by Ashton, Hugh
-oOo-
Chapter 6: Hanoi
Hanoi airport turned out to be large, modern, and virtually empty. The road to Hanoi, along which they travelled in a Japanese-built taxi, was likewise nearly empty, and seemed to have been in a half-finished state for some time.
The hotel which Sharpe had booked was located near the old French quarter of Hanoi, and was housed in an early 20th-century colonial building. As soon as they had left their luggage in the room, Mieko excitedly dragged Sharpe out of the hotel, and they wandered through the narrow streets of the traditional Hanoi markets, dodging the motor-scooters and cycles threading their way through the warm rain and the noisy good-natured crowds.
A few shopkeepers, seeing Mieko and Sharpe together, addressed her in Vietnamese, but when she shook her head and replied in English, they switched effortlessly to English and apologised to her. Sharpe and Mieko bought cheap Vietnamese plastic rainwear, and although Mieko usually hated rainy weather, the novelty of the surroundings overcame her usual dislike of getting wet.
Mieko had a passion for shoes as well as for jewellery, and when they reached a street of shoe stalls, Sharpe prepared himself for a long wait while she tried on pair after pair of seemingly identical footwear, demanding his opinion at every stage.
“Why don’t we go to the West Lake?” suggested Sharpe, in a desperate attempt to escape the inevitable. Much to his surprise, she agreed. It was an easy walk to the lake, with the central Post Office dominating one side, and groups of people sitting around chatting under the trees, even in the light rain.
“These people look as though they’re happy with their lives,” said Sharpe. He didn’t know quite why he said it, but it seemed to be true. They were definitely not as well dressed as Japanese people, and they almost certainly didn’t get as much to eat, but there was a certain contentment on their faces that was missing in the average Tokyo resident.
“Maybe,” said Mieko, dubiously. Having grown up in post-war Japanese society where wealth and happiness were considered synonyms, she found it a little difficult to believe that poverty and happiness could coexist.
Sharpe’s mobile phone rang. He had been pleasantly surprised when he had turned it on at the airport to find that he was able to use it in Vietnam, but the call was unexpected.
“Where the hell are you?” asked Jon.
“Not in Tokyo, and that’s all I’m saying,” replied Sharpe. “Maybe it will show up on your next phone bill.”
“Look, we have a problem,” said Jon.
“Who’s ‘we’, Jon? You may have problems, I may have problems, but I can’t think of any I want to share with you right now. I’m coming back on Sunday night. Talk to me then, but not before.” He hung up and turned the phone off to prevent any further calls.
“Just business,” he lied to Mieko. “Want to see the temple on the island?” They wandered through the temple, Mieko taking a photo of Sharpe by the guardian tiger carved on the gatepost, and later bought glasses of hot Vietnamese coffee, with condensed milk at the bottom.
When they got back to the hotel, Mieko yawned. “What shall we do for dinner tonight?” she asked. “Shall we just try the hotel restaurant? I don’t want to go anywhere far.” She yawned again.
“Fine by me,” replied Sharpe. “Why don’t you rest for an hour or so while I find out a few things? I’ll take the room key with me so I don’t have to wake you up when I come back.”
He slipped downstairs, and asked the whereabouts of the Sofitel Metropole, discovering it was only a few hundred meters behind the Post Office on the lake that they had passed earlier that day. The friendly desk clerk passed him a map, with the route clearly marked, and Sharpe set off.
He enjoyed strange cities, especially the sights and smells and sounds of them. Maybe that’s why, even though Japan and the Japanese way of doing things sometimes drove him to distraction, he continued to live and work in Tokyo. He took his time going to the Metropole, ducking into little stores selling landscape and abstract oil paintings, which he admired, but did not buy, a tiny supermarket, where he bought some cashew nuts, and a tourist souvenir store, where he bought a few postcards to send to family in England.
The Metropole itself was unmistakable – an elegant lump of colonial architecture taking up one side of a tree-lined avenue with a ministry building opposite, restored to its former glory, and entered through an imposing doorway. Inside the marble-floored entrance, a cheerful Vietnamese girl dressed in traditional ao dai sized him up, greeted him in English, and asked how she might be of service to him.
