No Direction Home Page 8

  Mr. Ito betrayed no sign of emotion. He stared straight ahead out of the bubble without so much as a word or a flicker of gesture.

  “As you are no doubt aware, this is the famous Statue of Liberty,” I said. “Like most such artifacts, it is available to any buyer who will display it with proper dignity. Of course, I would have no trouble convincing the Bureau of National Antiquities that your intentions are exemplary in this regard.”

  I set the autopilot to circle the island at fifty yards offshore so that Ito could get a fully rounded view and see how well the statue would look from any angle, how eminently suitable it was for enshrinement. But he still sat there with less expression on his face than the average C-grade servitor.

  “You can see that nothing has been touched since the insurrectionists blew the statue’s head off,” I said, trying to drum up his interest with a pitch. “Thus the statue has picked up yet another level of historical significance to enhance its’ already formidable venerability. Originally a gift from France, it has historical significance as an emblem of kinship between the American and French revolutions. Situated as it is in the mouth of New York Harbor, it became a symbol of America itself to generations of immigrants. And the damage the insurrectionists did only serves as a reminder of how lucky we were to come through that mess as lightly as we did. Also, it adds a certain melancholy atmosphere, don’t you think? Emotion, intrinsic beauty, and historicity combined in one elegant piece of monumental statuary. And the asking price is a good deal less than you might suppose.”

  Mr. Ito seemed embarrassed when he finally spoke, “I trust you will forgive my saying so, Mr, Harris, since the emotion is engendered by the highest regard for the noble past of your great nation, but I find this particular artifact somewhat depressing.”

  “How so, Mr. Ito?”

  The jumper completed a circle of the Statue of Liberty and began another as Mr. Ito lowered his eyes and stared at the oily waters of the bay as he answered.

  “The symbolism of this broken statue is quite saddening, representing as it does a decline from your nation’s past greatness. For me to enshrine such an artifact in Kyoto would be an ignoble act, an insult to the memory of your nation’s greatness. It would be a statement of overweening pride.”

  Can you beat that? He was offended because he felt that displaying the statue in Japan would be insulting the United States, and, therefore, I was implying he was nikulturi by offering it to him. All that the damned thing was to any American was one more piece of old junk left over from the glory days that the Japanese, who were nuts for such rubbish, might be persuaded to pay through the nose for the dubious privilege of carting away. These Japs could drive you crazy—who else could you offend by suggesting they do something that they thought would offend you, but you thought was just fine in the first place?

  “I hope I haven’t offended you, Mr. Ito,” I blurted out. I could have bitten my tongue off the moment I said it, because it was exactly the wrong thing to say. I had offended him, and it was only further offense to put him in a position where politeness demanded that he deny it.

  “I’m sure that could not have been further from your intention, Mr. Harris,” Ito said with convincing sincerity. “A pang of sadness at the perishability of greatness, nothing more. In fact, as such, the experience might be said to be healthful to the soul. But making such an artifact a permanent part of one’s surroundings would be more than I could bear.”

  Was this his true feeling, or just smooth Japanese politeness? Who could tell what these people really felt? Sometimes I think they don’t even know what they feel themselves. But, at any rate, I had to show him something that would change his mood, and. fast. Hmmmm…

  “Tell me, Mr. Ito, are you fond of baseball?”

  His eyes lit up like satellite beacons and the heavy mood evaporated in the warm, almost childish, glow of his sudden smile. “Ah, yes!” he said. “I retain a box at Osaka Stadium, though I must confess I secretly retain a partiality for the Giants. How strange it is that this profound game has so declined in the country of its origin.”

  “Perhaps. But that very fact has placed something on the market which I’m sure you’ll find most congenial. Shall we go?”

  “By all means,” Mr. Ito said. “I find our present environs somewhat overbearing.”

  I floated the jumper to five hundred feet and programmed a Mach two point five jump curve to the north that quickly put the great hunk of moldering, dirty copper far behind. It’s amazing how much sickening emotion the Japanese are able to attach to almost any piece of old junk. Our old junk at that, as if Japan didn’t have enough useless old clutter of its own. But I certainly shouldn’t complain about if, it makes me a pretty good living. Everyone knows the old saying about a fool and his money.

