Owl and the Japanese Circus (10 page)

I closed my eyes and leaned against the plush leather seat, my hangover threatening to push its way to the forefront again. After getting back from Gaijin Cloud last night, I’d fallen asleep on my computer and missed my alarm this morning. I’d woken up to Nadya swearing in Russian at ten to twelve before she pulled me out the door.

Without coffee.

Nadya and I sat in a booth tucked in the back of her bar, across from Nuroshi. Today his skin was particularly clammy, and he kept dabbing at his red, watering eyes. The only things off with my turnip analysis were his brown, stained teeth.

Nadya argued with Nuroshi in Japanese across the blue lacquer tabletop, hopefully bringing down the price. Whereas Nadya wore a black tank top and designer jeans, I’d shown up in my student getup. Nuroshi, lecher that he was, was so distracted by Nadya’s cleavage that he kept giving things away. Little nuances, little twitches . . . he lied, that was a given, but today he was nervous, and that worried me.

I was starting to think the morning had been a bad omen, warning me about the day ahead. I tapped the table as the arguing raised a notch. “Hey you two, quit it for a second.”

Nuroshi dragged his eyes off Nadya’s chest and turned them on me. A strained smile crept onto his face, as if he’d just been made to swallow something unpleasant. I was not Nuroshi’s favorite person to deal with; I don’t play nice with lecherous cowards.

“Owl,” he said, and glanced back at Nadya. “Ms. Aleyev and I were just discussing my . . . rate.”

Nadya made a guttural noise in the back of her throat. “Go to hell,” she told him, and added something unpleasant-sounding in Russian. Nuroshi just smiled, flashing his brown teeth. “What Ms. Aleyev so eloquently puts is that we have been unable to come to an agreement that financially takes into consideration the risks of . . .” His red, watery eyes regarded me. “. . . associating with you.”

“I got rid of the vampires,” I said.

He laughed and started to stand. “Somehow, coming from you, I do not find that at all settling. Ms. Aleyev, Owl, I wish I could say it’s been a pleasure—”

I cringed; I hate being on the wrong end of negotiations, and that was happening a lot lately. “I’ll double what I usually pay,” I said. Nadya made a frustrated noise beside me, but Nuroshi sat back down.

“I’m listening,” he said. I slid a white piece of paper with the transcribed inscriptions of the egg’s carvings across the slick lacquered table. The less Nuroshi knew about the egg itself, the better. “Can you translate this?”

Nuroshi examined the inscriptions. After a moment his eyes flicked up and he regarded my face as he weighed his answer. “Yes, but it will take time. I’m sorry to say I’m not familiar with this text. How old is it, and where did you find it?”

“What, just because I had a vampire problem you figure I fell off the stupid truck? Just translate it.” I took a deep breath; now for the million-dollar request. “I also need to access an old student project online.”

“I find that difficult to believe. All theses are public access. Call the university, you hardly need my services.”

“Yeah, but I want the good stuff,” I said, sliding the thesis title page and bad PowerPoint image of the tablet, which I’d lifted off a video recording I’d seen, over to him. I watched him take the blown-up, pixilated screencap in his clammy, fat fingers. “I want everything there is on the dig site this came from.”

He warily glanced up at me. Recognition and greed flickered across his face, as if I’d passed him a coveted Christmas present or a picture of Nadya. “Ahh, now I see. I can do you one better. I’m already familiar with the thesis it came from. This tablet,” he said, tapping the image, “is from a dig site in Bali, and the location will cost you.”

I choked, and Nadya made a similar noise beside me. “Nuroshi, me paying more for the location is about as likely as you getting a job as a hostess.”

His eyes narrowed, and he spit inches away from my feet. Then he leaned across the table and smiled. “Alix Hiboux may be the most infamous archaeology student to uncover something she shouldn’t have, but she is not the first or last.”

The hairs on my neck bristled, but I kept my temper in check at the sound of my old name.

