The Finder

by Will Ferguson

  Shimada would have asked about the missing bike, but the widow had pushed on, was calling to him over her shoulder.

  “I don’t know if he’s out, or just not answering. Maybe foreigners are heavy sleepers.” But she didn’t sound convincing, even to herself.

  “Perhaps,” said Shimada. Tabun. That all-purpose Japanese phrase, evasive, polite, fraught with meaning. Maybe.

  The guestrooms had doors that opened directly onto an overgrown and, it must be said, neglected backyard garden, a tanglement of weeds barely kept at bay. A breeding ground for habu, he was sure.

  “I knocked and I knocked,” she said. “But he wouldn’t open the door.”

  The widow jangled her keys, trying to find the correct one. They were now standing directly outside the last door. A faded number 4 was painted on it. Unlucky, that, the number four. It meant “death.” Strange she hadn’t skipped it; most hotels and guest inns went directly from three to five.

  She segregated the correct key, saw him looking at the number on the door. “I’m not superstitious,” she said. “Never have been.”

  Perhaps you should be.

  The wooden veneer on the door was rotting from the bottom up, black mold reaching partway toward the handle. She hesitated, voice dropping to a whisper. “I heard him when I came out at night to empty the wash pail. In his room, behind his door, arguing to himself, almost shouting.”

  “Alone?”

  She nodded. “I wasn’t sure if he was on his cell phone or just…” She twirled a finger around her temple. Crazy.

  “Maybe.”

  Shimada straightened his shoulders, leaned forward, and hammered on the door in a virile and by no means petite manner, calling out as gruffly as he could—in English. “Police! Please!” The way he pronounced it, they sounded like the same word.

  Nothing.

  He nodded to the widow, who, with hands slightly trembling, slid the key into the lock and pulled down on the handle. The door swung open and Shimada stepped through, into the darkness on the other side.

  * * *

  FUMBLING FOR THE CORD ON the overhead light, Shimada took a moment for his eyes to adjust as the florescent tubes flickered and buzzed into life.

  The bed hadn’t been slept in. That was the first strange thing. The cover was still pulled straight, sheets crisply turned down, no discernible indents on the pillow. Shimada caught his own reflection staring back at him, eyes hooded by the overhead glare. He was looking at the mirror above the washbasin. No bathroom—that was in the house, shared with the other guests—but each room did have a faucet and a hand towel and a small square of soap, still unwrapped. And a mirror to peer into.

  In the mirror, Shimada could see a large, misshapen shadow sprawled on the floor next to the bed, and now his hand was on his holster and his chest was tight. He stepped wide, around the bed. Waiting for him on the other side was neither a slumbering demon nor an ambush brewing but only a large duffel bag, unzipped and gaping, empty.

  Not quite.

  The officer crouched down while the widow stayed back, watching from the doorway. Inside the duffel bag was some loose dirt, a fragment of what looked to be pottery, and—he opened the bag wider—a block of money, shrink-wrapped in plastic.

  Shimada reached in, pulled out more blocks of money, and more. American currency, shrink-wrapped. He then examined the fragment of pottery. Held it up to the light. He recognized it. It was from a funeral urn, the type interred in turtleback tombs. This fragment had a partial pattern, raised like a welt on the surface, and he recognized that too. It was the family mon of the Kara clan, Okinawa’s royal dynasty, the last kings of Ryukyu. Some family mons were famous, and this was one of them. The Taira family crest was a long-tailed butterfly. The Yamato, a cherry blossom. The Ishida, a crane. The Kara family? Their mon resembled a stylized cicada, but was in fact a hotaru. A firefly.

  Shimada straightened up, knees stiff, and as he did so, his foot kicked something. It rolled across the floor. A red plastic tube. The officer retrieved this with his pen, wary of fingerprints. He recognized this item from his childhood boar-hunting days, running down grassy trails with his father and uncles. It was a shotgun shell.

  Later, they would try to determine why their officer hadn’t called the main police station on Ishigaki Island directly, rather than leaving it to a flustered widow. There was no clear answer. Perhaps the officer had thought a fraught call from a civilian would get quicker results, or perhaps he’d felt that time was of the essence and he needed to pick up the trail quickly, couldn’t afford to waste time talking his way up the chain of command. Maybe. Or perhaps, addled and unsettled, he simply wasn’t thinking at all.

