Then she looks up and sees the desolation on his face, knows that he feels responsible for landing her in life-destroying trouble.
But it’s not his fault, she thinks bitterly. It’s mine. I allowed ambition to goad me into bending the rules. I cut corners that ought not to be cut. He shouldn’t have to suffer for my failings.
“You’re right,” she says, arranging her mouth into something she hopes will pass for a smile. “I’m sure nobody will notice the small differences between them.” She bows deeply, holding the bowl. “Thank you for your generosity, Uchida-bōsan.”
Robin waves a brave and falsely hopeful farewell to the priest before stepping onto the train to begin her long trek back to Tokyo.
Finally, she can give in to sheer, unadulterated misery. Fortunately, the train isn’t crowded this afternoon, so her fellow passengers can give a wide berth to the alarming foreigner who’s hunched into the seat by the window, dabbing at her blotchy face and running nose with a wad of damp toilet tissue.
But wallowing in despair doesn’t help Robin feel better, it only conjures up unpleasant variations on what will happen next if she can’t figure out how to get herself and Nori Okuda out of this mess. For the next four hours, towns and rice fields zip past unseen as she racks her brain, cobbling together plans, shooting them down.
She’s no closer to a solution by the time she stands, swaying and exhausted, on the local that drops her at Tawaramachi, the station nearest to where Nori lives. She drags herself to Kappabashi Street under a blindingly bright full moon, which makes the steep flight of stairs up to the Okuda flat seem even darker. She’s running on fumes, but Nori is expecting her, and she can’t put off telling her partner in crime the terrible truth. She rings the doorbell, wishing she could be anywhere but here.
All too swiftly, Nori is standing before her, vibrating with nerves. Her eyes latch onto Robin’s nylon grocery bag.
“Did you get it? The document?”
“Yes. I took a photo. It’s on my phone.”
“Okay, good,” Nori breathes a sigh of relief, missing the defeat in Robin’s voice. She sets out a pair of guest slippers, then runs ahead to switch on the light in the main room.
“Come in, sit down,” she calls over her shoulder, disappearing down the hall toward the kitchen. “I’ll make us some tea.”
The cord pull is still swinging over the low lacquer table as Robin drops onto the same floor cushion she’d occupied before. Dreading the next half hour more than she’s dreaded anything in her life, she unties the cord from around Hikitoru’s wooden box and frees the dipping bowl from Hikitoru’s old wrapper. No point in delaying the inevitable. She sets it in the middle of the table.
Nori returns with the tea tray and deals out the Four Seasons cups and saucers, then takes her place across the table and pours. Full teacup in hand, her smile falters as she belatedly reads the disaster written on Robin’s face.
“Is something wrong? What happened? Is there something wrong with the paper that’s supposed to get Inspector Anzai off my back?”
“No, that’s not the problem. It says exactly what Uchida-bōsan said it did. But . . .” she can’t bear to look Nori in the eye, “while he was performing the ceremony, Uchida-bōsan broke Hikitoru.”
“He . . . what?” Nori snatches up the dipping bowl. “Is it cracked? Where?” She examines it inside and out. “I don’t see it.” Puzzled, she flips it over.
“That’s not it. That’s not Hikitoru.”
“What do you mean, it’s not Hikitoru?” She stares at the bowl in her hand. “This is a fake?”
“Not . . . exactly. It was made by Yakibō too, but . . .”
Robin sets a Shigaraki sweets box on the table and lifts the lid.
“This is Hikitoru.”
Nori stares at the jumble of broken pottery and snatches up one of the fragments in disbelief. Her eyes shift back and forth between the sharp-edged piece in one hand and the unbroken tea bowl in the other, as Robin explains how the priest had smashed Hikitoru in the woods behind the Hayashi kiln, and tried to make things right by replacing it with Yakibō’s reject Hikitoru, the tea bowl he’d used as a water dipper. By the time she finishes, the broken piece is clutched, forgotten, in Nori’s curled fingers, her expression congealed into blank shock.
