by Don Lee
“This is ridiculous,” Susan Countryman said. “Okay. Fine. What do you need from me?”
Tom pulled out Form FS-118, Report of a US Citizen Missing Abroad. “Her full name?”
“Lisa Marie Countryman.”
“Date and place of birth?”
“September 14, 1955. Yokohama.”
“She was born in Japan?”
“Yes.”
“Your father was in the military?” Tom asked. He himself was an Army brat, born in Heidelberg, Germany.
“Navy.”
“Don’t suppose you have her passport number.”
“No.”
“That’s all right. Is she married? Any dependents?”
“No.”
“Last known address?”
“Hold on,” Susan Countryman said, shuffling papers. “8-15-12 Higashiyama, Meguro-ku, Tokyo.”
“Phone number?”
“I don’t have one.”
“You don’t?”
“I’ve been trying to send her telegrams.”
“When’s the last time you actually spoke to her?”
“In March—when she left for Tokyo.”
“You haven’t talked to her since she came to Japan?”
“I just said that.”
“Was she here to go to school or to work?”
“She was going to teach English, but I’m not sure where.”
“You don’t know any friends or colleagues she might have had here, do you?”
“No.”
“What message would you like us to relay?”
“I have some documents for her to sign. Legal documents.”
“That’s your emergency?”
“They’re very important.”
He asked Susan Countryman to mail some recent photographs of Lisa to him, and promised he would report back to her soon.
THE ADDRESS turned out to be a gaijin house, a boardinghouse for foreigners. It was a rat hole, chock-full of Brits and Aussies, one of whom answered the door in his skivvies. Mrs. Fujiwara, an FSN Tom had taken along in case he needed an interpreter, discreetly turned away.
“Never heard of her,” the Aussie said. It was two in the afternoon, but it seemed he had just woken up, still drunk.
“How long have you lived here?” Tom asked.
“End of May?” he said, unsure himself.
“Is there someone who’s been here longer? She arrived in March.”
“Hang on,” the Aussie said, and slunk into the house.
There was hardly a clear patch of floor on which to stand in the foyer. It was crammed with shoes. Just beyond the entranceway, on top of a table, was a huge disorganized pile of mail, and underneath the table was a plastic crate stuffed with letters and papers. No doubt Susan Countryman’s telegrams were in that crate.
“Yeah, I remember Lisa,” a Brit named Tony Somers said.
“Did you know her well?”
“Not really. Only spoke to her once or twice. She didn’t last long here. A bit of a prima donna, if you ask me. She moved out in April.”
“Toward the beginning or the end of the month?”
“Beginning,” Somers said, scratching his left armpit.
“Do you know where she went?”
“I heard she got a private apaato from the same bloke who owns this shithole.” Somers fished through the mail pile on the table and found a namecard: Teiji Takagi, Friendship Guest Home Co.
“She was teaching English?” Tom asked.
“A novel concept, eh?” In Tokyo, the vast majority of gaijin in their twenties taught conversational English, or eikaiwa, to support themselves. “I think she was originally with an outfit in Shimbashi called Rocket America, but I heard she punted out of there right quick. I knew when I first laid eyes on her she was gutless, know what I mean?”
In the taxi back to the office, Mrs. Fujiwara studiously ignored Tom, plucking pieces of lint from her skirt. She had nineteen years of experience in the Consular Section, and she had no patience for JOs like Tom, with whom she was unfailingly polite and respectful, doing everything he asked, but never anything more, conveying an ever-present if passive hostility.
From Tom’s office, she called Teiji Takagi, who volunteered to come to the embassy. She then dialed Rocket America. After a minute, Mrs. Fujiwara set the phone down, looking shaken.
“They hung up on you?” Tom asked.
She nodded.
“Did they tell you anything at all?”
“The director said she quit after two weeks,” Mrs. Fujiwara told him. “He was very rude.”
