December 6 (30 page)

24

H
ARRY AND
M
ICHIKO
retreated to the apartment. Even there, every sound was Ishigami. A drunk stumbled in the dark against the club and was Ishigami breaking through the shutters. A cat padded across the roof and was Ishigami prying off the tiles.

Harry assumed that Willie and Iris had weighed anchor. Alice would be packing for Hong Kong. She might be surprised to be traveling alone, but she didn’t need Harry, all she’d needed was a head start. Once she was away from him, she’d see what a narrow escape she’d had. He hadn’t meant to mislead her. Alice was light and sanity. Michiko exercised a much stronger call, the dark where a rib was taken. Being attacked by Beechum didn’t dissuade Harry. With a cricket bat? No, it was a matter of Harry acknowledging that the Nippon Air DC-3 had been a delusion, a fantasy. In the end, he had no choice. There was simply Michiko, all else paled. Even this situation, being trapped with Michiko, now seemed strangely inevitable. He had watched Kabuki all his life and finally had a role.
Exit, pursued by samurai
. Only there was no exit.

Harry fed the beetle paper-thin slices of cucumber —with pets came responsibilities— and asked Michiko for the details of what happened at the ballroom. She said she had gone there from Haruko’s as Harry asked. Tetsu, sick with tattoo fever, had closed down the ballroom and gone home. Michiko waited alone in semidark for an hour before Haruko arrived, determined to reclaim her favorite outfit. What Haruko offered in exchange was her second-best dress and information about Harry and the plane to China. They traded in the women’s lounge. Haruko was still there when Michiko, too disgraced to face anyone, slipped into Tetsu’s office at the sound of someone at the ballroom door. Whoever it was, they were quick, in shoes or boots rather than clogs or sandals. Michiko heard no conversation, only a chair dragged across the floor and footsteps that retreated as swiftly as they had come. When Michiko emerged, she found Haruko propped up at the table with the box. Like a mouse and a hawk, she said, it was that fast.

Harry asked, “Didn’t it strike you that, wearing a dress and hat she had just taken back from you, with her hair styled like yours, Haruko looked like you?”

“You thought it was me? You were worried?”

“Well, with their head in a box, a lot of people look alike.”

Mist started to drain from the street. A woman with a lantern and a roll of kindling on her back bowed deeply to a shadow in the willow-house gate. The lantern briefly lit Ishigami’s eyes, his field uniform and cap, his sword worn blade up. Harry considered a shot but knew that with his powers of marksmanship, he was more likely to hit a cat than Ishigami. The pipes and chimes of other morning peddlers were approaching. If the colonel was going to attack in the dark, time was running out. Under the circumstances, Harry found Michiko’s faith touching. She sat on her heels, a magician’s assistant waiting for a trick.

“Happy?” he asked, because in a curious way, she seemed to be.

“Yes.”

“Why? Right now, being with me is not like winning a lottery. Tell me, Michiko, because I’ve always wondered, how much English do you understand?”

“Why should I understand English? We’re in Japan.”

“How much of the songs on the jukebox do you understand?”

She shrugged.

Harry suspected that had always been part of the appeal of the Record Girl, her vamping to lyrics that were a mystery to her.

“For example,” Harry said, “the songs about love.”

She nodded.

“You only mouth them,” he said.

“I think most people only mouth them, American or Japanese.”

“But you and I have never actually said it to each other, have we? ‘I love you,’ we’ve never said.”

“Americans say, Japanese do.”

“Ah, and love is different in Japan.”

“Yes, and you’re here.” She caught Harry’s glance out the window. “Is the colonel still there?”

“He’s not going anywhere. He’s after us.”

“After you. He already cut my head off.”

An electronic squawk startled Harry. He remembered the loudspeaker hanging on the lamppost at the corner. The pipes and bells of vendors ceased as they listened to the navy anthem pouring from the speaker.

The music quit, followed by a voice. The voice was humble and excited. The voice flowed through the gray winter morning and multiplied from street to street and house to house. Harry turned on the radio and the voice filled his room: “We repeat to you this urgent news. Imperial General Headquarters announced this morning, December eighth, that the Imperial Army and Navy have begun hostilities against American and British forces in the Pacific at dawn today.”

