, which meant he had only a welt, not broken skin, a good sign, although the very fact that he construed a lack of blood a good sign was, he admitted, a bad sign indeed. He sucked on a cigarette to ease the pain and read the schedule plaque. There wasn’t much service on a Sunday. And prospects for the rest of the week? He felt the sun stretch his shadow back toward the high walls and chimneys of the prison.

Palm Springs, Palm Springs, Palm Springs, he repeated like a mantra. Alice, Alice, Alice. Sometimes a man sensed a deal falling apart. The blow with the cane was a bad sign through and through. He hadn’t been taken so unawares since school, when Gen once caught him with a wooden sword before Harry had his padding on. Someone in the navy had to be sniping at Gen for Shozo to know so much about oil. Worse than the hit, though, was remembering what he’d done to Michiko. She’d laid herself down to save his life, and he’d reacted like a saint stoning a slut.

A crow trudged up the road and shared a glance with Harry, one wiseguy to another. There was nothing he could do. On Sunday morning there was no traffic, not even a truck to bum a ride with.

The worst sign of all was what had earned Harry the welt on his back.

Confusion.

Harry’s whole story about secret oil tanks on Oahu was meant to cause uncertainty; that was the point of the fabrication. Uncertainty was a paralyzed state where cooler heads could prevail. Confusion was active, committed, a labeling of targets. Confusion was planes in the air.

20

THE TRAIN WAS a narrow-gauge local that rattled across the hard crust of winter fields, and Harry rode standing up rather than let his back touch a seat. Other riders carried dusty sacks of root vegetables. Beer bottles and dead cigars rolled at his feet. He had never had such good posture, or such a watchful eye from fellow passengers, and when the train reached Ueno Station in Tokyo at nine o’clock and emptied at a platform with a sign that said CELEBRATE ANTI-SPY WEEK!, Harry felt as if a spotlight had followed him from the prison.

Outside the station, he slipped into a phone booth to call the waitress Haruko. Ueno Station was a building on a Mussolini scale, but its phone booths were intimate stalls that crammed the caller against a mouthpiece.

“Michiko isn’t here,” Haruko said.

“I told her to go to your place and wait there.”

“She came all dressed up like a geisha, changed into my best dress and left.”

The day was bright enough for men emerging from the station to pull down their hats, and Harry felt himself sinking back into welcome anonymity.

“Where to?”

“She was upset,” Haruko said.

“Did she say where she was going?”

“Just that she was going to find you.”

“All she had to do was wait at your place.”

Haruko was so silent that Harry thought the line had gone dead until she said, “Michiko didn’t think so.”

“What did she think?”

“You’re leaving her. She’s sure of it.”

“No one can leave. The whole country is closed.”

“Except for Houdini.”

“What do you mean?”

“That’s what Michiko calls you. The escape artist.”

From the vantage point of the booth, Harry became aware of a six-wheeled army staff car with soldiers on the running boards, at the park entrance across the avenue from the station. Two army Datsuns stopped in the middle of the traffic. They were full-size sedans, not the “baby cars” Datsun sold to the public, and each car was stuffed with soldiers.

“Harry?”

“I’m sorry, Haruko, you’ll have to remind me, what was your best dress?”

“White with a sailor collar and blue buttons down the side. And a white cap and a little blue bag. She just swept in and took them. Then she borrowed some money.”

“I’ll pay you back.”

In a different tone, Haruko said. “She has a gun.”

“I know.”

The staff car rolled into the park, and a moment later the two army sedans followed.

“Should I come in to work tonight? Will the Happy Paris be open?”

“No, I think the Happy Paris will be closed.”

“How long?”

“For a while. If you see Michiko, tell her to meet me at the ballroom.”

Harry hung up. He made one more brief phone call, went back into the station and descended steps to an underpass of newsstands, food shops, a shoe shine and pharmacy where Harry picked up a germ mask, a ready-made disguise that he slipped on his face. As he emerged at the park, a backfire led his eye to the gleam of a rear bumper just disappearing behind pines.

Harry set off running. He knew Ueno Park by heart from having carried the art box when Kato sketched the beggars and prostitutes who inhabited the grounds at night. A Sunday-morning crowd was different, and on such a warm December day, people filled the paths, art lovers headed to the museum, families to the zoo. Even so, the cars pushed through and drew away from Harry until he was left breathless at the edge of an undulating field that stretched maybe a hundred yards to a black border of bare cherry trees.

He didn’t know why he’d tried to follow the cars, it was a little like following a swarm of wasps. Perhaps because they shouldn’t have been on the footpaths. Perhaps because Shozo had used the word “confusion.” Harry was confused himself, and there was a side of his nature that hated to be in the dark. Now, gasping for breath, taking in the wide field, digging out a cigarette, he decided that not being in the know was okay, too. That was why a man should spend time around nature, for perspective. In one day he would be bound for California with a Lady by his side. His back stung, but he could breathe, hence no broken ribs, and smoking dulled the pain. Only surface injuries, and Asakusa was definitely walkable from here. Just a little dizzy. The episode at the prison had gone badly. Then there was Ishigami. It was crazy to be angry at someone who was trying to kill you, personal affront was beside the point, but the picture of the colonel with Michiko lit a flame under Harry’s brainpan. He wasn’t a man given to self-torture, but for some reason he could see Ishigami touch her, expertly apply the paint, lift the collar from her shoulders. In his mind Harry watched her eyes and examined her expression for signs of pleasure. He could stare at the blue sky over Ueno Park and witness the entire scene, the amour of the colonel and the Record Girl. Harry was hiding from Ishigami. The question now was whether to hide from her. Pretty funny. She was dangerous enough with a knife, let alone a gun. Did he want her at the ballroom so he could find her or avoid her? Perhaps she was asking the same question. The world was tilting like a pinball machine. East met West, and foreign correspondents lost their heads. Harry felt for DeGeorge, for the faithful accountant Kawamura being caned in a Sugamo cell, but if Harry’s story about oil tanks in Hawaii had caused confusion, it was too late to explain or confess. Things were in motion.

