“Share?”
Harry looked up at an American girl, a couple of years younger, with tangled curly hair and a dusty sundress. She was plain, with a square jaw and broad teeth, but she had the most dazzling eyes Harry had ever seen, like the glass heel of a Coca-Cola bottle crushed into crystals. He lit her a cigarette just to see what she would do. She let out a sensual exhale and leaned against the tree.
“I know who you are. You’re Harry Niles, the wild boy. Everyone says your parents don’t have a real church.”
“You sure know a lot.”
“They even send you to a Japanese school.”
“Why not? I don’t want to be a snob. Anyway, my dad preaches in church when he’s in Tokyo. If you don’t like it, play somewhere else.”
She squatted next to him. Her shoes were cracked, and her elbows were scabby, but Harry recognized self-possession when he was next to it.
“I know why you’re here,” she said.
Harry didn’t know. It was just a trip to Kyoto, although the decision had come out of the blue. He shrugged. “Church business.” Sundays were always full of church business, fund and oversight committees, temperance leagues and spirit rallies. Sunday could be boring in infinite ways.
“The trial,” she said.
“A trial?”
“They call it a mission meeting, but it’s a trial, my dad says.”
“Someone stole the offering?” If there was something worth stealing, Harry wanted to know.
“Not really stealing,” she said.
“What?”
“Currency rates.”
That beat Harry. He frowned because he didn’t like looking stupid.
“What’s that?”
“It’s not illegal,” she said. She took a stick and scratched into the ground. “If you turn in dollars for Chinese yuan at this rate in Shanghai, then trade yuan for Japanese yen, and then come home and trade yen back to dollars, you can double your money.”
“That’s legal?”
“Um-hum.”
Harry stared at the numbers as if glimpsing an entire new alphabet. She wiped them out with her hand.
“Why’d you do that?”
“Missionaries aren’t supposed to trade money. Even if it’s for mission work or food for people. So they’re going to have a trial.”
She glanced across the river, and on the far bank, Harry saw a man walking alone with his head down among a shadowy copse of willows.
“Where’s your mom?”
“Dead. Of pneumonia.”
“So what are you going to do?”
“I think they’ll send us back to Florida. I’d just as soon stay.”
“Ever been?” Harry hadn’t been to the States yet.
“Yeah. All they say is ‘Say something in Japanese.’ They couldn’t find Japan on a map. They think you’re stuck up because they’re so stupid.”
“You have a pretty high opinion of yourself.”
She shrugged. They sat quietly for a while and watched the slow passage of the stream. Harry felt her brilliant eyes light on him and dart away.
“Can you swim?” she asked.
“Sure.” He was a good swimmer, which was fairly un-Japanese. The Japanese liked going to the beach and splashing in the waves as a group, but going for a swim was regarded as virtually antisocial.
She said, “If I stayed in Japan, I’d be a pearl diver. Ever see pearl divers?”
“Pictures.” They were bare-breasted girls who wore goggles.
“Here.” She took his hand and put a pearl in it. The pearl was milky blue, with a hole drilled in it. Harry guessed it had probably fallen off a strand. He could see her diving under a pew for it.
“What am I going to do with one pearl?”
“Do you want more? I can get more.”
Her eyes were so intense that Harry said, “No, one’s plenty.”
“Put it in your pocket.”
After he did so, she took his hand and slipped it under her dress and up her thigh, which was so skinny he felt the bone. She had no chest, no shape at all, but her eyes were so intense, so many blues and greens at one time, that Harry couldn’t take his hand away until a voice came over the water. “Abby? Abigail?” The man on the far bank was waving. She let Harry’s hand slide out and whispered, “I have to go.”
“Abby?” Harry said.
“Yes?” She swung her focus back to him.
“Double the money? Really?”
“Yes.”
“That’s great. Thanks.”
She stood, stepped on her cigarette and hesitated on the verge of something inexpressible.
“Hope your dad does okay,” Harry said.
She nodded. After she was gone, darting along the trees that fringed the river, her gaze still seemed to hover over Harry.
Harry lost the pearl almost immediately. He learned later that the church reprimanded Abby’s father but allowed him to remain. Harry heard the following year that Abby got pneumonia and died in Japan, just like her mother.
11
A GONDOLA SWUNG on a cable above the rooftop garden of the Matsuya department store. Sheathed in aluminum, streamlined and shining, the gondola looked like a spaceship from the future. The interior was more down-to-earth, with leather straps and wicker seats, but Harry and Alice Beechum had the craft to themselves and, from its porthole windows, a view of the Ginza’s wide avenues, willow trees, French cafés. The gondola floated eight stories above trolleys, noodle wagons, the buzz of motorcycles racing to different newspapers. Farther off were waves of blue roof tiles and the green ridge of the imperial palace; to the south, rising over charcoal smoke, the white cone of Fuji.
The rooftop garden offered the foot-weary shopper an amusement park high in the air. Spider monkeys flew from tree to tree within a huge wire mesh enclosure. Cages displayed macaws, peccaries, raccoons. Children pedaled cars around a track while their mothers contemplated bonsai gardens. The latest attraction was a tank of water fifty feet in diameter holding model warships of the Japanese and American navies. Boys gathered around naval cadets who manipulated radio controls that sent the two fleets around the tank, the Japanese chasing the American, the Rising Sun after the Stars and Stripes. Battleships the size of sharks led aircraft carriers, cruisers and destroyers, their screws churning up swells. Out of tinny loudspeakers poured a navy anthem: “Across the sea, a corpse floating in water / Across the mountains, a corpse in grass.” The Japanese ships began firing, each salvo of guns signaled by red lights in their barrels and black smoke spewing from the Americans in retreat.
Harry said, “You know, there’s hardly anything as satisfying as a rigged fight. An honest fight is just a brawl, a rigged fight is theater.”
“You always have the most individual opinions.” Alice sat back in her riding suit of green tweed, her head resting on the golden pillow of her hair. Maybe it was the English complexion that made tweed sensual, Harry thought. He couldn’t help but think of stiff woolen fibers pricking her delicate skin, her map of light freckles and the fine down on her arms and the nape of her neck. She was saying, “I did my best to blacken your reputation after you left the Imperial, but you have to stop your friend Willie from telling any more tales about Nanking.”
“He got carried away.”
“He’s going to get you killed with those stories. The Japanese have a different version of their victory in Nanking. Willie tells me that you’re also being stalked by a man with a sword, a Colonel Ishigami.”
“I can handle Ishigami.”
“Oh, well, then nothing to worry about. Do you remember the wonderful stage direction from Shakespeare, ‘Exit, pursued by a bear’? You seem to have any number of bears. So, tell me what happened. Quick, did you get on the plane?”