“I’m so sorry,” Robin says, losing her battle with despair. “Ever since I left Shigaraki, I’ve been trying to think of a way out of this mess, but nothing works. Hikitoru might be able to be repaired, but there’s no time, and if I try to pass this dipping bowl off as the real thing, my boss will spot it. I even thought of faking a robbery, but the company’s security systems are too complicated. Too much could go wrong. If I got caught, we’d be in even worse trouble than we are now. I just . . . I can’t—” Her voice breaks. She buries her face in her arms and sobs, “I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry.”
Cats squabble in the alley outside, a distant siren wails, but no words of forgiveness come from Nori. And Robin doesn’t blame her. Not one bit.
When she finally raises her head, Nori’s gaze is fixed on the dipping bowl, but she doesn’t look as angry as she deserves to be. Obviously, it hasn’t hit her yet.
Not knowing what else to do, Robin begins to gather up the discarded wrapping and cord.
“I don’t get it,” Nori finally says.
Robin wilts, not sure she has the strength to go through it again. “What don’t you get?”
“Why this is the end of the world.”
If Robin could sink any lower, she would. In a defeated voice, she explains again. “Hikitoru is broken. We can’t put it back in the safe now. Once they discover it missing on Monday morning, all hell is going to break loose.”
“Yeah, but . . . do you really think they’ll guess this one isn’t the real Hikitoru? Because I sure wouldn’t. If my grandmother were here, she’d say, ‘they’ll buy it if you sell it, sweetheart.’ I mean, the way I see it, all we have to do is—”
Her words bounce off Robin’s ears, the dipping bowl swims in and out of focus. It’s not Hikitoru and never will b—
“What time did you get up this morning?”
“What?” Robin blinks.
“Not to be rude or anything,” Nori says, eyeing her critically, “but you look like you just fought ten bouts in the sumo ring. And you didn’t win. We’ve got thirty-six hours to come up with a plan, but you’re not going to be much help until you get some sleep.” In a kinder voice, she adds, “If you’re too beat to make it home, I could pull out my parents’ old futon . . .”
Robin is suddenly aware of how sore her feet are from walking in the “good” pumps she’d put on a lifetime ago, and how much her back aches from eight hours hunched in a train seat. She’s more tired than she’s ever been in her life. Maybe things will look better in the morning, if she faces them in clean clothes and sneakers. She swipes her ravaged face on her sleeve.
“Thanks for the offer,” she replies, trying to muster a smile. “But I should go home. Take a shower. And . . . I’ve got this goldfish. It’s probably pretty hungry by now.”
“Okay,” Nori says collecting the tea things. “Meet back here in the morning? Early?”
Robin staggers to her feet. “I’ll bring coffee.”
“Make mine black. And would you mind picking up some rice balls from the little supermarket on the way from the subway station? The tuna ones are the best.”
50.
Present-Day Japan
SUNDAY, APRIL 13
Tokyo
Nori yawns, lifting the new tea bowl and the carton of pottery shards from the secret hiding place. She carries them down the hall to the kitchen, where dawn is just beginning to pinken the curtains hanging over the tiny window. Kneeling on a worn cushion, she places the tea bowl atop the once-bold oilcloth on the low table, its plaid now scrubbed down to pale reds, yellows, and greens. Then she lines up the pieces of Hikitoru, contemplating them like a jigsaw puzzle. The doorbell peals.
Rob
in is on the landing with two coffees and a supermarket bag. Her eyes are still bruised with fatigue, but she’s standing straighter. She greets Nori with a weak smile.
“Good thing we decided to meet early. A peewee baseball team came into the market right behind me and hoovered up the rest of the tuna rice balls.”
Robin follows her to the kitchen and her smile fades a little, at the sight of the pottery shards. They sit and sort out the coffees—white for Robin, black for Nori.
“Itadakimasu,” they both mutter, blessing their rice balls as they unwrap them.
“Thanks,” Nori says, “for breakfast. And for getting a photo of that thing the priest’s grand-whatever wrote. At least I won’t have to worry about Inspector Anzai hauling me off to jail tomorrow.”
