Harry asked, “Did you know what the colonel wanted?”
“He said he wanted to surprise you.”
“Surprise me? You didn’t know he wanted to kill me?”
“I thought there was a chance. I think a lot of people would kill you if they had the chance.” She said it flatly, as if stating a fact.
“Did he say where he was staying?”
“At the willow house. He’s rich. He rented the whole house for a week.”
“So he could be there, he could be anywhere.”
They had pulled up and tied the ladder stairs from the club, although Harry could still imagine the colonel climbing up a gutter or down from the roof, maybe squeezing through a tap. Harry had thought that lighting the Eiffel Tower might attract a late-night customer or two and provide some security in numbers. A stone knocked out the sign; it shorted amid a rain of glass. Harry had tried the phone; the line was dead. All he had was the gun, but with daylight he could go for the car.
There was, of course, the option of sending up enough hue and cry to draw the police. Except that it was no option at all. Nothing like involvement in a homicide to upset travel plans. Know what a mark is? Harry asked himself. A mark is a guy who can’t report a murder. He was a mark.
“Are you going to leave me?” Michiko asked.
Harry didn’t have the heart to tell her the truth, and he didn’t have the heart to lie. He kept his eyes on the street. “I don’t know. I don’t know how much future I have in Tokyo. Except for you. I have the feeling I’m not wanted.”
“Are you going with her?”
“Her?” Alice, of course. Harry dropped at least some deceit. “She doesn’t have any future here, either. No whites do.”
“But you’re from Asakusa.”
“Yes.”
“You’ll hate it anywhere else.”
“Yes.”
Harry didn’t ask why Michiko had saved his life. This was no fair-weather American girl, he thought, and no sweet all-day-sucker American-style love. Michiko’s was more of the pathological jump-into-a-volcano-together type. That didn’t change things. When Nippon Air rolled the DC-3 from its hangar, Harry intended to be the first man aboard, and expected to have Alice Beechum in the seat beside him.
“You do a good imitation of a geisha.” Harry couldn’t help himself.
“Did you consider the possibility that we both might lose our heads?”
“No.”
“You like being trapped here?”
“No. Yes.”
Figure that out, Harry thought. Since whiteface covered Michiko halfway to her shoulders, she dropped the kimono to her waist. She looked divided, warm breasts in contrast to a plaster face. Ishigami had done an expert job, adding the highlights of Chinese red to her cheeks, subtle shades of green and blue around her eyes. Ishigami, the Renaissance man. Of course, Japanese girls seemed boyish, boys like girls. What did Ishigami crave? Love, of course. Harry had cheated him of that not once but twice.
Across the street, the lantern at the willow house had flickered and gone out. No matter, DeGeorge would draw attention soon enough. In cool weather, two days, maybe three. Ishigami didn’t hide his work. Ishigami didn’t care. After four years of slaughter on the China front, one more truncated body wouldn’t make a big impression. All the colonel wanted was four more heads. He had a Zenlike equanimity about his goal. Even with Michiko’s knife to his throat, he wore a triumphant expression, as if he had finally solved the question of her true allegiance. Harry had figured out the answer at the same moment. Well, it was a matter of gratitude, wasn’t it? Harry had taken this skinny kid, this Red on the run, a geisha of all things, planted her by a jukebox and called her the Record Girl. Made her a hit. Well, you could do anything with Michiko. She was like chopsticks. With someone that smooth and slim, the limbs were almost interchangeable. Variable. Inexhaustible. An American girl would have cried, “Save me, Harry, save me!” Michiko had said, “Go.” So, the matter of loyalty was settled. At the same time, that was no real obligation on him. If she wanted him to survive, so did he. Harry appreciated what she had done, but he couldn’t drive from his mind the image of Ishigami painting her. She still hadn’t taken off the whiteface, as if it afforded protection.
Harry spied motion near a streetlamp, but it was a cat with tail intact, flown like a flag. In any other neighborhood, a snoop might have reported strange noises to the police. Not Asakusa, where the late-night carousing of drunks, whores and theatergoers was the norm. And when a detective did investigate the willow house, what would he see? Swordsmanship. A single slash on the bias that had opened DeGeorge from his breastbone to his bowels, and one clean stroke for his head. The detective would also see the telltale sideways spray of blood produced when an executioner flicked his blade to clean it. The idea that anyone but a Japanese could have carried out an execution so beautifully would be met with astonishment.
One down and four to go. But perhaps the game had changed from mere numbers, Harry thought. Maybe there was added value in a head Ishigami thought Harry cared about. Just as the colonel had cared for his aide-de-camp in Nanking. Would Ishigami settle on tit for tat, ear for an ear, head for a head? Or would he embellish? There were things a man could do to another man’s woman. They certainly did them in China. Maybe he already had.
“You and Ishigami were together all day. What did you do?”
“We talked.”
“You talked. You had tea, coffee, a couple of drinks?”
“We talked about my family.”
“Talked about family?”
She told Harry how her father failed twice, lost his shop in the Depression, grew rice only to be ruined by drought and, under threat of starvation for the entire family, sold his daughters one by one to the brothels and geisha houses of Osaka. One reason there were so many angry young soldiers in the army was because they had seen their sisters sold. Ishigami had appreciated that. Michiko added that she hadn’t only run away from the geisha house. She was proud to have robbed it first.
Harry was struck by how little he had known. How could he reconcile a fugitive geisha with the Record Girl from the Happy Paris? There had been hints of a certain internal tension. Living with her hadn’t been like keeping a canary. One night she had thrown a priceless bottle of Black Label at him. Another night she’d broken a Dorsey record and threatened to slice her wrists or his. Granted, in both cases he had just sauntered home from an evening with Alice Beechum; in both cases he and Michiko ended up in bed. He remembered every vertebra in her spine, the way her hair hung around her face, the ten little daggers at her fingertips. Lie down with cats and rise with scratches.
“You were with Ishigami how long? Five hours? Six? All you did was talk about family and then he painted you up like a geisha? The two of you did nothing else?”
“The two of us?”
“That’s what I said.”
Her voice went even flatter. “I wanted to save your life.”
A man couldn’t balk at the hurdles, Harry thought. He had to plunge forward. “What did the two of you do? What did that entail?”
“What do you mean?”
“You know what I mean. He did the geisha makeup. What else did he do?”
“Are you angry because I let Ishigami touch me?”
“Is that all he did? That satisfied him, just a touch?”
A silence stretched like a conversation in itself. Michiko stared at the whiteface in the mirror.
Harry said, “It doesn’t matter, but I just want to know what happened. You entertained the colonel. You kept him busy. You convinced him there was nothing between you and me. How did you do that?”
“If it doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter.”
“But it does matter. It must have been pretty good.”
“It didn’t matter. I’m back.”
She rose and handed him a cloth so that he could wipe the nape of her neck and erase the white sexual W. Harry as good as saw Ishigami’s fingerprints all over her, her neck a scene of intimacy he found himself afraid to touch. He hadn’t escaped Ishigami. Ishigami was in the room with them.