The Bride's Kimono (12 page)

I
n the gentlest way possible, the librarian urged me out of the reading room at two minutes to five. I didn’t mind. I had learned more than I expected about the lineage of the kimono I had been carrying. At this point I knew I should go back to rest at the Washington Suites, but I was too wound up.

I took a short taxi ride to Dupont Circle, and once there, I went straight to a place I’d noticed when I’d gotten out of the Metro earlier: Kramerbooks. There, I found a tenth-edition copy of the biography of Dunstan Lanning. The bookstore had a pleasant café, so I sat down and ordered a caffe latte. After all, it was six
A.M
. Tokyo time—I was just starting to wake up. As I was thumbing through my backpack looking for a pen to use for underlining important passages, my fingers touched Hugh Glendinning’s business card.

I really looked at it this time. Under
Hugh Glendinning
it read,
Assistant Director, International Contracts
. The firm was called Andrews, Ferguson and Cheyne and was located downtown on I Street.

“Mr. Glendinning’s office, Rhiannon speaking.” A woman with a perfect BBC accent answered on the second ring. I wondered if the firm was the kind of place that thought British accents made good window dressing.

“I’d like to just leave a message for Mr. Glendinning to call me sometime, if he has the chance.” I knew from experience that I could never speak to Hugh during the workday. He was always in meetings with bosses or clients.

“Is this Miss Shimura?” Rhiannon asked, pronouncing my surname perfectly.

“Yes,” I said, feeling spooked. Had he told the office about me? How bizarre—how different from our time in Tokyo, where our cohabitation had been something we’d tried, quite unsuccessfully, to conceal.

“I’ve instructions to put you through immediately, madam. He’ll be with you shortly.”

Before I could react to this, Hugh’s voice was on the line. “What’s happening?”

What’s happening? He sounded like a 1970s American sitcom. Is this what a few months in a strange country could do to him? I wondered if he’d gotten into Casual Friday dressing as well.

“Um, I’m calling because I decided I wanted to take you up on dinner.”

“Great. I’m in conference right now, so let’s make a quick plan of where and when.”

“I’m in Dupont Circle right now.”

“I can be there in, um, forty minutes. Meet me at the fountain in the middle of the circle, we’ll go on from there.”

I was left with some time to kill, during which I read a third of the biography of Dunstan Lanning. I was beginning to think Lanning was a bit like my friend Richard Randall—fawning when it came to matters of fashion, but at heart a genuine, honest person. Dunstan Lanning had been killed because he’d published an account of an aristocrat who beat an innocent peasant to death—a mention that could only have embarrassed the Shogunate.

I concluded my reading session thinking that Dunstan Lanning had been a fairly reliable narrator—unfortunately, too honest to save his own head. It was a miracle that his books had made it into print in England, and were waiting for me to find in Washington, D.C., 150 years after their original publication.

It was five thirty-five, and I needed to go off to meet Hugh. In the bookstore’s tiny bathroom, I tried to freshen up, but somehow I had misplaced my last MAC lipstick. There was nothing I could do to improve myself except run a comb through my hair. What would Miss Love have done? Pinch her cheeks, maybe. Blacken her teeth with coal, for a fashionable smile.

I skipped both.

The fountain where Hugh had asked me to meet him was smack in the middle of Dupont Circle—literally surrounded by lane upon lane of buzzing traffic. Fortunately, there were some pedestrian walkways and stop-lights, so I crossed, bit by bit, with the flood of humanity. Once I had entered the small park that surrounded a fountain, I marveled at this tiny, busy green space within the traffic maelstrom. Old men in shabby clothing were playing chess at tables, younger men were cruising each other close to the fountain, and there were a few toddlers jumping around under the supervision of rather hip-looking parents—the kind with tattoos and copies of the
City Paper
or
The Gay Blade
tucked under their arm. The scene was quite different from the park in Japan, where the old people performed tai chi, and the young families seemed to be dressed like department-store mannequins.

Hugh was already sitting on the ledge of the fountain. He was wearing dark wraparound sunglasses and talking on a cell phone. In other words, he looked like a lot
of the American yuppies I’d seen in the Starbucks on Connecticut Avenue. I wouldn’t have known him except for the gorgeously tailored suit in a soft, mushroomy color, and the fact that he was waving at me. I kept to an even pace, though a part of me wanted to sprint to him. By the time we were face-to-face, his phone was off and in his pocket.

