Quin’s Shanghai Circus

The Policeman

As for where they go and why, we cannot be sure of such things. There are no tracks in such a barren waste. The sandstorms blow, the sun sinks, rivers disappear, and their camels are lost in darkness. Therefore the truth must be that the routes of such men are untrace-able, their missions unknowable, their ultimate destinations as invisible as the wind.

If the Son of Heaven is to continue to rule with integrity, we must defend our borders at all costs from such men.

—A Han dynasty account of the caravans in the Gobi Desert

The young bodyguard whom Kikuchi-Lotmann called the student stood in a long line of people waiting for a movie theater to open. It was his day off and he didn’t have to be back at the dormitory until muster the following morning.

All of the gangsters who worked for Kikuchi-Lotmann lived together in the company housing project, a large concrete block of windowless cubicles built around a central courtyard. Muster came at six o’clock, when a bugle sounded over the public address system. The gangsters fell in at attention in the courtyard and the roll was taken. A physical fitness expert then led them through a rigorous series of push-ups, pull-ups, and rope-skipping. The calisthenics ended at seven o’clock with the gangsters maneuvering around the courtyard in military fashion singing the company marching song, Kikuchi-Lotmann Enterprises Forever.

The supreme present,

Nothing compares to the present.

Unless it’s the past.

The lyrics were much too brief for the music, which one of the older employees claimed was similar to a tune he had heard in Singapore before the war, a song known at that time, there, as Roast Beef of Old England.

Hato hated calisthenics and he hated the dormitory. He hated the young whore, a mental health specialist, who burst into his cubicle three times a week dressed as an elderly woman, her face lined with gray make-up to give her the semblance of age, her breasts taped down to appear flat, her belly daubed with green chalk, her legs painted with varicose veins. The young woman yanked him to his feet and pushed him away from the door. He had to spend an hour with her.

Up against the wall, mother-fucker, she shouted as she charged.

Hato didn’t have any special feelings about his mother, so the therapeutic effect of the session was lost on him. He would have preferred a girl who looked like a movie star.

Hato’s father had made his living since the war selling gloves, hairpieces, and empty lipstick tubes that had formerly belonged to female movie stars. Most of these items were bought by girls who worked in massage parlors. The more select imports he auctioned off to industrialists, veterans of the Pacific war, who would pay high prices for anything that had belonged to an American star because America had won the war.

He had begun his career almost by accident when the most famous blond star in America, later a suicide, visited the Imperial Hotel for a few days. On a whim Hato’s father bribed the maids to search the sheets each morning to see what they could find.

When the movie star left he had two genuine pubic hairs in his possession. He framed the hairs under a magnifying glass together with a nude picture of the actress and auctioned off the display, realizing enough profit to set up a business importing less sensational items collected or stolen by maids and garbage men in Los Angeles.

The house where Hato grew up was strewn with movie magazines used by his father to check the authenticity of the gloves, hairpieces, and empty lipstick tubes he imported. As a child Hato was given to spells of dizziness that caused his eyes to roll back in his head. While the spells were upon him he was in danger of biting his tongue.

The best way to deal with the seizures, he discovered, was to lie down at once on a couch covered with movie magazines and stuff whatever was close at hand into his mouth. Generally the nearest available object was either a glove or a hairpiece or an empty lipstick tube.

Later he outgrew these attacks, but one or two of their ancillary aspects remained with him. When he went to the United States for graduate work in mathematics he found he was unable to fall asleep in a foreign country unless the bed was covered with the faces of several dozen actresses of that country. And if someone called him a Jap in the course of the day or made reference to his height, or to his grin or his lack of a grin, it was further necessary for him to fall asleep sucking a glove or a hairpiece or an empty lipstick tube in order to assure a full night’s sleep.

The male students at the university in New York wore beards and long hair. Hato let his own hair grow and bought false sideburns and a false moustache to cover his lack of facial hair.

The first weeks in New York were lonely ones. Toward the end of the third month, his hair now plausibly long, he broke out of his isolation and took a subway down to Chinatown. A chow mein restaurant there was said to have whores available. A woman approached him and he followed her to a hotel.

The whore turned out to be different from Japanese whores. She would neither take off her clothes nor masturbate him. Calling him Jappy, she hauled up her skirt and told him to get busy.

A few minutes later Hato was having trouble breathing. His sweat had loosened his false moustache, which was slowly slipping down over his mouth and sealing itself there.

Hato tried to hurry, his head down so that he wouldn’t have to see the whore’s face or smell her breath. The added effort loosened his false sideburns, sliding them up and in until they were pasted over his eyes. Blind, unable to breathe, he had to leap off the whore just as he was about to have an orgasm.

He staggered into a lamp. His sperm hit the lightbulb, he followed the lamp to the floor and cut his hand on the sticky slivers of glass. Somehow he managed to get to the bathroom and free his eyes and mouth under the hot water tap. When he came back the whore was gone, having taken not only his wallet but his shoes and socks as well so that he couldn’t follow her. Hato wrapped his sideburns and moustache around his bleeding hand and walked up the Bowery back to his room, too ashamed to be seen in the subway barefoot.

During the next weeks Hato brooded over the loneliness of life in New York. He realized he needed a project to sustain him, and at last he found one. He decided to become the world’s leading authority on airplane disasters.

Early in the morning he bought newspapers and clipped the articles that had to do with crashes. In the afternoon, after finishing his work, he bathed and changed into his kimono. From that time until midnight, his door locked, he worked on his shoebox files.

First he typed the articles on filing cards, then retyped them on other cards to show where the various accounts agreed and disagreed. Lastly he prepared cards under several hundred categories to cross-reference the accident.

His system was so meticulous that the crash of a small private plane could fill half a shoebox, a major disaster as many as eight shoeboxes.

It was demanding work but Hato knew that someday experts from many countries would come to consult his files. His fame would spread, he would be asked to lecture and give his opinions on television.

Near the end of his second and last year of study Hato was invited to a dance sponsored by an evangelical church group. He found himself sitting next to a girl who was a cripple and also couldn’t dance. She invited him back to the same hall that following night for a religious discussion. Hato ate cookies and volunteered to proselytize for the group every day from late afternoon to midnight.

