Traunsteiner said, “I haven’t spoken Norwegian since the war.”
“Study.” The man in white smiled. “Anything else? No? Well then, let’s have some more brandy and I’ll think of an appropriate toast to speed you on your way.” He picked up his cigarette case, opened it, and took out a cigarette. He closed the case and looked at it—and bringing his white sleeve to its inscribed face, briskly polished it.
Tsuruko bowed and thanked the senhor. Tucking the folded bills down into the waist of her kimono, she slipped past him and hurried to the serving table, where Yoshiko was nesting together small bowls of drying leftovers. “He gave me twenty-five!” Yoshiko whispered excitedly. “What did you get?”
“I don’t know,” Tsuruko whispered, crouching low, putting the leaning cover onto a rice bowl beneath the table. “I didn’t look yet.” With both hands she brought out the wide flat red-lacquered bowl.
“Fifty, I’ll bet!”
“I hope so.” Rising, Tsuruko hurried with the bowl past the senhor and one of his guests joking with Mori, and out into the hallway. She zigzagged her way through the other guests—handing shoehorns to one another, bending, crouching—and shouldered a swing-door open.
She carried the bowl down a narrow flight of stairs lit by wire-strung bare bulbs, and along an equally narrow corridor with walls of plastered lath.
The corridor opened into a steamy jangling kitchen where antique ceiling fans slowly turned their blades over a hubbub of waitresses, cooks, and helpers. Tsuruko in her pink kimono carried the wide red bowl among them; she passed a helper quick-chopping vegetables, and another who glanced up at her as he hauled a tray of dishes from a dripping glass-walled washer.
She set the bowl on a table where boxes of mushrooms stood stacked, and turning, took from a canvas hamper of linens a used napkin, which she shook out and spread beside the bowl on the metal tabletop. She lifted the bowl’s cover and put it aside. Within the red bowl a black-and-chrome tape recorder lay, a Panasonic with English-marked controls, the sprockets of the cassette in its windowed compartment smoothly turning. Tsuruko hovered a hand above the buttons, then lifted the recorder from the bowl and set it on the napkin. She folded the napkin-sides up around it.
Holding the wrapped recorder to her bosom, she went to a glass-paned door and took hold of its knob. A man sitting close by sewing at an apron looked up at her.
“Leftovers,” she said, flashing the napkined shape at him. “An old woman comes by.”
The man looked at her with tired eyes in a pinched yellow face; he looked down at his sewing hands.
She opened the door and went out into an areaway. A cat sprang from garbage cans and fled toward a far-off passage end of streetlights and neon.
Tsuruko closed the door behind her and leaned into darkness. “Hey, are you there?” she called softly in Portuguese. “Senhor Hunter?”
A figure hurried from the side of the passage, a tall lean man with a shoulderbag. “You do it?”
“Yes,” she said, unwrapping the recorder. “It’s still going. I couldn’t think which button turns it off.”
“Good, good, no difference.” He was a young man; his fine-featured face and crinkly brown hair caught the door’s light. “Where you put that?” he asked.
“In a rice bowl under the serving table.” She gave the recorder to him. “With the cover leaning against it so they wouldn’t see.”
He tilted the recorder toward the door and pressed one of its buttons and another; a high-pitched twittering sang. Tsuruko, watching, moved aside to allow him more light. “Near of where they sit?” he asked her. His Portuguese was bad.
“From here to there.” She gestured from herself to the nearest garbage can.
“Good, good.” The young man pressed a button, stopping the twittering, and pressed another: the voice of the man in white spoke in German, distantly, an echo surrounding it. “Very good,” the young man said, and stopped the voice with another button. He pointed to the recorder. “When you begin this?”
“After they finished eating, just before he sent us out. They talked for almost an hour.”
“They leave?”
“They were going when I came down.”
“Good, good.” The young man tugged at the zipper of his blue-and-white airline bag. He was wearing a short blue denim jacket and blue jeans; he looked to be about twenty-three, North American. “You are a big helper to me,” he told Tsuruko, fitting the recorder into the bag. “My magazine is very happy when I bring home a story about Senhor Aspiazu. He is the most famous maker of the cinema.” Reaching to his hip, he brought out a wallet and opened it toward the light.
Tsuruko watched, holding the balled napkin. “A North American magazine?” she asked.
“Yes,” the young man said, separating bills. “Movie Story. A very important magazine of the cinema.” He smiled brightly at Tsuruko and gave bills to her. “One hundred and fifty cruzeiros. Many thanks. You are a big helper to me.”
“Thank you.” She glanced at the bills and smiled at him, bobbed her head.
“Your restaurant smells like a good one,” he said, pocketing his wallet. “I am in much hunger while I wait.”
“Would you like me to get something for you?” She tucked the bills into her kimono. “I could—”
“No, no.” He touched her hand. “I eat at my hotel. Thanks. Many thanks.” He gave her hand a squeeze, and turned and went long-legging into the passage.
“You’re welcome, Senhor Hunter,” she called after him. She watched for a moment, then turned and opened the door and went in.
They had a round of complimentary drinks at the bar, persuaded to do so less by the pleadings of the tuxedoed Japanese—who introduced himself as Hiroo Kuwayama, one of Sakai’s three owners—than by the presence there of a novel electronic ping-pong game; and this proved so engaging that another round was ordered and drunk, and still another debated upon but decided against.
At about eleven-thirty they went en masse to the checkroom to collect their hats. The kimonoed girl, giving Hessen his, smiled and said, “A friend of yours came in after you, but he didn’t want to go upstairs uninvited.”
Hessen looked at her for a moment. “Oh?” he said.
She nodded. “A young man. A North American, I think.”
“Oh,” Hessen said. “Of course. Yes. I know who you mean. Came in after me, you say.”
“Yes, senhor. While you were going up the stairs.”
“He asked where I was going, of course.”
She nodded.
“You told him?”
“A private party. He thought he knew who was giving it, but he was wrong. I told him it was Senhor Aspiazu. He knows him too.”
“Yes, I know,” Hessen said. “We’re all good friends. He should have come up.”
“He said it was probably a business meeting and he didn’t want to break in. Besides, he wasn’t dressed right.” She gestured down her sides, regretfully. “Jeans.” She fluttered slim fingers at her throat. “No tie.”
“Oh,” Hessen said. “Well, it’s a shame he didn’t come up anyway, just to say hello. He went right out again?”
She nodded.
“Oh well,” Hessen said, and smiled and gave her a cruzeiro.
He went and spoke to the man in white. The other men, holding hats and attaché cases, gathered around them.
The blond man and the black-haired man went quickly toward the carved entrance doors; Traunsteiner hurried into the bar and came out a moment later with Hiroo Kuwayama.
The man in white put a white-gloved hand on Kuwayama’s black shoulder and talked earnestly to him. Kuwayama listened, and drew in breath, bit his lip, wagged his head.