Over a rusting pedestrian bridge, clattering down the stairs and then into the rockabilly club where Billy would be waiting for him, except that he wasn’t, and Peachy worming his way through the crowd, surveying the room as the Japanese DJ played Murasaki’s “Double Dealing Woman.” This was where Japanese rock and roll was born, in this city, in these streets, a fusion of island rhythms and American conventions, of Okinawan dialects and African echoes. Next on the turntable was Condition Green, “Life of Change.” They were playing the oldies tonight, and Peachy waved for a beer, but was too anxious to drink. Mixed up. Life of Change. And where the feck is Billy?
Peachy tried to wait, patient like, but his leg was restless and it bounced around nervously and his mind couldn’t sit still either. Something was wrong. Seriously wrong. Have t’get outta here.
Back on the street, not sure what to do.
Into the mayhem of a night market, bingata cloth and lacquerware with mother-of-pearl inlays. An American collector was holding up a piece for his wife to admire. “Okinawan lacquer, honey! Finest in the world. And it only grows more valuable with age.”
Like wine, thought Peachy. Like rock and roll. Like friendship.
Beyond the lacquer, an oilier market, sheaved with fish, their gaping mouths caught in a permanent surprise. No one ever expects the hook or the net. Rubber-aproned matrons, hosing down the pavement. Parrot fish and scarlet octopi. Fat-bellied tuna. Medusa-like squid, tentacles slopping over the sides of their trays, looking alive even in death. And in the next alley, a fish-fed cat and a chained-down dog squared off in competing tails: the curled Akita question mark of the dog, the raised tail and puckered anus exclamation point of the cat. A hiss, a single bronchial woof—and the cat bolts.
And again Peachy spins around, and again there is no one there. Not Billy, not anyone.
Where did’ja go, y’fecker?
Was that Shankill Road idjit confused, did he go to the saloon instead? Peachy tried to check his texts, but now his phone was gone. Jaysus feck. He looked around in case he’d dropped it, but it could have been anywhere. A cheap pay-as-you go burner, but still. Feckin’ hell.
There was nothing to do now but trudge all the way to the First Chance, Last Chance Saloon, so named because it was at the head of Gate 2 Street, practically at the doorstep of the US military base. This saloon was where American servicemen first stopped when they headed out for a night on the town, and the last place they visited on their way back. Which is to say, the First Chance, Last Chance featured only two levels of inebriation: fresh faced and full blown. The sober and the wrecked. There were no in-betweens in the First Chance, Last Chance Saloon. Like life, my friend, like life, Billy had said. Go all in, or feck off.
As Peachy walked up Gate 2 Street, the Kadena Air Base grew closer; he could see the searchlights pointed heavenward as though searching for Luftwaffe formations. Some of the bars along the way had signs posted on the door, in English: NO FOREIGNERS ALLOWED. Meaning no US personnel, meaning servicemen, meaning Peachy’s main clientele. But America is everywhere. In the scrum of soldiers bullying their way down the street, in the loud voice of Japanese Yankee boys, hair slicked back, in the aggressive revving of Harley Davidsons slow-crawling down the street, perpetually on the lurk.
He angled his way into the saloon, pummeled by voices and braying laughter, the sudden shiv of profanity. “Peachy!” shouts an American male. “Long time!” “Have y’seen Billy?” he shouts back. “Who? Your buddy? No. Come have a drink.” But Peachy pushes past.
A Japanese band is playing hurtin’ songs. We feature both kinds of music, the barkeep joked: country and western. Songs of love and love’s departure. Peachy waits, but no point to it. That fecker Billy is somewhere else, not here, and Peachy, feeling the walls closing in, escapes, heads back outside, into cooler air and the open arena of the street.
Kimonos are coming home, faces flushed and smiling. Parents are herding their children down the street. Kids in their summer clothes. Drummers lugging suddenly heavy taiko. The elation that comes with the end of any festival. Dragons, placated. Ancestral ghosts, entertained and sent off. Peachy crosses the street against a surging and indifferent tide, and now, coming toward him—a face both familiar and forgettable. Where has he seen that face before? This is what he thinks as they pass, and their eyes meet, and there it is: recognition, and a sting in Peachy’s thigh. Peachy turns, angrily, is about to say something, when he sees the wee man look back at him, dissolves into the crowd, and Peachy, confused and in pain, can feel the lights change, the sidewalk begin to tilt.
