The Gentleman from Japan

by James Church

  “My passport isn’t Japanese. It isn’t for someone named Tamada. It’s my old one.”

  “Didn’t Tomás tell you that’s no problem? We made arrangements. Most important, it will help reinforce your story when you get to the factory. If all you had was a genuine passport, they would be suspicious. They’ll be suspicious of a phony one as well, but less so. It’s Costa Rican, right? Let me see it.”

  “Passports are headaches.” I handed mine to Vincente. “Better to come ashore from a submarine. I did that once, but they make you wear black clothes. I don’t look good in black.”

  Vincente raised his eyebrows. “Sorry to be so traditional, going such a mundane route. We didn’t have a submarine handy. Don’t worry, no one here in Portugal will look twice at yours.” He flipped through it before handing it back to me. “It won’t be a problem, not even going through security. There’s a suitcase in the boot; you can check that at the ticket counter. They don’t like passengers without luggage traveling on an evening flight. It rings bells in the system. Bells we don’t need.”

  “Besides,” Rosalina said, “you can use a change of clothes. I picked out a nice shirt and a blue tie. Nothing black. You’ll like it.”

  “You sure I have a seat on this flight?”

  Rosalina turned around. “We are sitting next to each other.”

  “Am I supposed to know you? Or is that part three?”

  “Only casually.” She turned and looked at herself in the mirror. “But who knows where things could go?”

  Vincente grunted. “Good luck, Hiro. Bon voyage. Have a pleasant flight. Oh, here, something to remember us by.” He handed me a tiny cloth bag with a drawstring. “For you. We’ll be in touch.”

  The suitcase in the boot was an overnight bag, a Louis Vuitton that wasn’t cheap, unless it was counterfeit. It wasn’t heavy; in fact, I had a feeling it was almost empty. A shirt and a tie wouldn’t weigh much.

  “The plane isn’t full,” the woman at the ticket counter said. “You can take that bag on if you want. It will fit in the overhead. If you check it, it’s liable to get beat up. Looks expensive.”

  “No, I’ll check it. You mind?”

  “Makes no difference to me.” She looked at my face, then at my passport, then back at me. “Plane boards at eight fifteen. Security is that way. You’ll have to hurry.”

  A few seconds after leaving the counter I looked back. She was already on the phone.

  Chapter Seven

  As she said she would be, Rosalina was seated next to me. I was in the window seat; she was on the aisle, which meant I had to climb over her. It was a short flight, so we didn’t have much time to talk, and anyway I didn’t think it was a good idea if we appeared to know each other. Vincente hadn’t been specific on that, and Rosalina had only passed it off with a wink. I was getting used to their idea of what made for a good operation—leave most things vague and hope for the best. So far, there didn’t seem much to recommend that approach.

  “If you’d like to put your bag in the overhead before you climb into your seat, there’s room up there.” She pointed.

  “Thank you. I checked my bag.”

  “Interesting,” she said. “Most people carry their bags on, especially if they aren’t very big.” She paused. “Sometimes they disappear if they’re checked.”

  “I see,” I said. “You have a point. Unfortunately, it’s too late now.” If they had wanted me to carry it on, they should have told me. I smiled at Rosalina. “Excuse me, but I have to get to my seat.”

  “Going far?” Rosalina asked while we waited to take off. She was wearing sunglasses. I thought that might attract attention she wouldn’t want, but it wasn’t my operation so it wasn’t my place to say anything. Maybe they were banking on the idea that if people focused on her, they would be less inclined to pay attention to me.

  “Not far,” I said. “Only as far as the plane is going. And you?”

  “I love Barcelona.” She was pretending not to listen. “Beautiful city, graceful people, good food, a nice breeze off the Mediterranean. Have you been there?”

  I considered this. She knew I had been there, but we were just making up conversation. “Once or twice,” I said. “Maybe we could have a cup of coffee in the city. Do you know a good coffee shop?”

