by Don Lee
This should have all been the responsibility of CLO, the Community Liaison Office, but the two FSOs there were out—one had the flu, the other was on home leave. The switchboard was now forwarding all questions to ACS, and Reeves had told Tom to make all the arrangements.
He fielded another call—would the embassy be passing out yellow ribbons, or would people have to bring their own?—and then Tom buzzed Mrs. Fujiwara and asked her to take messages for a while, he had a headache. He sat at his desk and rubbed his temples, and he looked down at the name he had scribbled on his notepad, David Saito, and something nagged him about it—an echo of Inspector Iso Yamada’s earlier inquiry into the car accident. He picked up the telephone and dialed zero for the switchboard.
“Operator,” the woman said, and Tom hung up. No, that wouldn’t do, he thought. The operator would see his call was originating from within the embassy.
He grabbed his coat and walked out of the embassy and down the street, searching for a telephone. He always forgot which kind he was supposed to use. There were red telephones, both small and large, and blue telephones and yellow telephones. Some were for local calls, others for long-distance. Couldn’t he make a local call from any phone?
He found a small red phone in front of a newsstand, dropped a ten-yen coin into the slot, and dialed the main number for the embassy.
“US Embassy Tokyo,” the operator said.
“David Saito, please,” Tom said.
There was a pause, and then the operator said, “Please hold.” The call was transferred, and after two rings a woman with a deep, flat voice answered by merely saying, “Hello.”
“David Saito, please.”
A hesitation. “Who’s calling, please?” she asked.
“Which section of the embassy is this?” he asked.
“Who’s calling, please?” she asked.
Tom hung up. He tried to remember another name, one of the names Vincent Kitamura used as an alias, other than Bob Sasaki, which likely had been pulled from circulation. Tom waited ten minutes, killing time by walking toward the Diet building and back, then dropped another ten-yen coin into the same phone and dialed the main switchboard again.
“US Embassy Tokyo,” the operator said.
“Peter Okada, please,” he said.
Once more, a pause, “Please hold,” two rings, and the same woman answered, “Hello.”
“Is Peter Okada available?” he asked, altering the timbre of his voice.
The woman hesitated, and said, “Who’s calling, please?”
He returned to his office, looked into Lisa Countryman’s file, and plucked out the message of Susan Countryman’s first call to the embassy. Unable to decipher the initials on the message, he marched out to Mrs. Fujiwara’s desk. “Who took this message?” he asked her.
Startled, Mrs. Fujiwara delicately pinched the message between her fingertips and turned the paper around to read it.
“Who was the duty officer that night?” Tom asked her. “Come on, come on,” he said while she pulled out the duty roster and flipped through the sheets.
Mrs. Fujiwara found July 10 and traced her finger across the sheet to the attendant name in the next column. “Jay Steiner,” she said. The cultural attaché.
As Tom was about to leave the Consular Section, Benny caught up to him. “Hey, something’s going on,” he said worriedly.
“What?”
“Jorge’s in the Congen’s office.”
“I don’t have time for this right now,” Tom said. He climbed the stairs to Steiner’s office on the second floor, where Marly Hughes, Sara Sobeske’s old friend, was fixing the photocopying machine.
“Did you forward this message to me?” he asked her.
Marly looked at Jay Steiner’s July 10 message that Lisa Countryman was missing. She nodded.
“Did you and Steiner talk about it with Julia Tinsley?”
“What? No. Why would we have?”
“Could she have been around the office when you were discussing it?”
“What’s this about?” Marly asked, wiping toner from her fingers.
“Did you say the case was being referred to me?”
“No.”
“Are you sure?”
“You’ve been having an affair with her, haven’t you?” Marly said. “Sara had a feeling. You could be the biggest shit I’ve ever met, you know that?”
From his office, Tom tried calling Julia, but she wasn’t home. He took a cab to the ISA in Takadanobaba, and from the reception desk he was directed to the faculty lounge, where he saw her colleague, Yoshi, dipping a bag of green tea into a cup of hot water.
“Where is she?”
