Quin’s Shanghai Circus

Big Gobi

Jade, Quin. Geraty brought it all the way from Japan. It comes from palaces where princesses live. And there are dragons there and people who speak a funny language no one can understand.

But they’ll probably understand me sometimes because I look a little like them. Geraty said so.

There was only one other passenger on the Japanese freighter sailing from Brooklyn, a solitary young student who had just completed two years of graduate work in New York. The student was plump and carelessly dressed. His straight black hair, parted in the middle, hung down to his shoulders. He also wore false sideburns and a false moustache, being unable to grow them himself.

The student’s name was Hato. Quin and Big Gobi talked with him only once during the Pacific crossing, on the evening the ship sailed when he invited them to his cabin to share a bottle of beer before dinner. The lower berth in Hato’s cabin, the only one made up for use, was strewn with a thick layer of well-handled movie magazines pressed down as if someone had been lying on them. The magazines dated from the 1930s and were stamped with the name of a student film society from which Hato had evidently stolen them.

There was also an amazing array of shoeboxes in the room, neatly piled and arranged, some of the stacks reaching as high as the porthole. The shoeboxes were numbered and marked with Japanese characters. When Quin asked about them the nervous student broke into a short but violent diatribe on the cruelty of Americans to foreigners. He refused to discuss the shoeboxes and a few minutes later they left the cabin in silence, Hato choosing to sit with the Japanese officers rather than with his fellow passengers.

During the next few days Hato spent all his time in the lounge coaxing one or another of the off-duty officers into a game of checkers. On the third day he was caught cheating at checkers, and thereafter no one would play with him. Hato took to his cabin and locked the door, staying there the rest of the voyage. He had his meals brought to him and visited the bathroom only after midnight.

A few months after the freighter docked in Japan, Quin was to spend a long night in the company of Hato. And although Hato subsequently strangled himself while playing a drum in an apartment rented by Quin, having first caused a murder that led to the largest funeral celebration in Asia since the thirteenth century, an anonymous event in which only Quin and three or four other people knew the true identity of the deceased, he was never to connect the strangled Tokyo gangster with the retiring student who had guarded the secret of his shoeboxes across the Pacific. For as soon as Hato set foot in his homeland he abandoned his hairpieces and shaved his head, put on an immaculate dark business suit, and stopped speaking English.

In addition he quickly lost a great leal of weight due to the calisthenics forced on him by nis new employer, the cigar-smoking poet who staged the magnificent funeral and saw to it that most of Tokyo’s twelve million inhabitants spent an entire day watching the black procession circle the city.

As soon as the ship was out of sight of land Big Gobi sat down on the deck beside Quin’s chair and admired the green glass paperweight that had been stolen from the desk of a customs official in New York. Gently he turned the paperweight over and over and held it up to the sky.

Jade, Quin. Geraty brought it all the way from Japan. It comes from palaces where princesses live. And there are dragons there and people speak a funny language no one can understand. But they’ll probably understand me sometimes because I look a little like them. Geraty said so.

Big Gobi smiled shyly. He placed the paperweight carefully on the deck and with a deep breath touched the small gold cross that was hanging from his neck. Along with the paperweight it was Big Gobi’s most treasured possession. As far as Quin knew these two objects, given him by Geraty, were the only belongings Big Gobi had wanted to take with him when he left the orphanage.

The paperweight was a personal gift from Geraty. The small gold cross was supposedly a gift from Father Lamereaux that Geraty had been asked to deliver. The cross had unusual markings on it. To Big Gobi it was no more important than the paperweight, but Quin had been curious enough to ask one of the priests at the orphanage about it.

I suspect it’s very valuable, the priest had said. The markings may be an ancient form of Syrian which means it could be a Nestorian cross. If it’s genuine it could go back very far indeed, a thousand years or more, perhaps as much as fifteen hundred years. If you ever have a chance, I suggest you ask the former owner.

I intend to, said Quin. By the way, Father, what can you tell me about Father Lamereaux?

Nothing, answered the priest. He was apparently known by one of the fathers here before he went to Japan, but that was fifty years ago, long before my time. I suppose Father Lamereaux contacted his former acquaintance here when he was, trying to find a place for his orphan just before the war.

And by reputation?

Nothing. Nothing whatsoever except that old story they tell in seminaries about him and Aquinas.

What’s that?

Well it seems that when Father Lamereaux first began studying Aquinas, he memorized the entire Summa theologica. They asked him why and his answer was that the thirteenth century seemed crucial to him in the history of the church. Something of an eccentric, I’d say.

The priest smiled. Quin thanked him and said good-bye.

He had learned a little about Father Lamereaux, less about the small gold cross that in fact was not a gift from Father Lamereaux, who had never seen it although he knew every step of the strange journey that had brought it across central Asia. Yet the small gold cross would turn out to be vital nonetheless, for as Quin eventually discovered, it had belonged at one time or another not only to his mother and Big Gobi’s mother but to the two men who had played the most significant roles in his father’s life, the one his chief collaborator, the other the Russian linguist who had assembled the vast collection of pornography that Geraty tried unsuccessfully to pass off as his own in the customs house in New York. The ancient Nestorian relic, then, had a long history prior to its arrival in Shanghai during the 1927 Communist uprising, there to entwine the lives of many people before Geraty finally intervened one night, ten years later, to steal it from a drugged woman who came to him with a confession.

Quin was leaning back in his chair, his eyes closed, when Big Gobi suddenly exploded beside him. A lump of seagull droppings had landed in his lap. He was shrieking and beating the deck.

Fuck suck kill, he screamed. Shit cunt triple sea cocksucker.

Quin grabbed him by the arm.

Easy, Gobes, remember the cross. It was a present to you. Remember the cross and think about that and forget the other things.

Big Gobi moaned. He lowered his eyes and wiped his hand with the seagull droppings on the back of his shirt. He was glad Quin was holding him by the shoulder because that meant that Quin liked him. Quin liked him and he wanted to do what Quin said, so he kept his head down and he stared at the cross, he didn’t look at the sea. But his anger was still so great that one of his hands, the one soiled by the seagull droppings, crept across the deck and took hold of a large metal fixture protruding from the bulkhead.

The hand squeezed, the flesh went white. The metal snapped, the fixture struck the deck. With one twist Big Gobi had ripped apart the thick metal fitting.

Quin watched the hand clutch the jagged edge where the fixture had been. He saw the fingers tighten once more, heard the flesh tear and the bones crack, watched the blood trickle down onto the deck.

He clamped his teeth together and pressed Big Gobi’s shoulder as hard as he could, pressed and waited, knowing nothing could be done because Big Gobi’s ageless childish brain was trying to save him from an even more impossible pain, trying to protect him from the overwhelming insults he had known in life by making him feel instead the shattering bones and muscles of his hand.

When they arrived in Tokyo Quin wrote to Father Lamereaux explaining who he was, who was with him, and why he had come to Japan. Then he went to the bar where Geraty had said he could be found.

Most of the men in the bar were foreigners, several of them long-term residents of the country. Geraty had not been seen there in over six months, not since before his trip to New York, but it seemed this sort of absence was not unusual for him. No one was aware that he had been out of the country. Over drinks Quin learned a good deal about both Geraty and Father Lamereaux.

At the beginning of the war, he was told, Father Lamereaux had been interned in a special prison camp, a former mountain resort where a few Western scholars and missionaries were sent, friends of Japan who were now enemies because of the color of their skin. It was there that the renegade priest had become a drunkard, a minor scandal compared to others he had known.

Before the war, in particular, he had been notorious for the ever-changing procession of young acolytes who followed him through the streets on Friday at sunset on the way to his Victorian house, there to be entertained by him far into the night.

The priest was either a Canadian or a Belgian. He had arrived in Tokyo so long ago no one was quite sure of his origins. When he first came to Japan he studied No plays and Buddhism, in the Jesuitical tradition, in order to be able to wrestle with his theological opponents. He took instruction for ten years in the Buddhist temples of Kama-kura, coming to accept the fact that Gothic steeples were unsuitable in a land of earthquakes, learning to bend his beliefs as bamboo bends, again perhaps in the Jesuitical tradition.

Soon after he went to Kamakura there were rumors that his love for nature and his appreciation of No had lured him into becoming a practicing Shintoist.

Later there were more serious rumors that he had deserted his church altogether and taken Buddhist orders of initiation.

Lastly there was his alleged crime of having collaborated with the enemy by informing on his fellow Westerners.

Throughout the period prior to the war, supposedly, he had submitted regular reports on foreigners in Tokyo to the Kempeitai or secret military police, Japan’s principal intelligence and counterespionage agency. The evidence against him, considered conclusive, had been gathered over the years by a number of Westerners familiar with the operating techniques of the Kempeitai.

The story began when Father Lamereaux was called in for an interview with the Kempeitai.

This in itself was not exceptional. At the time, most Westerners living in Japan were periodically questioned or put under surveillance by the Kempeitai. But when they were questioned it was generally under some other guise, the Kempeitai officer posing as a civilian in a government office where the foreigner went on routine business. Only in the case of a man who had many government contacts and traveled frequently in and out of the country, such as a journalist, might the interview be conducted by an officer in uniform for purposes of intimidation.

