CHAPTER 79
It was midnight. Kumi had called Jim to say that Watanabe had left her on the side of a mountain road ten miles from the city edge. She was unharmed, but furious as only humiliation could make her. At the moment, for reasons Jim couldn’t quite grasp, she seemed to blame Thomas.
Jim took the rental car and went looking for her, apprehensively studying road signs whose characters he couldn’t read. Coming around a tight bend, he saw her. He braked hard and the tires skidded fractionally as the car came to a halt, so that Kumi, barefoot, her high heels dangling forgotten from one weary hand, flinched out of the way. She braced herself for whatever freak might be propositioning her this time, and her steely gaze softened not one iota when she realized it was Jim.
“Where the hell is Thomas?” she demanded.
“He’s at the lab with Matsuhashi,” said Jim.
“Yukking it up over beer and poker?”
“Hardly,” said Jim, quietly.
“Just bonding with the guy who handed me over to whatever that creep wanted.”
Jim nearly pointed out that Matsuhashi had, in fact, also gotten her out of the situation, and that she had insisted on meeting Watanabe against Thomas’s wishes, but it wasn’t his place. More to the point, he guessed that this was only the leading edge of an argument that went back years, rooted in the landscape of their relationship like Joshua trees.
“Ready?” said Thomas.
By way of answer, Matsuhashi pushed the buttons on his phone and waited for Watanabe to pick up. As soon as the conversation started, he turned away from Thomas, unwilling to show his face even in the darkness of the site.
Thomas’s Japanese wasn’t good enough to understand the technical nuance of the argument that followed, but Matsuhashi had planned his speech in advance and Thomas had the gist.
“There’s a problem with the bones from the find,” said Matsuhashi.
“What kind of problem?” said Watanabe. He sounded slurred with sleep or drink, probably both.
“The team has been preparing the samples for radiocarbon dating,” said Matsuhashi, “and studying everything that came off the bones in the process.”
“So?”
“There’s pollen.”
“You woke me after screwing up my evening to tell me there’s pollen?” said Watanabe. “Of course there’ll be pollen. So what?”
“It’s the wrong pollen. It’s olea. Olive.”
Watanabe was silent for a moment, and when he spoke his voice was odd. “There are olives in Japan,” he said.
“Yes, but they are a new cultivar. The olive did not come to Japan till the Bunkyu period in the 1860s.”
“What are you saying?”
“The find is contaminated,” said Matsuhashi. “The bones were not buried there. They were interred somewhere else, somewhere olives grow. They were moved later. The bones may be European, but the burial is not.”
There was a long silence.
“Tell no one,” said Watanabe. “Seal the remains until I get there. Don’t let anyone see them or your results. Then go home. Got it?”
“Got it. Will you go to the lab directly?”
There was a momentary hesitation.
“I’ll be there first thing in the morning,” he said. “I need to get some sleep.”
Matsuhashi hung up and, for a moment, just stood there, looking at the black hump of the burial mound.
“Well?” said Thomas.
“He’s on his way.”