by Philip Atlee
"I will not do that, Nogi-san," I answered politely. "However, we can try judo. I qualified as a black-belt shodan here in Tokyo, at the Kodokan."
The towering wrestler froze when I said the famous name. He started to glance at the darkened shrine, then checked himself. Straightened and bowed to me.
"I do not practice that discipline, Broderick-san," he announced formally. "We are pleased that you have arrived safely in Japan."
"Thank you." I returned his bow.
"You will be instructed," he added, and I bowed to him again and then to the shadowed niche. Nogi stood watching in silence as I turned out of the heya and walked down the hall. The rain was still failing and before I found another cab, I was drenched.
I got out of that cab in front of a Ginza bar, had one drink, and caught several more cabs. The safe house was as nondescript as all the others behind its walled facade, but a pleasant old man who spoke fragmentary English showed me to my room in the back.
Its far side, all glass, was open to a garden, dripping and gurgling now that the rain had stopped. Everything smelled clean and fresh. While the old man got my bedding from behind a shoji screen, I sat on the tatami mat in the lotus position and felt rather than saw the neat elegance of the room. The wooden ceiling was bare pine; its grain was polished.
When the old man turned and saw how I was sitting, he hissed in commendation and smiled. I told him I would like a bath and he bowed out. I noticed the small television receiver in the left-hand corner of the room but did not turn it on. It seemed the only blemish to the decor, but you can't fight progress.
In twenty minutes I was soaking in the huge wooden tub, and remembering.
I missed the girls. The lovely, laughing little Japanese girls with the incredible honey-colored skin. At the Takimoto Inn in Hokkaido, for example, where they sported around completely nude. As did men, women, and children of all ages, in communal bathing.
Bathing with naked and laughing Nipponese maidens doesn't make a sex idiot out of you. By cultivating control, you can reach the point where a single act of intercourse a day will be sufficient…
Smiling, still missing the sportive nymphs of Takimoto, I dried off and returned to my room.
The white phone in the corner rang and I snatched up the receiver.
"Calling for Colonel Hatta," said a brisk voice. "A cab will pick you up there at five o'clock tomorrow afternoon. Please be ready."
"Absolutely," I answered. "I don't smoke and I don't chew, and I don't go with the girls who do. In fact, my class won the Prize Bible."
There was a short silence and the receiver clickcd dead in my ear. Humming, I switched off the hanging, oval globe, slipped under the warmth of the futon, and fell asleep immediately.
FIVE
WHEN I WALKED INTO THE ELEGANT emerald grill of the Hotel Okura, I could hear more American voices than Japanese. That made it an ideal meeting place. Eleven million people in this city, largest in the world, and my old friend Frank has to arrange a clandestine meet next door to the U.S. Embassy.
I stood looking at the moon-shaped wall of golden bricks, listening to the corps diplomatique gabble, and was turning to leave when a waiter, better costumed than any daimyo, bowed at my elbow.
I followed him to the booth, and my horse-faced young friend from Harvard whinnied in delight. I damned near whinnied an answer, because sitting across from him was a tiny, haughty-looking blonde in a see-through blouse. Ruffled at the neck for propriety.
I sat down next to Frank. When he introduced us, the martini-lag was evident.
"Miss Katja Arnkloo," he announced, "may I present Mr. Broderick."
"I suppose I'm charmed," the petite Venus said, with a marked British accent. The bright imp of nonsobriety was in her tone.
"You don't have to decide right now," I replied, unsmiling and irritated. "Just keep turning the proposition over in your tiny mind. And after you have struggled to a conclusion, put the message in a bottle and toss it into the nearest sewer. Because I don't plan to be in your venue long enough for the answer."
Frank laughed, not very convincingly, and murmured "Christ's sake, old man…"
"My word!" exclaimed the startled, shapely little girl. "You are dour. Is that your bag, stalking around being dour? Or perhaps it is only hemorrhoid distress?"