Father Lamereaux never left the country. He traveled no farther than Kamakura and had no government contacts whatsoever. Yet when he was called in by the Kempeitai the interview was conducted not only by an officer in uniform but by a general in uniform, and by no less a general than Baron Kikuchi, the hero of the 1905 Russo-Japanese War who was thought by many to be the most powerful man in the secret police.

Astonished by this, several journalists later asked Father Lamereaux in private to tell them what had happened. The Jesuit spoke directly and succinctly as was his manner, quoting the entire conversation verbatim.

Baron Kikuchi was a tiny man. Father Lamereaux was tall, and his gaunt figure gave him an appearance of even greater height. The General had therefore not gotten to his feet when Father Lamereaux entered the room. He stayed behind his massive desk and pointed to a chair. The chair was small and low so that it would be impossible for a guest to arrange himself comfortably. Father Lamereaux had not missed the fact that the desk was bare, the General’s way of saying he knew everything he wanted to know about the priest without consulting his dossier.

The General spoke curtly, using the verbs and pronouns that were only appropriate when a man was speaking to his wife, to a child or servant or animal. Father Lamereaux had three choices. He could accept the gross insult and answer as an inferior speaking to a superior. He could use the same forms of speech and return the insult. Or he could ignore the insult and speak as an equal to an equal.

He chose the last to show that he had nothing to hide and to prove that he was in complete command of his emotions no matter what the situation, an approach the General might find slightly humiliating after having adopted a superior pose. The strategem worked, for the General subsequently switched to Lamereaux’s idiom.

Sit down.

Thank you.

How long have you been in this country?

Over ten years.

What have you been doing?

Pursuing my Buddhist studies.

Where?

Kamakura.

Why?

In order to gather the skills necessary for my missionary task.

What makes you think you have a missionary task here?

God’s task is here and everywhere.

Does it include what happened at your house last Friday night?

There was a meeting for religious instruction.

And the Friday night before that?

Yes.

The Friday night six months ago?

Yes.

How does it include all those Friday nights?

Because the meetings for religious instruction are always held on Friday evenings.

Night I said, not evening. What do you do with these young boys after you have finished your religious instructions early in the evening?

Sometimes we have a discussion on some topic.

What?

Generally some aspect of No drama.

Does one or the other of you act out a part?

We may.

Why?

To illustrate a point we are trying to make.

Do you dress up?

We may.

Why?

Because No cannot be performed without the proper costumes.

Do you wear masks?

They are part of the costumes.

Do you dance?

In some No plays there are dances.

Do you wear the dragon costume?

If that is a scene we are illustrating.

Not we, you. Do you wear the dragon costume?

If that is a scene I am illustrating.

And who wears the princess costume?

Whoever is illustrating that part.

Always one of the boys?

Not necessarily.

All right, you and the princess are doing your dance. What are the other boys doing at that moment?

They play the part of the chorus and the musicians.

You mean they sit around the room and watch? They make comments? They hum and make some private music of their own?

They sing the verses of the chorus and play the instruments that accompany the drama.

Playing their instruments, are they?

The drum and the flute.

What happens after you finish dancing?

We have refreshments and they go home.

Always?

Yes.

But sometimes it is very late?

It may be.

Dawn?

If the No play is a long one.

A long one, hissed the General, leaning forward over the desk. He rested his chin in his hands and stared at Father Lamereaux.

You are an expert on No?

I have studied it.

You are one of the leading Western experts on No?

I may be.

Then you understand Japanese tradition and you know a Japanese warrior will not allow corruption in his country.

Religious instruction does not corrupt.

And what do you do with one boy while other boys watch?

No drama does not corrupt.

But you corrupt.

If there is anything corrupting Japan today it is the army. It is you and men like you.

Be careful, you know nothing about politics. You are not in this country to advise us on politics. If you were you would be expelled.

I know I love this country, and what you’re doing to it is detestable.

We are on good terms with the West. Of course we wish that to continue.

Yes.

So there is no question of a missionary being expelled.

No.

You may remain here as long as you have the sanction of your church.

Yes.

You are naturally free to carry on your religious work.

Yes.

Including religious instruction to young boys.

Yes.

Naturally in the privacy of your home as well.

Yes.

But I am concerned about the fathers of the boys who attend your Friday night meetings. Their sons may be enjoying themselves but their fathers may not be. Is it possible they’re in jobs that don’t suit them? Perhaps we should release them from their jobs so they can be free to pursue their interests, just as you are free to pursue yours. Of course it is difficult to find work today because of what Western capitalism has done to my country. The fathers might not be able to find other jobs, but then, they could always go into the army.

And be sent to China?

We will not allow the West to do to us what they have done to China. We will achieve the kind of strength the West appreciates, and at the same time we will save China with our strength. We are of the same race as the Chinese. We understand them whereas Westerners don’t.

How could they when they’re foreign devils?

You are knowledgeable in No, that means you know that devils exist. Evil exists. Do you know it?

I do.

I am sure you do. And would you deny that evil exists in the West? In Westerners? In yourself?

I would agree it moves in the wind although its domain is a minor one.

Good, you agree. Now what I would like you to consider is what Western avarice has done to China, which it will not be allowed to do to Japan. Or consider a more immediate problem, consider the difficulty of finding jobs in Japan because of the collapse of Western capitalism. Consider the fathers of the boys who attend your Friday night dances. You must care a great deal for those boys and you love our country, we know that. It would be unfortunate if these men could not find work and their families had to suffer as a result. Reflect upon this situation for a moment.

The General stared at Father Lamereaux and a completely unexpected interchange began.

The priest was still slumped uncomfortably in the small, low chair. The General was still seated behind his massive desk with his chin resting in his hands. Now the General leaned forward and closed his left eye as if to multiply the acuity of his other eye, to increase his vision by narrowing it. The one open eye, round and unfathomable, stared at Father Lamereaux without blinking.

A minute went by. Father Lamereaux didn’t move. He was staring back also without blinking.

Two minutes went by.

A full five minutes according to the ticks of the clock on the wall.

Father Lamereaux kept a large collection of cats in his house. Sometimes to amuse himself he practiced outstar-ing the cats. Early in life he had discovered he had an unusual talent for concentration, so acute he could perform extraordinary feats of memorization. He could shuffle rapidly through a pack of cards once, and repeat the exact location of every card in the deck. He could memorize a list of random three-digit numbers, up to one hundred of them, in the time it took someone to read them off. He could enter a reading room in a public library, walk once around the room at a normal pace, and immediately upon exit give the title and author of every volume in the room.

Later, when he found his vocation, this talent was made impregnable by the rigors of Jesuitical training. Nothing he had seen or heard was ever lost to him. A cat could stare at him for fifteen minutes or more but eventually it had to turn away, its dumb mind no match for the severity of his intellectual discipline.

Yet he met his match that morning in General Kikuchi’s office. He met his match and lost a contest of intellect and will for the first time in his life.

The break came after fifty-nine minutes of silent staring, fifty-nine minutes during which time neither man moved, neither man blinked. At the end of that agonizing period Father Lamereaux could no longer bear it. He knew he was beaten. As the clock struck the hour he blinked. He sighed and looked out the window.

All right, he said.

The General stirred. He opened his other eye.

What did you say?

I said all right. I’ll stop holding my Friday night meetings.

It seems the wise thing to do, said the General. One might call it the safer course of action considering who you really are and what you are really doing.

Is that all then?

Yes.

Father Lamereaux climbed out of the small, low chair.

Somehow he managed to do it gracefully, not giving the General the pleasure of seeing how stiff he was. He rose to his full height and glared down at the tiny man behind the desk.

You are inhuman, a worm, not a man but a devil. I answer to God for my actions, but you answer to the wind of evil that has captured your soul. I pity the despicable companions of your spirit. May this country be delivered someday from its demons.

You may go.

Thus ended Father Lamereaux’s account of the interview. The journalists who heard it knew he was not a man who would lie. They also knew General Kikuchi’s reputation for fierce, unwavering attention, but they still could not accept the story the way Father Lamereaux told it. Obviously a part had been left out.

After discussing it among themselves they concluded the General had probably threatened to send Father Lamereaux to jail for corrupting minors unless he agreed to serve the Kempeitai as an informer. That had been the cause of the contest of wills that resulted in a full hour of unblinking silence, the suggestion of a safer course, a contest Father Lamereaux had lost.

Further evidence of the priest’s traitorous role turned up almost at once. Instead of leading a gay procession of young boys through the streets on Friday evenings, he was now seen in obscure quarters of the city late at night, hovering in doorways. Once he was reported to have been observed sneaking over a cemetery wall at midnight. Another time he was observed sneaking out the back gate of a cemetery at three o’clock in the morning. On both occasions, as the automobile of the observer drew near, he disappeared so quickly it was as if he had evaporated in the night.

Such clandestine behavior was readily explainable. The priest was meeting his contact from the Kempeitai.

Early in the 1930s the Western community in Tokyo succeeded in isolating Father Lamereaux. No one would speak to him. If he appeared on the street or at a public gathering, all backs turned on him. New residents were warned to have nothing to do with him. The tall, gaunt Jesuit who had once been known for his gentle wit, his perceptions, his prodigious memory, his articulate and sympathetic discourses on the subtleties of Japanese culture, became a totally solitary figure, shunned, abandoned, despised.

