Dragon Dance Read online

  “You’re paying me for them? That’s a very Western way of behaving, very dry and logical. In Japan we like things to be wet. You’ve been in Japan long enough, Martine-san. A woman like you should understand when to be dry and when to be wet.”

  For the first time in years Martine felt acutely embarrassed. Why was this happening? She was furious with herself. More times than she cared to remember she had listened to men being lewd, obscene, gross, saying the things about women they said when no women were around. She had been disgusted, puzzled, bored, and even occasionally amused. Never had she been embarrassed.

  Nozawa put the guitar down on the table and moved purposefully toward her. For a moment Martine had the bizarre idea he was going to lean forward and kiss her. Instead he thrust out a hand and they shook hands. His grip was [35] warm, strong, rough. She could still feel the imprint when she was walking down the corridor toward the elevator.

  Early evening, and Narita Airport was still seething with people. In the north wing security room, Deputy Manager Hasegawa sat staring at the flat-screen video display that covered the entire wall. Halfway through his shift, his head was aching and his eyes were slipping in and out of focus. The screen in front of him was split into twenty squares, each with a picture that changed every minute. Crowds of salarymen, elderly tourists hauling huge suitcases, school kids carrying tennis rackets, flight attendants pushing their cabin bags—a constant flow of human traffic poured into the departure lounge, swarming through the duty-free shops and blocking the escalators from top to bottom.

  Hasegawa sipped at a cup of green tea while his tired eyes flicked from screen to screen.

  The new software system had just been installed, and he wasn’t used to it yet. What was supposed to happen was that if you saw someone suspicious, you zoomed in and froze the screen. Immediately a duplicate image with a blank face would appear next to the subject. Then you clicked again and chose from the menu of possibilities—male or female, young or old, yakuza or religious fanatic or swindler on the run. In seconds the program would find the closest facial match from the police and Interpol databases and fit it into the blank space. One last click, and you got a drop-down text summarizing the subject’s personal history, criminal record, and known associates.

  According to the supplier, the program “ushered in a new era in computerized identification systems.” Hasegawa had his doubts about it, though. Already it had managed to fit the body of a top-ranking yakuza with the face of a flight attendant caught with a few grams of marijuana. In Hasegawa’s opinion, it would be a long time before computers could beat the judgment of experienced professionals such as himself.

  His gaze lingered on Screen 5, where a stunningly attractive woman was just walking through the X-ray machine. She was tall, with frizzed-out hair, catlike eyes, and a “brain-killer” figure. She was wearing round sunglasses propped on the top of her head, which made Hasegawa think she was maybe a model. One of the guys at the checkpoint, a youngster called Kato, tapped her on the shoulder. He was doing a routine follow-up, so Hasegawa zoomed in to get a better look.

  The strange thing was the woman’s reaction. Her eyes widened and she started glancing around nervously, as if looking for someone to come to her [36] aid. When Kato started to question her—as he always liked to do with a good-looking woman—her face froze and her fingers knotted tightly together.

  Hasegawa broadened the field a little and tracked the direction of her glances. Twenty yards away stood a middle-aged woman with short gray hair and baggy trousers, who looked rather like a housewife off on a shopping trip to Europe. She nodded at the younger woman and made a quick hand signal that Hasegawa interpreted to mean “Don’t worry, it won’t take long.” Then she turned and disappeared into the duty-free shopping area.

  Hasegawa shifted back to the younger woman. The check had finished now, and she scooped up her handbag and walked away, her face still pale and taut. Surprisingly, she marched straight past the duty-free area, not even bothering to glance inside. Now Hasegawa’s professional curiosity was fully engaged. A woman put into a state of panic by a routine security check: Two people pretending that they didn’t know each other. This was just the kind of problem that the new software was supposed to solve. Hasegawa zoomed in, froze her and clicked. When the menu appeared, he clicked “all female” and waited for the computer to find the best match.

