Ransom

by Jay McInerney

“Join the club.”

  “It’s not who you think. Can’t we go somewhere?”

  “I’ve got to go home.” Ransom put his key in the ignition.

  “It was yakuza,” Marilyn said.

  “Yakuza? Why would the yakuza demolish Miles’s bike? That’s a great idea, Marilyn.”

  A group of Japanese students emerged from Buffalo Rome. Two of them were supporting a third, who was moaning and comatose.

  Ransom asked if he was okay.

  Just drunk, they said. They rolled off down the street as a unit.

  “It’s my fiancé,” Marilyn said. “He’s yakuza.”

  “What fiancé?”

  A few blocks over was an all-night donut shop. Ransom gave Marilyn the spare helmet and waited while she arranged herself on the seat behind him. She asked if she could put her arms around him. “Sure,” he said, “but it’s only three blocks.” A beetle of some kind was riding the tachometer. Ransom tried to brush it away, but discovered that the beetle had somehow gotten inside the tach.

  Dismounting, Marilyn ran one of her stockings.

  At the door of Mr. Donut she said, “I’m not going to use the word yakuza and don’t you either. Okay?”

  Ransom agreed without much conviction. After they ordered coffee, she told her story. He knew she worked in a cabaret, and figured that gangsters weren’t exactly uninterested in nightclubs, so nothing she said amazed him. He just wondered how serious this was for Miles.

  She said she would spare him the whole trip, but she was in a refugee camp in Thailand, Samut Prakan, just south of Bangkok, when a group of Japanese businessmen came through, posing as journalists. She had a pretty good idea of what they were, but her options were few and this was no time to be choosy. She was among several women singled out for interviews. She had a good singing voice and a repertoire of American songs, and they seemed to like the way she looked. They asked her if she would be interested in working in Japan. They would arrange the necessary papers and visas.

  They came for her at night, and the hurried, secretive departure led her to suspect that no visas or papers were involved. They made the last leg of the trip from Korea in the hold of a ship and disembarked at night. The girls, about fifteen in all, were hustled into the back of a truck and dropped off at various towns and cities along the way. She had seen two of the girls since then. One was working in a Turkish bath; the other looked wasted and wouldn’t even acknowledge her. Marilyn was lucky—one of the head men liked her. She was placed in one of the best clubs in Kyoto, and her duties were aboveboard. The man put her up in a nice apartment and began to visit her with flowers. He was decent to her, but was violently jealous. A few months back he began mentioning marriage.

  She lit a new cigarette and sipped at her coffee. “He had me followed. He found out about Miles.”

  “You think he wrecked Miles’s bike?”

  “His men. He doesn’t do anything himself. He’s an oyabun.”

  “You’re sleeping with a goddamned oyabun?”

  She put her fingers to her lips. “Please, not so loud.” Then she said, “It’s better than sleeping with every man who has the price.”

  Ransom didn’t know what to think. “Why are you telling me?”

  “I don’t want Miles to know. If he finds out he’ll do something stupid. I thought maybe you could help me.”

  “How?”

  “That’s what I thought you could help me decide.”

  “There’s always seppuku.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Ritual suicide. How do you talk to this guy? Your Japanese isn’t too swift, is it?”

  “I know you don’t like me but I thought you’d want to help Miles.”

  “Is this fiancé of yours apt to hurt Miles?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Miles almost deserves to get his head bashed but he’s got a wife and a kid on the way. No doubt you’re worried sick about them.”

  “Please, Ransom. I’m not even sleeping with Miles, in case you were wondering.”

  “Fine. There’s your answer. Say Miles is just a friend.”

  “He won’t believe it. He’s convinced.”

  Ransom didn’t really believe it himself. “Why don’t you tell him he has the wrong guy?”

  “Then he will want to know who is the right guy.”

  Ransom didn’t want to think about this now. It seemed improbable and far away. He was still rattled by his lost evening at Buffalo Rome, and very soon he would be sweating his way through practice. But Marilyn was probably right to keep it from Miles, whose ax handle could land him in deep trouble. As little as he liked Marilyn, he was pleased that she had come to him first. If she was telling the truth, she was in a hard spot, and had no one else to help her.

