Tengu (15 page)

Mr. Esmeralda
had followed the Japanese student down the companionway to the cabin doors, on
which were painted a fleet of fantastic ships and a grisly collection of sea
monsters, in the style of the Shijo
school
. The
Japanese student had knocked at the doors and then waited, watching Mr.
Esmeralda blandly.

“I don’t
suppose you’re going to tell me what this is all about?” Mr. Esmeralda had
asked the student. The student had said nothing, but waited and watched as
before, impassive and utterly calm.

The doors to
the cabin had been opened. “You may go in now,” the student told Mr.

Esmeralda.

‘‘You are sure
that this is going to be worth my while?” Mr. Esmeralda had asked him.

“Go in,” the
student had repeated.

A small hand
had taken hold of Mr. Esmeralda’s wrist as he stepped into the cabin, to guide
him down a flight of darkened stairs, and then along the length of an unlit
corridor, to a door. It had been immediately opened, and Mr. Esmeralda had
found
himself
in a private stateroom, hot and smoky
with dozens and dozens of candles. Behind the swaying flames of the candles,
only half-visible through the dazzle and the smoke, Mr. Esmeralda had seen that
the basketwork palanquin had been converted into a throne–its bamboo carrying
poles having been fixed vertically to the sides of the basket, instead of
horizontally. He had shaded his eyes against the candles, but it had been
impossible to see clearly who or what it was that was perched in the basket.

Apart from Mr.
Esmeralda himself, there were several other people in the stateroom–two or three
young Japanese men standing in the shadows, all of them with masked faces–and a
very young Japanese girl, wearing only a red-and-gold silk shin and an
extraordinary lacquered headdress of stylized flowers, similar to the flowers
worn by the Yoshiwara courtesans of the eighteenth century. From her face, and
from her half-developed breasts, Mr, Esmeralda had guessed that she was only
twelve or thirteen years old.

“I seem to have
been sent for,” Mr. Esmeralda had said loudly, in the general direction of the
basketwork throne.

“Indeed you
have,” a voice had replied, slurred and Japanese, but with a peculiar
inflection all its own, as if it were emerging from the black-haired throat of
a tropical insect. “I know who you are, Mr. Esmeralda, and why you spent so
much time at Kochi, in the company of Katsuk-awa Shunsho.”

“I have many
acquaintances in Japan,” Mr. Esmeralda had answered cautiously, screwing up his
eyes to see what this “Kappa” really looked like. “Katsukawa Shunsho is a
trading associate, nothing more.”

“You are based
in Los Angeles, in America?” the peculiar voice had asked him.

Mr. Esmeralda
felt the first slide of perspiration down the middle of his back. Suddenly he
felt less like the conjuror than the conjuree, the perplexed victim whose socks
and cufflinks have been removed without his knowledge. He gave what he hoped
was an assured nod, but he had never felt less assured in his life. “I return
there on Friday,” he said. “Air Argentina, flight AX

109-Perhaps you
knew that, too.”

“I need a
certain task performed for me in Los Angeles,” the voice told him.

Mr. Esmeralda
licked his lips. “Certain tasks” usually turned out to be extremely
complicated, costly, and dangerous. If somebody in Japan wanted a
straightforward favor, they generally asked you for it outright. It was only
when it was unpleasant that they called it “a certain task” and approached you
so obliquely.

“I, er, I
regret that time will not permit me to accept any more commissions at present,”
Mr.

Esmeralda had
replied. “I have an art shipment to take care of; a whole freighter loaded with
netsuke. And I have a meeting in Detroit on Monday morning. And next Wednesday,
I must speak to some of my new associates in Cairo. I would have liked to be
able to accommodate you, but...” He shrugged, tried to smile.

There had been
a second’s silence. But then the voice had said, “Mr. Esmeralda, you will not
turn me down. I will pay you $1.6 million in U.S. currency, and in return you
will give me your absolute obedience. Is that understood?”

“I am not in
the habit of performing favors for money,” Mr. Esmeralda had replied, although
sdme hint of caution made him add, “Not as a rule, anyway. Well, not often.”

