CHAPTER 83

Thomas caught Matsuhashi at the lab as he wrapped up another round of interviews and press conferences.

“Do you believe Watanabe’s story, that Ed only came to get the bones returned?” he said.

“Yes,” said Matsuhashi, clearly wishing he had something more satisfactory to offer. “He did not stay long. I gave him a ride to the station.”

“What did you talk about?”

“Not much.”

“He went back to Tokyo?” said Thomas.

“No. At least, not directly,” said Matsuhashi. “I helped him buy his ticket. He did not speak Japanese.”

“Where was he going?” asked Thomas, urgent.

“Kobe,” said Matsuhashi.

“Kobe?” said Thomas. “Did he say why or if he knew someone there?”

Matsuhashi shook his head sadly. “I am sorry,” he said.

“Is there a museum in Kobe,” said Thomas, “or maybe a school or . . . some kind of archaeological institute?”

“Probably,” said Matsuhashi, “but nothing famous. There’s an aquarium. Supposed to be very good. If you are planning a visit . . .”

“I’m not,” said Thomas, managing a smile. “Thanks.”

He began to walk away.

“Wait,” said Matsuhashi. Thomas turned back to find the Japanese man earnest, one hand raised, index finger extended. Thomas had never seen him look so spontaneous and animated. “He left a bag at the station. He probably came back for it, but . . .”

“Come with me?” said Thomas.

“It would be my pleasure.”

 
They reached the station from the town side, parked in a lot dominated by bicycles, and emerged behind the statue of Takeda Shingen no more than a couple of blocks from where Kumi and Jim were finishing their dinner, talking about God knew what. Thomas pounded up the steps to the ticket offices in the graying evening light. Kofu was a regional station, connected to Tokyo by a reasonably direct line, and to Shizuoka by another, but there was no Shinkansen—bullet train—line here in the mountains. Thomas let Matsuhashi do the talking.

“Knight,” he said. “Edward Knight. A foreigner who came through around March fifth.”

The woman at the desk, in her fifties, her too-black hair piled up on her head, tapped computer keys and nodded. There was such a locker, as yet unopened, she said, but it was against company policy to open it unless requested to do so by the police.

“This is his brother,” said Matsuhashi.

The woman smiled and bowed as Thomas thrust his passport in her face, but she cocked her head to one side, grimaced with a suitably pained sense of personal failure, and told them that nothing could be done.

Matsuhashi began to talk, explaining politely, but she kept shaking her head and smiling. There was nothing she could do. Matsuhashi rephrased his request, but she shook her head.

“Watashi no kyodai ga, shinda,” Thomas blurted out. “My brother is dead.”

The woman became quite still. Then she looked to Matsuhashi, who nodded gravely. She hesitated, looking at him, and then opened a drawer and took out a ring of keys. She said something to Matsuhashi that Thomas didn’t catch.

“What was that?” he said.

“She said her mother died two months ago,” he said.

Thomas looked at the woman. Her eyes met his briefly and she nodded.

 
The locker contained a backpack in which were a change of clothes, some books and a clipping from the New York Times. It was dated April 4, 2006. The headline read SCIENTISTS CALL FISH FOSSIL “THE MISSING LINK.”

There was a picture, a fossil skeleton dominated by a heavy brown skull, lying next to a lifelike model of the creature itself. It was greenish and scaly, stocky, with a stumpy tail and a broad, crocodile head, the eyes on top. The body was fishlike but the head was reptilian, and the front fins that began just below the massive jaws were clearly legs.

“What the hell is that?” Matsuhashi whispered.

“That,” said Thomas, hastily scanning the article, “is Tiktaalik roseae. A nine-foot monster that swam in water and hunted on land at the end of the late Devonian era, three hundred sixty million years ago.”

“Edward was interested in paleontology?”

“No,” said Thomas, “not, at least, for its own sake.”

“Then what?” said Matsuhashi.

But Thomas did not speak for a long moment in which the student, the railway station with its traffic and PA announcements, and everything that had been in his mind till that moment all vanished. In their place was a kind of slideshow in his head, mosaics of strange fish from Herculaneum, carvings of crocodile-headed sea creatures from the Temple of Isis in Pompeii, the bizarre legged fish crawling out of the red water in a Paestum tomb painting . . .

But that made no sense. This creature from the newspaper had been dead for three hundred fifty million years.

So what was it doing swimming through the art of Roman Italy?