Tokyo Heist

by Diana Renn

“Yakuza,” Kenji says quietly. He glances toward the door.

  Hideki nods, but in a dismissive way. “He could simply be on vacation. They have benefits and time off, too. Their organizations are run like companies.”

  A vacationing gangster. This does not reassure me as much as I’d like it to.

  “No doubt he chose a private room because of his tattoo,” Hideki goes on. “Often they cannot go to public baths because they are not welcome there. The tattoos give them away, and the owners of public baths and hotels ban them, to avoid scaring off other guests.”

  Kenji frowns. “He should not be here. If there are yakuza here from one of Fujikawa’s rival gangs, and if they hear what we are looking for, our investigation could take a wrong turn.”

  “I will inform the okami-san and have her dismiss him,” Hideki promises.

  “You don’t think he’s someone working with Fujikawa?” I ask.

  Hideki smiles at Reika and me kindly. “You must not worry yourselves. There is no chance Fujikawa has sent men to follow us here. We have traveled discreetly and quickly.”

  His smooth voice reassures me a little. He will take care of this. The man will be dismissed. But my dad doesn’t seem too happy.

  “Rival gangs? A yakuza on the premises? I don’t like it,” he says, folding his arms. “Where there’s one, there might be more. Girls, after dinner, go straight to your room. Lock the door. Stay there all night. Understood?”

  * * *

  AFTER DINNER, REIKA and I stagger back to our room. I keep crashing into the walls. “Ow. Who moved the walls?”

  Reika laughs so hard she snorts.

  Then I laugh and get the hiccups.

  Somehow, despite the buckling floor and the blurry numbers on the sliding doors, we manage to find our room again. Two red futons are laid out for us, dressed with crisp, white cotton sheets. An electric fan purrs on the floor between them, stirring the soupy air.

  The tatami smell is getting to me. I lay back on a futon to quiet my churning stomach.

  Reika is giggling uncontrollably, somewhere in the room. “Have to stake awake! Stay awake! Stay . . . awake . . .” I hear her voice echo as the room tilts and rocks me to sleep.

  * * *

  I DREAM THAT I’m inside a ukiyo-e print. In a long wooden boat, propelled by an enormous silver salmon that pushes it from beneath the water. Two ayu trail behind us. I’m chasing after a boat up ahead, but I can’t see who’s on it. I just know I have to catch up. I shout at the salmon to swim faster, faster. I near the other boat, and the sole passenger turns and looks at me. In the moonlight, I see him. It’s Edge. A lost look in his eyes.

  My boat pulls up beside his.

  “Help me,” he says. “I can’t get off. I want to get off.”

  I find a pole on the boat, and I hold it out to him. “Grab on! I’ll pull you over here.”

  He reaches, but the pole is brittle, dead wood. It snaps.

  My salmon driver does not stop. My boat glides on. Edge is left alone on his, holding half of a stick and watching me go with the saddest eyes I’ve ever seen.

  * * *

  I WAKE UP drenched in sweat. Somebody turned off the lamp and the fan. I sit upright and check my watch. Almost midnight. Oh my God. When did I fall asleep? How much time did I waste on that horrible dream? “Reika?” Her futon is empty, her sheets hardly disturbed.

  I stand, still reeling from the sake. Maybe someone kidnapped her! Maybe the bathing yahoo in room nine! I run into the hallway. No light shines from under from under anyone’s doors. Through the paper-thin walls, I can hear snoring, shifting, settling.

  I first check the women’s restroom at the end of our hall. Empty. I walk back up the hall. Unlike the Grand Prince Hotel, with its fake cricket sounds and perpetual artificial lighting, the cricket song here is real, leaking in from outside, and the corridors are almost completely dark. As I tiptoe toward the lobby, I keep tripping over house slippers that other guests have set out in front of their doors.

  The air is hot and close, and thick with a thousand ghosts. I have a strong sensation of not being alone. Am I being watched, perhaps by someone from behind a cracked-open door? Or am I being observed by a ghost, perhaps the mournful van Gogh, wanting his painting to be brought out to the light of day? Or by the spirit of Tomonori Yamada, urging me forward?

