Quin’s Shanghai Circus

Kikuchi-Lotmann

Now we see him stepping into the ring, the master of ceremonies dressed in boots and frock coat, carrying whip and megaphone, a shaman and arbiter of marvels.

Quin came and went. Big Gobi left the apartment with him once, for the first visit to Father Lamereaux, but he was so confused by the meeting Quin left him behind after that. Quin said something about the names Father Lamereaux had given him. Big Gobi nodded and kept his eyes on the television screen.

Names are fine, he muttered as Quin closed the door.

The Living Room was an underground bar many levels below the street. Quin knew the Japanese custom of referring to all female proprietors of bars as Mama.-san, so as soon as he came upon a waiter, after having walked down several hundred steps, he asked for Mama-san saying they had a mutual friend, Father Lamereaux.

The suspicious waiter directed him to a corner where there stood a man of some four hundred pounds, a former sumo wrestler with a huge mallet resting on his shoulder. The former sumo wrestler held the mallet over Quin’s head until the waiter returned.

The waiter bowed. He apologized for his family and education, his meanness of spirit, his boorish and crass behavior, his whining voice, his unsavory appearance and total incompetence. Mama would see him presently.

In the meantime Quin was invited to be her guest in the Round Room, reserved for the most honored guests. They left the wrestler in the shadows and started down an interminable spiral staircase. Occasionally the waiter stopped to ask Quin if he liked Japan, and when Quin reassured him that he did the man sucked air noisily through his teeth out of wonder or gratitude, or simply because nothing else seemed appropriate.

After descending another three or four hundred feet they entered a circular room where a dozen men or more sat at a counter facing the wall, or rather small windows recessed in the wall. Their backs were to him and no one turned when he came in. The waiter directed him to an empty stool, sucked air, and disappeared.

A face peered up at him from the bartenders’ runway, which was sunken so the heads of the bartenders would not protrude above the counter. Quin ordered a drink and saw a hand come up over the edge with a glass.

On the counter in front of him there was a console of buttons. Family portrait, said one. Small projection lamp, said another. Tattoos. Kobe cameras. Quin arbitrarily pressed the button for Nose.

The screen that Quin had mistaken for a mirror flickered. The screens were built in such a way that only the man directly in front of one could see which private movie he had selected. To everyone else the screens remained mirrors reflecting a distorted view of the small round room.

The first nose was flat and spreading. It grew in size until the screen could no longer contain it. The pores, rich dark holes, were soon big enough to put a fist in, as big as craters in a desert. The rims of the craters were cracked, deep down inside lay heaps of fertile material. The picture continued to expand until there was only one enormous pore on the screen, a volcanic crater not unlike the one to be found on top of Mt. Fuji, the sides of the pore cut by ancient landslides, the center black with dormant bacterial lava.

The frame faded and another nose appeared, life-size, narrower than the first, quivering, and undeniably sensitive. A chrysanthemum or a cherry blossom presented itself to the nose. The nose hesitated and then inhaled deeply, bringing on a multitude of tender sensations.

The third nose moved rapidly. The hairs in the nostrils flapped as a bowl of custard slipped into view. The nose slammed itself into the custard, emerged, rammed itself into the waxy cartilage of an ear.

The same nose moved down a neck, across an armpit, through the crevice made by two pendulant breasts. It nudged a woman’s erect nipples, poked the ridges of her rib cage, shook itself vigorously in her navel, pecked at the mound of her smooth belly. It caressed the thighs and burrowed between the toes, sampling, working swiftly.

Quin’s head jerked back. For an instant a totally different image had appeared on the screen, or so it seemed. A scene from what looked like a barnyard, healthy animals being cared for by healthy, smiling peasants wearing starched muslin and embroidered blouses, East Europeans of some kind, Slavs perhaps, cheerfully tending their animals under the benign guidance, the approving fatherly gaze of a dashing man with a moustache and a worker’s cap, dressed in a loosely fitted black suit and a high celluloid collar.

Lenin?

The image was gone at once and not so much seen as imagined, an effect that made the tale of the nose curiously disturbing. Somehow the suggestion of an actual historical event added authenticity to a film that might otherwise have been merely obsessive and unreal.

The nose lay on its back as a woman’s legs opened at the top of the screen. The legs descended, spread wide, bringing down a curtain of wiry hair that ended the film.

Quin’s glass was empty. Even the ice was gone. A legend beside the buttons on the counter noted that all the films were changed every third day. It also invited the guest to indulge himself in combinations by pressing several or all of the buttons at once, thereby creating unique themes previously unwitnessed. Quin was about to order another drink when the waiter reappeared, apologizing as before, and invited him to pay a visit to Madame Mama.

Once more they walked down a spiral staircase, but this one was narrow and plain and neither carpeted nor lit by chandeliers. It wound down between weathered boards that formed a square shaft, reinforced at every level by what appeared to be a roof. In fact, Quin wondered if they were descending through a pagoda that had been built under the ground instead of above, narrowing into the earth instead of the sky.

She sat at the bottom of the well in a bare wooden room, a tiny white-haired woman in black kimono, her only decoration an oval emerald resting on her forehead. She inclined her head as she greeted him, a kindly, aristocratic woman who spoke precise English with a slightly archaic accent.

The sages like to remind us, she said, that the only life we know here is as one underground, that we must pass through many incarnations before we finally see the sun. A pagoda can also have three or five stories, but mine has seven. Is Father Lamereaux still alive?

Yes he is, answered Quin.

How strange. I always thought he died during the war.

No, but it seems he’s been pretty much of a recluse since then.

I see. Well he was very kind to me once and we must never forget a kindness. What may I do for you, Mr. Quin?

Father Lamereaux thought you might have known my father in Shanghai. He thought you might have been there when he died.

And when was that?

About 1937 I think.

Mama’s face showed no expression.

I was there about then, she said, and I did know many foreigners, many of whom died, most of them in the end. But they were all nameless to me. We didn’t use names then. Ever,

And you’ve never heard of someone called Quin?

Mama frowned. She unfolded her hands, paused, refolded them in a different way.

Yes, I believe I have. But it wasn’t in Shanghai, it was in Tokyo. It was in connection with something that had happened in Shanghai eight years before I lived there.

Mama spoke slowly. She talked of Japan before the war, of Shanghai and the desperation she had known there. She said that to recall the events of that lurid era would be to play an uneasy, painful game with the past. She talked for over an hour and asked him to come to see her again. Meanwhile she offered him the use of an interpreter to help him find the other person Father Lamereaux had mentioned.

Quin left feeling oddly close to the ancient little woman even though she had not discussed the circumstances in which she had heard his father’s name. Instead she had talked at length about herself. Why had she avoided his questions?

Quin thought he knew the answer. Geraty had said the espionage ring operated for eight years. If his father had died in Shanghai when Mama was there, then the event she had alluded to, the episode that occurred eight years before that time, might be connected with the beginning of the ring. Mama had said it would be an uneasy, painful game of memory to recall that era and Quin believed her, for the uneasy, painful game could have only one name.

Shanghai.

The interpreter, a meek elderly man, suggested they begin their search at once in Tsukiji, the area of Tokyo where Quin had been told to look for the gangster Kikuchi-Lotmann. Since it was the fish market district, Tsukiji had the best sushi restaurants in the city. The interpreter led Quin to one on a main street and indicated a table by the window.

If we sit there, he said, we should be able to get our bearings. Shall we?

