Chapter Five

1959

What a strange world...

September 2. 6 PM. 1959. Ancient Era.

Honse Hotel. Little Yamato, New York.

Ishida Yanagida spun his wife around, to the rhythm of the jazz playing in the living room, and smiled at her, and kissed her. The short-sleeved white dress Masako Yanagida was wearing at the time really complimented her porcelain skin.

She was a young woman in her early twenties, a head shorter than her husband. She had a delicate appearance and honeyed dark brown eyes.

One of the things she had done, a few days after arriving in New York, was to change her classic shoulder-length hairstyle, for a medium bob cut Sassoon, which had pleased her husband and certainly suited her graceful figure.

He, on the other hand, was a young man of about twenty-three years old, of medium build, though rather thin. His eyes were black and his hair was slicked back with hair gel. He wore a diplomatic pinstripe suit of Italian cut. Which was kind of funny to him, considering that the business that brought him to New York was handling business to bugger the families of the Italian kingpins in the city.

They were on the top floor of the Honse Hotel, a luxurious and incredibly spacious suite. In itself the entire interior of the hotel contrasted with the sober facade of the exterior. The suite was almost tastefully decorated in a 1920s style, with dark red upholstered walls. The large windows gave a clear view of the distant skyscrapers of Lower Manhattan's Financial District.

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Ishida lamented that he could not stay at the already legendary Attraction Hotel, with its famous rounded silhouette ending in a star, designed by Gaudi in 1908 and completed in 1914, which was very close to the recently opened World Trade Center, which rivaled it in height. Nevertheless, the Attraction Hotel remained as the structure for which Manhattan was known throughout the world.

Ishida visited it the same day he had arrived with his wife and would have liked to stay there but, since the place also hosted the bosses of some rival families, he had decided to stay in a more sober place that would not attract so much attention. But, either way, the hotel the young couple was staying in was not bad at all. It was one of the best in Little Yamato, and it suited their personal tastes.

At that moment Ishida had moved some of the living room furniture to dance with his wife and give her a smile.

"What's gotten into you today? You're crazy!" She said smiling.

Ishida Yanagida was actually enjoying his "vacation" away from Japan, although it wasn't a vacation at all. In fact, it was family business that brought him to the United States. His father had put him in charge of a large overseas operation, and that was a great honor for him at his young age of twenty-three. Considering that his father, Enryo Yanagida, had tried to keep him by his side until recently.

Ishida, for his part, although he had great respect for tradition, could not deny that he was doing well in the West. His wife was having a hard time getting used to what would be their new home for a while, but he couldn't deny that she was enjoying it too.

"Where should we have dinner tonight?" Ishida asked.

"Don't you have any bills to see? With the concession issue of the financial hotels?"

"We can see about that tomorrow. The Calzettis were the only ones who could bite us, and now with the investigation by the federals they've stopped all their operations."

"There's no other family that can take over the laundry business?"

"No. I assure you the hotels are going to be the ones calling us when the mountains of laundry start piling up," he said, taking long dance steps around the room.

"And what about the other accounts?"

"Interested in that part of the business?"

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"I'm just worried about you. What if they start looking into the family accounts?"

"We have nothing serious here. It's a clean business."

"For now…"

"Don't be like that. We're having a good time," he said, grimacing wearily.

"I'm just worried you're not being careful, these days you're also spending a lot of time in the study, distracting yourself with the books you brought from home."

"Ah, that has nothing to do with it. Those are my uncle Satou's papers and his diary. It's to remember him a little. I think it's because as a child I never paid much attention to the things he said."

"What did he say?"

"It's a lot of complicated theories. I can read you some passages if you want."

"Maybe another day," she said and kissed him.

Ishida really felt like a lucky man to have such a pretty wife. And added to the prospect that he had finally merited enough of her father's confidence to involve him in the family business on a large scale, his happiness was as great as the warmth the sun had radiated that day. Quite a hot day for September.

Because of the happiness of both of them, it could not but surprise them when it happened.

They were both still doing random dance steps to the sound of Louis Armstrong's "What a Wonderful World" when they went flying through the air a couple of meters.

There was a wave of heat that filled the entire suite and the windows exploded, producing a shower of glass on the street of Third Avenue. The people below looked up for a moment and ran into the street at the falling glass.

