“Later’s no good. Pencil him in from four to five.”
“Anyone else to attend?”
“I think not. We’ll be speaking Japanese. State business, but I’ll go it alone for now.”
Some things are best kept from too many ears, thinks Matías. Not that he doesn’t trust his secretary or the boys at the Home Office. But what this spook says at this stage will be off the record and, in all probability, none too realistic. No, give the guy the benefit of a listen, speak sincerely of “mutual ties,” then send him on his way. The President looks forward mischievously to letting the man talk, knowing full well it’s a no-go from the start.
Having run through the agenda, Jim Jameson withdraws, passing the ever-out-of-sorts Itsuko waiting in a corner of the room with a bowl of rice. The President goes on eating, likewise ignoring her. Following his bath and dojo, breakfast is also Japanese, so his first waking hours are essentially spent back in the “Japan period” of forty years before, though once he leaves these inner apartments, he’s all islander. As much as he relishes the Japanese lifestyle, why rub everyone else’s nose in it?
Few know that he enjoys Japanese rice with wakame miso soup, cucumber pickles, preserved squid shiokara, plus a good wake-up-it’s-morning helping of tuna sashimi. A Japanese breakfast is just the thing, though it’s not easy to procure these items here. The rice and wakame seaweed and miso he orders in specially. A hireling at the Tokyo bureau buys small quantities at a nearby supermarket and sends them once a week by diplomatic pouch, ostensibly for entertaining guests from Japan. The President is very fussy about his provisions and will sometimes ask for five different brands of umeboshi salted plums so he can select a personal favorite. He’s even had local farmers try to grow scallions, but the results have been disappointing. If only they were more like okra, which is practically a weed here!
Matías likes red meat maguro, but he just cannot face fatty toro tuna belly in the morning. Nor does he much care for wasabi. Instead he dips his sashimi in soy sauce mixed with lime juice and a dash of Tabasco, a postwar import from America. The Japanese who camped out down here through the war made do with that horrible powdered wasabi. Nowadays wasabi comes in squeeze tubes, but Matías will stick to his lime juice and Tabasco, thank you very much. He never tires of tuna. It’s his power breakfast for the day’s activities, so he eats huge portions of it. Fortunately, there is plenty to be caught in these waters, and there’s also Itsuko, whose job it is to haggle with the fishermen and keep the freezers full.
Itsuko sees to everything at breakfast. Matías typically lunches with his trusted few in the villa staff canteen, then dines with guests in the formal dining room. Having no family, it’s the standing arrangement, though on occasion the President may eat at the hotel or at a restaurant. Either way, Itsuko rarely has to prepare lunch or dinner.
“Is this the regular maguro?”
“Why? Does it taste different?”
The President hates it when people answer his questions with questions of their own. It’s not as if Itsuko doesn’t know, but she also knows that even if she sasses him, all he’ll ever do is grumble. Maybe the old maid has her finger on some dark secret from his past—or so the other servants whisper among themselves.
“No,” huffs the President.
“Last night, I was running late, so I didn’t have time to thaw it.”
“What’d you do? Run it under tap water?”
“No, there’s this invention called the microwave oven.”
“Hmph,” he snorts. So that’s why it’s so pale outside and still cold in the center. He opens the Navidad Daily, a tabloid that exists solely to suck up to the Executive Office. Still, you never know, they might just print something stupid. The headlines read:
VETERANS DELEGATION ARRIVES TODAY FROM JAPAN!
HIS EXCELLENCY PRESIDENT GUILI TO GREET THEM AT AIRPORT!
ANOTHER STEP FORWARD IN NAVIDAD-JAPAN RELATIONS!
In such big, bold typeface, it looks more like a poster than a newspaper. Is this the best they can do? The President knows better than to expect accomplished journalism, no subtle criticisms that invite a second reading and lend backhanded credence to faulted government policies. One quick glance, a nod of the head, and he puts down the paper.
At nine thirty, Matías Guili is meeting with Finance Bureau Chief Gregory Chan about foreign aid projections for the next year’s budget, when the door cracks open and in looks Chief of Island Security Katsumata.
