CHAPTER 74
Jim was waiting in a white Toyota sedan on the road outside the dig. The press had largely drifted away, and only a few starstruck groupies remained.
“Is Watanabe here?” said Thomas.
“The girls think so,” said Jim. “I suspect they would know best.”
“His assistant—Matsuhashi—said he was at the lab in Kofu. Didn’t want me to see him.”
“I might have some idea as to why,” said Jim.
“Ed came to Kofu? Oh, my prophetic soul.”
“For at least two days,” said Jim. “About ten days before he died. He introduced himself at the local church, ate with them, said mass at least once, stayed overnight.”
“So not exactly an undercover visit,” said Thomas. “What on earth was he doing?”
“He must have come to the site.”
“It seems so,” said Thomas, “but there was no site then. The find wasn’t made till after he died. What brought him here?”
“Got me,” said Jim. “So what do we do now?”
“We wait,” said Thomas. “Keep an eye open for the esteemed archaeologist.”
There was a long silence.
“Back in Chicago you said you were a missionary,” said Thomas.
“So?”
“Why does America need a missionary?”
“American Catholics put too much faith in faith.”
Thomas frowned.
“It’s not just about what you believe,” said Jim. “It’s about how you act, how you live the gospel, and I don’t mean in the way you police other people’s morality. Ed understood that. Some priests can be great blokes while you’re watching the game, but as soon as religion comes up they put their holy hats on. All they have to offer are rules and sanctimonious platitudes. Not Ed. He got it.”
“Got what?”
Jim thought for a moment. “Being a Christian means being one with the poor and the oppressed. We share their bodies as Christ shared his. We participate in their lives, in their social conditions, their political and economic environment.”
Thomas looked at him. He remembered what Hayes had said about an eviction and wondered if Jim’s principles had recently been put to the test. He wanted to ask about it, but more immediate concerns were pressing.
“Look,” said Jim.
It was beginning to get dark outside. The last of the journalists had been bussed out, and the translator, Miss Iwamoto, was opening the door of her own white car, casting a blank look at the three women who still lingered hopefully outside the hastily erected chain-link fence. Matsuhashi had emerged from the trailer and was talking to the night-duty security guard, who nodded, as if receiving orders. Then the girls were being shepherded out of the compound toward the road, looking disconsolate. All but one.
“I guess someone is going to get lucky after all,” Thomas muttered with weary distaste.
Matsuhashi opened the trailer door and the remaining girl, a willowy Japanese woman in a black cocktail dress, her hair down, gave him a minuscule bow and stepped into the rectangle of light from the doorway. Matsuhashi, his final duty of the day performed, nodded his farewell to the security guard and walked down to the lone car left on the gravel drive. The woman went in, turning outward only to close the door behind her.
It was Kumi.
Thomas put his shoulder to the car door in a flurry of expletives, but Jim reached over to restrain him.
“You knew?” Thomas spat. “You knew that was her? What she was doing?”
“She told me not to tell you,” said Jim.
“Yes, I can see how that would ethically trump any other moral concerns,” roared Thomas. “That’s my wife!”
“Ex,” said Jim.
“Oh, well that makes it all right, doesn’t it, Father?”
“She’s doing it for you,” said Jim. “And, as she said, she can look after herself. She won’t do anything . . . unsavory.”
“Unsavory?” Thomas shouted back. “The whole thing is unsavory.”
“She’s going to see if she can get him to reveal anything . . .”
“I think that’s a given, don’t you?” snarled Thomas.
“Information,” said Jim. “And while she’s in there, he is conveniently occupied. So I’m going to drive you to the lab in Kofu and give you a chance to poke around there. I’ll come back here. Kumi got us a couple of those card-operated cell phones. Here. It’s already programmed. She can call us if she needs us.”
“And you’ll charge in like the cavalry in a Goddamned dog collar, will you?”
“Hopefully not damned,” said Jim. He started the engine. “Okay?”
