It was the latter sort of eleven A.M. when the man came. And a monumentally unbusy one at that. The first half of September had been insane, and then work fell flat off. Three of us took a month-delayed summer vacation, but even so the rest of the crew had been consigned to an agenda of pencil sharpening and other exciting tasks. My partner himself had stepped out to the bank to get a money draft, while someone else had repaired to the neighboring audio-equipment showroom to listen to new record releases. The secretary was left to answer the telephone as she thumbed through the “Autumn Hairstyles” pages of a women’s magazine.
The man opened the door to the office without a sound, and he closed it without a sound. Not that he made any conscious effort to move quietly. It was second nature to him. So much so the secretary had no awareness whatsoever of him. The man was all the way to her desk and peering down at her before she noticed him.
“There is a matter I would like to take up with your employer,” said the man. He spoke as if running a white-gloved hand over a tabletop.
What could have happened to bring him here? She looked up at the man. His eyes were too piercing for a business client, his attire too fastidious for a tax inspector, his air too intellectual for a policeman. Yet she could think of nothing else he could be. This man, a refined piece of bad news now hovering over her, had materialized out of nowhere.
“I’m afraid he’s stepped out at the moment,” she said, slapping her magazine shut. “He said he’d be back in another thirty minutes.”
“I’ll wait,” pronounced the man without a moment’s hesitation. A foregone conclusion, it seemed.
She wondered whether to ask his name. She decided against it and simply conducted him to the reception area. The man took a seat on the sky-blue sofa, crossed his legs, peered up at the electric wall clock directly before him, and froze in position. He moved not an iota. When she brought him a glass of barley tea a bit later, he was in the exact same pose.
“Right where you’re sitting now,” my partner said. “He sat there staring at the clock in the same position for a full thirty minutes.”
I looked at the sofa where I was sitting, then looked up at the wall clock, then I looked back at my partner.
Despite the unusually hot late-September weather outside, the man was rather formally dressed. Impeccably. His white shirt cuffs protruded precisely two-thirds of an inch from the sleeves of his well-tailored gray suit. His subtly toned striped tie, accented with a hint of asymmetry, was positioned with the utmost care. His black shoes were buffed to a fine gloss.
Mid-thirties to forty in age, five foot ten plus in height, trimmed of every last ounce of fat, slender hands without telltale wrinkles. His long fingers suggested nothing so much as a troop of animals that had retained deep primal memories despite long years of training and control. His fingernails were meticulously manicured, a clean, perfect arc at the end of each fingertip. Truly beautiful hands, if somehow unsettling. They bespoke a high degree of specialization in some rarefied field—but what that field might be was anyone’s guess.
His face was even harder to figure. It was a straightforward face, but expressionless, a blank slate. His nose and eyes were angular, as if scored with a paper knife in afterthought, his lips bloodless and thin. He was lightly tanned, though clearly not from the pleasures of the beach or the tennis court. That tan could only have been the result of some unknown sun shining in some unknown sky.
The thirty minutes passed very slowly. Coldly, solidly, rigidly. By the time my partner returned from the bank, the atmosphere in the room had grown noticeably heavy. You might even say everything in the room seemed practically nailed down to the floor.
“Of course, it only seemed that way,” said my partner.
“Of course,” said I.
The lone secretary was worn out from nervousness. Bewildered, my partner went over to the reception area and introduced himself as the manager. Only then did the man unfreeze, whereupon he pulled a thin cigarette out of his pocket, lit it, and with a pained expression blew out a puff of smoke. The atmosphere lightened ever so slightly.
“We don’t have much time, so let’s keep this short,” said the man in a hush. Out of his wallet he flicked a name card sharp enough to cut your fingers with and placed it on the table. The name card was hermetically laminated, unnaturally white, and printed with tiny, intensely black type. No title or affiliation, no address, no telephone number. Only the name. It was enough to hurt your eyes just looking at it. My partner turned it over, saw that the back was entirely blank, glanced at the front side again, then looked back at the man.
“You are familiar with the party’s name, I trust?” said the man.
“I am.”
The man advanced his chin a few hundredths of an inch and nodded curtly. His line of vision did not shift in the least. “Burn it, please.”
“Burn it?” My partner stared dumbfounded at the man.
“That name card. Burn it. Now,” the man spoke sharply.
My partner hurriedly picked up the tabletop lighter and set fire to a corner of the name card. He held it by its edge until half of it had burned, then laid it in the large crystal ashtray. The two of them watched it as it burned. By the time the name card was white ash, the room was shrouded in a ponderous silence such as follows a massacre.
“I come here bearing the total authority of that party,” said the man, breaking the silence at length. “Which is to say that everything I say from this point on represents that party’s total volition and wishes.”
“Wishes …,” mouthed my partner.
“‘To wish,’ an elegant word to express a basic position toward a specified objective. Of course,” said the man, “there are other methods of expressing the same thing. You understand, do you not?”
My partner did a quick mental translation. “I understand.”
“Notwithstanding, this is neither a conceptual issue nor a political deal; this is strictly a business proposition.” Bizness, the man enunciated, which marked him as a foreign-born Japanese; most Japanese Japanese will say bijiness.
