Dragon Dance Read online

  Today Sato was looking far from soothed. When Martine slid open the door of the tatami room, he shot to his feet and glanced nervously over her shoulder.

  “I hope you’re on your own, Meyer-san?”

  “Of course.”

  “Please understand—this whole meeting is off the record. Not only that, but nobody should even know about it.”

  Martine nodded, and they sat down at the low table. While the waitress brought in a tray of dishes, Sato made no attempt at conversation. They sat there in silence until the waitress had gone, then he leaned across the table and fixed Martine in his bloodshot gaze.

  “How did you find out about this business?” he muttered sulkily.

  “I have a source of information.”

  “Inside the company?”

  “You know I can’t disclose that.”

  “How much did he tell you?”

  “I can’t disclose that either, just as I can’t disclose anything you tell me. But I promise you this—I’m not planning to write an attacking piece. The official view will be given due prominence. Bon appetit!”

  [81] Martine unsheathed her chopsticks and nibbled at a piece of the famous bean curd. Good for her complexion, that was what Makoto’s mother had said the other night. Was her complexion really getting blotchy? Maybe the stress was starting to show.

  Sato was frowning at her, probably wondering what line to take. But given the position he was in, there was only one line possible.

  “Delicious,” said Martine politely. She sliced off a larger piece of bean curd and put it in her mouth.

  Sato raised his hands in the air, then let them drop to his lap. “All right then,” he sighed. “Let me explain. You know the Hiroshima virus?”

  So that was it! The Hiroshima virus had appeared late last year. In a matter of days, it had shut down the Tokyo stock exchange, scrambled decades of data at the tax bureau and the Ministry of Justice, and wreaked havoc in hospitals and banks.

  “I thought anti-Hiroshima software had been installed everywhere.”

  Sato shook his head. “This is a new version, a hundred times more powerful.”

  “Where did it come from?”

  “The same place as the first version, I suppose.”

  That was rumored to be the computer science department of an American university, though nothing had been proved.

  “It’s horrendous,” said Sato grimly. “People are dying, billions of yen of damage is being done. The Americans should take this more seriously. So far they haven’t been at all cooperative.”

  “Not cooperative? How do you mean?”

  “The FBI must know who these vandals are. When their own companies are attacked, they hunt them down soon enough. But when it’s the Japanese who are suffering the damage—well that’s all a bit of a joke, isn’t it?”

  Martine blinked in surprise. That comment of Sato’s would turn the story from a standard news item into a diplomatic hand grenade. “Japan Blames Chemical Deaths on US Negligence”—she could picture the headline already.

  “Is that just a personal opinion?” she asked delicately. “Or is it the view of a highly placed source close to the investigation?”

  She was giving Sato a chance to withdraw the comment. He’d been a good source, and she owed him that much.

  “It’s time they got the message,” he growled. “Our patience is wearing thin.”

  Martine had never heard Sato talk like this before. He was usually so suave and relaxed.

  “So it’s the view of a highly placed source?”

  “Certainly, yes,” said Sato, slapping the table with the flat of his hand. The little dishes skipped in the air, and the bean curd wobbled.

  Martine watched him glowering with rage. What else did he know, she [82] wondered. How many similar incidents had been covered up? “Accidents”—come to think of it—seemed to have been occurring with unnerving frequency in recent months. The horrific fire at the Universal Studios theme park, blamed on sloppy maintenance procedures. The bullet train crash at Maebashi—eighty people dead, the proud symbol of Japanese engineering prowess lying on its side, twisted and broken. There had been innumerable collisions, leaks, and computer failures all over the country, but had they been random events or deliberate acts of sabotage? One thing was sure, though—Japanese bureaucrats would never reveal the truth voluntarily.

  After leaving the restaurant, Martine walked back through Ginza. Once the priciest and most elegant entertainment district in the world, the area was now filled with fast-food joints, discount stores, and sleazy “pink salons” where salarymen lined up on their lunch breaks. Martine had done a story about these places a few months ago. She had interviewed one of the salon women, a bright, well-educated single mother who had spent twelve years working for an insurance company that collapsed early in the crisis. Now instead of an office cubicle she had a curtained booth, and instead of a computer and a phone she was equipped with a box of tissues and a bottle of mouthwash. The schedule was regular—ten customers a day, five days a week, then home in time to make dinner for her ten-year-old son. Sometimes she thought she recognized former clients and colleagues, though it was so dark in the booth that she could never be sure. Strangely, she seemed quite cheerful, even claiming that what she was doing was not so different from her old job. It was about understanding men, she said, about satisfying their needs as efficiently as possible, while all the time your mind was somewhere else.

  Martine passed in front of a boarded-up restaurant that had once been favored by Japanese writers and intellectuals, and then turned into a narrow alleyway filled with uncollected rubbish sacks. The jazz club on the corner had long gone, leaving only a few tattered posters of past gigs. A huge crow—glossy-feathered and bright-eyed, with a beak like a steel spike—stared at her from its perch on the metal staircase. These creatures were getting bigger, bolder, and more aggressive. There were reports of them pecking out the eyes of sleeping drunks, clawing hanks of hair from unwary passersby, and even swooping down on picnicking families. On spring mornings the trees near her apartment shook with the violence of their feuding. No question about it—the crows were thriving. This crisis suited them fine.

