The Ends of the Earth (41 page)

He pulled out a knife and pointed it at Max. ‘Put your throat to the bars, Maxted. Maybe I will slit it for you.’

‘And disobey Daddy? I doubt it.’

‘One day you will beg me to do it.’

‘No. I can promise you, Noburo, I’ll never beg you for anything.’

‘You think you are better than me.’

‘I
am
better than you. And you know it. Your father knows it, too.’

The knife was trembling in Noburo’s hand. He was angry as well as frightened. He was angry
because
he was frightened. ‘One day I will kill you.’

Max smiled, confident it would infuriate Noburo to see he could not be cowed. ‘Try,’ he said. ‘Any day you like.’

Rue du Verger, Montparnasse, Paris, early morning, Wednesday 19th February, 1919

A MAN STEPS
out of an apartment building into the cold grey light of a winter’s dawn. He is Sir Henry Maxted, a sixty-six-year-old British diplomat with a seemingly unremarkable career behind him, recalled from retirement to act as one of many advisors on technical issues within the British delegation to the Paris Peace Conference. He looks the part: broadly built, bewhiskered, firm of gaze and bearing. He is the very model of reticence and respectability.

The gathering of the weary victors of the Great War has filled Paris with such men as Sir Henry – the politicians and functionaries of dozens of governments, along with the journalists, spies, mistresses, chancers, schemers and suppliers of unspecified services drawn to the councils of the powerful as are flies to a dung-heap.

Sir Henry has few illusions about the true nature of the peace conference, which he sees as an unseemly scramble for the spoils of war. He has few illusions about anything, in fact, least of all himself. But his long training in the art and wiles of diplomacy would have disposed him, in the normal course of events, to play his small part in the proceedings obediently and unobtrusively. Events, however, have not followed anything close to their normal course since his arrival in Paris a month ago.

He could and perhaps he should have declined the invitation to join the British delegation. His specialist knowledge of Latin American affairs is hardly crucial. He is very far from indispensable and he knows it. The truth is that his primary motive for coming to Paris was to renew his acquaintance with Corinne Dombreux. What that renewal has led to is a reappearance in his life of something he thought he would never experience again: joy.

How strange it is – how confoundingly odd – to rediscover passion at an age when it might be supposed to have withered. He lights a cigar as he reaches the starburst intersection of roads at Carrefour Vavin and glances across at Hazard, the grocery store on the opposite corner, where innumerable delicacies from around the world – grapefruit, caviar, anchovy paste, Turkish delight – seem always to be available.
Lait garanti pur
, the sign above its window reads.
25c.
Milk, guaranteed pure, for twenty-five centimes. He knows nowhere else where purity is available on such reasonable terms.

The morning is chill and overcast, but dry, which decides him against using the Métro to reach the Hôtel Astoria, where he will be expected to make at least a token appearance in the corner of Herbert Norris’s outer office set aside for him. He will take the number 2 tram from Gare Montparnasse to l’Etoile and stroll round from there to the building that has become the British delegation’s administrative hub.

He heads west along Boulevard du Montparnasse, puffing thoughtfully at his cigar. He has in truth a great deal to think about, though none of it concerns his negligible duties for the delegation. He is a man assailed as well as transformed by all that has intruded into his life of late. Falling in love with Corinne and discovering, to his delight and disbelief, that she was falling in love with him is more than enough to contend with. Social stigma and family turbulence are bound to ensue if they are to live together when the conference ends, as it eventually must. But he has more than that to dwell upon – much more.

It is still possible, he tells himself, to ignore what he has recently learnt, or to conclude that it is untrue. He has succeeded over the decades in largely forgetting the tragedy in which he featured. He has never once supposed he could have misunderstood it in the way it now seems he may have done.

The cities he has lived in press around him in his imagination as he walks: Vienna, Budapest, Tokyo, Constantinople, Rio de Janeiro, Petrograd; but Tokyo most of all. The city’s magical qualities have grown in the nearly thirty years since he left, to the point where now he experiences his memories of it as if recalling a dream – unreal, blurred, fragmentary.