  For almost half a minute the space where her face had been was filled with a blinking question mark. For some reason the program was taking an unusually long time to run through the database. Hasegawa was about to click “Cancel” when suddenly the question mark was replaced by a female face. Hasegawa gazed at it with rising excitement. The hairstyle was different, but the eyes, the jut of the lips, the shape of the nose—they were too close to be a coincidence. Hasegawa clicked again, and this time his spirits fell. The program was trying to tell him that this woman was Reiko Matsubara, Japan’s most notorious terrorist, wanted for murder, hijacking, and bank robbery. The only problem was that Matsubara had committed these crimes over thirty years ago, well before the woman in the Narita Airport departure lounge had been born.

  Hasegawa gave a grunt of irritation and clicked on “Cancel.” This “epoch-making” software was next to useless, just as he had thought. On the next screen, he watched the woman take the moving walkway to Gate 15, where the flight for Hong Kong had started boarding. So she was an ordinary tourist, off on a sightseeing trip with a family friend. Just imagine if he had rushed down there and accused her of being a terrorist! He would have been the laughing stock of the department.

  Hasegawa’s gaze shifted to the next screen. Two large black men were just coming through the checkpoint, grinning and swinging their bags as if they hadn’t a care in the world. Hasegawa felt a surge of anger. After what he’d seen on TV recently, he would never look at these people the same way again. He grabbed for the mouse, zoomed in, and froze.

  FOUR

  Martine emerged from the hotel lobby to find Shinjuku filled with throbbing red lights and the hysterical wail of sirens. The plump, middle-aged doorman was standing at the curb gazing at a long line of empty taxis. Martine placed him as an ex-section chief from some old blue-chip company that had collapsed earlier in the crisis. He would be one of the lucky ones who had found a job.

  “Has something happened?” said Martine.

  “Another bomb threat. The whole area has been sealed off.”

  “So where’s the bomb supposed to be?”

  The doorman shrugged. “There’s no information. It could be anywhere.”

  Beyond the hotel forecourt, an ambulance was trying to force its way down a street that was blocked solid. A medic was leaning out of the window screaming through a megaphone, his words lost in the noise of the siren and the revving of engines.

  Martine hurried to the nearest subway station. She was going to be late for the meeting with Charlie, which meant she was going to be late getting to Makoto’s place, which meant they would only have a few hours together before he left on a long business trip.

  This plague of security alerts was becoming a real problem, shutting the city down for hours at a time. The police were overreacting, but that was inevitable given the pressure they were under. So far they had made no progress in tracking down the mysterious Okinawa Liberation Army that had regularly claimed responsibility. Some said they weren’t really trying, that the OLA had become a useful distraction from all the political scandals. But that was too cynical, Martine felt. After all, the OLA had been responsible for so much mayhem. In the past couple of months movie theaters had been set ablaze, express trains derailed, teenagers trampled underfoot by panic-stricken [38] crowds at sports events and festivals. Advance warnings had been sent to newspapers and TV stations, but they were too cryptic to be of any use. Martine believed that the police were doing their best. The problem was that their best was no good at all.

  Also, the police were being hampered by a familiar problem. Whenever
a crime was given sensational coverage by the Japanese media—a woman poisoning her husband for insurance money, a homeless man buried alive by a motorbike gang, a high school girl decapitated by bullies—you could bet there would soon be dozens of copycat incidents, and this was no exception. Over the past few months there had been bomb attacks all over Japan. Bomb-making instructions were freely available on the internet—anyone could do it, and anyone did. And it wasn’t just the usual thugs and petty extortionists, but also housewives with grudges against sarcastic shopkeepers, middle-aged bachelors living alone with their parents, school kids scorned by their teachers, teachers scorned by their pupils.

  So the police were getting nowhere, and the security alerts were becoming a regular occurrence, costing hundreds of billions of yen in lost GDP. At first it had been a shock, but now it was just another aspect of the crisis that people were learning to live with.

  There was a long wait at the subway station as staff checked passengers’ bags and ran metal detectors over their bodies. Security on this line was particularly tight since the two incidents last month. First an unemployed salaryman had run amok with a sword, killing three people and wounding ten others before jumping in front of an oncoming train. Then there was the assassination of a credit analyst from a major bank, shot down during rush hour by a teenage hitman.

