Chapter 95 GOTO-SAMA

Avi meets Randy in the hotel lobby. He has burdened himself with a square, old-fashioned briefcase that pulls his slender frame to one side, giving him the asymptotic curve of a sapling in a steady wind. He and Randy take a taxi to Some Other Part of Tokyo-Randy cannot begin to fathom how the city is laid out-enter the lobby of a skyscraper, and take an elevator up far enough that Randy's ears pop. When the doors slide open, a ma

Still, he levers himself up on a big, gnarled cane and shakes their hands firmly. His son Furudenendu proffers a hand to help him to his feet and he shrugs it off with glare of mock outrage-this transaction looks pretty well-practiced. There's a brief exchange of small talk that goes right over Randy's head. Then the two minions peel off, like a fighter escort no longer needed, and the maet filsacross a totally empty restaurant-twenty or thirty tables set with white linen and crystal-to a corner table, where waiters stand at attention to pull their chairs back. This building is of the sheer-walls-of-solid-glass school of architecture and so the windows go floor-to-ceiling, providing, through a bead curtain of raindrops, a view of nighttime Tokyo that stretches over the horizon. Menus are handed out, printed in French only. Randy and Avi get the girl menus, with no prices. Goto Dengo gets the wine list, and pores over it for a good ten minutes before grudgingly selecting a white from California and a red from Burgundy. Meanwhile, Furudenendu is leading them in exceedingly pleasant small talk about the Crypt.

Randy can't stop looking at Tokyo on the one hand and the empty restaurant on the other. It's like this setting was picked specifically to remind them that the Nipponese economy has been on the skids for the last several years-a situation that the Asian currency crisis has only worsened. He half expects to see executives dropping past the window.

Avi ventures to ask about various tunnels and other stupefyingly vast engineering projects that he happens to have noticed around Tokyo and whether Goto Engineering had anything to do with them. This at least gets the patriarch to glance up momentarily from his wine list, but the son handles the inquiries, allowing as how, yes, their company did play a small part in those endeavors. Randy figures that it's not the easiest thing in the world to engage a personal friend of the late General of the Army Douglas MacArthur in polite chitchat; it's not like you can ask him if he caught the latest episode of Star Trek: More Time-Space Anomalies.All they can really do is cling to Furudenendu and let him take the lead. Goto Dengo clears his throat like the engine of a major piece of earth-moving equipment rumbling to life, and recommends the Kobe beef. The sommelier comes around with the wines and Goto Dengo interrogates him in a mixture of Nipponese and French for a while, until a film of sweat has broken out on the sommelier's brow. He samples the wines very carefully. The tension is explosive as he swirls them around in his mouth, staring off into the distance. The sommelier seems genuinely startled, not to mention relieved, when he accepts both of them. The subtext here would seem to be that hosting a really first-class dinner is a not insignificant management challenge, and that Goto Dengo should not be bothered with social chatter while he is coping with these responsibilities.

At this point Randy's paranoia finally kicks in: is it possible that Goto-sama bought the whole restaurant out for the evening, just to get a little privacy? Were the two minions just aides with unusually bulky briefcases, or were they security, sweeping the place for surveillance devices? Again, subtext-wise, the message seems to be that Randy and Avi are not to worry their pretty, young little heads about these things. Goto Dengo is seated underneath a can light in the ceiling. His hair stands perpendicularly out from his head, a bristling stand of normal vectors, radiating halogenically. He has a formidable number of scars on his face and his hands, and Randy suddenly realizes that he must have been in the war. Which should've been perfectly obvious considering his age.

Goto Dengo inquires about how Randy and Avi got into their current lines of work, and how they formed their partnership. This is a reasonable question, but it forces them to explain the entire concept of fantasy role-playing games. If Randy had known this would happen, he would have thrown himself bodily through a window instead of taking a seat. But Goto Dengo takes it pretty calmly and instantly cross-correlates it to late-breaking developments in the Nipponese game industry, which has been doing this gradual paradigm shift from arcade to role-playing games with actual narratives; by the time he's finished he makes them feel not like lightweight nerds but like visionary geniuses who were ten years ahead of their time. This more or less obligates Avi (who is taking conversational point) to ask Goto Dengo how he got into hisline of work. Both of the Gotos try to laugh it off, as if how could a couple of young American visionary Dungeons and Dragons pioneers possibly be interested in something as trivial as how Goto Dengo singlehandedly rebuilt postwar Nippon, but after Avi displays a bit of persistence, the patriarch finally shrugs and says something about how his pop was in the mining racket and so he's always had a certain knack for digging holes in the ground. His English started out minimal and is getting better and better as the evening proceeds, as if he is slowly dusting off substantial banks of memory and processing power, nursing them on-line like tube amplifiers.

