A Treasury of Stories (Collection of novelettes and short stories)

1

Jack Hollinger, U.S.N., up from Yokohama on a forty-eight, swung his arms wildly and shouted, “Shoo!” He squatted cross-legged on the floor in a little paper-walled compartment of the House of Stolen Hours, situated in one of the more pungent alleys of the Yoshiwara, Tokyo’s tenderloin. He glanced down at the array of thimble-sized saki cups before him. All of them were empty, but Hollinger hadn’t worked up much of a glow over them. A warm spot that felt no bigger than a dime floated pleasantly but without any particular zest behind the waistband of his white tailormades.

He tipped his cap down over one eye and wigwagged his arms some more.

“Outside,” he said. “Party no good. Joto nai. Terrible.” He made a face.

The geisha ceased her stylized posturing, bowed low and, edging back the paper slide, retreated through it.

The other geisha, who had been kneeling to twang shrill discords on her samisen, let her hands fall from the strings. “Me, too?” she asked. And giggled. Geishas, he had discovered, giggled at nearly everything.

“Yeah, you too. Music very bad. Send the girl back with some more saki. And try to find something bigger I can drink it out of.”

The slide eased back into place after her. Hollinger, left alone with his saki cups and the dancer’s discarded outer kimono neatly rolled up in the corner — they seemed to wear layers of them — scowled at the paper walls. He lit a cigarette and blew a thick blue smoke-spiral into the air. It hung there heavily as if it were too tired to move against the heavy staleness of the room’s atmosphere. Hollinger frowned.

“Twenty-four hours shore leave left, and not a laugh on the horizon,” he complained. “What a town! I should’ve stayed aboard and watched the movie. Damn!”

The racket in the public rooms up front where they had been playing billiards all evening seemed to have grown louder. He could hear excited shouts, jabbering voices that topped the raucous blend of phonograph music, clicking roulette wheels, rattling dice cups, and clinking beer glasses. Somebody had started a fight, he guessed. These Japs lost their heads easy. Still, a good fight might take some of the boredom out of his bones. Maybe he’d just... Knock it off, mate, he told himself. He’d been warned to stay out of trouble this trip.

They were sure as hell taking a long time with that saki. Annoyed, he picked up a little gong-mallet and began to swing it against the round bronze disc dangling between two cross-pieces. He liked the low, sweet noise. He hit the gong again.

There was the sound of feet hurrying across the wooden flooring now, as though a lot of people were running from one place to another. But it remained a considerable distance away, at the front of the big sprawling establishment.

Something whisked by against the outside of the paper screen walling him in. Like the loose edges of somebody’s clothes flirting past. The light was on his side. It was dark out there, so he couldn’t see any shadow to go with it. Just that rustling sound and the hasty pat-pat of running feet accompanying it. Whoever it was out there, he was in one hell of a hurry.

The pat-pat went on past until it had nearly died out, then turned, started back again quicker than before. He listened to it the way a man will listen to muffle voices coming from the other side of a thick wall, straining for some snatch of meaning. And then it stopped right opposite where he was. There was an instant’s breathless pause.

The slide whirred back suddenly, and a blond girl stumbled in toward him, both arms stretched out in mute appeal for help. He was on his feet by the time she’d covered the short space between them. He got a blurred impression of what she looked like as she threw herself against him, panting and trembling within the circle of his arms.

She was all in. Her blond hair fell over her forehead in a disordered, brilliant splash. Two or three flecks of red spattered the front of her gold evening gown. The gown was cut low, swooping over well-formed breasts, dropping in a wide V. She was barefoot, he noticed, but you always had to leave your shoes at the door when you came in. Her face was attractive, with wide-spaced brown eyes, a full, sensuous mouth. Her breathing was the quick, agonized panting of a hunted thing.

Hollinger looked down into her eyes — and whistled. He could tell by the contraction of the pupils that she’d been drugged. An opium pill, maybe, or a strong dose of morphine. He couldn’t be sure whether it hadn’t taken effect yet or whether she was just coming out of it.

Sound suddenly broke from her lips, and she sobbed against his shoulder. “Say you’re real. Please. Tell me I’m not seeing things.” Her fingers pressed hard against his chest. “Hide me. Don’t let them get me. I didn’t do it, believe me. I know I didn’t do it.”

He had squared off toward the opening in the slide because the tramping of feet was coming this way now and he wanted to be ready.

She pulled at his jumper, wrinkling it with her fingers. “No, don’t fight them. Don’t you see — that would be the worst thing you could do. It’s not just people, it’s the police!”

Police? Hollinger swore. He took a quick step over and slammed the slide shut. He kept his hand on it tentatively, as though not sure of his next move. He thought briefly of the warning he’d got before leaving the ship, and the idea of the brig for thirty days didn’t exactly appeal to him. But — this girl. An American, and in a jam and...

“Why are they after you?” he asked suddenly. “What did you do?”

“They think I... I murdered the man I came in with. I found him stabbed to death... just now... just now in the room with me when... when I woke up. I know it sounds silly, I know. They’ll never believe it. It’s too...” She broke off, shaking her head in despair. She opened her hands wide, indicating the crimson flecks on her bodice. “This blood all over me... and the dagger in my lap when they came in... oh please, please, get me out of this awful place. Please! I know I didn’t do it. I couldn’t have...”

He eyed her ruefully.

She seemed to sense what was passing in his mind. She smiled wanly. “No. No, it wasn’t anything like that. I’m not... the man was my fiancé. We were going to be married tomorrow. We were slumming. We stopped in here...”