He found he had walked out onto the familiar earth of the park’s great lawn, in the spring the scene of the debauch called cherry-blossom viewing. Kato and Oharu used to bring a quilt, champagne, sake and a ukulele and drink and sing while blossoms fell, and Harry served as their page. Was there ever a California beach as merry as that? He doubted it.

December was a patchwork month. Kids in threadbare sweaters ran down the field’s long incline to launch kites and gliders. Paper octopi and dragons dipped and swooped above a ring of autumn maples, and the breeze carried the smoke of chestnuts and coals. By a bridle path that ringed the field, a group of newspaper reporters and photographers stood with a pretty little girl of about five, wearing a red kimono and holding golden mums. Sundays were always slow news days. He considered letting the reporters in on the headless Al DeGeorge, that would be a scoop.

An army scout car moved along the bridle path and came to a stop fifty yards shy of the newsmen. The car was an open two-seater with a driver and, facing backward, a soldier with a film camera. Bell & Howell, it looked like to Harry. For a minute nothing happened besides the twisting of kites overhead. That was the movie business, as Harry knew full well, hurry up and wait, but curiosity lured him closer.

A horse and rider emerged from the cherry trees onto the path. The horse was a tall gray. The rider was in tweed from hat to boots, and although Harry had seen his joyless little face, mustache and round glasses at the Yasukuni Shrine the day before, it still took him a moment to realize the rider was General Tojo. With the world in the balance, the prime minister was taking a leisurely Sunday ride through Ueno Park in a wholesome tweed and a hat with a pheasant feather plopped on his shaved skull. Tojo was prime minister and war minister in one, and usually when he rode, it was in uniform at the Roppongi barrack grounds, where flags flew, drums beat and cheers of “Banzai!” resounded from a thousand troops. If Harry were to criticize, he would have said that Tojo was a little stiff in the seat, lacking the John Wayne slouch. An open Packard with three women under a plaid blanket crawled onto the path behind him. Harry recognized Mrs. Tojo; she was famous for promoting the patriotic value of big families, having produced seven children herself. Today she made an unhappy brood hen, a daughter on each side, her stare fixed on the back of her husband’s bobbing head. Finally a six-wheeled staff car with bodyguards standing on the running boards appeared. Up ahead, the cameraman in the scout car bowed, motioned with his hand, bowed again. Assembled, the entire parade crept forward, and the photographers on the side of the path snapped away as if Tojo were leading a steeplechase. He rode bolt upright, reins in his left hand, right hand free to draw a sword he wasn’t wearing, not with a hacking jacket. Harry had never seen General Tojo out of uniform before; had anyone besides the missus? Tweed suggested a fishing pole or a spot of tea. Maybe Alice or the Mad Hatter would show up, Harry thought. The reporters practically prostrated themselves as Tojo approached; the photographers apologized while they took pictures to be on time for the evening edition. A cowboy would have reared his horse. Tojo reined the gray to a stop and sat, motionless, bright certitude shining from his glasses. The staff car of bodyguards hung back, out of the frame, while the girl in the red kimono, exquisite, a little doll, handed up the golden mums. Tojo seemed distracted for a second by the sight of Harry, as if one brushstroke in a masterpiece were wrong, but lost him among flashing bulbs and older people rushing forward to add their bows and small boys to salute. Franklin Roosevelt would have answered with a jaunty grin or Churchill with a V. For Tojo, expression was utterly superfluous; the bouquet could have been ragweed for all he seemed to care. He returned the flowers so they could be presented to his wife, who raised a tepid smile from her blanket. Then the caravan got into gear again, making a slow circuit of the bridle path. The general hadn’t smiled, not once, but what Harry had spied behind the glasses was worse, and that was triumph.

•     вЂў     вЂў

ROY HOOPER was singing “Rock of Ages” in the back row of church when Harry showed up. Things were bad enough for Methodists; American wives and children had been sent home, while Japanese members of the congregation dwindled week by week until only a handful came to Sunday service. Hooper’s father had preached in this same modest church with its mahogany pews, pedal organ, plaque with hymnal numbers. Hooper himself had chosen the Foreign Service, but still he resented the fact that the cross now shared wall space with a portrait of the emperor in a Shinto robe, the Son of Heaven ensconced in the house of the Lord.

Hooper also resented a finger jabbing him in the back.

“Hoop, we’ve got to talk.”

Hooper whispered, “Harry, what are you doing here? We’re in the middle of the service. Whatever it is can wait.”

“It can’t wait.” Harry poked him again.

“I’m not going.”

“I’ll have a cigarette while I wait.”

“Jesus.” Hooper led the way out. As soon as they reached the street, he turned on Harry. “What is the matter with you? Other people go to church on Sunday. Remember that? Do you ever think of anyone but yourself?”

“Keep walking.” Harry had pulled his germ mask off, and he thought some of the passengers waiting at a trolley shelter looked more interested in the church than in the next ride. Otherwise, the street held the stillness of shuttered shops. The only store open sold candies and toys, taking advantage of kids being home. A top skittered out the door into the light.

“Cigarette?”

“I’m quitting.”

“Good for you. Filthy habit.”

“The first cigarette I had was at the age of twelve, with you.”

“Fun times.”

“No, they weren’t fun, they were stupid.”

“You’re just saying that because you always got caught.”

“Not all of us are born thieves.”

“Nip?” Harry showed his flask.

“No, I didn’t leave church in the middle of a service to have a drink.”

“Pretty sparse attendance.”

“You noticed. Well, there’s been a little intimidation. The authorities demand that the church support the war.”

“Which one?”

Harry turned the corner and led Hooper by a row of child-size statues with toys and flowers at their feet. Christians relegated the souls of unbaptized babies to limbo; the Japanese made room and welcomed all. In a corner of the cemetery was a red and gold one-room temple where Harry bought a joss stick. The rest of the plot was a jumble of headstones, stakes and blowsy roses. The stakes had special Sanskrit names given the dead; the more money paid, the longer the name. Harry suspected that when Charon ferried souls across the river Styx, he sold tickets for first class or steerage. At the bottom of one stake was Kato’s name. Harry lit the joss stick and set it in a glass on a shelf of the stone. Into another cup he poured an offering of Scotch.