His smile spread, and I clenched my fists under the table. “However, in Japan we prefer to bury things like this to save everyone’s face, not feed otherwise promising students to the proverbial wolves.”

I folded my hands on the table and gave Nuroshi a smile, though I’d much rather have slugged him.

After I’d been “dismissed” from academics and decided on my career change, I’d paid a bright young hacker to trash any and all digital records of my old existence he’d been able to find. As far as the powers that be were concerned, Alix Hiboux didn’t exist and never had, though I’m sure there are a handful of people at my old university to this day who claim otherwise, especially after several artifacts went missing. What? I’d excavated them, technically, and after they screwed me over, they owed me those pieces. Many people knew what I looked
like, and people like Nuroshi who were in the world of academics guessed. Throwing it back in my face was just low.

I would have preferred to throw Nuroshi out. Unfortunately I was pretty sure he was telling the truth. I glanced over at Nadya. She drew a deep breath and looked up at the ceiling as if she was weighing the options. She caught me looking at her and nodded towards the empty bar.

I snapped my folder shut on Nuroshi’s fat white fingers before he could rifle through my notes, then retreated with Nadya to the bar and out of Nuroshi’s hearing range.

“What do you think?” I asked.

Nadya shrugged. “It’s a supernatural temple. If it was me, I’d give back whatever money I’d been paid and tell them to find someone else.”

I shook my head. “Don’t think the dragon will take kindly to that. Do you think he’s lying?”

She snorted. “Lying? Not about Bali, but without a doubt he’s not telling us something.” She shook her head as if to emphasize the point. “And before you go anywhere, I want to see the dig notes myself.”

I let out a breath and glanced over at Nuroshi, who was sitting patiently at the booth, sipping his water. I felt like I was walking into a mousetrap, an ancient, magical, booby-trapped temple of a mousetrap, but a mousetrap all the same.

There also wasn’t a hell of a lot I could do, but I did have one idea to get ahead of Nuroshi. I pulled out my phone and checked for flights to Bali. There was one scheduled to leave before nightfall.

Nadya’s brows knitted as the airline webpage flashed onto my screen. “What are you doing?”

“I’m booking a flight, what does it look like I’m doing?”

“Are you nuts? Nuroshi could be lying—”

“Which I’m hoping you can check out for me—and if it isn’t a wild-goose chase, I’ll already be there. If it is, I’ll turn around and be on a flight back.”

Nadya swore in Russian. “You don’t attract trouble, Owl, you dive into it like the shallow end of a swimming pool.”

No arguing there.

I slid back into the booth, took out half the fee, and placed it on the table. “All right, here’s the deal. You bring Nadya and me those folders with dig site details and that translation by tomorrow morning, and we’ll give you the rest.”

His usual leer twisted into a sneer. “Everything up front or no folders,” he said, but he reached his puffy hand across the table to snatch the fold of bills.

I was faster. “Not a chance. You know I’m good for it. Either you bring us the dig folder tomorrow morning, or we go somewhere else.” I gave him my meanest glare. It doesn’t work on most people. Let’s face it, I’m just not that scary, but Nuroshi is a coward, through and through. He cringed back.

“Do we have a deal?” Nadya asked.

Nuroshi glanced between Nadya and me, calculating. “Only because I’m feeling generous to two such beautiful young ladies who have been such excellent customers.”

That much was true. We had been excellent customers, but if he thought for one second I believed he had any kind of loyalty to us, well . . . I think Nuroshi would as soon sell his own grandmother to turn a quick profit, and if you know much about Japanese culture, that’s saying a lot about him.

He reached his hand across the table to shake and I grasped it, trying hard not to think of what was under his fingernails. “Deal,” he said.

I relinquished the money, which disappeared into Nuroshi’s jacket. He stared at Nadya once more before heading out the door.

She said something in Russian under her breath as the door swung shut behind him. “One of these days I’d like to lock the leering fat turnip in a barrelful of water and nail the lid shut.”

“How ’bout right after we find out what he’s not telling us?”