The interpreter spoke to the waiter and plates of sushi began to appear, those for Quin heavy on the cheaper cuts of octopus and squid, those for the interpreter tending toward expensive sea urchin and expensive salmon roe and an extremely expensive northern whitefish that was so rare it was seldom available at any price.

Quin drank beer. The interpreter drank a premium iced sake from a brewery in Hiroshima that bottled the special brand only once a year on the Emperor’s birthday.

Quin finished his beer waiting to hear the interpreter’s plan for finding Kikuchi-Lotmann. The man said nothing, instead he ordered a second plate of sushi and a third. Quin found himself paying the bill, which was exorbitantly high, while the interpreter exchanged pleasantries with the man at the cash register. Once outside, the interpreter walked a few steps to a doorway and stopped.

Careful, he whispered. We must act naturally.

They stood on the sidewalk facing the door. The interpreter rolled his eyes to heaven meaningfully, hiccuped, unzipped his trousers. Quin went over to wait by the curb as a stream of urine splashed between the interpreter’s legs and slithered across the crowded sidewalk. The elderly man wiped his hands with a newspaper before joining Quin at the curb.

First piece of information, he whispered. There appears to be a houseboat in the neighborhood that everyone is afraid to talk about.

How do you know? said Quin.

The man at the cash register. We had a short discussion about the stores and shops and houses and inns and shacks and restaurants and hotels in Tsukiji, about the storerooms and warehouses and garages and so forth, and he never hesitated. He chatted right along with me. So that leaves only a houseboat, don’t you think? I’m quite sure that’s what we’re looking for. Shall we?

Quin followed the interpreter into a coffee shop, dark and restful after the hot sun in the street. The interpreter asked for the score to the music, a Mozart symphony, and read the score while they were waiting for their coffee to be brought. The beer and the summer heat had made Quin sleepy. Soon he dozed off. His untouched cup of coffee was sitting in front of him when the interpreter tugged his sleeve and woke him up.

The sun’s just going down, he whispered, always a good time to gather information. Besides, that’s Haydn and they don’t have the score. Shall we?

Shall we what? growled Quin.

The interpreter laughed lightly.

Very good, we shall. This is the moment we’ve been waiting for.

Quin expected the taxi to take them along a canal where a houseboat would be moored, but instead they drove across a wide stretch of reclaimed land to a breakwater. The interpreter strolled leisurely out toward the end of the breakwater while the taxi waited. Quin ran after him. The man stood at the end gazing across Tokyo Bay.

What the hell, said Quin.

I know, mused the interpreter, there’s nothing like it at sunset. The bay and the outline of the city and above it all in the distance our noble Fuji-san. I’ve always been able to think more clearly here. In fact, I have a feeling the next piece of information is almost within our grasp.

The interpreter rolled his eyes toward Mt. Fuji, toward heaven. The wind was behind him so the stream of urine arched a full thirty feet out over the bay.

Lovely, mused the elderly man.

What is?

All of it. Just lovely and here we are.

Where?

Just here, repeated the interpreter, his gaze fixed on either the sacred mountain or some cloud in the sky. But we mustn’t tarry now, the moment has come. Shall we?

The taxi returned them to Tsukiji, to another sushi restaurant, this one large and noisy. The interpreter elbowed his way through the drunken, shouting men to the counter and used some of Quin’s money to bribe a waiter into giving them seats.

Act naturally, whispered the interpreter as they sat down. This is the place, all right. Pretend we just dropped in to have a bite. No one must think we’re really looking for information.

Mounds of raw fish piled up in front of them, the interpreter eating ravenously as if he had not seen food in weeks. He drank heavily and hummed his way through the entire Mozart symphony that had been played in the coffee shop earlier in the afternoon. He laughed, he picked his teeth noisily, he shouted, he sang war songs, ordered more and more sushi and more and more sake to go with it.

Hours went by. Quin was furious, drunk, dazed from the heat. Some time after midnight he was presented with an enormous bill. He intended to pay it and leave and never see the interpreter again, but as he got up from the counter the elderly man tugged his sleeve and whispered urgently.

That’s right, just act naturally. But give me your money roll to pay the bill with, now is absolutely the moment.

Beside the cash register was a set of scales used for weighing fish. The interpreter dropped some money into one side of the scales, the bill into the other. He belched loudly.

A feast, he shouted.

Miserable fare, shouted the elderly man who served as cashier.

The finest restaurant in Japan, shouted the interpreter.

Impossible, shouted the cashier.

I insist upon it, yelled the interpreter.

The grace of Buddha descends upon me, yelled the cashier.

The houseboat, whispered the interpreter.

There is none, whispered the cashier.

The interpreter eased a handful of coins into the scales. He stroked a fistful of notes and let them flutter down one by one on top of the coins.

Snow, he whispered. Gently falling snow that covers the path to the castle.

Much snow must fall, whispered the cashier, to obscure the footprints of the stranger who attempts to sneak up on the castle under cover of darkness.

The interpreter pulled more notes from Quin’s money roll and let them fall into the scales.

Might it be, he whispered, that one must be careful because the lord of this castle is so powerful?

He has power beyond power. No one equals him in power.

No one? That is a difficult claim to make. We have our Emperor, after all.

The Emperor has been powerless since the thirteenth century.

True enough. He has been only a figurehead, a god. Real power has long been in the hands of the warlords. Is it not so?

The cashier shrugged. Of remote eras, he whispered, I know nothing.

But do you mean to say then, whispered the interpreter, that the power of this lord in the castle compares to that of the warlords of more recent eras? That it compares to those warriors who a few short decades ago were our leaders in the conquest of China and the Pacific? Could his empire really compare to their Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere?

Greater Asia what? whispered the cashier. China, you say? The Pacific? East Asia? Spheres of spheres and prosperity? No, this empire does not compare to that one because it is much larger. And it is real, unlike that other one that was only a dream, so flimsy it collapsed in a day or two under the weight of one bomb. No, this empire exists, I tell you.

Then the man who rules it must be a mighty emperor indeed. When does he hold court in his castle, this emperor of emperors?

The cashier scooped up the money in the scales and rang up a small sum on the cash register. He stopped whispering and spoke in a normal voice.

Fifty grams, he said. That would be a very good white-fish, short and round, but also too powerful a swimmer for any fisherman to catch. I’m afraid we don’t have what you’re looking for.

The interpreter hiccuped. The cashier sucked air through his teeth. They staggered out of the restaurant and down the street through crowds of men lurching back and forth, spraying each other. At last the interpreter found an unoccupied telephone pole, where he unzipped his trousers in the glare of a streetlight.

That’s it, he whispered, we have it all now. First, he said fifty grams and that’s half a hundred or half the night. Midnight. That’s when this emperor among gangsters shows up at his houseboat. Second, he’s a short rotund man. Third, the rackets he controls make up an empire larger than the Japanese empire during the Second World War. Fourth, the rackets aren’t confined to the Orient but operate all over the world. Fifth, he is more powerful than General Tojo was twenty years ago. Sixth, I don’t know what the cashier meant by calling him white. The Japanese language is very imprecise. Is it possible this gangster is a Westerner? Partly Western?

I suppose so, said Quin. But anyway, where is this houseboat?

