On the Fifth Day (33 page)

"I have someone asking questions at the Philippine em

bassy, for what that's worth," she said, apparently missing his irritation. "They should be calling any time now, but I don't expect much given the way we've been stonewalled so far."

"Are you sure it was you they recognized?" said Jim. He was squatting shoeless on the floor, looking distant, monkish.

"I mean, what if they thought you were someone else?"

"Like?" said Kumi, her eyes thoughtful.

"Ed," said Jim, his voice quiet, almost apologetic. "It wouldn't be the first time you'd been taken for him."

"But how would they have known Ed?" said Thomas.

"Satoh said Ed knew about a cross," said Jim. "You came here because something like that cross just appeared here. Is it possible that Ed somehow made the same connection?"

"But the find wasn't made till after his death," said Kumi. But Thomas was watching the priest, his eyes hard.

"What he means," he said, "is that the cross is a fraud, that it was planted here, and that my brother was somehow in

volved. That's right, isn't it?"

"I'm just speculating," said Jim.

"Maybe you shouldn't."

"Maybe I should go back to Chicago," said Jim, levelly.

"Maybe you should."

"Oh, please," Kumi inserted. "Will you two grow up? He's 246

A. J. Hartley

trying to help," she added to Thomas. "Gratitude might be the better way to go. And we won't get anywhere by dodging un

pleasant possibilities."

"Do you think Ed would have been involved in anything like that?" Thomas demanded. Kumi sighed petulantly, irri

tated. "Do you?" he pressed.

"No," she conceded. "But he
was
in Japan. If he came out here he never said so to me, but I'm increasingly convinced he was keeping his cards pretty close to his chest. There was a lot he didn't tell me."

She studied the mat floor, suddenly disconsolate, and Thomas felt that the admission had cost her something, though he wasn't sure what.

"I should be able to find out," said Jim. "If Ed was here and was not being particularly secretive, the local clergy would know. He would have made contact. Or if a strange foreigner appeared in their church, they would remember."

"What if he skipped church?" said Thomas, dryly.

"Not something priests usually do," Jim responded in kind.

"Certainly not priests like Ed. The Catholic congregations here are minute and all the priests are foreigners, mainly Xaverians from Italy but some Js too. There's no way he wouldn't have spoken to them unless he was completely undercover. Let me talk to the priests in Kofu."

"And I'll talk to Watanabe," said Kumi, abruptly rejoining the conversation as by an act of will.

"What makes you think you'll get anything out of him?"

said Thomas.

"Well, for one thing, because he won't know I have any connection to you," she said. "I can play the native pretty well now. He won't even know I'm American."

"And for another thing?" Thomas prompted.

"Have you ever seen Watanabe without a demure and at

tentive starlet on his arm?"

"You're suggesting a honey trap?" said Thomas, incredu

lous. "No way."

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Kumi smirked, amused both by his response and the idea that he could stop her.

"I just don't want you to get into trouble," said Thomas.

"Really?" she said. "Sure you wouldn't love to charge to my rescue on a white stallion? I'll fight my own battles, Tom. Always have."

Her phone rang. She answered it in Japanese and stepped into the corner, putting her hand over one ear to block out the sound of the room. Not that there was much. Jim was brooding to himself and Thomas, struck by the scent of the tatami, the familiar strangeness of rooms like this, was float

ing through memory to when he and Kumi had first met. They had spent months discovering precisely this kind of time-capsule hotel, wholly disconnected from the modern world outside. Everything within it had felt unique and mag

ical, precious and irrelevant to the rest of their lives, like in

sects trapped in amber, like love.

Kumi's tone had become clipped and she was pacing as she tried to find a way back into the phone conversation. She pressed, beseeched even, within the polite constraints of for

mal Japanese, but it was clearly a lost cause, and when she hung up, she cursed. But there was more than frustration in her eyes, though few people besides Thomas would see it. She was unsettled, scared even.

"What?" said Thomas.