“Sounds swell,” Nadya said.

I checked my watch; I needed to leave for the airport soon, and I still had to swing by Nadya’s to grab Captain and a change of clothes.

I pulled out the pages I’d gathered on the two PhD students who’d excavated the Bali site. I’d managed to glean a bit more information off them, current residence, clubs they were known to hang out at . . . remember, I said I’d made friends with a talented young hacker.

I passed the sheets to Nadya. “I don’t know about you, but I’ve got no intention of waiting for Nuroshi to bring us those folders. Think you can get those two talking by tonight? Jaded archaeology student to jaded archaeology student?”

A smile spread across Nadya’s face as she looked over the information. “Oh, I think that can be arranged. The owner of this snack bar is a friend of mine. He owes me.”

“Save your favor, just tell them you’re Alix Hiboux.”

She gave me an even stare; it’s not often I use my old name. I shrugged. “You heard Nuroshi. Those two were shafted nearly as badly as I was. Tell ’em you’re me and see if they’ll fill you in on the site so I can avoid falling into some ancient booby trap.”

“What if Nuroshi is setting you up?”

That same thought had occurred to me. Between Sabine and the Paris boys—I still wasn’t 100 percent sure they’d really backed off—I wasn’t thrilled about heading to Bali. “Let’s just hope all he’s trying to do is cut a deal and turn me in to the authorities. Besides, by the time he brings the site details in, I’ll already be in Bali, and hopefully you can get directions off those two students tonight. Waiting for those folders tomorrow morning is my backup plan. If there’s something else funny going on, hopefully I’ll miss it.”

“He didn’t tell you which site,” Nadya said. “How many dig sites are active there now? Six?”

I shook my head. “Five, but only two are old enough and big enough to house tablets that old. I’m betting on the pre–Majapahit Sanur site.”

Nadya crossed her arms. “And what if it’s Besakih?”

“Let’s just really hope it’s not and maybe I’ll get really lucky,” I said.

Nadya snorted derisively.

I was already headed for the door. I’d need ten minutes on my computer to call in a favor Stateside. As an afterthought, I yelled back over my shoulder, “Can I borrow your windsurfing board and beach clothes?”

“Go ahead—and Alix?”

I paused, halfway in, halfway out of the club. Nadya held up the folder on the students. “I’ll see what I can find out tonight, but something smells off about this whole thing. Don’t do anything stupid until I call.”

“Thanks, I owe you one—”

“You owe me a lot more than one,
plus
my usual cut.”

I smiled. “Just get a barrel ready. I’ve never tried to drown a turnip,” I said, and left.

Nuroshi might not have given me the exact location, but I hadn’t become infamous for nothing. Archaeology in Bali boomed about six years ago when five ancient catacombs had been found, two of them dating back to before the eighth century; old enough to hide something, but young enough to possibly reference Mr. Kurosawa’s egg and scroll, which had been buried in the tomb of the first emperor of China around 210 BC. Even if the Bali tablet didn’t mention the egg or China, it would give me more writing to go on than what was on the puzzle case. One set of catacombs, the Sanur Caves, was sitting nice and cozy on the coastline a little north of a beach resort town called Sanur. The Sanur Caves were accessible two ways. From the road you had to go through gates with a handful of guards. The other way was through underwater caves, which I don’t recommend for the run-of-the-mill tourist. Even if you managed to rappel over the overhanging
cliff or anchor your boat without crushing it on the rocks, you’d still have to navigate and crawl through unmapped tunnels.

As tricky as that sounded, I really hoped Nadya would call and say it was Sanur, because the second set of catacombs posed more problems; they were under the Besakih Temple.

Captain howled under my chair as the plane pulled into Ngurah Rai airport.

“Quiet, we still need to get through customs,” I whispered through the carrier screen. I reasoned that even if Sabine had tracked me to Japan, there was no way in hell she could get to Bali in time, but better to be safe and bring Captain than end up vampire chow.