Perhaps your voice is getting such a sharp edge and your house is becoming so strange and dark and smelly that they couldn’t bear it. Takuda smiled and indicated the back wall. “Are you an artist as well?”
Thomas relaxed visibly. “It’s what makes life worth living. While I get your money, come see my new sculpture for the Zenkoku Sales office in Oita. It’s my best work yet.”
Takuda slipped off his shoes and followed Thomas toward his studio, an old glass-ceilinged potting shed joined to the house by a low, narrow passage. Thomas stopped Takuda in the passage and went into the greenhouse alone. Takuda stood in the dark listening to dull ringing, like rocks in an oil drum, then Thomas came and led him out of the dark passage.
The greenhouse studio seemed bright, even though the day was overcast. On a plywood box in the center of the room, a three-headed dog slunk low in a hunting posture. It was huge, flanks all corded muscle, left forepaw raised in midstep. From the hip-wide sternum sprang three sleek, muscular necks, each flowing into a triangular head. Long jaws and thick, ridged skulls, blank almond eyes, and sharp, erect ears made Takuda think of wolves’ heads stretched and flattened to reptilian proportions. The rightmost head, tongue lolling, stared straight at him. He circled left to examine the long, even fangs, but his eyes caught in the net of sinew where necks met shoulders. From there, the center head strained low with its nose almost to the plywood, nostrils flared and expression as intense as a human frown. The leftmost head, raised high, stared in ear-pricked alarm at something past Takuda’s left shoulder. All three heads watched him light a cigarette.
He walked around it twice, tracing the lines with his finger a centimeter away from the plaster: the delicate slash of nostril; the regimented concavities of the outer ear; the folded musculature of jaw.
Takuda stepped back and then walked around the other way to take in the totality of it. “It’s amazing, Mr. Thomas,” Takuda said. Takuda turned, and Thomas was staring at him bug-eyed with a bandanna clutched to his mouth and nose. Thomas backed out of the studio gagging into the bandanna.
Takuda turned around twice looking for something that would serve as an ashtray. Bits of string, wire and tubing, apparently sorted out by gauge and length rather than composition, hung neatly on pegboard hooks. Cans of paint stood in regiments on handmade racks, their labels removed and colors hand-lettered on the cans themselves. The oils were in a wire rack beside them, all squeezed from the bottom and rolled around plastic laundry pegs. Not a speck of clay or plaster anywhere, not even on the plywood under the three-headed dog. Nothing that looked like an ashtray. He didn’t dare stub it out in the wrong place. Foreigners were apparently very particular about things like smoking and sex and eating meat.
At the sink, Takuda lifted a blue plastic tarp to reveal the handles of knives and clay tools, scrapers, hooks, and even an old upholstery knife, all with their blades neatly encased in cylinders of plaster. He picked up an entombed tool with a long, cylindrical handle. It was obviously a wood chisel, encased so carefully that it barely wobbled when Takuda rolled it on the counter. The rusting blade within had stained the plaster yellow and palest orange. Takuda laid it back in the sink among the rest. His cigarette wasn’t half-smoked, so he stubbed it out near the drain and stuck it back into his pack. If Takuda got the place dirty, he might end up in plaster as well.
The corridor to the main part of the house was dark and narrow, and the walls were rough enough that they snagged Takuda’s trousers. He stooped to feel the paneling, and found it chewed and battered. He flicked his lighter long enough to see that both walls were covered at knee height with crescent-shaped gouges, bright and fresh in the age-darkened cedar as if someone had crawled along on hands and knees hacking at the walls.
Thomas wasn’t in the main room. Takuda was suddenly very wary. He called for Thomas from the center of the room, listening to the sound of his own breath.
Then Thomas appeared in the opposite hallway, silhouetted by bright sunlight behind him. He held a small object in his hand.
The Kurodama, Takuda thought. His fears about entering the dark farmhouse returned. He’s not mad, he’s possessed by this stone knife, and I’m going to have to kill him to get out of this place alive.