His indecision didn’t last long. There wasn’t time. The footsteps were loud in the corridor now. And then they stopped right next door. Hollinger grabbed up the geisha’s discarded robe. “Get into this,” he said. “Quick. They’ll be in here in a second. Maybe we can swing it.” He jumped back to where he was sitting originally, collapsed cross-legged on the floor. The girl worked quickly wrapping the robe around her. He pulled her down beside him, snatched off his white cap, poked it inside-out and jammed it down over her telltale golden hair.

He pulled her against him, surprised at the warmth of her, surprised at the way she molded herself to him. “I’m sorry,” he said, “but this is our only chance. Keep your face turned away from the door. Don’t let that dress show through the kimono.”

“Suppose they talk Japanese to me?”

“I’ll do all the talking. You just giggle the way all these gals do.” His arm tightened around her, and he felt her body tremble involuntarily. “Okay now, this is it. Here they are.”

The slide hissed back. Three bandy-legged policemen stood squinting into the lantern light. Behind them was a fourth little man in plainclothes. And in back of him, craning and goggling, was a huddled group of curious customers.

Hollinger put down one of the saki cups, wiped his mouth with his free hand. “Well,” he said slowly, “what’s the attraction?” He stared at them belligerently. “Go on, beat it! Scram.”

“You see gal?” the detective demanded. “You see yellow-hair gal run by here.” He smiled deferentially. “ ’Merican gal, sir. Like you.” “I haven’t seen any gal but Mitsu-san here.” He stared at the detective. “I don’t think I like your barging in here like a damned...”

The plain-clothesman smiled at Hollinger and then snapped something in Japanese at the girl. Hollinger’s growl turned nasty.

“Listen,” he said. “You want to get kicked out of here on your backside?”

The girl, quaking against him, managed to produce a high-pitched giggle. Hollinger warmed inside, pulled her closer to him.

“Fool gal,” the detective snapped contemptuously. His mind seemed to grasp the fact that he was facing an American sailor, and he turned quickly, bowing at the waist. “So sorry to disturb, sir. Pliss overlook.” The three policemen bowed, too.

“Sayonara,” Hollinger said pointedly. “Goodbye.”

The screen slammed shut again. Someone barked a curt order, and the trampling feet moved on. He heard them stopping along the corridor, looking into every cubicle.

“Don’t move yet,” Hollinger said, his mouth close to the girl’s ear. Her head nodded, and she kept quiet as they listened to the retreating footsteps. She moved, finally, ready to straighten up. He caught her quickly as the screen began to ease back again.

He brought his lips down against hers fiercely, covering her face with his own, turning her away from the screen.

“I bring saki you order...”

The geisha stopped dead in her tracks, glancing in slant-eyed surprise at the pair. “You find another girl?” she asked.

Hollinger lifted his head, his blood racing with the memory of that quick kiss. “Yeah, I found a new girl. I like her better than the other girl. So long.” He jabbed his thumb at the screen.

The geisha backed out submissively, still peering curiously at the other girl. The slide closed shut with a final whisper.

“Let’s go,” Hollinger said. The girl straightened and looked up at him, her fingertips pressed wonderingly to her mouth.

“Come on, we’ve got to step on it. She looked damned suspicious.” He jumped to his feet, took a quick look out, then motioned for the girl to follow. She obeyed, holding herself very stiff and straight.

2

The clamor at the front hadn’t abated any. Through a gap in the partitions, he caught a glimpse of two white-garbed interns bringing in a stretcher. There was no out that way.

The girl looked at him in terror. “They’ve trapped us,” she said. “We’ll never be able to get through all those people. I’m sorry I ever got you into this.”

“We’ll try the back way. There must be another exit.” He threw his arm around her. “Lean against me, like you were dizzy. We’re going out for a breath of air, if they ask us. Take little pigeon-toed steps like you were going to fall flat on your face any minute. Buckle your knees a little, you’re too tall. Keep your head down.”

They wavered through the maze of paper-walled passageways, sometimes in darkness, sometimes in reflected lantern-light. The place was a labyrinth; all you had to do to make new walls was push a little. The only permanent structure was the four corner-posts and the top-heavy tile roof.

They detoured around one of the slides, sidestepping the police who were returning from the back. A hurrying geisha, carrying refreshments on a tray, brushed against them, apologized.

“We’ll make it,” he assured her.

The stampeding suddenly started behind them again. Evidently the first geisha had voiced her suspicions. They began to move faster. The wavering gait became a run, the run became tearing headlong flight. He slashed one more of the never-ending screens back into its socket, and they were looking out on a rear garden.

Apple-green and vermillion lanterns bobbed in the breeze, a little humped-back bridge crossing a midget brook; dwarf fir-trees made showy splashes of deeper darkness. It all looked unreal and very pretty — except for the policeman standing there. He turned to face them. They’d come to a dead stop, and they watched him swing a short, wicked-looking little club on a leather strap.

Hollinger whispered, “I’ll handle him. Don’t wait, just keep going across that bridge. There must be a way of getting through to the next street over.”

The cop said something that sounded like, “Boydao, boydao!” and motioned them back with his club.

“Take it!” Hollinger snapped at the girl. He gave her a shove that sent her up one side of the sharply-tilted bridge and down the other. She almost tumbled off into the water.

