Dragon Dance Read online

  Suddenly the drowsy peace was broken by an ear-splitting roar. A silver arrow appeared in the sky, zooming directly toward the town. Nobody looked up. It happened almost every day at the same time, when the planes returned to base after a run over the Japan Sea. Strangers might have been disturbed by the noise, but the people of this town hardly even heard it any more.

  Five hundred yards above ground level, Ray Rodriguez glanced out of his cockpit at the landscape below, the train tracks gleaming in the sunlight, the clusters of houses, the snub-nosed train disappearing into the tunnel like a snake sliding into a hole in a wall. It was like toyland down there, everything cute and clean and dinky. Rodriguez liked that about Japan. He liked the women too, and sometimes thought about marrying one and taking her back Stateside.

  The shadow of the plane flitted across the field toward the town, beyond which lay the airfield with its runway stretching out to receive him. In a matter of seconds he would be on the ground, and then relaxing in a hot bath, getting ready for his Japanese language lesson. None of the other pilots bothered with these language lessons. They spent most of their free time on the base, and liked to hang out with English-speaking hookers. Rodriguez had different ideas. He wanted to travel around the countryside on his own, see what there was to see, and date ordinary girls with ordinary jobs, the kind who would take him home to meet their parents.

  Rodriguez dipped a wing as he juddered through an air current. The voices of ground control were crackling in his ears, but he didn’t need to listen. He had come in on this flight path dozens of times before. He could do it in his sleep.

  He was about six miles from the town when he first realized something was wrong. The voices in his ears kept cutting up and disappearing under bursts of static. It was the kind of thing that might happen in stormy conditions, but not on a clear day like this. Then the emergency lights started [162] flashing and his earphones went completely dead.

  “We have a reception problem,” he called into the mouthpiece. “Please shift to backup immediately.”

  There was no response. Then the head-up display vanished from in front of his eyes, and Rodriguez began to get scared. He glanced down at the instrument panel. Suddenly there was a fizzing noise, and then a blue flash.

  “Holy shit!” he yelled. “I got system failure!”

  Even if the ground people were listening, there was nothing they could do now. He was just a mile from the town, losing altitude fast. He was close enough to make out cars, and some billboard of a guy wearing a headband. He struggled with the instruments and tried to get the nose up. It was useless. The plane was out of control, homing in on the town like a missile. There was only one thing to do—eject.

  Rodriguez crossed himself, closed his eyes, and hit the button. A blast of cold air knocked him backward, and his guts swapped places with his brains. For a moment he blacked out, then he heard the crump of the parachute opening and he was dangling in space, watching helplessly as his plane went hurtling toward the heart of the town.

  “Please! Not there!”

  There was a sound like a thunderclap as the plane smashed into the station and disappeared in a ball of orange flame. From his seat in the sky Rodriguez could hear the screams of the people below and see their tiny figures scurrying about.

  “I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry.”

  Rodriguez was crying. Deep sobs convulsed his body as he slowly drifted down to earth.

  Inside the station a curtain of fire was sweeping through the main shopping concourse, and clouds of toxic fumes were pouring into the underground passageways where the homeless were allowed to dwell. The entrance was a chaos of alarms and sirens and people with their hair and clothes on fire rushing screaming into the street.

  Such was the confusion that nobody noticed the two NTKDI engineers climb down the fire escape of the Matsukawa department store, lugging their box of equipment. Nobody noticed them get into the little white van and drive away as if nothing had happened. Nobody bothered to call NTKDI and complain about the attitude of the company’s staff. Even if such a complaint had been received, it wouldn’t have been taken very seriously since, according to NTKDI’s official records, those two engineers and their little white van didn’t even exist.