Right behind the restaurant we were just in, that’s why we went there of course. Most of the canals in Tokyo are sewers today, one of the few that isn’t is behind that restaurant. Clean water. Just what you’d want if you lived on a houseboat. I thought of sewers while we were in the coffee shop, which is why we went there of course, then I thought of clean water while we were looking at the clean lines of Fuji-san at sunset, which is why we went down to the bay of course. But it has been a long day and now I think we must be going. Shall we?

Quin took out his money.

Impossible, said the interpreter. I wouldn’t think of it. After all, I’ve done practically nothing for you. And let me thank you for the sushi and the sake and the Mozart. It was a very relaxing day.

He waved through the back window of the taxi as he drove away, leaving Quin astonished at the ease with which he had uncovered the information. But of course Quin had no way of knowing that he had just spent the day with a former corporal who had once been the chauffeur of a man who was a great master spy and double agent at the time of that other empire, who had observed ten thousand clandestine techniques as he drove the most feared man in the Kempeitai, the little Baron with the glass eye that never closed, through the dangerous streets of Mukden and the intricate alleys of Shanghai, the bewildering plots and deceptions of a Tokyo that had disappeared with the war.

Generally Big Gobi moved around and around the apartment while he was watching television. If he saw a clogged sink on the screen he went out to the kitchen to examine their sink. If he saw a clogged stomach he went into the bathroom to see if he could move his bowels.

Late one afternoon Quin went over to the set and turned it off. A minute or two later Big Gobi moaned.

Hey Quin. Hey what’s that all about? I was right in the middle of something.

What?

I don’t know. Something.

You haven’t moved in days.

Haven’t I?

Now listen, Gobes, the tube’s been out of focus since yesterday. You lost the picture and you didn’t even know it. There’s been nothing but a hum coming out.

Well hey, maybe I was in the middle of that.

No good, Gobes. Tell me what’s bothering you.

Nothing.

Come on.

Do I have to?

Yes.

Big Gobi twisted his hands. He wrung them, pretended to wash them, pretended to dry them.

It’s just this. I can’t think straight anymore.

What’s the matter?

Everything’s upside down, that’s what’s the matter.

Why?

Because everything’s changed. I mean all my life there’s always been one thing I could trust. I didn’t have much else and it was terribly important, but now it’s just gone, I mean just like that. How can you lose something that used to be the whole world to you?

Maybe you don’t, Gobes, maybe you don’t really lose it. What was it?

Big Gobi went through the ritual of washing his hands again. He rubbed the dent in his shoulder.

What do you want to know for?

Because I care about you.

I know, I know you do, I know that’s why you want to know, but what difference does it make when nothing can be done about it anyway? I mean some things are hard to talk about.

What, Gobes?

Well you know what I mean, don’t you, I mean you know me, I don’t have to come right out and say it.

All right. It’s television, isn’t it?

Sure.

It doesn’t mean as much to you as it used to.

As much? Doesn’t mean as much? It means nothing at all, that’s what it means. After all these years it’s just gone, just as if it had never been there. And it was my family, Quin, it was my home and my friends and you know, everything. It was just plain me and now it’s nothing at all.

Maybe not.

But it is, I mean I know it is. I look at the set now and I don’t feel a thing. I mean I remember how I used to feel, but that’s all. I used to feel I couldn’t live without it and now I don’t even care. It frightens me. How can things just be gone? How can you just lose them?

I don’t know that you can. New things happen though. Something else comes along. What’s the new thing, Gobes?

You know. You must know.

Tell me.

All right I’ll tell you, I’ll tell you tomorrow.

No, now.

Right now?

Yes.

Like that?

Like that.

All right, Quin, I will. I’ll tell you just like that.

Well?

Jigglies.

What?

Jigglies. I can’t think about anything but Jigglies. I look at the set and I see Jigglies. The picture goes off and I still see Jigglies. When I try to go to sleep I’m thinking of Jigglies and that keeps me awake. I think about Jigglies when I’m trying to eat and the silly food won’t go down. I mean I know that night wasn’t anything special to you, I know that, but it was to me and I feel just awful now. It’s driving me crazy.

Big Gobi washed and dried his hands. He buried himself in his chair. Quin was thinking of the bar in Yokohama, of Big Gobi marching away from the colored lights of the jukebox behind an aging, shapeless whore, a scarred admiral of a whore who had commanded fleets of Japanese battleships during the war, who had captained half the freighters in the world since then.

Listen, said Quin. I know a place that’s supposed to be the best in Asia for girls. How about it?

Where?

Right here.

Tokyo?

Right.

A kind of palace?

Exactly.

With a princess?

She’ll be a princess. We’ll make sure of it.

When?

Tonight. Right now.

Really?

Sure. You change and we’ll be on our way.

Change?

Big Gobi looked down at himself. He was wearing bathing trunks.

Why was he wearing bathing trunks? He tried to remember. It was because he had had them on that night. He had been in a hurry to leave the beach, the dull one for swimming, to get to the other beach where there were tattoo parlors and jukeboxes and jigglies. He had been in such a hurry he hadn’t changed, so that was the way he walked into the bar in Yokohama.

Bare feet. No shirt. Bathing trunks.

A life preserver over his shoulder.

But the aging, shapeless admiral standing in the colored lights of the jukebox hadn’t laughed at him. In her long career she had scuttled too many battleships and seen too many shipwrecked sailors to be surprised when a man staggered through the door stripped nearly naked, grinning, gripping his life preserver.

Big Gobi smiled shyly.

Sorry, Quin, I’ll change right now. As I told you, I’ve had this one thing on my mind.

They passed a sandlot where barefoot boys in white pajamas were beating their hands against trees.

Why, Quin?

Karate. Smash your hand against a tree for three or four years and you have calluses an inch thick. Smash it into a keg of sand for another three or four years and all the fingers are the same length.

Why?

So your hand’s shaped like a hoe.

Big Gobi looked at his hands. He saw a woman carrying pieces of chicken wrapped in broad wood shavings. Why didn’t they use paper? Girls in short skirts were going to work, and men with towels around their necks were coming from work after stopping at the public bath. Why didn’t they bathe at home? Why didn’t the girls go to work in the morning?

It was silly. The whole country was silly. He didn’t want his hand to look like a hoe.

He felt for the eye in his pocket, the eye he had bought after the accident with the tuna fish in Boston, the weekend the foreman slipped in the freezer locker and was crushed under a load of thawing fish. The whole episode had started with an eye, Big Gobi knew that and he didn’t want it to happen again. So a few days later when he had chanced to pass a store that sold surgical supplies and had seen a glass eye in the window he had gone in and bought it. Now he kept it with him always, never playing with it or taking it out except when he had to, saving it for emergencies. Even Quin didn’t know about the glass eye. No one knew about it because it had to do with the tuna fish and the foreman’s accident.

They went down a long spiral staircase, passed a huge man with a mallet, kept on descending.

Hey, said Big Gobi. Hey what’s the name of this palace?

The Living Room.

It was silly. Nothing made any sense anymore. Palaces didn’t have living rooms. Palaces were supposed to be up in the sky.

He was even more disappointed when they went into a small, dark room, smaller than the one in Yokohama, lacking a jukebox. They sat down in an alcove hidden behind palm trees. A bucket of ice was brought with a bottle in it. Big Gobi tasted the bubbly ginger ale and found it bitter. The tall, flat glasses held only a mouthful.

He was lonely. An old woman with a silly green jewel in the middle of her forehead came and sat down beside Quin. Was that Quin’s idea of a princess? While they talked he peeked between the palm trees. It was dark out there. Where was everyone?

