CHAPTER 67
Thomas and Jim rode the Chuo line from Shinjuku to Kofu, arriving in a little over three hours. Tokyo’s urban sprawl turned slowly into the wooded mountains of Yamanashi and the Japan of the great nineteenth-century woodblock print-makers: rice paddies; steep-sided irregular hills, their tops lost in mist and cloud; and tiny, remote shrines. And, of course, Mount Fuji, a snow-crested, symmetrical echo of Vesuvius.
In the course of the journey the sense of déjà vu with which Thomas had been struggling since they touched down returned with greater force than ever as they neared the town in which he had spent the two years before graduate school. He fell into himself, drawn by the gravity of memory, relieved that Jim was asleep and would need no commentary. He reread Kumi’s note, considering the appointment at what had been one of their favorite places, and it was impossible not to see it as promising harmony, so that the train seemed to be taking him into his past.
They took a cab from the station, the driver in white felt gloves opening the rear doors automatically, and as Jim remarked on this Thomas found his brain articulating the same “Yes, that’s how it was” that it had been doing since they arrived. In ten minutes they were at the entrance to the Zenko-ji Temple, pacing the long avenue through the sculpted black pines to the faded red structure, and every step was, for Thomas, uncannily familiar.
An old man on a set of steps was wiring a long bamboo pole to the long, straight limb of a pine. He glanced at them from under his broad-brimmed straw hat and bobbed his head in greeting. To the left was the great bronze Buddha surmounting the ornamental garden Thomas had seen in rain and snow, and to the right was the cemetery of stone figures and square wooden staffs carved with kanji. He saw Kumi before she saw him. She was standing in front of a row of squat stone figurines that looked like diminutive Buddhas shaped like babies in various poses. Jido, they were called, he remembered. Many wore red biblike aprons called yodarekake, one of which Kumi was adjusting.
She turned when she sensed them there, moving quickly toward them. Thomas was surprised to find her embracing him, muttering relief that he had made it and apologies for their last meeting.
“You’ve cut your hair short,” said Thomas.
“Shorter, yes,” said Kumi. “It’s been like this about three years.”
“I liked it long.”
“I know,” she said.
It was shoulder length now. It used to reach almost to her waist.
“It looks . . . professional,” said Thomas.
“Thanks,” she said, with a knowing, sideways smile that was so familiar, so absolutely her, that Thomas flinched and looked away.
“I’m Jim Gornall,” said Jim. “I work at the parish Ed was serving when he died.”
Kumi shook his hand and bowed fractionally, a habit she had acquired since being back, thought Thomas.
“I’m being watched,” she said, straight to business. “A guy was in my office the day I called you. An American. I’d seen him before on Sotobori Dori. There’s a golf store next to my office building and he goes in there.”
“Maybe he just likes golf,” said Thomas.
“Americans give up golf when they come to Japan, Tom,” she said. “They can’t afford it.”
“You think he’s Homeland Security?”
She shook her head.
“Homeland Security already questioned me about you,” she said. “If this guy’s government he’s going through some fairly covert channels. My office is only a block from the embassy so it’s sort of a magnet for U.S. businessmen looking to make a killing, but this guy didn’t look official.”
“How so?”
“He had a goatee. Hardly normal for anyone dealing with corporate or political Japan.”
Parks?
Thomas nodded and told her about his dealings with Parks.
“I don’t know where he fits in,” he admitted, “but he’s involved and he’s dangerous. If it was him you saw in your office, then he went there pretty much directly after leaving St. Anthony’s in Chicago, and he must have gone from there to Italy.”
“Whoever it was,” said Kumi, “I had no idea what the state of my phones were so I had to make it sound like I wasn’t really talking to you.”
“I’m kind of surprised you are,” said Thomas.
He said it lightly, but he meant it and her smile was an evasion.
“DHS knows you are in the country,” she said. “I’m not sure why they aren’t talking to you or having the Japanese police pick you up. They probably figure they can learn more by watching.”
“Or they are hoping I suffer some sort of tragic accident so that all this stuff just goes away,” said Thomas.
“Thomas is developing a very bleak view of our nation’s government,” said Jim.
“What do you mean ‘developing’?” she said. “Thomas has prided himself on his skepticism about the U.S. government for as long as I’ve known him.”
“Let’s just say I’m getting more cynical in my old age,” Thomas answered.
“Shame,” she said, deadpan. “You were such the wide-eyed innocent before.”
“Did you come here to help or just catch up on your insults?” said Thomas.
“A bit of both,” she said. “I can’t stay long. I’m supposed to be pouring soothing oil on the minister for agriculture, forestry, and fisheries in . . .” she checked her watch, “three hours. This trade delegation from the States has people jumpy.”
“Devlin?”
“Among others, yes. You know him?”
Thomas told her of his meetings with the senator and his link to Ed.
“You think it’s a coincidence that he’s here now?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” Thomas said. “Were you in contact with Ed when he was here?”
She hesitated.
“He stayed with me for a couple of days, but all our energy went into not talking about you,” she said. “In fact we talked about very little. I think he was relieved to go.”
She sounded wistful.
“But you think he came here?” said Thomas, strictly business.
“I know he came in this direction,” she said, “because I helped him with the train schedule, but he didn’t say where he was going and I heard nothing from him after he left Tokyo.”
“That’s unlike him,” said Thomas.
“Yes. He seemed anxious, troubled, even,” said Kumi. “When I asked him about it he said he’d tell me later, when things were clearer to him. He didn’t talk about his work or why he had come. I let him be, because I suspected some of it was about us. I hadn’t seen him for five years, remember, not since . . .”
“You left me,” said Thomas. “Yes.”
Kumi looked away, chewing the inside of her cheek as she did when restraining herself.
“So unless it really was all about us,” he said, using that last word as if it were a kind of in-joke, “then something happened between his decision to leave Italy and his arrival in Japan. He seemed quite happy according to the people who met him in Naples. What made him so ‘troubled’?”
“It would help if we knew exactly where he went when he left Tokyo,” said Jim, who had been staying on the conversation’s perimeter in case it became too personal.
“I think I know,” said Thomas, “though I don’t understand why.”