The militant sect, of southern origin, provided him with a sign quoting from the Bible and a tambourine. Because he was in love with the crippled girl he was only too glad to stand on streetcorners in the Bowery waving the sign and shaking the tambourine while she sang psalms. He intended to marry her and take her back to Japan.

A weekend came when the girl invited him to her home outside the city. The girl’s father watched him suspiciously, Hato grinned. The girl’s mother went into the kitchen and stayed there. The first meal at the house consisted of potato soup, potato pancakes, bread and bread pudding, and peppers stuffed with potatoes. Being accustomed to yogurt and a slice of raw fish for lunch, Hato was both dazed and nauseated. Several times during the meal he had to go to the bathroom to vomit noisily.

Afterward the girl’s father sat him down in the living room. He made an allusion to American nurses in Manila Bay. Hato grinned, still feeling ill. The father mentioned forced marches, death marches, sneak attacks, mass attacks, regimented ants, national guilt.

Hato fell asleep, awakening a few hours later to a meal of boiled potatoes, baked potatoes, mashed and fried and roasted potatoes, potatoes colored to look like vegetables and shaped to look like meats. By the end of the weekend he knew that he would always hate all Americans and that marrying the crippled girl was out of the question.

When he returned to Tokyo Hato decided to make a lot of money in order to go to Paris and become a movie director. The quickest way to make money was as a gangster. He was interviewed and eventually sat facing a small, rotund man who was rumored to be the director of an enormous criminal syndicate. In exchange for his loyalty, free room and board, and one day off a month, he was offered a substantial sum of money at the end of eight years of service. Hato accepted the offer, trimmed his hair, and bought a business suit.

Working for a criminal syndicate in Japan, however, didn’t turn out to be what he had expected. Instead of kicking whores and pistol-whipping shopkeepers, his job consisted of carrying reports from a computer across the gangplank to Kikuchi-Lotmann’s houseboat. He stood rigidly at attention while his employer smoked a cigar, changed his necktie, mixed a salad dressing, poured himself a pink gin.

Finally he was given instructions. He recrossed the gangplank and repeated the instructions to a programmer who fed them into a computer.

Despite his advanced mathematical training, his fanatical desire for adventure, and his fanatical willingness to take risks, Hato had been hired for only one reason. He was extraordinarily familiar with world geography. Few people would have recognized all the names that appeared in Kikuchi-Lotmann’s reports, so vast were his enterprises. Hato never confused them, however, due entirely to his experience with the airplane clippings.

In addition to crossing the gangplank he had only one other task, to accompany his employer periodically to the secret meetings he held with bereaved grandmothers. On these occasions he guarded the door while his employer and the grandmother discussed the details of a funeral.

Kikuchi-Lotmann’s syndicate was the largest criminal organization in greater east Asia. In terms of gross criminal profits it was the third largest in the world. Yet despite his responsibilities he indulged himself in a very curious sideline known as the funeral racket, whereby he would provide a long procession of black limousines and thousands of mourners dressed in black for a man who died unloved and unmissed.

The funeral procession might contain two limousines or many hundreds of limousines, depending on the amount of money paid. In the last limousine would be found the legitimate family, invariably small, presided over by a weeping, triumphant grandmother. The other family members would be unaware of the funeral’s fakery. Only the matriarch knew how large a part of her husband’s fortune she had used for this immensely expensive deception.

As they drove through the crowds of mourners the grandmother pointed them out and pointed to the line of limousines ahead of them.

Never forget, she said, the day your grandfather was cremated. Remember how he was loved and revered despite the money he made. Remember the thousands who came to do him homage.

Her children nodded, her grandchildren nodded, the mourners returned to Kikuchi-Lotmann’s henchmen to collect their wages.

Hato admired the cleverness of the racket. A whore had to spend at least a few minutes with a customer, everyone couldn’t take drugs all the time. But the funeral market had no limit, the number of ancestors to be revered was infinite. Hato intended to expose the operation in his first gangster movie. People would come from many countries to interview him. He would be asked to lecture and give his opinions on television.

Paris. Eight years away.

Hato stood in line thinking of the calisthenics he would have to do the next morning at six o’clock. At seven he would march around the courtyard singing a haiku. That night or the next night a young girl disguised in rags would break into his room and call him a mother-fucker.

Hato grinned. There could be more to gangsterism than gangplanks and funerals. When the movie was over he would go talk to Kikuchi-Lotmann’s other bodyguard, the one who was called the policeman.

He was a small man, as small as Mama, born to her parents the year they sold her to the brothel in Kobe, the year before the First World War broke out in Europe. His father beat him as regularly as he beat his wife until he was eaten by a dog one winter night.

The father had collapsed in a snow drift on the way home from a drinking bout. A dog found him and sniffed his hot breath. Like every other creature in the Tohoku that winter, the dog was starving. Soon he was not only sniffing the hot breath but chewing it, chewing the lips and tongue that went with it.

All the peasants in the neighborhood had been ordered to line the road the next day at first light, to show their respect for their landowner who was expected to drive past sometime during the morning. The policeman’s father was found with a large part of his face gone. He was carried home and treated, but his wife and son were told to wait beside the road until the aristocrat drove by. Thereafter the policeman’s father wore a cotton surgical mask and stopped beating his family.

The dreaded Tohoku district was forever given to gray skies and winds and blizzards from Siberia. Half of the family’s crop of mulberry leaves had to be turned over as payment for use of the land. With the other half they paid their taxes and tried to subsist.

Their plot of mulberry trees was an hour’s walk from the hut where they lived. Centuries ago the hills had been terraced, which gave the Tohoku the look of a land of giants. But for a peasant family such as the policeman’s the giant steps went nowhere.

When he was eight years old the silk market in America collapsed once again. As before, his father blamed the catastrophe on his wife because she was an Ainu and had Caucasian blood. Unable to bear the hatred in his eyes any longer, she finally broke the ice in a rice paddy and drowned herself in three inches of water.

The policeman’s father died of stomach cancer, arthritis, and advanced tuberculosis in 1931, the year the Japanese seized Manchuria after one of their railroads was blown up there, apparently by Chinese patriots. In retaliation the international city of Shanghai boycotted all goods of Japanese manufacture, an act that many Japanese army officers found outrageously insolent. That same year the policeman enlisted in the army to escape the misery of the Tohoku.

From the very beginning he liked his new life. The routine was easy enough, he worked hard and did what he was told. At the end of training he was rewarded with an assignment to a Kempeitai unit in Korea.

