The Devil of Nanking (19 page)

At about eleven o’clock we heard something that might have been a mortar attack, and for a moment our eyes met. Then came distant explosions, one–two–three–four in a sudden continuous string, and silence again. Ten minutes later a demon clattering rose in the alley. I went to the back, peeped through a shutter and saw that someone’s goat had slipped its tether, and was now in panic – racing aimlessly through the back plots, bucking and charging into trees and corrugated-iron buildings. Under its hoofs it crushed the summer’s rotten pomegranates until the snow appeared filthy with blood. No one came to catch the goat, the owners must have already fled the city, and it was twenty minutes before it found its way into the street and silence once again descended on our alley.

After that night Jason started watching me. He developed a habit of staring right at me, when we were walking home from the club, when I was cooking, or just when we were all sitting in the living room in front of the television. Sometimes I’d turn round to light a customer’s cigarette and Jason would be standing a few feet away, looking at me as if he was secretly entertained by everything I did. It was horrible and scary and exciting all at the same time – I’d never had anyone look at me like that before and I couldn’t imagine what I’d do if he ever came near me. I found excuses to keep out of his way.

Autumn came. The winey heat, the hot metal, frying and drains smell of Tokyo gave way to a cooler, starker Japan that must have been waiting near the surface all along. The skies were cleared of their haze, the maples drenched the city with russet, and the smell of woodsmoke came out of nowhere, as if we were back in post-war Japan among the cooking fires of old Tokyo. From the gallery I could reach out and pick ripening persimmon straight from the branch. The mosquitoes left the garden and that made Svetlana sad – she said that now they had left we were all doomed.

Still Fuyuki hadn’t come to the club. Shi Chongming remained as obstinate, as tight-lipped as ever, and sometimes I thought my chances of ever seeing the film were slipping away. One day, when I couldn’t bear it any longer, I took a train to Akasaka and in a public booth called the number on Fuyuki’s card. The Nurse, I was sure it was the Nurse, answered, with a feminine, ‘
Moshi moshi
,’ and I froze, the receiver to my ear, all my courage disappearing in a second. ‘
Moshi moshi
?’ she repeated, but I had already changed my mind. I slammed down the phone and walked away from the booth as quickly as I could, not looking back. Maybe Shi Chongming had been right when he said that I’d never make silk out of a mulberry leaf.

From Kinokuniya, the big bookshop in Shinjuku, I got every publication I could find on alternative medicine. I also bought some Chinese–Japanese dictionaries, and collections of essays about the
yakuza
. Over the next few days, while I waited for Fuyuki to come back to the club, I’d lock myself in my room for long, long hours, reading about Chinese medicine until I knew all about Bian Que’s moxibustion and acupuncture with stone needles, about Hua Tuo’s early operations and experiments with anaesthetics. Soon I understood the
Qi Gong
, ‘frolics of the five animals’ exercises back to front, and could recite the taxonomy of herbs from Shen Nong’s Materia Medica. I read about tiger bones and turtle jelly and the gall bladders of bears. I went to
kampo
shops and got free samples of eel oil and bear bile from Karuizawa. I was looking for something that could reverse all the principles of regeneration and degeneration. A key to immortality. It was a search that had been going on in one form or another since time began. Even humble tofu, they said, was created by a Chinese emperor in his quest for life without end.

But Shi Chongming was talking about something that no one had ever encountered before. Something surrounded in secrecy.

One day I took all my paints and carefully etched out a picture of a man among the buildings on my wartime Tokyo walls. His face came out crunched, like a
kabuki
man, so I drew in a Hawaiian shirt, and behind him an American car, the sort of car a gangster might drive. Scattered at his feet, I drew in medicine bottles, an alembic, a still. Something so precious – illegal? – that no one dared talk about it.

‘It’s beautiful,’ said Shi Chongming. ‘Isn’t it?’

I stared out of his window at the campus, at the trees turning gold and red. The moss on the gymnasium had deepened to a dark purply green, like an underripe plum, and from time to time a ghostly figure in
kendo
mask and robes passed the opened doors. The shouts of the
dojo
echoed across the campus, sending the crows up into the trees in great rustling clouds. It
was
beautiful. I didn’t understand why I couldn’t separate it from its context. I couldn’t help thinking of it trapped by the strapping modern city, by power-hungry Japan. When I didn’t turn from the window, Shi Chongming laughed.

