Dragon Dance Read online

  Martine flipped over a page in her notebook. When Nozawa got excited, the words came quickly.

  “But what is the Japanese way? Who decides?”

  “Nobody decides. That’s a typical Western question, if I may say so. We don’t need to decide. We all already know the Japanese way. It’s encoded up here, in the left side of the brain.”

  He tapped a finger on his left temple.

  “The Japanese way means respecting our ancestors and our parents. It means working hard, making excellent products at cheap prices. No more speculation, no more chasing profits, and no more wasting hard-earned money on stupid foreign luxuries. We must remember how to enjoy simple things. We must remember how to sweat.”

  Sweat was a key word in Nozawa’s songs, denoting sincerity and self-sacrifice.

  Martine wrote quickly. These days there were few politicians anywhere in the world who weren’t blathering about a return to traditional values. To [140] convince the editors, she would need something much meatier than that.

  “Let’s go back to the security question. You said that a country that relies on another country for protection is not a real country.”

  “That’s right,” growled Nozawa. “A real country defends itself with its own blood, not other people’s. This is common sense, I think.”

  “But is Japan really capable of defending itself outside the alliance structure?”

  “Really capable—what does that mean?”

  “Well, as you pointed out, Japan has been dependent on the US alliance ever since the war. Upgrading your own forces would be a slow and immensely costly process, wouldn’t it?”

  Martine was fishing, not really expecting him to bite. But he did, without a second’s hesitation.

  “In terms of conventional forces, yes, you’re right. That’s why it will be necessary to equip ourselves with the most powerful weapons available.”

  Martine’s heart skipped a beat. So Shimizu had been telling the truth. This really was going to be sensational material.

  “The most powerful weapons available are nuclear. Are you suggesting Japan should start a nuclear weapons development program?”

  “Development program? We aren’t some third-world country full of peasants and oxen, you know. Japan has the highest-grade nuclear power industry in the world, with plutonium produced by our own fast-breeder reactors. As for missile technology, some of the guidance systems used by the US are actually made by Japanese electronics companies. If we want to have nuclear capability, we can prepare it in a matter of weeks.”

  Martine tried to look calm, but her pulse was racing. Never before had any Japanese politician made a public commitment to nuclear weapons. Nozawa wasn’t just breaking a fifty-year taboo, he was gleefully tearing it to shreds and stamping them into the ground. She had once heard an aged right-winger mutter something similar late at night over whiskey and water. But that had been off the record, and the man had been half-drunk.

  “Let me confirm this. Your political group will be campaigning for Japan to go nuclear?”

  Martine shot a nervous glance at Shimizu. Would he step in and block the question? No, he didn’t say a word, just sat there examining his manicure.

  Nozawa leaned back in his chair, hands locked behind his head, eyes half-closed. “Look at the countries that have these weapons—the Americans, the French, the British, the Chinese. These are the countries that control the world. They attack whoever they want whenever they want. And if anyone fights back they call it an atrocity or a war crime.”

  “So you will be campaigning for Japan to go nuclear too?”

  Nozawa held a long pause. Martine bit her lip. She knew that he was [141] playing with her, enjoying the tension. Finally his long, rather feminine eyelashes flicked open.

  “Not campaigning,” he barked. “We will be insisting. After all, there is no other choice, is there?”

  Martine let out a long, slow sigh of relief. There it was, safely in her grasp, the biggest story of her career.

  Martine was still buzzing with triumph when she walked into the office, a plastic shopping bag swinging jauntily from her hand.

  “So what’s the matter with you?” queried Kyo-san, glancing over the top of her glasses. “You look as if you’ve won the lottery.”

  Martine put the bag down on the table in the center of the room and took out a box of bean-jam cakes, handmade at the best cake shop in Tokyo.

  “That’s more or less what happened. I’ve got a major scoop. It’ll be on the front page the day after tomorrow.”

  “Really,” said Kyo-san, eyes flicking back to the book she was reading. She knew all about the “major scoops” that got correspondents so excited and nobody even remembered a couple of weeks later.

  “Well, aren’t you going to ask me what it is?”

  “All right, what is it then?”

  “You mustn’t tell anyone about it, not even your pet goldfish.”

  “Don’t worry—I won’t be telling him anything. He died last week.”

  Martine glanced from side to side, then leaned over Kyo-san’s desk, low enough for her hair to brush the surface.

  “He’s going to campaign for Japan to go nuclear,” she said in a loud whisper.

  Kyo-san’s head jerked backward. “What? Nozawa said that?”

  “He certainly did,” beamed Martine. “It’s all on the record!”

  But Kyo-san wasn’t beaming. In fact she looked more shaken than Martine had ever seen her before.

  “People are going crazy,” she muttered, shaking her head. “Sometimes I don’t want to live in this country any more.”

  Martine was furious with herself for misreading her reaction. Kyo-san was a fervent pacifist in a way that the younger generation could never be. Her father had been killed in Manchuria in the last days of the war, leaving behind a nineteen-year-old bride who was a widow before she realized she was even pregnant.

  “So where would you go instead?”

  “Any place where the news doesn’t reach. I don’t want to be informed about this stuff any more.”

