Dead Man Calling

by Gavin Black

OHASHI ADHERED all right. There was no shaking off this boy. I got off that train at Kamakura station with almost the feeling that I’d added something permanent to my life. These people hold on when they have bitten into a relation with another human being, especially an English-speaking relation.

  Being at the end of the train we were the tail of the crowd making our way towards the ticket collector. If any of my former audience were on the lookout for me I didn’t see them, though we were loitering enough to discourage that. It was cooler down here than Tokyo, with the clean smell of the sea and something else, identifiable from a childhood experience before I remembered what it was, the unique Japanese smell of pine forests. It’s a thing, like the faint sweet mustiness off straw matting, that you never forget, resinous, and astringent.

  “You like Kamakura I think, Mr. Jones.”

  “I’ve been here before once, years ago. As a kid.”

  “So. You are childhood in Japan. That is how you speak. Japan most happy for childhood, I think. Not so later.”

  “Not so good for adults, you mean?”

  “So.”

  I knew what he meant. The children out here seem to have everything their own way, as though life was in their pocket. Then when they grow up they’ve lost the knack of keeping living that way. The Japanese love of children is maybe half a search for things lost, the simplicity, something they try to cling to.

  Nearly everyone was through the gates. I saw a men’s convenience handy, at the end of the platform.

  “Excuse me, Mr. Ohashi.”

  I had hoped that he would regard it as impolite to follow and he did, mounting guard at the entrance. There was another entrance. I went to it, peeked out, and saw him glancing back at the now empty train. I slid around a concrete wall and jumped on to a section of track, landing quite neatly for a man not in the first half of his thirties, straightened and walked towards a line of goods wagons in a siding, keeping the convenience between me and Ohashi, being so careful about that that I almost fell over a railway worker in a ditch squatting down to snatch a smoke during working hours.

  He stared up. His head was shaven and he had a thin cotton towel around it to keep the sweat out of his eyes. A westerner, looming up suddenly over his ditch, stunned him. Then sense came into the man’s eyes. He said in Japanese, but not too loud:

  “What are you doing here?”

  “Excuse me,” I answered, with a polite little bow.

  Then I walked away towards a gate in a white-painted picket fence and through it, all the time expecting a bellow from behind that would alert honourable chopsticks. The shout didn’t come. The railwayman must have reflected that a general alarm would have meant an explanation of why he was crouched in a ditch.

  In the station area Marla was standing beside a huge sky-blue car. A burly looking man, his bald pate tonsured by a ginger fringe, was putting her case in the back. Then he came around and put a paw on her arm, and said something I couldn’t hear. There were plenty of taxis about, but I couldn’t make for one until that car moved off, and waited, pretty well pressed against a wall, and in a convenient shadow.

  I didn’t know how long Ohashi’s politeness would keep him on sentinel duty but had the feeling that unless the blue car moved off soon the boy would come cruising alongside, saying: “You play game, I think.” This time I really did want to get rid of him, though it hurt in an odd way. I kept remembering his eyes, dog-like, brown, friendly.

  Marla was in the car. The driver’s door slammed and the thing slid away, vast and opulent looking against the weathered Japanese wood of the houses opposite. I waited until it had completed a huge sweep around and then bolted for the nearest taxi.

  “I’m going to the same house as the blue car,” I said.

  Though I kept looking back towards the station there was no sign of Ohashi. But I was pursued, as though telepathically, by a sense of his shame, and perhaps even a quiet sorrow from it. English speakers never really gave him that chance to adhere. He’d never have the opportunity, either, to digest thoughtfully my reactions to James Hadley Chase.

  The taxi driver had no trouble in keeping up with the blue car. It probably wasn’t going fast enough for him. We went down the main shopping street and then turned left into private housing, a road with indifferent surfacing which threw me about in the back.

  “More slowly,” I said.

  He didn’t like that at all, but a cart blocked us for a while and the blueness thinned away ahead, finally disappearing around a corner. I was on the alert when we got to that corner, and stopped the taxi. I paid him and got out. Far down a side road was the blue car, parked, Marla out of it and going up a drive.

