Some miles beyond the town, the car slowed and turned off up a hilly road. The driver turned into what looked like a cement works. Findhorn glimpsed the flickering blue of TV monitors through the slatted blinds of the big windows. Then the car was through the works and winding up a narrow, tarmacked path with a lawn on either side, interspersed with small manicured trees and wrestlers, holy men and geisha girls, laquered and life-sized.
The house was a simple one-storied affair. It comprised half a dozen or so simple buildings, all glass and unvarnished wood and verandas and pagoda-like roofs, linked by sheltered walkways and hump-backed bridges over still water, and surrounded by paths through lawns interspersed with miniature trees and stone lanterns. Through some tall trees Findhorn glimpsed what seemed to be a small golf course. A gardener with a long fishing net was scooping up leaves from a pond. He paid Findhorn no attention.
The car stopped and Mr Friendship opened Findhorn's door with a scowl. A middle-aged woman, in a traditional kimono and heavy-framed spectacles, was standing at the top of a flight of wooden steps. As Findhorn approached she smiled, bowed, said, 'O-agari kudasai' and, to Findhorn's embarrassment, dropped to her knees, untied his shoe laces and slipped his feet into brown slippers.
There was a large, scented atrium, almost bare of furniture apart from a couple of low chairs, some vases with flowers, and a pedestal a few feet ahead of him. The pedestal had Kanji script written down it, and it was topped with a bust of a severe-looking, bald-headed character. And in case anyone had missed the point first time round, Matsumo stared down severely in oil from the wall on the left. Findhorn was suddenly struck by the resemblance to Ming the Merciless in an old Flash Gordon movie he'd seen as a boy. In the circumstances, the comparison brought him no comfort.
The woman led the way past the pedestal to a sliding paper door, and bowed as Findhorn entered. He had hardly noticed the Friendship Society men until they closed the door behind him.
The room was furnished with little more than a low table, on which a few magazines were neatly piled. There were no chairs, but thin, square cushions and tatami mats were scattered around the floor in a geometric pattern. Delicate scents came from flowers in vases occupying the corners of the room. The walls were paper screens. One wall was taken up, floor to ceiling, by a bookcase, the opposite one by a number of unusual paintings.
Findhorn, tense and sensing danger, looked at the nearest one. It was a rectangle about four feet long, filled with what looked like half a dozen big whorls. They were light blue. Some were overlying others, partly obliterating them, while others seemed to merge, the lines at their edges running parallel. Here and there little thin fingers of lines tried to squeeze through their big brothers. As he looked, Findhorn began to make sense of the patterns, to detect a strange mixture of harmony and clashing, order and chaos. It was both peaceful and, as he looked, increasingly hypnotic.
'You are looking at the rolling waves of the sea.'
Findhorn turned, startled.
The gardener, alias Yoshi Matsumo.
Findhorn said, 'I thought I was seeing fingerprints.'
Matsumo's expression didn't change. He spoke in good Oriental English. 'How can I put this delicately? To understand the painting one needs, shall we say, a certain sensitivity, I suppose you could call it an awareness of artistic form. The painting is in the traditional style known as Nihon-ga. It is by Matazo Kayama, from Kyoto. He is a master of the style.'
Matsumo hadn't bowed, offered to shake hands, smiled or said O-agari kudasai. His words were polite; but his expression was that of a man who has just disturbed a burglar.
Matsumo continued, 'You have come a very long way, Findhorn-san. I believe you would benefit from a very long rest.'
Findhorn thought that maybe Matsumo's English wasn't perfect and that he didn't mean it the way it sounded.
29
Matsumo
'Look down there, young lady.' The doctor's hands waved over the city. 'And tell me what you see.'
Sachs and Romella were standing on a verandah, wine glasses in hand. They were high above a long main road, with car headlights drifting along in both directions; it was now almost dark. The Alps, low in the distance, formed a background to the church-scattered skyline. The sound of clattering dishes came from the kitchen.
Romella looked over the skyline of the mediaeval city. 'A stunning view. A lot of busy traffic. Big department stores. Hordes of people doing last-minute Christmas shopping.'
Sachs said, 'I look down and I see ghosts. It was along the Ludwigstrasse that the Brownshirts used to march, behind row after row of swastikas. There were children in Bavarian costumes, there were brass bands pounding out old Bavarian marching tunes. I feel a sense of dissociation.' His English was excellent, if accented. 'Somehow I'm just not part of what you see, the ghosts are my reality. But you can't understand what I mean.'
Maybe not.
He continued, 'Anyway, your interest is not in my life's journey, but in that of this Lisa woman. She survived.'
She survived! A thrill ran through Romella. 'How do you know?'
The old doctor smiled. 'I met her. It was through the grapevine, as I think you call it nowadays. She had been a good communist at the University, like me, as well as being Jewish. An acquaintance in medical school had heard of a survivors' group based in Leipzig — a handful of people, you understand. I made contact, and there she was, the only one of the group I knew. We swore to keep in touch, and have done so ever since.'
'She's still alive?'
'And happily married. We write to each other every year.'
Romella tried to keep the urgency out of her voice. 'I'd be extremely grateful if you could arrange a meeting.'
The doctor frowned; Romella held her breath. Then he was saying, 'Forgive me, I'm neglecting my wife. Misha, you should have called me. Why don't you sit down, fraulein, while I do my duty in the kitchen?'
The Friendship reps stood one on either side of the bathing-room door, presumably to intervene should Findhorn attempt to drown Yoshi Matsumo.
Findhorn sat chest-deep in the wooden tub, his clothes ostensibly removed for ironing but in reality, he suspected, to search for electronic devices. He was sweating in the painfully hot water, and any movement was painful. Steam billowed around the little room.
Matsumo, his expression openly hostile, contemplated Findhorn. 'I ask myself, did this man cross Asia to apologize in person for his theft of the Petrosian papers? He did not. Well then, has he come full of contrition, ready to give them to me? He has not. There are no papers in your luggage, nor did you deposit any between Kansai and Hikone.' He sipped at a small glass of saki and continued: 'There remain two possibilities. He has come to negotiate a sale with me, or he has come to blackmail me with the documents. On either count, I admire your courage if not your intelligence.'
'You're wrong on both counts. I'm here to propose an alliance.'
Matsumo's eyes peered into Findhorn's, looking for a trick. 'For what purpose? Why do you imagine I would possibly make an alliance with you?'
'Our interests coincide, at least momentarily. The secret has been taken from me.'
'What?' Ripples of hot water spread out from Matsumo. 'Who has taken the papers?'
'They were stolen from me by a man from Sirius.'
Matsumo's expression didn't change. Findhorn continued, 'The same man who intended to steal the process from you.'