The Ringmaster

by Morris West

  ‘One more question, Gil. What do you propose to do about this?’

  ‘Let me answer it with another. Who is paying my fee, you or Tanaka?’

  ‘We are splitting it down the middle.’

  ‘So you have joint ownership of my services under the contract, equal access to my counsel and equal severance rights. I cannot serve one of you at the cost of a disservice to the other. Also, I have my own freedom of conscience and my own right of withdrawal. What am I going to do? For the moment, what I have agreed. And remember, we both work under Japanese law. It is not a crime to associate with known criminals. Yakuza clubs operate openly with the insignia over the front door. Tanaka is certainly not acting in a criminal fashion. So, my counsel is to wait and see. When in doubt, do nothing. Let’s go to lunch.’

  Leibig still hesitated, but Franz was totally convinced. ‘He’s right, Carl. What have you got to lose by waiting? I’m sure I’ve got more stuff on Hoshino in my files. It shouldn’t be too hard to dig up some material on Cubeddu. Let’s be sure we’re treading on solid ground.’

  ‘Very well. That’s how we play it, with a poker-face. Thank you, Gil. Now we should go to lunch. If Tanaka asks what we have been talking about…’

  ‘We tell him the truth, or at least part of it. Lavrenti Ardaziani asked a question about the provenance of our new money. I disallowed it. You asked me how the question should be answered when it comes up again, as it inevitably will. We both invite Tanaka’s opinion. Clear?’

  ‘Absolutely. Let’s go to lunch.’

  The table groupings were interesting. Tanaka was seated with Forster and Cubeddu and a place had been left vacant for me. Marta was seated with Vannikov and the man from Georgia, who beckoned Carl Leibig to join them. Tanya, the interpreter, was placed with Leino the Finn, Hoshino the Korean and Miko herself.

  Miko had done her work well. The Korean and the Finn were effectively insulated by the presence of the two women. Forster would give a certain legitimacy to the Sicilian. I could field awkward questions addressed to Tanaka. The Russians could, if they chose, examine Marta and Leibig on the implications of the Haushofer thesis.

  This time there was no fault to find with Leibig’s hospitality. His chef was a young Rhinelander, French-trained and Swiss-polished. His waiters were all young men from the hoteliers school in Nara. Franz doubled as maître d’hôtel, moving discreetly from group to group, directing the service, alert always to catch a significant phrase in the talk. I had a suggestion for our group.

  ‘A round of golf after lunch … nine holes or eighteen, as you choose? We can talk as we go. What do you say, gentlemen?’

  Cubeddu was the first taker. Forster was the second. Tanaka hesitated.

  ‘I’m out of practice. I haven’t hit a ball in three months … But then, why not? After Tokyo the air here is almost too clean to breathe.’

  The moment that issue was settled, Cubeddu was off on another tack. ‘I’m much impressed with this language trick of yours, Mr Langton. How does it work?’

  ‘Well, it’s hard to analyse in a few words, but it isn’t a trick. It’s a combination of disciplines: linguistics, history, geography. Take your name, for example, Domenico Cubeddu. I would guess that your family originally came from the Western end of Sicily and that you could probably dig up relatives in Sardinia as well.’

  ‘How would you figure that out?’ He was giving nothing away.

  ‘I used to sail those coasts with my father. When we called into Cagliari in Sardinia, we used to stay with a family called Cubeddu. I believe the name is Sard and not Sicilian. There was traffic between the islands from earliest times.’

  He was taken aback, but only for a moment. He laughed and threw up his hands in a gesture of mock surrender. ‘You told me he was smart, Tanaka. He’s right. My father came from Sardinia and married a girl from Palermo. He was a great man, my father, very cool, molto dignitoso. Although he was a foreigner he became a man of high confidence. He never made a promise he didn’t keep. You impress me, Mr Langton. I should like to do business with you.’

  It was not a prospect that pleased me; but I did not want to insult the man either. I changed the subject and asked Forster: ‘Does your bank do much business with Mr Cubeddu’s corporation?’

