Harry could smell the sake on the hot plate.
“Sing,” Ishigami said.
Harry shrugged. What came to him was his mother’s favorite song, one she used to sing over Harry like a desperate wish, a mournful tune that brought out the last hints of the Southern Baptist in his voice. “Amazing grace, how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me… “He let the song slowly unroll, as if carrying a body through the cemetery gates. “I once was lost…“Michiko looked at him through her geisha mask, rosebud lips tentatively open. “Was blind…“For a moment he was in church, the congregation standing and singing with hymnals open, all except his mother, who knew each hymn by heart. She leaned forward to send a smile down the pew to Harry. “But now I see.”
Harry repeated the song in Japanese, and when he was done, he needed the sake badly, but Michiko only stared at him. Ishigami regarded him intently.
“That was a good song,” Ishigami said. “That is how I feel. There comes a time when you feel you are carrying all the dead, all the soldiers who have followed you. They weigh so you can barely place one step in front of the other, and you see ahead of you an endless road of more bodies. I don’t know why I tell you, except that you surprise me.” He reflected for a moment. “It’s good to say things aloud. When I was young, my mother and I would go to the beach at Kamakura, and she would tell me to find a seashell to tell my problems to. Not only problems but ambitions, the foremost being to serve the emperor. And desires.”
“And then?” Harry asked because Ishigami didn’t sound quite done.
“Then my mother said to crush the shell so that no one else would hear.”
“Makes sense.”
“You know,” the colonel said, “at this moment I feel that I can tell you anything.”
This did not bode well, thought Harry.
“Your sake.” Michiko set the flask in front of Harry. “Time for you to pay your penalty.”
The flask was scalding to the touch. All the better.
“Harry? Harry, are you in there?” A voice came from the front of the willow house. “It’s Willie.”
Willie Staub, doing his best to call softly. Harry heard the awkward scuffling of a gaijin removing his shoes. Ishigami took the sword from the table and motioned Harry to stay seated.
“Harry?” Willie called. “DeGeorge said he was coming here to find you. Are you there?”
“It’s late,” a woman told Willie.
Iris, Harry thought. Although the hall was dimly lit and the screen to the room was shut. If they got to the end of the hall, however, they’d see the blood or feel it underfoot.
“Harry? DeGeorge?”
Feet padded closer. Even seated, Ishigami achieved perfect balance. He wouldn’t wait, Harry thought. As soon as Ishigami saw a shadow on the sliding screen, he would rise and, in the same motion, slice through the paper, step through and finish both.
“Harry, please, are you there?” Willie asked.
“There’s no one,” Iris said.
“The house would be locked if no one were here.”
“It’s a geisha house,” she said. “They may be…you know.”
“DeGeorge said he would be here, inside or out. I just want to ask someone.”
Heads two and three delivered right to Ishigami. So much for the sweet Nazi and his Oriental bride. Harry opened his mouth to warn them, and the tip of Ishigami’s sword was at his neck, like a thumb checking a pulse.
“Answer your friends,” Ishigami whispered. “Call them here.”
Harry remembered the drills in the schoolyard, being beaten with wooden staves. That wasn’t the real thing. The real thing was like being skewered like a martini olive on a toothpick. The Chinaman who shit his pants in Nanking? Harry felt for him now.
“Call them.” Ishigami prodded Harry.
Willie and Iris opened shoji screens as they came. “Amazing Grace,” what a hell of a dirge to remember. Back in church. But then Harry saw Ishigami’s eyes twist backward as Michiko knelt behind the colonel, wrapped one hand around his forehead and, with the other, laid a chopping knife, the one she had cut ginger with, against the colonel’s throat.
Harry smiled. Ishigami smiled. Michiko smiled.
Harry thought Japan really was different.
Willie’s voice was fainter, farther down the hall. “We had to look.”
“We looked enough.” Iris was sounding like a wife. “We’ll come back tomorrow.”
“I just worry about DeGeorge.”
Don’t worry about DeGeorge, Harry thought. There was a second stumbling into shoes, discreet sounds of retreat along the path and the backfire of a car starting while the three in the back room sat like a family tied in an intimate dispute, waiting for the complete departure of intruders. Harry was still pinned to the sliding screen. At the same time, Ishigami was snug in Michiko’s grip, and Harry knew how fierce that could be. The situation reminded Harry of the church parable about people with short arms and long spoons who couldn’t feed themselves, only others, but with swords and a different moraclass="underline" he needed a gun.
Some of Michiko’s lipstick rubbed off on the colonel’s ear as she said, “Please be so kind as to put down your sword.”
Ishigami said, “If nothing else, we have clarified relations between you and Harry. You lied. That’s all right, I thought you had.”
She lifted his chin with the knife. Philosophically enough, Ishigami laid the sword on the floor, and Harry slid it to the far wall, then relieved Ishigami of his short sword, a beauty of nearly black steel, and did the same with it. Even without his swords, Ishigami didn’t appear disarmed enough. He was checked by Michiko’s knife but only slightly.
Michiko said, “Run, Harry. Go.”
“That’s right,” Ishigami said. “Run.”
All Harry could think of was the gun under the floorboards across the street. No one could hold Ishigami with a knife or sword; that was like trying to hold him down with a paper clip.
“Give me the knife,” Harry said to Michiko.
“No, Harry. Go!”
“I’ll go,” said Ishigami.
With a deep inhale, he slowly rose, lifting Michiko to tiptoe. As she lost her balance, he shifted toward her and then out of her grip. Harry moved to block the way to the door. Instead, Ishigami ran at the side wall and burst through panels of wood and paper. One moment there was a wall, and then a garden Buddha looking in. Too late, Harry remembered the swords. A fist punched through the back wall, gathered the swords and disappeared. Harry folded the gilded screen as the tip of a sword appeared at the top of the last remaining wall and sliced the paper open. As Ishigami stepped through the flaps, Harry launched the screen, wisely not at the colonel’s head but at his feet.
Without bothering with shoes, Harry and Michiko raced into the street. The Happy Paris was dark, the jukebox a moon among tables. Michiko locked the door while Harry got on his knees in the kitchen and slapped aside loose floorboards to root through pickle jars for the gun. “Camptown Races,” what a stupid song. A police investigation would really nix his travel plans. Was there room under the floorboards for DeGeorge? A jar slipped from Harry’s hands and broke. Bits of glass and brine swam around his knees as he dug out the cookie tin. Money spilled as he pried up the lid, found the Nambu, cocked a round into the breech and aimed at the door, at shutters, back to the door as if they were paper for Ishigami to step through.
19
HARRY WATCHED the street from his apartment while Michiko knelt by a mirror and candle to wipe her white face off. She had set the wig aside, and her own short hair was wrapped in gauze, exposing her ear, pink as a shell. Harry remembered Oharu awash in creams and tissues backstage at the Folies. As a kid he’d liked the way performers stripped themselves of one character and painted on another, one deception followed by the next. He wasn’t so sure how he felt about it now. Harry was always Harry Niles, blood washed off his knees, shaved now and dressed in a fresh suit, but essentially Harry, while Michiko was revealed in layers.