East is East (33 page)

It couldn't have been much past seven in the morning and the heat was like a weight on him already, pounds per square inch, a measure of his defeat. He sat there on the stone floor and pressed tentatively at his stomach, feeling a sword there, feeling liberation
and honor, and something else too: hunger. Stinking and mud-encrusted, bruised, flayed and terrorized, humiliated to the point at which there was no alternative but suicide, he was hungry. Hungry. It was an embarrassment. A joke. The urgings of life crowding in on a funerary rite, a preparation for death gone up in dreams of sweet bean cake and ice cream.

Well, all right. Perhaps he wasn't defeated yet. It was all in the interpretation, wasn't it?
Small matters should be taken seriously,
J
ō
ch
ō
said. Well, then, his hunger was a small matter, and he would take it very seriously indeed—and the larger matter, the matter of his solitary and eternal fate, he would take lightly. As for the smaller matter, he was sure they would feed him something—not even the
hakujin
could be so barbaric as to let a prisoner starve to death. And as for the larger matter, he would have the right to a fair trial, wouldn't he? He thought about that a moment, a fair trial, justices in their funereal robes, a jury of long-noses empaneled to vent their hate on him, Hiro Tanaka, the victim, the innocent, the
happa
from Japan trussed up like a turkey and studying the scuffed tiles of the courtroom floor as if their pattern would somehow reveal the solution to his predicament… and then all at once a glorious notion came into his head, a notion that tossed off fair trials, fuming sheriffs, dogs and Negroes and gun-toting crackers as if they were so much refuse, the outer wrapping of a morsel so sweet and nourishing it inflated his
hara
just to think about it: he would escape.

Escape. Of course. That was it: that was the solution. Two little syllables leaped into his head and he felt the blood beating in his veins, in his tiniest vessels and capillaries. He was a man with
hara,
a modern samurai, and if he'd escaped from the storage closet of the
Tokachi-maru,
from Wakabayashi and Chiba and all the rest, then he had the wits and courage and stamina to defeat all
the gaijin
cowboys in all the endless streets and alleys and honky-tonk bars of the whole Buddha-forsaken country, and he could escape from here too.

For the first time since they'd slammed the door on him he looked around, really looked, letting his eyes linger over each detail. The
cell was ancient, filthy, slowly giving itself back to the chaos from which it had evolved in some dim colonial epoch. It was like a stall in a barn, except that there was no water, no straw, no place to relieve oneself—not even a bucket. The amenities consisted of a wooden bench built into the wall opposite and two lawnchairs—aluminum tubing and plastic mesh—propped up in the corner. Above the bench, twelve feet from the ground at least, there was a single barred window that apparently gave onto an interior room beyond it, judging from the light. And that was it, but for the door through which he'd been bundled half an hour ago.

He was sitting on the stone floor where they'd left him, where they'd dumped him in a rush of clattering shoes and urgent feet, his ribs throbbing and a long nasty gash coloring his left shin. When he wet his lips, he tasted blood at the corner of his mouth, and there was a tender spot—and some swelling, it felt like—along the cheekbone beneath his right eye. At least they'd removed the cuffs, though it seemed a small thing to be thankful for after all they'd inflicted on him. He rubbed his wrists. And he scanned the cell again, hopefully, wondering if he'd missed something. He hadn't. He was locked in. He'd been abused and humiliated. There was no way out.

But then he gazed up at that dim high window, and then down at the lawnchairs and back up again, and a picture came to him of a pair of jugglers he'd seen on TV as a boy, one balancing atop a stack of stage chairs while the other offered him a whirl of knives, Indian clubs and flaming torches to spin over his head. If he stacked those chairs on the bench and if he could manage to climb atop them, he could reach the window—and if he could reach the window he could find out what was on the other side and see if one of the bars wasn't maybe just a tiny bit loose. But then why would it be loose? he thought, sitting there still, aching with a dull persistence. And yet, why not? The building was old and disused, a relic of the times when the Negroes were shackled and the red Indians butchered. And this cell—this must have been where the
hakujin
kept their Negroes before they dragged them out to whip and lynch and burn them.

The thought lifted him to his feet.

