Collector of Secrets

by Richard Goodfellow

“Damn! No kidding. I can’t believe I did that.”

  “Me neither. What happened to the law-abiding guy I knew?” Jeff laughed.

  Max grinned and then looked around puzzled. “Where exactly are we? This just looks like residential houses.”

  Jeff pointed up the road. “Those coordinates on the back of the Hanjie puzzle pointed here. This also ties into the first image of the puzzle—the boat.”

  “Even I can see we’re nowhere near any water.”

  “This was the Navy’s underground headquarters during World War Two. Japanese troops dug tunnels into the rock below this hill—by hand—when they were preparing for attack by the Allies. It’s been open to the public since the seventies.”

  “So you’ve been here before?”

  “I brought some friends here once, although I wasn’t feeling my best—a bit of the twenty-six-ounce flu—so I just hung out in the parking lot at the bottom of the hill. But we can’t leave the bike there, it’s too public. “Should be okay here for a while. Let’s go have a look underground.”

  “So if the puzzle is right, we’re looking for a tomb or a cross inside the tunnels?” Max asked.

  They both paused, listening to the distant wail of police sirens as Jeff’s normally laid-back style grew serious. “I don’t know, man, but whatever it is, I hope we find it fast.”

  Entering a modernist glass structure at the hill’s peak, they purchased tickets in the hushed marble lobby and descended the ninety-foot whitewashed staircase into the heart of the tunnels.

  “So, Yamashita’s Gold? What’s that all about?”

  Jeff’s voice echoed up the stairwell as they approached the bottom. “From what I read, conspiracy theorists have been talking about it for decades. Golden Lily was the project that buried all the stolen goods during the war, and Yamashita’s Gold is the name given to the same loot by the treasure hunters who’ve been trying to find it. They’re opposite ends of the same story, bro.”

  With the Hanjie puzzle in hand, they traced a path through the catacombs, along every intersecting corridor and passage, hunching now and then to make it through low archways. The few tourists they encountered spoke in whispered tones.

  Max glanced up and down the main tunnel and finally threw up his hands in frustration. “This can’t be right. There’s nothing that matches any of the shapes from the puzzle. All the walls are blank. There must be something we’re overlooking.”

  Jeff’s fingers brushed the pick-axe cut surface. “Maybe I made a mistake.” He crouched down, concentrating on the puzzle and its odd images, while a raucous group of children descended into the tunnel and thundered past, their shrill voices echoing and bouncing.

  An inquisitive boy stopped. He looked to be about six or seven years old. Max wanted to shoo him away, but the pensive face was filled with youthful anticipation as he said hello in English.

  Jeff returned the greeting without looking up or breaking his focus.

  The boy pointed at the first puzzle, pronouncing “boat,” before pointing at the second, grimacing. He seemed to be struggling for the English word, and when it didn’t come, he resorted to Japanese: “Soto.”

  Jeff’s head snapped up, “Outside! Did you just say outside?” He sprang to his feet. “Of course!”

  The child’s eyes inflated with surprise and he dashed away into the next chamber.

  “Nice work. Scaring the little kids . . .”

  But Jeff wasn’t listening, charging away up the long, sloping tunnel toward the exit. “I don’t know why I didn’t think of it before,” he shouted. “Thousands of people died in here at the end of the war. If there’s no graveyard inside, then there must be one nearby.”

  Max raced to catch up. Reaching the outside world, they exited onto a columned and tiled patio. A thin layer of clouds drifted overhead, muting the noontime sun. They turned to the right and crossed the winding length of a promenade, quickly reaching the staircase descending to the visitors’ parking area far below.

  Jeff pointed excitedly to the hillside next to where they stood. Four enormous tombs were inset into the rock. Surrounded by flowering trees, the paint-chipped monuments were camped together, shoulder to shoulder. Each was fronted with a ballroom-sized concrete plaza that needed to be crossed in order to reach the mustache-shaped awning capping the tomb’s front wall. Set within the smooth faces were recessed waist-high stones, each one marking a burial chamber’s entrance.

  Max took hold of the Hanjie puzzle as Jeff spoke. “Look, the second image shows the tomb’s curving roofline and the entranceway.”

