Lord of All Things Page 8

  Thunderstruck, he sat up in bed, switched his reading lamp back on, thought it through once more, and then one more time after that and then one more time again, and he couldn’t find a flaw. There was no reason why it shouldn’t work. It was wrong to think there had to be poor people so that there could be rich people! It was a fallacy! Totally misguided! Everybody could be as rich as they wanted. Everybody could have whatever they wanted, and nobody would have to harden their hearts or live a wicked life. And best of all, it was such a simple idea. Child’s play! The most astonishing thing about it was nobody had stumbled across the idea before him.

  There was no way he could sleep now. Hiroshi grabbed a notepad and pen from the shelf and began to write it all down. This was an important idea. He mustn’t forget it, whatever happened. But he wouldn’t forget. Quite the opposite. The more he wrote and the longer he thought about it, the more certain he became he had found the answer, the answer to all the problems of rich and poor, money and work, and all the rest.

  It took quite some time to write it all down. When he was done, he put the notepad down and turned the light off. His last thought before he fell asleep was that he would tell Charlotte all about it the next time they met.

  The next morning it was raining, which was unusual for that time of year. It was a gentle summer rain that seemed to melt away into the air before ever hitting the ground, a rain that felt good. Afterward, the air was wonderfully fresh, and everybody seemed to be in a good mood. And later that afternoon there were five dolls in Charlotte’s window.

  “I’m just going out for a bit,” Hiroshi told his mother as she came through the door.

  “Where?” she asked.

  He already had his shoes on and was halfway out of the door. “I’m going to meet Charlotte,” he called out, making sure he was well out of range before she could protest.

  Charlotte was jumping up and down with delight when he arrived. “I thought they’d never leave! Honestly, I could hardly stand the waiting. Come on in,” she said, taking his sleeve and pulling him into her room. She dragged him over to the desk, where there was a tray with all sorts of things to eat—tiny little schnitzels, colorful salads, strips of ham rolled up around some pale filling, and plenty of things Hiroshi had never even seen before. “I wheedled some food out of the cook, leftovers from dinner. That way, you don’t have to rush home. Come on, dig in! I’ll eat a bit as well, but just to be polite, because I’m already full.”

  “Where are your parents?” Hiroshi asked as he sat down, unsure about this.

  “They’re at a reception at some other embassy. Argentina, or Chile, or I don’t know where. Here, start with these.” She pushed a plate toward him that held some salad with finely sliced oranges in it, and a slice of dark ham, and some sort of pink sauce.

  It tasted unfamiliar but incredibly good. While he ate and ate—he couldn’t get over how good the food tasted—he felt a nasty feeling creep up inside him that almost choked him, a feeling he’d never experienced before. Envy. Plain and simple envy that Charlotte got good things like this to eat every evening, while he didn’t. He wanted so badly to be able to eat delicious food like this every day. And then he remembered that now he knew—he knew what to do so that everyone could be rich, including him. The thought calmed him down, and he began to feel happy and confident instead. He looked forward to seeing Charlotte’s face when he explained it all to her.

  “When you’ve had enough, we can head out to the swings,” she broke in just as he was considering how he would tell her. “It’s a beautiful day outside.”

  “Okay,” said Hiroshi, pushing aside the empty plate and pulling the next one toward him, “but not until I’ve had enough.”

  He ate every bit of food. He couldn’t help himself; it was that good. Afterward, he slumped in his swing and watched her swinging higher and higher. He tried to tell her his idea, but she was hardly listening, just kept on at him to join in and swing. She didn’t even want to know how he thought it would work; she just said straightaway that it wouldn’t, that not everybody could be rich.