“Teaching,” Yoshi said.
“Which classroom?”
“No, you wait. Outside.”
Three students Tom accosted in the hallways didn’t understand what he meant by “registrar,” yet he came upon a secretary in an administrative office who accommodated him with a class schedule and a building map, and he found Julia at last, manning a slide projector in the back of a classroom. Through the window slat on the door he tried to catch her attention, but she didn’t notice him, and he walked into the dimmed room.
“What are you doing here?” she whispered.
Her students turned around and looked at them. “I need to talk to you,” he said. She was wearing glasses. He didn’t know she wore eyeglasses.
“Wait in my studio. Down the hall to the left.”
Some of the photographs from the P-Moto 180 gallery show were in the studio, leaning in stacks against a wall. There were two large tables in the center of the room, both cluttered with supplies and equipment: a paper cutter, mat boards, negatives in sleeves, film containers, grease pencils, dry-mount tissue. The faint smell of chemicals wafted in from the adjacent darkroom.
After forty-five minutes, she entered the studio, carrying a dozen portfolios, which she dropped onto the near table. “Why are you here, Tom?”
“You knew about Lisa Countryman, didn’t you?”
“What?” she said, sweeping her hair back with her hand.
“Come on.”
She sat on a stool, lit a cigarette, and let the lighter clatter down on the table. “Okay. I did.”
“Was she having an affair with your husband?”
“I’m not sure. He denies it.”
“What was their connection to each other? Where did they meet?”
“I don’t know.”
“You must have some idea.”
“She was one of his informants. I don’t know the details. Vincent wouldn’t tell me.”
“How did you find out about them?”
She shrugged. “A fluke.”
She tugged on one of the flat-file drawers underneath the table and pulled out several black-and-white eleven-by-fourteens and spilled them across the tabletop. The enlargements seemed to be outtakes from the guerrilla photography series, five of the same person, a middle- aged Japanese woman, taken split-seconds apart. Apparently the mechanism at the department store had triggered not just one shot of each subject, but a succession with a motor drive. Some of the prints of the woman were blurry. She had been stepping back, not forward, wandering out of focus. One eye was closed, hand touching her hair. She was slim and well-dressed. “Who is she?” Tom asked.
Julia opened another drawer and slid a magnifying glass across the table. “Not her. Behind her. On the other side of the street.”
He peered through the magnifying glass, and there they were, Vincent Kitamura and Lisa Countryman, in the background of the photograph, standing on the sidewalk in Shibuya, waiting for the stoplight to change. He would never have noticed them unless Julia had pointed them out.
“In June, she ran up to me, screaming she was in love with my husband,” Julia said. “I thought she was a lunatic. She kept calling him David. Vincent told me she was a hostess he’d been using as an agent and he hadn’t seen her in a year and she was delusional, and I believed him until I deve
loped this roll of film. These shots were taken Memorial Day.”
“How did you know the case was going to me? Did you hear Steiner and Marly talking about her?”
“I was in Jay’s office and had to use the phone, and I saw a carbon of the call log on Marly’s desk.”
“And it said it was going to me in ACS.”
She drew on her cigarette, then said, “Yes.”
“What was the point? Why’d you approach me? What were you hoping to learn?”
“I wanted to find out if he’d lied to me, if they’d had an affair. I wanted to know what happened to her.”
“You think Vincent had something to do with her disappearance.”
“I don’t know. Maybe.”
“Do you think he killed her?”
She expelled a derisive puff of air. “No, don’t be ridiculous,” she said. “Nothing like that. He probably just paid her to vanish.”
“Then why the cover-up? Why the ruse about leaving for Hong Kong?”
“I don’t know.”
“You’re not actually sure. You think it’s possible he did something to her.”
“I seriously doubt it.”
She was being so cold, unrecognizable, as if nothing had ever transpired between them. “I was in love with you,” Tom said.
“Oh, Jesus. Are we really going to have this conversation? You’re still under the mistaken impression that this was about you. But it never had anything to do with you. Don’t you see? I was heartbroken. The thought of it—that he might’ve been in love with her—it destroyed me. I needed to know. I didn’t plan to get involved with you. There are things about our marriage—you’ll never know what we’ve been through.”
