Fishing for Stars (36 page)

I was forced to ask myself why the
yakuza
boss would want to help me. I was not a part of his organisation. In fact I was a relative stranger to whom he owed no loyalty. While we had swapped butterflies for twenty-five years we had only known each other in a personal sense for a few days, during which time I had caused him and his people nothing but trouble. Putting myself in his shoes I could see that there was yet another compelling reason why he should distance himself from Anna’s kidnapping. He held Konoe Akira’s ageing mother captive, and rather than merely using her as a bargaining tool to gain Anna’s freedom, he could use her to turn a handsome profit. A nice little ransom payment would see her restored to the comfort of her home with additional assurances that the
yakuza
boss would not reveal Konoe Akira’s patronage of the Jade House; if any inquiry were instituted, the Jade Mistress would deny ever knowing him. To make it even more attractive for him to pay up and shut up, the Jade House
mama-san
could quash all speculation about Anna by declaring that she had come to her establishment late at night looking for a job as a
gaijin
bondage mistress. Apart from proving incompetent, she had been discovered to be a heroin addict and so had been escorted off the premises and put back onto the streets where she belonged. The authorities of course would be well aware of what might happen to an attractive and desperate junkie in the sleazy nightclub area of a strange city at night. This little conspiracy between the
yakuza
boss and Konoe Akira would effectively discredit as well as dispose of Anna, who in the minds of the police and the authorities would be human trash, not worth bothering about. They’d duly notify the Australian Embassy and post a missing-persons bulletin and get on with the more important work of providing protection for honest law-abiding, tax-paying citizens.

As for my personal predicament, as the saying goes, I was done like a dog’s dinner! With his undoubted connections in high places, Konoe Akira could make it impossible for me to prove that he had a case to answer for crimes committed in the dim and distant past, and without that, how could I link him to Anna, or to her kidnapping? All my evidence was purely hearsay. It would be a lot easier for him to suggest that I was an opportunist and a con man with a junkie partner. And then there was my war record. To the Japanese authorities, I was a highly decorated killer of the sons of Japan’s grieving mothers. Like my own country’s hatred for the Japanese, here too I was sure there would be no love lost for an old enemy.

By the morning shift change, I finally concluded my own trial. I hadn’t slept a wink, the hospital painkillers had long worn off, I had a splitting headache and my lacerations were stiff and sore. As self-appointed judge and jury I found overwhelmingly for the prosecution and duly sentenced myself to a minimum of twenty-five years hard labour in a Japanese prison, a just sentence, given that I could well be responsible for Anna losing her life. All this because I’d allowed a scrawny old man time to put on his underpants!

Breakfast consisted of a tin mug of weak green tea and a bento box, a small cardboard container of fried fish and boiled rice. I was to learn that the fare never changed. After breakfast I was escorted to a washroom and allowed to wash my face and clean my teeth – a hugely gratifying experience.

At ten o’clock I was escorted into an interview room where two uniformed policemen and a plainclothes guy who may or may not have been a cop sat on one side of a large desk alongside a vacant chair. Each had pads and pencils (not pens) in front of them and a large tape recorder rested on the table. All three men were smoking and the plainclothes bloke reached over and offered me a cigarette. When I declined he seemed surprised; virtually every male smoked in Japan at that time.

I was motioned towards a chair on the opposite side of the desk. ‘Sit please,
Duncan-san
,’ the plainclothes bloke said in a friendly voice. I was to discover that he played the good guy in the good-guy bad-guy routine that was shortly to begin.

‘Thank you, but I prefer to stand. I have a problem with some cuts on my bum,’ I said, which caused them all to laugh.

‘Very expensive cuts I hear,’ the plainclothes bloke said, grinning, which indicated he had been briefed on the events of the previous night.

Moments later a second plainclothes guy entered the room, scowling at me. ‘Why is this man standing?’ he asked one of the policemen. The bad guy had arrived. The policeman explained and he grunted and took the vacant seat.

