Aces Abroad

When the water wasn't painful anymore, he got up and soaped and rinsed again and got back into the ofuro. It was time, he thought, for a decision. Either to face Peregrine and the others at the hotel, or leave town entirely, maybe stay a week at the Shukubo in Chiba City so he wouldn't run into them by accident.

Or, he thought, the third way. Let fate decide. Go on about his business, and if he was meant to find them, he would.

It happened five days later, just before sunset on Tuesday afternoon, and it was not an accident at all. He'd been talking to a waiter he knew in the kitchen of the Chikuyotei, and he'd taken the back door into an alley. When he looked up, she was there.

"Fortunato," she said. She held her wings straight out behind her. Still, they nearly touched the walls of the alley. She wore a deep blue off-the-shoulder knit dress that clung to her body. She looked to be about six months pregnant. Nothing he'd seen had mentioned it.

There was a man with her, from India or somewhere near it. He was about fifty, thick in the middle, losing his hair.

"Peregrine," Fortunato said. She looked upset, tired, relieved-all at once. Her arms came up and Fortunato went to her and held her gently. She rested her forehead on his shoulder for a second and then pulled away.

"This… this is G. C. Jayewardene," Peregrine said. The man put his palms together, elbows out, and ducked his head. "He helped me find you."

Fortunato bowed jerkily. Christ, he thought, I'm turning Japanese. Next I'll be stammering nonsense syllables at the begi

"The wild card," Jayewardene said. " I saw this moment a month ago." He shrugged. "The visions come without my asking. I don't know why or what they mean. I'm their prisoner."

"I know the feeling," Fortunato said. He looked at Peregrine again. He reached out and put a hand on her stomach. He could feel the baby moving inside her. "It's mine. Isn't it?"

She bit her lip, nodded. "But that's not the reason I'm here. I would have left you alone. I know it's what you wanted. But we need your help."

"What kind of help?"

"It's Hiram," she said. "He's disappeared."

Peregrine needed to sit down. In New York or London or Mexico City there would have been a park within walking distance. In Tokyo the space was too valuable. Fortunato's apartment was a half-hour train ride away, a four-tatami room, six feet by twelve, in a gray-walled complex with narrow halls and communal toilets and no grass or trees. Besides, only a lunatic would try to ride a train at rush hour, when whitegloved railroad employees stood by to shove people into already-packed cars.

Fortunato took them around the corner to a cafeteriastyle sushi bar. The decor was red vinyl, white Formica, and chrome. The sushi traveled the length of the room on a conveyor belt that passed all the booths.

"We can talk here," Fortunato said. "But I wouldn't try the food. If you want to eat, I'll take you someplace else-but it'd mean waiting in line."

"No," Peregrine said. Fortunato could see that the sharp vinegar and fish smells weren't sitting well on her stomach. "This is fine."

They'd already asked each other how they'd been, walking over here, and both of them had been pleasant and vague in their answers. Peregrine had told him about the baby. Healthy, she said, normal as far as anyone could tell. Fortunato had asked Jayewardene a few polite questions. There was nothing left but to get down to it.

"He left this letter," Peregrine said. Fortunato looked it over. The handwriting seemed jagged, unlike Hiram's usual compulsive penmanship. It said he was leaving the tour for "personal reasons." He assured everyone he was in good health. He hoped to rejoin them later. If not, he would see them in New York.

"We know where he is," Peregrine said. "Tachyon found him, telepathically, and made sure he wasn't hurt or anything. But he refuses to go into Hiram's brain and find out what's wrong. He says he doesn't have the right. He won't let any of us talk to Hiram, either. He says if somebody wants to leave the tour it's not our business. Maybe he's right. I know if I tried to talk to him, it wouldn't do any good."

"Why not? You two always got along."

"He's different now. He hasn't been the same since December. It's like some witch doctor put a curse on him while we were in the Caribbean."

"Did something specific happen to set him off?"

"Something happened, but we don't know what. We were having lunch at the Palace Sunday with Prime Minister Nakasone and all these other officials. Suddenly there's this man in a cheap suit. He just walks in and hands Hiram a piece of paper. Hiram got very pale and wouldn't say anything about it. That afternoon he went back to the hotel by himself. Said he wasn't feeling good. That must have been when he packed and moved out, because Sunday night he was gone."

"Do you remember anything else about the man in the suit?"

"He had a tattoo. It came out from under his shirt and went down his wrist. God knows how far up his arm it went. It was really vivid, all these greens and reds and blues."

"It probably covered his whole body," Fortunato said. He rubbed his temples, where his regular daily headache had set in. "He was yakuza."

"Yakuza…" Jayewardene said.

Peregrine looked from Fortunato to Jayewardene and back. "Is that bad?"

"very bad," Jayewardene said. "Even I have heard of them. They're gangsters."

"Like the Mafia," Fortunato said. "Only not as centralized. Each family-they call them clans-is on its own. There's something like twenty-five hundred separate clans in Japan, each with its own oyabun. The oyabun is like the don. It means 'in the role of parent.' If Hiram's in trouble with the yak, we may not even be able to find out which clan is after him."

Peregrine took another piece of paper out of her purse. "This is the address of Hiram's hotel. I… told Tachyon I wouldn't see him. I told him somebody should have it in case of emergency. Then. Mr. Jayewardene told me about his vision…"

Fortunato put his hand on the paper but didn't look at it.

"I don't have any power left," he said. " I used everything I had fighting the Astronomer, and there isn't anything left." It had been back in September, Wild Card Day in New York. The fortieth a

That had been the night he had made love to Peregrine for the first and last time. The night her child had been conceived.

"It doesn't matter," Peregrine said. "Hiram respects you. He'll listen to you."

In fact, Fortunato thought, he's afraid of me and he blames me for the death of a woman he used to love. A woman Fortunato had used as a pawn against the Astronomer, and lost. A woman Fortunato had loved too. Years ago.

But if he walked away now he wouldn't see Peregrine again. It had been hard enough to stay away from her, knowing that she was so close by. It was a whole other order of difficult to get up and walk away from her when she was right there in front of him, so tall and powerful and overflowing with emotions. The fact that she carried his child made it even harder, made just one more thing he wasn't ready to think about.

"I'll try," Fortunato said. "I'll do what I can."

Hiram's room was in the Akasaka Shanpia, a businessman's hotel near the train station. Except for the narrow hallways and the shoes outside the doors, it could have been any middle-price hotel in the U.S. Fortunato knocked on Hiram's door. There was a hush, as if all noises inside the room had suddenly stopped.