“Don’t thank me until we figure out how to make that permanent,” Robin warns, taking an exploratory sip of coffee, then a bigger one when she finds it cool enough to drink. “The thing is . . .” She puts down her cup. “I’ve been thinking about this all night, and once we get you off the hook for ‘intent to sell,’ there’s no reason you should share the blame. For any of this. Unless you looked up at one of the security cameras while we were in the lab, you can walk away. There’s no reason for us both to go to jail.”
“There’s no reason for either of us to go to jail.”
Nori balls up her onigiri wrapper and takes it to the trash. She returns, looking down at the dipping bowl.
“I still can’t believe this isn’t Hikitoru. I’d never have known if you hadn’t told me. Why would it be so impossible to swap this one for the one that got broken?”
“My boss will know. Instantly. She’s one of the top Japanese ceramics experts in the country. If she doesn’t spot the differences in the clay and glazing pattern, she’ll know by the shape. Even I could tell. The moment she picks it up, she’ll know it’s not the real one.”
“Well, maybe it’s not the Hikitoru, but it’s a Hikitoru,” Nori argues. “It’s at least the bronze medalist, maybe even the silver. Passing it off as the first-choice Hikitoru wouldn’t even be a crime.”
“Hashimoto-san still won’t let us get away with it.”
“What’s she going to do, tell her boss?”
“For starters. Then the police.”
“As my grandmother would say if she were here, ‘so what’? Your word against hers.”
“Yeah, but who would believe a lowly authentication assistant over the Japanese Ceramics Expert?”
“Believing isn’t proof.”
“Until they check the pictures. Or someone who saw the real Hikitoru backs her up.”
“Like who? Who’s seen it, besides your boss?”
Robin sips her coffee, thinking. “I’m sure she showed it to Fujimori-san.”
“Is his eye as good as hers?”
“No,” Robin admits. “He’s not actually an art expert at all. I bet all he saw when he looked at Hikitoru was a fat stack of ten-thousand-yen notes. He’d believe Hashimoto-san over me, of course, but you’re right—he wouldn’t swear to it. Not to the police. But let’s not forget that Inspector Anzai got a good look too.”
“I bet all he saw was ‘Case Closed’ stamped across that old police report, though,” Nori counters. “He wasn’t paying much attention to what Hikitoru actually looked like, just that its size and shape matched the description. This bowl is slightly rounder, but I measured it last night before I went to bed, and it’s less than a half centimeter off in each direction. Close enough to pass. What about the head priest of Senkō-ji, though? Do you think they showed it to him?”
“No, by the time Fujimori got involved, Hikitoru was under lock and key in the lab, and there are no names on the sign-out. I’m pretty sure they did their deal over the phone.”
“Anybody else?”
“That’s it, I think.”
“Okay.” Time for another rice ball. Unwrapping it, Nori asks, “What about photos? Does your boss have photos of the old Hiki-toru?”
“No. I just took the authentication shots on Friday, and haven’t put them in my report yet.”
“Didn’t you take some the day I first came in?”
“You’re right.” Robin grimaces. “But I could delete those from the intake file and substitute new ones.”
“Good. What about the internet? I searched pretty hard, but . . .”
“I did too, until I realized that if there were any photos of it out there, some Yakibō scholar would have pounced on them long before now.”
“What about books?”
“Hard to know.” Robin ponders the question. “Photography hadn’t been invented when Hikitoru began gathering dust in Senkō-ji’s treasure house in 1788,” she says, thinking aloud. “And if the temple had photos, wouldn’t they have been given to the police when the theft was reported? The only time pictures could have been taken was after it was stolen in 1945. Do you know who had it before your grandmother got ahold of it?”
Nori hasn’t told a living soul that she knows the identity of the thief, but she can hardly keep that from Robin now. She opens her mouth to answer, but it’s surprisingly hard to admit.
“Nobody took pictures of it after it left the temple,” she says. Maybe Robin will just take her word for it.
“How do you know?”
Crap. Nori rises and crosses to the small window.
“I’m sure there aren’t any photos,” she says, “because it went straight from the temple’s treasure house to ours. My grandmother is the one who stole it.”
