Dead Man Calling

by Gavin Black

  I thought I was much better, but there was a sudden check on that. I had to stop abruptly, and lean over the grass verge, very sick indeed. After a moment Ohashi came and held my head like a mother.

  It was while I was still looking down that I noticed he was wearing a pair of those black, cloven, rubber and canvas tabe.

  CHAPTER VI

  SLOWLY MY HEAD came up. Above those tabe Ohashi wore the neat near-black trousers of the student’s uniform, then the tunic, buttoned up, except at the neck. He might have opened the neck because of the warmth of the evening, or not had time to do it up. He had no cap on, which put him officially out of uniform. It might account for the split-toed shoes, suitable for an evening stroll. They took you silently where you wanted to go. Very silently.

  Ohashi smiled.

  “To be sick in this case is good thing.”

  “Have you been following me?”

  He looked a bit sheepish.

  “Not exactly. I come to see you at the hotel. But they say you go, they not know when you come back. So I go to restaurant. I eat raw fish. Stomach very full, you see. Then I lie down on sand and am sleeping.”

  “You’ve been sleeping all evening?”

  “I think a long time, yes. My mother perhaps worry. She very conservative. She like me in at eleven. Like boy. She is afraid of Tokyo, which she thinks very bad.”

  “You live here with your mother?”

  “So.”

  The moon was on Ohashi’s face, giving it an innocence so settled that it couldn’t be a mask. He was too young for the mask. It wasn’t quite a coincidence that he had been near the Daibutsu either, not if he had spent his evening trying to track me down. I could see him doing that, Ohashi the simple student doing that.

  He might, of course, not be a student at all. Anyone can wear their uniform. It could have been Ohashi who followed me down from Tokyo, that shadow Marla had hinted at. He could just have nipped on to that train before me, when he saw I was going to make it. On the other hand I was sure I would have noticed. There had been no one between me and that door hissing shut when I made my dash. A man on my trail couldn’t have managed things quite so neatly as that.

  He mightn’t have been on my trail then, but been recruited here in Kamakura. The real tracker might have spotted us together and realised how useful Ohashi could be. You can do a lot in Japan with a little money, especially with students who never have any.

  “I take your arm now, Mr. Harris. You are very tired.”

  I let him do more than that, I put mine around his shoulders, and his arm went round my waist. I could feel the strength in the slight figure, not a boy’s strength at all. I let him lead me even when after a moment or two the nausea passed and didn’t return. The thoughts in my mind pushed against each other.

  Only a clever man could come back after an attack like that, to find out something. Had he seen me with the knife? Was that what he wanted? He wouldn’t get it. Or did he want to find out what action I contemplated?

  “Should I go to the police, Ohashi?”

  “I think so. Oh, yes.”

  “Well, I’m not going to. And you’re not to say anything about what I’ve told you. I’ll deny it if you do.”

  “I do not understand?”

  “I just want to get to bed and sleep. I’m not seeing the police tonight. I couldn’t talk to anyone. Even if I let you report it they’d come nosing round and wake me up. I’m not having it.”

  “But it is bad thing to have robber in public place.”

  A civic conscience. His voice was very serious. Either he felt this or he was a tidy little actor.

  “Where are we going?” I asked.

  We were turning into a lane, a dark one, off the road.

  “Quick way to hotel.”

  I leaned on him heavily. I wanted him to feel me weak, but though I was battered I could resist again now. I could even use that knife if I had to.

  It was a shortcut to the hotel, through a small gate into the garden, down a path to the gravel drive. We were soon crunching along towards a few lights, though the bulk of the building was dark.

  “It is sore for you to go up steps, I think, Mr. Harris. Please put weight on me.”

  We went into the lobby. We could see a clerk asleep behind a desk with a naked bulb glowing over it, but the man didn’t wake. We climbed the stairs, two sets of them to my room on the top floor. Ohashi opened the door when we got there, and I knew our return hadn’t been seen by anyone. It surprised me a little to find the hotel open like that, for they’re usually watchful and frightened of burglars. Perhaps other guests were still out.

