James Maxted 03 The Ends of the Earth

by Robert Goddard

  ‘It does not matter. We have you now.’

  ‘Congratulations.’

  ‘You should have given up after your Arab friend died and Hashiguchi Azenbo’s model was destroyed. It was madness to continue.’

  ‘I never could take no for an answer.’

  ‘We will find out who helped you enter. When we do, we will kill them. But we will not kill you, Lieutenant Maxted. There is no death for you here. Except the death of old age.’

  ‘You mean to keep two prisoners now, Count? Is that it?’

  ‘Yes.’ Tomura smiled at Max. ‘You came for your mother. You have her.’ He looked towards Matilda. ‘Old above her years. Shrivelled in her mind and her body. She cannot look at me. She cannot speak to me. She is broken. As you will be broken.’

  ‘She’s your wife.’

  ‘No. Noburo’s mother is my wife. This creature is nothing to me.’

  ‘Let her go, then.’

  Tomura laughed. ‘I will let no one go. Her punishment and your punishment are the same. Life – the whole of the rest of it – buried here.’

  Max looked at Noburo. ‘Your father’s mad. You know that, don’t you?’

  Noburo said nothing. He stared at Max with a mixture of horror and hatred. The arrogance Schools had spoken of was there too. But there was vulnerability as well. Perhaps Delphine Pouchert had already wrought a change in him. Perhaps Laskaris’s road to revenge had always been the better one to tread.

  But revenge had not brought Max to Zangai-jo. He understood that about himself. The primal urge to answer the question his very existence posed was what had brought him, in the teeth of reason. Where had he come from? Where? The castle he stood in; the woman he was imprisoned with: they were the grid references of his quest. He was there at last. He had found it. And, having found it, he would never be free of it.

  ‘It would have been better for you to die in Marseilles,’ said Count Tomura. ‘That would have been clean and quick. This will not be. This will be slow extinction. You will watch your mother live another ten years or twenty years and then die. And then you will live on here alone. Until you die also.’

  ‘You’ll be dead yourself by then, Count.’

  ‘Yes. I will. But Noburo will not release you. You can be sure of that. You were born here. You will die here.’

  ‘I don’t think so. I have friends who’ll come after me.’

  ‘You have no friends who can rescue you from this. Morahan and his people have left Japan. I defeated them. And I have defeated you.’

  ‘So you think. Tell me, why didn’t you just stifle me at birth?’

  ‘That would have been too easy. I wanted your mother to know you had been taken away, to be raised as another woman’s child, without any knowledge of her. That was harder for her to bear than your death would have been.’

  ‘I have knowledge of her now.’

  ‘But the price you have paid for it is too high. You have learnt the truth. But you have become its prisoner.’ Tomura inclined his head sideways and squinted at Max, observing him as if he were some exotic specimen in a zoo. ‘These bars, Lieutenant Maxted. Study them well. Study them closely. They will be in your sight every day. Every one of the many days I will keep you here, alive, while to the world you will be … dead.’

  Max kept up a bold front until Count Tomura and the others left. Then he sat down at the foot of the bars and contemplated his situation. He had brought his present plight on himself. He knew that. He had gone on when all sense suggested he should stop. He had refused to turn back. He had forced his way into what was now his prison. That was his situation.

  Matilda Tomura crept over and sat down beside him. ‘James,’ she whispered, gazing at him in awe and disbelief. ‘My … son?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘That is who I am.’

  She pressed her hand – small, cold and trembling – into his. She looked into his eyes. Eventually, he would have to tell her how her brother had died and all he had done to find her. He would have to tell her everything.

  And, if Count Tomura was to be believed, as Max feared he was, there would be ample time to do that. In fact, there would be nothing but time.

  MATILDA MOVED AND spoke – when she spoke – slowly and hesitantly. She stroked Max’s hand and, on one occasion, his cheek. She stared at him for silent minute after minute. It was clear to Max it would take her many days simply to believe he was present. Perhaps she thought he was a hallucination. Perhaps hallucinations had troubled her before. She had been there, in that room, and the room beyond, for twenty-eight years. What effect such protracted confinement would have on someone Max could only guess.

  Or, alternatively, he could wait to find out.