He stood a moment at the door—a slab of oak, featureless, solid as rock—and then he noiselessly crossed the cell and took up the lawnchairs. They were frayed and dirty and their joints were locked with rust, but he managed to unfold them nonetheless. What followed bore less resemblance to a feat of skill performed in the center ring than an elaborate pratfall. The first attempt landed him on the stone floor and jammed that tough little appendage of bone at the nether end of his spine right up into his mouth. The second attempt twisted a knee, traumatized an elbow and put a permanent bow in the frame of one of the chairs. There was noise, of course—the stiff applause of the chairs clattering from bench to floor, the thump of perspiring flesh against unyielding stone, the small astonished grunts and gasps of pain—but no one came to the door as he lay there panting and writhing. For this, he was thankful.

He stacked the chairs again and again, balancing, teetering, clutching and falling, until finally, on his eighth attempt, as the chairs shot perversely out from under him and his arms flew up over his head, he made a wild snatch at the highflown bars and to his amazement caught hold of them—two of them, that is. For a moment he hung there, gratified, till the bars gave way and he dropped back into the cell, grazing the bench on the way down and reopening the gash on his shin as surely as if he'd been aiming for it. When he recovered, he found that he was still clutching the pitted iron bars as if they were a pair of dumbbells. Above him, the window gaped like a damaged mouth: four bars remained where a moment before there had been six. Better yet, numbers 2 and 3 were in his hands and the gap they left was easily wide enough to squeeze through. On the down side, his brief glimpse beyond the window had revealed a second cell, identical to his own, but for the lawnchairs. Clinging there, poised in the moment between hoisting himself up and lurching back from the window in a storm
of dust and mortar pellets, he discovered a familiar bench, a scatter of refuse, and a heavy ancient solid-core door, firmly shut and for all he knew as immovable as the one behind him.

If he was disappointed, he didn't have time to dwell on it, because at that moment the outside bolt slid back with a screech of protest and a low rumble of voices startled him to his feet. He looked wildly around him. The chairs lay crippled on the floor, the window gaped in the most obvious and incriminating way, and the bars—the bars were still clutched in his hands!
Think fast:
isn't that what the Americans say? They throw you a live hand grenade and say,
Think fast.
But Hiro, in that moment, leaped beyond thought and into the realm of pure reaction: even as the door pushed open, he slipped the cold iron bars into the rear waistband of his shorts and sat heavily in the bowed lawnchair, simultaneously booting its mate back into the corner with a discreet jerk of his foot. And then the heat from outdoors hit him like a fist and there they were, the sheriff and the two government men, edging warily into the cell.

For a long moment the three of them stood there in the doorway, watching him as they might have watched a tethered animal, as if trying to gauge how dangerous he might be and how far and suddenly he might leap. Hiro sat there on his iron bars and watched them watching him. The tall one, the spatterface, had the eyes of a rodent, pink and inflamed, the strangest eyes Hiro had ever seen in a member of his own species. Those eyes fastened on him with a look of wonder and bafflement. The sheriff's eyes were the eyes of a white-boned demon, as hard and sharp and blue as the edge of a blade. The little man—and it struck him in that moment how much he resembled the photo of Doggo, with his long blond hair and beard, a hippie for all his military trappings—the little man looked bemused. If the tall one regarded him with awe, as if he'd just dropped down to earth from another planet, and if the sheriff gave him that implacable look of
gaijin
hate, the little man's eyes said
I've seen it all before.
The moment lingered. No one spoke, and though it shrieked for attention, though it hovered over them
like a great flapping bird, no one seemed to notice the window.

“Here,” the little man said finally, shoving something at him—a paper bag, a white paper bag with the legend HARDEE'S printed on it in bright roman letters.

Hiro took the bag and cradled it stiffly in his lap. The little man held out a Styrofoam cup. Hiro reached for it, smelling coffee, and bowed his head reflexively in acknowledgment of the gesture. He felt the heavy pitted bars dig into his hams and his heart began to race.

