The Devil of Nanking (15 page)

Jason laughed at her, Irina was condescending. I said nothing. On the subject of ghosts I wasn’t going to commit. I loved the house and its quirks – I soon got used to the peeling walls, the musty, closed-off rooms, the rows of disused
kotatsu
electric heaters in the store rooms – but there were times in my room, so close to the barricaded wing, that I felt like the last line of defence. Defence against what I didn’t know. The rats? The emptiness? I wasn’t sure. I’d lived alone for so long now that I should have been accustomed to great empty spaces pressing against my bedroom walls at night, but there were times in Takadanobaba that I’d wake in the night, rigid with fear, convinced that someone had just walked past the bedroom door.

‘Something’s waiting here,’ Shi Chongming said, when he first saw the house. The day after Fuyuki’s gang had come into the club he called. He wanted to see me. That’s what I liked – his choice of words:
he
wanted to see
me
. I hurried around agitatedly, buying tea and cakes and cleaning my room, while he made his way across Tokyo to Takadanobaba. Now he stood in the corridor, in that rigid way of his with his hands next to his sides, his eyes focusing far away in the gloom of the corridor. ‘Something’s waiting to be uncovered.’

‘It’s very old.’ I was making tea in the kitchen, green tea, and I’d bought some chestnut
mochi
– little bean-paste cakes wrapped in demure semi-opaque paper. I hoped he couldn’t see how nervous I was. ‘I wish I could have seen it when it was first built. It survived the
Kanto
earthquake, it even survived the bombing. Lots has happened here. Lots.’

I arranged the pastel pale
mochi
on a small, lacquered tray, loosening the paper on each so the wrappers drooped open, like flower petals revealing secret fat stamens. I’d never prepared Japanese food, and I had no reason to think that Shi Chongming would have any appreciation of it, but I wanted to get it right, not make a mess of it, and I spent a long time choosing the angle at which to place the teapot on the tray. A man eats first, the Japanese say, with his eyes. Every object must be looked at carefully, its impact on its neighbours considered in detail. Next to the pot I placed the small Japanese cups – more like earthenware bowls than cups – picked up the tray, turned into the passage, and saw that Shi Chongming had moved to the shutters and was standing with his hands up, as if he was feeling the warmth of the sun penetrating them. There was a look of peculiar concentration on his face.

‘Mr Shi?’

He turned to me. In the piebald shadows of the corridor he seemed suddenly pale. ‘What is beyond this?’

‘The garden. Open it.’

He hesitated a moment, then pulled back the screen and stared out through the grimy window. In the glaring white sunlight the garden was breathless and still, not a thing moving in that ticking, throbbing heat. The trees and creepers seemed dusty and almost unreal. Shi Chongming stood for a long time until I wasn’t sure if he was breathing or not. ‘I’d like to go into the garden, if I may. Let us take our tea in the garden.’

I’d never been down there. I wasn’t even sure there was access to it. The Russians had both gone out so I had to wake up Jason and ask. He came to the door crumpled and yawning, pulling on a T-shirt – a cigarette between his teeth. He looked Shi Chongming up and down wordlessly, then shrugged. ‘Yeah, sure. There’s a way.’ He led us down to where, only two rooms along from mine, an unlocked door opened on to a tiny wooden staircase.

I was astonished. I hadn’t realized there were staircases going down – I had imagined the ground floor to be completely sealed. But there, at the bottom of the dark stairwell, was one room, empty of furniture, only drifts of dead leaves on the stone floor. Facing us was a ripped paper
shoji
screen, coloured green by the underwater light of the garden beyond. Shi Chongming and I stood for a moment, looking at it.

‘I’m sure there’ll be nowhere to sit,’ I said.

Shi Chongming rested his hand on the screen. Something mechanical, a nuclear buzz like a small generator, maybe one of the air-conditioners on the Salt Building, echoed from beyond. He paused for a moment, then pulled. The screen was rusty: it resisted briefly, then gave suddenly, rolling back, and the bitter, coiled underbelly of a jungle filled the doorway with green. We stood in silence, staring out at it. A wisteria, as thick and muscled as the woody wrists of a fighter, had been so long ignored that it no longer flowered but had become a living cage stretching outwards from the doorway. Hair moss and tropical creepers coiled round it, mosquitoes hovered in its dark spaces, untidy persimmon and maple battled for space, festooned with moss and ivy.

