The Japanese Corpse

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"Banzai" the five musicians shouted, and jumped from their seats. The commissaris, Dorin and de Gier stopped and bowed, three small and somewhat lost looking figures in the castle's hall, a hall four stories high and a hundred feet square. The commissaris seemed shy, Dorin was angry, but the sergeant felt as if he might take off for the sky. He looked at the two long rows of yakusa, each lining an entire wall, and at the small reception committee at the end of the hall, the daimyo and Kono, and kept on walking toward the two men. He was no longer aware that the commissaris and Dorin were walking with him; he felt supremely alone. I am a gaijin, he thought. I am a foreigner, all on my own. The conclusion was pleasurable and he grinned and the grin became part of the BANZAI shout from the stage. De Gier waved at the musicians, and the trumpeter gave a short blast in reply while the pianist struck a chord, making it change into the opening theme of "St. Louis Blues." De Gier went on walking and the daimyo and Kono moved forward. The sergeant's awareness of utter freedom was still growing. He hunched his shoulders and spread his arms and began to bounce with the bubbling rhythm, now strengthened by the saxophone supporting the trumpet's blasts, wheezing an octave lower, and the throb of the suddenly released double bass. The drums had burst free at the same time and a wild cacophony of trembling bangs mixed with the clashing cymbals.

The yakusa had been watching the sergeant jump, and a roar of approval filled the hall, finding its center in the daimyo, who, grinning widely and with arms outspread in an all-embracing gesture of welcome, was skipping along, trailing Kono with him and beginning to form a circle around his guests. The yakusa had left their walls and joined the circle, moving slowly at first, but increasing their speed as the volume of the blues grew. The commissaris, dumfounded, looked about him, but felt engulfed in the glow of energy which had so suddenly erupted and which also seemed to come from himself, for he felt a distinct trembling at the lowest point of his spine. A surge of energy rose along his back and flowed into his head and beyond and made him dance too, an old man's dance, involving a minimum of action but moving his feet and his shoulders. All around him he saw the brownish orange faces of the yakusa, each split by a white smile, and he grinned back. Very nice, he thought, and touched Dorin, smiling invitingly.

"What?" Dorin asked.

"Party!" the commissaris said. "Nice! Let's join them!"

Dorin seemed to wake from his stupor and lifted a leg, like a ballet dancer who intends to cross the entire stage in one leap, and the yakusa roared again.

The three men had become the center of a flowing moving circle and looked like three delicate animated toys. De Gier in his light blue denim suit and white silk scarf and Dorin in a beautifully tailored linen suit formed suitable ornaments for the commissaris in his shantung jacket and narrow trousers and a gray necktie fastened with a pearl. The yakusa, all in dark neat suits, white shirts and black ties, were the frame that contained the moving picture.

The blues tumbled on, repeating the theme in straight simple piano notes, but continuously improvising in trumpet and bass solos. The daimyo had unbuttoned his jacket and was flapping its tails so that he looked like a powerful bat, followed by a swarm of its blood-thirsty fellows. De Gier no longer moved about, but stood, trembling almost imperceptibly, his shoulders stretched, caressing the air with slow sensual gestures. The commissaris, lost in a vision from his early youth, saw himself as a toddler, playing in his grandfather's garden. Dorin, temporarily released from his anger, seemed to be playing basketball, making the ball veer against his flat hands. The daimyo shouted, a single word, "Jin-Gi," that hung in the hall for a moment. The musicians broke off, then started to play again after a short silence, changing the feeling of the hall but without interfering with the all-pervading togetherness. The guests, shaken suddenly, saw a second circle form around them. Slender Japanese girls clad in kimonos were tripping around their now loutish-looking menfolk and waving their decorated paper fans. It was the sergeant's turn to roar. He had seen the apparition leading the butterflies: a tall black woman, towering with her Afro-style hair, but also slender and graceful, striding through the hall with catlike skidding movements on impossibly long legs ending in thin ankles and high-arched feet. Each step of her stretched legs was a carefully slowed leap so that the mini-beings could keep up with her. The woman was dressed in a white ski suit; the tight-fitting jacket reached down to her buttocks which bulged and flexed every time she leaped.