The country was as poor as the Tohoku, but now the Koreans were the tenant farmers and he was one of the landlords and tax-collectors. The main work of his unit was the interrogation of peasants suspected of withholding rice. While trying to break the peasants, beating them when necessary, he experienced a sense of accomplishment that was new to him. For the first time in his life he learned to smile.

An inexplicable event occurred soon after he was promoted to corporal. He and some other corporals got drunk one night and the talk turned to women. There were no whores in the village where they had arrived that day, but the policeman boasted he could find one anyway. He went away laughing, leaving his friends laughing behind him.

The next day an officer called them in. A village elder had been clubbed while protecting his daughter. It was not the way for a member of the Imperial Army to act with monkeys of an inferior race. The guilty one was ordered to admit his breach of discipline.

The policeman stood stonily at attention, expecting the other corporals to do the same. But to his astonishment he saw them stepping forward one by one to denounce him.

It was spring. Tiny green shoots were just reaching above the water in the rice paddies. The three months of latrine duty meant nothing to him but the betrayal by his fellow corporals, the men he had thought were his comrades, influenced him so profoundly he was never able to trust anyone again, even to the point where the only sexual act of which he was capable thereafter was one involving a dead person, performed with an instrument so that his own body would have no contact with the corpse.

From Korea he was transferred to Manchuria, to the unit of a captain in Mukden who always wore civilian clothes. Although the Captain could read, he was also a peasant from the Tohoku and didn’t despise the policeman just because he was illiterate. It was from the Captain he learned that the bombing of the railroad in Manchuria the year before, the incident that led to the Japanese seizure of Manchuria, had not been the work of Chinese patriots but of the Kempeitai itself.

The Captain was the protege of a Kempeitai general then stationed in Tokyo. To provide the General with information he wanted on various factions in the army, thereby increasing the General’s maneuvering power over his fellow officers, the policeman was asked to steal documents from certain units near Mukden. The policeman was so successful in his assignments the Captain took him with him when he flew to Shanghai on a secret mission in January 1932.

For a week the policeman was locked in an apartment memorizing various Chinese patriotic slogans. The Captain came and went and at the end of the week gave him his instructions.

The two of them, dressed as Chinese students, were driven in a closed van to an alley behind Bubbling Well Road. They entered a hallway guarded by Kempeitai agents disguised as shoemakers and took up their places in an abandoned storefront that faced the thoroughfare. Some twenty minutes later when the crowds were thickest, an elderly Japanese monk came into view.

The monk belonged to one of the most famous Japanese families living in China. His great-grandfather had emigrated to Canton at the beginning of the nineteenth century, studied acupuncture, and founded a hospital.

In 1840 the acupuncturist’s son joined the Chinese forces that were fighting the British to try to end the opium trade in that city. Two years later he was killed, one of the last patriots to fall before Britain annexed Hong Kong as a base for expanding its opium interests.

The patriot’s son became a Buddhist scholar in Nanking. The scholar’s son became a monk in Shanghai. On that winter afternoon in 1932 he was walking from his temple to his residence, following the route he had taken every day for fifty years.

When the elderly monk was abreast of them they burst out of the storefront shouting their slogans and firing their revolvers. A few minutes later they had raced back down the alley and were speeding away in their van.

The next day, in retaliation for the murder, a Japanese squadron bombed the Chinese slums in the city, the first time in history that bombing planes had been used against civilians. A Japanese naval garrison clashed with the Nineteenth Chinese Route Army and thus began what became known in Japan as the Shanghai Incident, one more reason for the Japanese invasion of north China a year later.

Just before they left Shanghai an older man in civilian clothes visited them in their apartment. He was furious with the Captain because the monk had been killed rather than wounded in the arm, which was what he had ordered them to do. The terrified Captain replied that it had been impossible to aim carefully. They had been running across the sidewalk and had only a few seconds in which to act.

The claim was true on the Captain’s part. Only one of his bullets had struck the monk, and that one in the arm. As for the policeman, he said nothing. He had purposely emptied his revolver into the monk’s chest, partly thinking the Captain would be blamed for it, his revenge for the time his comrades had betrayed him in Korea, partly because he was so excited to be on a crowded street with a loaded revolver he had to empty it into someone.

The policeman had expected the captain to be sentenced to three months of latrine duty, but the old man in civilian clothes simply turned away, tears in his eyes, and left.

The episode in the Shanghai apartment was one of three times the policeman was to see the older man over the next five years. The older man was unaware of the second encounter, for despite the precautions he took it was perhaps inevitable that at least once during his eight years of clandestine work he would be observed servicing a dead drop.

The third time, however, they came face to face and that was when the policeman killed him.

After the adventure in Shanghai the policeman’s duties in Mukden seemed routine and uninteresting. He still stole files for the Captain and occasionally served as an undercover agent in one of the restaurants where Japanese officers gathered, but most of the time he worked in the icy cellars beneath Kempeitai headquarters.

The Chinese and Japanese and Korean prisoners were always stripped naked before being sent to the cellars. The Manchurian winters were harsh, and often there was no need to beat a man for more than a day or two before he confessed to anything. Those already condemned to die wore the traditional straw hat covering the eyes that was also worn by mendicant Buddhist monks.

The suspects were chained to the wall with their arms and legs spread, hung high enough so that their toes just touched the floor. The policeman’s job was to keep the prisoner awake when the interrogating officer grew tired and went upstairs to perform the tea ceremony or practice flower arranging for an hour or two. Because the policeman had always been humiliated by the body hair inherited from his Ainu mother, he particularly enjoyed the nakedness of the prisoners.

He tried slaps, kicks, punches. He squeezed the eyeballs and stuffed oily rags into the mouth, pinching first one nostril and then the other. He used his blackjack to rap the kneecaps, the elbows, the teeth.

Many methods worked but by far the best was holding the prisoner’s testicles in his hand and tapping them with his blackjack. The dull sounds that came out of the man then were unlike any he had ever heard. Only once did he imagine he heard them elsewhere, during an unbearably hot Manchurian summer when he was sitting alone on the plains, bareheaded, dizzily pulling a cricket apart.