Sharpe asked for Katsuyama, and she conferred with the reception desk staff before handing him a telephone which was ringing.
“Moshi moshi,” came the voice at the other end after about five rings. “Hello.”
“Dr Katsuyama,” Sharpe said quickly in Japanese. “We met in a coffee shop and walked by the Sumida River the other day. Maybe we can meet again and you can explain some more to me?”
“Certainly,” came the half-remembered voice with its husky overtones, still speaking Japanese. “Tomorrow at ten in the morning. At the place on the postcard.” The line went dead.
And that was that. Sharpe didn’t think there would be anything gained by hanging around the Metropole, so he made his way back to his own hotel, checking out the hotel restaurants as he went in, and woke up Mieko.
“Ready for dinner, dear?” he asked her. “We’ve got a choice of Vietnamese, French, or a bar with snacks.”
“Vietnamese, of course.” It was one of the things that Sharpe liked about Mieko – unlike many Japanese, she didn’t regard foreign food with suspicion. In fact, every new item on the menu was a potential Everest waiting to be conquered.
Some spring rolls and chicken fried with vegetables later, washed down with 3-3-3 (pronounced “ba-ba-ba”) beer, they were sated. “That was great,” said Mieko.
“Agreed,” said Sharpe. “There’s no nightlife in this town, apparently. Let’s go up to the room and make some of our own.” Mieko giggled.
-o-
The next morning it was raining again, but only drizzling. Sharpe’s suggestion that they visit the Ho Chi Minh mausoleum was halfheartedly endorsed by Mieko. Like many Japanese of her generation, she had a surprisingly vague idea of modern history, and seemed to be under the impression that Vietnam had threatened to invade the USA, and that Ho Chi Minh had been responsible for the bombing of Cambodia, hence the USA’s intervention to contain the rapacious Vietnamese.
Sharpe attempted to set her straight on the facts as he saw them, and explained that Ho Chi Minh had actually been an enemy of the French and the Japanese colonial systems before becoming leader of a Communist state, but he wasn’t sure how much had actually gone in. Part of it was the problems with the technical political vocabulary. Mieko’s English in that area was stronger than Sharpe’s Japanese, but not by much.
Although he had visited both Moscow and Beijing in the past, Sharpe had avoided visiting the mausoleums of the Communist demigods in either city, so he was unprepared for the formality and seriousness with which the usually smiling and easy-going Vietnamese treated the visit to Ho Chi Minh’s tomb. Visitors were divided into Vietnamese and foreigners, and were required to line up silently in single file. Cameras were forbidden, and hands were to be respectfully at one’s side or in front.
The whole process seemed designed to produce a serious and solemn atmosphere, as well as to magnify the importance of “Uncle Ho”, and it seemed to work. Sharpe found himself seduced by the theatre of it all, and the dramatic lighting of the inner chamber in which the embalmed corpse lay only served to enhance the effect. In fact, Sharpe found himself so caught up in the whole business that he forgot that he had originally come out to meet Katsuyama.
As they filed out of the “silent zone” surrounding the mausoleum, Sharpe actually felt as though he’d had some kind of religious experience, and so did Mieko, if her face was anything to go by. Wonderful what you could do with the r
ight lighting and psychological preparation, he thought, raising his camera to take a picture of Mieko standing in front of the square, Stalinist-style mausoleum. As he squinted through the viewfinder, a familiar husky voice asked in English if he wanted the speaker to take a photograph of him and Mieko standing together.
“Thank you, that would be very kind,” Sharpe said, handing the camera to Katsuyama. “You just press this halfway down to focus the camera, and then all the way down to take the picture.”
“I think I can manage to work that out,” replied the other. “Have you managed to work out my little toy yet?”
“Well, it’s a face-recognition program, as you said. I got it working, yes. And there’s something to so with currency trading as well, but I’ve no idea how to make it all work.”
