Dead Man Calling

by Gavin Black

  Just inside the French windows I found the Japanese with the gold tooth waiting for me. It felt a little like that, as though I was intercepted, and he at once engaged me in conversation, rather loud, because the radiogram was blaring now. His English, if deficient in articles, was well-groomed, and he had a kind of oiliness which some of his countrymen mistakenly believe is a good imitation of Western social attitudes. He could have taken a course once in occidental drawing-room behaviour, and was treating me to lesson three, even though this party was passing the point where social attitudes mattered much. Because I wanted a drink we went over to where these were available.

  “I’m afraid I missed your name during the introductions,” I said.

  The gold tooth caught the light from a wall bracket and it was like having a torch shone in your eyes.

  “Mishimando. Saburo Mishimando.”

  I could hear Mikos then, gasping his last words into a phone.

  CHAPTER V

  I SIPPED my man’s-sized whisky.

  “I didn’t expect to meet a rival tonight, Mr. Mishimando.”

  He was completely bland about that.

  “I live in Kamakura, Mr. Harris. I have small house in Tokyo, but am mostly here. I prefer by seaside, you see. We have saying in Japan that the sea makes for strong heart.”

  “No business thrombosis you mean?”

  He liked that, or pretended to. His laughter was part of the act.

  “No, no, Mr. Harris. I speak of spirit only. We contemplate the sea and it give us great strength.”

  “To put through deals for Shompei Shoten?”

  He used the lighthouse smile.

  “To attempt, at least.”

  “You’re fairly confident that you have everything tied up?”

  “I … think so. But then, many slip twixt cup and lip.”

  “Mikos certainly takes his time.”

  “But why not, Mr. Harris? Tokyo is not such an unpleasant place. I think Mr. Mikos like very much. He likes also geisha party.”

  “Given by Shompei Shoten?”

  “By us and also by rivals. Have you not given Mr. Mikos geisha party, Mr. Harris? I think you are in error here if not.”

  “Perhaps I have been. I came to do business.”

  “Oh … this not an approach I approve. Life is for living. You have warm cup of sake served by beautiful girl. She sings also. You are content.”

  “And you sign on the dotted line?”

  “Maybe, maybe.”

  Mr. Mishimando seemed very pleased with himself.

  “Mr. Harris, if we get the licence from Mikos we give a big party I think. Will you be too angry to come for pleasures?”

  “Not at all, I’ll be delighted. Free sake out of Shompei Shoten?”

  “That’s it! That’s it! You know, I think maybe I drink too much whisky at this party. The Japanese not have good head for whisky. It makes me wish to sing.”

  “Well, by all means.”

  “Ah, no, no.”

  But he did, suddenly, his voice surprising, a falsetto against the whining of the rumba. It went on for about half a minute, while I stared. Mr. Mishimando had shut his eyes, and his face and neck showed the strain he was under to get out that high pitched peeping. Then it just stopped. He opened his eyes.

  “I translate for you. So.

  ‘To see moon in water

  Sad omen of black cloud,

  Best to keep head lifted

  And eyes on unreflected face.’ ”

  He took a deep breath, as though he needed to get it back.

  “You like, Mr. Harris?”

  “It’s charming. I’m not quite sure I’m right there with the meaning.”

  “In Japan all poem has two meanings. Even bad one. Very good poem have seven meanings, perhaps.”

  “And you take your pick?”

  “Yes, yes, so. I think if you live here you understand soul of Japan.”

  Mr. Mishimando, more than a little drunk wasn’t terribly easy to get away from. He even embarked on the soul of Japan, which is a large topic for a party where the music is loud and there’s not much intellectual tone generally. I suddenly found myself feeling rather tired, wanting bed, but remembering then with a kind of jerk that this night was almost certain to lead me into a day full of the things Mr. Mishimando wouldn’t classify under the pleasures of living. I was acutely aware of tomorrow, of it hanging over me, and not wanting it at all.