  “Well, tell the oyabun it’s me. Tell him I’m the one you’ve been seeing. Don’t come right out with it or he’ll never believe you. Let him threaten and cajole for a while.”

  “But then he’ll come after you.”

  “Better me than Miles. I’ll think of something.” Ransom didn’t have a plan, but he had his reasons. His first thought was to protect Miles, who had more to lose than he did, but what grew on him was the challenge.

  He put Marilyn in a cab and gave her the number of the coffee shop. They had agreed to meet at the Miyako Hotel at five the next day; he made her promise she wouldn’t talk to Miles in the meantime.

  6

  South China Sea, April 1975

  The Chinese sat at their own table. They ate different food, their faces buried in deep bowls, chopsticks waving in front of their heads like antennae. The children sat on their mothers’ laps, tipping their heads back to receive morsels from the fat, boatlike spoons. The rich smells of their food filled the galley. At the third-class table Ransom ate overcooked food without taste or smell, the Hong Kong version of British cuisine. This morning it had been cold vulcanized eggs and limp toast, tonight a piece of untanned leather with gravy, flaccid gray beans, instant mashed potatoes, grilled tomato garnish. Ransom’s fellow diners included an English schoolteacher on her way to a posting in Hong Kong, a quiet family of Indian Sikhs, and an American hippie whose girlfriend had not once left their cabin, being afflicted with dysentery, the progress of which her boyfriend faithfully reported.

  Ransom had tried to buy fourth-class passage in Penang, but the man at the ticket window on the dock told him there was no fourth class. “What class are those people riding?” Ransom asked, pointing to a Chinese family camped on a pile of bundles in the corner of the ticket office. “They’re Chinese,” the man, a Malay, had said. “I want the cheapest ticket you’ve got,” Ransom said. “I don’t mind sleeping on deck.” The man said that fourth class was only Chinese. “You buy third class,” he said.

  Ransom had come overland from the subcontinent, travelling like a fugitive in third- and fourth-class train cars. He sometimes feared he was being pursued; when he rested his head against the hard wooden benches and closed his eyes, he envisioned Pathan drug runners from the Hindu Kush brandishing long, curved knives and modified M-16s with prayer beads wrapped around the stocks; corrupt Pakistani police familiar with instruments of torture loomed up behind them. Much worse were the apparitions of Ian and Annette. Because he did not know what had happened to Ian, who simply disappeared in Afghanistan, Ransom was unable to imagine anything but the worst: various states of mutilation and dismemberment. Annette he had seen—lying peacefully in the dank, putrid room they had occupied for three weeks, waiting for Ian to come back across the border. Stumbling in the moonlight, Ransom had carried her up the hillside above Landi Kotal. There was no question of going to the police. Annette was past help, which may have been where she wanted to be. Ransom was where he didn’t want to be, on the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan, a place without law. The authorities would have kept him in the country, subject to an investigation that would last as long as they thought they could squeeze out additional baksheesh. Ransom did what he had t
o do. But still.

  He belonged on a ship like this: rusting, dirty, infested with rats. The rats seemed to be in command, confident of their rights. The steward, the cabin boys, the waiters were silent and distracted. The brass fittings had turned brown and green with neglect. Crew members were occasionally seen in groups of two or three, smoking in some corner. They fell silent and dispersed at the sight of a passenger. Ransom spent much of his time on deck, looking out over the curved sea. It would have been better, he thought, if the earth had been flat, if you could arrive at the point where the known stopped and the unknown began, where you could finally say—this is the end, or the beginning. He vaguely imagined Japan as such a place, a strange island kingdom at the edge of the world, a personal frontier, a place of austere discipline which would cleanse and change him.

  The waiter had cleared plates and replaced them with dishes of green Jell-O when the intercom began to click and buzz. “Attention. Attention all passengers. This is the captain speaking. The republic of South Vietnam is just coming into view over our port bow.”

  The passengers drifted to the upper deck. Daylight was falling into the west over the stern. At first Ransom could see nothing but the crests of waves catching the last sun. Then someone called, “Look, there.”

