December 6

by Martin Cruz Smith

  “That’s what I said. We catch the Clipper from Hong Kong, and from there the world’s our oyster. A bungalow at the Beverly Hills, breakfast under an avocado tree.”

  “So you are choosing me? I am the lucky girl? I wish I could think of something that was sacred to you to swear by.”

  “I’m choosing California and you, it’s a package deal.”

  “I forgot, you’re not a romantic.”

  “Are you?”

  “No. Of course not. We’re just a pair of black sheep.”

  He placed a kiss on her neck and opened his door. Before he slipped out, he said, “You know what white sheep have? No imagination.”

  HARRY HAD LEFT the Datsun across the street. The more he thought about it, the more he knew that Alice was right. The last thing he should do was look for Michiko. The smartest thing would be to stay out of Asakusa. Just lie low.

  As he slid behind the wheel, he smelled the sweet scent of bay rum.

  Things were black for a moment, then Harry discovered himself lying on the street and looking up at Beechum, who straddled Harry and pressed the edge of a cricket bat across his neck. Tears dripped from Beechum’s face, gone a chalky red.

  “Stay away from my wife,” Beechum was saying. “Hands off my wife.”

  Bigger things at play than adultery, Harry would have said if he could. Diplomatic deafness. The emperor’s new maps.

  “Or I’ll kill you,” Beechum sobbed.

  What was it DeGeorge said? Harry thought. “Get in line.”

  Which earned him another swing of the bat.

  His next conscious moment, Harry was on the sidewalk, unable to do more than raise his head and scan for Beechum, who was gone. An unusual amount of car traffic rolled by on the other side of the car, in the direction of government ministries. Harry concentrated on throwing up. There were dues in adultery. This was one of them.

  Harry next found himself on his feet, rocking like a rocking chair and throwing up on the rear fender of his car. He had a knob the size of a golf ball behind his right ear and a tendency to lurch to one side with every step. Two old women with street brooms giggled with embarrassment while he retrieved his hat and reshaped it.

  “Too much to drink, maybe,” one of the ladies suggested.

  “One too many. I apologize for worrying you.”

  “You should walk,” the first lady said. “Drink less, walk more.”

  WALK? The idea appalled Harry, but he drove only as far as Tokyo Station before the smell of Beechum’s bay rum made him start to retch again and he decided that a long nocturnal stroll was just what he needed to reset his inner ear and stop veering to the side. He had fourteen hours to go before the plane, and as Alice had suggested, the smart thing would be to avoid Asakusa altogether, not to mention Ishigami and the Thought Police. It would have been nice to find Michiko, but he had to consider his own neck first. So, what the doctor ordered was a long, therapeutic walk. For an insomniac, a piece of cake.

  Cars were gathering at ministry offices, but this late, the plaza between the palace and Tokyo Station was quiet, the palace bridges patrolled by a few guards with white-socked rifles. It was wonderful how, on the eve of war, the emperor’s tranquility was maintained. Either the palace was a sinkhole in the middle of reality, or the rest of the world was the emperor’s dream. It almost made a man tiptoe as he went by.

  Foreigners who walked the city alone at night were suspect, but under streetlamps, with his face shadowed by his hat, the gaijin in Harry disappeared. The cool air refreshed him. As he went by the station, he took on a shorter, busier stride. Mastered his direction, swung a cigarette vigorously with every step, and policemen automatically nodded as he went by. One of the necessaries of being a hustler was resilience. He’d piss a little pinker was all. Harry was tempted to pass the night playing cards, but he knew that he wasn’t quite up to a serious game. Also, the less he hit his regular haunts, the better, even if he could practically feel the cards being laid down in Asakusa, hear the snap of the pasteboard, see the tiers of smoke above the table. No one was playing at the ballroom, of course. Haruko had that table to herself.

  The advantage of a great city was its labyrinth of streets and alleys. Especially at night, when drab housefronts turned to the fanciful silhouettes of Chinese eaves and ghostly shirts hung on rods to dry. The discreet murmur of geishas issued from a willow house, a flash like brilliant tropical birds in the dark. Even the meanest alley might have a shrine, candles and coins set before a pair of stone fox gods with eyes of green glass. Foxes could change into women, it was well known, so any encounter with a fox at night had an element of danger for a man.