  FIFTEEN

  Martine walked out of the karate dojo feeling like a squeezed dishcloth. The sparring session with the cop, Saya Miki, had been even more one-sided than usual. Saya was just too quick, too fit. She had such a wonderful figure too, not a pinch of flab on her waist. If she hadn’t been such an all-round nice woman—friendly and intelligent, with a streak of dark humor—Martine might have suffered a few pangs of envy. Her own body was definitely losing flexibility, the muscle tone fading. And as for the sight of her bum in the mirror as she walked past—she hardly had the courage to take another look.

  Outside, it was a sweltering midsummer morning. Already the sun was hammering down on the rush hour traffic, softening the tarmac and turning parked cars into ovens. Martine slipped on her sunglasses—white frames with big rectangular lenses that completely covered her cheekbones—and turned toward the subway station.

  “Meyer-san! Meyer-san!”

  Martine glanced across the street, where a tall guy in mirrored sunglasses was waving a long tanned arm. It took her a couple of seconds to recognize Ichiro, Makoto’s son. In his jeans and cheesecloth shirt he looked more like a cool man-about-town than a fifteen-year-old studying for his exams. “What’s going on? Aren’t you supposed to be at cram school?” “I wanted to ask you something. Come and have a coffee.” Martine glanced at her watch. “All right. But I haven’t got much time.” As she was crossing the road, she heard someone behind her call out, “See you on Sunday!” It was Saya, standing at the entrance of the dojo with a mischievous smile on her face. Martine smiled back, somewhat stiffly. It wasn’t hard to guess what the dog-loving cop was thinking.

  Ichiro pointed out a coffee bar, and they went inside. It was a fussily elegant [164] sort of place, with a chandelier and circular glass tables and potted plants that had somehow adapted to the icy blast of the air-conditioning. All the other customers were female, mainly young office workers stopping for a sticky pastry and a browse of the gossip magazines before starting their day’s work. The background music, hardly audible above the roar of the air-conditioning, was “One Hundred Million Dreams,” one of Nozawa’s chanson-style ballads. They took a table by the window and ordered iced coffee.

  “So what do you want to know?” asked Martine. She was expecting another fiendishly complex question about European history.

  Ichiro took off his sunglasses and slid them into the breast pocket of his shirt. He looked serious.

  “I want to know if it’s true,” he muttered.

  “If what’s true?”

  Ichiro’s eyes flicked downward. “You know, about Dad and you.”

  “Dad and I what?” asked Martine, mystified.

  “Dad and you getting married.”

  “Married!” exclaimed Martine, loud enough to be heard in the street outside. “Where on earth did you get that idea!”

  “From Granny.”

  “It sounds as if your grandmother’s imagination has been working too hard. There’s no truth in it whatsoever, I assure you.”

  Just then the waiter brought the iced coffee. Out of the corner of her eye Martine caught him staring at her with a strange half-smile on his face. Everyone was smiling at her this morning, but they all had the wrong idea.

  “Oh, I see,” said Ichiro. He poured three spoonfuls of syrup into his coffee, then poked in his straw and took a long noisy suck. Disconcertingly, he had reverted to his schoolboy persona.

  “So there’s nothing at all to worry about,” said Martine, patting him on the forearm.

  “You don’t understand. I wouldn’t have been worried, I would have been happy.”

  Martine blinked at him in surprise. “Happy? Really? That’s a very nice thing to say. Thank you very much.”

&nbs
p; “That’s okay. But if Granny has got it wrong, then it doesn’t matter. I just wanted to know the truth.”

  “Well, now you do,” said Martine lightly. “Anyway, tell me about your history studies. Have you managed to sort out the difference between the ghibellines and the guelfs?”

  For some reason she felt hot, despite the air-conditioning.

  They sipped their coffee and discussed late medieval Italy. Martine caught a few sideways glances from people walking past the window. She couldn’t [165] blame [them]. A handsome adolescent having early morning coffee with a blond foreigner roughly twice his age—it was worth a closer look.