When Japan went to war with the West he was interned with other scholars and missionaries in a prison camp in the mountains. But even then his former services to the Kempeitai were not forgotten, for at a time when the other prisoners were finding it difficult to eat, Father Lamereaux was getting drunk day after day, alone as always, on genuine Irish whiskey captured by the Japanese army at the British officers’ mess in Singapore.

No one who talked to Quin had anything good to say for Father Lamereaux. Those who had known him hated him, everyone else reviled him.

I’m only sorry, said one man, that he wasn’t around to face a court after the war. Or at least to face us.

After the war? said Quin.

Yes, he died a few days after Japan surrendered, I’m not sure how. One story has it that he came back to Tokyo and finally succumbed to acute alcoholism. Another was that he returned to Kamakura and went insane, committed suicide by throwing himself under a collapsing wall during a typhoon.

In any case he’s gone. A lost curiosity and an ugly one.

Geraty’s history, by contrast, seemed to begin where the Jesuit’s had ended.

Little was known of his life before the war other than that he lived in Tokyo claiming to be the representative of a Canadian firm that manufactured quack leprosy drugs. He was a gloomy man who kept to himself, he was uncommunicative and seldom spoke to Westerners. On the rare occasions when anyone saw him he was always alone. He never tried to peddle his drugs and had no apparent source of income. In fact, he never seemed to do much of anything.

One suggestion was that he had been a criminal wanted in the United States. Another possibility was that he had been smuggling contraband from Mukden to Shanghai, for that was the route he took when he left Tokyo in the 1930s. He appeared to have remained in Shanghai until the coming of the war, when he escaped from China to the Philippines. Trapped there by the Japanese invasion, he went into hiding in the mountains.

As soon as the Japanese surrendered he presented himself to the American forces as a legendary guerrilla figure who had been fighting alone in the mountains for years, an elaborate tale he told with such conviction he was awarded a decoration for valor and recommended for a colonel’s commission in the army reserve.

While waiting for his commission to be approved, Geraty talked himself into a flight to Japan on the basis of his knowledge of the language and his long experience both there and in China. He arrived back in Tokyo during the first days of the Occupation and was given a sensitive position doing preliminary research in the archives of the Imperial Army, more specifically the captured Kempeitai files on China.

Geraty was in the job only a month or two when a mysterious fire burned down an entire wing of the warehouse where the Kempeitai files were stored. The American authorities were immediately suspicious because of the absence of paper ashes in the ruins. Furthermore, a blind Japanese beggar who had been sleeping in a gutter near the warehouse reported that he had been awakened by a convoy of passing trucks on the night of the fire.

A few telephone calls revealed that although a number of military trucks were out on various errands at the time of the fire, no one had authorized a convoy anywhere in the Tokyo area.

This information coincided with a report on Geraty’s pending commission. A routine investigation in the Philippines had showed that the giant American was remembered in many mountain villages, but only for his outrageous indolence. Hundreds of peasants were ready to testify that he had done nothing during the war but steal their homemade beer and sleep. It was true he had taught their children to sing Onward Christian Soldiers and had urged them to march off and fight the Japanese, but he himself had never left the safety of the remote mountaintop church where his hammock was strung in a dark corner behind the altar.

Geraty was called in and shown the report, which he read without comment. The beggar was brought in to repeat his testimony. Geraty’s observation then was that the blind man was starving and therefore probably subject to hallucinations. To prove his point he gave the ravenous beggar a turnip and asked him how it tasted. The shaking old man replied that it had the bouquet of green tea, the flavor of new rice, and the delicate consistency of the finest raw tuna. Geraty patted the old man on the head, offered to buy him a sackful of turnips, and turned back to his accusers grinning broadly.

He was fired on the spot and told he would never be able to work for the American government again, an announcement he accepted with a guffaw and a gesture so insulting he was thrown out the door.

Thereafter he supported himself by conducting lurid after-hour entertainments for American officers and their wives. While stationed in the bar of one of the better Tokyo hotels he would allude to what he called the frightening sexual habits of the everyday man in kimono. Most of the Americans in the Occupation knew nothing about Japan and Geraty obviously knew a great deal. In the course of an evening, besides having his drinks paid for, he generally managed to talk himself into at least one private showing.

Beginning at midnight, he would say, because that’s when these demons come alive. These vices sprang up during the era of warring states when the capital was in Kyoto, saints preserve us, before the devils moved their foul activities to Kamakura. You’ve seen Kyoto? Then you know the dark alleys I’m talking about, the hidden passageways and trapdoors, the monasteries tucked away up in the hills where even the most hideous screams would go unheard. The boating parties were always set for midnight, and long before dawn, you can be sure, the tortured victims were bound and gagged and weighted and flung into the water so there would be no evidence of the fiendish pleasures witnessed only by the moon. Read the old chronicles, it’s all there and has been for a thousand years. There’s an awesome legacy, I tell you, behind the blank face and ingratiating manners of the everyday man in kimono. But possibly for a certain sum, if we went about it in the right way, a man and his drinking companion or even a man and his wife might be able to catch a glimpse of these lost lustful aberrations, these age-old sinewy slithering depravities of the Eastern mind. Why come to the Orient and not see the truth? How can we overcome evil unless we see it in all its perverse variations?

Geraty would grow more florid as the evening wore on, his huge head hovering above the bar, his eyes bulging as he intoned the names of his favorite saints.

Atrocities, he would hiss, atrocities a thousand years old, Satanic atrocities sipped and soaked and sating. Cormorants were sent to fish in the Uji just before dawn, and not just for fish. Nobles unmasked their falcons, warrior monks unsheathed their swords, warrior abbots unleashed their spiders and bats, whole battalions of enslaved children screamed from the shadows. What’s that you say? A private showing?

Geraty licking his chin and whirling down drinks, staggering off through back streets at midnight with his customers trotting in his steps, stumbling down the stairway to some dingy cellar where he would empty half a bottle and chant verses from the first chapter of St. Luke, the prayer wheel turning in his mind, while bringing on a crowd of hungry, tired performers and lining them up against the wall, while turning the spotlight on himself and undressing as he muttered memories from his childhood, from Mukden and Shanghai and the old Tokyo, a journey that led west and south through Manchuria and China to a long sleep in the mountains of the Philippines before returning to Japan, where he now took off his clothes in order to display his fat massive body to a few dazed, sleepy spectators.

Over the years Geraty’s acts deteriorated. After the first postwar months it was difficult for him to find the starving youths who would degrade themselves for so little money. His girls deserted him for cleverer operators, his boys grew older and older. What had begun as a giggling dance by corrupt children ended as a stiff parade of derelicts with nothing to show the audience or each other but collapsed veins and ulcerous sores.

Geraty himself found it increasingly impossible to break out of his alcoholic stupors. There were evenings when his exhibition of the history of Oriental lust consisted entirely of him taking off his clothes. He would stand in the spotlight mumbling the line he always repeated when naked, magnificat anima mea Dominum, at the same time as he fought off swarms of imaginary falcons and shouted orders at hordes of invisible children. After a time the whirlpool closed around him and he sank to the floor, collapsed on the immense black barge that was carrying Kyoto and all its ancient monasteries down through the night to the sea, there to begin for the ten thousandth time his incomprehensible recitation of dates and addresses, the journey across Asia that Quin remembered from the bar in the Bronx.

So ended Geraty’s first decade after the war. Business dropped off, tourists avoided him. He was thrown out of hotel bars and told not to return. Whenever he got any money he spent it on a drinking bout that lasted until the money was gone. More often he could be seen behind a noodle stand in one of the slums of the city, washing a few dishes in exchange for a pinch of horseradish.

Quin asked about the rare Buddhist manuscripts owned by Geraty, the extensive collection of pornography he had supposedly annotated.

He found that not only had no one ever heard of the collection, no one believed such manuscripts could really exist. And in any case, it was inconceivable that they had been translated by the old giant with the horseradish habit.

A scholarly exercise so vast it would take a convoy of trucks to transport it?

They shook their heads in the bar and laughed. Obviously Quin had his man confused with someone else.

When Quin returned from his wanderings in Tokyo, when he came back to the apartment where Big Gobi was waiting patiently for him, watching television, he always put his arms around Big Gobi and hugged him. That was the way they greeted each other. Quin smiling, Big Gobi grinning with tears in his eyes because he was so happy.

Well, Gobes, I hope I wasn’t gone too long.

It was nothing, Quin, nothing at all. You know you never have to worry about leaving me alone. I always know you’re coming back.

They hugged again, Big Gobi laughed. Ever since he was a child he had always wanted to touch people and have them touch him. It was the only way he could be sure they were real. But at the orphanage they had never understood that. When he put his huge hands on the other boys they had always backed away from him.

Stop pawing everyone, said the fathers.

Run away when he does that, they told the other boys.

From the beginning Big Gobi’s hands had disturbed him, even frightened him. He was never sure what they might do. For that reason he stopped touching the other boys, so they wouldn’t dislike him, and instead watched them carefully so he could understand how they acted, what they did and how they did it, so that he could do it the same way. He listened to them and said the same things. He watched their mouths and laughed the same way. He imitated everything about them and made the same silly faces.

But for some reason the faces weren’t silly on Big Gobi. And when he laughed it didn’t seem funny.