  How long he would be kept handcuffed to the bars was also a matter of guesswork. A pail was supplied for his use, which suggested it might be for some time. Tomura no doubt intended to prove to him from the outset that he had forfeited all forms of liberty.

  The absence of daylight in the castle’s basement was not, in fact, as complete as Max had assumed. Grilles in the ceiling admitted some light, channelled from above, as the day progressed. Activities in the rest of the building reached him as creaks and muffled percussions.

  Minutes became hours. His head hurt. He was hungry and thirsty. He was also very tired. At some point, he fell asleep.

  He was roused by a rumbling noise he could not identify. Its source, he eventually realized, was a dumb waiter in the wall next to the sliding door he had entered by. Ishibashi appeared a few minutes later and removed from it a tray bearing beakers of tea and bowls of rice. He slid the tray into the cell through a flap and, ignoring Max, called to Matilda, whom he addressed respectfully as Oku-sama.

  She came and collected her tea and rice with a humble nod of gratitude, then retreated to the rear room. Max took several gulps of tea and ate a handful of rice. He stared at Ishibashi, willing the man to react. But no reaction came.

  ‘Do you remember taking me to Tokyo after I was born?’ Max asked, as much as anything to break the silence.

  Ishibashi’s reply took a long time to emerge. ‘I remember,’ he said, in a low, sonorous voice.

  ‘Maybe you can tell me when I was born. Was it the fifth of May?’

  ‘Fifth?’ Ishibashi’s tone suggested he did not understand the word.

  ‘Yes. The fifth of May, 1891. Is that right?’

  Ishibashi shook his head. ‘Not fifth.’ He raised three fingers. ‘Three May. Go-gatsu mikka, Meiji ni-jyu yon. Then you born.’

  Max, it seemed, was two days older than he had supposed. All his birthdays had been late. ‘How long have you worked for Count Tomura?’ he asked, keen to prolong the conversation.

  But Ishibashi did not share his keenness. Perhaps he felt he had already said too much. He pointed to Max’s rice bowl. ‘Eat. No speak. Subayaku.’

  So Max ate. And drank his tea. He had barely finished when Matilda returned, walking in the halting, stooping way he feared he would become used to. Imprisonment had made her apprehensive and subservient. It had hollowed out the core of her, so that the self-possessed and vivacious young woman Max imagined his father had fallen in love with no longer existed.

  She replaced her beaker and bowl on the tray, then replaced Max’s as well. She bowed to Ishibashi and thanked him. ‘Arigato gozaimasen.’ He, the servant, had become one of her masters. Max felt bottomlessly sorry for her then. He longed to restore to her all she had lost. But he knew he could not.

  Ishibashi took the tray back to the dumb waiter, loaded it in and pulled the bell next to the compartment. A rumbling ascent to some part of the castle’s kitchen began.

  Ishibashi paused and looked at Max thoughtfully, though what he was thinking was utterly unknowable. He stood there for a full minute or so, statuesquely still.

  Then he turned and left.

  The day faded into night. Two guards came to trim the lamps and replace the pail. They did not speak. Max lay down and searched the shadows and patterns on
the ceiling for a way out of the trap into which he had blundered. His defiant words to Count Tomura meant nothing inside his own head. He had found his mother, but she was a confused, prematurely old woman who did not know him any more than he knew her. Blood was not always thicker than water. He had thought he could rescue her and shoot his way out if they could not escape undetected. He knew now the idea was exactly what Tomura had called it: madness. His arrogance and his stubbornness had brought him there. And he would probably still be there when they had changed to humility and acquiescence. But the changes, when they came, would avail him nothing. Tomura would show him no mercy. He listened to Matilda, shuffling around the rear room, muttering to herself too quietly for him to catch the words. Occasionally, it sounded as if she was singing, though what the song was Max could not discern. He felt the cold hand of despair on his shoulder. What a fool he had been. What a damned fool.

  Max was actually grateful when Noburo came to see him. Taunting an enemy was preferable to contemplating defeat by him. Although, in this case, Noburo clearly intended to do some taunting of his own.

  ‘You have lost, Maxted. You have lost. You are like all Westerners. You think you are superior to us. You think you can come here and take what you want. You are wrong. You will learn that now. You will learn what losing really means.’

