Quin?s Shanghai Circus (30 page)

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 untraceable, 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 a long 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.