by K. T. Tomb
“Very well; let us begin the treatment.”
After Ichita had completed the acupuncture session with the old doctor and steamed the toxins from his body in the sage water steam of the sauna, he felt a great deal better. He showered, got dressed and went into the tearoom to be served a tea ceremony by four beautiful geishas dressed in their full makeup and other traditional regalia.
As he drank the hot, bitter green macha tea, there was a vigor gradually returning to his disposition that he reveled in. A broad smile suddenly spread across his face and he promptly rose from the tatami mat, bowed to each of the women who had served him, and left the penthouse.
***
The end of the week came much too quickly for Chyna’s liking and on Friday morning, she was standing on the concourse at Bristol Airport kissing Tony goodbye... again.
“When will it stop being a life full of goodbyes?” she asked him sadly.
“Oh, Chyna, don’t be like that,” he admonished her. “A year ago when we were saying goodbye, we had no idea at all when we would be seeing each other again. It didn’t even make sense for us to make plans back then because anything could happen at any moment to change them; and it usually did. Look at it this way; when you’re done here and you get off that plane in Istanbul, you can bet I’ll be standing there to pick you up and kiss you and welcome you home.”
She smiled at his response, knowing he was absolutely right.
“That’s true, and when we leave the airport that’s exactly where we’ll go; home, together.”
“I love you, Babe,” he said, kissing her deeply again, holding her body against his as if he would try to make her a permanent part of him.
“I love you, too, Babe.”
Tony took hold of the handle on his bags and walked into the airport terminal before he got emotional. Chyna leaned against the black Jaguar XK and watched him go. Oscar’s plane had already landed and she would wait for him to make it through the airport before heading back to Dordogne. As she waited patiently, she prayed that, considering he knew the case was a light one, Oscar hadn’t brought too much luggage with him. She hadn’t chosen Robert’s most spacious car for the airport run.
As she was just beginning to enjoy the looks she was receiving from the passing travelers, Chyna’s phone rang. It was Lana calling to check in.
“Hey there, Lana girl,” Chyna said cheerfully.
She had missed her friend and wished that she had been able to join her in England as well, but Chyna couldn’t begrudge Lana the time at home in New York after everything she had been through in Iraq.
It was her time to detox and take care of herself; she had her fiancé to enjoy, a wedding to plan and an investigator to hire and train for Found History. With the instant success that the Istanbul office had enjoyed, they were badly in need of the manpower.
“Hey there yourself, Boss Lady,” Lana replied, smiling. “How are things going over there?”
“As well as can be expected, I guess. Are you calling to check on your cowboy?”
“Oh, please! As if I even care. But since you brought it up, did he get there okay?”
Chyna laughed loudly.
“As a matter of fact, he hasn’t, not yet anyway; the plane’s landed, but he hasn’t made it through the airport yet.”
“Oh, okay then. I really wanted to update you on my little project over here. I put the word out that we were looking for a new investigator and I got some really good responses.”
“Really, Lana?” Chyna quipped. “You don’t sound very enthused about them.”
“Well, it’s just that most of them looked really good on paper and then turned out to have personalities like wet cardboard; tons of experience and absolutely no soul. I tend to think that we have a fun operation here, Chyna. Serious, by all means, but certainly fun as well.”
“That’s totally correct,” Chyna agreed. “So what was the ultimate outcome?”
“I did the only sensible thing; I chose the greenhorn. A Finnish man named Mark Gunnar. He’s Thyri Ragnarsson’s candidate.”
“Oh, now it makes sense. Well, he isn’t as green as all that, Lana. He was in Russia with Thyri’s team. They were all over the news, remember?”
“Yeah, that’s partly why I decided he was best for the job. He has an idea of what can happen in the field, but not too much to be of the opinion that he knows all there is to know. It’s been going well with him so far.”
“I have to admit that’s the best news I’ve had in a while. I’ll be happy to have another investigator on the team soon; things are getting a little hectic without someone permanent in Istanbul.”
“I know. Well, say hi to my cowboy friend and take care of yourself. Keep me updated on the case.”
“I will, Lana. Take care.”
After about another ten minutes of waiting, Oscar stepped through the glass doors of the airport and walked up to Chyna. A smile spread across his face as he took in the sight of the car she was leaning against.
“That’s a step up, even for you, Boss Lady,” he said appreciatively. “I’ve always known you to be quite the SUV type.”
“Welcome to England, Oscar,” Chyna said. Then with a grin, she continued, “Haven’t you ever heard the phrase, ‘A change is as good as a rest’?”
“That it is.”
“Lana just called. She said to tell you hi.”
Oscar gave her a hearty laugh and proceeded to place his bags very carefully into the car’s trunk before making a move to the right side door where Chyna was already seated in the driver’s seat.
“What? So now you want to drive it, too?” she asked jokingly.
He shook his head, made his way to the other side and got in.
“So weird. Even the steering wheel is on the wrong side.”
