Ransom (10 page)

“Expensive.”

“Do they . . . Are they . . . you know?”

“Not exactly,” Ransom said. “You need an introduction just to get your foot in the door, and lots of money. What you would get for your money is conversation, mild flirtation, singing and dancing.”

“No sex?”

“You'd have to spend months, and thousands; then, maybe.”

“They sound like the girls I went to high school with.” Still dialling the ashtray, he looked wistful. “Are they beautiful?”

“Apparently to the Japanese. It's a question of packaging.” Shortly after he had come to Japan, Ransom had gone once to a geisha house, the guest of a rich private student. He had been fascinated and appalled. The geisha had white porcelain faces and blackened teeth. They moved like marionettes, and their voices were high, almost
mechanical, like the prerecorded messages on the subways and streetcars, artificial in the extreme. The wigs, the student told him later, weighed almost ten pounds.

“So much for Oriental nookie,” Constable said with a wink. Catching sight of his wife, he put a finger to his lips. “Mum's the word.”

He introduced his wife, Elizabeth, and said, “This young man here is an old Japan hand.”

“Oh, wonderful. We can pick your brain for ideas. Would you recommend the Temple of the Golden Pavilion?”

“I'm afraid I've never been there.”

“It's famous,” she said.

“I've heard it's very nice.”

“You know how it is, honey,” Constable said agreeably. “People come to Rochester from all over the world to see the George Eastman House, but if you live practically next door, you don't even think about it.”

“You probably know it as the International Photography Museum,” the woman said to Ransom. She was waiting for a response so Ransom nodded. “Rochester is the home of Kodak.”

“Don't forget Xerox,” Constable said.

“Anyway, we'd be grateful for some pointers. We really want to immerse ourselves in Japanese culture.”

“Your husband was just telling me that,” Ransom said.

Across the table, Dave's face suffered changes, tending towards fearful and gray.

“Did he tell you about the tea ceremony we participated in?”

“He didn't mention it.”

Mrs. Constable described the event in detail while her husband sat by silently, dialling the ashtray.

Ransom's first college roommate was from Rochester; it turned out that the Constables knew the family. They filled him in on the recent history of his classmate, who had just finished an internship at St. Vincent's in New York. The talk turned to the city: crime, restaurants, gentrification. The Constables went down from Rochester twice a year for a weekend, to do museums and theater. Summers they had a cottage in the Thousand Islands. While Mrs. Constable talked about an annual lilac festival, Ransom wondered how Ron Connors, former roommate and nerd, managed life or death decisions in the operating room. Ransom would just as soon operate on himself.

It was almost six o'clock, with no sign of Marilyn, when the Constables excused themselves to get ready for dinner.

“We're here for three more days,” Liz said. “That's if we last it out at this hotel. There's some rock group staying on the floor above us and last night they practically tore the place down.”

Ransom tried to imagine the country as they saw it: temples, gardens, exquisitely polite natives. They would welcome the inexplicable details—they had paid for some strangeness—although they probably wouldn't like the Kentucky Fried Chicken shacks. This was more or less how it had been for him when he arrived, except that he wasn't planning to get back on a plane at the end of the week. He was sick with Pakistani dysentery and guilt, having travelled three-quarters of the way around the world only to discover that everything he knew and believed was hideously inadequate to the task of living.

His ship from Hong Kong docked at Osaka. He took the train to Kyoto and found a room in a hostel. Three days later he met Miles in a coffee shop. Ransom had staggered into the place hoping to find a seat before he fainted, suddenly stricken with an attack of the cyclical fever he'd been fighting since India. He passed out just inside the door and when he came to he was looking up at a cowboy. Miles had taken Ransom home and Akiko had nursed him. Eventually they helped him find a teaching job and a place of his own. A Japanese doctor shot Ransom full of antibiotics and the fever stopped coming back. He enrolled in a language class, explored the streets of the city, and considered joining a Zen temple, until the day he wandered into a karate dojo.