  East of the palace was a warren of bookstores and print shops. Harry remembered an evening as warm and humid as a bathhouse, the height of Tokyo’s unbearable summer, when Kato had dragged Oharu and Harry to a printer there to pick up a surprise edition of a book entitled Fifty Views of Fuji. It was just a sketchbook, with a print run of one. The pictures had been quickly but deftly done. In each, Mount Fuji’s white skirt hung in the distance, but in the foreground were Asakusa’s narrow alleys, temple festivals and music halls, with Harry either stealing an orange, picking a pocket or smoking at a backstage door, a complete catalog of juvenile delinquency and petty crime. Harry was speechless; if the emperor had awarded him the Order of the Golden Kite, he could not have been more overcome.

  Better yet, as they left the printer, Oharu noticed a cart selling balls of shaved ice in paper cones. Three syrups were offered: strawberry, melon and lemon. “Hurry, before it all melts,” Oharu said, and it was true, a lake spread from the drain hole of the cart. Kato flavored his ice with brandy from a flask. Harry chose lemon. Oharu took both strawberry and melon.

  The lemon ice was tart and fresh. The problem was that it melted so instantly and the cone soaked through so quickly that Harry had to finish his ice in a race. Oharu, with two cones of ice, wasn’t fast enough. Red stripes of strawberry ran down one forearm and orange melon down the other. She wiped her hands with a handkerchief, but that left her arms sticky, and she seemed in such distress that what Harry did seemed natural. He took her arm and licked the syrup off, first the sweet strawberry and then the subtler track of the melon, mixed with the salt of her skin.

  “We’re going to spoil the boy,” Kato said. “He’ll never be able to go home now.”

  Harry realized that, moving for hours as mechanically as a sleepwalker, he had returned to familiar ground. The tea merchant, the willow house, the communal pump. He was on his own block, a black space suspended between corner lamps. It was hard to believe that, only two nights before, the Happy Paris had overflowed with customers drinking, boasting, admiring the Record Girl.

  The club was shuttered and locked, but he heard the murmur of a saxophone. As Harry unlocked the door, the music stopped. He entered and locked the door behind him. The club was dark except for a moonbeam glow around the jukebox, the lowest setting of the light, where Michiko stood with a gun.

  “I’m back,” said Harry.

  Michiko stared as if he were an apparition. “Where were you?”

  “Looking for you.”

  “Not soon enough. Were you busy, Harry?”

  “A lot of places to look.”

  “And women to see?”

  “Here and there.” Trying to stop a war, but Michiko always personalized things, Harry thought.

  She turned the gun around and offered it to him. “Why don’t you just kill me, Harry?”

  “No, thanks. I can see the headline, ‘Tragic End of Woman with Gaijin.’”

  “‘Lovers End Life Together.’”

  “‘Together’? After I kill you, I’m honor-bound to kill myself? My honor doesn’t stretch that far. To be honest, I’d cheat.”

  “Okay.” She turned the gun around and aimed at him. “I waited at the ballroom, then I waited here.”

  “Did you see Ishigami?”

  “No, but I heard him.”

  “Heard
what?” Harry didn’t like the way she put it.

  Michiko brought the words out slowly, as if from a hole she didn’t dare look into. “Haruko came for her stupid dress and hat. So we changed. I was in Tetsu’s office when someone else came. When I went out, Haruko was dead.”

  “Where was Tetsu? Where was everyone else?”

  “He had tattoo fever. He chased everyone out and went home. He said I could wait.”

  “Why were you in his office?”

  “I didn’t want anyone to see me. I was ashamed.”

  “Why?”

  “Haruko said that you were going to China with an Englishwoman. She said you weren’t coming back. Is that true?” She turned the gun toward herself, and he saw that the safety was off. He hated emotional blackmail. At the same time, he admired her nerve, the way she coolly placed the barrel to her temple.