Shi Chongming walked out into the thicket, moving quickly on his cane, the green and yellow light dappling the back of his strange head. I followed, treading carefully, balancing the tray. The air was thick with heat, insects and stinging, bitter tree saps. A huge winged beetle sprang from under my feet, hinged like a man-made bird, and whirred out of the undergrowth towards my face. I took a step back to avoid it, spilling a little tea on the lacquer tray, and watched it spiral past my face and up, crystalline and mechanical, clack-clack-clack, into the branches. It sat above me, as big as a wren, stretching its polished chestnut wings and began to make the electrical buzz I’d taken for a generator. I stared up at it, thrilled. The poet Basho’s
semi-no-koe
, I thought. The voice of the cicada. The oldest sound in Japan.

Ahead of me Shi Chongming had emerged into a clearing. I followed, stepping out into the glare, shrugging at the cobwebs on my arms and squinting in the sun at the glittering white Salt Building, flat against the blue sky. The garden was even bigger than I’d imagined: on my left lay a boggy area, a lotus pond, congested with rotting leaves, clouds of gnats hovering in the shadows of a giant
acer
that trailed into it.

Next to this, in the mossed and derelict remains of a Japanese rock garden, Shi Chongming had stopped. He was looking back across the garden, his head moving from side to side, as if he was straining for a fleeting glimpse of something, like a man who has let a dog run off into a forest and is trying to catch sight of it from the outskirts. He was so intent that I turned to look in the same direction. Tucked behind swathes of bamboo I could see glimpses of the red-ochre security grilles on the ground-floor windows, I could see a crumbling ornamental bridge spanning the lotus pond, but I couldn’t see what had so captured Shi Chongming’s attention. I looked again at his eyes, followed their trajectory and eventually settled in the region of a stone bench and stone lantern, the latter standing next to the lotus pond.

‘Mr Shi?’

He frowned and shook his head. Then he seemed to recover himself, noticing for the first time that I was carrying a tray. ‘Please.’ He took it from me. ‘Please, let’s sit down. Let’s drink.’

I found some mildewed steamer chairs and we sat at the edge of the rock garden in the shade, out of reach of the white flashes of sunlight. It was so hot that I had to do everything very slowly – pouring the tea, passing Shi Chongming a
mochi
on an individual lacquer tray. He took the tray and inspected it, then took the fork and carefully drew a line down the centre of the cake, cutting it so it fell open in two halves. A
mochi
is a floury, pale colour until it is opened, when it reveals a startling purple-red paste, like raw meat against a sliver of pastel skin. Shi Chongming’s face changed minutely when he saw it: I saw him hesitate, then politely lift a very small section to his mouth. He chewed it cautiously, swallowing painfully. Just as if he’s afraid of eating, I thought.

‘Tell me,’ he said at last, sipping his tea and patting his mouth with a handkerchief, ‘you seem much happier than when I first met you. Are you? Are you happy here in Tokyo?’

‘
Happy?
I don’t know. I haven’t thought about it.’

‘You have somewhere to live.’ He raised his hand to the house, to the upper floor gallery where a few puffy clouds were reflected in the dirty windows. ‘A safe place to live. And you have enough money.’

‘Yes.’

‘And you like your job?’

I looked down at the plate. ‘Sort of.’

‘You work in a club? You said you work in the evenings.’

‘I’m a hostess. It’s not exciting.’

‘I’m sure it’s not. I know a little about these clubs, I’m not the ignorant old man I appear. Where do you work? There are two chief areas – Roppongi and Akasaka.’

‘Yotsuya.’ I waved my hand in the vague direction. ‘The big building in Yotsuya. The black one.’

‘Ah, yes,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘Yes, I
do
know.’

Something in his voice made me look up. But he wasn’t looking at me, instead his milky eyes were focused in mid-air, as if he was thinking about something very puzzling.

‘Professor Shi? Have you come to tell me about the film?’

He inclined his head, his eyes still distant. It wasn’t a yes, and it wasn’t a no. I waited for him to continue but he didn’t, he seemed for a while to have forgotten that I was there. Then he said suddenly, in a quiet voice, ‘Do you know? To conceal the past is not such a rare trick.’

‘What?’

