December 6

3

HARRY MOTIONED MICHIKO to play a new record while he steered the drunk out onto the street and took the gun away. It was a Baby Nambu, Luger-styled like a full-size Nambu pistol but easier to hide. The sergeant’s balance was none too steady. He had fallen or walked into a lamppost; his nose was bloody, and when he sneezed, he sprayed blood off his mustache. Harry was to some degree relieved to get away from DeGeorge’s constant probing and step into the jostling of the street outside, a weekend crowd out for entertainment and prurient interest, off to cafés or after women. A geisha with a face as white as porcelain slipped into an elegant willow house across the street. A stilt walker advertised Ebisu beer. Men in kimonos wore squashed fedoras; nothing in Japan was so disregarded as a hat brim. University students paraded in filthy uniforms and caps. Pickpockets warmed their hands at carts selling sweet potatoes. Harry tucked the gun into his belt.

“I’ll find you a taxi, Sergeant,” Harry said. “No charge.”

“Harry! Harry, it’s me!” The soldier tried to pull his tunic straight. “It’s me, Hajime!”

“Hajime?”

“S’me. Harry, such a long time. Old friends, yes?” Hajime said, although Harry didn’t remember him as a friend. More the schoolmate most likely to be reborn as vermin. The eyeglasses and mustache were new, but behind them was the same round face. Harry remembered how, as a boy, Hajime had been the most relentless of tormentors, the first to set on Harry, the last to leave off. “Buy me a drink?”

“I’ll find you a ride.” Harry peeled Hajime’s hand off his sleeve.

“Wait, wait.” Hajime backpedaled, undid the buttons of his pants and pissed in a gutter as passersby jumped aside. The Japanese were the cleanest people on earth, but they made extraordinary allowances for drunks. A man could kiss his boss or piss in the street as long he was deemed under the influence. The nosebleed started again.

Harry gave him a handkerchief. “Keep it and button yourself up.”

Head back, handkerchief pressed against his nose, Hajime staggered under the neon sign. The Eiffel Tower sizzled like a rocket; everyone near it wore a red glow.

“This is your own club, I hear. ‘Happy Palace.’”

“ Paris.”

“Something like that. Just one drink, Harry. Meet your new friends.”

“Would you like to piss on their shoes or bleed on them?”

“I need to have a good time, Harry. I’m shipping out tomorrow. That’s why I was celebrating.”

“By yourself?”

Hajime leaned on him. “There’s no one, Harry. No wife, no family. Friends are worthless shits. But we had great times, Harry. ‘Forty-seven Ronin,’ that was us. A little rough, but no harm meant, Harry. How long has it been? Lord Kira, that was you.”

“I remember.” Harry directed Hajime toward the corner. There would be taxis at the theaters.

“ China. I’ve been to China, Harry. I could tell you stories.”

“I bet you could.” Harry knew that a real friend would inquire into Hajime’s military career, but war stories didn’t appeal to Harry. With the Japanese spy mania, it was unwise for a Westerner to ask a soldier anything: where he’d been stationed, where he was going, doing what.

“Americans don’t go to war, do they? So you’re safe.”

“I hope so.”

“I want to see your famous club, celebrate there.”

“I’m going to do you a bigger favor. I’m going to put you in a taxi.”

Hajime tried to wrestle free. “Now you’re rich, you’re too good for your old friends. Let’s see your club.”

“No.”

“Then promise me something.” Hajime stopped struggling and lowered his voice. “Promise to see me off tomorrow, Harry? Sixteen hundred, Tokyo Station.”

“You can find someone else.”

“You, Harry. Just to have someone there. Promise?”

Hajime wore a smirk, but maybe that was his sole expression, Harry thought. Like one size fits all. “You’ll get in a taxi if I do?”

“Yes.”

“Okay. Tokyo Station, four o’clock.” There were other things to do on a Sunday afternoon. Bidding Hajime a fond adieu wasn’t high on Harry’s list.

“You’ll be there?” Hajime asked.

“Scout’s honor.”

Harry stopped a taxi, stuffed Hajime into the backseat and gave the driver two yen, which would cover the meter to anywhere in the city and clean a bloody seat. As the car moved off, Hajime stuck his head out the window. His eyeglasses were bright with theater lights, but there was something hidden behind Hajime’s expression, some nasty surprise tucked under his mustache or kept up his sleeve.

“ Tokyo Station, Harry.”

