again, sighing.
“Iiya,” Moran answered, “gomen . . . gomen,” apologizing in his pidgeon Japanese.
“Okay,” she said, “okay. Take bath.”
She does speak some English, Moran thought. She drew a tub, scrubbed his back, insisted he wash his own genitals. Then after wiping him dry with the thin towel, she indicated he should lie down on his stomach on the table.
He eased onto the chilly vinyl and she leaned in over his right ear and whispered, “Skoshi mo?”
Moran did not have even an inkling what she was saying. “Eh?” he answered
In a breathy, exciting way she leaned in again, hot scallops of minted breath coming over his neck and ear, “Skoshi mo?”
When he didn’t answer she abruptly flipped the wet towel lengthwise down his back, over his buttocks, and started pounding the backs of his legs, then his shoulders. After a few minutes of this she leaped up on the table and began walking on his back in a way that signaled, it seemed, disgust with him. The door was still open. There could be no defense in this situation, Moran thought. He remembered that it was mostly Koreans who ran the Turkos. Koreans hardly succumbed to Japanese civility and pacifism. He imagined he had been set up. In another moment the enforcers would be in the room and with truncheons extract full payment.
She jumped down and said again, “Skoshi mo?”
“Wakarimasen,” Moran answered. “I don’t understand.”
“Okay. Time up,” she said. She put the basket up on the table and indicated he should get down and dressed. She stood quietly by as he got into his clothes and then when he slipped his coat back on she held out her crossed palms.
“How much?”
“Two thousand yen,” she answered in apparently perfect English. “Downstairs you may have tea or beer. Which would you like?”
“Beer.”
She preceded down the steps, guided him to a western style couch and then brought him a mug of draft beer.
“Thanks,” Moran said.
“Arigatoh,” she answered and went swiftly back through the doors from which thirty minutes before she had appeared.
A disaster Moran thought but at least his worst fears had been avoided. He was still intact. Perhaps she felt the same way. An absurdity of miscommunication. He would have to find out what “Skoshi mo” meant, or would he? He might savor the suggestiveness of it. Suppose he found it only meant “a hot night,” or “tomorrow is a holiday, thank God.” He quickly finished the beer, sensitive that a foreigner in the main lounge might inhibit business. When Moran got to the double glass doors and saw the tuxedoed barker on the street rushing up to new recruits, he suddenly remembered, “Jesus! The envelope!”
He glanced around. No one was in the lounge. He quickly went upstairs. He heard laughter from behind closed doors. But his door, as always, was open. He checked the basket, but the envelope wasn’t there. Nor was it on the massage table, or beneath the mattress, or in the bathroom. Not behind the rattan stool in the bath. Moran slumped against the frame doorway, he remembered carrying the envelope upstairs, remembered setting down some place, but where? He systematically examined the room again, knelt and examined the bath floor. Two absurdities, he thought, a double unfulfilment.
He went back downstairs, waited by the desk but no one came out. “Hello” Moran said strongly. “Onegai,” he said requesting help. “Onegai!”
No response. As he started to look over the top of the registry, he heard the door open behind him. She came back out.
“My envelope,” Moran said, pantomiming its shape. “Kaban, kind of—” he said recalling the word for briefcase. “Envelope. Where is it? Doko desuka?”
She smiled, went upstairs. Moran moved to the foot of the stairs. Soon enough she brought the envelope back down to him.
“Where did you find it?”
She smiled and walked quickly back through the door.
The tuxedoed barker let Moran out. “Good time, eh?” he said, his eyes dancing in phony delight.
“Terrific time,” Moran answered, “the best ever.” He clamped the envelope against his side under his left arm.
On the walk back to his hotel, once away from the heaviest crowds near the kabukicho, Moran opened the envelope. It contained three smaller white envelopes. In two of them he found wads of lined blank school notebook paper. In the third envelope there was only a pair of brown nylon socks with nifty little clocks stitched in the sides.
2.
C. Livingston Wells embodied his name, Moran decided. Immaculately suited in material that seemed softer than his jowls, more neatly trimmed than the spare silver hair tucked behind his ears, Wells sat stiffly behind a long white Formica table. To his right were Guade and two Japanese professors. Wells wore cufflinks, apparently translucent white discs joined by silver chains. He had a rather beefy face, but narrow shoulders suggesting a kind of elegant thinness. The face wasn’t quite right, perhaps a tinge too red. Either too much adulation has brought a permanent blush, Moran felt, or else the old fellow is a tippler. But his eyes contained none of the tell-tale, yellow-clay tone Moran found in alcoholics.
Evidently there were more enthusiasts for the Cold War in Tokyo than in Kyoto. The circular lecture hall was crowded. Media types lined the walls. Who would have thought the collapse of the perimeter defense theory in June, 1950 would have stirred so many? Was Wells something of a hero in Japan? Did they think he was still connected with the government?
Guade led off the panel with six minutes of sharp comments demonstration how each federal bureaucracy viewed the Asia defense line differently in the spring of 1950. Internal contradiction, then, seemed to account for the speedy collapse of the doctrine, Guade asserted. The two Japanese colleagues also spoke about six minutes and Moran studied Wells rather than absorbing the headphone translation. Finally both the Japanese and then Guade asked Wells for his comments.
“A lot of this is ancient history splendidly resurrected by Professor Guade. I certainly have no substantive revision of his remarks. But I suppose I should say that in a bureaucracy, and especially at that time, lots of posturing, lots of position papers get generated—especially during slack times—that were never very seriously considered, even by their authors. Oh, they were assented to, duly stamped, logged, but always considered a kind of window dressing. Speculative exercises. Since crucial committees with authority to act seldom committed themselves in writing. They didn’t have time or they found it, rightfully enough, binding in a way they wished to avoid. So I suppose admirable as Professor Guade’s account is, it may be miss-focused, or concerned with policy declarations, rather than policy itself.”
Guade said jocularly, ‘I’d like to see your substantive revision, if that is your non-substantive reaction.”
“Perhaps I’ve wandered out over my head. I don’t mean to suggest people didn’t believe their papers, but rather their belief was a double nature, what you Japanese so skillfully identify as tatemae, the official explanation, the public sentiment, versus honne, the real, private, accurate assessment. It is tatemae that these places, USIS or rather ICA (must keep up to date with our acronyms, mustn’t we!) these libraries are interested
