December 6 (V5.0)

by Martin Cruz Smith

  Oharu was Harry’s best friend at the theater, his older sister and secret love. Harry had seen her only in chic skirts and French hats. He moved another cast to pull more of the drop cloth off. A second, almost finished print was of Oharu at a cherry-blossom party, wrapped in a maiden’s pink kimono and seated on a quilt covered with fallen pink and white blossoms. It would have been a portrait of innocence itself, except for the fact that the quilt was planted with bottles of sake and beer. Oharu slumped to the side, her eyes slitted with drink, a ukulele forgotten in her hands. Golden bees crawled over the blossoms, bottles, Oharu’s hair. A third print was so dark it took Harry a moment to understand it was a ballroom flecked by the reflections from a mirror ball on dancing couples, black figures on a blue floor, the only one identifiable, Oharu, in a red kimono waiting by the slanted light of a half-open door.

  By now Harry couldn’t stop. He uncovered a stack of prints, a catalog of copulation, on every page a samurai or monk inserting his monstrously swollen erection into a woman experiencing such transport that her eyelids were closed and her teeth bit into cloth as if to stifle any outcry, while, under a kimono’s disarray, her legs splayed, the gaping bush lay exposed and her toes curled in ecstasy. The main thing so far as Harry was concerned was that the prints were antiques, not of Oharu.

  “Interested?” Kato asked.

  Harry hadn’t heard the artist return. There was no point in trying to hide the prints. “What are they?”

  “Treasures. Instruction for a bride, entertainment for an old man, a charm a samurai would be proud to carry in his helmet. Now items of shame, victims of Western morality. You know, Harry, Westerners know so little about and seem to take so little pleasure in sex, it’s a wonder they propagate at all. Your father, of course, is the worst.”

  “Why him?”

  “Because he is a missionary and a missionary is a murderer, only he murders the soul. And he is smug about it. If it were up to your father, Japan would have no Shinto, no Buddha, no Son of Heaven and no sex. What would be left?”

  “What about the pictures of Oharu? I like those.”

  “You do? One moment you’re a snoop, the next you’re a connoisseur.”

  “Could I buy one?”

  “Buy?” Kato put the medicine down to cough, slowly open his cigarette case and regauge the conversation. “That’s different. I should treat you with more respect. These portraits of Oharu are not for any ordinary print run. They are one-of-a-kind, special collector’s editions.”

  “I’ll pay over time.”

  “It might take your lifetime. I don’t know of any missionary boy, even you, Harry, who can afford that. Which one were you thinking of?”

  Harry scanned Oharu in the car, the cherry blossoms, the ballroom.

  “The ballroom.”

  “Ah, very telling, because she seems to be waiting, doesn’t she, hoping to dance. The room is so dark you might even be in it. You’d wait for the right dance, of course. She’s a little tall for you now, but in the fantasy she’s perfect, her ear to your cheek. That’s the charm, you know, of the ballroom dancer or café waitress. Not sex but conversation. Japanese men don’t talk to their wives. The most normal relationship they have is with their favorite waitress. How would you get that kind of money, Harry?”

  Harry was truculent, devoid of ideas. “Some way.”

  “That covers a lot of ground, all of it dishonest. I’ll have to think about that before you start robbing people in the streets. But, as an artist, I’ve never been more flattered.”

  Harry was good with a knife and glue, and Kato found work for him after school at the Museum of Curiosities, helping the proprietor patch its half-human monsters. Harry especially liked the mermaids with their long horsehair and lacquered skin of papier-mâché, hideous fangs and sunken eyes, like the remains of a nightmare washed up on a beach. Harry earned more money when Kato entrusted him with the carving of censors’ seals for certain reproductions, fakes. Kato taught him how to trace old seals on translucent paper, transfer the paper to balsa and carve an exact copy that would add the stamp of authenticity.

  “Who knows?” Kato said. “You may be an artist yet.”

  “I can’t draw.”

  “But you have a steady hand. Do you suppose that comes from picking pockets?”

  “I’m not doing that so much anymore.”

  “Go ahead. Artists steal all the time, that’s why taste is so important.”

