“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.”
“There’s always the option of sanity, declaring yourself winners and coming home.”
“It would be defeat. From then on, the hands of America and England would be around our neck. They could cut off our oil anytime, and we would be beggars. Better a truly decisive stroke than slow strangulation, don’t you agree?”
Everything seemed to be coming back to the sword shining by Ishigami’s side.
“How does the emperor feel?”
“The army will decide for the emperor’s sake.”
How will they do that, Harry started to ask, when Ishigami held up his hand for silence. Harry heard nothing to begin with, then a door shutting at the front of the hallway.
“These fucking shoes and laces, every time I go in a fucking house. Off and on, off and on. Harry! Harry, are you in there? Why isn’t the Happy Paris open? Is there a mama-san in the house? Harry? Anybody home?”
“An American correspondent named DeGeorge,” Michiko whispered to Ishigami.
DeGeorge sounded drunk, as if lurching into the sides of the corridor with every step. Harry could picture the man’s red nose and dirty gray suit. Go away, he thought.
“Harry Niles is here,” Ishigami said loudly. He smiled at his own English. “Come see Harry.”
“Where?” DeGeorge’s voice shouted. “I filed a story on your little speech. The censor killed it. What are you, hiding? Playing cards?”
“Come see Harry,” Ishigami said.
From the sound of it, DeGeorge slid open each door as he progressed up the hall, stumbling around in stocking feet. “Jesus, you hired the whole place? Having a private party, are we?” The heavy steps paused at the closed door behind Harry, who could almost feel the bulk of DeGeorge leaning into the shoji. “This must be the place.”
Harry turned and said, “Run! Get out of here!”
“Knockee-knockee.”
The door slid open. Al DeGeorge pushed through a leer that changed to a quizzical expression as Ishigami stepped over the table with sword cocked and sliced the correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor diagonally from his shoulder to his hip. Holding himself together with his hands, DeGeorge tried to go in reverse. Ishigami followed, poking him with the tip of the sword as if steering a pig into a sty to a room with more space to swing. DeGeorge was out of sight, but Harry heard him, a reporter to the last, ask a plaintive “Why?”
The answer was a sound like scissors closing, weight dropping in a heap and something rolling underfoot. Harry endured a sensation like falling from a window and not yet hitting the ground. Michiko maintained perfect geisha poise.
Ishigami returned, stepping fastidiously around the bloody mat at the threshold and sliding the door shut.
He said, “That’s one.”
18
THERE WAS AN ETIQUETTE to geisha parties: no groping, no show of money, no sake once rice was served, although the rules were often violated by wartime profiteers who knew no better. Ishigami was a gentleman of the old school, who fueled on nothing but high-octane sake. Screw the rice. Anyway, who was sleepy? Not Ishigami, who sat in a white kimono spotted with blood and tended his sword with an oily rag.
Ishigami seemed to swell and fill the room. Perhaps because every sense of Harry’s was sensitized, Ishigami was magnified, every pore of his hatchet face, the blue cap of his cropped hair, the black wires of his brows and lashes, the dark mirrors of his eyes, not to mention the smell of salty sweat tinged by background accents of incense and blood. Harry noticed the checkmarks of fragmentation grenades on the colonel’s scalp, a notched ear, the way his neck swelled like a forearm when he leaned back. He studied how Ishigami’s hands curled around the handle of the sword the way a baseball glove would fit around a ball. Harry had to wonder whether Ishigami had soaked his hands and sword in neat’s-foot oil for a better grip. He noted the white kimono, which suggested a sense of ceremony and dedication to a task. He also noticed how little air was in the room, as if he and Ishigami had labored to the thin atmosphere of a mountain peak.
The problem was that Ishigami was smart, moral and psychotic, the worst possible combination. He couldn’t be gulled, bought or reasoned with. The last option was to kill him, and Harry couldn’t imagine accomplishing that without the gun he had just buried under the floorboards across the street. There was Ishigami’s own sword, but the colonel was just waiting for Harry to try.