  Marla, still dancing, seemed not to notice I was in the room. I had seen her as the partner of everyone except Mr. Mishimando and Harry Komatsu. Harry was dancing all right, as smoothly as a gigolo in the American season. But they just didn’t seem in contact, husband and wife, though it wasn’t a thing that would have struck me if I hadn’t been interested in both of them.

  Finally Reggie and I left together, somewhat to my surprise not in the Armstrong-Siddeley.

  “I’m a considerate employer, Paul. I don’t like the idea of a poor wretch sitting for endless hours while his employer disports himself behind lighted windows.”

  “Splendid. Did you pick up this compassion at Eton, too? What do we do, walk?”

  “We do. Along the sand. How did you like the party?”

  “Well, to be quite frank it was the kind which makes me wonder if it wouldn’t be better to sign the pledge.”

  Reggie laughed.

  “So you don’t like our provincial society? Oh, it’s all really most amiable. I saw Mishimando had you cornered.”

  “Yes. He sang me a dirty song. Then produced his own fancy translation of it. Someone should tip him off not to do that kind of thing unless he’s sure that the foreigner doesn’t speak Japanese.”

  “Good heavens,” Reggie said. “I’m astonished.”

  “I’m not. I’ve seen them do it before. He was simply demonstrating his contempt of the company and the occasion. It’s part of that Prussian arrogance they’re supposed to have scrapped. If we meet him again I might sing him an English song with my own translation into Japanese.”

  “The party doesn’t seem to have put you in an amiable mood, Paul. Such a pretty night, too. Wasn’t Marla looking wonderful?”

  “Ravishing is the word. When did she marry Komatsu?”

  “A good many years ago, I think. I heard some story about her coming out here to marry her American boyfriend back from Korea. Only he got to Japan three weeks before she did and in the interval married a pretty Japanese girl. It’s so easy to do out here, just a case of juggling a couple of cups of rice spirit.”

  “Why didn’t she go back to America?”

  “My dear Paul, I have no idea. Pride, perhaps. At any rate she met Harry and married him. And that was about as bad a day’s work as any woman could do.”

  “Have those two bust up now? They don’t live together?”

  “No. Though Susie Clynder is always trying to do something about that. Susie hates unhappiness. She just can’t see why a lovely boy like Harry and a lovely girl like Marla can’t have a happy ending.”

  “I should have thought being married to Al would put any woman off happy endings for ever.”

  Reggie stopped to light a cigarette. He looked at me while the light from the match was still glowing up into his face.

  “What’s the matter with you?” he asked.

  “I’ve been drinking your wholesale whisky all evening, that’s all. I think I’ll go on walking for a bit. I don’t feel ready for bed yet.”

  “The Daibutsu is supposed to be impressive by moonlight. Not being a tourist I’ve never seen it.”

  When Reggie turned in at the hotel I didn’t at once make for the Daibutsu, but kept on the sand, going right down to the water’s edge. But somehow the night wasn’t beautiful anymore. The sea had gone glassy, and I saw the moon reflected on polished darkness just as in Mishimando’s little gem of phoney translation. And I saw black cloud, too.

  I knew now I had been a fool. When you find yourself with a corpse for which you are in no way r
esponsible there is only one sensible thing to do and that is to dissociate yourself from it as quickly and as deftly as possible. By going to Marla and letting her in on what had happened I had at once exposed myself. And I was left now with the very unpleasant feeling I couldn’t shake off that the killer knew and had every intention of taking action on this knowledge. I had no evidence, just the conviction that this was so, and that snares were being laid for me.

  The feeling of Japan as a trap came back. It was alien ground, and in some way dangerous still, as though my personal hostilities with these people were not yet over. And this time, as before, the advantage was with them. I could be held here if they wanted, and no one could arrange my escape.

  I was conscious, too, of the remoteness of the country even in our time, of the way it sat with its back to the unyielding walls of China and Russia, with on every other side vast expanses of sea. There was no border you could slip over and the moment you landed here you were in a geographical prison, marked down at once as a foreigner amongst a people whose exclusiveness pushed you away. I couldn’t see a door anywhere that would be opened by a friend.