  “No, I said good-bye to my English friend and her husband. They were very good about it.”

  “You’re lying.”

  “Maybe, but I’m back.”

  “You’ll be gone tomorrow, so what does it matter?”

  Harry punched in “Mood Indigo.” “You like this one? Ellington uses a baritone sax instead of a tenor to carry the lead. Did I ever tell you that before?”

  “Every time.”

  “Well, it’s a classy touch. I saw him at the Starlight in L.A., the whole band in white jackets. Duke was in tails.”

  “Don’t do it,” she said when Harry reached for her.

  “What have I got to lose?” He laid her cheek on his shoulder. She resisted for a moment, but they really fit together, he thought. A person couldn’t shoot herself and dance at the same time. They didn’t dance so much as drift. The great thing about “Mood Indigo” was that a couple couldn’t dance too slowly.

  “How many times did you play this song tonight?” he asked.

  “Ten times? Twenty?”

  “You must really like it.”

  She said, “Not anymore.”

  The turntable clicked to a stop. An arm rotated the record to the vertical and let it roll against a soft bumper of felt. For a moment she stayed in his arms.

  Harry heard a clicking noise from the shutters. They were metal, padlocked from the outside against burglars, effectively blinding and trapping Harry and Michiko within. There was no light outside since the neon sign had been broken. It was a Sunday night, a working day tomorrow, the weekend over, time for women to rest their heads on wooden pillows and for the police to knee up to office heaters. No one abroad but goblins, cats and insomniacs. Harry threw on the club’s interior lights and located the source of the sound, a sword tip that vigorously probed one shutter slat and then the next like a tongue. What had he expected? It was just what Alice warned him about. So far, the shutters were holding.

  “Are you staying?” Michiko asked.

  “How can I get out?”

  “No, are you staying?”

  Staying? Harry had never asked himself the question in exactly that way.

  “I wouldn’t leave you. Couldn’t leave you.”

  With those words, Harry pictured the plane, his getaway, the Air Nippon DC-3 in its hangar at Haneda Field. It shone in the dark. Then it disappeared.

  24

  HARRY AND MICHIKO retreated to the apartment. Even there, every sound was Ishigami. A drunk stumbled in the dark against the club and was Ishigami breaking through the shutters. A cat padded across the roof and was Ishigami prying off the tiles.

  Harry assumed that Willie and Iris had weighed anchor. Alice would be packing for Hong Kong. She might be surprised to be traveling alone, but she didn’t need Harry, all she’d needed was a head start. Once she was away from him, she’d see what a narrow escape she’d had. He hadn’t meant to mislead her. Alice was light and sanity. Michiko exercised a much stronger call, the dark where a rib was taken. Being attacked by Beechum didn’t dissuade Harry. With a cricket bat? No, it was a matter of Harry acknowledging that the Nippon Air DC-3 had been a delusion, a fantasy. In the end, he had no choice. There was simply Michiko, all else paled. Even this situation, being trapped with Michiko, now seemed strangely inevitable. He had watched Kabuki all his life and finally had a role. Exit, pursued by samurai. Only there was no exit.

  Harry fed the beetle paper-thin slices of cucumber —with pets came responsibilities— and asked Michiko for the details of what happened at the ballroom. She said she had gone there from Haruko’s as Harry asked. Tetsu, sick with tattoo fever, had closed down the ballroom and gone home. Michiko waited alone in semidark for an hour before Haruko arrived, determined to reclaim her favorite outfit. What Haruko offered in exchange was her second-best dress and information about Harry and the plane to China. They traded in the women’s lounge. Haruko was still there when Michiko, too disgraced to face anyone, slipped into Tetsu’s office at the sound of someone at the ballroom door. Whoever it was, they were quick, in shoes or boots rather than clogs or sandals. Michiko heard no conversation, only a chair dragged across the floor and footsteps that retreated as swiftly as they had come. When Michiko emerged, she found Haruko propped up at the table with the box. Like a mouse and a hawk, she said, it was that fast.

