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Macneils of Tokyo. Jack Seward
Читать онлайн.Название Macneils of Tokyo
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9781462918126
Автор произведения Jack Seward
Издательство Ingram
“Sarah, I do not like the sound of that.”
“Don’t worry, Father dear. I’ll tell you in confidence what Nathan says about me: Always on the verge, but still a virgin.”’
“God, I hope so.”
Sarah shielded her eyes against the burning afternoon sun. She waited impatiently for one of the drivers to bring a family car around from the garage.
The chauffeur was a middle-aged man she had not seen before, but Sarah resisted her natural impulse to engage him in a conversation. After telling him to take her to the Imperial Hotel in Hibiya, Sarah sat back, closed her eyes, and immersed herself in impatient thoughts about her lover.
Only two years older than she, Nathan Blum had returned from the Conservatoire de Musique in Paris earlier in the year, when she had first met him.
At once he had begun an ardent pursuit of Sarah. If he had not, she would have pursued him. Nathan was delicate and sensitive and quiet, and she longed to hold him in her arms and nurture him. His longish hair and intense eyes suited the image of what he burned to be: a concert pianist. His flexible fingers fascinated her as they danced over the piano keys. Those same fingers caressing her bared breasts sent a lovely thrill into her nether region, where those nimble hands had yet to be admitted.
Nathan was courtly and reserved. There was an unmistakable Gallic elegance about him. Although he and his father held French citizenship papers, Nathan was born in Manchuria and spoke French as his native language, good Mandarin Chinese, but utterly inadequate English. He and Sarah conversed in Chinese, which raised curious eyebrows when they were overheard in public speaking the Peking dialect.
Nathan Blum had not become the concert pianist he longed to be. He could never bring himself to practice more than two hours a day, even as his teachers at the conservatory assured him a minimum of four (“Four, M’sieu Blum, four!”) was necessary. They could have added, but charitably did not, that even more essential was a natural talent for the keyboard, which they privately feared had not been bequeathed to Nathan by his Creator.
After a vacation at his home in Dairen, Nathan Blum had intended to return to Paris and his studies, but then he met Sarah “Chink” Macneil, known to her Chinese friends as Lin Hsiao-mai.
Nathan played on the strings of Sarah’s heart with a skill and devotion he had never addressed to the keyboard. She had responded by falling passionately, exhilaratingly in love. It was as if all the affection and devotion Sarah had ever lavished on abused wives, desperate cattle, lost kittens, and fallen sparrows had focused on a single person—the slim, aesthetic Jew, Nathan Blum.
Chapter 3
Yokohama, Japan
August 1941
The freighter’s cranes whirred and creaked, the second mate roared commands, the stevedores shouted at each other, and the August afternoon sun peeled more paint off the ship’s strakes. If the 7,800-ton vessel was to clear the bay’s crowded entrance before dark, the master would have to push all hands to their limits.
Reclining against a stanchion on the main deck, Bill Macneil hoped they made it. His schedule was flexible, but the sooner he left this country he had come to dislike so intensely the better. In fact, if the Macneil Lines’ City of Glasgow could cast off its mooring lines from the dock bollards and stand out to sea this instant, it would not be too soon for Bill Macneil. Then he could have avoided what was sure to be a painfully awkward parting with Helma Graf.
“Excuse me, Mister Macneil.” The stubby, white-haired captain stood beside Bill, touching the enameled visor of his white hat with two fingers. “I regret we don’t have an owner’s cabin aboard these freighters, sir, but I don’t think we’ve ever had the pleasure of having a Macneil aboard. Is your cabin satisfactory? I’d be glad to let you have mine, but it would be tomorrow before I could have it cleaned and ready for you.”
Bill Macneil smiled. “The accommodations are quite all right, Captain. Tell me, when do you expect to slip lines?”
Captain Davis cast a judicious eye at the heaps of cargo still on the dock, then at his pocket watch. “Not for at least three or four hours.”
“In that case, I believe I’ll take a quick ride up to the Bluff.”
“Your family once had homes up there, didn’t they?”
Bill nodded. “And if a Miss Helma Graf comes looking for me, ask her to wait in my cabin, will you? And turn the fans on in there, please.”
The captain saluted. “I’ll tell the steward to place a block of ice in front of one of the fans, sir.”
Bill Macneil felt in his pants pocket for his passport and wallet, then strode down the gangplank. Taxicabs would be waiting along the Bund only 75 yards away. He lengthened his stride.
At twenty-two, Bill Macneil was an easy-moving natural athlete with not the slightest interest in competitive sports. He could do twenty-five one-armed push-ups, twist around and catch an oncoming baseball behind his back, and pass a football as well with his left as his right arm, but he did such feats only when begged to do so by children.
His sister, Chankoro, called him “sports-deaf.” Perhaps he was. He did not know the name of the lead pitcher for the New York Yankees or remember which football teams had played in the January 1941 Rose Bowl.
Bill’s only sport was mountain climbing, which he did not consider competitive. After learning to fly at fields around San Francisco, he had taken up mountain climbing in northern California and Oregon, where he joined a team that rescued amateur mountaineers stranded in the high peaks. When Bill’s team failed to climb up to one couple in time, the four members decided to add parachuting to their skills.
Over the past two years of Bill’s attendance at the University of San Francisco, he had answered eleven distress calls from the northern mountains.
Despite a break in his right ankle bone on his sixth jump, Bill had persevered, and now nothing gave him more satisfaction than flying his own plane to a field near the origin of the distress call, joining the rescue team, and parachuting in when necessary to save endangered and sometimes injured climbers.
That was the extent of his athletic activity.
The ankle fracture still sent occasional twinges up his right leg—it did now as he climbed the slope from the Foreigners’ Cemetery on the Bluff to the site of the two homes built long ago by Macneils as their Yokohama residences.
This pilgrimage had no particular objective. Probably no member of his family had bothered to come up here in years, although they still owned the land. Perhaps, he thought, someone should come up now and then to pay respects to the past.
His grandfather had built a house right over there on the left of the narrow road in the 1870s, and his grandmother had built another next door the following year. Neither had really been permanent. What was considered the main family residence still stood empty in Nagasaki, while Grandmother Anne had possessed two in Tokyo. From all he had heard, she must have been quite a woman. Imagine, a Scotswoman long imprisoned by the Japanese becoming first the teacher of the emperor, then his occasional mistress.
The Yokohama homes were destroyed in the Great Kanto Earthquake of September 1923 and never rebuilt. By then almost all Macneil affairs, especially the arms business, were conducted from the Tokyo main office. The rest, certain commodities like ships, steel, and tea, were exported from Nagasaki.
After standing in front of the property for several minutes, Bill Macneil shook his head and grinned wryly. Face it, he thought, the real reason for coming up here on this hot and muggy late summer afternoon was the urgent desire to avoid Helma Graf. He hoped she would come aboard the City of Glasgow while he was on the Bluff, get tired of waiting, and return to her missionary parents’ home in Shizuoka, on the south flank of Mount Fuji. A good hour and a half by train.
Turning,