Harry gave the taxi a halfhearted wave. The car had disappeared in the crowd when Harry remembered the gun still in his belt. He kicked himself. A gun might be useful if Ishigami caught up with him, but Harry didn’t want to shoot anyone. It was against the law to possess a handgun, and his first instinct was to ditch it. The trouble was that a soldier who lost a weapon entrusted to him by the emperor could face a firing squad, which was a little stiff even for someone as unpleasant as Hajime. Now Harry really would have to see him again just to return it.

In the meantime, there was plenty to do. Harry’s part of Tokyo was Asakusa, and its theater row was lit with side-by-side marquees like Broadway. Life-size posters of samurai stood between cardboard cutouts of Clark Gable and Mickey Mouse. A customer could see Gable, go next door to a samurai film and end up at a newsreel theater to follow warplanes in action over China. Tall banners animated by the evening breeze invited the passerby to music halls like the Fuji and the International. The Folies, where Oharu used to dance, had been closed on charges of frivolity, but the Tokiwaza Theater still offered allfemale swordplay, and Kabuki had special devotees, prostitutes tattooed with the faces of their favorite actors. Fortune-tellers in tents with gnostic symbols read palms, faces, feet, bumps on the head. Food stalls sold sake and shochu, sweet-potato vodka poured into a glass set in a little bowl until both glass and bowl brimmed over. Asakusa brimmed over. It was set between the pleasure quarter’s thousand licensed women and the elegant willow houses of the geishas and was called the Floating World in part for its evanescent, irrepressible quality. It was also called the Nightless City. Harry watched police with short sabers stroll by. The rest of Tokyo hewed to wartime regulations about brothels closing by ten and willow houses by eleven. But there was always action in Asakusa, which was too bizarre, too full of life to quell.

Warmed by shochu, Harry found a pay phone and made a call. A woman answered.

“Are you alone?” Harry asked.

“Not exactly.”

“How about tomorrow? Matsuya’s roof at two.”

“I’m sorry, this is a bad connection.”

A man came on the line. “Beechum here.”

“The lady of the house?” Harry switched to the querulous voice of an old woman uncertain about her l’s and r’s.

“What?”

“The lady of the house, please?”

“Busy. Do you have any idea what time it is?”

“She want to learn geisha dance, to play shamisen, to pour tea. I tell her she has to be Japanese to be geisha. Not Japanese, very difficult.”

“My wife has no interest in being a geisha girl.”

“Flower arranging is possible. Or prepare sukiyaki. Or maybe squid.”

“Are you quite mad?”

The man hung up. Too bad, Harry thought, though the course of adultery ne’er did run smooth. He considered wandering over to the Rheingold, a German version of the Happy. The Rheingold served Berlin pancakes with Holsten beer. The waitresses wore dirndls and were renamed Bertha and Brunhilda, gruesome enough; but worse, their jukebox played only waltz and schmaltz. Harry decided he couldn’t tolerate that. Still, the night was young. There was a hearts game at the Imperial Hotel, expats killing time with pissant pots. Better games were on river barges. Where the river Sumida lazed along Asakusa, boat after boat hosted games of dice. Merchants, brothel madams, famous actors bet serious money, and because the boats were run by yakuza instead of amateurs, the games were honest. Sometimes it was better to join a game midway, when you were fresh and the other players stale, for as the Good Book said, The last shall be first, and the first last: for many be called, but few chosen.

Heading for the river, Harry took a shortcut through a jigsaw puzzle of dark streets without names. Cars could pass through some streets, only bikes through others, and in some alleys the pedestrians squeezed between walls that nearly touched. Harry was at home, though. These were the escape routes he grew up in. From a chestnut cart, Harry bought a bag of nuts that were hot and charred, the skin split open and the meat as sweet as candy. Oharu came to mind. Harry remembered, as a kid, bringing her chestnuts wrapped in a cloth. “My hero,” Oharu would say and kiss his cheek. He saw more sparks down the street and thought that another chestnut cart lay ahead until he heard the singsong Klaxon of a fire engine.

