by Greenberg
He was hers before she’d even taken her third step. Every nerve in his body wanted her. The rest of the dance passed in a blur; he was hardly able to see it through the spell that enveloped him. His breath kept coming faster than the music.
When it was over and she was gone, the room seemed to cool down considerably, his heartbeats slowed and he could breathe better again.
Taking a long drink and a long shaky pull on a cigarette, he stopped a waiter with a peremptory jerk at his jacket.
“What was her name? Her, just now. You’ve got to give it to me.”
“Tomiko,” said the waiter blandly, as though this weren’t exactly a new experience.
“Wait,” he said, holding onto him. “Tell her she’s got to come out here. She’s got to come to my table. If she doesn’t, I’ll go in there myself and bring her out.”
“Maybe she no like that,” said the waiter, bland as ever.
Lyons crushed a paper tip into his breast pocket and managed to regain control of himself. “Ask her if she’ll please join me at my table. Say I’d like to meet her very much.”
Now, as he sat waiting, he didn’t want Matsuko to show up anymore. But that was all right, because Matsuko didn’t, in any case.
She didn’t keep him waiting too long, considering that she’d changed from head to foot into street clothes. Western, of course. A plain black wool dress with six strands of white miikbeads tight around her neck. Even her hair had been done over. The bulging Japanese pompadour studded with flowers and pins was gone – he saw now that it must have been a wig – and she wore it now in a sleek little doll-bob with doll-bangs across her forehead. She smelled faintly of jasmine.
She came to a posed halt just far enough away from the table so that she didn’t seem overanxious to get to it, one hip a little out of line, one foot pointed toe-forward, both hands holding the patent-leather envelope bag against the indentation of her waist.
“Good evening,” she said in very presentable English.
His chair clicked like a dice roll with the swiftness with which he stood up. “Will you give me the pleasure of your company?”
“If you wish,” she said demurely.
He circled the table and held her chair for her, and she eased into it. He was gone. He didn’t have a chance, and didn’t want one.
The waiter was beside them, solicitously.
“An anisette,” she said, but to Lyons, not directly to the waiter. She let him see that he was her host. She was tactful that way, she was knowing.
“An anisette,” he repeated to the waiter, although the waiter was standing closer to her than he was to Lyons himself.
“Did you like my dance?” she asked him, to break the ice while they were waiting.
“I didn’t see it,” he said. She waited for him to finish, and he did. “I only saw you.”
She smiled to show that she accepted it as a compliment and not a slur.
“Would you care for a cigarette?”
“I rarely smoke,” she said. And then quite unexpectedly added, “I will, though, if you want me to.”
There was a good cue there, and he took it. “I don’t want you to do anything you don’t care to.” A moment’s meaningful pause.
She didn’t pretend not to understand. “We haven’t come to that yet. That’s far ahead of us.”
The waiter put her glass down to one side of her in order not to block their view of one another.
She raised the glass. “To our friendship,” she said politely.
“No good,” he said.
“Why no good? Why can’t we be friends?”
“Oh hell, you know damn well we can’t,” he groaned, half under his breath.
She made a very slight warding-off motion with one hand, and smiled a little, to take the sting out of it. “I don’t like to disappoint anyone, you in particular, so let’s have things wellregulated in advance. In a little while – not immediately – but in a little while I’m going to get up and go home. It’s late, I’ve danced, I’m tired and I have to get up tomorrow.”
“What makes you think I’m not going right with you? I have a car outside.”
“Very well, then you may take me as far as where I live. It will save me the trouble of having to find a taxi at this hour of the night.”
“What was that ‘as far as’?” he asked suspiciously. “Don’t I get to go inside with you? What is it, off-bounds or something?”
“I happen to live with my family.”
“Oh, come on now,” he groaned. “Don’t pull that old thing.”
“I honestly do,” she insisted. “A complete assortment of them. Father, mother, two younger sisters, one baby brother. You can ask the manager here at the club, if you don’t believe me. He had to interview them before they permitted me to sign the contract with him. They’ve accepted my Western ways, my way of earning a living, but still I can’t bring someone into the house with me. That broad-minded they are not.”
“I’m going to have some night!” he lamented, throwing his face up toward the ceiling.
“What makes you think there won’t be others,” she said chastely, “after this one is over?”
“Whatever became of that little radio you used to keep on in the end room upstairs?” Ruth asked him unexpectedly at breakfast the next morning.
“I sold it.’’
He took another sip of his coffee, then asked “Why do you ask about that now? That’s been gone long ago.”
“Kind of sudden, wasn’t it? You used to spend hours tinkering with it, locked up in there.”
“Locked up? How do you know I was locked up?”
“I tried the door accidentally once or twice.”
“Accidentally, I bet,” was all he said.
“Another thing I keep thinking about,” she went on presently, “is all those people who keep coming to the house by mistake. A roofing contractor, when there was nothing the matter with the roof. An electrical repairman, when there was no power failure. I’ve watched from the window sometimes, when they leave. They never go to any of the other houses. It’s always only to this house they come.”