The old woman left and Quin went with her, saying he would be back in a few minutes. Big Gobi shrugged. He didn’t care.

He finished the bottle of ginger ale thinking about the girl in Yokohama who had jewels on her slippers, not on her forehead. He tried washing and drying his hands, but that didn’t help either. Another bottle came. He drank some more.

All at once a beautiful girl was sitting down beside him, a young girl with black hair to her waist, a princess. She was wearing an evening dress and stroking his arm. The only girl who had ever done that before was the nurse in the army when she gave him water injections. Instinctively he jerked his arm away.

Her hand fell on his knee. She giggled and went on stroking him.

Whatever you want, said her lovely eyes. I love your knee. I love all of you.

Big Gobi suddenly laughed. He was happy. This princess was the most beautiful girl he had ever seen and she was smiling at him, admiring him, loving him.

He began to talk, he couldn’t help it. He told her about the orphanage and oysters and the army and the bus trip and the seagull soup on the freighter and running away from the seagulls through a blizzard. He confessed his secrets, all but one of them, and still she smiled at him, loved him, urged him to go on.

Her hand slipped up to his thigh.

Big Gobi was smiling too, giggling, pouring himself more ginger ale. The princess was beautiful, life in the palace was beautiful. She loved him, why not tell her everything? She would understand about the accident in the freezer locker.

She blew in his ear. Her hand moved over and touched him right there, stroked him right there. Big Gobi took the eye out of his pocket so that he wouldn’t lose control.

It all happened quickly. She pulled her hand away, her smile was gone, her face a mixture of wonder and doubt. She was staring at his hand on the table, at the eye buried in his palm. The eye was staring back at her, reflecting the dim light in the alcove. Big Gobi didn’t want her to take her hand away and he didn’t want to stop talking. He wanted to tell her about the tuna fish and the accident with the foreman before it was too late.

He pulled her toward him, she pulled away. She said something he didn’t understand and her dress ripped. She screamed.

The jukebox in Yokohama, the jewels, the beach, oysters. Colored lights went off in Big Gobi’s head. What was that eye doing in his hand? Was it really an eye or was it an oyster?

He pushed it into his mouth. Swallowed it.

The girl shrieked. He pulled her again and her dress tore, the jigglies were right in front of him. He squeezed the jigglies, squeezed himself, got his trousers down as the two of them crashed backward through the palm trees into the middle of the room. Waiters tried to hold his arms and legs, the sumo wrestler’s mallet landed on his head but Big Gobi went on pumping. The mallet rose in the air a second time.

There was no way of knowing whether the second blow from that heavy weapon, by itself, would have stopped him. In any case his orgasm had already begun before the mallet fell. By the time it struck him he was spent, limp, relaxed. The mallet grazed his ear and he rolled over on his back, snoring, a smile on his face, one arm tucked underneath the naked girl.

He awoke on a landing near the street, his ear bandaged, Quin standing over him. He wanted to tell Quin that it had been nobody’s fault. Not hers for touching him right there where a princess touches you when she loves you. Not his for taking out the eye because he loved her and didn’t want an accident to happen at the table. No one was to blame. Everything had happened out of love.

Big Gobi thought of all the things he wanted to say, but only the same silly words kept coming out.

I’m sorry.

I’m sorry, Quin.

Sorry.

Terribly sorry.

He tried to say more and couldn’t, stammered, repeated himself. And then Quin turned on him.

Hold your tongue, he said.

Big Gobi closed his eyes. He didn’t say anything after that because he had heard that voice before. It was the kind of voice a cook on a freighter used, or a nurse in the army, or a bus driver when he took your ticket and tore it up.

Just destroyed it, just like that, and threw it away not caring that you were all alone and had nowhere to go without a ticket.

It was wrong, Big Gobi knew it was wrong. Quin was like a brother to him, but even Quin got angry because he could never say what he wanted to say, could never open his heart and love people the way he wanted to love them, touch them the way he wanted to touch them without some terrible accident happening. Perhaps if he’d told Quin long ago about the mistake with the foreman and the tuna fish, he might have understood this time. But he hadn’t told him then and now it was too late. It was all wrong and no one was to blame, but it was too late.

Hold your tongue.

Big Gobi closed his eyes. Those were the last words that would ever cause him pain for when they sank into him a gate clanged shut behind them, a palace gate that would never open again. He tried to live in a world that was strange and frightening, tried to call it silly, tried to pretend he could live the way other people lived. But the gestures had always been clumsy, the acting artless, a jester with a serious face, a buffoon without a smile. Although he was as kind and lonely as a clown, in the end no one laughed.

Thereafter he might walk after Quin, the brother, down this street or that from the past, through the mythical lost cities of Shanghai and Tokyo and there find his mother or father without knowing it, answering questions that went unheard because the dream was gone, because the child within him had fled to the safety of that changeless inner kingdom where neither pain nor insult could be found, nothing in fact but the silent palace where the prince who might have been sat alone in his cell, beyond hope or sadness, patiently waiting for death.

Each morning they had the same conversation when Big Gobi came into the living room and sat down with his hands in his lap, there to remain for the rest of the day.

How’s the ear, Gobes?

The ear’s fine.

Bandage too tight?

The bandage’s fine.

Look, I’m sorry I spoke to you that way, I didn’t mean it. I just got angry that something like that had to happen in Mama’s place.

Anger’s fine. That Mama’s fine. What happened’s fine.

Quin nodded to himself and went into the kitchen, or outside to walk, or back into the bedroom to stare at the floor. Somehow he knew he had to get through to Big Gobi, he had to break his trance. In the end, not knowing how it might help, he decided to take him along to the meeting with the gangster Kikuchi-Lotmann.

Later that evening on the houseboat with Kikuchi-Lotmann would remind him of another meeting on a houseboat, the one Mama had failed to mention in her first conversation with him, the episode that had taken place in Shanghai eight years before she arrived there, the evening when Baron Kikuchi had embraced his convictions and agreed to supply the plans of the General Staff of the Imperial Army to the engaging husband of his former mistress, a man named Quin.

One recollection, a small one.

Soon there would be many more since Quin was unknowingly nearing the center of the espionage ring that had received its code name from an event in the life of the mysterious Adzhar, a clandestine network that had connected his father and the General and Father Lamereaux, and Maeve and Miya and Mama, and through them others as well, in a performance of love and desperation so powerful it could reach out thirty years later to claim both murders and suicides, create a new Kannon Buddha, and bring on the most magnificent funeral in Asia since the death of Kublai Khan.

And all because Quin wanted to help Big Gobi, and in so doing introduced him to his murderer.

Just before midnight they were walking down the canal behind the sushi restaurant when a young Japanese stepped out of the shadows with a submachine gun. He was wearing a dark business suit and his hair was cut short, but Quin wouldn’t have recognized him anyway without his false moustache and false sideburns. The young Japanese pointed the submachine gun at an alley and moved behind them. There was nothing to do but march ahead.

They came to a blank wall at the end of the alley. A buzzer sounded. The wall rolled away to reveal an enormous hall, a brightly lit area where hundreds of young women in white overalls and white surgical masks sat at benches studying banks of miniature television sets. Behind the sets were computers. The television screens showed scenes from all over the world, shipyards and oil refineries, camera factories, massage parlors, motorcycle assembly lines, bars and restaurants, transistor radio plants, every manner of enterprise and industry.

