“You really should meet my friend, Ian,” Hector found himself saying.
“You mean Ian Fleming,” Mishima said. He made his fingers into a mockery of a gun and said, “Mr. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang? Licensed to kill?”
Mishima laughed along with Hector. “Actually, I would like to meet that man and as an actor, after a sorts, I’m looking forward to seeing the film, Doctor No. Fleming fascinates me, and in many ways. I read one of his Bonds, the one about Russia, many years ago in English. He’s far more writer than most of your Western critics give him credit for. Anthony Boucher just clearly doesn’t get the man.” A wry smile. “But then Boucher is an idiot.”
Hector smiled and said, “I agree, and your next flask is on me for certain. I’ll confess that Boucher’s a kind of bête noire of mine. He doesn’t really get me, either.”
Another, much harsher laugh. The Japanese novelist said, “What do critics ever know? They’re all now savaging my new novel, Utsukushii hoshi or Beautiful Star, some even as we speak, I expect. True, it’s almost science fiction and so unlike most of what I’ve done before now. But it was the book I had to write. I can’t give them the same book over and over, even if it would help sales. Do you know what I mean?”
Hector smiled in commiseration and reached across to light a fresh cigarette for Mishima, using his newly re-flinted Zippo. He again resisted the urge to get out a smoke of his own.
As he lit the other author’s cigarette, Hector said, “As popular writers, we endure vogues. Ups and downs we can do much too little to control.”
“Just so,” Mishima agreed. He presumed to take the lighter from Hector’s hand and to read the engraved inscription there. “A gift from Hemingway? I heard you were friends. I know that line about the true sentence is one most-associated with Hemingway.”
“That’s right,” Hector said. “I suppose not a day’s gone by since last July I haven’t thought of poor Hem. Maybe the critic Edmund “Bunny” Wilson said it best somehow, despite his day job. Hearing of Ernest’s death was like having one of the pillars of the world suddenly and terribly collapse, Wilson wrote.”
“But surely Hemingway was right to do what he did, taking his own life,” Mishima said unhesitatingly. “Admittedly, I may have certain biases in this area—” another funny smile “—but from my perspective, Hemingway’s only mistake was in not dying when he was young and beautiful and at the top of his game as a writer. Tell me, if you can confirm it: Is it true his mother dressed Hemingway in dresses when he was young?”
“I’ve seen the pictures to prove it,” Hector said. “And Hem told me about all that more than once.” Hector sighed and said, “Hem may be the only man I’ve ever met who, I believe, truly hated his mother.”
Mishima’s face grew dark. “My grandmother raised me for many years. She did something similar. My father was so concerned about my ‘feminization’ that he destroyed many of my early writings, thinking them a kind of symptom. He thought writing unmanly.” He rubbed his jaw and said, “Did your father approve of you becoming a writer?”
“I hardly knew my father,” Hector said candidly, suddenly almost feeling the actual weight of Haven’s gaze.
It was the first time he’d shared the story with another man. Hector wasn’t sure what it meant that he felt compelled to do so with this particular person. Yet, he pressed on: “I actually shot my father, just after he killed my mother. He caught her with another man. I winged my father and nearly cost him an arm. But the state eventually executed him for mother’s murder. I was raised by my grandfather. The old man was cordially dubious about the craft of writing as a means to make a living, but to Beau’s credit—I guess—he certainly didn’t try to stop my trying.”
The Japanese author, who many felt would claim a Nobel Prize any year now, leaned back in his chair, contemplating the fleeting fire at the end of his cigarette. It was some Japanese brand that seemed to burn faster than its Western counterparts.
Mishima at last said, “It’s been a crazy interval in my career these past few months, so I should perhaps be forgiven some of my thinking if it offends or concerns you in some way. I no sooner got back from a world tour with my wife than I was sued for libel—a very unusual thing to have happen here in Japan. I was sued by a politician offended by my novel, After the Banquet. Was this man, this politician, thinly disguised in my novel?” Mishima smiled. “Yes, he was. But then you of all authors know something of the risks of using real people in fiction.