  The lobby is lit by pale moonlight slicing through bamboo by the window. No one works the front desk at this hour. A mosquito whines by my ear. The lobby walls are decorated with some paintings, woodblock prints, and Japanese artifacts—musical instruments and what looks like old fishing equipment—but I can’t stop to inspect anything. I need to find Reika first.

  I head toward the onsen. Something seems different by the women’s entrance. Absent. Maybe it’s the dark, playing tricks on my eyes.

  I run on, back to the hotel area, around another corner of the west wing rooms. Fear rises up in my throat, a choking sensation, as I approach the room where I spotted the bathing yahoo. But no light glows from beneath the door of room nine. I don’t know if he’s sound asleep or if the okami-san sent him packing.

  I head down another corridor. That’s when I hear shuffling and scraping sounds. Bathing yahoo on the loose? I flatten myself against the wall, then peek around the corner.

  Hideki is a few yards away from me, lifting a large, framed picture off the wall. In the moonlight, his skin has a cool blue glow, and his dark eyes seem to glitter. I fight the urge to run. I keep my eyes fixed on him. Has he found the painting? Is that why he looks so intense?

  He lays the painting on the floor facedown and inspects it carefully with a flashlight. He runs his hands over the entire frame. Then he rehangs the painting and moves on to another.

  I take a step forward, thinking I’ll offer to help him. Then I step back. The look on his face is so determined, it’s almost fierce. I’m afraid to interrupt and break his concentration. He obviously can’t rest until he finds his dad’s art. This must be like a spiritual quest for him.

  I tiptoe back to the lobby, then up the stairs to the second floor. There I notice a faint glow beneath an unmarked door. A door with no house slippers lined up in front of it.

  I push open the door and shield my eyes as a light shines in my face.

  “My God, Violet, you scared me!” The light lowers.

  “Reika! Why didn’t you wake me up?” My relief at finding her quickly shifts to annoyance. “How long have you been here? Where did you get that flashlight?”

  She motions for me to close the door. “I brought the light from my aunt and uncle’s house. Thought it would come in handy. And I did try to wake you up. That sake went right to your head, you lightweight. We are seriously going to have to work on your drinking skills.”

  There’s no time to stay mad. “I saw Hideki in the hall, inspecting paintings. By himself.”

  “Me too,” says Reika. “Do you think that’s kind of weird?”

  “Not really. Kenji’s old. He probably can’t stay up so late. And I’m sure Hideki can’t sleep till he finds his dad’s painting.”

  “So I found this storeroom on the map. Take a look.” Reika shines the flashlight around.

  The room is like a museum—though a disorganized, cluttered one—filled floor to ceiling with art and antiques, including a suit of armor on a stand, old swords, and a wooden canoe hung by the ceiling. There are also lots of matted woodblock prints and framed and unframed paintings, stacked and leaning against the walls. Reika points to the unframed canvases. “I just started going through these.”

  “I can’t believe the door was unlocked. There’s valuable stuff in here,” I whisper.

  “Hey, kick that blanket under the door crack, will you? Oh, and it wasn’t unlocked,” she adds as I maneuver a gray wool blanket on the floor. “I picked the lock with a nail fil
e.”

  “Where’d you learn to do that?”

  She doesn’t answer. Instead, she sets the flashlight down between us, and we work in silence, dividing up the stacks of art, flipping through canvases and matted prints.

  I’m getting discouraged, but then at the end of the second stack, the last canvas makes my heart pound. I’ve seen this painting before.

  2

  9

  Reika shines the flashlight on the painting. The canvas, set in a heavy, dark wood frame, is about two feet by three feet—the same dimensions as van Gogh’s Japonisme paintings. It shows a scene from ukai. “Cormorant fishing,” Reika observes.

  “This was the painting outside the women’s entrance to the onsen! I thought something looked different when I walked by the bath just now. Somebody moved it.”

