Quin?s Shanghai Circus (4 page)

Geraty, in short, was able to trace most of modern Japanese history to the pornographic fantasies found in his collection.

The documents had been translated and bound under his personal supervision, a project that had taken forty years of his life. Although reluctant to part with his treasure, he was now returning to the United States to retire. He intended to sell the collection to a university or some other academic institution so that it could be available to scholars.

Or so he claimed.

Finally, with special pride, Geraty discussed his system of annotations. The system was exclusive and comprehensive, his own invention, and could only be understood by using the key or code book. It consisted of numbers in the margins, entered by hand, often as many as sixty-four numbers next to only one line of print. The drawings were thus wedged in between swarms of minute jottings.

These masses of numbers, it seemed, identified and cross-referenced every real or imagined act that took place in all those tens of thousands of pages.

Because he was so fat, Geraty sometimes gave the impression of being less than a giant. When he was sprawled over a bench in the customs warehouse waiting for his audience to assemble, doing nothing, staring blankly at the ceiling, he looked as if he might be only six and a half feet tall. But the moment he began to gather up his arms and legs, a transformation took place.

He seemed to put on weight as he pulled his parts together. It took several minutes for him to find his balance, but when at last he was standing he filled the room he was in, any room, his immense bulk the equal of three or four large men.

Geraty leaned far back to keep his belly from dragging him over. His feet were splayed to support his body, his chin rested on his chest, his massive arms stood out to the sides. When he moved, his hands hung behind him, stiffly jarred by each step. His white hair was clipped short in outdated military fashion and his face was scarred by pockmarks, or perhaps a combination of pockmarks and poorly treated knife wounds.

When he got to his feet the blood rushed to his head, causing it to expand, opening the pits and scars. After a while this swelling subsided together with the deep purple coloring that had accompanied it.

Geraty arrived in New York toward the end of winter. The unraveled tops of three or four sweaters showed at his neck, which was swathed in a piece of red flannel tied with a string. He wore torn military boots, the type issued to American soldiers during the Second World War, and a black bowler hat that might have belonged to a circus performer in the 1920s. Over everything was a military greatcoat, ancient and spotted and patched, of no recognizable era or campaign. Despite his size the ancient greatcoat covered him completely to the floor.

Before much time had passed the eight customs officials were no longer curious or suspicious or even bored, they were simply dazed with disbelief. For several days Geraty had been lecturing them, and they could no longer pretend to understand what he was talking about, or why. The senior of the eight officials, therefore, interrupted Geraty to ask him if he had a letter from a university, or a document of any kind from any academic institution, expressing interest in his collection.

Geraty had to admit he had nothing to show them.

He was then asked to produce academic credentials from the United States or Japan or any country in the world. Again he had to admit he had nothing to offer but his collection.

Throughout these interviews, or lectures, he continued to address everyone as
nephew.

The obscenity laws were still strict. Even so, Geraty's case might not have been dismissed as fraudulent had it not been for two facts. First, he never turned up at the customs warehouse even partially sober. Second, it was apparent from his eyes that he was suffering from a long-term addiction to some drug, probably of the stimulant class.

In the midst of a harangue he would suddenly rush away to the toilet, muttering about an incurable Oriental disease acquired in his youth. But later the same day even this pretense would be dropped. Instead of leaving the end of the warehouse where he was lecturing, he would turn around in the middle of an incomprehensible sentence and bury his head in his greatcoat. There would be the unmistakable sound of liquid being sucked through a straw, then a rapid movement of the hands followed by a sneeze and a violent cough.

Geraty turned back to face the eight officials as if nothing had happened, but it was impossible not to smell the fresh alcohol on his breath, or to ignore the unnatural luster of his eyes which were now bulging from his head more prominently than ever.

After these lapses he never failed to make reference to the charity shown to slaves by the founder of the first monastery for women in Ireland, the gently forgiving lady known to history as St. Brigid.

Yet the collection was still an extraordinary effort by someone, and that was the only reason the eight officials spent as much time with him as they did. They took the trouble of sending a report through a special review process, including a senior board that was then in session. To do more Geraty would have had to take his case to court.

All this was explained to him at length one winter morning in the customs warehouse in Brooklyn when the time came to confiscate the collection. Geraty listened gloomily to the decision, then began the long process of getting to his feet. Not until he was standing at full height did he break his silence.

He roared and upended three of the desks. He bellowed and knocked over the other five desks. He shouted that he had no money for lawyers, that America was a lunatic asylum, that the whole country could drink dragon piss down to the day of judgment. When a platoon of guards finally reached the end of the warehouse that Geraty had demolished, they found him struggling to take off his clothes, trying to strip himself naked, either to free himself for a fight or because he was sweating so heavily.

Geraty landed in the street in an Oriental squatting position, perhaps a modification of the lotus, his greatcoat soaking up the snow that had turned to slush in the morning sun. During the next few minutes he was totally immobile, either because he was meditating or because he was stunned, then he abruptly lurched to his feet and staggered down the block shouting the names of saints. He entered the first cheap waterfront bar he came to and was told to shut up or leave. He scratched himself, ordered a double gin, and collapsed in a booth by the window.

For the next thirteen hours he remained in the booth, not leaving even to go to the toilet. He stared at the grimy snow in the gutter, drank gin, and sank into a stupor, all the while carrying on an incoherent dialogue with himself in a variety of Oriental languages and dialects, a journey that began in Japan and moved west and south through Manchuria, from Mukden down the coast of China to Shanghai. From there he took a freighter to the Philippines, snored in the mountains during the Second World War, took a United States army airplane back to Japan, and began the journey again.