The drummer, touched by de Gier's roar, had bent down over his drums, tapping and ruffling so that he could control the sliding and shaking procession, and the trumpet shared his elation and blew round full notes at the hall's roof and the blackened hand-hewn beams that supported it.

The yakusa had stopped their bat imitations and were following Dorm's basketball technique, hitting their air-balls to and fro. The daimyo hummed, a short song consisting of three notes with a pause for the fourth beat, and the yakusa sang with him, but softly so that his voice carried their happy grunts.

The drummer could no longer hold the feeling of the hall and his sticks hung above the drums. The daimyo lifted a hand and the music broke.

"Welcome," the daimyo roared. "Drink for guests and drink for us!" The commissaris, stopped halfway in a graceful turn, blinked and his brain began to function again. He was wondering how far the daimyo had foreseen this happening. How could he have known that the sergeant would react so spontaneously? And hadn't de Gier, for the time being anyway, reached a state of mind that could no longer be manipulated?

The daimyo faced the commissaris and smiled and bowed.

"You like?" the daimyo asked.

"Oh yes," the commissaris said. "Very."

"Indeed," the daimyo said, and gestured at a waiter, one of the three Chinese bartenders from the Golden Dragon in Kyoto. The waiter, his skull gleaming in the soft light of the many paper lanterns hung all through the hall, shook his head so that his queue bobbed and flashed, and then made it turn, and stood under a silver disk a yard in diameter. He offered the commissaris a drink from his tray.

"A whisky, sir?"

"Surely," the commissaris said, and was conscious, while he drank, of the fact that he had danced and shouted and sung without even the excuse that the alcohol in his blood had reached a certain percentage. He had simply done as the daimyo had expected him to do, just like the time he had run and panted in the temple garden. But did it matter now? He didn't think it did. The whisky glowed in his throat while he looked into the kindly peering, bulging eyes of the daimyo.

"You like?" the daimyo asked again.

"Yes," the commissaris said. "I like."

The interval didn't last long. The bartenders brought a large red lacquered screen on which an orange dragon blazed, its fiery tongue and cruel head on the first panel, the twisting scaly body on the second and the swishing armored tail on the third. The bar disappeared behind the screen and hosts and guests looked for a place to lose their empty glasses, but the bartenders ran about, picking up the glasses and balancing their large round trays. The trumpet blew a long straight note, a resounding blast that stopped and started again on the same level, but broke with a sob and lowered away in a lamenting groan. Bass and percussion caught the almost dying note and revived it in a Thelonious Monk composition, gurgling and beeping and finishing each line in breaking glasslike sounds of the utmost right of the piano's keyboard. The commissaris grinned at the weirdly comical music but felt himself again swept up in the current that had, just now, taken him to higher regions. He thought, for a very short moment, of the possibility of restraining himself, for the sake of Dutch sense and good behavior, but resisted the temptation. The daimyo was going well and should be encouraged. And why shouldn't he, the commissaris, float on the thought power of another? He ambled to the stage and sat down next to the daimyo, and Yuiko came trotting along obediently, ready to translate.

"My court musicians," the daimyo said, "have made our nightclubs famous. I like jazz, I discovered the music in America, I often go to America. I discovered Miss Ahboombah too, one of the best dancers of New York and too expensive, I suppose, to be signed up here but I did it all the same, for a year. It turned out to be a good idea. Our clubs in Kobe and Osaka haven't had an empty chair since she began dancing there, and the clients often book weeks in advance."

"A very beautiful woman," the commissaris said, and dangled his legs contentedly. "I hope we will see her again tonight."

