Even at midnight it’s long drive from Tokyo-Narita into the city, and no evident way to shut down the cab’s screens or their ceaseless waves of clamoring ads. Snowflakes land on the windshield, their structure visible for a moment, then dissolved in the glass’s heat.
She retreats into the memory of an evening in Baja California, the sliver of beach before the desiccated mountains, how she’d felt that she was flying as the blood-warm waves lifted her up, let her down, passed on toward shore. The continental shelf is close to land there; she’d dived down and touched sand, and then, swimming a little farther out, dived down and down and touched nothing. Just darkness, below, and she’d been terrified, as though she were falling into an inverted sky, but she’d swallowed her panic and made herself stay there and tread water, and then her weight shifts as the cab corners and she’s back in the present looking up at the looming mass and scattered lights of the Imperial Tokyo Hotel.
She steps from the cab into bitter cold, thinks of the reversal of the Pacific currents, the climatological irony of the rim islands getting colder. A bellman in a sort of Ruritanian officer’s uniform reaches for the bag she bought in Athens; she dislikes being waited on, but his deep reserve demands no response so she lets him take it.
The hotel doors close behind her, enclosing her in the sound of the place, a somehow benign distillation of distant conversations. The interior is Moorish, the limestone walls and pillars carved with abstract geometric patterns.
The blazered desk clerk welcomes her in rather formal American English. Having made no reservation, she wonders what cue of dress or bearing gave away her nationality—she’d have thought she passed for any stripe of European. She feels a stab of guilt as she remembers that there was a first Imperial, built on the same site, leveled by the U.S. in the second World War.
“I have privacy concerns,” she tells him.
He regards her with acute, birdlike attention.
“And concerns about safety,” she admits, reluctant to self-dramatize.
“Very good, madame,” he says. “Perhaps our secured floors would be suitable?”
“How secured?”
“Highly secured. The most security-conscious parties have found them acceptable. The president of North Korea, at this very desk, said he felt peace of mind here.”
“Well, with a recommendation like that. Let’s do it.”
“There are, of course, no electronic records of our guests on the secured floors,” the clerk says, and opens a lockbox to retrieve a massive paper ledger.
* * *
Absolute silence in her room. At first it’s unsettling. She listens in vain for air-conditioning, footsteps, the hum of machines.
She’s never spent so much on a hotel room. She’ll think of it as a bunker high in the sky from which she can look down on the lights of Tokyo, its snowstorms.
Her phone rings—the number is Swiss—the bank, as expected. “Ms. Sunden?” asks a German voice, and when she assents says, “This is Klaus Dietrich, vice president of security at Crédit Nuage Cantonale. I’m calling in response to your email. First of all, I’d like to say that I’m extremely sorry that your account has been compromised. This is our first significant breach, and we take it very seriously. According to the letter of the law, it’s your job to keep your account information safe, but I’m happy to say the board has made an exception—we are refunding the stolen monies, and I’ve annotated your account so that facial recognition will be required for all future withdrawals. Moreover, I will, if you like, send you such information as we have about the thief.”
Heartening that it doesn’t always have to be war, that there are still functional—even rigorous—institutions, so much so she briefly wants to cry. “Please do,” she says. “And thank you.”
When she rings off there’s already an email from the bank with an attached security-camera video of a boy stepping into a bland foyer with the leather couches that looks like the foyer of every Nuage branch in the world. The boy looks uncomfortable, like the room’s moderate elegance oppresses him; she notices the dark stains on the knees of his pants, and his earpiece, and then she recognizes him—it’s Kern, who stole the phone that Cromwell desires so intensely. She wonders how he got her account number and passcode, and even though she was deep in Cromwell’s counsel it strikes her that she’s still missing something, that there’s someone else who has her information.
* * *
She wakes to a knocking at her door. It’s day. Just whiteness out the window.
The security screen by the door shows Philip standing dazed in the hall, roll-aboard behind him. She remembers telling the desk to let him up.
When she opens the door he says, “I’ve stayed here a dozen times and didn’t know this wing existed.”
She hugs him, though for years they’ve barely touched.
She sees him look at the minibar, then look away, and remembers Iliou’s plane. “Drink,” she says. “Compared to the room, the booze is free.”
He sits on the bed, seems to fold himself around his whisky, forcing himself to stay awake as she tells her story.
“Cloudbreaker,” he says, when she gets to that part. “It’s interesting, but the worst people use that. The worst people. I wish you’d left it alone.”
“I think I do too,” she says, and almost tells him what Cloudbreaker did to her but decides to keep it to herself.
He becomes very solemn when she gets to the attack on the villa and though it seems like that happened a long time ago she realizes there’s not much left to tell.
“So what are we going to do?” he asks, blinking to keep his eyes open as he lies back on the bed.
“Take the initiative.” She explains her plan to go to the node in Tokyo, break in, feign to offer Cromwell Magda’s life. “In the best case, it works and Parthenon gets to him,” she says. “In the worst case, we learn something about whoever he’s bargaining with, or maybe just offend them, and hopefully fuck up his life.”
“I can think of worse cases,” Philip says as his eyes close. “This is fucked. I applaud your initiative but this is much too … opaque. I can’t tell what’s in play, but it’s evident that you’re not safe, and that nothing is under control. You have a new passport. A diplomatic one, for Christ’s sake. You could bail, go live quietly until it blows over. There’s little to like in Cromwell, but I will say he’s rational. He’ll forget about you when it’s in his interest to do so. This will pass.”
The suggestion is both reasonable and practical and she could in fact go live somewhere off the grid and, say, read all the classics of every culture in the original and take up some harmless, donnish hobby—the cultivation of rare orchids, say—to keep her occupied while her life winds down, for she’ll have no money for the Mayo, and after the first year there’ll be no going back, and every night she’ll go to bed wondering if this is the night she wakes to find assassins smirking down at her—she remembers Corporal Boyd’s gauntleted hand fumbling for a hypodermic and Cloudbreaker’s predatory joy as it tore through her history and says, “No.”
“All right,” Philip says into his pillow. “I said my piece. This is fucked, but all right.”
The couch seems far away. It’s easier just to lie down beside him.
She waits until his breathing changes and she’s certain he’s asleep before she says, “Thank you for coming with me.”
* * *
When she wakes it’s night and she must have been moving in her sleep because the security screen by the door is illuminated; in its faint blue glow she sees Philip asleep on his back, arms folded over his chest like the marble effigy of a medieval knight, and as beautiful, like the boy he was.
He’s inches away. She’s aware of his heat.
So yes, he’s engaged, but they go back a long way, and he came all this way to see her, and whatever his commitments he’s a man, and men are simple creatures, and all she has to do is slide her hand down the front of his pants and she’s reasonably certain he’ll be entirely in the moment, and she’s about to do this when she remembers the earnestness behind the irony with which he’d spoken of his new and more settled life, and, really, it’s little enough to give.
There should be a sword to separate them, but all that’s to hand are his empty whisky miniatures, which she lines up down the middle of the bed. Probably the first time whisky kept someone chaste.
She kicks off her pants and socks, gets under the covers, disappears into sleep.