In the corridor, Yoshida turned and punched him right in the sternum. Her fist was small and hard, and the punch was like a solid poke with a broomstick.
“This is your fault. You know about these things, and you could have protected her. Go find out what’s happening with this insane foreigner and with these girls disappearing.”
“I can’t protect girls from their own bad decisions. Anyway, you told me you thought these things were unrelated. You were so sure about this. What changed your mind?”
She stared off in the middle distance, and then she spoke very deliberately: “Kaori says she sees things. What she said she sees corroborates your tales of . . . other worlds.” Her eyes flicked to Takuda’s face.
Takuda nodded. “The name Nabeshima sort of rings a bell. It’s an old family from Saga Prefecture, right? Maybe seeing other worlds runs in the family. They’ve had problems with shape-shifting cats, from what I’ve heard.”
“Why am I not surprised you would know that?” Yoshida closed her eyes for a second. “She says you’re crisscrossed with burning blue scars and great horns are ready to burst out of the corners of your forehead. She says the boy Mori has a bright green globe hiding beside his heart, like a seed ready to burst.” She hesitated. “She says she saw the priest begging over on the market street. She says the priest is all smiles, but every time he smiles, the hunger leaks from between his teeth like burning lava. She says the hunger inside the priest is the most terrifying thing she’s ever seen.”
Takuda frowned. “Did she say . . . can she tell if the priest is good or . . . or not good?”
Yoshida looked astonished. “I’m in counseling, not personnel.”
Takuda thought he might slap someone before the day was out, but it wouldn’t be Yoshida. He needed an ally. “Thomas Fletcher is unstable, but I don’t think anyone could know he was so dangerous.”
She snorted.
Takuda pressed her. “Miss Nabeshima sees things, but you know things. You knew something had possession of Thomas Fletcher the first time you talked to him, and you knew he was free of it when you spoke to him again. You heard the difference.”
“Don’t start talking about pathology versus supernatural evil, please.”
Takuda stared at her until the smirk faded. “We think it’s an object,” he said. “An ancient object that drives people to kill.”
“Rubbish.”
“People are missing in unprecedented numbers, so many that there’s a press blackout. There are rumors of a dismemberment killer, a jellyfish killer.”
Yoshida shook her head. “Starfish killer. I’ve heard of that. There’s nothing in the news. A blackout on missing persons wouldn’t keep murders quiet.”
He nodded. “Maybe not. But think about the phone call you received. What would a corpse be like without its bones? Like a jellyfish, yes? Or maybe laid out in a starfish pattern?”
The color drained from her cheeks.
Takuda continued. “We need to find out about this. Thomas Fletcher may know something. If he’s medicated now, he may be able to tell us.”
Her face contorted. “He’ll be so medicated he can’t tell you his mother’s name. He’s in intensive care in a secure facility.”
“Ah. Perfect. You can tell me where he is.”
She was very still.
Takuda looked at his boots. “He spoke to me a little this morning. He might speak to me again. He might be able to tell me about the artifact.”
“He’ll be in lockdown until he’s tried or deported.”
“And he’ll be deported quietly, no matter what Miss Nabeshima says,” Takuda said. “I sort of fade into the background. If your young coworker hadn’t . . . seen things . . . you would have forgotten I was even in your office. I even fit in when I’m wearing the wrong uniform.”
She sighed. Her hand shook slightly as she pushed back her hair. “What if you were already wearing the right uniform? Let’s say the uniform of the maintenance staff of a mental hospital?”
“Go on.”
“He’ll be in a public facility in the southern ward, a place I know well. Near the back door is a custodial staff office where keys hang on a board. The psychiatric and medical personnel, of course, wear formal whites, no scrubs. But the custodians wear jumpsuits much like the one you’re wearing now.”
He nodded. “We’ll stay in touch. I’m sure this will be helpful, even if he doesn’t know where the artifact is right now.”
When they walked out to the reception area a few minutes later, they came face-to-face with Section Chief Hasegawa.
He had a whole bench to himself, even though several people stood nearby. His mass, his rumpled suit, and his radiating anger drove everyone else away. He was an enraged and desperate bureaucrat in his prime.
