The Japanese Corpse (32 page)

"Certainly," the commissaris said, "and Mr. Johnson will assist us, I believe."

"I don't think the commissaris plays golf," de Gier said slowly.

"What would have caused such an outburst?" the commissaris asked after Dorin had left and de Gier had put down his mattress and bedding in the other corner of the room and switched off the light. "It seems that our associate has a personal interest in the case, don't you think? So far he hasn't shown much emotion although he is a high-strung man. It's really most extraordinary that he would lose his self-control."

"His brother," de Gier said. "He told me about his younger brother some time ago. His brother is a junkie. A dropped-out student, hooked on the heroin. One of these young men we saw in the back alleys of Tokyo, staring at their shoes for hours on end until the drug wears off and they have to start robbing again. Mr. Woo's merchandise is rather expensive."

The commissaris sighed.

"What do
you
think about our adventure, sir?" de Gier asked a few minutes later.

"I am not thinking much, sergeant," the commissaris said softly. "I might be upset about its unlawful procedure and I might be thrilled because it seems that we are mixed up in a fairy tale. And there may be some truth in what Dorin has told us. Maybe organized crime should be wiped out by trained warriors, although it would seem to me that too much power will be held by the men directing the warriors. What do you think yourself?"

"I am afraid I don't care much either way, sir," de Gier said, shifting his head so that he could see the vague outline of the commissaris' body. The blanket had slipped and a streetlight's ray lit up the commissaris' knee, a white circle in the dark room. "But then I haven't cared much about anything since I shot my cat. I feel very light and nothing touches me. Almost nothing. If I think about today I see a haze. All I really saw today were some ferns, waving in the breeze, I could see the lake's waves through them. And the daimyo's eyebrows."

"The daimyo," the commissaris said. "He hasn't got much chance of living through the week, not with that bunch of cutthroats camped near their helicopters."

"Jin-gi," de Gier said. "Friendship. I didn't ask Dorin about it, but the innkeeper explained it to me a little. He drew the two characters for me. The first stands for Two Men, and the second has to do with justice. Two men relating to each other and together they form something superior."

"Very nice," the commissaris said. "Very praiseworthy. But the result is perverted. As you said just now, young men are staring at their shoes for hours on end, in the gutters of the big cities. But if the yakusa didn't deal in drugs I would be tempted to drop a warning to the castle in the Rokko Mountains."

"It would cancel the party," de Gier said. "Good night, sir."

"Yes," the commissaris said, "and I am looking forward to that party. Good night, sergeant." But a few minutes later he was up again and de Gier stirred and reached for his gun.

"Anything wrong, sir?"

"No," the commissaris said brightly, "only that I can't find my slippers. I forgot all about the ambassador. I have to phone him from time to time, you know, and report. I am sure he is getting all upset about our fate."

"Yes," de Gier said. "How was it again, sir? Our mission here, I mean. The whole thing is beyond me sometimes."

The commissaris was sitting on the floor, struggling with his right slipper. "Easy," he said. "Don't you remember? In the year sixteen hundred and something the Japanese government granted us the right to live on a very small island just off the coast of Nagasaki, a port in the South."

"Us?" de Gier asked.

"Us. The Dutch. Merchants. We were allowed to buy things from them and they learned things from us. Medicine and how to make guns."

"Yes," de Gier said sleepily, "so the one favor equals the other, but I seem to remember that we ought to be grateful for something and that we are repaying a favor, us, I mean, you and I, running about like dumb rabbits so that the yakusa can shoot at us."

"Yes, that part was never clear to me either. The ambassador seemed very clear however. We are repaying a favor. The Japanese government is upset about their art being stolen and exported to the West and we are here to pose as buyers, to draw out the yakusa so that they can be arrested and tried in court. Maybe the ambassador was impressed by the point that only
we,
the Dutch, were allowed to trade with the Japanese."

"In the year sixteen hundred something," de Gier said.

"And during the three hundred and something years following that year. And apparently they kept us in food and wine and women when the French conquered Holland. Maybe that was the favor."

"You aren't really going for that sort of stuff, are you, sir?" de Gier asked, and sat up. The commissaris had finally managed to get his slippers on and was standing in the open door.