  A thin sliver of land was wedged between sky and sea. Within minutes the land was plainly visible, and above it, a random succession of dull yellow flashes.

  “Lightning?” the schoolteacher said.

  The hippie laughed.

  The soft pink and gold illuminations were hypnotic. Ransom watched as the weird light grew brighter in the darkening sky. So that’s it, Ransom thought. Later, when the boat docked at Hong Kong, he would learn that what he had seen was the final battle for Saigon.

  The passengers watched the flickering show of lights in silence. Ransom stayed at the rail until the peninsula had crossed over their stern and the light was little more than a dim, pulsing glow.

  7

  From a deep sleep Ransom woke into a sovereign state of anxiety. For a moment he held back on the edge of waking, with the notion of slowing the inevitable. Sunday morning, once the start of the Lord’s day.

  Ransom slipped on a pair of boxers, washed, shaved and rolled up the bed. He pulled back the doors to the terrace and stepped outside, where two sets of karate gi were hanging from the clothesline. The view from the terrace was the backsides of the houses on the next street, rigged out like galleons with TV antennae and clotheslines. Above the tiled rooftops, the sky was overcast. If it rained, practice would be cancelled.

  Beneath the terrace was Kaji’s garden, an immaculate plot with stones and dwarf trees that gave the illusion of major landscape. Presiding over the ornamental puddle was a ceramic tanuki, an animal that the Japanese loved inordinately and that seemed to Ransom a bear-racoon hybrid. The buds of the cherry tree were swollen and showing pink, the tortured yellow branches of the trained pine tipped with a new green. As he looked down, a ferret darted from underneath the house with a piece of paper in its mouth and dashed across the pebbles to the water; it rose on its hind legs to examine the tanuki and test the air. Ransom whistled. The ferret looked up at him, then bolted underneath the fence, leaving the paper behind. Ransom tried to remember if a ferret was a good or bad omen. In Japan, everything was some kind of omen.

  The first to arrive, Ransom changed into his gi and began to sweep the parking lot. They only trained inside during rainy season, when there was space reserved for them in the gym. The sensei had no use for padded mats and controlled temperature. Asphalt toughened the soles of the feet and gave you an incentive to stay on them. The winter had been cold and they had often practiced with snow on the ground. The biggest problem in winter was your toes; you couldn’t feel them until you jammed one, and then it was like a dentist’s drill hitting a nerve. The sensei had a shiatsu method of unjamming toes which involved yanking on them. In November Ransom had broken the middle toe on his left foot. He still taped the toe and favored right kicks. The doctor told him to lay off karate for two months. The sensei told him to tape it and forget about it.

  He hoped he would have time to finish sweeping the lot before anyone arrived. He liked having the morning to himself. It would get violent and sweaty soon enough.

  Ransom learned how to sweep when he started with the dojo. His first lessons were in bowing and sweeping. Ransom had been desperate to join. The sensei had not been eager to take on a foreign disciple. There were dojos that catered to gaijin but his wasn’t one of them. He did not believe gaijin had the stuff. His reluctance convinced Ransom that he had found the right teacher.

  Every night for a week Ransom watched them practice. He had not noticed the fighting so much as the grace of movement. The best of the students gave the impression of quadruped balance and intimacy with the ground. They conveyed an extraordinary sense of self-possession. For months Ransom had drifted across landscapes in a fevered daze, oblivious to almost everything but his own pain and guilt. The dojo with its strange incantations and white uniforms seemed to him a sacramental place, an intersection of body and spirit, where power and danger and will were ritualized in such a way that a man could learn to understand them. Ransom had lost his bearings spiritually, and he wanted to reclaim himself.

  Finally Ransom approached the sensei with a speech he had worked up out of the dictionary. It was the only time Ransom would see him entirely at a loss. Later the sensei told Ransom that he would have gotten rid of him if he had known how. The sensei’s English and Ransom’s Japanese were equally poor; the sensei struggled to explain in Japanese that he was not equipped to handle a foreigner. His was a small dojo. The gaijin-san would feel more at home elsewhere. The sensei repeated this, speaking very slowly, and then retreated into the gym with his clothes under his arm. Ransom was back the next night, and the night after that. The third night, after practice, the sensei gave him a piece of paper with what turned out to be an address, written in both Japanese and painstaking roman characters. He pointed to his white suit, then to the piece of paper.

