Ten miles out, he reached an oasis ringed by pines that separated the manicured fairways of a golf course from the muck of fallow paddy fields. Everything about the rice paddies suggested a desperate, crowded, exhausting struggle for life, and next to them the course hovered like a green and spacious heaven. The entrance to this paradise was a clubhouse reminiscent of a Spanish hacienda and a circular driveway with limousines and idle bodyguards.
Harry had caddied in Florida, enough to pick up the rudiments of the game, which enabled him to make occasional money teaching golf in Japan. Japanese golf was different from American in that it was tacitly understood before a match began which player, for reasons of respect, should win. Harry wasn’t crazy about golf as a game, but it was a gold-plated entrée to Japanese business. Harry could sell the Queen Mary over eighteen holes. He wasn’t a member of the club, but he had steered enough players to it to be welcome. To look the part, he shouldered the bag of clubs he’d bought at the pawnshop.
Members came and went through a reception area of Mexican tiles and mission wood. Notices on the reception counter advised that all guests had to be signed in, only golf shoes were allowed on the links, only regular shoes in the clubhouse and, as a patriotic sacrifice, players were limited to two balls per round. One of the first shortages caused by the American embargo was golf balls; some enterprising boys would be out by the water hazards, selling balls they had dredged out. The reception area opened to a sitting room of leather chairs and trophies and a fireplace stoked like a furnace. For Harry, it had never hurt to be seen at the club. Golf was a Japanese version of America, played in plus fours and tam-o’-shanters, celebrated on the nineteenth hole with a round bought by the highest score. Now, however, anything as American as golf was unpatriotic, and the club was virtually empty.
A horseplayer Harry knew was behind the reception desk. He wore a blazer with the club insignia on the breast pocket.
“Harry, what can I do for you?”
“I was supposed to meet the American ambassador here. I wondered whether he checked in.”
“An hour ago. You were going to play golf with the ambassador?”
“He asked if I could. Said to find him on the golf course if I missed the tee time.”
“Sorry, Harry, he’s got a foursome. You know the rules, four’s the limit.”
“Is the sensei here?”
“The teacher is at the shop. But I’m not supposed to let you past the desk unless a member invites you.”
“Since when?”
The receptionist shrugged apologetically.
“That’s too bad, because the fact is, I have a deal on golf balls.”
“That’s different. You’ll find the teacher at the shop.”
“I know the way.”
Harry walked through to the mournful shadows of the bar. The members present were mainly in import-export, and since the embargo, they had all day to drink. Harry worked his way out to a flagstone patio that overlooked the course. In a shop that stood separate from the clubhouse, the pro was demonstrating a putter. Customers were rare, and the pro was thoroughly occupied.
The course might be virtually abandoned, but it was beautiful, famous for fast greens of Korai grass and water hazards that were ponds paved in lily pads. The holes were framed by dark pine and autumn maples, all the colors of a blaze, as if a man with a torch had run around and lit the grounds. On the first tee, facing a relatively short dogleg right, were players Harry didn’t recognize, all four in knickers, the uniform of golf, and taking some very bad swings. In Japan, golf was performed with almost religious intensity of effort, never mind that the breeze from off the course carried a rice-paddy tang of rotting cuttlefish and human waste. No one else was even waiting to tee off.
The question was how far out on the course the ambassador was. Past the first pin, Harry could just see a foursome approaching the tee of the second hole.
Harry stepped back inside the bar to borrow a pair of binoculars hanging by the door. He focused on the second tee and a commanding figure with the look of an American eagle —dark brows and mustache and silvery hair— who towered over the other players. Unmistakably the ambassador. He was at the second hole with sixteen to go and would be out on the course at least four more hours. Harry couldn’t wait four hours. Michiko wouldn’t wait four more hours at the ballroom, safe or not. He’d wasted enough time getting this far.
