“Hey, wake up, you old whore,” he said, and nudged her with the toe of his shoe.
Kemo looked up at him with all the unveiled malevolence of a conquered people, and then came immediately awake, and smiled and told him she had made contact with someone who wanted to sell some very good pearls. She asked Jason if he understood that the pearls would be stolen pearls, which was why he was getting such a bargain on them. He hadn’t thought of it until just that minute, but it didn’t matter a damn to him whether they were stolen or what they were. So he said sure, he understood, and they made arrangements to buy a whole potful of them for the fifteen thousand dollars, more than he could have bought in the States for twice that price, good pearls, too, the real thing. He told Kemo to get more for him. He told her he’d have at least another five grand by the beginning of April, and that he wanted more pearls of the same quality. Kemo, always willing to oblige, said she would get them, and then archly asked if he was going to have them strung for Annaburr. “String this for Annaburr,” he said, and laughed and pinched her naked breast until a huge purple bruise showed near the nipple. Again the same look crossed Kemo’s face, the look she had awakened with the day he had returned to Tokyo.
Jason did not notice it.
He was beginning to realize that he would be a very rich man before he left Japan. It never occurred to him that he was selling property belonging to the United States government. Oh yes, it occurred to him; it simply never bothered him. The way he looked at it, these Jap bastards had it coming to them. Each time he sold them something, he felt as if he were gouging them, as if he were somehow taking food out of their mouths. He sold them all this worthless crap that was lying around all these bases just gathering dust, and he got yen for it, which he then used to buy the only good thing the Japs had ever come up with, their pearls. The United States government had nothing whatever to do with it. This was something personal between Jason and the Japs. He was giving it to the enemies of his country. He was doing it in his own way and in his own time, but he was giving it to them as surely as he was giving it to little Kemo in that crawling Tokyo shack, the old bitch.
On the third of April Jason returned to Sasebo from a tour of Hokkaido, where he had inspected four Japanese destroyers and seven Japanese cargo vessels, and where he had stolen and sold enough material to bring him not the five thousand dollars he had expected but the equivalent of two thousand five hundred and twenty-one dollars in yen, not bad for a short voyage. He tried to check out a jeep, but there weren’t any available, so he took a train up to Tokyo and then walked up Kemo’s street through the rows of rubble on either side of the street itself, Tokyo flattened, the shacks springing up everywhere like weeds in a vacant lot. At the far end of the street a man was building a house, working silently and rapidly in the flat afternoon light. The house was a real house and not a shack like Kemo’s. It was only half built, partially roofed over, but the sliding doors and windows were already in place, and a finished deck jutted out from the entrance door. He suddenly wondered where the man had got enough money to buy the lumber that was stacked alongside the house. He put the man out of his mind and knocked on Kemo’s door. He knew there was someone with her immediately. There was a short telltale hesitation, and then her voice came to him huskily, in Japanese, asking who was there.
“It’s me,” he said.
“Mo-men,” Kemo answered, and he heard her shuffling around inside the shack. He waited angrily. He heard her footsteps approaching the door. At last the door opened. Her face showed in the crack. Her hand was clutched into the closed front of her kimono. “Yess?” she said.
“Who’s in there with you?”
“Friend,” she answered.
“Get rid of him.”
“He good friend.”
“I’ll give you five minutes.”
“Jasonn, you verry minn,” Kemo said.
“I’ll break you and him in half, both,” Jason said. “Get him the hell out of there.”
“Oh, you so strong,” Kemo said, and grinned wickedly and closed the door. Angrily he walked away from the shack. He felt suddenly chilled. It was cold for April, with a wan pale light glowing flatly on the rubble, the stench of smoke and fish and humanity hanging on the air, the sound of the carpenter’s hammer ringing sharp and clear with each stroke. Jason lifted the collar of his jacket. He found a few scraps of wood in the gutter, carried them into the lot, lighted them with his Zippo, and made a small fire over which he squatted, warming his hands. She seemed to be taking a very long time in there, the old bitch; that was because she knew he was waiting. The flames were dying. He searched around for some more bits and pieces and then looked off to where the carpenter was working and strolled down to the end of the lot, watching for a moment. The man glanced at him apprehensively, smiling, bowing, and then turned back to his work.
“Hey,” Jason said.
The man turned, smiling again, waiting.
“You need these scraps here?” Jason asked.
The man did not understand English.
“You need this wood here?” Jason said. “These chips, do you need them? Oh, go to hell,” he said, and picked up the scraps and walked back to the fire with them.
They burned very rapidly.
It was three o’clock in the afternoon, but it seemed later because of the curious light that day, the clouds hanging in dark folds, refusing to allow the sunlight through. The hammer rings seemed to add to the feeling of coldness, each sharp biting clang reverberating on the air, carrying to where Jason squatted over the rapidly dying fire. He would need more wood. Unless she came out soon, he would need more wood. He got up and walked back to where the Japanese carpenter was working. He looked for some more scraps, but there didn’t seem to be any.
“You got any more wood you don’t need?” he asked.
The carpenter bowed and smiled.
“For the fire,” Jason said, pointing.
“Ahhh,” the Jap said. “Ahhh.”
“Have you got any?”
“Kemo,” the Jap said. “Kemo.” And he grinned.
The dumb bastard thinks I want to get laid, Jason thought. He’s giving me the phone number of the local whore. “Yeah, I know all about Kemo,” he said. “I want wood. You got some wood for me? To burn. Some junk you’re not going to use. Oh hell, what’s the sense?” He turned away from the Jap and was starting back for the dying fire when the door to Kemo’s shack opened.
He had expected her “friend” to be an American, perhaps even the sergeant he had kidded her about one time. But the man who came out of the shack was a Japanese, still wearing his uniform, his face browned and bearded, as if he had just come back from some Pacific island where he’d been holed up in a cave eating his buddies and shooting at Americans. Jason turned and walked to the neatly stacked pile of fresh lumber near the house. He picked up a long slat.
“I’m taking this,” he said, and began walking away. He very carefully avoided looking at the touching scene in the doorway of Kemo’s shack, the man bowing his little brown ass off, Kemo hanging in the doorway like a teen-ager coming home after the big Saturday night prom. He went to the fire, and he broke the wood in pieces over his knee and threw the pieces onto the waning flames. An idea, an impulse, came to him. He walked back to the house again and climbed up onto the partially finished deck where the carpenter was working.