The information would be turned over to Lamereaux coded, on microfilm, along with instructions on where it was to be delivered in either Mukden or Shanghai. For safety Lamereaux would deal only with Quin, the couriers only with Lamereaux. Quin wouldn’t know who the couriers were, Lamereaux wouldn’t know the sources from whom Quin obtained his information.
The couriers would deliver the microfilm to places, not people, also for safety. At a certain hour on a certain day the capsule would be wedged behind the mirror in the toilet of a restaurant in Mukden. Or it would be taped under the lid of the water cabinet in the toilet of a bar in Shanghai. There would also be capsules that had to be retrieved in either Mukden or Shanghai and brought back to Tokyo.
The afternoon came to an end. The picnic was over. Young Quin said the only thing left to do was to give their network a code name.
Adzhar spoke up with a smile.
I’ve done nothing at all here today, he said. At least let me offer a suggestion for that. Don’t you think Gobi would do nicely?
The three men shook hands and took off their gas masks.
Toilets, whispered Father Lamereaux, always toilets. The result of the device I developed for the couriers. All systems have definitions, even the vegetarian system, honey and eggs excepted.
Quin nodded.
Father, did you know that Geraty claims he found a report on the network in the Kempeitai files after the war?
Geraty? Alive after the war? I thought he died in Shanghai.
No, he escaped to the Philippines and later came back here to take a job in the Occupation.
And he’s still alive?
Yes.
It’s hard to believe. I didn’t think anybody was still alive.
But, Father, I don’t understand. Geraty destroyed the report so the Americans wouldn’t see it, and the Americans had just finished fighting Japan. Why keep it from them?
From them or anybody, what does it matter now? The action in a No play occurs when no one is moving. The past reduces emperors to pickles who bugger and barter. Once there was rice beside the road where now there is only a forgotten signature fading on withered parchment, a lost sign on a wayside of the thirteenth century. The 1920s were the best years for me, before all this happened. They played the beautiful music for me then, music so rare it tempted the sun goddess from her cave, played and sang in the still small voice of a shoemaker’s son, sang at the shoemaker’s bench the epic of a dragon descended from the Lapps. I had my cats and the flowers of Tokyo, but in the 1930s they placed cannons around the shrines, they ignored the effect rice has on the bowels and went to war, and soon the flowers were gone and my cats were gone and the Legion was gone. Did you know Elijah? Did you know the sun goddess or the shoemaker’s son? They were gone and there were no more Friday nights. Everything I had ever known was gone.
The old priest turned. He stared at the rain running down the windows.
I could no longer meet the legionaries here, it wasn’t safe for them. I had to meet them one at a time for a minute or two behind a tombstone. I had to sneak back and forth through the city, evaporate and materialize, die in doorways and resurrect myself in the moonlight of a cemetery. There seemed to be only one thing to do, so I did it. I became a ghost. And Quin became a ghost as well. The idealist became violent and unsure of himself, I could see it in his eyes. You don’t understand, you say? No matter now. There’s nothing to understand anymore.
Father Lamereaux rose. He gazed at the windows.
How did it end, Father?
End? How can there be an end when Our Lady’s reign is forever? As for Quin, he went to Shanghai and never came back.
When?
Just before total war began, but in retrospect who can say? Artillery pieces were placed around the Shinto shrines in 1905.
Is there someone who might know what happened to him?
There was a woman who once played a thousand-year-old koto with indescribable tenderness across the hours of a spring afternoon in Kamakura. She might have been in Shanghai then, I’m not sure. I’ll give you her name.
No one else?
Father Lamereaux moved into the hall. He opened the front door and held out his hand. He wrote on a piece of paper, then stared at the drops of rain in his palm. Deep scars formed around his eyes.
In Tsukiji, he whispered. A gangster. Good-bye.
The door closed. Quin moved up the street in the rain reading the piece of paper. On one side Mama, The Living Room, an address. On the other side no address, a name, Kikuchi-Lotmann.
Kikuchi-Lotmann must be the gangster in Tsukiji, the fish market district of Tokyo. Mama must be the woman who had been in Shanghai. Beside the names two arrows were drawn pointing in opposite directions.
The rain came down and Quin watched the Emperor’s autograph dissolve in his fingers.
Miya sat in the kitchen slicing turnips. The shopkeepers in the neighborhood, who knew nothing of her forebears, assumed that tuberculosis had stunted her growth as a child and made her into a dwarf. But that wasn’t true. The men in her family had been tiny for generations, and they had always been careful to choose tiny women to bear their sons. They were No actors who specialized in the difficult role of the princess.
In the tradition of a family devoted to No, these severely disciplined men passed their stage name down from one generation to the next. Miya’s father had been the thirteenth actor to use it. Thus when she was born in 1905 the stern old man barely noted the fact. He had dedicated his life to No and there were no roles on the stage for women.
At the age of sixteen Miya ran away from her home in Kyoto to marry a painter, an act of abandon that gave her the only moments of happiness she was ever to know in life. Romantically she thought she might become a painter like him in the Western style, using oils rather than charcoal, but as it turned out her young husband never had time to teach her. He was dying and her escape ended within the year. She returned home with the two gifts love had given her, a child and tuberculosis.
Her father wouldn’t forgive her act of disobedience but he embraced his grandson, who he assumed would someday be the fourteenth actor in the family to bear the traditional name. Her father stopped speaking to her and never entered her room. A servant brought her meals. From her bed she could hear the old man and her son playing together.
When the boy was a little older her father got him admitted to the Peers’ School in Tokyo. At the same time he was enrolled in a No theater in Tokyo to receive his initial training.
Miya objected to him being sent so far away, but her objections meant nothing. As she expected, his busy schedule kept him away from Kyoto for all but a few days out of every year. And even when he did come home he spent most of his time away from the house with his grandfather.
As he grew older he was increasingly ill at ease in her presence. He was silent and even sullen, as if embarrassed to be with her. She knew this was because she had always been sick and had never been able to be a mother to him. She also knew this couldn’t be helped, but that didn’t lessen the bitterness she felt toward the course life had taken.
Her father died suddenly one winter, and to her surprise Miya found herself relieved, perhaps even secretly pleased. Despite her sickness her son would now have to turn to her because she was all he had.
She wrote him a long letter praising his talents and talking about the future. With the letter she sent a small childish self-portrait done by her dead husband, the only memento she had from that short period in her life when both sickness and her son had come to her. The painting had hung by her bed since her husband’s death, so she was quite sure her son would understand what she meant by sending it to him.