“What kind of things?”
“They’re not your concern. They’re private.”
“You had an affair with Pete Congrieves,” Tom said. He realized he had known this all along, but hadn’t allowed himself to articulate it until now.
She rubbed her left hand. Several knuckles bore dark bruises from where she had hit the glass in the Sanno Hotel. “We tend to do the things we tell ourselves we’ll never do,” she said.
“What kind of bullshit is that? Is that supposed to be an excuse?”
“I’m not looking for absolution. I’m not saying any of this makes sense.”
“Did you start seeing Congrieves again? Is that what’s going on?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know what I’m doing. It’s all shit. At a certain point it didn’t matter to me what the truth was, what happened with the girl. I couldn’t trust Vincent anymore. My marriage was over.”
“So the bigger horror is not that Vincent might have killed her, but he cheated on you?”
“Maybe she was jeopardizing some operation of his. Maybe there was an accident. It doesn’t really matter now.”
“Why didn’t you just ask Congrieves about her?”
“I did,” Julia said. “Nothing in Vincent’s case files mention her.”
“You’re quite ruthless, aren’t you?”
“Tom, you don’t know how the world works. No, what am I saying? Of course you do. You’ve had no qualms cheating and lying your way through pretty much everything. Even with me. Really, who’s been trying to manipulate whom? But you’ve chosen to ignore all that. It makes it very convenient, then, doesn’t it? It makes it easy to deny your own complicity.”
“You were in love with me,” he said.
“No,” Julia said, a barely discernible quiver in her voice, “I don’t think I ever was.”
Outside, it was snowing, the first snow of the season, although nothing was yet sticking to the ground. There were Christmas decorations in the storefronts—red-and-white bunting, Santa Claus displays, canned Christmas songs, “Jinguru Beru.” All of it was purely for show, a fabricated commercial occasion. Christmas was like any other day in Japan, without religious or familial significance.
It was four o’clock, the start of rush hour. He took the Tozai Line to Otemachi, then switched to the Chiyoda Line and got off at Kasumigaseki. When he entered the Consular Section in the embassy, Jorge descended upon him. “What did you do?” he said. “How could you have been so stupid?”
“What are you talking about?”
The irregularities with Masahiro Yamada’s visa had been discovered. They were blaming it all on Benny. “I know you had something to do with this,” Jorge said. “He’s covering for you, and you’re hanging him out to dry.”
“Tell me where they are,” Tom said, and Jorge led him down the hall to the conference room, where everyone had assembled.
EIGHTEEN
AS IT happened, Emi Fukuda had called Kenzo out of a grudge. Midori Atsuta had let her go, feeling she had gotten too old to be a hostess at the club, and Emi had been seeking retribution, hoping to make trouble, but she hadn’t really known that much. She believed the two older men attached to bottle-keep No. 397, Mojo and Curly, were politicians, and she had overheard them one night refer to Larry, the younger nisei man, as David Saito. She told Kenzo about the gifts such as the Mikimoto necklace that Mojo had given to Lisa, yet, like Harper Boyd, Emi thought it more likely that Lisa had been going out on dohan with Saito. She saw the way they had looked at each other. But Emi didn’t know Mojo’s real name, and Tom Hurley at the embassy said he couldn’t locate a David Saito, and then, without warning, Hurley left Japan. With no further leads, Kenzo was forced to write the advisory opinion that Lisa Countryman was dead.
“You’ve done the right thing,” Kunichi said. “Now you can enjoy shogatsu in peace.”
It was customary in Japan to try to begin the New Year with as clean a slate as possible, not carrying over any debts or tasks, and Kenzo had to admit that he did feel better, burying the Lisa Countryman case once and for all. “I’ve been wondering, however,” he said, “where has Yamada been? Is he working on a special investigation?”
Kunichi’s face tightened. “Yamada had to take care of a family matter,” he said. “In fact, he has asked to be permanently reassigned. You won’t be seeing him again.”
