The Heat of the Sun

don’t understand,’ said Clifford T. Arnhem, ‘is what you thought you were playing at.’
    ‘Why should we be playing at anything? The interview took a peculiar turn – a bath, for Christ’s sake!’
    ‘The prince is a busy man. He bathes at odd times.’
    ‘He wouldn’t let Le Vol in with us.’
    ‘So your friend insisted? He’s disappointed me, Mr Sharpless. I thought he had some sense.’
    We were in the Lincoln; Goro drove, aimlessly it seemed, about the city. It was late afternoon. Until then I had spent all my time on the east side of the harbour. Now we had reached the west,
and I wished we could stop; at every rut in the road, at every pothole, pain shot up my injured leg and throbbed between my thighs. My testicles, my balls , would be black for weeks.
    Rain shivered down, pattering the windows. Shabby stores, a succession of holes in walls, reeled slowly by; yellowish faces loomed in at us through the glass. There was another pothole, a nasty
one.
    ‘Goro, drive carefully!’ I rapped the dividing glass, and Mr Arnhem glowered; I was too ashamed to tell him what Yamadori had done to me. ‘But Le Vol,’ I urged.
‘Surely they’ll let Le Vol go?’
    Mr Arnhem, summoned by Yamadori, had extricated me with some difficulty from military prison; Le Vol was another matter. ‘What do you think would happen if a Jap photographer muscled his
way in to take snaps of, say, Senator Pinkerton in his bath? The crime is comparable. Your friend has grievously insulted Prince Yamadori.’
    ‘And Yamadori,’ I cried, ‘has insulted me!’
    ‘ You are not a senior member of the Japanese government.’
    Another bump. Pain contorted my face. ‘Mr Arnhem, are you telling me that you , as consul, can’t make him see reason?’
    ‘You presume to know what reason in this case might be.’
    ‘So that’s it? You’re giving up on Le Vol?’
    ‘Don’t be silly. Yamadori’s intention, I hope, is just to frighten him. But I can do no more today.’
    Storefronts had given way to barbed-wire fences, scrubby fields, and, in the distance, low metallic sheds with half-built shells of ships towering above them. A checkpoint appeared ahead. With a
tap at the glass, Mr Arnhem directed Goro to proceed no further; but as we swerved back towards town, I glimpsed a motorcade parked within the shipyards, and Yamadori greeting a line of naval
officers. Standing stiffly by his side was Trouble.
    In the days that followed, I ate my meals and drank too much and spoke of idle things, as if no desperate uncertainty beat beneath each moment like a drum. Mr Arnhem was
preoccupied, busy with consular duties, and it fell to Goro to keep me amused, taking me for long drives around Nagasaki-ken and beyond. Green volcanic valleys unfolded before me, with volatile
hills and steam that hissed up foully from the earth. Here, said Goro, the Christians were massacred; here, the samurai met their doom; Japan, I reflected, was a violent land, never the dreamy
eternity the world thought it should be.
    Goro treated me with a deference that I found humbling. One afternoon, in a teahouse in Takeo, he introduced me to a little girl of twelve or so who was, he said, a daughter of his nephew. Only
after the girl had sat with us for some time, eyes downcast, and Goro had barked at her in Japanese, evidently telling her to improve her demeanour, did I realize he was offering her to me in
temporary marriage. My face flushed and I did my best to decline the offer graciously. How sorry I felt for the frail, bird-like girl! How amazed I was that Goro could think me another Lieutenant
Pinkerton! But I had no thought of castigating him. I feared I had insulted him and was ashamed.
    That night, Goro accompanied me to the theatre. I understood little of the Noh drama, with its masked actors and sweeping robes and slow, stylized gestures. We sat on benches, some rows back, to
the side of a jutting stage with pillars at each corner and a roof like a pagoda’s. Once or twice I would have asked Goro to explain what was going on, but I suspected a man of his class knew
no more than I. Only during the entr’acte, a knockabout affair of squabbling rude mechanicals, did he become animated, parting his yellow, peg-like teeth in laughter. When it was finished, he
rose abruptly, bowed to me, and hurried away.
    I assumed he had gone to the bathroom, but he did not return during the next act. Watching the robed figures make their exquisite gestures, I