It was Mrs. Shimura who anchored herself in silence, while Mr. Watanabe wept uncontrollably.
With the same excessive consideration of security as yesterday, the four guards stood along the wall on the door side of the small visitors’ room. The two Japanese looked tense and uncomfortable; the American MP yawned in boredom; and the stocky Russian seemed to daydream, which certainly he was not doing. Early in his conversation with Kishikawa-san, Nicholai had tested the guards, speaking first in Japanese. It was clear that the American did not understand, but he was less sure of the Russian, so he made up a nonsense statement and read a slight frown on the broad brow. When Nicholai shifted to French, losing the Japanese guards, but not the Russian, he was sure this man was no common soldier, despite his appearance of Slavic intellectual viscosity. It was necessary, therefore, to find another code in which, to speak, and he chose the cryptography of Gô, reminding the General, as he took out the small magnetic board, that Otake-san had always used the idioticon of his beloved game when discussing important things.
“Do you want to continue the game, sir?” Nicholai asked. “The fragrance has gone bad: Aji ga warui.”
Kishikawa-san looked up in mild confusion. They were only four or five plays into the game; this was a most peculiar thing to say.
Three plays passed in silence before the General began to glimpse what Nicholai might have meant. He tested this out by saying, “It seems to me that the game is in korigatachi, that I am frozen into position without freedom of development.”
“Not quite, sir. I see the possibility of a sabaki, but of course you would join the hama.”
“Isn’t that dangerous for you? Isn’t it in fact a ko situation?”
“More a uttegae, in truth. And I see nothing else for your honor—and mine.”
“No, Nikko. You are too kind. I cannot accept the gesture. For you such a play would be a most dangerous aggression, a suicidal de.”
“I am not asking your permission. I could not put you in that impossible position. Having decided how I shall play it, I am explaining the configuration to you. They believe they have tsuru no sugomori. In fact they face a seki. They intended to drive you to the wall with a shicho, but I have the privilege of being your shicho atari.”
Out of the corner of his eye, Nicholai saw one of the Japanese guards frown. Obviously he played a bit, and he realized this conversation was nonsense.
Nicholai reached across the rough wooden table and placed his hand on the General’s arm. “Foster-father, the game will end in two minutes. Permit me to guide you.”
Tears of gratitude stood in Kishikawa-san’s eyes. He seemed more frail than before, both very old and rather childlike. “But I cannot permit…”
“I act without permission, sir. I have decided to perform a loving disobedience. I do not even seek your forgiveness.”
After a moment of consideration, Kishikawa-san nodded. A slight smile squeezed the tears from his eyes and sent one down each side of his nose. “Guide me, then.”
“Turn your head and look out the window, sir. It is all overcast and damp, but soon the season of the cherry will be with us.”
Kishikawa-san turned his head and looked calmly out into the rectangle of moist gray sky. Nicholai took a lead pencil from his pocket and held it lightly between his fingers. As he spoke, he concentrated on the General’s temple where a slight pulse throbbed under the transparent skin.
“Do you recall when we walked beneath the blossoms of Kajikawa, sir? Think of that. Remember walking there years before with your daughter, her hand small in yours. Remember walking with your father along the same bank, your hand small in his. Concentrate on these things.”
Kishikawa-san lowered his eyes and reposed his mind, as Nicholai continued speaking quietly, the lulling drone of his voice more important than the content. After a few moments, the General looked at Nicholai, the hint of a smile creasing the corners of his eyes. He nodded. Then he turned again to the gray, dripping scene beyond the window.
As Nicholai continued to talk softly, the American MP was engrossed in dislodging a bit of something from between his teeth with his fingernail; but Nicholai could feel tension in the attitude of the brighter of the Japanese guards, who was bewildered and uncomfortable with the tone of this conversation. Suddenly, with a shout, the Russian “guard” leapt forward.
He was too late.
For six hours Nicholai sat in the windowless interrogation room after surrendering himself without struggle or explanation to the stunned, confused, and therefore violent guards. In his first fury the American MP sergeant had hit him twice with his truncheon, once on the point of the shoulder, once across the face, splitting his eyebrow against the sharp bone behind it. There was little pain, but the eyebrow bled profusely, and Nicholai suffered from the messy indignity of it.
Frightened by anticipation of repercussions for allowing their prisoner to be killed under their eyes, the guards screamed threats at Nicholai as they raised the alarm and summoned the prison doctor. When he arrived, there was nothing the fussy, uncertain Japanese doctor could do for the General, who had been nerve-dead seconds after Nicholai’s strike, and body-dead within a minute. Shaking his head and sucking breaths between his teeth, as though admonishing a mischievous child, the doctor attended to Nicholai’s split eyebrow, relieved to have something to do within the scope of his competence.
While two fresh Japanese guards watched over Nicholai, the others reported to their superiors, giving versions of the event that showed them to be blameless, while their opposite numbers were revealed to be something between incompetent and perfidious.
When the MP sergeant returned, he was accompanied by three others of his nationality; no Russians, no Japanese. Dealing with Nicholai was to be an American show.
In grim silence, Nicholai was searched and stripped, dressed in the same coarse “suicide-proof” uniform the General had worn, and brought down the hall to be left, barefoot and with his wrists handcuffed behind his back, in the stark interrogation room, where he sat in silence on a metal chair bolted to the floor.
To subdue his imagination, Nicholai focused his mind on the middle stages of a famous contest between Gô masters of the major schools, a game he had memorized as a part of his training under Otake-san. He reviewed the placements, switching by turns from one point of view to the other, examining the implications of each. The considerable effort of memory and concentration was sufficient to close out the alien and chaotic world around him.
There were voices beyond the door, then the sound of keys and bolts, and three men entered. One was the MP sergeant who had been industriously picking his teeth when Kishikawa-san died. The second was a burly man in civilian dress whose porcine eyes had that nervous look of superficial intelligence thinned by materialistic insensitivity one sees in politicians, film producers, and automobile salesmen. The third, the leaves of a major on his shoulders, was a taut, intense man with large bloodless lips and drooping lower eyelids. It was this third who occupied the chair opposite Nicholai, while the burly civilian stood behind Nicholai’s chair, and the sergeant stationed himself near the door.
“I am Major Diamond.” The officer smiled, but there was a flat tone to his accent, that metallic mandibular sound that blends the energies of the garment district with overlays of acquired refinement—the kind of voice one associates with female newscasters in the United States.