  Shimada turned to the widow. “Call the main police station on Ishigaki. Have them send backup, right away. Code— Code”—he couldn’t remember the number—“Code Important.”

  The widow hurried off and Shimada stepped out into the shrill, cicada-infused heat. He knew the meaning of the missing bike at the guesthouse, and he knew exactly where the foreigner was—he just didn’t know why.

  Shimada did the calculations in his head. They would take a speedboat from Ishigaki Island. Forty minutes, at least. The airport at Hateruma had closed down, but the runway was still maintained for charter flights and emergencies. If they commandeered a small plane, they could do it in twenty-five. But it would take the Ishigaki police station at least half an hour to clear a flight, and even then, if they could get approval to scramble an aircraft it would take another twenty to get to the airport, board a plane, lift off. And they would still have to get from the abandoned airport on Hateruma into town. No. They would come by boat.

  Forty minutes. That was the soonest they could arrive. If he bicycled back to his house, uphill for the most part, grabbed his car keys, and took the patrol vehicle, it would add another fifteen minutes. Or he could go to the dock, flag down one of the miniature trucks, have them run him across—if there was a truck, and if it was available—but at this stage it was quicker simply to bike it. He looked down at his feet. After he got rid of these slippers, of course.

  HATERUMA BLUE

  EVERY LABYRINTH HAS ITS DEAD ends. Hateruma was no exception.

  Coral walls pressed in from either side, funneling traffic into narrow lanes and cul-de-sacs and unexpected turnarounds. Whenever that happened, when a path or a road came to a sudden T, ending on a wall or a front yard, special heavy stone markers had been rolled into place. These markers were inscribed with Chinese characters to turn back malevolent spirits. Evil travels in a straight line, you see, hates to tack right or left, hates to change course, and Hateruma’s ishi-gan-to stones deflected the razor-like routes that evil followed. The island’s spirit lines formed a network, blocked here, averted there, redirected this way, then that, eventually leading to the cliffs at the island’s edge and then into the sea, in much the same way a wild boar might be corralled. A malicious presence would thus be directed away from the village, avoiding homes and businesses, and Officer Shimada wondered if perhaps the foreigner had wandered into this labyrinth and found himself unable to escape. Perhaps Shimada had done the same.

  He rode awkwardly, holster joggling with each turn of the pedal, leaning into his own momentum to make up time. A toad hobbled across the road in front of him. The wind was growing restless, the sugarcane was swaying back and forth, grassy fields were alive with whorls and rippling waves. At times like this, it felt as though the entire island were in motion. He was now skirting the very edge of Hateruma on a tarmacked road with open ocean on one side, a tumult of wind on the other. Clouds were boiling up in the distance. He could see the end approaching.

  All roads eventually led here, to the cliffs of Cape Takana, where the island sheared into the sea, jagged free falls of coral limestone, exposed to the full brunt of it, with the ocean swelling and dropping on every heave. A blue so deep it had its own name: Hateruma-no-ao.

  Set back from the cliffs was the domed tower of the Hateruma Observato
ry, a research station whose colossal telescope prowled the skies at night, the only building out here, often mistaken for a lighthouse. Low latitudes and a lack of light made Cape Takana ideal; it was one of the few places in Japan where you could view the Southern Cross, low along the horizon, the very constellation that featured so prominently on the Australian flag. Perhaps the foreigner was a scientist or an amateur astronomer. Perhaps it was a telescope he was toting in that bag, not a shotgun. Perhaps the foreigner was simply homesick, had come to view the Southern Cross from the other side, south by southeast. Except that the widow had said he was from England, not Australia. And, anyway, the observatory was closed for the season.

  Shimada parked his bike next to the commemorative stone marker that heralded the southernmost point in Japan—a lie, as noted, but a much-photographed lie nonetheless. There were no tourists about on this blustery morning. No one at all, except…

  Farther out, a bicycle lay on its side, its front wheel angling upward, rotating on the wind. As Shimada walked down to it, he knew before he got there that this was the missing bike from the widow’s guesthouse; he recognized the rust and pale green paint. It looked as though it had been flung aside in a panic—but no. The kickstand was up. The bicycle must have fallen on its own accord, most likely tipped over by the wind; people fleeing for their lives would rarely have the presence of mind to put down the kickstand first.