He replaced the binoculars. Maybe a dozen members sat by the window in the bar but couldn’t look out without blinking into the sun. The party on the first tee hit the last of four brutal hacks and started down the fairway with their caddies. Harry waited until they were a hundred yards along and strolled after them with his bag as if he had every right, no questions asked.
He stayed out of their line of vision until he reached the trees and a groundskeeper’s path that wound through them. Fallen leaves released a scent like cinnamon with every step. The second hole was a straightaway pinched by sand traps, a test of the player’s ability to hit low and use the roll rather than loft the ball into the vagaries of the wind. Behind the pin was a service road that ran outside the wind-break of pines back to the clubhouse driveway. If he could just get the ambassador alone and talk to him, he could walk the road back to his car and no one would be the wiser.
The ambassador’s foursome was moving up on the fairway of the second hole when Harry caught sight of them. The ambassador puffed on a pipe, a Gulliver in tow, while his hosts spoke loudly in English to make up for his deafness and lack of Japanese. Harry always described the American ambassador as hopeless. The truth was, Harry didn’t think the ambassador was a stupid man so much as stultified by good manners and the absence of curiosity, happier to swim in a swimming pool than in the sea, the sort who, in fact, wouldn’t have lasted one year as a missionary. His information was secondhand from other diplomats. His Japanese contacts were financiers and industrialists known for their moderate views and fading influence. None of the players had yet noticed Harry, but he recognized one who was bareheaded and as dark as a caddy, the old pirate Yoshitaki of Yoshitaki Lines.
Harry ducked through the trees. He wasn’t sure what he could say in a few minutes that would persuade the ambassador to cable Washington or Hawaii. He couldn’t explain about an oil-tank scam or the nuances of the word “confusion” or of Tojo riding in the park. Probably lie, keep it simple, just claim that sources in the navy said the war was on.
Because the ambassador had boomed his drive, he hit his second shot last. Harry hoped it would land on the right side of the fairway. The ambassador did better than that: he sliced a ball that flew viciously into the maples and kicked out to the rough not more than fifty yards from Harry. While the others lined up approaches to the green, the ambassador searched the grass. He wore a maroon sweater, plus fours and the trance of a man lost in a game. He found the ball, set his pipe down on the grass and considered his clubs with his back to Harry, who was close enough, with a quick dash, to pick his pocket.
“Mr. Ambassador!” Harry said. He wanted to get this over with fast.
The ambassador selected a six iron and took a practice swing. The caddy was a skinny boy in a huge cloth cap. He noticed Harry, but gaijin were known to act in bizarre ways. Popping out of the woods could be one of them.
Harry stepped within ten yards. “Mr. Ambassador, we have to talk about Hawaii. There’s about to be an attack, Mr. Ambassador, are you aware of that?”
The ambassador got comfortable over the ball. A lot of big men stiffened over the ball, but the ambassador seemed smooth and poised, discounting the slice into the trees. He stepped back for a practice swing and set up over the ball again.
“Mr. Ambassador!” Harry edged closer yet.
“It’s my theory,” Yoshitaki said, “that a deaf man’s concentration is a great advantage on the golf range.” He had returned so quietly along the trees that Harry hadn’t heard him. Harry felt a little trumped.
The ambassador unleashed a smooth sw
ing and a sharp “click” as the club struck the ball, which sailed low and true toward the pin.
“About Hawaii,” Harry tried again.
The ambassador focused on the bounce and roll of his shot as it split the bunkers. Yoshitaki looked in the opposite direction. Harry turned to see the following players and caddies transform to bodyguards and hustle toward him as they ditched their bags. Now Harry understood why they were such atrocious golfers.
“Mr. Ambassador.” The man was close enough to touch.
The ambassador’s shot had reached the green, from the excited reaction of the players ahead. He retrieved his pipe, produced a contented puff and, without a backward glance, strode toward the flag.
“How is that beetle of yours?” Yoshitaki asked Harry. “Still letting him out for walks?”
“When he needs the air.”
