A Trickster in the Ashes Page 6

  The first thing to confront him when he arrived at the Yamauchis’ had been Ted Macpherson’s body lying faceup on a tarpaulin in the middle of the rug. Everyone had been gathered around it, babbling with excitement. Crispin’s entrance had silenced them. Yamauchi explained—unconvincingly—that they were worried about waking his wife. Even after Crispin relayed what he’d just heard from the maid Saami, that Mme. Yamauchi hadn’t yet returned from her evening calls, the Little Governor’s anxiety didn’t abate (nor did he seem to wonder what his wife was doing out so late). Twittering about “security,” he had his thugs remove the corpse to an unspecified place of disposal. After they returned, the drinking and smoking started. Crispin had never in one evening been pressed so often to partake. He suspected they wanted to dope him into forgetting what he’d seen. They succeeded, and also failed, in that the dazeflower in the air had a slowing-down effect on him, diluting the initial horror of having his fears proved right into a weary, frustrated desire to get things straight. Now, in the face of Yamauchi’s bewilderment, he pursued his reasoning with less conviction. “This nonsense about masked knifemen is just that—nonsense. The knifemen were here five minutes ago.”

  “You accuse our colleagues rashly,” Yamauchi protested. “Of course, he was your charge, as you say, so naturally, but really—”

  “Or else your boys met up with Minami’s earlier, and they all ganged up on him. Poor old Ted. Drunk as a dog. Gets out of the car for a piss and probably the last thing he sees is the moon. Bit of a waste of manpower, Devi, if I may be so bold as to criticize. Judging from how they described where they found him, he’d only got a mile or two down the road, so if they’d waited a bit, in all likelihood he’d have crashed the motorcar and killed himself without any help at all. That would have made a watertight story. I’m surprised they brought the Exupresu back instead of bashing it about a bit and leaving him in it.” He heard his voice continuing, flat, gray. “But I forgot, I was supposed to die, too, wasn’t I? And no matter what my reputation, my wife”—his throat constricted briefly—“among others, would have sworn that I’m neither a reckless driver, nor prone to partake at inappropriate moments. I apologize. The whole scenario was gorgeously thought out. Pity it didn’t fly.”

  He looked up at Yamauchi. The Little Governor was gripping his moustache with both thumbs and index fingers; his eyes were closed.

  “I don’t understand, Devi! A New Worlder! Why? I mean, what are the Americans going to say? At the very least I expect they’ll reconsider their plans for a consulate in Redeuiina. At the very least.”

  Yamauchi leaned forward. He appeared to have recovered command of himself. His gaze sought Crispin’s and didn’t waver. “It was never,” he said clearly, “meant for you to die.”

  Crispin let out a long breath.

  “You were meant to survive, as a witness.” Yamauchi’s hands rose, palms up. “You might have gotten a knock or two…but we would still be sitting here talking, as we are now. I anticipated this conversation. I do not underestimate you, dear boy. But had you not outwitted us”—the flicker of a smile—“you would have had different questions. You would not be asking Why? but What are we to do about him?”

  “Minami.”

  “Of course.”

  “I wasn’t supposed to know the pair of you are in cahoots.”

  “We are not, never have been, and never will be!” Yamauchi nearly shouted.

  Crispin suspected that he was telling the truth—not just because he seemed really offended, but because Crispin had known him for almost four years, worked for him for half of that time, and if anything could be taken as an absolute index of Yamauchi’s character, it was his ego. Despite Yamauchi’s pretenses to modesty, he was the greediest, proudest lizard alive, and he would no more have cooperated with Minami than a rat would have gone into partnership with a snail.

  Crispin’s instincts told him to leave it there. But skepticism impelled him to press: “Then how did you find out that Minami had targeted Macpherson?”

  “How does one find out anything in this city?”

  “Then why didn’t you just stop him? It would have been the easiest thing in the world to tell me to take a different route.”

