Red Ice

Like many Japanese women, she giggled into her hands and had a voice that made you think of wind chimes. But there was a pervasive impishness that was uniquely hers. She knew when to bubble with enthusiasm, and still rarer, when to be quiet. Sensitive and intuitive, she could read my moods like a newspaper. She was proud of her heritage and could be damned patronizing in her answers to my foreigner’s questions. Aroused, she was the original Far Eastern spitfire.

Keiko was well known throughout Yokohama as the proprietress of the best restaurant and sushi bar on the waterfront. It was an enterprise she administered with the cool efficiency of a head accountant and the firm hand of a boss stevedore. Somewhere, someone long ago had started the rumor that Japanese women were submissive and fainthearted. Perhaps that was true, but I knew that in her case beneath that elfin manner and soft-spoken exterior lay a spine of 440-carbon steel. Stories about her evictions of unruly customers abounded. What she saw in me I never quite knew, possibly a similar inflexibility in matters of duty.

My delightful bathtub rested in an apartment above that restaurant, in a weathered-wood, quaintly Japanese building she owned. The apartment provided a refuge from the rigors of salvage diving—and the increasing number of free-lance military operations I was being called upon to engineer on a cash basis.

So here we both basked in the big boxlike tub, or ofuro. It had been a long day diving the ice-water salons of the Kamakura Mara, and every fiber of my neck and shoulders ached. A cool plum wine, an accommodating landlady, and a hot bath were surely the sinful answer to a broken-down frogman’s dreams.

Keiko slid lower into the tub until only her beautiful long-lashed almond eyes were above the steaming water. Then, stealthily she kipped from sitting to prone as her eyes glided closer to mine. With an abrupt splash she bussed me and laid her cheek against my shoulder.

“Koibito, you have been captured by famed Japanese sneak attack,” she giggled. “You must think of suitable ransom. There will be no rescue. MacArthur-sama is not around to rally the forces of right. Old Imperial Navel is gone.”

“Have pity, you slippery Ama wench, on an impoverished sailor stranded on these beaches with no hope of ransom. Let’s start with a proposition well-grounded in history. Will unconditional surrender do?” Holding my plum wine unsteadily, I gauged the appropriateness of counterattack.

“What hope do I have? I bow to your superior number. Keiko, you are perfidious, semi-inscrutable, and a peril-like credit to Nippon and…”

“So na no? Is that so? Inscru-table? What means this word ‘inscrutable’? I have not heard this word before.”

“…the gal with whom I most enjoy discussing global strategy, unconventional tactics, and matters of state with. Inscrutable? Oh, mysterious… er… hard to fathom, hard to really know.”

“Ah, I understan’. Yes, I am mysterious sometimes, ne? But it is you who is inscrutable, true?”

She reached over and gently dabbed her wet fingertips along the zipperlike scar on my right shoulder. “Sometimes I wish I could unzip one of these and get inside to see the true Quillon Frazer. Sometimes I see you thinkin’ so hard but you never let me know what you’re thinkin’….”

One of the girls from the restaurant called through the door to Keiko. A messenger had left a note for me downstairs.

Keiko looked at me with an appealing tilt to her head, her round breasts bobbing faintly with the motion of the water. Unconditional surrender. Yes, there is something to be said for unconditional surrender—to a magnanimous victor, accepted ever so gracefully.

The next November morning was crisp and clear. As I shaved, I studied the man beyond the mirror.

Inscrutable might have been an overplayed word because his appearance itself told too much. In his late thirties, the man was trim, hardy, with a relaxed but distinctly military bearing, and weary eyes. His high, broad cheekbones, those of a boxer or wrestler, were impassive, though his jet black hair hinted at Celtic turbulence. The broken nose told of a certain self-destructiveness. Only a faint glimmer deep behind the eyes revealed a wry and sanity-saving sense of humor. Frozen in a snapshot, he might have been an athletic stockbroker, a lobsterman, or a tennis pro. In the motion of real life, an erectness and slight rigidity of carriage betrayed a more adversarial calling.