December 6 (V5.0)

by Martin Cruz Smith

  “Willie,” Harry said. They’d agreed not to talk about this.

  “I heard Harry got in a tight spot in China,” DeGeorge said. “Was it stealing cars, or a scam like his pine-tree gasoline?”

  “Don’t do it,” Harry told Willie.

  “No, they think I’m a fool for asking you to help. I’ll tell them why.”

  DeGeorge sat forward to share the joke. The martinis arrived, and Harry sank with one into his chair. Sometime or other he had to get some food.

  Willie said, “I was manager of Deutsche-Fon in Nanking. We handled the telephone exchange and electrical power. By December it was clear that the Japanese army would attack because Nanking was the capital, and once it surrendered, everyone assumed that the war would be over. But the Chinese resisted more than was expected, and even when the city fell, the army wouldn’t surrender, which infuriated the Japanese, and they began executing people. They shot men in the back of the head or bayoneted them or beheaded them or drowned them individually and in groups. I have heard estimates of ten thousand to a hundred thousand dead. I personally would say many more. I had hundreds of Chinese employees I was responsible for, them and their families. I was not alone. There were twenty other Westerners left in Nanking, mainly German businessmen and American missionaries, and we created an international safety zone to protect Chinese whose homes had burned. I was elected head of the committee, a position I accepted because I was also head of the Nazi Party in Nanking and had to set a moral tone.

  “The zone was only a few square kilometers, but soon we had three hundred thousand Chinese under our protection. Though, as I said, there were only twenty of us, so the protection was not very good. Every day the Japanese would come to take away women to rape. Some we saved, some we did not. The Japanese came for men to kill. They roped them together a hundred at a time. Some we saved, most we did not. Or they robbed them. The Japanese took jade, gold, rugs, watches, wooden spoons. Attacked safes with guns, grenades, acetylene torches. If they took a woman away to search, we knew we would never see her again. We saved who we could.

  “We had to feed all these poor people. We transported bags of rice in my car, the roof of which I covered with a white sheet with a red cross, so that we wouldn’t be fired on, because cars were always being commandeered and the drivers killed. Every time we went for rice, someone would run from a house to tell us his wife or his daughter was being raped inside, would we help? I had a Nazi armband. With that as my authority, I stopped some incidents, but I was not always successful. One time when I was failing, our driver, one of the Americans, a new face, got out with me. Since he had a stethoscope, I assumed he was a doctor. He brushed a line of soldiers aside, pushed up the girl’s skirt, proceeded to examine her and spoke to the soldiers in Japanese. Apparently he convinced them the girl had a venereal disease. That was Harry. I don’t know where he got the stethoscope, I think he stole it. From then on, Harry was my driver.”

  Harry studied the ceiling’s Gothic gloom, the crosspieces of concrete and lava rock. All they lacked were bats.

  Willie went on, “Sometimes Harry and I would patrol in the car and load it with girls. Harry altered documents from the Japanese command so they seemed to give him the authority to prevent the spread of infection among the troops, which meant removing the women from their rapists. For added authority, he wore one of my armbands to pretend he was German, too.

  “It wasn’t only women. We had a truck. Harry and I would load it with men taken from hiding and put on a top layer of the dead bodies in case we were stopped, which we often were. Harry would produce papers ordering us to remove bodies around the zone to prevent cholera or typhoid. He was excellent at creating official papers. The killing went on for weeks. When new Japanese recruits arrived, they were drilled in the use of the bayonet with live Chinese, to accustom them to blood. One officer, a Lieutenant Ishigami, became a kind of legend for beheading a hundred Chinese.”

  “End of the story,” Harry said. “Willie, you’ve said enough.”

  “Except that Ishigami came to the Happy Paris last night after you left.”

  “Enough.”

  Willie slid back in his chair. “Very well. Anyway, that’s part of what happened in Nanking and why I am perhaps not such a fool to think that Harry, the Harry Niles I knew in China, might possibly help us here.”

  The table was quiet. Finally DeGeorge said, “Harry with a swastika on his arm? I can picture that.”