An hour later, Teiji Takagi walked into the office, carrying a large cardboard box. “Chotto shitsurei,” he said. “Koko de ii desu ka?”
Dressed in gray coveralls, he was a cheerful man, with none of the anti-gaijin sentiments of most landlords, and he spoke some English. He said Lisa Countryman had rented a room at the Meguro house in March, and then had moved to one of his furnished studios in Nishi-Azabu in April, where she had stayed until the night of June 18. That was when Lisa had called him to say that she was leaving Japan for Hong Kong and wouldn’t be returning.
“I go next day apaato? Typhoon!” Takagi said.
She had left the place a mess, everything strewn on the floor, as if hit by a tropical storm. Obviously she had been in a great rush. Takagi had collected her abandoned personal effects and kept them in the cardboard box, which he, Tom, and Mrs. Fujiwara examined now. Cassette tapes, books, towels, sheets, miscellaneous kitchenware, some large envelopes—she had dumped her clothes and toiletries into her suitcases and deserted the rest.
“You take box, okay?” Takagi said to Tom.
The box was neatly labeled with Lisa Countryman’s name and the apartment address. Despite the chaotic condition of his rental property, Takagi appeared to have been fretting over Lisa’s possessions. Was he this conscientious with all of his tenants’ detritus?
Tom picked up one of the envelopes and opened the flap. It contained sundry papers, but on top were two small identical photographs.
“Is this her?” Tom asked.
“Hai, Lisa-san,” Takagi said. “Pretty girl. Nice girl.”
She was pretty, Tom had to agree. The passport-size photo was a formal head shot—perhaps for an Alien Registration Card, a visa to another country, or an international driver’s license—but she was very striking. Her face was both hard and soft, a juxtaposition of opposites, with a strong jawline, enormous green eyes, brown hair, a slip of a nose, her skin whitewashed in the glare of the flash. A Caucasian mongrel, maybe Irish and Italian. Tom pulled out the other contents of the envelope, and lo and behold he found a half dozen telegrams from Susan Countryman, all addressed to the Meguro house, asking Lisa with increasing urgency to call her.
“Before same,” Takagi said. There had been two telegrams earlier that month which he had personally given to Lisa, who, it was now apparent, had been intentionally dodging her sister.
THEY NEEDED bodies for the party. Sara Sobeske’s best friend at the embassy, Marly Hughes, was the secretary for Jay Steiner, the cultural attaché, and at the last minute he had asked her to set up a reception for a sculptor visiting from New York. Marly was afraid no one would show up, and she had enlisted Sara to bring Tom, Jorge, Benny, and anyone else they could think of.
The party was in the lounge on the top floor of the Grew House. Enough people were there to make it respectable, but overall it had the feel of a perfunctory official function, replete with the usual soggy hors d’oeuvres, like the shrimp Tom was forking onto a plate.
“You’re fast, but not fast enough.”
There were so many sensations. First the voice—contralto, slow, confident, thrilling with its implied history of naughty behavior. Then her smell—a rich perfume, yet faint and elusive, even at this distance, the perfect distillation. Then the hair and face—wavy and blond, shoulder-length, high forehead with thick eyebrows arching over blue eyes and aquiline nose and large smirking mouth, croo
ked left incisor, lipstick, lambent skin. “Excuse me?” Tom asked.
“In the pool,” she said.
She was his age, he guessed. She was wearing tan Capri pants and a white silk blouse, top three buttons undone, a sneak of breast. With her heels, she was the same height as Tom, and she was slender, lean.
“Wasn’t that you I passed in the pool?” she asked. “Or was that a log held stationary by an anchor?”
“You caught me on an off day,” Tom said.
“Oh, really?”
“I had the flu.”
“I see. The flu. That seems to be going around. And let me guess. You were also still suffering from the effects of malarial shigella.”
“How did you know?”
“I couldn’t miss with that jaundiced pallor.”
They smiled. “You never came back to the pool,” Tom said.