The guard waved them through a door into another large hall, less well lit, where young men in white overalls and white surgical masks supervised machines that stacked and packaged currencies.

The next door led into darkness. They were outside again facing the canal. A narrow gangplank ran down to a small houseboat.

When they stepped on the gangplank a light went on. A speaker began to play circus music. They passed through a tiny room with a bare canvas cot and one empty coat hanger on the wall beside a whip and megaphone. They walked through another door onto the deck.

The water was black and still. On the far side of the canal the windowless wall of a warehouse stretched for hundreds of yards. A charcoal brazier burned near the edge of the deck, which was covered with sawdust. Folding canvas chairs were scattered here and there. From one of them rose a short, rotund man who wore steel-rimmed glasses and a lavender frock coat. He smiled as he put out his hand.

Just in time, he said. I’m serving Mongolian mixed grill tonight. Your name please?

Quin.

The short, rotund man shook his hand warmly.

Kikuchi-Lotmann, Mr. Quin, a pleasure. I was beginning to wonder what had happened to you. I expected to see you soon after you made your inquiries. Were you delayed?

Quin pointed at the bandage over Big Gobi’s ear. Kikuchi-Lotmann shook his head with concern.

An accident? How unfortunate. But in any case you’re here and now we can have our chat. Who was it that sent you to me?

Father Lamereaux.

Ah, such a good man, so gentle and so kind. I haven’t seen him since I was a child. Excuse me, please.

The young man with the submachine gun clicked his heels and handed a report to Kikuchi-Lotmann, who glanced through it with no expression on his face. The guard stood at order arms. Kikuchi-Lotmann lit a long cigar and puffed briefly.

That settles it, he said. Sell our Korean textiles, our Kuwait crude, and our Kabul goats. Buy Surabaja brothels and bring down the government in Syria. I’ll see the delegation from Bolivia next week. Tell the families in Belgium and Bali to stop feuding or I’ll put out contracts. Corner the unrefined sugar market in Burma, via Beirut. Put a hold on South African diamonds until the Venezuelans agree to our pineapple terms. Bring gin, ice, and bitters.

The guard clicked his heels and left. Kikuchi-Lotmann removed a necktie from his pocket and tied it in the place of the one he was wearing.

Not since I was a child, he repeated, in Kamakura before the war. He often used to visit the man who took me in when I was a nameless orphan, Rabbi Lotmann, the former Baron Kikuchi. Lotmann always admired Lamer-eaux’s knowledge of the No theater. Are you also interested in No?

Quin shook his head.

Nor am I. Performances yes, but of a different kind.

He paused, smiling, as if Quin were supposed to understand something by that. But when Quin said nothing he nodded quickly.

I see, he told you nothing about me. Well what might the name of your friend be?

Gobi.

Gobi? The desert in China? A curious name. In Chinese he would be called Shamo. That’s their word for it, it means sandy wastes. Men known as dune-dwellers lived there in prehistoric times. Artifacts have been found along with dinosaur eggs. Would you like a drink before dinner?

They sat down at a folding camp table and Kikuchi-Lotmann mixed pink gins. A servant, a short man with gray hair, appeared with a platter of kidneys and liver, heart, spleen, a section of the large intestine, tongue and hocks and throat. Something about the man reminded Quin of Mama, perhaps his height or the resignation in his eyes. But the servant was thickset whereas Mama was frail, and the compassion in her face was replaced by hardness in his.

Kikuchi-Lotmann inspected the platter and gave instructions for cooking the meat. At the same time he chopped up leeks and watercress and made a salad dressing.

I wonder if I haven’t seen him before, said Quin, nodding in the direction of the servant who was now bent over the charcoal brazier.

Unlikely, answered Kikuchi-Lotmann. He’s one of my two personal bodyguards and is always with me. The other is the young man who escorted you in. The young one I call the student and the old one the policeman, because that’s what they were when I hired them. The student is good at remembering things and the policeman is good at grilling meat. And now, Mr. Quin, let’s have our chat. Why are you here?

To try to find out about my father, although I don’t see how you could have known him. He died before the war.

I was a child before the war, Mr. Quin, and the only foreigners I knew as a child were two friends of Rabbi Lotmann. One was Father Lamereaux, the other was an elderly Russian linguist by the name of Adzhar who also lived in Kamakura. Adzhar was in his late seventies then, about the time you were being born. Is it possible you later changed your name to something more American?

Kikuchi-Lotmann grinned. Quin smiled and shook his head.

I’m afraid not. It would make a good story, but Adzhar’s not the man I’m looking for.

Looking for? You said he was dead. What do you mean?

I mean I know very little about my father or mother, other than that they lived out here. I came to Japan to find out what I could.

But how am I to help if I never knew a Quin and never heard of one?

I don’t know. All I know is that Father Lamereaux told me to come to see you and here I am.

Quin smiled. Kikuchi-Lotmann laughed.

I have a feeling, said Kikuchi-Lotmann, that the old Jesuit’s up to something. Well he’s clever, we know that. I assume he knew your father?

Not well, only in one special way. He saw him occasionally but never for more than a minute or two at a time. He can’t tell me much really.

But he did know him, just as he knew Rabbi Lotmann. He knew your father and he knew my guardian, and obviously there’s some reason why he wanted us to meet. Do you know what that might be?

No.

Kikuchi-Lotmann removed his glasses to polish them, his eyes shrinking to two solemn dots. The glasses went on again and Quin was faced with two large smiling eyes.

I think I might, said Kikuchi-Lotmann. I think it might have to do with No plays. They’re stylizations, aren’t they? The actors wear masks so there can be no doubt of that, then too the number of roles is quite limited no matter what the play. Only a handful really. The witch, the princess, the old man, the brother, and so forth. Now it happens there’s only one thing I know about my parents, and Rabbi Lotmann might have told Father Lamereaux about it just as he told me.

What is it?

Their last circus performance. How they died. Do you know the story of Emperor Taisho opening parliament?

No.

I’ll tell it to you, but just excuse me a minute, please.

The bodyguard with the submachine gun came to order arms, clicked his heels, and handed Kikuchi-Lotmann a second report. He lit a new long cigar and glanced over the single sheet of paper.

Just as I expected, he said. Say no to the automobile franchise in Thailand, offer Icelandic fishing grounds instead. Acquire a controlling interest in Ceylonese tea and let it be known that no ships will be unloaded in Malaysia and no opium allowed out of Turkey unless we get all of Bombay’s male brothels. Send a letter of condolence to the head of the Burundi family. Also agree to finance the airport in the Sulawesi but not the steel mill in Sikkim. Fix the horse races in Buenos Aires and send the proceeds to our London insurance firm. Switch our arms shipments from the sultans in Sabah to the terrorists. In Somalia do the opposite, withdraw support from the terrorists and send tanks to the sheiks. Buy Austrian skiing, sell Libyan electronics. Take control of the trans-Siberian pipeline.

Oil or natural gas? asked the bodyguard.

Natural gas, said Kikuchi-Lotmann. Use our Geneva and Zurich banks. Liquidate our off-shore rights in Africa, take an option on the Brazilian jungle. Levy an eight percent surcharge on all vessels anchored in the Mediterranean. Build a tourist industry on the Caspian in Iran, emphasis on speed boats and snack bars and fast service. Schedule a coal miners’ strike in Finland the day after tomorrow. End the Honduran boycott of Nicaraguan bananas. Put out the order that I want everyone in the organization to get a haircut before the weekend. Don’t bring me any more reports tonight.

