East is East

This time, they questioned him for what seemed like days, but what actually must have been closer to two hours, Hiro later realized. They asked him the same questions they’d asked him earlier, over and over again. Questions about his politics, about Honda and Sony and Nissan, about Ruth and Ambly Wooster and the old Negro and the accident at the shack. And all the while the disco beat drummed in his head and his voice cracked around the parched kernel of his throat. They held out the promise of water as a bargaining chip—if he cooperated he would be rewarded; if not, they’d watch him die of thirst and never lift a finger. He cooperated. He told them, over and over again, about Chiba and Unagi and Ruth and her lunches and everything else he’d told them a hundred times over, only this time he told it with Donna Summer and Michael Jackson for accompaniment. Every once in a while he would say something that struck the little man and the little man would interrupt him to give the tall one a look and say, “See? What’d I tell you? Squarest in the world.” They left him a Tupperware pitcher of tepid water and another Hardee’s bag, this one filled to the grease-spattered neck with twists of cold greasy potato and two geometrically perfect hamburgers.

Hiro forced himself to eat. And he drank down the water too, every drop: he didn’t know when—or if—he’d see more. There were two deputies outside the door—he’d seen them when his inquisitors had let themselves in and out of the cell. He could hear the soft murmur of their voices, smell the flare of their tobacco. Twenty minutes. He would give them twenty minutes to eat their corn dogs and piccalilli and butterscotch ripple ice cream, twenty minutes to stupefy themselves with gin and whiskey and beer. Then he would make his break.

He counted out each of those interminable minutes, second by second—one a thousand, two a thousand, three

—and he heard the faint but distinctive hiss of pop-tops, and there was the smell of hot grease and more tobacco, and then the murmur of voices faded away to silence. The time had come. The time for action. The time when a man of action must make up his mind within the space of seven breaths. Hiro only needed one. He sprang for the wall, clambering up the slick stones like a lizard, removed the false bars and squeezed through into the adjoining cell. Head first, then shoulders and torso and the right leg, then reverse position and drop lightly to the bench below. His blood was singing. He was moving, acting, in control of his own destiny once again—and the door? His fingers were on the rusted handle, his thumb poised over the latch—it was the moment of truth, the moment on which all the rest depended. He pressed: it gave. Ha!

Rusty hinges. Open a crack. Look. There, leaning back in a chair propped against the door of the first cell, was a deputy, red hakujin face and wheat-colored mustache, pointy nose and slivered lips. His head was thrown back, the cigarette smoking between his fingers, the can of beer and grease-stained bag at his side, and his breathing was deep and regular, somnolent, breath caught in the pit of the larynx and released again with the faintest stertor. Yes: the long-nosed idiot was asleep!

Hiro almost swaggered when he realized it: asleep!

But he contained himself—discipline, discipline—and slipped out the door like a shadow, a ninja, the nimblest assassin ever to float over two feet. But what of the other guard? What of him? He was nowhere to be seen. Stealthy, stealthy. The red cheeks and flaming nose, the air sucked down the tubes and vomited out again: Hiro couldn’t resist. He bent over the sleeping deputy and slipped the cigarette from between his fingers, justifying it to himself as a precaution: it was only a matter of a minute or two before the fool singed himself awake. But the chicken—it was chicken, breaded and fried, wings, drumsticks and thighs, in the grease-stained bag—the chicken was another matter. Casually—as casually as Yojimbo hiking up his yukata or Dirty Harry scratching his stubble—Hiro leaned forward to pluck a drumstick from the bag, savoring the moistness of it as he eased along the inner wall, looking for a door that would give onto the yard out back.