But the memories are potent for all that. They are the glittering shards of his shattered younger self. And Tokyo is a city, as Japan is a country, so unlike all others that it might exist on another planet: the maze of crowded streets and silent temples and stone walls and wooden bridges; the swarming inhabitants with their strange clothes and sing-song language; the hawkers of balloons and kites and noodles; the silvery rain and the cherry blossom and the cornflower blue of the domed sky. ‘
Moyaya-moya
,’ he remembers the kindling-women calling, as if it were an incantation. ‘
Moyaya-moya.
’ They were calling that morning long ago when he met Matilda Tomura by chance on Nihombashi Bridge and let her persuade him to accompany her to the Shirokiya department store, where, she said, she wanted to see the latest Western fashions to have reached the Orient.

He had never been alone with her before. They had met at balls and receptions and formal dinners – and once at her husband’s gloomy Western-style house in Akasaka – but never otherwise. They had never laughed and caught their breath at the look in each other’s eyes. All this was new to them that spring morning in Nihombashi – new and magical.

It should have ended there. For a British diplomat to enter into a dalliance with the English wife of a Japanese politician was the sheerest folly. It was also a gross dereliction of duty. But the heart is capable of many derelictions.

The price he paid for what happened in the course of the long, hot summer that followed their springtime encounter was considerable. But for Matilda it was worse, far worse. For most of the intervening years he has condemned himself for letting her murder – as he felt sure it was – go unavenged, though how he could have done otherwise remains unclear. It is a stain on his conscience nonetheless. It is a scar that will never fade.

Lately, however, the suspicion has formed in his mind that Matilda may have suffered a worse fate even than death – that her husband, Count Tomura, has punished her infidelity with imprisonment in a basement dungeon at his castle north of Kyoto.

It hardly seems credible. Yet the evidence that it is true has mounted to the point where Sir Henry is close to being convinced. It began with his visit to Pierre Dombreux during the Frenchman’s confinement in the Peter and Paul Fortress in Petrograd. It was a bone-numbingly cold day in early December, 1917, when the Neva was sheeted with ice. Dombreux said he wanted to tell Sir Henry something in case the Bolsheviks decided to shoot him. He had intercepted a letter sent to Sir Henry by Matilda’s brother, Jack Farngold, claiming that ‘Things did not happen as you believe they happened’ and that he needed Sir Henry’s help to ‘undo what Tomura has done’.

According to Dombreux, the letter had been taken from him by his interrogators. But Sir Henry’s liking for the man did not blind him to his duplicitous nature. Pierre Dombreux was a player of many devious games. How he subsequently extricated himself from the Cheka’s custody Sir Henry did not know. He had left Petrograd by then, evacuated with the Ambassador early in the New Year. And a few months later Dombreux, denounced by the French as a traitor, was reported dead. Unable to learn more of Jack Farngold’s supposed letter, Sir Henry tried to forget it.

In Paris, though, the possibility of investigating the matter further presented itself to him. Through Alphonse Soutine and his tame Arab cat burglar, le Singe, Sir Henry has obtained information culled from documents held by the Japanese delegation to the peace conference. This, and further information reluctantly revealed by his old Japanese police acquaintance from Tokyo days, Kuroda Masataka, who has owned to meeting Jack Farngold on several occasions, has strengthened his suspicion that Matilda is not dead after all, but a prisoner in Kawajuki Castle.

What to do? If he is to attempt a rescue, it must stand a good chance of success. Failure might be worse than inaction. Schools Morahan, whom he has consulted in confidence without entering into any details, has given him a rough idea of how expensive such an operation, if properly mounted, would be. The cost is simply beyond Sir Henry’s means, short of taking steps that would risk alerting others – notably his wife – to what he was doing. And Winifred must under no circumstances know anything of this. Without the necessary funds, therefore—

‘Damn,’ he says, suddenly noticing that cigar ash has fallen on his sleeve. He realizes he has been unaware of his surroundings since leaving Carrefour Vavin. Blowing the ash away, he presses on.