  I could see where we were, in a row of beach houses, the rutted lane behind them. They were lush houses, a few Japanese, with green pines looking over high wooden fences, but most southern California in feel, white concrete, patios, spiky pot plants and the air of holidays with money. All of the houses faced the beach and when the taxi had gone and the blue car was empty I moved down the lane, to a gap in building.

  There was green sea, white sand, a foam line of surf and little islands with more pines on them. There were pines on the steep hills flanking the beach, too. The light was fresh washed by a slight breeze, even though it was getting on in the afternoon, and far out the sun was golden on the water.

  One of these beach houses would be a nice place to live, quite nice, even after Singapore. And even allowing for earthquakes and tidal waves.

  I stood back in a gateway when ginger tonsure came out of his white house again. He got in the car and spurted it forward into a garage. Doors slammed. It looked as though Marla was settled for a while, for the man went into the house and shut himself away from the outside. I went nearer the place and had a look at it, so that I wouldn’t make any mistake in the dark. It seemed as though I might be staying in Kamakura for a while. It was as good a place as any under the circumstances, and much better than some.

  Kamakura had once been the capital of Japan, until a tidal wave made a move a good idea. Another tidal wave in 1923 hadn’t shifted the great outdoor Buddha, the Daibutsu, and the place had now settled to be a resort town in a big way. Most of the shops in the main street seemed to have junk for tourists, and the men’s outfitter I went into was featuring Hawaiian swimming-wear.

  The clerk spoke perfect American.

  “How can I serve you?”

  He had black hair glued to his scalp and a bright personality to match his shirt.

  “I’ve torn my jacket. I’m afraid it’s not a repair job. I was wondering if you had anything that could fit me.”

  From then on the rest was easy, a couple of shirts, pyjamas, swimming-shorts, handkerchiefs, and a bag to put everything in. The new jacket was on the loose American plan, and it hung all right from shoulders that weren’t quite mine, giving me a faintly raffish Mediterranean look which my wife wouldn’t have permitted once. But I didn’t have to worry about what a wife would permit any more. I could play at being a slick boy if I wanted to.

  The clerk liked the money I paid over, that was in his bright and shining eyes.

  “Would you care to leave your jacket, sir? We just might be able to do something. You’re at the Kamakura Hotel, are you?”

  “That’s right,” I said.

  I had been trying to remember the name of that hotel. I went along the street a bit farther for a razor and toothbrush, and then got another taxi.

  In it I considered my plans. In the first place I was going to keep an eye on Marla, in so far as I could. In the second Kamakura seemed a good place for me to be just now. I couldn’t guess how long it would take the police to latch on to me as a possible murder suspect, but it was pretty certain that my questioning would come. If I was lucky, and that hotel maid just didn’t remember much about me, then I would probably only be interviewed as part of a routine check up on all Mikos’s recent contacts. But looking square at the thing I couldn’t feel I was likely to be lucky. I was alm
ost certain that the killer of Mikos had not been spotted going into the suite or leaving it, and I had been, and bang on the murder time, too. Clearly I could expect to be a top candidate for interrogation at the very least, and once they got on my trail there ought to be plenty of leads to Kamakura. But I might have a little time I could use, all I could really hope for.

  The hotel is a sprawling, frame building sitting in its own grounds not far from the great outdoor bronze Buddha which has made the town famous. I signed in at the desk and as I turned from it saw Reggie Spratt coming slowly down the stairs.

  “Well, well,” he said. “This seems to be our day.”

  I couldn’t have been less pleased.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “My dear fellow, I live here, always have. I’m a commuter.”

  I had first met Reggie at the bar of the American Club in Tokyo. And afterwards he was there, lifting a glass, almost every time I was in the place. As an old Etonian he’d had no difficulty at all in achieving honorary membership. If all the British were old Etonians we wouldn’t have so much trouble with our American cousins.

