East is East Read online

  He felt the eyes of the Vietnamese on him and the blood rose to his face. “What’s it to you,” he said, holding Turco’s eyes, “I’m part albino, okay?”

  Turco stood his ground, smiling now, smiling up at him with the serenity of a man who’s never made a mistake in his life. He was taking his time. “Hey, no offense intended, man. It’s like I’ve seen a couple dudes over there that caught it, their own people dropping the shit on them—typical fuck-up—it’s like this jellied gasoline, right? Sticks to you like glue. But hey, if I’d known you were so sensitive about it—”

  “I am not sensitive,” Abercorn said, but even as he said it his voice rose to give him away.

  In the car, while the wipers beat uselessly at the smear of rain and they settled in for the seventy-minute drive down to Tupelo Island, Abercorn, not yet realizing that they’d have to wait three hours for the next ferry and that there were no motels on the island and never had been, began to soften a bit. He had to work with this guy, after all. And Turco was going to do all the grunt work while he, Abercorn, sat in the motel and coordinated things. “Listen,” he said after a while, the tinny strains of some moronic country song whining through the speakers, “this Japanese guy. I mean, in L.A. we never had to deal with the Japanese. What do you think?”

  Turco was chewing a stick of whatever it was the woman had given him. It was black and hard and had a forbidding alien smell to it. “Piece of cake,” he said, chewing. “What you got to realize about the Nips is they’re the squarest people in the world, I mean the hokiest, bar none. Shit, even the paddy Burmese are downtown compared to the Japs. They’re all part of this big team, this like Eagle Scout thing where everybody fits in and works real hard and makes this perfect and totally unique society. Because they’re superior to everybody else, they’re purer—that’s what they think. Nobody but Japanese in Japan. You fuck up, you let the whole race down.”

  Rain beat at the windshield. Turco gestured with the pungent black stick of whatever it was. “Even the far-out types, the rebels, the punks with the orange hair and the leather jackets—and there are precious few of them, believe me—even they can’t break the mold. You know how they get down, you know how they really thumb their nose at society and show what bad characters they are?”

  Abercorn didn’t know.

  “They all go down to Yoyogi Park in Tokyo on Saturday afternoon from one to three and turn up their boom boxes and dance. That’s it. They dance. All of them. Squarest people in the world.”

  Abercorn digested this information a moment, wondering how it applied to the case at hand, the case that had put him in this car, in this storm, with this root-chewing ex-LURP beside him. The whole thing was a real shame. Ninety-nine percent of the illegals just came in and disappeared—they got a tourist visa and vanished, rode in underneath a bus, breezed in for a semester of college and wound up collecting Social Security. It was a joke. The borders were sieves, colanders, picket fences without the pickets. But when somebody came in and made a lot of noise and started raising hell with the people who bought new cars and registered to vote, red lights started flashing all the way on up the line to Washington, and that’s where the Detlef Abercorns came in. “So, uh, what do you think we ought to do?” he said. “The Nips—the Japanese, I mean—tend to be pretty fanatical too, don’t they? Hara-kiri, kamikazes, the human wave and all of that?”

  “Yeah, I’ve been to the movies too. But the fact is, like I told you, they’re just plain square. You know how you catch this clown?”

  Abercorn didn’t have a clue. But he figured if the barefoot crackers and their hound dogs couldn’t bring him in, they were in for a real ordeal. He thought of the soldier they’d found in a cave in the Philippines, still fighting World War II thirty years later. “No,” he said softly.

  Turco gestured at the pack on the seat beside him. “You know what I got in there? A boom box. Sanyo. Biggest shitkicker you ever saw, puts out enough amps to kill every woodpecker out there stone dead in two minutes flat. I’ve got a couple disco tapes, Michael Jackson, Donna Summer, that kind of shit, you follow me? I’m going to track the fucker, no different than if this was 1966 in the la Drang Valley, cross a trail, any trail. Then I’m going to set this thing on a stump and crank it up.”

  Was he kidding? Abercorn couldn’t tell.