The good guy (I was never given any of their names) then explained that the interview must by law take place in Japanese regardless of how proficient I was in the language. ‘We cannot speak your language and no interpreter is permitted.’ I nodded and he continued. ‘No public prosecutor is present today and so you will not be formally charged. We simply wish to get all the facts down and we hope you will cooperate.’

I nodded again, determined to say as little as possible. I was unaware at the time that in a Japanese court only a judge presides and all evidence is written. Then, and even today, ninety-nine per cent of cases that go before a judge lead to a guilty verdict. Therefore, if the public prosecutor decides that a case may be heard, it is tantamount to a conviction. The interrogation I was about to undergo was clearly designed to make me admit my guilt. I was also to learn that there were no rules of engagement and no right of appeal against foul play.

‘Let us begin,’ the good guy said quietly. ‘Please state your name and nationality.’

‘Nicholas Duncan, Australian.’

‘Do you have any formal identification?’

‘My driving licence is in my wallet, which you have already taken from me.’

‘It has no photograph,’ one of the police officers said accusingly.

‘No, it is not required in my country.’

‘What country is that?’ the bad guy asked.

‘I told you, Australia.’

‘But you don’t live in Australia?’

‘No, I live in the New Hebrides.’

‘A tax haven?’ again from the bad guy.

‘Yes, I run an inter-island shipping company.’

‘Why did you come to Japan?’

‘To purchase two trawlers from the Mitsubishi Shipping Company.’

Good guy, smiling: ‘See, it is not all bad. We honour you for contributing to the prosperity of the Japanese people.’

Bad guy: ‘Where is your passport? When you were arrested you had no passport. It is an offence for a foreigner not to carry his passport.’

‘I was not told that.’

Bad guy: ‘Where is it?’

‘In the safe in my hotel suite.’

Bad guy: ‘What hotel?’

‘The Imperial.’

Bad guy: ‘You must give us the combination!’

‘No,’ I said quietly. ‘If you will contact the Australian Embassy I will give an embassy official the combination and he will fetch my passport and give it to you.’ Also in the safe was nearly six thousand American dollars in Thomas Cook traveller’s cheques and possibly Konoe Akira’s calling card, the gold fob watch, as well as the receipt for the two trawlers. I wasn’t going to let these buggers indulge in a lucky dip and then later find myself unable to prove that anything was missing.

Bad guy: ‘What are you suggesting?
We
are not the criminals here! It is required that you hand in your passport.’

‘Yes, an embassy official will do that.’

Bad guy: ‘I see, you do not wish to cooperate?’

There isn’t any real answer to a question like that. ‘I am trying to answer your questions, sir.’

‘Did you fight in the recent war?’

‘Yes.’

‘In what capacity?’

‘I was a radio operator.’

‘Did you carry a rifle?’

‘No.’ Strictly speaking this was true as I used an Owen submachine-gun.

‘You lie, you are a killer!’

I guess you get the idea. I was asked about my childhood in Japan and New Britain, how I came to speak Japanese and a host of other seemingly irrelevant questions, the bad guy always suggesting something fishy, the good guy smiling and asking me to cooperate as they were only trying to build a profile of me. It was all pretty ingenuous from the good guy and pointed and direct from the bad guy and I guess it was meant to get a pattern of questions and answers going so that I would become accustomed to the rhythms of speech and become less cautious with my answers.

When we got to the subject of the
yakuza
and
Fuchida-san
and I explained that we swapped butterflies and had done so for twenty-five years they clearly didn’t believe me. It only started to get really rough when they began to question me about Anna and her past. This was a story I was prepared to tell as it implicated Konoe Akira directly and gave us a further reason for coming to Japan.

But from this point there was no more good-guy bad-guy routine. ‘Thank you for coming to Japan,’ the original good guy suddenly shouted. ‘You give us an opportunity to pay you back for killing our fathers and uncles. You were not a radio operator! You are a murderer! You are going to die. Do you hear me! We are going to kill you!’