“You are a biznessman and I am a biznessman,” he went on. “Realistically, there should be nothing between us to discuss but bizness. Let us leave discussions regarding the unrealistic to others. Are we agreed?”
“Certainly,” said my partner.
“It is rather our role to take what unrealistic factors that exist and to work them into a more sophisticated form that might be grounded in the grand scheme of reality. The doings of men run to unrealities. Why is that?” the man asked, rhetorically. He fingered the green stone ring on the middle finger of his left hand. “Because it appears simpler. Added to which, there are circumstances whereby unreality contrives to create an impression that overwhelms reality. Nevertheless, business has no place in the world of unreality. In other words,” the man said, continuing to finger his ring, “we are a breed whose very existence consists in the rechanneling of difficulties. Therefore, should anything I say from this point forward demand difficult labors or decisions of you, I ask your forbearance. Such is the nature of things.”
My partner was utterly lost now, but he nodded anyway.
“Very well then, I shall state the wishes of the party concerned. Number one, it is wished that you cease publication of the public relations bulletin you produce for the ‘P’ Life Insurance Company.”
“But—”
“Number two,” the man interrupted, “it is wished that an interview be arranged with the person actually responsible for the production of this page.”
Pulling a white envelope from his pocket, the man extracted a sheet of paper neatly folded in quarters and handed it to my partner. My partner unfolded the sheet of paper. Sure enough, it was a copy of a photograph for a P.R. bulletin that our office had done. An ordinary photograph of an idyllic Hokkaido landscape—clouds and mountains and grassy pastures and sheep, superimposed with lines of an undistinguished pastoral verse. That was all.
“W
hile our wishes are herewith two, as regards the first of these, it is less a wish than a fait accompli. To be more precise, a decision has already been reached in accordance with our wishes. Should you have any doubts, please call the public relations head of the life insurance company.”
“I see,” said my partner.
“Nonetheless, we can easily imagine that for a company the size of yours, damages incurred by inconvenience such as this could be sizable. Fortunately, we are in a position—as you are no doubt aware—to wield no small degree of influence in this arena. Therefore, upon compliance with our second wish, granted that the person responsible gives us a report complete to our satisfaction, we are prepared to recompense you fully for your loss. Probably more than recompense, I would think.”
Silence prevailed.
“If you should fail to comply with our wishes,” said the man, “you will have no occupation in this or any other field, and henceforth, the world will hold no place for you, ever.”
Again silence.
“Have you any questions?”
“So, uh, it’s the photo that’s the problem?” my partner stammered.
“Yes,” said the man, choosing his words carefully, as if sorting through options on an outstretched palm. “Such is indeed the case. However, I am not at liberty to discuss the matter any further with you. I have not that authority.”
“I will phone the man you want to see. He should be here by three o’clock,” said my partner.
“Excellent,” said the man, glancing at his wristwatch. “I shall send a car here for him at four o’clock. Now this is important: you must speak of this to absolutely no one. Is that understood?”
Whereupon the two of them parted in a most biznesslike manner.
“The Boss”
“That’s the size of it,” said my partner.
“I can’t make head or tail of it,” said I, an unlit cigarette at my lips. “First of all, I have no idea who the person on the name card is. Second, I can’t imagine why he would get so upset about a photo of sheep. And last, I don’t understand how he could put a stop to a publication of ours.”
“The person on the name card is a major right-wing figure. His name and face are almost never publicized, so he’s not widely known, but you’re probably the only one in our line of work who doesn’t know who he is.”
“Dumb to the world, that’s me,” was my feeble excuse.
“He’s right wing, but not the so-called right wing. Or you could say, not even right wing.”
“You’re losing me.”
“The truth of the matter is no one knows what he thinks. He has no writings to his name, doesn’t make speeches in public. He never gives interviews, is never photographed. It’s not even certain he’s alive. Five years back, a magazine reporter got a scoop implicating him in some shady investment deals, but the story never saw the light of day.”
“Been doing your homework, I see.”
“I knew the reporter personally.”
I picked up the lighter and lit my cigarette. “What’s the reporter doing nowadays?”
“Got transferred to administration. Files forms morning to night. Mass media is a surprising small world, and he made a fine example. Like a skull posted at the entrance to an African village.”
“Gotcha,” I said.
“But we do know something of the man’s prewar background. He was born in Hokkaido in 1913, came to Tokyo after graduating from normal school, changed jobs repeatedly, and drifted to the right. He was imprisoned once, I believe. Upon his release, he went to Manchuria, where he fell in with the upper echelons of the Kanto Army and became party to some plot. Not much is known about the organization behind it, but he suddenly becomes a mysterious figure around this time. Rumor has it he was dealing in drugs, which may well have been true. He plundered his way all over the Chinese mainland only to board a destroyer two weeks before the Soviet troops arrived, beating a quick retreat back to Japan. In his booty—a huge, nearly inexhaustible stash of gold and silver.”
“He had, you might say, uncanny timing,” I threw in.