On Sunday nights they had oyster stew at the orphanage. While still young, Big Gobi discovered he loved oysters. He loved the smell of the sea that came from the pale jelly. He loved them because they were shapeless, because they had no hands.

When he was old enough he asked for the job of opening the oysters on Sunday afternoons. They showed him how to do it, and it was his happiest hour of the week. Alone behind the kitchen facing the sky and the fields, the receding ridges of the Berkshires, he slit the cartilage of the shells and peeked into the juicy caves of tides and algae, a calm, quiet place, a home deep and narrow, light brown, sucking and oozing, darker at the edges.

And for Big Gobi there were other sensations hidden in the mysterious oyster, not so much peaceful as ecstatic. Once while he was shucking them, once and no more so that he would never be caught, he sneaked an oyster for himself and held it above his lips, let it slide down slowly and swell in his throat until he grew dizzy and began to shake, felt a numbness in his loins and then a warm sticky wetness there.

An exquisite experience certainly, but for Big Gobi, not unexpected. Strangely similar, in fact, to the wonders the fathers attributed to the act of communion whereby God momentarily possessed the soul.

About the time Big Gobi should have gone to school they discovered his shoulder was malformed. The shoulder was operated on and allowed to heal, broken again and allowed to heal. Throughout his childhood he was operated on every year, and during the recoveries there was nothing to do but watch television.

He didn’t care about the programs but he loved the commercials because they told him what to do. They told him where to go every day. They told him how to get there. They advised him what to buy and what to eat, what to drink, when to drink it. They told him what to do once he was home again, and after that and later and the next time, everything he needed to know about life.

Of course he was an orphan who lived in an orphanage, he had no money, and his shoulder was in a plaster cast so there was no question of going anywhere or doing anything or buying anything. He had to eat and drink what he was given to eat and drink, when he was given it.

But none of that mattered. The commercials were concerned with his welfare. They watched over him. They cared for him the way family and friends might have cared for him had there been family and friends in his life. So he returned the love of the commercials. He loved them as they loved him.

The first time Big Gobi whispered that secret to Quin, Quin didn’t laugh or even smile. He just put his arms around Big Gobi and hugged him to show that he understood. Yet even then Big Gobi hadn’t been able to bring himself to mention the tuna fish. Instead he had pretended he had gone directly from the orphanage into the army.

He told them he didn’t want to go, but they said he had to. One afternoon during training he was sitting outside the barracks not doing anything, staring at the sand and thinking of television commercials, humming them, repeating their warnings and instructions, when all at once a corporal kicked him and shouted that he was out of his head, that he’d missed a meal sitting there, that he must be crazy if he didn’t know enough to eat.

What’s a crazy bastard like you doing in the army? They don’t let crazy bastards into the army.

That night Big Gobi was so excited he couldn’t sleep. The next morning he sat down on the edge of his cot and refused to go to breakfast. They pushed him and yelled at him and threw him into the shower. After refusing to eat for three days he was taken to see a doctor.

The doctor asked him questions and sent him to another doctor. The second doctor asked him more questions and moved him to a hospital with bars on the windows. Every morning the doctor came to ask the same questions again.

Do you like the army? Are you afraid of the army? Do you like boys? Do you like animals? Are you afraid of men?

Big Gobi smiled and answered all the questions with a different answer every day. The only questions he always answered the same were those about the army.

I like the army very much, he said. I want to spend my life in the army.

Why won’t you eat then?

Big Gobi smiled. He wasn’t hungry. The doctor pointed at his arms and legs.

Hungry? You’re starving.

Big Gobi smiled. He didn’t know about that. All he knew was that he wasn’t particularly hungry.

One day a nurse came to his bed with a large hypodermic needle. She showed him the thick point of the needle, how long it was, how much fluid the hypodermic held. She made him hold it so he could see how heavy it was.

This is water, she said, and its only effect is pain. If I inject this water into your arm you’ll be in pain all afternoon. Just tell me you don’t want it and I won’t give it to you.

Big Gobi smiled and put out his arm.

That night the nurse came back with the hypodermic. She said the pain would certainly keep him awake all night. But if he didn’t want it she wouldn’t give it to him. Big Gobi smiled and was still awake when she brought the hypodermic again in the morning.

Big Gobi spent his foodless, sleepless days and nights watching the soldier in the next bed. The soldier took a long time with his meals because he was right-handed and ate with his left hand. He kept a razor in his right hand and even while eating he continued to shave himself, shaving only the right side of his body.

He started with his right foot and shaved his right leg. He shaved the right half of his pubic hair and belly and chest, his right armpit, the right side of his face, his right eyebrow, and the right side of his head. When he had finished he went down to his right big toe and started over again.

Although he worked without water, soap, or mirror, the soldier never cut himself.

Big Gobi took the water injections for two months. He never ate and he never slept, he smiled and told everyone he loved the army. At the end of that time, unable to stand or even raise his head, he was given a medical discharge and taken by ambulance back to the orphanage.

When Big Gobi had regained his strength he was told he would have to leave and support himself. The fathers gave him a bus ticket and a sum of money sufficient for three or four months. The bus ticket was good for thirty days of unlimited travel anywhere in the United States.

Big Gobi was twenty-one years old. He took a bus to Boston and spent almost all his money in three days eating raw oysters. He asked where less expensive oysters could be found and was told the Maine coast. At noon the following day he arrived in Eastport on the Canadian border. By mid-afternoon the last of his money was gone.

He took a bus down the coast to Plymouth, Salem, and Lexington, a few of the sites made famous by the early English colonists. Next he went to Valley Forge, York-town, and Mt. Vernon tracing the steps of Washington during and after the War for Independence. He traveled to Atlanta and turned east to Charlestown on the route taken by Sherman during the Civil War. He rode down the section of the Florida coast where Ponce de Leon had sought the fountain of youth, reached the tip of the Florida Keys, traversed the Gulf Coast to the delta of the Mississippi. He bisected the country to the headwaters of the Mississippi, viewed the Great Lakes, sped across the plains of the former Sioux nation, and rose through the Rockies on the path favored by the solitary French voyageurs. On the far side of the old Northwest Territories he once more found himself standing on the Canadian border, this time with the Pacific beside him instead of the Atlantic.

He crossed railroads built by Chinese and dropped down to the tabernacle of the Mormons on the shores of the shrinking Great Salt Lake. He traveled the Spanish trail of the first European explorers through Santa Fe, surveyed the Rio Grande and the Grand Canyon and Yosemite and Yellowstone and Old Faithful, sweated in Death Valley, reached the Pacific on the Mexican border. In San Francisco, while watching the sunset from Russian Hill, he decided to return to the orphanage. He boarded a bus but the driver ripped up his ticket.

Hey, yelled Big Gobi. Hey that’s my ticket.

Thirty days, said the driver.

Big Gobi was bewildered. He wandered down a street vaguely aware that his hands were creeping around in the air. Suddenly remembering that he hadn’t eaten in weeks, he got into line outside an office where men were being hired.

In his confusion he didn’t understand what they said to him. He signed a paper and found a bus token in his hand. The bus took him to the docks, he was directed to a gangplank. The next day, on his knees chipping paint, Big Gobi sailed under the Golden Gate on a freighter bound for Asia.

From east Asia the ship sailed to India and Africa and South America. Although the other sailors frequently went ashore, Big Gobi missed one port after another. Once he had the watch, another time he took the watch for a sailor who promised to bring him a present. A third time he took the watch for a sailor who said he had relatives ashore, a fourth time for a sailor who said he had to see a dentist.

He had been on the ship about a month when the cook began to slip things into his soup, sometimes broken egg shells, sometimes pieces of a light bulb. He could fish them out, but when lumps of grayish foam began to appear in the bowl he didn’t know what to do. The lumps dissolved when he touched them.

Big Gobi spied on the cook and discovered the lumps were seagull droppings. For over a year he ate the contaminated soup without getting angry, reminding himself what had happened With the tuna fish.

Three days before Christmas, during a snowstorm, the freighter docked in another port. To his surprise Big Gobi learned they were in New York.

That night he went ashore for the first time in a year and started running. He ran the length of New York City and reached the suburbs. There he asked directions and set off again cross-country. He ran all day and all night and all the following day and night. On Christmas Eve he found he had made several wrong turns and was still far away from the orphanage. Nevertheless he reached it late on Christmas Day, having run six hundred and forty miles in eighty-eight hours, the entire last stretch through the worst Massachusetts blizzard in several decades.

Big Gobi collapsed on the steps of the orphanage and was admitted once more to his old home, this time as a laborer on the farm run by the orphanage. There he remained until a wheezing giant who said his name was Geraty arrived from Japan some years later to present him with two stolen objects, a worthless green paperweight and a small gold cross that had originated in Malabar around the beginning of the Middle Ages.

Oysters. Television. The army. Seagull droppings soup.

While crossing the Pacific Big Gobi had told Quin all his secrets but one. That last one he had put off and put off until all at once it was their last day at sea and he had no choice. The next morning they were due to dock in Yokohama, and if he were ever going to confess his final secret he had to do it while they were still out of sight of land.

He didn’t know why that was so but all the same he knew it. He knew he was so ashamed of that secret the truth of it could only be spoken where flux was all around him, where space turned without boundaries upon itself, where time and reach and movement were endless and indistinguishable. That is, in a desert or at sea.

