Nightclub restaurants of enormous scale, dazzling décor and long bars stocked with hundreds of liquors have become as common in major American cities as they are in Tokyo’s Ginza. Places like Tao and Buddakan in New York are as much party venues as they are dining rooms, while the London-based chain Hakkasan put more focus on the  food. This last was for many years a New York Theater District fixture, but it has been taken over by Fushimi Times Square and completely renovated, with several dining rooms that put the emphasis on the food menu along with a slew of specialty cocktails.
            Sake barrels, torii gates, dramatic Asian artwork are the backdrop for 230 seats that includes a splendid bar and a semi-private booth with a lazy Susan, where my friends and I sat away from the bustle up front and the DJ lounge area. It really is all quite handsome, very colorful and lighting casts shadows everywhere.
        Owners Daniel and Ben Chen named the restaurant for the city of Fushimi in Kyoto, famed for a series of red torii gates at the temples of the Fushimi Inari Shrine.  Their first Fushimi opened on Staten Island, which is not  exactly a crucible of Japanese dining. The reason was simple: the owners lived there and wanted to see if it could fill a niche. It did, and they opened another and one in Brooklyn.
      Now Times Square. The menu is predominantly Japanese, with a large sushi component, but the owners apparently want to appeal to an American audience as well, offering chicken and tomahawk steak on a very large menu spread over several pages. It takes some explaining, but the very friendly staff is readily up to the task.  Since I haven’t been to Fushimi when it’s going full tilt on weekends, I can’t measure how goes the flow, but on a midweek summer’s night, the experience was almost genteel.
        Given the size of the menu, with four soups ($7-$16), 14 hot appetizers ($8-$29), five salads (7-$16), seven cold appetizers ($16-$18), 13 special rolls ($18-$28), 15 nigiri sushi items ($14-$32 for an order), four bento boxes ($32), 11 main courses ($32-$54), 8 sushi combinations ($42-$79), 12 hand rolls ($9-$15), five side dishes ($10-$16) and desserts, if you don’t know exactly what you’re in the mood for, you’re going to need some help from the staff. We stayed with the Japanese offerings.
        Largely my party put ourselves in the chef’s trust, beginning with a good-sized bowl of steamed edamame with Maldon sea salt, and both tender pork potstickers (fried or steamed) and vegetable gyoza. Among the cold apps, we had spicy tuna gyoza with wasabi tobiko, unexpected mozzarella cheese, yuzu tobiko, a sweet chili emulsion and jalapeño guacamole with  spicy togarashi —quite a display, and one meant for sharing. Silky yellowtail took on added luster from a yuzu-truffle soy vinaigrette. The real surprise—and a bright idea—was a sashimi pizza, with a choice of tuna, salmon or yellowtail on jalapeño-studded guacamole laced with a spicy aïoli and dark balsamic glaze atop a crispy tortilla.
        I was very much looking forward to an array of sushi, which came as a "rainbow roll Fushimi style,” a California roll topped with tuna, salmon, whitefish and avocado. Another, called “Out of Control,” lived up to its name,  composed of tuna, salmon and asparagus roll topped with seared yellowtail salmon and tuna spicy mayo with a crispy rice pearl. More sushi was sent forth from the bar, 12 pieces in the “Chef’s Sushi” and 18 in his sushi and sashimi platter.
        The variety of flavors, textures and condiments was delightful,  although the same three fish species—salmon, tuna, yellowtail— kept repeating.  I would have preferred a selection from the à la carte sushi category that listed maguro, unagi, ikura salmon roe, hotate scallop, botan ebi spot shrimp and uni sea urchin.
        Fushimi would not be out of place in the Ginza, and its young clientele is the same. The sushi and sashimi may have an assembly line cast, but then, you’re not paying $500 and up to sit at a cramped sushi counter. It would be difficult not to have a lot of fun here and a good deal of sake from a stellar list.

Open for lunch and dinner daily.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

“It was not the kind of surroundings in which any one with free will — if such a man existed — would have chosen to await death.”—Graham Greene, The Honorary Consul (1973).

      Kim Philby’s apartment was on the sixth floor, up a winding stairwell. Rufina Philby (left) was already waiting outside the apartment in front of the studded leather door, beckoning them to come in but not even saying “hello.”
