Ishigami became more confidential. “Isn’t it curious how one person can make an impression in such a short time? One insult can change a life. In Nanking, from the time you drove up with your German friend to the time you drove away with my Chinese, how long do you think that took, five minutes? No more than ten. But I have thought about you every day since. I assumed for years you must have returned to America. Imagine my surprise to hear you hadn’t left at all. People in propaganda want me to tour the islands and sell war bonds. No, I came back for you.”

“I’m flattered.”

The room had become warm. Harry felt the sake insinuate itself through his veins. He became aware how Ishigami’s hands rested, fingers curved and clawlike. If Harry were to send some beast out to terrorize the countryside, Ishigami would be it. Samurais had evolved into soft men in Western suits, but Ishigami was a throwback, the real thing. Harry didn’t need a gun, he needed a machine gun.

Michiko filled their cups again and went around the screen for a portable record player with a crank that she churned. The notes of a shamisen plinked out of the machine while Michiko posed with a closed fan pressed against her cheek. Harry couldn’t believe it. It was her Record Girl routine gone Oriental. She was still as ceramic in her pink tones and white, demure in winter-blue silk, producing her own faint music from the chains of bells and chimes that hung from her hair and stirred with every breath. There was no more artificial creation than a geisha, yet as art, a geisha did possess enormous appeal, half human, half loose-sleeved butterfly. As Michiko shifted, her collar revealed the nape of her neck, painted in a white W to suggest the outline of a woman’s sex. It was a geisha’s badge.

The gramophone generated a scratchy song about a courtesan who had to buy a present for a lover on a rainy day. Michiko flinched from a threatening sky, tucked her fan into the loose sleeve of her kimono, opened an imaginary umbrella and not so much danced as enacted a series of movements and poses that mimicked a lovesick girl skipping around puddles, gracefully one moment and comically the next, and very different from the Record Girl who vamped in the Happy Paris to Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly. Harry’s life was on the line, but he was agape at Michiko when she finished.

“Isn’t she good?” Ishigami beamed like an impresario.

“She is unbelievable.”

“We agree, excellent.”

Michiko took the record player behind the screen and returned with bowls of crisply fried fishlings and flowers of red ginger. The food didn’t signify the saving presence of someone else in the willow house; fare for geisha parties generally came from restaurants. Was this a geisha party? Harry wondered. A murderer snacks with his victim, what sort of social event was that? Say it was a card game, Harry reminded himself. What did he know about the other player? A bastard son of a royal prince, right-wing fanatic, graduate of the military academy, Berlin attaché and a commander who had survived five years on the China front. In other words, intelligent, sophisticated and as brave as he was mad. He saw Ishigami sizing him up the same way, perhaps coming to a different conclusion. Harry had caught him off guard in Nanking. That wasn’t going to happen again.

Ishigami spoke while he ate. “Five heads, Harry. You choose the first four.”

“I choose?”

“Why not? It’s been so long since I’ve been in Tokyo, I hardly know anyone anymore.”

“You used to cut down Chinese left and right. Why change now?”

“In China I had no choice. There were too many. It just went on, like fighting the sea. That’s why the Japanese fighting spirit is so important. That’s what makes us different. You wouldn’t understand. You’re a gambler, all you understand is odds and numbers.”

“Because numbers are real. Spirit is a fantasy.”

Ishigami peeked up from his bowl. “What odds would you give yourself right now?”

“I see your point.”

“Yes. So, you choose. Friends, enemies, people on the street, it doesn’t matter to me, and, I suspect, it doesn’t matter to you.”

Michiko said in an offhand way, “Maybe there is someone he cares about, maybe there’s a girl?”

“Didn’t you have a friend named Gen?” Ishigami asked.

Harry said, “I’m not going to choose anyone. I’m not going to do your work for you.”

“Lazybones,” Michiko said.

“We’ll do it this way,” Ishigami said. “We’ll go out in the street. The first four people you look at, I’ll kill.”

“Innocent Japanese?”

“No one is innocent. Are my men guilty? They’re dying.”

“Gladly, for the emperor, I know.” That was always the propaganda.

“No, as a matter of fact, hardly ever. Asking for their mother, yes. A trench of bloody boys apologizing to their mother and father, yes. I thought it would be different. I thought there would be purity and nobility in struggle. But China is the same as here, a giant black market with businessmen corrupting army commanders for spoils and war matériel. We take a town and lose ten, twenty, a hundred soldiers, and men just like you, Harry, show up like worms within the hour.”

Which answered a question Harry hadn’t directly posed before: how was it that a heroic officer related to the imperial family was only a colonel after so many years in the field? Ishigami was a butcher, but plenty of butchers had flourished during the so-called China Incident. He was a fanatic, but fanatics had thrived. Was it his high moral code, his reluctance to batten off the slops of war, that had stalled his military career?

“I tried to tell the emperor,” Ishigami said. Such an intimate mention of his name brought a bow from Michiko. The Record Girl would have laughed.

“And?” Harry asked.

“I wanted to inform him of how affairs really stood in China. One of the old housekeepers let me in. I found the emperor surrounded by aides and maps, and I was excited that he was concerning himself about the affairs in China. Then I saw that almost all the aides were from the navy, and none of the maps were of China. Just islands. I never had a chance to say a word.”

“What islands?”

“What could it possibly matter to you?” He motioned to Michiko. “Bring me the box.”

Michiko shuffled behind the screen on her knees and returned with a white box tied in a white cloth, a scaled-down version of the box for a soldier’s ashes. Harry had seen only one like it, in a museum. It was a head box, designed to carry a singular trophy.

“I had this made to order today,” Ishigami said. He raised the box and gave Harry an appraising look. “I think it will fit.”

“On the map, was there a fleet track? From the west or north?”

“Questions like that could have you arrested as a spy.”

“How could that possibly matter if my head is in a box?”

Ishigami set down the box and brushed its lid with his hand. “Harry, you never stop, do you?”

“I’ll bet you.” Harry refilled Ishigami’s cup.

“You’ll bet me again? Once I have your head, I’ll have your money, too.”

“Forget the head. I have another thousand yen nearby. A simple wager of a thousand yen.”

“What sort of bet is that? I could say anything.”

“I trust you. I’ll bet the maps showed a chain of islands with a fleet launching station in the northwest and a central island with a southern harbor.”

Michiko sighed musically and said, “But there’s no bet, Harry. I know where that money is, in the Happy Paris under the floorboards. So, there’s nothing to bet with, is there?”

Ishigami let out his breath. But he had held it, Harry thought. It sounded like Pearl to him.

“Are you a spy?” Ishigami asked.

Michiko laughed and hiccuped. “I am sorry. It’s just so funny. Harry a spy? Who would trust Harry?”

Ishigami said, “I remember a boy who used to deliver woodblock prints to me. To see him, you would think he was an American lost in Tokyo, but he wasn’t lost at all. You knew too much, Harry, even then. Where do you keep all that information?”