It was toward the end of the afternoon. Quin sat in his chair, Big Gobi beside him on the deck. Big Gobi kept his head down so that Quin wouldn’t be able to see his face. He was pretending to study the small gold cross.

Hey, Quin, sometimes things happen by accident, don’t they? I mean even bad things can be mistakes, can’t they?

Right, Gobes, that’s the way it is.

Even the worst things? Between people I mean.

Well maybe, but maybe not. The worst things may not be accidents.

You really think so?

Yes, I guess I do.

Big Gobi turned away. He had always wanted to think the tuna fish was an accident, a mistake. He had been only eighteen then, it was the first time he had left the orphanage. They wanted to see if he could do regular work, so they found him a job in Boston unloading fish. He moved to a foundling home near the harbor and went to work every morning at six. In the evenings he watched television. On Saturday night he went to the movies.

One Saturday he stayed late to help the foreman. They worked alone, only the foreman knew he was there and not at the movies. Big Gobi was moving crates of fish in the freezer locker, stacking the crates along one wall. He had to walk around a frozen tuna that was lying in the middle of the floor, a fish about six feet long. All at once he realized the eye of the fish was staring at him. He swung his foot and the foreman yelled.

What the hell?

For a moment Big Gobi didn’t know where he was. He looked down and saw that he had kicked a hole in the fish. A large chunk of flesh had fallen out of its belly.

I’m sorry, he said, I must have slipped.

He got down on his knees and stuffed the chunk of flesh back into the hole in the belly, but when he removed his hand the chunk fell out on the floor.

What the hell, yelled the foreman, what are you doing now?

Don’t worry, whispered Big Gobi, I can fix it.

He ran out the door and came back with a bucket of wet fish slops and a piece of rope. The foreman watched him plaster the hole with fish paste, refit the chunk, and tie the rope around the fish.

You’ll see, said Big Gobi, we did it all the time at the farm. You cement around the stone and then the cement hardens and the wall’s perfect. This slop will freeze in no time, you’ll see.

Freak, shouted the foreman.

Like new, whispered Big Gobi. I promise.

Promise your fucking ass off. That’s fish, not stone.

I tripped, whispered Big Gobi.

Tripped my ass. You kicked that fish and you’re going to pay for it. Don’t you know you can’t go around destroying things?

The bucket of fish slops was still in Big Gobi’s hand. He groaned and his hands came together. The metal snapped, crumpled, fell in a ball at his feet.

A mistake, he whispered.

You idiot freak, yelled the foreman.

Big Gobi remembered telling himself he didn’t destroy things. He whispered it and shouted it as loud as he could, shouted so loud his ears were still ringing when he opened his eyes and saw the foreman’s head in his hands, blood on the man’s mouth, the broken neck twisted away from the body.

Big Gobi dropped the body and ran out of the freezer, ran until he was exhausted, hid in his bed in the foundling home.

The foreman was found in the locker on Monday morning. His neck was broken and the upper part of his body was crushed. Apparently he had returned to the freezer sometime during the weekend and slipped and struck his head, losing consciousness. He had left the door open, which caused the temperature to rise inside the freezer. During the thaw a stack of heavy crates had become dislodged and come crashing down on him.

Shortly after that it was decided at the foundling home that the experiment with Big Gobi had failed. Working with other men seemed to depress him, the traffic in the city frightened him, the noise kept him awake at night. He was better suited to the solitude of the farm where he had grown up. The fathers at the orphanage agreed with the fathers in Boston, and he was sent back to the Berkshires.

The deck beneath his eyes had blurred. Big Gobi had kept his head down so that Quin couldn’t see his tears.

You really think so, Quin?

Yes, I guess I do. It just seems that’s the way it has to be.

Sure, Big Gobi had whispered. Sure, of course it does. It just has to be, that’s all.

He had squeezed his eyes closed then, felt the tears burn, been furious with himself for being too afraid to tell Quin his last secret before they landed in Japan, a mythical land of princesses and palaces and dragons that had been tenderly described to him one winter afternoon and evening by a hulking giant, the ragged clown and impostor who had been his father’s closest childhood friend.

Angry with himself and yet sad as well. For if he couldn’t tell Quin it meant he could never tell anyone.

No one. Ever. He would have to bear one secret on his own, carry alone and forever one terrible inexplicable mystery.

Big Gobi had said nothing about the Japanese crew during the Pacific crossing because he knew all freighter crewmen were ugly regardless of nationality. But the morning the ship docked in Yokohama he clutched Quin by the hand.

What is it, Gobes?

Big Gobi pointed at the official who was stamping his passport, a short, stunted man with narrow, puffy eyes and skin that was sickly and discolored. The official had looked with apparent interest at the glass paperweight Big Gobi claimed was jade, and he had even listened politely while Big Gobi described Geraty’s famous emerald palace beneath the sea and asked where it might be found. But when the official opened his mouth he didn’t say anything. He only made odd squeaking noises.

What’s the matter? said Quin.

Big Gobi gripped his hand and peeked at the other people who were standing around on the pier. They were all making the same queer sounds and they all had the same disease, the same sickly skin, the same half-closed puffy eyes.

Big Gobi was terrified.

Hey, Quin, don’t you see what Geraty did? He lied to us. This isn’t the emerald kingdom, it’s a leper colony.

Quin didn’t know why Geraty had sought him out that late winter night in the Bronx. He didn’t understand how the old buffalo had known which bar to go to, only one of many in the neighborhood but the one where Quin and his friends always happened to do their drinking. Nor even how he had known it was Quin’s neighborhood in the first place. And above all, why the fat, muttering giant had lied so outrageously about Father Lamereaux, himself, Quin’s parents, everyone and everything.

Quin completely distrusted the old buffoon, but there was nothing to be done now but to find him and to try to get him to reveal some small part of the truth, or some clue that would lead to the truth.

Geraty hadn’t been seen in the Tokyo bar he normally frequented for six months, but Quin was told there was one place he might look, an abandoned empty warehouse in a slum on the outskirts of the city. In the past Geraty had been known to disappear in the vicinity of the warehouse for certain periods of time, a few days or weeks, perhaps even a month, never longer than that. He claimed these disappearances had to do with religious meditation, but of course no one believed that. Obviously Geraty’s retreats from society were caused by his basic condition, that is, advancing age, advanced alcoholism, general disability, and total poverty.

Exactly why Geraty had a fondness, or compulsion, for lurking near a warehouse no one knew. There was nothing whatsoever distinctive about the warehouse in question. It was merely an abandoned, empty place, roofless, in a slum on the outskirts of the city. But since he did spend periods of time there, it was probable he had built some sort of shelter for himself next to the warehouse. Quin would have to look for that. A taxi driver was called into the bar and given directions.

They found the small warehouse after nearly an hour of driving back and forth through the tiny alleys of the slum. But as soon as they pulled up before it Quin saw what he was looking for on one side of the warehouse, a shack made out of flattened gasoline cans that had been left behind by the American army after the war.

The shack was about as high as his shoulders. A burlap sack hung across the opening. Quin went up to it and rapped sharply on the roof.

For a minute or two he heard nothing. Then there was a heavy groan, a sneeze, a single violent cough. He pulled aside the burlap and saw the huge fat man sitting on the ground. He was squatting with his legs beneath him in the manner of a giant immobile Buddha, his greatcoat wrapped around him as a blanket. The space was so narrow Geraty could neither lie down nor stretch his legs, yet even in that cramped position his enormous body completely filled the shack.

Quin turned his head away from the stench of sweat and horseradish. Geraty cursed in several languages, finally in English.

Is this America? Have I died and gone to hell? Why are you disturbing the anchorite in his cave?

Up, buffalo. Outside. We’ve got some things to talk about.

Geraty scratched his belly. He moaned.

If that’s really you, nephew, you might as well know I can’t move. I came here to die and I’m staying here. He that is mighty hath done great things to me.

What?

Combined all the maladies known to man and visited them upon me. Laid me low at the end of life with a condition that amounts to general and extreme fatigue of the spirit. In other words I’ve given up. I’m never going to leave this cave again. So drop the curtain and leave me alone with the saints who have succored me in my years of torment, drop it and good-bye.

A drink, buffalo?

Geraty’s arms and legs began to move. A moment later the giant was outside gathering himself together, swatting at the clumps of mud that covered him. Despite the warm weather he still wore the thick layers of clothes Quin had seen in New York. His eyes rolled as he retied the piece of red flannel around his neck.

My condition is delicate, nephew. I have to be careful when exposing myself to the night air, even the air of summer. Did you come here looking for a game of liar’s dice?

But Geraty didn’t smile, nor did Quin. Quin rocked back on his heels and poked the fat man sharply in the ribs. Geraty hiccuped.

What’s this about the priest, buffalo? They tell me he’s dead.

No hope of that.

Well, is Big Gobi his son or not?

Him? A son? Are you mad? I don’t know who could have given you that idea.

Quin nodded. He rocked on his heels. It had been his own idea, and he was beginning to realize that with Geraty it was better never to have any ideas of your own.

The truth, buffalo. That’s what I want this time.

He hath filled the hungry with good things. Where are my documents?

Quin held them out, the forged Canadian passport and the two forged Belgian passports. As Geraty secreted them in his greatcoat the black bowler hat crept back on his head, his mouth opened, a wheezing cough struck Quin in the face. The fat man was laughing.