  ‘No. I know the organisation, of course; but he is not one of our regular correspondents.’

  There was a special shade of meaning to that in the jargon of international banking. Translated into bald terms, it meant they would happily deal with Cubeddu’s cash, but they would not be too keen to handle his paper. I could not be sure whether Cubeddu had caught the overtone or not. He seemed bent on cross-examining me.

  ‘How many languages do you speak?’

  ‘Fluently and correctly, twenty three. In varying degrees, fifteen to twenty others.’

  ‘That means you can get to talk with a lot more women than most guys.’

  ‘The problem is’ – the comic relief came from Tanaka, of all people – ‘he can only screw them at the same rate as the rest of us.’

  That prompted me to tell the story of my father welcoming me back to the boat after I had spent a boozy evening in the Corsican port of Calvi, where young sprouts like me were no match for the paratroops of the French Foreign Legion who trained there and monopolised the best of the fillies. I returned to the docks at two in the morning, escorted back by three rather pallid girls from Wimbledon who had not been able to cope either with the French language or the Foreign Legion paras.

  After I had got rid of them, with three pallid kisses and some inconclusive squeezes, my father fed me a mug of coffee and some bedtime counsel: ‘Remember, my son, you can’t drink all the wine in the world. You can’t screw all the girls in the world. It’s a physical impossibility for an exceptional man, which you most emphatically are not, at least, not yet. So what do you do? You buy yourself one, maybe two bottles of good wine; you find yourself one, maybe two happy, good looking girls; and you sit quietly in a corner and enjoy them. But remember something else … ’ I had a vision of that big, professorial hand of his, upraised like a prophet’s as he boomed across the harbour. ‘Remember, Gil Langton! If you try to drink all the wine in the world, you’ll get nothing but an almighty hangover. You try to screw all the girls in the world, you’ll get no fun and all the transmissible diseases in the medical dictionary. Now, go to bed.’

  I must have been talking rather more loudly than usual, because everybody in the room seemed to have picked up on the story. The laughter that went up was a welcome relief from the tension of the morning and the undercurrent of suspicion that flowed between the participants in the conference.

  Carl Leibig signalled the waiters to pour more drinks. Boris Vannikov took the floor and delivered his characterisation – famous, he claimed, on four continents – of the Cossack and the fifty-rouble hooker. After that it became a very relaxed lunch party and it was three thirty in the afternoon before we teed off for our golf game. At Tanaka’s request, we played two and two in separate games, he with me, Forster with Cubeddu. Thus, we had the opportunity to talk out of earshot of the others. Tanaka was tired and he looked it. He asked that we should drive the buggy instead of walking the course. He played with concentration but with little energy; all his shots were straight, but short. His talk was the same, terse and direct.

  ‘You are angry with me, aren’t you, Gil?’

  ‘Angry, no. Disappointed, yes.’

  ‘But you protected me today, when you disallowed the question.’

  ‘I was protecting a position; which is more important than you are.’

  ‘I don’t understand that.’

  ‘I know. That’s the sadness.’

  ‘The sadness for me, Gil, is that you refuse to accept my position. What have you told Carl?’

  ‘Nothing that he didn’t already know. You Ve called in black money – Yakuza, Mafia, all their tributaries.’

  ‘Don’t you understand why?’

  ‘We understand; but y
ou have shamed us, Kenji. This is not the company we choose to keep in our lives.’

  ‘So now, what?’

  ‘For the moment, nothing. We proceed as planned. We go to Bangkok for the full-dress performance. All the time, every moment, every day and night, we reserve our position. We give you every chance to bring off your coup, toss these fellows out and bring in legitimate money. You lose, we walk. You cheat one more time, we walk. We can’t change your life for you, Kenji. We can’t re-write your history. What more can you ask?’

  ‘Understanding.’

  ‘You have that. Otherwise, I wouldn’t be talking to you like this. ‘

  ‘Respect, too.’

  ‘You’ve always had that. Now you have to earn some of it. Answer some questions for me.’