“Today is the day. This will be the last Sunday like this we will see for a good while, don’t you think?”
“As a matter of fact, I do.” Harry watched the ambassador cross the undulations of the fairway. “He heard me.”
Yoshitaki said, “No, not if it was the wrong thing to hear or the wrong messenger, he didn’t hear a word. He’s a friend. I’ll make sure he gets home safely. Was it important, what you wanted to tell him?”
“I can’t even remember what it was.”
“Good. Don’t become complicated now. It’s not everyone who can lead a life of total selfishness. You should stick with that.”
Well, a man that deaf was a wonder, Harry thought. He could have shouted at the top of his lungs, but the moment had passed. Maybe the moment had never existed, Harry thought, any more than he existed to the embassy. It also occurred to him that he could be wrong, that he had failed only in sending the ambassador on a wild goose chase. Who the hell was Harry Niles to announce when war would start?
The bodyguards arrived and surrounded Harry. They didn’t seize him, threaten him or even show exasperation, only circled Harry and separated him from his golf bag.
“Don’t worry about the plane,” Yoshitaki said. “It won’t leave without you. Good-bye, Harry Niles.”
The bodyguards waited until Yoshitaki’s foursome holed out, then headed for the service road behind the green, a phalanx with Harry at the center. Harry had once witnessed a similar technique at a bullfight in Tijuana when a bull gored a matador and took possession of the ring. They got the bull out by sending in a herd of steers that surrounded him, trotted him once around and led him peacefully out the gate.
DRIVING BACK to town, Harry had to laugh at the picture of a con man saving the world. So through the night rode Paul Revere; And so through the night went his cry of alarm / To every Middlesex village and farm… It would help, he thought, if people would listen or could even hear. No more heroics. The main thing was, he hadn’t blown his seat on the plane.
Harry noticed how the sun danced over dry rice stalks sticking up from mud like black stitches on a cloth of gold, a sight he realized he might never see again. Amber waves of grain, not fields of rice. This time tomorrow he’d be airborne. There were things he’d miss: the whistle of a blind masseuse in the early morning, the shimmer of banners the length of a street, the way koi rose to the surface when a shadow passed. The way the tailor’s wife had laughed at her own distress so as not to bother him, which struck Harry as the most dignity he’d ever seen, but a dignity he saw in Japan all the time.
And delicacy, the way Yoshitaki’s men walked him off the course in the most nonviolent bum’s rush possible. There was style in that, a gentle art.
It was midafternoon when Harry got to Asakusa. Walking through Sunday crowds pushing to this movie or that shrine, treating themselves to red-bean buns or candy rabbits, he felt a million miles away from the artificial world of the golf course. Asakusa was still sane, even if the rest of the world was not. On one side a newsstand featured samurai photos, on the other side Shirley Temple. A music-hall billboard offered both patriotic songs and South Seas ukuleles. That was what Harry considered a healthy balance.
The front of the ballroom was locked, unusual on Sunday, when Tetsu sometimes had as many as four games going. Harry went around to the oversize doors in back, where theater flats and props were delivered for storage, the nominal use of the ballroom now. He couldn’t wait to get his hands on Tetsu. No one answered Harry’s call, but the doors eased open.
“Tetsu? Michiko?”
Since he had never entered through the rear, he didn’t know where the light switches were, and he followed the flame of his cigarette lighter around a maze of backdrop flats, prop chests, costume trunks. The Happy Paris had been shut the night before, and now the ballroom? Like parts of his life going dark.
“Michiko?”
There was no return glimmer or whisper, no card game or tango on a gramophone, let alone a welcome. Although Harry was late for Michiko, he decided to act the aggrieved party because she wasn’t waiting for him with sake and food. His back was burning, and he hadn’t had food or sympathy for a day. He remembered when he used to come to the ballroom with Oharu, how they had sat in the balcony and watched reflections from a mirror ball spin around the floor, over the men with their rolls of tickets and women lined up like pack animals along a velvet rope. The painful couples they made, stepping on each other’s feet to the quickstep, fox-trot, waltz. Oharu, the real dancer, would giggle and shush Harry at the same time. The way the reflections spun, he would feel he was rising to the sky. It was interesting how much more disorienting pitch black could be. He kept walking into nowhere across the ballroom floor.