  One thing preyed on Harry’s mind. “You’re not going to hold it against me that my father is a missionary?”

  “No. I’ve taken my revenge on him.”

  “What kind?” Harry wondered how Kato could ever reach a zealot like Roger Niles.

  “Ah, Harry, you’re revenge enough.”

  9

  A TEA CART WITH scones and cream, strudel and napoleons rattled around the lobby of the Imperial Hotel. The Imperial had been the safe haven of well-heeled tourists, especially Americans who were amplified, on-the-road versions of themselves, busy with backslaps and laughs that had boomed up to the lobby’s timbers. The Imperial had been designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, who piled brick and lava rock in a grandiose style suggestive of a Mayan temple. Harry thought the hotel, with its vaulting shadows and wintry drafts, was a proper set for Dracula. Still, it was sad to see the tea cart make its circuit around the lobby like a trolley car in an empty city.

  Also, Harry owed the Imperial. He’d come back to Japan for a public relations job that fizzled and left him high and dry, with not even enough money for return passage, until the American All-Stars came to town. Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig and Lefty O’Doul led a tour by the world’s greatest ballplayers and their wives. Naturally, they stayed at the Imperial. Harry was stalking the lobby for a tourist who might need a knowledgeable guide when a receptionist came up all aflutter. Harry expected the heave-ho. Instead, the receptionist bowed and asked if he would please proceed to the pool garden. When Harry got there, he found an official welcome that was falling apart. On one side of the garden were the Japanese in formal cutaways and kimonos with stacks of boxes, on the other side was a straggling line of the All-Stars in baseball uniforms and their wives in furs. In the middle was a movie camera with an operator who spoke no English, which was just as well because every time his assistant tried to push Mrs. Ruth within camera range, she told him to keep his mitts off. The Babe had had a little brandy in his breakfast coffee and tried to nudge O’Doul into the water. When the Babe’s wife told him to stop acting like an ape, the Babe gave her a playful pop on the shoulder. Meanwhile, the Japanese hosts grew smaller, their eyes wider. The girls in kimonos inched back, ready to run. One of the wives, a marcelled blonde in a fox stole, yawned and spat a wad of gum into the pool, setting off a tussle among the goldfish.

  Harry figured this was a classic case of nothing to lose. He stepped forward and announced in English, on behalf of the hotel, how honored the Imperial was by the presence of the All-Stars and their lovely wives, and responded in Japanese, on behalf of the players, how impressed they were by the warm hospitality of the famous Imperial Hotel. He spoke rapidly, no seam between English and Japanese, respectfully but with animation, easing each side toward the middle of the garden, directing the cameraman to start filming, interpreting speeches back and forth, signaling the Japanese girls it was safe to distribute gifts, a happi coat for each player and towels for their wives.

  “Do I look wet?” Mrs. Ruth asked Mrs. Gehrig.

  The Babe got in the mood, posed in his happi coat and pushed a dimple into his cheek. Before leaving the garden for the ballpark, he lit a huge Havana and asked Harry, “Kid, you want to make some change? My stepdaughter’s along. She’s cute and she likes to trip the light fantastic. Just keep your hand off her ass or I will feed you to the fucking goldfish.”

  “Sounds good,” said Harry. He stuck with the All-Stars for the rest of their tour and, by the end, had been hired by the movie company to do promotion, which was the kind of work he had do
ne in the States. From then on he felt a debt of gratitude to both the Babe and the Imperial.

  Now he picked up a paper from the hotel newsstand for any word of Ishigami. Nothing. Found an article about the Giants’ midwinter practice and dedication to victory. Returned to the front page and read that the Germans had as good as taken Moscow, as they had for weeks. In America, Charles Lindbergh declared that there was “no danger to this country from without.” Tensions in Washington had eased, negotiations were back on track. Roosevelt was more conciliatory. According to Ripley’s Believe It or Not, most chimps were left-handed. All the stories sounded equally likely to Harry.