The news heartened Kenzo. That night, he decided it was time to put his own family matter to rest. He called Yumiko’s mansion in Higashi-Azabu. A male gaijin answered in English—it could have been either Simon or Doug Marabelli—and Kenzo hung up. After a half-hour, he dialed again, and this time Yumiko picked up. Her husband must have been in the room, for Yumiko, although speaking in Japanese, pretended Kenzo was a caterer. It seemed she was planning a New Year’s Eve party.
“That’s correct,” she said, reading off a list, “the melon and prosciutto.”
“I’m not going to hire a lawyer,” Kenzo told her.
“And the jumbo shrimp.”
“I’ve decided not to pursue the paternity test.”
“The miniature beef Wellington.”
“You’re right,” Kenzo said. “Even if Simon were my son, there would be no point in disrupting his life.”
“The Parmesan puffs.”
“He has a home already.”
“Vegetable spring rolls,” Yumiko said.
“He’s an American.”
“Scallops wrapped in bacon.”
“I’m not going to call you again,” he said. “Yumiko, I wish you well. I hope you and your family will be happy and healthy. I’m going to hang up now.”
“Mushroom caps,” Yumiko said, her voice warbling, “stuffed with crab meat.”
The next day, December 30, Kenzo began his holiday, and he busied himself helping Miss Saotome—Keiko; he was still getting used to calling her Keiko—prepare for the New Year, supervising a cleaning crew she had hired to get the apartment building spotless, hanging pine branches and shimenawa around doorways to ward off evil spirits, and tidying his own apartment. On impulse, he tore off all the acoustical tiles in his bedroom and repaired and repainted the walls and ceiling. More often than not now, he was staying over at Keiko’s apartment, and after their vocal, wall-bouncing, sweat-drenched sessions
of sex—boisterous enough to rival the stewardess’s layovers next door—Kenzo always fell asleep with ease. He and Keiko were wonderfully compatible. They felt no apprehension with each other. Even the first time, after the fire in the boiler room, they had been somehow free of anxiety. He and Keiko had actually shared a good-natured laugh when he ejaculated prematurely—he had barely penetrated her—but what could be expected after so long of an abstinence? Any different, Keiko had said, and she would have been insulted. She had offered him, to use a golfing term, a mulligan, and he had quickly risen to the occasion. They were like teenagers now. Every day, they fucked morning and night.
On New Year’s Eve, they sat in Keiko’s apartment and watched Kohaku uta gassen, the annual Red and White Song Festival, on NHK-TV. The three-and-a-half-hour variety show featured performances by a slew of pop singers, pitting the men (the White Team) against the women (the Red Team). Each song was rated by the audience on an applause meter, and at the end of the show, by an unknown process, they totaled the applause and announced the winning team, frequently eliciting howls of protest from viewers and accusations that the show was rigged.
At eleven, Keiko served Kenzo buckwheat noodles for long life and prosperity, and at eleven-thirty, they sang along to “Ode to Joy.” A chorus of four thousand singers had gathered at the Kokugikan, the Sumo Hall, for the nationally televised performance. The ten-minute passage in the final movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony was an obsession in Japan. Kenzo and Keiko, like millions of Japanese, knew “Ode to Joy” by heart, in German: “O Freunde, nicht diese Töne!/ Sondern laßt uns angenehmere anstimmen/ Und freudenvollere!”
Fifteen minutes before midnight, the bells began tolling. At every Buddhist temple across the country, monks were solemnly swinging logs against cast-bronze temple bells, striking them 108 times, dispelling the 108 evil passions of man. After each strike, the TV switched to another temple or shrine, from Meiji-jingu to Kawasaki-taishi, and Kenzo and Keiko put on their coats and joined the stream of people walking down to the local shrine.
It was a cold night, but pellucid. “Look at the stars,” Keiko said, and she hooked her arm around Kenzo’s. The skies over Tokyo were always clearest during the holidays, when the factories temporarily shut down their industrial discharge.