Ransom began to wonder if something had happened to Marilyn. More likely, she had stood him up. He had given her more than an hour. The thing to do was make sure Miles was all right. He briefly imagined himself dispatching tattooed, heavily armed yakuza with his bare hands, and almost immediately realized that he was casting this scenario out of the kind of television fantasy that had made his father rich.

In the lobby a flash bulb went off in his face. A girl no older than twelve was pointing a camera at him and screeching. He pushed through the door and found himself looking at a hundred quizzical faces, all belonging to teenage girls. For a moment, nothing happened; he looked at them and they looked at him. Then someone screamed. Other voices joined in. The crowd pressed forward, hands outstretched.

Reflexively, he swept his arm in a mid-level block, clearing away several hands. The blazer slung over his shoulder was tugged down into the crowd. Then his shirt was torn at from all directions. He was pressed back against the glass door, which had swung closed behind him. The screaming pitched even higher when the shirt ripped and came clear of his chest. Hands were all over him, and he felt lips pressed to his arm. He watched his shirt dissipating in the mob, being torn into smaller and smaller pieces as it moved back. He was beginning to panic.

Fingers groped at his belt buckle, as Ransom spotted two policemen wading through the crowd, whistles in their mouths and clubs raised above their heads. Then he felt the door move behind him. A girl with pimples and pigtails seemed determined to write something on his chest with a ball-point pen, and another flourished a pair of scissors. He felt his shoes go; then, lips on his feet.

He was being pulled back into the hotel. Two girls made it through the door with him, but they were prised loose and whisked away. A hotel employee stood in front of the door; and while the crowd still leaped and screamed, no one attempted to rush indoors.

A man in a blue suit was bowing repeatedly to Ransom. “I am so sorry for this misfortune. We did not know you would be using main entrance. Please accept my deep apology on behalf of hotel. Our security was at fault.”

A knot of hotel guests gawked from the inner lobby at the half-naked gaijin. A woman in a hotel uniform appeared with a kimono which Ransom quickly put on. The
man in the blue suit kept apologizing. Outside, the school girls began singing choruses of a song Ransom eventually recognized as “Satisfaction.”

A limousine was placed at his disposal. Since his shoes were gone, he decided to pick up the bike later, and was escorted out the back entrance to a waiting car.

The driver had a broad face and drinker's complexion. He kept looking at Ransom in the rear view. “You Charrie Watts,
desu ne
?”

Ransom said that he was not a Rolling Stone.

“You know Mr. Kirk Douglas?”

“Not personally.”

The driver reached inside his jacket and handed back a pocket photo album. The first picture showed him standing at the gate of Yasaka shrine with his arm around a man who appeared to be Kirk Douglas. The next one was similar, except that it was signed
Best wishes Lloyd Bridges
. Standing beside the car, Lloyd looked dried-out, not a spear gun in sight.

“I drive Jack Kneecross last year,” he said.

“Say who?”

A crowd of schoolboys in uniforms had found their way into the Nicklaus picture. The proud driver naturally had his arm around Jack, a baby-faced god and credit to his race.

Because he didn't want the neighbors asking questions, Ransom asked to be dropped a street away from his house. He had to stand next to the car while the driver found a pedestrian to take their picture.

He saw a shadow cross his as he approached the corner. He ducked, rolled on his shoulder and sprang
back to his feet, but not quickly enough to dodge the second kick, which caught him on the chest and knocked him over.

Better
, the sensei said.
But not very good
.

En route to Osaka, ancient headquarters of fish peddlers and sake traders, Ransom felt that perhaps the country had begun to go awry when it relaxed the four-tier caste system in which merchants and businessmen occupied the lowest rung, beneath farmers, warriors, and nobility. Kyoto was a museum; Osaka, once reduced to rubble by American bombing, was a collaboration of accountants and engineers. The commute between the two was forty minutes by train. Ransom went to Osaka, like everyone else, to make money.

Avoiding the rush, he caught a ten-thirty train, his fellow passengers women and children. He felt right at home with his book, a collection of historical tales for children written in childish hiragana, the phonetic system of writing. Though Ransom knew Americans and Europeans who were as devoted to the study of the language as he was to karate, he himself was content to dabble. He wanted to preserve the strangeness of his environment, keep himself just slightly off-balance.

