Martin Smith - December 6

“Are you staying?” Michiko asked.

“How can I get out?”

“No, are you staying?”

Staying? Harry had never asked himself the question in exactly that way.

“I wouldn’t leave you. Couldn’t leave you.”

With those words, Harry pictured the plane, his getaway, the Air Nippon DC- 3 in its hangar at Haneda Field. It shone in the dark. Then it disappeared.

HARRY AND MICHIKO retreated to the apartment. Even there, every sound was Ishigami. A drunk stumbled in the dark against the club and was Ishigami breaking through the shutters. A cat padded across the roof and was Ishigami prying off the tiles.

Harry assumed that Willie and Iris had weighed anchor. Alice would be packing for Hong Kong. She might be surprised to be traveling alone, but she didn’t need Harry, all she’d needed was a head start. Once she was away from him, she’d see what a narrow escape she’d had. He hadn’t meant to mislead her. Alice was light and sanity. Michiko exercised a much stronger call, the dark where a rib was taken. Being attacked by Beechum didn’t dissuade Harry. With a cricket bat? No, it was a matter of Harry acknowledging that the Nippon Air DC-3 had been a delusion, a fantasy. In the end, he had no choice. There was simply Michiko, all else paled. Even this situation, being trapped with Michiko, now seemed strangely inevitable. He had watched Kabuki all his life and finally had a role. Exit, pursued by samurai. Only there was no exit.

Harry fed the beetle paper-thin slices of cucumber-with pets came responsibilities-and asked Michiko for the details of what happened at the ballroom. She said she had gone there from Haruko’s as Harry asked. Tetsu, sick with tattoo fever, had closed down the ballroom and gone home. Michiko waited alone in semidark for an hour before Haruko arrived, determined to reclaim her favorite outfit. What Haruko offered in exchange was her second-best dress and information about Harry and the plane to China. They traded in the women’s lounge. Haruko was still there when Michiko, too disgraced to face anyone, slipped into Tetsu’s office at the sound of someone at the ballroom door. Whoever it was, they were quick, in shoes or boots rather than clogs or sandals. Michiko heard no conversation, only a chair dragged across the floor and footsteps that retreated as swiftly as they had come. When Michiko emerged, she found Haruko propped up at the table with the box. Like a mouse and a hawk, she said, it was that fast.

Harry asked, “Didn’t it strike you that, wearing a dress and hat she had just taken back from you, with her hair styled like yours, Haruko looked like you?”

“You thought it was me? You were worried?”

“Well, with their head in a box, a lot of people look alike.”

Mist started to drain from the street. A woman with a lantern and a roll of kindling on her back bowed deeply to a shadow in the willow-house gate. The lantern briefly lit Ishigami’s eyes, his field uniform and cap, his sword worn blade up. Harry considered a shot but knew that with his powers of marksmanship, he was more likely to hit a cat than Ishigami. The pipes and chimes of other morning peddlers were approaching. If the colonel was going to attack in the dark, time was running out. Under the circumstances, Harry found Michiko’s faith touching. She sat on her heels, a magician’s assistant waiting for a trick.

“Happy?” he asked, because in a curious way, she seemed to be.

“Yes.”

“Why? Right now, being with me is not like winning a lottery. Tell me, Michiko, because I’ve always wondered, how much English do you understand?”

“Why should I understand English? We’re in Japan.”

“How much of the songs on the jukebox do you understand?”

She shrugged.

Harry suspected that had always been part of the appeal of the Record Girl, her vamping to lyrics that were a mystery to her.

“For example,” Harry said, “the songs about love.”

She nodded.

“You only mouth them,” he said.

“I think most people only mouth them, American or Japanese.”

“But you and I have never actually said it to each other, have we? ‘I love you,’ we’ve never said.”

“Americans say, Japanese do.”

“Ah, and love is different in Japan.”

“Yes, and you’re here.” She caught Harry’s glance out the window. “Is the colonel still there?”

“He’s not going anywhere. He’s after us.”

“After you. He already cut my head off.”

An electronic squawk startled Harry. He remembered the loudspeaker hanging on the lamppost at the corner. The pipes and bells of vendors ceased as they listened to the navy anthem pouring from the speaker.

The music quit, followed by a voice. The voice was humble and excited. The voice flowed through the gray winter morning and multiplied from street to street and house to house. Harry turned on the radio and the voice filled his room: “We repeat to you this urgent news. Imperial General Headquarters announced this morning, December eighth, that the Imperial Army and Navy have begun hostilities against American and British forces in the Pacific at dawn today.”

Harry read his watch by the light of the radio dial. Six-thirty. “Forces in the Pacific”? What did that mean, Harry wondered. Pearl Harbor? The Philippines? Singapore? Hong Kong? But could the Japanese navy have caught Pearl napping? It seemed impossible, except for the mundane human fact that the U.S. Navy held its Christmas parties on December 6. Across the dateline, it was still December 7, a day for sleeping in at Pearl.

“Will this mean war?” Michiko asked.

“It is war. We’re in it now,” said Harry.

Alice Beechum would not be flying out on Air Nippon. Air Nippon was going nowhere; the flight to Hong Kong was as much a ruse as Tojo’s ride in the park. The radio repeated, “The Imperial General Staff announced this morning…” This time the announcement was followed not with the dumb astonishment of a waking population but with spontaneous clapping and cries of “Banzai!” in the street. People opened their windows to share the excitement. As the sky lightened, vendors, the lame and burdened, bowed to one another, standing taller as they straightened up. Schoolchildren erupted from their homes to cheer as if Japan’s warplanes were passing directly overhead.

“He’s gone.” Harry realized that Ishigami had dematerialized during the announcement. The gateway was empty.

Michiko joined Harry at the window. “Where to?”

“I don’t know, but it’s going to get a little crowded here. After the declaration the police will round up Americans. Probably already started.”

“What will happen?”

“They’ll hold us in cells for a while and then exchange us. I’m not exactly Abe Lincoln or Andy Hardy, but I am an American citizen.”

“You aren’t like other Americans. The police will kill you.”

“I have connections.”

“That’s why.”

“The embassy will have a list for repatriation. I’ll be on it.”

“You must go to the embassy and be sure.”

“I’ve never asked for their protection.” He had always been proud of his independence.

Michiko said, “If you wait here, you’re dead.”

She’d put her finger on it. War was God’s way of overturning the card game. Even Harry was outraged.

“Maybe the war will be over quickly,” she said.

“After an attack like this? It had to be a surprise to work, and if it was a surprise, it will be a fight to the death.”

“Why are you on the Americans’ side?”

Harry watched a boy run by with an open umbrella of oiled paper and lacquered spokes. The boy spun the umbrella so that warplanes painted on the paper chased one another. It was a handsome umbrella, much like the planes themselves.