"My embassy contact," she said. She was very still after the pacing, as if deliberately reining in something powerful and chaotic. Thomas found his heart was beginning to race.

"And?" he said.

"No one is talking," she said, "and I've been told in no un

certain terms not to contact them again."

"So we've learned nothing new," Thomas sighed.

"One thing," she said, and she was quite pale now. "Noth

ing solid, only rumors. But the word is that Ed did not die in a car crash."

"I never believed that anyway, and Devlin said . . ."

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A. J. Hartley

"Tom," she said, cutting him off. "Listen. He wasn't the only one to die. There were maybe twenty or thirty local peo

ple killed at the same time, in the same place. None of them were terrorists. It was a bomb. A big one."

CHAPTER 70

Thomas woke the moment he hit the chill water, panic open

ing his eyes. His legs were drawn up to his chest and strapped in place with silver duct tape, his wrists lashed together be

hind him.

It took a moment for it to all come back to him. He had been out for a walk to think, to get a little space. He had returned to the
ryokan,
letting himself in because Jim and Kumi were out. The woman who ran the place said there had been a
gaijin
--a foreigner--snooping about. Thomas had gone to his room, but someone had been already inside, wait

ing. He had been hit from behind, hard enough to plunge him into unconsciousness . . .

The shock and cold of the water made him cry out, a word

less gasp of terror as he fought to understand what was hap

pening.

He was inside, in a tiled room with a sink and a central floor drain, and he had been dumped fully clothed into an
o-furo,
the square tub common to traditional Japanese bathrooms. He writhed and splashed as best he could, but he was secured with the duct tape and could barely move, let alone get out. Standing over him, drenched and breathless from the exer

tion of getting him into the bath, was Parks. He was pointing that replica short sword squarely at Thomas's chest.

"Hi," he said. "You've been out for a while. Don't know my own strength."

He sounded chatty, even friendly, but there was an edge to 249

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

the remarks, as if he were only just resisting to the urge to slash the sword across his face.

"What the hell is this?" said Thomas. "Get me out of here."

"The Japanese have lots to teach us about personal hy

giene, don't you think?"

"This is absurd," said Thomas, sitting on the bottom of the tub like an Egyptian cube statue while his captor loomed over him. He felt stupid and powerless. He blinked and swallowed. His mouth was dry, his stomach empty to the point of nausea, and his vision blurry. The blinking helped. He tried, stupidly, to rub his eyes, and Parks chuckled.

"Come on," said Thomas, his voice echoing flatly in the tiled room. "You have the weapon. Get me out of here."

"Right," said Parks, not moving. "Good idea. Especially since I'm so very stupid."

He leaned forward and Thomas flinched back, sure Parks would stab him with that purposeful blade, but he only chuck

led again.

"The sword," Parks said, as if just noticing it in his hand.

"It has a certain style, don't you think? And firearms are so hard to get in Japan, you know. Satoh had a gun. You wanna see it?"

He reached behind him and produced a small black auto

matic, casually pointing it at Thomas's face.

"Neat, isn't it?" he said. "Heavier than it looks. He didn't take it to Italy because it would be difficult to get it through airport security, and he didn't know that the paranoid loser brother of another paranoid loser would try to gut him like a fish."

The core accusation took a moment to register in Thomas's mind, and another moment for the extent of his danger to strike home.

"You think
I
killed Satoh?" he said.

"I gotta say, I was surprised," said Parks. "Didn't think you had it in you. Didn't think old Satoh would give you the op

tion. The man had skills, you know?"

"This is a mistake," said Thomas. "I didn't kill him."

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"Italian police think you did," said Parks.

"They are wrong," said Thomas, more urgently. "The man who killed Satoh died in Bari. He had tracked me there. We fought on the walls of the castle and he fell."

"Another victim, huh?" said Parks, mock impressed.

"Quite the serial killer, aren't you. And let's not forget old Monsignor Pietro. Wouldn't tell you what you wanted to know, huh?"