Hollinger threw himself on the policeman, and they struggled on the fine sand that surfaced the garden path. Hollinger held him in an awkward head lock, his left hand clamped across the Jap’s mouth to keep him quiet. His right fist pounded against the bristle-hair skull while the policeman’s club lashed out with dull, brutal thuds. The cop bit Hollinger’s muffling hand. Hollinger threw his head back, opened his mouth as if to scream, but held the cry in his throat until it died.

The girl stood on the other side of the bridge, her hand held to her lips once more, her body bent forward in the darkness. Hollinger had no time to waste. Lanterns were wavering nearer in the interior of the house, filtering through the paper like blurred, interlocked moons.

He sucked in a deep breath and lifted the squirming cop off the ground, tossing him like a sack into the stream. The bulge of his chest and the sudden strain of his back and shoulder muscles split his tight jumper from throat to waist. There was a petal-shaped splash and the little brown man swiveled there in the sanded hollow, half-stunned by the impact, water coursing shallowly across his abdomen.

Hollinger vaulted across to the girl with a single stretch of his long legs, caught at her as he went by, and pulled her after him. “I told you not to wait. I told you...” He clamped his jaws shut, glared at her fiercely. “Come on, let’s go.”

They found the mouth of an alley giving onto the rear of the garden behind a clump of dwarf firs that were streaked single file along its narrow black length between the walls. Hollinger pushed the hobbling girl in front of him. They came out at the other end into the fuzzy like brightness of one of the Yoshiwara streets.

It was strangely deserted; seemed so, at least, until Hollinger remembered that most of the usual crowd must have been drawn around to the front of the building. They ran down the alley to the end of the block, then turned a corner into another that was even more dismal. But this one was more normally crowded. Heads turned after them, kimonoed passers-by stopped to stare. A zigzagging bicycle rider tried to get out of their way, ran into them instead and was toppled over. Hollinger’s eyes scanned the crowd, looking for the yellow and black arm bands of the Shore Patrol.

“If the alarm spreads before we can get out of this part of town, we’re sunk,” he said. “They’ll gang up on us. Come on, faster.”

“I can’t,” she whimpered. “It’s... it’s this pavement. The ground’s cutting my feet to pieces.” He was without shoes, too, but his soles were calloused from deck-scrubbing. He was two arms’ length in front of her, hauling her after him. Betraying flashes of gold peeped out from the parachuting kimono, blazing a trail of identification behind them.

She stumbled and bit her lips to keep from crying out. He grabbed her up in both arms, plunging onward with her. The extra weight hardly slowed him at all. He could smell the scent of her hair in his nostrils, deep and musky. His arms tightened around her, and he kept running, faster, faster. A paper streamer hanging downward across the lane got snared in some way by their passage, ripped off its wire and flared out behind his neck like a long loose muffler. The shopkeeper whose stall it had advertised came out sputtering, both arms raised high in denunciation.

“Look,” Hollinger muttered, winded. A taxi had just dropped a couple of fares in front of a dance-hall ahead. Hollinger hailed it with a hoarse shout. Its gears grinded and it came slowly backward. Hollinger let the girl fall on the scat, ran along beside the cab for a minute as the driver went forward again, and then hopped in after her.

“Drive like blazes,” he snapped. “Ginza... anywhere at all... only get us out of here. Fast, savvy? Fast!”

“I go like wind,” the driver agreed cheerfully. He stepped on the gas, his head bent forward under its bright golf cap.

The girl was all in. The sudden release of all her pent-up tension finished the last of her control. She crumbled against his chest, her head buried in his shoulder, her fingers clutching his arm tightly. He didn’t speak to her. He rested his head against the cushions, feeling the slow trembling of her body against his. He pulled in a long shuddering breath, slowly, tasting it like a sip of icy wine. He looked at the teeth-gashes on his hand and felt real pain for the first time.

A sudden diminution of the light around them — a change to the more dignified pearly glow of solitary street lights — marked the end of the Yoshiwara.

At the end of a long five minutes, the girl pulled herself up. “I don’t know how to thank you,” she said weakly. “I mean...” She smiled wearily. “... there just aren’t any words.”

He didn’t know what to say, so he kept quiet.

Her face became suddenly earnest. She brought it close to his, her eyes intensely serious. “I didn’t do it! Why, I was going to marry Bob. I came here to...” She stopped suddenly, confused.

He looked at her sharply, her words somehow leaving an empty vacuum inside him. He started to reach for her hand, then drew back.

They were coming into the long broad reaches of Ginza now, Tokyo’s Broadway. The lights brightened again, glaring against the flattened, charred remains of precision bombing. The familiar smell of mixed wood smoke and dried fish seeped into the open cab. And slowly, the ruins gave way to the city. This was downtown, the show-part of town, modern, conventional, safe. Safe for some people.

“I suppose... I should give myself up,” she said. “The more I run, the more they’ll think I did it. I... I lost my head back there... the knife and the blood, and that horrible manager yelling at me.”

“Suppose you tell me all about it,” he urged gently. “I guess we’re in this together now.” He paused. “You say you didn’t do it. All right, that’s good enough for me. I don’t know who you are, but...”

“Brainard,” she said. “Evelyn Brainard. I’m from San Francisco.”

He said, “Please to meet you, Miss Brainard,” and after what had gone on in the past half-hour, he expected her to smile. She didn’t. He took her hand in his own and said, “I’m due back on shipboard tomorrow noon, and we’re shoving off for Pearl right after that. If we’re going to do anything, we’ve got to do it fast.”