  Turco turned to him with a grin that showed off all his teeth, black now with the stuff he was eating. “Hey,” he said, reaching back to pat a conspicuous bulge in the pack, “I’m Br’er Fox and this here is my tarbaby.”

  Queen Bee

  Owen’s wake-up call—three sharp but reverential knocks accompanied by a gently insinuating whisper—startled her from a dreamless sleep. “Es la hora,” he whispered through the door, and Ruth forced open her eyes. “Despiértese, señorita.” It was one of his Spanish days—that much registered, though she was groggy and hungover and it didn’t much matter whether she was summoned in Spanish, Norwegian or Navajo: all she wanted was to go back to sleep.

  At 6:30 each weekday morning Owen Birkshead made the rounds of the still and shadowy halls of Thanatopsis House, performing the delicate task of rousing the slumbering artists without compromising their dreams. Depending on his whim, he would summon them in one of the Romance languages, sweet on the early-morning tongue, or in crisp and businesslike German or even Russian. One morning it would be “Guten Morgen, Fräulein; ihre Arbeit erwartet Sie,” and the next, “Bum giorno, signorina, cbe bell agiornata!” Once, he’d even tried Japanese—“Ohayō gozaimasu!”—but he was afraid that the harshness of his accent would scuff the glossy patina of the artists’ dreams, and so he gave it up.

  “Yes,” Ruth gasped, “I’m up,” too fuddled to throw back her usual “Sί, señor, muchas gracias; yo me despierto.” She’d been up late, too late, and she’d drunk too many bourbons. She listened as the faint shuffle of Owen’s footsteps retreated down the hallway, and she heard his knock and the whisper of his voice at the next door: “Es la hora, es la hora.” She closed her eyes and felt the pain hovering there on the underside of her eyelids. Her throat was parched, her temples felt as if twin spikes had been driven into them, and she had to pee. Urgently. But even as she lay there she knew that the walleyed composer—Clara Kleinschmidt—had beaten her to the communal bathroom round the corner and that the half bath at the far end of the hall would at any moment resound with the thunder of Irving Thalamus’s potent morning micturition.

  But it wasn’t the urgency of her need or the pain either that ultimately drove her from her bed: it was guilt. Wholesome, fruitful, old-fashioned, gut-wrenching guilt. She had to get up. She was a writer, after all, and writers got up and wrote. Her enemies—and here the specter of Jane Shine, in all her phony, scheming, hateful and shy-smiling beauty, seized her like a pair of hot tongs—would already be up and at their typewriters and monitors, already out of the blocks and hurtling down the inside track to usurp her rightful place in Harper’s or Esquire, at Knopf or Viking or Random House. Besides which, it was so much easier to make use of the guilt if you were working well—and she was, finally, working well.

  The transformation had begun on the night she’d flared up in front of the little group gathered in the billiard room, though she hadn’t realized it at the time. In fact, the ensuing week had been worse than the first. At least during the first week she had the excuse of disorientation, but as the second week dragged on, she felt increasingly bored and out of touch. She continued to sit at the silent table, brooding and defensive, the evenings with Saxby her sole release. But something had happened, some subtle alteration had taken place among the fixed stars of the Thanatopsis firmament, and Ruth’s was on the rise. For one thing, she had the patronage of Irving Thalamus. He’d noticed her that night, oh yes indeed, and his attentions—the ironic glances, the little jokes and nudges—became her safety net. By the third week he’d lured her from the silent room to establish her as his chief ally at the raucous, gossipy and sacrilegious table in the convivial
room. Together they would pass through the doleful, dingy corridor of the silent room—smirking, always smirking, a joke on their lips—while Laura Grobian dwelt in the trembling deeps of her hollow-eyed middle-aged beauty and Peter Anserine and his young disciples frowned ascetically over their incomprehensible texts. And at night—and this was the root and cause of this morning’s hangover and the hangover she’d had two mornings ago and the one she’d have tomorrow morning too—he brought her into his after-hours circle, where she could really shine, where she could thrust and parry, charm, ridicule, demolish and redeem, where she could become her old self—La Dershowitz—once again.

