was a discreet knock on the door. “Yeah?” Brad said.
The man was small and shabby, with rimless spectacles and a jerky manner of bowing. “I’m Mr. Hara. May I come in?”
Brad shrugged. “I’ve only got a minute. I’m going out.” Whatever the guy was selling, Brad didn’t want any.
Hara smiled diffidently. “So. To search for Miss Kamiya?”
Brad stared at the little man. “Come in and shut the door. What do you know about her?”
Then he wondered how this man knew. The ad wouldn’t be in the paper until tomorrow. The New Opal? The girl there? Machiko had seemed to know something, but she’d been afraid to say anything. The omnipresent madam had made that plain. Brad asked his visitor where he got his information.
Hara bowed slightly. “A friend in the composing room of the Mainichi. He thought I would be interested.”
“Oh?” Eagerly, Brad leaned over the man. “Okay; I should care how. All I want to know is where she is.”
“I’m sorry,” Hara said, his English precise and stilted. “I do not know the whereabouts of Miss Kamiya. But I should like to offer my services. You will need an interpreter, a man who knows the city well.”
Leave it to the Nippers, Brad thought. Let them smell a dollar, and they’ll come running. Still, Hara was right; Brad would need help to sort the truth from rumors, the con men from people who actually knew something. This little guy looked and talked like a college professor down on his luck.
“For how much?” he asked.
Hara named a ridiculously low figure.
“You’re hired,” Brad said, and reached for the envelope with the return address. “Know where this is?”
Hara peered at the faded Oriental characters through his glasses. “We will find it.”
With the help of a voluble cabbie, they did. The house was small, crowded by others, set far back on an unpaved street. Brad stood at the gate while Hara rang the bell, and thought that this might be the place Sueko had played as a kid, the place she grew up. Before she had to go to work. And who the hell was he to censure her for turning prostitute? How else could a girl in Japan take care of a family then?
Brad tensed himself as the gate swung back. But a man stood in it, a man standing twisted because of a withered right leg, with bitter lines etched around his mouth and at the corners of his obsidian eyes. He flicked a glance at Brad, spat rapid Japanese at Mr. Hara. Hara answered politely, softly, while Brad shifted from one foot to the other. Dammit, did Sueko live here, or didn’t she?
The man was staring fixedly at Brad now, thin lips curled, hating. What the hell, Brad wondered. He’d never seen the guy before; why all the dirty looks? Mr. Hara touched his arm.
“This is Kamiya Saburo, and this is his house.”
“Kamiya?” Brad stuttered. “That’s Sueko’s last name. Who—her brother, maybe? Where is she? Where’s Sueko?”
The man looked down at his withered leg, back up at Brad. In English, he said: “I don’t know.”
Brad stepped close. “Hell—you must know. Look, I’ll pay you—plenty of money. Just tell me where she is. Isn’t Sueko your sister? Look—I’ll pay anything within reason. Just tell me—”
Saburo’s face was flinty. “You Americans already paid me,” he said savagely, and touched his crippled leg. “With this. Keep your dirty money. I tell you nothing.”
Involuntarily, Brad’s hands lifted to shake the information out of the sullen man. He stopped himself. Mr. Hara said something rapidly in Japanese; thin-voiced, Saburo answered him, hurling angry words. Then he hobbled back a few steps and slammed the gate. Brad heard a bolt slip into place on the other side. His legs tightened beneath him; his big shoulders lowered, readying him to smash through the wood, to pound the answers out of the sneering man.
“Please,” Hara said. “He will tell us nothing. A bitter man; a vengeful one.”
“Why, dammit? What the hell did I ever do to him? I don’t even know the guy; never saw him before. And is he related to Sueko?”
Hara nodded, led the way back to the waiting taxi. “Her brother, as you guessed. Why does he hate you? His leg—an American bombing raid. He was fourteen, and the planes also killed his father.”
Brad slammed into the back seat of the cab. “That’s my fault? Hell, you know better than that.”
Small, composed, the little Japanese settled back, told the driver where to go. “Yes, Mr. Saxon—I know. Perhaps I know better than most. But to such a man, you are a symbol, something to blame, someone to hate. He would tell me nothing, because I was with you.”
“Sueko’s brother,” Brad said. “She said something about him, and mentioned a sister, too.”
But nothing about blaming every GI for her father’s death, Brad remembered; nothing about how tough it was to live with everything gone. Uncomplaining, gentle, Sueko might have been a carefree schoolgirl. Except schoolgirls didn’t work in the New Opal Hotel. Unless they had to.
“What now?” Brad asked. For some reason, he found himself liking Hara. The guy looked like a prototype of all Japanese, but there was something sturdy about him, something deep and sincere.
“The Namura,” Hara said, “unless you wish to do something else?”
Brad clutched the back of the seat as the cab skidded dizzily around a corner. He told Hara about the New Opal, his hunch that a girl there knew something and was afraid to tell. It was only a hunch, he said, but possibly worth following up. Would Mr. Hara take a room at the Namura, so he’d be handy? Brad would pay for it, of course. Mr. Hara would, happily.
Brad made arrangements for the room next to his, and they ate together in the hotel dining room. The food was excellent and well served. So were the pre-dinner martinis and the coffee-and-brandies, based, Brad knew, upon black market stock peddled by GIs and officers who got it dirt cheap.
All in the game, he thought, and eyed the crowded room, the string combo playing softly in one corner. Everybody sells, everybody busy. The Forty-Niners had bought his beef and muscle. He had bought a girl for the night, in the New Opal.
Almost like the one seated alone at the table over there. Smaller, though—a tiny Venus of jeweled parts; softer-looking than the girl at the table, too. Sueko had no lines around her mouth, no cynicism stamped upon her delicate face. A porcelain doll, shined and polished and put out for hire.
She’d been ashamed of being a virgin. Could you imagine that? Ashamed, dammit, because she didn’t have the proper experience. She’d begged him not to tell the madam. A hell of a thing. And a stupid kid who didn’t realize what he had. Kamiya Sueko. The names worked out as “The Last Flower in the Garden of the Gods,” he found out later. And for a few lousy Yen, Brad Saxon had accomplished the deflowering.
Trembling and afraid, she’d been, and he thought it was an act, some phony setup she used to fool corny GIs. Until she was spread bare and face-hidden for him on the bed; until he ran his hands over the utter loveliness