  We stood in the room, after Ohashi had shut the door, looking at each other. He smiled.

  “Mr. Harris, I am good with massage. Please let me do. You will sleep.”

  “Massage?”

  I dropped the jacket on a chair, but so the knife wouldn’t clink. Then I took off my shirt and put that over the jacket.

  “Look,” I said.

  I could see myself, in a wall mirror, great welts, red now, but likely to be pretty tomorrow.

  “I not hurt you, Mr. Harris. You tell me and I stop.”

  “Okay. Help yourself to a cigarette.”

  I knew exactly where the knife was. I could roll off the bed and get it out of that pocket almost in one movement. With a knife I am at home. It’s something boys learn to be in Malaya.

  I got into pyjama trunks I’d bought at the shop for the hot weather and lay down on the bed. I groaned as I did it.

  Ohashi’s hands were quite astonishing, moving skin and tissue with a curious gentle rippling that was incredibly soothing. My legs weren’t bruised but when he reached my chest and stomach and arms he somehow felt his way about the burning pain and I don’t know why but the pain lessened.

  “Turn over, please.”

  I was sure this was the test. I turned over, slowly, like a man reluctant to do it, half drugged already with weariness. I put my head on one side, facing towards him, dropping the lids over my eyes so that I could still see him but it wouldn’t seem like that.

  He went on with his work slowly, and as he did it his tongue came out sometimes. I saw the sweat glistening on his forehead from the effort which, though gentle to me, required an endless and continuous movement that was bound to be fatiguing. I was feeling better and he must be becoming tired.

  Suddenly the hands stopped.

  “That enough, Mr. Harris. You sleep now. I come and see you tomorrow? But not in morning. In morning I am at Festival.”

  I turned over again slowly and looked at him. There was no doubt now that he intended to leave me. He had done his work which would relax me and I’d soon sleep.

  “Festival?” I said, dully, but remembering Susie. “What kind?”

  “Journey of Fox God. Once a year. We take shrine. You have seen in pictures. Two shrine. Then fight. Many fight.”

  “A street fight?”

  “Oh, yes. Many. We drink also. My mother not like. Very angry. But I go.”

  “It sounds like a tourist attraction. I’d better look at it. Meantime, no word to the police about tonight.”

  “As you say, Mr. Harris.”

  He smiled again. What good teeth the boy had.

  He switched out the light at the door and went out. I waited for perhaps five minutes, then I went over and turned the key in the lock, very gently indeed. I also put the back of a chair under the handle. There was no private bathroom, only the one door and the window. In spite of the heat I locked that, too. Then I went to the bed and lay on it, wondering whether Ohashi was coming back to try and finish, in his own time and his own way, his night’s work.

  But there was no sound at all until about an hour later some drunks came back, very noisy on the landing. There must have been another party in Kamakura that night, a good one from the sound of things.

  The knocking on the door was violent. I woke, thinking at once of the police. The room was very hot and close, the seal
ed-up lair I had made flooded now with sunshine.

  I remembered everything, including the knife in my jacket pocket. I’d meant to do something about that after a suitable lapse of time, but sleep had been demanding. The knock came again.

  “Breakfast, sir.”

  I had ordered it up here. I had no dressing-gown and went over in the crumpled shorts, removing the chair as quietly as I could, and turning the key. The waiter smiled with professional morning cheer. Then the smile dropped. It made me look down at my chest and arms. They looked as might be expected, a pattern of purple on a palish background of skin a bit bleached by my time out of the tropics.

  “You are hurt, sir?”

  “I fell. It’s nothing. Thanks.”

  I didn’t want to think about the waiter, someone else staring at me, making mental notes for re-issue later. I kicked the door shut and took the tray over to a table near the window, picking up the Tokyo daily English newspaper on it, letting the breeze put cool fingers on my skin while I read. On page after page there was no mention of Mikos.