When the sun went down Geraty emptied out the pockets of his greatcoat. In the manner of a fortune-teller he spread the objects across the table in front of him. He tapped each one three times and studied it.

A freighter ticket for the return trip to Yokohama.

His real passport.

An empty pint of gin with a straw twisted around the neck.

Sixty-odd dollars, a few less than the years he had lived.

A small gold cross, a Nestorian relic of incalculable value.

Several tattered passports from the 1930s, forged, stating that the bearer was a Belgian expert in animal husbandry, a Belgian dealer in films, a Canadian dealer in patent drugs. None of these false papers of any use anywhere in the world.

A worthless green paperweight that might have been meant to resemble jade, stolen from one of the desks he had overturned that morning.

Along with a screw-top jar hidden in a recess of his greatcoat, this was all he owned in the world.

Late that night Geraty
took a subway to the Bowery and knocked on the door of a shelter for homeless alcoholics. Before entering he insisted on presenting his counterfeit Canadian passport with the consular stamp that was thirty years out of date. He was fumigated, given a shower, and sent to bed.

The whole following day he slept. The next day he was able to swallow some soup. On the third day, feeling stronger, he resurrected himself and broke the lock on the closet where his clothes were stored. He made his way to the city bus terminal and found a bus that was journeying north through the Berkshires to a town where there happened to be an orphanage run by an order of Catholic fathers.

Forty-eight hours later he was back in New York without the precious small gold cross or the worthless glass paperweight, his money down to sixteen dollars. As insurance against a robbery attempt he bought a pint of gin, then took a subway to the Bronx, dozing most of the way, occasionally ordering a round of drinks in one Oriental language or another. He found a bar with a steam table and bought three large corned beef sandwiches which he covered with a thick layer of green paste from the screw-top jar hidden in his greatcoat.

He ended the meal with a double gin and a small dab of green paste tucked into each side of his nose. He sneezed and heaved himself out the door, his money now reduced to eight single dollar bills.

Darkness had fallen, the slush was freezing into ice. Geraty picked his way carefully along the sidewalk, his bulging eyes rolling over the buildings and down the alleys. From time to time he stopped under a streetlight to gaze at a fire alarm box, the number on a tenement, the stairs leading down to a basement. Once in the course of every block his hand dipped into the greatcoat and came out with a pinch of green paste which he pushed into his nose absentmindedly.

At last he came to the corner he was looking for, a bar with an old wooden sign in the window. There was a larger neon sign with a different name, but the old-fashioned lettering on the wood, in faded green paint, could still be read beneath the buzzing coils of electric light.

Geraty's.

For several minutes he gazed dully at the sign. He had come to the United States for only two reasons, and when those tasks were accomplished he had intended to return to Japan immediately. In the first he had failed. He had been unable to sell his magical collection of pornography. And in the second he had succeeded. He had returned the mysterious small gold cross to its rightful owner.

But now a third possibility crossed his mind. Instead of just making a nostalgic visit to his family's old neighborhood in the Bronx, he would honor his mother by invoking her memory on the feast day of the saint for whom she had been named.

Geraty crossed himself, the first time he had done so in thirty years. From St. Edward the Confessor he begged forgiveness for what he was about to do, for what it might lead to, for the lost paths that might be opened and the forgotten lives that might be discovered. Then he crossed himself once more and kicked aside the door of the bar, shuffled to the counter, clamped a paw on the bartender.

Dragon piss, nephew.

How's that?

Double gin.

He rested both arms on the counter listening to the noisy conversations around him. Twenty minutes later he was on his way to the toilet at the back, bumping into drinkers as he passed. When he returned he bumped into them again, this time choosing a stool toward one end of the counter next to a younger man whose name was Quin.

Geraty had heard the name soon after coming into the bar. There were two drinkers there with that name, one closer to the right age than the other, but before he approached his man he wanted to be sure the name was spelled correctly. So he had waited until both men were near the counter and picked their pockets as he went to the toilet, replacing their wallets on the way back.

In the years he had spent wandering around Asia he had known only one other man named Quin, a lecherous and violent drunkard who had last been seen in Shanghai before the war, supposedly in a warehouse on the outskirts of the city. There were rumors of a terrible night in that warehouse, but Geraty never knew whether they were true or not. By the time he got to the warehouse the next morning, it was deserted. The only sign that anyone had been there was a discarded hat on a mound of sawdust, the black bowler he himself was now wearing.

Geraty spread his greatcoat over the stool and lowered himself into place.

Quin was then about thirty. He had grown up in the Bronx, played stickball and fought in the streets as a boy, spent two years in the navy and one in prison as a man. A short time ago his only relative had died, the woman who had raised him, his father's older sister. The aunt had left him a small amount of money, and he was trying to decide what to do with it the night a fat staggering giant, old and drunk and ragged, wheezing and muttering, lurched into his stool and nearly knocked him to the floor.

A dozen years ago, perhaps even two or three, Quin might have broken a bottle over the old man's head. But at the moment he was paralyzed. A hideous stench had enveloped him, a mixture of rotting wool and rotting cheese, sour wax and decaying skin, all of it overwhelmed and held together by a pervasive smell of mustard.

The fat giant had breathed on him as he settled down on the next stool.

Blow it the other way, said Quin.

Double gin, nephew, the fat man called down the bar. Quin swung his elbow and the fat man hiccupped.

You stink, buffalo.

How's that?

You bumped into me just now.

Not me, nephew.

You. Twice.

The fat man rubbed the red flannel around his neck while sneaking a hand under his greatcoat. Quin saw him unscrew the top of a jar. A finger came out with a dab of green paste, the cap was rescrewed, the finger flickered under his nose. It was all done in one quick movement, but Quin recognized the smell.

Hooked on horseradish, buffalo?