Floating City (47 page)

“Searching for breaches in my defenses?”

The Colonel turned to contemplate Katsuodo Kozo. He had a face like a skull with the skin drawn tightly over occipital and malar ridges. His eyes were those of a man long in high fever, unnaturally bright with paranoid conjecture.

“Spoken like a true daimyo,” the Colonel said with a hint of amusement. It was clearly the wrong tack to take with Katsuodo, though he doubted there was a tack that would be right.

“I am no feudal samurai lord,” Katsuodo said with a ramrod-straight back maintained by smoldering indignation. “I have none of the perquisites of caste that a samurai had by matter of birthright. Whatever status I possess I forged in the furnace of my own will.” He removed his slippers, shoved his feet into street shoes that had to be worn on the cool stone floor of the anteroom because it was not yet a true part of the house and, as such, was unclean. “Not that my position means much of anything to the world at large. What prominence I may have stolen is like a unique work of art: I cannot display it beyond a small circle of likeminded individuals.”

“What did you expect? You’re a criminal.”

A small smile crept across Katsuodo’s skull-like visage. “Correct me if I have it wrong, but aren’t some of your closest acquaintances criminals?”

“My job requires me to liaise with every level of Japanese society.”

Katsuodo nodded. “Still, it appears as if you’ve developed an undeniable fondness for what you have termed the criminal class.”

It was clear, at this point, that Katsuodo was not going to invite the Colonel into his house proper, but meant to keep him marooned in this no-man’s-land room that served as a kind of bridge between the world outside and Katsuodo’s private domain.

“You don’t care for the work I do with Okami-san.”

Katsuodo laughed, baring yellow teeth. “Is that what you call the vile mischief you and Okami are up to? It’s a disgrace, Yakuza working with the Occupation forces. My stomach heaves just to have you this close to me. I ask you now to leave before violence occurs.”

“There will be no violence,” the Colonel said in as even a tone as he could muster.

“Good.” Katsuodo turned his back on him. “Then we have nothing more to say to one another.”

“There is one more thing,” the Colonel said as Katsuodo was about to go through the sliding fusuma to the interior of his house. He waited until the
oyabun
turned around. There was no expression on his face; he might already have been dead.

“What Okami and I are doing is for the benefit of everyone—even you. That is why I have come here: to ask you to join us. We would both benefit from your insight and your wisdom.” Silence. His image had already faded from Katsuodo’s eyes. “You seek to stop us, but I assure you it is like trying to change the course of a mighty river by building a dam out of matchsticks. It cannot be done. My work will outlive all of us; there is nothing you or anyone else can do to stop it.”

Katsuodo turned and, without a word, disappeared beyond the fusuma. The Colonel, left alone in the stone-floored anteroom, stared down at his shoes. He required some time to cool his boiling blood. The man was precisely as Okami had described him: infuriating in his adamantine resolve to dismantle the partnership that the Colonel had spent so much time in nurturing. The Colonel, looking into his reflection in his spit-polished shoes, could already read Katsuodo’s fate as if he were a seer in a sacred trance. And, in a way, this was what he was.

At last he roused himself and, moving across the stone floor, sought to leave this place as quickly as he could. Already the scent of blood was in the air.

While the Colonel was trying to make peace, Okami was preparing to go to war. Major General Willoughby, who had earned the epithet “the Little Fascist,” was obsessed with the Communist threat in Japan. To that end, he had proposed to turn this Gang of Fifteen into the nucleus of an indigenous anti-Communist military. His people were training Lieutenant General Arisue, former chief of military intelligence for the General Staff, to head up a contingent of his former officers within G-2, the American intelligence arm. They had buried his protégés in the historical section where, Okami had hard evidence, the Gang was already hard at work reporting on Soviet troop movements in the area. In a mind-boggling display of putting the tiger in with the hens, Willoughby’s people had placed another notorious war criminal, Colonel Hattori, in charge of local military demobilization. Hattori promptly returned the favor by saving his cronies from the war crimes ax. When and if Willoughby got his sorely-wished-for go-ahead for remobilizing the Japanese military to act as an American puppet force, Hattori would oversee it.

