The Golden City (12 page)

Votive candles in red glass holders burned like coals in a dying fire. The faces of the icons were absorbed by the darkness, but the candlelight was reflected by the gold frames and brass chandeliers. When Gabriel walked over to the left aisle of the church, he saw one of the monks in front of the altar screen. He was an old man—very short with hunched shoulders—and he held a length of prayer beads with a spindle at one end. As he prayed and paced, he manipulated the chain with his thumb and forefinger. The spindle turned clockwise like a miniature prayer wheel while the monk’s sandals scuffled across the stone floor.

Gabriel stood on one side of a pillar and wondered what to do. If he moved forward, the monk would see him immediately; if he tried to leave the church, the outer door might be locked. He waited in the shadows for over twenty minutes until the inner door swung open and a second monk entered the church. The two men spoke to each other in Greek, and Gabriel wondered if someone had heard his footsteps
on the roof. The old monk headed toward the side aisle, then changed his mind and followed the younger man out of the church.

Were they gone for the rest of the night or just a few minutes? Gabriel grabbed one of the candles and hurried past the altar screen to the tapestry. Pulling back the dust-covered fabric, he found an oak door with cast-iron door handle and keyhole lock. Quickly, he tied back the tapestry. The lock looked fairly new, but the monks hadn’t installed a new door. Standing sideways, Gabriel kicked above the lock. He kept kicking until a section of the wooden frame cracked off and the door popped open.

The chapel was smaller than he had imagined—about twelve feet long and six feet wide. A white stone altar displayed a gold cross and two candle holders. Directly above the cross was a murky looking painting of Moses standing beside the burning bush. There was a three—legged stool in one corner next to an embroidered pillow, but no other furniture was in the room.

Gabriel circled the small space again and again until he noticed a marble slab resting on the floor below the altar. It was a rectangular piece of stone that looked like the top of a sarcophagus. A cross and Greek letters were carved into the surface.

Kneeling on the floor, he pushed the slab back a few inches and saw darkness surging and flowing like black oil in a white stone box. The Traveler reached out his hand and moved his fingers. No burning bush. No voice of God. He was in this world, this particular reality, but that was only one thin layer of a far more intricate system. Then he lowered his hand into the darkness and watched it disappear.

H
ollis met Linden in the storeroom above the falafel shop a few days before the Harlequin escorted Gabriel to Egypt. Linden sat by the window dropping shreds of black tobacco into a square of cigarette paper. He rolled the cylinder between his stained fingers and then nodded in Hollis’s direction. Go ahead. Talk.

“Gabriel said you could help me get to Japan.”

The big Frenchman lit the cigarette and flicked the dead match through a crack in the window. The tobacco gave off a faint odor of burnt sugar. “I bought you a plane ticket using one of my Luxembourg corporations.” He reached into the inside pocket of his jacket, pulled out an airline ticket and a packet of British pounds. Both gifts were tossed onto the table.

“Thank you.”

“Ne tracassez pas
. This was not my idea.”

“Then thank Gabriel.”

“You are not connected to us any longer, Mr. Wilson. But remember this fact: you will be punished if you mention the Traveler to anyone.”

A stack of newspapers were on the table and Hollis assumed that
a handgun was concealed beneath
Le Monde
. If there was a confrontation, he wondered if he would have enough time to draw his knife and drive it into the center of Linden’s chest.

“I respect Gabriel,” Hollis said. “And that’s never going to change. I keep my promises. You know that.”

Linden appeared to be calculating an equation with a half-dozen factors that related to Hollis’s death. Apparently, there was some advantage to letting him live. The Harlequin shrugged his shoulders.

“Au revoir
, Mr. Wilson.”

“Not yet. I want to meet this Japanese woman that Gabriel told me about—the one who speaks to the dead. He said you’d know how to find her.”

“She is called an
Itako
. You should speak to Sparrow’s old friend—a high school teacher named Akihido Kotani. After Sparrow was killed at the Osaka Hotel, Kotani claimed the body and helped get Sparrow’s pregnant fiancée out of the country. I was in contact with Kotani for a few years, and then he stopped answering email. But he sent me some books once, and I still have his card.”