He saw Takuda and Yoshida approaching, and he leapt to his feet, his face twisting as if the first words of his tirade were fighting each other to escape his mouth.
And at that moment, the glass front doors whooshed open and Detective Kimura sauntered in from the darkened street.
Hasegawa’s gaze drifted from Takuda and Yoshida to Kimura. He strode to the detective and poked him in the sternum with his thick forefinger. “You didn’t take care of my staff.” His eyes were red-rimmed and puffy. “She says you knew. You knew he was unstable.”
Kimura said, “Sorry, but I can’t comment on this ongoing investigation.”
Hasegawa leaned into Kimura, his face even darker.
Yoshida groaned. Takuda handed her his staff.
Hasegawa had Kimura by the collar by the time Takuda reached them. Hasegawa grunted and strained as Takuda gently forced himself between them, inexorably wedging them apart. “Security guard . . . you . . . oof . . . let me . . .”
It was just a matter of keeping himself between them. He bowed as Hasegawa threw punches past his ribs, murmuring apologies in the politest language he knew, ridiculously polite, period-drama polite, so polite he had never used some of the phrases himself.
Hospital security came just as it was winding down. Takuda bowed and explained that they would all leave soon, and that there was a simple disagreement on protocol. Prefecture business and all. Takuda didn’t even have to look to know that Kimura flashed the detective’s notebook at that point.
This set the stage for the head of hospital security to step forward and lambaste them all, leaving Takuda to use his most polite Japanese twice in the same day. This was the detective’s cue to slip out the door, and it should have been the section chief’s time to go as well, but he stood and made his bows beside Takuda, handing over his card and explaining that he was protecting a patient from badgering by police.
“That’s the doctors’ decision,” said the head of security. “It’s a hospital, not a bar. You don’t go having this sort of dust-up in the lobby.”
No one pointed out that the shouting by the head of security was louder and longer than the original scuffle.
When it was all over, Hasegawa thanked Takuda. “It’s been twenty years since I got that angry. Thanks for taking care of me there. I would have broken his ass off.”
Takuda bowed. Hasegawa bowed in return. “I’ll put in a good word with Ota for you,” Hasegawa said.
Yoshida drifted up to him and handed him the staff. “I hid this under the couch while you were scuffling,” she said. “The section chief owes you a favor, but Detective Kimura owes you his life. You kept him from getting his ass broken off today.”
Takuda snorted.
“I’m serious,” she said. “Now he’ll feel obliged to tell you whatever he knows about Thomas.”
“I need to talk to Thomas. That’s what I really need.”
She said, “Before you go, see if Kimura can tell you something that will unlock Thomas’s head.”
Takuda frowned. He wasn’t at all sure
he wanted to unlock the foreigner’s head. After the encounter in the foreigner’s house, he was a little afraid of what he might find.
CHAPTER 13
Friday Morning
The detectives’ office was beige and gray with desks pushed flush together so that work groups sat face-to-face. At the center of the room, a short, balding detective wrote hurriedly in a small notebook. Takuda asked for Kimura. Without looking up, the detective pointed with his pen toward at the other corner of the office where Kimura sat alone at a table.
Kimura had the hippest glasses Takuda had seen since the 1970s, and he grinned when Takuda told him so. “Yeah, my boss hates them.” He pointed at the man out at the table. “So I bought more.” He laughed a high-pitched hiccuppy laugh and smoothed his hair with his free hand.
Kimura put on one of his business faces. “You know, this incident with Mr. Thomas and Miss Nabeshima is very serious. When we look at his notebooks, there is a lot that we don’t know. I thought that you, as a special consultant, might have some input on this matter.”
Takuda looked down pointedly at his coveralls. He almost reached for his staff before remembering that he had left it at home on purpose. “I’m not really a specialist.”
Kimura tossed his chin at the busy detective out in the main room. “Chief of Detectives Ishikawa said you are. He said he got the call that you and your friends were sent from the heavens.”