  The jumper’s trajectory put us at float over (he confluence of the Harlem and East rivers at a thousand feet. Without dropping any lower, I whipped the jumper northeast over the Bronx at three hundred miles per hour. This area had been covered by tenements before the insurrection, and had been thoroughly razed by firebombs, high explosives, and napalm. No one had ever found an economic reason for clearing away the miles of rubble, and now the scarred earth and ruined buildings were covered with tall grass, poison sumac, tangled scrub growth, and scattered thickets of trees which might merge to form a forest in another generation or two. Because of the crazy, jagged, overgrown topography, this land was utterly useless, and no one lived here except some pathetic remnants of old hippie tribes that kept to themselves and weren’t worth hunting down. Their occasional huts and patchwork tents were the only signs of human habitation in the area. This was really depressing territory and I wanted to get Mr. Ito over it high and fast.

  Fortunately, we didn’t have far to go, and, in a couple of minutes, I had the jumper floating at five hundred feet over our objective, the only really intact structure in the area. Mr, Ito’s stone face lit up with such boyish pleasure that I knew I had it made; I had figured right when I figured he couldn’t resist something like this.

  “So!” he cried in delight. “Yankee Stadium!”

  The ancient ballpark had come through the insurrection with nothing worse than some atmospheric blackening and cratering of its concrete exterior walls. Everything around it had been pretty well demolished except for a short section of old elevated subway line which still stood beside it, a soft, rusty-red skeleton covered with vines and moss. The surrounding ruins were thoroughly overgrown, huge piles of rubble, truncated buildings, rusted-out tanks, forming tangled manmade jungled foothills around the high point of the stadium, which itself had creepers and vines growing all over it, partially blending it into the wild, overgrown landscape.

  The Bureau of National Antiquities had circled the stadium with a high, electrified, barbed-wire fence to keep out the hippies who roamed the badlands. A lone guard armed with a Japanese-made sheer patrolled the fence in endless circles at fifteen feet on a one-man skimmer. I brought the jumper down to fifty feet and orbited the stadium five times, giving the enthralled Ito a good, long, contemplative look at how lovely it would look as the centerpiece of his gardens instead of hidden away in these crummy rains. The guard waved to us each time our paths crossed—must be a lonely, boring job out here with nothing but old junk and crazy wandering hippies for company.

  “May we go inside?” Ito said in absolutely reverent tones. Man, was he hooked! He glowed like a little kid about to inherit a candy store.

  “Certainly, Mr. Ito,” I said, taking the jumper out of its circling pattern and floating it gently up over the lip of the old ballpark, putting it on hover at roof-level over what had once been short center field, Very slowly, I brought the jumper down toward the tangle of tall grass, shrubbery, and occasional stunted trees that covered what had once been the playing field.

  It was like descending into some immense, ruined, roofless cathedral. As we dropped, the cavernous triple-decked grandstands—rotted wooden seats rich with moss and fungi, gre
at overhanging rafters concealing flocks of chattering birds in their deep, glowering shadows—rose to encircle the jumper in a weird, lost grandeur.

  By the time we touched down, Ito seemed to be floating in his seat with rapture. “So beautiful!” he sighed. “Such a sense of history and venerability. Ah, Mr. Harris, what noble deeds were done in this Yankee Stadium in bygone days! May we set foot on this historic playing field?”

  “Of course, Mr. Ito.” It was beautiful. I didn’t have to say a word; he was doing a better job of selling the moldy, useless heap of junk to himself than I ever could.

  We got out of the jumper and tramped around through the tangled vegetation while scruffy pigeons wheeled overhead and the immensity of the empty stadium gave the place an illusion of mystical significance, as if it were some Greek ruin or Stonehenge, instead of just a mined old baseball park. The grandstands seemed choked with ghosts; the echoes of great events that never were filled the deeply shadowed cavernous spaces.

  Mr. Ito, it turned out, knew more about Yankee Stadium than I did, or ever wanted to. He led me around at a measured, reverent pace, boring my ass off with a kind of historical grand tour.