She nodded, her hair reflecting the bright lights outside the cab. They had already reached the lower end of the Ginza, were heading slowly back again.

“We’ve got to get you off the streets first. Every good cop in the city is probably looking for you by this time. Know anyone here you can hole up with?”

“Not a soul. Bob Mallory was the only one. I just got off the Empress yesterday afternoon. I’ve a room at the Imperial...”

“You can’t go back there,” he said. “If they’re not there already, they’ll be there damned soon, you can count on that. What about this Mallory... where did he hang out?”

“I don’t know, he wouldn’t tell me. He gave me an evasive answer when I asked him. Somehow I got the idea he didn’t want me to find out.”

“I thought you were engaged to him.”

“I was, but...”

“Well, it wouldn’t be much help, even if you did know. They’d probably check there as soon as they finished with your own place.” They drove on in silence for a minute. Finally, he said, “Look, don’t get offended, but... I’ve had a room since yesterday. It’s not much of a place, and my landlord is a crazy bugger, but it would be safe and you could stay there while I...”

A small smile tilted the corners of her mouth. “Thanks,” she said.

He gave the driver the address. It was a Western-style building in one of the downtown reaches of the city, little better than a shack really — clapboard under a corrugated tin roof. But it had wooden doors and walls. And windows with shades on them.

He said, “Wait in the cab a minute. I’ll get the landlord out of the way. Just as well if no one sees you going up.”

After he’d gone in, she caught sight of the driver slyly watching her in his rear-view mirror. She quickly lowered her head, but with the terrifying feeling that he’d already seen she was white, even in the dimness of the cab’s interior. Hollinger came back and helped her out. “Hurry up. I sent him out to the back on a stall.”

Going up the unpainted wooden stairs, she whispered, “The driver. He saw I wasn’t Japanese. He may remember later, if he hears...”

He made a move to turn and go down again. The sound of the taxi driving off outside reached them, and it was too late to do anything about it.

“We’ll have to take a chance,” he said.

There was nothing Japanese about the room upstairs. Just a typical cheap lodging house room, universal in appearance. Flaked white-painted iron bedstead, wooden dresser.

She sat on the edge of the bed, wearily pulled off the white cap. Her hair tumbled down to her shoulders in a golden cascade, framing her face. She looked down at her blood-stained gown, and a shiver of revulsion worked over her body.

“Would you like to change. I mean...”

She stared at him with wide, frank eyes. “I’d like to. Is there anything? I’d... like to.”

He yanked a small overnight bag from the top of the dresser, pulled out a clean white jumper and a pair of trousers.

“This is all I’ve got,” he said.

“It’ll do fine. I just want to get out of this.” She indicated the blood-stained gown again. Then she turned her head, her eyes searching the walls.

“There’s just this room,” he said softly. “Maybe if I stepped outside.”

“No. No,” she said quickly. “Don’t leave me. Please.”

She slipped out of the kimono, turning her back to him. He watched while she lowered one thin strap of her gown. The other strap slid off easily as he watched.

“Tell me all about it,” he said. “The whole thing from the beginning. Talk low.”

3

“I hadn’t seen him in three years. We were engaged before he left the States. He came out here with the Occupation forces in the beginning. Then he stayed on when his hitch was up. I was to come out after him. But he never sent for me.”

She sighed deeply, unrolled the jumper and trousers and put them on the bed. She had lowered both straps of the gown, and nothing held it up now but the rich curve of her breasts.

“He kept putting me off. Finally I got tired of waiting. I paid my own fare, came out without letting him know. I was getting worried. All this Korean business, and not hearing from him... I was getting worried. I didn’t tell him I was arriving until the night before last. I sent him a cable from the ship. He met me yesterday at Yokohama.”

She bent over, pulling the long gown up over her thighs, past the swell of her breasts, over her head. Her hair tumbled down over her outstretched arms. He knew he should turn away, but he sat there watching her. She didn’t seem embarrassed. She was engrossed in her story, and she moved swiftly, dropping the gown on the floor, dropping the blood-soiled garment like a loathsome thing.

“He’d changed. He wasn’t glad to see me, I could tell that right away. He was afraid of something. Even down there on the pier, while he was helping me to pass through the customs inspection, he kept glancing nervously at the crowd around us, as if he were being watched or something.”

“When we got here, it was even worse. He didn’t seem to want to tell me where he lived. He wouldn’t talk about himself at all. I’d been sending my letters to the company office — he’d taken a job here, you see — and... I just couldn’t make head or tail of it. This morning when I woke up, there was a piece of white goods tied around the knob of my door — like a long streamer or scarf. When I happened to mention it to him later on, he turned the ghastliest white. But I couldn’t make him talk about that, either.”

Hollinger nodded, watching the girl in her underwear now, watching the sharp cones of her bra, the thin material that covered her wide hips. “White’s the color of mourning in this country. It’s the same as crepe back home.”

“I know that now. I’ll spare you all the little details. My love for him curled up, withered. I could feel that happening. Do you know what I mean? You can feel it when something like that happens.”

“Yes, I know.”

The girl pulled the jumper over her head. It came down to her thighs, leaving her long, curved legs exposed. The jumper was large on her, the V in the neck coming down below the line of the bra. She looked at the fit and suppressed a smile.

“Anyway,” she said, “we were sitting in a restaurant tonight and I happened to say, ‘Bob, this is dull. Can’t you take me to one of the more exciting places?’ He didn’t seem to want to do that either. As though he were afraid to stray very far off the beaten path.” “Funny,” he said.

