Quin’s Shanghai Circus

The Impostor

The suspicious illness and subsequent investigation of a corporal serving in Mukden suggest that an espionage network with astonishing capabilities is operating within the Empire.

The net has access to such important material it must include a member of the General Staff, in addition to whatever foreigners are involved.

The corporal died while undergoing questioning. Just before death, however, he revealed two unrelated facts.

1. The code name of the net is Gobi (the barbarian name for the .great desert in western China).

2. The unknown disease from which he was suffering is called, phonetically, Lam-ah-row’s Lumbago.

—From a secret report submitted in the autumn of 1937 to Baron Kikuchi, Japanese General in charge of intelligence activities in Manchuria.

The report was said to have been seen in the archives of the Imperial Japanese Army immediately after the surrender in 1945. But it never reached Allied intelligence officers, having been either lost or destroyed in the first days of the Occupation.

Some twenty years after the end of the war with Japan a freighter arrived in Brooklyn with the largest collection of Japanese pornography ever assembled in a Western tongue. The owner of the collection, a huge, smiling fat man named Geraty, presented a passport to customs that showed he was a native-born American about as old as the century, an exile who had left the United States nearly four decades before.

The collection contained all the pornographic works written in Japan during the last three hundred and fifty years, or since the time when Japan first closed itself to the West. More important, it included rare manuscripts from several thirteenth-century Buddhist monasteries.

According to Geraty, the very existence of these manuscripts had never been suspected. The tales they told began harmlessly, but before the scholar reached the end of the second page he was confronted with astonishingly obscure practices, and by the beginning of the third page he was totally immersed in devices and dreams and masks, all serving the wildest sort of inversions.

The manuscripts were illustrated with ink drawings exquisitely detailed to show every hair. Even the cat hairs could be counted, where cats appeared.

For the officials at the Brooklyn customs house the sudden appearance of Geraty’s collection was an uncommon event. Although they frequently handled questionable materials, never in anyone’s memory had the pornography to be examined been of such vast scope.

Thus a second official immediately applied himself to the case, and a third soon joined the second. In fact by the end of Geraty’s first day in New York there were no less than eight customs officials of differing ranks and seniority, representing a reliable spectrum of American ethnic and racial and cultural backgrounds, lined up behind a row of desks at one end of the spacious customs warehouse in Brooklyn, solemnly listening to Geraty deliver a lecture on the secret merits of his collection.

He noted at random, for example, in order to emphasize the artistry of the drawings, the patina that had been worked into the leather phalluses and the grain that showed in the spiraled ivory finger pieces. Because of these touches, he claimed, a specialist could easily tell whether the leather was cow or pig or whether the ivory was from north or south India.

The women depicted in the illustrations were as numerous as the men, but they were always shown with their own kind. There was no mixing of the sexes.

After pointing out the value of the manuscripts in the fields of animal husbandry, trade, and sociology, Geraty went on to discuss their literary and historical merits.

The manuscripts were invariably told in the first person. Therefore they were source material for modern Japanese fiction, which was also confessional.

The century under study, the thirteenth, was an era of national upheaval in Japan, an age of revolution led by innumerable orders of fanatical monks. Therefore the manuscripts were a record of the unknown thoughts of these warring monks at a time when Zen and the game of Go, the tea ceremony, rock gardens, and No plays and so many other unique Japanese arts, notorious for their refinement and austerity, first became revered throughout the islands.

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 ether way, said Quin.

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

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?

A Japanese blend. By far the most effective.

For what?

For the thirty years I’ve used it which is little enough in the game the Almighty plays. He looks for longer scores and every point is as hard as a dragon’s hemorrhoids. I know what I’m talking about, nephew, I’ve spent most of my life there.

Where?

The other side, the dark side, our own foreign shore. A place so different, saints preserve us, it’s whatever you want it to be. Where are the dice? It’s time to drink to what we were and are becoming.

Money?

The fat man grumbled and put his eight single dollar bills on the bar. Quin nodded. No one in Geraty’s had ever been able to beat him at liar’s dice. The fat man rolled and passed the cup. On Quin’s second roll the fat man called him.

You win, buffalo. Where did you say that place was?

Where? The old Tokyo and the old Shanghai, cities that don’t exist anymore. Cities where people went around in disguises passing themselves off as emperors and Buddhas and dwarfs and precision masturbators. So afraid, some of them, they hid in unlocked cages waiting for the hinges to rust. The Orient, that’s where. This is the first time I’ve been back here in forty years. I’ve been to Massachusetts and I’ve seen the Bronx and now I’m leaving.

I spent a year in Massachusetts, said Quin.

Doing what?

Time.

What kind of time?

Mailboxes.

An unworthy cause, nephew. Your mother wouldn’t have liked that.

Never knew her.

Your father wouldn’t have liked it either.

Never knew him.

I know, muttered the fat man.

What do you know?

The fat man’s face suddenly darkened. The scars and pits opened as he fumbled for his gin glass. He emptied the glass and his eyes receded, the hat settled back on his head. He pointed at the cup of dice.

Roll. We need a drink.