  “Here Al Gionfrido made his famous World Series catch of a potential home ran by the great DiMaggio,” he said, as we reached the high crumbling black wall that ran around the bleachers. Faded numerals said “405.” We followed this curving overgrown wall around to the 467 sign in left center field. Here there were three stone markers jutting up out of the old playing field like so many tombstones, and five copper plaques on the wall behind them, so green with decay as to be illegible. They really must’ve taken this stuff seriously in the old days,, as seriously as the Japanese take it now.

  “Memorials to the great heroes of the New York Yankees,” Ito said. “The legendary Ruth, Gehrig, DiMaggio, Mantle… Over this very spot, Mickey Mantle drove a ball into the bleachers, a feat which had been regarded as impossible for nearly half a century. Ah…”

  And so on. Ito tramped all through the underbrush of the playing field and seemed to have a piece of trivia of vast historical significance to himself for almost every square foot of Yankee Stadium. At this spot, Babe Ruth had achieved his sixtieth home run; here Roger Maris had finally surpassed that feat; over there Mantle had almost driven a ball over the high roof of the venerable Stadium. If was staggering how much of this trivia he knew, and, how much importance it all had in his eyes. The tour seemed to go on forever. I would’ve gone crazy with boredom if it wasn’t so wonderfully obvious how thoroughly sold he was on the place. While Ito conducted his love affair with Yankee Stadium, I passed the time by counting yen in my head. I figured I could probably get ten million out of him, which meant that my commission would be a cool million. Thinking about that much money about to drop into my hands was enough to keep me smiling for the two hours that Ito babbled on about home runs, no-hitters, and triple plays.

  It was late afternoon by the time he had finally saturated himself and allowed me to lead him back to the jumper, I felt it was time to talk business, while he was still under the spell of the stadium, and his resistance was at low ebb.

  “It pleasures me greatly to observe the depths of your feeling for this beautiful and venerable stadium, Mr. Ito,” I said. “I stand ready to facilitate the speedy transfer of title at your convenience.”

  Ito started as if suddenly roused from some pleasant dream. He cast his eyes downward, and bowed almost imperceptibly.

  “Alas,” he said sadly, “while it would pleasure me beyond all reason to enshrine the noble Yankee Stadium upon my grounds, such a self-indulgence would only exacerbate my domestic difficulties. The parents of my wife ignorantly consider the noble sport of baseball an imported American barbarity. My wife unfortunately shares in this opinion and frequently berates me for my enthusiasm for the game, Should I purchase the Yankee Stadium, I would become a laughing stock in my own household, and my life would become quite unbearable.”

  Can you beat that? The arrogant little son-of-a-bitch wasted two hours of my time dragging around this stupid heap of junk, babbling all that garbage and driving me half-crazy, and he knew he wasn’t going to buy it all the time! I felt like knocking his low-posture teeth down his unworthy throat. But I thought of all those yen I still had a fighting chance at and made the proper response: a rueful little smile of sympathy, a shared sigh of wistful regret, a murmured “Alas.”

  “However,” Ito added brightly, “the memory of this visit is something I shall treasure always. I am deeply in your debt for granting me this experience, Mr. Harris, For this alone, the trip from Kyoto has been made more than worthwhile.”

  Now, that really made my day.

  I was in real trouble, I was very close to blowing the biggest deal I’ve ever had a shot at. I’d shown Ito the two best items in my territory, and, if he didn’t find what he wanted in the northeast, there were plenty of first-rate pieces still left in the rest of the country—top stuff like the St. Louis Gateway Arch, the Disneyland Matterhorn, the Salt Lake City Mormon Tabernacle—and plenty of other brokers to collect that big fat commission.

  I figured I had only one more good try before Ito started thinking of looking elsewhere: the United Nations building complex. The U.N. had fallen into a complicated legal limbo. The United Nations had retained title to the buildings when they moved their headquarters out of New York, but when the U.N. folded, New York State, New York City, and the federal government had all laid claim to them, along with the U.N.’s foreign creditors. The Bureau of National Antiquities didn’t have clear title, but they did administer the estate for the federal government. If I could palm the damned thing off on Ito, the Bureau of National Antiquities would be only too happy to take his check and let everyone else try to pry the money out of them. And once he moved it to Kyoto, the Japanese government would not be about to let anyone repossess something that one of their heavyweight citizens had shelled out hard yen for.