“We argued about it a little. The girl who was waiting on us must have heard. Because not long after that he was called to the phone and as soon as his back was turned, this waitress came up to me. She said if I wanted to see the real sights, I ought to get him to take me to the Yoshi. The House of the Stolen Hours, she said, was a very nice place. Then Bob came back. And although he’d looked scared when he went to the phone, he was all right now. He said there’d been a mistake... no call for him at all.

“It never occurred to me that there could be anything prearranged, sinister, about this sequence of events — that it might be a trick to get us in an out-of-the-way place where we couldn’t easily get help.

“Like a fool, I didn’t tell Bob where I’d found out about the Yoshiwara. I let him think it was my own idea. I had a hard time talking him into taking me there, but finally he gave in.”

She pulled on the trousers, held them out from her waist and looked down in disdain. She took the sash from the kimono, then, doubled the extra fold of material, and knotted it around the waist in a belt. “There,” she said. “Let’s hope no Commodore sees me.”

“What happened next?” he asked.

“Well, we were shown into one of the little rooms and told just where to sit, to enjoy the entertainment.”

“There’s something right there,” he interrupted. “What difference would it have been where you sat, when you just unroll mats on the floor? Who told you where to sit?”

“The manager, I guess it was. Yes, he spread out one mat for me, pointed, and I sat down. Then he spread the one for Bob opposite mine instead of alongside it. They spread the tea things between us. Mine tasted bitter, but I thought maybe that was on account of drinking it without cream or sugar.”

“A mickey,” he said. “Plain and simple.”

“There was a lantern shining in my face, I remember. My eyes felt small, like pinheads, and the lantern light dazzled them. I began to get terribly sleeply. I asked Bob to change places with me, so I’d have my back to the light. He sat where I’d been, and I moved over to his place.”

Hollinger took out a cigarette, offered her one, lighting it for her. She drew in the smoke quickly, let it out in a tall, grey plume.

“A few minutes later it happened. Even I saw a gleam of light, shining through the screen from the next compartment behind Bob’s back — as though someone had opened a slide and gone in there. A big looming shadow hovered over him and then it vanished, and the screen went blank. I was feeling dizzy, and I couldn’t be sure if I’d really seen it or not.”

She squeezed out the cigarette, stepped on it nervously.

“Bob never made a sound. I thought he was just bending over to pick up his cup at first, but he didn’t straighten up again. He... he didn’t...” She threw herself into his arms, the uniform smelling clean and pressed, the scent of her hair mingling with it. “It was awful. He just kept going lower and lower. Then the cup smashed under his chin and he just stayed that way. Just bent in half like that. And then I could see the ivory knob sticking out between his shoulder blades, like a horrible little handle to lift him by. And red ribbons swirling out all around it, ribbons that ran!”

She caught a sob in her throat, held him tighter.

“The last thing I saw was a slit, a two or three-inch gash in the paper screen behind him. My own head got too heavy to hold up and I just fell over sideways on the floor and passed out.”

She pushed herself away from him and began pacing the floor.

“But I know, I know I was sitting on the opposite side of the room from him. I know I didn’t touch him!”

“All right,” he said. “All right.”

“When I opened my eyes, I was still there in that horrible place, in the flickering lantern light, and he was dead there opposite me, so I knew I hadn’t dreamed it. The dream was from then on, until I found you. A nightmare. The slide was just closing, as though someone had been in there with me. I struggled up on one elbow. There was a weight on my hands, and I looked down to see what it was, and there was the knife. It was resting flat across the palm of one hand, the fingers of the other hand folded tight around the ivory hilt. There was blood on the front of my dress, as if the knife had been wiped on it.”

“That’s the symbol of transferring the guilt of the crime to you,” he told her.

“Then the slide was shoved back, almost as if they’d been timing me, waiting for me to come to before breaking in and confronting me. The manager came in alone first. He flew into a fury, yelling at me, shrieking at me. I couldn’t think of anything to say. He pulled me up by one arm and kept bellowing into my face, You kill! You kill in my house! You make me big disgrace!”

She sat down on the edge of the bed, almost spent, her face showing tired lines.

“I tried to tell him that Bob had been stabbed through the paper screen from the next compartment, but when I pointed to where the gash had been, it was gone. The paper was perfectly whole. He kept yelling, and then he stamped out to call the police. That was when I left. I got up and ran. I ran the other way, toward the back. I couldn’t find my way out, but I remembered hearing your voice when you came in. You... you said, ‘Here’s looking at you, kids,’ and I knew you were an American, and I knew I had to find you because that was the only thing that... that I could think of.”

4

She sighed deeply. “That’s the story, sailor. All of it. And here I am in your clothes. And here you are.”

He stood up abruptly. “Here you are, maybe, but I’m on my way back there.”

She put one hand on his arm, and he looked at the way she filled out his jumper, shaking his head in mild surprise. “They know you helped me get away,” she said. “They must be looking for you, too, by this time. If I let you go back there again...”

“Sure they’re looking for me. But that’s the one place they won’t be looking. Something sure as hell happened to that slashed paper, and I want to find out what. You say you saw a slit in the paper. When you came to, it was gone. Well, somebody sure as hell took it. Maybe the manager is in on it. I don’t see how they could do that in his house without his knowing it.”

He began pacing the room. “I’ve got to locate the exact compartment you were in, and that may not be easy.”

“Wait,” she said, “I think I can help you. It’s not much to go on but... those lanterns in each cubicle... did you notice that they all have a character heavily inked on them?”

