Quin?s Shanghai Circus (12 page)

The ferocious adventurers came from every corner of the world. There were Burmans and Chadians and Quechuas and Lapps and Georgians swearing in a hundred tongues and brandishing a thousand varied weapons, every conceivable kind of knife and pick and sword and bludgeon and pike. Between them they were missing every part of the human body. They had warts in every combination supplemented by a multitude of tattoos and moles, birthmarks, miscellaneous discolorings, and wounds both old and new, generally treated but often only recently scabbed. They were a desperate army with only one goal, a night of unlimited plunder after weeks at sea.

Darkness fell, the late sunset of a summer night. Children waved good-bye to the pretty ships in the harbor, crowds moved from the department stores to the movie theaters. Strollers ate cold noodles. It was a peaceful evening in downtown Yokohama with a cooling breeze off the bay.

And yet no more than two miles away the battle was ready to begin. Some fifty or sixty Japanese heroines were preparing to defend the homeland against the combined navies of the world.

The gangplanks came down, the launches sped back and forth. The first wave of barbarians swarmed into pawnshops snatching up cameras and silk jackets, raced down the streets through the whining music, climbed over the crashing chairs, and hurtled the bottles shattering in the alleys. The massed squadrons pushed forward, regrouped, mounted another assault. Heads cracked on the pavement, bellies spilled out in doorways. The sailors fought on their backs and rolled over to strike again from the side, from above, from below, in between, in back, knee level, naval level, chest level, eye level, from the rooftops and the tops of chairs and toilet bowls.

But gradually their ranks thinned, their bodies piled up on the docks and jetties. A few snipers still carried on in upstairs windows, but long before sunrise the outcome of the battle was decided.

Here and there a whore lay temporarily unconscious, but most were walking home on their own sturdy legs, limping perhaps, certainly exhausted, but with their sea chests bulging with money from around the world. Behind them they left carnage and ruin, snoring carcasses from a hundred distant ports, the broken lust of foreigners. Once again a handful of heroines had won total victory in the nightly Yokohama battle, and all over Japan innocent women and children were able to sleep safely because of it.

Big Gobi sat in the train with his eyes closed. When he had first left the princess in the palace, he had felt as if he had no bones, then for a while he had lost his legs and been an amputee. Now the numbness was gone and he was suffering the torture of a thousand cuts. Oriental torture. Time.

He smiled.

Did you see how she walked right up to me, Quin? She never backed away at all. On the freighter they used to say I smelled of seagull droppings, but she didn't say anything like that. She just took me by the hand and then when we were in the room she let me turn on the television set so we could watch it from the bed. Imagine just doing it and watching television at the same time. You know tomorrow I think I'll just stay home and relax and watch television. She said she watches all the time, so I think I'll just sit around tomorrow and think about it. She must have been about sixteen and that was the first night she'd worked there and I was the first one, you know, she'd ever done anything with. Her parents are poor and she doesn't want her little brother to go to an orphanage and that's why she's there. She said I understood a lot about people considering I don't even speak Japanese, the people we were watching I mean, the people on television. She said I could come again and watch television, or watch her while she was watching television, or watch them while they were watching us. Just us, the two of us I mean, and all the others. I mean I've never been with a person like that where there were just the two of us, two of us alone but me not alone at all because she was there. Never. Not since I was born.

Big Gobi smiled as he fell asleep.

Quin looked out the window at the lights flashing by. He was thinking of Geraty then, wondering as always how much of the giant's tale he could believe, not realizing that at that very moment he was returning from the site of the famous picnic on the beach south of Tokyo where Maeve Quin had long ago laid out a blanket for three men in gas masks, her husband and Father Lamereaux and the elderly Adzhar, the wandering Russian linguist whose cross Big Gobi now wore, thereby setting in motion an espionage game that was to last eight years, culminating in Big Gobi's conception in a warehouse on the outskirts of Shanghai on the eve of a doomed circus performance.

I had to sneak back and forth through the city, evaporate and materialize, die in doorways and resurrect myself in the moonlight of the cemetery.

