On the Fifth Day

“They knew me,” said Thomas. “How do you explain that? Watanabe and the other guy, the graduate student, they recognized me the moment they saw me.”

Kumi was back from her Tokyo meeting, back, she said, without further explanation, for the weekend. They had rented three rooms in a traditional hotel or ryokan in Shimobe, a village beside a river a few miles outside Kofu. It was quiet and just picturesque enough to make the idea of three tourists staying there plausible, but small enough that any strangers asking about them would stand out as much as they did. A local train could have them in Kofu in a matter of minutes or take them up to the mountain shrines of Minobu.

“It can’t be because of what you’ve learned,” said Kumi with a casualness that brought color to Thomas’s cheeks. “We don’t really know much of anything.”

“You’re working on that, are you?” said Thomas, his voice a little strident in the tiny, six-mat room, with its sliding paper-covered shoji.

“I have someone asking questions at the Philippine embassy, for what that’s worth,” she said, apparently missing his irritation. “They should be calling any time now, but I don’t expect much given the way we’ve been stonewalled so far.”

“Are you sure it was you they recognized?” said Jim. He was squatting shoeless on the floor, looking distant, monkish. “I mean, what if they thought you were someone else?”

“Satoh said Ed knew about a cross,” said Jim. “You came here because something like that cross just appeared here. Is it possible that Ed somehow made the same connection?”

“What he means,” he said, “is that the cross is a fraud, that it was planted here, and that my brother was somehow involved. That’s right, isn’t it?”

“Oh, please,” Kumi inserted. “Will you two grow up? He’s trying to help,” she added to Thomas. “Gratitude might be the better way to go. And we won’t get anywhere by dodging unpleasant possibilities.”

“Do you think Ed would have been involved in anything like that?” Thomas demanded. Kumi sighed petulantly, irritated. “Do you?” he pressed.

“No,” she conceded. “But he was in Japan. If he came out here he never said so to me, but I’m increasingly convinced he was keeping his cards pretty close to his chest. There was a lot he didn’t tell me.”

She studied the mat floor, suddenly disconsolate, and Thomas felt that the admission had cost her something, though he wasn’t sure what.

“I should be able to find out,” said Jim. “If Ed was here and was not being particularly secretive, the local clergy would know. He would have made contact. Or if a strange foreigner appeared in their church, they would remember.”

“Not something priests usually do,” Jim responded in kind. “Certainly not priests like Ed. The Catholic congregations here are minute and all the priests are foreigners, mainly Xaverians from Italy but some Js too. There’s no way he wouldn’t have spoken to them unless he was completely undercover. Let me talk to the priests in Kofu.”

“Well, for one thing, because he won’t know I have any connection to you,” she said. “I can play the native pretty well now. He won’t even know I’m American.”

“Really?” she said. “Sure you wouldn’t love to charge to my rescue on a white stallion? I’ll fight my own battles, Tom. Always have.”

Her phone rang. She answered it in Japanese and stepped into the corner, putting her hand over one ear to block out the sound of the room. Not that there was much. Jim was brooding to himself and Thomas, struck by the scent of the tatami, the familiar strangeness of rooms like this, was floating through memory to when he and Kumi had first met. They had spent months discovering precisely this kind of time-capsule hotel, wholly disconnected from the modern world outside. Everything within it had felt unique and magical, precious and irrelevant to the rest of their lives, like insects trapped in amber, like love.

Kumi’s tone had become clipped and she was pacing as she tried to find a way back into the phone conversation. She pressed, beseeched even, within the polite constraints of formal Japanese, but it was clearly a lost cause, and when she hung up, she cursed. But there was more than frustration in her eyes, though few people besides Thomas would see it. She was unsettled, scared even.

“My embassy contact,” she said. She was very still after the pacing, as if deliberately reining in something powerful and chaotic. Thomas found his heart was beginning to race.

“One thing,” she said, and she was quite pale now. “Nothing solid, only rumors. But the word is that Ed did not die in a car crash.”

“Tom,” she said, cutting him off. “Listen. He wasn’t the only one to die. There were maybe twenty or thirty local people killed at the same time, in the same place. None of them were terrorists. It was a bomb. A big one.”