Then the tall one spoke, his face spattered with the strange paint of his skin. “Sheriff Peagler,” he said, his voice officious and cold, the voice of the prosecutor calling in the evidence, and the sheriff reached out to pull the door closed. “Thank you,” he murmured, and he turned to Hiro, the look of wonder replaced now by something harder, more professional. “We'd like to ask you a few questions,” he said.

Hiro nodded. He concentrated on their shoes—the sheriff's steel-toed cowboy boots, the tall one's gleaming impatient loafers, the scuffed suede hiking boots that embraced the little man's delicate feet. The shoes edged closer. Outside, beyond the heavy door, a bird called out in a high mocking voice. And then the three of them started in on him, insinuating, badgering, hectoring, and they didn't let up for nearly four hours.

Was he familiar with the Red Brigades? Did the name Abu Nidal mean anything to him? Where had he learned to swim like that? Was he aware of the penalties for entering the country illegally? What was his full name? What had he hoped to gain by attacking the late Olmstead White? Was it a burglary? An assault? How long had he known Ruth Dershowitz?

The heat rose steadily. Hiro crouched over the paper bag and clung to the Styrofoam cup till the black liquid grew tepid. His
hara
rumbled, the iron bars cut into his backside like files. And yet he didn't dare move, not even to sip the coffee—the slightest agitation could collapse the chair, send him reeling in a clatter of iron and aluminum, the bars he'd pried from the window exposed to
his inquisitors' eyes, and then where would he be? He held himself as rigid as a statue.

His interrogators were insatiable. They wanted to know everything, from what school he'd attended to his grandmother's maiden name and what each of Ruth's lunches contained, right on down to the number of seeds in the pomegranate, and yet, rapacious as their curiosity was, never once did they glance up and discover the naked evidence hovering over their heads. For the first half hour or so they remained standing, circling him, punching their questions at him with quick jabs of their fingers and fists—what time? what day? what hour? why? how? when?—riding a current of body English and cold
hakujin
rage; but then, starting with the tall one, they began to succumb to the heat, and they settled in on the narrow bench beneath the window, buttock to buttock, firing questions in a synchronized barrage and jotting notes in the little black pads they produced from their shirt pockets.

Hiro answered them as best he could, head bowed, eyes lowered, responding with the restraint and humility his
ob
ā
san
had instilled in him. He tried to tell them the truth, tried to tell them about Chiba and Unagi and how the Negro had attacked him and how he'd tried to save the old man when the fire exploded round them, but they wouldn't listen, didn't care, caught the vaguest glimmer of what he was saying and shouted him down. “You went there to steal, didn't you?” the spatterface cried. “You attacked an officer aboard your own ship, took advantage of a senile old lady and her crippled husband, set fire to an innocent man's house when he resisted you—isn't that right?” Hiro never had a chance to respond. The little man was on him. Then the sheriff. And then it was back to the spatterface and on and on and on.

“You're a thief.”

“A liar.”

“An arsonist.”

They knew all the answers: all they needed was confirmation.

What seemed to interest them most, though, what aroused even the increasingly sleepy-eyed sheriff, was Ruth. They wanted to
implicate her, and as the morning wore on, it seemed to be all they cared about. Hiro was already packaged, already wrapped up and condemned—he was history. But Ruth, Ruth was an unknown quantity, and they converged on the mention of her like sharks on a blood spoor. Had she given him food, clothing, money, sex, drugs, alcohol? Had she harbored him, tucked him in at night, was she planning to help him escape from the island and evade the law? Had she fondled him, kneaded his flesh, conjoined her lips and her private parts with his own? Was she a communist, a scofflaw, a loose woman? Was she a folksinger, did she wear huaraches, attend rallies, eat lox and bagels? Was she a Jew? She was, wasn't she?

No, he said, no. No to every question. “She doesn't know me,” he said. “I take her food, sleep when she go away.”

The tall one was particularly aroused. “You're lying,” he mocked, glaring like a big spattered rodent. “She harbored you all along, she shared her bed with you, brought you groceries and clothing.”

“No. She doesn't.” Hiro ached in every joint from holding himself erect. He wanted to tear open the bag and fall on the food, wanted to moisten his lips with the tepid coffee, but he didn't dare. The iron bars were part of him now. The chair creaked when he spoke. The window gaped.