"It's a free trip to a foreign country, isn't it?" the commissaris asked, and smiled pleasantly.

"Maybe a free trip to death."

"To die is to travel," the commissaris said. "It should be the most interesting journey of all the journeys a man can make."

The sliding door closed and de Gier could hear the old man's slippers rustling down the stairs. He grinned and lay back, trying to stay awake. He was still awake when the commissaris came back half an hour later.

"That was a long telephone call, sir."

"The ambassador was a little slow tonight," the commissaris said, and rubbed his hands, "but he did manage to understand me in the end."

\\\\\ 27 /////

"B
ANZAI" THE FIVE MUSICIANS SHOUTED, AND JUMPED from their seats. The commissaris, Dorin and de Gier stopped and bowed, three small and somewhat lost looking figures in the castle's hall, a hall four stories high and a hundred feet square. The commissaris seemed shy, Dorin was angry, but the sergeant felt as if he might take off for the sky. He looked at the two long rows of yakusa, each lining an entire wall, and at the small reception committee at the end of the hall, the daimyo and Kono, and kept on walking toward the two men. He was no longer aware that the commissaris and Dorin were walking with him; he felt supremely alone. I am a gaijin, he thought. I am a foreigner, all on my own. The conclusion was pleasurable and he grinned and the grin became part of the BANZAI shout from the stage. De Gier waved at the musicians, and the trumpeter gave a short blast in reply while the pianist struck a chord, making it change into the opening theme of "St. Louis Blues." De Gier went on walking and the daimyo and Kono moved forward. The sergeant's awareness of utter freedom was still growing. He hunched his shoulders and spread his arms and began to bounce with the bubbling rhythm, now strengthened by the saxophone supporting the trumpet's blasts, wheezing an octave lower, and the throb of the suddenly released double bass. The drums had burst free at the same time and a wild cacophony of trembling bangs mixed with the clashing cymbals.

The yakusa had been watching the sergeant jump, and a roar of approval filled the hall, finding its center in the daimyo, who, grinning widely and with arms outspread in an all-embracing gesture of welcome, was skipping along, trailing Kono with him and beginning to form a circle around his guests. The yakusa had left their walls and joined the circle, moving slowly at first, but increasing their speed as the volume of the blues grew. The commissaris, dumfounded, looked about him, but felt engulfed in the glow of energy which had so suddenly erupted and which also seemed to come from himself, for he felt a distinct trembling at the lowest point of his spine. A surge of energy rose along his back and flowed into his head and beyond and made him dance too, an old man's dance, involving a minimum of action but moving his feet and his shoulders. All around him he saw the brownish orange faces of the yakusa, each split by a white smile, and he grinned back. Very nice, he thought, and touched Dorin, smiling invitingly.

"What?" Dorin asked.

"Party!" the commissaris said. "Nice! Let's join them!"

Dorin seemed to wake from his stupor and lifted a leg, like a ballet dancer who intends to cross the entire stage in one leap, and the yakusa roared again.

The three men had become the center of a flowing moving circle and looked like three delicate animated toys. De Gier in his light blue denim suit and white silk scarf and Dorin in a beautifully tailored linen suit formed suitable ornaments for the commissaris in his shantung jacket and narrow trousers and a gray necktie fastened with a pearl. The yakusa, all in dark neat suits, white shirts and black ties, were the frame that contained the moving picture.

The blues tumbled on, repeating the theme in straight simple piano notes, but continuously improvising in trumpet and bass solos. The daimyo had unbuttoned his jacket and was flapping its tails so that he looked like a powerful bat, followed by a swarm of its blood-thirsty fellows. De Gier no longer moved about, but stood, trembling almost imperceptibly, his shoulders stretched, caressing the air with slow sensual gestures. The commissaris, lost in a vision from his early youth, saw himself as a toddler, playing in his grandfather's garden. Dorin, temporarily released from his anger, seemed to be playing basketball, making the ball veer against his flat hands. The daimyo shouted, a single word, "
Jin-Gi,
" that hung in the hall for a moment. The musicians broke off, then started to play again after a short silence, changing the feeling of the hall but without interfering with the all-pervading togetherness. The guests, shaken suddenly, saw a second circle form around them. Slender Japanese girls clad in kimonos were tripping around their now loutish-looking menfolk and waving their decorated paper fans. It was the sergeant's turn to roar. He had seen the apparition leading the butterflies: a tall black woman, towering with her Afro-style hair, but also slender and graceful, striding through the hall with catlike skidding movements on impossibly long legs ending in thin ankles and high-arched feet. Each step of her stretched legs was a carefully slowed leap so that the mini-beings could keep up with her. The woman was dressed in a white ski suit; the tight-fitting jacket reached down to her buttocks which bulged and flexed every time she leaped.

