On the Fifth Day (35 page)

"Got what?"

Jim thought for a moment. "Being a Christian means being one with the poor and the oppressed. We share their bodies as Christ shared his. We participate in their lives, in their social conditions, their political and economic environment."

Thomas looked at him. He remembered what Hayes had said about an eviction and wondered if Jim's principles had recently been put to the test. He wanted to ask about it, but more immediate concerns were pressing.

"Look," said Jim.

It was beginning to get dark outside. The last of the jour

nalists had been bussed out, and the translator, Miss Iwamoto, was opening the door of her own white car, casting a blank look at the three women who still lingered hopefully outside 261

O n t h e F i f t h D a y

the hastily erected chain-link fence. Matsuhashi had emerged from the trailer and was talking to the night-duty security guard, who nodded, as if receiving orders. Then the girls were being shepherded out of the compound toward the road, look

ing disconsolate. All but one.

"I guess someone is going to get lucky after all," Thomas muttered with weary distaste.

Matsuhashi opened the trailer door and the remaining girl, a willowy Japanese woman in a black cocktail dress, her hair down, gave him a minuscule bow and stepped into the rectan

gle of light from the doorway. Matsuhashi, his final duty of the day performed, nodded his farewell to the security guard and walked down to the lone car left on the gravel drive. The woman went in, turning outward only to close the door behind her.

It was Kumi.

Thomas put his shoulder to the car door in a flurry of ex

pletives, but Jim reached over to restrain him.

"You knew?" Thomas spat. "You knew that was her? What she was doing?"

"She told me not to tell you," said Jim.

"Yes, I can see how that would ethically trump any other moral concerns," roared Thomas. "That's my wife!"

"Ex," said Jim.

"Oh, well that makes it all right, doesn't it,
Father?
"

"She's doing it for you," said Jim. "And, as she said, she can look after herself. She won't do anything . . . unsavory."

"Unsavory?" Thomas shouted back. "The whole thing is unsavory."

"She's going to see if she can get him to reveal anything . . ."

"I think that's a given, don't you?" snarled Thomas.

"Information," said Jim. "And while she's in there, he is conveniently occupied. So I'm going to drive you to the lab in Kofu and give you a chance to poke around there. I'll come back here. Kumi got us a couple of those card-operated cell phones. Here. It's already programmed. She can call us if she needs us."

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"And you'll charge in like the cavalry in a Goddamned dog collar, will you?"

"Hopefully not damned," said Jim. He started the engine.

"Okay?"

Thomas sighed. "Just get back here fast," he said. Kumi had done her research. The girls outside had been younger than her, but too obvious and tawdry in their dress and manner to have had a chance. She had spent an hour or two poring over the online sketches of her celebrity target in
Shukan Shincho
,
Shukan Bunshun
, and other tabloid weeklies. Watanabe liked a touch of class, or the appearance of it, and he liked a challenge, if only because his inevitable conquest appealed to his vanity. There was no whisper that he forced the agenda if he didn't get what he wanted, though she sus

pected that rarely happened.

He was wearing tight black jeans with a large silver belt buckle modeled on a Navajo design, alligator boots, and a col

larless white silk shirt open at the neck, sleeves folded loosely at the cuffs and pushed up to the elbows. He wore blue-tinted glasses and smoked with a studied coolness as he acknowl

edged her entrance. He didn't need to look at her too closely right now. Matsuhashi had made the invitation, but Watanabe had made the choice.

Kumi entered carefully, opting for smaller, more graceful movements than was her norm, letting her eyes bounce around the surprisingly luxuriant trailer with a carefully judged blend of shyness and coquetry. It was all out of her character, but she was used to playing roles in her line of work, albeit not usu

ally this grotesque, as foreigners--female foreigners in particular--were bound to if they were to succeed among Tokyo's "
salary
men."

