The Typhoon Lover

by Sujata Massey

  Well, today wasn’t a weight-lifting day, but at least my posture was better than it used to be. I sucked in my abdominals a touch as I passed the majestic, redbrick Gothic castle that housed the Smithsonian’s administrative offices, and kept them in place as I entered the circular glass atrium entrance of the Freer Museum’s Ripley Center, which led in turn to the Sackler Gallery, a few flights down.

  I’d sworn I wasn’t going to look around, but I had to pause for a second glance at an impressive art installation right inside the entrance. A modern Chinese artist had dredged up the hull of an old wooden Japanese fishing boat and perched it atop thousands of pieces of broken white porcelain cups and saucers. A boat afloat on china; I loved the metaphor, but cringed at the thought of all the pottery smashing that had gone on.

  “Ma’am? The museum doesn’t open until ten.”

  The security guard who’d been at the desk was suddenly at my side. I’d gotten too close to the artwork. I apologized and told the guard that I was a few minutes early for my appointment in the administrative offices with Michael Hendricks.

  “We have nobody working in our museum with that name,” she said, frowning at me again. “Are you sure he isn’t a part-time volunteer?”

  “I don’t think so.” I scrambled through my bag for the paper where I’d written down the few details I’d been given. “A woman called me back as well. Her name is Elizabeth Cameron—”

  “She’s the ancient Near Eastern curator.” The receptionist flipped through some papers. “She left a message about someone coming to a nine o’clock meeting.”

  “That might be me. My name is Rei Shimura.” I felt uneasy, because I didn’t think ancient Near Eastern art was anything I could take a stab at. Also, the timing of the meeting was off. Michael Hendricks had said nine-thirty, or so I’d thought.

  But it turned out that the security guard’s message had my name on it, so she called another guard to escort me through the labyrinth of dimly lit galleries to the administrative section.

  Not an auspicious start, I thought as we rode down the elevator to the second floor, where the administrative offices lay. I was stupid to have arrived late and without knowing more about why I was being interviewed. Perhaps they’d made a mistake calling me in. I knew about the art of the Far East, not the Near East or Mesopotamia, as it used to be called. I would make that clear right away, I decided, and I’d be out the door fast—before nine-fifteen, probably. I would be able to make a ten o’clock Pilates class at the gym, if I hustled enough.

  Huge double doors to the administrative section were locked, but the guard unlocked them for me. Right behind them there was someone waiting, a tall, slender African-American woman in her fifties. The green skirted uniform that she wore had silver oak leaves on the shoulders; her black name tag read simply “Martin.”

  “Are you Rei Shimura?” the woman officer asked.

  I nodded, surprised that she not only knew my name but had pronounced it correctly. Rei rhymes with X-ray—which was what she seemed to be doing as she surveyed me all the way from my conservative pumps up to my bed-head hairstyle and bloodshot eyes. It seemed, from the tightness of her expression, that she could guess the kind of night I’d been through.

  “You may come in, Miss Shimura. We’re all here.”

  The guard departed and I followed the woman along a wide, carpeted hall and into a large room where a few people were sitting. The woman locked the door behind her, and I gulped.

  I surveyed what lay before me: a windowless room decorated with a few framed posters from past exhibitions at the Sackler, and a huge film screen similar to the ones I remembered from college lecture halls. The room was filled with a long, teak table, a much larger table than was needed for the one woman and two men sitting at it. One of the men was a distinguished-looking, older Japanese; the other an athletically built man with hair cropped as closely as a soldier’s. He was wearing what seemed to be the official D.C. uniform: a Brooks Brothers suit, the all-American label that Hugh, who wore only European designer suits, abhorred.

  “Coffee?” The woman who had been seated at the table spoke to me gently, as if she realized I needed special handling. I nodded gratefully, even though I’d already had a huge dose of caffeine. As she moved to a coffeemaker set up on a side table, I checked her out—brunette pageboy hairstyle and a hip-length, hand-knit olive green sweater over a calf-length black skirt. Very artsy; perhaps she was the curator?