That? Just that? But you should have said so before, nephew. Right this way for the illusive dream often sought and seldom found, or to be exact, often found but seldom recognized.

Abruptly Geraty turned away and lurched into an alley, his immense shadow moving surprisingly fast down the narrow passage. As much as it bothered him, Quin had no choice but to trot along behind recalling a scene only recently described to him, Geraty leading one of his customers off at midnight to some interminable obscene performance that existed only in his own mind, if it existed at all.

They sat on stools at a pushcart beside a vacant lot where a few vagrants were already asleep on the sand. The pushcart served boiled vegetables and cheap liquor. Geraty ignored the owner and fished in the pan of steaming water with his hands. He threw a bamboo shoot over his shoulder, grunted a few words, wiped his hands on his sweaters.

A bowl of horseradish appeared followed by two glasses of raw sake and a plate of turnips. Geraty dipped a slice of turnip into the horseradish and chewed.

The priest, buffalo.

Geraty swallowed and threw off one of the glasses. His eyes bulged.

Could it be that we are both referring to the hero who shortened the Second World War and thereby saved millions of lives? A man whose vocation is the alleviation of suffering? An elderly drunkard and pederast, now reformed and retired, who once sent reams and reams of valuable secret information to the West? Is this the heroic figure before us at tonight’s turnip bar of history? Look now behind you at those wandering Japanese poets curled up on the sand in the spacious urinal they have found for themselves in a slum of the world’s largest city. Note that they sleep soundly because of what a frail, gentle man once did for them three decades ago. The sacrifices were his. The courage was his. Save for him they might never have returned from China. Their bones might be bleaching at this very moment on a Pacific atoll. But do they know it? Have they heard his name even once in the waves and the desert and the wind?

The priest, buffalo.

Geraty stuffed horseradish into his nose. He sneezed, coughed once.

An anonymous Jesuit once known for his Friday night performances? Precisely that frail, gentle man who wears the buttons on his coat in a totally personal configuration? Yes, I thought so, I was sure that’s who we were talking about. A genuine article and rare. Rare? Rare by God, you never met such a man in the Bronx. When you see him you’ll find out for yourself, but I suggest you not expect too much at first. His memory was phenomenal once but now, as I say, he’s reformed and retired. To have some idea of what he’s done for people in the past, savor the name of St. Brigid. Recall her sanctity and her miraculous powers, above all her hospitality to the poor and the suffering, her charity to slaves. Most of us are slaves of one kind or another, to one thing or another, and the alleviation of suffering, nephew, is the path this Jesuit has followed. But also remember that path has been in Japan for fifty years, fifty years of speaking nothing but Japanese. You’ll have to adopt their manner of circumlocution with this rare man, you’ll have to talk about nothing at first and sniff the air for clues. Clues? Sniff the air and chat about this and that, whatever comes up, slip from one unrelated and unresolved topic to another, and all the while circle your man the way a puppy circles a wise old hound, waiting for a whiff of his hindquarters, waiting to find out who he is in fact. Backward it may seem to you, coming up from behind it might appear to be, but that’s the way it’s done over here. Why? For He hath exalted the humble and put down the mighty from their seat. The sergeant who wore this overcoat the day they took Nanking could tell you what that means, could tell you just as he told me years later on a beach south of Tokyo, a beach in Kamakura, the same beach where they put on gas masks and had the picnic that saved Moscow from the Germans.

Lamereaux, buffalo.

That’s right, that’s our man and none other. Why else would I be talking about the picnic? They were there to recruit Lamereaux of course. That was the whole point.

Who was there?

Adzhar for one. Adzhar the incredible linguist. How did he ever survive the roads where life took him? No matter, he did, and someday I thought those roads would lead me to the pine grove I’ve always wanted to find, a quiet grove on a hill above the sea, no more than a soul deserves after lurking forty years in the locked, shuttered rooms of Asia. But no. Adzhar in his simplicity was too complex for them, his simple faith in love was beyond their comprehension. The fools were delirious on dragon piss and confiscated everything.

Who was Adzhar?

You’re right there, who was Adzhar and who was Lamereaux? And who was Baron Kikuchi for that matter? The picnic was held near his estate after all, saints preserve us. They say he was the most feared man in the Kempeitai and I’ve no reason not to believe them, but who was I? Who was I then and who am I now? And who was Edward the Confessor? Go ahead, tell me that.

Adzhar, buffalo. Who was he?

A reindeer from Lapland, a dragon from every country in the world. I didn’t know him, I only knew him through his work, his legacy to me. Other people knew him that way too. He and Lamereaux were good friends then. Why? Who can say. Who can fathom why people watched those worthless films I bought in Mukden? Who can say why those films led to a cemetery in Tokyo, why the cemetery led to two bottles of Irish whiskey in Lamereaux’s Victorian parlor, why two bottles of Irish whiskey led to a picnic on a beach south of Tokyo. A beach? Kamakura of course.

You said there were four people at the picnic.

Exactly four, definitely four. The trinity plus one? Three men and a woman? The trinity in gas masks so the secret conversation could not be overheard? The fourth presence not bothering with a gas mask, instead concerning herself with the blanket and the food and the comfort of the other three? Yes, that’s what Lamereaux told me the night we made our suffering journey through two bottles of Irish whiskey.

Adzhar and Lamereaux. Who were the other two?

Ask your man, he would know because he was there. Fools say he became a drunkard when he was interned in the mountains, but that’s because they can’t sniff a change in the wind, they can’t feel it coming, they like to think it happens quickly. An hour ago? Yesterday at the latest? Eight years ago is more like it and fifty years ago is even more like it. And as for those little boys he knew, he loved them like a father. Why not? He was and is so ordained by the Almighty.

Buffalo, when was the picnic?

At the onset of an era given to murders and assassinations, a time when a hunger for human flesh rumbled in men’s bowels. Look what happened in Nanking where a sergeant strangled his own commanding general. When he told me that on the beach, I knew I was hearing a voice direct from the rectum of lunacy. No one but me would probably ever believe such a voice, but that doesn’t matter now. A long time ago I destroyed the evidence, destroyed the only report the Kempeitai had on it.

On what?

The spy ring. The report was short, no more than a paragraph or two. That sergeant had gone mucking around in the rectum of his lunacy and killed the courier they caught, beat him to death, murdered the only source of information they had before there was time to get anything worthwhile out of him.

Spy ring. What spy ring?

My God, nephew, isn’t that what we’re talking about? The spy ring run by Lamereaux? The man who saved Moscow from the Germans? The hero who shortened the war in China and saved millions of lives? Worthless films, a cemetery, two bottles of Irish whiskey, a picnic for the trinity plus one? That’s the path Lamereaux and I were on thirty years ago. What path? The path at our feet, nephew, the path that runs from a whiskey bar in the Bronx to a turnip bar in Tokyo, that begins right here beside a vacant lot where dreaming poets pass themselves off as sleeping scavengers. My doctors have warned me to be careful of the night air, my condition is delicate at best. Another glass of dragon piss is what we need now, then perhaps we’ll be able to find a barge and float our souls down the river to the sea, through the mist and vapors we see rising from our vessel, not really a pushcart. Steam, you call it? The breath of boiled turnips? Saints preserve us, nephew, you better examine more closely the shores where we pass.

Geraty emptied one glass after another. Quin forced him to eat, forced him to answer questions, forced him to sit up when his head sank toward the counter. The fat man muttered and swore, laughed, lied when there seemed no reason to lie, and then corrected himself before wandering off on some byway of his four decades of travel through Asia.

He recited Manchurian telephone numbers and Chinese addresses, changed costumes, sang circus songs, beat a drum and played a flute, consumed bowls of horseradish and mounds of turnips, sneaked through the black-market district of Mukden late in 1934 and again in 1935, noting discrepancies, brought out all the peeling props and threadbare disguises of an aging clown working his way around the ring. Grinning, weeping, he eventually revealed how he had discovered thirty years ago that Lamereaux was the head of an espionage network in Japan, a network with such an ingenious communication system it was the most successful spy ring in Asia in the years leading up to the Second World War.

The information had come to Geraty by chance because he happened to fall asleep in a Tokyo cemetery.

At the time he was planning a trip to the mainland, ostensibly to sell patent drugs. His real interest, however, was in acquiring pornographic movies that could be sold at a large profit in Shanghai. Since the military had come to power in Japan these movies could be found nowhere in the country, but there were rumors that when the Japanese army had seized Manchuria a few years before, they had confiscated a large supply of them, probably from a White Russian entrepreneur.

Geraty made inquiries and was finally introduced to a young Japanese army corporal, on leave in Tokyo, who worked as a film projectionist in a unit stationed near Mukden. The corporal, little more than a boy, said the films could be provided for the right sum of money. The amount named was far more than Geraty had.

At this point Geraty’s story became confused. Although he would not admit it outright, it appeared he had stolen the money.

Worse, he was particularly ashamed of the source of the stolen money. He cried uncontrollably in front of Quin and insisted on whispering in a voice so low Quin couldn’t hear him. He was talking to his saints, he said. At least half an hour went by before Quin could get him to resume his account.

