Quin?s Shanghai Circus (7 page)

Because
No
cannot be performed without the proper costumes.

Do you wear masks?

They are part of the costumes.

Do you dance?

In some
No
plays there are dances.

Do you wear the dragon costume?

If that is a scene we are illustrating.

Not
we,
you. Do
you
wear the dragon costume?

If that is a scene I am illustrating.

And who wears the princess costume?

Whoever is illustrating that part.

Always one of the boys?

Not necessarily.

All right, you and the princess are doing your dance. What are the other boys doing at that moment?

They play the part of the chorus and the musicians.

You mean they sit around the room and watch? They make comments? They hum and make some private music of their own?

They sing the verses of the chorus and play the instruments that accompany the drama.

Playing their instruments, are they?

The drum and the flute.

What happens after you finish dancing?

We have refreshments and they go home.

Always?

Yes.

But sometimes it is very late?

It may be.

Dawn?

If the
No
play is a long one.

A long one, hissed the General, leaning forward over the desk. He rested his chin in his hands and stared at Father Lamereaux.

You are an expert on
No?

I have studied it.

You are one of the leading Western experts on
No?

I may be.

Then you understand Japanese tradition and you know a Japanese warrior will not allow corruption in his country.

Religious instruction does not corrupt.

And what do you do with one boy while other boys watch?

No
drama does not corrupt.

But you corrupt.

If there is anything corrupting Japan today it is the army. It is you and men like you.

Be careful, you know nothing about politics. You are not in this country to advise us on politics. If you were you would be expelled.

I know I love this country, and what you're doing to it is detestable.

We are on good terms with the West. Of course we wish that to continue.

Yes.

So there is no question of a missionary being expelled.

No.

You may remain here as long as you have the sanction of your church.

Yes.

You are naturally free to carry on your religious work.

Yes.

Including religious instruction to young boys.

Yes.

Naturally in the privacy of your home as well.

Yes.

But I am concerned about the fathers of the boys who attend your Friday night meetings. Their sons may be enjoying themselves but their fathers may not be. Is it possible they're in jobs that don't suit them? Perhaps we should release them from their jobs so they can be free to pursue their interests, just as you are free to pursue yours. Of course it is difficult to find work today because of what Western capitalism has done to my country. The fathers might not be able to find other jobs, but then, they could always go into the army.

And be sent to China?

We will not allow the West to do to us what they have done to China. We will achieve the kind of strength the West appreciates, and at the same time we will save China with our strength. We are of the same race as the Chinese. We understand them whereas Westerners don't.

How could they when they're foreign devils?

You are knowledgeable in
No,
that means you know that devils exist. Evil exists. Do you know it?

I do.

I am sure you do. And would you deny that evil exists in the West? In Westerners? In yourself?

I would agree it moves in the wind although its domain is a minor one.

Good, you agree. Now what I would like you to consider is what Western avarice has done to China, which it will not be allowed to do to Japan. Or consider a more immediate problem, consider the difficulty of finding jobs in Japan because of the collapse of Western capitalism. Consider the fathers of the boys who attend your Friday night dances. You must care a great deal for those boys and you love our country, we know that. It would be unfortunate if these men could not find work and their families had to suffer as a result. Reflect upon this situation for a moment.

The General stared at Father Lamereaux and a completely unexpected, interchange began.

The priest was still slumped uncomfortably in the small, low chair. The General was still seated behind his massive desk with his chin resting in his hands. Now the General leaned forward and closed his left eye as if to multiply the acuity of his other eye, to increase his vision by narrowing it. The one open eye, round and unfathomable, stared at Father Lamereaux without blinking.

A minute went by. Father Lamereaux didn't move. He was staring back also without blinking.

Two minutes went by.

A full five minutes according to the ticks of the clock on the wall.

Father Lamereaux kept a large collection of cats in his house. Sometimes to amuse himself he practiced outstaring the cats. Early in life he had discovered he had an unusual talent for concentration, so acute he could perform extraordinary feats of memorization. He could shuffle rapidly through a pack of cards once, and repeat the exact location of every card in the deck. He could memorize a list of random three-digit numbers, up to one hundred of them, in the time it took someone to read them off. He could enter a reading room in a public library, walk once around the room at a normal pace, and immediately upon exit give the title and author of every volume in the room.

Later, when he found his vocation, this talent was made impregnable by the rigors of Jesuitical training. Nothing he had seen or heard was ever lost to him. A cat could stare at him for fifteen minutes or more but eventually it had to turn away, its dumb mind no match for the severity of his intellectual discipline.

Yet he met his match that morning in General Kikuchi's office. He met his match and lost a contest of intellect and will for the first time in his life.

The break came after fifty-nine minutes of silent staring, fifty-nine minutes during which time neither man moved, neither man blinked. At the end of that agonizing period Father Lamereaux could no longer bear it. He knew he was beaten. As the clock struck the hour he blinked. He sighed and looked out the window.

All right, he said.

The General stirred. He opened his other eye.

What did you say?

I said all right. I'll stop holding my Friday night meetings.

It seems the wise thing to do, said the General. One might call it the safer course of action considering who you really are and what you are
really
doing.

Is that all then?

Yes.

Father Lamereaux climbed out of the small, low chair.

Somehow he managed to do it gracefully, not giving the General the pleasure of seeing how stiff he was. He rose to his full height and glared down at the tiny man behind the desk.

You are inhuman, a worm, not a man but a devil. I answer to God for my actions, but you answer to the wind of evil that has captured your soul. I pity the despicable companions of your spirit. May this country be delivered someday from its demons.

You may go.