“Next, an extremist political group took offense at one of my short stories. They issued a death threat and promised they would burn down my house, preferably with my family and I still inside. This was no hollow or idle threat, my friend. I had to have a bodyguard for the past year, just in case they followed through. It’s only lately I can feel safe going out by myself like this, not looking over my shoulder all the time.”
That last sentiment certainly resonated with Hector given certain current circumstances of his own.
Mishima reached over and shook Hector’s downturned hand, letting the touch linger after the shake was over. Mishima’s much smaller hand came to rest on the back of Hector’s bigger, hairier mitt. It was an unusual gesture coming from another man and evoked more thoughts of certain rumors about Mishima’s sexuality. Hector let it happen though.
The Japanese writer searched his eyes and said, “Sometimes I think the fools forget we’re merely myth-makers. In the end, what real harm can we do anyone? You would agree?”
At a loss for any worthy words, Hector just smiled noncommittally.
Mishima ended the lingering, intimate touch and sat back in his chair again, his cigarette in one hand, his cup of tea in the other. “And the days are getting shorter. Within a year or two, I’ll be forty-five and will have to make a plan for my life.”
Mishima’s glowered, his thick, bushy brows knitting closer. “When a man reaches the age of forty, he has no chance to die beautifully. No matter how he tries, he will die in an ugly way. So he has to force himself to live from that point on. It is undeniable, yes?”
Now Yukio Mishima really reminded Hector of Ian Fleming. It seemed a shame the two peculiar, egocentric and fatalistic writers couldn’t meet and commiserate about decay and death over raw fish, just as Hector was doing with Mishima.
That very morning, quoting Raymond Chandler, Fleming had groused, “Lust ages men but keeps women young.”
The Japanese author abruptly pointed at Hector’s scabbed and bruised hands and said, “Speaking of threats and enemies, what’s behind what happened yesterday to you at the airport? It’s all in the news, as I’m sure you know. It frankly sounds more like the kind of thing that would have happened to me—that is if those threatening me had had any real guts to act.”
Hector shrugged and said, “I honestly wish you could tell me what all that might mean. I’m really just here to sight-see and to write about Ian pretty much doing the same.”
***
Outside the club, after a goodbye and a firm dry handshake with Mishima—when it was again just the two of them and Hector was weighing hailing them a cab—Haven reached over and caressed his un-bruised cheek.
She said, “You look very troubled darling, what’s wrong? Are you not feeling well?”
He shook his head and sighed. “Just reflecting on our lunch and all of the gloomy talk that went with it. Honest to God, am I the only writer on earth who doesn’t want to die, not ever?”
Haven smiled and hugged him close. “Certainly stay alive as long as you can, my darling Hector. The novelty and charm of you hasn’t nearly worn off for me and I have all manner of carnal designs for you back at the hotel and elsewhere across this grand country. Even now, I’m thinking we should go somewhere naughty together soon, perhaps we should do that right this instant.”
“Sounds like a stellar idea,” Hector said. “But first, I think I need a drink—a proper, strong and Western-style cocktail. Tell me, my lovely Haven, where in God’s name in Tokyo ca
n a man get a potently-made double bourbon on the rocks?”
On the way in search of a bar that might serve some drink equal to that of Hector’s dreams, Haven talked him into a film after promising it was the scandalous talk of Tokyo—a new genre of filmmaking dubbed “eroduction” and a piece of cinema that only ran a little under half-an-hour.
Reluctantly, Hector complied. What, after all, was half-an-hour?
In the end, the Japanese stag film called Flesh Market really did nothing for Hector more than heighten his desire for that stiff Western-style drink.
Haven eventually led him to Golden Gai, or “Golden Town,” a cramped and bohemian little sector of shops and bars that seemed somehow a world away from the neon flash of Tokyo proper.
