On New Year’s Day, a month before Geraty arrived in New York with the largest collection of Japanese pornography ever assembled in a Western tongue, the policeman got very drunk and took a train to Kamakura. As always when he left the city at night, he was wearing his old Kempeitai overcoat. He found what he was looking for, an isolated hut on the beach, and was about to break in when he saw someone sitting on the sand, a huge, immobile figure in a squatting position.
The giant had a round black hat pulled down to his ears. The sky was black and the policeman couldn’t make out his face. He went across the beach and asked the stranger what he was doing.
In answer the giant held out a bottle.
The policeman sat down and had a drink. An hour went by in silence, perhaps two hours. They finished one bottle of the unknown alcohol and the giant opened another. Not once during this time did the stranger turn his eyes away from the sea. A third hour passed or a fourth and the policeman was reminded of his mysterious union with the stars long ago in Siberia.
He began to talk. He spoke of his childhood, the hateful body hair he had been born with, his father eaten by a dog, his mother drowned in a frozen rice paddy, the giant steps to the mulberry trees, the latrines in Korea, the icy cellars in Manchuria, the abandoned storefront in Shanghai, the tundra weed beer brewed for Russian guards, the first and second and third meetings with Baron Kikuchi.
Mysteriously he came under the spell of the immobile giant, mysteriously repeating on a Kamakura beach the act of confession performed by his unknown sister in a locked, shuttered room a quarter of a century earlier in Shanghai. The giant was impassive. He never stirred. The lapping waves took the place of the humming reels of film. Toward dawn, exhausted, having confessed everything, the policeman fell asleep.
He awoke colder than he had ever been before, naked except for a towel over his lap. The tide was rising, water washed his hairy legs. Beside him lay two empty bottles of Irish whiskey, a jar that smelled of horseradish, the clothes he had taken off during the night while recounting his tale, thereby reversing the nakedness of that other confession in another era.
But the policeman discovered his clothes weren’t all there. One garment was missing. For some reason the stranger with the unseen face had stolen his greatcoat and silently carried it away in the darkness.
Hato found the policeman sitting on the edge of his cot in his cubicle, an illustrated magazine in his lap. He smiled down at the little man.
Why don’t you admit you can’t read?
The policeman stared at the floor. Hato laughed and closed the door behind him.
Listen, he whispered, how would you like to make a lot of money?
What?
Money, you idiot.
How?
Easy. We kidnap one of the Americans who was on the houseboat, the dumb one with the bandaged ear, and make his friend pay ransom. But maybe you’re afraid because the dumb one, the bodyguard, is carrying a revolver. I saw the bulge in his pocket when they left the houseboat.
The policeman stared at the floor. Didn’t this grinning young fool understand anything at all? It wasn’t a revolver that had made the bulge in the boy’s pocket, it was a slab of grilled meat. He had seen the boy slip the meat off his plate when no one was looking and drop it into his pocket. He had seen him do it and he knew exactly what it meant. More than once he had done the same thing in Siberia, where there was never enough to eat. It meant the boy with the bandaged head had been in prison. He was a criminal. And he had also seen him pick up a bottle of Japanese meat sauce and look at the label with a dull expression in his eyes. The policeman knew what that meant too. The boy with the bandaged head was not only a criminal, he was illiterate.
Of course he’s an American, whispered Hato, grinning. Maybe that frightens you.
The policeman stared at the floor and saw his mother face down in a frozen rice paddy because she was an Ainu with Caucasian blood and the silk market had collapsed in America. He took the magazine in his hands and turned the pages until he came to one without any pictures, a page covered with hundreds of minute Chinese characters. He held the page up in his hands scarred from digging salt in Siberia and tore it into long strips, shredded the strips, let the tiny white pieces flutter over his lap to the floor.
Does that mean you’re with me?
The policeman nodded.
They talked for a while and then Hato left, dreaming of Paris and the funeral movie he would make there. People would come to interview him, they would ask him to give his opinions on television, and he would tell them the truth about America. Tell them everything and never again do calisthenics or march in haiku parades or put up with young women dressed as hags who broke into his room calling him a mother-fucker.
Behind him the policeman sat on his cot staring at snowflakes.
Mama finished painting the nails on her right hand and went on to the left. For days she had been pondering the small gold cross worn by the young man whom Quin had brought with him to her nightclub.
Once Mama had known that cross well. It was the most treasured present the General had ever given her. Later it was stolen in Shanghai while she was under the influence of laudanum, taken from her during one of those evenings spent gazing at the falsely pornographic images projected dimly on the wall by the whirring imagination of a clown.
Kikuchi-Lotmann. Quin. Big Gobi.
What connected these three men? Why had one of them come to possess the General’s gift of love to her?
She knew the names Lotmann and Kikuchi, she knew the name Quin. But Gobi was a desert, a remote place in western China, a forsaken place of sandy wastes. To see what it might teach her she consulted the oldest document on the Gobi that she could find, an apocryphal chronicle written two thousand years ago during the Han dynasty.
A region of sudden sandstorms, read the chronicle, sudden sandstorms and terrifying visions. Rivers disappear overnight, landmarks go with the wind, the sun sinks at midday. A timeless nonexistent land meant to plague the mind with its mirages.
But the most dangerous thing that must be mentioned is the caravans that appear at any moment on the horizon, there to drift uncertainly for minutes or days or years. Now they are near, now far, now just as assuredly they are gone. The camel drivers are aloof and silent, undistinguishable, men of some distant race. But the men they serve, the leaders of the caravans, are truly frightening. They wear odd costumes, their eyes gleam, they come from every corner of the world.
These men, in sum, are the secret agents who have always given the authorities so much to fear. They represent the princes and despots of a thousand lawless regions.
Or is it perhaps that they represent no one at all? Is that why their aspects make us tremble? In any case we know only that this is their meeting place, the unmarked crossroads where they mingle and separate and wander on their way.
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.
Thus ended the uneasy commentary written two thousand years ago by a Chinese traveler wishing to warn the Sons of Han of the dangers to be found in the desert west of the Central Kingdom. Mama found the allusions evocative but she wanted to know more.