The second time he saw the older man from Shanghai was in the autumn of 1937, a few days before he was transferred to an infantry unit in central China. He was on duty in civilian clothes in a restaurant listening to conversations when the older man came in and sat down alone in a corner. Something in the way he moved his head confused the policeman. Curious, he got to his feet and went off to the toilet.

Ever since the months in the Korean latrines the policeman had been able to think more clearly when immersed in an atmosphere of dung and urine. They were not only the smells that reminded him to beware of betrayal, they also brought back an older memory, one of his earliest, the times as a boy when he had carried heavy buckets of nightsoil up the giant steps of the Tohoku toward the mulberry trees.

There were only two stalls, the policeman sat down in one. He was just beginning to feel comfortable with himself when someone entered the other stall and locked the door.

The policeman always had to have privacy in the toilet, otherwise he couldn’t concentrate and make the smells that pleased him. He climbed up on the seat to peek over the partition, thinking he might use his blackjack on the intruder, when he saw a hand go up under the lid of the water tank and place something there. The hand withdrew, the door was unlocked, the older man from the Shanghai apartment left the room. What did it mean?

He went into the other stall and found a small length of bamboo, sealed at both ends, wedged into a niche under the lid of the water tank. He opened the bamboo tube and took out a tiny film. What was it?

He replaced the device and wandered over beside the urinals. He knew he had discovered something but he didn’t know what it was. He bent to tie his shoelace. His hand strayed into the urinal and picked up the hard cake of deodorant lying there. The cake was green and looked like candy. Absentmindedly he bit into the crunchy nugget and chewed.

What had he witnessed just now?

Angered that he could not understand what had happened, angered as well by the indistinct passions aroused in him by the older man from Shanghai, the policeman took a long walk that night to the outskirts of the city. The next day an elderly woman was found beaten to death with a blunt instrument, probably made of leather, and sexually violated with an inhuman object, either the same instrument that had caused the death or one similar to it.

Rape with the instrument had occurred after death. The body had then been stripped and the head scalped. Small patches of hair from the head had been crudely attached to the chest and forearms and thighs, a larger amount to the nearly hairless pubic region.

This necrophiliac crime was similar in every respect to others that had gone unsolved in remote areas near Mukden over the last five years, or since the policeman had completed his tour of duty in the Korean latrines. The victims, always of advanced age, included both men and women. Sexual assault was limited to the anus.

Normally the policeman or one of the other corporals in his unit would have been sent to investigate the murder of the elderly woman, but this time everyone on duty at Kempeitai headquarters had been placed on special alert. A Japanese soldier was being held on suspicion of espionage. A crippling backache had led to a doctor’s examination, in the course of which the doctor had discovered a microfilm bearing highly sensitive military and political information.

The soldier, also a corporal, tried to commit suicide by jumping out of a window, but a tree broke his fall and he only suffered a broken arm. Now he was being held in a ground-floor room empty save for the cushion on which the interrogating officer sat. Even the glass from the barred window had been removed.

The policeman’s Captain questioned the prisoner a full day and night. At the end of that time he retired for a few hours of sleep after learning only two minor facts, the code name for the espionage network and the unknown disease that had caused the corporal’s backache. The policeman was told to stay in the room and not take his eyes off the corporal.

The corporal, little more than a boy, had the delicate features and delicate body of a young girl. Dead leaves blew in through the window along with the cool autumn air. The boy asked if he could use the policeman’s overcoat, and the policeman gave it to him after first emptying out the pockets.

There was a secret in that overcoat that had tormented the policeman ever since it was issued to him in the winter of 1935, a secret that had to do with size. In the supply shipment received by his unit that year there had been included a monstrous mistake by the manufacturer, an overcoat so large it could have gone around three or four large men.

The policeman, who was small, was given the coat as a joke and told not to cut it but to take it in, a project that had lasted just over a week. During that time he went about in the cold weather unprotected while the other men ridiculed him.

The young corporal now turned the overcoat over before putting it on. He saw where it had been roughly stitched. Suddenly he held it up and laughed.

What’s so funny? said the policeman.

This is, said the boy.

Why?

Because I made it. That coat got me fired from the factory. I was thinking about my mother and the coat came out all wrong, so they fired me. I had to do something, so I went into the army. If it weren’t for that coat I wouldn’t be here today.

The boy stopped laughing. He moaned the name Miya and began to cry.

The policeman didn’t hear the name or see the tears, he saw only the jeering faces that had insulted him two years before when he was cold. The Captain came back an hour later to find the prisoner crumpled up in the corner, his head battered out of shape, his face unrecognizable. The policeman was sitting on the cushion by the window watching the dead leaves fall in the yard.

The Captain flipped the safety on his revolver, but at the last moment kept himself from shooting his subordinate in the head.

Soon afterward the Captain was standing in front of the desk of his commanding officer, a General, the man from the apartment in Shanghai who had once been his patron and protector. There was no need for the Captain to be told that the death of so important a prisoner was unpardonable. At the same time as he turned in his report he made a formal request that both he and the policeman be transferred to a front-line infantry unit.

A month later the Captain was killed in a reckless assault on a Chinese machine gun emplacement. The policeman, however, was still carrying his favorite blackjack the December night his regiment broke ranks outside the gates of Nanking.

Fires were everywhere. For a thousand years the policeman stabbed and shot and clubbed Chinese, for ten thousand years he beat victims and mutilated them and burned them. Then all at once he turned a corner and found himself facing the man from the apartment in Shanghai, from the toilet in Mukden, a man he knew from the winter morning when his father had been found with his face gone and he had had to wait beside the road with a bowed head until an automobile passed bearing the powerful Baron who owned his family’s land and all the land for miles around.

He had been only eight years old, but he had peeked up and caught a glimpse of the passing face. The man had held his head differently then, not in that stiff, rigid way, and that was what had confused the policeman in the Shanghai apartment and the Mukden toilet. But now in the screams and shadowy firelight of Nanking the policeman was no longer confused, his head cleared, and he knew exactly whom the face belonged to.

He struck him with his blackjack, the General went down. He dragged him out of the alley into a deserted courtyard, stripped off his uniform, rapped his testicles to hear the sounds from the icy Manchurian cellars.

A low moan. A quiet dying moan.

The fires burned and the policeman tapped out the rhythms in his head, the footsteps on the terraced hills of his childhood, the giant steps to nowhere. He tapped and gently tapped until he felt the sack in his hand growing cold. He severed the sack, shredded the testicles, knotted them around the General’s neck and squeezed.