A meeting between the corporal and Geraty had been arranged for a Tokyo cemetery, one of the few places where a Japanese and a foreigner could still safely transact illegal business. Geraty was to bring the money, and the corporal in turn would tell him where the films would be cached for him in Mukden.

Geraty took a circuitous route through the cemetery and met the corporal behind a mausoleum. The deal was settled and the corporal left. Geraty had gotten very drunk before coming to the cemetery, obviously because of the stolen money he had just given away. It was a warm evening. After the corporal left, Geraty leaned against the mausoleum and wept. A minute later he was asleep on his feet.

Some time passed. He awoke in a heavy sweat, unable to remember where he was or how he had gotten there. He stumbled between the gravestones until he heard a man’s voice, whereupon he dropped behind a stone to hide. He was lying on his stomach and it was impossible to make out anything in the darkness.

The clouds suddenly parted. Geraty was astonished to see the young boy he had just met, the corporal from the unit near Mukden. In the corporal’s hand was the packet of money Geraty had paid over for the films. The boy was holding out the packet as if to give it to someone. The packet disappeared, the corporal turned and dropped his trousers. He bent over a tombstone, baring a slender bottom to the moon and whoever else was there.

A tall, gaunt figure stepped forward from the shadows, his eyes raised to heaven. He had the features of a Westerner and the clothes of a cleric. A specific deed was about to be performed.

Geraty stared. Only one man in Asia answered to that description.

Lamereaux piously crossed himself, but his next action wasn’t at all what Geraty had expected. The priest’s hand shot out and made a flickering motion, a deft and practiced movement much like Geraty’s own when he was inserting a ball of horseradish in his nose. The hand withdrew, the corporal retrieved his trousers and fled.

Geraty watched Lamereaux drop to his knees. The Jesuit took hold of his rosary and recited the fifty-three Hail Marys, curiously omitting both the Credo and the Our Fathers. The clouds closed as suddenly as they had opened. In the darkness Geraty heard the priest begin to sing the Litany of the Saints.

Once more Geraty’s narrative broke down. He became incoherent, he sobbed, he hid his face and whispered. He admitted the scene infuriated him, but he wouldn’t say why.

Quin had no way of knowing what it meant. Was it because the money Geraty had stolen was now being given to someone else? To someone he knew? Because that person was Father Lamereaux?

Who or what enraged him? The corporal? Lamereaux? A gesture by the priest that mimicked his own?

Or simply himself.

Geraty whispered over his bowl of turnips. He cried. He buried his scarred face in the folds of his greatcoat. Again it took some time before Quin could coax him back to the story.

Fury, hissed Geraty. Overweening wrath was upon me.

His first impulse had been to rush over and give Lamereaux a beating, beat him mercilessly over the head and shoulders as he knelt there in the darkness. But fortunately it had been many years since he’d heard the Litany from beginning to end. The sound of Latin was a nostalgic memory to him, a monotonous chant from his childhood. He knew the chant would last a good thirty minutes, so there seemed no reason to hurry the beating.

He was lying on his stomach. The buzz of Latin was comforting. Long before the Litany ended he had fallen asleep for the second time that night.

The next day he went to see Father Lamereaux, who it turned out had a hangover every bit as bad as his own. The two men drank green tea and swallowed fistfuls of aspirins, but that was no help to either of them. Before long Lamereaux suggested something stronger and broke out a bottle of Irish whiskey.

An hour later they were both feeling better. They got into a discussion on No plays and proceeded to lecture each other. Finding words inadequate, Lamereaux got to his feet to illustrate a point by acting out a scene. Geraty watched him, then in answer acted out a scene of his own. They tried a second sequence and discovered they both knew all the movements, all the poses.

When they were drunk Geraty mentioned what he had seen in the cemetery and how Lamereaux’s choice of the Litany had probably saved him from a beating. The two exiles laughed so hard they were in tears. Lamereaux broke out a second bottle of Irish whiskey and they began drinking in earnest.

The afternoon turned into the evening. Much of the truth Geraty had already guessed. Father Lamereaux told him the rest.

The Jesuit had always been opposed to Japanese militarism, he wanted to help China and the West if he could. After his friend Adzhar had arranged the meeting on the beach, he had known what to do. The Japanese acolytes who had served him over the years were still loyal to him. By then many of them had good positions in the army, the ministries, the occupied areas of China. Some traveled back and forth throughout the Empire on one mission or another. Their bits and pieces of information could be compiled to form a complete intelligence picture.

The problem was getting the information out of Japan. Some of the ex-acolytes traveled to areas where contact could be made with Allied agents, but how were they to smuggle the reports out of Tokyo? The information was too bulky to be memorized. Everyone was searched both going and coming by the secret police. Father Lamereaux analyzed the problem and found a solution.

The Kempeitai considered itself the defender of the samurai tradition. Its officers and agents prided themselves on their fierceness, their warlike masculinity. Therefore when they searched a young man they only went so far. Their searches were thorough with one exception. As a result, Lamereaux’s couriers could always get through with the microfilm they carried in his small bamboo device.

Device? Nothing more than a hollow piece of bamboo sealed at both ends. Among the couriers it was called Lamereaux’s Lumbago because of the severe backaches it caused when the courier run was a long one, deep into China, say.

Thus had Lamereaux been responsible for the most successful invention in the history of espionage, the living dead drop, revolutionary because it moved where the master spy wanted it to go, because it recognized for the first time the very simple concept that espionage, the collection and storage of information, was based on the principle of man’s anus.

Lamereaux asked Geraty to keep the story of his incredible intelligence pipeline a secret, and of course Geraty agreed. He even went so far as to destroy the one vague report on the ring that appeared in the files of the Kempeitai after the war.

And the fire he had started, claimed Geraty, the fire that had burned down an entire wing of the Kempeitai warehouse and lost him his job in the Occupation, the beginning of his downfall and degradation, that fire had been set for no other reason than to conceal the destruction of that one vague report.

True, shouted Geraty. All true. That’s how it ended and that’s how it began. Awake setting a fire one night after the war, asleep in a cemetery one night a decade earlier. Ended and began it did, and not even Edward the Confessor can tell you more.

Geraty hung his head. He peeked over his shoulder at the bodies lying in the vacant lot. With a shudder he lowered his face into the steam rising from the vegetables boiling on the pushcart. He teetered on his stool. He was whispering.

Asleep and awake, you say? Awake? The time came that night when Lamereaux and I had finished that second bottle of Irish whiskey. Done we were, saints preserve us, and we knew it. The old days were gone and we knew it. We were two drunk butterflies circling a candle, two motionless No actors stuck in a pose, two exiles in the secret bag the Almighty was carrying across Asia. War. The Orient thirty years ago.

Geraty’s head hung over a bowl of turnips. He stared at the turnips, the steam creeping up along the layers of sweaters, the red flannel tied with string, the black bowler hat pulled down to his bulging eyes. His dark, gloomy face was cut with scars, running with tears.

Quin waited. After five or ten minutes of silence he tapped Geraty on the shoulder.

My father. What about him?

Your father, hissed Geraty, who’s your father? Who are you?

His fist struck the counter. He waved his arms in the air, fighting off imaginary bats and spiders and falcons. All at once he was on his feet moving away from the pushcart, roaring and shouting curses, shaking his fists at the sky.

Slander, do you hear? They call him a drunkard and a pederast and that’s how they’ve always treated him, with lies and ridicule. Do they know a man of God when they see one? Do they? Just point him out to them, point him out now, point him out where he stands. Point out that Emperor so they can slander him and malign him and drive him where? Where?

Geraty crashed into the vacant lot and fell on his back, his greatcoat settling around him. Quin propped the black bowler hat under his head. He felt his pulse and listened to the painful rasp of his snoring. There was no way to move him. He would have to lie there until he awoke.

Quin picked up a handful of sand and nodded to himself. He thought of leaving some money in Geraty’s pocket, but then he realized there were already too many scavengers there waiting like Geraty for the night to grow old, some not yet too drunk to go through his pockets before they fell asleep, before they in turn were robbed of all they had.

Another time, thought Quin, not knowing he would meet Geraty only once again in his life, three months from then when he was about to leave Japan on a clear autumn day that happened to be the feast day of the saint Geraty revered above all others, Edward the Confessor, three months that he would spend tracking down the lives of the men and women whose secrets lay encrypted in the code name Gobi, perhaps because not until then would Quin be ready to witness the final performance of this raving giant who had spent a lifetime posing as a clown.

The year Big Gobi went to sea he heard innumerable accounts of the nights the sailors spent on the beach. There were stories about tattoo parlors and whores, cops and whores, pawnshops and whores, camera stores and whores, whores and bars and whores and special shows and whores jiggling their things in front of jukeboxes that had colored lights. Big Gobi had never left the ship as it went around the world, and that was the reason he was excited the day Quin took him to the beach.

On the train Big Gobi took out his small gold cross and rubbed it against the side of his nose. Polishing the cross helped him when he felt dizzy, he had discovered that as soon as they arrived in Japan. It kept him from being confused, it kept his hands from wandering. Big Gobi continued polishing the cross all the way to Kamakura.

They left the station and began to walk. Quin said they should have looked for a bus but Big Gobi didn’t hear him, he was dreaming. After an hour or thirty years, a mile or two or ten thousand miles, they reached the end of the continent, the eastern shore of Asia. Quin was walking across the sand but Big Gobi didn’t move. He was staring into the distance.

