by Greenberg
And it was worse when he made those quick flying trips in and out, to Manila, Hong Kong, places like that, which he did regularly every two or three months. No wonder she was lonely here, didn’t like the place.
The taxi that had brought him home from the railroad station let him out in front of the house. Before that there’d been the train from Nagasaki, before that the ship, before that the Hong Kong hotel room. He’d been away a total of five days this time. Just there, turn around, and back.
He was tall and lean, lanky would almost be the word. He had a thatch of dingy-colored hair, actually a lifeless light-brown shade, with scarcely any recession along the hairline. His eyes had a piercing quality to them, and were spaciously shadowed underneath from too many drinks and too many girls. His cheeks were on the gaunt side, probably for the same reason. He was not at all a bad-looking man, but the first telltale traces of fast living were beginning to leave their marks on his face. He looked about forty; actually he was thirty-five.
He had a herringbone topcoat slung over one arm – it was warm in Tokyo for October – and was carrying a small overnight case with the other.
Ruth must have seen him drive up before the house. She had the door open and ready for him before he could get at it with his key.
She was just as tall as he was. Red of hair, blue of eye and with a nice, frank American-girl face. A few freckles on it instead of face powder.
“How’s the girl?” he said offhandedly.
She put her arms to his shoulders and held up her face. He touched his mouth to hers.
“Hello, Johnnie,” she said then.
He squeezed his eyes shut in distaste. “There goes that name again.”
“Is that going to start again?” she said. “Something new.”
“No, it isn’t. I never could stand it, even as a kid. Little girls in pigtails – ” He mimicked ferociously. “Johneee! John-eee!” After a moment he added, “It makes me feel like I’ve never grown up at all.”
“Have you?” she countered.
“Thanks,” he said.
“I’ve always called you that, all our married life.”
“And I still don’t like it.”
“Is it the name itself you don’t like to be called,” she said with momentary insight, “or is it me you don’t like to have say it?”
“Let’s drop it, shall we?”
“All right, John,” she agreed with a slight cutting edge to her voice. “How was the trip?”
“Same as usual,” he answered carelessly.
She gave him an unfathomable look. Then they went inside together and closed the door.
Once he’d nearly sent her in his place. “Do you want to go instead of me?” he’d asked, giving her a keen appraising look. As though thinking it was about time she’d started to make herself useful, instead of moping around all day.
“Why can’t we both go?”
“That’s out,” he told her flatly. “Somebody has to stay and watch the store.”
“What’s there to watch? You don’t even have an office.”
“We both can’t go at once, and that’s all there is to it. Do you want to go or don’t you?”
All right,” she said finally. “I’ll go. What do I have to do?”
But he wasn’t satisfied yet. “Do you promise to do exactly as I tell you?” he asked her. “And not ask any questions?”
“Yes, of course, if that’s what you want.”
The night before she was to have gone, as she was undressing for bed, he came into the room and handed her a tiny tight-packed roll of something wrapped in waterproof material, either oil-silk or plastic, she could not be sure which. It was about the diameter of a cigarette, but not nearly as long as one.
“Slip this inside your garter belt when you get dressed in the morning,” he told her. “I’ll have another one for the other side by then.”
She must have lain and thought about it all night. In the morning she said quite abruptly, “Johnnie, I don’t think I want to go on this business trip for you after all. Something about it – scares me. Something about it – isn’t on the up-and-up.”
He gave her a long hard look, then banged out of the house and went on the trip himself.
He was gone two weeks that time, and she knew he must have been with some woman at least part of that time. But she also knew it probably wasn’t the first time.
Now, returning from this latest trip, he asked her, “Anything new around here?”
“Harry Matsuko called.”
“I told him I’d be away – didn’t he know that?”
“He said you’d told him. He was just checking to see if you were back yet.”
They seemed to have difficulty talking to one another. It was not that they were strained or ill at ease; it was more as though they’d run out of things to say. Not just now, but some time ago.
“Anything else?”
“Oh, and some roofing contractor came around. I had the hardest time making him understand – ”
“I didn’t send for anyone like that,” he said, narrowing his eyes at her.
“I told him I was sure you hadn’t, or you would have told me about it. I tried to explain there was nothing wrong with our roof whatever. But he spoke of some city ordinance about making sure loose tiles didn’t slide off and hurt somebody below. And they went ahead and put a ladder against the house and climbed up on the outside.”
“How many were there?”
“Two. The contractor and his assistant. They poked around up there an hour. I even saw them lift up some of the tiles and look underneath.” She stopped. “Why’d you do that?” she asked him curiously.
“Do what?”
“Stroke both sides of your face with one hand like that?”
“I was feeling to see if I needed a shave.”
“No,” she said tonelessly. “You did it when I spoke of that roofing contractor having been here.”
They were in the bedroom by this time. He shrugged off his coat and flung it across the back of a chair. “Guess I’ll shower up,” he said, untying his necktie. “That train coming up from saki was pretty sooty.”
