December 6 (27 page)

The question was how far out on the course the ambassador was. Past the first pin, Harry could just see a foursome approaching the tee of the second hole.

Harry stepped back inside the bar to borrow a pair of binoculars hanging by the door. He focused on the second tee and a commanding figure with the look of an American eagle —dark brows and mustache and silvery hair— who towered over the other players. Unmistakably the ambassador. He was at the second hole with sixteen to go and would be out on the course at least four more hours. Harry couldn’t wait four hours. Michiko wouldn’t wait four more hours at the ballroom, safe or not. He’d wasted enough time getting this far.

He replaced the binoculars. Maybe a dozen members sat by the window in the bar but couldn’t look out without blinking into the sun. The party on the first tee hit the last of four brutal hacks and started down the fairway with their caddies. Harry waited until they were a hundred yards along and strolled after them with his bag as if he had every right, no questions asked.

He stayed out of their line of vision until he reached the trees and a groundskeeper’s path that wound through them. Fallen leaves released a scent like cinnamon with every step. The second hole was a straightaway pinched by sand traps, a test of the player’s ability to hit low and use the roll rather than loft the ball into the vagaries of the wind. Behind the pin was a service road that ran outside the wind-break of pines back to the clubhouse driveway. If he could just get the ambassador alone and talk to him, he could walk the road back to his car and no one would be the wiser.

The ambassador’s foursome was moving up on the fairway of the second hole when Harry caught sight of them. The ambassador puffed on a pipe, a Gulliver in tow, while his hosts spoke loudly in English to make up for his deafness and lack of Japanese. Harry always described the American ambassador as hopeless. The truth was, Harry didn’t think the ambassador was a stupid man so much as stultified by good manners and the absence of curiosity, happier to swim in a swimming pool than in the sea, the sort who, in fact, wouldn’t have lasted one year as a missionary. His information was secondhand from other diplomats. His Japanese contacts were financiers and industrialists known for their moderate views and fading influence. None of the players had yet noticed Harry, but he recognized one who was bareheaded and as dark as a caddy, the old pirate Yoshitaki of Yoshitaki Lines.

Harry ducked through the trees. He wasn’t sure what he could say in a few minutes that would persuade the ambassador to cable Washington or Hawaii. He couldn’t explain about an oil-tank scam or the nuances of the word “confusion” or of Tojo riding in the park. Probably lie, keep it simple, just claim that sources in the navy said the war was on.

Because the ambassador had boomed his drive, he hit his second shot last. Harry hoped it would land on the right side of the fairway. The ambassador did better than that: he sliced a ball that flew viciously into the maples and kicked out to the rough not more than fifty yards from Harry. While the others lined up approaches to the green, the ambassador searched the grass. He wore a maroon sweater, plus fours and the trance of a man lost in a game. He found the ball, set his pipe down on the grass and considered his clubs with his back to Harry, who was close enough, with a quick dash, to pick his pocket.

“Mr. Ambassador!” Harry said. He wanted to get this over with fast.

The ambassador selected a six iron and took a practice swing. The caddy was a skinny boy in a huge cloth cap. He noticed Harry, but gaijin were known to act in bizarre ways. Popping out of the woods could be one of them.

Harry stepped within ten yards. “Mr. Ambassador, we have to talk about Hawaii. There’s about to be an attack, Mr. Ambassador, are you aware of that?”

The ambassador got comfortable over the ball. A lot of big men stiffened over the ball, but the ambassador seemed smooth and poised, discounting the slice into the trees. He stepped back for a practice swing and set up over the ball again.

“Mr. Ambassador!” Harry edged closer yet.

“It’s my theory,” Yoshitaki said, “that a deaf man’s concentration is a great advantage on the golf range.” He had returned so quietly along the trees that Harry hadn’t heard him. Harry felt a little trumped.

The ambassador unleashed a smooth swing and a sharp “click” as the club struck the ball, which sailed low and true toward the pin.

“About Hawaii,” Harry tried again.

The ambassador focused on the bounce and roll of his shot as it split the bunkers. Yoshitaki looked in the opposite direction. Harry turned to see the following players and caddies transform to bodyguards and hustle toward him as they ditched their bags. Now Harry understood why they were such atrocious golfers.

“Mr. Ambassador.” The man was close enough to touch.

The ambassador’s shot had reached the green, from the excited reaction of the players ahead. He retrieved his pipe, produced a contented puff and, without a backward glance, strode toward the flag.