  “No. Harry was heroic.”

  “Maybe. You don’t speak any Japanese, you don’t really know what actually transpired, you know only what Harry told you. But Harry in a Nazi armband, that I can believe.”

  “I’ll call some people about Iris,” Harry said.

  “I would be forever grateful.” Willie jumped up to shake Harry’s hand. “At the War Ministry? Someone from the military police would be best. High up?”

  “Well, people with influence.”

  “Thank you,” Iris said. “You are just as Willie described.”

  “Willie has a hell of an imagination.” Harry stood to leave. “Nice to meet you. Only, no more fairy tales.”

  “You can’t stay?” Willie said.

  “I’m off, too, to Matsuya’s for the necessities, soap, Scotch, cigarettes,” Alice said.

  “Lady Beechum thinks there may be a war in a day or two,” said DeGeorge.

  Harry said, “Your husband says, ‘The little yellow Johnnies don’t have the nerve.’”

  “There you are.” She lifted a smile to Harry. “It’s men like Arnold who have put the British Empire where it is today.”

  AN ENTIRELY DIFFERENT Hajime was at Tokyo Station. Gone was last night’s maudlin drunk and in his place was a sober Hajime in khaki, field cap and cape. The railroad platform was crowded with recruits, parents, friends, little brothers waving flags, sisters delivering thousand-stitch belts with all their protective powers. Some men were shipping out for the second time, but most were boys clumsy in their helmets and field packs with bedrolls and entrenching tools. Banners hung vertically from lamp poles announced, ONE HUNDRED MILLION ADVANCING LIKE A WALL OF FLAME!, the sort of wish some travelers could do without, Harry thought. A brass band produced a rendition of “My Old Kentucky Home” that shook dust from the station’s spidery skylights.

  Hajime regarded the confusion with a veteran’s detachment. “Thanks for coming, Harry,” he said. “All you need is one friend to see you off, right?”

  “I guess so.” Harry probably would not have come at all if it hadn’t been for Hajime’s gun. Harry gave it to him still boxed and wrapped as if handing over a farewell gift. Since its loss was punishable by death, Harry expected a little gratitude. Instead, Hajime demanded a smoke. Harry gave him a pack, and Hajime lit up with ostentatious ease.

  “Thanks. Remember the days when we used to run around Asakusa? We ruled the roost, Harry. You and me and Gen, we ruled the roost.”

  Hajime had done well by the army, however. Here he was in a crisply ironed uniform with a sergeant major’s tabs, a waxed and bristling mustache and thick spectacles that magnified his self-importance, no sign of the falling down drunk who had pissed on the street outside the Happy Paris the night before. He was still loathsome, but he had no family or friends, and Harry supposed that, after all, someone ought to see the son of a bitch off. It didn’t seem to matter to anyone on the platform that Harry wasn’t Japanese. In this crowd, with its blur of emotion, he seemed to blend in well enough.

  “These kids think they’ve been through boot camp,” Hajime said. “Wait until I get my hands on them. Do you know why a soldier will charge a machine gun across an open field?”

  “Why?”

  “Because he’s more afraid of me.”

  Which was true enough. Harry had heard plenty of stories about recruits considered too short or tall or slow or quick who had been beaten until their noses were split, teeth lost, eardrums burst. Supposedly it was a psychological approach, to create a rage that co
uld be turned on the enemy. Rage and fear plus devotion to the emperor. Harry was always amazed how the army could take so many young scholars, gentle poets, honest farm boys and fishermen’s sons and turn them into killers. It took the hard work of men like Hajime.

  “Well, I can see why you’re so eager to get back to China. Ever afraid of a bullet from your own men?”

  “I never turn my back on them.”

  The train was late. The crowd shifted to fill the platform without falling onto the tracks. Fathers sucked in their chins with pride while women seemed more ambivalent about sending off sons who looked young enough to be trading baseball cards. A man in a bowler asked Harry, “Would you be so kind?” and handed him a camera, a little spring-bellows Pearlette. Harry took a picture of the man with a young recruit who had a bright red face from ceremonial farewell cups of sake and a thousand-stitch belt tied like a scarf around his neck, a son who was obviously the measure of his father’s love.