She was standing there looking at him, but her thoughts seemed to be in another world.
He was down to his shorts and undershirt now. Suddenly he stopped and said, “Why do you have to stand there like that? Didn’t you ever see me getting undressed before? I don’t need help.”
She came back to herself with a start. “I’ll see how Micky’s getting along with the dinner,” she said and went out. Mikki was their maid of all work; her name was too long for them to handle, so they called her by just the first two syllables of it. Mikki, or, more often than not, Micky.
But she was back in the room again when he came out of the shower, toweling himself vigorously. He stopped for a moment, narrowly scanned the expression on her face, and then nodded. “So you wouldn’t be happy until you nosed, would you?”
‘No,” she said wearily. “I only came back to see if you needed an extra towel.” She pointed to the chair seat. There was a fresh one lying folded on it.
He turned his back and began putting on his clothes again.
“But when a husband tells his wife not to stand watching him undress,” she went on, “it’s not modesty, it can’t be. It’s because he has something to hide.”
He didn’t answer.
“I found the money belt, with five thousand dollars United States currency in it.”
“You took the trouble to count it, too, I notice,” he said over his shoulder.
“You don’t trust me anyway,” she pointed out. “So I may as well have the game as long as I’ve got the name.”
“Go ahead, ask me,” he defied her. “Ask me where I got it and what I got it for!”
“Would you tell me the truth?”
“No!” he said sharply.
She shrugged her shoulders to show she knew the futility of it. “And the unset diamond, where did that come
from?”
“Oh, you saw that, too.” He went over to her and held it out on the flat of his hand. “That’s something I don’t mind you asking about,” he told her unhesitatingly. “Although you probably won’t believe me about that, either. A Chinaman came up to me in Hong Kong and asked if I wanted to buy it. He was a refugee or something, needed money. I bought it off him for peanuts.”
“You don’t buy a diamond that size for peanuts,” she said skeptically.
“It’s probably hot.”
She didn’t seem too interested in the diamond bit. “I hope it brings you good luck,” she said indifferently. And then, as though turning to something of more consequence, “I also found a woman’s Chinese silk handkerchief stuffed in your breast pocket, reeking of some God-awful cheap perfume.”
“That’s something I picked up on the street.”
“The handkerchief or the woman?” she asked sweetly.
“Gee, you’ve been a busy little bitch in the half-hour since I came home!” he yelled. And he gave the door a slam that shook the whole house.
The girl in the taxi was extremely frightened as it drew up before Secret Service Headquarters. It was written all over her face, and every move she made indicated it plainly. She lowered her head first and peered worriedly under and out at the ugly, blocklike concrete building. Her hands were too rapid and agitated as she opened her purse and fumbled for money to pay the driver. Then, when he returned change, she fumbled again and spilled some to the floor. Finally, when she opened the door and got out, she left her gloves lying on the seat. He had to call her attention to them.
She was extremely beautiful, tall and straight for a Japanese girl, and with particularly lovely, long, well-proportioned legs, again an exception. She wore a tailored suit of tan pongee silk, with a turned-down white collar and a flowing black satin bow tie, such as artists are sometimes pictured wearing.
But she was still very frightened as she went up the steps and inside. The apprehensive way she looked all about her seemed to say, Why have I been sent for like this? What have I done? Will I ever come out of here again?
She noticed a building attendant and approached him. “The office of Colonel Setsu, please. Which way?”
He pointed. “Right at the end there, facing you.”
She went over to the door and stood there looking at it. Finally she went in.
The outer office was nothing to be frightened of. There were desks with typists seated at them, a receptionist, all the usual business office personnel. But they were all men; there wasn’t a woman in sight.
She was directed into an inner office and told to wait there. She sat down on a straight-backed chair placed against the wall and began to slap her loose gloves nervously with one hand against the other. Suddenly a door opened, and a young man in army uniform stood there, rigid and impersonal as an automaton. “In here, please,” he ordered her.
She got up and went in. The young man, closing the door behind her, remained outside.
The man at the desk in the center of the room was also in uniform. He was in his sixties, bald of crown and with a wizened but cracklingly intelligent face. A cigarette burned away in a little lacquered tray to one side of him, untouched.
He let her stand there for several minutes out in the center of the room before him, while he looked over papers. Then he said, as though reading from the papers, without looking up at her, “You are Tomiko.”
She inclined her head. “Yes, Colonel.”
“You are paid to dance each night at the Yeddo entertainment place.”
She inclined her head again. “Yes, Colonel.”
His voice became a droning mumble while he continued to read from the papers, as though he did not need any further confirmation from her. “Twenty-four years old. Born here in Tokyo. Grandfather gave his life in the glorious victory at Tsushima Straits. Older brother died in Service in the China incident.”
He became less formal, discarded the papers and clasped his hands comfortably on the desk before him, although he still allowed her to stand there, almost at attention.
“An honorable family.”
She bowed her gratitude.
“Would you too like to serve your divine Emperor?”