“How is that beetle of yours?” Yoshitaki asked Harry. “Still letting him out for walks?”

“When he needs the air.”

“Today is the day. This will be the last Sunday like this we will see for a good while, don’t you think?”

“As a matter of fact, I do.” Harry watched the ambassador cross the undulations of the fairway. “He heard me.”

Yoshitaki said, “No, not if it was the wrong thing to hear or the wrong messenger, he didn’t hear a word. He’s a friend. I’ll make sure he gets home safely. Was it important, what you wanted to tell him?”

“I can’t even remember what it was.”

“Good. Don’t become complicated now. It’s not everyone who can lead a life of total selfishness. You should stick with that.”

Well, a man that deaf was a wonder, Harry thought. He could have shouted at the top of his lungs, but the moment had passed. Maybe the moment had never existed, Harry thought, any more than he existed to the embassy. It also occurred to him that he could be wrong, that he had failed only in sending the ambassador on a wild goose chase. Who the hell was Harry Niles to announce when war would start?

The bodyguards arrived and surrounded Harry. They didn’t seize him, threaten him or even show exasperation, only circled Harry and separated him from his golf bag.

“Don’t worry about the plane,” Yoshitaki said. “It won’t leave without you. Good-bye, Harry Niles.”

The bodyguards waited until Yoshitaki’s foursome holed out, then headed for the service road behind the green, a phalanx with Harry at the center. Harry had once witnessed a similar technique at a bullfight in Tijuana when a bull gored a matador and took possession of the ring. They got the bull out by sending in a herd of steers that surrounded him, trotted him once around and led him peacefully out the gate.

D
RIVING BACK
to town, Harry had to laugh at the picture of a con man saving the world.
So through the night rode Paul Revere; And so through the night went his cry of alarm / To every Middlesex village and farm
… It would help, he thought, if people would listen or could even hear. No more heroics. The main thing was, he hadn’t blown his seat on the plane.

Harry noticed how the sun danced over dry rice stalks sticking up from mud like black stitches on a cloth of gold, a sight he realized he might never see again. Amber waves of grain, not fields of rice. This time tomorrow he’d be airborne. There were things he’d miss: the whistle of a blind masseuse in the early morning, the shimmer of banners the length of a street, the way koi rose to the surface when a shadow passed. The way the tailor’s wife had laughed at her own distress so as not to bother him, which struck Harry as the most dignity he’d ever seen, but a dignity he saw in Japan all the time.

And delicacy, the way Yoshitaki’s men walked him off the course in the most nonviolent bum’s rush possible. There was style in that, a gentle art.

It was midafternoon when Harry got to Asakusa. Walking through Sunday crowds pushing to this movie or that shrine, treating themselves to red-bean buns or candy rabbits, he felt a million miles away from the artificial world of the golf course. Asakusa was still sane, even if the rest of the world was not. On one side a newsstand featured samurai photos, on the other side Shirley Temple. A music-hall billboard offered both patriotic songs and South Seas ukuleles. That was what Harry considered a healthy balance.

The front of the ballroom was locked, unusual on Sunday, when Tetsu sometimes had as many as four games going. Harry went around to the oversize doors in back, where theater flats and props were delivered for storage, the nominal use of the ballroom now. He couldn’t wait to get his hands on Tetsu. No one answered Harry’s call, but the doors eased open.

“Tetsu? Michiko?”

Since he had never entered through the rear, he didn’t know where the light switches were, and he followed the flame of his cigarette lighter around a maze of backdrop flats, prop chests, costume trunks. The Happy Paris had been shut the night before, and now the ballroom? Like parts of his life going dark.

“Michiko?”

There was no return glimmer or whisper, no card game or tango on a gramophone, let alone a welcome. Although Harry was late for Michiko, he decided to act the aggrieved party because she wasn’t waiting for him with sake and food. His back was burning, and he hadn’t had food or sympathy for a day. He remembered when he used to come to the ballroom with Oharu, how they had sat in the balcony and watched reflections from a mirror ball spin around the floor, over the men with their rolls of tickets and women lined up like pack animals along a velvet rope. The painful couples they made, stepping on each other’s feet to the quickstep, fox-trot, waltz. Oharu, the real dancer, would giggle and shush Harry at the same time. The way the reflections spun, he would feel he was rising to the sky. It was interesting how much more disorienting pitch black could be. He kept walking into nowhere across the ballroom floor.