Dinner arrives; and so everyone has to eat for a bit, and to thank Goto-sama for his excellent recommendation. Avi gets a bit reckless and asks the old man if he might regale them with some reminiscences about Douglas MacArthur. He grins, as if some secret has been ferreted out of him, and says, "I met the General in the Philippines." Just like that, he's jujitsued the topic of conversation around to what everyone actually wants to talk about. Randy's pulse and respiration ratchet up by a good twenty-five percent and all of his senses become more acute, almost as if his ears have popped again, and he loses his appetite. Everyone else seems to be sitting up a bit straighter too, shifting in their chairs slightly. "Did you spend much time in that country?" Avi asks.

"Oh, yes. Much time. A hundred years," says Goto Dengo, with a rather frosty grin. He pauses, giving everyone a chance to get good and uneasy, and then continues, "My son tells me that you want to dig a grave there."

"A hole," Randy ventures, after much uncomfortableness.

"Excuse me. My English is rusty," says Goto Dengo, none too convincingly.

Avi says, "What we have in mind would be a major excavation by our standards. But probably not by yours."

Goto Dengo chuckles. "That all depends on the circumstances. Permits. Transportation issues. The Crypt was a big excavation, but it was easy, because the sultan was supporting it."

"I must emphasize that the work we are considering is still in a very early planning phase," Avi says. "I regret to say I can't give you good information about the logistical issues."

Goto Dengo comes this close to rolling his eyes. "I understand," he says with a dismissive wave of the hand. "We will not talk about these things this evening."

This produces a really awkward pause, while Randy and Avi ask themselves what the hell are we going to talk about then?"Very well," Avi says, sort of weakly lobbing the ball back in Goto Dengo's general direction.

Furudenendo steps in. "There are many people who dig holes in the Philippines," he explains with a big knowing wink.

"Ah!" Randy says. "I have met some of the people you are talking about!" This produces a general outburst of laughter around the table, which is none the less sincere for being tense.

"You understand, then," says Furudenendo, "that we would have to study a joint venture very carefully." Even Randy easily translates this to: we will participate in your loony-tunes treasure hunt when hell freezes over.

"Please!" Randy says, "Goto Engineering is a distinguished company. Top of the line. You have much better things to do than to gamble on joint ventures. We would never propose such a thing. We would be able to pay for your services up front."

"Ah!" The Gotos look at each other significantly. "You have a new investor?" We know you are broke.Avi grins. "We have new resources." This leaves the Gotos nonplussed. "If I may," Avi says. He heaves his briefcase up off the floor and onto his lap, flips the latches open, and reaches into it with both hands. Then he performs a maneuver that, in a bodybuilding gym, would be called a barbell curl, and lifts a brick of solid gold into the light.

The faces of Goto Dengo and Goto Furudenendo are transmuted to stone. Avi holds the bar up for a few moments, then lowers it back into his briefcase.

Eventually, Furudenendo scoots his chair back a couple of centimeters and rotates it slightly toward his father, basically excusing himself from the conversation. Goto Dengo eats dinner and drinks wine calmly, and silently, for a very, very long fifteen or twenty minutes. Finally, he looks across the table at Randy and says, "Where do you want to dig?"

"The site is in mountains south of Laguna de Bay-"

"Yes, you already told my son that. But that is a large area of boon docks. Many holes have been dug there. All worthless."

"We have better information."

"Some old Filipino has sold you his memories?"

"Better than that," Randy says. "We have a latitude and longitude."

"To what degree of precision?"

"Tenths of a second."

This occasions another pause. Furudenendo tries to say something in Nipponese, but his father cuts him off gruffly. Goto Dengo finishes his dinner and crosses his fork and knife on the plate. A waiter's there five seconds later to clear the table. Goto Dengo says something to him that sends him fleeing back into the kitchen. They have essentially a whole floor of the skyscraper to themselves now. Goto Dengo utters something to his son, who produces a fountain pen and two business cards. Furudenendo hands the pen, and one card, to his father, and the other card to Randy. "Let's play a little game," Goto Dengo says. "You have a pen?"

