Harry returned to the Happy Paris and slipped into the narrow kitchen. Kondo used the cool space under the floorboards for pickling eggplant, ginger, melon. Harry shifted loose boards, moved pickle jars aside and pulled out a loosely buried cookie tin. Just enough light made its way from the street to see a picture of Tara on the lid. Framed by white plantation columns, Scarlett O’Hara wore a bustle skirt as big as a parachute. Harry lifted the lid. Inside the tin were separate envelopes of cash: $10,000 American, $5,000 in yen and even $1,000 in Chinese yuan. Traveling money. He added the pistol to the money, set the tin on the damp ground and replaced the boards. Things were moving so fast now that he felt light-headed as he stood.
It was just him and the jukebox now. He selected “Any Old Time” and set the volume low. The intro was smooth, melodious, going nowhere in particular until Billie Holiday shyly chimed in, “Any old time you’re blue, you have our love to chase away the blues.” As if Michiko were with him, Harry took a solo turn around the record player. For some reason he was put in mind of Kato’s copy of the Moulin Rouge, the redheaded cancan dancer. Too bad they never had dancing at the Happy Paris, Harry thought, only the immobile, inscrutable Record Girl. The front door was open a crack, and figures on the street flickered by. Harry decided he needed something not so sad. Who needed love if they had wings? How many hours till takeoff? Thirty-six? Harry punched three, six. Behind glass the automatic arm lifted Shaw off the turntable and put on “Sing, Sing, Sing,” which Harry regarded as four minutes of pure inspiration, starting with Krupa’s native drums, then joined by a growl of brass and, diving boldly in, Goodman on clarinet. Because of Krupa, “Sing, Sing, Sing” had a manic force that usually made Harry think of Tarzan, conga lines, war canoes. Tonight was different. He imagined tanks rolling over trenches and flamethrowers lighting huts. A horn soloed and a temple turned to a poppy-red ball of fire. Krupa took over and machine guns chattered. Harry didn’t know how long he had listened before he stopped the record and noticed that a geisha stood at the front door, her matte-white face cocked to one side.
“Niles-san?” she asked in a high voice.
“Yes.”
“Please.” The geisha bowed and motioned Harry to follow her. She was small, a shimmer of silk in the dark.
“Now?”
She stayed bowed. “Yes, please.”
Harry saw that she was trying to direct him to the willow house. “Who is there?”
“A friend, please.”
She showed no sign of straightening up, a social pressure that was like a soft nutcracker. Although a geisha party was the last thing Harry was in the mood for, people did not snub geishas in public. Also, this was not a smart time for a gaijin to offend anybody. Even if it was to make excuses, Harry had no choice but to go.
“Okay.”
“Thank you, thank you so much.”
While they crossed the street, the girl chirped about what excellent Japanese he spoke, about such pleasant weather for December. She was vaguely familiar to Harry. He’d seen geisha go in and out of the willow house for the past two years. The problem was that the whole geisha presentation was a mask. Their faces were masks of white greasepaint under elaborate, top-heavy wigs with hairpins and tiny bells. They were wrapped in volumes of kimono and minced unnaturally in high wedge sandals. Every gesture and every note were pieces of acting, a doll-like combination of the innocent and erotic.
Inside the willow-house gate, a walkway lit by stone lanterns led to a slatted door with saucers of salt on either side. Harry left his shoes in a foyer that was discreetly dim and followed the geisha down a hallway lit by standing lanterns. Usually an older man or a lady of the house welcomed a visitor to make sure of the privacy of the parties within. Harry saw no one, heard no one, although on either side were the screens of different rooms. At this hour on a Saturday night, each room should have been ringing with idiot hilarity. There was a parabola to geisha parties: first, the soulful plucking of the shamisen; second, sake-fueled parlor games; third, maudlin singing; fourth, collapse. The girl made not a sound, just a beeline to the end of the corridor where the best room was, as far from the street as possible. As the geisha bustled ahead, he had a good view of the seasonal blue of her kimono and the tinkling bells in her hair and the way the red inner collar revealed the nape of the neck. Every once in a while she would glance back, a painted simper on her red double-bow lips. It was like following a puppet until they reached the end of the hall, where she stumbled ever so slightly, and Harry saw the three pinpoint moles on her neck and felt the electrical charge of recognizing Michiko while his legs carried him forward.
She slid open the screen to the last room. In the middle sat Ishigami in a white kimono at a low table of lacquered black. The colonel was darker than Harry remembered, flesh drawn taut around the skull, skin raw from a campaign in bitter weather, hair close-cropped and flecked with gray. The curve of an unsheathed sword lay across the table. Michiko gently pushed Harry to his knees.
Ishigami’s eyes lit on Harry. He said, “You owe me five heads.”
17
THE SWORD LAY edge out, a sinuous temper line running from the tip of the blade to a long grip of braided silk. Harry wondered if it was the same sword he had seen employed in Nanking or in the demonstration of swordsmanship so many years before.
“I should have recognized you in China,” Ishigami said. “Even if you were only a boy the first time I saw you, there is only one like you.”
“Well, that can be a good thing or a bad thing.”
“Not good for you. You were easy to find.”
Harry hoped to hear someone else in the house, but Ishigami seemed to have paid for the absence of the owners. He could afford to; he drew a colonel’s pay and a stipend from the imperial household, and what did he have to spend it on in China? Harry had to give him credit, a lot of aristocrats devoted their time to tennis or whisking tea. Instead, Ishigami had been fighting in the never-ending China Incident for four years, five? A hero as indefatigable as that deserved an evening in an elegant willow house. The room’s single window was a latticed ring, the lights a pair of paper globes, the only decoration a painted screen of carp with gilded scales. The sword was within reach of either man, but the colonel was poised, a wolf over a bone. He wore a shorter sword tucked into his sash. Harry remembered the gun across the street. If he ran for it, Ishigami would slice him down before he was halfway down the hall.
Although Ishigami demanded total concentration, Harry couldn’t keep his eyes off Michiko. With all her shuffling and tittering, the Record Girl did an unsettlingly good imitation of a geisha. He really didn’t know all of Michiko’s background; part had always been a mystery. Now he saw clues. A geisha’s face was painted white, her eyebrows and the outer corners of the eyes extended with red and black lines. Michiko also had the slightest shade of cherry blossom across her eyes and cheeks, and a hint of blue around the temples and the line of her jaw, the added color of a maiko, a younger apprentice geisha. So many bells tinkling from the wig and the incessant giggling were other earmarks of a maiko. She must have been both a young Commie and a geisha-in-training, an interesting combination. She made the whole outfit light up like a neon sign.
“Five heads?” Harry asked.
“Five. That was the number you cheated me of in Nanking.”
“It was just a bet.”
“It was a humiliation. I have thought about Nanking many times.” Ishigami took a deep breath of tightly controlled emotion. There was an exhausted, even emaciated quality to the colonel, yet he still gave an impression of great strength. If the Grim Reaper wore a kimono, he would be Ishigami. This was not the smooth exit from Tokyo Harry had planned. “Do you know I am a hero? Two Orders of the Golden Kite, fifth and second class.”