  “Ah, that is the beauty of it!” Yamauchi’s eyes shone briefly. Then he said with a semblance of humility, “Very well, Crispin. Perhaps I should have warned you in as many words. Perhaps that would have been more honorable. I know you like these old-fashioned paradigms. But you would have been quite safe. You would have been signaled to stop by Minami’s men—as they in fact signaled Macpherson—and they would then have attacked you—as they in fact attacked Macpherson. We guessed, correctly, that no guns would be used because of the noise, which gave us time to ambush the ambush. The American did not fight back.” Yamauchi’s nose wrinkled with contempt.

  “He was too drunk,” Crispin said, defending Macpherson he knew not why.

  “But as you said, you do not partake unwisely. You would have fought back, and before you were overwhelmed, our friends”—he gestured to the pulled-together chairs where the thugs had sat smoking his bounty—“would have burst out of the hedges, as in fact they did, saving you; but unfortunately coming too late to save our foreign friend—as in fact they were too late. They would have told you they’d been tracking Minami’s men to see where they were going, so stealthy, so far out of the city, so late at night. You would have been indebted to them—”

  “And to you—”

  “—for life.”

  Crispin steepled his fingers. “I find it difficult to believe you staged—or even allowed—Macpherson’s murder just to make sure of me.”

  “You are so perceptive!” The fingers had crept up to twist the moustache again, and above them Crispin saw the telltale crinkles forming around Yamauchi’s eyes. “I hesitate as always to boast, dear boy. But I believe that Minami has laid himself open to the prettiest masterstroke in the history of the occupation.”

  Crispin felt suddenly exhausted. Behind Yamauchi, dawn dripped greasy and gray onto the carpet, through the cracks between the curtains. Most of the daze smoke had dispersed, and in this first intimation of day which was more powerful than the plethora of burning gas lamps, Crispin saw the flattened place on the carpet where Macpherson’s body had lain. Crispin had tried to roll the American over with his foot and discovered that he was vastly heavy, weighing five or six times as much as any air-marrow-boned Lamaroon. Crispin didn’t believe that he hadn’t fought back. Maybe some farmer would discover the carcasses of a city type or two stuffed under his hedge, grinning in rictus.

  “The essential thing, after all, is and has been for some time, our need to get this nuisance, this buzzing, stinging horsefly, this Minami, out of our way,” Yamauchi said with the self-confident grandiosity that only he could manage without the help of cocaine.

  While he explained his masterstroke, Crispin thought mostly of Yleini. He tried to keep from imagining her adultery in detail—there was no point in torturing himself—but when he fixed his eyes on Yamauchi’s face, affecting to listen to the governor’s involved scheme for provoking the Americans and the Japanese (heretofore the closest of friends) into mutual suspicion (whatever that had to do with Minami), all he could do was watch the Kirekuni’s mobile slice of a mouth move, and imagine it kissing her (all over her beloved body) soft soft…and that moustache, waxed as hard as twin nails, scraping her, hurting her…

  Yamauchi naked. A repulsive image. His mind recoiled, and he heard what the Little Governor was saying.

  “…they’re like demogorgons on choke chains: big, violent by nature, and easy to anger. The trick is angering them to one’s own advantage. When Minami is put on trial for the brutal murder of one of their citizens—that should do it, I think!” Yamauchi nodded several times, pleased with himself. “And when they dig him up by the roots and find the Japanese—aha, we shall feel the ground shift under our feet! We’ll show them that here in Lamaroon we are not afraid of punishing
wrongdoing as it ought to be punished. We’ll prove we share with them that moral probity they esteem so highly. Okimachi ought to promote me to Significance for it—for promoting internationalism, and for having the balls to repair the damage done here by Their Disciplinarians’ laxity. There has not been a court trial held here in Redeuiina for years; I have decided I cannot permit that any longer.”

  “I didn’t know there’d ever been a trial held here,” Crispin said.

  Soft, dark, honey, her kisses like pure distilled love. Even before they married, it had been the bond of the flesh that held them together; that had been the thread by which their marriage hung; but now he was losing sight even of what it had been like. His memories were irrevocably contaminated. At the bottom of the abyss waited Mr. Nakunatta, occasionally glancing at the sky and checking his pocket watch.