  Harry asked, “Didn’t it strike you that, wearing a dress and hat she had just taken back from you, with her hair styled like yours, Haruko looked like you?”

  “You thought it was me? You were worried?”

  “Well, with their head in a box, a lot of people look alike.”

  Mist started to drain from the street. A woman with a lantern and a roll of kindling on her back bowed deeply to a shadow in the willow-house gate. The lantern briefly lit Ishigami’s eyes, his field uniform and cap, his sword worn blade up. Harry considered a shot but knew that with his powers of marksmanship, he was more likely to hit a cat than Ishigami. The pipes and chimes of other morning peddlers were approaching. If the colonel was going to attack in the dark, time was running out. Under the circumstances, Harry found Michiko’s faith touching. She sat on her heels, a magician’s assistant waiting for a trick.

  “Happy?” he asked, because in a curious way, she seemed to be.

  “Yes.”

  “Why? Right now, being with me is not like winning a lottery. Tell me, Michiko, because I’ve always wondered, how much English do you understand?”

  “Why should I understand English? We’re in Japan.”

  “How much of the songs on the jukebox do you understand?”

  She shrugged.

  Harry suspected that had always been part of the appeal of the Record Girl, her vamping to lyrics that were a mystery to her.

  “For example,” Harry said, “the songs about love.”

  She nodded.

  “You only mouth them,” he said.

  “I think most people only mouth them, American or Japanese.”

  “But you and I have never actually said it to each other, have we? ‘I love you,’ we’ve never said.”

  “Americans say, Japanese do.”

  “Ah, and love is different in Japan.”

  “Yes, and you’re here.” She caught Harry’s glance out the window. “Is the colonel still there?”

  “He’s not going anywhere. He’s after us.”

  “After you. He already cut my head off.”

  An electronic squawk startled Harry. He remembered the loudspeaker hanging on the lamppost at the corner. The pipes and bells of vendors ceased as they listened to the navy anthem pouring from the speaker.

  The music quit, followed by a voice. The voice was humble and excited. The voice flowed through the gray winter morning and multiplied from street to street and house to house. Harry turned on the radio and the voice filled his room: “We repeat to you this urgent news. Imperial General Headquarters announced this morning, December eighth, that the Imperial Army and Navy have begun hostilities against American and British forces in the Pacific at dawn today.”

  Harry read his watch by the light of the radio dial. Six-thirty. “Forces in th
e Pacific”? What did that mean, Harry wondered. Pearl Harbor? The Philippines? Singapore? Hong Kong? But could the Japanese navy have caught Pearl napping? It seemed impossible, except for the mundane human fact that the U.S. Navy held its Christmas parties on December 6. Across the dateline, it was still December 7, a day for sleeping in at Pearl.

  “Will this mean war?” Michiko asked.

  “It is war. We’re in it now,” said Harry.

  Alice Beechum would not be flying out on Air Nippon. Air Nippon was going nowhere; the flight to Hong Kong was as much a ruse as Tojo’s ride in the park. The radio repeated, “The Imperial General Staff announced this morning…” This time the announcement was followed not with the dumb astonishment of a waking population but with spontaneous clapping and cries of “Banzai!” in the street. People opened their windows to share the excitement. As the sky lightened, vendors, the lame and burdened, bowed to one another, standing taller as they straightened up. Schoolchildren erupted from their homes to cheer as if Japan’s warplanes were passing directly overhead.

  “He’s gone.” Harry realized that Ishigami had dematerialized during the announcement. The gateway was empty.

  Michiko joined Harry at the window. “Where to?”

  “I don’t know, but it’s going to get a little crowded here. After the declaration the police will round up Americans. Probably already started.”

  “What will happen?”

  “They’ll hold us in cells for a while and then exchange us. I’m not exactly Abe Lincoln or Andy Hardy, but I am an American citizen.”

  “You aren’t like other Americans. The police will kill you.”

  “I have connections.”

  “That’s why.”

  “The embassy will have a list for repatriation. I’ll be on it.”

  “You must go to the embassy and be sure.”