  When they had finished their coffee—Ichiro’s straw rootling amongst the ice cubes for the last drops of sweetness—Martine called for the bill. As they were leaving she asked the question that had been weighing on her mind all through the conversation.

  “Tell me something. This strange idea that your grandmother had—where did it come from?”

  Ichiro frowned, very serious again. His dark cheeks were as smooth as satin. Martine had an impulse to reach across the table and run her fingertips down them.

  “I think it was when Dad told her about the move.”

  “The move?”

  “Yes, Dad said he’s looking for a bigger apartment. He said we’re going to need more space, an extra bathroom and a room with plenty of light and big enough for lots more books.”

  “Oh,” said Martine, suddenly at a loss for words.

  “Why do we need an extra bathroom?” mused Ichiro, flicking a quiff of hair out of his eyes. When he was puzzled by something he looked so like Makoto—the same twist of the lips, the same jut of the jaw.

  “I don’t know,” said Martine, getting up to leave. “You’d better ask your father.”

  Ichiro held the door open for her. As she walked through it, she was conscious of a dozen pairs of female eyes boring into her back.

  Martine arrived in the office shortly after nine. Kyo-san was nibbling a rice cracker and watching the news on the wide-screen TV on the wall. A reporter was standing at the scene of yesterday’s plane crash, interviewing a middle-aged man with his arm in a sling and a bandage covering the left side of his face.

  “There was an incredible bang,” he was gabbling. “Like a bomb exploding just above our heads.”

  “And where were you when it happened?”

  “I was on the second floor, next to the ticket machines. I ran for the emergency exit, but flames were shooting out of the air vents. It was hell in there.”

  The scene shifted to the local hospital and an interview with the chief doctor, somber as he explained the technicalities of skin grafts and reconstructive surgery. Beside him the list of casualties scrolled down the screen—eight people dead, twenty-five seriously injured.

  Martine’s anonymous stalker had known this was going to happen. He had known the place and he had known the time. But how? How could anyone forecast a random event like a plane crash? The only plausible answer was that it wasn’t a random event, that someone had made it happen.

  [166] Now the scene was the Diet building and an interview with the chief cabinet secretary, a wrinkle-faced veteran of innumerable factional squabbles and backroom deals. He mumbled a few words about “regrettable events,” “full investigation,” and “cooperation with the American authorities.” The next interview was with Nozawa, a live link with the TV studio in his villa in the trendy Denenchofu district. He was dressed more conservatively than Martine had ever seen him before, in a dark suit and an immaculate silk shirt. The only trace of his showbiz persona was the “nZw” insignia on his tiepin. He was glowering with indignation, his eyes hard and bright.

  “This kind of cowboy hooliganism cannot be tolerated. The pilot should be charged with murder, and the commanding officer of the base must take full responsibility.”

  “The US authorities have already expressed deep apologies. Do you think that is sufficient?”

  “Absolutely not! This is Japan, not America. The Japanese people are demanding that the Americans apologize in the traditional Japanese way. The commanding officer must visit the houses of every single victim, get down on his hands and knees, and beg for forgiveness! This is the least he can do.”

  “And how do you see the future of the air base?”

  “Future? It has no future! We the Japanese people demand that it be closed down as soon as possible. The Americans’ real reason for keeping these bases is obvious to everybody. They talk about regional stability, but their real purpose is to stop Japan becoming an independent nation again. They want to keep those little yellow monkeys safely locked up!”

  The next shot was an aerial view of the damaged station building. There was a huge hole in the glass frontage where the plane had smashed clean through. Martine picked up the remote control and switched off the volume.

  “Unbelievable,” muttered Kyo-san softly. “Just think of those poor people in the station, peacefully going about their daily business. Then suddenly the whole place goes up in flames, just like a war zone.”