  “You’re too stressed out, Kyo-san. What you need is a massage.”

  Martine went behind Kyo-san’s chair and started kneading the muscles of her neck. Calm, good-humored Kyo-san, a woman who had spent the best part of three decades working in news organizations, couldn’t tolerate the [142] news any longer. That was the effect the crisis was having. Sensible, moderate people were getting more and more frazzled. And the others—the ones who would say and do anything to have their names in the papers—their energy levels were rising all the time.

  Kyo-san’s muscles were as hard as a board, and there were several gristly nodes in the area between her left shoulder blade and spine. Martine worked on them slowly and methodically, the same as Makoto did for her when she was too tired to relax.

  “By the way,” said Kyo-san, head bobbing to the rhythm, “I’ve got some bad news about the Morikawa Leadership School. They don’t want to see you.”

  “Really? Who did you speak to?”

  “The head of the public relations department. He said they weren’t accepting any requests from journalists. It’s a top-level decision, apparently.”

  “That’s interesting. Did you ask why?”

  “He wouldn’t give a reason. He was not at all polite, actually.”

  Martine blinked. A public relations department that didn’t want any publicity. Perhaps that made sense for a school of leadership whose graduates preferred to remain in the shadows. She finished the massage with a flurry of little hand chops, then went to get some plates for the cakes. After laying them out, she sat down at her desk and called Shiina at the antique shop. She disliked herself for doing it, but this story couldn’t be allowed to die.

  “Thank you for the information you gave me last week. It was very useful.”

  “That can’t be called information,” wheezed Shiina. “It was just the personal opinion of a weak-brained old man.”

&nbs
p; There followed a crescendo of coughing at the other end of the phone. Shiina really did sound in bad shape.

  “You mentioned the Morikawa School of Leadership.”

  “Yes, yes.”

  “I was thinking that might be a good subject for an in-depth article. I doubt if many of our readers have even heard of it.”

  “Yes, yes—a good idea. Many Japanese people are not aware of the Morikawa school either. Yes indeed—someone should write about it.”

  Another spasm of coughing, as rough and rasping as sandpaper. Martine pictured the state of his lungs and shuddered.

  “It seems they are refusing to see any journalists,” she prompted.

  “Maybe that’s wise. Journalists can cause a great deal of trouble.”

  “All we are doing is putting information in front of the public.”

  “And that is a dangerous thing. The public shouldn’t have too much information, only what is necessary.”

  Shiina broke into another spasm of coughing, this time interspersed with laughter. They had had this conversation several times before.

  [143] “It’s difficult to treat the subject properly without the school’s cooperation.”

  “Yes, very difficult. Morikawa people don’t like to cooperate with outsiders. They only cooperate with each other.”

  “So maybe I should drop the idea.”

  “And maybe you should not. Maybe you should show up there without an appointment and ask to see the deputy chief of the school. And maybe he will agree to see you.”

  “You think so?”

  “Mmmm ...” Shiina’s next words were drowned in a gale of coughing. When he recovered, he started talking about a set of Genroku-era tea ceremony implements that had recently come into his possession. Martine made polite noises, but she wasn’t really listening. She was thinking about a young French woman who lost her life in a car crash sixty years ago.

  After putting down the phone, Martine prepared some coffee and sat chatting with Kyo-san about their favorite places in the world. Kyo-san, who was a keen golfer, dreamed of retiring to Hawaii. Martine talked about the grasslands of East Africa, which she’d last seen at the age of six. She still carried the images with her—the huge sky, the noise and color of the markets, the herds of animals. Occasionally she came across news items about the country of her birth, brief accounts of disease, violence, and political chaos. They barely registered with her. That was a different place entirely.

  After their coffee break, Martine sat down at her desk and checked her messages. Two immediately caught her attention. The first one she opened was from her anonymous admirer.

  Dream angel,

  You do not need to know who I am. Just be sure that I am thinking of your beautiful golden body all the time. The next important thing is to avoid the Tachikawa area. There will be a big problem with falling objects.

  Dream angel? Beautiful golden body? Stalkers were supposed to be wild and weird, their imaginations fired with perverse energy. This guy kept coming up with clichés, as if he were copying a bad translation of a nineteenth-century erotic novel. As for falling objects, what did that mean? With a sinking feeling, Martine recalled that Tachikawa was close to the American air base. She quickly typed her reply.

  Please tell me what is going to happen at Tachikawa.

  After sending it, she opened the next message, which was from Makoto. It took her a while to focus on what he was saying. What with the Nozawa scoop, the leadership school interview, and now another prediction of disaster, she had completely forgotten about their little quarrel. How had it [144] happened again? Oh yes—Makoto had displayed male insensitivity of the worst sort, humiliating her without even realizing it. “Thank you very much,” indeed! The memory of his words set off another little surge of vexation. And now he had come up with some plodding apology.

  Dear Martine,

  I’m sorry I seem to have made you angry. I am doing my best to understand you, but sometimes it isn’t easy. Don’t you know that I care for you very much?

