On the Fifth Day (38 page)

"Got it. Will you go to the lab directly?"

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A. J. Hartley

There was a momentary hesitation.

"I'll be there first thing in the morning," he said. "I need to get some sleep."

Matsuhashi hung up and, for a moment, just stood there, looking at the black hump of the burial mound.

"Well?" said Thomas.

"He's on his way."

CHAPTER 80

Thomas lay on his back on the far side of the trash mound where the filler dirt from the site had been dumped. When the excavators had carved the earth from around the burial mound, they had created a great sloped cone of rubble and sandy earth that was actually taller than the mound itself. From where he lay Thomas could look out over the entire site without being seen, though with no permanent lights in place, there was lit

tle to see in the dark. The night was still and calm, too early in the year for the metallic drone of the cicadas. Watanabe arrived half an hour before dawn. He had parked at least a block away and entered the site silently, his move

ments furtive. He had brought a flashlight no larger than a pen, and most of the time he worked without switching it on. He took no more than five minutes to prepare, and then disap

peared around the back of the mound. Thomas listened, but he could hear nothing, and for a full ten minutes it looked as if Watanabe had left.

"Where is he?" he whispered.

"Inside," said Matsuhashi, who had not moved at all for at least two hours.

"How did he get in? The entrance is right there."

"There must be another
tanuki
hole we didn't know about 285

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

on the other side," said Matsuhashi. "Clever. It must give him access to the unexcavated part of the mound."

Another silent five minutes passed, and, then they heard him moving around again outside the mound. Thomas risked a look. The darkness was graying fast and the archaeologist had stowed his flashlight. He was bent over the ground, barely moving except for his hands, rubbing, polishing one tiny ob

ject at a time, using what might have been a child's toothbrush, working with infinite care. He wore gloves and had spread some kind of tarp on the ground, but the meticulousness of the scene was belied by the feverish muttering that increased as time passed. He was desperate, panicking.

Thomas turned away, easing back down the slope, careful not to dislodge so much as a pebble.

"How long does pollen last?" he whispered.

"Tens of thousands of years," Matsuhashi said, still not moving. "The outer shell is almost indestructible. It can say much about conditions when an object went into the ground."

"If it's really there," said Thomas.

Matsuhashi didn't speak for a moment, then said, "He's going back in. It is almost time."

They waited till the sun was barely over the horizon, the chorus of birds winding down, before they made their move. It was simple enough, climbing over the top of the fill heap and down into the excavation site proper. They did not speak and still moved quietly, unwilling to reveal themselves. Watanabe didn't see them at first. He emerged, looking grubby and distracted, and had already gathered his tools be

fore he looked up and saw the pair of them standing there, waiting.

He became quite still, and then, as if he might yet ride this out on personality alone, snapped on his trademark grin. Without the shades he looked old, haggard.

"Early start?" he said in Japanese.

Matsuhashi stood silently, his back ramrod straight, his eyes on the ground, like a soldier at inspection. 286

A. J. Hartley

"It's over," said Thomas. He felt no triumph, just weariness and a desire for it all to be done. But there was something he needed to know.

"Tell me about Ed," he said. "My brother. What exactly did you fight over?"

"I don't know what you are talking about," he said. Thomas looked to Matsuhashi, but the student just stood there as if paralyzed, unable to look at his teacher.

"Tell him about the pollen," said Thomas.

"What pollen?" said Watanabe with an unconvincing shrug. He was going to brazen it out after all, convinced his student wouldn't turn on him. "Do you know anything about any pollen?" he asked his student, inching closer, looming.

"No,
sensei,
" said Matsuhashi. "I know of no pollen."

Watanabe smiled, genuinely this time. His hands patted his breast pocket and located his trademark shades.

"Your brother," he said, "was a fool."

"He came for the cross?" said Thomas, persisting with an effort.

Watanabe looked at Matsuhashi, who seemed so still and powerless before him, and permitted himself another grin.