CHAPTER 11
Thursday Afternoon
“You’re a man after my own heart,” Thomas said. Takuda stared at the foreigner silhouetted in the light from the kitchen. “I like that spot, too. Sometimes I just stand there.”
Thomas’s favorite spot was in the middle of his work: shredded canvas and gouged plaster, a covered easel, a shin-high table with pens and notebooks, a hip-high table with a large plywood box. As Takuda twisted to look back at Thomas, Thomas stepped up to him and put the dark object right in his face. It wasn’t a knife, but Takuda jerked back just for show.
“Sir, you scare me to death! What are you doing?”
The object in the foreigner’s hand swam into focus: a squat brown bottle, some sort of energy drink. The bottle was nice and cold. Takuda grunted his thanks in what he thought of as a friendly foreign fashion and twisted off the cap. The drink was carbonated, with sweet, high notes like Ramuné soda and an undertone like watered-down cough syrup. Takuda swallowed, because it didn’t seem dangerous. The aftertaste was of potting soil and Chinese five-spice. No alcohol whatsoever. Takuda squinted at the label: Gen-Key, a miniature of Nabeshima’s tee shirt.
I am a leopard.
We must everyday nutritional,
happy with B1, B2, B12. . .
“It’s very good for you. You look very flushed. Is something wrong with you? Are you ill?”
“I don’t know,” he lied. “It happens sometimes, when I’ve been working too hard. I’m eating enough, but I’m not sleeping.” Takuda felt strong as an ox. The Gen-Key had made his guts lurch with the first gulp, and it stuck to the back of his tongue like a hangover. “I’ll have to lay in a supply of this stuff.”
Thomas edged toward the little table, so close that their elbows touched. He was deliberately pushing Takuda away from his writing. If Thomas was uncomfortable, fine. Takuda hoped he was so uncomfortable that he’d leave the room and give Takuda a chance to look for the phone. Takuda reached past Thomas toward notebooks laid open on the low table. “You draw, and you write poetry. Can I have a look?”
Thomas closed his notebooks one by one. Takuda drew his hand back, and Thomas bent motionless with his hand on the last book. “I’m not interested in showing anyone my notes just now. They really have gone well beyond what you see here.” He gestured absently toward the plywood box on the hip-high table. “But there is one little bit of work I can show you.”
When Thomas gestured toward the box, he accidentally flipped a loose sheet with his sleeve and uncovered the tiny prize: a cell phone no bigger than a candy bar, opalescent pink and gray with a jeweled strap.
Takuda bowed. “Sir, please give me the money. I must be elsewhere soon.”
Thomas didn’t move a muscle. “What are you doing here?”
“What do you mean?”
He looked Takuda dead in the eye. “Just that. Just. That.”
Takuda bowed at thirty degrees and held position. It made him belch a combination of grilled fish and Gen-Key. “Sir, I don’t have time for any games like this. I am grateful for the drink and your hospitality, but I really must be going. The money, please.” He held the bow, not knowing whether a foreigner would understand the meaning of such a prolonged attitude.
Thomas snorted as if frustrated with himself. “I was afraid you were here about a girl.”
Nabeshima? Why would anyone be here about her? “Ah. I see. You like a Japanese girl?”
“Oh, yes. Kaori and I . . .” He was looking at the torn canvas, and his lips were moving, silently toward torn canvas, broken plaster, hacked lath.
“What are you looking at?”
&
nbsp; Thomas snapped back into the moment. “It just takes time,” he said. “You Japanese say it yourselves. You are like onions; you reveal yourselves layer by layer.”
Takuda had never heard such a thing, but he didn’t care to argue about it. “Japanese girls are like onions because they make you cry. Please, sir, the money.” So I can grab the phone and get out of here before I throw up.
He turned as if Takuda had just walked into the room. “It’s an analogy. The Japanese use it to explain that you get to know people bit by bit. It’s a cultural difference, and I’m surprised you don’t know this after shaking down foreigners. Do you even try to peel us, or do you just chop us up all at once?” He laughed. It sounded like a dog yelping. Takuda had to look away.