Thomas sighed. “Just get back here fast,” he said.
Kumi had done her research. The girls outside had been younger than her, but too obvious and tawdry in their dress and manner to have had a chance. She had spent an hour or two poring over the online sketches of her celebrity target in Shukan Shincho, Shukan Bunshun, and other tabloid weeklies. Watanabe liked a touch of class, or the appearance of it, and he liked a challenge, if only because his inevitable conquest appealed to his vanity. There was no whisper that he forced the agenda if he didn’t get what he wanted, though she suspected that rarely happened.
He was wearing tight black jeans with a large silver belt buckle modeled on a Navajo design, alligator boots, and a collarless white silk shirt open at the neck, sleeves folded loosely at the cuffs and pushed up to the elbows. He wore blue-tinted glasses and smoked with a studied coolness as he acknowledged her entrance. He didn’t need to look at her too closely right now. Matsuhashi had made the invitation, but Watanabe had made the choice.
Kumi entered carefully, opting for smaller, more graceful movements than was her norm, letting her eyes bounce around the surprisingly luxuriant trailer with a carefully judged blend of shyness and coquetry. It was all out of her character, but she was used to playing roles in her line of work, albeit not usually this grotesque, as foreigners—female foreigners in particular—were bound to if they were to succeed among Tokyo’s “salarymen.”
Watanabe made a bobbing bow and babbled his dozos and welcomes and slick compliments with a clumsiness that was almost endearing. For all his stardom, he wooed like most of the Japanese men she had known, with a boyish awkwardness that tempted her to lower her guard. He offered cigarettes, which she declined, and champagne, which she accepted.
They spoke in Japanese. She had no intention of revealing her background and had the language facility to mask it. She could not convincingly embrace a Japanese regional dialect, but the woman she was playing would do everything in her power to suppress such limiting ordinariness, so she figured that would pose no problem. She was the slick Tokyoite visiting a college friend who worked for NHK. She had seen him at the press conference and had been . . . intrigued. He smiled, gratified, and said he didn’t recall seeing her there.
“I didn’t want you to see me until I had decided what I was going to do,” she lied easily.
“And what are you going to do?” he said, enjoying the game.
“Have a drink,” she said, cool, giving nothing away, but doing so with a frank look right into his shaded eyes.
Delighted, he clinked his glass against hers and sipped.
For ten minutes she made small talk, let him make his incremental flirtations while keeping her distance physically, maintaining a very Japanese reserve without shutting him down. Then she led the conversation around to the dig, emphasizing how interested she was, how impressive it all made him. Her persona wouldn’t praise him directly, but praising his work did the job nicely. He didn’t want to get off track, but seemed to recognize that this was the route to greater intimacy, and began to talk about the site, how he came upon the first artifacts, what struck him as unique about the bones . . . Carefully, discreetly, without shedding her restrained calculation, Kumi grew keen and wide-eyed, rewarding his casual preening with a brush of his hand with hers.
“What about the rest of your team?” she said. “Do they work too, or do they just schedule your groupies?”
He laughed at her frankness.
“Matsuhashi is a student of mine,” he said. “Not a great archaeologist, but very loyal. Scientists don’t have body-guards, but he does the job well enough.”
“He is very imposing,” said Kumi.
“You don’t know the half of it,” Watanabe confided, refilling her glass. “He’s a ninth-degree black belt in tae kwon do and shim soo do. That’s Korean sword stuff. Did some prison time before embracing archaeology.”
He waved his arms suddenly, half imitation, half parody, and squawked like Bruce Lee before lapsing into helpless giggles.
“Does he protect you?” Kumi pressed. “Make sure no one gets in your way?”
“I don’t need him for that,” said Watanabe, dismissively. He was getting more obvious as the alcohol took hold. “I can look after myself. And I have other friends. Powerful people.”
“I’m sure,” she said.
“That’s right,” he said, removing his shades and leaning into her, staring into her eyes with desire and a hint of menace.