  “You think the okami-san took it down and hid it here?” Reika asks.

  “Yeah, maybe that’s why our dinner took so long. She needed time to hide the painting!”

  “And are you sure it’s the same painting?”

  “Positive.” I inspect at the canvas more closely. “Not only that, but I can tell you the artist. It’s Tomonori Yamada.”

  “No!”

  “Take a look. Some of the images in this scene are right out of his sketch journal.”

  The more I stare at it, the more those separate embedded sketches from his journal now come together to make one beautiful, harmonious painting. I point them all out.

  A nighttime scene on a river, a long boat in the foreground. Three men stand on the boat, all wearing dark blue robes. One man maneuvers the boat with a long pole. Another beats the water with a wooden paddle. A third, wearing a kind of apron, holds five or six leashes in his hands. A wire basket with flaming logs hangs from a pole off the front of the boat, illuminating an area of water where you can see what is on the ends of those leashes: black cormorants, with collars clamped around their slender necks. The diving birds strain at their leashes.

  And in the lower left corner, in gray paint, is a circle with two ayu coiled together. The same image from the box where his journal was hidden. “There’s his ‘signature.’”

  “You’re right,” Reika says. “Man, what a gorgeous painting. He’s captured cormorant fishing perfectly. I saw this two summers ago, in Gifu. See here, this guy with the pole stirs up the water, and this other guy beats a drum to bring the river trout to the surface. Then they let the birds go in to catch the fish.”

  Dark hills, furred with forests, rise up behind the river. To the right is the graceful arc of a long, low bridge, which can only be the Moon Crossing Bridge. In the background, arranged in a semicircle, other boats drift: long boats with raised roofs, dotted with glowing lanterns, and filled with the silhouettes of spectators.

  In the passenger boat closest to the fishing boat, one figure catches my eye: a woman in a pink kimono with red-and-white flowers, leaning over the side to trail one hand in the water. I can’t see the features of her face very well, as her hair, falling out of a clip, partially obscures it, but I get the distinct impression she is a beautiful, young woman. How strange that she would be painted with such a level of detail, since she’s part of the background. Or is she? The more I look at her, the more I feel like the painting is really all about her.

  “It’s sad. Tomonori Yamada could have been a great artist,” says Reika.

  “I know. He died too young. Nobody knew his potential. Maybe not even himself. And you know what else is sad? If there is a van Gogh painting underneath this, Tomonori’s over-painting will have to be removed. This guy’s one painting will be lost forever in the recovery of the van Gogh. Just so we can give it to a gang boss.”

  “You really think the van Gogh is under here? The frame doesn’t look old,” Reika says.

  “Any canvas can be reframed.” I touch the paint. It feels thick, applied more heavily in some places than others. “I can’t say for sure. We need special equipment to see beneath.”

  “Or we need Kimono Girl.” Reika sits back on her heels. “Too bad you made her up.”

  “Wait. There’s someone who can help us. Skye.”

  “Your dad’s ex? In Seattle?”

  “I could call her. She might know someone who could help us here, someone with one of those infrared camera thingies.”

  “And you trust her?”

  I consider this. An unanswered question still lingers about her. The issue of her “cash windfall.” If she wasn’t trafficking in stolen art, where was her windfall coming from? Still, she’d been right about one very important thing: the men Edge and I caught on film did turn out to be yakuza. She’d been right to warn me to be careful. “I trust her. And Skye has knowledge of art and restoration work that we don’t.”

  It’s now one in the morning Tokyo time. Skye should be at work by now. We look up the SAM number on Reika’s phone. I call, and reception transfers me to Skye’s direct line.

  “Violet? What a surprise to hear from you. Are you guys back in Seattle already?”

  “Nope. We’re in Kyoto. Arashiyama, actually, just outside the city.”

  “Arashiyama? What are you doing there? Wait—is something wrong? Is Glenn okay?”

  “He’s fine,” I say. “I mean, considering he might be kidnapped or killed in a week. . . .”

  I hold the phone away from my ear because Skye’s shriek of alarm is so painful.

