John Hawks - The GoldenCity

Gabriel circled the small space again and again until he noticed a marble slab resting on the floor below the altar. It was a rectangular piece of stone that looked like the top of a sarcophagus. A cross and Greek letters were carved into the surface.

Kneeling on the floor, he pushed the slab back a few inches and saw darkness surging and flowing like black oil in a white stone box. The Traveler reached out his hand and moved his fingers. No burning bush. No voice of God. He was in this world, this particular reality, but that was only one thin layer of a far more intricate system. Then he lowered his hand into the darkness and watched it disappear.

Hollis met Linden in the storeroom above the falafel shop a few days before the Harlequin escorted Gabriel to Egypt. Linden sat by the window dropping shreds of black tobacco into a square of cigarette paper. He rolled the cylinder between his stained fingers and then nodded in Hollis’s direction. Go ahead. Talk.

“Gabriel said you could help me get to Japan.”

The big Frenchman lit the cigarette and flicked the dead match through a crack in the window. The tobacco gave off a faint odor of burnt sugar. “I bought you a plane ticket using one of my Luxembourg corporations.” He reached into the inside pocket of his jacket, pulled out an airline ticket and a packet of British pounds. Both gifts were tossed onto the table.

“Thank you.”

“Ne tracassez pas . This was not my idea.”

“Then thank Gabriel.”

“You are not connected to us any longer, Mr. Wilson. But remember this fact: you will be punished if you mention the Traveler to anyone.”

A stack of newspapers were on the table and Hollis assumed that a handgun was concealed beneath Le Monde . If there was a confrontation, he wondered if he would have enough time to draw his knife and drive it into the center of Linden’s chest.

“I respect Gabriel,” Hollis said. “And that’s never going to change. I keep my promises. You know that.”

Linden appeared to be calculating an equation with a half-dozen factors that related to Hollis’s death. Apparently, there was some advantage to letting him live. The Harlequin shrugged his shoulders.

“Au revoir , Mr. Wilson.”

“Not yet. I want to meet this Japanese woman that Gabriel told me about-the one who speaks to the dead. He said you’d know how to find her.”

“She is called an Itako . You should speak to Sparrow’s old friend-a high school teacher named Akihido Kotani. After Sparrow was killed at the Osaka Hotel, Kotani claimed the body and helped get Sparrow’s pregnant fiancée out of the country. I was in contact with Kotani for a few years, and then he stopped answering email. But he sent me some books once, and I still have his card.”

“That’s all? Just his card?”

“This is your problem, Mr. Wilson. You have to solve it on your own.” Linden pulled out a dog-eared business card and placed it on the table. A name was given in Japanese, French and English.

Akihido Kotani-White Crane Books-Jimbocho- Tokyo .

Hollis’s plane arrived at Narita Airport early in the afternoon. It took an hour to get through passport control. After a series of polite questions, the immigration officer ordered the foreigner to open his suitcase. The atmosphere was tense and slightly hostile until Hollis held up a karate uniform and two books on Japanese martial arts that he had purchased in London. The immigration officer nodded as if this answered all his questions, and Hollis was allowed to leave the detention area.

He exchanged his money and took a train into Tokyo, passing through suburbs crammed with two and three-story concrete block buildings. Each residential apartment had a little balcony with a hibachi, a few plastic chairs and a potted bush that offered a splash of green. Winter had passed, but it was still cold. Little chunks of ice clung to the blue tile roofs beneath a pearl gray sky.

The conductor was neatly dressed and very efficient. He stared at Hollis when he punched his ticket, then relaxed when the foreigner took out the martial arts book. “You are student?” the conductor asked in English.

“Yes. I’ve come to Japan to study karate.”

“Good. Karate is very good. Always obey your sensei.” At Ueno train station, Hollis went into a cubicle in the men’s toilet. He opened up the back of his notebook computer, took out a ceramic knife blade and handle, then joined them together with epoxy glue. The eight-inch long ceramic knife was light, durable and very sharp. Hollis slipped the weapon into a nylon sheath strapped to his arm and then threw away what remained of the computer.

As far as the Japanese were concerned he was a gaijin: an “outside person” who would never fit in. Hollis left his bag in the checkroom and stepped out onto the street. Everyone was staring at him; he fumbled through his canvas shoulder bag, found his sunglasses, and put them on to conceal his eyes.

It took him three hours to reach Jimbõchõ-a Tokyo neighborhood comprised of small buildings and shops near Nihon University. Hollis quickly discovered that most of the streets and alleyways in Tokyo were unnamed and that addresses didn’t follow the western system. Usually, a small plate was attached to each building. It showed something called a banchi number that indicated the district and lot. But the numbers weren’t always consecutive, and he saw a few Japanese men wandering through the area with an address on a slip of paper.

He searched through his phrase book, learned how to say sumi-masen -”excuse me” in Japanese-and began to ask directions to the White Crane bookstore. No one in Jimbõchõ had ever heard of the place. Gomennasai , everyone answered-”I’m sorry”-as if their lack of knowledge had caused his confusion. Hollis followed side streets that wandered left and then right like ancient pathways. There were very few children or teenagers on the streets. The city felt like the Kingdom of the Old, a land occupied by short elderly women who wore running shoes and pushed portable shopping carts.

Hollis had grown up in cities and didn’t particularly care about nature. But in Tokyo he became aware of the crows, large black birds with jabbing beaks. Everywhere he walked, they were watching him, perched on telephone poles or strutting down the middle of alleyways like little potentates of darkness. A few of them made a screeching sound when he waved his hands or kicked a piece of trash in their direction. It sounded like they had their own crow language they expected him to understand: we see you, gaijin . We’re watching you.

He stopped at every bookstore he could find and asked if they had ever heard of White Crane Books. After two hours of searching, he saw a bookstore that looked like a hole burrowed into a shabby apartment building. Two bookshelves on wheels were out on the street with plastic tarps attached in case of snow or rain.

Hollis looked inside the shop. It was a dark tunnel lined with books-some of the volumes were arranged on shelves, but most of them were stacked on top of each other or dumped into cardboard boxes. An older Japanese man wearing a tweed jacket sat at the end of the tunnel and read a book stuffed with pieces of paper. A wad of tape held his eyeglass frames together.

“Good afternoon, sir. Can I help you?”

“Just looking…” Hollis entered and found a wall of books in various foreign languages. “You got a hell of a lot of books here.”

“It is a small shop, sir. I never have enough room.”

“Ever heard of a store called White Crane Books? A friend told me to check it out when I came to Tokyo.”