The bodyguard backed away. Kikuchi-Lotmann took a new necktie from his pocket.

The Emperor Taisho, he said, was on the throne in the 1920s when Father Lamereaux first came to Japan. There was an event then that made a great sensation although nothing was ever printed about it, naturally. Being god in those days, the Emperor didn’t have much to do. One of his few duties was to open parliament. The chamberlains were always worried how Taisho would handle himself at the opening because he had never been quite right in the head. Well this time he stood at the podium and didn’t seem to be doing anything at all, not even reading his document. He just stood there looking down at the bowed heads, rather a blank expression on his face. After about ten minutes of this had gone by, he smiled suddenly as if an idea had just come to him. All at once he rolled up the document he was supposed to be reading, rolled it up in the shape of a spy glass. He put it to his eye and swept the chamber with it, peeking at one man after another. The chamberlains were rushing to get ahold of him when he yelled out in a high squeaky voice: Hello down there. I am the Emperor. Who are you?

Kikuchi-Lotmann laughed.

He wouldn’t give up his spy glass, so they had to lead him away and open parliament without the document being read. Well the point is, perhaps that’s what Father Lamereaux is doing. Perhaps he’s saying, I am the Emperor and it’s up to you to answer for yourself. He knew my guardian, he knew your father, he knew the way my parents died. There’s a connection somewhere, and it must have to do with that last circus. With that vast unreal warehouse on the outskirts of Shanghai.

Shanghai?

Of course. Where else in Asia could such a circus have been performed?

After they finished the meal Kikuchi-Lotmann poured brandy. Big Gobi stared at the fire and dozed. A full moon had risen above the canal. It was well after midnight and the city was quiet. Facing the still water from the houseboat, they seemed far from Tokyo.

Kikuchi-Lotmann removed his necktie and tied in its place one of deep crimson.

The circus, he announced, taking off his glasses. His eyes shrank to dots as he recited the poem.

To know its sawdust,

Its smells and rings and highbars,

Is to remember.

A haiku, he said. Not a very good one, but at least of my own making. Now let us recall that other circus, the circus we knew as children. The sweep of the trapeze acts, the grace of the dangerous cats, the ridiculous clowns, the lumbering elephants, the confusing jugglers, the flying bareback riders. A magical show without end because of the magic in a child’s heart.

Yet when we go back years later we see a different performance. The costumes are shoddy, the smells cheap, the clowns not quite so funny, the aerialists not quite so daring. The dream is gone and what we see is crude, even grotesque. Sadness? Yes. Because we know the circus hasn’t changed.

So much for the wonders of childhood. Now for the setting of this particular circus, Shanghai in those last days before the war.

Enormous wealth, enormous poverty. Thousands of entrepreneurs and tens of thousands of slaves. The opium rights to a province lost at a game of cards. Women given fortunes in exchange for an evening of pleasure, or thrown into the baggage train of a warlord as a different kind of payment. Peasant boys reigning as queens one day and tortured to death the next. Hundreds of people slaughtered because a Chinese or Japanese general wakes up in the morning with painful hemorrhoids.

In food the favored delicacy is shrimp fed on human flesh. In alcohol and drugs the preferred mixture is laudanum, which combines the two.

These are the simple facts and figures of Shanghai, a city crowded with White Russians and exiles and adventurers of every kind, the halfway point on the east coast of Asia, a terminal for victims of all breeds and races.

Facts and figures. Are they enough, or is it possible that Shanghai was more than this? Not just a city but a state of mind, or to be more precise, an actual part of the mind? A vision we all carry somewhere within us?

It is here that my father finds himself with his circus one winter late in the 1930s. He is the circus master and my mother, in order to be near him, has taught herself to be an aerialist. A group of wealthy degenerates approaches him for a special performance, a private showing, acts to match the times and mock them. He listens to them and agrees, implying a performance unlike any ever staged. He moves his circus to an abandoned warehouse on the outskirts of the city and goes to work alone rigging the high wires, preparing the props and costumes himself.

The night of the circus comes. It is to begin exactly at midnight. The spectators arrive in evening dress and take their places while the band plays ruffles and flourishes. It is cold in the gloomy warehouse, but the excitement is too great for anyone to bother with that.

Trumpets. A drooping clown holds a sign for silence.

The drum rolls. A juggler spins a shadowy web of balls in the air.

Now we see him stepping into the ring dressed in boots and frock coat, carrying a whip and megaphone, the shaman and arbiter of marvels. He raises the megaphone and we hear the acts he will present.

The one-eyed tomb of Semarang.

The sure-footed vine of Mindanao.

The prancing Brunei horse.

The untamed leopard of Irrawaddy.

The Malacca cane.

The one and only Johore jerkin in captivity.

The spectators refuse to acknowledge this list of preposterous acts. Some are stupefied, others angry, a few fearful. They have brought bags of shrimp with them to eat during the performance, and now they begin noisily cracking the tails of the shrimp, peeling them, stuffing the rich meat into their mouths. There is hissing and shouting, stamping, catcalls.

The snare drum rolls again, the juggler plays out his shadowy game. My father continues announcing acts that have never been acted, animals that have never lived. It’s nonsense, of course, yet all of it is serious as well as meaningless.

At last he lowers the megaphone. He walks across the sawdust to the side of the ring looking up at my mother who is poised on the highbar, waiting for her trapeze act, a hundred feet above the ground.

Does she understand at the moment what he is doing? What is about to happen?

Perhaps. But it is too late for her or anyone to stop a performance that began long ago. Long ago, yes, and now it is here.

Tuneless, masterless

Come the acts of memory,

A Shanghai circus.

Kikuchi-Lotmann untied his necktie. He took a black one from his pocket and knotted it in place.

Poetry is a sauce, he said, and like all good sauces it should be both sweet and sour. The performance he had prepared that night, you see, was for a very small audience. The wealthy patrons in the stands, the animals and acts and clowns, the band and the jugglers were all props for a private performance he was about to stage for one person and one person alone, the woman on the highbar. To each of us love is a different mixture. To him it meant a ring and a bed.

But before I complicate the tale, let me say that it is really very simple. A man is enamored with the dash and excitement of the circus. He gives his life to it and discovers too late that the love of one woman is more important. Now wasting one’s life is commonplace. This man’s madness came because he had knowingly refused the gift.

The ring? The circus ring of course, the circle where a confident dissembler struts in his clever costumes sowing shouts and laughter, thinking he will trick life with his acts and disguises by tricking the fools who have come to watch him, which indeed he will one evening after another since spectators are there for that very purpose. The spectators applaud vigorously but after every performance the hall is emptied, and thus at the end of every clever evening the circus master must remember and remove the disguises he has squandered before the trumpets. He is naked then, trapped in the tight silence of the ring that has become his cage, alone with the squeezed tubes of paint and the hollow, worn costumes, standing alone on sawdust strewn with dead footprints that are mere acts of memory. Others come to see and marvel, they leave, and when they are gone he no longer exists.

And the bed? The bed of my mother, all her beds in one. The bed where she was born and slept as a child, a girl, a young woman. Where she took her first lover and her first ten and twenty lovers and many more even after she married because her husband would not receive her love. Because he thought the circus was too important to him. Because he gave his life to become a ring master in the clamor and triumph of a sawdust circle.

