“We’re going to spoil the boy,” Kato said. “He’ll never be able to go home now.”

Harry realized that, moving for hours as mechanically as a sleepwalker, he had returned to familiar ground. The tea merchant, the willow house, the communal pump. He was on his own block, a black space suspended between corner lamps. It was hard to believe that, only two nights before, the Happy Paris had overflowed with customers drinking, boasting, admiring the Record Girl.

The club was shuttered and locked, but he heard the murmur of a saxophone. As Harry unlocked the door, the music stopped. He entered and locked the door behind him. The club was dark except for a moonbeam glow around the jukebox, the lowest setting of the light, where Michiko stood with a gun.

“I’m back,” said Harry.

Michiko stared as if he were an apparition. “Where were you?”

“Looking for you.”

“Not soon enough. Were you busy, Harry?”

“A lot of places to look.”

“And women to see?”

“Here and there.” Trying to stop a war, but Michiko always personalized things, Harry thought.

She turned the gun around and offered it to him. “Why don’t you just kill me, Harry?”

“No, thanks. I can see the headline, ‘Tragic End of Woman with Gaijin.’”

“‘Lovers End Life Together.’”

“‘Together’? After I kill you, I’m honor-bound to kill myself? My honor doesn’t stretch that far. To be honest, I’d cheat.”

“Okay.” She turned the gun around and aimed at him. “I waited at the ballroom, then I waited here.”

“Did you see Ishigami?”

“No, but I heard him.”

“Heard what?” Harry didn’t like the way she put it.

Michiko brought the words out slowly, as if from a hole she didn’t dare look into. “Haruko came for her stupid dress and hat. So we changed. I was in Tetsu’s office when someone else came. When I went out, Haruko was dead.”

“Where was Tetsu? Where was everyone else?”

“He had tattoo fever. He chased everyone out and went home. He said I could wait.”

“Why were you in his office?”

“I didn’t want anyone to see me. I was ashamed.”

“Why?”

“Haruko said that you were going to China with an Englishwoman. She said you weren’t coming back. Is that true?” She turned the gun toward herself, and he saw that the safety was off. He hated emotional blackmail. At the same time, he admired her nerve, the way she coolly placed the barrel to her temple.

“No, I said good-bye to my English friend and her husband. They were very good about it.”

“You’re lying.”

“Maybe, but I’m back.”

“You’ll be gone tomorrow, so what does it matter?”

Harry punched in “Mood Indigo.” “You like this one? Ellington uses a baritone sax instead of a tenor to carry the lead. Did I ever tell you that before?”

“Every time.”

“Well, it’s a classy touch. I saw him at the Starlight in L.A., the whole band in white jackets. Duke was in tails.”

“Don’t do it,” she said when Harry reached for her.

“What have I got to lose?” He laid her cheek on his shoulder. She resisted for a moment, but they really fit together, he thought. A person couldn’t shoot herself and dance at the same time. They didn’t dance so much as drift. The great thing about “Mood Indigo” was that a couple couldn’t dance too slowly.

“How many times did you play this song tonight?” he asked.

“Ten times? Twenty?”

“You must really like it.”

She said, “Not anymore.”

The turntable clicked to a stop. An arm rotated the record to the vertical and let it roll against a soft bumper of felt. For a moment she stayed in his arms.

Harry heard a clicking noise from the shutters. They were metal, padlocked from the outside against burglars, effectively blinding and trapping Harry and Michiko within. There was no light outside since the neon sign had been broken. It was a Sunday night, a working day tomorrow, the weekend over, time for women to rest their heads on wooden pillows and for the police to knee up to office heaters. No one abroad but goblins, cats and insomniacs. Harry threw on the club’s interior lights and located the source of the sound, a sword tip that vigorously probed one shutter slat and then the next like a tongue. What had he expected? It was just what Alice warned him about. So far, the shutters were holding.

“Are you staying?” Michiko asked.

“How can I get out?”

“No, are you staying?”

Staying? Harry had never asked himself the question in exactly that way.

“I wouldn’t leave you. Couldn’t leave you.”

With those words, Harry pictured the plane, his getaway, the Air Nippon DC- 3 in its hangar at Haneda Field. It shone in the dark. Then it disappeared.

24

HARRY AND MICHIKO retreated to the apartment. Even there, every sound was Ishigami. A drunk stumbled in the dark against the club and was Ishigami breaking through the shutters. A cat padded across the roof and was Ishigami prying off the tiles.

Harry assumed that Willie and Iris had weighed anchor. Alice would be packing for Hong Kong. She might be surprised to be traveling alone, but she didn’t need Harry, all she’d needed was a head start. Once she was away from him, she’d see what a narrow escape she’d had. He hadn’t meant to mislead her. Alice was light and sanity. Michiko exercised a much stronger call, the dark where a rib was taken. Being attacked by Beechum didn’t dissuade Harry. With a cricket bat? No, it was a matter of Harry acknowledging that the Nippon Air DC-3 had been a delusion, a fantasy. In the end, he had no choice. There was simply Michiko, all else paled. Even this situation, being trapped with Michiko, now seemed strangely inevitable. He had watched Kabuki all his life and finally had a role. Exit, pursued by samurai. Only there was no exit.

Harry fed the beetle paper-thin slices of cucumber-with pets came responsibilities-and asked Michiko for the details of what happened at the ballroom. She said she had gone there from Haruko’s as Harry asked. Tetsu, sick with tattoo fever, had closed down the ballroom and gone home. Michiko waited alone in semidark for an hour before Haruko arrived, determined to reclaim her favorite outfit. What Haruko offered in exchange was her second-best dress and information about Harry and the plane to China. They traded in the women’s lounge. Haruko was still there when Michiko, too disgraced to face anyone, slipped into Tetsu’s office at the sound of someone at the ballroom door. Whoever it was, they were quick, in shoes or boots rather than clogs or sandals. Michiko heard no conversation, only a chair dragged across the floor and footsteps that retreated as swiftly as they had come. When Michiko emerged, she found Haruko propped up at the table with the box. Like a mouse and a hawk, she said, it was that fast.

Harry asked, “Didn’t it strike you that, wearing a dress and hat she had just taken back from you, with her hair styled like yours, Haruko looked like you?”

“You thought it was me? You were worried?”

“Well, with their head in a box, a lot of people look alike.”

Mist started to drain from the street. A woman with a lantern and a roll of kindling on her back bowed deeply to a shadow in the willow-house gate. The lantern briefly lit Ishigami’s eyes, his field uniform and cap, his sword worn blade up. Harry considered a shot but knew that with his powers of marksmanship, he was more likely to hit a cat than Ishigami. The pipes and chimes of other morning peddlers were approaching. If the colonel was going to attack in the dark, time was running out. Under the circumstances, Harry found Michiko’s faith touching. She sat on her heels, a magician’s assistant waiting for a trick.

“Happy?” he asked, because in a curious way, she seemed to be.

“Yes.”

“Why? Right now, being with me is not like winning a lottery. Tell me, Michiko, because I’ve always wondered, how much English do you understand?”