Bel Canto(6)

Gen Watanabe paused for a moment as if he were remembering. A swarm of Australian teenagers passed them, each with a knapsack strapped to her back. Their shouts and laughter filled the concourse. “Wombat!” one girl cried out, and the others answered, “Wombat! Wombat! Wombat!” They stumbled in their laughter and clung to each other’s arms. “They are all there,” Gen said, eyeing the backs of the teenagers with cautious suspicion. “My father, mother, and two sisters.”

“And your sisters, are they married?” Mr. Hosokawa did not care about the sisters, but the voice was something he could almost place, like the notes opening the first act of, what?

Gen looked at him directly. “Married, sir.”

Suddenly this dull question took on the edge of something inappropriate. Mr. Hosokawa looked away while Gen took his luggage and led his party through the sliding glass doors into the blasting heat of Greece at noon. The limousine waited, cool and idling, and the men climbed inside.

Over the next two days, everything Gen touched became a smooth surface. He typed up Mr. Hosokawa’s handwritten notes, took care of scheduling, found tickets to a performance of Orfeo ed Euridice that had been sold out for six weeks. At the conference he spoke in Greek for Mr. Hosokawa and his associates, spoke in Japanese to them, and was, in all matters, intelligent, quick, and professional. But it was not his presence that Mr. Hosokawa was drawn to, it was his lack of presence. Gen was an extension, an invisible self that was constantly anticipating his needs. He felt Gen would remember whatever had been forgotten. One afternoon during a private meeting concerning shipping interests, as Gen translated into Greek what he had just that moment said himself, Mr. Hosokawa finally recognized the voice. Something so familiar, that’s what he had thought. It was his own voice.

“I don’t do a great deal of business in Greece,” Mr. Hosokawa said to Gen that night over drinks in the bar of the Athens Hilton. The bar was on top of the hotel and looked out over the Acropolis, and yet it seemed that the Acropolis, small and chalky in the distance, had been built there for just this reason, to provide a pleasant visual diversion for the drinking guests. “I was wondering about your other languages.” Mr. Hosokawa had heard him speaking English on the phone.

Gen made a list, stopping from time to time to see what had been left out. He divided into categories the languages in which he felt he was extremely fluent, very fluent, fluent, passable, and could read. He knew more languages than there were specialty cocktails listed in the Plexiglas holder on the table. They each ordered a drink called an Areopagus. They toasted.

His Spanish was extremely fluent.

Half a world away, in a country twice as foreign, Mr. Hosokawa was remembering the Athens airport, all the men with mustaches and Uzis who called to mind the man who held the gun now. That was the day he met Gen, four years ago, five? After that, Gen came back to Tokyo to work for him full-time. When there was nothing that needed translating, Gen simply seemed to take care of things before anyone knew they needed taking care of. Gen was so central to the way he thought now that Mr. Hosokawa forgot sometimes he didn’t know the languages himself, that the voice people listened to was not his voice. He had not understood what the man with the gun was saying and yet it was perfectly clear to him. At worst, they were dead. At best, they were looking at the beginning of a long ordeal. Mr. Hosokawa had gone someplace he never should have gone, let strangers believe something that was not true, all to hear a woman sing. He looked across the room at Roxane Coss. He could barely see her, her accompanist had her so neatly wedged between himself and the piano.

“President Masuda,” the man with the mustache and the gun said.

There was an uneasy shifting among the well-dressed guests, no one wanting to be the one to break the news.

“President Masuda, come forward.”

People kept their eyes blank, waiting, until the man with the gun brought the gun down so that now it faced the crowd, though in particular it appeared to be pointed at a blonde woman in her fifties named Elise, who was a Swiss banker. She blinked a few times and then crossed her wide-open hands one on top of the other to cover her heart, as if this was the place she was most likely to be shot. She would offer up her hands if they might afford her heart a millisecond of protection. While this elicited a few gasps from the audience, it did little else. There was an embarrassing wait that ruled out all notions of heroics or even chivalry, and then finally the Vice President of the host country took a small step forward and introduced himself.

“I am Vice President Ruben Iglesias,” he said to the man with the gun. The Vice President appeared to be extremely tired. He was a very small man, both in stature and girth, who had been chosen as a running mate as much for his size as for his political beliefs. The pervasive thinking in government was that a taller vice president would make the President appear weak, replaceable. “President Masuda was unable to attend this evening. He is not here.” The Vice President’s voice was heavy. Too much of this burden was falling to him.

“Lies,” the man with the gun corrected.

Ruben Iglesias shook his head sadly. No one wished more than he that President Masuda were in attendance right now, instead of lying in his own bed, happily playing over the plot of tonight’s soap opera in his mind. General Alfredo quickly turned the gun in his hand so that he now held the muzzle rather than the handle. He brought the gun back in the air and hit the Vice President on the flat bone of his cheek beside the right eye. There was a soft thump, a sound considerably less violent than the action, as the handle of the gun hit the skin over the bone and the small man was knocked to the ground. His blood wasted no time in making its exit, spilling out the three-centimeter gash near his hairline. Some of it made its way into his ear and started the journey back into his head. Still, everyone, including the Vice President (now lying half conscious on his own living-room rug where not ten hours before he had rolled in a mock wrestling match with his three-year-old son) was pleased and surprised that he had not been shot dead.