"Yes," Randy says.

"I am going to write down a latitude and longitude," Goto Dengo says, "but only the seconds portion. No degrees and no minutes. Only the seconds part. You understand?"

"Yes."

"The information is useless by itself. You agree?"

"Yes."

"Then there is no risk for you to write down the same."

"It's true."

"Then we will exchange cards. Agreed?"

"I agree."

"Very well." Goto Dengo starts writing. Randy takes a pen from his pocket and jots down the seconds and tenths of a second: latitude 35.2, longitude 59.0. When he's done, Goto Dengo's looking at him expectantly. Randy holds out his card, numbers facing down, and Goto Dengo holds out his. They exchange them with the small bow that is obligatory around here. Randy cups Goto-sama's card in his palm and turns it into the light. It says

35.2/59.0

No one says anything for ten minutes. It's a measure of how stunned Randy is that he doesn't realize, for a long time, that Goto Dengo is just as stunned as he is. Avi and Furudenendu are the only people at the table whose minds are still functioning, and they spend the whole time looking at each other uncertainly, neither one really understanding what's going on.

Finally Avi says something that Randy doesn't hear. He nudges Randy firmly and says it again: "I'm going to the lavatory."

Randy watches him go, counts to ten, and says, "Excuse me." He follows Avi to the men's washroom: black polished stone, thick white towels, Avi standing there with his arms crossed. "He knows," Randy says.

"I don't believe it."

Randy shrugs. "What can I say? He knows."

"If he knows, everyone knows. Our security broke down somewhere along the line."

"Everyone doesn't know," Randy says. "If everyone knew, all hell would be breaking loose down there, and Enoch would have gotten word to us.

"Then how can he know?"

"Avi," Randy says, "he must be the one who buried it."Avi looks outraged. "Are you shitting me?"

"You have a better theory?"

"I thought all the people who buried the stuff were killed."

"It's fair to say that he's a survivor. Wouldn't you agree?"

Ten minutes later they return to the table. Goto Dengo has allowed the restaurant staff back into the room, and dessert menus have been brought out. Weirdly, the old man has gone back into polite chitchat mode, and Randy gradually figures out that he's trying to work out how the hell Randy knows what he knows. Randy mentions, offhandedly, that his grandfather was a cryptanalyst in Manila in 1945. Goto Dengo sighs, visibly, with relief and cheers up somewhat. Then it's more completely meaningless chatter until postprandial coffee has been served, at which point the patriarch leans forward to make a point. "Before you sip-look!"

Randy and Avi look into their cups. A weirdly glittering layer of scum is floating atop their coffee.

"It is gold," Furudenendu explains. Both of the Gotos laugh. "During the eighties, when Nippon had so much money, this was the fashion: coffee with gold dust. Now it is out of fashion. Too ostentatious. But you go ahead and drink."

Randy and Avi do-a bit nervously. The gold dust coats their tongues, then washes away down their throats.

"Tell me what you think," Goto Dengo demands.

"It's stupid," Randy says.

"Yes." Goto Dengo nods solemnly. "It is stupid. So tell me, then: why do you want to dig up more of it?"

"We're businessmen," Avi says. "We make money. Gold is worth money."

"Gold is the corpse of value," says Goto Dengo.

"I don't understand."

"If you want to understand, look out the window!" says the patriarch, and sweeps his cane around in an arc that encompasses half of Tokyo. "Fifty years ago, it was flames. Now it is lights! Do you understand? The leaders of Nippon were stupid. They took all of the gold out of Tokyo and buried it in holes in the ground in the Philippines! Because they thought that The General would march into Tokyo and steal it. But The General didn't care about the gold. He understood that the real gold is here-" he points to his head "-in the intelligence of the people, and here-" he holds out his hands "-in the work that they do. Getting rid of our gold was the best thing that ever happened to Nippon. It made us rich. Receiving that gold was the worst thing that happened to the Philippines. It made them poor."

"Then let's get it out of the Philippines," Avi says, "so that they too can have the opportunity to become rich."

"Ah! Now you are making sense," says Goto Dengo. "You are going to take the gold out and dump it into the ocean, then?"

"No," Avi says, with a nervous chuckle.

Goto Dengo raises his eyebrows. "Oh. So, you wish to become rich as part of the bargain?"

