The Japanese Corpse

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There wasn't much to do for the next few days and the commissaris and the sergeant wandered about while the CIA was busy. The commissaris had found a public bathhouse where he soaked in a communal bath the size of an Olympic swimming pool, and de Gier visited the girl he had met in the yakusa bar. He had gone to see her in the hospital, the day after she was admitted. She hadn't said much, she was obviously exhausted and possibly also drugged, but she seemed pleased with the magazines and flowers he had brought. When he came again she was ready to go home and he got her a taxi and saw her to the door of her apartment. She asked him to come back the next day and have dinner with her, but she still looked pale and sickly when he arrived and weakly excused herself. She hadn't been able to do any shopping, perhaps they could go out for dinner? He was taking off his shoes at the entrance and she knelt down to help him untie his laces.

"Never mind," he said, and touched her hair. "I am not hungry. I won't stay long and you can have an early night."

But she smiled and pushed him into the room. "Sit down, please, I have some tea, green tea which my aunt sent me from the country. It has been waiting for a special occasion."

He watched her make the tea, admiring the exact control of her movements, and sipped the hot foaming brew carefully. Her miniskirt and tight blouse contrasted with the quietness of the room. A lush fruit on a simple bamboo tray. He smiled at the thought and she laughed at him and bent down and nibbled his ear. His hand strayed over her breasts but she pushed it away gently.

"Later," she said. "First you have to see some photographs. It's a Japanese custom; you have to know who you are sleeping with." She went into the bedroom and came back carrying two albums, holding them away from her body on outstretched arms. He thought they might be porno pictures, but the snapshots showed family groups. He pretended to be interested as she explained the pictures. Father and mother. Uncle so-and-so in front of his house, a famous house which had been a cookie store at one time. The emperor had visited it, the emperor Meiji who had opened the country to the foreigners.

A soup vendor, rattling his bamboo sticks in the street, provided an excuse to get away, and he went out and brought back a paper container, and they sat opposite each other in the four-mat room, fishing noodles and bits of meat out of the hot broth.

"The musicians who play in my bar came to see me just before the doctor said I could go home," she said, feeding him a choice bit of meat with her chopsticks. "They said you had been to their old temple and that you played the flute." De Gier nodded.

"How did you find their temple?"

"I asked the doorman at the Golden Dragon."

"They said you were crazy, just like them."

"Mother there walks an eagle," de Gier said, with his mouth full.

"Pardon?" He thought about explaining the eagle. "Eagle?"

"Never mind. A bird, sometimes it walks. Yes, I played the flute with them."

"Why did you come to the bar that evening?"

"You know," he said.

But she shook her head. "I didn't know, they only told me later."

"Who told you? And what did they tell you?"

"Somebody, you wouldn't know him, he is in charge of the bar. He told me that you are a member of an organization which interferes with ours."

"So why don't you kill me?" de Gier asked pleasantly, looking at the small refrigerator in the rear of the room. She turned around to see what he was looking at.

"Are you hungry? I have some tofu in there; do you like tofu? It's beancurd, very tasty. I can put some in this soup, I have other things too, but they are all Japanese too, and I don't know whether you like them."

"Anything," de Gier said, "except sour plums. They gave me some at the inn yesterday. Nice-looking little plums, but I thought my face would fall off when I tried one. Very sour, like a thousand lemons."

She giggled. "No, there are no plums in the icebox. I'll get the tofu? Yes?"

"Please. But you didn't answer my question. Why don't you kill me?"

"Me?"

"You. The yakusa."

She was searching about in the icebox, and he couldn't see her face, but her tone of voice was normal. "Maybe we don't want to kill you. You haven't been to Kobe yet, have you?"

"No."

"Don't go there."

"I'll go where I want to go," de Gier said. "The yakusa tried to frighten me. It was well done. They also tried to bother my boss. I didn't like that; he is an old man, and he has rheumatism."

"You weren't frightened," Yuiko said. "You played your flute, I was told. I would have liked to hear that."

De Gier took out his flute and played the tune he had heard in the little theater. The flute's high notes wavered and broke, and the room suddenly seemed very cold.

