The advantage of a great city was its labyrinth of streets and alleys. Especially at night, when drab housefronts turned to the fanciful silhouettes of Chinese eaves and ghostly shirts hung on rods to dry. The discreet murmur of geishas issued from a willow house, a flash like brilliant tropical birds in the dark. Even the meanest alley might have a shrine, candles and coins set before a pair of stone fox gods with eyes of green glass. Foxes could change into women, it was well known, so any encounter with a fox at night had an element of danger for a man.
East of the palace was a warren of bookstores and print shops. Harry remembered an evening as warm and humid as a bathhouse, the height of Tokyo’s unbearable summer, when Kato had dragged Oharu and Harry to a printer there to pick up a surprise edition of a book entitled Fifty Views of Fuji. It was just a sketchbook, with a print run of one. The pictures had been quickly but deftly done. In each, Mount Fuji’s white skirt hung in the distance, but in the foreground were Asakusa’s narrow alleys, temple festivals and music halls, with Harry either stealing an orange, picking a pocket or smoking at a backstage door, a complete catalog of juvenile delinquency and petty crime. Harry was speechless; if the emperor had awarded him the Order of the Golden Kite, he could not have been more overcome.
Better yet, as they left the printer, Oharu noticed a cart selling balls of shaved ice in paper cones. Three syrups were offered: strawberry, melon and lemon. “Hurry, before it all melts,” Oharu said, and it was true, a lake spread from the drain hole of the cart. Kato flavored his ice with brandy from a flask. Harry chose lemon. Oharu took both strawberry and melon.
The lemon ice was tart and fresh. The problem was that it melted so instantly and the cone soaked through so quickly that Harry had to finish his ice in a race. Oharu, with two cones of ice, wasn’t fast enough. Red stripes of strawberry ran down one forearm and orange melon down the other. She wiped her hands with a handkerchief, but that left her arms sticky, and she seemed in such distress that what Harry did seemed natural. He took her arm and licked the syrup off, first the sweet strawberry and then the subtler track of the melon, mixed with the salt of her skin.
“We’re going to spoil the boy,” Kato said. “He’ll never be able to go home now.”
Harry realized that, moving for hours as mechanically as a sleepwalker, he had returned to familiar ground. The tea merchant, the willow house, the communal pump. He was on his own block, a black space suspended between corner lamps. It was hard to believe that, only two nights before, the Happy Paris had overflowed with customers drinking, boasting, admiring the Record Girl.
The club was shuttered and locked, but he heard the murmur of a saxophone. As Harry unlocked the door, the music stopped. He entered and locked the door behind him. The club was dark except for a moonbeam glow around the jukebox, the lowest setting of the light, where Michiko stood with a gun.
“I’m back,” said Harry.
Michiko stared as if he were an apparition. “Where were you?”
“Looking for you.”
“Not soon enough. Were you busy, Harry?”
“A lot of places to look.”
“And women to see?”
“Here and there.” Trying to stop a war, but Michiko always personalized things, Harry thought.
She turned the gun around and offered it to him. “Why don’t you just kill me, Harry?”
“No, thanks. I can see the headline, ‘Tragic End of Woman with Gaijin.’”
“‘Lovers End Life Together.’”
“‘Together’? After I kill you, I’m honor-bound to kill myself? My honor doesn’t stretch that far. To be honest, I’d cheat.”
“Okay.” She turned the gun around and aimed at him. “I waited at the ballroom, then I waited here.”
“Did you see Ishigami?”
“No, but I heard him.”
“Heard what?” Harry didn’t like the way she put it.
Michiko brought the words out slowly, as if from a hole she didn’t dare look into. “Haruko came for her stupid dress and hat. So we changed. I was in Tetsu’s office when someone else came. When I went out, Haruko was dead.”
“Where was Tetsu? Where was everyone else?”
“He had tattoo fever. He chased everyone out and went home. He said I could wait.”
“Why were you in his office?”
“I didn’t want anyone to see me. I was ashamed.”
“Why?”
“Haruko said that you were going to China with an Englishwoman. She said you weren’t coming back. Is that true?” She turned the gun toward herself, and he saw that the safety was off. He hated emotional blackmail. At the same time, he admired her nerve, the way she coolly placed the barrel to her temple.
“No, I said good-bye to my English friend and her husband. They were very good about it.”
“You’re lying.”
“Maybe, but I’m back.”
“You’ll be gone tomorrow, so what does it matter?”
Harry punched in “Mood Indigo.” “You like this one? Ellington uses a baritone sax instead of a tenor to carry the lead. Did I ever tell you that before?”
“Every time.”
“Well, it’s a classy touch. I saw him at the Starlight in L.A., the whole band in white jackets. Duke was in tails.”
“Don’t do it,” she said when Harry reached for her.
“What have I got to lose?” He laid her cheek on his shoulder. She resisted for a moment, but they really fit together, he thought. A person couldn’t shoot herself and dance at the same time. They didn’t dance so much as drift. The great thing about “Mood Indigo” was that a couple couldn’t dance too slowly.
“How many times did you play this song tonight?” he asked.
“Ten times? Twenty?”
“You must really like it.”
She said, “Not anymore.”
The turntable clicked to a stop. An arm rotated the record to the vertical and let it roll against a soft bumper of felt. For a moment she stayed in his arms.
Harry heard a clicking noise from the shutters. They were metal, padlocked from the outside against burglars, effectively blinding and trapping Harry and Michiko within. There was no light outside since the neon sign had been broken. It was a Sunday night, a working day tomorrow, the weekend over, time for women to rest their heads on wooden pillows and for the police to knee up to office heaters. No one abroad but goblins, cats and insomniacs. Harry threw on the club’s interior lights and located the source of the sound, a sword tip that vigorously probed one shutter slat and then the next like a tongue. What had he expected? It was just what Alice warned him about. So far, the shutters were holding.
“Are you staying?” Michiko asked.
“How can I get out?”
“No, are you staying?”
Staying? Harry had never asked himself the question in exactly that way.
“I wouldn’t leave you. Couldn’t leave you.”
With those words, Harry pictured the plane, his getaway, the Air Nippon DC- 3 in its hangar at Haneda Field. It shone in the dark. Then it disappeared.
24
HARRY AND MICHIKO retreated to the apartment. Even there, every sound was Ishigami. A drunk stumbled in the dark against the club and was Ishigami breaking through the shutters. A cat padded across the roof and was Ishigami prying off the tiles.
Harry assumed that Willie and Iris had weighed anchor. Alice would be packing for Hong Kong. She might be surprised to be traveling alone, but she didn’t need Harry, all she’d needed was a head start. Once she was away from him, she’d see what a narrow escape she’d had. He hadn’t meant to mislead her. Alice was light and sanity. Michiko exercised a much stronger call, the dark where a rib was taken. Being attacked by Beechum didn’t dissuade Harry. With a cricket bat? No, it was a matter of Harry acknowledging that the Nippon Air DC-3 had been a delusion, a fantasy. In the end, he had no choice. There was simply Michiko, all else paled. Even this situation, being trapped with Michiko, now seemed strangely inevitable. He had watched Kabuki all his life and finally had a role. Exit, pursued by samurai. Only there was no exit.