Takuda controlled his expression. The euphemism “sent from the heavens” to mean “from upper strata of the hierarchy” was already getting on his nerves. “I think Yoshida of the social services offices would be more helpful,” he said.
Kimura smiled and handed Takuda a large binder. “She’s not a criminologist like you.”
Takuda sighed and opened the binder. It was filled with copies white on black, like photostats. They were splotched with gray clouds of fingerprints and crossed by sheets of scudding stains from the ham of Thomas’s hand. He had lettered and sketched with a mechanical pencil, that or a nib too fine to blob or fill.
Thomas drew with a vivisectionist’s precision: details of charred flesh peeling from the bones of inverted popes, intricate and sparingly cross-hatched views of the damned abroil on pikes with their bellies ballooned and juices bubbling from burst navels, and one freer rendering of the Greek Titan Sisyphus crushed beneath his stone, blood spewing from his twisted mouth and coiled mass issuing from his anus. In the lower right-hand corner of each page lay clustered fingerprints as if Thomas had paused after each drawing to examine and approve before moving on.
Kimura took notes as Takuda spelled out the classical references in what he saw. He was surprised the detective was so ignorant of European mythology and religion. Even a cursory reading of popular manga would have taught him as much as Takuda knew.
Three pages were drawings of the three-headed dog, but they were rough enough to be just starting points for Thomas’s sculpture, if that. The last sketch in that group was a jointed framework. Either he had continued in another notebook or he had been good enough to pull off that sculpture with almost no preparation.
The sketches were interleaved with bits of writing, none longer than two pages. Thomas’s longhand was a surprisingly childish scrawl, but his printing was sharp and angular with neither loops nor curves. He wrote in diamond O’s and isosceles D’s with high ascenders and deep descenders alike barbed as fishhooks, all characters discretely vertical and altogether more like primitive runes than any English writing Takuda had ever seen. He had reserved this sharp, unleaning style for poetry and essays, as if it were a script specially designed for recording madness, but what he wrote in that stilted hand was even stranger than the lettering itself.
Takuda lit a cigarette after reading the first paragraph, a bizarre and disjointed admission of lust for another foreigner named Tracy.
Kimura directed him to one short passage about knives and Thomas’s fear of them. He had written that he couldn’t go to Nepal for fear of the long, curved kukri nor to Israel for fear of the “shining fish” commando daggers, that he didn’t sculpt wood because he thought eventually his own knives would turn on him. It may have explained why he encased his knives in plaster, but Takuda didn’t think it told the whole story.
Another, much longer essay was on someone named Job. It seemed deliberately convoluted, filled with internal references to biblical names “two lines above” and concepts “forty-three words before.” Had it been straightforward, Takuda still would not have understood; this went far beyond his casual knowledge of Christianity. As it was, Takuda just scanned it. It ended on the second page with a nicely shaded cross-section of a boil, that or some geological formation for which Takuda had no name.
The longhand scribbling was in random spots, sometimes wedged into trapezoids between finished drawings. When Takuda noticed this, he flipped through the binder. It seemed that Thomas had filled a one-hundred-page composition book from cover to cover, then had started to fill in empty spots. No wonder the police had copied this journal. If they were looking for proof of insanity, it seemed a likely place to find it.
One page featured a full-sized drawing of the stone knife, in loving detail. The legend in English at the bottom of the page read, Kurodama, unknown stone, unknown origin.
Takuda flipped past it. The following pages were detailed drawings of individual bones and full skeletons, some highly detailed and some ridiculously stylized, some dancing in apparently joyous abandon with the legend Poor Skeleton Steps Out.
Two facing pages stopped Takuda as he flipped through. On first glance he thought there was an old Japanese print stuck in Thomas’s notebook, but the meticulous cross-hatching was unmistakably Thomas’s work. Then the whole thing came clear and Takuda’s stomach started to squirm. Thomas had drawn caricatures of Japanese people in scenes from Buddhist hell. They were tortured by comically grotesque demons who grinned to show their tusks and fangs while they flayed and roasted emaciated bodies. The flapping tongues of businessmen were nailed to the floor. Nabeshima, unmistakably Nabeshima, was skewered on a demon’s pike in a parody of physical love. Others Japanese girls were stacked in tiers on beds of smoking coal.