"Bad," she said. "Evil. Is that what they played to you? You repeated it, didn't you?"

De Gier had picked up the photo album again and flipped through the pages. Each snapshot looked formal: serious citizens, lined up in balanced patterns, like chessmen on a checkered board, staring noncommittally at the lens. The vacation pictures were a little more relaxed. The fathers and mothers, uncles and aunts and the few children had shed their neat suits and kimonos and starched dresses and were now wearing swimsuits and jeans and colorful shirts. Some of the girls were shown in bikinis, and there were a few portraits of Yuiko herself accentuating her large firm breasts and slim straight legs. She had been placed against suitable backgrounds-a bush of azaleas in bursting color, an enormous rock standing upright in carefully swept sand. None of the photographs showed a boyfriend. There would be another album somewhere, safely hidden.

She was cutting the tofu, a white spongy cake reminiscent of very young cheese, and dropping the little elastic bricks in the pot of bubbling soup, which she was reheating on a hot plate.

"You like the photographs?"

"Yes, very interesting. Especially this one." He showed her the album and pointed at an enlargement which had been given a page of its own. Yuiko in color, legs tucked behind her, pouted lips and aggressive nipples directed at the camera. The tiny bikini was wet, she had obviously just come out of the sea, which formed the background of the photo, and the damp cotton showed every detail of her body.

She laughed. "Yes, that one got me a nice check. I sold it to a company manufacturing canned foods and they used it for an advertisement, but the daimyo saw it in a magazine and I was told not to model anymore. I can't have two jobs."

He was slurping the tofu soup, stuffing the streaked white blobs, darkened by the soy sauce she had poured into the pot, into his mouth with the chopsticks, sucking them in at the same time. She was watching him and reached over to ruffle his hair.

"You are doing very well. You are eating Japanese style. Are you going to burp afterward?"

He shook his head. "I can never do it at the right moment. It usually comes much later, when the meal is over and done with and I am on my way home. The air, I mean. It gets stuck here." He pointed at his throat. "Makes a big bubble and sits there. The maids at the restaurant up in the hills, the fish restaurant where you have to catch your own carp before they will serve it to you, were also telling me to belch after the meal. I couldn't do it. They were bumping me on the back but nothing happened. The burp came in the car, half an hour later."

"The restaurant where your friend stuck a knife through Kono-san's hand?"

"Is that his name? Kono?"

"Yes. He is a dangerous man, chief of the tough guys. He trains them in the daimyo's palace. He lost face that evening."

"Is he angry now?"

"No. Your friend bandaged his hand. Kono isn't as wicked as he pretends to be; he is really very sensitive. He is very fond of birds you know. He has pheasants and peacocks, and when the eggs are incubated he sleeps in the bird barn." She giggled. "He has a special bird friend, an old fat turkey whom he calls MacArthur. MacArthur has been picked bare by the other younger turkeys and he is half-blind, but he is always trying to make everything he sees. The daimyo has a big black car, and I saw MacArthur stamp up to it, honking deep in his chest, but the car just stood there, and the bird got bored in the end and went to look for something else. When Kono calls him he jumps into his arms, it's very funny to see the two of them."

"Has he got any cats?" de Gier asked, fishing about in his bowl for a particularly slippery noodle.

"No."

"Pity. Cats are the only beings I can get on with. If he had cats we could be friends, I don't know much about birds. I like looking at them, but they always fly away or run off when I come close."

"Shame," she said, and touched his hand. "Birds must be stupid. I won't run away when you come close." She kissed his ear, but he pushed her away gently. "No," he said, "you are still weak. That poisoning must have been something terrible. I think you should rest as much as possible now. Let's wait a few days. How do you feel now, Yuiko?"

"Fine," she said, and looked at him languidly. "Don't you like me anymore? I am strong; soon I'll be working again. We should enjoy this holiday, just a few days. Would you like to go sailing with me on Lake Biwa?"

"Sure."

"Can you sail?"

"I had a sloop once, and I often sail with friends. Sailing is easy. It's like riding a bicycle; once you have mastered the trick you never forget it."

"Aren't you afraid?" she asked. "You know now that I am yakusa, and we have been very unpleasant to you and your associate. Is he your associate or your boss?"