  “Remember ‘Forty-seven Ronin’?” Hajime said. “Remember how we let you in even though you weren’t Japanese?”

  “I think you needed someone to chase.”

  “We had a great gang. Then you and Gen started hanging around the theater and dumped the rest of us.”

  “We grew up.”

  “What was the name of that dancer you were so crazy about? Oharu? That was terrible about her.”

  “What’s the point, Hajime?”

  “The point is, I know how much you wanted to be Japanese, and now you see you’re not.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “This. This army is only for real Japanese, that is why it is unstoppable. This is a pure army. No pretend Japanese here. You think you know everything, you always thought you were so clever. Soon enough there won’t be a white man left in Asia, and that includes you.”

  Hajime’s voice rose with the approach of a locomotive drawing a train decked in red and white bunting. Flags flew on the engine’s steam domes and boiler front. Recruits who had already been gathered from other stations leaned out coach windows to shout over the explosion of air brakes, squeal of rails and renewed fervor of the band, which welcomed them with a popular song.

  Bullets, tanks and bayonets

  Bivouac with grass for a pillow.

  My father, appearing in a dream,

  Encourages me to die and come home.

  “Hold this.” Hajime handed back the gun while he cleaned the lenses of his glasses. There was a rush to board because the train was running late. This was a city where people were physically packed into subways and onto buses. Harry let families shoulder by to the steps for leave-taking, mothers and fathers bowing to their soldier-sons with much trembling but no crying. Hajime set the glasses on his face and took a step backward up to the railroad car.

  “Don’t forget this.” Harry stretched out an arm with the package.

  “From me to you,” Hajime said. A smirk crept across his face as if this was a moment he had waited years for, a payback for ancient debts. The locomotive let off a snort of steam, aching to roll; Japanese engines were thoroughbreds, black and slim. At once, the press of bodies, enthusiasm and noise carried Hajime all the way up the steps of a coach that was rocking from the motion of soldiers finding seats.

  “It’s yours,” Harry shouted.

  The tide of embarkation, boys aching to leave good-byes behind, pushed Hajime into the car. “Too late,” he said, or something like that, his words overwhelmed by the noise of the band. The press grew greater, and the next time Harry saw Hajime was at an open window where families passed up last-second remembrances and boxes of food. Hajime pulled aside his cape to open his holster flap and show Harry another pistol, a full-size Nambu, already nestled there.

  “Good luck, Harry,” Hajime mouthed through the window.

  The train shuddered and began to slide along the platform. Harry tried to push forward to Hajime, but the wall of bodies and banners and flags was too dense to breach. The fervent waving of hands prevented Harry from even following Hajime’s coach by sight. The boys were going, hurtling toward destiny with lives that weighed less than a feather, with the bulletproof prayers of their loved ones, to open a whole new dawn for Asia. With such purity of spirit, how could they fail?

  10

  GAIJIN WERE FREAKS , and Harry’s parents were the biggest freaks of all. The pair of them preaching the gospel on a street corner was almost mortally embarrassing to Harry. First was the presumption of preaching at all before being asked. Second was his father’s total inability to speak Japanese. Third was his mother’s partial Japanese. Fourth was the fact that she spoke not women’s but men’s Japanese, full of bluster no decent woman would use. Fifth was the way she stood beside her husband instead of behind him. Sixth was their mysterious ignorance about how much and to whom to bow. Seventh was their loudness. Eighth was their clumsiness. Ninth was their color. Tenth was their size. Those were the Ten Sins of Gaijin, and every day Roger and Harriet Niles were guilty of each one. And if there was any contradiction between Harry’s condemnation of them and his own black reputation, it escaped him. Sundays were the worst. A Baptist church had no stained glass or popish carvings, only pews leading up to the choir organ and pastor’s pulpit and, in between, the satin curtain that veiled the baptismal well. The order of service was call to worship, Scripture, prayer and sermon leading to the testimonials of believers. Thus was the hand of Jesus made visible, His intervention and the redemption of a sinner followed by hymns translated and sung in Japanese in triumphant dissonant satisfaction. Or the service would include baptism, when the veil of purple satin was drawn aside for an immersion into water that cleansed the soul, a drama that, when he was in town, Roger Niles conducted with the theatrical vigor of the original John the Baptist. The entire congregation would lean forward and hold its breath, all transfixed except for two figures in the front row, Harry and his uncle Orin, who both smelled of mint, his uncle to cover the reek of whiskey, Harry to hide a taste for cigarettes. He would rather have been strolling with Kato and Oharu, taking in fresh air on the Rokku or, better yet, sharing a smoke in a movie house.

