Killing Commendatore: A novel (17 page)

He chose a recording of Mozart. A sonata for piano and violin. The Tannoy Autograph speakers weren't very showy, but gave out a deep, steady sound. The perfect speakers for classical music, especially for listening to vinyl records of chamber music. As you might expect of old speakers, they were well suited to a vacuum-tube amp. The pianist was Georg Szell, the violinist Rafael Druian. Menshiki sat on the sofa, eyes closed, and gave himself over to the music. I listened to it from a little ways off, making tomato sauce. I'd bought a lot of tomatoes and had some left over and wanted to make some sauce before they went bad.

I boiled water in a large pan, parboiled the tomatoes and removed the skins, cut them with a knife, removed the seeds, crushed them, put them in a large skillet, added garlic, and simmered it all with olive oil, let it cook well. I carefully removed any scum on the surface. Back when I was married I often made sauce like this. It takes time and effort, but basically it's an easy process. While my wife was at work I'd stand alone in the kitchen, listening to music on a CD while I made it. I liked to cook while listening to old jazz. Thelonious Monk was a particular favorite.
Monk's Music
was my favorite of his albums. Coleman Hawkins and John Coltrane played on it, with amazing solos. But I have to admit that making sauce while listening to Mozart's chamber music wasn't bad either.

It was only a short while ago that I'd been cooking tomato sauce in the afternoon while enjoying Monk's unique offbeat melodies and chords (it was only half a year ago that my wife and I had dissolved our marriage), but it felt like something that had taken place ages ago. A trivial historical episode a generation ago that only a handful of people still remembered. I suddenly wondered how my wife was. Was she living with another man now? Or was she still living by herself in that apartment in Hiroo? Either way, at this time of day she would be at work at the architectural firm. For her, how much of a difference was there between her life when I was there, and her life now without me? And how much interest did she have in that difference? I was sort of half thinking about all this. Did she have the same feeling, that our days spent together seemed like something from the distant past?

The record was over, the needle making a popping sound as it spun in the final groove, and when I went to the living room I found Menshiki asleep on the sofa, arms folded, leaning over slightly to one side. I lifted the needle up from the spinning disc and switched off the turntable. Even when the steady click of the needle stopped, Menshiki continued to sleep. He must have been very tired. He was faintly snoring. I left him where he was. I returned to the kitchen, shut off the gas under the skillet, and drank a big glass of water. I still had time on my hands, so I began to fry some onions.

When the phone rang Menshiki was already awake. He was in the bathroom, washing his face with soap and gargling. The call was from the foreman at the work site, so I handed the phone to Menshiki. He said a few words, and then said that we would be right over. He handed the phone back.

“They're almost done,” he said.

Outside it had stopped raining. Clouds still covered the sky, but it was lighter out now. The weather seemed to be steadily improving. We hurried up the steps and through the woods. Behind the little shrine the four men were standing around a hole, staring down into it. The backhoe's engine was off, nothing was moving, the woods strangely hushed.

The stones had been neatly removed, exposing the hole below. The square lattice lid had been taken off too, and laid to one side. It was a thick, heavy-looking wooden cover. Old, but not rotted at all. After that the circular stone-lined room below was visible. It was under six feet in diameter, about eight feet deep, and was enclosed by a stone wall. The floor seemed to be dirt. Not a single blade of grass grew there. The stone room was completely empty. No one there calling for help, no beef jerky mummy. Just a bell-like object lying on the ground. Actually less like a bell than some ancient musical instrument with a stack of tiny cymbals. A wooden handle was attached, about six inches long. The foreman shone a floodlight down on it.

“Was this all that was in there?” Menshiki asked him.

“Yes, that's it,” the foreman said. “Like you asked, we left it just as we found it, after we took off the stones and lid. We haven't touched a thing.”

“That's strange,” Menshiki said, as if to himself. “So there really wasn't anything else at all?”