Probably he even encouraged her in those transitory affairs in order to be more at ease with himself, in order to think she wasn’t lonely, in order to hide from himself the fact that ultimately he could neither accept her love nor return it. Surely they both must have been involved in those acts of life that became decisive through repetition, even though the two of them might never have openly admitted they were making decisions.

And so it went year after year. An ambitious costumed man cleverly performing in the ring. A lonely woman in a bed exchanging love for hope with one passerby after another, exchanging love for flowers, for dinner, for an evening with someone, anyone, so that at least for an evening time could pass finger by finger instead of minute by minute.

The circus had always been his passion. When did its magic begin to slip away? When did he begin to have doubts about the trumpets that sounded when he stepped into the ring night after night? When did he begin to loathe the costumes and disguises? To detest the audiences who cheered only when he followed one act quickly with another? Who hissed when he faltered, hissed when he stumbled, demanded more and more, and then left the moment the performance ended?

There is no way to know. It happened. The ring became a cage. He had to reinforce himself with heavier and heavier doses of alcohol before he could bring himself to put on his costumes, to fix a smile to his face, to step forward and pretend he was still pleased with himself, still in command of the animals, still trying to amuse the spectators, still striving for the applause that was now utterly meaningless to him. He was given to darker and darker moods. He became morose, even violent.

His wife tried to help him but she couldn’t. Her kindness infuriated him because it reminded him of what he had lost in life, what he had thrown away. Despite her efforts the only time he could be intimate with her was after he had been drinking for hours. When he thought he could forget.

A woman opens

Her legs with smiles and gestures.

The bed is crowded.

Crowded with the men she had known over the years, the men he had driven her to. He tried to forget but he couldn’t. The woman he loved and the circus he hated mixed in his mind, the bed and the ring were entangled. One became a vision of the other and that vision obsessed him. When he looked at her now he saw a succession of vulgar defiling acts, the smiles and gestures of other men that were a part of her, a performing hell of screeching animals and leering jugglers, clowns pulling water pumps out of their trousers, pulling live chickens out of their baggy trousers as they smirked and worked their tongues.

A man so haunted by her past that a time came when he could no longer make love to her at all, no matter how much alcohol he had consumed. And that was the end for him. He could bear it no longer. Exhausted, totally humiliated, he prepared a last performance and stepped into the ring in front of a howling Shanghai mob.

Trumpets. Snare drums. The spotlight rises to the ceiling where a tiny figure is crouching under the skylight, a world-famous dwarf whose high dive will be the opening act. All heads go back. Silence. The dwarf leaps into space blindfolded and hurtles down from the black sky.

A thin silk cord, invisible from below, is attached to the dwarf’s ankle. At the last moment the silk cord will catch him. His fall will be broken a few inches above the floor. He will go into a long bouncing swing as he removes the blindfold, grins, waves triumphantly from his upside-down position.

Except this time the cord is a few inches too long. The snares roll, the drums boom, and the dwarf’s head splatters over the sawdust.

The end of a man who has been my father’s friend for years.

At once the spotlight turns to three clowns approaching the stands on stilts a full thirteen feet high. The clowns assume antic poses. Their hands interpret various obscene suggestions. Suddenly there’s a sharp crack, one of the stilts has been sawed through the middle. The clown comes tumbling down, knocking over the other two as he falls.

One man rips open his face, another is pierced through the heart by the broken stilt. The third lies on his back opening and closing his mouth, unable to move or make a sound.

Once more the spotlight shifts, this time to a balancing act. A man with huge biceps is peddling a unicycle while juggling balls with both hands. On his forehead he supports a tall metal pole, on top of the pole is a crossbar where a naked woman bends backward. The man seems to be peddling more rapidly, the balls drop away. The heavy pad meant to protect his head has been tampered with, the end of the pole has been sharpened and is slowly boring into his head. As the woman on the crossbar spreads her crotch wide to the audience, the pole splits her partner’s skull in two.

She crashes to the ground. The spotlight shoots into the air.

An aerial performance. A woman hangs by her knees from a trapeze, a mouthpiece clamped between her teeth. From the mouthpiece dangles another trapeze on which two wiry men, also hanging by their knees, masturbate each other while cursing their female relatives. The woman’s neck muscles bulge even more than expected, for the mouthpiece isn’t the one she generally uses. This mouthpiece has been fitted with a spring that gradually expands in her mouth. Of course she can’t spit it out, nor can she scream. The fellatio comes to an end when the two ejaculating men follow their sperm toward the ring together with the lower half of the woman’s face, her hanging tongue showing where she has been severed at the ears.

These opening acts, meant to set a circus mood, are quickly over. Now the spotlight dips back and forth, leaving the ring in darkness. The audience responds to the darkness by swinging their little red lights.

The flashlights were my father’s idea, miniature red lights on a string. He had devised them after long experience with audiences of children.

A circus ring is continually being darkened to prepare for the next act, and it seems that when a large number of children are gathered together in darkness they have a irresistible urge to exert themselves. They shriek, they tear off their clothes, they punch and kick each other and try to urinate on someone’s face.

My father introduced the little red lights so the children could amuse themselves when the hall was dark. Then he noticed that the parents of the children also enjoyed swinging the lights. Subsequently he never gave a performance without passing around the little red lights to everyone.

Although sophisticated and wealthy, the Shanghai audience was the same as any other when it came to darkness. While an act was under way they cracked and peeled their shrimps, giggled, nudged one another, and congratulated themselves. But the moment the act ended they desperately swung their little red lights.

A sense of community, perhaps, in that vast and gloomy warehouse?

There was always an undercurrent of fear, you see, in the old Shanghai, fear of a special kind. The city hung by the sea, a dot of land under international control. Beyond it stretched all of China and more, all of Asia. Tens of thousands of miles of interminable mountains and deserts. Tens of millions of nameless people babbling in unknown tongues. Swarming river valleys and uninhabitable mountain ranges. Caravan trails spiraling back into antiquity.

Who were these bewildering peoples? What esoteric fantasies might be the heritage of tribes that had wandered for millennia on the byways of unrecorded languages?

A few travelers had always explored these ancient routes. Learned Arabs, gentle Nestorians, adventurous Greeks. Some even reached the Pacific and lived to pass on their tales to the curious. But the stories they told only hinted at the mysteries to be found out there, the dragon bones of lost and future worlds, the illusions of mystics and madmen.

Shanghai stood on the edge of this hinterland. There were only a few people there, relatively speaking, with only a few days or weeks to live. To them this precarious existence on the edge of China had become man’s precarious existence on the edge of sanity. That’s what I meant when I said that Shanghai, then, was not only a state of mind but an actual part of mind. Within the narrow bounds of the city, people explored depravity, to be sure, but perhaps that was only because the wastes that lay beyond were too vast to contemplate.

These creatures now swung their little red lights in the warehouse of my father’s mind, the circus of his life. The ring was tiny, the warehouse huge, the walls were lost in darkness. There was nothing for them to do but huddle together in front of the master of ceremonies past and present, the magician and lord of the acts.

A Shanghai circus, then, a circus of the mind. My mother still watches from the highbar a hundred feet in the air. My father stands in the middle of the ring with his megaphone and whip, waiting, and at last the audience begins to see the truth. One by one the skilled performers, his oldest friends, are being maimed and killed. Now one by one the spectators cease to nibble the fat shrimps in their laps. Instead they squirm and whine as they swing their little red lights.