“In Japanese,” he said. “Laundry tickets.”

“I know, I know. But the one in our booth was finished in a hurry or something. The artist probably inked his brush too heavily. Anyway, a single drop of ink came to a head at the bottom of the character, with the slope of the lantern. It ran down a little way, left a blurred track ending in a dark blob. It was staring me in the face in the beginning, before I changed places, that’s how I know. Here, Look...”

She took a charred match stick, began drawing on the dresser-top. “It’s very easy to remember. Two seagulls with bent wings, one above the other. Under them, a simple pot-hook. Then this blot of dried ink hanging down from that like a pendulum. Look for that, and you’ll have the cubicle we were in. I don’t think they bothered to remove the lantern. They probably wouldn’t expect a foreigner to notice a little thing like that.”

“Neither would I,” he said approvingly. He picked up a razor blade from the edge of the washstand, carefully sheathed it in a fragment of newspaper.

“What’s that for?”

“To let myself in with. In some way, paper houses are pretty handy. Lock yourself in here behind me, just to be on the safe side. I’ll let you know when I get back. Don’t open up for anybody else.”

She moved after him to the door. “You’ll never make it in that uniform. It’s all torn. I shouldn’t have taken your clothes. You need them.”

“I’ve dodged S.P.’s before,” he said. “Try to get some sleep, and get that dope out of your system.”

He turned to go, and she caught at his arm.

“Be careful,” she said. “Please be careful.” She lifted her lips to his, kissing him gently. “Come back.”

“You couldn’t keep me away,” he said. “Remember what I said about opening doors.”

The House of the Stolen Hours seemed deserted.

Hollinger couldn’t be sure whether or not the manager slept here after hours or not. The geishas and other employees probably didn’t. He took out the razor blade and made a neat hair-line gash down alongside the frame, then another close to the ground, making an L around the lower corner. He lifted it up like a tent-flap and ducked through. It crackled a little, fell stiffly into place again. He could hear bottle cricket chirping and clacking rhythmically somewhere ahead. He knew that crickets were used as watchdogs in Japan, stopping their chirping whenever a stranger enters a house. He winced as they broke off their song after the first tentative steps he took. He’d have to be careful now, damned careful.

He worked his way forward, feeling his way along the cool slippery wooden flooring with a prehensile toe-and-heel grip, shuffling the multiple deck of screen aside with a little upward hitch that kept them from clicking in their grooves. He waited until he was nearly midway through the house, as far as he could judge, before he lighted his first match. He guarded it carefully with the hollow of his hand, reduced the light to a pink glow. The place seemed deserted.

He tried six of the cubicles before he found the right one. There it was. Traces of Mallory’s blood still showed black on the floor. The smeared ink-track on the lantern was just a confirmation. He lit the wick and the lantern bloomed out orange at him, like a newly risen sun.

The location of the blood smears told him which of the four sides to examine. The screen in place at the moment was, as the girl had said, intact. He ran his fingers questioningly over the frame, to see if it felt sticky or damp with newly-applied paste. It was dry and gave no signs of having been recently inserted. He could see now that the inserts weren’t glued into the frame at all. They were caught between the lips of a long, continuous split in the bamboo and held fast by the pressure of the two wood halves closing over them again, bolstered here and there by a wooden nail or peg. They could not be put in a hurry.

But they could be taken out in a hurry!

He shoved it all the way back flush with the two lateral screens, and squinted into the socket. There were two frame edges visible, not just one. He caught at the second one, and it slid out empty, bare of paper. But there were telltale little strips and slivers of white all up and down it where the paper had been hastily slashed away.

He stood then and nodded grimly. Probably the frame itself would be unslung tomorrow and sent out to have a new filler put in. Or destroyed. There hadn’t been the opportunity tonight, with police buzzing all over the place. He didn’t think, now, that the rest of the staff had been in on it — just the manager and the murderer.

The fact that the girl’s last minute change of position hadn’t been revealed to them in time showed that. The geishas waiting on the couple would have tipped them off if they had been accessories. They hadn’t, and Mallory had been killed by mistake. But she’d only arrived the day before — why did they want her out of the way? And why not him?

Hollinger thought about it.

There was no audible warning. But his shifting of the slide had exposed the compartment beyond. And the lantern light, reaching wanly to the far screen threw up a faint gray blur that overlapped his own shadow. The other shadow owned an upraised arm that ended in a sharp downward-projected point.

The dagger came down abruptly. There was no sound. Only the dagger slicing downward in a glittering arc. He threw himself flat on the floor, rolling as he hit. His torn jumper flapped out under him and the dagger pierced the cloth, pinning it to the floor. The other man threw himself on Hollinger, the full weight of his body crushing Hollinger’s chest to the floor.

They both had sense enough not to try for the knife. It was jammed in the floor halfway up to the hilt.

Hollinger was flat on his stomach, and the man felt like the sacred mountain of Fujiyama on top of him. He was pinned down by eight inches of steel through a jumper he couldn’t work himself out of. He nearly broke his back trying to rear up high enough to swing his shoulders around and get his arms into play.

Clutching, apelike hands found his throat, closed in, tightened there. He lashed out with the back of his hand, felt the blows glance harmlessly off a satiny jawline. He gave that up as a bad bet, swung his legs up instead. Then he looped them around the big Jap’s neck in a tight scissors lock and began to squeeze.