Kappa, from
behind the swaying candle flames, had said something else hurriedly and
authoritatively. Two more Japanese had come forward, both masked, as their
colleagues were, dragging a large hardwood block, painted shiny red. Then the
young Japanese girl in the headdress had stepped forward, knelt down, and
pulled open the zipper of Mr. Esmeralda’s white tropical trousers. She had
reached inside, wrestled out his penis from his shorts, and tugged it out until
it was stretched across the top of the red block.

Mr. Esmeralda
had tried to thrash his legs and wriggle from side to side; but the two young
Japanese boys had a firm grip on his arms, and the young Japanese girl had an
unyielding grip on his penis.

A third
Japanese youth had stepped forward, this one clutching a curvy-bladed samurai
sword.

He had lowered
the sword until the sharp edge was just touching the skin of Mr. Esmeralda’s
penis, not breaking the skin, but resting it there so that Mr. Esmeralda could
feel just how keen the blade was.

Then, without
warning, the Japanese youth had let out a sharp cry, whipped back the samurai sword,
and flashed it down toward the red hardwood block. Mr. Esmeralda had screamed,
in spite of
himself
; in spite of the fact that he was
a man of the world.

He had looked
down to see that the Japanese youth had somehow managed to stop the blade’s
descent exactly an inch above the hardwood block. He had cut a thin line across
the tip of Mr.

Esmeralda’s
penis, but that was all.
Only a scratch, nothing serious.
Mr. Esmeralda had closed his eyes, and whispered, “Madre mia.”

There had been
a lengthy silence. The girl had not released his penis the boy with the sword
had not moved away. But the insectlike voice of Kappa had said, “
you
wish to assist me now.”

Mr. Esmeralda
had cleared his throat. “I see no reason why not.”

“Well, that’s
excellent,” Kappa had told him. “Welcome to the the Circle of the Burned
Doves.”

“The Burned Doves?”
Mr. Esmeralda had asked.

There had been
a short hesitation; then Kappa had whispered, “Come forward. Come nearer.

Then you will
see what I mean.”

Mr. Esmeralda
had glanced down at the girl, and then sideways at the boy.

“Let him go,”
Kappa had ordered, and the girl had stood up and shuffled quickly back into the
shadows.

Mr. Esmeralda,
zipping up his pants, had made a suspicious circuit of the rows of flickering
candles. As he had approached the basketwork throne, a curious smell had
reached his nostrils, a sweetish smell that would almost have been alluring if
he hadn’t been so sure that it was the odor of something curious and
frightening. If it had put him in mind of anything at all, it was Japanese
seaweed, cloying and slightly briny.

“Come nearer,”
Kappa had told him, his voice so hoarse and quiet now that Mr. Esmeralda could
hardly hear what he was saying. Mr. Esmeralda, sweating in the candlelight, had
finally come face to face with the creature that called itself Kappa.

Lying in the
basketwork throne on a soiled cushion of blue Japanese silk was a yellowish
thing that looked, at first sight, like a hugely enlarged human embryo. Its
head was more than man-sized, but Mr. Esmeralda could see nothing of its
features because they were concealed behind a bland yellow-painted mask, a
faintly smiling warrior of the reign of the Emperor Kameyama, an uncanny and
disturbing masterpiece of Japanese decorative art.

The body,
however, was naked, and completely exposed, and it was this grisly collection
of distorted flesh and bone that subsequently gave Mr. Esmeralda so many
nightmares. There was a narrow chest, which rose and fell as rapidly as that of
a suffocating puppy; two tiny arms with budlike nodes instead of fingers; and a
bulging stomach. The genitals were even more malformed, a gray and wrinkled
array of folds and dewlaps, neither male nor female, which glistened in the
candlelight with slippery mucus. The creature had legs of a kind, hunched
beneath its genitals, but they were sticklike and obviously powerless.

‘‘You wonder
why I hide my face and leave my body
exposed?
” Kappa
had asked Mr.

Esmeralda
hoarsely, as Mr. Esmeralda stared at him in horror.

Mr. Esmeralda
had been unable to answer. His mouth hadn’t been able to move itself into any
kind of shape at all.