"But of course," the daimyo said, and tapped the commissaris' hand softly. "And there are other events on the program. I myself will try to be worthy of your attention"-he laughed and his hand touched the commissaris' sleeve-"but that may be boring for you, so afterward we'll have Miss Ahboombah again. And there'll be something to eat of course. Perhaps we should have started with the meal, but I thought that if we were all plonked down at long tables and if Yuiko had to run up and down to translate and if we had to stare at each other all the time… No."

"No," the commissaris said.

"No, no, so first we watch Miss Ahboombah. I will have to balance the feeling that exists between you and me. I frightened you not so long ago. I am sorry about that now, I saw your fear and afterward I felt guilty, although I thought, while it happened, that I had won."

"In the temple garden," the commissaris said, and went on dangling his legs. Behind him the gurgling and beeping had softened and a sweetness had crept into the music and he allowed himself to be cradled in the song of the bass and the flowing lines of the trumpet.

"But you mustn't mind that adventure," the daimyo said. "I would have been frightened too, and the trick wasn't original. I read the recipe in a book about the silver foxes of the Rokko Mountains, seven witches who lived here once, long ago now, in seven huts built in a circle. The witches thought of the torture-to show a man his own dead face. Evil women and very powerful, well-trained necromancers. They meditated, for weeks on end, like the monks in Kyoto-the good monks, not the bad ones who steal from their own temples and deliver the goods to us, nicely wrapped in cotton cloth. And the witches only wanted power, not the insight of the Buddha. Yes."

"Are you a Buddhist?" the commissaris asked. He thought he had heard a note of reverence in the daimyo's voice.

"Would I be a Buddhist?" the daimyo said, and held his broad hands upside down in front of his chest. "What would I be? A good question. I have no answer. My mind is clouded by the countless thoughts with which I have identified myself and which have all left their traces, and it is said that the Buddha mind is empty, empty and pure, for emptiness is always pure."

He thought. Yuiko's eyes seemed glued to his thick fleshy lips. "But we have cleared our minds, you and I. Jin-gi, do you remember?"

"I remember," the commissaris said, "and I asked the hotel director if he knew the word. He wrote it down for me. Two characters. 'Jin' means 'two men' and 'gf 'justice.'"

The daimyo beamed. "You remembered the word, and you have even thought about it! But that's very good, much more than I might have hoped for. You are in a foreign country and you receive many impressions, words, ideas. All day they fall on you, like raindrops, and like raindrops they roll away down the protection of your mind and are sucked up by the ground. That's what happens to me in America and I thought the same would happen to you here. But you remembered the word, the word that I gave to you on Lake Biwa. An important word that only we, the yakusa, have penetrated and truly understood. The idea, like so many ideas in our country, originates in China, but we don't always know what we are supposed to do with the Chinese wisdom, so very often we just store it somewhere, in temples mostly."

The daimyo grinned and pushed his fist softly into the commissaris' chest.

"Yes," the commissaris said. "This Jin-gi, a rule of behavior, I thought, some sort of code."

"Yes. Two men-justice. Two ideas that together form a third, and the third idea says something about human relations. The old daimyo, the man who I replaced after I had gotten myself through the war and had been appointed to a series of functions in our organization, said that two men will only be able to really meet after they have learned to destroy their own desires. Every time I saw him he would discuss that particular subject. Rather step back than jump ahead at the cost of another person."

The commissaris raised a thin hand. "At the cost of another yakusa?"

"Yes," the daimyo said "another yakusa. And when, in the end, he decided that I understood, he didn't want me to bow to him anymore. He claimed that the Japanese custom of bowing has degenerated from a greeting to an acceptance of status." He turned toward the commissaris. "Do you follow me?"

"No," the commissaris said. "To bow is to greet, I thought."