The caricatures themselves were worse than the tortures inflicted. Nabeshima’s face was haggard and bleary. Thomas had drawn her in three-quarter profile, her forehead sloping down to heavy brows, then shoved her pug nose farther up between her eyes to make room for her jutting jaw and hugely outsized teeth.
The squirming settled deeper into Takuda’s stomach. He laid the binder facedown on the table and lit another cigarette. Kimura picked up the binder and pointed out some interesting sights in Buddhist hell, including the Hari no yama, the mountain of needles, and the Sanzu no kawa, the flaming river. Takuda didn’t care. He was done.
“But wait. See, it changes.”
Kimura turned the page. Willowy, indistinct shapes floated out of slipstreams and waves. They were beautiful, like faceless angels shining white on the black pages. There were arrows and labels to indicate different figures: “the woman in the hallway,” “the screaming boy,” “the man who stands sideways.”
In the angular script:
They are very shy. They disappear when they turn sideways. They aren’t transparent, and they aren’t like chameleons. They just know how to disappear. One is a woman and she always hides in the wood crying. I hear her just as I fall asleep, and it wakes me up. But I turn on the light, and she doesn’t want to be seen. She just cries.
Beneath that, in longhand:
Eleven voices, two that are certainly not mine.
Takuda sat back on the sofa and exhaled. Kimura raised an eyebrow.
“It’s interesting, isn’t it? He was hallucinating vividly.”
Takuda just looked at him across the notebook. “You’re not a psychiatrist.”
“When I spoke to Mr. Thomas in the hospi
tal, I thought perhaps he had a borderline personality disorder, but everything else points toward paranoid schizophrenia. And when I went to his house, I thought he also had an obsessive compulsive disorder. Look.”
He laid out another binder, this one full of photos from the house. It was like a haunted house from a traveling festival sideshow. Cerberus was gone from the greenhouse studio, and the plasticene bust was hacked down to gray-green chunks. The paneling in the narrow hallway between the studio and the main room hung in splinters from the lath. Kimura directed Takuda’s attention to a two-page series of photos: the dissection of Thomas’s identical daily garbage bags. Each one contained an empty Gen-Key bottle and the plastic box from his daily boxed lunch, a deep-fried mix from a local restaurant. The next photo was the mixture of cigarette butts and shrimp tails in each Gen-Key bottle.
“All schizophrenics smoke,” Kimura said conspiratorially.
Ishikawa, still in the other corner of the detectives’ bull pen, barked for Kimura in the local dialect. Kimura winked at Takuda just to show that he didn’t care what anyone thought, then excused himself to talk to his boss.
Takuda went back to Thomas’s notebook for clues about the Kurodama. Instead, he found a list of nice things to say to Nabeshima about her hair, her body, her work, her English.
At the bottom of the page in scribbled longhand almost too small for Takuda to read, he had written:
KAORI is MOMMYROT.
Beneath that, in his hooked script:
Not MOMMYROT, but like MOMMYROT.
Outside the window in East Park, the sun shone as if in a different world. Takuda shoved the copy of Thomas’s notebook in his satchel and stood to leave.
A framed canvas leaned against the back of the couch. Takuda pulled it out and set it right side up. It was in oils, painted from the center outward with the foreground fading into an unpainted grid with mountains, a valley, and a small town penciled in. At the center was the shadow of a cross cast by the bars of an open window. It fell on dirt near the knobby feet of men who slept shadowed in a squat earthen house. Jesus sat on the doorsill in the golden morning light. He was small and wiry, a nut-brown man with a slightly hooked nose, flaring eyebrows, and the large, liquid brown eyes of Arab children. In his right hand he held a knife, and from his left hand dangled a strip he had cut from his ragged cloak. A kitten at his feet batted at the strip as its mother cleaned her paw in a patch of sunlight in the foreground. Jesus looked off to the distance with his brow furrowed and his jaw set hard.
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