It was sub-standard interrogation technique, what not to do, almost the first lesson I’d been taught in naval intelligence. The threat of certain death usually achieves nothing in an interrogation. The alternative of sweet and sour, hope and despair, is the only technique that works in the psychology involved in obtaining a confession. If no carrot exists the stick won’t do the job on its own. Hope springs eternal, remove it and the subject closes down. Individual survival is largely built on choosing one or another outcome. In interrogation, threat only works when physical or psychological punishment, not death, is the consequence. The interrogator’s mantra has always been ‘Dead men tell no tales.’

‘If you intend to kill me, then there is no point in my answering your questions,’ I said. I had been standing for nearly two hours, and with no sleep and the aggravation of the cuts I was in pretty poor shape, dog tired and hurting like hell. There wasn’t much more they could do to make things worse than they were. I decided to say nothing more.

‘Sit!’ the original bad guy commanded. I remained standing. ‘Sit!’ he shouted again. Again I refused to comply. The bad guy turned to the two policemen. ‘Make the murderer of our fathers sit,’ he instructed.

The two uniformed officers rose from their chairs and came to stand on either side of me and the original good guy came around the table and placed the chair behind me. The two policemen then pushed me down hard onto the chair. The pain was excruciating as my lacerated buttocks crashed down onto the seat. ‘Stand!’ The cops lifted me partially from the chair. ‘Sit!’ I resisted by pushing down on the desk in front of me, making it impossible for the two small policemen to force me back down. ‘Handcuff him!’ came the order. I was handcuffed and at the same time the chair was pulled sufficiently far from the table to be out of reach. Then they crashed me down again. The command to sit or stand went on for a good twenty minutes with the result that first the dressings aggravated the wounds, then I felt the thirty or so stitches in the cheeks of my buttocks begin to tear apart. The seat of my trousers was soon soaked with blood, which ran down the back of my legs into my socks and shoes.

The effect of lifting me and crashing me back down meant that my shoulders often met the back of the chair, which caused the large cut behind my right shoulderblade to open up, and soon I could feel my blood-soaked shirt sticking to my back. ‘Confess! You murdered the old lady! Confess!’ my tormentor shouted each time I crashed down, his face no more than an inch from my own. Up I went and then down again, the command to confess becoming a mantra screamed into my ears. I lost count of the times I was lifted and dumped – the two policemen were plainly exhausted – then suddenly the seat of my blood-soaked trousers met the blood-covered chair and I slid off it and crashed to the floor, hitting the back of my head on the edge of the chair. I rolled onto my stomach and lay on the floor with my handcuffed hands tucked under me and my eyes closed. The dozen or so stitches on the back of my forearms were the only ones that still seemed intact. I was dazed, bloody and close to passing out from sheer exhaustion, or possibly loss of blood.

‘Get up!’ the second plainclothes guy commanded. I lay still, eyes closed, feigning unconsciousness. ‘Lift him!’ came the command. The policemen were not big men and attempting to lift a bloodied and inert body weighing two hundred and thirty pounds was not easy. They tried rolling me over onto my back to get at my arms but the back of my shirt and trousers from shoulders to ankles was blood-soaked and the task proved well nigh impossible for the two men. They made several attempts and must have been pretty bloodied by the time I heard the command, ‘Leave him!’ Then moments later, ‘Call an ambulance!’

I must have passed out on the way to the hospital because I came to in Emergency where two nurses were swabbing me with iodine, the sting of the antiseptic excruciating. They then set about removing the broken stitches, another very painful experience, and finally a doctor attended to me, re-stitching the wounds, all of which was done without giving me any anaesthesia. I confess I didn’t handle the process at all well. While the police were torturing me I managed to contain the agony with grunts and winces and an occasion cry of pain, but released from the need to remain stoic I sobbed and shouted and pleaded like a child for them to stop. I was finally given a blood transfusion and spent the night in a private room in the hospital with a police officer outside the door.