  In a way, she almost felt sorry for her rivals. In the aftermath of that fateful night on Peagler Sound, none of them was really in the running. Ina Soderbord was attractive, she guessed, in a big, blocky, heavy-breasted, white-eyebrowed sort of way, but she inhabited her own little corner of interplanetary space and spoke in the breathless, lisping pant of the brain-numb ingénue. Gravity had not been kind to Clara Kleinschmidt and she had a sad sour smell to her, the smell of inherited lace, hope chests and the lingering loveless death of the game show and rocking chair. And the punk sculptress—Regina Mclntyre, a product of Ladycliff and Mount Holyoke, Ruth learned after some probing—was too consumed in self-loathing to speak, but for the occasional vitriolic outburst, and her personal style was strictly for the leather crowd. Neither Irving Thalamus nor Bob the poet was the type, not to mention Sandy De Haven, a late and supremely interesting addition to the group, twenty-six, bleached locks dangling in his eyes as he bent over the billiard table, his first novel due out in the fall from Farrar, Straus and Giroux. No. Ruth was supreme here, queen of the hive.

  As her confidence improved, so did her work. She revised an old story and sent it off to The New Yorker with Irving Thalamus’s blessings, and her Japanese piece suddenly began to take off, to blossom, to feel like something bigger than a mere short story. That’s where the second thing came in, the other factor that turned Ruth’s life around at Thanatopsis, as serendipitous in its way as Irving Thalamus’s tutelage—the appearance, on her studio porch, of Hiro Tanaka. Hiro Tanaka, the outlaw, the renegade, the terror of Tupelo Island, filcher of Clara Kleinschmidt’s panties, castigator of Bobby and Cara Mae Cribbs, eluder of the sheriff and the INS, Hiro Tanaka, lunch bucket thief. He was her secret, her pet, her own, and it gave her an edge on all of them.

  She’d caught him in the act, caught him there on her porch on that rainy afternoon ten days back, caught him with the evidence in his hands while the trees strained their backs and the earth shook and the stink of sulfur fell like a blanket over the trapped and stifling air. Lightning flashed, rain raked the trees. He hesitated—she could see it in his eyes, recognition and confusion both: he’d seen her naked, her breasts, her navel, her secret hair—and for a moment the dull shock of animal surprise left his face. Food was one thing, the first thing, yes, and this was the second.

  She wasn’t afraid, not a bit. He was just a boy, scared and dirty, his eyes feverish, clothes torn, a scrap of frayed red cloth knotted round his head. He didn’t even look Japanese, with his tan irises and dull reddish hair, or did he? There were the epicanthic folds she remembered from anthropology, the round face and stutter nose, the bow legs and the too-deep tan of his scraped and bitten limbs. Blink once and he was Toshiro Mifune; blink again, and he was something else.

  He stirred something in her, he did. It all happened so fast that first day, so adventitiously, she didn’t have time to think it out: she just saw him there, hungry and scared, and she wanted to fold him in her arms. He was the motherless fawn she’d found as a girl out back of the cabin at Lake Arrowhead, the squirrel the cat had got, the sunken-eyed orphan in a nameless village crying out to her from the black and white ad in the glossy magazine. She had no other motive but sympathy, no other desire but to help—or if she did have, it was buried deep, in the deep soil of the unconscious where plots and schemes and counterschemes have their first quiescent life. And if he was a fawn, and if he was pitiable, and if the lunch bucket was his salvation, she didn’t want to scare him off.

  The rain lashed him. His hair was knotted with burrs, his nostrils crusted over, his lips cracked. He cradled the lunch bucket and took a step back. What could she do to convince him, what could she say? Take it, and welcome to it, I’m on a diet anyway, my bed is dry and warm, there’s plenty more where that came from, I want to help you, I want to keep you, I want to make you my own. She said nothing. He said nothing. But her expression must have told him all that and more, and as he backed off and the rain sobbed from his face and fed the green of the world around him till it threatened to swallow him up, she slowly, gradually, breathlessly lifted her hands to the level of her waist and spread her palms. And then he was gone.