  Yamauchi nodded inattentively. “Back in the early days, after the Occupation, we used to hang several insurgents a day. But mostly Ferupians, and those were inexcusably sloppy trials. This one, by contrast, will be an indictment by means of incontrovertible proof with which not even the Americans, with their love of procedure, will be able to find fault.”

  Become quite the international-policy apologist, haven’t we? Crispin thought.

  “The Japanese will not dare to show any interest, for fear of showing their hand. The same goes for Okimachi. Their hands are tied by their very own laws. They may grind their teeth, but they will never dare to replace me. I am too valuable. They will just send me an older, less ambitious secretary of the interior, and in private, both they and the Americans will butter up the Japanese and hand them an official or two, gift-wrapped, to make up for their loss. The status quo will hold, my dear boy, never you fear. We are not provoking an incident, only making sure justice is done.” Yamauchi giggled in pure delight. “Our dear friend Tomichi, though he does not yet know it, is stuck on a specimen card with a pin through his middle.”

  The gaps between the curtains glowed as bright as the crackedopen doors of furnaces burning gray. “And I suppose when the time for the trial rolls around, I’m to be the star witness,” Crispin said.

  “I hate to ask, dear boy. But really, I am not asking. I am insisting. Without you—you who have the distinction of never having been employed by me, you who are a completely unbiased witness, a chauffeur hired for the American’s stay—” Yamauchi giggled again. “Without you we have no case.”

  “And after Minami is hanged?”

  “Ah. You anticipate an upshot for which I scarcely, as yet, dare to hope.” Yamauchi infused his expression with honest regret: eyes wide, lips quivering, forehead furrowed a little as if he could not comprehend why life had to be so hard on them all. Crispin knew that expression. He gripped the arms of his chair, whose red leather showed scars where people had knocked their pipes out. Pain tingled through his two numb fingers. The nerves were coming alive again. The brightness of the sunlight now finding its way into the parlor seemed an outrage, an offense against nature. He wanted a cigarette. In the QAF he’d smoked twenty-five a day without even thinking about it, because everyone knew that on the front lines tobacco was as essential as booze and comradeship to keeping your sanity and your nerve; he’d not given up the habit until he shipped on the Slow Express Oil Flower without a sentime in his pocket. The pangs of nicotine withdrawal had been almost as hellish as the pangs after he lost Indela Mishime Akele Favis Kendris Belamis the evil-spawned geniuses—so naturally, after he settled in Redeuiina, and Yamauchi filled his pockets with more cash than even Yleini could think of ways to spend, he’d tried to recapture the pleasure once delivered by a cigarette in solitude…only to find that something had immunized his body to even the mildest forms of palliation. The finest imported tobaccos, Sjintang paperweed, it made no difference. The craving fleeted by him like a whiff of scent and was gone.

  Yamauchi seized his left hand in both of his own. He raised it to his chest and pressed it there. Crispin stared, and forced himself not to pull away.

  “After the trial,” Yamauchi repeated, and swallowed, his pain visible. “Minami has friends. The Japanese would never interfere on his behalf, far less avenge him; but there are others, right here in Redeuiina, men and women both, whose love he has won. Bought is probably more accurate, but in any case. They have not the power of the American government; they are not the sort of people, in fart, who have any real power at all; but they do have their hands, and their own friends, and quite a few of them have guns…and unfortunately, when it comes down to it, that is the sort of ‘power,’ if you want to call it such, which we are least able to negate. Against which I am least able to protect you.”

  “Get to the point,” Crispin snapped.

  Yamauchi clasped Crispin’s hand passionately, his eyes overflowing. “For your own good, my dear, dear boy, I think it will be best for you to go away for a while.”

  Folk burnt out need a vacation,

  Kind court alleviates people’s vexation;

  Throw out the flattering fakes,

  scare blighters and crushers,

  Don’t ruin folk pretending it’s government,

  tho’ you’re mere babes in this business

  and the job bigger than you can guess.

  —Confucius, tr. Ezra Pound

  To the Letter

  21 Devambar 1899 A.D.

  The Significant Empire of Kirekune: Swirling

  “Nizhny,” Ashie said as if the word had thorns. “Nizhny. For all our sakes, Yoshi, please scour every last trace of that stuff out of Achino-uchi. Give her laudanum instead. All the most fashionable ladies are taking it, it’s a cure-all; tell her that. If it’s the ritual of smoking she finds addictive, I have a man who can get her the best opium from China. The other advantage of morphia is that, unlike nizhny”—her nose wrinkled—“it will keep her quiet. Isn’t that what you want?”

