“Interested?” Kato asked.
Harry hadn’t heard the artist return. There was no point in trying to hide the prints. “What are they?”
“Treasures. Instruction for a bride, entertainment for an old man, a charm a samurai would be proud to carry in his helmet. Now items of shame, victims of Western morality. You know, Harry, Westerners know so little about and seem to take so little pleasure in sex, it’s a wonder they propagate at all. Your father, of course, is the worst.”
“Why him?”
“Because he is a missionary and a missionary is a murderer, only he murders the soul. And he is smug about it. If it were up to your father, Japan would have no Shinto, no Buddha, no Son of Heaven and no sex. What would be left?”
“What about the pictures of Oharu? I like those.”
“You do? One moment you’re a snoop, the next you’re a connoisseur.”
“Could I buy one?”
“Buy?” Kato put the medicine down to cough, slowly open his cigarette case and regauge the conversation. “That’s different. I should treat you with more respect. These portraits of Oharu are not for any ordinary print run. They are one-of-a-kind, special collector’s editions.”
“I’ll pay over time.”
“It might take your lifetime. I don’t know of any missionary boy, even you, Harry, who can afford that. Which one were you thinking of?”
Harry scanned Oharu in the car, the cherry blossoms, the ballroom.
“The ballroom.”
“Ah, very telling, because she seems to be waiting, doesn’t she, hoping to dance. The room is so dark you might even be in it. You’d wait for the right dance, of course. She’s a little tall for you now, but in the fantasy she’s perfect, her ear to your cheek. That’s the charm, you know, of the ballroom dancer or café waitress. Not sex but conversation. Japanese men don’t talk to their wives. The most normal relationship they have is with their favorite waitress. How would you get that kind of money, Harry?”
Harry was truculent, devoid of ideas. “Some way.”
“That covers a lot of ground, all of it dishonest. I’ll have to think about that before you start robbing people in the streets. But, as an artist, I’ve never been more flattered.”
Harry was good with a knife and glue, and Kato found work for him after school at the Museum of Curiosities, helping the proprietor patch its half-human monsters. Harry especially liked the mermaids with their long horsehair and lacquered skin of papier-mâché, hideous fangs and sunken eyes, like the remains of a nightmare washed up on a beach. Harry earned more money when Kato entrusted him with the carving of censors’ seals for certain reproductions, fakes. Kato taught him how to trace old seals on translucent paper, transfer the paper to balsa and carve an exact copy that would add the stamp of authenticity.
“Who knows?” Kato said. “You may be an artist yet.”
“I can’t draw.”
“But you have a steady hand. Do you suppose that comes from picking pockets?”
“I’m not doing that so much anymore.”
“Go ahead. Artists steal all the time, that’s why taste is so important.”
One thing preyed on Harry’s mind. “You’re not going to hold it against me that my father is a missionary?”
“No. I’ve taken my revenge on him.”
“What kind?” Harry wondered how Kato could ever reach a zealot like Roger Niles.
“Ah, Harry, you’re revenge enough.”
9
A TEA CART WITH scones and cream, strudel and napoleons rattled around the lobby of the Imperial Hotel. The Imperial had been the safe haven of well-heeled tourists, especially Americans who were amplified, on-the-road versions of themselves, busy with backslaps and laughs that had boomed up to the lobby’s timbers. The Imperial had been designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, who piled brick and lava rock in a grandiose style suggestive of a Mayan temple. Harry thought the hotel, with its vaulting shadows and wintry drafts, was a proper set for Dracula. Still, it was sad to see the tea cart make its circuit around the lobby like a trolley car in an empty city.
Also, Harry owed the Imperial. He’d come back to Japan for a public relations job that fizzled and left him high and dry, with not even enough money for return passage, until the American All-Stars came to town. Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig and Lefty O’Doul led a tour by the world’s greatest ballplayers and their wives. Naturally, they stayed at the Imperial. Harry was stalking the lobby for a tourist who might need a knowledgeable guide when a receptionist came up all aflutter. Harry expected the heave-ho. Instead, the receptionist bowed and asked if he would please proceed to the pool garden. When Harry got there, he found an official welcome that was falling apart. On one side of the garden were the Japanese in formal cutaways and kimonos with stacks of boxes, on the other side was a straggling line of the All-Stars in baseball uniforms and their wives in furs. In the middle was a movie camera with an operator who spoke no English, which was just as well because every time his assistant tried to push Mrs. Ruth within camera range, she told him to keep his mitts off. The Babe had had a little brandy in his breakfast coffee and tried to nudge O’Doul into the water. When the Babe’s wife told him to stop acting like an ape, the Babe gave her a playful pop on the shoulder. Meanwhile, the Japanese hosts grew smaller, their eyes wider. The girls in kimonos inched back, ready to run. One of the wives, a marcelled blonde in a fox stole, yawned and spat a wad of gum into the pool, setting off a tussle among the goldfish.
Harry figured this was a classic case of nothing to lose. He stepped forward and announced in English, on behalf of the hotel, how honored the Imperial was by the presence of the All-Stars and their lovely wives, and responded in Japanese, on behalf of the players, how impressed they were by the warm hospitality of the famous Imperial Hotel. He spoke rapidly, no seam between English and Japanese, respectfully but with animation, easing each side toward the middle of the garden, directing the cameraman to start filming, interpreting speeches back and forth, signaling the Japanese girls it was safe to distribute gifts, a happi coat for each player and towels for their wives.
“Do I look wet?” Mrs. Ruth asked Mrs. Gehrig.
The Babe got in the mood, posed in his happi coat and pushed a dimple into his cheek. Before leaving the garden for the ballpark, he lit a huge Havana and asked Harry, “Kid, you want to make some change? My stepdaughter’s along. She’s cute and she likes to trip the light fantastic. Just keep your hand off her ass or I will feed you to the fucking goldfish.”
“Sounds good,” said Harry. He stuck with the All-Stars for the rest of their tour and, by the end, had been hired by the movie company to do promotion, which was the kind of work he had done in the States. From then on he felt a debt of gratitude to both the Babe and the Imperial.
Now he picked up a paper from the hotel newsstand for any word of Ishigami. Nothing. Found an article about the Giants’ midwinter practice and dedication to victory. Returned to the front page and read that the Germans had as good as taken Moscow, as they had for weeks. In America, Charles Lindbergh declared that there was “no danger to this country from without.” Tensions in Washington had eased, negotiations were back on track. Roosevelt was more conciliatory. According to Ripley’s Believe It or Not, most chimps were left-handed. All the stories sounded equally likely to Harry.
The bar was virtually empty. The only occupants Harry saw at first were German officers from the blockade-runner. It was a long run from Bordeaux, evading British cruisers or the torpedo of a submarine, twenty thousand miles not to fire a shot but to carry precious rubber to Germany, and there was something exhausted about the men and the way they sank into their schnapps. Of course, the Imperial was lucky to have them. Aside from troopships, international travel had come to a halt. Tokyo’s World Fair and Olympic Games had been canceled, luxury liners called home, embassy dependents ordered out. In the far corner Harry found Willie Staub with DeGeorge and Lady Beechum.