Harry spied motion near a streetlamp, but it was a cat with tail intact, flown like a flag. In any other neighborhood, a snoop might have reported strange noises to the police. Not Asakusa, where the late-night carousing of drunks, whores and theatergoers was the norm. And when a detective did investigate the willow house, what would he see? Swordsmanship. A single slash on the bias that had opened DeGeorge from his breastbone to his bowels, and one clean stroke for his head. The detective would also see the telltale sideways spray of blood produced when an executioner flicked his blade to clean it. The idea that anyone but a Japanese could have carried out an execution so beautifully would be met with astonishment.
One down and four to go. But perhaps the game had changed from mere numbers, Harry thought. Maybe there was added value in a head Ishigami thought Harry cared about. Just as the colonel had cared for his aide-de-camp in Nanking. Would Ishigami settle on tit for tat, ear for an ear, head for a head? Or would he embellish? There were things a man could do to another man’s woman. They certainly did them in China. Maybe he already had.
“You and Ishigami were together all day. What did you do?”
“We talked.”
“You talked. You had tea, coffee, a couple of drinks?”
“We talked about my family.”
“Talked about family?”
She told Harry how her father failed twice, lost his shop in the Depression, grew rice only to be ruined by drought and, under threat of starvation for the entire family, sold his daughters one by one to the brothels and geisha houses of Osaka. One reason there were so many angry young soldiers in the army was because they had seen their sisters sold. Ishigami had appreciated that. Michiko added that she hadn’t only run away from the geisha house. She was proud to have robbed it first.
Harry was struck by how little he had known. How could he reconcile a fugitive geisha with the Record Girl from the Happy Paris? There had been hints of a certain internal tension. Living with her hadn’t been like keeping a canary. One night she had thrown a priceless bottle of Black Label at him. Another night she’d broken a Dorsey record and threatened to slice her wrists or his. Granted, in both cases he had just sauntered home from an evening with Alice Beechum; in both cases he and Michiko ended up in bed. He remembered every vertebra in her spine, the way her hair hung around her face, the ten little daggers at her fingertips. Lie down with cats and rise with scratches.
“You were with Ishigami how long? Five hours? Six? All you did was talk about family and then he painted you up like a geisha? The two of you did nothing else?”
“The two of us?”
“That’s what I said.”
Her voice went even flatter. “I wanted to save your life.”
A man couldn’t balk at the hurdles, Harry thought. He had to plunge forward. “What did the two of you do? What did that entail?”
“What do you mean?”
“You know what I mean. He did the geisha makeup. What else did he do?”
“Are you angry because I let Ishigami touch me?”
“Is that all he did? That satisfied him, just a touch?”
A silence stretched like a conversation in itself. Michiko stared at the whiteface in the mirror.
Harry said, “It doesn’t matter, but I just want to know what happened. You entertained the colonel. You kept him busy. You convinced him there was nothing between you and me. How did you do that?”
“If it doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter.”
“But it does matter. It must have been pretty good.”
“It didn’t matter. I’m back.”
She rose and handed him a cloth so that he could wipe the nape of her neck and erase the white sexual W. Harry as good as saw Ishigami’s fingerprints all over her, her neck a scene of intimacy he found himself afraid to touch. He hadn’t escaped Ishigami. Ishigami was in the room with them.
“Did he pay?” he heard himself ask.
“Harry.” She pulled up the kimono and sank to his feet, and he was amazed by how small she looked, a puddle of silk.
“Was it good?”
A few more questions, Harry thought, and she would disappear completely. Out the window he noticed the cat run from the streetlamp, chased by a shadow that developed into a black Datsun with the lights off.
THREE IN THE MORNING was the Thought Police’s favorite hour for hauling people in, a time when defenses were down and thoughts tended to be in sleepy disarray, so when Sergeant Shozo and Corporal Go pounded on the door, they were surprised to see Harry answer it dressed.
The police gave the apartment the once-over, but they were in a rush to haul him off, not conduct a lengthy search. Harry suggested following the policemen in his own car, but the sergeant said it wasn’t necessary. He moved to the back with Harry, who was free to figure out where they were headed. If they couldn’t catch him asleep, they could play another game that police around the world enjoyed, the ride with no clear destination in the dead of night. Harry’s mind was still on Michiko. While the policemen had stumbled up the stairs, she had slipped down the ladder to the club. Harry had told her to stay with the doors locked until daylight and go to Haruko’s to wait for his call. He had given her the gun. Michiko with a gun. That was a scary picture.
“Did your ears tickle?” Go hiked himself to see Harry in the rearview mirror.
“No, they weren’t tickling.”
“Because we were talking about you. Right, Sergeant? Talking about Harry Niles?”
Shozo said, “The life you’ve led, Harry. The best of both worlds.”
The sergeant had heard about Michiko. She might have disappeared, but Shozo and Go had found her dresses and kimonos and sequined jacket in the apartment. “‘Michiko Funabashi, the famous Record Girl, the woman with icy reserve,’” Shozo read from a notebook with the aid of a penlight. “‘The woman with icy reserve.’ She is your paramour?”
“She works in the café below my apartment. Sometimes she stays at my place when the weather’s foul.”
Shozo shook his head with wonder. “‘When the weather’s foul.’ Harry, you never disappoint. But the Record Girl was away tonight?”
“As it turned out.”
Harry thought that if being rousted was meant to frighten him, it wasn’t working. To him, Japanese police were Keystone Kops, with their work done for them. The yakuza maintained a rough sort of law and order and kept their hands off civilians, who in turn kept one another under constant surveillance. This was an entire population that loved to turn in bicycle thieves. The Japanese were so law-abiding by nature that crime was generally accompanied by a complete psychological breakdown. Japanese murderers loved to confess.
Harry knew what would happen if he led Shozo to the willow house and showed him Al DeGeorge. A foreign correspondent executed samurai-style? That said “army” or “patriot,” and that meant “Don’t touch.” Harry could name Ishigami, and it still wouldn’t matter. The police would not rush to arrest a war hero who was related to the imperial family. They would interview the owners of the willow house, geishas and Ishigami’s fellow officers for months before they even dared, obliquely and with many bows, approach the colonel himself. And if in the end the army decided Ishigami was a homicidal maniac, they would send him back to China, where his talents had an outlet.
However, the gaijin who accused a war hero of murder, who spread such subversive propaganda and disturbed social harmony, would find that things could happen very quickly, beginning with immediate detention and isolation. Harry would be lucky to see the surface of the earth again, let alone the last plane out of Tokyo.
“Why are you up?” Harry asked. The sergeant and corporal were rumpled, as if they’d passed a sleepless night of their own.
“Hoping to catch you by surprise,” Shozo said. “I admit it, it’s hard to catch an insomniac by surprise.”