  “But which one is the right one?”

  “The puzzle’s third picture—look for a tomb with a cross on it.” Jeff was already jogging away before he finished his thought. He waved back. “You start on the right one, and I’ll start on the far left.”

  “Sounds good.” Max scanned the waist-high concrete pony wall while crossing the first tomb’s plaza. Time had worn most of the paint off the exterior, leaving only splotchy gray and black patches on the surface. Faded flowers lay near the entrance to the tomb, next to a porcelain dish filled with the ashes of burned incense. He ran his fingers along the marble wall, scrutinizing it. Names of the deceased were engraved on a stone slab near the tomb’s front. Otherwise, the surfaces were flat and smooth, with no noticeable markings. Moving on, he glanced around surreptitiously before scaling the pony wall into the next tomb’s plaza; there was no time to go around the proper way. Then his eye caught movement in the parking lot below, and he watched in astonishment as the maroon car cruised out from behind a parked school bus.

  Shit! Max dropped to a crouch. How’d they find us? He rose up enough to peer over the pony wall’s top, waving first with one arm, then with both, but to no avail. Two gravesites over, Jeff was oblivious, absorbed in his own search.

  Half hunched, Max raced to the front of the next tomb where a hasty search revealed nothing. Finally, vaulting over another pony wall, he scurried toward the third marble exterior.

  Seeing Max stooped over, Jeff stopped what he was doing. “What’s going on, bro?”

  “Get down! Get down!” Jeff dropped just as Max reached him. “That car is in the parking lot!”

  “Impossible! Man, there’s no way they could have followed us.”

  “Yeah, well, they did. I don’t get how, but we have to go. I haven’t found anything. You?”

  Jeff shook his head. “No. Nothing even remotely resembling a cross. But it’s a Christian symbol. I wouldn’t expect to find it in a Japanese graveyard.”

  “Let’s leave.”

  “No.” Jeff’s ponytail shook as he swung his head from side to side. “We’ve come this far. Let’s go around the other side of the tunnel’s exit. If there’s nothing, then we leave.”

  Max felt locked in place by fear. That’s three dead now―how many more will it be? Every time he had tried to escape, he’d been found. Maybe it was time to stop running and instead walk calmly down to the parking lot and hope for the best.

  Jeff rose to a half stance and snapped his fingers for attention. “Listen—I know this whole thing has been rough, but you have to do it for Tomoko―and for yourself.”

  “If she’s still alive.” Max took a deep breath before finally nodded agreement.

  Regaining the promenade, they took shelter behind a pillar overlooking the parking lot. The maroon car had pulled to a stop and they watched as a single man climbed out the passenger’s side. A blue military cap hid his downturned face. It was impossible to get a good look at him.

  Jeff flicked his head, indicating a desire to get moving. Crouching in a half run, they returned back the way they had come. Reaching the promenade’s opposite end, he pointed down a lengthy staircase that made a ninety-degree left turn beneath the decking of an overhead bridge. “Let’s try here.” They sprang down the stairs and around the corner.

  Emerging from the trees under the bridge, they slowed. Max could see a laneway twenty feet below, and off to the far lef
t, in the distance, was an open amphitheater. To their immediate left was a small grassy plateau. The remains of a decaying, moss-covered tomb stood half swallowed by the hillside. Jeff leaped onto the grass and moved along the wall. “Keep an eye out.”

  The first two sites were bare of any markings, and they moved to the third burial site while keeping a wary eye on the laneway.

  The final moss-covered tomb was clearly the oldest. Snaking vines and tree roots hung over the edges of the encroaching hillside, covering the tomb’s top. Crumbling pieces of wall lay on the ground, mixed with dead leaves and discarded water bottles. The stench of urine filled the air. “A homeless shelter,” Jeff said wryly. “Hey—help me move these vines.”