“For a fact. Our man had a real knack for seizing the moment. He’d learned instinctively when to go on the attack and when to withdraw. Plus his eyes were always trained on the right thing. Even when he was incarcerated by the Occupation forces as a Class A war criminal, his trial was cut short midway and never reconvened. For reasons of health, ostensibly, but the facts get a little fuzzy here. More likely, a deal was worked out with the Americans, what with MacArthur looking toward the Chinese mainland.”
My partner pulled another ballpoint pen out of the pencil tray and twirled it between his fingers.
“When he was released from Sugamo Prison, he took half his stash and put an entire faction of the conservative party on his payroll. The other half went to buying up the advertising industry. Note that this was back when advertising wasn’t anything but cheap handbills.”
“The gift of foresight. But weren’t there claims about concealment of funds?”
“Nothing of the kind. Remember he’d bought out an entire faction of the conservatives.”
“Ah.”
“In any case, he used his money to corner the market on both politics and advertising, setting up a power base that thrives to this day. He never surfaces because he doesn’t need to. So long as he keeps a grip on certain centers of political authority and on the core sectors of the public relations industry, there’s nothing he can’t do. Do you have any idea what it means to hold down advertising?”
“I guess not.”
“To hold down advertising is to have nearly the entire publishing and broadcasting industries under your thumb. There’s not a branch of publishing or broadcasting that doesn’t depend in some way on advertising. It’d be like an aquarium without water. Why, ninety-five percent of the information that reaches you has already been preselected and paid for.”
“There’s something I still don’t understand,” I said. “I follow you as far as our man having the information industries in the palm of his hand, but how does that extend to his putting the clamps on a life insurance company’s P.R. bulletin? That didn’t even pass through the hands of any major rep. That was a direct contract.”
My partner coughed, then drank down the last of his now-lukewarm barley tea. “Stocks. They’re his principal source of revenue. Manipulating the market, forcing hands, takeovers, the works. His newsboys gather all the necessary information, and he picks and chooses according to his fancy. Only a minuscule slice of what really goes on ever hits the wires. All the other news is set aside for the Boss. No overt pressuring, of course, but things do get awfully close to blackmail at times. And if blackmail doesn’t work, he sends word around to his politicos to go prime a few pumps.”
“Every company’s got to have a weak point or two.”
“Every company’s got a secret it doesn’t want exploded right in the middle of the annual shareholders’ meeting. In most cases, they’ll listen to the word handed down. In sum, the Boss sits squarely on top of a trilateral power base of politicians, information services, and the stock market. So as you can probably surmise, it’s as easy for him to rub out one P.R. bulletin and put us out of business as it is to shell a hardboiled egg.”
“Hmm, then tell me why should such a major fixture get so heated up over one landscape photo of Hokkaido?”
“A very good question,” said my partner. “I was just about to ask you the same thing.”
I could only shrug.
“So tell me, how did you know all this had to do with sheep?” my partner asked. “Is something funny going on behind my back?”
“Nameless elves out in the woods have been busy at the spinning wheel.”
“Care to run that by me again?”
“Sixth sense.”
“Give me a break,” my partner sighed. “Well anyway, let me fill you in on the latest two developments. Just to snoop around a bit, I phoned that ex-reporter at the monthly. Word h
as it that the Boss is down for the count with a brain hemorrhage, but it hasn’t been officially confirmed yet. The other piece of news concerns the man who came in here. He turns out to be the Boss’s personal secretary, his number two, the guy he entrusts with actually running the organization. Japanese-American, Stanford graduate, been working for the Boss for twelve years. He’s something of a mystery man himself. Undoubtedly got a head on his shoulders. That’s about all I could find out.”
“Thanks,” I said, meaning it.
“You’re welcome,” said my partner without even glancing my way.
Any way you looked at it, when my partner wasn’t drinking he was far more of a regular guy than I was. He was more innocent and more considerate and more organized in his thinking. But sooner or later he’d get himself drunk. Not a comforting thought: that my betters could fall to pieces before me.
As soon as my partner left the room, I pulled the whiskey bottle out of his drawer and had myself a drink.
Counting Sheep
We can, if we so choose, wander aimlessly over the continent of the arbitrary. Rootless as some winged seed blown about on a serendipitous spring breeze.
Nonetheless, we can in the same breath deny that there is any such thing as coincidence. What’s done is done, what’s yet to be is clearly yet to be, and so on. In other words, sandwiched as we are between the “everything” that is behind us and the “zero” beyond us, ours is an ephemeral existence in which there is neither coincidence nor possibility.
In actual practice, however, distinctions between the two interpretations amount to precious little. A state of affairs (as with most face-offs between interpretations) not unlike calling the same food by two different names.
So much for metaphors.
My placing a photo of sheep in the life insurance company’s P.R. bulletin can be seen from one perspective, (a) as coincidence, but from another perspective, (b) as no coincidence at all.
(a) I was looking for a suitable photo for the P.R. bulletin. By coincidence, I happened to have a photo of sheep in my drawer. I decided to use that photograph. An innocent photograph in an innocent world.