Thus ended Father Lamereaux's account of the interview. The journalists who heard it knew he was not a man who would lie. They also knew General Kikuchi's reputation for fierce, unwavering attention, but they still could not accept the story the way Father Lamereaux told it. Obviously a part had been left out.

After discussing it among themselves they concluded the General had probably threatened to send Father Lamereaux to jail for corrupting minors unless he agreed to serve the Kempeitai as an informer. That had been the cause of the contest of wills that resulted in a full hour of unblinking silence, the suggestion of a
safer course,
a contest Father Lamereaux had lost.

Further evidence of the priest's traitorous role turned up almost at once. Instead of leading a gay procession of young boys through the streets on Friday evenings, he was now seen in obscure quarters of the city late at night, hovering in doorways. Once he was reported to have been observed sneaking over a cemetery wall at midnight. Another time he was observed sneaking out the back gate of a cemetery at three o'clock in the morning. On both occasions, as the automobile of the observer drew near, he disappeared so quickly it was as if he had evaporated in the night.

Such clandestine behavior was readily explainable. The priest was meeting his contact from the Kempeitai.

Early in the 1930s the Western community in Tokyo succeeded in isolating Father Lamereaux. No one would speak to him. If he appeared on the street or at a public gathering, all backs turned on him. New residents were warned to have nothing to do with him. The tall, gaunt Jesuit who had once been known for his gentle wit, his perceptions, his prodigious memory, his articulate and sympathetic discourses on the subtleties of Japanese culture, became a totally solitary figure, shunned, abandoned, despised.

When Japan went to war with the West he was interned with other scholars and missionaries in a prison camp in the mountains. But even then his former services to the Kempeitai were not forgotten, for at a time when the other prisoners were finding it difficult to eat, Father Lamereaux was getting drunk day after day, alone as always, on genuine Irish whiskey captured by the Japanese army at the British officers' mess in Singapore.

No one who talked to Quin had anything good to say for Father Lamereaux. Those who had known him hated him, everyone else reviled him.

I'm only sorry, said one man, that he wasn't around to face a court after the war. Or at least to face us.

After the war? said Quin.

Yes, he died a few days after Japan surrendered, I'm not sure how. One story has it that he came back to Tokyo and finally succumbed to acute alcoholism. Another was that he returned to Kamakura and went insane, committed suicide by throwing himself under a collapsing wall during a typhoon.

In any case he's gone. A lost curiosity and an ugly one.

Geraty's history, by contrast, seemed to begin where the Jesuit's had ended.

Little was known of his life before the war other than that he lived in Tokyo claiming to be the representative of a Canadian firm that manufactured quack leprosy drugs. He was a gloomy man who kept to himself, he was uncommunicative and seldom spoke to Westerners. On the rare occasions when anyone saw him he was always alone. He never tried to peddle his drugs and had no apparent source of income. In fact, he never seemed to do much of anything.

One suggestion was that he had been a criminal wanted in the United States. Another possibility was that he had been smuggling contraband from Mukden to Shanghai, for that was the route he took when he left Tokyo in the 1930s. He appeared to have remained in Shanghai until the coming of the war, when he escaped from China to the Philippines. Trapped there by the Japanese invasion, he went into hiding in the mountains.

As soon as the Japanese surrendered he presented himself to the American forces as a legendary guerrilla figure who had been fighting alone in the mountains for years, an elaborate tale he told with such conviction he was awarded a decoration for valor and recommended for a colonel's commission in the army reserve.

While waiting for his commission to be approved, Geraty talked himself into a flight to Japan on the basis of his knowledge of the language and his long experience both there and in China. He arrived back in Tokyo during the first days of the Occupation and was given a sensitive position doing preliminary research in the archives of the Imperial Army, more specifically the captured Kempeitai files on China.

Geraty was in the job only a month or two when a mysterious fire burned down an entire wing of the warehouse where the Kempeitai files were stored. The American authorities were immediately suspicious because of the absence of paper ashes in the ruins. Furthermore, a blind Japanese beggar who had been sleeping in a gutter near the warehouse reported that he had been awakened by a convoy of passing trucks on the night of the fire.

A few telephone calls revealed that although a number of military trucks were out on various errands at the time of the fire, no one had authorized a convoy anywhere in the Tokyo area.

This information coincided with a report on Geraty's pending commission. A routine investigation in the Philippines had showed that the giant American was remembered in many mountain villages, but only for his outrageous indolence. Hundreds of peasants were ready to testify that he had done nothing during the war but steal their homemade beer and sleep. It was true he had taught their children to sing
Onward Christian Soldiers
and had urged them to march off and fight the Japanese, but he himself had never left the safety of the remote mountaintop church where his hammock was strung in a dark corner behind the altar.

Geraty was called in and shown the report, which he read without comment. The beggar was brought in to repeat his testimony. Geraty's observation then was that the blind man was starving and therefore probably subject to hallucinations. To prove his point he gave the ravenous beggar a turnip and asked him how it tasted. The shaking old man replied that it had the bouquet of green tea, the flavor of new rice, and the delicate consistency of the finest raw tuna. Geraty patted the old man on the head, offered to buy him a sackful of turnips, and turned back to his accusers grinning broadly.

He was fired on the spot and told he would never be able to work for the American government again, an announcement he accepted with a guffaw and a gesture so insulting he was thrown out the door.

Thereafter he supported himself by conducting lurid after-hour entertainments for American officers and their wives. While stationed in the bar of one of the better Tokyo hotels he would allude to what he called the frightening sexual habits of the everyday man in kimono. Most of the Americans in the Occupation knew nothing about Japan and Geraty obviously knew a great deal. In the course of an evening, besides having his drinks paid for, he generally managed to talk himself into at least one private showing.