  Working from opposite sides of the battered wall, they yanked back overhanging vegetation, unearthing blank surfaces along with an excess of dirt and startled insects. With each tug, Max’s voice overflowed with frustration. He spat dirt from his mouth. “Nothing—nothing—nothing—noth—”

  His last pull yielded something different. High on the wall, rising out of the tomb’s face, was the stylized shape of a sixteen-point chrysanthemum. The Imperial symbol. He pointed at the spot. “That’s the same image as on the diary’s satchel!” His voice rose an octave. “This is it!” He stood on his toes and ran his fingertips across the plate-sized symbol.

  “It’s the Japanese royal crest . . . but what to we do now?” Jeff sounded perplexed. “It’s not a cross, and the Hanjie shows a picture of a cross.”

  Max’s face pressed against the rough rock wall while his fingers probed around the image’s outer edge. “I can feel a space between the petals and the wall. It’s not carved from the wall; it’s been inset into the surface. They feel like they’ll move.”

  “Maybe—maybe we have to push the four that form the shape of a cross . . .”

  “It’s worth a shot!” Max nodded with excitement.

  “But we don’t know what order to push them in.” Jeff was pacing on the grass now. “I’ll bet there’s a specific order.”

  Their heads jerked in unison when the brakes of an aging truck squealed in the laneway below them. It crawled over a speed bump before driving away.

  Turning back, Jeff shook his head. “We’d better hurry. Just push the top one and then go around the symbol clockwise.”

  “All right.” Max stretched his arm up, but paused as he heard Jeff muttering the words, “North, east, south, west.” His hand stopped in midair. “What did you just say?”

  “Uh . . . first push north, then east, south, and west. Why?”

  Max flashed back to Mr. M’s office, and he recalled seeing the top of the wooden box as it was pressed four times. “That’s it!” He felt a rush of excitement as his outstretched fingers pushed the eastern petal first, then the bottom one, followed by the left, and finally the top.

  Jeff grabbed him by the shoulder. “Why in that order?”

  “Mahjong winds—east always goes first.” The waist-high burial stone slid quietly backward.

  Jeff let out a whoop and clapped his hands before fumbling in his jacket pocket. He produced two hikers’ headlamps. “I thought these might come in handy at the underground museum.”

  Max grinned with anticipation, feeling sure they were close to a breakthrough. He slipped the elastic strap over his head before flicking on the light. “I knew you must have been a Boy Scout.”

  “Yeah, right!” Jeff laughed. “Let’s roll—hurry up, before it closes.”

  At that moment, Max spotted the maroon sedan pulling into the laneway’s end. “The car!” He dropped to his knees and scrambled forward, brushing away cobwebs. “You think they spotted us?”

  “I don’t think so,” Jeff replied as he followed hastily.

  Inside the narrow passage, the headlamps cast pale glowing beams. Just ahead was a metal lever jutting from a split in the rock wall, and Max gripped it as his voice echoed. “Here goes.”

  He slammed the lever down, sealing them within—it seemed not a moment too soon.

  HER PURSE sailed through the air and crashed into a shelf, scattering its jumbled contents onto the industrial carpet. Yoko stared from her office chair at the room that had held her secret dreams of freedom. She listened to the silence, amazed to find that she actually would have preferred the chorus of children’s laughter in the classroom next door. It had always seemed like such an annoyance, but now without it, the place felt like a hollow husk.

  Armani, Lauren, and Versace had been replaced by sweatpants, a baggy T-shirt, and white sneakers. Her normally immaculate bobbed hair was disheveled.

  She picked up the legal documents on her desk and read again from Murayama-san’s last will and testament. The old man had left everything to Max.

  How could she not have foreseen? She had been too blinded by her own ambitions to notice everyone conspiring against her. Max had transformed so quickly into Brutus. Her mind raced a wild course, consumed with betrayal. She struggled to find the pivot point when everything had turned.

  There would be no new gallery. The palazzi of Venice would no longer welcome her with open arms. One selfish boy had washed away years of painstaking work.

  Pools of moisture gathered in her eyes, threatening to roll down her cheeks, but she dabbed them away. Her mother’s haunting voice whispered over her shoulder, urging her to run and hide, to begin anew. But the thought that troubled her most: is there time enough to start again?

  She wasn’t young and beautiful anymore, and she couldn’t risk taking much when she left—Masami Ishi’s men were parked in a van on the street below.