  A flapping noise, and he spotted a strap of some sort wedged in the coral nearby. When he pulled on it, a black fabric bag came loose. He recognized this as well: it was a padded shoulder case typically used to transport long-bore rifles. Shotguns, for example. But the weapon itself was gone.

  What are you hunting, gaijin-san? Habu? Ghosts?

  The officer looked out, into the wind of Cape Takana. He could see the curve of the earth in the ocean. Hateruma blue. Where have you gone, gaijin-san? There is nowhere to run. Only the cliffs and the sea and the wind. Coral convolutions. Jagged hillocks. Nowhere to run, perhaps, but a thousand places to hide. If Shimada was going to be ambushed, it was going to be now.

  The officer picked his way across the sharpened coral and ragged ankle-rolls of rock, out to the very edge of Cape Takana. Carefully, carefully, he leaned over, peered at the waves below. Seabirds wheeled. Waves came in on cymbal crashes of foam. And, buffeted by a sudden shove of wind, Shimada stumbled forward, lurched to keep his cap on his head, just as quickly stumbled back on a surge of vertigo: fear and elation in equal measure. He could picture himself falling, end over end…

  He picked his way back across the coral. If there was a body at the bottom of the cliffs, he hadn’t glimpsed it, and even if there was, the undertow would have been battering it on broken rocks for a long while yet. It could be days, if ever, before the body was spat out again. He thought of the widow’s husband, of the sea reaching up to pull him off his boat.

  When Shimada got back to the side of the road, his bicycle was rocking on its stand, ready to topple as well, and he would have ridden back to his police box to await the arrival of the other officers had he not noticed something odd. The observatory, on its sweep of hill. The front door was open. He could see the square of black even from here. But the observatory didn’t operate during the summer; the current team of astronomers had returned to Tokyo and Osaka, wouldn’t be back for at least a month. They didn’t mingle much with the locals, these scientists, though his wife had always taken an interest in them. “Such fascinating young men! To think that they spend their lives searching the heavens. They must get lonely.”

  Leaving his bike to rock on the wind, Officer Shimada made his way uphill to the observatory. He was in no rush, because he knew. He knew exactly where the foreigner had gone. He’s inside, my lost gaijin. He’s waiting for me. He doesn’t know it, but he is.

  In a tuft of grass, something thin was caught: a snake skin, turned perfectly inside out like a dried windsock of scales, unraveling like a discarded party favor.

  The door had been pried open. Shimada could see the splintered wood on the frame. He unlatched the clasp on the holster of the gun that he had never fired, had never had cause to fire, and for the second time that morning, he stepped across a threshold, not knowing what was waiting for him on the other side.

  * * *

  HE NEVER THOUGHT TO DRAW his weapon. Unlatching the holster was as far as he got.

  “Gomen kudasai!” He still wasn’t sure why he was speaking so politely.

  He stood in the doorway, the light outside fanning inward, catching arbitrary angles and sharp corners. It looked like a classroom, and in a way it was. The first floor of the observatory was open to the public, and display cases and educational panels were arranged accordingly. Momentarily blinded by the darkness, eyes adjusting to an empty room, he entered.

  “Gomen kudasai!” But his voice was swallowed by the silence.

  It was faint at first, a hesitant rustling, almost rhythmic, like a broken wing trying to take flight, feathered bones moving in vain, back and forth. Or a moth trapped in a jar. The wind was searching the room, had found something apparently, and Shimada traced the sound to a far corner, where a secondary hallway branched off.

  He looked down and there it was. Exhibit A. Not a bird’s wing, but a book. A journal of some sort, lying open on the floor with the pages flipping back and forth in the cross breeze as though turned by an impatient hand. Shimada crouched down, didn’t want to disturb it, noted the scribbled writing and something that looked like a smear of rust, but wasn’t.

  Just past the discarded journal, jutting out from behind the corner, was the polished wooden stock of a shotgun. A piece of coral had been wedged into the trigger, and although the end of the barrel was out of view, he could smell it. Scorched powder, burned flesh, like a matchstick that was still trailing smoke.

  With a steadying breath, Shimada stepped around the corner. A body was sprawled backward into the hall, legs splayed. Cheap running shoes. Baggy cargo shorts. A pastel polo shirt, belly exposed. Arms akimbo. Face missing. No features, only a charred absence. A pool of sticky syrup was coagulating beneath the back of the head. A congregation of flies. Exclamation points of blood radiating outward.