"This is crazy," said Thomas. "I found Satoh dead. I found Pietro dying. The killer was still around both times. The sec

ond time he tried to kill me too."

"But you survived where a black belt martial artist didn't,"

said Parks. "Sounds plausible, English teachers being famed for their survival skills. And then you killed the guy who did it on some castle in . . . ?"

"Bari," said Thomas. His mouth was dry. He tried flexing his wrists, but the tape wouldn't budge and the slightest move

ment made giveaway ripples. He thought the water was warmer than it had been.

"Bari," said Parks. "Right."

He stood up and walked away for a moment, turning his back, confident Thomas couldn't move.

"So here's what we do now," he announced. "We talk, or rather, you do."

"About what?"

"You can start by talking about this."

Carefully he laid something down on the tabletop, stood up, and watched Thomas's eyes. It was the silver votive shaped like a fish.

"What am I supposed to say about that?" said Thomas.

"Where did you get it? Where did it come from?"

"I didn't get it," said Thomas, irritated. "As you well know. It was in Ed's room in Chicago. I had barely noticed it before you came in and stole it. The next time I saw it was when the police showed it to me in Italy, among Satoh's things. How did you get it back?"

"This is a different one," he said. "You will have noticed by 251

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

now that the water you are sitting in is getting warmer. Mar

velous things,
o-furo,
don't you think? It has a heater built right into the bath, gas in this case. Leave it on long enough and the water will boil. The controls are, of course, well out

side your reach. So, tell me about Ed's silver fish. Where did it come from? Originally. Where was it made and when?"

"How the hell should I know?" said Thomas. He could hear the gas heater now, feel the water warming quickly all around him. "You aren't listening to me. I know nothing about that thing. NOTHING. All I know is that Ed was interested in religious images of fish with oversized fins. I heard there was supposed to be a silver cross with one of those fish on it. Satoh told me about it, but I was skeptical. Now there's talk of a sim

ilar cross here in a grave about eight hundred years too early. Does it sound like an odd coincidence? Sure, but that's about as far as my insight goes. Okay? I don't know anything about it. Now how about you take this Goddamned tape off my wrists?"

He was playing up the righteous indignation a little, watch

ing Parks's response, but his panic was showing through. The water was already hand hot and getting warmer by the mo

ment.

"This one was bought in Bilbao, Spain," Parks said sud

denly, looking at the fish. "It is silver."

"So why are you asking, if you already know where they come from?" Thomas demanded, shifting, trying to stir the water so that the heat that was building at the bottom would dissipate. He was starting to sweat.

"I didn't say where it came from. I said where it was
bought.
It's old and it's not from Spain. I think it was made in Mexico about three hundred years ago, and that it traveled to Spain as a lot of silver did in trade. What do you think of that?"

He was probing, trying to trigger a response. Thomas was getting desperate.

"I don't think anything of it," he said. "It means nothing to me. It came from Mexico? Oh. How interesting. Can I go now?"

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The water was starting to steam.

"You know that the Smithsonian was sent a strange fish scale found in Florida in 1949? Like a coelacanth scale?"

Thomas had the fleeting idea that Parks was insane.

"No," he said. "I didn't know about that."

"Your brother did," said Parks, leaning in close, the pistol lolling casually from his hand. "Where did he die?"

"The Philippines," said Thomas. It was only later that he realized he had finally given Parks something he didn't al

ready know. The man's eyes widened and his jaw dropped a little.

"
The Philippines,
" he repeated in an awed whisper. "Where in the Philippines?"

"I don't know," said Thomas.

Parks reached forward and dunked him hard so that his feet rocked up in front of him. His head tipped back under the scalding water, and through the pain came the sudden surety that if Parks didn't right him soon, he would drown. He was dragged back into a sitting position and gasped the cool air. His skin was bright pink. A few more minutes and he would start to burn.

"That's all they told me," said Thomas. "Leave me in here as long as you like. That's all you'll get: the Philippines. For God's sake, get me out . . ."