  At the end of the alley was a doorway covered by a faded noren cloth. Martine ducked inside. As usual the little antique shop was gloomy, impossibly cluttered, and empty of customers. A young man in a blue serge kimono was sitting at the counter inspecting a battered lacquer bowl through a magnifying glass roughly the same size as his face.

  [83] Martine picked up a wooden pestle and tapped it against the verdigris-streaked temple bell hanging from the ceiling.

  The young man glanced up, eyes narrowed. When Martine emerged from the shadows of a full-size statue of Kannon, the Buddhist goddess of mercy, his face relaxed.

  “I like this piece. It would be just right out on my balcony.”

  The young man shook his head “It isn’t intended for outdoors. Rain and wind would cause damage to the paint.”

  “Well, anyway—how much would it cost?”

  “Hmmm ... For you—shall we say, thirty thousand yen.”

  “Thirty thousand? That’s a bit expensive, isn’t it?”

  “I’m sorry, but we only have five in stock. And the factory that made them went bankrupt last year.”

  “That’s a shame,” said Martine. Of course these fake antiques weren’t supposed to be on sale. They were just samples of the real works of art—often costing hundreds of millions of yen—that were stored in the high-security area at the back of the shop. It used to be only restaurants that displayed plastic simulacra of their wares, but now it was common practice at antique shops, jewelers, and luxury retailers.

  “By the way, Meyer-san—were you looking for my grandfather?”

  “I’d just like a quick word, if he’s got time.”

  “No problem—please come through.”

  Martine slipped off her shoes and stepped into the musty corridor leading to the winding
staircase up to the suite of rooms where Ken Shiina lived and worked. Of all the contacts Martine had made since she had been working with the Tribune, Shiina was the most precious. He was totally unknown to the public, and few journalists had even heard his name. To all appearances he was an eighty-year-old antique dealer. If you chose to inquire more closely, you might discover that he numbered several of Japan’s wealthiest and most influential citizens among his clients, and that some celebrated museum pieces had passed through his hands, sometimes more than once. Also that he had written two well-regarded novels under a pen name, and that in his youth he had been a fervent communist.

  Little more than that was in the public domain. The fact that for decades Shiina had been the ultimate insider in Japan’s political world, a regular drinking companion of prime ministers and faction leaders, a man whose softly spoken and ever-ambiguous advice had broken apart factions and toppled cabinets—this was a tightly guarded secret. Fifteen years ago, Shiina had handed over the antique business to his son and taken orders as a Buddhist priest. Since then he had severed his ties with the political world and become a detached observer. Or at least, that’s what he said.

  [84] “Meyer-san, it’s good to see you after such a long time.”

  Martine bowed low before entering the room. “I’m sorry to cause trouble at such a busy time.”

  Shiina was indeed busy. He was fiddling with the aperture of a large camera mounted on a tripod. Stretched out on the floor in front of him was a scroll of animal drawings, yellowish and cracked.

  “Motonobu Kano?” queried Martine.

  “That’s right,” said Shiina. “You’ve got a good eye for paintings.”

  “Do you see many of these?”

  “This is the first ever. The temple that was keeping it had a sudden need of funds, a problem with the back payment of property taxes.”

  “Really? That must be quite a back payment.”

  “Yes, indeed.”

  Shiina motioned her over to the wooden table and poured out some tea. Martine let him start the conversation his own way.

  “The weather has become troubling these days. There are winds blowing from many different directions, hot and cold, hot and cold. A big storm is brewing, I think.”

  “Can’t it be stopped?”

  “I don’t think so. This storm has been a long time coming. All we can do now is batten down our houses and wait for it to blow over. They always do in the end.”

  Shiina paused. Martine sipped her tea and waited for him to continue.

  “Anyway,” he muttered softly. “There is a feeling that maybe this storm is necessary. Maybe it’s necessary to be woken up by the noise of the roof breaking up.”

  “Is this opinion now widely held?”

  Martine didn’t need to say by who. It was clear that the opinion in question was the common view of the Japanese establishment.

  “For the moment, yes.”

  “But what if the storm doesn’t pass? What if it stays in people’s hearts?”

  Shiina gave a dry chuckle. “All storms pass. That’s their nature. If it doesn’t pass, it can’t be a storm.”

  Martine understood what he was saying, or at least she grasped the direction of his thoughts. With Shiina’s elliptical phraseology, that was the best you could hope for. What he meant was that the establishment had decided on a tactical withdrawal. The crisis was deepening and the powers-that-be, their credibility battered by years of scandal and economic chaos, wanted to avoid further responsibility. They probably figured they could afford to let some, inexperienced coalition take over and then retreat to the sidelines and watch it fall apart. And if it didn’t fall apart quickly enough, then the necessary [85] pressure would be applied and in due course they would resume their traditional role as guardians of the nation’s destiny. But what if they were wrong? What if this wasn’t just a spell of bad weather, but an actual change of climate?