“Come on, Oscar,” Chyna urged. “I’d like us to get started on some real work today. If we don’t get our weekend plan sorted out, we’ll be left hanging until Monday again. This isn’t like New York. You can’t just turn up at offices and places of interest on a Saturday or Sunday with the assumption they’ll be open.”
***
Ichita was still smiling to himself as he descended to his office in the elevator. He had just started thinking about his antique collection again. He was remembering a conversation he’d had at a party a few years back with a certain Arabian emir.
“The wonderful thing about us Japanese,” he had said, “is that we never feel the need to ask questions about the price that was paid for things or where one may have gotten them from; we consider it extremely rude to question people about their possessions in that manner.”
The other man had given him a puzzled look, but still nodded in agreement. Perhaps he was surprised at how insightful Ichita’s simple observation actually was, once the meaning of it had sunk in for him. Ichita continued his little oration.
“It is somewhat similar with Westerners as well, but for entirely different reasons.”
“How do you deduce that, Nagasaki?” the man had asked him, clearly enthralled by Ichita’s esoteric observations.
“They rarely discuss the matter of cost and procurement of fine things in public; particularly when they strongly believe that they are discussing such matters with one who is superlatively wealthier than they are. Which, in my situation, is almost always the case, Emir.”
The armor that had belonged to Eleanor of Aquitaine had been acquired by his father, Hiroshi Nagasaki.
An interest in antiquities and the purity of the past and cultural traditions had been just about the only thing that Ichita and his father had shared. So when Hiroshi had passed away, the entire collection had been left to him. The inheritance had caused quite a scandal in the city, and just as much upheaval in the family, but no one dared to contest the wishes of their dead patriarch.
Their high-class family was among those in Japan who still clung to the old feudal system of familial inheritance and traditionally, as a younger son, Ichita was not entitled to a
ny of his father’s possessions.
His successful fishing company, Nagasaki Oceanic, had passed gracefully to Ichita’s older brother as was expected; but apparently that had not been enough for greedy Koichi, who had instigated the quarrel over the artifacts. However, on closer review of the catalogs kept on the items, they had both realized their father’s reasons for dividing his property in the manner that he had.
More than eighty percent of the objects in the collection were of questionable provenance or were officially classified as missing from some part of the world; a respectable first son could never have inherited them without fingers potentially being pointed at him. Hiroshi would never subject his first born to the possibility of such shame. With Ichita, however, he would have had no such concern.
Ichita Nagasaki was actually his father’s fourth born son. Knowing from an early age that he and his brothers would have to make their own fortunes, he had built his chemical company from the ground up, refining opium for the smoking rooms of downtown Tokyo in an abandoned house in the neighborhood.
Over the years, he had legitimized the business by hiring scientists to reverse engineer and develop the formulas for popular opioid medications which he renamed, produced and sold to the markets that needed the less expensive, ‘no-name’ generic brand drugs. Of course, he supplied his labs with his own raw materials for the production process.
Ichita still ran all the opium and heroin business in Tokyo, which he did through his own ruthless yakuza gang based in the Harajuku district of the city. He had a warehouse, four cookhouses and a couple smoking rooms of his own there.
But Tokyo was not where Ichita made his real money; that came from the Californians and the Hawaiians who found their way to Japan to buy his opium and heroin to sell in the States. It was the best quality they could get and Ichita kept his prices reasonable.
It wasn’t long before he grew ridiculously rich and lured his two older brothers away from the drudgery of the middle management level jobs they held at Nagasaki Oceanic working for Koichi.
It had been so simple to do.
Ichita had invited them both to a geisha party he was throwing in Kyoto for some of his medical company clients. Afterwards, he had pulled them aside and asked them both if they had not yet grown tired of scraping by on the wages Koichi paid them to take care of a business that would eventually pass to their nephew. He let them know that he had ideas which would enable them to make their own names in business and finally establish themselves.
He sent Tatsuya to university in Hong Kong to learn about art history, antiques and ancient artifacts. While he studied full time for six years up to the post graduate level, Ichita installed Tatsuya’s family in a newly built house on the extensive and elaborate IchiCo estate outside Tokyo.
His other brother, Yoshiro, was still a bachelor so he sent him to the United States to study business at Princeton, majoring in corporate marketing. It was his hope that Yoshiro would come back with new ideas of how to expand the medicinal side of the business as well as a few good contacts to aid that project along.
And he did.
The first deal Yoshiro brokered with an international drug manufacturer was for the labs at IchiCo to reverse engineer the top selling painkiller that was being manufactured by that company’s biggest competitor. IchiCo had the generic ready in a record three months and was granted the production contract for it.
Ichita made Yoshiro IchiCo’s vice president of corporate marketing and Tatsuya became the vice president of corporate culture. Tatsuya’s portfolio included managing the penthouse recreation center and Ichita’s art collection; acquiring provenances for his existing pieces as well as procuring priceless art and antiques worldwide at rock bottom prices by targeting financially-troubled aristocrats and floundering governments. What Ichita liked, he kept; the others, they sold at auction for ridiculous profits. It was the perfect laundering operation for Ichita’s drug money.