“What is it?” the President demands. The bureau chief turns to look.
“Emergency,” pants Katsumata, slipping into the room. “Wanted to report it as soon as possible.”
Executive Secretary Jim Jameson peers around him from behind.
“Listen, sorry,” Katsumata snarls at Chan, as if a commandant outranked a bureau chief, “but could you, like, scram?” Visibly excited, Katsumata is forever trying to badger others—with little success. Does he honestly imagine this attitude of his gets him anywhere? When Matías first met him, the man was a yakuza, a right-wing goon with sufficient promise at bullying young recruits for a certain politician to recommend him. So nine years ago he hired the mobster to beef up the Island Security forces.
Katsumata’s forehead glistens with sweat. The President plants both hands on his desktop and braces for the worst. The finance bureau chief has no choice but to leave, accompanied by the executive secretary.
“Take off your glasses!” barks Matías. How many times has he told the man not to wear sunglasses when talking to him? He keeps them on at all times, even during sex they say. Indeed, without sunglasses his face would look ludicrously soft, his droopy eyes more likely to elicit grins than grimaces.
“They did it,” says Katsumata.
“They?” queries Matías.
“The torii gate, they …”
“Who did what?” he demands again. Katsumata thinks clipping his sentences makes him sound tough, but he can only keep it up for two or three minutes at most before reverting to his usual blathering self.
“Knocked it down, sir.”
“The torii gate at the Shinto shrine?”
“Correct. Word came in and I went to look. It’s down, all right. Posts broken in half, no way to repair them.”
“Any clue who’s behind it?” asks the President, calmer than Katsumata could have predicted.
“They put up those handbills over the rubble, that same slogan, so it’s gotta be their faction.”
“That’s no slogan. Mumbo jumbo, that’s all it is. Though it means the louts are serious, pulling off a stunt like this.”
“Right. The slogan’s gotta be a clue. We did a full-force sweep, but sorry to say …”
“It’s not a slogan!” sputters Matías. “How the hell did they knock it down? How many men would that take? It’s solid stone, shipped in from Japan, joined with cement. Push or pull, that’s no one- or two-man job.”
“They probably used a car,” offers Katsumata.
“Was there a car there at the scene?”
“No, but anyone could figure. Tie one end of a rope to the crossbar, the other end to the bumper, step on the gas, down it comes.”
“Right. Anyone see it happen?”
“No, but we’ll keep on it.”
There’s a big difference between no witnesses and no one informing Island Security, thinks Matías.
“Probably done in the middle of the night,” continues Katsumata. “No houses, no people around. But put up some reward money, we’ll get names all right.”
But the torii? More than even the culprits, it’s the gate that preoccupies the President. He reassembles a mental picture of it, a landmark he’s known since childhood. If the shrine was built the year before he was born, then that torii has stood well on sixty-three years. Feels almost as if he’s been
knocked down himself. The shrine building was demolished after the war, leaving the torii standing alone for nearly fifty years. And now it’s gone.
During the war, Japanese MPs used to patrol near the gate and jump on any islanders who passed by without bowing. Not even kids were spared. The shrine faced south, so bowing at the gate sent a long-distance prayer across the northern seas to the imperial capital. If kids saw an MP staked out there, they’d hide in wait for grown-ups to get beaten up, though they had to be careful not to laugh out loud or the MP would catch them too. Crouching in the bushes, desperately stifling their giggles … Not one of his pals from those days is still around. Or maybe they are? What were their names? Those friends from when he’d just arrived from Melchor Island. He was running errands for the Chinese laundry, so that must make him thirteen or fourteen at the time. The other kids were younger. He can almost see their faces. They must know exactly who he is, but none has approached him since he became president. A population this small and not one of them has come forward. What would his chums think of the old boy now?
Matías snaps back to the present. “Well, then, we can’t hold tomorrow morning’s ceremony for the delegation there.”
“Not necessarily. If we clean up the rubble, they won’t know when the torii disappeared.”
“Okay, we’ll consider it. But even so, something must be done. About those hoodlums.”
“Yes, something,” mumbles an uncharacteristically evasive Katsumata. “I did issue an alert.”