He offered the flask to Hooper. “You’re sure?”

“What the hell.”

“Yeah, I’m afraid so.”

Harry added a cigarette on the shelf for Kato, and Hooper had one, too. It was peaceful in the cemetery, among the stones and wilting flowers.

Hooper said, “I hear you’re on the plane. I can think of a few thousand people more deserving than you. Why you?”

“I earned it.”

“I bet. And if I brought you a mother whose small children were waiting for her in Shanghai, what would you say?”

“I’d say bring your violin. Anyway, it’s not that sort of flight, it’s back and forth, just to show the imperial flag.”

“Are you coming back, Harry?”

Harry said nothing.

Hooper laughed weakly. “At least you don’t lie about it, I suppose that’s something.”

“The Lord hates a lying tongue. How did you know about the plane?”

“You’re not the only one in Tokyo with contacts.”

“You’re the only one at the embassy with contacts.”

“The American embassy is staffed with keenly intelligent men.”

“Right, starting with the ambassador, only he can’t speak a word of Japanese and he’s deaf as a post. Where is he now?”

“As a matter of fact, I think he’s golfing. He’s a very decent man, and he’s made friends with the top people.”

“The top people don’t run this country, the army does. The man has never met ninety-nine percent of the Japanese. He couldn’t communicate with them if he did. If a beautiful woman took his hand and slipped it in her pants and said, �Give it to me, Mr. Ambassador, give it to me good,’ he wouldn’t know what to say.”

Hooper developed hiccups. Harry shared the flask again.

“Thank you. The ambassador doesn’t learn Japanese because—”

“Because he’s got you.”

“Because he’s afraid of making a mistake that would damage the dignity of the United States. How would it be if, say, an ambassador from China came to the States and said, �No tickee, no washee’?”

“That’s the level of competence you expect the ambassador to reach?”

“No. But face is important.”

“Not anymore. Something’s up.”

The hiccups vanished. Hooper looked around. “Harry, I can’t give you intelligence information.”

“You’ve got it backward. I’m giving you.” Harry plucked a rose and put the petals, like dabs of paint, on Kato’s stone.

Hooper said, “You’re a tainted source.”

“Any good source is tainted. This is not a pact with the devil, do you want the information or not?”

“Harry, I don’t know. I’m not even supposed to be seen with you.”

“Have I ever lied to you, ever?”

“You’re such a cynic.”

“Exactly, that’s what you call a guy who tells you the truth.”

Hooper smiled with resignation. “Okay, Harry, then I’ll tell you. The Japanese Combined Fleet disappeared a week ago. It’s exercising radio silence, which is the same as sounding a fire alarm, so far as I’m concerned. It could be just to rattle us. I don’t think so, they don’t have enough oil for that kind of bluff. They’re going to the Dutch Indies, I’m sure. That’s where the oil is. They’ll also probably strike in Malaysia and Singapore. Even the Philippines. It’s a matter of days at the most. You’ll get out by the skin of your teeth.”

“That’s the plan.” Harry looked at his watch. Where he really wanted to be was the ballroom, to keep tabs on Michiko and lay low.

“You have something to add?”

“Hawaii.”

Hooper raised his eyebrows. His bow tie went up and down. “You’re serious? Impossible. They’d never reach it without being seen, and then they’d be hung out to dry.”

“That’s where they’re going. If you were going to fight a hundred-foot snake and you had one shot, would you go for the tail or the head? They’re after Hawaii—the fleet, the planes and the oil tanks—and then they’ll rule the Pacific. They’re going to gamble big, Hoop, they don’t have a choice.”

“Oil tanks, too?”

“Especially.”

“When is this attack going to take place?”

“Very soon.”

“Just �soon’? You didn’t see a written order?”

“No.”

“Where does this information come from?”

From urgent questioning with a bamboo rod about cooked books, not the kind of source the embassy would recognize. “From me.”

“From you? From Harry Niles?”

It was one of those moments, Harry thought, when your life was put on the scale and the needle didn’t budge.

“I’m the best source you ever met, Hoop. The Russians have sources, but Americans don’t, because our embassy is a club of Christian gentlemen who don’t snoop. I do.”

“You make that sound like a virtue.”

“In my trade, yes. And no one knows the Japanese like me.”

“That’s the problem. Very well, on what exactly is your information based?”

Harry didn’t want to go into the details of nonexistent oil tanks, and he didn’t have time for a debate. “Hawaii, that’s it. Tell the ambassador.”

“I told you, he’s golfing.”

“Warn Pearl, at least. They ought to be on alert, put some planes up, look around.”

“They are on alert. Besides, it’s Saturday there. It’s the navy’s Christmas-party day, and Hawaii is not going to go to battle stations because someone in Tokyo has secret information he won’t divulge. I’m sorry, Harry, it’s just not credible. Maybe you mean well, maybe you feel a patriotic twinge, maybe you’re just playing us for suckers, which is what you usually do. Anyway, no one is going to attack Hawaii. It’s too far from here, and it’s too well defended.”

“When is the ambassador coming back?”

“He’ll be golfing most of the day, so there’s no point even trying to get him at the embassy. I tell you what, if you don’t take that plane, I’ll get a group of fellows together later in the week, somewhere outside the embassy, and we’ll kick around your ideas, how’s that? It can even be a kind of rehabilitation for you. A start, anyway.”

“You know those monkeys who hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil? You could be a fourth monkey covering your ass.”

“I give up. I don’t know what you’re up to, some inscrutable scheme to turn a tragic situation into a buck, but I’m washing my hands of you, Harry.”

“People always say that. Wait.” Harry clapped a couple of times and bowed to Kato’s stone. He straightened up. Most of the stones in the cemetery weren’t carved, just selected for their dignity. “You know why we got along, Hoop?”

“I always hate that nickname.”

“Know why, more than the obvious reasons that you secretly liked breaking the rules and I needed a lookout? Because we both liked Japan. It was like a mysterious club no other Americans could join. We knew what was going on and no one else did, not our parents, not our teachers, not our preachers. We understood Japan.”

“That’s over now.”

