“Are you all right, Harry?” Shozo stooped to ask.
“Sure.” It was a fluid situation, that much was clear. So far as Harry was concerned, Shozo’s push for a confession proved he didn’t have enough for an arrest. However, the Thought Police were capable of anything when antagonized. Harry had just pressed too hard.
“No hard feelings. No warning, sorry.” Go grinned with his upper teeth.
“Now, while you can, Harry, write your statement.”
“Can’t.” He couldn’t even stand.
“Then tell me about the tanks.”
“Don’t know.”
“The Magic Show.”
“No.”
“Lady Beechum. We know she’s a spy.”
A bugle call and the clamor of a bell were followed by a general coughing, a rustle of bodies on thin mats, a sickly chorus of hundreds in a mausoleum above and below. Time to contemplate a person’s spiritual nature, Harry thought. Time to call the bluff.
“I’m ready to go.”
Shozo helped Harry up. “Would you like some water? Tea? Last chance, Harry.” Shozo had the expression of a fireman removing a ladder from someone who refused to leave a burning building.
“No. May I go?”
“Of course.”
Shozo called a guard to return Harry to the processing area. On the way out, he passed a trustee in a patched kimono pasting rules up in the hall:
NO SPEAKING BETWEEN PRISONERS IS ALLOWED. NO SIGNALING BETWEEN PRISONERS IS ALLOWED. NO DISRESPECT TO WARDS OR GUARDS IS ALLOWED. NO REMOVAL OR DAMAGE OF THE CELL LIGHT IS ALLOWED. NO BLOCKING OR COVERING OF THE DOOR SIGHT IS ALLOWED. RISING IS AT 0600, INSPECTION AT 0630, EXERCISE AT 0900, LUNCH AT 1100, DINNER AT 1600, SLEEP AT 1900. HAIRCUTS TWICE A MONTH. SPECIAL ITEMS WILL BE AVAILABLE AT THE COMMISSARY. COMMENTS SHOULD BE DIRECTED ONLY TO THE PRISON GOVERNOR.
This time the rules were in English.
HARRY FOUND a train platform half a mile from the prison on a road between potato fields. Scarecrows whirled their arms at the rising sun, and Harry found cheer in the fact that his shirt wasn’t sticking to his back, which meant he had only a welt, not broken skin, a good sign, although the very fact that he construed a lack of blood a good sign was, he admitted, a bad sign indeed. He sucked on a cigarette to ease the pain and read the schedule plaque. There wasn’t much service on a Sunday. And prospects for the rest of the week? He felt the sun stretch his shadow back toward the high walls and chimneys of the prison.
Palm Springs, Palm Springs, Palm Springs, he repeated like a mantra. Alice, Alice, Alice. Sometimes a man sensed a deal falling apart. The blow with the cane was a bad sign through and through. He hadn’t been taken so unawares since school, when Gen once caught him with a wooden sword before Harry had his padding on. Someone in the navy had to be sniping at Gen for Shozo to know so much about oil. Worse than the hit, though, was remembering what he’d done to Michiko. She’d laid herself down to save his life, and he’d reacted like a saint stoning a slut.
A crow trudged up the road and shared a glance with Harry, one wiseguy to another. There was nothing he could do. On Sunday morning there was no traffic, not even a truck to bum a ride with.
The worst sign of all was what had earned Harry the welt on his back.
Confusion.
Harry’s whole story about secret oil tanks on Oahu was meant to cause uncertainty; that was the point of the fabrication. Uncertainty was a paralyzed state where cooler heads could prevail. Confusion was active, committed, a labeling of targets. Confusion was planes in the air.
20
THE TRAIN WAS a narrow-gauge local that rattled across the hard crust of winter fields, and Harry rode standing up rather than let his back touch a seat. Other riders carried dusty sacks of root vegetables. Beer bottles and dead cigars rolled at his feet. He had never had such good posture, or such a watchful eye from fellow passengers, and when the train reached Ueno Station in Tokyo at nine o’clock and emptied at a platform with a sign that said CELEBRATE ANTI-SPY WEEK!, Harry felt as if a spotlight had followed him from the prison.