He regarded me thoughtfully, as if he was thinking not about Nanking but, rather, about me. I stared back at him, my face getting redder and redder.

‘
What?
’

‘It’s not such an unusual thing. It’s a trick that relies only on silence.’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

He reached inside his pocket and produced what looked like a small origami crane about the size of a matchbox, made from vivid red and purple
washi
paper. Its head was held back, its wings were extended dramatically. ‘Look at this – this perfect bird.’ He put the crane on my palm. I stared down at it. It was heavier than it looked; it seemed to be bound round the base with a complex structure of rubber bands. I looked up at him questioningly. He was nodding, his eyes on the little bird. ‘Imagine that this, this calm little bird, is the past. Imagine.’

I looked down at the crane, not understanding. Then I saw something was happening. It was quivering. I could feel the tremor in my wrist, my arms, all over my skin. The purple wings were shivering. I opened my mouth to say something, but the bird seemed to explode. From its centre leaped something red and terrifying, like a jack-in-the-box: the hideous face of a Chinese dragon shooting up at me, making me drop it and jump to my feet. My chair toppled over and I stood trembling, my hands out, staring down to where the odd, paper-accordion dragon twitched and twisted on the ground, the rubber bands unwinding.

Shi Chongming hooked it up on his cane, catching it and crumpling it into his pocket. ‘Don’t worry. I’m not a magician.’

I glanced up at him, my face red, my heart pounding.

‘It’s only a children’s trick. Don’t look so bewildered. Please, sit down.’

After a while, when I was sure the dragon wasn’t going to leap from his pocket, I picked up my chair and sat, looking at him warily.

‘I mean you to understand that when you talk about the past it is like putting a ball of phosphorous out under a cloudy sky. The past has transforming energy. The energy of wind or fire. We need to have respect for something so destructive. And
you
are asking to walk straight into it without a thought? It is a dangerous land. You have to be sure that you want to go ahead.’

‘Of course I am,’ I said, still watching him guardedly. ‘Of course I want to.’

‘There was a professor who wanted to do his best for his university in China.’ Shi Chongming sat holding his teacup primly, his feet close together. As he spoke he didn’t let his eyes meet mine, but addressed his words to the air. ‘I hope you understand my meaning. This professor heard that there was a company in Hong Kong, a manufacturer of Chinese medicine, that wanted to join with a university to cast a scientific eye over traditional cures. He knew how important it was that his university win this partnership, but he also knew that his research team would have to find something special to interest the company.’ Shi Chongming sat forward and lowered his voice: ‘Then one day he heard rumours, through strange and unnamable networks, whispers of a tonic that had remarkable effects. It was rumoured, among other things, to cure chronic diabetes, arthritis, even malaria.’ He raised his eyebrows at me. ‘Can you imagine how astounding it would be if it were true?’

I didn’t answer. I was still uncomfortable, still wary of Shi Chongming and the paper dragon in his jacket. I didn’t know what I had expected from this meeting – his acquiescence, maybe, or simply more obstinacy. What I hadn’t expected was the focused, determined look on his face now as he spoke.

‘The professor knew that if only his university could find the ingredients in this tonic they would have a chance of winning the partnership deal. It took him much hard work and many secretive enquiries, but at last he tracked down someone who was said to be in possession of the tonic. There was only one problem. That person lived in Japan.’

He put down his cup and sat up a little straighter in his chair, placing both hands stiffly on his thighs as if he were a small child in a confessional. ‘I have not been completely honest with Todai University. They are under the impression that I am interested in what Chinese traditions the Japanese Army brought home. And, largely speaking, that is true. But there is a little more to it than that. I secured my post at Todai for one reason: to get to Japan and track down the ingredients.’

‘You lied, you mean. You lied to them to get your fellowship.’

He smiled wryly. ‘If you want to put it like that. Yes, I lied. The truth is that I am in Tokyo to secure the future of my university. If I could find what this mysterious substance is, things would change – not only for me but for hundreds of others.’ He rubbed his eyes wearily. ‘Unfortunately my arrival in Tokyo was not the end of the hunt. Rather, it was the beginning. The man I want to talk to is very elderly, more than eighty years old, and he is one of the most powerful men in Japan. He is surrounded by people who are absolutely forbidden to talk and most information that comes out is rumours and superstition.’ Shi Chongming smiled. ‘To put things in brief, I have come up against a wall.’