December 6 (21 page)

17

T
HE 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?”