  He was the Tokyo Spratt of Spratt and Lielson, Importers and Exporters. He bought and sold everything without the slightest narrowing of the eyes, and someone had told me that Reggie was worth three-quarters of a million sterling. I could well believe it. He had been born to money and trained to go on making it in a quietly professional way.

  “Your bag will go up without you,” Reggie said. “How about a drink? It’s only a couple of hours to sundown, or is that stretching things for a ritualist?”

  “I’d like one,” I said.

  We went into the bar. You could hear the sea through open windows and we sat near one. Reggie was slightly proprietorial about Kamakura as though he owned it. He seemed to know everyone in the place and had made it his headquarters since arriving in Japan some six years before. We drank a very much better whisky than you usually get in the Far East and from Reggie’s special bottle.

  “So glad you like it,” he said. “I thought as a mock Scotsman you might have a snob line on whisky. Tell me, did you see Mikos this afternoon?”

  I tried not to show how alert that made me.

  “Did I say I meant to?”

  “No, no, my dear fellow. You just gave the impression of trailing him like a bloodhound, with snuffing noises. It wouldn’t have surprised me to come on you peeking at him from behind a screen of palms, watching that charming fellow shovel in his lunch. Stubborn, aren’t you? You won’t give up, even when you’re beaten.”

  “What makes you so sure I’m beaten?”

  “Everything I hear,” Reggie said.

  I took a slow deep breath, remembering where I had last met this man, on his own, wandering around the Myoko Hotel.

  “So you’re in on this, too, Reggie? I had a feeling you might be. Working under cover.”

  “There’s no point in going around bellowing about what one is up to.”

  “Who’s behind you?”

  Reggie smiled.

  “I don’t kiss and tell.”

  He was a very smooth-looking youngish man, with light blue eyes and hair that always threatened to come down about his ears but never did. It was decidedly thin on top, but lush lower, fair once, but now a kind of uncertain brown. Sitting there in that bar with the cheerful noise of a wind-whipped sea behind us we might have been friends, but I didn’t have the feeling then that this was likely to be something in our separate futures.

  “Did you come down here, Paul, to lick your wounds before a fresh sortie?”

  “I just came down here.”

  “How about coming to a party with me tonight? It’ll probably be quite good. A man called Clynder from Yorkshire who sells motor bicycles and lives here. He tells you at once that everything is on the house. Creates an agreeable sort of pub atmosphere. I sell him his whisky wholesale.”

  “Good reason for supporting those parties.”

  “Offensive Colonial type,” Reggie said. He looked at me thoughtfully. “You don’t have an anti-English thing do you?”

  “Perhaps, sometimes.”

  “Whatever for? I thought fortune kept laying beautiful golden eggs in your lap. I’ve been in Singapore, you know. And been prodded in the waistcoat when you came into the room, and hissed at … that’s Harris. Bags of lolly. Made it running guns.”

  “That old libel,” I said.

  “Do you mind about it? It seems agreeably colourful to me. If I’m ever nudged over by anyone it’s only to be pointed out as a buyer and seller of biscuits or something.”

  “And scrap metal.”

  Reggie’s smile was serene.

  “How beautifully we’re informed about each other! Look here, do come to this party. I think you’d rather enjoy it. And you seem a bit cast down.”

  I evaluated then my chances as a night snooper, hanging around ginger tonsure’s house for a chance of spotting Marla. It seemed a slim chance, particularly early in the evening. I could always leave the party when I felt like it.

  “When is that English bulletin on Tokyo radio?” I asked.

  “Six. Worried about the Russians? Got an American thing on that, have you?”

  “Stop prodding, Reggie. I’ll come to your party.”

  “Gracious of you. But don’t rush in with thanks. I’m counting on using you on my way home to England. Thought I’d stop over in Singapore for a time.”

  “Business or fun?”

  “Well … I’m always the harrassed worker behind this façade. A bit of both.”

  “I’ll entertain you, Reggie, but if you’re after more than that you’ll find me fending you off with bamboo poles. There is no room in Singapore for Spratt and Lielson.”