  The bar was virtually empty. The only occupants Harry saw at first were German officers from the blockade-runner. It was a long run from Bordeaux, evading British cruisers or the torpedo of a submarine, twenty thousand miles not to fire a shot but to carry precious rubber to Germany, and there was something exhausted about the men and the way they sank into their schnapps. Of course, the Imperial was lucky to have them. Aside from troopships, international travel had come to a halt. Tokyo’s World Fair and Olympic Games had been canceled, luxury liners called home, embassy dependents ordered out. In the far corner Harry found Willie Staub with DeGeorge and Lady Beechum.

  “Harry.” Alice Beechum offered her hand for a kiss. She was pink as a petit four offering a taste. Pink as a Gainsborough portrait, pinker than pink with an exuberant mass of ginger hair. On the Tokyo stage, actresses who played Europeans wore ginger wigs. Alice’s blue eyes and ginger hair were her very own, and Harry also remembered breasts with the tang of Chanel.

  “Lady Alice. I saw your husband this morning.”

  “Yes. He was so worked up when he got home, he was ready to strangle puppies. He told me he gave you quite the rocket. He was very proud. Then he went off to toss medicine balls or something with his pals.”

  “You’re not a popular man at the British embassy, Harry,” DeGeorge said.

  “I’ll slit my throat.”

  “Get in line.”

  Willie was sipping tea, but for everyone else at the table “tea” meant martinis or MountFujis, gin with a peak of frothed egg white. Harry wondered, would this be his social circle for the duration if he missed the plane? The expats of the Imperial bar? DeGeorge, who dripped acid like a wreck leaking oil?

  Willie asked, “What would they do to you? You’d be enemy aliens, but there are conventions about this sort of thing. They wouldn’t put you in jail.”

  “Or make us learn Japanese,” DeGeorge said. “I’d rather be behind bars.”

  “This conversation is absolutely sparkling,” Alice Beechum told Harry. “But I was wondering, how is that little Michiko of yours?”

  “Speaking of…” Willie said.

  Harry’s heart sank when he followed Willie’s eyes to a young Chinese woman making her way toward the table. She wore a silk cheongsam with a pattern of peonies, her hair was twisted into a chignon set off by an ivory comb and her eyes were bright with hope. Harry had to say that she was a little chubby, a bad sign since it suggested that she was real and Willie truly loved her. She was, in short, a disastrous complication for a man who should be traveling light. The problem was that Germans were such romantics. Not as romantic as Japanese; the Japanese preferred sad endings and suicide. But what Willie needed after China was a Wanderjahr on a beach somewhere, or searching the desert for philosophy, anything but dragging some poor Chinese girl to Nazi Germany.

  “Iris is a teacher,” Willie said after introductions. “We’re hoping she’ll be able to continue doing that in Germany.”

  “I suppose that would be up to the local Gauleiter or Gruppenführer,” Harry said.

  “Yes.”

  “Have you tried the Mount Fuji?” DeGeorge asked Iris. “It was invented here.”

  “Inventing alcoholic drinks is a major pastime of the expatriate community,” Harry said to her. “Where did you teach?”

  “At a missionary school,” she said.

  “Iris’s father is a Methodist minister,” Willie said. “Her mother went to WesleyanCollege in the United States, and her oldest brother is a graduate of Yale.”

  “Well, your English sounds better than mine,” Harry said. Even the cupped echoes of Iris’s Chinese intonation were charming.

  “What university did you attend, Harry?” Willie asked.

  “Bible college.”

  “But you chose not to become a missionary?” Iris said.

  “I did publicity for Paramount and Universal. Pretty much the same thing. Are you enjoying the hotel?”

  “It doesn’t seem Japanese,” Iris said.

  “Not at all. Like Valhalla with Oriental lamps. But the emperor is a major shareholder, and that makes it Japanese enough.”

  “Earthquake-proof,” DeGeorge added. “That’s all this tourist needs to know.”

  “How is Michiko?” Willie tried to steer the conversation.

  “Yes,” Alice said, “we all want to know. Is Michiko doing a little flower arranging or is she whisking tea?”

  “There’s a gal who could whisk the balls off a bulldog,” DeGeorge said.

  “According to Willie, she has musical interests,” Iris said.

  “Contemporary music,” Harry said.

  “Iris plays the piano,” Willie said. “Mozart, Bach.”

  “Michiko plays the record player. Basie, Beiderbecke.”

