“You used to cut down Chinese left and right. Why change now?”
“In China I had no choice. There were too many. It just went on, like fighting the sea. That’s why the Japanese fighting spirit is so important. That’s what makes us different. You wouldn’t understand. You’re a gambler, all you understand is odds and numbers.”
“Because numbers are real. Spirit is a fantasy.”
Ishigami peeked up from his bowl. “What odds would you give yourself right now?”
“I see your point.”
“Yes. So, you choose. Friends, enemies, people on the street, it doesn’t matter to me, and, I suspect, it doesn’t matter to you.”
Michiko said in an offhand way, “Maybe there is someone he cares about, maybe there’s a girl?”
“Didn’t you have a friend named Gen?” Ishigami asked.
Harry said, “I’m not going to choose anyone. I’m not going to do your work for you.”
“Lazybones,” Michiko said.
“We’ll do it this way,” Ishigami said. “We’ll go out in the street. The first four people you look at, I’ll kill.”
“Innocent Japanese?”
“No one is innocent. Are my men guilty? They’re dying.”
“Gladly, for the emperor, I know.” That was always the propaganda.
“No, as a matter of fact, hardly ever. Asking for their mother, yes. A trench of bloody boys apologizing to their mother and father, yes. I thought it would be different. I thought there would be purity and nobility in struggle. But China is the same as here, a giant black market with businessmen corrupting army commanders for spoils and war matériel. We take a town and lose ten, twenty, a hundred soldiers, and men just like you, Harry, show up like worms within the hour.”
Which answered a question Harry hadn’t directly posed before: how was it that a heroic officer related to the imperial family was only a colonel after so many years in the field? Ishigami was a butcher, but plenty of butchers had flourished during the so-called China Incident. He was a fanatic, but fanatics had thrived. Was it his high moral code, his reluctance to batten off the slops of war, that had stalled his military career?
“I tried to tell the emperor,” Ishigami said. Such an intimate mention of his name brought a bow from Michiko. The Record Girl would have laughed.
“And?” Harry asked.
“I wanted to inform him of how affairs really stood in China. One of the old housekeepers let me in. I found the emperor surrounded by aides and maps, and I was excited that he was concerning himself about the affairs in China. Then I saw that almost all the aides were from the navy, and none of the maps were of China. Just islands. I never had a chance to say a word.”
“What islands?”
“What could it possibly matter to you?” He motioned to Michiko. “Bring me the box.”
Michiko shuffled behind the screen on her knees and returned with a white box tied in a white cloth, a scaled-down version of the box for a soldier’s ashes. Harry had seen only one like it, in a museum. It was a head box, designed to carry a singular trophy.
“I had this made to order today,” Ishigami said. He raised the box and gave Harry an appraising look. “I think it will fit.”
“On the map, was there a fleet track? From the west or north?”
“Questions like that could have you arrested as a spy.”
“How could that possibly matter if my head is in a box?”
Ishigami set down the box and brushed its lid with his hand. “Harry, you never stop, do you?”
“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.