  “Sugar? Cream? I’m Elizabeth Cameron, the one who called you.” The woman confirmed my thoughts. “I’m so glad you could join us.”

  “I’ll take both,” I said. “And I’m glad to be here too.” The last was a slight exaggeration, given the locked doors and serious faces. I knew that this was going to be like no interview I’d ever had before.

  “I’m Michael Hendricks, from the Japan desk at State. Senator Snowden gave me your name.” The guy in Brooks had taken the coffee from Elizabeth Cameron and handed it to me. He had an accent that I couldn’t place, as clipped and correct as his military haircut. On second glance I realized that his hair, which I’d first thought was brown, was actually a salt-and-pepper mix of brown and silver. Men could gray prematurely and look fabulous, I thought sourly. At least, I thought it was premature graying. I couldn’t guess his age at all, just as I couldn’t make out the details of where he worked on the ID tag that hung from a chain around his neck. My eyes were simply too tired.

  I turned from him to the Japanese-looking man, who was wearing a conservative dark blue suit. He was a guest here, too, I thought. I wasn’t sure what to do until he bowed to me slightly; I bowed back more deeply. He smiled, and in that moment I knew I’d seen him somewhere. But my brain was too frazzled to make the connection.

  I hesitated, holding my coffee, not wanting to be too presumptuous about my next movement—or any movement at all.

  Michael Hendricks said, “We have a place set up for you on the other side.” I tripped slightly in my awkwardness to get around the table.

  “Kiotsukute kudasai,” the Japanese man said. Be careful, please.

  “Gomen nasai,” I apologized back to him, then said in English to the others, “I’m a little uncoordinated,” as I sat down gingerly on an unholstered chair.

  “Oh, I don’t think so. You danced pretty well last night.” Michael Hendricks smiled easily. “I apologize for not introducing myself, but it was hard to get through the throng.”

  Could this be some game of Hugh’s—a faux interview on the tail of a wild night? Was the military officer going to slide out of her uniform, any minute? Confusion washed over me. Carefully, I said, “I’m afraid I don’t understand what this meeting’s about.”

  “I’ll start by introducing the remaining people. Now, you’ve spoken with Elizabeth on the phone already, I understand, and you just met Colonel Martin, who came in from Baghdad a few days ago to join us.”

  Brenda Martin nodded at me and sat down next to Hendricks as he continued his introductions.

  “I’m grateful that Mr. Yukio Watanabe, the Japanese consul general, was able to take time away from his responsibilities at the embassy to join us.” Michael paused. “Everything that we say must be kept confidential, Miss Shimura. Are you comfortable with that?”

  Feeling flabbergasted by both the power of Mr. Watanabe and the demand being put on me, I said, “I could give you an answer if I knew what this was about.”

  “It’s about considering you for a job,” Michael Hendricks said.

  “In that case, of course I’ll maintain confidentiality. And I’ve brought my résumé.” I extracted the résumé with the scholarly focus and slid it onto the table. Nobody picked it up. Feeling awkward again, I asked, “Does the job relate to Japanese art or antiques?”

  “Not exactly.” Michael Hendricks leaned back in his chair, studying me with eyes the color of a cold fall sky. “This mission involves ancient Near Eastern art. Even though this isn’t an area you’ve worked in during the past, we beli
eve you are qualified to handle this assignment.”

  “Dancing and all?” I thought I’d make a joke to relieve my nerves, but nobody smiled.

  “I think we can all safely agree that dancing doesn’t hurt anyone or anything. And now, we’re running a few minutes late, so I’ll get right to the presentation.” As he spoke, I finally placed Michael’s accent: eastern-educated—absent of slang and regional influences. He’d probably attended Andover, Exeter, or a similar northeastern boarding school.

  The lights went out, and slowly the film screen at the end of the room lit up with the glow from a projector. REI SHIMURA BACKGROUND, the screen said. The words vanished and there was a photograph of me, a reproduced photo clipped from the Japanese newspaper Asahi Shimbun. I straightened up a little, because I’d always liked this shot, in which I appeared stunningly slender in an Azzedine Alaia dress a girlfriend had lent me to wear to a party at the Tokyo American Club. The Japanese paparazzi had snapped me because of a murder investigation I was peripherally involved in—something that had fortunately come out all right in the end.