Harry read his watch by the light of the radio dial. Six-thirty. “Forces in the Pacific”? What did that mean, Harry wondered. Pearl Harbor? The Philippines? Singapore? Hong Kong? But could the Japanese navy have caught Pearl napping? It seemed impossible, except for the mundane human fact that the U.S. Navy held its Christmas parties on December 6. Across the dateline, it was still December 7, a day for sleeping in at Pearl.

“Will this mean war?” Michiko asked.

“It is war. We’re in it now,” said Harry.

Alice Beechum would not be flying out on Air Nippon. Air Nippon was going nowhere; the flight to Hong Kong was as much a ruse as Tojo’s ride in the park. The radio repeated, “The Imperial General Staff announced this morning…” This time the announcement was followed not with the dumb astonishment of a waking population but with spontaneous clapping and cries of “Banzai!” in the street. People opened their windows to share the excitement. As the sky lightened, vendors, the lame and burdened, bowed to one another, standing taller as they straightened up. Schoolchildren erupted from their homes to cheer as if Japan’s warplanes were passing directly overhead.

“He’s gone.” Harry realized that Ishigami had dematerialized during the announcement. The gateway was empty.

Michiko joined Harry at the window. “Where to?”

“I don’t know, but it’s going to get a little crowded here. After the declaration the police will round up Americans. Probably already started.”

“What will happen?”

“They’ll hold us in cells for a while and then exchange us. I’m not exactly Abe Lincoln or Andy Hardy, but I am an American citizen.”

“You aren’t like other Americans. The police will kill you.”

“I have connections.”

“That’s why.”

“The embassy will have a list for repatriation. I’ll be on it.”

“You must go to the embassy and be sure.”

“I’ve never asked for their protection.” He had always been proud of his independence.

Michiko said, “If you wait here, you’re dead.”

She’d put her finger on it. War was God’s way of overturning the card game. Even Harry was outraged.

“Maybe the war will be over quickly,” she said.

“After an attack like this? It had to be a surprise to work, and if it was a surprise, it will be a fight to the death.”

“Why are you on the Americans’ side?”

Harry watched a boy run by with an open umbrella of oiled paper and lacquered spokes. The boy spun the umbrella so that warplanes painted on the paper chased one another. It was a handsome umbrella, much like the planes themselves.

“Because they’ll win.”

E
ACH RADIO REPORT
began with the opening bars of the “Warship March,” and with every account, Tokyo seemed to rise farther above sea level. Sun flags festooned streetcars, framed shop-windows, waved in hands. The air turned intoxicating. Eyes grew brighter and faces flushed with pride as loudspeakers broadcast news of an astonishing raid on Hawaii and the sinking of the entire American Battleship Row, as if history’s menacing giant had been slain with a single righteous blow. Paced by a military beat that poured from the radio, the entire city seemed in motion, becoming the new center of the world.

Harry left the apartment first, in case the colonel was still lurking. He wore a dark suit and fedora with a germ mask over his face, like any midlevel salaryman afflicted with a head cold but duty-bound to go to work. Michiko emerged minutes later in a beret, knitted cashmere coat and bright red lips, like a smart little sailboat challenging a squall. Her pace was quick enough so that by the time he reached the subway station, Michiko was only twenty feet behind. The throngs were themselves some protection— there was a giddy milling among the turnstiles. Just in case Ishigami did appear, Harry had tucked a boning knife wrapped in cloth into his waistband. Michiko carried the gun in a handbag, ready to plug a colonel of the Imperial Army in the middle of a station. Altogether, Harry thought, one hell of a girl. Loudspeakers advised all troops to return to their regiments, though Harry believed that Ishigami was no longer strictly responding to orders. The clumsy blows on Haruko, for example, suggested a deterioration of the colonel’s usually immaculate style. On the other hand, Michiko’s likening the suddenness of the attack to a hawk and mouse sounded right.

