“Do we still speak of Gô, Teacher?”
“Yes. And of its shadow: life.”
“What do you advise me to do then?”
“Avoid contact with them. Camouflage yourself with politeness. Appear dull and distant. Live apart and study shibumi. Above all, do not let him bait you into anger and aggression. Hide, Nikko.”
“General Kishikawa told me almost the same thing.”
“I do not doubt it. We discussed you at length his last night here. Neither of us could guess what the Westerner’s attitude toward you will be, when he comes. And more than that, we fear your attitude toward him. You are a convert to our culture, and you have the fanaticism of the convert. It is a flaw in your character. And tragic flaws lead to…” Otake-san shrugged.
Nicholai nodded and lowered his eyes, waiting patiently for the teacher to dismiss him.
After a time of silence, Otake-san took another mint drop and said, “Shall I share a great secret with you, Nikko? All these years I have told people I take mint drops to ease my stomach. The fact is, I like them. But there is no dignity in an adult who munches candy in public.”
“No shibumi, sir.”
“Just so.” Otake-san seemed to daydream for a moment. “Yes. Perhaps you are right. Perhaps the mountain mist is unhealthy. But it lends a melancholy beauty to the garden, and so we must be grateful to it.”
After the cremation, Otake-san’s plans for family and students were carried out. The family collected its belongings to go live with Otake’s brother. The students were dispersed to their various homes. Nicholai, now over twenty, although he looked no more than fifteen, was given the money General Kishikawa had left for him and permitted to do what he chose, to go where he wanted. He experienced that thrilling social vertigo that accompanies total freedom in a context of pointlessness.
On the third day of August 1945, all the Otake household were gathered with their cases and packages on the train platform. There was neither the time nor the privacy for Nicholai to say to Mariko what he felt. But he managed to put special emphasis and gentleness into his promise to visit her as soon as possible, once he had established himself in Tokyo. He looked forward to his visit, because Mariko always spoke so glowingly of her family and friends in her home city, Hiroshima.
Washington
The First Assistant pushed back from his console and shook his head. “There’s just not much to work with, sir. Fat Boy doesn’t have anything firm on this Hel before he arrives in Tokyo.” There was irritation in the First Assistant’s tone; he was exasperated by people whose lives were so crepuscular or uneventful as to deny Fat Boy a chance to demonstrate his capacity for knowing and revealing.
“Hm-m,” Mr. Diamond grunted absently, as he continued to sketch notes of his own. “Don’t worry, the data will thicken up from this point on. Hel went to work for the Occupation Forces shortly after the war, and from then on he remained more or less within our scope of observation.”
“Are you sure you really need this probe, sir? You seem to know all about him already.”
“I can use the review. Look, something just occurred to me. All we have tying Nicholai Hel to the Munich Five and this Hannah Stern is a first-generation relationship between Hel and the uncle. Let’s make sure we’re not flying with the wild geese. Ask Fat Boy where Hel is living now.” He pressed a buzzer at the side-of his desk.
“Yes, sir,” the First Assistant said, turning back to his console.
Miss Swivven entered the work area in response to Diamond’s buzzer. “Sir?”
“Two things. First: get me all available photographs of Hel, Nicholai Alexandrovitch. Llewellyn will give you the mauve card ID code. Second: contact Mr. Able of the OPEC Interest Group and ask him to come here as soon as possible. When he arrives, bring him down here, together with the Deputy and those two idiots who screwed up. You’ll have to escort them down; they don’t have access to the Sixteenth Floor.”
“Yes, sir.” Upon leaving, Miss Swivven closed the door to the wirephoto room just a bit too firmly, and Diamond looked up, wondering what on earth had gotten into her.
Fat Boy was responding to interrogation. His answer clattering up on the First Assistant’s machine. “Ah… it seems this Nicholai Hel has several residences. There’s an apartment in Paris, a place on the Dalmatian coast, a summer villa in Morocco, an apartment in New York, another in London—ah! Here we are. Last known residence equals a château in the bleeding village of Etchebar. This appears to be his principal residence, considering the amount of time he has spent there during the last fifteen years.”
“And where is this Etchebar?”
“Ah… it’s in the Basque Pyrenees, sir.”
“Why is it called a ‘bleeding’ village?”
“I was wondering that myself, sir.” The First Assistant queried the computer, and when the answer came he chuckled to himself. “Amazing! Poor Fat Boy had a little trouble translating from French to English. The word bled is evidently French for ‘a small hamlet.’ Fat Boy mistranslated it to ‘bleeding.’ Too much input from British sources just of late, I suspect.”
Mr. Diamond glared across at the First Assistant’s back. “Let’s pretend that’s interesting. So. Hannah Stern took a plane from Rome to the city of Pau. Ask Fat Boy what’s the nearest airport to this Etchebar. If it’s Pau, then we know we have trouble.”
The question was passed on to the computer. The RP screen went blank, then flashed a list of airports arranged in order of their distance from Etchebar. The first on the list was Pau.
Diamond nodded fatalistically.
The First Assistant sighed and slipped his forefinger under his metal glasses, lightly rubbing the red dents. “So there it is. We have every reason to assume that Hannah Stern is now in contact with a mauve-card man. Only three mauve-card holders left alive in the world, and our girl has found one of them. Rotten luck!”
“That it is. Very well, now we know for sure that Nicholai Hel is in the middle of this business. Get back to your machine and root out all we know about him so we can fill Mr. Able in when he gets here. Begin with his arrival in Tokyo.”
Japan
The Occupation was in full vigor; the evangelists of democracy were dictating their creed from the Dai Ichi Building across the moat from—but significantly out of sight of—the Imperial Palace. Japan was a physical, economic, and emotional shambles, but the Occupation put their idealistic crusade before mundane concerns for the well-being of the conquered people; a mind won was worth more than a life lost.
With millions of others, Nicholai Hel was flotsam on the chaos of the postwar struggle for survival. Rocketing inflation soon reduced his small store of money to a valueless wad of paper. He sought manual work with the crews of Japanese laborers clearing debris from the bombings; but the foremen mistrusted his motives and doubted his need, considering his race. Nor had he recourse to assistance from any of the occupying powers, as he was a citizen of none of their countries. He joined the flood of the homeless, the jobless, the hungry who wandered the city, sleeping in parks, under bridges, in railway stations. There was a surfeit of workers and a paucity of work, and only young women possessed services valuable to the gruff, overfed soldiers who were the new masters.
When his money ran out, he went two days without food, returning each night from his search for work to sleep in Shimbashi Station together with hundreds of others who were hungry and adrift. Finding places for themselves on or under the benches and in tight rows filling the open spaces, they dozed fitfully, or jolted up from nightmares, hag-ridden with hunger. Each morning the police cleared them out, so traffic could flow freely. And each morning there were eight or ten who did not respond to the prodding of the police. Hunger, sickness, old age, and loss of the will to live had come during the night to remove the burden of life.