  She patted my hand. “That would be nice, but I’m afraid I’m terribly busy. I have to go to a conference.”

  “Oh? Something interesting, no doubt.”

  “Yes, it is. It’s a conference on nuclear engineering. A lot of people from all over the world. Austrians, Poles, Japanese, Israelis, quite a mix. You’re not a nuclear engineer by any chance, are you?”

  “Me?” I noticed the man across the aisle leaning slightly in our direction. “No, I’m just a businessman, a buyer of trinkets.”

  “Trinkets?”

  “Machinery, actually. That sort of thing.”

  “Well, you never know, we might run into each other on the street. The conference only lasts a day. Then I want to do some sightseeing. Have you seen the Gaudí yet? If I were you, I’d stay away from the Gaudí.”

  “The what?”

  “Gaudí. He was an architect. The Catalonians are crazy about him. I think he’s a little overdone. I prefer things more subtle. How about you?”

  “I do,” I said. “I mean, maybe I’ll have a glass of water.”

  2

  After standing at the baggage carousel for twenty minutes, after all the bags from the plane had gone around the belt and been taken away, I went over to the baggage desk.

  “My bag is missing.”

  “It happens. Describe it.”

  I realized I hadn’t paid much attention to its appearance. “It’s small, a carry-on.”

  “Looks like you should have carried it on. Make?”

  “A Louis Vuitton, I think.”

  The man whistled. “You think. Must be nice, having expensive luggage and then forgetting what it looks like.”

  “I need it.”

  “Sure. Everyone does. Let me see your ticket and your passport.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I need to fill out a form. The form goes to the baggage department. They run it through the computer. The computer coughs once if it recognizes the description.”

  “I have a baggage claim ticket. That should help.”

  “It should.”

  I handed it over. The man looked at it carefully. “We’ll give you a call when we find it. Got a phone?”

  “I do.” Actually I didn’t have one anymore, but someone walking around without a phone was sure to raise flags. “Unfortunately, my phone was in the bag.”

  He nodded. “Hotel? Or was that in the bag, too?”

  “Never mind,” I said. “When you find the bag, just set it aside. I’ll pick it up when I come through the airport on my way home. It will only be a day or so.” I figured I could do without Rosalina’s shirt and tie for a couple of days. If there had been anything important in the bag, they would have told me. Or at least, in a normal operation they would have told me.

  “Have it your way,” he said.

  3

  The same burgundy taxi was waiting in the queue outside the entrance to the terminal at the Barcelona airport. Vincente had told me to take the same cab as before. He said that the taxi driver would take care of me again, but he hadn’t gone beyond that. It was clear what he meant, so I didn’t ask what or why.

  Rosalina had left me as soon as we walked off the plane. She had squeezed my hand when we landed, but otherwise, there were no farewells, none of the “nice talking to you” chatter that ends a flight. I stopped to look into a couple of shops in the terminal so she could get ahead of me. Running into each other at the exit would mean having to exchange more pleasantries. At that point, I wasn’t feeling pleasant.

  In fact, I was feeling unpleasant because I was pretty sure this couldn’t end well. It occurred to me to find a plane to China and go back to my nephew’s, but I knew I coul
dn’t. I’d never left in the middle of an operation, even a poorly planned one, and I wasn’t going to start now. I reached into my pocket and found the tiny bag Vincente had given me. It contained a small piece of wood—beech, the sort of wood my grandfather insisted was loyal beyond imagination. “Beech doesn’t waver,” he’d told me. “Everyone might desert you, leave you naked in front of howling enemies, but beech will stand firm at your side. No one ever accused a beech of betrayal.” He had clenched his jaw. “A turncoat can get you killed,” he’d said. “Beech will save your life.” When I asked why, if beech was so loyal, there were no beech trees around our village, he looked at me silently for a long moment, and then walked away.