‘So you, too, are one of the number who cannot forgive.’

I turned and looked at him directly. ‘Forgive?’

‘Japan. For what she did in China.’

The words of a Chinese-American historian I’d studied at university went through my head: ‘
The Japanese were brutal beyond imagination. They elevated cruelty to an art form. If an official apology did come would it be sufficient for us to forgive?
’ ‘Why?’ I asked. ‘Are you saying you have?’

He nodded.

‘How could you?’

Shi Chongming closed his eyes, a little smile on his face. He was silent for a long time, thinking about this, and I might have thought he had fallen asleep if it wasn’t for the way his hands moved and twitched, like dying birds. ‘How?’ he said eventually, looking up. ‘How, indeed? It would seem impossible, wouldn’t it? But I have had many, many years to think about it – years when I couldn’t move outside my own country, years when I couldn’t move outside my own house. Until you have been pelted in the street, paraded through your own town bearing propaganda . . .’ He spread his thumb and forefinger across his chest and I thought immediately of Cultural Revolution photographs, men huddled pitifully together, hounded by the Red Guard, slogans like
Intellectual Renegade
and
Anti-Party Element
screaming from placards around their necks. ‘. . . until you have experienced this you don’t have the tools to understand human nature. It took a long time, but I came to understand one simple thing. I understood
ignorance
. The more I studied it, the more it became clear that their behaviour was all about ignorance. Oh, there were soldiers in Nanking, a handful, who were truly evil. I don’t dispute that. But the others? Their biggest sin was their ignorance. It is that simple.’

Ignorance. That was something I thought I knew a lot about. ‘What they did on your film. Is that what you mean? Was
that
ignorance?’

Shi Chongming didn’t reply. His face closed and he pretended to be busying himself with some papers. The mention of the film always turned him a little quiet with me.

‘Is that what you meant? Professor Shi?’

He pushed aside his papers, clearing his desk, ready to get to business. ‘Come,’ he said, gesturing to me. ‘Let’s not talk of that now. Come and sit down and tell me why you’re here.’

‘I want to know what you mean. Did you mean that what they did to the—’

‘Please! Please – you haven’t come here today for nothing. You’ve come to me with ideas – I can see them in your face. Sit down.’

Reluctantly, I came to the desk. I sat opposite him, my hands in my lap.

‘Well?’ he said. ‘What is it?’

I sighed. ‘I’ve been reading,’ I said. ‘About Chinese medicine.’

‘Good.’

‘There was a myth. A story about a god, the divine farmer who divided the plants into orders. I’m right, aren’t I?’

‘Taste, temperature and quality. Yes. You’re talking about Shen Nong.’

‘So what I ought to do is decide where Fuyuki’s cure falls in that order. I’ve got to put it in a category?’

Shi Chongming held my eyes.

‘What?’ I said. ‘What have I said?’

He sighed and sat back with his hands on the table, lightly tapping his fingertips together. ‘It’s time I told you a little more about myself.’

‘Yes?’

‘I don’t want you to waste your time. You should know that I have some very, very good suspicions about what we are looking for.’

‘Then you don’t need me to—’

‘Ah.’ He smiled. ‘Yes, I do.’

‘Why?’

‘Because I don’t want to hear what I want to hear. I don’t want a parrot to come back to me, cheeky and obsequious, telling me, “Yes, sir, yes, sir, you were correct all along, O wise one.” No. I want the truth.’ He pulled a battered portfolio out of the pile of books on the desk. ‘I have been working on this for too long to make a mistake at this point. I will tell you everything you need to know. But I will not tell you
exactly
what I suspect.’

From the portfolio he pulled a handful of yellowing paper tied with a scruffy black ribbon. Out it came, dragging with it pencil shavings, paper-clips, balled tissues.

‘It took me a long time to find Fuyuki, more years than I care to consider. I discovered many, many things about him. Here.’ He pushed the bundle of papers across the table to me. I looked at them, a big untidy pile that threatened to slip off on to the ground. They were in Chinese and Japanese, official letters, photocopied newspapers; one seemed to be a memo on notepaper from a government office. I recognized the
kanji
for the Land-based Defence Agency.

‘What am I looking at?’