"Yes, but who bows first? That's what matters. In Japan we always try to determine one's level of life. When two men meet, someone has to bow first. Not in Jin-gi, however." He folded his hands into a praying gesture. "You see, two separate hands become one new form. You can use us, you and me as an example too. If we had met at some official event we might have had trouble bowing. You are a powerful man in Holland, but Holland is a long way off and I have my strength here, so perhaps I am of more importance, should we meet here. If that should be true, you might be expected to bow first. But we could look at the problem from another angle. You are older than I am, and you are far more experienced; you are an exotic foreigner from the West, and I am Mr. Tanaka or Mr. Tamaki, one of a hundred million creatures pushing for space on these little islands. So now what do we do? Who bows first?"

"I will," the commissaris said, "if I can do you a favor that way."

"No bows," the daimyo said. "We forget bows. You had the opportunity to kill my old friend Kono, and your assistant could have left Yuiko in her bathroom, in her own vomit. But you forgot your own desires and stepped back and proved, in the eyes of every yakusa who is worthy of the name, that you had learned the lessons of your own organization in Holland and that you can practice your insight."

"Well…" the commissaris said.

"Jin-gi," the daimyo said, and stared into space. The trumpet had returned to the first note of the Monk song and the sustaining rhythm ended. Silence had returned to the hall. "Please excuse me," the daimyo said. "I have to go to the kitchen to see that the liquor you brought has been cooled properly. A rich royal liquor, but your assistant said that the taste gets lost when it isn't served very cold, so I asked the cook to place the bottles in his freezers, then we can drink the spirit later tonight. You brought a great quantity and you must have troubled yourselves considerably. It wasn't necessary; your presence is an important gift in itself."

Dorin took the daimyo's place on the edge of the stage and smiled nervously. "Miss Ahboombah is next on the program," he said softly. "What a spectacle, a black stripper in a Japanese castle. Our civilization is going ahead with leaps and bounds."

"You don't like black women?" the commissaris asked politely.

"Oh yes," Dorin said, and gestured vaguely. "I do. As a boy in San Francisco I was absolutely thrilled by them and my mother claims that I became quite impossible, even as a baby, whenever black ladies paid the slightest attention to me. I think that my first real excitement was caused by a girl from the Congo. I don't remember what she was doing in San Francisco, maybe she had come to some congress. She was dressed in a wide flowing African garment, very colorful, and she had her hair dyed gray and put it up into a sort of knot. I followed her about all day and I am always dreaming about her, even now, and it happened more than ten years ago."

"Sexual dreams?" the commissaris asked.

"Yes, of course, but maybe more than that. Sex, certainly, but without any pornography, elevated sex, something like that."

Dorin seemed confused. He was bending forward, almost falling off the stage and his otherwise so carefully brushed hair hung down into his eyes.

The three Chinese bartenders rushed from behind the screen and pushed the yakusa to the sides of the hall. They were gliding about on their velvet slippers and making exaggerated gestures. The yakusa allowed themselves to be pushed, grinning at the antics of the three pompous but elegant men in their brocade vests and wide trousers. The bartenders, as if they wanted to excuse themselves for their rude behavior, retreated to the screen while they held hands and did a kind of shuffle, bowing and bobbing their pigtails, gracefully following the rhythm of the music which had started up again.

A round dim moon glowed softly as the paper lanterns were switched off, one by one. Miss Ahboombah stood at the lake shore, and felt the water with a carefully extended foot. The soft light was reflected in a bleached cloth wrapped around her body. Only percussion and bass accompanied her slow dreamy movements. When she pulled a boat toward her, with small jerks on a long rope, the trumpet became audible too, whispered sounds spaced by dark lulls wherein the piano touched short double notes. The boat moved away from the shore again, powered by long paddle strokes. She stood in the rear of the boat, which glided over the swell of the lake's surface.

The commissaris sighed. There was no boat, no shore, no rope, no water; there was nothing but a floor made out of wide boards, a floor in a vast hall. But Miss Ahboombah had taken him to an African lake; there were palm trees on the shore, there would be a native village not far away, with round straw-topped huts. He saw how she looked up, following the flight of a bird, gliding about on large dark wings. He felt the slow heat of a tropical night. The bleached cloth fell off her as she dived; a long leap powered by the muscles of her legs and the resistance of the boat that glided on, empty and alone. He saw the slender body cut through heaving waves and circles formed by the splash of the leap. He saw her break through the surface and swim with stretched strokes, bending and pushing her hands through cool water. She turned and swam back to the boat and swung a glistening leg into the narrow hollowed-out tree trunk. She was squatting down and came up in a single movement, standing with the paddle back in her hand.