Quin lost. The fat man massaged his enormous belly and licked the new glass of gin with a long yellow tongue. Quin’s question had turned him into a huge jungle beast crouching beside a path.

What I know is that over there, before the war, everybody was plotting. One day a hundred conspiracies, the next day a hundred new ones. Agents everywhere and all of them changing sides yesterday or tomorrow. From what to what? Why? International networks spent millions of dollars while others were so clandestine they consisted of only one individual, existed in only one man’s head. His private fantasy? No. The Almighty had dumped His creatures in a secret bag and put the bag on His back and was dancing over the earth. The thirties, nephew, the Orient. This overcoat I’m wearing belonged to a sergeant who murdered the general responsible for the rape of Nanking. An overcoat? For He hath put down the mighty from their seat. Or the beach just south of Tokyo where four people once sat down to a picnic that only one of them ate. Why? Because the other three were wearing gas masks. The beach was near the estate owned by Baron Kikuchi, the most feared man in the Japanese secret police, and at the end of the afternoon those picnickers had arrived at a decision that kept the Germans from capturing Moscow ten years later. A picnic? Impossible? For He that is mighty hath done great things to me. Let’s have another game.

The fat man scratched his gallbladder with the dice. Once more Quin lost and had to pay for the drinks.

I knew them, the fat man announced abruptly.

Who?

Your parents. Over there of course, before you were born. Your father had a limp, shrapnel in his leg, some kind of hero in the First World War. Left New York in the early 1920s, worked his way to Paris, ended up in Asia. Where? Shanghai? Tokyo? A postcard to your aunt once in a while, the last news from south China in the late 1920s. Canton? In any case nothing after that for eight years. Eight years? Not until 1935 when a missionary couple brought a baby to your aunt. War was coming, China was unsafe. The Quins were to follow in a few months but of course they never did, of course they were never heard from again. Eight years without any news? In those days, out there, a long time.

Quin’s glass was in the air. He stared at the fat man.

Or rather I should say I knew of them. About them. We were in the same places but at different times. A friend mentioned that to me. He knew them.

What else did he mention? said Quin, having just heard repeated everything his aunt had ever been able to tell him about his father after he disappeared from New York. About his mother she could tell him nothing, not even having been aware that her younger brother had married. The missionary couple had only been able to add that the woman who came to their ship in Shanghai asking for help was an American about thirty years old, that her papers were genuine and proved both her own and the baby’s identity.

The fat man scratched his liver.

What else. What else? Nothing else. He’s still alive though, that friend, his name is Father Lamereaux. Lived in Tokyo before the war and still lives there although he never sees anyone, no one at all except a dead cat. Rather a strange man. Too bad you can’t write to him but he never touches mail, something to do with a vow he made during the war. A vow? Of course if you were to talk to him that would be different.

Talk to him?

Not that expensive by freighter, nephew, and once you get there you’ll be able to taste the finest horseradish in the world. The finest and the best.

The fat man groped behind his back trying to find a kidney to scratch. Quin nodded to himself.

Buffalo. What did you say your name was?

Didn’t say. Right? It’s the same as that wooden sign in the window.

What? Geraty?

When addressing St. Edward the Confessor I use none other.

All right, Geraty, that’s just fine. Now tell me how you knew who I was when you walked in here. And better than that, tell me why you walked in here in the first place.

Geraty’s head rolled sideways. He seemed exhausted by the weight he was carrying in flesh and memories. He licked his gin and began reciting in a monotonous voice.

He said Father Lamereaux must have also mentioned the neighborhood in the Bronx where the aunt lived. Tonight he was in the same neighborhood visiting friends.

Who? said Quin.

Geraty ignored the question. He left his friends and passed a bar with his name on it. That intrigued him so he stopped in for a drink. Someone used Quin’s name and when he heard it, he didn’t know why, Father Lamer-eaux’s long-ago story came back to him. The recollection made him wonder. The neighborhoods were the same, his own name was on the bar, thirty years had passed.

A coincidence?

Or perhaps thirty years didn’t matter. He was curious and decided to find out. He picked Quin’s pocket to see how he spelled his name, to see if the two Quins were the same.

Quin nodded. The tale was so outrageous and told so matter-of-factly he might have believed it if Geraty had left out the pickpocketing episode. But with the exception of opening and closing his horseradish jar, Geraty seemed too clumsy to do anything covertly.

Quin watched the giant sink closer to the counter.

Come to think of it, nephew, the old man’s become such a recluse he might not want to talk to you even if you did go to see him. He wasn’t just another priest, Lamereaux, he was quite a rake in his time. He might not want to recall that era at all, I mean not at all. Still there could be a way.

Quin waited, expecting there would turn out to be a way.

Yes, just possibly. Do you know whose feast day you are honoring this evening with your beer? By chance, that of St. Brigid, known for her miraculous powers and particularly for her charity. Charity I said, that may be the clue we’re looking for. It so happens that Father Lamereaux was the guardian of a boy, an orphan who was brought to America not long after you were. Father Lamereaux loved that boy dearly but he’s never been able to see him because the boy can’t make the crossing alone, he’s a little simple in the head, and Lamereaux’s lumbago is so bad he can’t make the crossing either. Lumbago. As I remember a lot of his friends had it before the war. Well it seems to me that if you took the boy with you for a visit the old hermit would be so delighted he’d tell you everything.