“Were you looking for me?”
“No, not at all,” he told her. After that morning, the rainy season had begun in earnest, and it had poured almost every day since. Tom had gone to the pool for six straight mornings, looking for her, and then had given up. It had been wretched swimming in the rain.
“I think you’re lying,” she said. “In fact, I’m sure of it.”
“You’re rarely unsure of anything, are you?”
“It makes life much simpler.”
Her name was Julia Tinsley. She was an artist, a photographer. Now and then, she said, she helped Jay Steiner out with the artist exchange program.
“Where are you from?” she asked.
“Everywhere. Nowhere,” he told her—the standard answer. “I was an Army brat.”
“What are you? Half-nisei?”
“I’m Hawaiian,” he said.
“What does that mean?”
“Sorry?”
“You’re native Hawaiian? You have Hawaiian blood?”
He looked at her, trying to determine if she was being combative or merely curious. She was asking all the questions he normally despised—Where are you from? What are you?, code for You don’t look like a real American—but he decided to give her the benefit of the doubt. “I’m half and half,” he said. “White and Korean. I grew up in Hawaii.”
“Which island?”
“Oahu.”
“Did you surf? You look like a surfer.”
He laughed—it was such a stereotype. “Yeah, I surfed.”
“Which breaks? Town or country?”
Startled she knew enough to ask, he said, “All the ones near Haleiwa. Lani’s, Jocko’s, Leftovers. Sometimes in the summer we’d drive into town to Kaiser’s and Bowls. Did you live in Hawaii? Did you surf?”
“No, it’s just something I’ve always loved to watch. An old boyfriend. Were you any good?”
“I ripped. I was a fucking marvel.”
“Oh, you like yourself, don’t you?” she said. “I can tell you’re trouble.”
He snagged two glasses of wine from a waiter passing with a tray and gave her one. She took a sip, grimaced, and set the glass down on the buffet table.
“What about you?” he asked. “Where are you from?”
“Boston.”
“Ah,” he said. He knew Boston, and an image of Julia Tinsley began to coalesce before him, an Eastern Seaboard, old-money image of private schools and Block Island vacations and Brahmin privilege.
“Did you know we’re being surveilled?” she said. “Rather intently, I might add.”
He thought she meant Jorge and Benny, who were standing in the corner, but she was referring to Sara and her friend Marly, who were across the room.
“The blonde your girlfriend?”
“I wouldn’t call her my girlfriend,” Tom said.
“Does she know that?”
“We’ve been going out a little. Very casually. She’s leaving for the States in a couple of days.” Across the room, Sara waved to Tom unhappily, and he waved unhappily back.
“She doesn’t at all seem like your type,” Julia said.
“What’s my type?”
She looked at him, sizing. “I don’t know. You’re not one of those men who gets all tender and sentimental, are you?”
“No.”
“Good. I hate those kind of men. No, I think you like women who give you a hard time, who are a bit mean and unpredictable. You’re a lot like my husband that way. You see him in the corner? The forlorn one?”
Tom was disappointed to hear she was married. She wore two modest silver rings on the right hand, one on the left, but none had been immediately recognizable as a wedding ring. He looked to the corner of the lounge, and he was surprised to see her husband was Japanese. He was a handsome, thin man, and he did look forlorn—absolutely miserable.
“I better get back to him,” she said. “Although I don’t think he’s missed me.”
Tom watched her move across the floor, everything about her unhurried, long, and athletic.
Jorge joined Tom beside the buffet table with Benny in tow. “Sara hasn’t left yet, and here you are, trolling already,” Jorge said.
“I like to be prepared.”
“What is it with you and blondes, primo?”
“It happens to be my favorite color.”
“She’s married.”
“I know,” Tom told him. “Her husband’s a nisei?”