  He understood what she was thinking; until the day before he had thought the same way. But it didn’t have to be that way. There was an answer, and he was just about to tell her what it was when he suddenly realized something that hadn’t occurred to him until that very moment. His idea was simple. It was child’s play. If he told her now, then she would tell someone else, maybe her father. And he would certainly tell someone else in turn, and then what? An ambassador can make his voice heard much more easily than some ten-year-old Japanese kid, and people would be more likely to believe the ambassador had thought it up. The idea would get out into the world, and nobody would ever know—or believe it if they found out—that it had been his idea first, that he had been the one to find the answer.

  Hiroshi felt as though he had been struck by lightning. He knew now he would have to be the one to make his idea a reality. And that until he did, he would have to keep it quiet.

  And it was strange…at the very moment he realized this, Charlotte suddenly seemed to become more interested. “How are you going to do that?” she asked as she swung back and forth ever faster, ever higher.

  “I’m not telling you,” Hiroshi shot back.

  “Because you don’t know. You’re just showing off.”

  Hiroshi leaned back and flung his legs out in front of him to swing higher. She didn’t have a clue. Nobody had a clue. He was the only one. “Just wait,” he said and got ready to jump. Jumping from the swing—just letting go and flying through the air—was the best feeling there was.

  And so he didn’t mention his idea again, not that whole evening, particularly since Charlotte didn’t ask again. But when it got dark and he went home, he let his mother scold him till she fell quiet and then he fetched his Masters of the Universe notebook from the tin. He finally knew what he would write in it.

  5

  The first thing Charlotte did when she found out was run to her room and put Valérie in the window. Then she ran straight down to the garden to the spot where Hiroshi would climb over the fence. The quarter hour until his head popped up over the wall lasted an eternity for her.

  “Oh, here you are,” he said, surprised to see her.

  “We’re going to the museum tomorrow,” she told him excitedly. “And you absolutely have to come along!”

  He frowned. “Which museum?”

  “Seito-Jinjiya, the Island of the Saints. Tomorrow is the last day it’s open this year, and Yumiko’s taking me. My mother doesn’t want to go. That means that you can come along.”

  Hiroshi hesitated. “I don’t know. We’re flying out to see my grandparents in two days. I don’t know whether I can get away before then.”

  “That’s in two days,” Charlotte thought that Hiroshi was always much too cautious about things. He wanted to make everybody rich, but he couldn’t go out to a museum. “Just be at the main gate at nine o’clock tomorrow morning.”

  Of course, he was standing there the next morning when she came through the gate with Yumiko. Charlotte had managed to persuade her mother to let them take the metro rather than a boring old limousine. Papa had taken her side and explained that Tokyo was really a very safe city, that nobody was going to kidnap Charlotte and Yumiko. He also said that because they were diplomats, they had an obligation to show they trusted the Japanese police to keep order.

  How thrilling! Charlotte had never been on Tokyo public transit, nor had she ever been so far from home. All she knew of subway systems was the Paris metro. There had been talk of building a metro in Delhi as well, but the only form of public transit there had been some crummy-looking buses, and Charlotte had never wanted to take those. And now here was the subway station. It was called Hiroo Station, and it was much cleaner than the Paris metro. All along the platform there were yellow lines with textured bumps set into them where you had to stand and wa
it for the train—Yumiko was very strict about that.

  A boxy, silver-gray train with red stripes pulled in and came to a stop. The doors opened by themselves, not like in Paris. Masses of people got off and on, and by the time they boarded there were no seats left.

  “Hold on tight,” Yumiko told them.

  Some of the people who had seats were asleep, many of them slumped almost across their neighbors. When the train pulled into the next station, some of them sat up with a start, leapt to their feet, and left the carriage as though they did this every day of the week.

  They had to transfer a couple of times before they resurfaced at ground level. They continued their journey on a green bus, whose seats were upholstered in some weird comic book–figure pattern. They had to get on at the back and take a ticket from a machine, then hold on to it carefully, because they would only pay when they got off at the other end. They rode the bus for a long time. At first it threaded its way through narrow little streets not so different from the ones around the embassy. Then they drove along a main road for a while. Eventually, gardens began to appear along the side of the road, then trees and even meadows.