One eye was still wide open staring at him. He ripped it out and threw it away.

Screams.

A collapsing burning wall, flames leaping into the air, the General’s epaulets shining in the gloom.

He dropped his trousers, squatted over them before loping out of the courtyard and down the alley.

After a month of arson, torture, and murder along the banks of the Yangtze the policeman was given a summary court martial. While racing a truck through a group of children in a village a machine gun mount had fallen from the truck to the ground. Due to the cries of the children he had failed to hear it. He was found guilty of negligent loss of property. The cost of the mount was deducted from his pay and he was transferred out of the war zone back to his old Kempeitai unit in Manchuria.

The next eight years passed without incident. More and more men were shipped out to the Pacific, to the Philippines, to Okinawa. The barracks in Mukden were unheat-ed, food was scarce. Days he spent in the icy cellars, nights he took long walks into the countryside. One hot summer morning the Russians crossed the border and quickly overran what had once been the Kwangtung army.

As a fascist militarist the policeman was sent with the other Japanese prisoners to a labor camp in Siberia and put to work mining salt, which they did with their hands since the Russians had neither picks nor shovels. His eyes became infected from the salt, temporarily blinding him. Daily classes were held in the new order of justice the prisoners were to carry with them back to Japan.

They were encouraged to grow food or otherwise supplement their rations. The policeman’s specialty was a kind of beer made from tundra weeds, homemade beer being traditional among the peasants of the Tohoku. The Russian guards liked it so much there was seldom any left for him, but for some reason he seemed happy to let them have it.

The end of the third year came. The prisoners, fully indoctrinated, were now ready to return to Japan to begin their revolutionary work. On the last night there was a banquet where the guards and prisoners embraced, sang, wept, congratulated each other on now being comrades in a common cause. The policeman left the banquet early to check the special batch of beer he had brewed for the celebration.

Around midnight the Russian guards began to arrive, most of them already drunk. In all, eight of them came, although more had been invited and fewer might have turned up. They sat in the pine grove laughing and singing as he poured out the frothy brew.

The Amanita muscaria was a mushroom as well known to Siberian peasants as it was to peasants in the Tohoku. When eaten, a cold sweat was followed by stupor, convulsions, delirium. Death’s angel it was called, because its victims were always young children who had not yet learned to recognize the deadly muscarine.

The policeman watched the guards die and found himself falling under a magical spell, perhaps because eight fates were dying in the pine grove and eight times eight was the number of paths that led to the primeval Oriental hexagram, the ancient figure found in the Book of Changes.

In any case the sky was so clear that night that every eye in the unfathomable darkness could look down upon this little creature who had come to take part, briefly, in a faceless, patternlesss drama that was without beginning or end, who had come to creep with chance through scenery as impenetrable as millennia of fallen pine needles, a creature who understood as much of the winds that moved him as a leaf broken from the branch of a mulberry tree.

The prisoner-of-war ship arrived in Yokohama in the spring of 1948. The cherry blossoms were still in bloom. A Japanese government band played the Washington Post March and Stars and Stripes Forever. Hundreds of mothers and sisters crowded the pier waving white handkerchiefs, trying to hear the chant from the men at the railings. What were they shouting? Banzai three times with the arms raised?

The chant grew louder as the ship moved in. They could hear it more clearly now.

Pulverize. Smash. Crush. Exterminate.

The handkerchiefs dropped out of the air, the families were quiet and uneasy. Down came the gangplanks and the men, but none of them stopped to embrace their wives and mothers and sisters. Instead they set up folding camp stools, climbed on top of the stools, and began shouting out interminable lectures on mad dog revanchists and imperialist jackals. The families surged hysterically up and down the pier losing themselves in the confusion.

The policeman pushed his way through the crowds and took a train to the industrial suburb where he had been given an underground assignment by the party. Ostensibly he worked in a factory owned by a secret party member that made novelties for export. He painted souvenir models of the Empire State Building. But his real job was to stand in the front line during antigovernment demonstrations and use a straight razor rolled up in a newspaper to slash the flanks of horses used by the police in controlling riots.

He also used the disguised razor to slash the faces of policemen who were on the ground. This routine continued for several years until war broke out in Korea. That May Day the party issued different orders. Not only were they to attack the police, they were also directed to burn the cars of Americans and steal revolvers from policemen where possible.

Razors. Fires. Clubbings. By ten o’clock in the morning he had his first revolver, by noon he had his third. Toward early evening he had cached several more. His procedure was to stagger out of an alley when a policeman passed and yell that he was being attacked by Communists. When the policeman went into the alley he hit him over the head with his blackjack and stole his revolver, then hurriedly worked over his face with the razor before going off to burn another car.

When the sun went down he found himself sitting in the cellar where the revolvers were hidden. He was tired. He counted and recounted the revolvers and went into a trance that lasted more than an hour. Once more the mystical number had descended upon him.

Upon awakening he went in search of a demonstrator who had been injured in the fighting. He came across a dazed student whose head was bleeding. He brought the boy back to the cellar and knocked him out with the blackjack.

Shortly thereafter a squad of police broke into the cellar, acting on the information of a concerned citizen. They discovered eight stolen revolvers under the boy’s crumpled body. Due to his head wound the boy could remember nothing of what had happened.

The hero responsible for leading the authorities to the cache was given a patriotic award by a police captain. Despite his illiteracy, his application for employment with the metropolitan police force was given priority because he was an unemployed veteran who had spent three years in a Russian slave labor camp. At his own request he was assigned to the special riot detachment that dealt with Communist demonstrations.

Over the next decade he used his blackjack on any demonstrator he saw carrying a rolled-up newspaper. At the same time a series of murders and rapes occurred in the Tokyo area, unsolved, that were identical in every respect to those reported in Mukden before the war.

On New Year’s Day, a month before Geraty arrived in New York with the largest collection of Japanese pornography ever assembled in a Western tongue, the policeman got very drunk and took a train to Kamakura. As always when he left the city at night, he was wearing his old Kempeitai overcoat. He found what he was looking for, an isolated hut on the beach, and was about to break in when he saw someone sitting on the sand, a huge, immobile figure in a squatting position.

The giant had a round black hat pulled down to his ears. The sky was black and the policeman couldn’t make out his face. He went across the beach and asked the stranger what he was doing.