  A temple gong boomed. It was a sound that seemed to claim the whole of the night, reaching out over the flat, unresisting sea. It made me turn and look back at the town where the lights were out, and I began to walk slowly towards the tall old pines that screened the Buddha.

  The Daibutsu should be seen by moonlight. It has survived a lot, just sitting there. There was a roof over it once, but that got washed away by one of the tidal waves. Now it is in the open, a vast bronze Buddha forty feet high sitting looking out through pines to the sea. In some lights it seems to be smiling, but you’re never quite sure. Tonight it was just vastly calm, remote from me, towering above a man alone on the concrete paving of the square in front.

  That gong must have been the last for the night. The stillness now was heavy, no wind at all, the resinous scent from the pines almost oppressive, like heady incense in a stuffy church.

  Gautama. He seemed to have travelled a long way, this figure probably cast centuries ago in little improvised sheds not far from the ancestors of these pines. It was a face that might almost have come from Greece, via India and China, a slow traveller, but arriving eventually at the edge of this huge sea which stopped him, settling in as a naturalised Japanese. He represented one half of the world that looks at the other half, and always will, just holding back that strange smile.

  The East is my home and always has been, and it makes strong emotional claims at times. I hadn’t expected it here, but it happened, and for a moment or two I was emptied of everything that oppressed me. I could easily have gone up then and burned joss, the kind of idolatry that Gautama himself had never wanted.

  So still, so quiet, so suddenly easing to the heart. I didn’t move, and there was no sound at all for a long time, nothing but that huge face with the moonlight on it.

  I don’t know what made me turn, perhaps it was the feeling of intrusion, the peace broken. I wasn’t alone any more.

  Just at the edge of moonlight, arrested by my movement, but in it, was a man. Though it would have been easy in that moment not to believe it was quite a man. I saw the split-toed footwear, the cloven-hoofed tabe of the Japanese coolie, then tight trousers, black going on up, covering the head. There were two eye-holes in some kind of black stocking hood pulled right down over the face.

  I remembered how old I was. If this was a judo expert my chances were thin. Then I saw a glint on steel. He had a knife. Not judo, not the straight stuff anyway.

  He came running, like an animal, hunched. He might almost have been a big man disguising his size, I couldn’t be sure. But he certainly wasn’t heavy on his feet.

  The knife hand wasn’t lifted, not for that first rush.

  I’m no judo man, but as a kid I learned Malay boxing, in which your feet are as vital tactical weapons as your hands. No one expects that from a European, all weight and Queensberry Rules. I braced to meet him, looking a bit like Carpentier in his action photos, period and dated. He came in for that, in the way a snake strikes at a mud ox.

  I didn’t catch him where I wanted with my left foot … right in the guts … but there was contact, his thigh, and he spun half round with a grunt. But it wasn’t the grunt of wind kicked out of you. He closed again, too quickly, not taking time to assess the unexpected game of his opponent. I sent a right to clip a hooded ear, then swung back, my eye on that knife hand. I got in another kick, to his wrist, and the knife went clattering.

  Then he came swirling at me and we both went down. I smacked on to that concrete, the cushion for the fall, not able to help that, or to twist over in time.

  I knew now how young he was, this black, grunting horror. He hadn’t my weight, or anything like it, but that didn’t matter, it didn’t matter at all. He had steel in arms and legs and with it the terrible suppleness of youth, a loose, writhing body as his servant, his fingers claws.

  The claws got at my throat. All I could do then was pull down on his forearms, my two hands round them. Like that we rocked on concrete, with me trying to use my weight to swing him over. But he kept on top, using one slithering leg as a brace to do that. The other was twisted round me as though he was a contortionist. My body was polishing the concrete slabs, that was about all it was doing. And his fingers tightened.

  In a threshing, sweating moment I felt the weight gone from my right leg. I brought up my knee hard. He made a retching sound behind the black cloth, almost in my face. But the steel slackened, enough for me to drag away the fingers. I heaved him off and got up, shaking, the breath whimpering in my mouth. I turned and kicked him.

