They managed to side-step the police who were returning from the back, by detouring around one of the slides, and waiting until they’d gone by. A hurrying geisha or two, carrying refreshment-trays, brushed against them, apologized.
“Don’t weaken,” he kept whispering. “We’ll make it yet.” The stampeding suddenly started back again behind them. Evidently the geisha had voiced her suspicions. They went a little faster. The wavering gait became a run, the run became tearing, headlong flight. He slashed one more of the never-ending screens back into its socket, and they were looking out on a rear garden.
Apple-green and vermilion lanterns bobbed in the breeze; a little hump-backed bridge crossing a midget brook; dwarf fir-trees made showy splashes of deeper darkness. It all looked unreal and very pretty — all but the policeman posted there to see that no one left. He turned to face them. They’d come to a dead stop. The policeman was swinging a short, wicked-looking little club on a leather strap.
Hollinger said into her car: “I’ll handle him. Don’t wait — just keep going across that bridge. There must be a way of getting through to the next street over. Be right with you—”
The cop said something that sounded like, “Boydao, boydao!” and motioned them back with his club.
“Take it!” Hollinger snapped at the girl and gave her a scooting shove that sent her up one side of the sharply-tilted bridge and down the other. She almost tumbled off into the water.
Hollinger and the Japanese policeman were locked and struggling, silent but for the crunching of their feet on the fine sand that surfaced the garden path. The sailor had a sort of awkward headlock on the Jap, left hand clamped across his mouth to keep him quiet. His right fist was pounding the bristle-haired skull, while the policeman’s club was spattering him all over with dull, brutal thuds. The cop bit Hollinger’s muffling hand. Hollinger threw his head back in the lantern-light, opened his mouth like the entrance to the Mammoth Caves — but did not yell.
The girl hovered there across the bridge, her hand held against lips once more, her body bent forward in the darkness. Hollinger knew that every minute counted. Lanterns were wavering nearer in the interior of the house, filtering through the paper like blurred, interlocked moons. Their flight had been discovered.
Hollinger sucked a deep breath into his toiling lungs, lifted the squirming cop up bodily off the ground and tossed him like a sack into the stream. The bulge of his chest and the sudden strain of his back and shoulder muscles split the tight middy from throat to waist. There was a petal-shaped splash and the little brown man swiveled there in the sanded hollow, half stunned by the impact, water coursing shallowly across his abdomen and cutting him in half.
Hollinger vaulted across to the girl with a single stretch of his long legs, caught at her as he went by, and pulled her after him. “I told you not to hang around— Come on, willya?” He glared at her fiercely. She was a fine girl, all right. Scared to death and sticking around that way anyhow...
They found the mouth of an alley giving onto the rear of the garden behind a clump of dwarf firs that were streaked single-file along its narrow black length between the walls. Hollinger pushed the hobbling girl in front of him. They came out at the other end into the brazierlike brightness of one of the Yoshiwara streets.
It was strangely deserted: seemed so, at least, until Hollinger remembered that most of the usual crowd must have been drawn around to the front of the Stolen Hours by the hubbub. They ran down it to the end of the block, then turned a corner into another that was even more dismal. But this one was more normally crowded. Heads turned after them, kimonoed passersby stopped to stare. A zigzagging bicycle-rider tried to get out of their way, ran into them instead and was toppled over.
“If the alarm spreads before we can get out of this part of town, we’re sunk.” he panted. “They’ll gang up on us. Faster, lady, faster—”
“I can’t,” she whimpered. “It’s... it’s this pavement — the ground’s cutting my feet to pieces—” He was without shoes, too, but his soles were calloused from deck-scrubbing. He was two arms’ length in front of her, hauling her after him by the combined span of his own arms and hers. Betraying flashes of gold peeped out from under the parachuting kimono, were blazing a trail of identification behind them.
She stumbled and bit her lips to keep from crying out. So he grabbed her up in both arms, plunged onward with her. The extra weight hardly slowed him at all. A paper streamer hanging downward across the lane got snared in some way by their passage, ripped off its wire and flared out behind his neck like a long loose muffler. The shopkeeper whose stall it had advertised came out sputtering, both arms raised high in denunciation.
“There’s our dish!” he muttered, winded. A taxi had just dropped a couple of fares in front of a dancehall ahead. Hollinger hailed it with a hoarse shout and it came slowly backward. Hollinger let the girl fall on the seat, ran along beside the cab for a minute as the driver went forward again, then hopped in after her.
“Drive like blazes,” he panted. “Ginza — anywhere at all — only get us out of here. Fast, savvy?”
“I go like wind,” the driver agreed cheerfully. He wore a kimono and a golf-cap.
The girl was all in; the sudden release of all the pent-up tension finished the last of her control. She just lay inertly, hiding her face with both her hands. He didn’t speak to her or try to touch her. His head back against the cushion he pulled in eight long, shuddering breaths — slowly, tasting each one like a sip of icy wine. After that, he began to lick the ugly teeth-gashes on his hand.
A sudden diminution of the light around them — a change to the more dignified pearly glow of solitary streetlights — marked the end of the Yoshiwara.
At the end of a long five minutes, the girl pulled herself up. “I don’t know how to thank you,” she said weakly. “I mean” — she smiled just a little, wearily — “there just aren’t any words.”
“Who does things for thanks?” he said, spading his hand at her.
She said what she’d said before: “I didn’t do it. I know I didn’t do it! Why, I was going to marry Bob. I loved him—” She stopped suddenly, confused.
He looked at her sharply, but he didn’t ask any questions. He started, though, to reach for her hand, then drew back.
They were coming into the long broad reaches of the Ginza now, Tokyo’s Broadway. The lights brightened again, but with a difference: This was downtown, the show-part of town, modern, conventional, safe. Safe for those who weren’t wanted for murder, anyway.
“I suppose I ought to give myself up to the police,” she said, her eyes restless, like an animal in a trap. “The longer I keep running away, the more they’ll think I did do it — I lost my head in that dreadful place — the knife on my lap and his blood on my dress, and that horrible manager yelling at me.”
“Suppose you tell it to me first,” he urged, gently. “I’m sticking with you, see? I didn’t go through all that trouble just to have you put into jail. You say you didn’t do it. All right — that’s good enough for me. I don’t know who you are—”
“Brainard,” she said. “Evelyn Brainard. I’m from San Francisco.”
He said something that should have been very funny, after what had gone on during the half hour, but she didn’t laugh. “Pleased to meet you, Miss Brainard,” said he, and blanketed one of her hands in the enormous expanse of his. Etiquette.
“If you give yourself up now, I won’t have time to do anything for you. I’m due back on shipboard tomorrow noon, and we’re pulling out for Chefoo right away after that. You’d just stay cooped up until the American consul gets good and ready to ask what they’re going to do about you, and that might be a week — ten days. And then he probably wouldn’t take as much personal interest in you as” — he faltered awkwardly — “as a fellow like me would, that has met you socially.”