I stared across the table at Harvard Frank. My most important contact! The canny fellow who had not only gotten zinged with this opulently endowed little tramp when he was supposed to brief me but had managed to do it in a blindingly public place, next door to the U.S. Embassy. He was tittering apologetic, as if he could read my thoughts, and spread both manicured hands in admission of guilt.
"Couldn't the fun-and-games wait?" I asked wearily.
"You misjudge me," he said with drunken dignity. "I don't even own a pornograph."
Miss Arnkloo tinkled with laughter, slugged off the rest of her double martini, and waved for the waiter to set them up again. He turned toward the bar.
"What's it all in aid of?" inquired the little blonde sadly. She was holding her head with both hands, elbows on the table. This action bunched the perfectly formed breasts under the transparent blouse. "I mean, this business of being not only dour but a poltroon as well."
"Sorry," I said. "Didn't mean to be those things." This did not satisfy her, however; she continued to shake her head. The waiter returned, set three huge martinis on the table, and withdrew again.
"Or is it just," continued Katja Arnkloo, "that you were lonely as a child and had to play with yourself? So that you came here expecting someone more like Twiggy… or even wanted to be alone with my date?"
I smiled at her then; what had been a nuisance was now watered by acrimony into controlled rage. Patting her elbows, I asked Katja to forgive my surliness. That I had only seemed that way because I was thunderstruck on meeting her.
"Truth is," I amplified, "I'm an udder man. I was lonely when young, but we lived in the country and I spent the happiest of my puberty years with the teat of a Guernsey milk cow in my mouth. Then, when I was detached from it by main force and ordered to concentrate on girls, I found most of them horrendously meager.
"In high school my comrades and I defined surplus as that part of the female tit you could not get entirely into your mouth. Most of my formative years were spent in a bitter and disappointing search. Then, without warning, here… I met you, and my old Guernsey dream was reborn."
Katja Arnkloo reflected for three seconds and threw her untouched drink into my face. I closed my eyes and the chilled martini drained down from my hairline and ran around my nose. Patting at the juniper-perfumed dampness with a napkin, I stood up.
"I'll say good-bye now," I promised.
"No, no!" Frank was struggling up. "Katja's staying here in the hotel. Half a moment, eh? I'll just see her upstairs and be right with you."
He herded the diminutive beauty by me and she stuck out her tongue as she passed.
I looked at the Japanese waiter, and he looked at me. I won't say he was smiling, but he looked agreeably quizzical. "Would you like another drink, sir," he asked. "Or some food?"
"No. Did they owe you anything?"
"No, sir. The gentleman had just paid before you arrived. They had been here some time."
He stooped and retrieved a lady's jacket from beneath the table. "The lady was wearing this when she entered."
I took the jacket and handed him a tip.
"Where did you go to school in the United States?" I asked.
"Southern Cal, sir. A sociology major."
I could believe it. "Your name?"
"Kita, sir."
"Thank you, Kita. Would you call me a cab?"
The young waiter bowed. "I have already done so, sir. The doorman informed me thai you came by cab, so I have had one waiting since you came to my station. I hope you have a nice evening, sir."
I was bending to enter the cab when Harvard Frank came rushing up. He asked me to come back inside, but I shoo
k my head and walked him out of earshot, along the golden wall.
"There is something you can do," I said, "if you're sober enough to remember it."
He nodded vigorously.
"All right. At five o'clock a car will pick me up. I suspect it will be the same cab you hooked me up with last night. The driver wouldn't talk, wouldn't take a tip, so I want him tailed and his number taken."
"Then what?" Frank asked.
"Then nothing." I said, "Just wait." I got into the cab and gave its driver the address of the safe house.
SIX
EXACTLY AT FIVE O'CLOCK THE OLD MAN came back to my room and said, "Friend come." I nodded and walked down the hall and out the front door. The same cab that had picked me up the night before was waiting, the same nondescript driver. I got in and we rolled away down the darkening street. The sky was overcast with low clouds, stained by the gaudy lights of downtown Tokyo.
When we were several blocks from the Kokugikan Sports Arena, the driver handed me four tickets. "Sit by yourself," he said.