  He curled up like a millipede, protecting his body. I bent down to drag off that hood. He caught me around the legs, not rising to do it. I went down again, and this time my head went whack on the concrete.

  He could have got the knife then and finished it, but he didn’t. On hands and knees I watched him go, scuttling, again bent over, towards the pines. I hoped he was in pain. I hoped his body felt like mine. I hoped he felt sick and dying.

  He was certainly gone, and I couldn’t run after him. For a moment or two I knew how near it had been, my reserves just about used. If he hadn’t been expecting an easier win he would have stayed and claimed that. Maybe he’d been counting on a gent who wouldn’t use his feet and knees.

  I got up. It wasn’t easy to stand. I wasn’t even conscious then of the Daibutsu in the moonlight, just of trees and darkness between me and the hotel. A long way of darkness. Alone. If he was waiting for his victim he’d get me.

  The only way I knew was down by the beach, and that was the way I went, down the long walk the pilgrims come, with the pines a thick screen on each side. I couldn’t go quietly. My breathing was still like an asthmatic’s.

  It wasn’t until I was well down the walk that I looked at the knife. I had just picked it up, with the idea of having a weapon in my hands, something. Now I stared.

  It was a wooden-handled knife, the kind the bean curd sellers use in the streets to chop up their wares. That handle was a twin of the one I’d seen sticking out of Mikos’s chest.

  I thought then about throwing it away. My sweating palms would have blotted out any fingerprints on the wood. But there just might be something on the blade. I knew what a pretty piece of evidence this would be if the police found it on me, but I still couldn’t afford to throw it away. I put it in my jacket pocket.

  My new jacket was pretty much the worse for wear, with one sleeve hanging from the shoulder. It hadn’t helped with the black devil to have my arms constricted by a jacket, either.

  I went down a flight of steps on to a road which ran behind the beach, and along this road, my feet shuffling. I could hear them, but I couldn’t stop them doing that. It was why I didn’t hear anything else, or see anything, either. I was looking down. Right then I couldn’t have defended myself again, I couldn’t have tried.

  I heard, though, a cough. It brought
my head up, slowly. There was a man coming towards me, small and compact. The moonlight sparkled on the round lenses of his glasses.

  “Good evening, sir.”

  It was honourable chopsticks.

  “You are out late, I think, Mr. Harris. But not uncommon to see Daibutsu in moonlight.”

  He knew my real name.

  “What are you doing here?” My voice was harsh.

  “I also come out in evening. Very often.”

  I looked at him, measuring his height, and his shape, seeing him running hunched over. Then I pushed that away. Not this face under a hood and those hands as claws.

  I filled my lungs, slowly.

  “You are staying at Kamakura Hotel, Mr. Harris.”

  “So you know.”

  “Yes,” he said, almost happily. “I find out. After you give me slip I become curious. I play detective.”

  “It’s a nice game.”

  We were standing facing each other. He seemed to see my state for the first time, the torn coat, the way I stood as though I couldn’t yet straighten up.

  “Mr. Harris. Is there accident?”

  I told him, slowly, watching him. His eyes, behind the glasses, widened.

  “Oh. Wicked thugs! It is common. Even in Kamakura. He wishes to rob.”

  “I don’t think so,” I said, though I wasn’t showing him the knife. “I don’t think he was interested in my wallet at all.”

  “But thug will make unconscious first. Then take. Oh, Mr. Harris, you are fortunate to escape. Truly.”

  “I feel that.”

  “I see you back to hotel at once. I think you in pain, yes?”

  “I feel as if a steamroller had been over me. That’s all.”

  He came and walked beside me. I began to feel a little better. He must have been wearing rubber soles for he didn’t make any noise, but it was good to have him there. I’d have even let him talk about English literature. And I wasn’t going to believe anything against Ohashi with the brown dog-eyes. I couldn’t. Not when I was so alone. Why shouldn’t he walk around in the night if he wanted to?