The bodyguards waited until Yoshitaki’s foursome holed out, then headed for the service road behind the green, a phalanx with Harry at the center. Harry had once witnessed a similar technique at a bullfight in Tijuana when a bull gored a matador and took possession of the ring. They got the bull out by sending in a herd of steers that surrounded him, trotted him once around and led him peacefully out the gate.
DRIVING BACK to town, Harry had to laugh at the picture of a con man saving the world. So through the night rode Paul Revere; And so through the night went his cry of alarm / To every Middlesex village and farm… It would help, he thought, if people would listen or could even hear. No more heroics. The main thing was, he hadn’t blown his seat on the plane.
Harry noticed how the sun danced over dry rice stalks sticking up from mud like black stitches on a cloth of gold, a sight he realized he might never see again. Amber waves of grain, not fields of rice. This time tomorrow he’d be airborne. There were things he’d miss: the whistle of a blind masseuse in the early morning, the shimmer of banners the length of a street, the way koi rose to the surface when a shadow passed. The way the tailor’s wife had laughed at her own distress so as not to bother him, which struck Harry as the most dignity he’d ever seen, but a dignity he saw in Japan all the time.
And delicacy, the way Yoshitaki’s men walked him off the course in the most nonviolent bum’s rush possible. There was style in that, a gentle art.
It was midafternoon when Harry got to Asakusa. Walking through Sunday crowds pushing to this movie or that shrine, treating themselves to red-bean buns or candy rabbits, he felt a million miles away from the artificial world of the golf course. Asakusa was still sane, even if the rest of the world was not. On one side a newsstand featured samurai photos, on the other side Shirley Temple. A music-hall billboard offered both patriotic songs and South Seas ukuleles. That was what Harry considered a healthy balance.
The front of the ballroom was locked, unusual on Sunday, when Tetsu sometimes had as many as four games going. Harry went around to the oversize doors in back, where theater flats and props were delivered for storage, the nominal use of the ballroom now. He couldn’t wait to get his hands on Tetsu. No one answered Harry’s call, but the doors eased open.
“Tetsu? Michiko?”
Since he had never entered through the rear, he didn’t know where the light switches were, and he followed the flame of his cigarette lighter around a maze of backdrop flats, prop chests, costume trunks. The Happy Paris had been shut the night before, and now the ballroom? Like parts of his life going dark.
“Michiko?”
There was no return glimmer or whisper, no card game or tango on a gramophone, let alone a welcome. Although Harry was late for Michiko, he decided to act the aggrieved party because she wasn’t waiting for him with sake and food. His back was burning, and he hadn’t had food or sympathy for a day. He remembered when he used to come to the ballroom with Oharu, how they had sat in the balcony and watched reflections from a mirror ball spin around the floor, over the men with their rolls of tickets and women lined up like pack animals along a velvet rope. The painful couples they made, stepping on each other’s feet to the quickstep, fox-trot, waltz. Oharu, the real dancer, would giggle and shush Harry at the same time. The way the reflections spun, he would feel he was rising to the sky. It was interesting how much more disorienting pitch black could be. He kept walking into nowhere across the ballroom floor.
“Tetsu! Where are you?”
His voice circled.
“Michiko!”
He finally saw something. A realization filtered through him that the floor had become slippery and that a warm, cloying scent hung in the air. Harry slowed like a man approaching an abyss. He gave his breath a moment to catch up before the last few steps.
In the wavering light before him, a woman in a white dress with a blue sailor collar slumped at a card table. She didn’t have a head. Not on her, but her arms stretched across the table to a white wooden box the right size.
22
HE SET THE lighter on the table like a candle. Her hands were waxy, heavy in death. She wore Haruko’s dress, white with blue trim, now flecked with brown around the collar. She looked lonely. Harry supposed that anyone being executed felt alone, but the victims he’d seen in Nanking at least died in a war where death was the norm. To be killed like this, trapped by a man with a sword while a peaceful city lay outside, was to be particularly deserted. Her forearm was cool but soft, perhaps two hours dead. About the time Harry had arrived at the golf course, Ishigami must have arrived at the ballroom, where Harry had told Michiko to wait. He couldn’t have set her up better if he’d tried.
“No-”
Was he talking to her? This was a little late, he thought. What he was going to say was that he was just trying to help Willie and then alert the right people about nothing less than a war. It didn’t matter, because the right people weren’t interested. He certainly hadn’t helped her. Harry didn’t see his gun, so that hadn’t helped her, either.
“It’s not-”
He couldn’t imagine her dead. There was nothing sweet or pleasing about her, not the candy-box kind of love Americans sang about. He couldn’t imagine her dead because she was so difficult, she was the burning fuse, the spark and imminent explosion in his life. Where Michiko died, there should be a smoldering crater in the earth, a volcanic upheaval, at least the smell of gunpowder, instead of a sense that the air was awash in droplets of ruby red. He could almost feel the mist settle on his cheek. Ishigami had painted her once, now twice. Still, it wasn’t right, dull submission wasn’t Michiko’s style. With the world about to roll down the drain, it probably made no difference to examine an individual death, but Harry, having been a bust where the world was concerned, needed to know what had happened.
There should have been more blood. Blood should have flooded the table and the floor around it if she’d been killed where she sat. There was relatively little. Maybe this was coldhearted of him, but he could deal with details better than the whole picture, a little like Sergeant Shozo’s jigsaw puzzle, except that Harry refused to see the piece in the center or touch the wooden box, not yet. Before the lighter’s flame died, he looked up and found its dim reflection in the mirror ball hanging above, and another glint from a brass post of the velvet rope. Now he knew where he was.
In the dark, Harry climbed to the cockpit over the door and threw on the house lights: whites, cells, spots and mirror ball all at once. The ballroom leaped out of the dark. Michiko and table gained color, focus, dimension. The size of the ballroom, the gilded ceiling and balcony tier made her smaller, braver, a child prodigy playing to an empty house. The parquet shone except for two tracks from the table to the swing door of the women’s restroom.
The ballroom management had kept the restroom’s size and amenities to a minimum to discourage dancers from loitering. The light was out; why bother changing it after the dancing had stopped? A broken window on an airshaft admitted as much dust as light to two sinks with a cracked mirror and two Western toilets without seats that sat in a floor of hexagonal tiles. Blood pooled around a central drain that was stopped with clotted hair. Harry edged around the blood, searching the ceiling and walls for a bullet hole and the floor for a loose button, anything dropped. Just going tacky, the blood bore the imprints of her knees and toes and a man’s shoes, relatively large, a red negative of where she knelt and where he stood.
Harry retreated to the dance floor.
“Tetsu!”
Tetsu was not in his office. Harry found cases of cigarettes, packs of cards, dumbbells, tattoo books, but no sign of blood or disarray. Harry returned to the bathroom door. Had Ishigami surprised Michiko in the bathroom? Had she put the gun down out of reach? Had she meekly sunk to her knees? Did she see the head box? Of course, Ishigami was the man who had peered deeply into her and found the geisha. In some ways, he might know her more intimately than Harry.