  Max longed to tell Noburo that Delphine Pouchert was not in thrall to him, as he doubtless supposed, and Louis Pouchert would soon be coming to demand satisfaction. But those surprises would have to wait. The past was a safer topic. ‘When did you find out you were illegitimate, Noburo? It must have been quite a shock. More to the point, when did you find out your father had a legitimate son – but it wasn’t you?’

  ‘I am his son. You are not.’

  ‘I don’t know how Japanese law works, but in English law a son born in wedlock is the legitimate offspring of his mother’s husband whoever actually fathered him.’

  Noburo stepped closer to the bars and spat at Max. ‘You are no one here, Maxted. Nothing. Dirt under my boot. Shit of a dog.’

  Seizing the moment, Max grabbed at Noburo with his unfettered left hand. But his fingers only brushed the shoulder of Noburo’s kimono as he sprang away. He was alarmed, though, and a little frightened. Max could read that much in his eyes.

  He pulled out a knife and pointed it at Max. ‘Put your throat to the bars, Maxted. Maybe I will slit it for you.’

  ‘And disobey Daddy? I doubt it.’

  ‘One day you will beg me to do it.’

  ‘No. I can promise you, Noburo, I’ll never beg you for anything.’

  ‘You think you are better than me.’

  ‘I am better than you. And you know it. Your father knows it, too.’

  The knife was trembling in Noburo’s hand. He was angry as well as frightened. He was angry because he was frightened. ‘One day I will kill you.’

  Max smiled, confident it would infuriate Noburo to see he could not be cowed. ‘Try,’ he said. ‘Any day you like.’

  Rue du Verger, Montparnasse, Paris, early morning, Wednesday 19th February, 1919

  A MAN STEPS out of an apartment building into the cold grey light of a winter’s dawn. He is Sir Henry Maxted, a sixty-six-year-old British diplomat with a seemingly unremarkable career behind him, recalled from retirement to act as one of many advisors on technical issues within the British delegation to the Paris Peace Conference. He looks the part: broadly built, bewhiskered, firm of gaze and bearing. He is the very model of reticence and respectability.

  The gathering of the weary victors of the Great War has filled Paris with such men as Sir Henry – the politicians and functionaries of dozens of governments, along with the journalists, spies, mistresses, chancers, schemers and suppliers of unspecified services drawn to the councils of the powerful as are flies to a dung-heap.

  Sir Henry has few illusions about the true nature of the peace conference, which he sees as an unseemly scramble for the spoils of war. He has few illusions about anything, in fact, least of all himself. But his long training in the art and wiles of diplomacy would have disposed him, in the normal course of events, to play his small part in the proceedings obediently and unobtrusively. Events, however, have not followed anything close to their normal course since his arrival in Paris a month ago.

  He could and perhaps he should have declined the invitation to join the British delegation. His specialist knowledge of Latin American affairs is hardly crucial. He is very far from indispensable and he knows it. The truth is that his primary motive for coming to Paris was to renew his acquaintance with Corinne Dombreux. What that renewal has led to is a reappearance in his life of something he thought he would never experience again: joy.

  How strange it is – how confoundingly odd – to rediscover passion at an age when it might be supposed to have withered. He lights a cigar as he reaches the starburst intersection of roads at Carrefour Vavin and glances across at Hazard, the grocery store on the opposite corner, where innumerable delicacies from around the world – grapefruit, caviar, anchovy paste, Turkish delight – seem always to be available. Lait garanti pur, the sign above its window reads. 25c. Milk, guaranteed pure, for twenty-five centimes. He knows nowhere else where purity is available on such reasonable terms.

  The morning is chill and overcast, but dry, which decides him against using the Métro to reach the Hôtel Astoria, where he will be expected to make at least a token appearance in the corner of Herbert Norris’s outer office set aside for him. He will take the number 2 tram from Gare Montparnasse to l’Etoile and stroll round from there to the building that has become the British delegation’s administrative hub.

