December 6 (5 page)

5

B
Y 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.

T
EN 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.”

“HitokappuBay?”

“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.”

S
ATURDAY 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.