“I’ll bet you.” Harry refilled Ishigami’s cup.
“You’ll bet me again? Once I have your head, I’ll have your money, too.”
“Forget the head. I have another thousand yen nearby. A simple wager of a thousand yen.”
“What sort of bet is that? I could say anything.”
“I trust you. I’ll bet the maps showed a chain of islands with a fleet launching station in the northwest and a central island with a southern harbor.”
Michiko sighed musically and said, “But there’s no bet, Harry. I know where that money is, in the Happy Paris under the floorboards. So, there’s nothing to bet with, is there?”
Ishigami let out his breath. But he had held it, Harry thought. It sounded like Pearl to him.
“Are you a spy?” Ishigami asked.
Michiko laughed and hiccuped. “I am sorry. It’s just so funny. Harry a spy? Who would trust Harry?”
Ishigami said, “I remember a boy who used to deliver woodblock prints to me. To see him, you would think he was an American lost in Tokyo, but he wasn’t lost at all. You knew too much, Harry, even then. Where do you keep all that information?”
Harry avoided the obvious answer. He drained his cup and held it out. “Thanks, I will have more.”
Ishigami wavered, his hand halfway between the jar and the sword. He seemed to shift in and out of focus, and Harry felt it wasn’t just the effect of the sake. There was something damaged and smudged about the colonel, like a photograph taken into battle too many times. Harry read a mood that was dangerously variable: exhausted, energized, amiable, mad. Talking to Ishigami was like walking in the dark while trapdoors opened and closed on all sides. Michiko busied herself slicing ginger with a small knife until the colonel snapped out of his reverie and they were back on friendly terms, then she refilled the cups. Pouring sake was a geisha’s primary concern.
“How long have you really known the colonel?” Harry asked her.
“One day,” Michiko said. “Sometimes one day is enough, sometimes a year is too long.”
“I wanted to take care of you in your own club,” Ishigami said. He smiled as if appreciating an earthy joke. “But she wants to take over the establishment when you’re dead, and it’s not good to start with a bloody floor, so she convinced me she could bring you here.”
“Such an ambitious girl. I never knew,” said Harry.
“Oh, Harry, there’s so much you don’t know.” Michiko hid her laugh behind her hand again.
Harry remembered how Kato had said that geisha covered their laugh to hide their teeth, which were bound to look yellow next to their white face paint, although Harry would have been happy to see any sign of the Michiko he thought he’d known.
They played jan-ken-pon-two-fingered scissors cut paper, open paper wrapped rock, fisted rock broke scissors-and the loser drank. It was a favorite geisha party game, and Harry and Ishigami drank twice as much as Michiko. With too much sake in him, Harry found himself staring at this new, illuminated woman. He couldn’t help but think of her hidden self, the softer whiteness of her skin, the tiny moles at the base of her neck, the way her spine sank into the swell of her ass. Between cups of sake, he thought he could almost taste her mouth. This painted outer self didn’t so much disguise the Michiko he’d known as split her into two versions.
“Rock breaks scissors!” Michiko clapped for herself and poured Harry another cup.
“If you want the Happy Paris, you can have it. You don’t have to kill me for it.”
“Don’t be a sore loser,” Michiko said.
“Drink up,” Ishigami said.
“Why are you doing this?” Harry asked Michiko.
She smiled as she refilled his cup. “Because you were leaving, Harry.”
“I would have left you everything.”
“But I didn’t want to be given, Harry, I wanted to take.” She laughed as if explaining something simple to a child. “If I take it, it’s mine. If you give it, it’s always yours. That’s at the heart of the Marxist struggle.”
“She’s a Red, you knew that?” Harry asked Ishigami.
“Asia is the same way,” Ishigami said. “We can’t wait for the white man to give us what’s ours. We have to take it. One, two…”
“Three.” Michiko squealed with delight as she threw paper to Ishigami’s fist. “You drink.”
“It’s a shell game, the way she plays,” Harry said. He caught a glance from her that told him she could have beaten him at any game he chose. Who had he been living with the past two years? In his vanity, he had supposed she’d cared for him in at least a possessive mother-serpent sort of way. He had never spent more time with anyone and never been so wrong. It hurt a man’s self-confidence. The way only the pads of her lips were painted gave her a smile within a smile, as if she had one for Harry and another for Ishigami.
“Who did your makeup?” Harry asked. Even the most experienced geisha needed help with all the powders-vermillion, gold and pale blue-and brushes-wide and flat-handled for base glue and paint, sable brushes for the eyebrows-and the wig, a sculpted mass of human hair. Especially for painting the intimate design on the nape of the neck. Simply putting on a kimono, with all its hidden strings and tightly wrapped obi, demanded the hands of someone else. “Is someone else here?”
“No.”
“Somebody helped.”
Michiko ducked Harry’s eyes while Ishigami lit a Lucky. Harry finally noticed flecks of white on the tips of the colonel’s fingers, the same way paint used to stick to Kato’s hands no matter how hard he washed. This time Ishigami was the artist. Information came in vivid images: Ishigami applying white primer to Michiko’s skin, brushing red powder on her cheeks, binding her hair with strips of gauze and setting the crown of her wig. Which were skills learned only through long practice. Ishigami blew aside smoke and offered Harry a gaze that held a whole catalog of images. Of tracers spraying the night sky. Of an officer’s tent sagging under pillows of snow. Inside, the tent was lit by a kerosene lamp, and an aide with narrow shoulders and a long gentle face held still as he was painted, his eyelids outlined in black, his lips budded red. The officer fixed a wig on the boy with strings and gum, brushed the bells in the hair to make them sing. Well, Harry thought, gender had always been a slippery item in Japan. The first geisha had been men, and sex between samurai had been virtually Greek.
Ishigami became confidential. “You must be brutally honest to achieve beauty. The eye that seemed bewitching can become as stupid as a cow’s. The chin that was handsome becomes heavy, the feet and hands too large, the neck too crooked. You must erase the flaws. You lengthen the eye, shade the chin, train the hands and feet. An effect of the moment, but that’s all you need.”
Harry remembered the first time he had dressed Michiko in her Record Girl suit of top hat, sequined jacket and long black stockings. And the underkimono of red silk she slept in, was that her idea or his? Meanwhile he said, “What I hear is, there’s lead in the paint. People who paint geishas sooner or later go insane.”
“It has that effect.” Ishigami’s voice tailed off, and his gaze dropped to the head box, which smelled of freshly cut and sanded wood. The mood was changing again, losing a little effervescence. They were sliding back into China, Harry thought, back to Nanking, as if his life were on a tether tied to one spot. He even had a brief picture of Ishigami carrying out the execution as before, this time aided by Michiko, who looked likely to start off as Butterfly and end as Salome.
“The emperor,” Harry prompted Ishigami, “when you saw him, did he say anything?”
“The emperor asked the aides how long a Pacific war would take. They said three months. He reminded them that the army had told him four years ago that a war in China would take three months. The problem is, we have won decisive battle after decisive battle, and nothing is decided. There are just more Chinese. Now we would lose too much face to leave. It would be better to lose to anyone other than China.”