“That’s all? Just his card?”

“This is your problem, Mr. Wilson. You have to solve it on your own.” Linden pulled out a dog-eared business card and placed it on the table. A name was given in Japanese, French and English.

Akihido Kotani—White Crane Books—Jimbocho—Tokyo
.

—

Hollis’s plane arrived at Narita Airport early in the afternoon. It took an hour to get through passport control. After a series of polite questions, the immigration officer ordered the foreigner to open his suitcase. The atmosphere was tense and slightly hostile until Hollis held up a karate uniform and two books on Japanese martial arts that he had purchased in London. The immigration officer nodded as if this
answered all his questions, and Hollis was allowed to leave the detention area.

He exchanged his money and took a train into Tokyo, passing through suburbs crammed with two and three-story concrete block buildings. Each residential apartment had a little balcony with a hibachi, a few plastic chairs and a potted bush that offered a splash of green. Winter had passed, but it was still cold. Little chunks of ice clung to the blue tile roofs beneath a pearl gray sky.

The conductor was neatly dressed and very efficient. He stared at Hollis when he punched his ticket, then relaxed when the foreigner took out the martial arts book. “You are student?” the conductor asked in English.

“Yes. I’ve come to Japan to study karate.”

“Good. Karate is very good. Always obey your
sensei.”
At Ueno train station, Hollis went into a cubicle in the men’s toilet. He opened up the back of his notebook computer, took out a ceramic knife blade and handle, then joined them together with epoxy glue. The eight-inch long ceramic knife was light, durable and very sharp. Hollis slipped the weapon into a nylon sheath strapped to his arm and then threw away what remained of the computer.

As far as the Japanese were concerned he was a
gaijin:
an “outside person” who would never fit in. Hollis left his bag in the checkroom and stepped out onto the street. Everyone was staring at him; he fumbled through his canvas shoulder bag, found his sunglasses, and put them on to conceal his eyes.

—

It took him three hours to reach Jimbõchõ—a Tokyo neighborhood comprised of small buildings and shops near Nihon University. Hollis quickly discovered that most of the streets and alleyways in Tokyo
were unnamed and that addresses didn’t follow the western system. Usually, a small plate was attached to each building. It showed something called a banchi number that indicated the district and lot. But the numbers weren’t always consecutive, and he saw a few Japanese men wandering through the area with an address on a slip of paper.

He searched through his phrase book, learned how to say
sumi-masen
—”excuse me” in Japanese—and began to ask directions to the White Crane bookstore. No one in Jimbõchõ had ever heard of the place.
Gomennasai
, everyone answered—”I’m sorry”—as if their lack of knowledge had caused his confusion. Hollis followed side streets that wandered left and then right like ancient pathways. There were very few children or teenagers on the streets. The city felt like the Kingdom of the Old, a land occupied by short elderly women who wore running shoes and pushed portable shopping carts.

Hollis had grown up in cities and didn’t particularly care about nature. But in Tokyo he became aware of the crows, large black birds with jabbing beaks. Everywhere he walked, they were watching him, perched on telephone poles or strutting down the middle of alleyways like little potentates of darkness. A few of them made a screeching sound when he waved his hands or kicked a piece of trash in their direction. It sounded like they had their own crow language they expected him to understand: we see you,
gaijin
. We’re watching you.

He stopped at every bookstore he could find and asked if they had ever heard of White Crane Books. After two hours of searching, he saw a bookstore that looked like a hole burrowed into a shabby apartment building. Two bookshelves on wheels were out on the street with plastic tarps attached in case of snow or rain.

Hollis looked inside the shop. It was a dark tunnel lined with books—some of the volumes were arranged on shelves, but most of them were stacked on top of each other or dumped into cardboard
boxes. An older Japanese man wearing a tweed jacket sat at the end of the tunnel and read a book stuffed with pieces of paper. A wad of tape held his eyeglass frames together.

“Good afternoon, sir. Can I help you?”

“Just looking …” Hollis entered and found a wall of books in various foreign languages. “You got a hell of a lot of books here.”

“It is a small shop, sir. I never have enough room.”