“Your grandmother was the thief?”
Nori hangs her head. Being related to a thief is almost as shameful as being one yourself.
“But . . . that’s the best news I’ve ever heard!”
She whips around to find Robin grinning for the first time since she returned.
“I was afraid that there might have been a whole string of shady owners between 1945 and now,” she explains, “and we’d be lucky if they were just thieves, not drug runners or arms traffickers. I was worried they might come after Hikitoru, once they hear it’s surfaced. I can’t tell you how relieved I am that your grandmother had it the whole time.”
Sounding more optimistic, Robin says, “Okay. Next steps.” She picks up the dipping bowl and eyes it critically. “I need to go into the office this afternoon and delete all the photos I took of the other Hikitoru, and substitute shots of this one instead. And I should probably redo the thermo-luminescence testing too, so the numbers in the authentication report match the dipping bowl exactly.”
“Is there time?”
“If I prepare the samples this afternoon and let them cure overnight, I could run the analysis before work tomorrow.”
“What about the security sensor? You saved the one you took off Hikitoru, right?”
“I did, but,” worry casts a small shadow, “I had a hard time finding the right solvent, so it got a little banged up while I was scraping it off. When the security chief takes it to the lab to remove it before the press conference, he’ll know it’s been tampered with.”
“I don’t think we need to be too worried about that,” Nori says. “If you manage to convince your boss that Uchida-bōsan’s document raises too many questions about Hikitoru’s ownership, there won’t be a press conference.”
51.
Present-Day Japan
MONDAY, APRIL 14
Tokyo
Something buzzes as Robin steps through the security gate in the still-dark Fujimori Fine Art lobby. But it’s not the alarm, it’s her phone. Who would be messaging her at this hour of the morning? She excavates it from her bag. Uchida-bōsan? What’s he doing up so early?
Swann-san,
I haven’t been able to sleep all night, worrying about your meeting with your boss today. I deeply regret not insisting that you take the original documents supporting my temple’s claim to the tea bowl, and since there’s no time to messenger them now, I’ve decided to bring them myself. Right now, I’m standing on t
he platform at Shigaraki Station, waiting for the first train. I should be in Tokyo by 10:30. I hope that’s not too late. I’ll come straight to the address on your business card, unless it would be more convenient for you to meet me somewhere else. Let me know?
Uchida
Ten-thirty. That’ll be cutting it close—the press conference is scheduled for two. But if she can delay talking to Hashimoto-san until he arrives, there should still be time to stop the handover.
Gratitude blooms. She hadn’t realized how much she dreaded doing this alone. The priest’s solid presence backing up the authenticity of the dipping bowl will be as much of a comfort as the evidence he’s bringing.
She sends him a warm reply, thanking him and promising to postpone the meeting until he gets there. Then she unlocks the lab and gets to work.
After feeding the dipping bowl samples she’d left curing overnight into the thermo-luminescence tester, she perches on a lab stool, nipping at a cuticle, waiting for the machine to render the results. They finally pop up on the monitor and she scans them.
Just as she thought. They’re so close to Hikitoru’s, she could have used the old numbers and saved herself the trouble of running new tests. Still, it’s a relief. She’ll need all the ammunition she can get when she shows them to Hashimoto-san this morning. It hadn’t been hard to pretend a confidence she didn’t feel when Nori was coaching her in the art of salesmanship yesterday, but bluffing her way through the substitution while looking Hashimoto-san in the eye will be another matter.
She turns to her laptop and substitutes the new numbers for the old in the authentication report. Then she checks to make sure that the dipping bowl photos she came into the office to shoot yesterday were saved in place of the old ones in both the report and the intake form she’d filled out on the first day Nori brought Hikitoru to the office. All good. She deletes the old ones permanently from the hard drive. The report is now an airtight authentication of the dipping bowl that she’d switched into Hikitoru’s box yesterday before locking it back inside the safe. If anyone insists on testing it, there will be nothing to fuel suspicions that this isn’t the same tea bowl Nori brought in for authentication two weeks ago.
The Last Tea Bowl Thief Page 27
