He stands there with the cup in his hand, scanning the street. Her last text—Got to go away now—is now half a day old.
An hour later he has a private detective agency on retainer, and a week later they email him an obliquely phrased warning about Japan’s strict privacy laws, and the penalties for violating them, along with a link to a site hosted on an offshore server where he finds ten minutes of pixelated black-and-white footage from the security camera in the coffee vending machine across the street from the cafe.
He sits cross-legged on the bed in his darkened hotel room, running the footage on a continuous loop. There’s Irina looking dazed, staring at the vending machine for an unsettlingly long time, as though slowly coming to terms with the idea of coffee, and then she looks back at the cafe and walks out of the frame, seemingly entranced, and the next nine and a half minutes are defined by her absence. By now he knows all the passersby, and can name them just before they come on screen—there’s posh mom in movie-star sunglasses, diabetic salaryman, grungy bike messenger, hard-core gamer kid, and all the rest of the unvarying cavalcade. He wills the camera to pan left twenty degrees, which would show him the table where he found her phone. In the last three seconds of the clip Irina reenters the frame as she gets into a drone cab which then drives away.
There are many taxi companies in Tokyo, and most are Yakuza fronts, which seems promising, at first, as he expects them to be willing to be influenced, or at least bribed, but none have a record of a pickup on that street on that day, and they continue to have no record as he puts more money on the table and brings pressure to bear through Mitsui. He hires imaging specialists but however painstakingly they analyze the footage they can’t identify the cab, and there’s nowhere else to look.
71
Dolos
Shock of impact and Kern is on the floor, bound in his sleeping bag, the tortured metallic groan invading his dream of black ships.
He scrambles out of the bag. The floor is at an angle. Balance found, duffel grabbed, he opens the module’s door, expecting to see another ship, but in fact the Nukunu’s hit a breakwater made of huge, haphazardly interlocked concrete anchor-things; beyond them, a beach.
Waves rock the ship, white water washing over his feet.
He times the waves, jumps onto one of the concrete anchors. It’s slimy, but he finds a grip.
When he looks back the ship is pulling away. He hopes he was supposed to disembark. Too late now!
He clambers over to the beach, wondering where it is he’s supposed to be going. Hard to get more lost than this. He resolves never to go to sea again.
Headlights on the beach. Someone standing in front of them—a man, hatted and overcoated, probably Asian—waving his arms like he’s trying to flag down a plane, and now he’s shouting into the night what Kern realizes is probably meant to be his name.
Kern gets closer, staying in the shadows, studying the man’s silhouette—he’s middle-aged, Japanese, looks worried, seems harmless.
“Hi,” says Kern, from five feet away, and isn’t even pleased when the man jumps.
*
The car is so old it has no computer, not even a nav, though the leather of its seats is smooth and uncracked and its hull’s in a high state of gloss. He’d tried to sit in the front seat but the man—the driver—had seemed embarrassed and ushered him into the back.
The beach is far behind. Streetlights slide by. The could be anywhere. The driver, who speaks no English, seems to know where he’s going.
Kern loses track of time. The journey feels indefinite. He wants to sleep but is too restless and just stares out the window.
The driver’s phone bleats. He fishes it out of his pocket, hands it back to Kern without looking at the screen. It’s the cheapest of cheap models, a disposable kind he’s seen in Red Cross charity kits—limited battery, no GPS. There’s a text reading:
Welcome to Japan! Sorry for the bumpy ride—my technical friend said your ship would have pinged the Coastal Authority if it had thought it was within five miles of Japanese waters, so he had to trick its navigation system and improvise a docking.
He wants you to be sure to stay off all cameras, so no bathroom breaks, please. It’s only two hours to Sakai.
I’d tell you more but my friend doesn’t want me to use any low probability terms. Don’t worry—you’ll be okay.
xxo,
Your friend from the phone
P.S. Please delete this once you’ve read it!
He deletes the message, hands back the phone.
Soon, they’re in a city.
It’s almost dawn. There are other cars on the road now. The driver has said almost nothing, but seems unflappable, like he’d keep on calmly driving his spotless antique automobile through minefields and artillery fire should he find them in his way.
The car stops in front of a low, grimy building that looks like it used to be an auto body shop.
The driver turns around to peer at him through his spectacles and says something in Japanese. Kern feels he’s saying it’s time to part.
“Here?” Kern says, making an inquiring face, reaching as though to open the door.
The driver nods, gets out, opens the door for him, bows him out of the car, then gestures toward the front door of the auto body shop. Kern goes up, hesitates, looks back. The driver nods encouragingly, makes as though to shoo him inside.
Kern knocks, and in a few seconds the door is opened by a Japanese man wearing singed and filthy work pants and three torn fisherman’s sweaters over an untucked plaid shirt. He is old, very old, but entirely present. He cocks his head to one side and smiles at Kern cautiously, like he’s a welcome guest who might happen to be carrying a bomb.
In a voice that sounds English-from-England the old man says, “You can’t imagine how interested I’ve been to meet you. But you seem to have come a long way, so, please, come in.”
72
Memorial