Benny, eating Tom’s forgotten shrimp, said, “Sansei. His name’s Vincent Kitamura.” They watched Julia Tinsley and Vincent Kitamura exit the lounge and make their way toward the elevators. “He’s a spook in Econ,” Benny said, which was not terribly shocking news. Other than in Moscow, there were more CIA officers in Tokyo than at any other post, most of them posing as FSOs in the Economic and Political sections.
“If you’re smart, you’ll stay away from her,” Jorge said.
It was sensible advice, and, left to his own devices, Tom might have listened to it, despite being more than a little intrigued with Julia Tinsley. She was spirited and intelligent. She bristled with all kinds of potential for fun and unbecoming conduct. She was everything someone like Sara was not. She had mystery about her. Sophisticated and cultured. Maybe a little spoiled. She was also beautiful. But Tom told himself he would, for once, behave. He would, for once, check his impulse for self-sabotage. He would, for once, keep out of trouble. It was a fine commitment, a very honorable resolution, that fell apart immediately at the end of the month, when he came home to his apartment in Harris House and found a handwritten note under his door. “Let’s go out for a drink sometime,” Julia Tinsley had scrawled, “before the whole summer slips away.”
THREE
THE FIRST thing Kenzo Ota noticed was the refrigerator. It had been turned off when he had inspected No. 401, but the next weekend, when he moved into the apartment, he turned on the refrigerator, and it whirred and cranked to life with an awful racket. He was flabbergasted. It had a compressor. Yet this refrigerator was identical to the one in the other apartment on the third floor, and he hadn’t noticed it at all. The compressor kicked up in twenty-minute cycles with a loud click, then kept getting louder with weird whizzes and buzzes and whines for seven minutes, then shut off with another click. It was clearly defective. He called Miss Saotome.
“The previous tenant never made a complaint about it,” she told Kenzo.
“I’m very sorry,” he said.
She agreed to have a repairman come over for a look, and the next night, when Kenzo got home, he found a maintenance report taped to the front of the refrigerator. He was pleased the problem had been addressed so quickly, until he read the report. The repairman wrote that he had checked the compressor and the evaporator fan and the condenser and the coils, and had concluded that everything was “normal.”
“If I may be presumptuous,” Kenzo told Miss Saotome on the telephone, “I don’t believe the repairman was here long enough. You know how these repair people can be. He probably didn’t have time to wait for the compressor and the fan to go on.”
“It’s such a smal
l refrigerator,” Miss Saotome said. “How noisy can it be?”
“My point exactly,” Kenzo said, a little too excitedly. “There must be something wrong with it.”
She would send for the repairman again, she said.
The following night, there was another maintenance report taped to the refrigerator, with the same diagnosis: “normal.”
“I was with the repairman in the apartment this time,” Miss Saotome told Kenzo when he called to protest.
“You waited for the compressor?”
“Twice.”
“You didn’t think it was noisy?”
“No.”
“You didn’t hear the buzzing and whining?”
“Those are normal refrigerator sounds,” she said. “Refrigerators make noise.”
“The refrigerator in the other apartment didn’t make those noises.”
She was silent for a good ten seconds. “Mr. Ota,” she said at last, “perhaps this building location is bad for you?”
“Excuse me?”
“Perhaps you would be happier somewhere else with a more convenient location?”
Shut up or move out, Kenzo understood her to be saying. “The location is fine.”
“You like the apartment in general, then?”
“Yes.”
“I’m so glad,” Miss Saotome said. “Sometimes it’s unsettling, being in a new place, but you get used to things. Air conditioners, for instance, or refrigerators. It may seem abnormal now, but I’m sure you’ll get used to it. Wouldn’t you agree?”
“I suppose,” he said, not agreeing with her at all.
“Are you recently divorced, Mr. Ota?”
“Yes,” Kenzo said, although it had been fourteen years since Yumiko had left him. It was such a stigma—divorce. In Japan, the divorced were called batsu-ichi. One strike against them.
“Ah, I see now,” Miss Saotome said. “And you don’t have a girlfriend?”