Geraty ordered another round. They rolled the dice, Quin lost. The giant’s bleary eyes roamed the bar completely out of focus.

Boy isn’t right, he’s only a few years younger than you are. I only call him that the way I’d call you a boy. Most of the time he’s just like anybody else only more so. More so, anybody. Now and then you have to tell him what to do but he’s obliging and friendly and kind, kinder than anyone you’ll ever meet, saints preserve us. I know because I’ve just been to see him.

In that case, buffalo, why aren’t you taking him to Japan?

Because it wouldn’t be for a visit, that’s why. My bowels haven’t moved since I left the East, haven’t and won’t until I get back where I belong and stay there. I came to this country to sell a magnificent set of documents on the sources of Japanese culture, my life’s work, intending to retire on the proceeds in some pine grove and what happens?

What?

The rich He hath sent empty away.

What happened to the collection?

What do you think happened to it in this hell of stupidity and violence? They confiscated it.

Why?

Pornography, hard-core pornography, no redeeming social value. Value? Manuscripts written by the monks who invented rock gardens and tea ceremony and made Zen famous and made No and Go famous and everything else anybody has ever heard of? No value in them? Does that make sense? Does it? Now does it?

Geraty was raving, yelling, waving his arms. He lost his balance and fell into the counter, his face coming to rest in a pool of spilled gin.

He was muttering to himself, Manchurian telephone numbers and Chinese addresses, the name of a bar in Mukden where he had gone to get drunk after buying a supply of films before the war, a description of Bubbling Well Road early one winter morning when he was on his way to a warehouse on the outskirts of Shanghai. He returned to Tokyo, still in the thirties, to make a train connection to a beach just south of the city. He changed buses three or four times in the international quarter of Shanghai before approaching the locked, shuttered room where he went nightly to set up his movie projector, to take off his clothes, to whisper silently to himself the words with which he secretly greeted the wealthy degenerates and drug addicts he was there to entertain, magnificat anima mea Dominum, my soul doth magnify the Lord. He sneaked through the black-market district of Mukden late in 1934, and again in 1935, noting discrepancies.

Smiling affably during the early months of the Occupation in Japan, having just stolen a secret intelligence report marked with the code name Gobi, he ordered drinks for everyone at his favorite Tokyo bar and shouted out yet again the verses from St. Luke that obsessed him.

He hiccuped. Someone was poking him in the ribs.

Wake up, buffalo. What’s the boy’s name and where do I find him?

Geraty blinked up from the bar. He sneezed, raising a spray.

You were born there and lived here, I was born here and lived there. See the difference? Don’t bother, there is none. The truth is I don’t know who you are or what you’re talking about. Nothing you’ve told me makes any sense, nothing I’ve heard in years makes any sense. The truth? The truth is that everything they said about my leprosy drugs before the war was a lie, but then and now and forever He hath scattered the proud in the conceit of their heart. Are you satisfied now? Is that what you wanted to hear?

The boy’s address, buffalo. And Lamereaux’s address in Tokyo. And yours.

Geraty emptied the gin glass into his mouth without taking his head off the bar. He scribbled the address of the orphanage in Massachusetts, an address in Tokyo, the name of a bar in Tokyo.

Everybody knows the place. They can tell you where to find me.

And the boy’s name?

An odd one, I’ve always thought so. Gobi’s his name. Gobi. The same as the desert in western China.

Gobi what?

Nothing. Big Gobi maybe. He seems to like that.

Geraty was struggling to gather up his arms and legs. His face was purple again, his head swollen. With a groan he lurched off the stool and pocketed his eight single dollar bills that had been left untouched on the bar. His hand rummaged inside his greatcoat and made the flickering motion under his nose. He sneezed, coughed once. Quin watched him heave himself out the door.

Quin ordered another beer and looked down at the three passports he had stolen from the giant’s pocket. He had taken them thinking the fat man would have to come back for them, but now he realized they were worthless, the props of a clown.

The nationalities were different, the names were different, the combinations of false eyeglasses and false beards and false moustaches were different in each of them. But there was no mistaking Geraty’s huge scarred face in the three disguises.

Three costumes. There might be dozens more. Dozens of hidden pockets in the greatcoat stuffed with forged papers. For the bowler and the greatcoat, the army boots from the Second World War, the layers of sweaters and the red flannel tied with string were the props of an impostor as well as a clown.

Quin nodded to himself. A giant, an impostor, a clown. Yet he knew things, and in the end Quin decided a few facts were reasonably certain.

For one, a recluse named Father Lamereaux must have known his father and mother.

For another, the priest wanted him to bring to Japan a retarded boy who was probably his bastard son.

And third and most intriguing of all, the best player of liar’s dice he had ever met bore the name, real or assumed, of the neighborhood bar where he had spent a good part of his life.