He pushed it into his mouth. Swallowed it.
The girl shrieked. He pulled her again and her dress tore, the jigglies were right in front of him. He squeezed the jigglies, squeezed himself, got his trousers down as the two of them crashed backward through the palm trees into the middle of the room. Waiters tried to hold his arms and legs, the sumo wrestler’s mallet landed on his head but Big Gobi went on pumping. The mallet rose in the air a second time.
There was no way of knowing whether the second blow from that heavy weapon, by itself, would have stopped him. In any case his orgasm had already begun before the mallet fell. By the time it struck him he was spent, limp, relaxed. The mallet grazed his ear and he rolled over on his back, snoring, a smile on his face, one arm tucked underneath the naked girl.
He awoke on a landing near the street, his ear bandaged, Quin standing over him. He wanted to tell Quin that it had been nobody’s fault. Not hers for touching him right there where a princess touches you when she loves you. Not his for taking out the eye because he loved her and didn’t want an accident to happen at the table. No one was to blame. Everything had happened out of love.
Big Gobi thought of all the things he wanted to say, but only the same silly words kept coming out.
I’m sorry.
I’m sorry, Quin.
Sorry.
Terribly sorry.
He tried to say more and couldn’t, stammered, repeated himself. And then Quin turned on him.
Hold your tongue, he said.
Big Gobi closed his eyes. He didn’t say anything after that because he had heard that voice before. It was the kind of voice a cook on a freighter used, or a nurse in the army, or a bus driver when he took your ticket and tore it up.
Just destroyed it, just like that, and threw it away not caring that you were all alone and had nowhere to go without a ticket.
It was wrong, Big Gobi knew it was wrong. Quin was like a brother to him, but even Quin got angry because he could never say what he wanted to say, could never open his heart and love people the way he wanted to love them, touch them the way he wanted to touch them without some terrible accident happening. Perhaps if he’d told Quin long ago about the mistake with the foreman and the tuna fish, he might have understood this time. But he hadn’t told him then and now it was too late. It was all wrong and no one was to blame, but it was too late.
Hold your tongue.
Big Gobi closed his eyes. Those were the last words that would ever cause him pain for when they sank into him a gate clanged shut behind them, a palace gate that would never open again. He tried to live in a world that was strange and frightening, tried to call it silly, tried to pretend he could live the way other people lived. But the gestures had always been clumsy, the acting artless, a jester with a serious face, a buffoon without a smile. Although he was as kind and lonely as a clown, in the end no one laughed.
Thereafter he might walk after Quin, the brother, down this street or that from the past, through the mythical lost cities of Shanghai and Tokyo and there find his mother or father without knowing it, answering questions that went unheard because the dream was gone, because the child within him had fled to the safety of that changeless inner kingdom where neither pain nor insult could be found, nothing in fact but the silent palace where the prince who might have been sat alone in his cell, beyond hope or sadness, patiently waiting for death.
Each morning they had the same conversation when Big Gobi came into the living room and sat down with his hands in his lap, there to remain for the rest of the day.
How’s the ear, Gobes?
The ear’s fine.
Bandage too tight?
The bandage’s fine.
Look, I’m sorry I spoke to you that way, I didn’t mean it. I just got angry that something like that had to happen in Mama’s place.
Anger’s fine. That Mama’s fine. What happened’s fine.
Quin nodded to himself and went into the kitchen, or outside to walk, or back into the bedroom to stare at the floor. Somehow he knew he had to get through to Big Gobi, he had to break his trance. In the end, not knowing how it might help, he decided to take him along to the meeting with the gangster Kikuchi-Lotmann.
Later that evening on the houseboat with Kikuchi-Lotmann would remind him of another meeting on a houseboat, the one Mama had failed to mention in her first conversation with him, the episode that had taken place in Shanghai eight years before she arrived there, the evening when Baron Kikuchi had embraced his convictions and agreed to supply the plans of the General Staff of the Imperial Army to the engaging husband of his former mistress, a man named Quin.
One recollection, a small one.
Soon there would be many more since Quin was unknowingly nearing the center of the espionage ring that had received its code name from an event in the life of the mysterious Adzhar, a clandestine network that had connected his father and the General and Father Lamereaux, and Maeve and Miya and Mama, and through them others as well, in a performance of love and desperation so powerful it could reach out thirty years later to claim both murders and suicides, create a new Kannon Buddha, and bring on the most magnificent funeral in Asia since the death of Kublai Khan.
And all because Quin wanted to help Big Gobi, and in so doing introduced him to his murderer.
Just before midnight they were walking down the canal behind the sushi restaurant when a young Japanese stepped out of the shadows with a submachine gun. He was wearing a dark business suit and his hair was cut short, but Quin wouldn’t have recognized him anyway without his false moustache and false sideburns. The young Japanese pointed the submachine gun at an alley and moved behind them. There was nothing to do but march ahead.
They came to a blank wall at the end of the alley. A buzzer sounded. The wall rolled away to reveal an enormous hall, a brightly lit area where hundreds of young women in white overalls and white surgical masks sat at benches studying banks of miniature television sets. Behind the sets were computers. The television screens showed scenes from all over the world, shipyards and oil refineries, camera factories, massage parlors, motorcycle assembly lines, bars and restaurants, transistor radio plants, every manner of enterprise and industry.
The guard waved them through a door into another large hall, less well lit, where young men in white overalls and white surgical masks supervised machines that stacked and packaged currencies.
The next door led into darkness. They were outside again facing the canal. A narrow gangplank ran down to a small houseboat.
When they stepped on the gangplank a light went on. A speaker began to play circus music. They passed through a tiny room with a bare canvas cot and one empty coat hanger on the wall beside a whip and megaphone. They walked through another door onto the deck.
The water was black and still. On the far side of the canal the windowless wall of a warehouse stretched for hundreds of yards. A charcoal brazier burned near the edge of the deck, which was covered with sawdust. Folding canvas chairs were scattered here and there. From one of them rose a short, rotund man who wore steel-rimmed glasses and a lavender frock coat. He smiled as he put out his hand.
Just in time, he said. I’m serving Mongolian mixed grill tonight. Your name please?
Quin.
The short, rotund man shook his hand warmly.
Kikuchi-Lotmann, Mr. Quin, a pleasure. I was beginning to wonder what had happened to you. I expected to see you soon after you made your inquiries. Were you delayed?
Quin pointed at the bandage over Big Gobi’s ear. Kikuchi-Lotmann shook his head with concern.
An accident? How unfortunate. But in any case you’re here and now we can have our chat. Who was it that sent you to me?
Father Lamereaux.
Ah, such a good man, so gentle and so kind. I haven’t seen him since I was a child. Excuse me, please.