  Mickey lit a cigarette with his tail and shifted on the wooden bench, resting his left elbow on his knee, the stump of his right arm dangling. “Don’t you understand?” he said to the smelly coal fire in the hearth. “I don’t procure for her. She buys her nizhny herself, in secret, and I’ve had her followed, I’ve searched her room, I’ve taken away her pocket money, I’ve done everything I can think of, but it’s no good. She’s a grown woman.”

  Ashie said, “Darling. I hate to remind you, but you’ve no one to blame except yourself.”

  “Don’t remind me.” He rubbed his eyes with the tip of his tail. It was seven in the morning, the earliest (Ashie said) she’d been able to get away from her ongoing private party, where Swirling’s ugliest and richest rubbed shoulders in a medley of new money, old jewelry, and conspicuous sidearms. Any irritation Mickey had felt when she didn’t receive him immediately had long since vanished. He could scarcely keep his eyes open. Ashie, on the other hand, seemed as fizzy as a freshly mixed cocktail. She wouldn’t let him leave until, as she put it, they’d “decided what to do” about Fumie. She didn’t seem to understand there was nothing to decide or even to discuss.

  She curled in an armchair with its springs sticking out the bottom, her dress arranged over her feet, her pale skin burnished gold in the firelight. The parlor was as dingy as the rest of Achino-nichi: given a free hand and a minimal budget, Mickey would have ripped out the hard benches circling the fireplace, the motley assortment of armchairs, the stained carpet, the pornographic wall hangings—everything except the window—and started over. Yet amid this shabbiness Ashie, like those of her whores Mickey had seen, looked as desirable as a flower growing on a garbage heap. Her smooth skin, oak brown chignon, and carmine lips glistened. When they lived at home, long ago, she’d accepted the role of middle sister, making no effort to match Fumie’s capability or Zouy’s exuberance. Now she was dazzling. She’d filled Achino-nichi, itself an organism rather than an edifice, sprawling through five or six town houses on Swirling’s grimy Yellowside, with prefabricated mange, slovenly servants, and the most beautiful geishas Mickey had ever seen.
This made for stunning contrasts, but it wasn’t just a gimmick; it was an expression of beliefs he wasn’t sure she herself understood properly. She’d become convinced that prostitutes were such low-class professionals they could appropriately ply their trade only in settings as tawdry as the cheapest streetwalker’s rented room. She was inordinately proud of the fact that her establishment had gone to seed five minutes after its grand opening. More than once, he’d heard her explaining that the only valid brothel aesthetic was archetypal decrepitude, the knife edge between “going slumming” and the slums.

  She despised the luxuries with which Mickey had furnished his brand-new premises. He’d gambled that lavish spending on his part would encourage the same spirit in his clients, and so it had, until Greater Significance stepped in. But it had also been a self-compensation for all the years of danger and privation—a way of reclaiming his pride. Ashie had taken a different route.

  Mickey wondered suddenly if the scrupulously contrived illusion of poverty with which she’d surrounded herself was in fact her revenge: the self-indulgence of a frustrated narcissist.

  But that was doing her an injustice. She’d found a way to blend work and leisure that suited her perfectly, and Mickey could only envy her for it. This wasn’t a genteel “all among friends” enterprise, where you pocketed your fees quietly at a later date, for the very fact of requiring them was something of an embarrassment. This was an entertainment emporium catering to a spectrum of Swirling men—and women, for in addition to one-on-one services, Ashie offered food, drink, and entertainment in the restaurant on Main Street that was the public face of her enterprise. Every night she held court at a corner table, collecting friends, strangers, and “characters” to add spice to her private parties. She never tired of socializing. Achino-nichi wasn’t a House of Ecstasy at all but a way of life, one woman’s statement of independence rendered a Swirling phenomenon by the Achino instinct for turning pleasure to profit.