“I don’t think so. No matter how hard you try, I think you still have a mustard seed of intelligence. You asked when this attack was going to take place. Did I see a written order? No, but I did see Tojo in the park this morning.”

That got Hooper’s attention. “Really? What was he doing?”

“He was riding. He was riding horseback in tweed and breeches and a sporty hat, followed by the missus and daughters in a convertible. The tweeds are important because, as we know, General Tojo is never seen out of uniform, and he never, ever takes a day off from running the busy empire. Today of all days, he took the time to ride around Ueno Park with his lovely family and be presented flowers by a little girl. There were photographers. The embassies all take each edition of every paper. Everyone can go to sleep tonight with a picture of a new, peace-loving Tojo under their pillow. Now you tell me when they’re going to attack.”

“Tweeds? Gosh, I wish I’d seen that.”

“So?”

Hooper rocked back and forth. Finally he said, “I can’t do it. Signal Hawaii on a hunch?”

“It’s not a hunch. You know.”

“All on your say-so, Harry. I’ll check the evening paper and see if Tojo’s in it.”

“And you’ll still sit on the pot. Or pray.”

Hooper flushed as if Harry had slapped him. In fact, Harry felt a band of pain across his back from bending to the joss stick and thought, Well, I’ve made my pitch to save the world and failed. It was stupid to even try. Now he thought about aspirin, Michiko and Ishigami, in that order. A gang of kids ran along the cemetery with their arms out like planes. A breeze pushed first one petal and then another off Kato’s stone to Hooper’s feet. Harry didn’t move, and Hooper became aware that although he was with Harry, he could as well have been alone. Before he headed out the gate, he said, “I’ll pray for you, too, Harry.”

“Do that, Hoop.”

AFTER HOOPER LEFT, Harry found a café to use the restroom, which was a cabinet behind a sliding door. He leaned to one side to feel, inside his shirt, a welt raised like a snake across his back. When he pissed, the toilet bowl turned pink. That wasn’t good, either.

21

AGAWA’S PAWNSHOP was open on Sunday because December was a busy time, when people needed cash for winter house-cleaning and the big blowout at New Year’s. They didn’t like banks; banks transferred mysterious papers around, sign here, sign there. At a pawnshop a person’s goods were safe, redeemable within three months, and shelves were filled with bright stacks of women’s kimonos, toolboxes, movie cameras, tap shoes, ice skates, a golf bag and clubs. A glass case displayed ivory netsuke, a comb and brush set of mother-of-pearl, earrings of black pearl and golden filigree, everything a little chipped, a little shabby, and over it all reigned thin, dyspeptic Agawa at the counter with an abacus, ashtray and pack of Golden Bats.

“That story about Noah’s ark. That was pretty cute,” Agawa said when he saw Harry at the door.

“I knew you were good with numbers. You, saying you couldn’t play cards with Jiro’s ashes there?”

“Well, I find it distracting to play next to a dead man.”

“You’re not so far from there yourself. We’ll just prop you up at the ballroom and deal you a hand.”

“I’d probably still win.” The picture obviously appealed to Agawa. His shoulders shook to indicate that he was laughing. “And I suppose you scratched together some dust for Jiro’s box?”

“We found something appropriate.”

Agawa looked around his shop, at pawned saws and patched umbrellas hanging from the beams, slightly dingy scrolls hanging on the walls, like a personal museum assembled by a man who never dusted. “Want anything here, Harry? Ski poles, telescope, carving of a bear with a salmon in his mouth?”

“No.”

“Good.” Agawa shouted for an assistant who crept in to mind the shop while he led Harry out the back and across a dirt yard populated by hens to a two-story cement tower that looked like the keep of a medieval castle. The tower door was a bank-vault door with a combination lock, and the upper window had iron bars and coffered shutters faced in iron plate. Drop cloths covered everything on the ground floor, although Harry caught a luminous hint of porcelains and the dark stare of a samurai helmet. These weren’t the pawned baubles of the working class, these were treasures of major debt. He followed Agawa up a ladder to the floor above, where the pawnbroker maneuvered a strongbox toward the crosshatched light of the window. Every movement of Agawa’s had been quick and agitated, but in unblocking the box he became nearly reverent, lifting the lid from the rich, swarming glow of gold bars.

The bars were cosseted in red velvet and stacked according to size. Indian tael bars were about the size of calling cards. Chinese “biscuit” bars were six ounces and carried the impression HONG KONG GOLD & SILVER EXCHANGE. Strings of Chinese doughnut coins Harry didn’t bother with. Selling or buying gold was illegal, but there was a rough black-market price both he and Agawa knew: five hundred yen per tael bar, and two thousand yen per Hong Kong biscuit. Biscuits made the pockets sag. Harry laid down three thousand for six tael bars that would be his currency from Hong Kong to America.

“How much for the golf clubs?” Harry nodded back toward the shop. “Keeping in mind that the army’s taking over all the courses and there’s no place to play.”

“A hundred.”

“Twenty.”

“Fifty.”

“Forty.”

“Done.” Agawa spread the bills like playing cards to count them. “Always good to do business with you. Very professional. As long as you let me count the money, not you. Just joking. You know the first time I saw you, Harry, you were running errands for the girls backstage at the Folies. I was interested in a dancer named Oharu, remember her? I wasn’t so old. I was married, but I was still interested. But I could never get her away from that artist. I think she posed for him. Now, there’s a job, painting someone like Oharu. Anyway, I heard that the artist was going to an exhibition out of town, and at once I got over to the Folies in time to catch Oharu and ask her to meet me after the show. She said she had a date. I got the drift, I didn’t have a chance, not with her. I went out and tried to drown my sorrows in drink. Then I went to the movies. I don’t think I ever looked at the screen, because three rows ahead of me was Oharu with you. You were her date. A boy, not even Japanese. I fought a powerful impulse to strangle you. I could feel my fingers closing around your throat. I could feel your breath rattle. You were so friendly with her, so easygoing. I wanted to beat your head against the steps and crush it under my heel.” Agawa rocked with excitement and slowly settled back. “I didn’t, of course. I controlled myself and left the movie theater. I went to a red lantern and got drunk again and calmed down. Although, I have to say, when the earthquake hit soon after and I heard that Oharu didn’t survive, my first reaction was Good, I hope the little gaijin died, too. I didn’t know you had already gone home.”