“Ever heard of a store called White Crane Books? A friend told me to check it out when I came to Tokyo.”

The shopkeeper laughed, and then covered his mouth to be polite. “You have reached your destination, sir. This is White Crane Books and I am the owner, Akihido Kotani.”

“I’m looking for a special book. It might be difficult to find.”

“Is it a foreign book or Japanese?”

“I only know the English title. It’s called
The Way of the Sword.”

Looking frightened, Kotani held up both hands. “I am sorry, but do not know this book.”

“Of course you do. It was written by a fighter who called himself ‘Sparrow.’ He was close to a German named Thorn and Frenchman named Linden.”

“You must be mistaken. I have never heard of these people. Excuse me. I must close my shop now.
Gomennasai …”

Kotani wheeled one of the book shelves into the tunnel while Hollis stood on the sidewalk. “You were Sparrow’s friend, Mr. Kotani. You got his fiancé out of the country and she had a son named Lawrence Takawa. He was a brave young man, but the Tabula killed him.”

“Do not bother me. Please …” With frantic energy, the bookseller grabbed the second shelf and pushed it into his shop.

“I need your help, Mr. Kotani. It’s important.”

Kotani hurried into bookstore, pulled the door shut and locked it.

Seconds later, he peered out the display window. When he saw that Hollis was still there, he retreated into the darkness.

—

Hollis wandered down the street to a bus stop and sat on a wooden bench. He had concentrated so much on finding the bookshop that he hadn’t considered an alternative plan. Should he search for this spirit woman on his own or should he return to London? Although he had never totally believed that he could speak to Vicki again, he had felt a spark of hope. Once again he sensed the stone inside him, that constant anger that never seemed to go away.

“Excuse me, sir. Excuse me.” Hollis glanced up and saw that Akihido Kotani was standing beside the bench holding a plastic shopping bag. “I am sorry to bother you. But you left this at my shop.”

Confused, Hollis took the shopping bag. Kotani gave him a quick bow before hurrying away. Why didn’t he stay and talk? Hollis wondered. Are surveillance cameras watching on this side street? He returned to the main avenue before he inspected the bookseller’s offering. Inside the bag was a copy of
The Way of the Sword
and a mobile phone.

M
ichael was locked inside a metal container carried by a steam-powered crawler that was bumping its way down a country road. No one had explained where they were going. He had been dragged out of the men’s dormitory, carried across the courtyard and thrust through a narrow opening like a log being tossed on a fire.

The holding container had a teardrop shape and sloping sides. It felt as if he was sitting in an empty water boiler built with sheet metal and rivets. The only light came from an air vent near the top of the container, and Michael spent most of the morning gazing up at a rectangular patch of clouds and sky.

Late in the day, the crunch of steel wheels on gravel changed to a steady grinding noise. Michael scrambled to his feet, grabbed the grate covering the air vent and pulled himself up. Peering through the bars, he saw that the crawler was passing through a city.

The buildings that lined the street had slate roofs, round windows made of yellow glass, and walls constructed with a series of triangles, each three-sided shape outlined with a darker shade of red brick. The
visionary screen had revealed a society with sophisticated technology, but Michael couldn’t see any electric lights or power cables. Porters carried baskets filled with chunks of a black substance that looked like coal, and smoke trickled out of crooked pipes that jutted from the roofs.

Michael saw one guardian wearing the distinctive green robe and two church militants patrolling the streets with clubs hanging from their belts. But the city was dominated by the faithful servants. Men and women baked bread, cobbled shoes and stitched clothing. There were street sweepers with long, feathery brooms.

The crawler made a great deal of noise as it turned to the left and began to climb a low hill. Michael let go of the bars and slid back down to the bottom of the container. He sat quietly and waited as the machinery creaked and shuddered and stopped moving. A few minutes passed, then the door was unlatched and light streamed through the opening.

Michael crawled out and encountered three militants holding thick wooden clubs. Maybe this was a different world, but the militants resembled the police officers he had met in the Fourth Realm. Michael wondered if there was some kind of universal cop attitude towards suspects:
Mess with me and I’ll put you down
.