On the Fifth Day (30 page)

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She got out and walked briskly. The van hadn't moved, though the engine was still running.

Taking your time to pay your fare, Thomas?
she thought.
You smug, stupid, self-involved . . .

She glanced around once, then lowered her head, swept the pistol from her sleeve, and yanked the door open. The back of the van was empty, with only a cell phone sit

ting on the rear seat. As she stared at it, the driver gunned the engine and pulled away, leaving the side door flapping and Pestilence gazing stupidly after it.

THE BONE MOSAIC

CHAPTER 62

Ryan Air's flight to Frankfurt was a cheerful confusion, an ef

ficient no-frills operation that felt a little like a traveling holi

day camp. When it touched down, the passengers broke into spontaneous applause. A bizarre response, thought Thomas, wondering if they did things like that before 9/11. Not in America. But here? Probably. And looking around him he thought that the applause wasn't relief so much as apprecia

tion for the pilot expressed by a short-lived community for whom the journey was a bit of an adventure.

No one stopped him in Frankfurt. If an alarm had been raised about his departure, it was slow in spreading, and as the Japan Airlines flight to Tokyo tucked its wheels up, Thomas fi

nally began to relax. The flight was thinly populated and he could stretch out and get some sleep. It was all behind him, at last, and for a few hours he would not think about what had happened or what he would find when he touched down. Such willful oblivion lasted no more than five minutes, shattered by a voice beside him, a low, ironically conversa

tional tone that he knew at once.

"If it isn't the globe-trotting, atheist archaeologist!"

Thomas, who had been staring blankly out the window, turned in disbelief.

It was Jim. He was wearing an olive-colored woolen sweater and jeans without dog collar or crucifix, but the priest's wry smile was the same as ever.

"What the hell are you doing here?" said Thomas.

"Language, my son," said Jim with mock horror, as he dropped into the seat beside him.

"Seriously," said Thomas. "What on earth . . . ?"

"Never been to Japan," said the priest, plucking the in-flight magazine from the seat pouch and thumbing through it as if nothing could be more ordinary. "Been saving my meager 224

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wages for years waiting for something exciting and expensive to come along. But like most priests, your brother notwithstand

ing, adventure on the high seas isn't exactly part of the daily routine. So, 'Jim,' I says to myself. 'If you want excitement or--

for that matter--just a change from sick visits to the environs of Chicagoland, you have to make it happen yourself, take the bull by the horns and . . . ' "

"Enough," said Thomas.

"You sent me your itinerary," the priest answered. "I took it as an invitation."

"It wasn't."

"Apparently," said Jim. "But like I said, I'd never been to Japan. And it sounded like you could use some company. Maybe some help too." Jim didn't look at him, his eyes still on the glossy pages of some article about beaches in Tahiti.

"Why didn't you fly direct from O'Hare?" said Thomas.

"Why fly to Frankfurt?"

"Cheaper," said Jim. "I counted out the dusty shekels I kept in a jar under the bed and found that the private plane serving champagne all the way was a bit rich for my clerical blood. Hopping from airport to airport saves a pile, and allows us to get reacquainted along the way. With your itinerary in hand, and thanks to the beneficence of the good people at Japan Air

lines, I was able to book a seat beside you all the way. Can't say fairer than that, can you now?"

"I guess not," said Thomas, smiling, trying to keep the wariness from his face.

"Brilliant," said Jim. "Drink? Normally it would be a bit early, but I really have no idea what time it is anymore. In fact, I couldn't swear to what day it is. Ironic, eh? It's like I've had a few already."

Thomas smiled again, trying not to like him too much. He couldn't afford to lower his guard. Vesuvius had taught him that. But there could be no harm in a little drink. He flagged down a flight attendant and requested a couple of miniature whiskys: Jack Daniels, as it turned out.

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"So, you going to fill me in or what?" said Jim. Thomas hesitated only a second and then started telling him what had happened in Italy. Part of him was cautious and watchful throughout, looking for a telltale response from the priest, and that same part sifted the material as it came to mind, prepared to hold back anything that seemed too revela

tory. But in the end, he told Jim everything, because either he really was an innocent looking to help and knew nothing, or he already knew. In either case Thomas found, somewhat de

pressingly, that he had discovered little that might truly unset

tle his enemies.

The Irish priest was a good audience, asked appropriate questions, responded with shock at the right points, and fell into a puzzled silence at the end.

"I don't know if Ed died because of his research into this

'new' symbol," said Thomas, "though I can't imagine that anyone would think that worth killing for. But there are these other goons trying to stop me from asking questions. There are the planted weapons in my home in Chicago, and there are the deaths of Satoh and Pietro. Ed died for a reason, and someone is spending a lot of time and money to see that I don't find out what that reason was."

"And you think you'll find the answer in Japan?" said Jim.

"It's where he went after Italy," Thomas said with a shrug,

"and there's the story of the Herculaneum cross and this weird tomb find that suggests that Italian missionaries went to eighthcentury Japan. My gut says it's all connected, but how . . ."

He opened his hands in a gesture of casual bafflement, as if he were releasing a bird.

"You're going to see your wife?"

"Ex."

"Right," said Jim.

"Maybe." Thomas shrugged. "I'm not sure yet. I'm making this up as I go."

"Might be a good opportunity to--you know--reconnect. Bury the hatchet."

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"Ah," Thomas replied, "the Catholic priest as marriage counselor. I always got a real kick out of that; after all, who better than the celibate clergy who deny women a place in their world to advise couples on how to keep their marriages strong? Classic."

"Who says the church has no sense of humor?" said Jim, grinning.

"Is there anything new on the weapons they found at my place?"

"Nothing in the press except a few speculations that the trail has gone cold," said Jim. "I spoke to the DHS agent again, Kaplan, and he said that tests were moving unusually slowly."