  It wasn’t twenty-four hours since the killing, but I had the feeling then of a man who has been waiting an almost unendurable time for the inevitable. Beyond the window and the pines was the sea, a bright new blue, all the omens for a calm, hot day, a day that could be very pleasant for a man who wasn’t, in his way, on the run. Perhaps I’d allowed myself to slip into an attitude of mind about being a fugitive, and I should push away the thought of police, just using what was here. That would mean the beach. Why not?

  After all, Mikos’s killing had certainly given the police an interesting assortment of lines to follow up and my particular performance, while seeming highly dramatic to the performer, mightn’t yet be interesting them very much. They might have found another that was much more interesting. For all I knew I might even be in the clear.

  I sat down to breakfast with an applied optimism, for the moment even forgetting about that chopping-board knife in the pocket of my mangled jacket. I remembered with the second cup of coffee.

  The hotel was one of those compromise structures, an approximation of Western building with Eastern features. One of these features was sliding wooden shutters fitted to all the windows. Probably these were used in winter storms, and the shutters were housed in little boxes attached to the outside wall. The wooden panels, which were quite light, simply slithered along their runway on the ledge and into the box, where they were tucked away like leaves in a folio. I put the knife there, very gently prising forward the four shutters and sliding it in behind the last one. It seemed as good a hiding place as any, particularly with the glass shoved along towards the box end of the sash. A cursory search of my few possessions wouldn’t be likely to carry on as far as that.

  I leaned on the sash for a while looking down, to where the beach was gold and already glittering and the tide seemed to be coming in, with lazy, amiable rollers, here and there the flick of a white crest. The water would be cold by tropic standards, but the sand baking. I wanted to lie on it and get my tan back.

  “Hallo,” Reggie said.

  He was standing in the doorway looking like the British colonial on a P. & O. liner the day of the changeover into tropic kit, a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up to just below the elbows and a pair of blue serge shorts. I looked at them and they were serge. He also wore cute little socks and sandshoes.

  “All ready for deck quoits?” I said.

  He laughed.

  “Oh, this? Actually I’m going for a walk. To sweat off some alcoholic poundage.”

  My back was to the bright light. As yet he hadn’t noticed my markings. I considered him carefully, as a physical specimen, fairly fit, with just a hint of that slight extra weight you can so easily begin to carry at his age and mine. His hands, too, were small, very neat looking. But it hadn’t been Reggie wearing black last night. On the other hand Reggie had a chauffeur, a young Japanese ronin who might be very well paid indeed to do his master’s bidding in anything at all, however superficially unconventional.

  I knew that I was beginning to be somewhat obsessed by this feeling of the threat to me close all the time, practically a breath on my neck even in the sunshine. But there was good reason for the feeling. It would have been difficult, under the circumstances, for even the most besotted optimist not to sense that he was under observation, and pretty continually at that.

  When he did see the purple trophies Reggie was at once alert and interested and reacted quickly with a piece about Japanese thuggery of the old bad type on the increase again despite dem-mo-kra-shi.

  “He didn’t get your wallet, Paul?”

  “No, I think it was my life he was after. Failing that he cleared off.”

  “Good lord. You’ve told the police?”

  “No. And I’m not going to. I’m being secretive about this. I’m going to cover my sores with suntan oil and toast them down on that beach.”

  “But you can’t leave it like that!”

  “Look, Reggie, I’m feeling rather smug this morning. The type who can still look after himself in a scrap. If I report this I’ll have to answer a bookful of questions about myself, my family life back for three generations, and too much about my business. As soon as the deal is fixed up one way or another I want to catch the first plane south out of here. There wouldn’t be a hope in hell of doing that if I was involved in some business with local thugs. I’d have to hang on as potential witness in a prosecution that might never come up. I’m just not doing that. So don’t go all civic-minded. It’s not your country. Any duties you have in it are entirely towards Spratt and Lielson. Remember that. If you don’t, I’ll drag you in as a witness or something. That’s a warning.”