The cobbled breadth of Place de Rennes opens before him, loud with the rumble of carts and the squeal of trams. Looking to his left, he notes the time shown on the station clock and takes out his watch to check it by. There is no discrepancy.

He stares at the watch-face, letting its Swiss-perfected representation of time confer some clarity and precision on his thoughts. He needs both. He needs them as never before. He cannot hesitate for long. He either acts or he does not. He either stakes his all on this or he turns his back on it and grasps the chance of happiness with Corinne.

If he does act – and he can raise the money he needs to act – no one close to him must know. That is clear to him. Not Corinne, not Winifred, not Ashley. Above all, not James. What James would do if he learnt the truth does not bear contemplation.

Normally, Sir Henry would amble along to the Café de Versailles, just across from the station, and sip a milky coffee while nibbling a croissant and flicking through the pages of one of the establishment’s cane-bound newspapers to see what the French press make of the doings of Wilson and Lloyd George and their very own Clemenceau. Only then would he go on to the Astoria. He would be in no hurry – no hurry at all.

But his mood is unsettled, his mind abuzz with whether and what and how. Loitering holds no appeal. He sees a number 2 tram entering the square and knows it will stop to take on passengers. He discards his cigar and heads towards it at a rapid stride.

A fateful intersection becomes certain in that moment. The lifelines of two men who have not met for nearly three decades turn towards each other … and converge.

Sir Henry boards the tram just as it moves away from the stop. There is barely space for him to slip into the car. He catches a drift of cologne from one of the other occupants. It carries the scent of apples and is familiar in the vague, unsettling way smells can be.

As the tram takes a gentle curve into the continuation of Boulevard du Montparnasse, the passengers sway with it, to varying degrees. And in that variation a figure reveals itself to Sir Henry’s sight: a man, standing only a few feet from him, overcoated and hatted, one arm raised to grasp the rail, the other buried in his pocket. He is bearded and bespectacled, his expression calm, his gaze confident yet withdrawn.

Sir Henry’s mouth falls open in surprise. They know each other. Better than either would care to admit. The encounter should not be so shocking. The world has come to Paris. It was predictable – though Sir Henry failed to predict it – that Fritz Lemmer should have come too. He is not likely to have admitted defeat, however many of his countrymen have. He is here, where the future is at stake. Of course he is. Sir Henry almost smiles then, at the chance – and the irony – of their meeting once more.

There is not even the hint of a smile on Lemmer’s face, however. It is expressionless. No one could guess they are old acquaintances. He takes his gloved hand from his pocket and draws it sideways through the air. It is a gesture of conciliation as well as caution.
Leave me alone
is the message it conveys.
Leave me alone and I will leave you alone.

Sir Henry obliges him by looking away. The conciliatory note puzzles him, however. It is uncharacteristic. Perhaps the war – and especially the manner of its ending – has dented even this man’s legendary sangfroid.

A tempting but dangerous idea forms in Sir Henry’s mind in that moment. It is a sign, he knows, of his desperation. But this is surely an opportunity he should not let slip. There are many who would be willing to pay handsomely for information concerning the whereabouts of the Kaiser’s fugitive spymaster, the ever elusive Fritz Lemmer. Sir Henry is one of very few people who know what Lemmer looks like, thanks to their paths crossing in Tokyo. And now he has seen him again. Here, in Paris. Where he should not be. Providence has shown its hand.

Fine judgement is required, however. Sir Henry knows he must be seen to yield. He must give Lemmer no cause to think him a threat. To move against such an opponent will be perilous. It would be madness to forewarn him in any way.

Accordingly, Sir Henry drops his head slightly and turns aside, his show of submissiveness intended to convey acceptance:
I will leave you alone
. He looks out through the rear of the tram. It is slowing for its next stop. No one else is edging forward to leave, since they have only just boarded. He steps out alone on to the platform.

A few moments later, he is walking back along the boulevard towards Place de Rennes, considering what he should do next. Money is the key, which Lemmer has just unwittingly handed to him. And there may be other ways to raise money, given le Singe’s capabilities and the market for secrets that Schools Morahan and his partner, Travis Ireton, actively trade in. There is much to think about.