  Martine didn’t say anything. She could guess what was on Kyo-san’s mind—the fire bombing that had burned Tokyo to a cinder in the summer of 1945. A baby at the time, she had been rushed to safety in a papoose on her mother’s back. Kyo-san claimed to remember the huge orange flames dancing from building to building and the showers of cinders flying in the wind. Martine doubted whether those were real memories—more likely they were images from photos and books and the words of the grown-ups around her; but Kyo-san had made them part of her life story, and the emotions they excited were powerful enough. In that sense they were as authentic as any newsreel.

  “All these fighter planes and bombs and weapons—we don’t need them here in Japan. All we want to do is live in peace.”

  [167] Kyo-san’s unconditional pacifism was dying out with her generation, the last to have any personal experience of war. And the comfortable world of that generation was changing too. If Gary Terashima was right about the reorientation of US foreign policy—the big sayonara, as he called it—unconditional pacifism was going to be an untenable option. Nozawa had grasped this instinctively. He was riding with the tide of history.

  Which reminded Martine that she hadn’t checked the interview yet. The Tribune’s online edition should have appeared already. She switched on her monitor and went straight to the front page. There it was, in big, bold headlines that screamed out of the middle of the screen.

  Japan’s Nuclear Blackmail

  Prominent Japanese politician Tsuyoshi Nozawa yesterday threatened the world with a new arms race. Nozawa, a radical right-winger committed to restoring Japan’s prewar glory, revealed in an exclusive interview with our Tokyo correspondent that he plans ...

  The style was more sensational than she had expected—closer to tabloid than the Tribune’s usual stodgy prose. Still, she couldn’t complain. It was a huge spread, the largest she had ever been given. And alongside was a four-column photo of Nozawa, scowling theatrically with arms crossed.

  Martine clicked onto the features page and scanned the interview itself. Miraculously the copy editors had left it more or less intact. There were no misprints, no cuts, no jumbled grammar where three sentences had been squashed into one. She was basking in satisfaction when suddenly she noticed that something was missing. There was no byline at the head of the piece! In fact there was no mention of Martine Meyer anywhere.

  Martine gave a little groan of disappointment. Of course everyone who mattered would know who had written the piece—there was no other correspondent, now that Charlie had gone—but even after five years on the paper Martine still got a buzz out of seeing her name on a story. And this was no ordinary story; it was by far the biggest of her career.

  Out of habit she clicked through the letters section, then the editorial column. To her surprise, the Nozawa interview was the subject of the lead editorial, feebly entitled “Just Say No to Nozawa.” That was strange, to say th
e least. Japan-related editorials were usually supplied by the Tokyo bureau. If for some reason that didn’t happen, there would still be lengthy consultation between Martine and the editorial team. So who had written this piece? It certainly didn’t read like the work of the gay Winchester-and-Oxford man who covered the Japanese economy.

  [168] It is high time that the international community woke up to the very real dangers of Japanese ultranationalism. The man who is now threatening the world with nuclear catastrophe is not some right-wing kook, but the most popular politician in Japan. It goes without saying that this outrageous show of aggression must be opposed with full vigor.. We call on the UN, the G8, and the United States Congress to make it absolutely plain that the Japanese threat to regional stability will not be tolerated. The right response is to hit them where it hurts—through coordinated restrictions on Japanese exports and imports of raw materials. Major corporations have an important part to play also, and NGOs should organize a program of dramatic direct action. If history has taught us one thing, it is that the only sensible policy toward a rogue state is bold, uncompromising defiance ...

  Martine gazed at the screen in horror. “Rogue state”—what a ridiculous concept! The Tribune was putting Japan—which even after years of crisis was still one of the richest countries in the world—on the same level as places like Libya and North Korea. And as for the “program of dramatic direct action”—that was akin to an incitement to terrorism. Fire bombing fast-food restaurants, kidnapping scientists—these were some of the forms of direct action that had been in the news lately. Whoever had written this editorial must have been drunk at the time. And the worst thing of all, the thing that made her tremble with anger and humiliation, was that people would believe the person responsible was Martine Meyer!