There seemed to be only one thing to do, so I did it. I became a ghost.

Father Lameraux peered down the corridor. The kitchen door was closed, a mop slapped the floor. He tiptoed out of his study. Just before he reached the garden door the mop stopped.

Master?

He held his breath. The voice spoke again from the blank wood of the kitchen door.

It's raining, master. Use the toilet.

Father Lamereaux sighed. A little summer drizzle never hurt anyone. Besides, he had intended to go only as far as his favorite patch of moss beside the garden wall.

He left the toilet and sank into the chair behind his desk. Japanese urinals were the worst-smelling in the world, everyone knew that. They were so bad Japanese men never used them, which was a sound custom, practical as well as wise. It kept little boys from associating their tassels with dark, smelly places. In the West a boy had to hide in a closet, lock himself in. No wonder he grew up thinking his body and the demands of his body were impure.

Yet at the same time the little Western boy was enjoying himself, he had no choice. Eliminating waste was always enjoyable.

Guilt.

While in Japan, on the other hand, a boy was encouraged from the beginning to do his business out-of-doors. In public. His mother spread him over the gutter when he was a baby. Later, on the train, his older sister urged him to use an empty bottle rather than bother people by pushing up the aisle. Or if there wasn't an empty bottle, she showed him how to stand on the seat and direct his aim downwind.

Women admired him. A natural act naturally performed. A world of sun and rain and men and flowers living together in harmony.

After fifty years in Japan a man couldn't piss in his own garden?

Fifty years, half a century. A life that spanned three-quarters of a century. Nearly one-quarter of a century without a drink.

Father Lamereaux liked to think in terms of centuries, epochs, dynasties. When he first came to Japan it had helped him understand these people. Now it helped him understand himself.

He stirred. Someone was watching him.

He saw his housekeeper standing beside his desk, a tiny woman with a flat face, tangled hair, legs thinner than a man's wrist. She wore yellow cotton trousers rolled up to her knees, a faded yellow blouse that hung open. But there was no sign of a woman there, only a pole of ancient polished wood. The womanly parts had dried up long ago.

Go away, he said. Don't you know I lived half a century without you?

She stood with her arms hanging down to her sides, her eyes fixed on the middle of his forehead. Did she see anything when she stared at him like that? Or had she died at the end of the war as he often suspected, died in a fire bomb raid. So many had died then, almost everyone he knew. When the Americans arrived, there were only two million people living in the charcoal, two million from a city of five million.

He fumbled with the book in his lap, dropped it. A page ripped.

Now look what you've done, Miya. Go away and leave me alone.

You were going to the garden without your hat, she whispered. Without your rubbers.

Father Lamereaux crossed himself. How could he argue with a dead woman? She saw through doors, she saw in the dark. She heard the smallest sound no matter where he was in the house. She had the eyes and ears of a cat and she was always watching him. Listening. Watching. A dead cat.

Miya, leave me at once.

There are visitors.

What? Where?

Here. In the parlor.

Who are they?

Two men. Foreigners.

What do they look like?

Who knows? They all look alike.

But what do they want? Why are they here?

The housekeeper held out a letter. It was written by himself, signed with his name. The letter was addressed to someone named Quin and suggested an hour and a day when this Quin could come to call. The date, in his own hand, showed that he had written the letter several weeks ago.

Father Lamereaux frowned. He had not had a visitor since the war. Who was this man? Why had he come to call? Why had he agreed to let him come to call in the first place?

Father Lamereaux reached out for the sheaf of papers he always kept beside him no matter where he was in the house, whether in his study or his bedroom or the dining room. He never carried them into the parlor, but that was only because he never went into the parlor, because he never had any visitors anymore.

The sheaf of papers was the index to his memoirs, a manuscript on which he had been working for nearly a quarter of a century. The memoirs were not yet finished but the index was complete and up to date. He thumbed through it and found no one by the name of Quin listed there.

I'll tell them you're resting, whispered the housekeeper.