‘Years and years of work. Most of it done a long time before I was permitted to travel to Japan. Letters, newspaper articles and – maybe the riskiest thing I did – reports from special investigators. I don’t expect you to understand them, but you do need to know how dangerous Fuyuki is.’

‘You’ve said that already.’

He smiled thoughtfully. ‘Yes. I understand your scepticism. He seems like a very old man. Maybe even kind. Benevolent?’

‘You can’t say what someone’s like until you’ve talked to them for a bit.’

‘Interesting, isn’t it? The most powerful
sarakin
loan shark in Tokyo, one of the biggest manufacturers and illegal importers of methamphetamine – interesting how innocuous he appears. And yet don’t be fooled.’ Shi Chongming sat forward, looking at me intently. ‘He is ruthless. You cannot imagine how many died in his determination to establish his amphetamine routes between here and any number of poor Korean ports. And maybe the most intriguing thing is the care with which he chooses the people who surround him. He has a unique technique – it’s all in there in those papers, if you know how to look. What a skilled manipulator he is! He scours the newspapers for arrests, carefully selects certain offenders and finances their defence cases. If they escape conviction they are sworn to Fuyuki for life.’

‘Do you know about . . .’ I leaned closer, my voice lowering instinctively ‘. . . about his Nurse?’

Shi Chongming nodded seriously. ‘Yes, I do. His Nurse, his bodyguard. Ogawa. Those who are afraid of her are quite right to be cautious.’ He lowered his voice to match mine, as if we might be overheard. ‘You must appreciate that Mr Fuyuki favours sadists. Those with no concept of good or bad. His Nurse is there for her criminal brilliance, her absolute inability to empathize with her victims.’ He indicated the pile of papers. ‘If you spend time looking through these you will find her referred to by the popular press as the Beast of Saitama. For her methods she is a living myth in Japan, a subject of intense speculation.’

‘Her methods?’

He nodded, and squeezed his nose lightly, as if trying to suppress a sneeze or a memory. ‘Naturally,’ he said, dropping his hand and breathing out, ‘violence is a necessary part of life in the
yakuza
. Maybe it is not surprising, no, considering her sexual confusion, maybe it’s not altogether surprising the way she seems compelled to . . .’ his eyes wandered briefly to a point just above my head ‘. . . to embellish her crimes.’

‘Embellish?’

He didn’t answer. Instead he pursed his mouth and said, conversationally, ‘I haven’t seen her but I understand she is unusually tall?’

‘Some of the people in the club think she’s a man.’

‘Nevertheless she is a woman. A woman with a – I don’t know the word in English – a disorder of the skeleton, maybe. But, enough of that. Let us not speculate our morning away.’ He looked at me very carefully. ‘I need to know. Are you quite sure you want to continue?’

I moved my shoulders, a little shudder going down my back. ‘Well,’ I said eventually, rubbing my arms, ‘well, actually, yes. That’s the thing, you see – this is the most important thing in my life. I’ve been doing it for nine years and eight months and twenty-nine days, and I’ve never even once thought about giving it up. Sometimes I think it annoys people.’ I thought about this for a moment, then looked up at him. ‘Yes. It does. It annoys people.’

He laughed and gathered up the papers. While he was returning them to the portfolio he noticed a photograph that had been hiding at the bottom of the pile. ‘Ah,’ he said casually, pulling it free from the stack. ‘Ah, yes. I wonder if you’d be interested in this.’ He slid it across the table, his long brown hand half covering the image. I could see an official stamp in the top right corner, the
kanji
for ‘Police Department’, and under his hand a grainy black-and-white image. I saw what I thought looked like police tape, a car with its boot open. There was something in the boot, something I couldn’t recognize, until Shi Chongming lifted his hand and I understood.

‘Oh,’ I said faintly, instinctively covering my mouth with my hand. It felt like having all the blood drained from my head in one sweep. The picture showed an arm – a human arm with an expensive watch on it, hanging lifelessly out of the boot. I’d seen similar pictures of mob victims in the university library, but it was what lay under the exhaust pipe of the car that I couldn’t tear my eyes from. Arranged almost ritualistically, coiled like a boa constrictor, was a pile of . . . ‘Are they . . .’ I said faintly ‘. . . are they what I think they are? Are they human? Are they his?’