Hey, he whispered. Hey where are we?

The sand was hot on his feet, his mind was a jumble. Below him there was a nearly deserted cove, ahead only the endless stretch of the sea.

Hey, he whispered. Where is everybody?

Big Gobi sifted sand through his fingers. He turned away so that Quin couldn’t see his face.

Where are the parlors? he whispered softly.

Quin rubbed himself with a towel.

Which ones, Gobes?

The ones for tattooing, the ones they have on the beach. They were always talking about them when I worked on the freighter.

Liberty port. Yokohama.

I don’t know the name of the place, but it’s where they have the jukeboxes. You know, the jukeboxes with colored lights where the girls stand around and jiggle their things.

Yokohama.

Well where is this?

Kamakura.

Well what’s it for?

How do you mean?

I mean is this a beach or is the other one a beach?

Both of them. One’s for swimming and one’s for whores and tattoos. Aren’t you going to take a swim?

Big Gobi shuffled down to the edge of the water and put his big toe in. Cold water made him feel lonely. He dragged himself along the shore kicking sand, wondering why things never happened the way he wanted them to, never, no matter how long he waited and waited.

His foot touched an oyster. He pried it open, gazed at the pale, swelling meat.

There was a reason why those things never happened, and he knew exactly what it was. He was afraid. That was why he hadn’t gone ashore with the other sailors from the freighter, and it would have been the same today if they had gone to the other beach, the one not for swimming. He would have been afraid, too afraid to do anything.

Yokohama. Quin had been there in the navy. Probably he’d been there a hundred times and knew all about it.

Big Gobi sipped the juice from the oyster, poked the soft meat with his nose, sucked, swallowed it. All at once he jumped in the air.

He was running back up the beach, running as fast as he could, running so hard his legs ached. He fell down on his knees near Quin and scooped up a fistful of sand, threw it down, scooped up another. He pawed with both hands, pushing the sand behind him through his legs. He knew Quin was watching him but he was going to say it anyway.

Hey, he shouted. Hey this is a nice place for swimming.

He stopped digging. Why was he yelling like that when Quin was only a few feet away? Quin would think something was wrong. He leaned forward and rested his elbows at the bottom of the hole he had dug. He tried to grin.

I like it, Quin. I like it a lot.

He was whispering now, but Quin smiled and nodded, a warm smile that made him feel better.

Glad you do, Gobes. I was wondering what you were thinking while you were walking down there.

Were you, Quin? That’s funny, because I had an idea just then, just now I mean. I was walking along thinking how much I like this beach and that got me thinking about the other beach you were talking about, and then I remembered you’d been there and knew all about it, I mean you know, you’re a friend so why shouldn’t I ask you?

Big Gobi hung his head.

That was my idea, he whispered.

Right, Gobes. Sure. Let’s hear about it.

Well you have to understand it’s not much of anything, I mean I even feel kind of silly bringing it up but it’s just that I’ve never done it before, I mean gone right up and said it, said what you have to say, and if there were any misunderstanding I’d feel terrible.

About what?

Me, Quin. Me. I mean just suppose she didn’t know what I was talking about, suppose she got frightened or something and started backing away.

Who started backing away?

The girl jiggling her things in the colored lights. I mean what do you say to a girl at a time like that? Let’s fuck? Something like that?

Just a minute, Gobes, let me get it straight. Where are we, Yokohama?

That’s the place.

All right. We’re in Yokohama and we pass a tattoo parlor and come to a bar where there are a lot of whores standing around. One in particular is over by the jukebox keeping time to the music. I mean she’s bouncing and they’re big ones and you know she’s ready the second you walk in. Is that it? Something like that?

Big Gobi whistled.

That’s it. That’s the place all right, and she’s the one I’m talking about.

Quin nodded. His face was serious. Big Gobi leaned on his elbows, his chin on the sand, and waited. When Quin didn’t say anything he was afraid he had upset him.

Thinking about Yokohama, Quin? Thinking about the other times you went there?

No, Gobes, but listen. Have you ever had a girl before?

No.

Never?

Well I mean I never left the ship the year I worked on it, you know that. And where else would I have found a girl?

I don’t know. On the bus trip maybe.

Well maybe, I mean I suppose I could have if I’d ever left the bus but I didn’t. I mean I got off lots of buses lots of times, but I always got right back on another one again. And before that I was in bed with my shoulder and after that I worked on the farm at the orphanage. The only girl I’ve ever really talked to, I mean the only girl who’s ever talked to me, was the nurse who gave me the water injections in the army.

All right, Gobes, that’s settled. Done. Finished. Tonight we’re going to Yokohama and have a session.

What?

It’s on the way home, more or less. We might as well drop in and see what’s doing.

Tonight?

Sure.

One of those places?

Sure.

The one jiggling in the colored lights?

Sure.

And maybe you’ll help me speak to her?

Sure.

Just like that?

Just like that.

Big Gobi jumped into the air. He yelled, he danced, he spun up and down the beach collecting driftwood from Chinese rivers and Manchurian forests, dancing down a beach on the edge of Asia finding wood for a bonfire in the sun.

Hey, he shouted. Hey hey hey.

Women hey.

Oysters hey.

Hey hey hey.

Late that night, his lips torn and his neck scratched, his back bearing scars, Big Gobi staggered into a train bound for Tokyo, a veteran of the campaigns on the Yokohama waterfront, that narrow strip of land where hordes of invading sailors streamed ashore every night to do battle with a handful of brave whores.

The ferocious adventurers came from every corner of the world. There were Burmans and Chadians and Quechuas and Lapps and Georgians swearing in a hundred tongues and brandishing a thousand varied weapons, every conceivable kind of knife and pick and sword and bludgeon and pike. Between them they were missing every part of the human body. They had warts in every combination supplemented by a multitude of tattoos and moles, birthmarks, miscellaneous discolorings, and wounds both old and new, generally treated but often only recently scabbed. They were a desperate army with only one goal, a night of unlimited plunder after weeks at sea.

Darkness fell, the late sunset of a summer night. Children waved good-bye to the pretty ships in the harbor, crowds moved from the department stores to the movie theaters. Strollers ate cold noodles. It was a peaceful evening in downtown Yokohama with a cooling breeze off the bay.

And yet no more than two miles away the battle was ready to begin. Some fifty or sixty Japanese heroines were preparing to defend the homeland against the combined navies of the world.

The gangplanks came down, the launches sped back and forth. The first wave of barbarians swarmed into pawnshops snatching up cameras and silk jackets, raced down the streets through the whining music, climbed over the crashing chairs, and hurtled the bottles shattering in the alleys. The massed squadrons pushed forward, regrouped, mounted another assault. Heads cracked on the pavement, bellies spilled out in doorways. The sailors fought on their backs and rolled over to strike again from the side, from above, from below, in between, in back, knee level, naval level, chest level, eye level, from the rooftops and the tops of chairs and toilet bowls.

But gradually their ranks thinned, their bodies piled up on the docks and jetties. A few snipers still carried on in upstairs windows, but long before sunrise the outcome of the battle was decided.

Here and there a whore lay temporarily unconscious, but most were walking home on their own sturdy legs, limping perhaps, certainly exhausted, but with their sea chests bulging with money from around the world. Behind them they left carnage and ruin, snoring carcasses from a hundred distant ports, the broken lust of foreigners. Once again a handful of heroines had won total victory in the nightly Yokohama battle, and all over Japan innocent women and children were able to sleep safely because of it.

Big Gobi sat in the train with his eyes closed. When he had first left the princess in the palace, he had felt as if he had no bones, then for a while he had lost his legs and been an amputee. Now the numbness was gone and he was suffering the torture of a thousand cuts. Oriental torture. Time.

He smiled.

Did you see how she walked right up to me, Quin? She never backed away at all. On the freighter they used to say I smelled of seagull droppings, but she didn’t say anything like that. She just took me by the hand and then when we were in the room she let me turn on the television set so we could watch it from the bed. Imagine just doing it and watching television at the same time. You know tomorrow I think I’ll just stay home and relax and watch television. She said she watches all the time, so I think I’ll just sit around tomorrow and think about it. She must have been about sixteen and that was the first night she’d worked there and I was the first one, you know, she’d ever done anything with. Her parents are poor and she doesn’t want her little brother to go to an orphanage and that’s why she’s there. She said I understood a lot about people considering I don’t even speak Japanese, the people we were watching I mean, the people on television. She said I could come again and watch television, or watch her while she was watching television, or watch them while they were watching us. Just us, the two of us I mean, and all the others. I mean I’ve never been with a person like that where there were just the two of us, two of us alone but me not alone at all because she was there. Never. Not since I was born.

Big Gobi smiled as he fell asleep.

Quin looked out the window at the lights flashing by. He was thinking of Geraty then, wondering as always how much of the giant’s tale he could believe, not realizing that at that very moment he was returning from the site of the famous picnic on the beach south of Tokyo where Maeve Quin had long ago laid out a blanket for three men in gas masks, her husband and Father Lamereaux and the elderly Adzhar, the wandering Russian linguist whose cross Big Gobi now wore, thereby setting in motion an espionage game that was to last eight years, culminating in Big Gobi’s conception in a warehouse on the outskirts of Shanghai on the eve of a doomed circus performance.