This time she bowed deeply, reverently, arms held stiffly close to her sides. “I would give my unworthy life itself.”
The colonel gravely nodded his approval. “Spoken like a true daughter of Yamato.”
“But who am I to dare offer this, a mere woman?”
The colonel was more and more pleased with her. His first instinctive antipathy to her Western apparel and her un-Japanese mode of earning a living began to wear off. Underneath that she was all Japanese, he could see. She had the white flame of patriotism in its holiest form.
“Men must give their lives on the field of battle, true. But there are other ways in which men cannot serve, and a woman may. These can be just as important for the good of our country. In the eyes of the gods, these smaller ways can be just as worthy.”
Her eyes were smoldering now. “Command me.”
He thawed completely, captivated by her – not personally, but patriotically. “Sit down, san.” He took out a fresh cigarette for himself and offered her one.
“This is not our way,” she said quietly. “This is the way of the Others. Smoking is for men.”
“For over a year now,” he began without further preamble, “there has been, somewhere in this city, a secret radio transmitter, sending out coded messages. Our detector units have picked up its call signals over and over. This can only mean one thing. An enemy agent or a group of enemy agents are operating right here in the capital. We have been unable to pinpoint the transmitter closely enough to locate it. Our radio detection equipment is not accurate enough. However, there are other ways of capturing and silencing it. By identifying and arresting the person or persons who are operating it. Starting with a list of almost two hundred possible suspects at the beginning, our investigations have now brought this down to not more than six all told. Five out of the six are being covered by my other operatives.
“In Azabu-ku lives an American – ” he grimaced as he pronounced the word – “called Jo-hin Lai-hyon. This is your task. He is a possibility, if only because so many others have already been eliminated. Close watch from the outside has uncovered nothing. His house has been searched a number of times without result. It is only from the inside, where a man has not the same defenses, that success may come. You must get on the inside of him. Know him inside out. There is your assignment. You may have to lie in his arms, and be the body to his body. Is this too much to ask?”
“No.”
“It will not be too difficult. He has a sort of fever for women on him. All men do, but with him it has already become sickness. There is no let and no stop to it; until finally the door of the mind closes without ever again reopening.”
“Where shall I meet him? How shall I know him?”
“You will be given a photograph we have of him, to study before you leave here. We will arrange the meeting for you also. His house is being watched. When he is seen to leave it, and it is sure he will not answer the call himself, I will have someone ring up on the telephone, give the name of one of the other five I mentioned, a Californian Japanese, and ask to have him meet him at the place you work, the Yeddo. His wife, who is stupid in our ways of speech, will not know one voice from another. She will give him the message. His friend will not be there, of course, when he goes there. Instead, he will see you. The rest will follow. You will know what to do. This is nothing that comes out of books. It was born into you.
“I will arrange with the central telephone exchange to have a closed circuit set up, so that you can reach me direct at any hour of the night or day, either at my home or here at the office, without having to go through the usual switchboards and interception desks. Simply give my name and say your own. Precious moments may be saved that way.”
She dropped down to her
knees and inclined her forehead until it touched the floor.
“I serve my divine Emperor.”
The Yeddo Club was just off the Ginza, Tokyo’s Broadway-Piccadilly-Champs Elysées. A single ideograph, in coral tube-lighting, announced its name. There was no Western lettering in the accompaniment. And yet the evidences of Westernism on every hand could not be escaped, for a nightclub in itself was a Western product, unlike the native geisha-houses, which were something entirely different.
Everyone in the place, even the Japanese, wore Western clothing. The barmen were busy mixing martinis and daiquiris, not serving sake. And at the moment when Lyons entered, a small Japanese band was sawing away – and with no sense of the beat – at an antique American number called “Button Up Your Overcoat.” A few couples were on the floor doing the old-fashioned walkaway fox trot.
He asked for and got a small table for one on the edge of the parquet, rather than one of the banquettes lining the walls. He ordered a Tom Collins and sat out a trio of jugglers and a magician with a kimonoed girl assistant, wondering what was holding Matsuko up, and whether he’d come to the right place.
Then the spotlight, which had been spread out to envelop the whole floor area, contracted to just an aspirin tablet of dazzling white intensity, and a girl came out and began to dance.
Instantaneously, at first glance, she did something to him. A sort of spitting, sizzling electrical charge seemed to come from her and form an arc to him. Simply because he was what he was, and who he was, and ready to be grounded.
At first she was in a rich purple silk kimono, embroidered with gold cranes and chrysanthemums, and obi of pale violet, a gold eye mask on her face. She postured gracefully this way and that for a moment, opened and discarded the kimono – which was whisked from sight by a girl attendant – and then really began to dance.
She was not unclothed in any sense of the word. But a tier of long silken fringe fell from her bosom to her waist, and a second tier from her waist to her lower thighs. It was the glimpses of her body, as the fringe continually parted and split with her movements, that did the damage. It stirred his senses so that he almost reeled, and had to grab the sides of his chair tight to stay on.