These actions were offensive to Okami on several counts. Besides not buying into Willoughby’s Communist-under-every-doormat theory, he had no wish to see his country kept on America’s short leash, which rearmament would surely accomplish. Also, as the Colonel correctly pointed out, the cost for start-up and maintenance of a significant military force would undermine everything the Colonel had been working toward: a viable economy, free of high inflation, that would get Japan back on its feet.

But, if the truth be known, Okami had another compelling reason for wanting Willoughby’s plan to fail. He held a grudge against a number of the Gang of Fifteen for their despicable orders during the last days of the war. Their treatment of the men under their command was abysmal, and a number of Okami’s friends had suffered. Also, his brother had died.

Okami preferred not to think of his brother, who had died before he could experience the full flower of life. Some excused his death as being part of the caprice of war, but Okami was not fooled. He knew who was responsible for his brother’s death, and though those people were currently under Willoughby’s aegis, he had devised a plan to destroy them.

This he decided to do without the Colonel’s help. For one thing, the Colonel had been inexplicably dragging his feet on the Gang of Fifteen situation. Despite daily reminders from Okami, he had yet to act. Lately, these reminders had degenerated into heated arguments that left Okami feeling frustrated if not betrayed.

“Try being Japanese,” the Colonel had said heatedly. “Be patient. There are many strands to this web. Let them play out in their own time.”

“I
have
no time,” Okami had said, matching heat for heat. “This is
my
country. Until you’ve walked in my shoes, you’ve no right to tell me how to act.”

Though he could understand the Colonel’s need for caution—he was working within the confines of SCAP, where Willoughby and his people currently wielded a great deal of power—Okami’s burning desire for revenge required him to find his own path.

That he had done. With the Colonel’s attention directed elsewhere Okami was left with only one source. He had spent many weeks examining the dire nature of the gamble he was being forced to take.

He would have to deal with the Communists.

If they were somehow to gain knowledge of the fifteen war criminals that Willoughby and his followers had saved from the tribunals, he knew exactly what would happen. The Russians were animals; they were big on primary responses, and on that level they were vicious. Diplomacy was a game they could only stumble through as ineptly as children.

He was aware that Soviet agents abounded in Tokyo, some of them in higher places than the Occupation command could imagine. If these people were to come into possession of the right intelligence, he had no doubt they could penetrate the military’s safeguards, especially if they were given a bit of clandestine help.

Yes, it would be fitting for the Communists to become the unwitting tool of my revenge,
Okami had thought as he awoke on the morning the Colonel went to see Katsuodo Kozo.
Let them kill Willoughby’s Gang of Fifteen and in the process avenge the deaths of my brother and my friends.

But of course he had to sell it with the proper motivation. The Communists would know him, so ideology was out. But money wasn’t. Yakuza could be notoriously mercenary when the spirit or necessity moved them. To this end he began to spend his late-night hours in a sleazy bar where his informants had assured him Communist agents hung out. He made a great show of getting drunk and then talking with a loose tongue, bragging to anyone who would listen that he knew about an American plot to harbor war criminals.

Eventually, a rat would come sniffing around. Okami, who could be subtle when the need arose, had deliberately cut a wide swath through the bar. Subtlety was not the Soviets’ strong suit.

One night a lithe, slight-shouldered Japanese man sat down next to him at the bar and said, “I understand you and I have a similar point of view.”

“Is that so?”

“Maybe not. But it has come to my attention that you have information I could use.”

“I think I hear the rustle of money.”

“In that you may not be wrong. I have a grudge to settle with some wartime officers. I can use your help.”

Okami grunted. “That depends on whether the rustle is far off or close at hand.”

“I assure you it’s very close indeed. Tell me, friend, how did you come by this information about the Americans?”

Okami finished his Scotch, ordered another. “It’s none of your business.”

“It is. It’s going to be my money.”

Okami regarded the man without seeming to try to size him up. “I have my thumb squarely on the SCAP adjutant Jack Donnough,” he half-lied. “What’s it to you?”