  I smoothed the little piece of wood with my fingers. If I ever put stock in omens, I might have done it now. But an omen was like a coincidence; it could only get you so far. Beech—maybe Vincente and his friends had done more research than I’d realized, or maybe it was all they could find. I put the wood back in my pocket. Since I didn’t know who was on which side, it was going to be tough to figure out who was loyal to what. It wasn’t my business, anyway. Somebody wanted a dumpling machine that made fuel for nuclear bombs not to get wherever it was going, and they thought I was just the fellow to stop it. No one had told me, but I had a pretty good idea where they thought it was going, and if I was right, it was starting to be clear what had happened to those unlucky diners in Yanji.

  As I climbed in the back of the cab, the driver looked at his watch. “You got a bag? People don’t usually travel without a bag.”

  “I had one, but they lost it.”

  “You checked it in Lisbon?”

  “I did.”

  “Mistake,” he said, and looked a little worried for a moment. “Nothing fatal, but it’s probably being given a complete physical. They won’t bother to put it together again either. You know what was in it?”

  Funny question, unless he already knew I’d only received it at the last minute.

  “Not really,” I said. “Do we have a problem?”

  “I don’t. You might.” He took out his phone and dialed a number. After an exchange of a few words in Spanish, he put the phone away. “The usual from Rosalina, just a shirt and a tie. Well, maybe that will keep them guessing.” He smiled and looked a little relieved. “Actually, it might be good. They’ll spend a lot of time worrying whether the bag was checked just to throw them off, or whether it got checked by mistake and there is something in it they ought to be able to find.”

  “I take it this is not just the baggage people you’re talking about.”

  He nodded. “You remember the green van? The one parked nearby when you were first here?”

  Connection points started lighting up. He knew Rosalina. He knew about my first trip here with Luis. This thing was better organized than it first appeared. Better organized, or maybe less secure.

  “It’s the same people,” he said. “They’re not sure of anything yet. What they most want is to get you on the rack.”

  “More training from your Inquisition?” I looked out the window at the crowd waiting for cabs. “Hadn’t we better get moving?”

  “You’re early.” The driver pointed to his watch. “I thought you’d be on the ten o’clock plane.”

  “Who told you that?” I don’t like scheduling mistakes. They can end up being fatal—wrong place, wrong time.

  The driver ignored the question. “We end up having some time to kill. I can take you downtown. Maybe we can find another bag. After that we’ll walk around the Gaudí cathedral.”

  “Let’s skip the church. Someone told me to avoid Gaudí.”

  “What? Who would say such a thing?” The driver started the engine, listened to it for a moment, then pulled into the airport traffic. “You can’t understand the Catalonian mind if you don’t see this church, my friend. And who knows, it might come in handy, understanding the Catalonian mind.”

  “Why, it’s unique? No frontal lobe?”

  “None at all.” The driver turned off the main road onto a small street. He pulled over for a minute, then sped down the street. After two quick right turns he looked in the mirror and said, “All sacrificed in favor of the creative portions, with the remainder given over to pleasure and rebellion, in equal measure.”

  I looked behind. “Green van?”

  “No, not green.” He pushed a button on the steering wheel; a tiny red light flashed a couple of times. “Pleasure and rebellion,” he said. “What would life be without them?”

  “No room for discipline?”

  “Ha! Just the sort of thing you’d ask,” he said. “Believe me, once you see Gaudí, I’ll have to drag you away.”

  During my first visit to Barcelona, with Luis, there hadn’t been a chance to see much. The second time here had been no better. Now I had a couple of extra hours. Rosalina had warned me against going to see Gaudí, but she hadn’t bothered to explain, and a little peek couldn’t hurt, especially in the dark.

  “All right,” I said, “as long as we won’t get off schedule.” I hadn’t told the driver where I needed to be, or when. Presumably he already knew, assuming they hadn’t misinformed him on that as well.

  “Stop worrying. Besides, you never know when you’ll need a mental map of a place.”

  “How do we know the van people won’t be with us?”

  “That’s my job. As of right now, they’re arguing about who lost us. Listen, it’s a nice evening, and as long as you’re here there are a few places you ought to see.”