"You came here to make accusations against me that you cannot substantiate," he said. "Your brother did the same. Whining about giving a proper burial to certain . . . human re

mains." He shook his head and chuckled. "A strange quest for a priest, no? Wanting to return dead people--whose names he didn't even know--to some hole in the ground on the other side of the world?"

He rolled his eyes at the absurdity of the thing.

"That's all?" said Thomas, aghast. "He came to get the bones back to Naples because Pietro was eaten up with guilt for selling the dead down the river? That's all? What about the cross? The fish symbol? His research?"

"Research?" Watanabe sneered. "He was a priest. What could he be researching that would be of interest to a scien

tist? We didn't discuss it."

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Watanabe shrugged again, pleased with Thomas's disap

pointment, and the shrug looked real. Ed's time in Japan had been a sidebar, a tangent, and Thomas's following him here was just so much wasted time. Anger welled up in Thomas and he turned to Matsuhashi.

"Finish this," he said.

But Matsuhashi, his cheeks tear-streaked again, seemed in

capable of speech or movement.

"You see, Mr. Knight," said Watanabe, slipping his shades on, "we Japanese are very loyal to our
sempai
--our superiors. Matsuhashi-
san
is my student, my
kohai,
my inferior. His fu

ture is also mine. Without me he is nothing."

Thomas looked from him to the student, willing him to speak.

"There is no pollen," said Matsuhashi with great slowness, each word hauled out like a millstone.

"Yes," said Watanabe. "You must have made a mistake in the lab . . ."

"There never was any non-Japanese pollen on the bones,"

said Matsuhashi, and suddenly he straightened up and looked his teacher directly in the eye. It was such a surprising and de

fiant gesture, one Thomas was sure Watanabe had never seen from his student before, that the archaeologist took a step backward. "But," Matsuhashi continued, "you did not know that, which is why you just entered the tomb and cleaned off the artifacts you had planted earlier, artifacts that you hadn't planned to 'discover' for several days."

Watanabe flinched as if slapped.

"That's a lie," he said, very quiet.

"No,
sensei,
" said Matsuhashi, eyes lowered again, the sol

dier standing before his superior.

"Yes," said Watanabe, "it is."

"No," said Thomas, gesturing to the perimeter of the site.

"And we have proof."

Curious, Watanabe peered out over the tops of his shades. People were emerging from cover close to the entrance, others 288

A. J. Hartley

on top of the fill heap. They had video cameras and long, foam-covered directional microphones. NHK had agreed to come only when Thomas had warned that a minor reporter with the
New Zealand Herald
would scoop the entire story and make Japanese archaeological science into a laughingstock unless they came. They hadn't believed his tale, but they would now. Everyone would.

"No!" shrieked Watanabe, hurling himself at Thomas. Flashbulbs fired, hardening the soft morning light like a blaze of gunfire.

CHAPTER 81

The pictures were everywhere by breakfast time. The TV

news all showed the NHK footage every ten minutes and the newspaper headlines shrieked. It was a feeding frenzy, and if they had loved Watanabe's meteoric rise, that only made his graphic fall all the more sensational.

Parts of a third skeleton were recovered from the "unexca

vated" area of the mound, including some apparently genuine Kofun ceramics and a contemporaneous terra-cotta statue of the Virgin Mary, probably Italian in origin. The Blessed Mother cradled a pomegranate in her right hand. Watanabe was facing jail time for fraud of various kinds and Matsuhashi had become a reluctant celebrity in his own right, moving to the head of a short list to take over the Ya

manashi Archaeological Institute on completion of his doctor

ate. That might change when the cameras averted their gaze, of course, but for now, Thomas had a resounding success on his hands, and though he dreamed of the ghoul in the Fontanelle, he woke with a sense of relief and a kind of closure. So his depression after the news broke was not immediately easy to explain. He shunned the spotlight, letting Matsuhashi 289

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take the credit whenever possible, which seemed both politic and ethical. It was the student whose neck had been on the block, who had finally had to stand up to an archaic system of patronage, which could have utterly torpedoed his career. But the ordeal had taught him nothing useable about Ed, except that he had been in Naples at the same time that Watan

abe had been trawling for unnoticed bones and Christian arti

facts, and that Ed had pursued him to Japan to demand their return. The crucial link that then took him to some obscure place in the Philippines, the link that had DHS creating a ter

rorism file with his name on it, was no closer now than before Thomas left Italy.