  He took one of my cigarettes and sat down.

  “Paul, why did you suddenly arrive in Kamakura out of the blue?”

  “It’s a resort, isn’t it? I was hot.”

  “So you came down here on a sudden impulse. You had to buy the things you needed to stay in a local shop.”

  I looked at him.

  “How and why do you know that?” I asked.

  “I’m a nosy type. I haven’t tried to hide it. Furthermore I’m keeping pretty close tabs on all parties interested in that dear little diesel. You see the people I work for still hope to get it.”

  “I came down here because I was chasing a beautiful blonde secretary. Didn’t you see me last night, with my tongue hanging out?”

  “To hell,” Reggie said. “I may join you on the beach later.”

  “Do. But bring your own oil. I’m going to use the whole of my bottle.”

  I did just that, down on the beach, having left my wallet in the hotel safe, with practically nothing of interest amongst the few personal effects in my room. I walked out wearing swimming-shorts and carrying a big bath towel draped around my top half, padding along the grass to avoid the sharp stones of the gravel. The sand on the beach was very hot, and well back, sheltered by a dune with grass on it, I settled in, coating myself in the liquid grease, a man on the run suddenly vastly immobile in an aggressive sort of way. The sun prickled on me, especially on the welts. I didn’t really feel relaxed, just waiting, as comfortably as possible.

  There was a kind of noise from the town, a long way off. The gong bangers were back at work, but it was something else, the distant shouting of a mob, the kind of sound the Chinese make at a big funeral or wedding, people roaring in the heat when you’d have thought they would choose to be sensibly quiet. Far down the beach were a few parties of people, but it was mainly deserted, too early yet for the swimming hour and the drinks after it. I closed my eyes.

  I opened them because I knew I was being observed. A little boy was standing in the soft sand in front of me, about eight I should say. He was slight, but tall for his age, wearing only a pair of blue swimming-trunks, his body bronzed with the summer look of health. He had jet black hair and at first glance I thought he was a Japanese. Then I saw his eyes. They were violet-coloured, bright, s
tartling.

  I sat up slowly, not quite believing this. Marla’s eyes were looking at me.

  “Been swimming?” I asked, after a moment.

  The boy shook his head.

  “No, it’s too soon. The water’s cold.”

  His English was without accent, but with the words spaced slightly, as though he had to stop and think.

  I was hit then by the feeling that comes to a man when he sees boys about the age his own son would have been. It hits you as sharp loss that doesn’t seem to blunt at all, of waste, of living written off. It brings a kind of loneliness of failure.

  I reached out and filled my hand with sand and let it trickle away between my fingers.

  “You on holiday?” I asked.

  “Yes. Are you?”

  “You could call it that.”

  The little boy sat down, putting his thin brown arms around his knees and looking, not at me, but at the bright glitter of the sea. His head was bent forward on a slight, almost fragile seeming neck. It’s this apparent fragility of children, false usually, which gets you. They look vulnerable, not able to defend themselves in a jungle.

  I knew now that he was Eurasian. The boy had luck in one way, he was good-looking, and would grow up like that. It helped in the jungle. I knew, too, with a kind of pounding in my mind, that he was Marla’s child. You could see it in the line of his small nose, and his mouth, too. Little boy lost, though he mightn’t know it yet, between two worlds. He was also Harry Komatsu’s child, but I didn’t let that in.

  Reggie hadn’t said anything about this. It just might be one of the things Reggie didn’t know.

  “Where are you staying?”

  “In a hotel. A Japanese one.”

  From the way he said that he wasn’t pleased about the hotel. And I knew that the boy was with Harry, not with his mother.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Joe.”

  A nice simple handle for a boy to take around with him. I wondered if that was Marla’s doing.

  “Joe Komatsu,” I said.

  He looked up startled, those eyes on me.

  “Hey! I didn’t tell you.”

  “I’m a good guesser.”