  The next morning Ruth was awake and washed and dressed by the time Owen made his rounds. “Bonjour, mademoiselle,” he whispered, tapping at her door. She answered him before the words were out of his mouth—“Merci, je suis réveillée”—and in the next moment she pulled open the door and regaled him with a dizzy wide-lipped parody of a vamp’s smile. Humbled, he could only gape as she flipped her bag over one shoulder and sashayed down the hall to breakfast. She was excited, so excited she’d barely been able to sleep. Not only over the Japanese sailor and the expectation that he’d be back again and that she’d aid and abet him, hide and nurture him, her own breathing secret, but over the new factor—or rather, factors—in the equation: Detlef Abercorn, the tall young square-jawed agent from the Immigration and Naturalization Service, and his comical little henchman, Turco.

  They’d arrived the previous evening, bedraggled and wet, at the height of the storm’s second assault. The rain had tapered to a drizzle through the long festering afternoon, and fell off altogether as Ruth made her way back to the big house for cocktails. The colonists were all gathered in the parlor—even Septima, in her shimmering silver chemise and antediluvian pearls—when the storm broke loose again with a gush of rain that rattled the windows and for a long scintillating moment cut the electricity. “Oh, we must have the candles lit,” Septima cried, clapping her hands together like a child. Her voice floated over the sudden crepuscular hush of the room, warbling and authentic, the stately breathless voice of refinement and Southern breeding. If the colonists, immersed in the generic gabble of the convivial room and cocktail parlor, ever forgot for a moment where they were, Septima’s caressing and unimpeachable accent brought them back.

  Saxby had left that morning for Savannah to collect the equipment for a new fish study he was contemplating—Ruth didn’t know any more about it than that: it was a fish study, plain and simple—and it was Bob or maybe Owen who appeared a moment later with a candelabrum in full festive blaze. A cheer went up, another round of cocktails was drunk, and when the lights were restored it was unanimously decided to forgo them in favor of candlelight and the romance of the storm, which beat now at the darkening windows with all the fury of the Atlantic in turmoil.

  Just as Owen stepped into the room to announce dinner, there came a knock at the outer door. The front parlor, where cocktails were served, gave onto the foyer and the regal front entrance. No one ever knocked—all had free entrée—and the thunderous, rude, impatient booming at the front door took them all by surprise. The noise level dropped off to zero, conversations died; all heads turned to peer through the parlor doorway to the foyer, to which Owen, his shoulders thrust forward and with an officious look on his face, was proceeding. Ruth, who was then in the first stages of the metamorphosis that would make her the cynosure of Irving Thalamus’s clique and rescue her forever from the oblivion of the silent table, followed him.

  Owen threw back the door, a wild busy smell of drizzling nature flooded the vestibule, and Abercorn and Turco, the one too tall, the other too short, stomped dripping into the room. “Hello,” Abercorn said, extending his hand to the bewildered Owen and flashing a flawless smile, “I’m Detlef Abercorn, Special Agen
t of the INS, and this”—indicating Turco, who glared round him suspiciously—“is my, uh, assistant, Lewis Turco.”

  Ruth felt her heart catch. This was the man she’d spoken to on the phone a week ago—spoken to blithely, pleased with the attention—the man to whom she’d divulged every relevant detail of her encounter with Hiro Tanaka on Peagler Sound. And now here he was, horning in on her secret. She wasn’t calculating, not yet anyway, had no dream of Hiro as anything more than a creature that needed to be stroked and appeased and comforted—an exotic and fascinating creature, yes, but not yet her own, not yet her sword and wedge and bludgeon to lay all of Thanatopsis House at her feet. She wasn’t calculating, but she knew that she wouldn’t—couldn’t—cooperate with this tall and very wet man in the cheap detective’s overcoat.