“Aren’t you a picture,” he said, taking off his sunglasses as he looked me over. I’d walked quickly enough from the bookstore to get warm, so I’d taken off my light coat.

“What a strange thing to say,” I said, my eagerness turning to reserve.

“No, I mean it. The dress. Isn’t there a photo of your mother in it?”

While in Japan, Hugh had checked out my family photo albums. He’d thought that my mother looked a little like Catherine Deneuve and was canny enough to say it to her when she phoned me once, and he’d picked up. After that my mother had been very interested in Hugh, and when he left Japan, she had mourned along with me. But six months ago she’d decided Takeo Kayama was the next great hope. I suspected my aunt Norie had told her about his
Fortune
magazine ranking.

“Of course it’s my mother’s,” I said, upset that Takeo had popped up in my head again, making me feel guilty.

“There’s a good restaurant nearby called Obelisk, but it can be a bit chancy to get in at the last minute. We can try,” Hugh said, leading me to one of the many crosswalks radiating out of the park.

“Could we do something…unfashionable?” I asked. “I mean, eat in a place that’s low-key? I’m feeling a bit overwhelmed. After losing that bridal kimono, I found out some things today that are…incredible. I need to talk without distraction.”

“Well, then, if your shoes don’t bother you, how about walking a few more blocks to a little place in my neighborhood? It’s good for drinks and those little Spanish dishes—tapos or however you say it—”

“Tapas!” I said. Hugh was always awkward when the language wasn’t English or legalese.

As we walked along from Nineteenth onto Columbia Road, the atmosphere seemed to shift. The gracious old town houses were home to businesses with Spanish, African, and Asian names. I heard unidentifiable Spanish pop music spilling out of some doorways, and a band I liked, Cornershop, singing “Brim Full of Asha” from another. There were shops selling incense and newspapers and vintage electrical fixtures. I would have loved to explore, if I didn’t have so many problems.

“You really live in this neighborhood? What is it called?” I asked Hugh. This was a significant change, since Hugh had chosen to live in one of the most expensive, foreigner-occupied apartment buildings in West Tokyo.

“It’s called Adams Morgan. It used to be very posh at the turn of the last century, but then it fell off. In the 1980s, immigrants from Africa and Central America started a great restaurant and club scene going on Eighteenth Street. Then the yuppies moved in all around.” Hugh gave me a self-effacing grin. “I arrived too late to be able to afford to buy property, so I’m renting the second floor of a house on Biltmore Street. This neighborhood is like Notting Hill without Julia Roberts and Mexico City without the altitude problem. I quite like it.”

“It’s not your style, though. I thought you’d live in The Watergate or somewhere else similarly fancy and convenient—”

“No more cost-of-living allowance for me. Those
glory ex-pat days are over, Rei. I shop for provisions at Price Club and buy my clothes at that all-American mall near your hotel.”

“I never dreamed you’d join the rest of us plebes. After all, you’ve got such a nice title on your business card.”

“It’s not ‘partner,’ which is all that really matters.” Hugh raised his left eyebrow, a neat trick of his. “Anyway, less pressure is nice. It gives me the chance to leave work before seven, which almost never happened in Japan.”

Hugh waved me into a plain glass door labeled
EL RINCON ESPAÑOL
. The owner beamed at him when he walked in, and the waiter called him by his first name. Within a minute we were ensconced at a cozy table with a carafe of a zesty Rioja between us. A short while later the waiter brought a savory pancake of egg and potato, a bowl of mushrooms marinated in garlic and wine, and slivers of a salty hard white cheese with some crusty rolls.

“This is so good,” I said, relaxing for the first time all day. “I was looking forward to coming to America to eat all the ethnic food I can’t find in Japan, but I’ve been so upset about things that I forgot to have dinner last night and lunch today. I’m behind schedule.”

“That’s awful, because you’re even thinner than you used to be. We’re going to have to finish up with a chocolate mousse at the patisserie on the corner. It’s the best kind of chocolate with the essence of hazelnuts.”

“Mmm. Well, it’s true I want to eat chocolate every day that I’m here. I’m trying to undo the dulling of my palate from all those lousy Lotte bars.”