  Luciano trailed her as she stomped from the office down to the third floor. The costly art prints would go with her. Since the gallery exhibit was technically still underway, it shouldn’t raise questions from Masami’s men. Glancing around, she attempted to locate a cardboard tube. As her eyes swept the long, pictured wall, they stopped on a gap. An empty space stared back. She knew the spot well—a picture was missing.

  Yoko gasped.

  Rushing to the wall, she prayed that the photo had somehow fallen from its hook. Her eyes scanned desperately, but it was nowhere in sight. Turning around, she finally saw it on the corner of the desk. The slim copper frame was lying face down, the paper backing torn open.

  Almost simultaneously, she saw pages in the fax machine’s bottom tray. A receipt slip showed they had been sent only hours before. On the cover page, the FROM box was blank, while the TO box simply said, “Max.”

  Luciano rubbed against her leg, and he hissed as she kicked him away.

  Yoko’s hands shook uncontrollably and a tear finally escaped its prison, snaking its way down her cheek. She recognized Mr. Murayama’s handwriting on the pages. Dropping into a chair, she studied the first paragraph of the guilt-filled confession, but there was no point reading it all. She knew it as her own story, or more accurately, their story. The voices in her head grew to a screaming crescendo. They told her to be strong, to get up and flee, and to not stop until she was far away.

  But from this . . . there was no place to run or hide.

  She laid her head into folded arms and wept. Forty years of tortured thoughts and haunted nights burst forth. Tears from her uncontrollable sobs soaked the pages and blurred the ink.

  Only a single way out remained.

  MAX CRAWLED into the forbidding gloom, drawing in the tomb’s dank musty air. Goose bumps slithered over his exposed skin. The wet black walls, cut straight but unfinished, pressed in around him. He hated confined spaces. Slender drainage canals ran down both sides of the narrow passage. Even so, stale water lay in shallow pools on the ground. Twenty feet inside, light from the headlamp allowed him to view the rising ceiling. He desperately wanted to take the weight off his aching knees.

  Several paces back, Jeff’s voice rang forward. “That door better open up again.”

  Max turned his head back, momentarily blinding them both.

  “Bro! Point that thing at the floor.” Jeff threw u
p a hand to block his eyes.

  “Sorry.” Max rose to a half stance. “Hey, it’s high enough to stand up. Whoa!” His right foot shot forward, and he bridged his hands between the walls to keep from falling. “Careful—it’s slippery.”

  Jeff guffawed while standing. “We’re crawling around inside a tomb. I think falling on my ass is the least of my worries.”

  Max swiped cobwebs from the path and edged forward with determination. “This whole mess is my fault.”

  “Ease up, bro—it’s not like you planned it. Let’s just find what we need and get outta here. This place gives me the creeps.”

  Walking single file, they advanced a dozen paces. The slender passage joined a foyer-sized room at right angle to a ramp—ten feet wide—descending farther into the stone hillside. Opposing handrails allowed them to simultaneously navigate the slick incline.

  Trailing behind, Jeff lost his footing and let out a shout as he slipped the last few feet, dropping hard onto the smooth floor. “I’m okay, I’m okay!”

  Max took a couple of tentative steps forward, barely noticing Jeff’s echoing voice. “Look at this room!” The chamber they were standing in was fifteen feet wide and extended another twenty feet before a steel door blocked the way. The oval-shaped door was embedded in the center of a curving wall that arched up and forward before meeting the high ceiling above them.

  Jeff whistled his astonishment. “Amazing!”

  “No kidding.” Max walked slowly toward the door. “After you mentioned the extra burial site in the Philippines and we found that the Hanjie coordinates pointed here, to Okinawa, there were only two things I thought it could be.” His voice rose with excitement. “Either it was the location of a map for the 176th treasure, or else it was the treasure itself—somehow moved here after the war ended—Yamashita’s Gold!” He touched the curving wall’s vulcanized rubber surface. “Maybe it really is the treasure. Maybe I will have something valuable to bargain with after all.”

  “Look here, this floor is dry.” Jeff held a hand on the smooth ground. “The granite must be heated—it’s slightly warm—and there’s writing.”