The Heat of the Sun

crowd.
    Horns bellowed, loud as the shouts and screams. Then, blasting through the throng, came a long, dark sedan, like a president’s car, sweeping one hapless fellow on to its hood.
    The Lincoln! I had no way to reach it.
    Soldiers had appeared, mounted on horses. One struck at rioters with a club. One fired shots. My rickshaw-puller lost his grip on his vehicle and was carried away from me, sinking under the
human tide. I was flung against one side of the chair, then the other, then out into the street. The rickshaw overturned and covered me like a shell.
    I scrambled out. I struggled to my feet. I was pushed down again; I forced myself forward. Where was my ashplant? A camera flared, burning my eyes. I lost my footing. Shots rang out again.
Rearing over me, whinnying, was a horse. The rider, a Japanese officer.
    I would be crushed. Horse and rider blocked the sun, then veered away, and I whispered (for, after all, I knew that rider, that officer from the bar): ‘Isamu... Isamu.’
    Another figure fought its way towards me. Le Vol! He wrenched me upright. We plunged through a door. The chaos was muffled; leather protected us, brown and slithery as polished brogues.
    ‘Pleasant afternoon, Mr Sharpless?’ said Clifford T. Arnhem.
    I lay, breathing heavily, in Le Vol’s arms. His camera, big and boxy, jutted at my spine, and through a glass partition I studied the back of Goro’s neck: like the upholstery, it was
leathery, brown.
    ‘Communists.’ Mr Arnhem bit the end from a cigar. ‘Communist agitators. What do the fools want? Don’t they understand this country is on the brink of
greatness?’
    To my surprise, Le Vol made no protest at this, only extricating his limbs from mine, winding down the window, and taking more shots. The riot had subsided, leaving a street strewn with debris.
Goro drove on slowly. We passed corpses and overturned vehicles, one on fire.
    Glumly, I thought of my missing ashplant.
    ‘This is just the beginning,’ Le Vol was saying. ‘Mr Arnhem’s arranged an important interview for us tomorrow, Sharpless. Big wheel in the government, this fellow. No
drunken philandering tonight, eh? This is where you come into your own.’ He tapped the window. ‘Who better to explain all this? And China too! The inside story, from their point of
view.’
    ‘Great Temples of Kyushu, indeed!’ I said.
    ‘I love temples,’ said Le Vol. ‘Without them, would the Geographic have stumped up for our tickets? Don’t worry, I’m shooting temples too. Anyway,’ he
went on, ‘this fellow you’re interviewing, he’s a Jap nobleman. Years ago he was a rootless playboy, living in the West. Back home, he’s the fiercest patriot. What did you
say his name was again, sir?’
    ‘Yamadori,’ replied Mr Arnhem. ‘Prince Yamadori.’
    ‘This isn’t like Yamadori,’ I said.
    ‘Yamadori isn’t like Yamadori – politics, Sharpless!’
    ‘Since when does a playboy get up at five?’
    We trudged through early-morning streets. Gravely, I placed my ashplant ahead of me. Last night before dinner, Goro had appeared in my room, bowed, and presented me with the gnarled black stick,
held horizontally across his upturned palms; he was a servant, I realized, of exceptional powers.
    Deserted in the dawn, the broad thoroughfare with its trolley-car tracks might have been anywhere. Only the hand-painted signs above the stores suggested Japan. We were a few streets back from
Dejima Wharf, somewhere between Chinatown and Nagasaki Station.
    I asked Le Vol the name of Yamadori’s hotel.
    ‘City’s finest. Built over thermal springs.’
    We crossed the road. Between stores selling fish or rice or radios, an imposing façade stretched the length of a block. Festooned with statues and Doric columns, it looked like an
Austro-Hungarian palace, but for the sense that it was all lathe and paste: Vienna via Hollywood. As Le Vol led me through a pair of mighty doors, young men in bow ties bent low, and a desk clerk,
proud in pince-nez, gestured to an ugly ottoman.
    ‘We’re expected,’ Le Vol said, impressed.
    The young men resumed their tasks: one, polishing a brass plate by the elevators; one, wiping with a damp cloth each leaf of an aspidistra; one, fluffing cushions on sofas and chairs. The desk
clerk, pince-nez glinting, scratched solemnly in a ledger, as if recording deeds of conquest in imperial annals.
    Le Vol was nervous, his hands twisting as he asked me, in a murmur, whether I had my