Harry carefully wrapped the bars in velvet so they wouldn’t click together. He looked up. “I guess those were the good old days.”

“History. Like Noah’s ark. That what you need now, Harry. Noah’s ark.”

HARRY BOUGHT A newspaper and met Goro at a Ginza pastry shop where the reformed pickpocket was squinting through a display case, trying to decide between napoleon or eclair, meringue or tarte citron.

Everyone had expected Goro to become a yakuza like Tetsu. He had the supple fingers of a born dip, but he also had the exquisite mole of an actor. Goro distracted shopgirls while Tetsu lifted the goods, and the two boys were successful thieves until they wandered into a stationery store they had robbed before. The owner at once recognized the mole. She chased Tetsu, locked the door before Goro could escape and could have turned him in to the police. However, she was a widow only ten years older than he, and the more he wept, the more she sympathized. Within a month they married. Goro took her family name as his and never had to steal again, though he still flirted with salesgirls. To get him out of the shop, his wife found him a position at the government printing office, where all he had to do was sort stationery to different ministries. That was still all he did ten years later, except for card games at the ballroom and occasional business with Harry.

“You’re fogging the glass,” Harry said.

“It’s hard to choose between the meringue and the eclair, each has its merits.”

“Then one of each.”

“Excellent. Harry, that’s why we’re still friends.”

Goro had his sweets with coffee, Harry had tea and they took a booth under a mural of cancan dancers kicking on the Champs-Élysées. Harry had met the wife once, and she had used the word “chic” in every other sentence. Goro had padded at her side, to all appearances a well-dressed consort, a neutered cat.

Harry opened the newspaper to the movie times. “I was thinking of taking in an early show. Want to come? You can pick.”

A tael bar sat in the paper’s crease. As Goro pointed to a theater, he incidentally palmed the bar. A moment later he rested his hand in his jacket pocket and let the bar slide down, every move natural and unhurried.

Goro read, “Stanley and Livingstone, what’s that about?”

“Missionary gets lost. Nothing new there.”

“I’m supposed to meet the wife for lunch. She’s very Western, strong-willed. She has me on a diet.”

“I can see.”

“A wonderful woman.”

“Absolutely.” Harry watched Goro stuff his face. “Marriage suits you.”

“She watches every move.” Goro’s tongue searched the corners of his mouth for crumbs, and only after could he bother with chat. “Are you in trouble, Harry?”

“Me? Furthest from it.”

“This request was a little unusual.”

“Was it scary at your end?” Harry asked. “Did you have to get into some offices? Get past a guard? Was it fun?”

Goro permitted himself a grunt of satisfaction. He drank the dregs of his coffee and sat for a moment with his eyes closed, breathing deeply the scent of cream and powdered sugar before rising from the table. “The wife.”

Harry left a minute later. He waited until he got to his car to unfold the newspaper to an envelope that Goro had slipped in so smoothly that even Harry hadn’t noticed. The envelope was government issue, with a twine closure he unwound to draw out two sheets of paper that were blank except for the letterhead of the Department of the Military Police, Defense Section, Ministry of War. A third piece of paper as fine as tissue bore the red imprint of a ministry stamp. The government printing office was also responsible for rubber stamps. A forged document wasn’t quite as good for Willie and Iris as a call from Saburo, which would have swept all objections aside. However, it was heartening to see that a son of Asakusa like Goro still had, despite all efforts at reformation, an itch that had to be scratched.

Harry felt better, more the captain of his fate. He didn’t have to go to the ballroom right away. Knowing what he did about Hawaii was like standing by a burning fuse and doing nothing. It was just too…annoying. He didn’t have to go through Hooper, he could go direct.

Michiko would have to wait. He knew she had made it to Haruko’s long enough to swipe a dress and she had a gun. At the ballroom card game, she would be protected by the yakuza. Harry couldn’t wait to get his hands around Tetsu’s throat for the rebuff at Saburo’s gate, but Tetsu wouldn’t let anyone harm a woman at his game. She was safe.

•     вЂў     вЂў

WEST TOKYO petered out into dry fields, sun-warped wooden houses and small children with bare bottoms who waved as Harry drove by. If the Japanese fleet really was headed to Hawaii, he felt he had to do something. He wasn’t a patriot, but the con he had run on Gen and the navy about phony oil tanks on Oahu was the shell game of a lifetime, his masterpiece, and he refused to see it come to such a miserable end. He refused to lose.

When he thought about Iris, he wondered if he really had helped her. Assuming that the Orinoco made it through the blockade, racist Germany was going to be no bed of roses for a Chinese bride. That was the problem with good deeds, they rarely stood up to scrutiny. Besides, mixed marriages always seemed to bring grief. He could just imagine Michiko meeting California girls, like a panther among tabbies. When he did tell her that he was leaving, he had to remember to take the gun away from her first. His back began to throb again, and he chewed aspirin as he drove.

Ten miles out, he reached an oasis ringed by pines that separated the manicured fairways of a golf course from the muck of fallow paddy fields. Everything about the rice paddies suggested a desperate, crowded, exhausting struggle for life, and next to them the course hovered like a green and spacious heaven. The entrance to this paradise was a clubhouse reminiscent of a Spanish hacienda and a circular driveway with limousines and idle bodyguards.

Harry had caddied in Florida, enough to pick up the rudiments of the game, which enabled him to make occasional money teaching golf in Japan. Japanese golf was different from American in that it was tacitly understood before a match began which player, for reasons of respect, should win. Harry wasn’t crazy about golf as a game, but it was a gold-plated entrée to Japanese business. Harry could sell the Queen Mary over eighteen holes. He wasn’t a member of the club, but he had steered enough players to it to be welcome. To look the part, he shouldered the bag of clubs he’d bought at the pawnshop.