  “Rei Shimura lived in Japan from the age of twenty-four. Here she is outside the Tokyo American Club, a place where she once socialized with prominent expatriates like Joseph Roncolotta, who still runs a consulting business in Tokyo.”

  Next came a shot taken from the Tokyo Weekender party page: a picture of Joe Roncolotta lifting a beer at one of Tokyo’s several German beer gardens, surrounded by Japanese businessmen. After that, the screen showed a picture of my antique-dealing mentor, Ishida-san, and then a picture of my Aunt Norie with a prizewinning flower arrangement that had appeared in the Kayama School of Ikebana newsletter. There was even a picture of me with Hugh, back in his days as a lawyer in Tokyo, leaving his old apartment building in Roppongi.

  “May I say something?” I interjected. “My personal life really shouldn’t be taken into account if this is about a job. It may even be illegal.”

  “Your personal life is what’s perfect.” Michael Hendricks’s voice sounded almost reverent. “But don’t worry, Hugh Glendinning is not of particular significance.”

  Hugh’s image faded and was replaced by a new man’s. It was another media snap, this one of Takeo Kayama emerging from the doorway of the Kayama School. Takeo, who had been my boyfriend a very long time ago, looked different. He still had the same knife-edge, elegant features, but the long, floppy, rock star hair was gone, cropped to a length perfect for business. He was wearing a long black trench coat open, flapping behind him, giving him the look of a bat. The coat, in fact, cut off half the face of the woman trailing behind him—a young woman, probably his sister.

  “Now, here we have Takeo Kayama, the recently appointed iemoto—that means headmaster, right, Mr. Watanabe?—of the Kayama School of Ikebana in Tokyo.”

  The outside details on the picture blurred as I focused on Takeo’s expression, which seemed harder than I remembered. When I’d decided to return to Hugh, Takeo had been unpleasantly surprised—but I’d heard on the trans-Pacific grapevine that he’d quickly bounced back. Well, men always did, didn’t they?

  I listened as Mr. Watanabe, in careful English, described Takeo’s life: the lonely childhood in a luxury apartment, his schooling at Tokyo University, and then the University of California at Davis, the building passion for environmentalism, and his brief passion for me. Or, as Mr. Watanabe put it politely, “the pleasant friendship with Shimura-san.”

  A shot of Takeo’s country house flashed on the screen, and I felt a pang. I had spent a whole summer helping Takeo brighten old, stained walls to the colors of sea, sky, and garden. I loved that house, which had been built in the 1920s; it was one of the places I missed most in Japan. Takeo and I had been together at the house, ostensibly restoring it, but in truth spending almost as much time at the beach, or in bed. My friends had harangued me to invite them for a country weekend, but we’d never wanted company. Takeo and I had no need for anyone that summer.

  “The friendship with Miss Shimura kindled Mr. Kayama’s interest in antiques. Under her guidance, he began a study of Japanese antiques.” As Mr. Watanabe spoke, the image on the screen changed to a photo that a paparazzo with a long lens had taken of us behind Takeo’s beach house in Hayama. The two of us were lying close together, poring over a comic book. Now I looked at the image of my younger self and felt dismayed by how pin-thin my arms had been. Takeo hadn’t minded, of course—one of his hands rested lightly on my Speedo bikini bottom. With a sudden rush, I remembered the things that Takeo and I had done, within the walls of that ancient, always empty house.

  I tried to focus my attention back where it belonged. “That’s a comic book we’re reading, actually. I never taught him anything about antiques. He has no interest.”

  “Then why did he spend just over eighty thousand pounds on Asian ceramics at Christies in London last year?” Michael Hendricks said, flipping to a photograph of a sales slip from Christies. “And just before that, ten million yen at Meiwashima Auction House in Tokyo.”

  “Really? I’d like to know what he bought.” Ten million yen was about $100,000, and Meiwashima was a high-end auction house, a far cry from the country auctions I usually frequented. It had been a major effort for me to get a membership at Meiwashima, and once I was in, I realized I couldn’t afford anything.