“No, we’ve got to act now. We don’t even need to know who we’re dealing with. Here we are, on the verge of improving ties with Japan and getting a major injection of capital. We cannot tolerate such outright anti-Japanese acts. How do we put that across?”
Matías thinks of countermeasures. He’s not angry. This is a game of chess, a power play in which a show of anger may have nothing to do with actually getting angry. If he can’t hit these unseen enemies where they live, then he has to do something visibly forceful. The point is the punch, not the punching bag. Anything can be the target. Irrational, maybe, but effective. That’s how politics works, at least his politics, his way of maneuvering the pieces on the board.
“Katsumata.” Matías stares straight at him and lowers his voice. “Burn down a house!”
“A house? Whose?”
“Anyone’s. No, let’s see … a distant relation of Bonhomme Tamang. Somebody ordinary people wouldn’t know, but as they catch on they’ll come to suspect, yes, he’s the ringleader. Find me that somebody and set his house on fire. In the dead of night. I want a real blaze. Pretend we know exactly who our enemy is. That should do the trick.”
“Yessir, right on it. And uh, about the slogan?”
“I told you, it’s not a slogan! Gibberish, that’s all it is. Just make sure not one of those handbills remains up around town. Meaningless or not, they’re an eyesore.”
The Nissan slowly descends the slope toward the airport. The limousine was a “little something,” a personal gift to Matías nine years ago, only two months after he took office, during final negotiations with Japan over the war. Japan had no qualms about laying out a sizeable sum, but refused to acknowledge the payment as compensation for wartime occupation and conscription of forced labor. No, it was “goodwill aid.” In the end, newly elected President Guili relented; it was his first big job as leader, his first gift from Japan. He regarded it as a personal handout, but when he lost the third term, accountants started making noise and forced him to turn it over to incoming President Bonhomme Tamang. Now back in office, Matías takes renewed pleasure in the limo. It’s an emblem of his career, this Nissan President. Could be the name, but he’ll never trade it in. Heinrich the chauffeur has been at the wheel the entire nine years, despite the change in passengers.
The car pulls up to the officials and citizens lining the way to the airport—but where’s the motorcade? Matías fumes in the back seat. That Jim Jameson isn’t on the ball. Or no, this is Katsumata’s turf. Didn’t he allocate extra budget to Island Security for two motorcycles? Must have a word with Katsumata. No, wait, didn’t some freewheeling Island Security rookie wrap one of the bikes around a tree? When Katsumata came to report the accident, Matías himself decided that one bike wouldn’t look up to snuff, so they canceled it. Mind is going to pieces, crumbling away. Is he really getting so old? Maybe he doesn’t recover all the particles of memory that sift away while he’s asleep. Maybe his morning bath and dojo aren’t enough. Like sand through his fingers, his strength is trickling away.
The whitewashed airport building is just up ahead, the very symbol of this island country’s existence—built entirely with foreign money. Could we, he often wonders, get by without it? Shut down the borders and make a go of it? Just seventy thousand people, but in today’s world no one can cut off all ties and look inward. No self-reliance, physical or spiritual. The earth’s not big enough. No sooner would we say, “We’re going our own way,” than the developed countries would insist, “Oh, but that’s so hard.” Anything to “protect” us.
Granted, that’s how he got to be president. If the job of a politician in a small country is to balance island ideology with pressures from abroad, then clearly he’s the best qualified. Okay, so maybe he’s leaned too much on Japan, and in ways he’d prefer not to tell his countrymen. Ah, the time it would take them to understand! He had no choice. Still, his self-confidence hasn’t flagged, he’s managed to keep things on course.
Why in this modern age is value always parceled out in monetary form? The airport terminal was built eight years ago with funds from Japan and the United States—and both have tagged along with Navidad ever since. Predictably, each gave construction jobs to their own contractors, who spirited the donated money back home. They even demanded that his presidential kickbacks be deposited in their own domestic banks, mere paper figures he has yet to withdraw. The airport may be here in Navidad, but it’s really just a stepping-stone for America and Japan, a tangible promise of incursions to come.