  He heads west along Boulevard du Montparnasse, puffing thoughtfully at his cigar. He has in truth a great deal to think about, though none of it concerns his negligible duties for the delegation. He is a man assailed as well as transformed by all that has intruded into his life of late. Falling in love with Corinne and discovering, to his delight and disbelief, that she was falling in love with him is more than enough to contend with. Social stigma and family turbulence are bound to ensue if they are to live together when the conference ends, as it eventually must. But he has more than that to dwell upon – much more.

  It is still possible, he tells himself, to ignore what he has recently learnt, or to conclude that it is untrue. He has succeeded over the decades in largely forgetting the tragedy in which he featured. He has never once supposed he could have misunderstood it in the way it now seems he may have done.

  The cities he has lived in press around him in his imagination as he walks: Vienna, Budapest, Tokyo, Constantinople, Rio de Janeiro, Petrograd; but Tokyo most of all. The city’s magical qualities have grown in the nearly thirty years since he left, to the point where now he experiences his memories of it as if recalling a dream – unreal, blurred, fragmentary.

  But the memories are potent for all that. They are the glittering shards of his shattered younger self. And Tokyo is a city, as Japan is a country, so unlike all others that it might exist on another planet: the maze of crowded streets and silent temples and stone walls and wooden bridges; the swarming inhabitants with their strange clothes and sing-song language; the hawkers of balloons and kites and noodles; the silvery rain and the cherry blossom and the cornflower blue of the domed sky. ‘Moyaya-moya,’ he remembers the kindling-women calling, as if it were an incantation. ‘Moyaya-moya.’ They were calling that morning long ago when he met Matilda Tomura by chance on Nihombashi Bridge and let her persuade him to accompany her to the Shirokiya department store, where, she said, she wanted to see the latest Western fashions to have reached the Orient.

  He had never been alone with her before. They had met at balls and receptions and formal dinners – and once at her husband’s gloomy Western-style house in Akasaka – but never otherwise. They had never laughed and caught their breath at the look in each other’s eyes. All this was new to them that spring morning in Nihombashi – new and magical.

  It sho
uld have ended there. For a British diplomat to enter into a dalliance with the English wife of a Japanese politician was the sheerest folly. It was also a gross dereliction of duty. But the heart is capable of many derelictions.

  The price he paid for what happened in the course of the long, hot summer that followed their springtime encounter was considerable. But for Matilda it was worse, far worse. For most of the intervening years he has condemned himself for letting her murder – as he felt sure it was – go unavenged, though how he could have done otherwise remains unclear. It is a stain on his conscience nonetheless. It is a scar that will never fade.

  Lately, however, the suspicion has formed in his mind that Matilda may have suffered a worse fate even than death – that her husband, Count Tomura, has punished her infidelity with imprisonment in a basement dungeon at his castle north of Kyoto.

  It hardly seems credible. Yet the evidence that it is true has mounted to the point where Sir Henry is close to being convinced. It began with his visit to Pierre Dombreux during the Frenchman’s confinement in the Peter and Paul Fortress in Petrograd. It was a bone-numbingly cold day in early December, 1917, when the Neva was sheeted with ice. Dombreux said he wanted to tell Sir Henry something in case the Bolsheviks decided to shoot him. He had intercepted a letter sent to Sir Henry by Matilda’s brother, Jack Farngold, claiming that ‘Things did not happen as you believe they happened’ and that he needed Sir Henry’s help to ‘undo what Tomura has done’.

  According to Dombreux, the letter had been taken from him by his interrogators. But Sir Henry’s liking for the man did not blind him to his duplicitous nature. Pierre Dombreux was a player of many devious games. How he subsequently extricated himself from the Cheka’s custody Sir Henry did not know. He had left Petrograd by then, evacuated with the Ambassador early in the New Year. And a few months later Dombreux, denounced by the French as a traitor, was reported dead. Unable to learn more of Jack Farngold’s supposed letter, Sir Henry tried to forget it.

  In Paris, though, the possibility of investigating the matter further presented itself to him. Through Alphonse Soutine and his tame Arab cat burglar, le Singe, Sir Henry has obtained information culled from documents held by the Japanese delegation to the peace conference. This, and further information reluctantly revealed by his old Japanese police acquaintance from Tokyo days, Kuroda Masataka, who has owned to meeting Jack Farngold on several occasions, has strengthened his suspicion that Matilda is not dead after all, but a prisoner in Kawajuki Castle.