At this point Avi does something that Randy's never seen him do, or even come close to doing, before: he gets pissed off. He doesn't flip the table over, or raise his voice. But his face turns red, the muscles of his head bulge as he clenches his teeth together, and he breathes heavily through his nose for a while. The Gotos both seem to be rather impressed by this, and so no one says anything for a long time, giving Avi a chance to regain his cool. It seems as though Avi can't bring words forth, and so finally he takes his wallet out of his pocket and flips through it until he's found a black-and-white photograph, which he pulls from its transparent sleeve and hands across to Goto Dengo. It's a family portrait: father, mother, four kids, all with a mid-twentieth century, Middle-European look about them. "My great-uncle," Avi says, "and his family. Warsaw, 1937. His teeth are down in that hole. You buried my uncle's teeth!"

Goto Dengo looks up into Avi's eyes, neither angry nor defensive. Just sad. And this seems to have an effect on Avi, who softens, exhales finally, breaks eye contact.

"I know you probably had no choice," Avi says. "But that's what you did. I never knew him, or any of my other relatives who died in the Shoah. But I would gladly dump every ounce of that gold into the ocean, just to give them a decent burial. That's what I'll do if you make it a condition. But what I was really planning on doing was using it to make sure that nothing of the kind ever happens again."

Goto Dengo ponders this for a while, looking stonefaced out over the lights of Tokyo. Then he unhooks his cane from the edge of the table, jams it into the floor, and shoves himself to his feet. He turns towards Avi, straightens his posture, and then bows. It's the deepest bow Randy's ever seen. Eventually he straightens up and retakes his seat.

The tension has been broken. Everyone's relaxed, not to say exhausted.

"General Wing is very close to finding Golgotha," Randy says, after a decent interval has ticked by. "It's him or us."

"It's us, then," says Goto Dengo.

Chapter 96 R.I.P.

The clamor of the Marines' rifles echoes through the cemetery, the sharp reports pinging from tombstone to tombstone like pachinko balls. Goto Dengo bends down and thrusts his hand into a pile of loose dirt. It feels good. He scoops up a handful of the stuff, it trickles out from between his fingers and trails down the legs of his crisp new United States Army uniform, getting caught in the trouser cuffs. He steps to the sharp brink of the grave and pours the earth from his hand onto the General Issue coffin containing Bobby Shaftoe. He crosses himself, staring at the coffin lid stained with dirt, and then, with some effort, lifts his head up again, towards the sunlit world of things that live. Other than a few blades of grass and some mosquitoes, the first living thing that he sees is a pair of feet in sandals made from old jeep tires, supporting a white man wrapped in a shapeless brown garment of rough fabric with a large hood on the top. Staring out from the shade of that hood is the supernaturally weird-looking (in that he has a red beard and grey hair) head of Enoch Root-a character who keeps bumping into Goto Dengo as he goes around Manila trying to carry out his duties. Goto Dengo is seized and paralyzed by his wild stare.

They stroll together across the burgeoning cemetery.

"You have something you would like to tell me?" Enoch says.

Goto Dengo turns his head to look into Root's eyes. "I was told that the confessional was a place of perfect secrets."

"It is," Enoch says.

"Then, how did you know?"

"Know what?"

"I think your Church brothers told you something that you should not know."

"Put this idea out of your mind. The secrecy of the confessional has not been violated. I did not talk to the priest who took your first confession, and if I did, he would tell me nothing."

"Then how do you know?" Goto Dengo asks.

"I have several ways of knowing things. One thing I know is that you are a digger. A man who engineers big holes in the ground. Your friend and mine, Father Ferdinand, told me that."

"Yes."

"The Nipponese went to much trouble to bring you here. They would not have done this unless they wanted you to dig an important hole."

"There are many reasons they might have done this."

"Yes," Enoch Root says, "but only a few that make sense."

They stroll silently for a while. Root's feet kick the hem of his robe out with each step. "I know other things," he continues. "South of here, a man brought diamonds to a priest. This man said he had attacked a traveler on the road, and taken from him a small fortune in diamonds. The victim died of his injuries. The murderer gave the diamonds to the Church as penance."

"Was the victim Filipino or Chinese?" asks Goto Dengo.

Enoch Root stares at him coolly. "A Chinese man knows of this?"

More strolling. Root will gladly walk from one end of Luzon to the other if that's how long it takes for the words to come out of Goto Dengo.

