Two Graves

6

KYOKO ISHIMURA WALKED SLOWLY DOWN THE HALLWAY, whisking the polished wooden floor ahead of her with a traditional hemp broom. The hall was spotlessly clean already but Miss Ishimura, out of long practice, swept it anyway, day in, day out. The apartment—three apartments, actually, which had been combined into one by the owner—was shrouded in a close, listening silence. The traffic noise from West Seventy-Second Street barely penetrated the thick stone walls here, five stories above the street.

Returning the broom to the nearby maid’s closet, she took a felt cloth, walked a few steps farther down the hallway, and passed into a small room with Tabriz and Isfahan carpets on the floor and an antique coffered ceiling above. The room was full of beautifully bound illuminated manuscripts and incunabula, stored within cases of mahogany and leaded glass. Miss Ishimura polished first the cases, then the glass, and then, with a separate special cloth, the volumes themselves, carefully passing it over the ribbed spines, the head caps, the gilded top edges. The books, too, were already clean, but she dusted each one nevertheless. It was not simply from mere force of habit: when Miss Ishimura was anxious about something, she found solace in the act of cleaning.

Ever since her employer had returned home four days ago, without warning, he had been acting strangely. He was already a strange man, but this new behavior was exceedingly disturbing to her. He spent his days in the sprawling apartment, clothed in silk pajamas and one of his English silk dressing gowns, never speaking, staring for hours at the marble waterfall in the public room, or sitting in his Zen garden for the better part of a day, in an apparent stupor, unmoving. He had stopped reading newspapers, stopped answering the telephone, and ceased communicating in any way, even with her.

And he ate nothing—nothing. She had tried to tempt him with his favorite dishes—mozuku, shiokara—but everything went untouched. More disturbingly, he had begun taking pills. She had surreptitiously noted the names on the bottles—Dilaudid and Levo-Dromoran—looked them up on the Internet and was horrified to find they were powerful narcotics, which he showed every evidence of abusing in larger and larger quantities.

At first, it had seemed to her that he was wrapped in a deep, almost unimaginable sorrow. But as the days passed, he seemed to physically collapse as well, his skin turning gray, his cheeks slack, his eyes dark and hollow. As he sank increasingly into silence and apathy, she felt that, rather than sorrow, there was no feeling left in him at all. It was as if some terrible experience had burned all emotion from him, hollowed him out, leaving him a dry, ashen husk.

A small blue LED began to flash beside the door. For Miss Ishimura, who was deaf and mute, this was the signal that the phone was ringing. She walked over to a corner table where a telephone sat and examined the caller ID. It was Lieutenant D’Agosta, the policeman. Calling again.

She stared at the ringing phone for perhaps five seconds. Then—on impulse—she picked it up, despite express orders to the contrary. She placed the receiver in one of the TTY machines she used and typed a message: You wait, please. I will call him.

She exited the room, then passed down the long hallway, turned when it doglegged, continued down a second hallway, then stopped and rapped quietly on a shoji—a rice-paper partition serving as a door—pulling it back after a moment and stepping inside.

The room beyond contained a large Japanese ofuro bathtub built of blond hinoki wood. Agent Pendergast reclined within the tub, only his head and narrow shoulders rising above the steaming, high-walled surface. Bottles of pills and French mineral water were arrayed in lines, like sentinels, behind him. Naked, his appearance shocked her even more: his face dreadfully gaunt, and his pale eyes dark, almost bruised. A copy of T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets sat on the wide tub edge beside a heavy, gleaming straight razor. She had noticed him absently stropping the razor, sometimes for hours, in the bath, until its edge sparkled wickedly. The bathwater was tinged the palest rose—the bandage on his leg injury must be leaking again. He had done nothing about it, despite her urgent entreaties.

She handed him a note: Lieutenant D’Agosta.

Pendergast merely looked at her.

She held out the phone and mouthed a word. “Dozo.”

Still he said nothing.

“Dozo,” she mouthed again, with emphasis.

At last, he told her to engage the speakerphone in the wall. She did so, then stepped back deferentially. She could not hear, but she could read lips with complete perfection. And she had no intention of leaving.

“Hello?” came the voice, tinny and thin through the speakerphone. “Hello? Pendergast?”

“Vincent,” Pendergast replied, his voice low.

“Pendergast. My God, where have you been? I’ve been trying to reach you for days!”

Pendergast said nothing, merely reclining farther into the bath.

“What’s happened? Where’s Helen?”

“They killed Helen,” Pendergast replied in a flat, expressionless, terrible voice.

“What? What do you mean? When?”

“In Mexico. I buried her. In the desert.”

There was an audible gasp, then a brief silence, before D’Agosta spoke again. “Oh, Jesus. Jesus. Who killed her?”

“The Nazis. A shot to the heart. Point-blank range.”

“Oh, my God. I’m so sorry, so sorry. Did you… get them?”

“One got away.”

“All right. We’re going to get the bastard. Bring him to justice—”

“Why?”

“Why? What do you mean, why?”

Agent Pendergast raised his eyes to Miss Ishimura, and with a small twirl of his right index finger indicated that she should hang up the phone. The housekeeper—who had been intently watching his lips during the brief exchange—came forward after a short hesitation, pressed the OFF button, stepped backward across the slate floor of the bath, and then very quietly shut the shoji, leaving Pendergast once again alone.

Now she knew what the problem was. But it did not help her at all. Not at all.