But just how—with what?—is Navidad to repay those two great greedy powers for these runways scraped out of the jungle with Mitsubishi Caterpillar bulldozers, for the monstrous pseudo-ethnic terminal that dwarfs the surrounding coconut groves, the traditional “praying hands” roof beams clumsily mimicked in reinforced concrete? Lucky the locals don’t realize how ugly it is; they probably think all airports in the world look like this.
To either side along the twenty meters to the terminal building stand Island Security corpsmen, chests out at attention. The limousine steers a slow progress between their ranks and stops before the main entrance. Heinrich gets out and walks around to open the back door, when up runs Katsumata. Like a faithful bird dog, he looks pleased with himself. His dark glasses reflect the sky and clouds and plantings of stunted palms.
“What is it?”
“Found twenty-four total, all around town,” he beams, holding out a sheaf of handbills.
“Don’t hand them to me,” Matías growls under his breath. The man’s gaffes are an embarrassment. He may be good at threatening people but is hopeless at investigating. “Get them out of sight and burn them. Or no, stash them. They’re evidence. Are those the last?”
“Yessir, we combed everywhere,” crows Katsumata as the President strides up the paved walk to the terminal, the other officials a few paces behind.
And what if they tack up more? Matías almost asks.
“Got men posted at key locations. Won’t be a slogan stuck anywhere,” adds Katsumata, fielding the unspoken question, but Matías keeps walking. Even if they catch the scoundrels in the act, a whack on the tail won’t make the problem go away. The real question is, who’s the brains behind it all?
He reaches the terminal in ten steps and heads inside. The interior is air-con chilled. Prior to construction, Matías fought with the Japanese architects. Why the air-condit
ioning? What’s so bad about arrivals feeling the heat? Just open it up to the breeze. Must make a mental note for when it comes time for repairs. If he can remind himself to remember, that is. As he follows Jim Jameson toward the VIP Lounge, he turns and glares at Katsumata.
“Just make sure no vet sets eyes on them. Can’t imagine any of them can read Gagigula, but if anyone asks, just say it’s a government motto. Meanwhile, find out if it’s some old saying or what. Ask around, try some old folks.”
“Old folks never listen to us,” pleads Katsumata, as if he’s been asked to do the impossible. Island Security isn’t cut out for intelligence work. Just a bunch of juvenile delinquents from the villages. All muscle, absolutely nowhere in the head department.
“And another thing, about those punitive measures, get on them tonight,” says the President, lowering his voice.
“Oh, you mean the arson thing?”
“Whatever. Just hop to it!”
Katsumata nods and disappears.
The JAL Boeing 727 carrying the veterans delegation touches down at 14:45, right on schedule. Tourism is booming here. Nearly every flight is filled to capacity three times a week, bringing tourists to these crystal clear waters and coral reefs dazzling with tropical sun and colorful fish. But today’s passengers are different. These forty-seven have little to do with the “tourist route”; the only money they spend will be a Japanese government stipend for bus charter and lodging at the Japanese-built Navidad Teikoku Hotel. All the ceremonial whatnot is to be paid out of Navidad’s own diplomatic budget, making their visit a rather uneconomic proposition. They probably won’t even buy any souvenirs.
Before reaching passport control, a Foreign Office minion swiftly diverts them from that endless queue for the one and only Immigration officer and slips them through a side door to a special waiting room. Seated there on the upholstered benches, they clearly do not resemble any breed of foreigner typically seen on the islands. An all-male group is unusual enough, but every one of them is wearing dark blue or gray wool suits despite the tropical heat. Each, moreover, has a big black leather bag and white hat marked with a single red stripe, an easy mark for the staffer to spot. All are in their sixties or upwards. All except two: one, young and restless, checking back and forth with the Navidad officials, a travel coordinator who packages special group tours; the other, middle-aged and calm, a liaison officer from the Japanese Ministry of Welfare. The old men sit mopping their faces with white handkerchiefs, whispering among themselves. Sharing remembrances from fifty years ago? No, one of them is unfolding a piece of paper and muttering something to himself.
The Navidad Incident Page 2
