Much to my surprise, months passed without my father abruptly looming out of the shadows. I didn’t see Fiona Cassidy again or Lucas Drackman, but I knew they had not gone away forever. Considering the weirdness of the previous couple of years, the sudden ordinariness of my daily life seemed like a setup, false calm meant to encourage me to let my guard down. And after a while, the quiet became tedious, because I guess a person can become as addicted to danger and to weirdness as much as to dope of any kind.
Mr. Yabu Tamazaki of the Daily News had nothing more to tell us about the whereabouts of Drackman when the Cassidys and Mrs. Kolshak were killed. I had mistakenly believed that he must be a reporter, but he was instead the curator of the newspaper morgue. In his great enthusiasm for the case, he began to mistake himself for a reporter, and when discovered investigating those murders, he was asked to explain himself and, in the absence of an explanation, was told in no uncertain terms to focus solely on the job for which he was paid.
I learned this one snowy day when I came out of the community center after a piano session and found Mr. Yoshioka walking home, looking rather dashing in a well-cut topcoat, neck scarf, and fedora.
“Mr. Tamazaki does have a degree in journalism,” Mr. Yoshioka explained. “In this city, however, most reporters have traditionally been of other ethnic backgrounds, mostly Irish. The Irish are very good at journalism because they are very good also at politics, and politics and journalism are twined. Mr. Tamazaki has no more interest in politics than he has in hara-kiri, which is to say none at all.”
“Now what are we going to do?” I wondered.
“Mr. Tamazaki will continue to research the case more quietly, entirely on his own time. And there is also Mr. Nakama Otani, who is interested in the case as a sideline to his primary work.”
“He’s the one who found where my father is living, with Miss Delvane on the north side. He calls himself Nick or Nicholas but never Nickie.”
“That is correct.”
“He’s good at chatting people up.”
“No one is better.”
“Who’s he chatting up now?”
“We will leave that entirely to Mr. Otani. Because he is doing the chatting, he alone must choose those to whom he wishes to chat.”
“What does he do besides chat? Is he a reporter?”
“Mr. Otani does many things well, though he is a humble man who, if you praised him, would deny his competence and plead that he is only lucky.”
Whenever it came to revealing anything about Nakama Otani, Mr. Yoshioka became secretive and often responded to my questions with answers that seemed to be answers only if you didn’t think too hard about them.
We were passing under bare-limbed maples through which snow streamed, and though my subject wasn’t snow, I took the opportunity to reveal my recently gained erudition. “ ‘The sleet falls As if coming through the bottom Of loneliness.’ ”
“Naito? Jo?so?,” said Mr. Yoshioka. “A poet of the seventeenth century. He was once a samurai, and then he became a priest. A man of many disciplines.”
“Sorry I can’t say it in Japanese.”
He obliged: “ ‘Sabishisa no Soko nukete furu Mizore kana.’ ”
He looked so pleased that I had memorized even one haiku, and his smile was the widest I had ever seen on him, but he didn’t inquire what had inspired my interest. Because haiku were important to him, almost sacred, maybe he thought that to ask such a question would be too personal. More likely, he knew that my respect for him was the source of my interest in that poetry, and he would have been embarrassed to hear me say as much.
And so the months passed with me suspended in a peculiar state. I felt that I was walking a ledge, yes, but each time I looked down, the ledge was only two feet off the ground. Maintaining a high degree of wariness and the suspicion for which I was known—at least to Mr. Yoshioka—proved difficult when none of the bad guys came sneaking around.
We kept waiting for more bombs to explode, like those that had trashed the military-recruitment centers. Surely if Fiona Cassidy was a skilled bomb-maker, she’d had plenty of time in 6-C to build more than two. But nothing exploded.
When the calamity occurred on Wednesday, April 19, 1967, it was nothing that I’d been anticipating.
At Saint Scholastica’s, all the students in the fourth grade were gathered in the music room during the sixth period, practicing the choral piece we would sing as our part in the annual spring recital. The head of the music department, Mr. Hern, was a civilian, not a priest. He knew music, but he wasn’t much of a disciplinarian. Some of us boys were horsing around, singing “banana” though the word was hosanna, that sort of thing, when Sister Agnes entered in a rustle of habit, and went directly to the piano, where Mr. Hern was playing well the song that we were doing our best to sabotage. He took his hands off the keys the moment that he saw her, and she whispered something to him, and all of the kids stood on the tiered chorus platform in respectful silence because Sister Agnes was a dedicated and effective disciplinarian.