“Well, you’re about halfway there, I suppose. Just remember the big K and use it,” said Katsuyama, enigmatically. “I really don’t want to tell you any more than that.”
“Is this some kind of intelligence test?”
“You might call it something like that. Now move over and join your lady so that I can take the picture.”
Sharpe sheepishly went over to Mieko, and Katsuyama took two pictures of them together. Sharpe went over to collect the camera.
“I had to tell your father-in-law where you were. Of course he knew it wasn’t you who died at Shinjuku that day when he saw the body at the police station,” said Sharpe, hoping he might get some information about the whole affair. Katsuyama’s face darkened, but he didn’t seem about to provide any details of the incident.
“I would have preferred it if you hadn’t done that. But no real harm done now that I’m dead, I suppose,” he said without a trace of humour. “But get to the real purpose of that program, and you’ll have a lot of fun and make a big difference to things, if you don’t tell my father-in-law all about it.”
Oh, not again, thought Sharpe. Why did everyone seem to think a simple program and hardware device was going to change the world? Were the contents of a Hello Kitty box really more important than the whole of what thousands of Microsoft engineers and billions of Bill Gates’s dollars had achieved?
He left Katsuyama and rejoined Mieko. Once out of the solemn oppressive atmosphere of the mausoleum grounds, the Vietnamese seemed to revert to a state of easy-going normalcy, and Sharpe felt his spirits lifting, as they walked around the park surrounding the monument and saw the unusual One Pillar Pagoda with its foot in the lake, Uncle Ho’s house, where he reportedly spent his last years pottering around in his garden, and the rest of the sights.
-o-
Sharpe was pretty sure that there would be no more messages forthcoming from Katsuyama in the next few days, and decided he was free to enjoy his time in Vietnam. He and Mieko stayed in a modern hotel in Halong, with its thousands of green enchanted islands scattered throughout the bay, shopped in the old quarter of Hanoi (Mieko restricted herself to only two pairs of shoes) and discovered the joys of pho, the Vietnamese rice noodles that form a traditional Hanoi breakfast. As a memento of the trip, Sharpe bought Mieko a pair of ruby earrings she had admired in a small local jeweller’s.
“That was a good break,” said Sharpe to Mieko as they sat in the plane carrying them back to Japan.
“Yes,” she agreed, still a little shaken from the taxi ride. The driver had tried to avoid paying the highway toll, and had taken them on a tour of what seemed like every water-buffalo track within a 20-kilometre radius of Hanoi. At one point, Sharpe had been almost convinced that they were about to be taken into the wilderness and robbed of all their possessions, but the smiling driver had pulled up to the airport terminal, seemingly unconcerned about the damage he had undoubtedly caused to his vehicle’s suspension, and the worry he had caused his passengers, and in plenty of time for them to catch their plane.
“I never saw you do any business, though,” Mieko pointed out to Sharpe.
“Oh, I got most of it done while you were asleep the first evening,” replied Sharpe.
-o-
At Narita airport, when Sharpe turned on his mobile phone, it reported a flood of missed calls, all from Jon’s mobile number.
“Excuse me,” he said to Mieko and called back.
“Where the bloody hell have you been?” asked Jon.
“Hanoi.”
Sharpe could hear the smack of Jon’s palm against his forehead. “Hanoi. Of course. How fucking obvious. How could I possibly have missed that? I was thinking somewhere a bit closer to home, like Timbuktu, or the Lost City of the Incas. Where are you now?”
“Narita, waiting for our bags to come round on the carousel.”
“Call me again as soon as you get home, then. And don’t bugger off like that again without letting me know. Or without letting Ishihara know. He told us some time back that he’d told you not to leave the country without letting him know first. And he may not be real police, but he can probably make life pretty unpleasant for you, even without the assistance of Al Kowalski.”
Oh shit. The scene with “Sugita” and “Ben” in the police interview room came back to Sharpe and he swore aloud. “You said something?” enquired Jon sarcastically. “You want me to smooth over your troubled waters one more time? You owe me one, pal. Actually, you owe both me and Ishihara more than one. Life would be a lot simpler for you if you let us know who your other friends are – you know, the friends who cut off other people’s heads on your behalf. Assuming that’s not something you do yourself in your spare time, that is.”