"I have information from Europe too," Root says. "I know that the Germans have been hiding treasure. It is widely known that General Yamashita is burying more war gold in the northern mountains even as we speak."

"What do you want from me?" Goto Dengo asks. There's no preliminary moistening of the eyeballs, the tears leap out of him and run down his face. "I came to the Church because of some words."

"Words?"

"This is Jesus Christ who taketh away the sins of the world,"Goto Dengo says. "Enoch Root, no one knows the sins of the world better than me. I have swum in those sins, drowned in them, burned in them, dug in them. I was like a man swimming down a long cave filled with black cold water. Looking up, I saw a light above me, and swam towards it. I only wanted to find the surface, to breathe air again. Still immersed in the sins of the world, at least I could breathe. This is what I am now."

Root nods and waits.

"I had to confess. The things that I saw-the things I did-were so terrible. I had to purify myself. That is what I did, in my first confession." Goto Dengo heaves a deep, shuddering sigh. "It was a very, very long confession. But it is finished. Jesus has taken away my sins, or so the priest said."

"Good. I'm glad it helped you."

"Now, you want me to speak of these things again?"

"There are others," says Enoch Root. He stops in his tracks, and turns, and nods. Silhouetted on the top of a rise, on the other side of several thousand white tombstones, are two men in civilian clothes. They look Western, but that is all Goto Dengo can tell from here.

"Who are they?"

"Men who have been to hell and come back, as you did. Men who know about the gold."

"What do they want?"

"To dig up the gold."

Nausea wraps around Goto Dengo like a wet bedsheet. "They would have to tunnel down through a thousand fresh corpses. It is a grave."

"The whole world is a grave," says Enoch Root. "Graves can be moved, corpses reinterred. Decently."

"And then? If they got the gold?"

"The world is bleeding. It needs medicine and bandages. These cost money."

"But before this war, all of this gold was out here, in the sunlight. In the world. Yet look what happened." Goto Dengo shudders. "Wealth that is stored up in gold is dead. It rots and stinks. True wealth is made every day by men getting up out of bed and going to work. By school children doing their lessons, improving their minds. Tell those men that if they want wealth, they should come to Nippon with me after the war. We will start businesses and build buildings."

"Spoken like a true Nipponese," Enoch says bitterly. "You never change."

"Please make me understand what you are saying."

"What of the man who cannot get out of bed and work, because he has no legs? What of the widow who has no husband to work, no children to support her? What of children who cannot improve their minds because they lack books and schoolhouses?"

"You can shower gold on them," Goto Dengo says. "Soon enough, it will all be gone."

"Yes. But some of it will be gone into books and bandages."

Goto Dengo does not have a rejoinder for this. He is not outsmarted so much as sad and tired. "What do you want? You think I should give the gold to the Church?"

Enoch Root looks mildly taken aback, as if the idea hadn't really occurred to him before. "You could do worse, I suppose. The Church has two thousand years of experience in using its resources to help the poor. It has not always been perfect. But is has built its share of hospitals and schools."

Goto Dengo shakes his head. "I have only been in your Church for a few weeks and already I have many doubts about it. It has been a good thing for me. But to give it so much gold-I am not sure if this is a good idea."

"Don't look at me as if you expect me to defend the Church's imperfections," says Enoch Root. "They have kicked me out of the priesthood."

"Then what shall I do?"

"Perhaps give it to the Church with conditions."

"What?"

"You can stipulate that it only be used to educate children, if you choose."

Goto Dengo says, "Educated men created this cemetery."

"Then choose some other condition."

"My condition is that if that gold ever comes out of the ground, it should be used so that we do not have any more wars like this one."

"And how should we accomplish such a thing, Goto Dengo?"

Goto Dengo sighs. "You put a big weight on my shoulders!"

"No. I did not put the weight on your shoulders. It has always been there." Enoch Root stares mercilessly into Goto Dengo's tormented face. "Jesus takes away the sins of the world, but the world remains: a physical reality on which we are doomed to live until death takes us away from it. You have confessed, and you have been forgiven, and so the greater part of your burden has been taken away by grace. But the gold is still there, in a hole in the ground. Did you think that the gold all turned into dirt when you swallowed the bread and the wine? That is not what we mean by transubstantiation." Enoch Root turns his back and walks away, leaving Goto Dengo alone in the bright avenues of the city of the dead.