Watanabe made a bobbing bow and babbled his
dozos
and welcomes and slick compliments with a clumsiness that was almost endearing. For all his stardom, he wooed like most of the Japanese men she had known, with a boyish awkwardness 263

O n t h e F i f t h D a y

that tempted her to lower her guard. He offered cigarettes, which she declined, and champagne, which she accepted. They spoke in Japanese. She had no intention of revealing her background and had the language facility to mask it. She could not convincingly embrace a Japanese regional dialect, but the woman she was playing would do everything in her power to suppress such limiting ordinariness, so she figured that would pose no problem. She was the slick Tokyoite visit

ing a college friend who worked for NHK. She had seen him at the press conference and had been . . . intrigued. He smiled, gratified, and said he didn't recall seeing her there.

"I didn't want you to see me until I had decided what I was going to do," she lied easily.

"And what are you going to do?" he said, enjoying the game.

"Have a drink," she said, cool, giving nothing away, but doing so with a frank look right into his shaded eyes. Delighted, he clinked his glass against hers and sipped. For ten minutes she made small talk, let him make his in

cremental flirtations while keeping her distance physically, maintaining a very Japanese reserve without shutting him down. Then she led the conversation around to the dig, em

phasizing how interested she was, how impressive it all made him. Her persona wouldn't praise him directly, but praising his work did the job nicely. He didn't want to get off track, but seemed to recognize that this was the route to greater inti

macy, and began to talk about the site, how he came upon the first artifacts, what struck him as unique about the bones . . . Carefully, discreetly, without shedding her restrained calcula

tion, Kumi grew keen and wide-eyed, rewarding his casual preening with a brush of his hand with hers.

"What about the rest of your team?" she said. "Do they work too, or do they just schedule your groupies?"

He laughed at her frankness.

"Matsuhashi is a student of mine," he said. "Not a great archaeologist, but very loyal. Scientists don't have body

guards, but he does the job well enough."

"He is very imposing," said Kumi.

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"You don't know the half of it," Watanabe confided, refill

ing her glass. "He's a ninth-degree black belt in
tae kwon do
and
shim soo do
. That's Korean sword stuff. Did some prison time before embracing archaeology."

He waved his arms suddenly, half imitation, half parody, and squawked like Bruce Lee before lapsing into helpless giggles.

"Does he protect you?" Kumi pressed. "Make sure no one gets in your way?"

"I don't need him for that," said Watanabe, dismissively. He was getting more obvious as the alcohol took hold. "I can look after myself. And I have other friends. Powerful people."

"I'm sure," she said.

"That's right," he said, removing his shades and leaning into her, staring into her eyes with desire and a hint of menace. CHAPTER 75

Watanabe's office was in the Yamanashi Archaeological Insti

tute, a low-slung concrete affair with a brown pebble-dash finish and a slab roof that might have passed for architec

turally intriguing in the sixties but now looked merely shabby and a little squat: a blockish toad crouched on the edge of the town as if unwelcome. He had university-loaned spaces in Tokyo and Osaka for when he was doing fieldwork close by, but this was where he spent most of his time, in easy striking distance of the Kofun sites that had become the center of his career.

Thomas got out of the car a couple of blocks before the fa

cility and walked the rest of the way, a baseball cap pulled low. Yamanashi was no Tokyo, and foreigners still stood out.

"Get back to Kumi," he said to Jim. "If anything happens to her . . ."

"Go," said Jim, handing him a flashlight from the glove 265

O n t h e F i f t h D a y

compartment. "Classes will be finishing up. It's the perfect time for you to get in."

He walked through a park where the cherry blossoms were just opening and waited there for three long minutes before students began to emerge from the building. He pushed through the glass doors, head lowered, walking fast.

There were no more than eight faculty on staff judging by the office listings, two of whom were part time. Two of the other six were away on digs, one was on sabbatical, one more away at a conference. Watanabe, the school's celebrity, was elsewhere, which meant that only one full-time teacher was working at the moment. He located the classroom on the sec

ond floor and waited.