Hugh smiled at my reference to the most popular brand of Japanese chocolate, which was usually the only option in Japanese shops. He knew me so well—
better than Takeo, I realized suddenly. Takeo and I had never shared a chocolate bar together, because he wasn’t fond of sweets.

“So tell me what’s happening, Rei,” Hugh said, after we’d both eaten a dinner’s worth of snacks.

“This is the thing. I knew four of the kimono that I brought over belonged to the wife and daughter of one of the ruling Tokugawa families. The other four kimono—including the bride’s kimono that was stolen—belonged to a woman called Ai Otani who was alive during the same time. Jamie—she’s the conservator at the museum—suggested that I look for a specific book that talked about life under late Tokugawa rule. It was a rare book, she said, but I might find it at the Library of Congress. I did find it there, as well as an earlier book by the same author with some really amazing information.” I saw I had Hugh’s rapt attention, so I went on. “Ai Otani, the one with the really fabulous kimono, was probably the mistress of Ryohei Tokugawa. And the other kimono that I brought—a very nice, but typically matronly kimono—belonged to Ryohei’s wife. She apparently forced Ryohei to drop the mistress, and I’m guessing he was the one who arranged the marriage between Ai and a tea merchant in Osaka.”

Hugh was silent for a minute. Then he said, “You’re going to give a great lecture tomorrow evening. I’m sorry, but there’s no way in hell I’m staying away.”

“Okay. Just don’t speak to me, and it should be fine.” I winked at him, then got serious again. “Don’t you see how strange things seem? If the Museum of Asian Arts had made it clear that they wanted me to bring the kimono belonging to a wife and the mistress of an important lord, and talk about their lives, that would have been easy to understand. But they never said the ki
mono belonged to a pair of romantic rivals. I don’t know if they were testing me, to see if I would find out. If Jamie hadn’t given me the tip, I would never have known the truth—and just how awful the loss of the bridal kimono is.”

“What’s happening with that?”

“Well, as you might have guessed, the hotel staff hasn’t found it.”

“Did you report it to the police?”

“Not yet. I want to have a chance to check things out with Hana, the Japanese girl I mentioned to you. She’s simply got to come back tonight, since the tour leaves tomorrow morning.”

“What? You mean to say the office ladies arrived on a Monday night and are leaving on a Thursday morning?” Hugh looked at me incredulously. “They don’t even have time to get over their jet lag.”

“Well, the whole purpose of the tour was shopping. You don’t need more than two days to shop this region. On the way back, they’re stopping on the West Coast to go to a mall in southern California. Two days there, and then they’ll be back in Tokyo on a Sunday, ready to go to work the next day.”

“What if Hana remains on the lam?”

“Then I’ll have good reason to believe she robbed me. I’ll assume that she’s traveled on to another place using my passport, and that she plans to sell the kimono. I was thinking that it might actually be easier for the police to track her if I get them in gear
tomorrow.
She could very well have used my name to obtain her seat on a plane, and that kind of information could be accessed by the police—”

“Rei, you’re stalling. I don’t understand.”

I looked at Hugh. How well he knew me. “I’m not in a rush to do it because…” I paused, realizing that
Takeo’s advice was the chief reason I’d not yet let the Morioka Museum know about the theft. I didn’t want to go into the topic of Takeo Kayama with Hugh.

“Because you’re nervous?” Hugh finished for me.

“That’s part of it. The bride’s kimono wasn’t insured, so they might choose to hit me up for its value, since no insurance company’s going to pay them. I don’t even know what the value is. I imagine they can charge whatever they like, especially after I give my talk and reveal that Ai Otani was a much more interesting figure than previously thought.”

“We don’t know what they’ll do until they have a chance to respond,” Hugh said. “Don’t lose sleep over that point.”

“How can I not lose sleep when I’m still on Japanese time? Anyway, this evening with you has made me feel better, but once I leave this restaurant, I have to face reality. I’ll call the Morioka Museum.” I drained my wineglass regretfully. “I probably should go home now.”

“You’re in no state to be walking about in the dark,” Hugh said. “Let’s go around the corner to the patisserie, and then I’ll drive you back to Northern Virginia. Don’t worry, I’m safe to drive. I’ve only had one glass.”