Tengu Read online

  “A glass of water would be admirable.”

  “So it shall be. Now please wait.”

  While the Japanese went to bring his water, Mr. Esmeralda wandered impatiently into the large empty area which, before this house had been taken over by Kappa and his entourage, must have been the “generous, oversized family room.” Now there was nothing here but bare floor boards and scores of flickering candles. The walls were white and bare, except for three or four sheets of handmade paper on which were written thousands of intricate Japanese characters. Mr.

  Esmeralda went over and peered at them, as he had peered at them before, and wished he could read Japanese. For all he knew, they were nothing more threatening than Tokyo-Kobe bullet-train timetables.

  Upstairs, or next door, or wherever it came from, he could hear that distant moaning sound, and for a moment he held his breath and frowned and listened as hard as he could, trying to make out once and for all what it actually was.

  At last, the Japanese came padding back with his glass of water. Mr. Esmeralda drank a little of it and then handed the glass back. “Tepid,” he said. The Japanese didn’t answer. Then Mr.

  Esmeralda asked, “Is Kappa going to be very much longer? I am not particularly good at waiting. It doesn’t suit my temperament.” Still the Japanese didn’t answer. “You know, temperament?” repeated Mr. Esmeralda. “I am what they call a man of little patience. I have a short fuse.”

  A gong rang; a sound more felt than heard. The Japanese said, “Kappa will see you now. Please follow me.”

  Mr. Esmeralda took out his handkerchief and dabbed at the back of his neck. “Thank God for that.” He glanced up at the ceiling and crossed himself quickly. “Thank you,” he muttered.

  Perhaps the house in Laurel Canyon disturbed him so much because he knew that he was going to have to confront Kappa again. Kappa still gave him occasional nightmares, even though he had seen beggars all over the Middle East, and lepers in Africa, and the deformed victims of mercury pollution at Minamata. Mr. Esmeralda liked to think of himself as a cosmopolitan, a man who could slip comfortably onto a stool at the Oak Bar of the Plaza one week and be greeted by the barman by name; and then be welcomed the next week at a small brothel in Marseilles with the same affability. He couldn’t think, offhand, of a country he hadn’t visited. He couldn’t think of a major international gangster whose hand he hadn’t shaken, and whose assistance he couldn’t rely on.

  But he had never met anything like Kappa; and he nightly prayed to the Virgin Mary that he would never meet anything like Kappa again.

  Mr. Esmeralda had become involved with Kappa by accident, on board a ferry that was taking passengers from Tokushima to Wakayama, across the Kii-Suido. The ferry had been elegant, white-painted, and old, with two large paddles which left curling patterns of foam on the silver-gray water. It had been a strange misty afternoon, with the sun as red behind the mist as a Japanese flag, a supernatural scarlet orb. Mr. Esmeralda had been talking to his people in Kochi about heroin. They had left him unsatisfied: there had been a great deal of ceremonial tea-drinking, chanoyu, but very little in the way of firm delivery dates. Mr. Esmeralda was leaning on the rail of the ferry feeling irritated and tired. He often found that the so-called superefficiency of the Japanese was nothing more than an impressive display of Oriental ritual.

  He enjoyed Tengu subtlety in his dealings, but the Kochi people were so suble that they practically disappeared up their own inscrutability.

  A voice had said close beside him, “You are Mr. Esmerarda?”

  Mr. Esmeralda had shifted sideways to see who was talking to him. Anybody who knew his name was probably police or customs, and he didn’t particularly want to speak to either. But, in fact, it had been a young Japanese in a khaki windbreaker and thin beige slacks, unexceptional-looking, the kind of Toyko student type you could have lost in a crowd in Nihonbashi just by blinking. “Mr. Esmerarda?” the student had repeated. “What do you want?

  You had better know that I am very selective when it comes to shipboard romances.”

  The Japanese student had stared at him unblinkingly. “You must prease accompany me.”

  “I am here. I am listening. What more do you want?”

  “You must accompany me downstairs.

  Kappa wishes to speak with you.”

  “Kappa? Who’s Kappa?”

  The Japanese student had said, “You may have seen him carried on board.”

  Mr, Esmeralda had said quietly, “You mean the...” and the Japanese student had nodded.