The three brothers never looked back after that.
Chapter Three
The ride into Bristol was uneventful, but just as they were coming to the intersection where one road led into the city and the other into a suburb, Chyna noticed something that seemed very familiar. She couldn’t quite place it.
There were several cars and a small truck in a tiny gas station to her left. Nothing jumped out at her as out of the ordinary, but she let her gaze linger for a little while.
The gas station store didn’t seem like it was being robbed; everyone was going about their business calmly. There was a red motorcycle filling up at a pump behind a black sedan which was doing the same at the pump in front of it. The driver of the truck came out of the store, jumped back into his seat in the cab and left. The motorcycle rider lifted the visor on his helmet and said something to an Asian woman who was standing beside the car in front of him. The woman turned and looked toward the road and Chyna briefly before returning her attention to her car.
Just then, the light changed and an impatient driver behind Chyna immediately started honking for her to get moving. She shook it off, but instead of continuing straight into the city, Chyna quickly turned right and drove into the little neighborhood.
“Change of plan,” she said to Oscar.
“Really?” he retorted sarcastically. “I wasn’t even aware there was one.”
“The caretaker at Dordogne suggested that I should visit the library at the Montgomery’s house in Winchester. He said there are manuscripts at Châtellerault Castle that date back to before Eleanor’s arrival in England. I wasn’t planning on going until tomorrow, but something tells me that it’s a better idea to go there now.”
“A castle, huh?” Oscar scoffed. “What do you think you’ll find there?”
“At the very least, I’m hoping for some provenance; like a really old picture of it and some family genealogy.”
“How’s that going to help?” he asked.
“I really wish you would try to learn some more about investigating from Lana instead of nit-picking with her all the time,” Chyna admonished. “You know she has a lot of fun baiting you into that, don’t you?”
“She’s just like an older sister that way. I love it.”
Chyna smiled. She liked that the people on her team felt like they were family; she certainly considered them all to be a part of hers.
“Well, if you can’t learn from her, you’re going to have to learn from me,” Chyna instructed him. “We need to establish, beyond a doubt and through our research, that there is a provenance that links the armor to the Montgomery family. It’s obvious that whoever stole it isn’t worried after thirty-five years that it will ever be recovered. So when we do find it, we have to be able to prove that it’s in their possession illegally.”
“I see,” Oscar said. “I mean, they could have bought it from someone and would have assumed the deal was legit.”
“Exactly,” she confirmed.
“Let’s go then.”
The street wound through a quiet upscale neighborhood before dumping them into a large roundabout. According to the GPS navigation system in the posh Jaguar, Chyna was to keep to the left, go around it and take the second roadway out of it. That would take her south toward Bath, then Salisbury, into Southampton, and then they would turn north to Winchester. The drive was estimated at an hour and fifty minutes, but somehow, Chyna felt that even an hour and a half would be a long time for the trip in that car.
***
It took them an hour and twenty minutes to arrive at the gates of Châtellerault.
A quick call to Robert informing him about the change of plans had solicited them entry into the grounds and free run of the house there. The Baron had encouraged them to make themselves at home and told them that he would be informing the staff to attend to them for the night. Chyna called Marcus to let him know they wouldn’t be back that evening; she thought it would be best to advise him of their plans so that no meals or other preparations would be made for them until they return
ed the next day.
When they pulled up to the front door, there was a maid and a butler waiting for them and as Oscar handed the man the small suitcase, Chyna realized that she didn’t even have a toothbrush with her. The stern-looking man led Oscar into the hall and up the stairs as Chyna stood looking very bashfully at the maid.
“Never mind that, milady,” the maid said reassuringly. “Baron Montgomery has asked me to take care of everything for you. You’ll find absolutely everything you need in the lady’s apartments and anything that fits is yours to use. Follow me, please.”
In the so-called ‘lady’s apartments’, Chyna was led through a series of closets by Abigail. The first stop was the bathroom, where she opened several drawers in the vanity to show Chyna where toothbrushes, razors and other personal items could be found. Then, after giving Chyna a quick look up and down, the maid proceeded to a set of drawers that ran from the ceiling to the floor. She pulled one out and produced a set of brand new underwear tied neatly together with a ribbon and a couple of perfectly sized bras. Abigail closed the drawers and went to a rack of clothes.
“You should find everything else here, milady. They should all fit perfectly,” she said. “Please make yourself at home.”
She made a little curtsy and left Chyna in private.
Downstairs, a lovely spread had been put out for them in honor of lunchtime and Chyna and Oscar did not shy away. They were famished from the trip and neither of them had eaten a morsel of food since breakfast. After lunch, Chyna insisted that they get straight to work.
Victor, the butler, led them up into the tower that housed the ancient library as he regaled them with the extensive history of the house. When they arrived at the door, Victor held it open for them and they stepped into the perfectly climate-controlled room. Oscar went directly to a shelf and raised his hand to touch one of the volumes there.
“Sir!” Victor said commandingly. “Please, do not touch the books with your bare hands.”