“I called you right after we lifted off the lid. I haven't been down inside. This is exactly the way it was when we uncovered it,” the foreman said.

“Of course,” Menshiki said, in a dry voice.

“It might have been a well originally,” the foreman said. “It looks like it was filled in, leaving the hole. But it's too wide for a well, and the stone wall around it is so elaborately constructed. It couldn't have been easy to build. I suppose they must have had some important purpose in mind to construct something that took this much time and effort.”

“Can I go down and check it out?” Menshiki asked the foreman.

The foreman was a little unsure. With a hard face, he said, “I think I should go down first. Just in case. If it's all clear, then you can climb on down. Does that sound good?”

“Of course,” Menshiki said. “Let's do that.”

One of the workmen brought over a folding metal ladder from the truck, opened it up, and lowered it down. The foreman put on his safety helmet and climbed down the eight feet to the dirt floor. He looked around him for a while. He gazed up, then shone his flashlight on the stone wall and the floor, closely checking everything. He carefully observed the bell-like object that lay on the dirt floor. He didn't touch it, though, just observed it. He rubbed the soles of his work boots a few times against the dirt floor, kicking his heel against it. He took a few deep breaths, smelling the air. He was only in the hole for about five or six minutes, then slowly clambered up the ladder to ground level.

“It doesn't seem dangerous. The air's good, and there aren't any weird bugs or anything. And the footing is solid. You can go down now if you'd like,” he said.

Menshiki removed his rainwear to make it easier to move around, and in his flannel shirt and chinos, he hung his flashlight by a strap around his neck and climbed down the metal ladder. We watched in silence as he descended. The foreman shone the floodlight below Menshiki's feet. Menshiki stood still at the bottom of the hole for a while, waiting, then reached out and touched the stone wall, and crouched down to check out what the dirt floor felt like. He picked up the bell-like object on the ground, shone his flashlight on it, and gazed at it. Then he shook it a few times. When he did, it was unmistakably the same bell sound I'd heard. No doubt about it. In the middle of the night someone had been ringing it here. But that
someone
was no longer here. Only the bell was left behind. As he studied the bell Menshiki shook his head a few times, evidently puzzled. Then he carefully studied the surrounding wall again, as if looking for a secret entrance and exit. But he found nothing of the sort. He looked up at us at ground level. He seemed totally confused.

He stepped onto the ladder and held out the bell toward me. I bent over and took it from him. A dampness penetrated deep into the ancient wooden handle. As Menshiki had done, I tried shaking it a few times. It sounded louder and clearer than I'd expected. I didn't know what it was made of, but the metal portion wasn't damaged at all. It was dirty, for sure, but not at all rusted. I couldn't figure out how it had remained rust-free despite being underground in damp soil for years.

“What
is
that?” the foreman asked me. He was in his mid-forties, short but with a sturdy build. Suntanned, with a bit of stubble on his face.

“I'm not sure. Maybe some kind of Buddhist implement or something,” I said. “Whatever it is, it's certainly from ancient times.”

“Is this what you were looking for?” he asked.

I shook my head. “No, we were expecting something else.”

“At any rate, it's a strange place,” the foreman said. “I can't explain it, but there's a mysterious feeling about it. Who would make this kind of place, I wonder—and why? This was a long time ago, and it must have been quite a task to haul the stones all the way up the mountain and stack them up.”

I didn't say anything.

Menshiki finally climbed up out of the hole. He called the foreman over to his side, and they talked for a long time. I stood there, bell in hand, next to the hole. I pondered climbing down into this stone-lined chamber, but then thought better of it. I wasn't as hesitant as Masahiko, but I did decide it was better not to do anything uncalled for. If things could be left alone, the smart thing might be to do so. I placed the bell, for the time being, in front of the little shrine, and wiped my palm on my pants a couple of times.