  Nobody could have failed to notice the long black Toyota limousine that had drawn up to the dock just before the ferry was due to leave, and the extraordinary ensemble which had alighted from it and hurried to the gangway. Four men, hooded and gowned in black, bearing between them a kind of elaborate wickerwork palanquin, in which a diminutive figure nodded and swayed, completely swathed in a white sheet.

  When Mr. Esmeralda had seen them come on board, he had crossed himself. Another passenger, an elderly Japanese, had actually disembarked, in spite of the arguments of his relatives, and refused to travel on the ferry in the company of demons. The palanquin had quickly been taken below and the lacquered cabin doors shut behind it, and the ferry had set off on its spectral journey through the mist of the Kii-Suido. But many of the passengers had appeared to be unsettled, and there had been a lot of forced laughter and whiskey-drinking.

  Mr. Esmeralda had followed the Japanese student down the companionway to the cabin doors, on which were painted a fleet of fantastic ships and a grisly collection of sea monsters, in the style of the Shijo school. The Japanese student had knocked at the doors and then waited, watching Mr. Esmeralda blandly.

  “I don’t suppose you’re going to tell me what this is all about?” Mr. Esmeralda had asked the student. The student had said nothing, but waited and watched as before, impassive and utterly calm.

  The doors to the cabin had been opened. “You may go in now,” the student told Mr.

  Esmeralda.

  ‘‘You are sure that this is going to be worth my while?” Mr. Esmeralda had asked him.

  “Go in,” the student had repeated.

  A small hand had taken hold of Mr. Esmeralda’s wrist as he stepped into the cabin, to guide him down a flight of darkened stairs, and then along the length of an unlit corridor, to a door. It had been immediately opened, and Mr. Esmeralda had found himself in a private stateroom, hot and smoky with dozens and dozens of candles. Behind the swaying flames of the candles, only half-visible through the dazzle and the smoke, Mr. Esmeralda had seen that the basketwork palanquin had been converted into a throne–its bamboo carrying poles having been fixed vertically to the sides of the basket, instead of horizontally. He had shaded his eyes against the candles, but it had been impossible to see clearly who or what it was that was perched in the basket.

  Apart from Mr. Esmeralda himself, there were several other people in the stateroom–two or three young Japanese men standing in the shadows, all of them with masked faces–and a very young Japanese girl, wearing only a red-and-gold silk shin and an extraordinary lacquered headdress of stylized flowers, similar to the flowers worn by the Yoshiwara courtesans of the eighteenth century. From her face, and from her half-developed breasts, Mr, Esmeralda had guessed that she was only twelve or thirteen years old.

  “I seem to have been sent for,” Mr. Esmeralda had said loudly, in the general direction of the basketwork throne.

  “Indeed you have,” a voice had replied, slurred and Japanese, but with a peculiar inflection all its own, as if it were emerging from the black-haired throat of a tropical insect. “I know who you are, Mr. Esmeralda, and why you spent so much time at Kochi, in the company of Katsuk-awa Shunsho.”

  “I have many acquaintances in Japan,” Mr. Esmeralda had answered cautiously, screwing up his eyes to see what this “Kappa” really looked like. “Katsukawa Shunsho is a trading associate, nothing more.”

  “You are based in Lo
s Angeles, in America?” the peculiar voice had asked him.

  Mr. Esmeralda felt the first slide of perspiration down the middle of his back. Suddenly he felt less like the conjuror than the conjuree, the perplexed victim whose socks and cufflinks have been removed without his knowledge. He gave what he hoped was an assured nod, but he had never felt less assured in his life. “I return there on Friday,” he said. “Air Argentina, flight AX

  109-Perhaps you knew that, too.”

  “I need a certain task performed for me in Los Angeles,” the voice told him.

  Mr. Esmeralda licked his lips. “Certain tasks” usually turned out to be extremely complicated, costly, and dangerous. If somebody in Japan wanted a straightforward favor, they generally asked you for it outright. It was only when it was unpleasant that they called it “a certain task” and approached you so obliquely.

  “I, er, I regret that time will not permit me to accept any more commissions at present,” Mr.