The fire was down a side street at a tailor’s shop; Harry knew the place, which was near the garage where he kept his car. He had often seen the tailor and his wife, a grandmother, a girl and her younger brother eating dinner in the room behind, the tailor’s eye on the open shop door and any possible trade that might be lured by his window display of the cheapest cotton, rayon and sufu. The house was old, built of wood frame with a bamboo front, the typical tinderbox Japanese lived in. The fire was already in full throat, an oven roar accompanied by exploding glass and the excited whoosh of paper screens. The crowd inched close, in awe of how a hovel’s straw, books, bedding, needles and thread could transcend themselves into such a beautiful tower of flame, the sort of fireworks that spread, rose and blossomed a second time into a glowing maelstrom. The way Eskimos had words for different kinds of snow, the Japanese had words for fire: deliberate, accidental, initial flame, approaching blaze, invading, spreading, overwhelming fire. Harry found himself next to the tailor, who was explaining through his tears and with many apologies how the girl had left her homework on a space heater. The paper had caught fire and fallen and lit a mat, then a screen and scraps of rayon that lit as fast as candlewicks. Sufu was worse. It was a new wartime material, ersatz cloth made of wood fibers, basically cellulose that disintegrated after three or four washings but burned like hell. One minute, the tailor said, one minute the family was out of the room, and then it was too late. Harry saw the wife and children, everyone painted orange and black in the fire’s glow. Two Red Cross workers bore off the grandmother on a litter. Air-raid drills were all the fashion. Well, this was more like the real thing.

A pumper arrived with a company of firemen. In helmets of lacquered leather with paneled neck protectors they looked like samurai in armor launching a siege. They hosed one another until their jackets of heavy cotton were soaked. One man climbed with a hose to the top of a tall ladder that was supported by nothing but the strong arms of his companions. Other firemen swung stout poles with metal scythes to tear down not only the burning house but also the tattoo shop and eel grill on either side. No one protested, not in a city where sparks swarmed over the rooftops like visible contagion and a hundred thousand could die in a single blaze. A second wall peeled off, revealing a tailor’s dummy trapped by flames. Screens burned from the center, stairs step by step. Hell, Harry thought, why not just build the whole damn thing of matches? Smoke swirled like cannon fire, and all the windows of the street lit, as if each house yearned to join in. The firemen regrouped, their jackets steaming. Firemen had a special incentive in leveling whole neighborhoods, since their second occupation was construction. What they tore down, they rebuilt. Not a bad racket, it seemed to Harry. However, there was more than money in such a drama of smoke and flames. It sometimes struck him that there was in the Japanese a majestic perversity that made them build for fire, leaving open the chance that at any time they could be wiped from the map just so they could start from scratch again.

But the tailor was defeated. He sank to the ground, a man who would hang himself if he had a rafter and a rope, his eyes dazed by the light that was consuming his life’s possessions, as if he had been displaced from his home by a visiting dragon. He looked vaguely in the direction of the ambulance siren and returned his stupefied gaze to his daughter, the girl who had left her homework on the heater. She was a plump girl who looked like she wished she were already dead. He lifted his eyes to his wife, who looked to Harry like a wrung-out rag, beyond tears. It wasn’t just their shop and home, it was their neighbors’ homes and shops, too, which involved the idiocy of honor and face. As a third house collapsed the tailor sucked air through his teeth and seemed to draw in his eyes to avoid the unbearable sight.

Harry opened his billfold and found a hundred-yen note. And another hundred-yen note, which cleaned him out. He pressed the money into the wife’s hand.

The tailor’s boy ran toward the fire, not directly in but obliquely around the firemen. A sack he had been holding had slipped from his hands, spilling small boxes. The boy bent forward as he ran, and Harry saw that he was chasing beetles perhaps two inches long. Every boy kept pet beetles at some point, kept and fed and pampered them. The beetles scuttled nimbly ahead, a miniature menagerie flying in short bursts, not so much drawn to the flames as confused by the fiery heat and glow. Even after a fireman seized the boy by the scruff of his neck and dragged him away from the flames, he struggled to break free. Harry followed the beetles through puddles of water and picked up the insects one by one, depositing them in his jacket pockets. The beetles were black beauties, some equipped with antlers, some with horns. Four had disappeared underfoot into the crowd, but Harry was satisfied that he had rounded up the majority, and when he delivered them, the boy identified each by name as he replaced them in their boxes.

From the peak of a ladder, a fireman swung his pole like an executioner’s ax and the house next door came down, front punched in, sides sliding together, a house of cards in a city of cards. Glutted, the fire took on a rosy glow that made Harry feel thoroughly baked. He noticed that his pants and sleeves were wet and smudged. He finally noticed by a reflection of the fire in sequined lapels that Michiko was in the crowd, watching him instead of the flames.

HARRY STANK SO MUCH of smoke that he went straight up to the apartment while Michiko closed the club. He undressed and soaped thoroughly at a bucket, sucked in his balls and sank into a tub of water so hot the steam was suffocating. When he was settled against the velvety wood, he lit a cigarette and let his head rest against the rim. A bath for Harry was both ritual and amniotic fluid. It was his context, the sea he swam in. His missionary parents had been too busy wearing out shoe leather on the byways of Japan to enjoy salubrious moments in a bath, but Harry had been brought up on his nurse’s back. That was how Japanese learned how to behave, bowing whenever their mother-or nurse-bowed. Who had washed him but his nurse? And what followed the washing? A bath veiled in steam, where Harry was as Japanese as the next man.

