“We were dismasted, and lost three men, and my left eye, and two of Otto’s fingers, and a few other items, going around Cape Horn,” Rudy says apologetically. “Our cigars got a little wet. It played havoc with our schedule.”
“No matter,” Bischoff says. “The gold isn’t going anywhere.”
“Do we know where it is?”
“Not exactly. But we have found one who does.”
“Clearly, we have much to discuss,” Rudy says, “but I have to die first. Preferably on a soft bed.”
“Fine,” Bischoff says. “Is there anything that needs to be removed from Gertrude before we cut her throat, and let her barnacles pull her to the bottom?”
“Sink the bitch now, please,” Otto says. “I will even stay up here and watch.”
“First you must remove five crates marked Property of the Reichsmarschall,” Rudy says. “They are down in the bilge. We used them as ballast.”
Otto looks startled, and scratches his beard in wonderment. “I forgot those were down there.” The year-and-a-half-old memory is slowly resolving in his mind’s eye. “It took a whole day to load them in. I wanted to kill you. My back still aches from it.”
Bischoff says, “Rudy—you made off with Göring’s pornography collection?”
“I wouldn’t like his kind of pornography,” Rudy answers evenly. “These are cultural treasures. Loot.”
“They will have been ruined by bilge water!”
“It’s all gold. Sheets of gold foil with holes in it. Impervious.”
“Rudy, we are supposed to be exporting gold from the Philippines, not importing it.”
“Don’t worry. I shall export it again one day.”
“By that time, we’ll have money to hire stevedores, so poor Otto won’t have to put his back out again.”
“We won’t need stevedores,” Rudy says. “When I export what is on those sheets, I’ll do it on wires.”
They all stand there on the deck of V-Million in the tropical cove watching the sun set and the flying fish leap and hearing birds and insects cry and buzz from the flowering jungle all around. Bischoff’s trying to imagine wires strung from here to Los Angeles, and sheets of gold foil sliding down them. It doesn’t really work. “Come below, Rudy,” he says, “we need to get some vitamin C into you.”
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 maître d’ is standing right there anticipating them with a radiant smile and a bow. He leads them into a foyer where four men wait: a couple of younger minions; Goto Furudenendu; and an elderly gentleman. Randy was expecting one of these gracile, translucent Nipponese seniors, but Goto Dengo is a blocky fellow with a white buzz-cut, somewhat hunched and collapsed with age, which only goes to make him seem more compact and solid. At first blush he seems more like a retired village blacksmith, or perhaps a master sergeant in a daimyo’s army, than a business executive, and yet within five or ten seconds this impression is swallowed up by a good suit, good manners, and Randy’s knowledge of who he really is. He’s the only guy in the place who isn’t grinning from ear to ear: apparently when you reach a certain age you are allowed to get away with staring tunnels through other people’s skulls. In the manner of many old people, he looks vaguely startled that they have actually shown up.
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 a 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 maître d’ leads Randy, Avi, and Goto père et fils across 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 his line of work. Both of the Gotos try to laugh it off, as if how could a couple of young American visionary Dungeons and Dra
gons 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 boondocks. 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 chee
rs 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.”