The light died in the paper moon, the music had gone with it, only the bass vibrated in the hall. When the paper lanterns came on again the hall was empty. The commissaris didn't want to break the silence. He heard the daimyo breathing quietly next to him and the trumpeter's leg rubbing against the side of the piano. But the applause came, hesitantly at first, then swelling till it filled the hall.

De Gier had stood in a corner, half hidden by the dragon screen. He had shaken his head unbelievingly when the dance began. He had expected a wild performance, a strip act stressed by heavy drumbeats and piercing trumpet bursts working up to some rough orgasm in which the saxophone would blare and sob and wheeze. A nightclub dancer, intent on holding her public enthralled, who will show all, while bits of garments whirl to the floor.

But de Gier had followed the woman too, on and in the lake, which had reminded him of his balcony, as the commissaris had been reminded of his garden. She had taken him to a protected spot, hidden deep under his thoughts, to the quiet glade that had to be at the end of the path which he sometimes followed in his dreams.

He pushed himself free from the wall and saw the commissaris wave, and he crossed the hall that began to fill up with yakusa, waiting for the bar to open.

"Good party, sir," he said. "Pity that the Snow Monkeys will smash it to smithereens in a minute. I suppose they can come any moment now, right?"

The small shape of the commissaris on the edge of the stage seemed as unreal as the rest of his entourage and his words formed themselves with difficulty. "Not yet," the commissaris said, and grabbed a glass from a passing tray. "We still have a few hours. I am glad that the ambassador remembered to send the jenever and that you were able to pick up the cases from the airport this morning."

"Forty-eight bottles of the very best," de Gier said. "If they get themselves stuck into that lot, it'll be a bit of a mess, sir."

The commissaris looked at the bar, which was disappearing behind the dragon screen again. "The daimyo is disciplining them pretty well up to now, sergeant, but I suppose he'll loosen up as the night moves on. You and I will have to join the merriment; let's see who can get the most drunk, you or I."

"You are serious, sir? That won't be difficult. The bar is loaded with whisky and brandy and our jenever will be poured on top of that."

"Yes," the commissaris said, and nodded. "Drunk, that's what we'll have to be, dead drunk, smashed, the worse the better."

"But shouldn't we be able to look about? You know what Dorin is planning. Maybe we should be on our feet by the time the helicopters come."

The commissaris pointed with his head. De Gier looked round and saw Dorin, finding his way slowly through the massed yakusa. "Don't worry, Rinus," the commissaris said softly. "Maybe they'll have to carry us out, but tomorrow we'll wake up as usual, with a bit of a hangover I imagine, but safe and sound."

"I was talking to Kono just now," Dorin said. "He took the bandage off his hand. The wound seems to be doing well."

"A nice man," the commissaris said.

"A darling," Dorin said, "just like all those other sweetie pies. Their pleasantness makes me sick to my stomach. They are doing it much too well tonight, I have to tell myself over and over again that they are the worst bastards you might ever want to avoid, because if I don't I forget, and I forget all the same, every time one of them comes over for a chat and a smile."

"Is that so bad?" the commissaris asked, and made the cubes in his glass tinkle.

"Yes, that's bad." Dorm's smile had become a sneer. "I hate that filth. If I could have a chance to think clearly, I would know that they are of exactly the same type as the Chinese warlords and their cronies who rotted their own country to the point where farmers wouldn't bother to sow their land and babies were left in the ditch because their starving mothers couldn't feed them. The yakusa are a living plague and they should be crushed the minute they reveal themselves, without ceremony, without a second thought. When the daimyo danced just now he showed his true spirit, a vampire, a sucking vermin, but a minute later he was the ideal host who can create a perfect atmosphere by a single gesture."