“So?”
She was silent for a short time. Then she said, “Look, I’m not a fool, John. I went to U.C.L.A., same as you did. In fact that’s where we met, remember? Level with me. What’s up?”
She waited for it to sink in.
“What do you mean, what’s up?” he said finally.
“Just what I said. What’s up? What are you up to? What are you doing? Do I have to draw you a picture?”
He stared at her silently.
“All right, then here it is – listen to it. You make a hundred and fifty a month with the Acme Travel Agency. You don’t even have an office. So where and when do you sell your tickets? Yet you go away on these little side-trips, come back with five thousand dollars in your money belt. The time before that it was fifteen hundred.”
“Maybe I’m a dope smuggler,” he jeered. “Have a shot on me.”
“That was what first occurred to me,” she admitted gravely. “Only the drug traffic flows the other way. Out of China, not into it. So it wouldn’t be that.”
“You name it, then.”
“It all adds up to only one thing. Why try to deny it? You’re engaged in espionage work of some kind or another. You’re nothing but a – a common, ordinary spy.”
“How revolting!” he said sarcastically.
“There’s nothing in it to be proud of that I can see. Maybe I have the wrong slant. A soldier fights openly on the field of battle. That’s honest, at least. But this is – is sneaky, behind-the-back, in-the-dark kind of fighting. I never could see where it was romantic or glamorous. Never could see that at all. It’s dirty and it’s below the belt. It’s juvenile, it’s adolescent, only an immature mind could think other – ”
“Like mine,” he supplied for her.
The door opened tentatively, and she said sharply, “Stay in the kitchen, Mikki, until we cal
l you.” Mikki did not know enough English to make a very good eavesdropper, even if she’d wanted to.
They were silent for a long while.
Then she said, dully, shaking her head in continued disbelief, “My own husband a spy. After nine years I find it out.”
“We’re not married that long,” he said almost facetiously, as though he enjoyed tormenting her.
“No, but we’ve known each other that long. I don’t know, something about it sticks in my craw. Why didn’t you tell me at the start?” she cried out bitterly. “Why didn’t you give me a chance to decide at that time whether I wanted to go on with you or not? Not let me give up six or seven years of my life, and then stumble on it by accident.”
“You’re sure taking it big.”
“Because there’s something unclean about it. I can’t stomach it.”
“Well, if you don’t like it, you can damn well lump it!” he burst out. “Because I’m staying with it. It’s my life, and it’s too late to back out now. I couldn’t even if I wanted to, and I don’t want to.”
She rose from the table, but still stood there by it, half turned away. “I’m glad we haven’t any children.” Then she went on to the door, turned and asked him, “Is Matsuko in on it, too?”
“Look,” he said roughly, “no questions, hear? You’ve talked just about enough for one day. Now zip up your yap and leave me alone. I want a little peace.”
“You answered my question anyway, just then, whether you realized it or not. Sure he is, he must be. All those cryptic phone calls you get from him.”
He swung his arm around at her impatiently. “Blow. Beat it. Take an aspirin.”
“They’ll shoot you one of these days,” she said hollowly from outside by the stairs.
“They don’t shoot here in Japan, they hang,” he called back flippantly.
“How many other places have you done it? Did you do it in Russia, too, that time you went there before we were married? It’s a wonder they didn’t shoot you there.”
He was pouring himself a drink of Japanese whiskey, his own nerves frayed now by the prolonged dispute. “Why would they shoot me in Russia, you jerk?” he exclaimed, caught off guard. “That’s where I – ”
He stopped. She was coming back toward him now. He shrugged, as though to say, What the hell’s the difference anyway? He downed his drink.
He’d never seen her face so white before. He’d never seen any face so white before.
“What did you say just then?”
“Nothing.”
“Finish it. Finish what you started to say.”
“You heard me the first time, so what do you want me to repeat for?”
“Tell me I didn’t hear you right. Tell me. You’ve got to tell me that.” She tried to shake him by the shoulders.
He backed his hand at her. “Knock it off or I’ll belt you!”
“It is the United States? It is the United States?” She was almost incoherent by now, sobbing drily without tears. “That’s bad enough, but at least it is the United States?”
“What is the United States?”
“ – you’re working for.”
“Grow up, you fool, he said with lethal slowness, spacing each word. “How dumb can you be? It’s Russia.”
At the sound she made, Mikki stuck her head in at the door. “Somesing happen, Missy?”
“Yeah, he said, without lifting a finger to help her. “Missy’s chicken-hearted. She just fainted dead away on the floor.” And he poured himself another drink.
It didn’t take her long to get ready. In less than an hour she was tottering clumsily down the stairs, swaying off-balance from the bulky valise she was lugging with both hands.
When he saw her go past toward the front door, he got up and went out into the hall after her.
“Here, you better take this with you,” he said briefly.
This wasn’t any ordinary husband-and-wife quarrel, and they both knew it. This was terminal.