  Very best regards,

  Your Makoto

  Martine didn’t know whether to laugh, cry, or yell out in frustration. “Very best regards”—how pathetic could you get? It sounded like a bank manager calling in an overdraft. Martine wrote her reply quickly and stabbed the “Send” key, not even checking for typos.

  Dear Makoto,

  You can’t apologize unless you understand what you’re apologizing for.

  Very best regards,

  Your Martine

  Kyo-san was staring at her, spectacles glinting. Sometimes she reminded Martine of her first Latin teacher, a kindly but strict methodist preacher.

  “Is something wrong, Kyo-san?”

  “I’m all right, but what about you? You’ve suddenly gone red in the face.”

  This was a problem that Martine had had since she was a teenager. Strong emotions—anger, pride, joy—showed up in her face straightaway. It was one of the reasons she was such a terrible bridge player.

  “Oh—it’s nothing. The stress is finally getting to me, I suppose.”

  “In that case it’s your turn for a massage.”

  Kyo-san came over to Martine’s chair. Martine quickly closed her mailbox. She dipped her head forward as Kyo-san’s supple fingers dug into her clavicles.

  “You poor thing,” murmured Kyo-san. “The muscles here are all knotted up.”

  Not just the muscles, thought Martine. She closed her eyes and let the rhythm of Kyo-san’s fingers work on her shoulders. But the tension wouldn’t dissolve because she didn’t want it to dissolve. It was a necessary part of being Martine Meyer, alive at this particular moment of history.

  Mark Fletcher gazed down at the huge slab-like chest gently rising and falling—the only sign that his father was still alive. The eyelids were pale and waxy, [145] the cheeks gray, the mouth slanting slackly to one side. Mark knelt down to the ruddy bacon-rasher of an ear.

  “How are you doing there?” he whispered. “Can you hear me?”

  There was no response but the bleep of the electrocardiogram and the twitching of the needles on the dials.

  “What happened, Dad? You should have taken more care of yourself.”

  The wiry hairs inside his nostrils—silver-white, Mark noticed—quivered with the shallow breathing.

  “You should have stayed with Mum. She was the only person who could keep you on the rails. Jenny could never do that for you.”

  There was a dry rattling sound from his father’s throat, and one of the needles gave a sudden jump.

  “That’s a high-stress response,” said David Liu, who had appeared in the doorway. “You’d better lay off for a while.”

  Mark followed Liu down the corridor to his office. Liu was a small, fussy man with a clammy handshake and a taste for gold jewelry. According to Mark’s sources he had a growing reputation, though to say he was “the top man in his field,” as Roger Mance had, was stretching it somewhat.

  Liu’s office was a spacious room with a picture window that framed central Los Angeles like a postcard—the skyscrapers glinting in the noonday sun, the blue sky scored by the vapor trails of a couple of jets. On the wall behind Liu’s desk was a late-period de Kooning, the American flag bisected by a splash of red paint. Lining the interior wall was a display cabinet containing golf trophies, a photo of Liu with Tiger Woods, and another of him with the new president, who appeared to be giving him a kiss on the left cheek.

  “Do you collect de Kooning?”

  Liu smiled pleasantly. “Yes, I do. I think he’s seriously undervalued.”

  “And you’re politically active too?”

  “Well, I had a modest role in the president’s fund-raising activities here in LA. I’m a strong supporter of the president and everything she stands for.”

  “So are we, apparently.”

  “That’s nice to hear.”

  David Liu hadn’t caught the note of irony in Mark’s voice. It was at Jenny’s prompting
that InfoCorp had swung its weight in favor of the president, making substantial contributions to her support groups and imposing a single cross-media editorial line. Previously, InfoCorp had always hedged its bets, but this time Jenny had insisted that there was only one possible winner. And she had been right.

  “David, I’d like an honest appraisal of my father’s condition. No bullshit, no false hopes. What’s going to happen to him?”

  Liu folded his fingers together under his chin. They were short, plump, [146] well tended. He wore three rings, and a bracelet on each wrist.

  “This is a complex condition, Mark. There’s a whole range of potential outcomes, from quick recovery to long-term coma. Fortunately, your father has an immensely strong physique. On the other hand, the cerebral infarction was massive and there has certainly been brain damage.”

  “Enough to stop him working again?”

  Liu leaned forward in his chair, still smiling pleasantly. “You said no false hopes, didn’t you? Well, the reality is that your father is unlikely ever to talk again, and if he does talk he’s not going to make any sense. Returning to work would be out of the question.”

  Mark’s face felt as stiff as cardboard. An old man in a wheelchair sipping soup through a straw, unable to remember anything, unable to make himself understood—that wouldn’t be his father. It would be someone else entirely.

  The jet lag was just starting to hit when Mark arrived at the InfoCorp headquarters. This gigantic mirror-plated suppository had been the home of InfoCorp’s American operations for the past three years. Before that InfoCorp had been based in New York. Under Jenny’s influence, Warwick had decided that New York was too Atlanticist, too old economy, too Wall Street. The company needed to become more Asia-focused, more entertainment-driven, more tech-savvy. So, like an amoeba, the organization divided into two and, as Jenny put it, the twentieth-century businesses went to London and the twenty-first century businesses moved to Los Angeles.