  “That calls for another round.” DeGeorge summoned the waiter.

  “Is there any news on the negotiations in Washington?” Willie asked.

  “The U.S. wants Japan out of China. Japan wants to stay. It’s the old story of the monkey and the cookie jar. He can’t get his hand out without letting the cookie go, so he doesn’t get the cookie or his hand. Now, Harry may have a different version, he’s the number one defender of the Japanese.”

  “I just think there were lots of hands already in that cookie jar. British, Russian and American.”

  “You know what I hear, Harry? The Japs are selling the Chinese cigarettes laced with opium.”

  “Well, the British once fought a war in China to sell opium. The Japanese are great admirers of the British.”

  “He really is incorrigible,” Alice Beechum said.

  “You never thought of being a missionary?” Iris asked.

  “Maybe I should,” Harry said. “It’s a good racket. Missionaries stole Hawaii.”

  “Not everybody sees it that way,” DeGeorge said.

  “Because they read Time, published by the son of a China missionary. The American people are fed stories about Chiang Kai-shek as though he’s Washington at Valley Forge. The most sanctimonious lobby in the United States is China missionaries, and if we have a war, it will be due in good part to them.”

  “You really have no sense of morality at all, do you, Harry?” DeGeorge said.

  Iris bowed like a flower in the wind and changed the subject. “Michiko sounds very interesting. I so look forward to meeting her.”

  “That depends on how long you’re going to be here, I suppose. Willie?”

  “Perhaps for a while. The embassy is slow about giving us our papers.”

  “Willie has his papers, but the embassy is holding back mine,” Iris said. “They say he should go, and I would follow.”

  Willie said, “They’ll never give her papers once I go.”

  “What’s their reason for stalling?”

  “They claim that the background of any foreign applicant must be investigated for unhealthy political involvement. That’s natural, I understand. But there are no investigative German agencies in China, and it seems any such investigation would have to be carried out by Japanese authorities. Although Germany and Japan are allies, there seems to be a lack of cooperation.”

  “Imagine that.”

  “That’s why we’re turning to you, Harry. You have influence with the Japanese. I saw this morning at the Chrysanthemum Club how you swayed them. They might approve Iris for you. Then, if th
ey sent an approval to the German embassy, something would happen. Otherwise, they may force me to go alone.”

  “Why does Harry have influence with the Japanese, that’s what I want to know,” DeGeorge said.

  Harry took the deep breath of a surgeon reluctant to cut. “Willie, your embassy gave you good advice. Get Iris someplace like Macao, then you go home to Germany and wait. According to the führer, the war will be over in a week or two.”

  “What if it’s not?”

  “Yes,” Alice Beechum said. “What if, for some unlikely reason, it’s not?”

  “A year or two. True love can wait.”

  Willie’s cheeks turned red. “Anything can happen. Harry, you have to help.”

  “I didn’t get her into this. You could have had the honeymoon without the preacher. You could have had your fun and said good-bye. You could have left Iris in China with enough money to buy her safety.”

  “I am not a prostitute.” Tears sprang down Iris’s face.

  “Money is not just for prostitutes,” Harry said. “The Bible says, ‘For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.’ The Portuguese are a kind and worldly people, and they’re neutral. Portuguese Macao is probably the safest place on earth.”

  “Harry Niles, marital adviser. Willie, let me explain,” Alice said. “If we were in England, Harry would help my marriage by being my corespondent, the ‘other man.’ We’d arrange compromising photos in bed. He’d be perfect because his reputation can’t get any blacker. He is the bar other villains measure themselves by.”

  Harry said, “Aren’t you supposed to be at a meeting of ‘British Housewives Against the Huns’?”

  “I’m kind of curious,” DeGeorge said and hunched closer to Willie. “Why would you even ask Harry Niles to help? When did Harry Niles lift a finger for his fellow man?”

  Willie looked away.

  “Seriously,” DeGeorge said, “how could you ask Harry?”

  “In China…” Iris began.

  “I don’t know,” Willie said.

  “Hey, I’m a reporter,” DeGeorge said. “I smell something here, Willie. You knew Harry in China. ’Fess up.”