He almost makes it to the other side before he collapses.
THE CATALOG OF LOST THINGS
HERE, THEN, WAS THE INFORMATION Agent Rhodes presented, her dissertation in a sense, ten years in the making, a PowerPoint parade of objects, once lost, now found, complete with timelines cross-referenced by date and location and mad leaps in conjecture.
It began with an image of polished perfection: an alabaster sphere, decorated to look like a miniature royal carriage pulled by an intricately rendered angel, a bejeweled egg that had opened up to reveal the finely crafted bronze filigree of an ornamental clock, hiding inside.
CASE #1: THE LOST FABERGÉ EGGS
“Easter, 1885: Russia’s imperial family, the Romanovs, commission a series of decorative eggs from the House of Fabergé to be given as gifts, one-of-a-kind creations, each with a surprise inside waiting to be found. It might be a ruby pendant or a diamond-encased manicure set, a miniature tiara or a clockwork hen. Breathtaking creations. Elaborate. Opulent to the point of garish. Playful and intimate and magnificent, all at the same time. These annual Imperial Easter eggs symbolized the very best and the very worst of royal affluence. It was the final glory of a dying star. In 1918, the Romanov family, unceremoniously deposed, were lined up in a basement and shot by their Communist captors. The Fabergé eggs were confiscated. Some were sold off by the Bolsheviks’ cash-strapped regime, others were put on display at the Kremlin as examples of bourgeois decadence, others still were filched and smuggled out of the country. Of the fifty eggs that Fabergé created for the czar and his family, forty-two are accounted for. Eight are missing. Those missing eggs have a combined value of more than $140 million. None has ever been recovered. Until now. Two years ago, this very egg—the one you’re looking at, Cherub and Chariot—surfaced in Ukraine. Long thought lost, Cherub and Chariot was discovered inside a strongbox in the manor of a recently ousted oligarch. The egg was then flown under armed guard to Saint Petersburg, where it was verified as authentic, and now sits in a place of pride in the Hermitage museum. How it came to be in the oligarch’s possession is less clear. The egg’s provenance, its chain of ownership, is murky at best.”
“Why not just ask him?” said one of the Brits. “The oligarch who owned it.”
“Because, unfortunately, said oligarch is currently lying in a radioactive grave. He fell ill during the trial, you see. A bad case of Putin-was-pissed. We have since learned that the deceased man had surreptitiously purchased Cherub and Chariot years before, through a brokerage firm in Amsterdam. He paid $17 million for it. Today, it is worth almost double that amount. You would think tracking a large lump-sum payment such as that would be easy—after all, we have the name of the brokerage firm, TLT Limited. But our investigation quickly turned into a maze of mirrors. The firm was a shell—inside a shell, inside another shell. The financial equivalent of a Russian nesting doll. The original payment had long since disappeared into an offshore account in Panama, and TLT had likewise disappeared into a puff of air.”
“But—where is the crime in that?”
“We believe that whoever sold this Fabergé egg to our now-deceased oligarch used that money to fund his later activities. We believe everything that follows came from this initial windfall.”
“Not we,” said Addario. “You.”
Agent Rhodes advanced to the next slide.
CASE #2: MUHAMMAD ALI’S GOLD MEDAL
/> “Louisville, 1960: A young Olympian by the name of Cassius Clay returns to his hometown, jubilant. He has just won a gold medal in boxing at the Rome Games, for his country, has been feted and celebrated abroad and is now back in the US of A. But nothing has changed. The bigotry hasn’t abated—if anything, it’s gotten worse—and after being refused service at a restaurant, he flings his gold medal into the Ohio River in disgust and walks away. Four years later, Cassius Clay would become heavyweight champion of the world and would change his name to Ali. His gold medal would sit in the muck at the bottom of the Ohio River for more than forty years. Enter TLT Shipping and Dredging. Through a series of what turned out to be dubious contracts and forged permits, TLT begins dredging the river, ostensibly as an aid for increased traffic along the Ohio. Soon after, coincidentally, I’m sure, Muhammad Ali’s gold medal appears at an elite auction house. You see, Ali had never flung his gold medal into the Ohio River. He’d lost it during his early years bouncing from place to place and had been too embarrassed to admit it, so he concocted a story of righteous anger. The medal itself had turned up in an attic of unclaimed goods, its fortuitous discovery confirmed by witnesses and fully notarized. No one thought to wonder whether the medal hadn’t already been discovered and then simply planted there in order to be found. Storage Wars on steroids.”