  “Vessels,” said Michael.

  “Do you mean—like the boat upstairs in the atrium?” My eyes widened.

  Michael shook his head, and looked as if he was trying not to laugh. “Containers. Mr. Kayama is after historic containers of all kinds—urns, bowls, vases, anything that could hold water and plant material.”

  “Oh, for ikebana purposes. Well, I’m glad he has a new hobby. Everyone should have a hobby.” I felt embarrassed to have made the mistake. Of course I knew that ceramics with openings were called vessels—why hadn’t I understood Michael the first time around?

  “The problem is that the young headmaster’s hobby may be illegal.” Michael Hendricks cleared his throat. “Colonel, maybe it’s time to give Rei the background on the situation with the National Museum in Iraq.”

  “I’m sure Miss Shimura has read accounts of the looting at the museum during the early stages of the war,” Colonel Martin said. “Hundreds of civilians stormed the museum, grabbing whatever was nearby and looked valuable—mostly gold items from the closest open galleries. At the same time, many priceless treasures were actually hidden by the curators, who had anticipated the looting. But there was a third class of museum items that were probably taken by a few insiders who knew their worth. Within this category of missing items is a group of Mesopotamian vessels dating from approximately three thousand years ago.” A grainy black-and-white slide flashed on the screen, showing a rustic pottery vessel shaped like a goat. Its long, curved horn made a handle, and there was room to pour something in at the tail, and then out at the goat’s mouth.

  “Our Iraqi colleagues at the museum called this the ibex ewer, because it’s made in the form of an ibex—a wild goat native to the Mesopotamian area, which includes modern countries like Iraq, Iran, and Syria. The ewer vanished during the looting along with about three hundred other objects from the museum.”

  “What a shame,” I said. For a country to lose its art was to lose its soul. Legend had it that the Americans had chosen not to bomb Kyoto during World War II because it was the center of Japan’s high culture. But they’d bombed Tokyo plenty.

  Next, a photo flashed on the screen of a round-faced man with thinning black hair. He was trudging toward an airplane with an oversize briefcase in one hand, looking every bit like a lawyer going to court.

  “This is Osman Birand,” Colonel Martin said. “A millionaire Turkish antiques dealer with a business in Istanbul. He’s suspected to have dealt in antiquities stolen from mosques and museums throughout the Middle East. We believe that he may have been involved in brokering antiques stolen from the Royal Museum, but we have yet to find the evidence, and a buyer w
ho’ll testify, in order to charge him with anything.”

  The next picture: Osman Birand, without his briefcase and looking considerably more relaxed with a wineglass in hand, standing on a yacht with a taller, slimmer companion. The photo had been shot at dusk, so I couldn’t see the details very well.

  “Osman Birand had a party on his yacht in Hong Kong, just a few months ago. Takeo Kayama, pictured here, was one of his guests,” Colonel Martin said.

  I wasn’t at all convinced that the fellow onboard was Takeo, and the situation didn’t make sense. “Why was Takeo there?”

  “Fund-raising for an organic flower-farming cooperative.” The colonel raised her thin, arched brows. “He says he wants to apply the kibbutz prototype to help poor Arabs help themselves. Birand contributed the equivalent of twenty thousand dollars.”

  Organic flower farming did sound like Takeo, I admitted to myself as the image on the screen changed again, back to the country house. The headline over the magazine spread said “Seaside Beauty!” in the phonetic katakana script used for foreign words like these. It was true that the room was beautiful, and one could see the sea through the new, floor-to-ceiling glass windows that formed one wall of the old living room I remembered. When I’d last been in the house, it had been under renovation, so there was no furniture; now I saw it in its restored glory, filled with eclectic Japanese pieces from the early twentieth century, and other things that couldn’t have come from Takeo’s family: a carved dark wood Indian colonial almirah cabinet and a low, midnight blue couch that curved with a feeling of art deco. In front of the couch sat a gorgeous lacquered tea table decorated with an animal-shaped vessel with a sinewy hawthorn branch arching up from it.