by Diana Renn
Now he’s holding up a long tube. Kenji reaches out for it. I suck in my breath. “Fujikawa’s just handed over the drawings,” I whisper to my dad and Reika. That means we’re minutes, or seconds, from gunfire.
Think, think, think. Tears sting my eyes. I’m not Kimono Girl. I have no superpowers. I can’t fly over to that boat and stop this exchange from continuing.
They say your entire life flashes before your eyes when you’re about to die. For me, it’s all forty-three episodes of Vampire Sleuths. Scenes of Kyo and Mika thwarting bad guys. And suddenly a scene from episode five flashes into my mind and sticks. Kyo and Mika were on a boat not unlike this one. A canoe. An armed villain crept onto it, and they threw all their weight against the side to knock him off the boat. This ukai spectator boat is wider and longer, but maybe if three of us rocked the boat hard, we could cause Hideki and the hit man to topple off.
Back under the canvas, I quickly whisper the plan to my dad and Reika. “Hideki and the hit man are right on the front of the boat. Hideki’s perched on the edge, and the hit man is standing up with the pole. It shouldn’t take much effort to throw off their balance.”
“But how can we rock this boat?” Reika asks. “If we all stand up, they’ll see us and shoot us.”
“We can stay under the tarp. We’ll roll really hard and make the boat lurch.” I’m surprised at how steady my voice is. There’s no time for fear. Only action. “Go right, then left. On the count of three. One. Two. Three!”
We roll right. The boat tips. I hear a splash. Then another. We throw off the canvas, and I see both men in the water, thrashing and coughing.
The bathing yahoo’s hand reaches up for the boat. He’s going to climb back on.
“Quick, girls! Swim toward the ukai boat!” my dad shouts, jumping off. Reika follows.
And I, too, slip over the side of the boat, into the dark, cold water of the Katsura-gawa.
3
7
The yukata fabric weighs me down and sticks to my legs. I tread water, gasping, pushing the fabric away. My dad and Reika are stronger swimmers, and don’t notice I’ve gotten tangled up and fallen behind.
While I loosen my yukata belt so I can move in the water better, I see the bathing yahoo and Hideki both climbing back on the boat we’ve just left.
I look at the Yamadas’ boat. Startled by the commotion, the Yamadas are looking toward us. Mitsue points to my dad and Reika swimming toward the ukai boat.
The bathing yahoo stands on the prow again and raises one arm. He points a gun. Not at the Yamadas, but at my dad and Reika. The ukai fishermen fight to control the agitated birds as my dad and Reika approach.
Hideki barks something at him in Japanese. The bathing yahoo turns and aims in the direction of the Yamadas and Fujikawa instead. This is it, then. The moment when he kills Fujikawa, Kenji, and Mitsue. I close my eyes.
Fujikawa starts the motor of his boat, and I open my eyes again. Passengers on spectator boats, figuring out what’s going on, start to scream. Boatmen struggle to turn their boats around and flee.
The bathing yahoo fires the gun. Twice. I can feel the hot rush of air as the second bullet screams past my head. Instinctively, I dive under water. I stay there, holding my breath.
When I emerge, gasping, I see my dad and Reika are being hauled up onto the ukai boat. They’re safe, for now. But I can’t see Kenji and Mitsue. Did the bathing yahoo kill them?
No. They’re standing up. Kenji picks up the wrapped canvas, the painting, and hurls it into the water, and then he hurls the tube with the drawings, like a javelin. Then he and Mitsue jump overboard and swim for shore.
The painting! The drawings! Why did Kenji throw them into the river? Maybe he wanted to distract the gunmen, send them away from him and toward the art.
Another shot rings out. This one comes from the snack boat. From Fujikawa himself, now crouching and pointing his gun. So the hit man didn’t kill him yet, either.
The bathing yahoo teeters on the edge of the boat for a moment, as if hesitating, and then falls backward into the water with a loud splash. He does not come up for air.
In the next instant, Hideki dives overboad. He must swim underwater a long distance; I can’t see where he went. I don’t know if he’s armed. I don’t know if he’s going after his aunt and uncle, Fujikawa, the van Goghs in the water, or me. And Fujikawa is now scanning the water, his arm with the gun outstretched as he searches for his next target.