“Tetsu! Where are you?”

His voice circled.

“Michiko!”

He finally saw something. A realization filtered through him that the floor had become slippery and that a warm, cloying scent hung in the air. Harry slowed like a man approaching an abyss. He gave his breath a moment to catch up before the last few steps.

In the wavering light before him, a woman in a white dress with a blue sailor collar slumped at a card table. She didn’t have a head. Not on her, but her arms stretched across the table to a white wooden box the right size.

22

H
E SET THE
lighter on the table like a candle. Her hands were waxy, heavy in death. She wore Haruko’s dress, white with blue trim, now flecked with brown around the collar. She looked lonely. Harry supposed that anyone being executed felt alone, but the victims he’d seen in Nanking at least died in a war where death was the norm. To be killed like this, trapped by a man with a sword while a peaceful city lay outside, was to be particularly deserted. Her forearm was cool but soft, perhaps two hours dead. About the time Harry had arrived at the golf course, Ishigami must have arrived at the ballroom, where Harry had told Michiko to wait. He couldn’t have set her up better if he’d tried.

“No—”

Was he talking to her? This was a little late, he thought. What he was going to say was that he was just trying to help Willie and then alert the right people about nothing less than a war. It didn’t matter, because the right people weren’t interested. He certainly hadn’t helped her. Harry didn’t see his gun, so that hadn’t helped her, either.

“It’s not—”

He couldn’t imagine her dead. There was nothing sweet or pleasing about her, not the candy-box kind of love Americans sang about. He couldn’t imagine her dead because she was so difficult, she was the burning fuse, the spark and imminent explosion in his life. Where Michiko died, there should be a smoldering crater in the earth, a volcanic upheaval, at least the smell of gunpowder, instead of a sense that the air was awash in droplets of ruby red. He could almost feel the mist settle on his cheek. Ishigami had painted her once, now twice. Still, it wasn’t right, dull submission wasn’t Michiko’s style. With the world about to roll down the drain, it probably made no difference to examine an individual death, but Harry, having been a bust where the world was concerned, needed to know what had happened.

There should have been more blood. Blood should have flooded the table and the floor around it if she’d been killed where she sat. There was relatively little. Maybe this was coldhearted of him, but he could deal with details better than the whole picture, a little like Sergeant Shozo’s jigsaw puzzle, except that Harry refused to see the piece in the center or touch the wooden box, not yet. Before the lighter’s flame died, he looked up and found its dim reflection in the mirror ball hanging above, and another glint from a brass post of the velvet rope. Now he knew where he was.

In the dark, Harry climbed to the cockpit over the door and threw on the house lights: whites, cells, spots and mirror ball all at once. The ballroom leaped out of the dark. Michiko and table gained color, focus, dimension. The size of the ballroom, the gilded ceiling and balcony tier made her smaller, braver, a child prodigy playing to an empty house. The parquet shone except for two tracks from the table to the swing door of the women’s restroom.

The ballroom management had kept the restroom’s size and amenities to a minimum to discourage dancers from loitering. The light was out; why bother changing it after the dancing had stopped? A broken window on an airshaft admitted as much dust as light to two sinks with a cracked mirror and two Western toilets without seats that sat in a floor of hexagonal tiles. Blood pooled around a central drain that was stopped with clotted hair. Harry edged around the blood, searching the ceiling and walls for a bullet hole and the floor for a loose button, anything dropped. Just going tacky, the blood bore the imprints of her knees and toes and a man’s shoes, relatively large, a red negative of where she knelt and where he stood.

Harry retreated to the dance floor.

“Tetsu!”

Tetsu was not in his office. Harry found cases of cigarettes, packs of cards, dumbbells, tattoo books, but no sign of blood or disarray. Harry returned to the bathroom door. Had Ishigami surprised Michiko in the bathroom? Had she put the gun down out of reach? Had she meekly sunk to her knees? Did she see the head box? Of course, Ishigami was the man who had peered deeply into her and found the geisha. In some ways, he might know her more intimately than Harry.

Then he set her up. He moved her with her toes dragging to a table in the middle of the ballroom floor and sat her in a chair. There he stretched her arms across the table as if setting the head box down or respectfully offering a gift. Then he locked the front door, which made no sense unless he wanted only Harry to find her. Harry had told her to wait at the ballroom. He was the one man sure to try every door.