"Perhaps," the commissaris said. "But he isn't a common man, not by any means, and I doubt whether he is the maniac you seem to think he is. Perhaps the fact that he exists proves that this society in which he lives allows room for his existence, wants him to be, perhaps. In another society he would act a different part, maybe a part which could be defined as good."

Dorin tried to light a filter cigarette at the wrong end. He pulled the smoldering cigarette from his mouth and rubbed it into the floor with his heel. "No."

"What do you think, de Gier?" the commissaris asked, but the sergeant didn't answer. Ridiculous, de Gier thought, I shot my cat, I am in a castle in the Rokko Mountains, a black angel has danced all through my soul just now.

"De Gier?"

Esther is dead, de Gier thought, and the earth in my flowerpots is caked and has burst. I can't go back, but I am free, I have been free for weeks, and I have no idea what I should do with my freedom. I have slept with a Japanese woman and all I saw were fern leaves growing from a lake. And all the people in this hall are my deadly enemies.

"Where are you?" the commissaris asked.

"Yes, sir," de Gier said, and walked away.

The daimyo, holding Yuiko's hand, came to fetch his guests. Tables were being carried in, and the bartenders, helped by cooks in white uniforms, brought in trays loaded with dishes and bowls.

"I had some special food prepared for you," the daimyo said. "I heard that you have been living on Japanese dishes so far, and I thought that you might be ready for a change. There is some steak, and lamb chops and fried potatoes and salads and…" He pointed and described the various dishes, and pulled the commissaris and Yuiko with him. "The salads are the cook's specialty and he also knows how to prepare the right dressings. The salads come from Kono's garden, I helped him with the harvest this morning, we often work together in the fields, too often perhaps, I am neglecting my duties these days. The pleasure of a man about to retire."

"You are retiring soon?" the commissaris asked.

"In another year perhaps, but I will remain interested. Old men still have some value in Japan. Perhaps I will be asked to advise from time to time."

"Here," the daimyo said. "Please feel free to serve yourselves, I'll be back in a minute, I have to cut the carp on the other table."

Dorin was looking at his watch. "The airstrip should be in our hands by now," he said into the commissaris' ear, "and the castle should be surrounded. I don't suppose the guards had a chance to resist, if there were any guards. The daimyo has lived safely behind the bribe barrier, for years and years."

"I hope the Snow Monkeys have been trained in patience too," the commissaris said, and tipped a spoon above his salad, allowing the dark red dressing to dribble down on the fresh leaves. "They should come in only when our friends are nicely drunk, and that event hasn't come to pass yet, not by a long way."

Dorin stabbed his spoon into a silver bucket filled with a white creamy fluid. "Sure," he said. "They are trained in many ways. This is a Russian sauce, I always choose Russian dishes, so that I will be accustomed to them when the time comes. They can be here within a few hours."

"The Russians?"

"The Russians. I saw them last month through my binoculars. They were exercising just off our north coast. Their islands are so close that they sometimes get onto our beaches after a swim and we have to ferry them back." The spoon shot free, creating a vacuum that filled with a sick gurgle. "Don't you worry about the Russians? They must form the same menace in Europe that they do here."

The commissaris was cutting his steak with slow careful cuts of a very sharp knife. The red bloody slices fell over on his plate.

"No," he said hesitatingly. "No, I don't suppose I do. Perhaps when the time comes, but it hasn't come yet. And so many things are coming. Death, for instance."

De Gier joined them, with Ahboombah holding his arm. The dancer was dressed in a long gown, closing at the elongated neck. She held her plate and de Gier dropped lettuce leaves on it, while she smiled approvingly.

"You are a true artist," the commissaris said. "I enjoyed your dance very much." She laughed. "I hope you weren't disappointed? I usually dance in a different style, but the daimyo wanted me to do this pantomime. He had seen me do it in New York."

