“Did he pay?” he heard himself ask.
“Harry.” She pulled up the kimono and sank to his feet, and he was amazed by how small she looked, a puddle of silk.
“Was it good?”
A few more questions, Harry thought, and she would disappear completely. Out the window he noticed the cat run from the streetlamp, chased by a shadow that developed into a black Datsun with the lights off.
THREE IN THE MORNING was the Thought Police’s favorite hour for hauling people in, a time when defenses were down and thoughts tended to be in sleepy disarray, so when Sergeant Shozo and Corporal Go pounded on the door, they were surprised to see Harry answer it dressed.
The police gave the apartment the once-over, but they were in a rush to haul him off, not conduct a lengthy search. Harry suggested following the policemen in his own car, but the sergeant said it wasn’t necessary. He moved to the back with Harry, who was free to figure out where they were headed. If they couldn’t catch him asleep, they could play another game that police around the world enjoyed, the ride with no clear destination in the dead of night. Harry’s mind was still on Michiko. While the policemen had stumbled up the stairs, she had slipped down the ladder to the club. Harry had told her to stay with the doors locked until daylight and go to Haruko’s to wait for his call. He had given her the gun. Michiko with a gun. That was a scary picture.
“Did your ears tickle?” Go hiked himself to see Harry in the rearview mirror.
“No, they weren’t tickling.”
“Because we were talking about you. Right, Sergeant? Talking about Harry Niles?”
Shozo said, “The life you’ve led, Harry. The best of both worlds.”
The sergeant had heard about Michiko. She might have disappeared, but Shozo and Go had found her dresses and kimonos and sequined jacket in the apartment. “‘Michiko Funabashi, the famous Record Girl, the woman with icy reserve,’” Shozo read from a notebook with the aid of a penlight. “‘The woman with icy reserve.’ She is your paramour?”
“She works in the café below my apartment. Sometimes she stays at my place when the weather’s foul.”
Shozo shook his head with wonder. “‘When the weather’s foul.’ Harry, you never disappoint. But the Record Girl was away tonight?”
“As it turned out.”
Harry thought that if being rousted was meant to frighten him, it wasn’t working. To him, Japanese police were Keystone Kops, with their work done for them. The yakuza maintained a rough sort of law and order and kept their hands off civilians, who in turn kept one another under constant surveillance. This was an entire population that loved to turn in bicycle thieves. The Japanese were so law-abiding by nature that crime was generally accompanied by a complete psychological breakdown. Japanese murderers loved to confess.
Harry knew what would happen if he led Shozo to the willow house and showed him Al DeGeorge. A foreign correspondent executed samurai-style? That said “army” or “patriot,” and that meant “Don’t touch.” Harry could name Ishigami, and it still wouldn’t matter. The police would not rush to arrest a war hero who was related to the imperial family. They would interview the owners of the willow house, geishas and Ishigami’s fellow officers for months before they even dared, obliquely and with many bows, approach the colonel himself. And if in the end the army decided Ishigami was a homicidal maniac, they would send him back to China, where his talents had an outlet.
However, the gaijin who accused a war hero of murder, who spread such subversive propaganda and disturbed social harmony, would find that things could happen very quickly, beginning with immediate detention and isolation. Harry would be lucky to see the surface of the earth again, let alone the last plane out of Tokyo.
“Why are you up?” Harry asked. The sergeant and corporal were rumpled, as if they’d passed a sleepless night of their own.
“Hoping to catch you by surprise,” Shozo said. “I admit it, it’s hard to catch an insomniac by surprise.”
“What does the newspaper say?” Harry noticed one sticking out of the sergeant’s briefcase.
Shozo opened it. “The morning edition. It says that in Singapore, the British have called off picnics and tennis parties. Doesn’t that seem to you to be a provocation?”
“Putting tennis on a war footing?”
“Yes.”
“Cricket, maybe.” It probably wasn’t a great idea to wander in the jungle with a picnic hamper. The car kept heading north. Harry had expected them to take him downtown if they had questions. This was the opposite direction.
“Another article says that American battleships are too big to pass through the Panama Canal. Is that true?”
“I wouldn’t know. Sergeant, I’m flattered by the wide scope of knowledge you think I possess. Does your newspaper say anything about the talks in Washington?”
“Going well. Roosevelt is backing down.”
“Sounds like peace in our time.”
The object was to get in sync with events, Harry thought. Go with the flow, avoid the rocks. Ishigami was one, Michiko was another. Harry focused on the prize. It sounded like the flight was still on.
Shozo confided, “When I can’t sleep, I do jigsaw puzzles. I once had a five-hundred-piece puzzle of the Grand Canyon in America. It took me a week, but I so looked forward to seeing the complete sweep of this natural wonder. When I was done, however, I was missing a piece right in the center of the puzzle. The effect was ruined. I have to confess, I did something childish. In a fit of frustration, I threw the puzzle out the window, literally out the window and into the canal. I still remember seeing the pieces float away.”
“Sounds like you were steaming,” Harry said.
“I was livid. Then, two days later, I stepped on a mat and felt something underneath. It was the missing piece, the five-hundredth piece. It showed a man standing at the canyon rim and looking out, only now he looked out at nothing. The entire picture would have been complete if I had only waited. It was at a price, but I learned something, to be patient and not let go of anything. Sooner or later I will see how everything fits.”
The headlights projected a film of the city, the street becoming a road with billboards and vacant lots, rice paddies and vegetable plots. The glint of railroad tracks whipped by. Shirts with outstretched arms loomed on drying rods. People said the Japanese treated paper with reverence, that nothing on paper was ever thrown away, but this was where Tokyo’s litter blew. Paper skated on the ground, collected against trees, kited in the air ahead of the car. Go aimed toward two tall smokestacks planted among black conifers, and Harry finally knew where he was being taken. Today was Sunday. Most people would head for a day at the movies, neighborhood fairs, family graves. He was headed to Sugamo Prison.
THE PRISONER PROCESSING area had the white tiles, clothes bins and wooden tubs of a public bathhouse. Posters listed rules (NO SPEAKING, NO SIGNALING, NO DISRESPECT) and illustrated the difference between lice and crabs. Harry took it in with the bright attitude of a member of a blue-ribbon committee investigating penal conditions, even when two guards in Sam Browne belts relieved him of his belt, tie and shoelaces, and even though he knew that at any moment he might be stripped, scrubbed and inspected. He understood that it was never more important than when in a correction facility to maintain the air of a visitor. Besides, complaining was something done outside Sugamo. Inside, a man could be held for months, sometimes years, while his case was investigated for suspicion of crime. The one way an inmate could force a trial date was by confessing his guilt, and only then could he see a lawyer.
Shozo and Go quick-marched Harry down a steel corridor. The middle was open to the floors above and below, with a grille to prevent anyone from cheating the law by jumping to his death. Sugamo seemed designed to transmit and magnify the sound of misery, and though the week had been relatively warm for December, Harry heard the coughs and spitting of tuberculosis, endemic in jails, and reminded himself that he had the protection of Gen and the very top of the Imperial Navy. He had to act like that. When a con man lost confidence, he was dead.