The cab inched along through heavy traffic to the main entrance, and when we were up to it, I stepped out and offered the driver a tip. He shook his head, drove off, and I turned to battle my way through the crowd sluicing inside. The harassed ticket-taker in my lane glanced up when I presented the four fanned tickets. Looked behind me, but I shook my head and he handed me all the stubs.
The location of the seats was good. After taking off my shoes and putting them on the ledge before the small box with the low rim, I relaxed and cased the place. The tremendous hall must have held twenty thousand seats, rising in gentle tiers, and every one of them had an unobstructed view of the ring. There were no columns anywhere.
The big hall was nearly filled, and had been since morning, because sumo tournaments run all day and into the night for several days. Usually it is late afternoon before the expensive seats are filled, because it is not until then that the wrestling stars, the ones "in the tent," appear. There was no bout going on, and I sat listening to the anticipatory hum that is common to sports arenas all over the world. Trying to remember what I knew or had heard about sumo.
Its competitors are not created by accidents, or special aptitudes. For two thousand years, except in brief periods of suppression, the sons and daughters of wrestlers in the sumo guilds have intermarried, and their male children are force-fed on incredible amounts of chanko ryori, which is mixed chicken, beef, and perk with fattening vegetables added. As they grow up, the children deliberately get as fat as they can while exercising as hard as they can. Because of this regimen-gorge and rest, exercise hard-the giants with the distended bellies are not really fat.
The applause and shouting grew louder, because the topflight boys were coming on now. They all had vociferous cliques, including groups of geishas and bar girls sitting together, but to my Western eyes the bouts were fiat. They only lasted a few minutes. The two nimble giants with the glistening topknots and skimpy loincloths would waddle around, hoisting one stiffened leg and then the other, and salt would be sprinkled to purify the ring.
This ritual is part of the Shinto origins of the sport, as is the shrinelike roof holding the spotlights. When the two big-bellies were ready to go, the referee, resplendent in his kimono and flat-sided hat, would motion with his fan and the bout would be on. Champions wore a huge rope belt and elaborate loincloth over the breechclout while being introduced.
The black giant, Nogi, seemed to have a considerable following. The hall shook with applause as he stepped up to the ring and I wondered again how he had managed to get into one of the sumo guilds. His Negro father must have been big. At any rate, his civil rights had not been denied, and he moved in ebony contrast to his equally large opponent.
An overcome Japanese gentleman with spectacles and a white goatee leaned over from the next box and slammed me on the shoulder. That felt more like home, so I nodded at him, punched out my left hand vigorously, and shouted, '"Way to go, Nogi!"
The old gentleman looked saddened, so I knew I had picked the wrong wrestler. He frowned at me, erupted in rapid-fire Japanese, and, clutching the toes of his velvet socks, began to rock back and forth.
I turned to have another look at the old gentleman.
He was Colonel Hatta, and he made an admirable elderly Japanese if you didn't examine his graying hair or wispy white beard too closely.
"Don't watch me, please," Hatta instructed. "Look at the ring."
I looked at the ring.
He began talking rapidly, leaning toward me. The price was $80,000, half payable beforehand, if I would agree to enter Indonesia and remove something to Japan. Get it past customs.
"I don't touch armaments or dope," I said.
"Neither one. What you have to move is a load weighing ten thousand pounds, plus the tare weight of their containers. It must be done within the next month."
"Why?"
"Because the load is precious metals, stored in the vaults of Borobodur."
I grunted. "Why the rush?"
"An international commission from the United Nations' UNESCO Section is moving in immediately to restore Borobodur. Once they begin work on its foundations, the four tons of gold and one of silver will be discovered."
Nogi had won his bout, and applause erupted over the huge arena as the black giant shrugged into his robe and came down the aisle below us.
I applauded with the rest. "What is this?" I asked irritably. "Some ancient treasure with nine bad maps leading to it?"
"No," he said, behind my ear. "The metals are in mint bars and ingots, placed there less than three years ago."