  Esmeralda had replied. “I have an art shipment to take care of; a whole freighter loaded with netsuke. And I have a meeting in Detroit on Monday morning. And next Wednesday, I must speak to some of my new associates in Cairo. I would have liked to be able to accommodate you, but...” He shrugged, tried to smile.

  There had been a second’s silence. But then the voice had said, “Mr. Esmeralda, you will not turn me down. I will pay you $1.6 million in U.S. currency, and in return you will give me your absolute obedience. Is that understood?”

  “I am not in the habit of performing favors for money,” Mr. Esmeralda had replied, although sdme hint of caution made him add, “Not as a rule, anyway. Well, not often.”

  Kappa, from behind the swaying candle flames, had said something else hurriedly and authoritatively. Two more Japanese had come forward, both masked, as their colleagues were, dragging a large hardwood block, painted shiny red. Then the young Japanese girl in the headdress had stepped forward, knelt down, and pulled open the zipper of Mr. Esmeralda’s white tropical trousers. She had reached inside, wrestled out his penis from his shorts, and tugged it out until it was stretched across the top of the red block.

  Mr. Esmeralda had tried to thrash his legs and wriggle from side to side; but the two young Japanese boys had a firm grip on his arms, and the young Japanese girl had an unyielding grip on his penis.

  A third Japanese youth had stepped forward, this one clutching a curvy-bladed samurai sword.

  He had lowered the sword until the sharp edge was just touching the skin of Mr. Esmeralda’s penis, not breaking the skin, but resting it there so that Mr. Esmeralda could feel just how keen the blade was.

  Then, without warning, the Japanese youth had let out a sharp cry, whipped back the samurai sword, and flashed it down toward the red hardwood block. Mr. Esmeralda had screamed, in spite of himself; in spite of the fact that he was a man of the world.

  He had looked down to see that the Japanese youth had somehow managed to stop the blade’s descent exactly an inch above the hardwood block. He had cut a thin line across the tip of Mr.

  Esmeralda’s penis, but that was all. Only a scratch, nothing serious. Mr. Esmeralda had closed his eyes, and whispered, “Madre mia.”

  There had been a lengthy silence. The girl had not released his penis the boy with the sword had not moved away. But the insectlike voice of Kappa had said, “you wish to assist me now.”

  Mr. Esmeralda had cleared his throat. “I see no reason why not.”

  “Well, that’s excellent,” Kappa had told him. “Welcome to the the Circle of the Burned Doves.”

  “The Burned Doves?” Mr. Esmeralda had asked.

  There had been a short hesitation; then Kappa had whispered, “Come forward. Come nearer.

  Then you will see what I mean.”

  Mr. Esmeralda had glanced down at the girl, and then sideways at the boy.

  “Let him go,” Kappa had ordered, and the girl had stood up and shuffled quickly back into the shadows.

  Mr. Esmeralda, zipping up his pants, had made a suspicious circuit of the rows of flickering candles. As he had approached the basketwork throne, a curious smell had reached his nostrils, a sweetish smell that would almost have been alluring if he hadn’t been so sure that it was the odor of something curious and frightening. If it had put him in mind of anything at all, it was Japanese seaweed, cloying and slightly briny.

  “Come nearer,” Kappa had told him, his voice so hoarse and quiet now that Mr. Esmeralda could hardly hear what he was saying. Mr. Esmeralda, sweating in the candlelight, had finally come face to face with the creature that called itself Kappa.

  Lying in the basketwork throne on a soiled cushion of blue Japanese silk was a yellowish thing that looked, at first sight, like a hugely enlarged human embryo. Its head was more than man-sized, but Mr. Esmeralda could see nothing of its features because they were concealed behind a bland yellow-painted mask, a faintly smiling warrior of the reign of the Emperor Kameyama, an uncanny and disturbing masterpiece of Japanese decorative art.

  The body, however, was naked, and completely exposed, and it was this grisly collection of distorted flesh and bone that subsequently gave Mr. Esmeralda so many nightmares. There was a narrow chest, which rose and fell as rapidly as that of a suffocating puppy; two tiny arms with budlike nodes instead of fingers; and a bulging stomach. The genitals were even more malformed, a gray and wrinkled array of folds and dewlaps, neither male nor female, which glistened in the candlelight with slippery mucus. The creature had legs of a kind, hunched beneath its genitals, but they were sticklike and obviously powerless.