Menshiki ambled over. “We'll have them do a more thorough examination of that stone-lined chamber,” he said. “At first glance it looks like just a hole, but I'll have them check it all out from one end to the other. They might discover something. Though I sort of doubt it.” He looked at the bell I'd placed in front of the shrine. “It's odd that this bell's the only thing left. Since someone had to be inside there in the middle of the night ringing the bell.”

“Maybe the bell was ringing by itself,” I ventured.

Menshiki smiled. “An interesting theory, but I doubt it. For whatever purpose, someone was sending out a message from down inside that hole. A message to you, or maybe to us. Or to people in general. But whoever it was has vanished like smoke. Or else slipped away from there.”

“Slipped away?”

“Slipped right past us.”

I couldn't understand what he was getting at.

“Because the soul isn't something you can see,” Menshiki said.

“You believe in the existence of the soul?”

“Do you?”

I didn't have a good answer.

“I believe that it's not necessary to believe in the soul's existence. But turn that around and you come to the belief that there's no need to
not
believe in its existence. A kind of roundabout way of putting it, but do you understand what I'm getting at?”

“Sort of,” I said.

Menshiki picked up the bell from where I'd placed it in front of the shrine. He held it out and rang it several times. “A priest probably breathed his last there, underground, ringing this bell and chanting sutras. All alone, shut away in the pitch-black darkness, that heavy lid in place, in the bottom of a sealed well. And most likely all in secret. I have no idea what sort of priest he was. A respectable priest, or merely some fanatic. Either way, someone constructed a stone tumulus on top of it. I don't know what happened after that, but people then completely forgot he'd been voluntarily buried under here. Then a big earthquake occurred at some point, and the mound collapsed until it was just a pile of stones. It could have been during the Kanto earthquake of 1923, since certain areas around Odawara suffered real damage back then. And everything was swallowed up into oblivion.”

“If that's true, then where did the priest who died there—the mummy, I mean—disappear to?”

Menshiki shook his head. “I don't know. Maybe at some point someone dug up the hole and took him away.”

“To do that they'd have to move all these stones and then pile them up again,” I said. “And then who was ringing the bell yesterday in the middle of the night?”

Menshiki shook his head again, and smiled faintly. “Good grief. We used all this equipment to move the stones and open up the chamber, and in the end all we found out for sure is that we don't know a single thing. All we managed to get was an old bell.”

They examined the stone chamber thoroughly, and merely determined that there were no hidden devices anywhere. This was merely a round hole, lined with a stone wall, 8.2 feet deep with a diameter of 5.9 feet (they made precise measurements). Finally, they loaded the backhoe up onto the truck bed, and the workers collected all their tools and left. All that remained was the open hole and the metal ladder. The foreman was kind enough to leave it behind. They also laid several thick boards on top of the hole so no one would fall into it by mistake. They left some heavy stones on top to weigh the boards down so they wouldn't blow away in a strong wind. The wooden lattice cover was too heavy to lift, so they left it on the ground nearby and covered it with a plastic tarp.

Before they left, Menshiki told the foreman not to mention this operation to anyone. It had archaeological significance, and he wanted, he said, to keep it from the public until the time was right to announce the find.

“Understood,” the foreman said with a serious expression. “We'll leave it all here. And I'll warn the others not to say anything about it.”

After the workers and heavy machinery had left and the mountains were blanketed in their usual stillness again, the dug-up area looked like skin after a major operation, shabby and pitiful. The formerly vigorous clump of pampas grass had been trampled down beyond recognition, the ruts left by the backhoe like stitches left behind in the dark, damp soil. The rain had cleared up completely, though the sky was still covered by an unbroken layer of monotonously gray clouds.

When I looked at the pile of stones now stacked up on another piece of ground, I couldn't help but think, We should never have done this. We should have left them the way they were. On the other hand, though, the indisputable fact was that it was something we
had
to do. I couldn't go on listening to that strange sound night after night. But if I hadn't met Menshiki, I never would have had the means to dig up that hole. It was only because he had arranged for the workers, and had paid for the whole thing—I had no clue how much it cost—that the operation had been possible.