  So I jumped her at Mach one point seven to a hover at three hundred feet over the greasy waters of the East River due east of the U.N. complex at Forty-Second Street. At this time of day and from this angle, the U.N. buildings presented what I hoped was a romantic Japanese-style vista. The Secretariat was a giant glass tombstone dramatically silhouetted by the late afternoon sun as it loomed massively before us out of the perpetual gray haze hanging over Manhattan; beside it, the slow sweeping curve of the General Assembly gave the grouping a balanced calligraphic outline. The total effect seemed similar to that of one of those ancient Japanese Torii gates rising out of the foggy sunset, only done on a far grander scale.

  The insurrection had left the U.N. untouched—the rebels had had some crazy attachment for it—and from the river, you couldn’t see much of the grubby open-air market that had been allowed to spring up in the plaza, or the honky-tonk bars along First Avenue. Fortunately, the Bureau of National Antiquities made a big point of keeping the buildings themselves in good shape, figuring that the federal government’s claim would be weakened if anyone could yell that the bureau was letting them fall apart.

  I floated her slowly in off the river, keeping at the three-hundred-foot level, and started my pitch. “Before you, Mr. Ito, are the United Nations buildings, melancholy symbol of one of the noblest dreams of man, now unfortunately empty and abandoned, a monument to the tragedy of the U.N.’s unfortunate demise.”

  Flashes of sunlight, reflected off the river, then onto the hundreds of windows that formed the face of the Secretariat, scintillated intermittently across the glass monolith as I set the jumper to circling the building. When we came around to the western face, the great glass façade was a curtain of orange fire.

  “The Secretariat could be set in your gardens so as to catch both the sunrise and sunset, Mr. Ito,” I pointed out. “It’s considered one of the finest examples of twentieth-century utilitarian in the world, and you’ll note that it’s in excellent repair.”

  Ito said nothing. His eyes did not so much as flic
ker. Even the muscles of his face seemed unnaturally wooden. The jumper passed behind the Secretariat again, which eclipsed both the sun and its giant reflection; below us was the sweeping gray concrete roof of the General Assembly.

  “And, of course, the historic significance of the U.N, buildings is beyond measure, if somewhat tragic—”

  Abruptly, Mr. Ito interrupted, in a cold, clipped voice. “Please forgive my crudity in interjecting a political opinion into this situation, Mr, Harris, but I believe such frankness will save you much wasted time and effort and myself considerable discomfort.”

  All at once, he was Shiburo Ito of Ito Freight Boosters of Osaka, a mover and shaper of the economy of the most powerful nation on earth, and he was letting me know it. “I fully respect your sentimental esteem for the late United Nations, but it is a sentiment I do not share. I remind you that the United Nations was born as an alliance of the nations which humiliated Japan in a most unfortunate war, and expired as a shrill and contentious assembly of pauperized beggar-states united only in the dishonorable determination to extract international alms from more progressive, advanced, self-sustaining, and virtuous states, chief among them Japan, I must therefore regretfully point out that the sight of these buildings fills me with nothing but disgust, though they may have a certain intrinsic beauty as abstract objects.”

  His face had become a shiny mask and he seemed a million miles away. He had come as close to outright anger as I had ever heard one of these heavyweight Japs get; he must be really steaming inside. Damn it, how was I supposed to know that the U.N. had all those awful political meanings for him? As far as I’ve ever heard, the U.N. hasn’t meant anything to anyone for years, except an idealistic, sappy idea that got taken over by Third Worlders and went broke. Just my rotten luck to ran into one of the few people in the world who were still fighting that one!

  “You are no doubt fatigued, Mr. Harris,” Ito said coldly. “I shall trouble you no longer. It would be best to return to your office now. Should you have further objects to show me, we can arrange another appointment at some mutually convenient time.”