“I’ll show you an onion,” he said. His high-pitched laugh still grated on Takuda’s inner ear. He lifted the plywood cube to reveal a pop-eyed, grinning bust. It was as if a maniacal, grayish-green child were squirming its way up through the table. It was made of some sort of plasticene, but it was sleek and striated like carefully folded corduroy.
Takuda stepped up to the table: the bust was a skinless head, like the plastic one from his high school human anatomy class. The detail was perfect. The stretch of the muscles on either side of the pharynx alone was too precise to have come from imagination. The left side of the head had patches of plasticene skin applied but as yet unsmoothed. The fat and flesh had been filled in around the lidless eyes, but the mouth was still lipless, revealing a slight underbite and crooked bottom incisors.
Kaori Nabeshima. Chills slid up his spine like ice water, but his face felt light and flushed. His guts gurgled. Gen-Key did not agree with him at all.
Thomas stood too close behind him. “I’m doing this one inside out. Layer by layer. The onion analogy breaks down in the face of true knowledge.”
Takuda’s hair stood on end, and his left ear was twitching uncontrollably. Takuda hadn’t even known he could move it. He reached up to stop it. “This is interesting,” he said, but he was shouting inside, and he was somehow afraid Thomas would notice his spastic scalp. He struggled for something else to say, just to keep from turning around and running. “Uh, why is there dust on it?”
“I don’t know.” Thomas smoothed his own fingerprints from the temple. “Sometimes you just get to a point where you see the finished product in the unfinished piece.” He passed his palm over the crown of the skull. “I don’t think I want it to be finished.”
Takuda stepped back. “I’ve got to go.” He backpedaled for the door. “If I don’t have the money this afternoon, delivery will stop automatically. Today.” Thomas turned on his heel without change of expression, then veered back toward the bust after the third step. He put the box over the bust carefully, then went into the bright hallway without a glance in Takuda’s direction.
Takuda lunged for the cell phone, pocketed it. On impulse, he flipped open one of the notebooks, found an empty page, and drew a large, comma-shaped symbol like the drawing of the curved jewel Suzuki had shown him.
When Thomas came back, he seemed furious that Takuda had opened his journal. He froze when he saw the half yin-yang symbol.
“Do you recognize that?” Takuda said. “Have you seen anything like that, but made of stone?”
Thomas held out a white packet. Takuda assumed Thomas had put the money in a clean white envelope, as polite Japanese often do, but the bills slipped out of a facial tissue and into Takuda’s fingers. Too dirty for Thomas to touch directly. “Right,” Thomas said. “Here it is, all of it.” He smiled, but his eyes were slits, and his lip was quivering.
Takuda pinched the thin wad hard, spreading the bills enough to count them. He put it into his wallet slowly, not letting his hands shake. When it was all put away, Takuda looked Thomas in the eye.
“Have you seen a stone like that?” Takuda asked again. “A curved jewel?”
Thomas’s face twisted with rage, and he opened his mouth to speak, but then his focus began to wander all over Takuda’s face. “Your face, up close. You’re covered with . . . with writing.”
Ah, this poor boy is so special. “I don’t know what the writing is, but I mean you no harm.”
“You’re a devil. You’re growing horns. Are those horns?”
“They aren’t horns. I don’t know what they are. Sir, have you seen the stone knife? Where is it now?”
Thomas backed away, toward the brightly lit kitchen.
Takuda went after him, but he was almost felled by another wave of nausea and dizziness.
“Thomas Fletcher, where is the Kurodama?”
“I don’t know!” Thomas shouted from the kitchen. “She took it! They took it! Someone took it from under the straw mats!” He slid the kitchen door shut with a bang.
Takuda came up the hallway, belching and retching. By the time he got the kitchen door open, Thomas was long gone, out the back door.
Takuda didn’t tarry over Thomas’s notebooks or stacks of student papers. He did move the tables enough to look under the straw mats. There, under the central mat, was an old-fashioned hidey-hole cut into the subflooring. He slid the panel aside . . . empty. Anything once hidden there was gone.