  Ransom was waiting the next night in his crisp new gi, short in the arms and legs. When the sensei arrived he handed Ransom a broom. Ransom began to sweep the lot. The sensei stepped in several times to correct his technique. Ransom wasn’t sure what to make of it. After the seated meditation, the sensei took him off into a corner of the lot. Through Suzuki, a college student who spoke more English than anyone else in the dojo, the sensei explained that bowing was the first skill to be mastered in karate. Suzuki demonstrated the proper bow. It looked simple enough—the all-purpose bob that Ransom had been seeing since he first arrived in the country. The sensei took Ransom over to the post wrapped in hemp. Ransom had seen the others punching it, but the sensei wanted him to practice bowing to it. He spent the next hour doing so, while the others leaped and kicked. The sensei came over several times to watch, shaking his head each time and demonstrating once more. Ransom watched and tried to determine what was different and crucial in the sensei’s bow. He wondered if there was an exact angle of inclination, if the thing was codified that far; Ryder told him months later that department stores had machines designed to train their employees to bow correctly. Ransom concentrated on putting as much sincerity and humility into it as he could. After an hour his lower back was aching and his store of sincerity exhausted.

  After a closing round of seated meditation, the sensei handed him the broom. Wondering why this was necessary after practice, Ransom swept the lot again from one end to the other.

  The next night was the same. While the others followed their secret choreography, Ransom stood in the dunce corner bowing to his post. The sensei came around twice to measure his progress but offered no comment. Ransom’s back ached so severely the next day that he could hardly get out of bed. He walked to the public bath hunched over like the old country women he saw sometimes at the bus stops, women who spent their lives bent doubled over in rice fields.

  At the end of the thi
rd night he was convinced he was being systematically humiliated. The sensei hadn’t wanted him in the dojo to begin with. When he came around to watch, Ransom was too stiff to bow fluidly, and the proper mix of humility and sincerity was out of the question.

  Practice finished, he was changing into his street clothes when the sensei held out the broom. Ransom continued buttoning his shirt and didn’t look up. When he got to the second-to-last button he saw there were three buttonholes left. The sensei saw, too. He held out the broom. Ransom rebuttoned and tucked in his shirt, then took the broom and snapped it in half over his knee. He laid the two halves down at the sensei’s feet and was out in the street before he realized he had left his shoes behind.

  The shoes were sitting beside the door of the gym when he arrived the next night, under a folded-paperbag tent. Ransom was fifteen minutes early. He had brought a new broom. The sensei arrived as he was beginning to sweep. Ransom continued sweeping. The sensei walked over to the post and began punching. Ransom laid down the broom and approached him. The sensei changed hands and hit the post fifty times before turning to look at Ransom. Ransom drew himself up, clenched his fists at his side and bent deeply from the waist. He kept his head down.

  Okay, the sensei said. Good.

  Ransom had finished sweeping when Udo arrived. He walked like a sumo wrestler, with a semicircular swing of his legs, looking like he was carrying something between them. Udo had been a body builder before he joined the dojo and the hypertrophied pectorals and thighs that had won two Mr. Kyoto titles were no help with karate. He could bench-press two hundred kilos, but his punches were slow and ineffective.

  Initially, Udo had refused to acknowledge Ransom’s existence. The sensei forced him to do so by letting a match between them run on much too long. Udo went down three times. After the second knockdown there was blood all over the front of Udo’s gi. Ransom had no heart to go on, but he knew better than to question the sensei’s tactics. The next day Udo began to ask Ransom for pointers. Later, when Ransom had carburetor trouble with his bike, Udo brought him down to the service station where he worked, showed him all the features of the three-bay garage with hydraulic lifts, showed Ransom off to his friends and refused payment for the rebuild of the carburetor. Since then they had been out fishing a few times.