De Gier touched Dorin's elbow, while the commissaris and the dancer talked.

"Yes?"

"I don't know what your plans are for the rest of the evening," de Gier whispered, "but the old man has to get out of this." His whisper was cold and fierce and Dorin jumped.

"Don't fuss, man," he hissed back. "Of course he'll get out of this. This is a party, isn't it? A jolly party! We are with friends, aren't we?"

De Gier didn't have a chance to answer. Dorin had banged his plate on the table and stalked off, his face twitching and his arms swinging.

The daimyo came back and got into the conversation, and wandered off again, taking Ahboombah. The commissaris watched the pair move across the hall. The dancer's long hand, each tapered finger ending in a long curved silver nail, rested on the daimyo's shoulder and her face was bent down to his head, her cheek touching a bristling tufted eyebrow.

Maybe I don't have to get all that drunk, the commissaris thought, but shook his head despondently. He would have to get drunk and afterward he would be ill. Headache, thirst, cramps most probably, diarrhea if the worst came to the worst. But he cheered up again. He could always take a bath, the Japanese baths had done wonders so far, his legs didn't hurt much anymore.

The daimyo turned up again, offering delicacies. Giant shrimps fried in batter and some pieces of squid floating in a thick dark gravy.

"Tomorrow," the daimyo said. "Tomorrow we can talk quietly, while we walk and look at things. Kono wants to show off his birds. He has some new pheasants, very wonderful creatures, and there are swans too now, black Australian swans. His birds are his pride, just as my bears were mine once, but they are too old now, and they never wanted to breed."

"I saw your bears," the commissaris said, "when we came in, in a cage near the gates. A peacock was sitting on the cage's roof and I saw a bear's face, in between the tail feathers of the peacock. A sight of great beauty. You do live in splendor, sir."

"I live in my dream," the daimyo said, "and the dream changes, not always in the way I want to change. But now that my years are catching up with me I try to live with the change and not to force it anymore, as I used to. And the dream is about to finish. I will be leaving this place and I am getting used to the thought."

"Where will you go?" the commissaris said, and took a bite of seaweed. He kept the slimy substance in the front of his mouth and chewed softly.

"I think I will find myself a small house, maybe on an island in the Inland Sea. A house with a vegetable garden; I've been enjoying growing things lately. Why don't you come and see me then? You can stay with me and perhaps we can do some traveling and you can tell me what you see and I will experience my country through your eyes. It will be an adventure we can share."

"Yes," the commissaris said, and swallowed, trying not to shiver.

"But that time hasn't come yet," the daimyo said sadly. "For the time being we are driven by our own plans. Although…" He cut his sentence, leaving Yuiko in the middle of a word. "Perhaps you will understand me better later tonight. I will be acting in a little play, a Noh play. The Noh plays are true Japanese, the only art form which we didn't import from China."

"A play?" the commissaris asked. "What about?"

"About a bad man. I will be the bad man. He is bad because he doesn't know what is good. A very complicated theme, but I will try to act simply. I will dance and sing and the yakusa will sing too and the musicians will accompany us. They are getting ready now, there they are already; I will have to go and change."

The commissaris walked over to de Gier and they found their way to the stage together.

"How are things, sergeant?"

De Gier smiled uncertainly. "Very good, sir, too good, perhaps. I can hardly stand it. I keep on seeing the helicopters taking off. I saw helicopters exercise in Holland once. They have heavy machine guns mounted on bars protruding from the sides of the cockpit, fed by ammunition belts that swing out. Slow machines, ponderous, but you can't defend yourself against them, for they can move in any direction. And each helicopter filled with those nasty little men, destructive apes. They will break and burn everything here. There'll be nothing left, a smoldering heap of rubbish, and then they will raise themselves and take off again."

The commissaris was carrying a bowl of ice cream. "I don't really want this, sergeant, why don't you eat it?"

"Thank you." De Gier began to eat.