  At last they got off. They passed through a wooden gate guarded by two snarling lions carved from weathered gray stone. A set of very shallow steps led up the hill between bushes and trees to an open space, where lots of people were standing about as though at a festival. Then came the actual entrance, another gate, where they had to bow down deeply and go to a basin to wash with water: first the left hand, then the right, then rinse their mouths.

  Charlotte was surprised to see the Island of the Saints itself was only a tiny part of the temple grounds. Beneath a sturdy roof held up by two rows of thick, wooden, almost-black pillars was a rectangular pond hardly bigger than her room at home. In the middle of the pond was an island covered entirely with fine, white gravel. From where they were standing, they could look out across the island to a part of the temple gardens that was not open to visitors, a landscape of mossy rocks, pale green bamboo, and tiny little trees bowed down as though before an unrelenting wind. It was an enchanted landscape, meticulously planned. If you squinted just a little, you could imagine you were a giant looking down onto a world empty of people.

  The gravel on the island was raked into smooth curving lines, like waves of stone, rippling outward from a little altar that stood on this side of the island. It was made of some brown wood that looked worn and tired, maybe bamboo, perhaps hundreds of years old. Several objects lay on the altar, including a knife, notched, night black, gleaming dangerously. The sight of the knife took Charlotte’s breath away.

  “What’s that?” she asked Yumiko.

  Yumiko smiled indulgently. “It’s the Island of the Saints. They say that it is the grave of two holy men who worked miracles here a thousand years ago—”

  “No, I mean the knife!” Charlotte grabbed Yumiko’s sleeve and dragged her over to a bulletin board that might explain what they were looking at—but it was only in Japanese. “Read it for me. What does it say about the knife?”

  Yumiko studied the text. “Hmm. It’s a dagger made of kokuyoseki. It belonged to the first emperor, Jimmu, and it was probably made three thousand years ago in Honshu.”

  Charlotte stared at the knife. “What’s kokuyoseki?” She didn’t know the Japanese word for obsidian, and she wouldn’t have known the French word either.

  “A special sort of stone, I think,” Yumiko said hesitantly. “Like marble but black.”

  Charlotte looked at the knife and felt disappointed by the explanation. It was far too…small a story for this thing that held her gaze so hypnotically. From the moment she had seen the knife on the altar, she hadn’t been able to take her eyes off it, hadn’t been interested in anything else, had found herself coming back again and again to the only place in the whole temple that was really worth seeing.

  She let the crowd carry her along but kept glancing back, thinking all the time about the stretch of water between the paved yard and the altar, about how wide the gap was, how deep it might be, whether she could perhaps wade across.

  “What’s the matter with you?” Hiroshi asked. She didn’t reply. She didn’t know how to explain it to him. Every time she looked back, it was as though the black knife were looking in turn at her—as though that gleaming knife on the other side of the water were a wild animal in a zoo.

  At last she found her chance. Yumiko said she was going to the restrooms back by the gate and told Hiroshi and Charlotte to wait for her.

  “Or we could wait by the island?” Charlotte suggested straightaway. “It’s very pretty over there.”

  “Good, then; by the island,” Yumiko said, agreeable as always, and hurried away.

  Charlotte turned straight to Hiroshi. “Quick,” she whispered. “Help me. I want to touch that knife!”

  Hiroshi looked at her in astonishment. “What knife?”

  “Come on!” Charlotte grabbed his hand and dragged him back to the front of the pond, where only a narrow strip of water separated them from the altar. Though there were plenty of visitors at the shrine that day, by some miracle there was nobody around right at that moment.

  “Hold on tight,” she ordered, reaching out her left hand to Hiroshi as she stepped up to the edge of the water. “Then I can lean forward and stretch.”