"Boss," de Gier said, putting his arm around her shoulders, and lighting the cigarette she had taken from his pack, "and if you are nasty to me and kill me, somebody else will come out. We are a small organization, but Holland is full of merchants. Others have seen the traffic in stolen art and drugs and have calculated the profits. And the yakusa office in Amsterdam is closed now, I hear. It will be some time before you can work your way in again. Any Japanese asking for a resident's permit will be suspect right away. It will take a lot of effort to start all over again."

"Good," she said, "so you will be coming out here all the time, and I can see you. I don't care about the yakusa losing a little business. I am only a girl in the bar. I won't lose my job. They need me; I speak English. I took an interpreter's course; they are paying me good money. In another year I will be free and can set up my own bar. They are paying me one third of my salary in cash, another third goes into a savings account which I can't touch until my contract is up."

"And the other third?"

"My mother gets it. My father is dead. The yakusa wrote the contract with my mother."

"She sold you?"

She laughed and got up, busying herself with the coffee percolator. "We don't call it selling here. Daughters are often hired out on contracts. The big factories write similar contracts. They get all their girls that way, and after some years the girls have money and they can marry. They learn all sorts of things while they are working for the factory. There are classes in the evening and during the weekends. Flower arrangement and tea ceremony and how to cook and sew and keep house and how to bring up babies. The yakusa aren't much different from the factories and the business companies. I go to classes too. I like to arrange flowers."

De Gier looked at the tokonoma in the corner of the room. A wild flower, soft orange with a reddish brown heart, was set at a slight angle, balanced, both in line-play and color, against two dead twigs. The scroll hanging behind the vase showed the top of a mountain done with a few dabs of black ink.

"Beautiful. The mountain is Fuji-san right?"

"Right. It's a copy. The original is in a temple run by the state, the temple you bought your little wooden statue from. It was stolen by a guardian who used to sell to us. Kono-san sent one of his men to see him and the poor fellow is sick now-he broke his nose and lost a few teeth-but there will be others who will sell to you."

"Kono-san is too rough," de Gier said. "Can't he think of something more interesting. Like the play I saw in the little theater?"

"The daimyo thought of the play. He also thought of the mask which your boss saw in a temple garden. He happened to be here in Kyoto when you arrived and took great pleasure in arranging the tricks. The so-called student who took you to the theatre works in our bar. He hid when you came in. He thought you might shoot him with your automatic."

She patted his jacket. "Have you ever killed anyone?"

"Almost," de Gier said, and sipped his coffee, "but not with a weapon. I nearly killed a man with my hands, twisted his neck. It had nothing to do with the business."

"A fight?"

"No. He didn't see me coming."

"Why did you attack him?"

"I didn't like him," de Gier said. "He was throwing stones at a cat. The cat had broken its spine and was trying to crawl away and he was standing over it. He had another stone and he was going to throw it at the cat's neck."

"So you nearly broke his neck," she said softly. "I see. Strange you didn't kill Kono. He wanted to hurt your chief."

"My chief took care of him," de Gier said. "And I have to go now. Thank you for the meal. We go sailing tomorrow? Shall I pick you up? I have my own car now, a nice little sports car with an open top, I hired it."

"Yes," she said, "but the top has to be closed when I drive with you."

"You don't want to be seen being driven around by a foreigner?"

"I am yakusa. Yakusa are always very secretive."

He lifted her to her feet and kissed her. There were heavy shadows under her eyes and her shoulders sagged. She wasn't trying to be sexy anymore, her hands were clasped around his neck as she rested her face against his chest.

"Take care," she said. 'The daimyo has given no specific orders about you. He knows you are seeing me and it must be all right, for he hasn't sent me a message. Kono won't do anything either. He is in Kobe building a fence near the bird barn, or, rather, he is sitting around while others build the fence, for his hand still hurts him. But there may be some of us who think that they should save his face."

"I'll see what I can do for you," de Gier said, sliding the front door open. She watched him get into his car, standing in the shadow, so that he couldn't see the puzzled expression on her face as he waved goodbye. As the car turned the corner she picked up the telephone.