'Good,' de Gier said. 'They giggle when I bump my head. It'll serve them right.'
'Right,' the commissaris said, remembering the eagle and flapping his arms again, 'and Mr. Johnson can arrange to have the ten kilos of heroin picked up in Hong Kong and shipped to Holland and taken to Germany, and then he can arrest everybody in sight, and we'll help him. Mr. Johnson will be busy. He likes to be busy. He told me so in Amsterdam.'
There was a knock on the door, and Dorin came in. The commissaris dropped his arm. 'You explain it all to Dorin, sergeant. I am going to telephone. And while I am at it, I'll ask Mr. Johnson to get Miss Andrews her passport, so that she can leave my niece's house and go to the States. We are getting to the end of it all. Pity. I liked it here.'
While the commissaris was telephoning, Dorin came in and de Gier ordered coffee. Dorin had seen Mr. Woo leave the inn.
'A Chinese,' Dorin said. 'Now what would a Chinese want of us? A Communist Chinese?'
'Why Communist?'
'He looked sad, didn't he?' Dorin said. 'Communists always look sad, except in the movies. I have seen then-propaganda films, and they sing and dance while they are picking carrots or cabbages, or starting up a water pump or building a schoolhouse. But when I see them here they look sad, in and out of uniform.'
'Maybe he looked sad because he was selling heroin,' de Gier said. 'Heroin is dangerous to the health.'
'Yes. It knocks the shit out of the addicts.'
'No, it blocks it. The addicts I have come across always had constipation. Selling heroin is a sad business.'
Dorin shrugged. 'They enjoy selling it. It gives them hard currency and they think it will destroy us. Maybe it will. My little brother is hooked on it, in Tokyo. He has to steal fifty dollars' worth a day, maybe more. He is in and out of jail and his teeth are falling out and he isn't nineteen yet. Good Chinese heroin, pure, grade A. I got him some once, thinking it might give him a break from jail, but his friends robbed him and knocked him around so badly that he had to go to the hospital to get stitched up. I think I'll catch Mr. Woo myself, when the game is up.'
'You believe in revenge?' de Gier asked, but Dorin was leaving the room, his face set and his arms swinging.
\\ 21 /////
There wasn't much to do for the next few days and the commissaris and the sergeant wandered about while the CIA was busy. The commissaris had found a public bathhouse where he soaked in a communal bath the size of an Olympic swimming pool, and de Gier visited the girl he had met in the yakusa bar. He had gone to see her in the hospital, the day after she was admitted. She hadn't said much, she was obviously exhausted and possibly also drugged, but she seemed pleased with the magazines and flowers he had brought. When he came again she was ready to go home and he got her a taxi and saw her to the door of her apartment. She asked him to come back the next day and have dinner with her, but she still looked pale and sickly when he arrived and weakly excused herself. She hadn't been able to do any shopping, perhaps they could go out for dinner? He was taking off his shoes at the entrance and she knelt down to help him untie his laces.
'Never mind,' he said, and touched her hair. 'I am not hungry. I won't stay long and you can have an early night.'
But she smiled and pushed him into the room. 'Sit down, please, I have some tea, green tea which my aunt sent me from the country. It has been waiting for a special occasion.'
He watched her make the tea, admiring the exact control of her movements, and sipped the hot foaming brew carefully. Her miniskirt and tight blouse contrasted with the quietness of the room. A lush fruit on a simple bamboo tray. He smiled at the thought and she laughed at him and bent down and nibbled his ear. His hand strayed over her breasts but she pushed it away gently.
'Later,' she said. 'First you have to see some photographs. It's a Japanese custom; you have to know who you are sleeping with.' She went into the bedroom and came back carrying two albums, holding them away from her body on outstretched arms. He thought they might be porno pictures, but the snapshots showed family groups. He pretended to be interested as she explained the pictures. Father and mother. Uncle so-and-so in front of his house, a famous house which had been a cookie store at one time. The emperor had visited it, the emperor Meiji who had opened the country to the foreigners.
A soup vendor, rattling his bamboo sticks in the street, provided an excuse to get away, and he went out and brought back a paper container, and they sat opposite each other in the four-mat room, fishing noodles and bits of meat out of the hot broth.
'The musicians who play in my bar came to see me just before the doctor said I could go home,' she said, feeding him a choice bit of meat with her chopsticks. 'They said you had been to their old temple and that you played the flute.' De Gier nodded.
'How did you find their temple?'
'I asked the doorman at the Golden Dragon.'
'They said you were crazy, just like them.'
'Mother there walks an eagle,' de Gier said, with his mouth full.
'Pardon?' He thought about explaining the eagle. 'Eagle?'
'Never mind. A bird, sometimes it walks. Yes, I played the flute with them.'
'Why did you come to the bar that evening?'
'You know,' he said.
But she shook her head. 'I didn't know, they only told me later.'
'Who told you? And what did they tell you?'
'Somebody, you wouldn't know him, he is in charge of the bar. He told me that you are a member of an organization which interferes with ours.'
'So why don't you kill me?' de Gier asked pleasantly, looking at the small refrigerator in the rear of the room. She turned around to see what he was looking at.
'Are you hungry? I have some tofu in there; do you like tofu? It's beancurd, very tasty. I can put some in this soup, I have other things too, but they are all Japanese too, and I don't know whether you like them.'
'Anything,' de Gier said, 'except sour plums. They gave me some at the inn yesterday. Nice-looking little plums, but I thought my face would fall off when I tried one. Very sour, like a thousand lemons.'
She giggled. 'No, there are no plums in the icebox. I'll get the tofu? Yes?'
'Please. But you didn't answer my question. Why don't you kill me?'
'Me?'
'You. The yakusa.'
She was searching about in the icebox, and he couldn't see her face, but her tone of voice was normal. 'Maybe we don't want to kill you. You haven't been to Kobe yet, have you?'
'No.'
'Don't go there.'
'I'll go where I want to go,' de Gier said. 'The yakusa tried to frighten me. It was well done. They also tried to bother my boss. I didn't like that; he is an old man, and he has rheumatism.'
'You weren't frightened,' Yuiko said. 'You played your flute, I was told. I would have liked to hear that.'
De Gier took out his flute and played the tune he had heard in the little theater. The flute's high notes wavered and broke, and the room suddenly seemed very cold.
'Bad,' she said. 'Evil. Is that what they played to you? You repeated it, didn't you?'
De Gier had picked up the photo album again and flipped through the pages. Each snapshot looked formal: serious citizens, lined up in balanced patterns, like chessmen on a checkered board, staring noncommittally at the lens. The vacation pictures were a little more relaxed. The fathers and mothers, uncles and aunts and the few children had shed their neat suits and kimonos and starched dresses and were now wearing swimsuits and jeans and colorful shirts. Some of the girls were shown in bikinis, and there were a few portraits of Yuiko herself accentuating her large firm breasts and slim straight legs. She had been placed against suitable backgrounds-a bush