  Hiroshi did as he was told, holding fast to her left hand and bracing his feet against the lip of the paving stones by the pond. It was barely half an inch high. Charlotte inched her feet down the slope until the tips of her shoes were touching the water. Then she leaned forward, with Hiroshi anchoring her, and stretched out her right hand as far as she could. Her heart was pounding like a drum. She didn’t know why she had to touch this knife, but she did. The temptation was incredible, hypnotic, and she leaned out toward the altar on Island of the Saints. But no matter how she strained, willing her arm to grow, no matter how far she stretched her fingers, she couldn’t get close enough.

  “Come on!” she groaned. “Let me farther down!”

  Hiroshi was breathing hard as well, and his hold on her began to slip. “I don’t know if it’ll work. I can barely hold on to you.”

  Charlotte stared at the knife and at the inch or so between it and her fingers. “Come on!” she yelled. “Just a little more!”

  Of course, Hiroshi’s mother had begun to splutter and choke when he had told her he was going to the museum with Charlotte. “You see?” she said reproachfully. “She’s already bossing you around.”

  Though Hiroshi had the feeling that was exactly what Charlotte had done, he answered, “No, she’s not. She just wants me to come along. Because we’re friends. She doesn’t have anyone else in Tokyo.”

  His mother kept quiet, radiating disapproval.

  “Anyway,” said Hiroshi, “when I’m grown up, it will all be different. I know what I’m going to do when I’m big. I’ll put an end to this difference between rich and poor. Everybody will be rich, and nobody will be able to boss anybody else around or look down on them.”

  His mother shook her head and sighed. “The things you say!”

  “You’ll see,” said Hiroshi. More than ever, he was sure he was going to change the world, so it made no difference if he let Charlotte boss him around a little bit now.

  Which is how he met Yumiko, the nanny Charlotte had been telling him about, for the first time the next day. Yumiko had sturdy, thick legs and waddled rather than walked, but she was the very embodiment of good cheer. She carried a black handbag with every imaginable necessity for a trip like this, and she could conjure up drinks, snacks, tissues, a city map, and all sorts of other things from its depths.

  Charlotte was so excited that you would have thought they were going on a jungle expedition. Even the simple trip on the metro filled her with such delight that it was as though she had never been in a train in her life. When they had transferred
to the bus in Akabane and could see the city all around—the endless blocks and buildings, the houses, streets, and roofs—she clung to the windowpane, pointing at everything and asking what such and such a building was.

  At the shrine she put her hands on absolutely everything she could touch. Hiroshi watched, fascinated, as she ran her fingers over handrails, stone statues, and lanterns, her eyes half-closed, or traced the patterns in the wood carvings. Now and then she would lift her eyebrows in amazement as though she were watching a film play out in her mind’s eye, a film only she could see.

  “So?” he asked. “What can you see?”

  She stopped where she was and looked into empty space for a long while, blinking in confusion. “I don’t know,” she admitted at last. “I don’t understand everything. But it’s…awesome!”

  And then all of a sudden she had a bee in her bonnet about the black dagger lying on the altar with all the other bric-a-brac. She wanted to touch that knife and only the knife; not the carved horn combs, not the polished silver mirror or any of the amulets but the old stone knife.

  Hiroshi had thought it would be easier than it actually turned out to be to hold her so she could lean over and touch it. Her fingers were almost touching the knife, but he could hardly keep hold of her other hand. He feared he might lose his balance at any moment and splash down into the pond along with her. But of course she wanted him to let her down just a little bit farther.

  “All right then,” Hiroshi said. He planted his right foot further down on the bank and tried to imagine he was He-Man or Clamp Champ or some other strongman from Masters of the Universe. He wouldn’t let go, and he wouldn’t lose his balance. No. He would hold on to Charlotte for as long as she wanted him to. But nobody must spot them, not any of the other visitors, and certainly not a Shinto priest.

  As Hiroshi watched Charlotte’s fingertips close the last half inch, he was sorry her face was turned away from him. He would have liked to see that thoughtful smile again when she finally managed to touch the knife.