Kikuchi-Lotmann smiled.
And so I do. I prefer to think that somewhere in the vastness of central Asia, beyond those interminable arid wastes where the paths are too old and new for the rest of us, there is a home for a soul such as his. A small resting place beside a stream, under a tree, where a man who has dreamed and failed can surrender his ghost without regrets. I prefer to believe that.
Kikuchi-Lotmann creaked out of his chair and stretched his arms. The shadows were gone. One final time he changed his necktie. When he turned to Quin he was smiling.
Well, have we learned anything tonight? Have we discovered what Father Lamereaux might have had in mind when he sent you here?
I’m not really sure, said Quin, but one thing bothers me. If he knows the story, which he must, why didn’t he tell it to me himself?
Perhaps because he’s a holy man and a holy man is supposed to guide, not teach. Or it might have been just a whim of his. In any case we followed the holy man’s directions and did what was expected of us.
Quin shook Big Gobi by the shoulder and told him it was time to leave. As he stood Kikuchi-Lotmann noticed the cross hanging from his neck.
That’s an old piece. Where did it come from?
It was given to him in America, answered Quin.
Once as a boy I saw a cross much like it. It belonged to Rabbi Lotmann’s twin brother, who apparently treasured it greatly. He always wore it hidden under his uniform, which was odd for a Japanese who wasn’t a Christian, who was an ultranationalist in fact. It wouldn’t have gone well for him in the army if anyone had known about it.
Who was he? said Quin.
A very powerful General who was killed in China in 1937. He inherited the title of Baron Kikuchi when Lot-mann became a Jew.
The Policeman
As for where they go and why, we cannot be sure of such things. There are no tracks in such a barren waste. The sandstorms blow, the sun sinks, rivers disappear, and their camels are lost in darkness. Therefore the truth must be that the routes of such men are untrace-able, their missions unknowable, their ultimate destinations as invisible as the wind.
If the Son of Heaven is to continue to rule with integrity, we must defend our borders at all costs from such men.
—A Han dynasty account of the caravans in the Gobi Desert
The young bodyguard whom Kikuchi-Lotmann called the student stood in a long line of people waiting for a movie theater to open. It was his day off and he didn’t have to be back at the dormitory until muster the following morning.
All of the gangsters who worked for Kikuchi-Lotmann lived together in the company housing project, a large concrete block of windowless cubicles built around a central courtyard. Muster came at six o’clock, when a bugle sounded over the public address system. The gangsters fell in at attention in the courtyard and the roll was taken. A physical fitness expert then led them through a rigorous series of push-ups, pull-ups, and rope-skipping. The calisthenics ended at seven o’clock with the gangsters maneuvering around the courtyard in military fashion singing the company marching song, Kikuchi-Lotmann Enterprises Forever.
The supreme present,
Nothing compares to the present.
Unless it’s the past.
The lyrics were much too brief for the music, which one of the older employees claimed was similar to a tune he had heard in Singapore before the war, a song known at that time, there, as Roast Beef of Old England.
Hato hated calisthenics and he hated the dormitory. He hated the young whore, a mental health specialist, who burst into his cubicle three times a week dressed as an elderly woman, her face lined with gray make-up to give her the semblance of age, her breasts taped down to appear flat, her belly daubed with green chalk, her legs painted with varicose veins. The young woman yanked him to his feet and pushed him away from the door. He had to spend an hour with her.
Up against the wall, mother-fucker, she shouted as she charged.
Hato didn’t have any special feelings about his mother, so the therapeutic effect of the session was lost on him. He would have preferred a girl who looked like a movie star.
Hato’s father had made his living since the war selling gloves, hairpieces, and empty lipstick tubes that had formerly belonged to female movie stars. Most of these items were bought by girls who worked in massage parlors. The more select imports he auctioned off to industrialists, veterans of the Pacific war, who would pay high prices for anything that had belonged to an American star because America had won the war.
He had begun his career almost by accident when the most famous blond star in America, later a suicide, visited the Imperial Hotel for a few days. On a whim Hato’s father bribed the maids to search the sheets each morning to see what they could find.
When the movie star left he had two genuine pubic hairs in his possession. He framed the hairs under a magnifying glass together with a nude picture of the actress and auctioned off the display, realizing enough profit to set up a business importing less sensational items collected or stolen by maids and garbage men in Los Angeles.
The house where Hato grew up was strewn with movie magazines used by his father to check the authenticity of the gloves, hairpieces, and empty lipstick tubes he imported. As a child Hato was given to spells of dizziness that caused his eyes to roll back in his head. While the spells were upon him he was in danger of biting his tongue.
The best way to deal with the seizures, he discovered, was to lie down at once on a couch covered with movie magazines and stuff whatever was close at hand into his mouth. Generally the nearest available object was either a glove or a hairpiece or an empty lipstick tube.
Later he outgrew these attacks, but one or two of their ancillary aspects remained with him. When he went to the United States for graduate work in mathematics he found he was unable to fall asleep in a foreign country unless the bed was covered with the faces of several dozen actresses of that country. And if someone called him a Jap in the course of the day or made reference to his height, or to his grin or his lack of a grin, it was further necessary for him to fall asleep sucking a glove or a hairpiece or an empty lipstick tube in order to assure a full night’s sleep.
The male students at the university in New York wore beards and long hair. Hato let his own hair grow and bought false sideburns and a false moustache to cover his lack of facial hair.
The first weeks in New York were lonely ones. Toward the end of the third month, his hair now plausibly long, he broke out of his isolation and took a subway down to Chinatown. A chow mein restaurant there was said to have whores available. A woman approached him and he followed her to a hotel.
The whore turned out to be different from Japanese whores. She would neither take off her clothes nor masturbate him. Calling him Jappy, she hauled up her skirt and told him to get busy.
A few minutes later Hato was having trouble breathing. His sweat had loosened his false moustache, which was slowly slipping down over his mouth and sealing itself there.
Hato tried to hurry, his head down so that he wouldn’t have to see the whore’s face or smell her breath. The added effort loosened his false sideburns, sliding them up and in until they were pasted over his eyes. Blind, unable to breathe, he had to leap off the whore just as he was about to have an orgasm.
He staggered into a lamp. His sperm hit the lightbulb, he followed the lamp to the floor and cut his hand on the sticky slivers of glass. Somehow he managed to get to the bathroom and free his eyes and mouth under the hot water tap. When he came back the whore was gone, having taken not only his wallet but his shoes and socks as well so that he couldn’t follow her. Hato wrapped his sideburns and moustache around his bleeding hand and walked up the Bowery back to his room, too ashamed to be seen in the subway barefoot.