I have to get to the ukai boat, to my dad and Reika.
A white paper lantern with a cormorant painted on it drifts by; it must have fallen off our boat when we rocked it. Without a light in it, it slips easily over my head. It’s amazing it hasn’t disintegrated yet; the paper must be treated. I’m now at a part of the river that’s shallow enough for me to touch bottom. From a distance, in darkness, I might look like a lantern bobbing on the water and avoid detection by Hideki or Fujikaya. I poke a hole in the paper so I can see out.
Halfway to the ukai boat, my fingers brush something. A stick? I scoop the object toward me. A black plastic tube. I clutch it with both hands. This has to be the drawings! I grab the tube and frog-kick through the water, trying to glide without making a splash or a sound.
As I near the ukai boat, I can see the last bird has been hauled out of the water. My dad and Reika are anxiously looking out over the water for me. “Violet!” my dad calls. “Violet! Where are you?” His voice is hoarse, his eyes wild.
A few feet from the boat, I rip the lantern off my head and wave the plastic tube at him.
“Violet! Thank God, you’re there!” my dad calls. “Swim over here, kiddo! Hurry!”
A fisherman tosses me a rope. I reach for it, but in doing so, I drop the tube.
Somebody grabs the end of it.
Hideki. I didn’t even hear him swim up behind me.
I grab for the tube with one hand and manage to get my fingers around it.
“Give. Me. That.” Hideki tugs hard on the tube as he spits out his words.
I hold on firmly with one hand and cling to the fisherman’s rope with the other.
“You are a troublesome little gaijin,” Hideki snarls. “You seem to be always in the way.” He lunges at me and tries to push me under.
I kick him off and resurface. Chikara fills me head to toe. If I were in Miyazaki film right now, a great wind would be stirring up and the water would curl into waves. My voice, when it comes, sounds so commanding I hardly recognize it. “Your dad would be so disappointed if he knew what was going on here!”
“You know nothing of my father. What do you know about anything? You are a typical American child—an interfering, spoiled, disobedient child,” he hisses. He grabs the tube with such force it slips out of my hand.
I grab it back and hold it close to my chest.
“I do know things,” I shout at Hideki. “I know that if you kill your aunt and uncle and Fujikawa, and then sell this art, you can build your stupid business complex, and the world can enjoy the lost van Goghs. But the world won’t have Kenji and Mitsue. And I know that people are more important than art.”
I feel the rope tugging at me. All three fishermen are pulling now, dragging me toward the boat. Hideki splashes after me. His fingers graze my sleeve, but I manage to snatch it free.
Just as I reach the side of the boat, Hideki makes one last grab for the tube. I summon all my strength, let go of the rope, take the tube in two hands, and hurl it onto the ukai boat. It comes dangerously near the basket of fire, but lands safely on deck.
The next thing I know, strong arms are pulling me up. I flop onto the boat deck, gasping. The cormorants in their cages squawk wildly. As my dad and Reika throw towels around me, I see that the fishermen have managed to get a rope looped around Hideki’s leg. They are pulling it tight while he thrashes
and shouts. It’s their biggest catch of the day.
I look beyond him to the snack boat, whose motor is sputtering and spewing smoke. Something seems wrong with it. Fujikawa frantically tries to fix it. Then I see someone stand up from behind the counter of the snack boat and approach Fujikawa, pointing a gun.
I stifle a scream when I see who it is. It’s Yoshi!
Fujikawa turns around. Slowly, the crime boss raises his arms in surrender.
Then a police boat zooms toward the scene. Someone calls out through a megaphone. The police pull up to the snack boat, board it, and handcuff Fujikawa, as Yoshi, gun lowered, stands to the side.
“Yoshi must have snuck onto Fujikawa’s snack boat,” I say to my dad and Reika, through chattering teeth. “I bet he did something to mess with the motor, and then he threatened Fujikawa with the gun and forced him to surrender.”