“You’re spraying this all over the place. Do you think that’s wise?”

“Who cares?” Okami downed his Scotch and ordered another all in one motion.

“I do, for one.”

Okami cocked his head. “And you are?”

“A friend of yours... maybe.”

Okami nodded. “Okay, friend. Have a drink on me.” He gestured to the bartender, and when the other man had gotten his drink, they went to a vacant booth in the rear of the bar. Of course, it really didn’t matter where they went, Okami’s people were all around.

He knew the Communists’ tactics. They would try to trap him. It wasn’t enough for them simply to trade intelligence for money; they’d insist on their pound of flesh—a sword to hold over his head so that they would be able to control him forever afterward. It was sad as well as frightening, Okami thought as he slipped into the booth opposite the contact. This was how the Communists treated their own people, it was how their ideology had become as intractable as iron.

The man’s name was Iwanushi. He was a factory worker, but more importantly he was a ranking member of Shin’ei Kinro Taishato, the most virulent of the reactionary groups allying themselves with the nascent labor movement. Uncontrollable inflation, high unemployment, the Yoshida administration’s unstemmed corruption and seeming inertia in trying to overcome Japan’s postwar economic woes, the populace’s general perception that SCAP’s promises of a better life through democracy was a lie—all this was a highly flammable mix. It was tailor-made for Communist infiltration at the worker level, where frustration was at high tide, The Soviets were adept at using unionists and reactionary elements such as Iwanushi’s organization as stalking horses to further their own ends. It was another example of how they used their obdurate ideology as a whip to exhort their disciples into what they so quaintly—and misleadingly—called “revolutionary fervor.”

Iwanushi was typical of his kind: browbeaten, self-righteous, impatient, smug in the security that socialism was the key to a new and better world, if only he were in power. But, as Okami knew, the Iwanushis of the world would never be allowed to gain power. Either the forces they sought to bring down would disperse them or the masters who controlled them now would continue to do so in a new world order. The simple fact was that people like Iwanushi had no clear idea of their own policy once the old guard was disposed of. And, of course, this was just how the Communists had planned it, because they were ready, willing, and all too eager to impose the Communist way of life on Japan.

Okami did not hate Iwanushi; he pitied him. Someone had to. Neither the Communists nor the Yoshida government were in the least interested in the personal plight that had driven him into poverty and anger.

“You are Yakuza,” Iwanushi said when they had settled themselves. “You are a collaborator working with SCAP. You are an enemy of the people so please do not expect me to be sympathetic. Information for money. I wish to engage in a simple business arrangement.”

Knowing this would be anything but simple, Okami said, “I commend you for volunteering to get your hands dirty, comrade.”

Iwanushi gave him a hard look. “I wish I had your ability at levity. You who live like a shogun cannot know our hard life. Try not to judge us.”

“It seems to me that a bit of levity would do you a world of good. It would help you step back and evaluate your situation.”

“Food is my situation or, rather, the lack of it. Also, a job. While you get rich and fat in the black market, my family and countless others like mine starve. This is how today looks from my perspective. Is it any wonder that I am fixated on making tomorrow better?’’

“Better for whom? Your family or the Communists?”

“It’s one and the same,” Iwanushi said with such convction that Okami knew he had him.

The next evening Okami arrived unannounced at Iwanushi’s house. He carried with him gifts of food and drink: fresh fruit, vegetables, and fish that he knew were unavailable to the family. The place was tiny and ramshackle, a row house standing near enough the railroad tracks that the thin walls shook each time a train rushed past.

Iwanushi, glassy-eyed but polite, ushered him inside. It was just before the dinner hour and the entire family was home: Iwanushi’s tiny graying wife and their three children. The place stank of boiled root vegetables.

Iwanushi bowed, accepting Okami’s gifts mutely, but when he took them into the kitchen, Okami saw Iwanushi’s wife throw them into the garbage. There was a brief argument. He heard her speaking in a hiss, could make out the word
shameful
and the awful epithet
futei,
which Prime Minister Yoshida had used to describe the unionists in a recently broadcast speech. The word meant “subversive.”