But at least you've completely alienated your ex-wife . . .
Kumi was still angry about the way he had left Jim to en

sure her safety while he set about laying traps with Mat

suhashi. The fact that she hadn't been hurt was irrelevant, she said. He argued that Jim couldn't have done what Matsuhashi needed, that only he could have closed the thing out the way he had.

"Of course," she snapped back. "Always the hero, the leader, aren't you, Thomas? Always hogging the limelight except when you are really needed, except when
I
really need you."

And it was clear then, as it should have been much earlier, that they weren't really fighting about the evening she had spent with Watanabe at all. They were fighting about what they always fought about, even if they never said so out loud. Anne.

Don't say the name. Don't think it. Ever.
But he felt as he had felt all those years ago that it hadn't been his fault. He had run interference for Kumi. That was how he thought of it. He had protected her, dealing with their friends and family, keeping her out of it while she recovered. It never occurred to him that what she had really wanted was for him to stay in there with her, crying day after day. He worked better by keeping moving, getting past it.
For which she never forgave you.

It was ironic when he thought about it, because he never 290

A. J. Hartley

had gotten past it. Not really. It had been the beginning of the end, and not just with Kumi. With lots of things. Marriage, work, God, and, by extension, his brother. And here it was again, ghosting their most recent squabble as it always did, al

ways would.

"I need to get back to Tokyo," she said. "Devlin has some scheme that's raising eyebrows and they need me back there."

They were sitting in a quiet restaurant in Kofu on the main street up to the railway station where the statue of Takeda Shingen sat in full samurai armor.

"Excuse me," said Jim, getting to his feet and nodding in the direction of the restroom, fooling nobody. It had been intended as a kind of victory dinner, but a pall had settled over them the moment they had sat down.

"Okay," said Thomas, staring at the vegetable tempura on his plate. They were out of shrimp, apparently. A national shortage had made them both scarce and expensive. Not that it mattered. His appetite was gone. "Okay," he said again. His acceptance clearly irritated her, but she wasn't about to argue. He ordered another beer. That irritated her too, but she let it slide.

"I like Jim," she said. "Having him here is oddly like . . ."

"Being with Ed," Thomas completed for her. "I know."

"I'm sorry this hasn't worked out," she said. He didn't know what
this
meant exactly, and didn't know for sure that she did. "I think you have to let it go. Go back to the States. I don't know that you'll ever really know the truth about Ed. I hate it, but . . . You need to go back to the States. Get a job. Get on with your life."

His beer arrived.

"That's what I'm good at, right?" he said.

"I didn't say that," she said.

"I know."

He found himself hoping Jim would return so that neither of them would say any more, so that they could go back to their disconsolate dinner, make small talk, stay inside themselves, 291

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hollow though they might be. He took a long swallow of his beer, and she looked away.

"I'm sorry," he said, as soon as he put the glass down. "I have to go. I'll be back as soon as I can. Tell Jim . . . I don't know. Something."

Kumi did not speak and he could think of nothing else to say, so he left.

CHAPTER 82

Pestilence had abandoned her nun's habit. In her tailored busi

ness suit she looked younger, tougher, her arms and legs strong and tanned. It was still impossible for a
gaijin
to completely disappear in Tokyo, but her new attire at least bought some anonymity.

She was uncomfortable nonetheless. Between the two of them, she and War had surveyed as many major hotels as they could and had staked out Kumi's Tokyo office, but they had nothing new to report, and had come to dread the Seal-breaker's calls. Knight and his companions had dropped off the map. They knew he was in the country and that he had contacted his ex-wife. They had a car but they were driving blind. Nei