Sharpe exploded. “No, it is not! What the hell are you accusing me of?”
“I know, I know. You’re too busy trolling off to foreign climes without letting us know. Keep your hair on.”
“Thank you for nothing. I’ll call you when I get back home. A couple of hours, probably.”
“Make sure you bloody well do.”
Sharpe rang off, and in a temper pulled Mieko’s bag from the carousel as it passed him. It was heavier than he had expected it to be, and he nearly felled an elderly Japanese gentleman as it came off the belt, striking the poor man hard across the back of the knees so that he staggered badly. Mieko offered copious apologies in ultra-polite Japanese, while Sharpe stood by, bowing feebly and feeling totally useless.
His own case went by and he made a desperate lunge for it, carefully lifting it clear of those around him. Mieko and he loaded up their baggage cart, and with a few last bows in the general direction of Sharpe’s victim, who was still standing waiting for his baggage, left the baggage area and went through customs towards the escalator leading to the underground train stations.
An express train, from which they only had to make one change to arrive at their local station, was leaving in only ten minutes, so they bought reserved seats on it, and had a smooth and easy journey home. As soon as Sharpe had carried their cases into the bedroom, he apologised to Mieko. “Look, you know that I’d normally help you get the meal ready, but I promised to make this call.” She sniffed. Sharpe wasn’t sure of the deep significance of the sniff – Mieko’s sniffs had various meanings and interpretations, but he knew that this one was not a good omen. He closed the office door and dialled Jon.
“Thanks for calling back. That was a quick journey from the airport.”
“We were lucky with the trains. So what’s up?”
“I assume you remember pissing off Kermit Winslow III? Well, it seems that he intended to return the favour. Our man watching your place at night recognised him going into your apartment building the other night, and followed him up the stairs. Do you know, the bugger had a can of lighter fluid and a lighter on him?”
“Hardly a crime.”
“Might have been if our man hadn’t stopped him. He was soaking rags in lighter fuel and dropping them through your front door’s letterbox, and he was about to send a lit version of the same after them when our man stopped him.”
“Thank you.” Sharpe thought for a minute. “There were no rags on the floor when we just came b
ack.”
Jon coughed in a slightly embarrassed fashion. “Er, no. One of our people picked your lock and removed them for you.”
“I suppose I should say thanks again, but it seems a bit more difficult to do this time round.”
“We’ll consider ourselves thanked, then,” replied Jon.
“And what about our frog-named friend?”
“Well, he is a diplomat of a kind, so we can’t officially do anything. But apart from being one of these ultra-nationalistic Republicans, and a complete nutter to boot, he also has a penchant for dressing up in frilly maids’ outfits.” Sharpe laughed. “I can assure you that it’s not a pretty sight,” Jon went on. “I know. I’ve seen the photos. And so has he, with the understanding that if he tries anything else stupid, those photos go straight to the American Ambassador and to all the Japanese scandal weeklies.”
“What does Major Tim Barclay have to say about it all?”
“Oh, he loves it. Especially those saucy frills around the knees. I really do think he’s on the way out. Don’t worry about him for now.”
“Thanks.”
“You owe us, Sharpe,” Jon reminded him. The use of his surname underscored the stern tone. “We’re going to have to collect soon. I want some names, remember.”
“Understood,” replied Sharpe, and rang off. He went to the kitchen and helped Mieko get the supper ready.
-oOo-
Chapter 7: Tokyo
The next day, Sharpe put on his second-best suit and took the early train to Vishal’s bank. He already had an electronic access card, having worked there in the past, but it had expired, so he spent the first twenty minutes of the day being re-photographed and his details re-entered into the security database. It struck him at that point that Katsuyama’s face-recognition database did indeed have many practical uses; but the currency-trading functionality that Vishal claimed to have discovered, how it was accessed, and what it did, remained an almost complete mystery.