Outside the station, he slipped into a phone booth to call the waitress Haruko. Ueno Station was a building on a Mussolini scale, but its phone booths were intimate stalls that crammed the caller against a mouthpiece.
“Michiko isn’t here,” Haruko said.
“I told her to go to your place and wait there.”
“She came all dressed up like a geisha, changed into my best dress and left.”
The day was bright enough for men emerging from the station to pull down their hats, and Harry felt himself sinking back into welcome anonymity.
“Where to?”
“She was upset,” Haruko said.
“Did she say where she was going?”
“Just that she was going to find you.”
“All she had to do was wait at your place.”
Haruko was so silent that Harry thought the line had gone dead until she said, “Michiko didn’t think so.”
“What did she think?”
“You’re leaving her. She’s sure of it.”
“No one can leave. The whole country is closed.”
“Except for Houdini.”
“What do you mean?”
“That’s what Michiko calls you. The escape artist.”
From the vantage point of the booth, Harry became aware of a six-wheeled army staff car with soldiers on the running boards, at the park entrance across the avenue from the station. Two army Datsuns stopped in the middle of the traffic. They were full-size sedans, not the “baby cars” Datsun sold to the public, and each car was stuffed with soldiers.
“Harry?”
“I’m sorry, Haruko, you’ll have to remind me, what was your best dress?”
“White with a sailor collar and blue buttons down the side. And a white cap and a little blue bag. She just swept in and took them. Then she borrowed some money.”
“I’ll pay you back.”
In a different tone, Haruko said. “She has a gun.”
“I know.”
The staff car rolled into the park, and a moment later the two army sedans followed.
“Should I come in to work tonight? Will the Happy Paris be open?”
“No, I think the Happy Paris will be closed.”
“How long?”
“For a while. If you see Michiko, tell her to meet me at the ballroom.”
Harry hung up. He made one more brief phone call, went back into the station and descended steps to an underpass of newsstands, food shops, a shoe shine and pharmacy where Harry picked up a germ mask, a ready-made disguise that he slipped on his face. As he emerged at the park, a backfire led his eye to the gleam of a rear bumper just disappearing behind pines.
Harry set off running. He knew Ueno Park by heart from having carried the art box when Kato sketched the beggars and prostitutes who inhabited the grounds at night. A Sunday-morning crowd was different, and on such a warm December day, people filled the paths, art lovers headed to the museum, families to the zoo. Even so, the cars pushed through and drew away from Harry until he was left breathless at the edge of an undulating field that stretched maybe a hundred yards to a black border of bare cherry trees.
He didn’t know why he’d tried to follow the cars, it was a little like following a swarm of wasps. Perhaps because they shouldn’t have been on the footpaths. Perhaps because Shozo had used the word “confusion.” Harry was confused himself, and there was a side of his nature that hated to be in the dark. Now, gasping for breath, taking in the wide field, digging out a cigarette, he decided that not being in the know was okay, too. That was why a man should spend time around nature, for perspective. In one day he would be bound for California with a Lady by his side. His back stung, but he could breathe, hence no broken ribs, and smoking dulled the pain. Only surface injuries, and Asakusa was definitely walkable from here. Just a little dizzy. The episode at the prison had gone badly. Then there was Ishigami. It was crazy to be angry at someone who was trying to kill you, personal affront was beside the point, but the picture of the colonel with Michiko lit a flame under Harry’s brainpan. He wasn’t a man given to self-torture, but for some reason he could see Ishigami touch her, expertly apply the paint, lift the collar from her shoulders. In his mind Harry watched her eyes and examined her expression for signs of pleasure. He could stare at the blue sky over Ueno Park and witness the entire scene, the amour of the colonel and the Record Girl. Harry was hiding from Ishigami. The question now was whether to hide from her. Pretty funny. She was dangerous enough with a knife, let alone a gun. Did he want her at the ballroom so he could find her or avoid her? Perhaps she was asking the same question. The world was tilting like a pinball machine. East met West, and foreign correspondents lost their heads. Harry felt for DeGeorge, for the faithful accountant Kawamura being caned in a Sugamo cell, but if Harry’s story about oil tanks in Hawaii had caused confusion, it was too late to explain or confess. Things were in motion.