No, don't do that, of course I'll see them. It's just that I can't recall the man's name at the moment.

Welcome. It's raining. This house has not seen a caller since the war.

Quin found himself facing a tall, cadaverous priest in his middle seventies. The old man smiled gently. He sat down in a chair with horsehair arms and poured tea from a tray brought by the dwarf who had met them at the door. Quin introduced himself and Big Gobi.

It's raining, repeated Father Lamereaux. Exactly half a century ago I came to Japan on a day much like this. At one time the Emperors of Japan were men of great stature, but all that changed when military dictators seized power and moved the capital to Kamakura. The young Emperor was left behind in Kyoto to barter his autograph for pickles and rice. That was in the thirteenth century. Then in the 1920s I went to Kamakura to study in certain Buddhist temples.

Father Lamereaux unbuttoned his coat. There was something wrong with the movement. Quin looked more closely and saw that the buttons were reversed, buttoning right side over left as with a woman. The priest turned his attention to Big Gobi, who had nervously taken out his small gold cross to polish it on the side of his nose.

Four decades ago, whispered Father Lamereaux, I heard the tale of a cross very much like that one. This other cross was a rare Nestorian Christian relic that had been in the hands of a Malabar trading family for hundreds of years, during which time the family made a fortune in peppercorns. A man named Adzhar married into the family and traveled east with his wife and the cross. Of course Adzhar wasn't his real name, only the name we knew him by. He was a Russian from Georgia and I believe he adopted the name of the province where he had been born. He also died before the war.

Father Lamereaux paused. He looked thoughtful.

I hope we're not disturbing you, said Quin.

Not at all. I was just working on my memoirs as I have been every day for the last quarter of a century. Did you know cannons were placed around the Shinto shrines during the thirties? Decrepit artillery pieces captured from the Russians in 1905?

Father Lamereaux rubbed the horsehair arm of his chair.

An ugly mistake. For me the best years in Japan were the 1920s. I was young and I had just arrived, so everything here appealed to me. My studies were in Kamakura but I came to Tokyo on the weekends, to this very house, which was filled with cats then. In those days Tokyo was constructed entirely of wood and every night there would be a fire within walking distance, the flowers of Tokyo they were called. There's nothing more stimulating than watching a fire when you're young. On Friday nights we had our meetings here, and if we had been to see a fire the discussions we had on
No
drama were always more spirited. Since the war I've been a strict vegetarian, honey and eggs excepted. Rice has a particular effect on the Japanese an hour or two after they've eaten it, which is undoubtedly the principal reason they prefer the out-of-doors.

Quin nodded. He was looking at the legs of Father Lamereaux's chair. They ended in carvings of claws crushing the heads of rodents.

How is your work progressing, Father?

Slowly, a little bit at a time. I want my memoirs to be as nearly perfect as possible. To me it seems unworthy of a human soul to resign itself to imperfection. I think the early fathers made a mistake there, I've always felt it was the Virgin we should be imitating. Christ doubted himself in the end but not the Virgin. We're not enough like her, yet those years in Kamakura were charming all the same. The temples in the hills were beautiful and the views of the sea, the pine groves, the gongs and the rituals and the hours set aside for contemplation. And there was a spring afternoon when I nodded with the flowers while they played the music that had once tempted the sun goddess from her cave, played and also sang the epic of the dragon in a still small voice, a song so strange and soaring it surely was descended from the distant Lapps. A sad tale and yet not so. The shoemaker's son sang it, sang it from his shoemaker's bench. Incredibly, his code name when he was still in the business himself was
The Holy Ghost.
Did you know him? Did you know Elijah or the sun goddess? Did you know Henry Pu Yi?

No, said Quin.

Father Lamereaux leaned forward and rested his long, thin fingers on the stack of papers he had brought with him into the room. The papers were wrinkled and soiled as if often consulted. Slowly, pondering, he ruffled through the stack with his thumb and forefinger. Nothing was written on the papers. They were empty save for the prints of his fingers.