A man in ragged clothes, with long hair, and with an oversized instrument in a loaded case on his back, also had to run into the street, but continued to walk whistling, and without reacting like the others around him.

The explosion was difficult to describe. There was no explosion like that produced by a bomb or grenade. It was a sound that resembled a buzzing sound that was unbearable for a split second and then a wave of heat.

It came from the room Ishida used as a study. Papers flew out, along with a glare thousands of times stronger than that produced by a flash camera.

Masako Yanagida flew off and landed on the sofa, which flipped over on impact, while Ishida landed against one of the columns that served as the room's decoration, and knocked down one of the indoor ferns at the base.

Masako thought for a moment that it might be due to some retaliation, from a group whose business was being harmed by the Yanagida Clan, but that made no sense at all.

They both got up and there was a commotion in the room, and two of Ishida's personal guards, dressed in dark suits, came in and, with revolver in hand, helped them to their feet. Ishida stared dumbfounded at the study door.

A man had just come out, completely naked and with some smoke coming from his body. His black hair on the right side of his head was singed. He must have been in his late thirties or early forties and appeared to be in good physical condition. He had a piercing black-eyed gaze and a neat beard, but half of his moustache was burned off. His skin appeared to have a slight tan, that Ishida did not know whether to attribute to the explosion, or if he had been like this before. But he was not Japanese, he was Caucasian.

The man took a few wobbly steps and staggered back to his feet.

The situation was so bizarre that even Ishida's guards didn't quite know how to react to the sudden appearance.

What the hell?

Masako let out a shriek when she saw the man trying to go in her direction. Ishida pulled out a revolver from the back of his pants and pointed it at the man.

"Don't move! Who are you?" Ishida asked.

"He's a pervert!" Masako shrieked.

The man finally sat up and looked around the room and saw that he was naked and grabbed a cushion from the floor to cover his groin. Ishida's men tried to catch up with him, but the man jumped back and, using the furniture, tried to avoid them.

"Please gentlemen. I mean no harm," the man said. "Can we talk like civilized people?"

To any observer the scene could very well pass for some kind of bedroom comedy. With a naked man scurrying around the room trying to dodge the guards who were trying to catch up with him, while the woman kept shrieking from time to time, and her husband didn't quite know what to make of all of it.

The man finally went back inside the way he had come, and just looked out with half his head poking out, while three guns were pointed at him.

"I'm not here to cause any harm! Please... Damn it! I thought I'd be in Japan."

"Who are you?!" Ishida asked again. "What do you want?!"

The man this time stuck a hand out the door and held out a dark stone.

Ishida recognized it instantly. It was the stone he had brought with his uncle Satou's papers. To anyone else it might pass for nothing more than a peculiar paperweight, but to him it was important.

Uncle Satou, as he affectionately called him, had not been part of the family, but it was as if he had been. A friend of his grandfather, Kenji Yanagida, they had always remained friends, even though they had followed very different paths in their lives. A close enough friendship that Satou, before his death, caused by a cancer of strange origin, left in his grandfather's possession many of the papers of his research in the field of physics, along with plans and ideas that never came to fruition.

Ishida was not very good at it, but his uncle's journal was always good reading for him, because it made him question things about the nature of the world. It was more than a book of hard science, a compendium of mathematics, plans of strange machines, mixed with his uncle's often philosophical thoughts. Not to mention drawings of strange creatures of geometric appearance.

Among the papers, Satou left many things, but he had left in special care two stones that he obtained in his childhood, and that had a special relationship with his diary and research. Ishida brought one along with his uncle's writings, for perhaps there was some key to unraveling the mystery behind it.

"Where is the other one?" asked the newly arrived exhibitionist.

"What?"

"Where is the other part? It's safe, isn't it?"

What does this man mean? Ishida thought.

The man leaned half his body out of the doorway, while with the other hand he was still holding the cushion over his genitals.

"Who are you?"

"Ishida Yanagida, right? Pleasure. I'm sorry this is the way we met... My name is Jack."

"What do you want?" Ishida asked, without lowering his gun.

"How about a whiskey and some underwear to start? A towel could work too. I have a lot to tell you Mr. Yanagida."

Everyone in the room, with the exception of the quirky newcomer, looked at each other as if they didn't believe the situation before their eyes.

The last part of the song at that moment was the only sound that filled the room.