"But you look cheerful enough," the commissaris said.

"That's the point I was trying to make, sir. The music is excellent and that dance got me too. It's as if everything fits exactly tonight. I am, in fact, completely happy, but 'happy' is such a ridiculous word."

The commissaris patted him on the back. "You are doing very well, sergeant. Keep it up for a while. We'll see what all this will lead to, and in the meantime we can live for the moment."

Dorin caught up with them. "I don't think they are armed," he said, "but we'll have to watch it, there must be a store of arms in the castle."

"They'll be drunk in an hour," the commissaris said pleasantly. "We'll have to drink with them, you too, Dorin. The daimyo is a sensitive and intelligent man. If we show any reluctance he'll know immediately."

A shrill shriek erupted from the stage and the lights dimmed and disappeared, changing the hall into a large black hole. Three lanterns appeared from behind the dragon screen, carried by the bartenders, who had changed into black kimonos. They formed a half circle and waited, raising their lights.

A man's voice sang, a deep voice, mouthing sad words. A wide-shouldered shape jumped into the weak light. Short drum taps punctuated the song. A flute trembled through the percussion, high and thin, detached notes modulating into a glass-sharp trill.

"The daimyo," Dorin said, pointing at the actor. "He is much better than I thought he would be. I know the piece too. It has to do with a warrior who has lost his lord and is trying to find a new base for his life. A difficult piece and written in such antique language that most of its implications are obscure. It ends badly, that much is certain. I think he loses his mind, a strange piece to use for a party."

A second shape became visible, threatening the singer.

"Ahboombah," de Gier said, "with a mask and a white wig."

The woman leaped around the daimyo and stopped directly in front of him, her hands raised. The mask had been cut in an expression of sneering fury, with drawn lips and triangular gleaming teeth. The head began to shudder and the white hair spread in a broad fringe. The daimyo retreated slowly and the woman followed him, bending her arms and threatening him with quivering long bent nails. Other actors appeared and attacked the daimyo, who tried to defend himself but had to cover his face to lock the vision out. The flute accentuated the threat, but changed back into a soft alluring melody, and the daimyo appeared to rest. The enemy regrouped and attacked afresh and the demons of fear won, forcing the daimyo into an abject kneeling posture that shifted into total surrender as he dropped to the ground. The lanterns shuffled back toward the screen and disappeared behind it.

The hall was lit again, and the musicians struck up a gay throbbing tune while the bartenders wheeled the bar into the center of the hall.

The change had been too quick for the commissaris. He was still hunched up, staring at the spot where the daimyo had been destroyed a moment ago.

"My word," the commissaris mumbled. He was glad to hear de Gier's cough next to him, and looked up. "What did you think of that, Rinus?"

"That's the way I felt the night of the accident," de Gier said softly. "Why do you think he did that, sir?"

The commissaris shook his head.

"Something to do with that Jin-gi, sir?"

"Perhaps. He certainly did show us his soul. A strange man, sergeant."

"What did you think of the play?" Dorin asked politely.

"I beg your pardon," the commissaris said. "We shouldn't have spoken in Dutch. Yes, I thought it very good, certainly very interesting."

"Performed in a very unorthodox manner," Dorin said. "That's the first time I have ever seen a woman act in a Noh play. It's a pity the art professors of Kyoto University weren't here to watch it. If the daimyo directed the play, he has missed his calling."

"He did direct it," the commissaris said. "That man is an artist and yet he is a criminal, a profiteer. Most extraordinary. One would think that he would never have had to become a yakusa, not if he could express himself in this way. But the man is to be detested. Undoubtedly, he destroys the order of the state. But why? Out of habit? Because he slipped into a routine which didn't give him alternate possibilities?"

"You like the daimyo, don't you?" Dorin asked. His voice had grown cold again.

The commissaris turned and faced him. It seemed as if he didn't recognize the major.

"Ah," he said. "Yes, certainly. I like the daimyo very much, and I think I got to know him tonight."