  Oddly enough, Harry actually liked the painting of the river Jordan above the well. The artist had depicted Jesus in white robes and John in a lion skin, wading into azure water with the spirit descending from heaven in the form of a dove. Cedars and date palms fringed the riverbanks, and around the entire scene was a string of pearls. Harry found the scene calming, not the baptism itself but the slowly flowing river.

  Kyoto had a river like that. The summer after Harry had met Kato, he and his parents had gone down to the old capital, which had a Baptist hospital and church. While the congregation attacked the hymns, Harry slipped out and wandered behind the church. There the river lay, brown-green water with torpid folds and ripples under a yellow haze. A branch trailed like an idle hand in the water. On a twig, two dragonflies touched tails of gold. Harry sat at the base of the tree to dig cigarettes from his shirt.

  “Share?”

  Harry looked up at an American girl, a couple of years younger, with tangled curly hair and a dusty sundress. She was plain, with a square jaw and broad teeth, but she had the most dazzling eyes Harry had ever seen, like the glass heel of a Coca-Cola bottle crushed into crystals. He lit her a cigarette just to see what she would do. She let out a sensual exhale and leaned against the tree.

  “I know who you are. You’re Harry Niles, the wild boy. Everyone says your parents don’t have a real church.”

  “You sure know a lot.”

  “They even send you to a Japanese school.”

  “Why not? I don’t want to be a snob. Anyway, my dad preaches in church when he’s in Tokyo. If you don’t like it, play somewhere else.”

  She squatted next to him. Her shoes were cracked, and her elbows were scabby, but Harry recognized self-possession when he was next to it.

  “I know why you’re here,” she said.

  Harry didn’t know. It was just
a trip to Kyoto, although the decision had come out of the blue. He shrugged. “Church business.” Sundays were always full of church business, fund and oversight committees, temperance leagues and spirit rallies. Sunday could be boring in infinite ways.

  “The trial,” she said.

  “A trial?”

  “They call it a mission meeting, but it’s a trial, my dad says.”

  “Someone stole the offering?” If there was something worth stealing, Harry wanted to know.

  “Not really stealing,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Currency rates.”

  That beat Harry. He frowned because he didn’t like looking stupid.

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s not illegal,” she said. She took a stick and scratched into the ground. “If you turn in dollars for Chinese yuan at this rate in Shanghai, then trade yuan for Japanese yen, and then come home and trade yen back to dollars, you can double your money.”

  “That’s legal?”

  “Um-hum.”

  Harry stared at the numbers as if glimpsing an entire new alphabet. She wiped them out with her hand.

  “Why’d you do that?”

  “Missionaries aren’t supposed to trade money. Even if it’s for mission work or food for people. So they’re going to have a trial.”

  She glanced across the river, and on the far bank, Harry saw a man walking alone with his head down among a shadowy copse of willows.

  “Where’s your mom?”

  “Dead. Of pneumonia.”

  “So what are you going to do?”

  “I think they’ll send us back to Florida. I’d just as soon stay.”

  “Ever been?” Harry hadn’t been to the States yet.

  “Yeah. All they say is ‘Say something in Japanese.’ They couldn’t find Japan on a map. They think you’re stuck up because they’re so stupid.”