Harry pictured it. Wood wasn’t paper, and Ishigami couldn’t punch through the restroom wall, but he could slip through the door, and in such poor light Michiko might not immediately see who he was. It still wasn’t right. Nobody who ever made love with Michiko came away unscathed. There’d be a shot or some of Ishigami’s blood. Overhead, the mirror ball hung like a ghostly daytime moon. Harry remembered her in her sequined jacket. There’d be
something
.

He approached the table again, circling as he neared, trying to chase the shakes out of his knees. Bullets were different. Once they left a gun they became, to some degree, middlemen between the killer and the victim. There was distance, if only an inch, and at long distance a sniper’s objectivity. A sword, however, never left the hand and was never less than personal. Harry remembered being the butt of bayonet practice at school and how passionately the drill sergeant sprayed spit as he urged students to plunge their bamboo poles through Harry’s wicker armor. How smooth, in comparison, Ishigami was. An artist. Americans wondered how samurai could fight in loose-sleeved kimonos, not understanding how the robes accentuated the sweep and thrust of the sword, and how the final plunge of steel through silk wrapped agony in beauty. Harry thought all this as if each idea were armor protecting him from the simple reality of a headless girl sitting like a sack of potatoes in a chair.

Death changed people, but that much?

Harry tentatively raised the lid of the box. The wood was white wisteria sanded to a sheen that emphasized the glossy black of the hair inside, cut short. He dug his fingers in and lifted. Since the head faced away he first saw damp, matted hair and two wounds down to the skull that must have preceded the final slice. A broad neck. Small ears with thick lobes. He turned the head around to face Haruko. Her eyes were slitted, mouth parted, forehead creased by a frown. It was an expression she might wear if a friend had suddenly accosted her with a a trick question, something she didn’t have the answer for and was still figuring out.

Haruko in her own dress. That explained a lot. After telling Harry on the phone that Michiko had taken the dress, Haruko must have gone after it and found Michiko, and the two must have come to the ballroom together. Why Michiko didn’t wait and Haruko did, Harry couldn’t understand, although it explained why Haruko was taken so completely by surprise. In the murk of the restroom, with no gun and no warning, how could she defend herself from Ishigami?

A reverberation pounded at the back door and died. Harry fought the impulse to run. Where to? The door opened for a man dressed in shadow who moved through the scenery racks, emerged onto the ballroom parquet and peeled his goggles back. It was Gen in a leather coat and helmet. He slowed as he approached the table.

“Harry, what did you do?”

“Nothing.”

“It doesn’t look like nothing. Who is that?” Gen nodded toward the head in Harry’s hands.

“Haruko.”

“The waitress from your club?”

“Yes.”

Harry had a ringing in his ears that he couldn’t place as either alarm or relief. He put the head into the box as gently as he could and replaced the lid.

“Any witnesses, Harry?”

“I don’t know, I wasn’t here.”

“Okay.” Gen followed the trail to the restroom and edged in, careful to stay out of the blood. He emerged breathing hard and shaking his head. “You’ve done it now, Harry.”

“It was Ishigami. If you’d gotten him out of town when I asked, this wouldn’t have happened.”

Gen made a show of looking right and left. “I don’t see Ishigami. What I see is you and Haruko.”

“If I did it, where’s the sword?”

“You tell me. Did you kill her?”

“No, I swear.”

“On what, Harry? What would you swear on?”

“I didn’t do it. Simple as that.”

“Nothing is simple with you.” Gen looked at Harry coldly. “Did anyone see you come in? Tetsu? Anyone?”

“No.”

Gen started twice to say something and finally softened. “Come on.”

T
HE SUN HAD SET
while Harry was in the ballroom. He and Gen rode the motorbike the long way around to AsakusaPark. They joined a circle under a streetlamp watching a storyteller with a box of illustrated slides depicting the feats of the Golden Bat, the same show they had watched as kids. Around them the crowd was in constant motion, from food stalls to fortune-tellers, sandal and kimono shops, stands selling toys, masks, souvenirs. Some people flowed out to the movie-theater row while others restlessly wandered back to the precincts of the temple like a sea that didn’t know which way to go. Harry didn’t know where else to look for Michiko. Would she go to the apartment, the one place where Ishigami was sure to look? Every time Harry thought about her, the ringing in his ears returned like a deafening alarm. He kept moving, hoping to find Tetsu or someone else who might have seen her. In the slide box, the Golden Bat killed an ogre. Harry wiped his hands with his handkerchief. Gen had tucked his motorcycle cap under his arm, but he still drew admiring glances as if he’d parachuted in.

