The second time he saw the older man from Shanghai was in the autumn of 1937, a few days before he was transferred to an infantry unit in central China. He was on duty in civilian clothes in a restaurant listening to conversations when the older man came in and sat down alone in a corner. Something in the way he moved his head confused the policeman. Curious, he got to his feet and went off to the toilet.
Ever since the months in the Korean latrines the policeman had been able to think more clearly when immersed in an atmosphere of dung and urine. They were not only the smells that reminded him to beware of betrayal, they also brought back an older memory, one of his earliest, the times as a boy when he had carried heavy buckets of nightsoil up the giant steps of the Tohoku toward the mulberry trees.
There were only two stalls, the policeman sat down in one. He was just beginning to feel comfortable with himself when someone entered the other stall and locked the door.
The policeman always had to have privacy in the toilet, otherwise he couldn’t concentrate and make the smells that pleased him. He climbed up on the seat to peek over the partition, thinking he might use his blackjack on the intruder, when he saw a hand go up under the lid of the water tank and place something there. The hand withdrew, the door was unlocked, the older man from the Shanghai apartment left the room. What did it mean?
He went into the other stall and found a small length of bamboo, sealed at both ends, wedged into a niche under the lid of the water tank. He opened the bamboo tube and took out a tiny film. What was it?
He replaced the device and wandered over beside the urinals. He knew he had discovered something but he didn’t know what it was. He bent to tie his shoelace. His hand strayed into the urinal and picked up the hard cake of deodorant lying there. The cake was green and looked like candy. Absentmindedly he bit into the crunchy nugget and chewed.
What had he witnessed just now?
Angered that he could not understand what had happened, angered as well by the indistinct passions aroused in him by the older man from Shanghai, the policeman took a long walk that night to the outskirts of the city. The next day an elderly woman was found beaten to death with a blunt instrument, probably made of leather, and sexually violated with an inhuman object, either the same instrument that had caused the death or one similar to it.
Rape with the instrument had occurred after death. The body had then been stripped and the head scalped. Small patches of hair from the head had been crudely attached to the chest and forearms and thighs, a larger amount to the nearly hairless pubic region.
This necrophiliac crime was similar in every respect to others that had gone unsolved in remote areas near Mukden over the last five years, or since the policeman had completed his tour of duty in the Korean latrines. The victims, always of advanced age, included both men and women. Sexual assault was limited to the anus.
Normally the policeman or one of the other corporals in his unit would have been sent to investigate the murder of the elderly woman, but this time everyone on duty at Kempeitai headquarters had been placed on special alert. A Japanese soldier was being held on suspicion of espionage. A crippling backache had led to a doctor’s examination, in the course of which the doctor had discovered a microfilm bearing highly sensitive military and political information.
The soldier, also a corporal, tried to commit suicide by jumping out of a window, but a tree broke his fall and he only suffered a broken arm. Now he was being held in a ground-floor room empty save for the cushion on which the interrogating officer sat. Even the glass from the barred window had been removed.
The policeman’s Captain questioned the prisoner a full day and night. At the end of that time he retired for a few hours of sleep after learning only two minor facts, the code name for the espionage network and the unknown disease that had caused the corporal’s backache. The policeman was told to stay in the room and not take his eyes off the corporal.
The corporal, little more than a boy, had the delicate features and delicate body of a young girl. Dead leaves blew in through the window along with the cool autumn air. The boy asked if he could use the policeman’s overcoat, and the policeman gave it to him after first emptying out the pockets.
There was a secret in that overcoat that had tormented the policeman ever since it was issued to him in the winter of 1935, a secret that had to do with size. In the supply shipment received by his unit that year there had been included a monstrous mistake by the manufacturer, an overcoat so large it could have gone around three or four large men.
The policeman, who was small, was given the coat as a joke and told not to cut it but to take it in, a project that had lasted just over a week. During that time he went about in the cold weather unprotected while the other men ridiculed him.
The young corporal now turned the overcoat over before putting it on. He saw where it had been roughly stitched. Suddenly he held it up and laughed.
What’s so funny? said the policeman.
This is, said the boy.
Why?
Because I made it. That coat got me fired from the factory. I was thinking about my mother and the coat came out all wrong, so they fired me. I had to do something, so I went into the army. If it weren’t for that coat I wouldn’t be here today.
The boy stopped laughing. He moaned the name Miya and began to cry.
The policeman didn’t hear the name or see the tears, he saw only the jeering faces that had insulted him two years before when he was cold. The Captain came back an hour later to find the prisoner crumpled up in the corner, his head battered out of shape, his face unrecognizable. The policeman was sitting on the cushion by the window watching the dead leaves fall in the yard.
The Captain flipped the safety on his revolver, but at the last moment kept himself from shooting his subordinate in the head.
Soon afterward the Captain was standing in front of the desk of his commanding officer, a General, the man from the apartment in Shanghai who had once been his patron and protector. There was no need for the Captain to be told that the death of so important a prisoner was unpardonable. At the same time as he turned in his report he made a formal request that both he and the policeman be transferred to a front-line infantry unit.
A month later the Captain was killed in a reckless assault on a Chinese machine gun emplacement. The policeman, however, was still carrying his favorite blackjack the December night his regiment broke ranks outside the gates of Nanking.
Fires were everywhere. For a thousand years the policeman stabbed and shot and clubbed Chinese, for ten thousand years he beat victims and mutilated them and burned them. Then all at once he turned a corner and found himself facing the man from the apartment in Shanghai, from the toilet in Mukden, a man he knew from the winter morning when his father had been found with his face gone and he had had to wait beside the road with a bowed head until an automobile passed bearing the powerful Baron who owned his family’s land and all the land for miles around.
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.