  ‘I’ll try.’

  ‘Who is Cubeddu?’

  ‘He’s number one laundry man for South American cocaine money.’

  ‘How did you contact him?’

  ‘Miko arranged it.’

  ‘Hoshino?’

  I’ve known and used him for many years. He banks with us. We invest for him. Huge monies. Girl business, show business, wrestling, sports events, pachinko parlours. A great customer for any bank. A great investor for our project because he wants clean money and he’ll offer a lot better terms than the World Bank.’

  ‘You’re talking of cash terms only, of course.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘But now the relationship has changed.’

  ‘I do not see that. They are putting up hard cash, not paper.’

  ‘They are thieves and killers. You are handing them the keys to the house.’

  ‘It is not my house. Let the owners look to their own security.’

  That took us both to the third hole, a short eight iron shot for the green. Kenji took a seven but even then hit short, landing in the rough on the forward edge of the green. I took an eight, hit too hard and too low and landed on the far edge with a steep downhill putt to the hole. Tanaka, being just off the green, had the first shot. He took a long time settling himself for it, then holed it for a birdie. I had an easier shot, but I muffed it and finished with a par.

  As we drove away from the hole, Tanaka said amiably: ‘Golf s a crazy game, isn’t it?’

  ‘It can drive you insane, sure enough.’

  ‘So learn from it, Gil. ‘ Suddenly there was a ring of steel in his voice. ‘Don’t write me off until I’ve played the last shot on the last hole! That would be a big mistake.’

  ‘And it’s my right to make it. Don’t you forget that either, old friend.’

  It was perhaps symbolic that we were finishing square on the last hole, when I missed a three-foot putt and lost the game and a ten thousand yen stake to Kenji Tanaka.

  Nine

  When I got back to the guest house, Marta had the bath running and our fresh clothes laid out on the bed. We went through the cleansing rituals and the sex play that inevitably followed them. Afterwards we sat together in the big pinewood tub, neck deep in scalding water, and talked through the day.

  Marta was riding a high wave of excitement. The luncheon talk with Vannikov and the political officer had gone very well. She had to play it through again for my benefit.

  They had both read my thesis and examined me very closely on it. At first, they seemed intent on proving that it had been financed by Carl Leibig for a political purpose. I told them that was nonsense. I had done the work on my own time, with my own money. After that, the talk became much more relaxed. I pointed out that Haushofer’s theories had been based on a variety of sources: Kjellen the Swede, Ratzel the German geographer and Halford Mackinder the Englishman. There was still great value in them, but they had been corrupted and confused by his association with the politics and pseudo-philosophy of the Nazis. However, I pointed out the classic Marxists had been equally wrong when they rejected any notion of interaction between a society and its environment. That started another lively argument and …’

  ‘And you’re going to spare me the details, Frau Professor. This natural environment is about as primitive and pleasant as you can get. I refuse to foul it up with Middle European metaphysics.’

  ‘You’re a very rude man, Gil Langton.’

  ‘Guilty as charged. Now stop talking, close your eyes and just live through your skin for a little while.’

  ‘I have brains too, remember!’

  ‘I know; but mine have turned to water.’

  For a while we floated together, silent and sensuous in the liquid world. Then, a propos of nothing at all, Marta asked: ‘Have you ever been to bed with Miko?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Have you ever wanted to sleep with her?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Why the questions?’

  ‘She fascinates me, that’s why. She’s never married. She has no children. Her life with Tanaka is very much a part-time affair. She tells me that after Bangkok she’ll be going back to Los Angeles to look after her business. And yet she’s a very sexy, sensual woman.’

  ‘How would you know that?’

  ‘The way she talks, the way she acts. The things she’s told me. After lunch today, while you were playing golf, she borrowed a car from the estate and we drove out to see the Katsura temple. Then we strolled in the park and fed the deer. We were like sisters together, open and relaxed. She told me that her sex-life here is spent exclusively with Kenji Tanaka, but in Los Angeles she has other lovers, some of them women. Does that surprise you?’