In answer the giant held out a bottle.

The policeman sat down and had a drink. An hour went by in silence, perhaps two hours. They finished one bottle of the unknown alcohol and the giant opened another. Not once during this time did the stranger turn his eyes away from the sea. A third hour passed or a fourth and the policeman was reminded of his mysterious union with the stars long ago in Siberia.

He began to talk. He spoke of his childhood, the hateful body hair he had been born with, his father eaten by a dog, his mother drowned in a frozen rice paddy, the giant steps to the mulberry trees, the latrines in Korea, the icy cellars in Manchuria, the abandoned storefront in Shanghai, the tundra weed beer brewed for Russian guards, the first and second and third meetings with Baron Kikuchi.

Mysteriously he came under the spell of the immobile giant, mysteriously repeating on a Kamakura beach the act of confession performed by his unknown sister in a locked, shuttered room a quarter of a century earlier in Shanghai. The giant was impassive. He never stirred. The lapping waves took the place of the humming reels of film. Toward dawn, exhausted, having confessed everything, the policeman fell asleep.

He awoke colder than he had ever been before, naked except for a towel over his lap. The tide was rising, water washed his hairy legs. Beside him lay two empty bottles of Irish whiskey, a jar that smelled of horseradish, the clothes he had taken off during the night while recounting his tale, thereby reversing the nakedness of that other confession in another era.

But the policeman discovered his clothes weren’t all there. One garment was missing. For some reason the stranger with the unseen face had stolen his greatcoat and silently carried it away in the darkness.

Hato found the policeman sitting on the edge of his cot in his cubicle, an illustrated magazine in his lap. He smiled down at the little man.

Why don’t you admit you can’t read?

The policeman stared at the floor. Hato laughed and closed the door behind him.

Listen, he whispered, how would you like to make a lot of money?

What?

Money, you idiot.

How?

Easy. We kidnap one of the Americans who was on the houseboat, the dumb one with the bandaged ear, and make his friend pay ransom. But maybe you’re afraid because the dumb one, the bodyguard, is carrying a revolver. I saw the bulge in his pocket when they left the houseboat.

The policeman stared at the floor. Didn’t this grinning young fool understand anything at all? It wasn’t a revolver that had made the bulge in the boy’s pocket, it was a slab of grilled meat. He had seen the boy slip the meat off his plate when no one was looking and drop it into his pocket. He had seen him do it and he knew exactly what it meant. More than once he had done the same thing in Siberia, where there was never enough to eat. It meant the boy with the bandaged head had been in prison. He was a criminal. And he had also seen him pick up a bottle of Japanese meat sauce and look at the label with a dull expression in his eyes. The policeman knew what that meant too. The boy with the bandaged head was not only a criminal, he was illiterate.

Of course he’s an American, whispered Hato, grinning. Maybe that frightens you.

The policeman stared at the floor and saw his mother face down in a frozen rice paddy because she was an Ainu with Caucasian blood and the silk market had collapsed in America. He took the magazine in his hands and turned the pages until he came to one without any pictures, a page covered with hundreds of minute Chinese characters. He held the page up in his hands scarred from digging salt in Siberia and tore it into long strips, shredded the strips, let the tiny white pieces flutter over his lap to the floor.

Does that mean you’re with me?

The policeman nodded.

They talked for a while and then Hato left, dreaming of Paris and the funeral movie he would make there. People would come to interview him, they would ask him to give his opinions on television, and he would tell them the truth about America. Tell them everything and never again do calisthenics or march in haiku parades or put up with young women dressed as hags who broke into his room calling him a mother-fucker.

Behind him the policeman sat on his cot staring at snowflakes.

Mama finished painting the nails on her right hand and went on to the left. For days she had been pondering the small gold cross worn by the young man whom Quin had brought with him to her nightclub.

Once Mama had known that cross well. It was the most treasured present the General had ever given her. Later it was stolen in Shanghai while she was under the influence of laudanum, taken from her during one of those evenings spent gazing at the falsely pornographic images projected dimly on the wall by the whirring imagination of a clown.

Kikuchi-Lotmann. Quin. Big Gobi.

What connected these three men? Why had one of them come to possess the General’s gift of love to her?

She knew the names Lotmann and Kikuchi, she knew the name Quin. But Gobi was a desert, a remote place in western China, a forsaken place of sandy wastes. To see what it might teach her she consulted the oldest document on the Gobi that she could find, an apocryphal chronicle written two thousand years ago during the Han dynasty.

A region of sudden sandstorms, read the chronicle, sudden sandstorms and terrifying visions. Rivers disappear overnight, landmarks go with the wind, the sun sinks at midday. A timeless nonexistent land meant to plague the mind with its mirages.

But the most dangerous thing that must be mentioned is the caravans that appear at any moment on the horizon, there to drift uncertainly for minutes or days or years. Now they are near, now far, now just as assuredly they are gone. The camel drivers are aloof and silent, undistinguishable, men of some distant race. But the men they serve, the leaders of the caravans, are truly frightening. They wear odd costumes, their eyes gleam, they come from every corner of the world.

These men, in sum, are the secret agents who have always given the authorities so much to fear. They represent the princes and despots of a thousand lawless regions.

Or is it perhaps that they represent no one at all? Is that why their aspects make us tremble? In any case we know only that this is their meeting place, the unmarked crossroads where they mingle and separate and wander on their way.

As for where they go and why, we cannot be sure of such things. There are no tracks in such a barren waste. The sandstorms blow, the sun sinks, rivers disappear, and their camels are lost in darkness. Therefore the truth must be that the routes of such men are untrace-able, their missions unknowable, their ultimate destinations as invisible as the wind.

If the Son of Heaven is to continue to rule with integrity, we must defend our borders at all costs from such men.

Thus ended the uneasy commentary written two thousand years ago by a Chinese traveler wishing to warn the Sons of Han of the dangers to be found in the desert west of the Central Kingdom. Mama found the allusions evocative but she wanted to know more.

She telephoned the leading Chinese historian in the country, an acquaintance from her early days in the brothel in Kobe. The historian gave her an account of the tribes that had passed through the desert over the last three or four thousand years, a tale of innumerable influxes and exoduses.

Next she called the leading geologist in the country. He compared the landscape of the Gobi to the surface of the moon. Lastly she called Japan’s most famous paleontologist.

