'The information is useless by itself. You agree?'
'Yes.'
'Then there is no risk for you to write down the same.'
'It's true.'
'Then we will exchange cards. Agreed?'
'I agree.'
'Very well.' Goto Dengo starts writing. Randy takes a pen from his pocket and jots down the seconds and tenths of a second: latitude 35.2, longitude 59.0. When he's done, Goto Dengo's looking at him expectantly. Randy holds out his card, numbers facing down, and Goto Dengo holds out his. They exchange them with the small bow that is obligatory around here. Randy cups Goto-sama's card in his palm and turns it into the light. It says
35.2/59.0
No one says anything for ten minutes. It's a measure of how stunned Randy is that he doesn't realize, for a long time, that Goto Dengo is just as stunned as he is. Avi and Furudenendu are the only people at the table whose minds are still functioning, and they spend the whole time looking at each other uncertainly, neither one really understanding what's going on.
Finally Avi says something that Randy doesn't hear. He nudges Randy firmly and says it again: 'I'm going to the lavatory.'
Randy watches him go, counts to ten, and says, 'Excuse me.' He follows Avi to the men's washroom: black polished stone, thick white towels, Avi standing there with his arms crossed. 'He knows,' Randy says.
'I don't believe it.'
Randy shrugs. 'What can I say? He knows.'
'If he knows, everyone knows. Our security broke down somewhere along the line.'
'Everyone doesn't know,' Randy says. 'If everyone knew, all hell would be breaking loose down there, and Enoch would have gotten word to us.
'Then how can he know?'
'Avi,' Randy says,
'You have a better theory?'
'I thought all the people who buried the stuff were killed.'
'It's fair to say that he's a survivor. Wouldn't you agree?'
Ten minutes later they return to the table. Goto Dengo has allowed the restaurant staff back into the room, and dessert menus have been brought out. Weirdly, the old man has gone back into polite chitchat mode, and Randy gradually figures out that he's trying to work out how the hell Randy knows what he knows. Randy mentions, offhandedly, that his grandfather was a cryptanalyst in Manila in 1945. Goto Dengo sighs, visibly, with relief and cheers up somewhat. Then it's more completely meaningless chatter until postprandial coffee has been served, at which point the patriarch leans forward to make a point. 'Before you sip-look!'
Randy and Avi look into their cups. A weirdly glittering layer of scum is floating atop their coffee.
'It is gold,' Furudenendu explains. Both of the Gotos laugh. 'During the eighties, when Nippon had so much money, this was the fashion: coffee with gold dust. Now it is out of fashion. Too ostentatious. But you go ahead and drink.'
Randy and Avi do-a bit nervously. The gold dust coats their tongues, then washes away down their throats.
'Tell me what you think,' Goto Dengo demands.
'It's stupid,' Randy says.
'Yes.' Goto Dengo nods solemnly. 'It is stupid. So tell me, then: why do you want to dig up more of it?'
'We're businessmen,' Avi says. 'We make money. Gold is worth money.'
'Gold is the corpse of value,' says Goto Dengo.
'I don't understand.'
'If you want to understand, look out the window!' says the patriarch, and sweeps his cane around in an arc that encompasses half of Tokyo. 'Fifty years ago, it was flames. Now it is lights! Do you understand? The leaders of Nippon were stupid. They took all of the gold out of Tokyo and buried it in holes in the ground in the Philippines! Because they thought that The General would march into Tokyo and steal it. But The General didn't care about the gold. He understood that the real gold is here-' he points to his head '-in the intelligence of the people, and here-' he holds out his hands '-in the work that they do. Getting rid of our gold was the best thing that ever happened to Nippon. It made us rich. Receiving that gold was the worst thing that happened to the Philippines. It made them poor.'
'Then let's get it out of the Philippines,' Avi says, 'so that they too can have the opportunity to become rich.'
'Ah! Now you are making sense,' says Goto Dengo. 'You are going to take the gold out and dump it into the ocean, then?'
'No,' Avi says, with a nervous chuckle.
Goto Dengo raises his eyebrows. 'Oh. So, you wish to become rich as part of the bargain?'
At this point Avi does something that Randy's never seen him do, or even come close to doing, before: he gets pissed off. He doesn't flip the table over, or raise his voice. But his face turns red, the muscles of his head bulge as he clenches his teeth together, and he breathes heavily through his nose for a while. The Gotos both seem to be rather impressed by this, and so no one says anything for a long time, giving Avi a chance to regain his cool. It seems as though Avi can't bring words forth, and so finally he takes his wallet out of his pocket and flips through it until he's found a black-and-white photograph, which he pulls from its transparent sleeve and hands across to Goto Dengo. It's a family portrait: father, mother, four kids, all with a mid-twentieth century, Middle-European look about them. 'My great-uncle,' Avi says, 'and his family. Warsaw, 1937. His teeth are down in that hole. You buried my uncle's teeth!'
Goto Dengo looks up into Avi's eyes, neither angry nor defensive. Just sad. And this seems to have an effect on Avi, who softens, exhales finally, breaks eye contact.
'I know you probably had no choice,' Avi says. 'But that's what you did. I never knew him, or any of my other relatives who died in the Shoah. But I would gladly dump every ounce of that gold into the ocean, just to give them a decent burial. That's what I'll do if you make it a condition. But what I was really planning on doing was using it to make sure that nothing of the kind ever happens again.'
Goto Dengo ponders this for a while, looking stonefaced out over the lights of Tokyo. Then he unhooks his cane from the edge of the table, jams it into the floor, and shoves himself to his feet. He turns towards Avi, straightens his posture, and then bows. It's the deepest bow Randy's ever seen. Eventually he straightens up and retakes his seat.
The tension has been broken. Everyone's relaxed, not to say exhausted.
'General Wing is very close to finding Golgotha,' Randy says, after a decent interval has ticked by. 'It's him or us.'
'It's us, then,' says Goto Dengo.
Chapter 96 R.I.P.
The clamor of the Marines' rifles echoes through the cemetery, the sharp reports pinging from tombstone to tombstone like pachinko balls. Goto Dengo bends down and thrusts his hand into a pile of loose dirt. It feels good. He scoops up a handful of the stuff, it trickles out from between his fingers and trails down the legs of his crisp new United States Army uniform, getting caught in the trouser cuffs. He steps to the sharp brink of the grave and pours the earth from his hand onto the General Issue coffin containing Bobby Shaftoe. He crosses himself, staring at the coffin lid stained with dirt, and then, with some effort, lifts his head up again, towards the sunlit world of things that live. Other than a few blades of grass and some mosquitoes, the first living thing that he sees is a pair of feet in sandals made from old jeep tires, supporting a white man wrapped in a shapeless brown garment of