  ‘‘You wonder why I hide my face and leave my body exposed?” Kappa had asked Mr.

  Esmeralda hoarsely, as Mr. Esmeralda stared at him in horror.

  Mr. Esmeralda had been unable to answer. His mouth hadn’t been able to move itself into any kind of shape at all.

  Kappa had watched him for a while through the expressionless eyeholes in his mask. Then he had said, “I hide my face because my face is normal; the face of a normal man. The rest of my body you are welcome to see. I am not ashamed of it. What happened to me was not my fault; nor the fault of my mother. Look at me, and see what the Americans were responsible for, with their atomic bomb. My mother was one month pregnant on August 6, 1945, when the first bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. She was staying with her uncle and aunt in Itsukaichi, but she had traveled to the city the day before to see an old friend of my father, who had been wounded in the Army. She was exposed both to the flash, which burned her, and the gamma rays, which eventually killed her, after eight years. But she was just outside the two-kilometer radius from ground zero within which all pregnant women had miscarriages and even though I was grotesquely premature I was born alive.”

  “.The doctors didn’t...” Mr. Esmeralda had begun, his voice thick and choked.

  “Think of killing me at birth? No, they didn’t do that. My mother was back at Itsukaichi for her confinement. After a while, in a strange way, she became attached to me, and she refused to contemplate euthanasia. She took me every day to water therapy, in the hope that my limbs would grow strong and my body develop. That is why they call me Kappa. It is Japanese for

  ‘water devil’–a nasty little beast that lives in the water and refuses to compromise with anyone.”

  Mr. Esmeralda had deliberately turned his back on the revolting spectacle in the basketwork throne, and had made his way unsteadily back through the lines of candles to the far side of the room. During this time, Kappa had said nothing, but had watched him intently through his yellow warrior’s mask. Mr. Esmeralda had felt closed-in and nauseous, and the slight roll of the ancient ferry as it had turned on the Pacific swell to dock at Wakayama had unsettled his breakfast, pork leg with mushrooms and too much hot tea.

  “What is it you want me to do?” Mr. Esmeralda had asked Kappa at last, clearing his throat.

  “A friend of mine, a doctor, must establish himself in America. You will arrange a work permit, and for somewhere priv
ate for his research. You can do this kind of thing: Kat-sukawa Shunsho told me. You have friends who can forge papers, friends who can arrange for green cards. This is so?”

  Mr. Esmeralda had nodded queasily.

  “You will also bring together four or five people who can help you with the further stages of my scheme. They should be experienced people, people like yourself, preferably with good knowledge of Japan and an under-Tengu standing of the Japanese way of life. But you must understand that they might have to be dispensed with, especially if anything goes wrong. So I would advise you not to select friends or lovers, or anyone close to you.”

  Mr. Esmeralda had said, “When you say dispensed with, you mean murdered? Or do we speak a different language?”

  “Was Hiroshima murder?”

  “I am an entrepreneur, not a historical moralist. Hiroshima was war.’’

  There was a long, breathy pause. Then Kappa said, “Pearl Harbor was war; Wake Island was war; Midway was war; Guadalcanal was war. War–men fighting each other like warriors. But Hiroshima was murder. And, for me personally, and all of my brothers and sisters who make up the Circle of the Burned Doves–that is to say, all those innocent children reared in secrecy, who have been born with terrible deformities because of the American atrocity–it has been worse than murder. If there is such a thing as living murder, then we have suffered it.’’

  Mr. Esmeralda had brushed the sleeves of his coat with mock fastidiousness. He didn’t intend to argue with Kappa about the morality of revenge. Revenge, as far as he was concerned, was both petulant and boring. Revenge was for cuckolded husbands, rejected wives, and lunatics.

  “This doctor friend of yours?” he had said, “What exactly does he want to do in the United States?”

  Kappa had been silent for almost a minute. Then he had said, “His name is Sugita Gempaku. He is a doctor of anthropology, not of medicine, a graduate of Keio University in Tokyo. I suppose you could call him something of a revolutionary. I first read about his work in a French science magazine. He was trying to recreate, as a historical experiment, some of the more specialized and arcane defense programs that Emperor Hirohito ordered toward the close of the war.