She looked down at his hand first and then up into his face.
“Money from those people? That kind of money?” she said bitterly. “Thank you, no!”
“All right, Betsy Ross,” he answered grimly. “It’s still a whole lot better shake than I ever got from my own country. You never stopped to think of my side of it, did you? Selling apples and shoelaces on the street corner, unable to finish my schooling, pounding my feet off looking for a job and never finding one. Standing on soup lines like a beggar. Living in tincan shanties. Fatso Hoover. ‘Prosperity is just around the corner.’ ‘Happy days are here again.’ Even when I finally did marry, I wasn’t allowed the privilege of having children of my own, like a man should. Even that right was taken away from me. That’s what’s turned me into what I am today, lushing and wolfing. My own country couldn’t offer me a living. Why shouldn’t I turn to those people? They offered the only hope there was, for an underdog like me.”
She’d put the valise down, but only momentarily.
“A hundred million other Americans went through that right along with you. How is it all the others didn’t turn their backs on their country, too? Because they had guts, and you and a few like you didn’t. Don’t blame your own weakness on your country’s shortcomings. Every country goes through a tough time at one time or another. To turn your back on it just because of that is like – is like turning down a friend when he needs your help.” Her lip curled disdainfully. “I don’t think the United States wants a man like you. I think she’s better off without a man like you, if you want to know the truth of it.”
“Three cheers for the red, white and blue,” he said sourly.
She hoisted the valise and turned and went out into the street.
He watched her for a moment, his expression changing from anger to relief.
“You better let me call a taxi for you, at least,” he called after her.
“I don’t want a taxi. I’ll walk downtown along the middle of the street, carrying my valise in my hand until I get to the American consulate. They’ll take care of me there, they’ll see that I get back home.”
“Are you going to inform on me?”
“No. I’m more loyal to the man I married, than you are to – the country you were born into. I’ll simply say there was another woman, that’s all.”
She turned a corner and was lost to view.
Suddenly, without any warning, two members of the Kempetai, the terrible, the terrifying “thought-police,” were standing one on each side of her. One riveted his hand upon her shoulder, the other riveted his hand around her arm.
“You come with us,” one said in Japanese.
“What for?” she asked, her eyes widening with unalloyed fright. “Why are you arresting me?”
“Detain for questioning.”
She came hurrying across the room to him at the Yeddo, the smile on her face far brighter than any lipstick could have been.
She was still in the same black dress with the same milk-beads around her throat, but she’d added two new touches tonight. She had on a tricky black satin cocktail-hat, pert as a kitten. And she’d changed her perfume. Tonight she was wearing muguet.
She held out both hands to him as he sprang to his feet, and he took them in both of his. Then they swung them in and out a few times, in affectionate greeting.
“Johnnie!” she piped gleefully, like a small child.
“I love it when you call me that,” he purred.
“ Johnnie. Johnnie,” she said softly.
They became aware that they were still standing and that people were turning around to grin at them. They sat down with a little mutual laugh.
“Did I keep you waiting long? I never changed so fast in my life. And that girl in there, she’s no help at all, poor thing. She’s not used to Western zippers.”
“I wouldn’t care how long you took.” He leaned across the table and put his hand on top of hers. “Tonight’s an anniversary. You know of what, don’t you?”
She
nodded with a sort of conspiratorial animation. “One week ago tonight we first met.”
He became serious. “Let’s do something different tonight. Let’s – A week’s an awful long time for a fellow to wait. And I’ve been awfully good about it, haven’t I? Admit it.’
“Except for begging every other minute,” she said mockingly.
Then she, too, became serious.
“I’m not like all the others, Johnnie. I want to know you inside out. What are you like, really? What do you do, really? What is your life, really?”
“I’ve told you everything, there isn’t anything I’ve left out,” he said earnestly. “I even told you about Ruth, the second night we met.”
“Oh, Ruth,” she said in contemptuous dismissal. “Every married man tells the girl he loves everything about his wife the very first thing. That’s nothing. I want to know you deeper than that, closer than that.”
“There isn’t any deeper, there isn’t any closer,” he said stubbornly.
“Then there isn’t any use for us to keep on meeting every night,” she said, as stubbornly. “What for, if you’re going to keep part of yourself away from me?”
He was glumly silent, and she saw that this was going to require more than just ordinary persuasion.
“Suppose I were to say yes,” she came out with suddenly. “I’m not saying yes – this is just supposition, remember. But suppose I were to say yes. Then where would we go? My family’s at my own home. I won’t go to your house. And I’m not the sort of girl, Mr. Johnnie Lyons, would go with you to some disreputable hotel just for the night.”
His face lit up like a floodlight. A little pulse in his temple started to jazz. His carburetor was in business again.
“I have a little bungalow, a country place, outside the city, on the Peninsula, overlooking the bay. Would you come there with me? We could make it in a forty-minute drive.”
“What would we do there?”
He chuckled outright in her face.