Although rhythmic clapping broke out on the train, Harry feigned drowsiness on the short ride to Tokyo Station rather than show his eyes. There the entire country seemed to pour out the station doors. Harry and Michiko were swept along by crowds to the plaza that faced the imperial palace, where thousands silently knelt along the moat. Men removed their hats, women set down their red-stitched scarves and trusted their prayers to a morning wind just as, not too many hours before, in the mid-Pacific, their sons had stood on the decks of aircraft carriers and launched their planes into the wind of the new day. Half of Harry wanted to rail at what a gimmick the emperor was, a nobody for a thousand years, just a mantelpiece curio; the other half had to bow to not only the beauty of the con but its beauty, period, the sweeping rampart of the walls and brocade of golden trees, perfect as both a screen and royal throne under a dome of blue. No imperial figure appeared on the battlements or bridge. No cannonade hastened the drop of a single leaf. Serenity, more than anything, was the mark of a demigod. A troop of Hitler Youth arrived in shorts and caps only to have their “Sieg Heil!” brushed aside. Responding to shadows on the moat, carp rose and tinged the green murk gold, reminding Harry of the tael bars he had wasted.

Harry pointed out the Datsun parked at the south end of the station, but Michiko wanted to walk.

“And be seen.” She was definite about that.

M
OUNTED POLICE
blocked the gate of the American embassy as if they’d trapped the Dillinger gang, which seemed, to Harry, to be going overboard, especially since down the street they’d left the embassy garage unguarded. He situated Michiko at a French café on the corner while he went through the garage door.

He pulled off his mask. The embassy he had known as a boy had been destroyed by earthquake, and a new residency of white stucco and black eaves stood at the top of a long compound landscaped with fountains and arbors like a college campus. However, the activity around them this morning suggested an anthill half kicked in. Attachés and secretaries huffed from building to building under the weight of cartons. All these Americans he had never seen before. Amazing. Moving was never easy, Harry thought, especially under the pressure of a declaration of war, and he was happy to help a clerk pick up folders she had dropped. She said that Roy Hooper was with the ambassador, which Harry took as invitation enough to wander into the official residency. No one seemed to be home. Harry was impressed by the bronzed doors, central hall and grand staircase of polished teak, a ballroom with a movie projector and screen, salon with piano, walnut-paneled smoking room, separate banquet hall empty except for a card table with an unfinished jigsaw puzzle of cowboys and Indians. The ambassador’s own desk sat on a Turkish carpet and held a silver-framed photo of Bobby Jones and a portrait of Franklin Roosevelt signed “With admiration and warmest regards to Good Old Joe from Frank.” The window looked down on the front driveway, where the ambassador and a pair of aides seemed to be effectively stalling Japanese diplomats in top hats while document destruction went on. No Hooper.

The chancery, down the hill, was the center of mayhem, where staff spilled as many files as they carried down the stairwells. Harry found Hooper’s office, a room with woodblock prints of Tokyo. Again no Hooper, but Harry shut the door behind himself.

The office safe was wide open and empty, but what he was after wasn’t particularly secret. The desk drawers that opened easily were stuffed with economic analyses and clippings from Japanese magazines and journals. He forced a locked drawer by hammering in a letter opener with his flask and found what he was after, a master list of American citizens residing in Japan: Foreign Service officers and staff, businessmen and agents, teachers and instructors, medical doctors and nurses, missionaries, military on liaison duty, foreign correspondents, American employees of either non-Japanese or Japanese companies, sailors or ships’ officers, Japanese wives of Americans, women and children, invalids or anyone requiring medical care, a list for every category, hundreds of names in all. “Harry Niles” was entered vaguely under “Self-employed.” A second list was of Americans for whom the embassy would request repatriation or safe internment. It was identical to the master list except for one name crossed out, Harry’s.

The smell of smoke insinuated itself into the office. Harry joined the traffic on the stairwell and asked, “Where’s Hooper?”

A man negotiating a carton around a corner asked, “Who are you?”

Harry began to tip the carton. “Where?”

“Jesus, fellow. Below, in the code room.”

Harry pushed ahead to the basement and followed the smoke to an open door where Hooper directed a bucket brigade. Inside the room, desks had been pushed aside to make space for iron-wire wastebaskets set on metal chairs. Files and codes had been stuffed into the baskets and set on fire, flames wrestling like torches and spewing smoke that collected under the ceiling and snowed black confetti. A nervous circle of diplomats stood ready with their pails.