Chapter 27

“It could be a trap,” I said as we hurried down the winding path beneath the torii gates. “It was a text message, not a voicemail.”

Sébastien raised a bushy white eyebrow at me. “He only needed time away to think.”

“Do we really know that?” I tried to raise an eyebrow back at him, but it was an expression I’d never been especially good at.

Sébastien sighed. “We’ll approach carefully.”

The address Sanjay had given us led to a modern apartment building.

Safety in numbers, I thought to myself as we walked along the concrete path connecting apartments. I knew which door before I came to the number Sanjay had given us. The door handle had been smashed.

I knocked on the door, and a familiar face opened it. Yoko.

She gave a start when she saw us standing in her open doorway.

“I thought you were the lock-maker,” she said.

“Locksmith,” Sébastien corrected gently.

A noise sounded from inside the apartment. Behind Yoko, an elderly woman wearing a kimono was preparing tea. Sanjay wasn’t in sight.

Yoko smiled weakly. She held a small porcelain fox figurine in her hands. “If you’re looking for Houdini-san, he left when the police did.”

“You’ve seen him? In person?”

“I was with him all afternoon. He arrived late, as he said he would. There was something wrong with him, though. During practice, he repeatedly dropped his hat…” She shook her head. “I told him you were looking for him. He didn’t call you?”

“No,” I growled. So Sanjay had been screening calls. He’d ignored mine but had gone to see Yoko? I had no right to feel jealous, but I did.

My irrational jealousy faded away as Yoko shifted her body and I saw the full extent of what lay beyond. Her apartment had been trashed. I looked more closely at the fox figurine she held in her hands. It had been broken in half. The head was separate from the body, and the tail was nowhere to be seen.

The woman behind Yoko said something to her in Japanese. Yoko flushed and invited us in. Sébastien stepped out of his shoes and walked inside. I lingered for a moment. Should I be going after Sanjay?

Sébastien caught my eye. “If he doesn’t want to be found…”

Yoko set the broken fox on a low wooden bureau with other broken objects, all neatly arranged with the broken pieces of each object in its own separate pile. She was beginning to put the things back in place. The ceramic bear looked especially forlorn, his smile subverted into a broken frown.

Was it misdirection? Had she ransacked her own apartment to throw suspicion off of herself? She looked truly distraught, but she acted on the stage for a living.

Sébastien tried to assist the woman making tea, but she swatted him away and insisted he sit down.

“Akira and Houdini-san,” Yoko said, “and now this.” A tear rolled down her cheek. Without makeup and with her hair tucked partially under a cap, she looked both older and younger. “Why?”

“What happened, exactly?” Sébastien asked.

Over the tea Yoko’s neighbor served from her cast iron teapot and traditional chestnut sweets from her kitchen counter, we learned that Yoko had returned home after practicing for the show with the camera crew to find the front door had been crudely forced open. She went to a neighbor’s apartment and called the police, and also Sanjay, from there. She didn’t enter until the police arrived and made sure the culprit wasn’t still there. One of her neighbors had caught a glimpse of him.

“It was Oku-san who saw him,” Yoko said, nodding towards the woman fixing us tea.

The woman looked up and spoke a few words to Yoko. The words struck Yoko as forcefully as if she’d been slapped. I didn’t understand any of them except one: gaijin.

A foreigner.

“Not a Japanese person?” I asked. “How can she be certain?”

“I apologize for her rude language,” Yoko said. She turned and said something in Japanese to the woman, who nodded decisively and spoke several sentences of rapid Japanese, while Yoko nodded.

“The man covered his face,” Yoko translated. “He tried to disguise himself, but she insists he was a foreigner. She told all this to the police, but I must have been occupied with what’s left of my belongings.”

“Could you ask her if he was dressed in black?” I asked. “Like a ninja?”

The woman laughed when she heard the word “ninja.” Yoko repeated my question.

“Yes,” she translated. “He wore black, with cloth over the lower part of his face. But this man didn’t look like a ninja. Besides, she says there are no ninjas left in Japan.”

But dressed in black, could this be our ninja? The eyes of the man I’d seen for a fraction of a second on the surveillance video had looked Japanese, but had I only seen what I was expecting to see?

“You think it’s the same man?” Yoko whispered.

“No harm came to you,” Sébastien said. “That’s the most important thing.”

“I don’t fear him. It was not like the attack on Houdini-san, they did not wish to harm me. Only my possessions. He came during the day, while I was gone and my apartment was empty. He must have been looking for notes on the illusion.”

“It seems likely,” Sébastien said. “Perhaps someone who cares more for you, who didn’t wish to hurt you, but didn’t mind hurting Akira and Sanjay…”

“But a foreigner? Who could it be?”

Sébastien raised an eyebrow at me. Was I supposed to know what he meant?

Yoko’s neighbor could tell something was wrong. Yoko stood and spoke again to the woman, a hand on her arm, murmuring something that sounded comforting.

Sébastien leaned in to me and spoke quietly. “A foreigner who didn’t wish to harm anyone…”

“What are you talking about?”

“There’s someone who cares very much for you, who is respecting your wishes and staying away from you. But if he thinks you’re in danger, it might be too much temptation. He might have come with the best intentions—”

“No,” I said. “You can’t mean who I think you do. You think the foreigner is Lane Peters?”

“Of course,” Sébastien said. “Who else could it be?”