  Martine recalled that even just a few years ago Tokyo had been considered one of the safest cities in the world. Nobody said that any more, just as nobody talked about wise, benevolent bureaucrats, selfless business leaders, or obedient wives who thought only of their husbands’ needs. All that had gone—if it had ever really existed. The crisis had exploded the myths a whole society had grown up with, and there was nothing to fill the space.

  The platform was seething with people, and it wasn’t until the third train arrived that Martine managed to squeeze aboard. As usual the train was packed but silent. Martine scanned the tabloid she had bought, aware that several pairs of eyes were scanning her at the same time. Papers like this were not meant for women, let alone foreign women. Their role was to provide stress relief for salarymen, which they did through pornographic stories and mindless abuse of unpopular celebrities. Occasionally, though, they carried snippets of political gossip and scandal that the regular newspapers, all members of the official press clubs, would never touch. About a third of the gossip [39] was fabricated by the editors, another third was disinformation fed to them by the political factions, and another third was more or less accurate. The skill was in knowing which was which.

  The front page was taken up by the Mari-chan story. On the right was a photo of the poor girl staring at the camera with shy, melancholy eyes. On the left was a photo of Jackson, apparently glancing across the page at Mari-chan with a gleeful smile on his face. It had clearly been touched up, the pupils of his eyes made bigger, the lips thicker. There was nothing new in the text, just a couple of unsourced quotations from the police. “He claims he can’t remember anything that happened.” “He’s not normal, sometimes screaming like a beast, sometimes crying like a baby.” Then came some comments from the owner of the shop where Mari-chan used to go to buy candy with her pocket money.

  Predictable stuff, put together by desperate journalists facing a deadline with nothing new to say. Martine turned the page and moved on to the political column. “Cabinet of Crooks About to Fall!” screamed the headline. Underneath was a hazy account of a new plot to oust the prime minister. It wasn’t much of a story. There was always a plot to oust the prime minister. Japan had been through fifteen prime ministers in the past twelve years, and each of them had been removed not by an election, but by the scheming of rival factions. There was just one detail in the story that caught Martine’s attention. “With the international situation threatening Japan’s survival, patriotic young politicians are calling for a radical new approach to national regeneration.” “National Regeneration Songs” was the title of Nozawa’s new CD. That was either an incredible coincidence, or proof that Shimizu’s “delivery system” was doing its work.

  The only other story of interest concerned the murder of the Japanese ambassador to the United States. One night last month Ambassador Ohara had been found shot dead in the parking lot of a hotel in downtown Washington. The official explanation was that he had been mugged on his way to a social engagement, but not many people were taking that at face value. For one thing, he had gone without his chauffeur and bodyguard. For another, what kind of social engagement took place at two o’clock in the morning in a hotel used mainly by transvestite prostitutes?

  The tabloid dealt with the story from a different angle. Apparently the Japanese embassy had been receiving death threats for months from a white supremacist group called the “Defenders of Aryan America.” Just before Ohara’s death, dozens of messages had been posted to internet discussion groups claiming that “a big yellow rat” was about to be “exterminated.” In one of the messages the exact date had been mentioned. So far that was all that was known. The “Defenders of Aryan America” appeared to be a newly [40] formed group, and the sender of the messages had used advanced concealment techniques to cover his trail.

  True or not true? Martine suspected a leak from the Foreign Ministry, attempting to divert attention from the embarrassing details.

  The next story was all about soccer. Martine rapidly turned the page. She hated the game—the noise, the empty passion, the gracelessness and stupidity of everyone involved, from the players themselves to the pathetic characters who wrote about it in the press. At an early age she had decided she would have nothing to do with any man who made a fuss about soccer. Now, though, she found herself involved with a man whose favorite pastime was fishing. At least soccer fans didn’t keep buckets of writhing worms in their bathrooms or proudly present you with a freshly caught trout, expecting you to gut and cook it.