Members came and went through a reception area of Mexican tiles and mission wood. Notices on the reception counter advised that all guests had to be signed in, only golf shoes were allowed on the links, only regular shoes in the clubhouse and, as a patriotic sacrifice, players were limited to two balls per round. One of the first shortages caused by the American embargo was golf balls; some enterprising boys would be out by the water hazards, selling balls they had dredged out. The reception area opened to a sitting room of leather chairs and trophies and a fireplace stoked like a furnace. For Harry, it had never hurt to be seen at the club. Golf was a Japanese version of America, played in plus fours and tam-o’-shanters, celebrated on the nineteenth hole with a round bought by the highest score. Now, however, anything as American as golf was unpatriotic, and the club was virtually empty.

A horseplayer Harry knew was behind the reception desk. He wore a blazer with the club insignia on the breast pocket.

“Harry, what can I do for you?”

“I was supposed to meet the American ambassador here. I wondered whether he checked in.”

“An hour ago. You were going to play golf with the ambassador?”

“He asked if I could. Said to find him on the golf course if I missed the tee time.”

“Sorry, Harry, he’s got a foursome. You know the rules, four’s the limit.”

“Is the sensei here?”

“The teacher is at the shop. But I’m not supposed to let you past the desk unless a member invites you.”

“Since when?”

The receptionist shrugged apologetically.

“That’s too bad, because the fact is, I have a deal on golf balls.”

“That’s different. You’ll find the teacher at the shop.”

“I know the way.”

Harry walked through to the mournful shadows of the bar. The members present were mainly in import-export, and since the embargo, they had all day to drink. Harry worked his way out to a flagstone patio that overlooked the course. In a shop that stood separate from the clubhouse, the pro was demonstrating a putter. Customers were rare, and the pro was thoroughly occupied.

The course might be virtually abandoned, but it was beautiful, famous for fast greens of Korai grass and water hazards that were ponds paved in lily pads. The holes were framed by dark pine and autumn maples, all the colors of a blaze, as if a man with a torch had run around and lit the grounds. On the first tee, facing a relatively short dogleg right, were players Harry didn’t recognize, all four in knickers, the uniform of golf, and taking some very bad swings. In Japan, golf was performed with almost religious intensity of effort, never mind that the breeze from off the course carried a rice-paddy tang of rotting cuttlefish and human waste. No one else was even waiting to tee off.

The question was how far out on the course the ambassador was. Past the first pin, Harry could just see a foursome approaching the tee of the second hole.

Harry stepped back inside the bar to borrow a pair of binoculars hanging by the door. He focused on the second tee and a commanding figure with the look of an American eagle—dark brows and mustache and silvery hair—who towered over the other players. Unmistakably the ambassador. He was at the second hole with sixteen to go and would be out on the course at least four more hours. Harry couldn’t wait four hours. Michiko wouldn’t wait four more hours at the ballroom, safe or not. He’d wasted enough time getting this far.

He replaced the binoculars. Maybe a dozen members sat by the window in the bar but couldn’t look out without blinking into the sun. The party on the first tee hit the last of four brutal hacks and started down the fairway with their caddies. Harry waited until they were a hundred yards along and strolled after them with his bag as if he had every right, no questions asked.

He stayed out of their line of vision until he reached the trees and a groundskeeper’s path that wound through them. Fallen leaves released a scent like cinnamon with every step. The second hole was a straightaway pinched by sand traps, a test of the player’s ability to hit low and use the roll rather than loft the ball into the vagaries of the wind. Behind the pin was a service road that ran outside the wind-break of pines back to the clubhouse driveway. If he could just get the ambassador alone and talk to him, he could walk the road back to his car and no one would be the wiser.

The ambassador’s foursome was moving up on the fairway of the second hole when Harry caught sight of them. The ambassador puffed on a pipe, a Gulliver in tow, while his hosts spoke loudly in English to make up for his deafness and lack of Japanese. Harry always described the American ambassador as hopeless. The truth was, Harry didn’t think the ambassador was a stupid man so much as stultified by good manners and the absence of curiosity, happier to swim in a swimming pool than in the sea, the sort who, in fact, wouldn’t have lasted one year as a missionary. His information was secondhand from other diplomats. His Japanese contacts were financiers and industrialists known for their moderate views and fading influence. None of the players had yet noticed Harry, but he recognized one who was bareheaded and as dark as a caddy, the old pirate Yoshitaki of Yoshitaki Lines.

Harry ducked through the trees. He wasn’t sure what he could say in a few minutes that would persuade the ambassador to cable Washington or Hawaii. He couldn’t explain about an oil-tank scam or the nuances of the word “confusion” or of Tojo riding in the park. Probably lie, keep it simple, just claim that sources in the navy said the war was on.

Because the ambassador had boomed his drive, he hit his second shot last. Harry hoped it would land on the right side of the fairway. The ambassador did better than that: he sliced a ball that flew viciously into the maples and kicked out to the rough not more than fifty yards from Harry. While the others lined up approaches to the green, the ambassador searched the grass. He wore a maroon sweater, plus fours and the trance of a man lost in a game. He found the ball, set his pipe down on the grass and considered his clubs with his back to Harry, who was close enough, with a quick dash, to pick his pocket.

“Mr. Ambassador!” Harry said. He wanted to get this over with fast.

The ambassador selected a six iron and took a practice swing. The caddy was a skinny boy in a huge cloth cap. He noticed Harry, but gaijin were known to act in bizarre ways. Popping out of the woods could be one of them.

Harry stepped within ten yards. “Mr. Ambassador, we have to talk about Hawaii. There’s about to be an attack, Mr. Ambassador, are you aware of that?”

The ambassador got comfortable over the ball. A lot of big men stiffened over the ball, but the ambassador seemed smooth and poised, discounting the slice into the trees. He stepped back for a practice swing and set up over the ball again.

“Mr. Ambassador!” Harry edged closer yet.

“It’s my theory,” Yoshitaki said, “that a deaf man’s concentration is a great advantage on the golf range.” He had returned so quietly along the trees that Harry hadn’t heard him. Harry felt a little trumped.

The ambassador unleashed a smooth swing and a sharp “click” as the club struck the ball, which sailed low and true toward the pin.

“About Hawaii,” Harry tried again.

The ambassador focused on the bounce and roll of his shot as it split the bunkers. Yoshitaki looked in the opposite direction. Harry turned to see the following players and caddies transform to bodyguards and hustle toward him as they ditched their bags. Now Harry understood why they were such atrocious golfers.