         “Come in. My husband is in the bedroom and will be out in a few minutes.”  She did not offer them anything to drink. The place smelled of curry spices and bacon. Katie and David heard Kim Philby coughing loudly in the next room.
         The apartment was small and cramped by all the furniture, books and memorabilia acquired over decades. David’s policeman’s eyes ran quickly over all he could see; Katie’s surveyed it all slowly. 
      The furniture was cheap and more or less functional. An old radio with ivory buttons sat on a low table. On another, an old manual typewriter. Above a tatty sofa in a flowery fabric hung two frayed animal furs, perhaps Siberian wolf pelts, and below them two antique pearl inlaid Afghan dueling pistols. Against the remaining wall were shelves of books, which Katie perused while David stood at the rear window looking down at the street at a school playground where a few children were kicking around a soccer ball.
         The shelves seemed stocked in equal measure with Russian and English books, including more than a dozen volumes of the Cambridge Modern History.  There were scores of mystery novels—Arthur Conan Doyle, Raymond Chandler, Graham Greene—and Katie noticed a copy of Anthony Trollope’s 1869 novel He Knew He Was Right, and jotted it down in her note pad. There was a photo of Philby with what appeared to be his granddaughter.
      Still standing, David said to the women, “Yesterday, Mrs. Philby, you said it was unlikely your husband would want to speak with us. May I ask what might have changed his mind?”
         The woman put out her lower lip, blinked for a few seconds, then said, “My husband is dying. He has very little time left. He believes it is time to reveal what his comrades did to him. They cannot hurt him any further.”
         She lit a cigarette and looked off towards the window, not at the Americans.   
       “You know that when he escaped to Moscow, my husband—we had not yet met—was told he would be treated like a hero. We have an expression—kak syr v masle—like cheese in butter. Instead, he was treated like someone worth nothing to them. Even when he tried to help them, they pushed him away. Then they told the world he was dead and have hidden the truth ever since. As if he had never existed. My husband needs to speak with someone. He decided it would be you.  And if you betray him,”—the woman shrugged—“nothing will change and he will soon be dead.”
         Katie didn’t know if she felt sorry at all for Philby but was touched by Rufina’s grief about her husband, whom by all accounts she truly loved. David was suspicious of the woman’s explanation of why Philby agreed to see Katie and him.  Katie said, putting her hand on her heart, “Well, I can promise you we will not reveal anything your husband doesn’t want us to.”
         At that a voice came from behind: “Well, well, so you are the two Americans who think I’m Harry Lime!”
         Katie and David turned to find Kim Philby before them and immediately recognized how the man in better days had impressed men and cast a spell on women. He was tall, paunchy now, with a British upper class lilt in his baritone voice. His eyes, behind thick glasses, were as blue as had been reported, his nose patrician, his hair thinner but brushed back at the sides. The face was flabby now, but had this not been a walk-up apartment in a decrepit section of Moscow, Katie and David might have taken him for a retired British military man, his jaw out, with a mouth that barely hinted at a welcoming smile. All he lacked was a double-breasted blue blazer with regimental necktie and campaign ribbons and medals pinned on it.
         Instead, he wore gray corduroy slacks and a loose plaid shirt with its cuffs rolled back to his elbows.  He offered the Americans a cigarette but they said no thank you. Katie mumbled, “I don’t smoke,” realizing it was bad form to sound superior to a man obviously dying of lung cancer. Philby took one out of the pack and lit up, taking a long draw then coughing with a congested wheeze.
         “I see you’ve met my wife,” he said. “Rufina, did you offer these Americans some tea?” which was a signal for her to leave the room for a while. “Sit down, sit down. I’m afraid the springs on that couch have seen better days but then haven’t we all?”
         Philby backed into his favorite chair and flicked his cigarette into an ashtray.   “So, how is my friend Lentov? Enjoying the lap of luxury as I am? Poetic justice, you know. Me here, him there, on different sides.”
         David told him about their meeting with Lentov, deciding not to mention what Southey had told them. Katie asked if she could use her pocket recorder and Philby just waved his hand in consent.
