Read Online December 6 by Martin Cruz Smith - Free Book Online Page B

of straw. He always enjoyed the secretly triumphant way salesgirls and switchboard operators twitched to work in their long tight skirts and little French hats. Today, however, everyone just seemed in Harry’s way. Yet he discovered that, at a certain level, he didn’t give a damn. Here he was at the acme of his business career, invited to dine with the Rockefellers and Carnegies of Japan, while Ishigami tracked him down like a crazed assassin. Not to mention Michiko’s suspicions. He needed a ship, he needed a train, he needed a plane and here he was riding the eight ball. And part of him couldn’t care less. It was the part that he didn’t see often. Occasionally it looked out of the mirror and asked, What’s the point of this game?
    Behind the domes of Tokyo Station rose an eight-story imitation of Wall Street, a row of gray financial temples, the great banks of Japan. They stood side by side, the Ionic columns of Mitsubishi, Corinthian columns of Mitsui, tomblike doors of Sumitomo, all leading to the marble stairs and double brass doors of the Chrysanthemum Club with their famous crest of a Fuji mum within a ring. Harry tucked the Datsun behind a row of uniformed chauffeurs in Cadillacs and Packards. He might be almost an hour late, but he took the stairs one at a time, aware of the study he was receiving from bodyguards grouped on the stairs. They were retired detectives and off-duty police, chewing toothpicks or smoking cigarettes. Although the rate of political assassination had slowed, the army had made it clear it would eliminate anyone it suspected of less than white-hot patriotism, and if the atmosphere in Asakusa was frivolous, the air around the palace seemed weighted with dread and expectation. It had taken nothing less than the threat of war for the club to open its doors to Harry Niles, but once in, he found himself guided by a sort of butler dressed like a royal chamberlain. At the sixth floor, Harry was directed from the elevator to a door that was ajar to the sound of murmuring. Too late, he regretted the sake with Taro.
    The worst thing was to look like a schoolboy late for class. Harry forced himself to slowly enter a dining room of a few hundred diners who fell silent at the sight of him. Palpable opprobrium and curiosity took aim, but Harry made a ninety-degree bow of apology and moved toward a head table where a conspicuously empty chair awaited him. Only when he had seated himself, made more apologies and drawn himself up to the table did he dare take in the room itself, its panels of precious woods, black persimmon and pale Yaku cedar, the blaze of chandeliers, the ornamental fires in the fireplaces at each end. The Chrysanthemum Club was the club of international trade, and it was, to some degree, an imitation of a London gentlemen’s club, yet unmistakably Japanese. Chrysanthemums stood in crystal vases, staff in swallow-tailed suits shuffled softly around with coffee and green tea, always bowing when they passed a larger than life-size oil portrait of the club’s royal sponsor, the emperor himself, a stooped, scholarly man regarding a globe with great intensity.
    The diners had fallen on the last of their kippers and eggs. There were close to three hundred guests, Harry thought, not a bad muster considering how many foreigners had fled Tokyo. The Americans were an embassy attaché, a couple of Rotarians, a pair of forlorn managers from Standard Oil of New York and National City Bank, and Al DeGeorge, who never missed a free meal. The British side was led by First Secretary Arnold Beechum, a beefy sportsman with small eyes stuck on a dome of freckles. A blockade-runner must have come in, because the Germans were well represented. Naval officers in roguishly handsome sweaters and dress blues shared a table with beaming executives from Siemens and I. G. Farben who were already anticipating a vigorous postwar economy. Willie Staub had been seated at a second table with Ambassador Ott, who had