Through the steam, he noticed Michiko enter the narrow bathroom with Hajime’s gun. She aimed it at Harry. “Did you call her?”

“Who?”

“You know who.”

“Ah, this is one of those circular conversations.”

“Her.” The gun bobbed for emphasis.

“She couldn’t talk. Her husband was there.”

A Japanese face could be flat as paper, slits carved for the eyes and mouth. Michiko showed no emotion at all. “If we were married, you could have a mistress, I wouldn’t care. But I am your mistress. I could kill you and then me.”

She aimed at his head, his heart, his head. It was distracting. Also, he was too old for this. Suicide was for the young.

“Have you ever fired a gun before?” Harry asked. It was amazing what he didn’t know about Michiko.

“No.”

“I’ll bet you a hundred yen you can empty that gun at this range and not hit me.”

“Your life is worth that little? A hundred yen?”

“Eight shots, Michiko. You’re not going to get better odds than that.”

“I could do it so easily.”

“Keep your elbows flexed. You know, it’s moments like these that make me wonder what marriage with you would actually be like. Michiko, if you’re not going to shoot me, could you get me a drink?”

“So irritating. Why do you have a gun?”

“An old friend came by.”

“And left you this?”

“I’ll give it back tomorrow.” He pointed to the water. “Michiko, I do believe there’s room for you.”

“Harry, we know from experience there is not. Why are you giving a speech to bankers tomorrow?”

“Why not? I’m a respectable businessman.”

“Respectable? Have you ever looked at yourself, Harry?”

“Well, you’re not exactly the girl next door, either. Okay, I’m going to see bankers in the morning to screw them out of some money. I’m going to be charming and well rested. That means that right now I will enjoy a soak and a cigarette. Unless you are going to shoot me, of course.”

“You’re leaving, aren’t you?”

“I explained before that I can’t.”

“But you always have an angle.” The Nambu had a dart-shaped sight. Harry waited for it to waver. Not a millimeter. “Who is this?” Michiko asked.

Harry wafted steam aside and saw that in her other hand, Michiko held the newspaper picture of Ishigami. “Where did you get that?”

“Your German friend. Who is it?”

“An officer we knew in China. I guess he’s back.”

“Yes. He came to the club tonight after you left.”

As the news sank in, the bath seemed warmer.

“Tonight?”

“Yes.”

“Exactly what happened?” Harry asked.

“He went to the bar and asked for you. Kondo said he didn’t know where you were. The colonel asked where you lived, and Kondo said he didn’t know that, either. They talked a little.”

That was okay, Harry thought. The bartender had four sons in the military. Ishigami wouldn’t hurt Kondo. “Did he talk to anyone else?”

“The German.”

“Willie? What did Willie say?”

“He doesn’t speak Japanese. The colonel saw this picture on the table and was amused.”

Ishigami amused? That didn’t sound pretty.

“Was he in uniform?”

“Yes.”

“Did he threaten anyone?”

“No.”

Harry was relieved at that. Sometimes soldiers busted up cafés out of patriotic fervor. Harry paid for protection from that sort of agitation, and whether he was leaving town or not, he disliked being out good money.

“As soon as he was gone, I came looking for you.”

That was pure Michiko, Harry thought. She saw no contradiction in holding a gun on him while expressing concern for his safety.

“Then nothing really happened, right?”

Her eyes narrowed, and Harry waited. He could tell she was mustering an attack on a new front. “If there’s a war, what will you do?”

“There won’t be a war.”

“If there is.”

“There won’t be.”

“If.”

A man stands on a rock in a river, and sooner or later he slips. Harry regretted his words even as they left his mouth: “I’ll tell you what I’m not going to do. I’m not going to be a sucker, a fall guy, the chump left holding the bag.”

She lowered the gun.

“Ah. That’s all I need to know.”

“Michiko, don’t take that the wrong way. That doesn’t mean I’m skipping-”

But she disappeared from the doorway.

The news that Ishigami hadn’t forgotten was unnerving. Harry had blithely assumed that no one would survive four years of leading bayonet charges on the China front, yet here he was at the Happy Paris. Ishigami, Ishigami, Ishigami. Sounded like the sweep of legs through high grass. It was like walking down through a misty valley and seeing a white kimono far behind but gaining.