  The thought of Makoto reminded her that she had to get the meeting with Charlie over with as soon as possible. Tonight she had promised to help Makoto’s fifteen-year-old son with his homework. Exams were coming up, and the devoted father was getting concerned. She would never have expected Makoto to take these exams so seriously. But then he took everything about Ichiro seriously. Ichiro was the most important thing in his life. The brewery came second, and there was no third.

  How well did Martine really know Makoto? After eighteen months, she sometimes felt that she hardly knew him at all. For example, he sometimes bought this tabloid to read on the train. When he skimmed through the pages, what went through his mind? He saw the same images as she was looking at now—naked women lying spread-eagled, hog-tied, ready to submit to any humiliation. He saw the pornographic cartoons, the reviews of strip clubs and “soaplands.” Was he amused, or bored, or even secretly titillated? The latter was hard to believe. Makoto was always so restrained, so gentlemanly. But he was a man, and men were very basic. It wasn’t a question of culture. It was the same everywhere, the way they were designed.

  The strange thing about Makoto was that Martine had nothing in common with him, and yet she felt completely relaxed in his presence. Most of her relationships had been with men she had plenty in common with—lawyers, journalists, writers, manipulators of information—and not one had lasted more than two years. There seemed to be a time limit in operation. Two years, and that was it. They went away, or she went away, and they never asked her to come back. They were so insecure, these men, so absurdly keen to impress. And when they saw that she wasn’t impressed, it disturbed them, scared them even. Makoto was different. He wasn’t trying to compete. And he certainly wasn’t scared.

  They had been together for almost two years now, and Martine could [41] sense that a turning point was at hand. She did her best not to think about it. She wasn’t going to say anything. She wasn’t going to do anything. But starting again with someone else was out of the question.

  Peng Yuan sat alone at the window, gazing out at the throbbing heart of Beijing. The changes of the past decade never
ceased to astound him. There were splendid new buildings and flashing neon everywhere, and giant cranes dotted the skyline, indicating that further marvels were under construction. The roads were clogged with expensive cars where once there had been just hordes of bicycles. The shops were filled with the finest goods, the kind that had once been available only to top party officials. And the people, bright-eyed and strong, surged forward with the invisible tide of history.

  For a man of Peng Yuan’s generation, it was a dreamlike vision. Sometimes he thought he would wake up and find himself back in the old days. He shuddered at the thought of the rough blue tunics, the big communal toilets, men and women together, the daily scrabble for meat and soap, the ever-present fear that something dangerous was happening behind your back.

  China had changed, and Peng Yuan had changed too. He looked down at his feet and saw good leather shoes that didn’t blister his heels and cramp his toes. He relished the cool smoothness of the shirt against his neck, the pleasant scent of the imported deodorant he used daily.

  Now he had everything he’d ever wanted. He lived in a luxurious apartment, large enough to accommodate his wife and child and his aging parents from the countryside. He kept five mistresses in small apartments around the city. Most important of all, he had a secure position at the new institute, with a big budget and a group of assistants devoted to his work. And at the old institute, his enemies had long gone, their corruption and incompetence exposed. Peng Yuan had become a man of influence, the kind you didn’t want to cross.

  “Come this way, Comrade. The committee are ready for your report.”

  Peng Yuan followed the svelte shape of the secretary into the familiar room with the long oblong table that gleamed like a sheet of black ice. He had been coming to this room every three months for around ten years now. In that time the committee had grown. Once it had been the old man and his son and some trusted aides. Now there were usually at least twenty of them, including security people, political people, and a few who never gave their names. The old man was still there, though, as bright and alert as ever. If anything, he looked younger each time, his face smoother and chubbier. [42] How did he manage it? According to the rumors, there was a top-secret medical facility that provided him with experimental treatment involving human placenta, the pituitary glands of pre-adolescent boys, and the organs of a giant clam that lived for one hundred and fifty years. But those rumors were put about by rival factions. Peng Yuan’s theory was simpler. The old man from Nanjing was determined to stay alive until he had his revenge on the Japanese for the mayhem they had wreaked all those years ago.