Gen said, “I should be handing you to the police. What happened at the ballroom?”

“I don’t know, but it was Ishigami.”

“You’re sure?”

Harry pushed through the crowd. “I asked you to get him out of town, and you didn’t.”

“You also said he was after you. Why would he kill Haruko? Did they even know each other?”

“I doubt it.”

“It was a sudden homicidal impulse?”

“Maybe. And he carried a head box, like a Boy Scout. ‘Be Prepared.’”

“Harry, if Ishigami and Haruko didn’t have a relationship, then someone else was involved.”

“I don’t know.”

“You’re holding back. I promise, no matter how bad it is, I’ll help, but you have to help me, too. Did you have a fight with Michiko over Haruko?”

“No.”

“The fact is, Harry, you have a reputation for women, and Michiko has a reputation for a temper.”

“Leave Michiko out of this.”

“Okay, okay. Did anyone see you at the ballroom?”

“I don’t think so.”

“That’s good. Where were you?”

“At the golf course.”

“With…?”

“Actually, I was talking to the ambassador.”

“The American ambassador? That’s great.”

“Not really. He didn’t hear me.”

Gen laughed. “Really? Did he see you?”

“No.”

Gen wore a smile that suggested he was enjoying a stick of Wrigley’s. “That’s one hell of an alibi. That’s rich. Anyone else?”

“Yoshitaki.”

“Of Yoshitaki Lines? Forget it, he has lawyers. He never talks to the police about anything. What did you want to talk to the ambassador about?”

“I ran into my old friend Hooper. He said the ambassador wanted to talk to me. It turned out he didn’t.”

“I wonder what it was about.”

“We’ll never know.”

The pillowy glow of paper lanterns led to the temple steps. Inside but visible, a row of monks with shaved heads chanted to the beat of a hanging drum. Sweating from steady effort, they repeated sutras over and over like oars pulling through deep water, while a younger monk shook brass cylinders containing fortunes to be sold. Fortunes were sold everywhere, in the forms of paper lilies that opened in water, paper letters with invisible ink, dream papers to take to bed. And prayers, too, with the purchase of candles, joss sticks or the toss of a coin through a temple grate. From the top step, Harry watched smoke billow from the joss sticks set in a great bronze urn. More than ever, people needed a prayer or hope for a son or brother just called to duty. They paid no mind to Gen or Harry.

Gen said, “How are you going to find Michiko in this mob?”

“I’m not going to sit still while Ishigami hunts her down.”

“Why would he? You said he was after you.”

“He’s gotten ambitious.”

“So you
have
seen him. What happened?”

Harry had never told Gen about the Chinese prisoners in Nanking, and he did not intend to get into the subject of DeGeorge. Haruko was bad enough.

“Ishigami came to my place last night and saw Michiko with me.”

“He’s after you but didn’t touch you?”

“Remember Sergeant Shozo and Corporal Go? They came by to ask some questions and scared Ishigami off.”

“Last night? What time?”

“Three in the morning.”

“For questions?”

“Oil-tank questions, Hawaii questions.” Harry caught the shift to impassivity on Gen’s face. The American breeziness always could be dropped like a mask. “They’re talking to someone in Naval Operations. Someone on your end is leaking like a sieve.”

“What did you tell them?”

“Nothing.”

“Good. Nothing about the Magic Show? Nothing about the C in C?”

“No.”

“Terrific. Look, Harry, the navy will protect you, but you’ve got to be honest. First, you’re lying about China. Colonel Ishigami isn’t going to chase you around Tokyo over a couple of cars you appropriated years ago in Nanking. Something else happened there. Second, you’re lying about last night. The colonel has a sense of honor. He wouldn’t harm a woman unless she had betrayed him in a personal way. How could Michiko or Haruko do that if they didn’t know him? Why would he hurt either one? Sometimes I think you lie like other people whistle. Do you know why I came by the ballroom? I was looking for you. Sergeant Shozo did you the favor of calling me to say you were one inch away from a prison cell. I vouched for you and went all over town to warn you, and what do I see when I find you?”

“It wasn’t pretty.”

“You used to be a lot slicker. I hate to say it, but you’ve lost your touch.”