My dad frowns. “I don’t get it. I thought Yoshi was an informant.”
“Yeah, wasn’t he tipping off Fujikawa?” Reika asks. “Like about the Seattle sting?”
“I’m sure Yoshi was an informant,” I say. “But I think he was working against Fujikawa all this time. Not for him.” A new piece of the puzzle slides into place. I smile. “Which means he didn’t tip anyone off about the Seattle sting after all. He wasn’t the leak.”
Reika stares at me. “He didn’t? Then who did?”
“Hideki. I bet he’s had his own little private communications with Fujikawa all along.”
Another motorboat, carrying more policemen, speeds over to the ukai boat. The officers move fast, hauling Hideki out of the water, into one of their boats, and handcuffing him. He’s no longer a handsome movie-star man, and not even a crafty mastermind anymore. He looks more like a scrawny drowned rat, and the firelight reveals his true expression. Bitter. Defeated.
Then police help my dad, Reika, and me off of the ukai boat and onto the police boat. One officer drapes a wool blanket around my shoulders. I’m grateful for the gesture as much as the warmth.
We speed back to the dock at Arashiyama. Two police help us off the boat, and Hideki is led away.
I hear footsteps approaching. I turn and see Agent Chang approaching us with a smile.
“I thought you went back to Seattle!” I exclaim.
“I couldn’t leave. I only said that to pacify Hideki. This art exchange tonight was too important,” Agent Chang says. “Kenji and Mitsue are on their way here by boat. Officers picked them up on the opposite shore.”
I reach into my yukata and pull out the letters from Hideki’s suitcase. I hand the two soggy papers to Agent Chang and explain what they are as we unfold them. The ink, though blurred, is legible.
“This will be very useful for the Japanese detectives who will interrogate Hideki,” says Agent Chang. “You’re one brave young lady,” she adds. “You saved lives. And the drawings.”
“Thanks. But the drawings might be wrecked. And the painting—that fell into the river, too, and I’m sure it’s completely waterlogged by now.”
“The painting is fine.”
I shake my head, not understanding. “But I saw the flat package on the Yamadas’ boat. And then I saw Kenji throw it, along with the drawings, once people started shooting.”
“It was blank,” Agent Chang says. “The real van Gogh painting is safely in a vault in the Kyoto National Museum. Natsuko Kikuchi told me privately, at the meeting last night, that she had a funny feeling about Hideki.”
So that explained the odd look the conservator had on her face when she hurried away to package the van Gogh, out of Hideki’s sight.
“Ms. Kikuchi couldn’t bear to send a real van Gogh out on the river like that,” Agent Chang continues. “I told her that while we couldn’t formally mount a sting operation in Japan, due to the laws forbidding undercover operations, it was not against the law for an art conservator to make an independent judgment, an ethical decision. And it was not against the law for an FBI agent, concerned for the safety of some American travelers she knows, to monitor a brewing situation and line up some officers from the Organized Crime Bureau. Now, shall we have a look at those drawings and see if they survived submersion?”
I hope the plastic tube has done its job, and the drawings aren’t water damaged.
We follow Agent Chang to a police station down the road, where we can safely open the plastic tube without tourists and onlookers watching. As Agent Chang uses a razor to slice through a laminated seal, I have a horrible thought. Maybe Fujikawa tricked us with an empty tube. I hold my breath.
Agent Chang pries off the lid and carefully shakes out three dry papers. My dad and Reika look over my shoulder.
“Nice job, kiddo,” says my dad.
It’s the three van Gogh drawings of Moon Crossing Bridge, safe and sound.
3
8
My dad and I stand before the Yamada Building in a gentle rain, waiting for Reika. We’re holding the same clear plastic umbrella as everyone else in the streets. It’s like we’re all standing in bubbles. I want to draw this. As soon as my dad’s mural is revealed, I’ll take out my sketchbook and capture this scene. I haven’t had much time to draw just for fun lately, and I want to get back into that.