  “There’s always room, dear boy. By the way that’ll do for the party. No one dresses up. Though who the hell is your tailor? That jacket looks as though it had been made for the Japanese idea of a playboy.”

  “It was.”

  The six o’clock news made no mention of a corpse in the Myoko. There could be a number of reasons for that. The Japanese are touchy about that hotel; they spent a lot of money on it forty years ago and regard it as a national asset. No one ever dies there officially, but then they probably don’t in most hotels. It could also be that the police weren’t allowing any Press story as yet. The police in Japan have that kind of control again, to help democracy settle in. They call it dem-mo-kra-shi and it is supposed to have replaced ancestor worship.

  We went to the Clynder party in Reggie’s Armstrong-Siddeley. He had imported one of the last executive models into Japan, and it was a huge, bland car which went well with its owner’s personality, clearly a tremendous prestige asset. There was enough room in the back for a small cocktail party and a chauffeur sat beyond a glass partition. Reggie explained this interesting anachronism.

  “If we should run someone over I find it policy to have a Japanese up there behind the wheel. You go in for Bristols, I believe?”

  “Hells bells, do you employ a full-time inquiry agent to keep you posted on your business contacts?”

  “I just keep my ears and eyes open.”

  “Well, you’re not getting more for your dossier on me for nothing.”

  Japanese roads, even in the town, are usually noticeable. But not in this car. I sat back on many layers of cushioning, but still with that feeling of oppression which had only lifted for a time in Ohashi’s company. The full colour picture of Mikos lying on a purple coverlet was there again, and the fact that I couldn’t, right now, hear any buzzing of police activity didn’t mean that it wasn’t going on. I was damn’ certain it was going on. Everything in that office in the Benten Building would have been set out for analysis. Every contact that Mikos had made since arriving in Japan would be a line for the little white-coated bobbies to follow up. One of those lines was certainly me. Another Marla.

  I was very conscious, too, of the trail I had left behind me in my sudden flight, about as cle
arly marked as a mad elephant’s. I began to wonder if a host of witnesses could in any way work out in my favour, but didn’t take much hope from the possibility.

  The police might assume that I had fled from Tokyo in panic. I had a story for that, about Tokyo’s heat becoming too unbearable, hence my sudden decision and the little matter of a wardrobe bought locally to tide me over. If the maid couldn’t identify me, and Marla kept her mouth shut, the fact that I had been in the hotel wouldn’t serve the police any. But I didn’t like the ifs.

  “What do you make of Mikos’s blonde secretary?” Reggie asked.

  My head jerked round.

  “What made you think of her?”

  “Well, she’s the kind of woman you do think of. Or don’t you agree?”

  “Yes.”

  “I imagined you would. The true blonde is very refreshing in this part of the world, particularly since we don’t see so much of the white Russians.”

  “What do you know about Marla Haines?”

  “Quite a lot, as a matter of fact. I’ll tell you sometime, if you’re interested. And I thought there was a chance you might meet her tonight.”

  I tried not to hold my breath.

  “At this party?”

  “Yes. She comes a lot to the Clynders’. Weekends and things.”

  “Clynder? Has he got a ginger fringe instead of hair?”

  “He has. So you’ve met him?”

  “No, I’ve seen him.”

  “In Kamakura?”

  “Yes.”

  “Not at the station meeting Marla? You didn’t, by any chance, chase her down here?”

  I looked at Reggie with a sweet smile. He returned it.

  “Well, well,” he said. “And here we are. I seem to have had the right idea, bringing you to this party.”

  We got out of that mobile monument to a secure position in life and went up the cement walk to the Clynders’ front door. I had the feeling that if I listened closely I’d hear the sound of Reggie’s purring.

  The door was opened by a middle-aged Japanese maid with a plain, used face which stated that life had given her quite a working over. I noticed her face because of something most unusual with Japanese women, she hadn’t dyed her hair the moment grey touched it, and there were two white streaks going back from her temples into the bun. She bowed, with her hands placed neatly on her apron. Her greeting was traditional, one you don’t hear too often these days.