I watched two more ponderous wrestlers "begin cavorting in the brilliantly lighted ring. It seemed to me that Hatta was asking me to help him steal from his own government. "Two crimes, then. A major theft and smuggling of the loot. Or three, if you add smuggling the bullion into Japan."
"No, only two," said Hatta, still not looking at me. "The bars and ingots have already been stolen. You are not concerned in that, only with removing them from Java to Japan."
I didn't answer and he went on hesitantly. "It may sound strange to you, but the theft was not made to realize the intrinsic value of the metals. It was done to preserve them, to keep them out of the wrong hands."
"A trifle confusing," I murmured. "You steal a sizable chunk of the Indonesian Treasury's bullion, which it must need very badly, in order to keep it safe?"
"Yes," said Hatta.
After a pause I said. "It's a deal, if you deliver forty thousand in gold to the place I am staying by three o'clock tomorrow afternoon."
"No problem," murmured Colonel Hatta behind my head. I reached over the low railing of the box for my shoes, slipped into them, and walked out of the sports palace. When I got back to the safe house, Frank was waiting and he looked terrible.
SEVEN
WHEN I CAME IN, FRANK GAVE ME A BIG, world-inclusive smile and steepled his hands under his chin in the Indian namaste gesture.
"You hate me, don'tcha?" he inquired. He was nearly, but not quite, sober.
"No." I put on the heavy socks I had bought for tatami wearing. "I don't know whether the contract I'm on is important or not, but it is supposed to be clandestine. I never saw you before yesterday, yet in one of the best hotels in Tokyo you made asses out of both of us. And I haven't been briefed yet because you had to get loaded, in public, with your Scandinavian doxy."
Frank looked gloomy. And then asked, "My what?"
"The little blonde with the transparent blouse," I said irritably, and he began to laugh.
"Katja Arnkloo is not my doxy. I never saw her until this afternoon, several hours before we met you at the Okura. The fact of the matter is, the young lady, is to be a principal part of your cover in Indonesia."
"Come on now!" I said sharply. "'Nobody in the agency would set a kicky little idiot like that to work with me."
"Nevertheless. somebody did. She is the private secretary of Dr. Groslier, head of the Bo
robodur Mission."
He broke it down further. Katja Arnkloo was from the Paris office of UNESCO. She had come to Japan with Groslier to work on the reconstruction of Barobodur Temple, in Java.
The Indonesian Government had appealed to the United Nations for help, saying that "a monument to all mankind" might be lost. The temple's plight had been surveyed by UNESCO's Bernard Groslier, who had handled the same kind of job on Angkor Wat, and the Dutch Hydrokogist Caesar Voute. They were in agreement, and the United Nations, through UNESCO, had allotted four million dollars for a restoration that could take several years.
Miss Arnkloo; said Frank, knew nothing of my agency connection.
I shook my head doubtfully, because I could not figure out whether I was ahead of. or behind, events. I told Frank about my heya visit and my conversation in the sports arena. He was delighted and said he would report that while no personal contact had been made, a deal had been closed. That the reason for the whole business, now revealed, was removal of five tons of precious metals from the vaults of Borobodur.
"You'll report nothing," I said sharply. "If the advance payment is delivered tomorrow afternoon, we'll talk about the next step then."
"Right." Frank was being boyishly ingratiating. "Hope you'll be around a few more days. I'll be taking delivery soon on an oceangoing Chinese junk. A monster. all the staterooms designed to my specifications.
Built in Hong Kong, launched three weeks ago, and now en route to Yokohama. If you're still here when she arrives, we might latch onto some go-go geishas and run libidinous sea trials on her."
And he gave me a toothy, Saltonstall-type leer.
My thought processes, which had been elsewhere, accelerated and fixed on his lanky figure like a radar needle locking onto a signal.
"You mean that you own a really seaworthy vessel, which will be arriving in Japan soon?"
"Aye, sir. Beauty, too. Nearly two-hundred feet overall, big diesels down below, and fully rigged for sail. Custom-designed, every inch,"
