He had been only eight years old, but he had peeked up and caught a glimpse of the passing face. The man had held his head differently then, not in that stiff, rigid way, and that was what had confused the policeman in the Shanghai apartment and the Mukden toilet. But now in the screams and shadowy firelight of Nanking the policeman was no longer confused, his head cleared, and he knew exactly whom the face belonged to.
He struck him with his blackjack, the General went down. He dragged him out of the alley into a deserted courtyard, stripped off his uniform, rapped his testicles to hear the sounds from the icy Manchurian cellars.
A low moan. A quiet dying moan.
The fires burned and the policeman tapped out the rhythms in his head, the footsteps on the terraced hills of his childhood, the giant steps to nowhere. He tapped and gently tapped until he felt the sack in his hand growing cold. He severed the sack, shredded the testicles, knotted them around the General’s neck and squeezed.
One eye was still wide open staring at him. He ripped it out and threw it away.
Screams.
A collapsing burning wall, flames leaping into the air, the General’s epaulets shining in the gloom.
He dropped his trousers, squatted over them before loping out of the courtyard and down the alley.
After a month of arson, torture, and murder along the banks of the Yangtze the policeman was given a summary court martial. While racing a truck through a group of children in a village a machine gun mount had fallen from the truck to the ground. Due to the cries of the children he had failed to hear it. He was found guilty of negligent loss of property. The cost of the mount was deducted from his pay and he was transferred out of the war zone back to his old Kempeitai unit in Manchuria.
The next eight years passed without incident. More and more men were shipped out to the Pacific, to the Philippines, to Okinawa. The barracks in Mukden were unheat-ed, food was scarce. Days he spent in the icy cellars, nights he took long walks into the countryside. One hot summer morning the Russians crossed the border and quickly overran what had once been the Kwangtung army.
As a fascist militarist the policeman was sent with the other Japanese prisoners to a labor camp in Siberia and put to work mining salt, which they did with their hands since the Russians had neither picks nor shovels. His eyes became infected from the salt, temporarily blinding him. Daily classes were held in the new order of justice the prisoners were to carry with them back to Japan.
They were encouraged to grow food or otherwise supplement their rations. The policeman’s specialty was a kind of beer made from tundra weeds, homemade beer being traditional among the peasants of the Tohoku. The Russian guards liked it so much there was seldom any left for him, but for some reason he seemed happy to let them have it.
The end of the third year came. The prisoners, fully indoctrinated, were now ready to return to Japan to begin their revolutionary work. On the last night there was a banquet where the guards and prisoners embraced, sang, wept, congratulated each other on now being comrades in a common cause. The policeman left the banquet early to check the special batch of beer he had brewed for the celebration.
Around midnight the Russian guards began to arrive, most of them already drunk. In all, eight of them came, although more had been invited and fewer might have turned up. They sat in the pine grove laughing and singing as he poured out the frothy brew.
The Amanita muscaria was a mushroom as well known to Siberian peasants as it was to peasants in the Tohoku. When eaten, a cold sweat was followed by stupor, convulsions, delirium. Death’s angel it was called, because its victims were always young children who had not yet learned to recognize the deadly muscarine.
The policeman watched the guards die and found himself falling under a magical spell, perhaps because eight fates were dying in the pine grove and eight times eight was the number of paths that led to the primeval Oriental hexagram, the ancient figure found in the Book of Changes.
In any case the sky was so clear that night that every eye in the unfathomable darkness could look down upon this little creature who had come to take part, briefly, in a faceless, patternlesss drama that was without beginning or end, who had come to creep with chance through scenery as impenetrable as millennia of fallen pine needles, a creature who understood as much of the winds that moved him as a leaf broken from the branch of a mulberry tree.
The prisoner-of-war ship arrived in Yokohama in the spring of 1948. The cherry blossoms were still in bloom. A Japanese government band played the Washington Post March and Stars and Stripes Forever. Hundreds of mothers and sisters crowded the pier waving white handkerchiefs, trying to hear the chant from the men at the railings. What were they shouting? Banzai three times with the arms raised?
The chant grew louder as the ship moved in. They could hear it more clearly now.
Pulverize. Smash. Crush. Exterminate.
The handkerchiefs dropped out of the air, the families were quiet and uneasy. Down came the gangplanks and the men, but none of them stopped to embrace their wives and mothers and sisters. Instead they set up folding camp stools, climbed on top of the stools, and began shouting out interminable lectures on mad dog revanchists and imperialist jackals. The families surged hysterically up and down the pier losing themselves in the confusion.
The policeman pushed his way through the crowds and took a train to the industrial suburb where he had been given an underground assignment by the party. Ostensibly he worked in a factory owned by a secret party member that made novelties for export. He painted souvenir models of the Empire State Building. But his real job was to stand in the front line during antigovernment demonstrations and use a straight razor rolled up in a newspaper to slash the flanks of horses used by the police in controlling riots.
He also used the disguised razor to slash the faces of policemen who were on the ground. This routine continued for several years until war broke out in Korea. That May Day the party issued different orders. Not only were they to attack the police, they were also directed to burn the cars of Americans and steal revolvers from policemen where possible.
Razors. Fires. Clubbings. By ten o’clock in the morning he had his first revolver, by noon he had his third. Toward early evening he had cached several more. His procedure was to stagger out of an alley when a policeman passed and yell that he was being attacked by Communists. When the policeman went into the alley he hit him over the head with his blackjack and stole his revolver, then hurriedly worked over his face with the razor before going off to burn another car.
When the sun went down he found himself sitting in the cellar where the revolvers were hidden. He was tired. He counted and recounted the revolvers and went into a trance that lasted more than an hour. Once more the mystical number had descended upon him.
Upon awakening he went in search of a demonstrator who had been injured in the fighting. He came across a dazed student whose head was bleeding. He brought the boy back to the cellar and knocked him out with the blackjack.
Shortly thereafter a squad of police broke into the cellar, acting on the information of a concerned citizen. They discovered eight stolen revolvers under the boy’s crumpled body. Due to his head wound the boy could remember nothing of what had happened.
The hero responsible for leading the authorities to the cache was given a patriotic award by a police captain. Despite his illiteracy, his application for employment with the metropolitan police force was given priority because he was an unemployed veteran who had spent three years in a Russian slave labor camp. At his own request he was assigned to the special riot detachment that dealt with Communist demonstrations.