"I don't understand why they haven't tried to reach me,"

said Thomas.

"Assuming they haven't," said Jim.

"What do you mean?"

"These guys who have been after you seem to have a lot of information, a lot of resources. You don't think they could be . . . ?"

"Government?" said Thomas, incredulous. "No."

"Why not?"

"Because if they are . . ." said Thomas, pausing, trying to find the words.

"Then we're one step from a primal anarchy without law or justice or apple pie?" said Jim.

"Something like that."

"Welcome to the world, mate," said Jim.

"You have Ed's subversive edge," said Thomas. "I still can't get used to that in a priest."

"Because we're supposed to be so . . . orthodox? Religion being the opiate of the masses and all that?"

"I guess."

"Some of us believe in a socially activist church," said Jim.

"That's how you get involved in evictions?"

Jim flinched. "Who told you about that?"

"Why don't you tell me about it yourself?" said Thomas. 227

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Jim blinked, and then said, with careful emphasis, "I've never been to Japan. I wonder what it will be like."

He went back to his magazine.

CHAPTER 63

It didn't start till they were out of the airport. Airports, after all, tend to have little character, little that marks them out as different from each other. So Thomas felt nothing as he wan

dered Narita airport's cramped and cluttered environs, except perhaps when he heard the pattering announcements in Japa

nese, and even those were too predictable to really do it. But once they were on the bus into the city, it started, that sense of the familiar and the strange crowding in on him like deja vu, as if he knew this place, as if a part of him had never left, and--at the same time--that he didn't belong and never had. By the time the bus was idling at the station in Shinjuku, Thomas's hands had begun to shake slightly. Twenty minutes later, as they dragged their luggage into a down-market noo

dle house for a bite of what Ed called "local color" before looking for Kumi, Thomas--now ashen pale and taking hur

ried, shallow breaths--was seriously considering taking the next bus back to the airport.

He concealed it from Jim, whose face had been pressed to the tinted window ever since they left the airport, marveling with a tourist's awe at the landscape, at the road signs, at Tokyo Disneyland flashing past pale and tawdry, at the clustered sky

scrapers, the sea of black-haired people moving through the streets, the splashes of neon and the colossal video screens. Jim talked constantly, exclamations mainly, but punctuated with questions no one answered, and all the time he gazed around him, his eyes like saucers, a man transported to a planet he had never truly believed in. It was hardly surprising that he 228

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was oblivious to the fact that his traveling companion was experiencing something like posttraumatic stress. Thomas was buoyed on steadily building waves of panic and anxiety bizarrely underwritten by the insistent sense that he had never left this place, that he still lived here with a girl called Kumi whom he one day hoped to marry. . . .

He had known it would be like this or, more accurately, had known it would be something like this, some pained and be

wildered sense of stepping back into the past. He had never experienced anything quite like it in the States, even when re

turning to the streets where he'd been raised, pacing the rooms of the house where his parents had lived and, eventually, died. All that felt lost and immediate at the same time, but it also felt real because he had never doubted that it would be basi

cally the same as when he played stickball on the corner with Ed and Jimmy Collins from two doors down. But this, this was different. Japan was different.

Thomas had known nothing about Japan before he had gone to work there. For him it had been exotic, foreign, and however much he grew used to being there in the two years he had taught high school in the little town southwest of Tokyo, it had never stopped being exotic and foreign. When he left, he took a piece of it with him in Kumi, but when she left him, it had all gone away, shut out of his life, his reality. In a few years it became hard to imagine that such a place really ex

isted, that he had been there, that it had shaped who he was. Even on those rare drunken occasions when he could bring himself to look at pictures taken there, his experiences in Japan increasingly felt as if they had happened to someone else. He could stare at those photographs baffled for hours, gazing at himself, trying to remember what it had been like, that life on the other

(planet)

side of the world, trying to believe in it. But it was too strange, too alien, too utterly lost to any notion of who he was now. And now he was back and it was all still here. The faces. The voices. The traffic. The climate. The immaculate gardens. 229

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The tiled roofs and timbered houses. The glimpses of ancient wooden shrines clanging in the mind like temple bells. Then the model food in the restaurant windows. The cries of "
ir

rashaimasse
!" from the staff as they came inside. The red and black paper lanterns splashed with calligraphy. The new-wood smell of the building, almost smothered by the rich but simple aroma of the food itself. The picture menus with their bowls of thick, steaming noodles . . . There was nowhere he could look that didn't somehow insist that the world had wobbled on its axis and reality had changed.

You don't belong here. Never did. Never will.
But it was inside him too, dyed indelibly in his sense of self.

Ay, there's the rub.

Because however much he had tried to shut Japan out of his life forever, it had shaped him, had even--he dreaded to think it--given him his best years. Since then everything had unrav

eled. Being back here again was like stepping back a dozen years to when he had been young and cocksure, when the world and all that was in it had been spread out before him, when life had been so full of promise, of purpose, of fulfillment.

"I think I'm going to be sick," he muttered suddenly. And as Jim snapped out of his reverie for a moment to stare at him, Thomas looked for a place to throw up.

CHAPTER 64

Thomas stood with his hands on the ancient wooden rail and watched the ceremony inside, the bride in an iridescent ki

mono, her face white and still, hair piled and artfully pinned with lacquered chopsticks, the groom in black, watchful and a little nervous. The Buddhist priest wearing a broad, circular hat chanted over the dull clanging of occasional bells as incense 230

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spiraled from the stone votary. The temple was open to the air on two sides, the central podium draped with red and gold fab

ric. From his vantage, the couple, the priest, the structure itself and the manicured pines that stood in the background, were a window on a world perhaps a thousand years old. Only the groom's stainless steel watchband suggested they were any