My father points his megaphone. The regular performances have ended, he has seen enough of human acts. The time has come for animals. With growing fury he shouts out the names of the beasts he will present.

The Afghan ibis.

The unicorn and centaur and sphinx.

The Cochin mermaid, the humpbacked zebra, the

two-legged sheep.

The pregnant tapir, the Sunda sable and purple

sail.

The hairless ibex and furry dolphin.

And a dozen more, all the monsters his tortured mind can conjure up. The cages are opened under the spotlight. Save for the circle of little red lights, the warehouse is lost in blackness.

The animals have not been fed in weeks, nor does their trainer give them any commands. His whip is curled around his legs and he watches them without moving. They paw the ground, staring at the little red lights that spin like eyes in a jungle night.

The Siberian tiger is the first to move. His tail swishes, his head goes down.

The leap carries him thirty feet into the stands, little enough for a tiger that size. The beast chews his way through the undergrowth and leaps again, snapping and growling, a head hanging from his maw.

The tiger’s roar is a signal to all the animals. The panther moves quickly, then the leopard, the bison, the herd of baboons, the rhinos and horses and monkeys, the hulking elephants. They crawl and swing through the stands chopping and clawing jungle eyes. An elderly woman is caught between a female elephant and an advancing male. Her daughters, products of successive unnatural unions with her twin brothers many years before, are assaulted in several positions by a pack of baboons. A man falls under the thrusts of a rhino’s horn, another is straddled by the bison. A horse eats its way into a leg thick with swollen veins and buried abscesses.

The big cats leap from pile to pile, the monkeys root in the rubbish, stealing shoes and eyeglasses and false limbs, especially teeth inlaid with gold. The shiny metal attracts them and whenever they see a victim captured by a larger beast, nuzzling to find a liver that isn’t sclerotic, they pull out the pretty teeth before the head is swallowed.

The baboons abandon the two hemorrhaging daughters and go in search of scirrhoid lesions. They had discovered a cancer in one of the girls that was tastier than the undiseased parts, which in that wealthy group tended to be too fat and oversalted. In just such a short time the baboons have also become specialists.

Last comes the jackal, a cautious beast. He circles a body many times before approaching, for he requires a man or woman who is alive yet paralyzed. When he finds one he settles down on his sticky haunches and performs the sexual act on the victim’s mouth. He then licks the mouth clean and moves on, a silk evening cloak over his shoulders, earrings dangling from his teeth.

The band plays, the tubas thump, the snares roll. The base drum booms, the horns blare unrelated chords, and the ring master stands alone in the spotlight. Just beyond the circle a juggler tosses an array of torches into the sky, toward the highbar where my mother watches the little red lights disappear.

By now all the animals have found a specialty. The monkeys hide sackfuls of gold teeth. The baboons wear expensive sport clothes and eat only cancerous tissue. The rhinos wallow in women’s underwear, the elephants trample eyeglasses into grains of sand. The horses prance in review, the leopard licks its hind quarters, the panther crunches kneecaps and other heavy bones, the Siberian tiger studies the stains left on the seats. The dogs, decorated in ribbons and epaulets, dance on two feet while the jackal pursues his solitary course along the fringe.

My mother saw it all. She saw him descend into the circus where lust and teeth and the wail of a victim are joined together in a single act, where animals run free and bodies pile up while a band plays and a juggler lifts torches end over end. She saw the performance rage and die, saw him step out of the ring and move away from the life where once he had ruled.

A monotonous juggler. A discordant band. A herd of snoring animals.

She shivers from the cold. After so much meat the animals will sleep for days. Even the jackal has closed his eyes. The band is sleeping too, lost in the nirvana of an opium dream. The spotlight still lights the juggler, but less clearly now. The torches give off an oily smoke and burn low as the juggler falls asleep beside them.

The spotlight is gone, the gloom begins to lift. From the skylight above her head dawn dimly falls on the interior of the empty warehouse.

After that? After my father stepped out of the ring he was never seen again. Armies were marching, war was coming. The great circus was beginning in which millions would have a part to play, an act, a specialty. The audience in Shanghai was soon forgotten, as was my father’s night in a deserted warehouse.

Those people, you see, would have died soon anyway. They were looking for death, and one way or another they would have found it. They were on the edge, voyeurs a step away waiting for the final spectacle. They must have known they had gone to the warehouse that night to witness their own deaths. After all, there was nothing else left to see.

So it wouldn’t be right to say they were victims that night. There were only two victims. The ring and the bed were theirs, the circus was theirs, the sounds and the smells and the horrors were theirs.

Thus when dawn came she gripped the trapeze and took a last breath. She balanced on her toes and the trapeze swung wide as it had many times before. And as she had many times before, she left it and turned the graceful, loving figures in the air.

Turned and turned through three somersaults, hung still where there was no hand to catch her. Still for a moment, one moment before she spiraled down and down.

Kikuchi-Lotmann’s glasses had fogged. He cleaned them on his necktie, his eyes black dots.

I have never forgotten, he said in a low voice. I have remembered and lived accordingly. How could it be otherwise?

Heaven and water go their opposite ways,

Thus in all transactions the superior man

Carefully considers the beginning.

Not mine and not a haiku either. That one’s from the old book. To the ancient Chinese the superior man was the ordinary man, that’s what it means. So I have remembered the way they lived and the torment it brought them and done the opposite, doing everyday business in a businesslike way, putting the war and the passions they knew behind me, satisfying myself with the mundane affairs of ordinary business because I have considered my beginning, my father, and where it led him.

Where did it lead him? said Quin.

To the interior of China I suppose, the coastline was already at war. But where exactly would be impossible to say. Wandering the trails of those learned Arabs perhaps, those gentle Nestorians and adventurous Greeks. Or rather I’d like to think that. As with the audience in the warehouse that night, it would be better not to know the end. It would be better to think he’s still wandering.

Kikuchi-Lotmann smiled.

And so I do. I prefer to think that somewhere in the vastness of central Asia, beyond those interminable arid wastes where the paths are too old and new for the rest of us, there is a home for a soul such as his. A small resting place beside a stream, under a tree, where a man who has dreamed and failed can surrender his ghost without regrets. I prefer to believe that.

Kikuchi-Lotmann creaked out of his chair and stretched his arms. The shadows were gone. One final time he changed his necktie. When he turned to Quin he was smiling.

Well, have we learned anything tonight? Have we discovered what Father Lamereaux might have had in mind when he sent you here?

I’m not really sure, said Quin, but one thing bothers me. If he knows the story, which he must, why didn’t he tell it to me himself?

Perhaps because he’s a holy man and a holy man is supposed to guide, not teach. Or it might have been just a whim of his. In any case we followed the holy man’s directions and did what was expected of us.

Quin shook Big Gobi by the shoulder and told him it was time to leave. As he stood Kikuchi-Lotmann noticed the cross hanging from his neck.

That’s an old piece. Where did it come from?

It was given to him in America, answered Quin.

Once as a boy I saw a cross much like it. It belonged to Rabbi Lotmann’s twin brother, who apparently treasured it greatly. He always wore it hidden under his uniform, which was odd for a Japanese who wasn’t a Christian, who was an ultranationalist in fact. It wouldn’t have gone well for him in the army if anyone had known about it.

Who was he? said Quin.

A very powerful General who was killed in China in 1937. He inherited the title of Baron Kikuchi when Lot-mann became a Jew.