  His first corpse, in situ. Shimada leaned in, studied the open wound, the absence in front of him. It was as though the man’s face had been yanked inward. Embedded in the sunken wound were glimmers of dull ivory. Those would be teeth. A glimpse of pewter. Those would be fillings. No eyes, no nose, no lips. And Shimada wondered, Why would you kill yourself by firing a shotgun into your face? Wouldn’t it be simpler to hold the barrel in your mouth, blow out the back of your head instead? And if the goal was suicide all along, why not take a long step off one of the many conveniently located cliffs outside, let the sea do the work for you? The body, the rifle, the journal: it almost seemed staged, a tableau arranged as though for public viewing.

  He pulled his own notepad from his pocket, opened it to a new page, wrote DEAD FOREIGNER across the top in large kanji characters, then, “Discovered at…” He checked the time on his watch. But that was as far as he got, as far as he was allowed to get, because before Shimada could jot down the hour or minute or even the day, he felt a low thrum in the air. Then he heard it: a whomp-whomp-whomp outside the observatory.

  When he stepped into the sun, shielding his eyes, Shimada saw it coming in, low across the water, fighting updrafts all the way, blades thumping, pushing a wave of noise in front of it, and for a moment he thought, They sent a helicopter? But as it swept over the coral cliffs and circled the observatory, he could see the insignia on the side, not that of the regional Okinawa prefectural police, but the Coast Guard’s SST unit, part of Japan’s National Security Agency. The helicopter hovered a moment like a dragonfly in midflight then tilted away, toward the landing strip at the abandoned airport. Through the open sides, rolled back and ready, Shimada could see a cohort of dark-garbed officers, flak jackets and opaque helmets, and in their midst, a flurry of blond hair blowing every w
hich way and a thin face staring back at him. Their eyes met for a moment—and then she was gone, pulled away as if by a rip cord.

  And with that, the investigation was no longer his. Police Inspector Shimada, senior officer, Hateruma Island Substation, wheeled his bicycle onto the tarmac, climbed astride with a wobbled lack of grace, and pedaled back to his village to await further instructions, back to a life of lost and found, of sugarcane wives and messy kitchens, of bamboo and bitter melons, where widows smile through their pain and the tables are never turned.

  PART TWO THE LAST TESTAMENT OF BILLY MOORE

  FOR AS LONG AS I can remember, I’ve had a knack for finding things.

  It began in childhood, as most things do, amidst the threadbare and doily-laden flat I shared with my mum, surrounded by knickknacks and keepsakes and the stifling presence of a semi-mythical father, long gone. The entire place, I realize now, was little more than a museum of the mundane, a diorama of sadness—Belfast sadness, a peculiar breed all its own. Clocks that needed winding, mantels that needed dusting, ceramic figurines with rictus grins, holiday snapshots in ill-fitting frames. This is Blackpool. That was Portrush.

  And yet, as narrow as that flat was, my mother still managed to mislay things, was constantly walking in and out of rooms like a character in a play who has forgotten her lines, endlessly baffled by the turns her life has taken. “Now, where on earth did I…?” and quietly, consistently, I would find it for her: reading glasses (atop the refrigerator), her pocketbook (behind the sofa), memories (sinking fitfully into photo albums).

  There were tricks involved. Memories could be nudged into place with soft-spoken queries. “Mum, who is this again?” “Oh, that’s your uncle Bertie.” “And when?” “The war.” “Which war?” “Does it really matter?” “Yes. Yes, it does. Which war? Think, Mum. Think.” Sometimes all that was required was a shift in gaze, looking up instead of across, for example. Most of us slumber-walk through life at eye level; a simple tilt of the head can divulge entire kingdoms. This was how her glasses revealed themselves atop the Frigidaire. At other times, one had to back-walk through events, reeling in one’s movements until you came to the crux of where you and the object had parted company, like running a film in reverse. A lost reel, respooled. Sometimes locating lost objects involved entering a trancelike state, allowing one’s gaze to go ever-so-slightly out of focus, reducing the jumbled details to a mottled glow against which the lost object might pop out, into the foreground. One looks for incongruities. Such was the Case of the Missing Pocketbook, wedged deep between faded cushions, where a thin gap created a subtle but distinct break in the floral pattern of the sofa’s fabric. The pocketbook was also florally arrayed; it was the blackness of that gap which had revealed its presence.