“So na no? Is that so? Inscru-table? What means this word ‘inscrutable’? I have not heard this word before.”
“…the gal with whom I most enjoy discussing global strategy, unconventional tactics, and matters of state with. Inscrutable? Oh, mysterious… er… hard to fathom, hard to really know.”
“Ah, I understan’. Yes, I am mysterious sometimes, ne? But it is you who is inscrutable, true?”
She reached over and gently dabbed her wet fingertips along the zipperlike scar on my right shoulder. “Sometimes I wish I could unzip one of these and get inside to see the true Quillon Frazer. Sometimes I see you thinkin’ so hard but you never let me know what you’re thinkin’….”
One of the girls from the restaurant called through the door to Keiko. A messenger had left a note for me downstairs.
Keiko looked at me with an appealing tilt to her head, her round breasts bobbing faintly with the motion of the water. Unconditional surrender. Yes, there is something to be said for unconditional surrender—to a magnanimous victor, accepted ever so gracefully.
The next November morning was crisp and clear. As I shaved, I studied the man beyond the mirror.
Inscrutable might have been an overplayed word because his appearance itself told too much. In his late thirties, the man was trim, hardy, with a relaxed but distinctly military bearing, and weary eyes. His high, broad cheekbones, those of a boxer or wrestler, were impassive, though his jet black hair hinted at Celtic turbulence. The broken nose told of a certain self-destructiveness. Only a faint glimmer deep behind the eyes revealed a wry and sanity-saving sense of humor. Frozen in a snapshot, he might have been an athletic stockbroker, a lobsterman, or a tennis pro. In the motion of real life, an erectness and slight rigidity of carriage betrayed a more adversarial calling.
No, little more than a quick look made it all too clear; here was a stiff-necked, hard-nosed, old-school officer who’d taken that duty-and-honor bilge seriously, and it’d nearly destroyed him. It was an easy guess that off watch he would be unremarkable in general—inclination to be cosmopolitan, perhaps; surely culturally adventurous, as that type generally were; occasionally roisterous, under the right circumstances. Study him stressed under the responsibility of command and all those drearily conventional attributes of the classic military officer oozed through the casing, like sweating plastic explosive. Incorruptible, steadfast, selfless, courageous—all that hokum people had once pretended mattered. Here he is, ladies and gents, a bygone archetype, the warrior monk, in modern dress. Sees command as a moral charge, he does, he does. Ready to share the burden of sacrifice with his men at any moment. Step this way, our next exhibit…
In one aspect, however, the display of emotion, he was inscrutable; that element remained locked behind a case hardened will. Sometimes, not often, emotion flickered, accompanied by a subtle tightening of the jaw muscles. This single mannerism betrayed a building anger that might someday flare into white hot fury.
Soon I was bounding down for breakfast at Keiko’s. Its heavy timbers and sophisticated Japanese joinery lent stability to the early morning. She handed me my usual breakfast of fried eggs and misoshiro soup, along with a business card and a smile. It was a lawyer’s card with a note on the back. The lawyer was asking me to visit his office that afternoon to discuss a confidential matter. The address given was an impressive one in the Ginza section of Tokyo, a short train ride away.
As I had just finished the Kamakura Maru job and my next project wasn’t for a week, I dug out a tweed jacket to make my turtleneck sweater more respectable. Then I set course for the Ginza.
CHAPTER 2
Ginza in Japanese means market. The Ginza in Tokyo had evolved into the Far Eastern version of Fifth Avenue. Without the shoppers and signs to give it away, a visitor would be hard pressed to distinguish it from midtown Manhattan or the Market Street section of San Francisco.
Here, however, the constant throng of shoppers is quietly different. The crowds are thick yet without jar or aggression, a reflection on the ingrained courtesy of the Japanese. For some unknown reason you must pack the inhabitants of Tokyo more tightly before they reach critical mass than you can their Occidental cousins.
The law office was nestled in a modern tower of innovative design. There the receptionist greeted me with the proper mixture of cordiality and distance befitting a firm of significance. While I stated my business, I noticed her eyes drifted to the perceptible lack of crease in my trousers. She then announced my name into the intercom and remained unerringly polite and courteous as I cooled my heels in that outer office. Looking around the office, I concluded that this lawyer’s client could afford the best. In salvage, I was neither the biggest nor the best, and under the circumstances this was the type of work I expected.
“Frazer-san, Sato-san will now see you. Please excuse his delay, he is most interested in seeing you,” the receptionist murmured in flawless, inflectionless English, gesturing to the door on the left.
As I entered an office about the size of a small gymnasium, a forceful-looking gray-haired man rose and offered me his hand in firm American style. Sato, the lawyer, had clearly seen something of the world and was used to commanding respect. I sensed the calculating mind of a chessplayer, always three moves in the future, and that this trait fused well with his bearing, which would-have done honor to a Roman senator. Everything about his manner radiated tenacious intelligence.
Another older man—undoubtedly Western—lean, stooped, his beard streaked with white and gray—said something to me in an eastern European language and gave me a Continental dead-fish handshake. On an empty chair next to him lay a pile of outer clothing and a pair of sunglasses. Neither were suitable for November Japan. No, this wasn’t going to be a marine salvage job, after all.
I’d never met either one of them before, but there was something hauntingly familiar about the stooped man and those mournful hound-dog eyes of his.
“Mr. Frazer, I am Kiyoshi Sato. I sent you the business card. Please be seated. This meeting must be kept in the strictest confidence….”
I nodded.
“…for reasons which my client assures me will soon be obvious. The gentleman here on my left, as I am sure you have already recognized, is my client, Sergei Kurganov.”
I must have paled. No wonder he had looked familiar; Kurganov was the Iron Curtain exile whose novels had rocked the West to its long-ignored or forgotten foundations. Perhaps no man in this century had endured the fathomless pain or had seen the unquantifiable suffering he had—and still maintained the resilience to skewer the most powerful and oppressive political system in the world with his pen. He dwarfed the other great men of the decade. I could not help feeling humble.
Sato, sensing my unabashed awe, started in, “Mr. Kurganov, as you probably know, does not speak English. I do not know the reasons why he has arranged for this meeting. He has asked me to translate for him and, as a lawyer, keep these communications in the strictest confidence.”
Sato began, at first haltingly, to interpret Kurganov’s famous sardonic style:
“The creative thinking of the Soviet penal system established a rehabilitative marvel, the Corrective Labor Camp, to attend to its class enemies. Class enemies leave such camps vertically or feet-first. There is, of course, always some doubt about those who leave the camps vertically. It is, therefore, a credit to the camps that the majority of the inmates leave feet-first and unquestionably rehabilitated to the requirements of Soviet society.”