“Why go through all that trouble? If they rescued it from the river, why not admit it?”
“Because the city would’ve had dibs on it. That medal sold for $1.7 million at open auction. A Vegas casino owner, I believe. Remember, too, that the city of Louisville had covered the cost of dredging as an economic incentive. If they realized they’d been duped into footing the bill for what was, in essence, a private salvage operation, there would have been lawsuits flying in every direction. As it was, wouldn’t you know it, but TLT Shipping and Dredging shut down just before the medal reappeared. The rusted hulk of their dredging operation is still standing knee deep in the Ohio River, even now.”
The black-and-white image of an African drum appeared, dark-sheened wood, a taut cowhide skin.
CASE #3: THE KALINGA DRUM
“You are looking at the dynastic symbol of Tutsi royalty in Rwanda. An emblem of authority, the Kalinga drum served in much the same role as”—she turned to the Japanese officers—“the imperial jewel, sword, and mirror of the Emperor, or”—to the Brits now—“the way that the throne of Westminster represents Britain’s royal line, or”—to Colonel McNair—“the way the Declaration of Independence represents American sovereignty. The Kalinga drum had been handed down for four hundred years. It was traditionally adorned with the testicles of the king’s defeated enemies.”
The Brits snorted at this, because of course they did.
“When the last Tutsi king of Rwanda was toppled by the Hutu majority in 1959, the Kalinga drum was locked away, deep in the presidential vaults. Most people assumed the drum had been destroyed, in much the same way the Romanov family was wiped out—to erase the past. But even the most vocal of Rwanda’s anti-Tutsi hardliners lacked the courage to destroy an object imbued with such power.”
Another image came forward. It was a snapshot from a nightmare: human skulls. Thousands upon thousands of human skulls, stacked in rows, stretching back into infinity.
“The Rwanda genocide. In 1994, this small central African nation collapsed into bloodshed and madness. Under the ethnically obsessed ideology of Hutu Power, the ruling regime unleashed a second apocalypse aimed at wiping out the nation’s Tutsi population once and for all. One million people died in the span of one hundred days, the most efficient genocide in human history; even the Nazis didn’t reach a killing rate such as they did in Rwanda. And it was an intimate genocide as well. The victims were murdered by their neighbors and in-laws, friends and coworkers, chopped down with machetes, chased into swamps, burnt out of the fields they’d been hiding in. When Rwanda’s Hutu Power regime was finally pushed out by an army of Tutsi rebels, the genocidaires fled across the border into eastern Congo, where they set up a murderous government-in-exile. They brought with them Rwanda’s entire national reserve of gold and all its foreign currency. They’d looted the treasury, leaving their country in ruins as they departed. They also brought with them the royal drum.”
Another image: a mud-splattered refugee camp, drooping with blue tarps and small fires, packed with people ragged and shell-shocked.
“The refugee camps in eastern Congo soon disintegrated into anarchy and mob rule, as UN workers and Oxfam volunteers tried to sort the genocidaires from the real refugees. In the middle of this suppurating wound, a small international NGO set up camp, ostensibly to distribute water and blankets: TLT Ministries. By the time they left, a dozen people had been killed and the Kalinga drum had been recovered. It was an operation that spun out of control. TLT mercenaries attacked, the Presidential Guard returned fire, and the civilians were caught in the crossfire, as civilians always are. But what are a dozen lives against a million? The drum was spirited away and was later sold back to the current Tutsi-led government of Rwanda for an undisclosed amount. Make no mistake,” said Rhodes, “there is a body count associated with these objects. A record dealer in Memphis tried to get cute with an early recording of ‘Hound Dog.’ He ended up floating facedown in a hotel pool. A stamp collector in Madrid was turned inside out over a forged One-Cent Magenta. An antiquities dealer we spoke with in Vatican City later had his tongue cut out. This isn’t a treasure hunt. This is a dark river. Massive criminal interests are involved, millions of undeclared dollars are moving across international borders with impunity. It’s not fun and games, it’s not hide-and-seek, it’s not cat and mouse. This is a hyena loose among the wildebeest.”