It’s been hard to find spare time since we left Arashiyama two weeks ago, with all the interviews Reika and I have been doing. My dad gave a few interviews in the beginning, too. (“It’s good exposure for you,” Margo insisted to him on the phone.) But it became clear that both the Japanese and the American media were more interested in the two American girls than they were in some middle-aged artist. TEENAGERS HELP RECOVER VAN GOGHS. AMERICAN SWEETHEARTS EXPOSE CORPORATE CORRUPTION; HIDEKI YAMADA BEHIND BARS. GAIKOKUJIN GIRLS PUT NOTORIOUS GANG LEADER IN PRISON.
I also have so much going on these days at the Yamada Museum, where I’m learning from Mitsue how to assess prints for damage. I’m helping to set up an exhibit in Mitsue’s show, to show the connection between modern manga and ukiyo-e prints. Kenji and Mitsue also replaced my set of wood-carving tools, since my set floated away in the river. My ayu is coming along nicely, and Mitsue knows a printmaker in Seattle who can help me to ink and print it when I get back.
In between work and media interviews, Reika and I have been doing a lot of brainstorming on Kimono Girl together. I’ve decided to enter that teen manga contest back in Seattle, and the deadline is coming up fast. I knew I needed to make the story stronger, and to rewrite it so it didn’t end up framing Skye. Reika has turned out to be a huge help. She has really creative plot ideas, which include adding a little romance between KG and that handsome samurai in the print.
“You’d better get inside and get ready,” I tell my dad. “I’ll wait out here for Reika.”
“Okay.” But my dad seems unable to get himself through the revolving door. He stares at it, scratching his neck.
“They’re going to love it,” I assure him, even though I haven’t seen the completed mural myself. I don’t even know what he decided to do about it in the end, if he put a bridge in it or not. But I can’t imagine anyone not loving his work. And Hideki has no say about it anymore. He lost his position at the company and is awaiting trial. Kenji and Mitsue have disowned him.
“I hope so,” he mutters. “I’ve knocked myself out trying to get it done in time. The paint’s not even dry.”
“Ganbatte.” I give him a thumbs-up sign. “Do your best.”
He smiles back. “See you inside, kiddo.”
I turn to Yoshi, my wingman. “I’m okay on my own now,” I tell him. “I don’t see any reporters or paparazzi hanging around here.”
“All right, I’ll see you in there,” Yoshi says, winking at me as he pushes the revolving door. I’m so glad Kenji hired him back as personal security after Inspector Mimura confirmed that Yoshi was working for the Organized Crime Bureau
in a long-standing effort to keep tabs on Fujikawa. Hideki confessed, in custody, that he was the real informant about the sting, not Yoshi. My suspicion was correct. Hideki had sent an anonymous note to Fujikawa to warn him about the FBI’s sting operation. It was yet another part of his master plan to capitalize on Fujikawa’s interest in the van Goghs.
The only information Yoshi tried to leak was to me, in a hastily written note that he put in my backpack pocket. That weird “fortune” about the nail standing up. Knowing Hideki was dangerous, he was just trying to tell me not to take unnecessary risks. He couldn’t tell me directly that he was monitoring the situation all along.
Reika jogs up the steps a minute later, holding a huge, hot-pink umbrella, not a clear one. “Violet, you look sugoi!” she gushes.
“Thanks.” I’m wearing my latest Harajuku find: a gauzy, green sleeveless blouse, a pair of slimming pants—black, with some kind of shiny fabric—and a pair of totally sugoi sandals, with thick heels, black straps, and gleaming silver buckles. Yes, I finally found my size, confirming my suspicion that you can find anything in Japan, even size-nine sandals, if you just look hard enough.
In the lobby, my dad and Kenji stand before a curtain that has been hung across the big wall. The crowd of office workers gathering around looks eager and happy, maybe because of the impending unveiling, but maybe also because the temperature in the building has finally returned to a comfortably cool setting, now that the mural is done.
The crowd quiets as Kenji steps up to a podium. My dad and Mitsue stand off to the side.
Kenji makes a brief speech in Japanese. I don’t have a clue what he’s saying, but he seems proud. When his speech ends, everyone applauds. And Kenji pulls back the curtains.
The crowd breathes as one, gasping in awe at the mural.