Among her many scholarly acquaintances the paleontologist was somewhat special. He had visited her immediately after she arrived in the brothel and had never forgotten the experience, nor had she, for even then he had bizarre tastes having to do with shards and slivers of bone. The paleontologist was very old now and largely deaf, but a hearing aid attached to his telephone made conversation possible.

My dear, he shouted, it’s good to talk to you again after all these years. How long has it been, about half a century? Well, we’ve both come along way since then, my bones tell me so. What can I do for you?

Mama told him. She said she was trying to find some significance in the word Gobi when it was used as a man’s name.

A kind of code word? shouted the paleontologist. Well, as you know, the earth’s climate has changed a bit over the last million years. Something to do with shifts in the magnetic fields of outer space. That causes the poles on earth to shift, which changes the balance of the globe. Every now and then, in other words, the world goes out of whack. Right off its head. Things just aren’t the same anymore. Confusion at the poles, confusion all around. What used to be isn’t, what never was is. Areas get mixed up. A place that was a desert becomes fertile. The fertile place becomes a desert. It’s almost enough to make a man believe in the Book of Changes, but of course old books are intolerably boring.

Well, a million years ago man was just about getting started, so what we surmise from the paleontological evidence is that he wasn’t getting started in the places you might think. Just the opposite, the worst places today being the best places then. Therefore the Gobi was probably one of the original cradles of the race. Where it all began, my work and yours, the origin of man. I suggest you follow that line of reasoning.

And my dear, don’t forget to call again. Fifty years is much too long to wait at our age. Which reminds me, someone mentioned that you were tattooed later on. Was it all over? What kinds of tattoos? Describe the part for me. You know the one I mean.

The shouting paleontologist became obscene. Mama skillfully turned the conversation aside and hung up.

She returned to her dais to prepare for the mudra of contemplation. The origin of man. That’s what the paleontologist had said.

She reflected on the boy who had raped one of her girls in the middle of the floor. Many times in her life she had seen violence, but never violence committed with such an innocent face. She had known then that the boy was a genuine primitive, a child from another age.

As proof there was the object he carried in his pocket, the object that had started all the trouble. This child carried an eye with him the way another man might carry a watch. That night in the club he had taken out the eye to consult it.

Did the man truly exist who could tell time by looking into an eyeball?

Mama focused her thoughts on an imaginary point in the middle of her forehead, the ancient attitude of memory. Her fingers were immobile, she stopped breathing. Recollections and impressions flowed freely in place of breath. Twenty-four floors below, the swans disappeared from the Imperial moat. Her nails dried in the afternoon sun. High above the city Mama floated in the world of her mind.

The time had come to discover Big Gobi’s role in the world. Who was he? Where had he come from?

Mama recalled the information gathered by the General’s former chauffeur. After taking Quin to Tsukiji he had watched Quin’s house for several days as a matter of course.

The big one, he reported, spends all day watching television. He seems to have no other interest, nor does he ever speak. When the other one is there the big one sits with his hands folded in his lap. He does nothing. But as soon as the other one leaves, he takes a piece of meat out of his pocket. The meat is black and crusted and he holds it while he watches television. The sliding door was open while I was there, so I leaned in to get a better look. The meat appears to be a tongue, a common beef tongue that must have been grilled over charcoal, which explains its black crust. After so much handling, and because of the hot spell we’ve had, it’s beginning to fall apart. Another curious fact is that although he watches television all the time, the television screen lacks a picture. There is just grayness and a hum.

Mama had listened to the former corporal’s report without surprise. The surprises that men might work were far behind her. In the brothel in Kobe she had known ten thousand men with their ten thousand tricks and fantasies.

But as the sage had said, although there may be ten thousand creatures, every one of them cannot turn its back to the shade without having the sun on its belly.

Mama closed her eyes and thought of the tongue the boy held in his hands, the meat filled with white worms the shape of fingernail parings.

That meat was the same kind of flesh horsemen in the Gobi Desert had been carrying under their saddles for thousands of years. These horsemen, who must be the boy’s spiritual ancestors, had once been the terror of the world. From their desert they had galloped across the earth conquering the palaces of many civilizations. But then the sandstorms had come and the rivers had gone, the caravans had lost their way and a single horseman was left to ride on alone into the wastes of the desert clutching his meat.

He holds his tongue in his hand, thought Mama, because he knows the destiny of his Mongol tribe and dares not relate it. He knows it is too fearful for others to hear and he knows that a tongue can never fail to speak of the past. It is the umbilical cord of the past and yet it is the strangest of all umbilical cords for it does not nourish, for those who speak do not know and those who know do not speak.

The sage tells us that the soul of man is like a grandee on his travels. When a place is not to his liking he moves on. He consults the time piece of his eye and enters a realm from another era.

And thus, thought Mama, this child we know as Big Gobi is ageless. He is the oldest child in the world, the child who was born a million years ago when the desert was not even a desert. And now he has removed his tongue so that he will not be tempted to walk on the sands of other eras, to recall those sands and converse upon them and reveal thereby secrets unknown to us, secrets he alone can envision with his timeless eye.

The emerald in the middle of Mama’s forehead glistened. An insight had come to her from the cross the boy wore, a cross given to her by the General, whose subsequent death brought her to despair and made of the cross, his gift, an unbearable burden. A cross taken from her then in the locked, shuttered room where she had gone to confess her misery, slipped off her neck by an immobile fat man who had listened to her tale for her sake, a nameless naked giant in the shadows who thereupon silently lifted the intolerable weight from her shoulders and in so doing bestowed upon her the most precious of gifts, the blessing of hope.

A small gold cross. A crossing of two people in the shadow of a battered projector that later led to another in the Shanghai warehouse where she gave her love in return to the nameless circus master of the acts, for his sake, in the last hours of his torment.

Mama opened her eyes. She began to breathe again.

The ivory elephant bearing the lotus had been moved to the far side of the room, to the window facing west. She climbed up the side of the elephant now and arranged herself on the lotus. It was late afternoon, the time to consider the end of the day. She faced the setting sun.