  “And I think my friend Reika and I have just found Moon Crossing Bridge.”

  “The drawings?”

  “The painting. And now we need your help.” I describe what we’ve found.

  “This had so better not be a prank call,” she says after a long pause.

  “It’s not. I swear. I can take a picture of the painting we found and email it to you.”

  “No, I believe you. But you guys are in way over your heads. I’m calling the FBI.”

  “No! They’ll communicate with Japanese law enforcement, and Kenji doesn’t want that. He says that Fujikawa seeks revenge every time Kenji calls in the authorities. Besides, we don’t know for sure that this painting is concealing the van Gogh. That’s why we need you.”

  “Can’t you just give the art to Kenji? This is his problem, not yours.”

  “It is my problem. My dad’s in danger!” I feel dizzy. It’s not the sake this time. It’s panic. “Please. Help us.” I swallow hard. “We need someone with the right equipment to see if the van Gogh’s underneath the painting we found.”

  “Okay,” Skye relents. “I do know someone who might be able to help out. A woman named Natsuko Kikuchi. I went to grad school with her. She’s a conservator at the Kyoto National Museum. I’ll call her and set something up. But you have to trust Kenji. Tell him what you found.”

  Do I trust Kenji? “You said he was a cheater,” I cautiously remind her.

  “Oh, that.” Skye sighs. “Yeah, he hit on me. Maybe he’d had a beer too many after work. One slip doesn’t make him a womanizer or a pathological liar. Go easy on him. I don’t even think about it anymore.”

  I hadn’t thought of it that way. Along the same lines, maybe one emotionally charged public scene with my dad doesn’t make Skye a crazed, revenge-seeking art thief. Maybe one comment about Mardi’s tastes in movies doesn’t mean Edge is in love with her. I’ve always wanted people to see there’s more to me than meets the eye, but I forgot that can work both ways. Who knows what I’ve missed by slotting people into boxes so quickly, framing them with my expectations?

  “Violet, are you still there?”

  “Yeah. I was just thinking about what you said.”

  “Look. Adults are just complicated and, well, weird sometimes,” says Skye.

  “That’s what people say about teenagers.”

  Skye laughs. “So maybe we’re not all that dif
ferent. But seriously. Tell Kenji. And while you’re at it, you might want to pass on some breaking news about Julian Fleury.”

  “Julian?”

  “After he quit his job at Margo’s, suddenly no one could reach him,” Skye says. “Police even got a search warrant to enter his apartment. His neighbors said he hadn’t been there for days. Then Federal agents caught up with him this morning at a real estate agency in Tacoma. I guess Kenji called in a tip about some phone number Julian had on his notepad at work, and that’s how they tracked him down there. Anyway, Julian showed up with a big fat check, hoping to buy a gallery space right by the Chihuly Glass Museum. That’s prime real estate.”

  I catch my breath. That part of the investigation happened because I did that notepad rubbing, and because I gave the information to Kenji!

  “It’s all pretty bizarre, since Julian’s hardly wealthy,” Skye goes on. “He’s been up to something, all right. They’re just trying to find out what.”

  “I’ll let my dad know. And thanks again for your help.”

  The instant I hang up, the door to the storage room flies open. The doorway frames the T-shaped silhouette of a woman in a dark blue kimono. For a moment I’m sure I’m looking at a ghost.

  Then a light switches on, revealing the okami-san glaring at us.

  3

  0

  The okami-san marches into the room, shuts the door behind her, and points to Tomonori’s painting, which we have propped up in front of an antique bureau. She says something in Japanese, practically spitting.

  Reika looks terrified. “She’s going to get your dad and Kenji—who she thinks is my dad—unless we can explain what we’re doing here.”

  I think fast. “Let’s let her think we suspect her of having something to do with the missing van Gogh. Make her nervous. Get some information.”

  “What, interrogate her? She’s in charge here. We have to humble ourselves.”

  “As nice as it is to follow Japanese customs, this just isn’t the time. Ask her if she moved this painting from the wall outside the onsen.”