Within a minute, the last of the students began filing out. Thomas got a look at the teacher--a small, middle-aged woman with a hawkish look and outlandish horn rims--and then stooped to his backpack so that she wouldn't notice him as she walked by en route to her office. Thomas tailed her carefully, slipping into a bathroom down the hallway from her room. When he heard the door open and close a second time he glanced out in time to see the teacher taking her coat and bag, fishing in her pocket for keys as she left for the day. A janitor would be making the rounds at some point, and maybe a graduate student or two using the labs to complete research, but he hadn't seen sign of any so far, and was fairly sure he had the place to himself. So far as he could tell there were no security cameras or any surveillance devices except a motion-activated security lamp in the parking lot. It was clear.

Watanabe's office was on the same hall. He tried the han

dle, but the door didn't move. It was the only door in the build

ing with two locks, one in the handle and a deadbolt above it. Thomas had no secret skill with such things, no knack with hairpins, no magical electronic devices that would send the deadbolt snapping back, but he knew what was studied in this building and, after a brief consideration of the door's strength, he started trying every other door he could find. 266

A. J. Hartley

A janitor's closet was unlocked, but he found nothing useful there. Next was a disused office full of old furniture and over

stuffed filing cabinets. Then he found the storeroom he was looking for, made his selections, and returned to Watanabe's of

fice.

Kumi pulled back, putting a single finger on his advancing lips and pushing him playfully away.

"Patience," she said. "Things are always better when you have to wait."

"Depends on how long you have to wait," said Watanabe. It was grudging, but he sat back, even managed a smile.

"You must travel a lot in your line of work," she said. "Tell me about it."

She offered the subject as another stage of the game, one that would seduce him still further.

"I spend a lot of time in Korea," he said.

She grunted dismissively.

"Nowhere more exotic?" she said. "Europe? France? Italy?"

His eyes narrowed, hardened, and he seemed to shed his drunken clumsiness. Kumi backpedaled.

"I've never been," she cooed. "Prague. I hear Prague is beautiful. I'd love to go there. Or Vienna."

"I've been to Italy," he said, relaxing. "It's dirty. Ugly. Naples especially."

Kumi tried to keep the flicker of excitement out of her face. He was watching closely.

It wasn't going to be subtle, and it wasn't going to be quiet, but Thomas was going to get in. He slid the bit of the mattock he had found in the closet into the crack of the doorjamb and used the long handle as a lever. The wood of the frame began to splinter immediately. He adjusted the position of the bit and tried the same movement again. The entire frame rippled and 267

O n t h e F i f t h D a y

bucked, tearing half an inch away from the wall. With the flat edge of the mattock he pushed, prized, wrenched, until there was a pile of wooden fragments at his feet, and the door fi

nally yielded to a jolt from his shoulder.

It juddered open, revealing a spacious, utilitarian office containing a metal desk with a computer, phone, fax, and a se

ries of heavy steel filing cabinets. There was also a long table arrayed with boxes, tubs of chemicals, a pair of microscopes, and assorted other equipment that Thomas could not name. The window blind was down. Thomas closed the slats, shut the door as best he could, and switched on first the flashlight, then the computer. While it warmed up he searched the room quickly, unsure what exactly he was looking for. The filing cabinets were all locked, and he doubted he would get into them with the mattock. A stack of packing cases stood in the corner behind the door, two of them large and wooden, con

taining only wood shavings, the shipping labels carefully stripped off.

One of the desk drawers was unlocked. It contained a se

ries of folders each holding stacks of paper covered in num

bers and formulas, and in Japanese far too technical for Thomas to decipher. One folder, however, contained numbers keyed, it seemed, to three different samples, identified by the number and letter combinations 4F, 12A, and 21A, the first page of each beginning with the equation:

D
2
i
,
j =
(
x
-
x
)2
Pw
[?]1 (
x
-
x
)
i

j

i

j

x
= vector of values for individual
i,
i

x
= mean vector for population
j,
j