“Mr. Ambassador.” The man was close enough to touch.

The ambassador’s shot had reached the green, from the excited reaction of the players ahead. He retrieved his pipe, produced a contented puff and, without a backward glance, strode toward the flag.

“How is that beetle of yours?” Yoshitaki asked Harry. “Still letting him out for walks?”

“When he needs the air.”

“Today is the day. This will be the last Sunday like this we will see for a good while, don’t you think?”

“As a matter of fact, I do.” Harry watched the ambassador cross the undulations of the fairway. “He heard me.”

Yoshitaki said, “No, not if it was the wrong thing to hear or the wrong messenger, he didn’t hear a word. He’s a friend. I’ll make sure he gets home safely. Was it important, what you wanted to tell him?”

“I can’t even remember what it was.”

“Good. Don’t become complicated now. It’s not everyone who can lead a life of total selfishness. You should stick with that.”

Well, a man that deaf was a wonder, Harry thought. He could have shouted at the top of his lungs, but the moment had passed. Maybe the moment had never existed, Harry thought, any more than he existed to the embassy. It also occurred to him that he could be wrong, that he had failed only in sending the ambassador on a wild goose chase. Who the hell was Harry Niles to announce when war would start?

The bodyguards arrived and surrounded Harry. They didn’t seize him, threaten him or even show exasperation, only circled Harry and separated him from his golf bag.

“Don’t worry about the plane,” Yoshitaki said. “It won’t leave without you. Good-bye, Harry Niles.”

The bodyguards waited until Yoshitaki’s foursome holed out, then headed for the service road behind the green, a phalanx with Harry at the center. Harry had once witnessed a similar technique at a bullfight in Tijuana when a bull gored a matador and took possession of the ring. They got the bull out by sending in a herd of steers that surrounded him, trotted him once around and led him peacefully out the gate.

DRIVING BACK to town, Harry had to laugh at the picture of a con man saving the world. So through the night rode Paul Revere; And so through the night went his cry of alarm / To every Middlesex village and farm… It would help, he thought, if people would listen or could even hear. No more heroics. The main thing was, he hadn’t blown his seat on the plane.

Harry noticed how the sun danced over dry rice stalks sticking up from mud like black stitches on a cloth of gold, a sight he realized he might never see again. Amber waves of grain, not fields of rice. This time tomorrow he’d be airborne. There were things he’d miss: the whistle of a blind masseuse in the early morning, the shimmer of banners the length of a street, the way koi rose to the surface when a shadow passed. The way the tailor’s wife had laughed at her own distress so as not to bother him, which struck Harry as the most dignity he’d ever seen, but a dignity he saw in Japan all the time.

And delicacy, the way Yoshitaki’s men walked him off the course in the most nonviolent bum’s rush possible. There was style in that, a gentle art.

It was midafternoon when Harry got to Asakusa. Walking through Sunday crowds pushing to this movie or that shrine, treating themselves to red-bean buns or candy rabbits, he felt a million miles away from the artificial world of the golf course. Asakusa was still sane, even if the rest of the world was not. On one side a newsstand featured samurai photos, on the other side Shirley Temple. A music-hall billboard offered both patriotic songs and South Seas ukuleles. That was what Harry considered a healthy balance.

The front of the ballroom was locked, unusual on Sunday, when Tetsu sometimes had as many as four games going. Harry went around to the oversize doors in back, where theater flats and props were delivered for storage, the nominal use of the ballroom now. He couldn’t wait to get his hands on Tetsu. No one answered Harry’s call, but the doors eased open.

“Tetsu? Michiko?”

Since he had never entered through the rear, he didn’t know where the light switches were, and he followed the flame of his cigarette lighter around a maze of backdrop flats, prop chests, costume trunks. The Happy Paris had been shut the night before, and now the ballroom? Like parts of his life going dark.

“Michiko?”

There was no return glimmer or whisper, no card game or tango on a gramophone, let alone a welcome. Although Harry was late for Michiko, he decided to act the aggrieved party because she wasn’t waiting for him with sake and food. His back was burning, and he hadn’t had food or sympathy for a day. He remembered when he used to come to the ballroom with Oharu, how they had sat in the balcony and watched reflections from a mirror ball spin around the floor, over the men with their rolls of tickets and women lined up like pack animals along a velvet rope. The painful couples they made, stepping on each other’s feet to the quickstep, fox-trot, waltz. Oharu, the real dancer, would giggle and shush Harry at the same time. The way the reflections spun, he would feel he was rising to the sky. It was interesting how much more disorienting pitch black could be. He kept walking into nowhere across the ballroom floor.

“Tetsu! Where are you?”

His voice circled.

“Michiko!”

He finally saw something. A realization filtered through him that the floor had become slippery and that a warm, cloying scent hung in the air. Harry slowed like a man approaching an abyss. He gave his breath a moment to catch up before the last few steps.

In the wavering light before him, a woman in a white dress with a blue sailor collar slumped at a card table. She didn’t have a head. Not on her, but her arms stretched across the table to a white wooden box the right size.

22

HE SET THE lighter on the table like a candle. Her hands were waxy, heavy in death. She wore Haruko’s dress, white with blue trim, now flecked with brown around the collar. She looked lonely. Harry supposed that anyone being executed felt alone, but the victims he’d seen in Nanking at least died in a war where death was the norm. To be killed like this, trapped by a man with a sword while a peaceful city lay outside, was to be particularly deserted. Her forearm was cool but soft, perhaps two hours dead. About the time Harry had arrived at the golf course, Ishigami must have arrived at the ballroom, where Harry had told Michiko to wait. He couldn’t have set her up better if he’d tried.

“No—”

Was he talking to her? This was a little late, he thought. What he was going to say was that he was just trying to help Willie and then alert the right people about nothing less than a war. It didn’t matter, because the right people weren’t interested. He certainly hadn’t helped her. Harry didn’t see his gun, so that hadn’t helped her, either.