Kappa had
watched him for a while through the expressionless eyeholes in his mask. Then
he had said, “I hide my face because my face is normal; the face of a normal
man. The rest of my body you are welcome to see. I am not ashamed of it. What
happened to me was not my fault; nor the fault of my mother. Look at me, and
see what the Americans were responsible for, with their atomic bomb. My mother
was one month pregnant on August 6, 1945, when the first bomb was dropped on
Hiroshima. She was staying with her uncle and aunt in Itsukaichi, but she had
traveled to the city the day before to see an old friend of my father, who had
been wounded in the Army. She was exposed both to the flash, which burned her,
and the gamma rays, which eventually killed her, after eight years. But she was
just outside the two-kilometer radius from ground zero within which all
pregnant women had miscarriages and even though I was grotesquely premature I was
born alive.”

“.The doctors
didn’t...” Mr. Esmeralda had
begun,
his voice thick
and choked.

“Think of
killing me at birth? No, they didn’t do that. My mother was back at Itsukaichi
for her confinement. After a while, in a strange way, she became attached to
me, and she refused to contemplate euthanasia. She took me every day to water
therapy, in the hope that my limbs would grow strong and my
body
develop
. That is why they call me Kappa. It is Japanese for

‘
water
devil’–a nasty little beast that lives in the water
and refuses to compromise with anyone.”

Mr. Esmeralda
had deliberately turned his back on the revolting spectacle in the basketwork
throne, and had made his way unsteadily back through the lines of candles to
the far side of the room. During this time, Kappa had said nothing, but had
watched him intently through his yellow warrior’s mask. Mr. Esmeralda had felt
closed-in and nauseous, and the slight roll of the ancient ferry as it had
turned on the Pacific swell to dock at Wakayama had unsettled his breakfast,
pork leg with mushrooms and too much hot tea.

“What is it you
want me to do?” Mr. Esmeralda had asked Kappa at last, clearing his throat.

“A friend of
mine, a doctor, must establish himself in America. You will arrange a work
permit, and for somewhere private for his research. You can do this kind of
thing: Kat-sukawa Shunsho told me. You have friends who can forge papers,
friends who can arrange for green cards. This is so?”

Mr. Esmeralda
had nodded queasily.

“You will also
bring together four or five people who can help you with the further stages of
my scheme. They should be experienced people, people like yourself, preferably
with good knowledge of Japan and an under-Tengu standing of the Japanese way of
life. But you must understand that they might have to be dispensed with,
especially if anything goes wrong. So I would advise you not to select friends
or lovers, or anyone close to you.”

Mr. Esmeralda
had said, “When you say dispensed with, you mean murdered? Or do we speak a
different language?”

“Was Hiroshima
murder?”

“I am an
entrepreneur, not a historical moralist. Hiroshima was war.’’

There was a
long, breathy pause. Then Kappa said, “Pearl Harbor was war; Wake Island was
war; Midway was war; Guadalcanal was war. War–men fighting each other like
warriors. But Hiroshima was murder. And, for me personally, and all of my
brothers and sisters who make up the Circle of the Burned Doves–that is to say,
all those innocent children reared in secrecy, who have been born with terrible
deformities because of the American atrocity–it has been worse than murder. If
there is such a thing as living murder, then we have suffered it.’’

Mr. Esmeralda
had brushed the sleeves of his coat with mock fastidiousness. He didn’t intend
to argue with Kappa about the morality of revenge. Revenge, as far as he was
concerned, was both petulant and boring. Revenge was for cuckolded husbands,
rejected wives, and lunatics.

“This doctor
friend of yours?” he had said, “What exactly does he want to do in the United
States?”

Kappa had been
silent for almost a minute. Then he had said, “His name is Sugita Gempaku. He
is a doctor of anthropology, not of medicine, a graduate of Keio University in
Tokyo. I suppose you could call him something of a revolutionary. I first read
about his work in a French science magazine. He was trying to recreate, as a
historical experiment, some of the more specialized and arcane defense programs
that Emperor Hirohito ordered toward the close of the war.

“One of these
programs was an attempt to rediscover a derivative of the Heaven Drug, a kind
of sleeping powder which the ancient samurai were said to have burned in
censers around their battlegrounds, and which gave their enemies such strange
and compelling hallucinations that they simply laid down their weapons and
allowed themselves to be beheaded without a fight.