1. Two days later

Thomas gazed out over Manila Bay from his room on Roxas Boulevard and waited for a voice on the other end of the line. He was tired, despite fourteen hours of sleep, but he was clean and a good deal of what had been weighing on him since they reached the Nara had lifted.

“The Druid Hills Museum, can I help you?”

“Deborah?” said Thomas.

“This is Tonya, can I help you?”

“I was hoping to speak to Miss Miller,” said Thomas. “This is Thomas Knight. I’m phoning from the American embassy in the Philippines . . .”

“Hold on.”

Deborah was on the line in less than thirty seconds.

“Thomas?” she said.

“Yes,” he said.

“I saw it all on the news,” she said. “I’m so sorry. I tried but . . .”

“You saved my life,” said Thomas, “and a lot of other people as well.”

“If we’d been faster,” said Deborah “we might have stopped the planes.”

“And if you had failed to stop any, I would be dead and so would everyone on the Nara.”

“But your friend . . .”

“Died with dignity and purpose,” said Thomas with force.

She was silent then, and for a moment he did not know what to say.

“There’s a lot of interest in the fish,” she said, grasping for something. “They said none survived the bombing, but there are scientists already demanding the release of the remains.”

“It would be ironic if they were the last of their kind,” said Thomas. “But who knows? Maybe there are other populations in the area, or elsewhere.”

“The papers say Devlin’s wife will take his seat until his term expires.”

“I should write to her,” said Thomas. “Or try to visit her in Chicago. Her husband and I agreed on almost nothing, but I think he was a man of principle and integrity. I wish I had realized that before he died.”

“Death is like that,” she said. “It changes the way you see life.”

He nodded and smiled, knowing she couldn’t see, knowing she understood.

“They have Ed’s remains here,” he said. “Just bones, of course, but I’m glad they have them.”

“When do you come back to the States?” she asked.

“Soon. A couple more things to do before I get back.”

“I hear your school is offering to rehire you,” said Deborah. “You’re quite the hero.”

“Well,” said Thomas, “we’ll see about that. I have a gift for falling off pedestals. But, I don’t know . . .” His smile stalled. He caught a fleeting recollection of Jim on the beach. “Maybe this time will be different,” he said. He drained his glass of Bushmills, savoring it, and did not pour a second.

2. One week later

Tetsuya Matsuhashi sealed the package and handed it to the customs clerk, who smiled and bobbed her head in that pleased and embarrassed way that said his celebrity status hadn’t completely faded. He took the train into Tokyo, thinking vaguely about visiting Watanabe before his trial, wondering what he would say to his former mentor. He reread Thomas’s letter of thanks for his sending the satellite data to Deborah and for his recent dealings with the American and Japanese officials who had been falling over themselves to figure out what in the name of God had been going on. And, of course, for his standing up to his sensei: an act that could have cost him his career.

Thomas had wished him well for his upcoming doctoral defense, but in truth it seemed unlikely that his school would deny him even if they were skeptical of his work. Great things were being planned for him. All he had to do now was be worthy of them. It was a significant pressure, but he had learned a great deal about himself in the wake of the Watanabe business, and he felt quietly confident in ways he never would have done before. Matsuhashi felt that he should be thanking Thomas, not the other way around.

Perhaps that was what he would tell Watanabe. He might understand. He might even respect him for it. Matsuhashi stared out the window and into the rain, and he smiled a little, for the first time in what felt like a very long time.

3. Two weeks later

It was cool in the Fontanelle, and though still dim there were ventilation shafts—like the one Thomas had entered that night so long ago—that allowed a green and dusty light to filter softly through the corridors of stacked bones.

“Here?” said Father Giovanni.

Thomas nodded and laid the box on the stone floor. It had arrived from Japan that morning, covered in official tape. He opened it carefully, reverentially, sitting back to reveal the contents. Giovanni lit a candle and set it on the low shelf as Thomas took the skulls from the box and carefully set each of them on the stack.

“This is all of them?” said Giovanni.

“All we could find,” said Thomas. “These are the oldest, the ones Watanabe buried in the site. These others,” he added, “are the more recent ones he couldn’t use.”

There was one skull left in the box. By comparison it looked bright, clean: new.

Giovanni looked at it. “You are sure you want to do this?” he said.

“No,” said Thomas, honestly. “But I think it’s what Ed would have wanted.”

The two men looked in silence at the skull.

“I used to be afraid of this place,” said Giovanni. “It seemed to me morbid. Horrific. Then when I first came here after Pietro’s death it felt merely sad. But after a time . . . I don’t know. I started to feel that the dead here were like family, that I was to look after them as I would an old aunt whom I didn’t know well but who was too sick to take care of herself. Is that crazy?”

“Probably,” said Thomas, smiling. “But I think I understand.”

“Anyway,” said Giovanni. “Now I am not afraid of the place and it does not make me sad. There is a purity to it, a clarity. It helps to keep things . . . what? The right size?”

“In perspective,” said Thomas. “Yes.”

“You don’t mind that Eduardo will have no gravestone?”

“I do, but he spent most of his life working with the poor, the people whose names no one remembers. I think he would prefer to lie with them in death.”

“And this is not him,” said Giovanni. “Only the remains of his earthly body. Eduardo is long gone.”

“Yes,” said Thomas, his eyes prickling at the thought, and of the thought of Jim, his friend, who had given his life that Thomas might live.

A good man, he thought, remembering what Jim had said about Ed.

Yes. Both of them.

“Are you ready?” said Giovanni.

Thomas wanted to speak, but the words would not come. Kumi stepped forward, took his hand, and said, for both of them, “Yes.”

Then Giovanni crossed himself and, in the words of the Italian mass that he knew so well and so dearly, he began the funeral service for Ed, for Jim, for Senator Zacharias Devlin, for Ben Parks, even for Hayes, for those misguided souls who followed him, and for the nameless dead who lay around them.