  He drove down quiet streets. The stores were all closed. “Mostly dark buildings,” I said. “That should help with a mental map.”

  “Are all of your people so dour?”

  “Not dour, just practical.”

  I thought of what my grandfather would say when I complained he was always negative. “Being positive doesn’t get you across the river.” He’d look up from the piece of wood he was measuring. “Being positive wastes time. Do you think birch trees spend their time running about with smiles on their faces? They do not, boy, and neither will you when you realize what life is about.”

  “Dour is Seville,” the driver said. “Dour is the mind that ran the Inquisition. Dour was Tomás de Torquemada.”

  “Friend of yours?”

  “Tomás de Torquemada? Not in this lifetime. He was the Grand Inquisitor, a monk if you can believe it.”

  “His name was Tomás?”

  The driver turned around. “Not an uncommon name,” he said slowly.

  Thin ice, I thought. For some reason it was OK for him to mention Rosalina, but not Tomás. But it was clear the driver knew Tomás, or at least knew of him. That would make sense if he was more than just a local hire. I sat back to think. Looking at dark buildings wouldn’t improve my mood. What I needed was a quiet place where I could lay out the holes in my knowledge about a few necessary facts—who did what, who knew whom, and where did I fit? The closer the time got to going back to the factory, the more I felt this was a deep hole, and it was going to be fatal to someone.

  For one thing, I didn’t want to stroll around in plain sight. “Won’t it appear strange, the two of us together? An Asian and a European walking around at night? Maybe if we were a couple of businessmen it wouldn’t stand out, but you don’t look like a businessman. Pardon me, but you look like a taxi driver. Why don’t we just find somewhere to sit and relax?”

  “Do you people worry about everything? Cheer up, we can have a bite to eat at a place I know. No one will give us a second glance. Then we’ll get you up to the factory in plenty of time. You’re supposed to be there just before midnight, right?”

  The man knew something about the operation, at least the logistics; he knew Tomás, he knew Rosalina, he probably knew Vincente. The possibility began dancing at the edges of my sudden paranoia that he knew more than he was supposed to. It was even possible, I thought glumly, that like Yuri he was playing both sides of the street. Maybe that’s what Rosalina meant when she warned
I should avoid Gaudí.

  “Yes, before midnight,” I said. “Who picked that time? It’s a lousy time of night to show up at that place.”

  “That’s why we need to tire you out with a little sightseeing around here. You’re supposed to look weary from travel.”

  “With this back and forth to Lisbon, I’m already tired. Don’t I look it?”

  The driver glanced at me. “No, you still look too fresh. When we’re walking around, just pretend I’m your guide. Can you gawk like a tourist? Too bad you don’t have a camera.”

  “Maybe we should buy an orange.”

  The driver grinned. “That’s the spirit,” he said.

  He knew plenty.

  4

  Once we got downtown, we drove up and down some smaller streets with Chinese grocers in front of their stores smoking, a few taking the fruit in from the sidewalk displays; past a bakery with a few cakes still in the window; by apartment houses with ornate balconies and orange awnings; past sidewalk cafés with old men sitting under large umbrellas sipping coffee from small cups. The driver’s phone rang once and then stopped. A minute later he pulled into a narrow, dark alley and parked. Dark alleys, dark buildings, dark rooms with dark portraits—the clouds of gloom around me thickened.

  “This is good,” he said. “We can walk from here to Gaudí’s masterpiece, and from there to Avinguda del Paral.lel to look around. From there it’s a short walk to the Jewish Quarter. It has tiny streets that wind around. The place is rarely crowded, especially this time of night. That’s where the restaurant is. If there’s time after we eat, I’ll take you to the Roman ruins. They look terrific in the dark.”

  “The Romans were here? In Barcelona?” I asked to be polite. I didn’t care about the Romans. Europeans talked as if they were the center of civilization. It was annoying. “What about the Mongols? I don’t suppose you know if they were here as well?”