  ‘Not really. In the traditions of the floating world, sex has always been an elaborate game, in which people can play roles which in ordinary life would be forbidden to them. The game has nothing to do with love, only with the refinement of pleasure. Love, in fact, is the danger to be avoided, because it destroys the illusion and stops the game.’

  ‘What would you say if I told you Miko had invited me to play the game with her? She used a Japanese word …’

  ‘Asobi.’

  ‘That’s right. It was just a diversion, she said, a change of taste and flavour. You think this is very silly, don’t you?’

  ‘I find it intriguing. I wonder why you bring it up just at this moment.’

  She gave a little teasing laugh and slid out of my arms. ‘Because it’s a sexy notion and I like to have sexy notions and sexy talk while I’m making love.’

  ‘When I need a second woman in bed or in the bath with us, I’ll let you know. You can call Miko and invite her over.’

  ‘Now you’re angry. I’ve always thought lovers should be able to share everything, even their fantasies.’

  ‘They also should try to get their timing right. Just now, Miko and Tanaka are not my favourite people. But I’ll answer your question. If you need another kind of loving, you’re free to go looking for it. You’re an adult, intelligent woman. I, on the other hand, would not be prepared to share you, or the experience. But I’ll give you a caution, schatzi. This is the wrong place for a Western woman to go looking for sexual adventure. I’d be very careful walking into the world of flowers and willows, hand in hand with Miko. Now, let’s dry off and get dressed. It’s coming up to cocktail time.’

  It was one of those explosive little moments which left the smell of gunpowder in the air. It reminded me that my relationship with Frau Professor Doktor Marta Boysen was far from being a tenured one. It was complicated in a curious way by my father’s relationship with her mother, the eleven years difference in our ages and her slightly incestuous perception of me as a big brother as well as a lover.

  There was also more to the Miko situation than I cared to confess. From our first meeting, I had always found her an attractive and intriguing woman. I had never made a move towards her because my friendship with Tanaka forbade it and any indiscretion would have put that friendship at risk. More, my own forays into the floating world had been made under special circumstances. I was always gaijin, the outside man, but my command of the language was a talisman tha
t opened many doors which would otherwise have remained sealed. I had been introduced to the dying art of geisha asobi, the old-fashioned and very expensive game of ‘playing with geisha’. On the interminable nightclub circuit, I had learned that even the humblest girl in the floating world was an artefact and that everything that passed between her and her clients was a calculated illusion. To take it seriously was a folly. In the Takarazuka theatre, all male roles were played by women who, so long as they were with the troupe, were, and are, obliged to live the cloistered lives of vestal virgins. Comics for teenage girls tend to be full of impossibly beautiful, sexless young men. The love of young men, often romantically undeclared, was one of the traditional ideals of the samurai code.

  All of which made too much of a mouthful to explain to Marta at the end of a long day. I wondered, uneasily, how much of it needed explaining, and how much of herself she was trying to explain to me. One thing, however, I did know. Miko was attempting something more than a lesbian seduction. She was carefully teasing Marta into a situation where she could use her as a weapon against me, or as a counterweight to my expressed hostility to Tanaka’s plans.

  The threads she was weaving around Marta were tenuous as gossamer. At this moment it seemed a laugh, a sigh would blow them away; but once the web was woven I knew it would hold like steel mesh. So, before we went across to join the others for pre-dinner drinks, I made an apology for my brusqueness. She accepted it with a kiss and an embrace and made me sit down on the bed, holding my hands as she explained.

  ‘This is the one thing that worries me, Gil. I told you how it was between my husband and myself. I was like a prisoner beating my head against iron bars. Even now, the horror of it haunts me and I have to prove to myself that I am really free, that I can do what I choose and no one can stop me. I love you, Gil. I truly love you. I’m content to perch like a bird on your open hand and sing happy songs for you all day. The moment you close your hand, you lose me. That’s not a threat. I fear that moment more than I can explain. Try to understand.’