On the way to the station, Takuda stopped to vomit, spewing the pavement in a shocking arc that made one woman not only cross to the other side of the street but wait to pass until Takuda was done, as if she were afraid he might suddenly hit the far sidewalk. With thin lunch stringing from his lips and the horrid aftertaste of Gen-Key to keep him company, Takuda felt his pocket to make sure the cell phone was there. A fool’s errand, he thought, but at least we can make sure no more calls don’t come from the Nabeshima girl’s phone. And then we may perhaps have some allies. We shall see.
Takuda slept till late in the afternoon, and he went to the mental health satellite office at twilight, well after office hours, just in time for the night shift. He showed up in uniform, with his staff over his shoulder, but the office was dark. He let himself in and found a note on Yoshida’s desk:
Security Guard Takuda,
Miss Nabeshima has been hospitalized.
The foreigner beat her.
I will return as soon as I can.
Yoshida
CHAPTER 12
Thursday Evening
Most of Nabeshima’s face was yellow-brown and purple. Her left eye was swollen almost shut, and her right eye twitched as if she were dreaming of another fall. Iodine, stitches, and tape traced the hospital’s work on her shaven scalp.
Yoshida sat in the only chair in the room, so Takuda leaned against the wall and watched the saline drip. “How did her face get so beat up? Did he do that?”
“The wormy little redheaded bastard pounded her with a chisel encased in plaster. He froze when the plaster broke and exposed the blade. She ran, and he chased her, and she got up on the neighbor’s roof. She was throwing tiles down on him, and she got him good. He fell right on his own chisel. In under the collarbone and out over the shoulder blade. Lucky he didn’t bleed out right there. She broke her leg jumping down, and she passed out from the pain as soon as people came out of their houses. That’s what she told the police right before dinner.”
“Was Kimura here?”
She shook her head. “No, his boss, the chief of detectives. Section Chief Hasegawa is waiting for Kimura in the lobby. It’s going to get ugly. If you want to earn your salary, since you didn’t protect our girl Nabeshima, you can at least protect the section chief from his own anger . . .”
Her face twisted, and the tears began to flow. “Stupid girl. Stupid, stupid girl.” She reached out to smooth Nabeshima’s hair or stroke her check, but there was no hair to smooth, and the cheek was a mass of bruises, tape, and oxygen tubes. Her hand trembled in midair for a second before she withdrew it. “Oh, stupid girl.”
The saline dripped, and Takuda pretended
to watch.
“The chief of detectives was named Ishikawa, by the way. He asked about three men answering the description of you and your friends, asked if you’d been around. He’d heard that you and your friends were some sort of special consultants sent down from the heavens. I didn’t tell him where I thought you’d come from.”
Takuda bowed slightly. He didn’t bother to tell her he didn’t know Chief of Detectives Ishikawa, and he didn’t bother to thank her for simply keeping her mouth shut.
“Anyway, the section chief brought flowers and candy and a stuffed giraffe. He said the giraffe reminded him of Nabeshima because she had such a long neck, like Audrey Hepburn. So she told me to stuff it all in the trash as soon as he left. He’s the one who signed off against her dental benefits and overtime pay, but he’s so screwed that he’s trying to make it all look nice.” She shook her head. “The section chief is desperate now with the chief of detectives around, and he’s looking for somebody to blame. He was asking why we all didn’t come to him, if we knew the situation.”
“What situation?”
“Thomas and Kaori. I’m her direct supervisor, so of course I’m in trouble here, but he’s in worse trouble.”
“Thomas worked for Zenkoku. This will sink without a ripple, and everyone will be paid off handsomely.”
She smiled a tight little smile. “Look at that girl. Do you think she’s going to go away quietly?”
She stood and motioned for Takuda to follow her out.
Before he left Nabeshima, he reached into his zippered pocket and drew out her tiny pink-and-gray cell phone. He had wiped the grime from Thomas Fletcher’s house from the phone housing, but it still seemed unclean. Still, he thought it might give her some comfort to have it back. He looped the strap around her thin wrist, the one without the IV tubes.
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