They found a hole in the wall joint that seated maybe a dozen diners, tops, and Hector at last got his stiff, American-style drink. He also finally permitted himself a blessed cigarette.
Watching him, Haven smiled and shook her head. “You’re already homesick, I think.”
Hector blew a long, thin stream of smoke, mulling her observation. That cigarette—he already thought he could have skipped it. Another sign, maybe, he was closer to changing his way of living. . .no mean feat past sixty.
He shook his head and tapped off a little ash. He said, “Not like you mean. For one thing, I’m still rather shaken up by that whole Cuban Missile Crisis interval. I suspect we all came closer to Armageddon than we ever want to know. America doesn’t feel all that safe to me, these days. Kennedy is a worry. He’s clearly too young and callow for the office. For another thing, I’ve always been a traveler, but I suppose Europe isn’t all that terribly far from America once you tick off the language differences. Lacking the language, lacking the map in my head, and clearly being somebody’s target over here? It’s just not shaping up to be a sightseeing lark, this passage, you know? It’s a little too much like living in an Ambler novel, or maybe one of Graham Greene’s so-called dark entertainments.”
Looking a bit sad and disappointed, she said, “I so wish it was different, but I understand what you’re saying, of course. It’s all undeniably the way it is—the world feels like it rests on the knife’s edge. More and more, that seems so. Ideally, we’d get this thing with Ian and the microfilm handled sooner rather than later and then—or at least one would expect—the pressure on you would quickly drop off.”
Hector didn’t see how that could come to be—not unless he and Ian called some kind of conference for the world press to say they’d recovered the key to manufacturing an unspeakable biological weapon, but then turned it over to the British or the American governments.
Hector heard Ian in his head delivering this imaginary press conference, cigarette smoke trailing as he spoke with his hands: “So, there you see, ladies and gentleman—Hector and I have nothing more to provide the espionage community and so now we’re off to seek some nubile naked Japanese pearl divers and to savor other, most robust treasures of the Orient.”
Following his second double bourbon, Hector finally felt a pleasant numbing sensation setting in. Sensing the change—Haven seemed terribly attentive and attuned to him, Hector thought, almost cloyingly so—she smiled and said, “Your blood sugar issues aside, will you trust me on one thing and try some Japanese whiskey?”
Hector almost laughed. “Holy Jesus, there is such a thing?”
Smiling, holding up a finger, Haven ordered in Japanese. Hector thought he caught a brand name. He repeated, “Suntory?”
“Suntory Old Whiskey,” she confirmed. “They modulate their handling of the whiskey in relation to the changes of the seasons.”
“Really? That sounds complicated.”
“But well worth the efforts,” she said. “You’ll see.”
To his surprise, Hector found he quite liked the Japanese whiskey. He was something of a single malt aficionado—even a kind of whisky snob, probably.
Hell, Hector figured even his fellow whisky-phile, good old Jimmy Hanrahan, would grudgingly approve of this Japanese stuff.
Haven tapped his glass with hers and said, “You like?”
“I like very much.”
“It’s your turn for the toast,” she said.
He’d taken some trouble to learn a few key phrases from Tiger. He said, “Kampai.”
“That’s charming, if ever-so slightly mispronounced,” Haven said, stroking his leg slowly under the bar, out of sight of their server. Her hand drifted elsewhere. Husky voiced, she whispered in his ear, “Where’d you learn that?”
Before he could answer, he felt something sharp and hard poke his right kidney. Haven was suddenly sitting up straighter.
There was a mirror behind the bar. Two smallish men in dove-gray trench coats and matching gray porkpie hats stood behind them. Both also wore white surgical masks that hooked behind their ears, covering more of their faces.
Hector assumed the other man, just like the one behind him, had a gun pressed to Haven’s spine.
The one standing behind Hector said, “You will get up very slowly, and then you will walk out quietly with us, your hands in your pockets.” His English was disarmingly assured.