Long ago she had accepted the loss of the General, her first son, the circus master, her second son. But now as the light fell and the darkness closed around her, as she recalled the distant blessing from the naked giant that had once given her new life, she prayed that it might not yet be too dark for the child known as Big Gobi to see the smile of the Kannon Buddha, to feel the mercy and compassion in her face, to find somewhere in those worn, wrinkled lines a measure of the love that had conceived him in a Shanghai ring soon to be extravagantly crowded with animals and acts, before his circus came to an end and the lone Mongol was left to wander the barren wastes westward, into the desert of sandstorms and mirages where the secret agents of lost caravans conversed in unknowable tongues.

The grayness buzzed and Big Gobi watched, unable to align the ten thousand lines in his head with the ten thousand lines in front of him.

Ghosts smiled from the grayness.

He saw the dancing, solemn ghost of a boy on a beach, a boy in an army hospital, a boy on a bus, a boy looking at a frozen tuna fish and a powdery bowl of seagull soup.

In a few weeks the first typhoons of early autumn would come to Japan. Even now violent winds circled each other in the South China Sea waiting to break out of their ring into the Pacific. But for Big Gobi that dangerous season had already passed. The winds that blew over him came from the north, from the Manchurian plains and the Siberian tundra. Where he lived it was winter, a blizzard was forming in his brain.

He sat with a blanket around his shoulders. Quin had gone to find a doctor.

He was shivering, his bad shoulder ached, his legs were numb. He slumped sideways, no longer able to keep himself upright against the wind. The caravan wound toward the horizon and he knew he was lost, losing touch with the world.

He was sorry he had to disappoint Quin and Geraty and the gentle Father and the wise Mama by falling behind. He wanted to stay with them but he was exhausted, the blizzard raged and he could no longer keep up.

Alone and delirious in the desert of his Mongol ancestors, in the solitude of wind and snow, he raised his hand to wave farewell.

Hato stuttered that he wanted to leave. The policeman hit him in the stomach and went on working on the window, working slowly because he didn’t want the small half-moon of glass above the lock to fall and make a noise. It was hot, they were both sweating. The cutter slid, the suction cup held. The policeman turned the lock and raised the window.

They were in a bedroom at the back of the house. A light showed under the door. Hato was whispering again, stuttering. The policeman hit him across the mouth and forced him up through the window. He followed and stopped to listen at the door. A humming sound. He brought his knee up into Hato’s groin, opened the door, pushed him through.

Hato stumbled into the living room where the big foreigner was sitting with a blanket wrapped around him, shaking, sweating. A television set hummed on the far side of the room. Hato smiled weakly and tried to think of the crippled girl in New York, his shoeboxes of airplane disasters, the chow mein whore, movies.

Nothing happened. He had forgotten all his English.

He grinned and then he frowned. He was wetting his pants. He saw the big foreigner wave, and in desperation he waved back.

Hurry, whispered the foreigner. The blizzard’s here, we can’t wait any longer, we have to begin the ceremony.

He pulled a small table over and wedged it between his legs. He pushed another small table toward Hato.

Beat the drum, he whispered. Hurry, call the tribe.

Hato squatted on the floor watching the big foreigner with the dark face and the slanting eyes and the high cheekbones drum on the table. He drummed for several minutes and then raised his arms to the sky. There were tears in his eyes as he chanted.

Women hey.

Oysters hey.

Hey hey hey.

I’ve seen it, whispered the big foreigner. I’ve been to the top of the mountain and seen the palace. I’ve looked down into the valley.

While the fool and the giant beat their drums the policeman was working his way around the room. He crouched, he loped, he crept on all fours. He prowled the corners and sniffed the air for the stars he had seen in a Siberian pine grove. He came across a translucent green paperweight stolen from the desk of a customs official in New York.

The paperweight reminded him of urinal candy, urinal candy reminded him of Baron Kikuchi and his father’s eaten face. He bit into the paperweight and snapped his front teeth, the pain bringing with it a jumble of memories.

A huge overcoat.

Frozen rice paddies.

Mulberry trees.

Landlords and taxes.

Peace.

Riots.

Shredded testicles.

War.

Hair.

A special sound.

Latrines.

Mushrooms.

Icy cellars, scalped heads, razors, a blackjack.

His head was humming, he had to have the silence of that other night under the stars. He picked up the heavy television set and brought it down with all his strength.

Glass broke, metal cracked, wires spun. The foreigner’s huge body toppled backward, the box driven down to his shoulders. His eyes were still open but his skull was crushed, his mouth jammed shut. The policeman saw the face in the hole where the screen had been.

Hato was down on his knees, his chin covered with saliva. The policeman kicked him and watched him fall over. He was moaning, twitching, gripped by a seizure he had last experienced as a child on a bed of movie magazines. His hand reached out for the familiar objects, the gloves and hairpieces and empty lipstick tubes, but there was nothing there but the table drum. He bit his lip. Swallowed. Blood frothed over his mouth.

He was strangling on his own tongue.

The policeman undid the cross the foreigner was wearing and tied it around his own neck. He took the piece of meat out of the foreigner’s pocket and squeezed it. White worms dribbled through his fingers. He dropped the meat and licked his fingers.

In the kitchen he found some cans of beer and a package of cigarettes. He smoked and drank until the cans were all empty, then he urinated in one of them and put it back in the refrigerator. He shredded the cigarettes that were left and scattered the tobacco around the kitchen.

Hato was no longer twitching. The policeman dropped his trousers to make a pile between the two boys and smell the familiar smell.

At the subway station he bought a newspaper and stood patiently in line waiting to buy his ticket. All the other passengers in the subway were using their newspapers to fan themselves, but he held his in front of him pretending to read. From Tsukiji he walked to Tokyo Bay, to the end of the concrete breakwater where Quin had recently been with Baron Kikuchi’s former chauffeur.

Steps led down to the water. The lights of the city hid most of the stairs. The water was very black as he approached the giant steps of the Tohoku and descended them for the last time.

Around his neck hung the small gold cross that had been revered for thirteen centuries by traders crossing central Asia, a cross that had once been given to Adzhar by his wife and subsequently worn by Maeve and the General and Mama before a naked giant stole it in Shanghai, stole it for safekeeping, and kept it for thirty years until he could return it to the doomed son of the Shanghai circus, a lonely Mongol horseman from whom it might have been taken in order to bring to an end the last invisible caravans hidden in the code name Gobi, carried at last to a dark resting place in the waters where its glittering lines could no longer cross and recross the lives of those who had worn it over the years in honor of love and the memory of love.