For several days he had been working on one of the tales; his translation-in-progress was folded into the book:

The Lord Michizane lost favor in the court through the slander of his enemies and was banished. Not content with this, his enemies required the extermination of his family.

Spies from court searched the countryside and discovered Michizane's son and heir hidden in a small town. The son had been entrusted to Genzo, a former retainer of the Michizane family, now a provincial schoolmaster. An edict from the court arrived, commanding Genzo to present the head of the young heir to an envoy from the court.

Genzo was in despair. He could not disobey an order from the court. Nor could he kill his former lord's son, entrusted to his protection. A scheme occurred to him. He searched the classroom for a face that resembled the young prince. He would substitute another boy. But the others were rough peasant boys. None resembled the young lord.

Ransom's sleeve was tugged. When he looked up he was face to face with a boy standing in the aisle; he examined him for princely features. Meantime, the boy scrutinized Ransom before arriving at his verdict: “Gaijin.”

Two seats back, his mother gestured frantically.

Who are you?
the boy demanded.

I am a spy
, Ransom said.

The boy nodded gravely. This seemed to be just what he had suspected. The mother came forward, apologizing and blushing, and the kid bolted for the next car.

* * *

The envoy from the court arrived on the specified day. Genzo presented him with the head of a young boy. The boy's features were noble and aristocratic. The envoy took the head in his hands and examined it closely as if he were checking a persimmon for bruises. Genzo kept his hand on his sword. At last the envoy pronounced the head to be truly that of the young prince.

A final paragraph remained. Ransom wanted to know how it turned out. As the train emerged aboveground at Katsura, he took out his pocket dictionary and set to work; by the time the prerecorded female voice informed him that the train was coming up on Ibaraki, he had roughed it out.

Not far off, the mother of the dead youth waited. When she heard a sound at the gate she knew that it was not her son. She knew that she would never see her son again. The sliding door of the cottage was pulled back and a man entered. It was Genzo. He said, “Rejoice, my wife, for our son has been of service to his lord Michizane.”

This was the stuff, Ransom thought, that turned brats like his little inquisitor into loyal salary men like those who had packed the train a few hours earlier. It might not be so bad to know where your loyalties lay, to have a distinct place in a chain of obligation and command. He wondered which was worse: having a master for whom you would cut off your child's head, or not having a master at all.

Outside the window a thin green fuzz showed on the rice paddies, lately flooded. Old women stooped, ankle-deep in mud, weeding and thinning the shoots.

At Umeda Station Ransom descended to the subway, a cheerful android voice welcoming him aboard and naming the stops. He arrived at the office a little after eleven-thirty, where the receptionist, Keiko, greeted him elaborately. Honda, his boss, president and director of the A-OK Advertising Agency and English Language Conversation School, was less effusive.

“Ransom-san,” he called from his desk, as Ransom unloaded at his own. “Please to speak with me a moment.” Desmond Caldwell, Ransom's British colleague, was hunched over in such a manner as to appear to be writing with one end of a pencil and picking his nose with the other.

Ransom wished Honda-sama good morning and performed a perfunctory bow before taking the seat in front of his desk.

“What happened to your face?” Honda said, indicating the scratches. “Karate?”

“Rock and roll,” Ransom said.

Honda lit a Seven Star and asked how the weather was in Kyoto. For him this was a subject of genuine concern. Kyoto weather was notorious, the ring of mountains surrounding the city allegedly kept the good weather out and the bad weather in. Honda lived in Osaka, and couldn't understand why Ransom didn't. He claimed only gaijin and native Kyoto-jin could stand to live in the inclement ancient capital.

Ransom's report of partial clouds did not seem to satisfy
him. “It's sunny here,” he said, in case Ransom hadn't noticed, but he was clearly thinking of something else. He took a long drag on his cigarette and said, “I have had complaint from Mitsubishi.”