Nodding at the bartender, the masked man said something in Japanese, then nodded toward the front of the establishment where a third man, one dressed the same way and also masked, stood glaring back at them.
Haven said to Hector, “He just told the bartender to relax and to do nothing, or else that man at the door will pitch a hand grenade in here, killing everyone and likely burning down the entire block.”
Hector said to Haven, “Who are these fools? Do you have any ideas?”
Before she could answer, the man behind Hector said, “Shut up, both of you, or I’ll kill you right now. Don’t you put me to some test, Mr. Lassiter. Nor you, Miss Branch.”
12 / A Hidden Claw
Remarkably, their would-be captors didn’t search them or even pat down Hector to discover his gun. On the other hand, he couldn’t have done much with it anyway, not after his hands were jerked behind his back and secured there with some kind of surgical rubber cord that all but robbed the circulation from his fingers.
Haven’s hands, too, were lashed behind her back. They pitched her purse onto the floorboard of a waiting car, then forced Hector into the back seat, stretched out on his back. Haven was slung face down across his chest, her weight and its impact sparking fresh pain from his earlier bumps and bruises.
She said softly, scared-eyed, “I’m so sorry, Hector. I was a perfect fool to have us go wandering around like bloody tourists when all this is boiling around you. This is my fault, all my fault.”
“I said to shut up,” warned the man who spoke English. “No more words, or I’ll shoot this woman in the leg and leave her to slowly bleed out in front of you, Mr. Lassiter. She is frankly of no practical use to us. It’s you we mean to talk to. Be clear on this—it’s only you we need. It’s important you both understand this woman of yours is merely a means to an end, and we will act accordingly. You should do the same if you would spare her further suffering.”
***
Riding in grim silence, smelling her fear-born perspiration mixed with his own, Hector tried to calculate and memorize distances and the turns they took in case he got some chance to try and navigate them in reverse in the course of an eventual escape.
That seemed a very remote possibility, however—his mental exercises just something inchoately arrived at to keep him distracted from whatever dark outcome might loom for the two of them.
All the light went out just as the car began to slow and then stopped—Hector assumed they’d entered an underground garage of sorts. He estimated they’d traveled less than two miles, but there had been a fair number of turns before arriving.
As they hauled him out of the car after Haven, while seeking to get a better grip on his rangy body, one of the men at last felt the hard piece of metal under his arm and grunted.
The Walther was immediately taken from his should
er holster and shoved into the pocket of the man who spoke English.
So much for that possible tool of escape.
That said, he still had his deadly lighter and his garrote watch. Given any chance at all, he’d use them, Hector promised himself.
That was if he could ever get his hands free to do so.
Pinned behind his back and with Haven’s weight fully on his chest, Hector hadn’t been able to work at the rubber bonds on his wrists as they were being driven.
As he stood up, Hector began to turn his hands, the surgical rubber tubing tearing painfully at his hairy wrists but already intimating some promising new slack.
Shuffling a few steps ahead of Haven and her escort, Hector was shoved through a connecting door from the garage into a larger empty room—this one with bare concrete walls and a slightly pitched concrete floor that sported a center drain just visible in the low light.
This space looked old and appeared to have survived innumerable earthquakes: troubling cracks speaking to the region’s sorry seismic history spread across the floor, ceilings and walls like spiders’ webs.
Seething, Hector watched helplessly as two of the masked men shoved Haven through yet another door. A shouted order in English before that door was slammed shut: “Strip! Take off every stitch of clothing, you white bitch!”
Haven clearly resisted: Screams and the sounds of tearing fabric ensued, then muffled cries just before the door firmly closed, followed by a torturous silence.
Moving toward that door, Hector was stopped when his own PPK’s barrel was shoved up tight against his back. A curt voice said simply, convincingly, “No.”
A single chair was positioned in the middle of the main room. Its legs appeared to have been fastened to the floor with metal plates and screws. The man holding Hector’s gun pointed for the author to take a seat there.
Death in the Face Page 11
