December 6 (18 page)

“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.

H
ARRY FOUND
K
ATO
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

H
ARRY 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…