  “Many new political groups are appearing these days,” ventured Martine, gently steering the conversation toward specifics.

  Shiina slid a piece of red bean jelly into his mouth and licked the remnants off the wooden fork. “This is natural,” he mumbled. “Always in times of uncertainty, a lot of new styles and formations are tried. It is the same in art as in politics.”

  “One of these groupings will be quite substantial, I hear. It will contain sixty young politicians, coming from all the major parties.”

  “Yes, yes. This has been spoken of.”

  “It could be very popular, I think.”

  Shiina looked puzzled. “Popular? Popular with whom?”

  “I mean with ordinary people, the public.”

  “Ah, yes. The public will like it. The public always delights in entertainment, doesn’t it?”

  Shiina smiled as if he were discussing the behavior of a wayward child. Whether or not a politician was popular with the public was a trivial question to the power brokers of his generation.

  Martine pressed on. “It would be interesting to know which factions are supporting this new grouping.”

  “All the factions are quiet at the moment. They’re supporting nothing, opposing nothing. They’re merely watching and waiting.”

  “But this kind of movement can’t happen without strong support from somewhere.”

  “That’s true.”

  “So where is the support coming from?”

  Martine had been forced into asking a direct question, which was a kind of defeat. Shiina gazed at the wall as if he hadn’t heard properly, his jaws moving slowly up and down. That piece of bean jelly had been in his mouth for a couple of minutes now, but still he hadn’t swallowed it.

  “Here is an interesting fact,” he said abstractedly. “These eager young politicians who are gathering together—in their backgrounds there is a common theme. All received the same education.”

  “They all attended the same university?”

  “It calls itself a school, a place for training the leaders of the future.”

  Shiina smiled again. The idea that leaders could be trained in a school was clearly one he found amusing.

  “You mean the School of Leadership?”

  Shiina didn’t answer. He didn’t need to. There was only one school of [86] leadership in Japan, the one set up by the founder of Morikawa Electric Industries. It had a reputation for grueling study programs and intense secrecy.

  “So now they’re putting what they learned into practice?”

  Shiina made a sound halfway between a sigh and a groan. “Young people are always foolish. It can’t be helped. It’s only by being foolish that they discover the meaning of wisdom.”

  These “young people” he was talking about were men and women in their late thirties and early forties, with many years of political experience behind them. In many countries they would be approaching the summit of their careers. In the Japanese political world they were treated like children.

  “Morikawa people are elsewhere too. I hear they’re strong in media and finance.”

  “Ah, you know better than me, Martine-san. I’m just a weak-brained old man at the end of his life. All I have is memories.”

  He gave a long racking cough that Martine suspected was faked, then turned his attention back to the scroll on the floor. This was Shiina’s way of saying that the conversation was over.

  Martine padded down the creaky staircase back to the shop. Shiina’s grandson was squatting on the floor behind the counter, carefully polishing a statue of Daikoku, the god of prosperity. Martine stopped and stared at the statue’s joyous features.

  “Now that piece is really well done. How much are you asking for it?”

  Young Shiina squinted up at her. “This one? Not decided yet, probably around a million yen.”

  “A million? Not exactly cheap.”

  “It’s authentic early Meiji, Martine-san. It was the property of a famous saké brewing family, and is supposed to have brought them a hundred years of prosperity.”

>   “And then the prosperity ran out?”

  “Not at all. They had too much money to continue living in Japan. Last year they sold everything and moved to Monaco. As you know, that’s quite a trend these days.”

  Martine nodded. With inheritance tax rates rising to eighty-five percent, wealthy Japanese families were dispersing to the four corners of the earth.

  “And the saké business?”

  “Bought by one of the big food companies. I don’t think the taste will be as good as it used to be, though.”

  Martine examined the statue more closely—the chubby cheeks, the pendulous earlobes, the fingers clutching a bag of rice. The little god’s zest for life was infectious. You couldn’t look into his face without smiling.

  “How about seven hundred thousand?” she said, on the spur of the moment.

  [87] Young Shiina blinked with surprise. “Are you really interested?”

  “Maybe. It’d be just the right present for someone I know.”

  The boy sucked air through his teeth, as he had probably seen his grandfather do hundreds of times when negotiating prices. “That’s difficult ... I really can’t go below eight hundred ...”

  Eight hundred thousand yen was more than Martine had paid for her car, a nifty little coupé she had picked up secondhand. But then a hundred years of prosperity wasn’t going to come cheap.

  “Okay,” she nodded. “It’ll take me a while to get the money together. I’ll pick it up next time I come through.”

  Martine opened the sliding door and stepped into the trash-strewn alley. Once again, the old man had gone out of his way to provide her with crucial information. The thought made her slightly uncomfortable. It was only recently that she had found out what lay behind his generosity. In hushed tones a senior politician’s aide had told her the story of Shiina’s years in Paris as an art student and his passionate affair with a model who bore more than a passing resemblance to Martine.