“It’s not—”

He couldn’t imagine her dead. There was nothing sweet or pleasing about her, not the candy-box kind of love Americans sang about. He couldn’t imagine her dead because she was so difficult, she was the burning fuse, the spark and imminent explosion in his life. Where Michiko died, there should be a smoldering crater in the earth, a volcanic upheaval, at least the smell of gunpowder, instead of a sense that the air was awash in droplets of ruby red. He could almost feel the mist settle on his cheek. Ishigami had painted her once, now twice. Still, it wasn’t right, dull submission wasn’t Michiko’s style. With the world about to roll down the drain, it probably made no difference to examine an individual death, but Harry, having been a bust where the world was concerned, needed to know what had happened.

There should have been more blood. Blood should have flooded the table and the floor around it if she’d been killed where she sat. There was relatively little. Maybe this was coldhearted of him, but he could deal with details better than the whole picture, a little like Sergeant Shozo’s jigsaw puzzle, except that Harry refused to see the piece in the center or touch the wooden box, not yet. Before the lighter’s flame died, he looked up and found its dim reflection in the mirror ball hanging above, and another glint from a brass post of the velvet rope. Now he knew where he was.

In the dark, Harry climbed to the cockpit over the door and threw on the house lights: whites, cells, spots and mirror ball all at once. The ballroom leaped out of the dark. Michiko and table gained color, focus, dimension. The size of the ballroom, the gilded ceiling and balcony tier made her smaller, braver, a child prodigy playing to an empty house. The parquet shone except for two tracks from the table to the swing door of the women’s restroom.

The ballroom management had kept the restroom’s size and amenities to a minimum to discourage dancers from loitering. The light was out; why bother changing it after the dancing had stopped? A broken window on an airshaft admitted as much dust as light to two sinks with a cracked mirror and two Western toilets without seats that sat in a floor of hexagonal tiles. Blood pooled around a central drain that was stopped with clotted hair. Harry edged around the blood, searching the ceiling and walls for a bullet hole and the floor for a loose button, anything dropped. Just going tacky, the blood bore the imprints of her knees and toes and a man’s shoes, relatively large, a red negative of where she knelt and where he stood.

Harry retreated to the dance floor.

“Tetsu!”

Tetsu was not in his office. Harry found cases of cigarettes, packs of cards, dumbbells, tattoo books, but no sign of blood or disarray. Harry returned to the bathroom door. Had Ishigami surprised Michiko in the bathroom? Had she put the gun down out of reach? Had she meekly sunk to her knees? Did she see the head box? Of course, Ishigami was the man who had peered deeply into her and found the geisha. In some ways, he might know her more intimately than Harry.

Then he set her up. He moved her with her toes dragging to a table in the middle of the ballroom floor and sat her in a chair. There he stretched her arms across the table as if setting the head box down or respectfully offering a gift. Then he locked the front door, which made no sense unless he wanted only Harry to find her. Harry had told her to wait at the ballroom. He was the one man sure to try every door.

Harry pictured it. Wood wasn’t paper, and Ishigami couldn’t punch through the restroom wall, but he could slip through the door, and in such poor light Michiko might not immediately see who he was. It still wasn’t right. Nobody who ever made love with Michiko came away unscathed. There’d be a shot or some of Ishigami’s blood. Overhead, the mirror ball hung like a ghostly daytime moon. Harry remembered her in her sequined jacket. There’d be something.

He approached the table again, circling as he neared, trying to chase the shakes out of his knees. Bullets were different. Once they left a gun they became, to some degree, middlemen between the killer and the victim. There was distance, if only an inch, and at long distance a sniper’s objectivity. A sword, however, never left the hand and was never less than personal. Harry remembered being the butt of bayonet practice at school and how passionately the drill sergeant sprayed spit as he urged students to plunge their bamboo poles through Harry’s wicker armor. How smooth, in comparison, Ishigami was. An artist. Americans wondered how samurai could fight in loose-sleeved kimonos, not understanding how the robes accentuated the sweep and thrust of the sword, and how the final plunge of steel through silk wrapped agony in beauty. Harry thought all this as if each idea were armor protecting him from the simple reality of a headless girl sitting like a sack of potatoes in a chair.

Death changed people, but that much?

Harry tentatively raised the lid of the box. The wood was white wisteria sanded to a sheen that emphasized the glossy black of the hair inside, cut short. He dug his fingers in and lifted. Since the head faced away he first saw damp, matted hair and two wounds down to the skull that must have preceded the final slice. A broad neck. Small ears with thick lobes. He turned the head around to face Haruko. Her eyes were slitted, mouth parted, forehead creased by a frown. It was an expression she might wear if a friend had suddenly accosted her with a a trick question, something she didn’t have the answer for and was still figuring out.

Haruko in her own dress. That explained a lot. After telling Harry on the phone that Michiko had taken the dress, Haruko must have gone after it and found Michiko, and the two must have come to the ballroom together. Why Michiko didn’t wait and Haruko did, Harry couldn’t understand, although it explained why Haruko was taken so completely by surprise. In the murk of the restroom, with no gun and no warning, how could she defend herself from Ishigami?

A reverberation pounded at the back door and died. Harry fought the impulse to run. Where to? The door opened for a man dressed in shadow who moved through the scenery racks, emerged onto the ballroom parquet and peeled his goggles back. It was Gen in a leather coat and helmet. He slowed as he approached the table.

“Harry, what did you do?”

“Nothing.”

“It doesn’t look like nothing. Who is that?” Gen nodded toward the head in Harry’s hands.

“Haruko.”

“The waitress from your club?”

“Yes.”

Harry had a ringing in his ears that he couldn’t place as either alarm or relief. He put the head into the box as gently as he could and replaced the lid.

“Any witnesses, Harry?”

“I don’t know, I wasn’t here.”

“Okay.” Gen followed the trail to the restroom and edged in, careful to stay out of the blood. He emerged breathing hard and shaking his head. “You’ve done it now, Harry.”

“It was Ishigami. If you’d gotten him out of town when I asked, this wouldn’t have happened.”

Gen made a show of looking right and left. “I don’t see Ishigami. What I see is you and Haruko.”

“If I did it, where’s the sword?”

“You tell me. Did you kill her?”

“No, I swear.”