The hands left his throat, and a strangled cry escaped the Jap’s lips as he reached for Hollinger’s legs. Hollinger let him pry them off — the hold had been a temporary measure anyway, too passive to get any real results. Both men rolled over on the floor, breaking; the Jap scrambled to his feet, blowing like a fish on land.

Hollinger straightened, came up at him swinging. His right went wide, streaked upward into empty air. The Jap cupped a slapping hand to his elbow, gripped the thumb of that hand at the same time. Hollinger felt himself rising from the floor, turning as he vaulted through the empty frame. His back came down with a brutal thud that rattled his teeth. He squirmed on the floor, half-paralyzed. The Jap whirled to face him, stamped both feet in a new position, crouched again.

Jiu-jitsu. Great.

Hollinger watched the Jap circling in like a preying wolf. He stumbled to his feet, weaved around warily, every muscle in his body protesting.

The big hands shot out at him again, open. Dizzily, he lurched to one side, still stunned. The Jap wasn’t quick enough in shifting positions. His legs and shoulders swung, exposing his flank for a second. Through a dizzy haze, Hollinger saw the opening and sent a quick short jab to the Jap’s ear. The blow rocked him for an instant, held him long enough for Hollinger to wind up a real one. He lashed out with his fist, catching the Jap right between the eyes. He went over like a ninepin, and Hollinger stood swaying, his bleary eyes watchful.

There was a board-like stiffness about the Jap’s middle that caught Hollinger’s eye. It had cost the Jap the fight, whatever it was. A wedge of white showed in the kimono opening, below the rise and fall of his huge chest. Underclothing maybe. Whatever it was, it had kept the Jap from pivoting out of range of Hollinger’s finishing blow.

Hollinger bent over him, pulled the garment open. Paper. Layer after layer of stiff, board-like paper, rolled around him like a plaster cast extending from ribs to thighs. A narrow sash held it in place.

Hollinger rolled the Jap out of his queer cocoon by pushing him across the floor, like a man laying a carpet. The Jap had evidently slashed the whole square out of the screen first, then quickly slit that into two strips, narrow enough to wind around himself. The knife-gash itself showed up in the second section as it peeled free, the edges driven inward by the knife. Any cop worth his salt would be able to figure out what had really happened with this to go by.

He shoved it out of the way. Then he straddled the still stunned Jap and gripped him by the throat. “Who was it?” he asked in a low voice. “Who was in there? Who killed the American?”

“No,” was the only answer he could get. “No. No.”

He slammed the back of his hand into the Jap’s face. “Open up, damnit.”

“No see. Man go in, come out again. I no know.”

He hit the Jap again, harder this time. The big man’s eyes went wide with fright.

“Denguchi do,” he blurted. “Denguchi do! I no do, he do. He get money for to do, he hired for to do...”

“Who hired him?”

The yellow man’s eyes glazed.

“Who hired him? Goddamnit, who hired him?”

The eyes closed. The head rolled over heavily. Hollinger swore, got up quickly and then rolled the paper into a long staff. He tucked it under his arm, took it out with him. Nothing more could be done there tonight.

The landlord was snoring in his lighted wall-niche when Hollinger got downtown again. He chased up the stairs past him, shook the knob of the door triumphantly.

“Evelyn, open up. It’s me. Open up and listen to the good news.”

There wasn’t a sound from within.

5

He figured she was in a pretty deep sleep after what she’d been through earlier. He began to rap on the door gently.

“Evelyn,” he called, “it’s me. Let me in.”

A puzzled frown crossed his brow. He knocked on the door a little louder. He crouched down, then, looked through the keyhole. The light was still on inside, and he could make out the pear-shape of the key on the inside of the door.

Alarmed now, he threw his shoulder against the door. The cheap lock tore off on the fourth onslaught. The landlord appeared but was no help at all.

The girl was gone.

Hollinger’s eyes swept the room. A corner of the bedding was trailing off onto the floor. One of the cheap net curtains inside the window was torn partly off its rod, as though somebody had clutched at it despairingly. The window was open all the way. There was a tin extension roof just below it, sloping down to the alley below.

It hadn’t been the police. They would have come in by the door and left the same way. He thought about the name the Jap had blurted. Denguchi. That was all he had to go on.

Where would they take her? What could they possibly want with her? Just to hold her as hostage, shut her up about the first murder? He didn’t think so. It was she they’d meant to get the first time, and not the man. Now they’d come back to correct the mistake. Then why hadn’t they killed her right here? Why had they gone to the trouble of taking her with them?

He had a sudden hunch, remembering Evelyn’s remark in the taxi: “He didn’t seem to want me to know where he lived.”

He grabbed the landlord by the shoulder. “How do you find an address in a hurry, an address you don’t know?”

“You ask inflammation-lady at telephone exchange...”

He grinned. Not so different from home after all. He started shoving the landlord downstairs ahead of him. “Do it for me. I can’t speak the lingo. The name’s Robert Mallory — and tell her to steer the police over there fast!”

The landlord came out in a moment and threw a “Twenty-five” and a tongue-twisting street name at him.

“Take care of that piece of paper upstairs for me,” he shouted. He ran out onto the streets saying the street name over to himself out loud. If he dropped a syllable, Evelyn... He left the thought unfinished. He caught a prowling cab and kept repeating the name over and over, even after he was in it.

“I hear,” the driver sighed finally. “I catch.”

Mallory had done himself well. His place turned out to be a little bungalow on one of the better-class residential streets.