Colonel McNair leaned forward. “You’re saying a single person was responsible for—all of this?”
“I am. We almost had him, too, in Vatican City, but he… Well, he vanished. We got a lucky break in the Congo, though. This was back when I first started out, a junior officer, still in training. I wasn’t directly involved in that operation, but I can tell you, during the bloodshed in Rwanda and Congo, our Africa bureau received its first, and so far only, physical description of the person in question. It came to us from a doctor with Oxfam who’d set up her clinic right next to TLT. She only ever saw him in the dark, and she understandably had other things on her mind, but she described the small man as quiet, unassuming, well mannered, Caucasian, vaguely unspecific accent, nondescript features.”
“So… not a description,” said one of the Brits. “More a lack of description.”
“Yes, but using that we can eliminate who he isn’t.” It was like a round of Guess Who? the board game where you jettison suspects until you narrow it down to a single face. “Not female, not black, nor Asian, not old, nor physically imposing. That is who was in the Congo. That is who we are hunting. A white male, diminutive stature, uncertain nationality.”
The Brits were unconvinced. “We can certainly see the seriousness of this. Murder, perhaps. Theft, certainly. But these still seem more like local matters.”
Rhodes advanced to the next slide: a violin, deeply adored. One could see the patina of care, the generations of love involved. It glowed with it.
“A Stradivarius,” said Rhodes. “Protected under the World Heritage Act. Would that be a local matter?”
CASE #4: THE STOLEN STRADIVARIUS
“Italian violin maker Antonio Stradivari, born 1644, died 1737, left behind a legacy that is unsurpassed. He crafted the most prized musical instruments the world has ever known, famed for their lush sounds and pitch-perfect notes, coveted for their artistry, their history, their enduring and deserved fame. When they disappear, they disappear forever.”
Officer Gushiken frowned his approval. “Very famous,” he said. Even he, who had no interest in classical music—he preferred Okinawan rock and roll—knew of Stradivarius.
Rhodes brought up another slide of another violin.
“In 1995, thieves broke into th
e home of ninety-one-year-old violinist Erika Morini as she lay dying alone in her Paris flat and stole the Stradivarius she had owned since her youth. Made in 1727, it was valued at $3 million. Never recovered.” Rhodes brought up a list of others:
The Karpilowsky Stradivarius (1712): stolen 1953
The Arnes Stradivarius (1734): stolen 1981
The Colossus Stradivarius (1714): stolen 1998
The King Maximilian Stradivarius (1709): stolen 1999
The Le Maurien Stradivarius (1714): stolen 2002
“Combined value: in excess of $18 million. None has ever been recovered.”
One of the Brits tried to laugh it off. “So? Someone is collecting Stradivariuses. Surely you’re not suggesting our man Billy from Belfast has been stealing priceless violins for more than fifty years. Tricky that, considering he wasn’t even born in 1953.”
“That’s not what I’m saying. Not at all.” She pointed to the screen. “None of these violins ever resurfaced. They were taken as objects of art, and no doubt sit in lonely vaults, are played late at night when no one is listening. You can’t resell any of these, they’re too renowned, too well known. You can’t put a $2 million stolen Stradivarius up for auction. Interpol would be all over you.”
“So why are we—?”
“Last summer, violinist Min-Jin Kym stopped for a sandwich at a London train station. In the moment it took for her to put her case down to take out her wallet, her violin was lifted. A 1696 Stradivarius valued at $1.8 million—gone. The pair of thieves who took it clearly had no idea of what they had on their hands, because they first tried to sell it on the black market for $167. They were caught and convicted, but the violin had vanished. Two months later, an East End Cockney moneyman took a nasty stumble and fell out of a six-floor window. Tragic accident. He was, coincidentally, I’m sure, a known associate of certain petty thieves who haunted the rail stations of London, but any connection to the stolen violin is only conjecture, I’m afraid. They had to scrape him off the pavements with a spatula. Soon after, the violin reappeared. A nameless person contacted the London Met, gave them the good news: he had Min-Jin’s lost violin. All he was asking for was a finder’s fee of $2.5 million. It wasn’t a ransom, you see, it was a reward—albeit one he set himself. When they balked, he replied, sympathetically, ‘I understand. If it is hard to come up with such a large amount all at once, why don’t I sell it back to you piece by piece?’ ” Agent Rhodes paused for full effect. “They paid.”
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