         “So,” said Philby, “what do you want to know?” His fist was at his lips to stifle another cough. “All about Graham and me and Holly Martins and Harry Lime? And how I even fooled Graham all those years. He never forgave me, but he also never stopped being my friend.”
        David spoke first. “How did you feel about betraying Greene?”
        Philby let out a light chuckle and said, “Actually, I felt worse about that than I did about spying for Russia. But Graham understood my motives better than anyone.”
         He picked up a book on the table next to his chair. It was the memoir he’d written, My Silent War. He opened it to the Introduction and handed the book to Katie. “Would you be so kind as to read that, Miss Cavuto? There, where I’ve put a little paper tab. It should tell you something.”
         Katie took the book and saw the Introduction had been written by Greene:  
       “The end, of course, in his eyes is held to justify the means, but this is a view taken, perhaps less openly, by most men involved in politics, if we are to judge them by their actions, whether the politician be a Disraeli or a Wilson. He betrayed his country–-yes, perhaps he did, but who among us has not committed treason to something or someone more important than a country? In Philby's own eyes he was working for the shape of things to come from which his country would benefit."
         David felt revulsion at what he’d just heard but said nothing. Philby’s way of justifying his treason was to have someone else say it, in this case the friend he had lied to and betrayed without a backward glance. Katie shared David’s reaction while trying to fathom Greene’s own blindness in the matter of Kim Philby. 
         Katie was also surprised by Greene’s use of the phrase “the shape of things to come,” which she felt sure he’d lifted—on purpose—from the science fiction novel from 1933 of the same name by H.G. Wells in which he foretold World War II, then a descent of the modern world into chaos, followed by a benevolent dictatorship and finally a Utopian vision for the future. Could someone as jaundiced about modern society as was Greene think that was what Philby had in mind by betraying the West?
         There were so many aspects of the Philby story she wanted to get into but knew her time with him was going to be brief, perhaps ended abruptly if she struck the wrong nerve. David was perfectly willing to let Katie handle the interview along the lines of the Greene-Philby connection.
         Philby suddenly had a coughing fit that lasted half a minute, phlegmy, shaking him and making him gasp. His wife arrived carrying a tea tray that she put down, then began to pat her husband on his back but said nothing until he recovered from the fit, asking if he was going to have some tea with the Americans. Philby just waved his hand, still taking deep breaths.
         The tea was served Russian style, in glasses not cups, without sugar but with cherry preserves on the side. The pouring and stirring allowed Philby to recover and begin speaking, flicking cigarette ashes from his trousers.
         Like Lentov, Philby had a rambling story to tell, whether or not it had anything to do with Graham Greene. It was told without chronology, flipping back and forth to pre-war England, then to Beirut and Moscow and back again.  Philby apparently had no desire to issue any apologies, though it was clear that he felt betrayed by his Russian comrades even as he made fun of his current circumstances. He reminisced about what he did miss in England—including his favorite marmalade—and how he listened to the BBC broadcasts on radio when its signal was clear enough to receive. He asked about certain figures in his past, not expecting that Katie and David would have any knowledge of them, and tried to sound resigned to his fate.
         “I forget who wrote it,” he said, “I think it was John Kenneth Galbraith (right), whom I met once. He said, ‘Under capitalism, man exploits man. Under communism, it’s just the opposite.’ A little pat but largely true. The difference is that neither capitalism nor communism has ever worked as it’s supposed to. As soon as the flag is raised in either camp, it becomes soiled by those who wish to use it for their own purposes, and those purposes are always venal.”
         “Are you saying you were naïve when you sided with communism?” asked David.
         “Probably, but I was a true believer. One look at Britain’s arrant colonial policies will dash any thought of capitalism working for those colonized. Perhaps I was really more of a Socialist, though that’s not really a belief, more like a notion. At Cambridge everyone we knew trifled with Marxism, and half of those were homosexual. Burgess (left) was flagrant about it, which was one of the reasons he couldn’t stand living in Moscow, because he’d be arrested as a pervert. He did have a lover, though, then his liver gave out. Anthony Blunt (right) was one, too; hung with the arts crowd and refused the KGB’s help squirreling him out of England.  Said he’d rather die shivering in London than freezing to death in Moscow.”