Of course Harry was skipping town. Any sane person would. People expected war back in June, and now they were in December, each day like a drop of water trying to fall. The way he saw it, the Westerners trapped in Tokyo were there for a reason. They could have gotten out earlier, but they were grown-ups who had made decisions to stick by their Japanese investments or their Japanese wives. Missionaries wanted to scoop a few more souls. DeGeorge wanted one more Pulitzer. If they were counting on Harry to be their weather vane, forget it. Three more days and there would be no Harry Niles in Tokyo or its vicinity. That was the purpose of his talk at the Chrysanthemum Club, not just to massage an audience of bankers but to earn a million-dollar ticket out of Tokyo. It was a matter of playing his cards in the right order at the right time. He didn’t like the news that Ishigami was in uniform, which probably included a sidearm and sword, but he remembered what the poet said: “I went into my bath a pessimist and came out an optimist.” All he had to do was dodge the colonel for two days, and then it was clear sailing.

Wrapped in a light kimono, Harry wandered with his glass into the living room, which was dark, bedding spread on the floor. Michiko was tucked under the quilt, the gun in her hand. He felt like he was defanging her by easing the gun from her fingers. She stirred, moving her head in dreamy motion.

He had literally run into her when they met, Harry at the wheel of his car, Michiko bloody from a crackdown on the last Reds in Tokyo, a police sweep that scattered the comrades over rooftops and down alleys. Harry had pulled Michiko into the car and driven off, the first in a series of impulsive decisions he regretted, such as taking her home, patching her head, letting her stay the night. She left in the morning and returned a week later, her hair hacked short, with a pack containing a prayer wheel and the works of Marx and Engels. She stayed another night and another and never left Harry’s for good; that was two years ago. If he’d left her on the street, if he’d given her over to the police, if he hadn’t fed her the morning after he’d rescued her. That was probably the worst mistake of all, the fatal bowl of miso. If he’d just returned her silence when she left instead of asking whether she liked Western music. Gratitude was always a dicey issue in Japan; the very word arigato meant both “thank you” and “you have placed a sickening obligation on me.” When she returned, she presented him with an Ellington record. What was interesting was that it was one of the few Ellington albums he didn’t own, which suggested the possibility that in the middle of the night, her head bandaged, she had searched his apartment while he slept. Besides admitting she was a Red, she told him nothing about her past. Never did. Harry had seen others like her, tough girls from the mills who organized unions in spite of the owners and police, who got their education from night school rather than Tokyo Women’s College and read Red Flag instead of Housewife’s Friend. Men, when they went to prison for radical activities, got religion and dedicated their confessions to the emperor. Women like Michiko hanged themselves in their cells rather than give their keepers an inch of satisfaction. Harry had gotten her into the chorus line at the Folies, but she was too argumentative for management, so when the war scare chased his American musicians from the Happy Paris to Hawaii, he replaced them by making her the enigmatic and, apart from lyrics, silent Record Girl.

He heard a scraping outside. The club’s neon sign was off, but in the haze of the street-lamp Harry saw the discreet gate of the willow house directly across from the Happy Paris. A willow house was an establishment where geishas entertained. Harry was no fan of geisha parties, but he occasionally hung out in a back room across the street just to escape DeGeorge, if nothing else. A cart with metal-rimmed wheels went by, the nocturnal visit of the night-soil man visiting homes without plumbing, gathering what kept the rice fields fertile, the cycle of life at its most basic. The cart moved aside to let pass a van with the crossed poles and looped wires of a radio direction finder on the roof. The van sifted the air for illegal transmissions the way a boat night-trolled for squid. Or, Harry speculated, if the van was from the Thought Police, perhaps they were trying to sift dangerous ideas out of the air. They typically liked to raid suspects around three in the morning, but this time they seemed to be just passing through. The surveillance usually annoyed Harry, but with Ishigami on the prowl, the added security was welcome. Anyway, in one week, two at the most, Harry would be in the States. He saw himself driving down Wilshire, having that first martini at the Mexican place around the corner from Paramount where they stuffed the olives with chili peppers. He could taste it.

When Harry left the window and approached the bed again, he saw that Michiko had moved the quilt aside in her sleep. The looseness of an underkimono made her limbs ghostly thin, half submerged in silk. Wouldn’t it be a relief to be with an American girl, a big blonde built for a convertible? He knelt and, with no more pressure than the weight of the air, ran his fingertips around the base of her thumb and up her arm to the warmth and soft hair in the hollow under her arm, then along her collarbone to the line of her cheek as if committing to memory her shape and smoothness, a calligrapher writing in the dark.