East is East

Hiro answered them as best he could, head bowed, eyes lowered, responding with the restraint and humility his obāsan had instilled in him. He tried to tell them the truth, tried to tell them about Chiba and Unagi and how the Negro had attacked him and how he’d tried to save the old man when the fire exploded round them, but they wouldn’t listen, didn’t care, caught the vaguest glimmer of what he was saying and shouted him down. “You went there to steal, didn’t you?” the spatterface cried. “You attacked an officer aboard your own ship, took advantage of a senile old lady and her crippled husband, set fire to an innocent man’s house when he resisted you—isn’t that right?” Hiro never had a chance to respond. The little man was on him. Then the sheriff. And then it was back to the spatterface and on and on and on.

“You’re a thief.”

“A liar.”

“An arsonist.”

They knew all the answers: all they needed was confirmation.

What seemed to interest them most, though, what aroused even the increasingly sleepy-eyed sheriff, was Ruth. They wanted to implicate her, and as the morning wore on, it seemed to be all they cared about. Hiro was already packaged, already wrapped up and condemned—he was history. But Ruth, Ruth was an unknown quantity, and they converged on the mention of her like sharks on a blood spoor. Had she given him food, clothing, money, sex, drugs, alcohol? Had she harbored him, tucked him in at night, was she planning to help him escape from the island and evade the law? Had she fondled him, kneaded his flesh, conjoined her lips and her private parts with his own? Was she a communist, a scofflaw, a loose woman? Was she a folksinger, did she wear huaraches, attend rallies, eat lox and bagels? Was she a Jew? She was, wasn’t she?

No, he said, no. No to every question. “She doesn’t know me,” he said. “I take her food, sleep when she go away.”

The tall one was particularly aroused. “You’re lying,” he mocked, glaring like a big spattered rodent. “She harbored you all along, she shared her bed with you, brought you groceries and clothing.”

“No. She doesn’t.” Hiro ached in every joint from holding himself erect. He wanted to tear open the bag and fall on the food, wanted to moisten his lips with the tepid coffee, but he didn’t dare. The iron bars were part of him now. The chair creaked when he spoke. The window gaped.

“All right,” the tall one said finally, rising and consulting his wristwatch. He looked at the sheriff. “It’s noon now. I’m going to want him alone—just me and Turco, after we’ve talked to her.”

The sheriff rose. He stretched and rolled his head back on the axis of his neck, rubbing the cords and muscles there. “Sure. You do what you need to. It’s you fellas that’re going to have to handle this anyway—it’s way out of our league.” He sighed, cracked his knuckles and gave Hiro the sort of look he might have given a twoheaded snake preserved in a jar. “I’ve heard about all I want to hear.”

Then the little man stood too, and the three of them shuffled their feet in unison as if it were part of an elaborate soft-shoe routine, and then they were out the door and the door slammed shut behind them. Hiro felt the thump of that door in his very marrow, and all at once he found he could breathe again. Gingerly, he lifted first one leg and then the other and eased the adamantine bars away from his flesh, which seemed by now to have incorporated them as a living tree incorporates a rusted spike or the abandoned chain of a dog long dead. He dropped the bars to the floor and worked himself out of the chair, wincing, cup and bag still clutched in his hand. His legs were raw, cramped, bloodless, his buttocks inert, and he felt as if he’d been hoisting sumo wrestlers up on his shoulders, one after another, for whole days and nights, for weeks and months and years … but then he looked up at the window and broke out in a grin.

Ha! he exulted. Ha! The fools. They were so stupid it was incredible. Four hours they’d sat there, and never once did they glance up at the window. It was the American nature. They were oafs, drugged and violent and overfed, and they didn’t pay attention to detail. That’s why the factories had shut down, that’s why the automakers had gone belly up, that’s why three professional investigators could sit in an eight-by-ten-foot cell for four hours and never notice that two of the bars had been pried from the window. Hiro wanted to laugh out loud with the joy of it.