He didn’t waste time on the front door. He hooded the tattered remains of his jumper over his head for padding, bucked one of the ground floor window panes head on. It shattered and he climbed in, nicking his hands a little. A scream sounded through the house.

He ran down the hallway toward a light at the back. As the room swung into his vision, he saw Evelyn, writhing, clutching at her throat. She was bent backward, her breasts thrust against the fabric of the jumper he’d loaned her, a pair of strong brown hands tugging at the scarf wrapped around her throat.

Hollinger caught a faint movement behind the stirring bead curtains bunched over to one side of the entryway. The girl’s eyes fled to his in panic, indicating the curtain.

He caught up a slim teak wood stand quickly, rammed it head on into the curtain at stomach level. A knife slashed out at him. It sliced the air with a menacing whick. He reached out at the brown fist holding it, yanked it close to him, vising it against his chest. Then he shot a punch out about two feet above it.

There was a cry of agony and the man reeled out into the open, a short little barrel in a candy-striped blazer. Hollinger twisted the knife out of his hand, exerting all the pressure his shoulder muscles could put to bear. He brought his fist back, sent it forward in a short, jabbing motion that knocked the man out cold.

Something white streaked by, and when Hollinger looked over at Evelyn, she was alone, coughing, struggling to unwind the sash around her throat. She staggered forward, fell into his arms with a jerky backward hitch of her elbows, like something working on strings.

A door banged closed somewhere upstairs.

The girl had collapsed into a chair. He found a water tap in a Western-style kitchen adjoining the room, filled the hollows of his hands, came back and wet her throat with it. He did that three or four times until she was breathing normally again.

“That’s the girl,” he said. “You’re a tough one to kill.”

She managed a wan smile. “It would have been all over before you got here if she hadn’t wanted to... to get it out of her system... to rub it in that he’d been hers, not mine.”

“Who was she?”

Her gaze dropped before his. “His wife,” she said slowly. “Legally married to him by the Shinto rites. Poor thing. She...”

He shook his head at her. “A nice guy, your boyfriend,” he said. He turned. “She’s still in here someplace. I heard her go upstairs.”

She reached out, caught him by the arm. “No,” she said, a peculiar look on her face. “I don’t think so. She... loved him, you see.”

He didn’t at all. A whiff of sandal-wood incense crept down the stairs, floated in to them, as if to punctuate her cryptic remark.

There was a loud banging at the front door. They listened while the door gave, and they heard the clack-clack of wooden shoes against the flooring. The police-watch trooped in, flourishing clubs, hemming them in against the wall.

“Now you get here,” Hollinger said.

“Hai!” the little detective said, pointing to the professional hatchet man on the floor. Two of the cops began whacking him with their clubs. They turned him over on his face, lashed his hands behind him, and then dragged him out by the feet, Oriental style.

The police had, evidently, been playing steeplechase, picking up the traces Hollinger had been leaving all night long. They had battered the Stolen Hours proprietor, the furled wallpaper, the landlord, and the first taxi driver, the one who must have gone back and betrayed Evelyn’s hiding place to Denguchi.

The detective, puffing out his chest like a pouter pigeon, said to Evelyn, “So you do not kill the American. Why you not stay and say so, pliss? You put us to great trouble.”

They found her upstairs, as Hollinger had said, behind the locked door, kneeling in death on a satin prayer pillow before a framed photograph of the man Evelyn Brainard had come out to marry. A pitch of incense sent a thread of smoke curling up before it. Her god.

She had toppled forward, as the ritual prescribed, to show she was not afraid of meeting death. Her hands were tucked under her, firmly clasping the hara-kiri knife that had torn her abdomen apart.

She looked pathetic and lovely and small — incapable almost of the act of violence that had been necessary in order to die.

Hollinger looked at the weak mouth and chin on Mallory’s photograph inside the frame. Too cowardly to hurt either one, he had hurt both, one unto death. A pair of lovebirds were twittering a scarlet bamboo cage. A bottle of charcoal ink, a writing brush, a long strip of hastily traced characters lay behind her on the floor.

The detective picked it up, began to read.

“I, Yugiri-san, Mist of the Evening, most unworthy of wives, go now to keep my husband’s house in the sky, having unwittingly twice failed to carry out my honored husband’s wish...”

Evelyn had stayed downstairs, and Hollinger was glad now.

“Don’t tell her,” he said. “She doesn’t have to know. Let her go on thinking the woman was the one who tried to get rid of her, through jealousy. Don’t tell her the man she came out here to marry hired a murderer to get her out of his way because he didn’t have the guts to tell her to her face. It’s tough enough as it is. Don’t tell her.”

It was getting light in Tokyo when they left the police station, walking slowly side by sides. They held hands, walking idly, like two lovers anywhere, anytime.

“I guess,” she said ruefully, squeezing his hand a little, “I pretty well messed up your shore leave.”

He grinned playfully. “I didn’t have anything to do, anyway.” He snapped his fingers. “Which reminds me. Keep the night of November third open, will you?”

“November third! But that’s six months away.”

“I know. But that’s when we dock in Frisco Bay.”

“I will,” she said. “I’ll keep November third open. There isn’t any night I wouldn’t keep for you — ever.”

Hollinger looked down at her, at the way her body molded the lines of the dress the police had secured for her. Her eyes were bright, and they met his with unveiled honesty.

“There’s a little time yet before I make the ship,” he said.

She didn’t answer. She gripped his hand more tightly, and they walked slowly down the street, bright now in the morning’s sunshine.