“Tetsu! Where are you?”
His voice circled.
“Michiko!”
He finally saw something. A realization filtered through him that the floor had become slippery and that a warm, cloying scent hung in the air. Harry slowed like a man approaching an abyss. He gave his breath a moment to catch up before the last few steps.
In the wavering light before him, a woman in a white dress with a blue sailor collar slumped at a card table. She didn’t have a head. Not on her, but her arms stretched across the table to a white wooden box the right size.
22
HE SET THE lighter on the table like a candle. Her hands were waxy, heavy in death. She wore Haruko’s dress, white with blue trim, now flecked with brown around the collar. She looked lonely. Harry supposed that anyone being executed felt alone, but the victims he’d seen in Nanking at least died in a war where death was the norm. To be killed like this, trapped by a man with a sword while a peaceful city lay outside, was to be particularly deserted. Her forearm was cool but soft, perhaps two hours dead. About the time Harry had arrived at the golf course, Ishigami must have arrived at the ballroom, where Harry had told Michiko to wait. He couldn’t have set her up better if he’d tried.
“No—”
Was he talking to her? This was a little late, he thought. What he was going to say was that he was just trying to help Willie and then alert the right people about nothing less than a war. It didn’t matter, because the right people weren’t interested. He certainly hadn’t helped her. Harry didn’t see his gun, so that hadn’t helped her, either.
“It’s not—”
He couldn’t imagine her dead. There was nothing sweet or pleasing about her, not the candy-box kind of love Americans sang about. He couldn’t imagine her dead because she was so difficult, she was the burning fuse, the spark and imminent explosion in his life. Where Michiko died, there should be a smoldering crater in the earth, a volcanic upheaval, at least the smell of gunpowder, instead of a sense that the air was awash in droplets of ruby red. He could almost feel the mist settle on his cheek. Ishigami had painted her once, now twice. Still, it wasn’t right, dull submission wasn’t Michiko’s style. With the world about to roll down the drain, it probably made no difference to examine an individual death, but Harry, having been a bust where the world was concerned, needed to know what had happened.
There should have been mor
e blood. Blood should have flooded the table and the floor around it if she’d been killed where she sat. There was relatively little. Maybe this was coldhearted of him, but he could deal with details better than the whole picture, a little like Sergeant Shozo’s jigsaw puzzle, except that Harry refused to see the piece in the center or touch the wooden box, not yet. Before the lighter’s flame died, he looked up and found its dim reflection in the mirror ball hanging above, and another glint from a brass post of the velvet rope. Now he knew where he was.
In the dark, Harry climbed to the cockpit over the door and threw on the house lights: whites, cells, spots and mirror ball all at once. The ballroom leaped out of the dark. Michiko and table gained color, focus, dimension. The size of the ballroom, the gilded ceiling and balcony tier made her smaller, braver, a child prodigy playing to an empty house. The parquet shone except for two tracks from the table to the swing door of the women’s restroom.
The ballroom management had kept the restroom’s size and amenities to a minimum to discourage dancers from loitering. The light was out; why bother changing it after the dancing had stopped? A broken window on an airshaft admitted as much dust as light to two sinks with a cracked mirror and two Western toilets without seats that sat in a floor of hexagonal tiles. Blood pooled around a central drain that was stopped with clotted hair. Harry edged around the blood, searching the ceiling and walls for a bullet hole and the floor for a loose button, anything dropped. Just going tacky, the blood bore the imprints of her knees and toes and a man’s shoes, relatively large, a red negative of where she knelt and where he stood.
Harry retreated to the dance floor.
December 6 (V5.0) Page 28