The drummer, touched by de Gier's roar, had bent down over his drums, tapping and ruffling so that he could control the sliding and shaking procession, and the trumpet shared his elation and blew round full notes at the hall's roof and the blackened hand-hewn beams that supported it.

The yakusa had stopped their bat imitations and were following Dorm's basketball technique, hitting their air-balls to and fro. The daimyo hummed, a short song consisting of three notes with a pause for the fourth beat, and the yakusa sang with him, but softly so that his voice carried their happy grunts.

The drummer could no longer hold the feeling of the hall and his sticks hung above the drums. The daimyo lifted a hand and the music broke.

"Welcome," the daimyo roared. "Drink for guests and drink for us!" The commissaris, stopped halfway in a graceful turn, blinked and his brain began to function again. He was wondering how far the daimyo had foreseen this happening. How could he have known that the sergeant would react so spontaneously? And hadn't de Gier, for the time being anyway, reached a state of mind that could no longer be manipulated?

The daimyo faced the commissaris and smiled and bowed.

"You like?" the daimyo asked.

"Oh yes," the commissaris said. "Very."

"Indeed," the daimyo said, and gestured at a waiter, one of the three Chinese bartenders from the Golden Dragon in Kyoto. The waiter, his skull gleaming in the soft light of the many paper lanterns hung all through the hall, shook his head so that his queue bobbed and flashed, and then made it turn, and stood under a silver disk a yard in diameter. He offered the commissaris a drink from his tray.

"A whisky, sir?"

"Surely," the commissaris said, and was conscious, while he drank, of the fact that he had danced and shouted and sung without even the excuse that the alcohol in his blood had reached a certain percentage. He had simply done as the daimyo had expected him to do, just like the time he had run and panted in the temple garden. But did it matter now? He didn't think it did. The whisky glowed in his throat while he looked into the kindly peering, bulging eyes of the daimyo.

"You like?" the daimyo asked again.

"Yes," the commissaris said. "I like."

The interval didn't last long. The bartenders brought a large red lacquered screen on which an orange dragon blazed, its fiery tongue and cruel head on the first panel, the twisting scaly body on the second and the swishing armored tail on the third. The bar disappeared behind the screen and hosts and guests looked for a place to lose their empty glasses, but the bartenders ran about, picking up the glasses and balancing their large round trays. The trumpet blew a long straight note, a resounding blast that stopped and started again on the same level, but broke with a sob and lowered away in a lamenting groan. Bass and percussion caught the almost dying note and revived it in a Thelonious Monk composition, gurgling and beeping and finishing each line in breaking glasslike sounds of the utmost right of the piano's keyboard. The commissaris grinned at the weirdly comical music but felt himself again swept up in the current that had, just now, taken him to higher regions. He thought, for a very short moment, of the possibility of restraining himself, for the sake of Dutch sense and good behavior, but resisted the temptation. The daimyo was going well and should be encouraged. And why shouldn't he, the commissaris, float on the thought power of another? He ambled to the stage and sat down next to the daimyo, and Yuiko came trotting along obediently, ready to translate.

"My court musicians," the daimyo said, "have made our nightclubs famous. I like jazz, I discovered the music in America, I often go to America. I discovered Miss Ahboombah too, one of the best dancers of New York and too expensive, I suppose, to be signed up here but I did it all the same, for a year. It turned out to be a good idea. Our clubs in Kobe and Osaka haven't had an empty chair since she began dancing there, and the clients often book weeks in advance."