Bertil had to go back to Sweden a week later; the parting was excitingly bitter-sweet. She threw her razor away.
Which left just one problem; she hated the idea of flying. She traipsed out to Narita sometimes, to watch the jets take off and land. She enjoyed that, it was no ordeal. But the idea of actually getting on to a plane filled her with horror.
She auditioned for the NHK, the same orchestra she'd heard in Sapporo when she'd been a little girl and decided she wanted a cello. That she was nervous about.
But her fate was unstoppable now. She scraped through her last exams at Todai just as she'd scraped through the rest, but it was still a pass, and she'd hardly finished celebrating when the letter came from the NHK.
The day before her mother was due to arrive from Sapporo, she went back to the bald summit of the hill north of the Fuji Five Lakes, and sat there cross-legged in her kagool, listening to the rain drip off the trees and spatter on her hood, and watched the clouds trail like skirts round the base of Fuji. She took the letter out a couple of times and reread it. It still said yes; she had the place; it was hers. She kept thinking something was going to go wrong, and prayed her mother didn't change her mind at the last moment and in a fit of extravagance fly down to Tokyo.
'In the Caribbean, Mr Mandamus said in the midst of the storm, pronouncing the name of the sea in the British manner, with the emphasis on the third syllable, 'if you are on a low-lying island or part of the coast, you must beware of the slow-timed waves. The normal timing of waves hitting a shore is seven or eight per minute, but if the frequency becomes four or five beats a minute, you must flee, or be prepared to meet your maker. First of all, the sky will be cloudless and brassy, and the wind dies, leaving a leaden heat. The sea goes strangely greasy-looking, becoming uniform and undisturbed except for the long, ponderous waves; all lesser movements are smothered. The breakers hit the beach with a slow monotony, regular and machine-like and mindless.
'Then, in the sky; streamers of high cloud like ragged rays of dark sunlight, seeming to imanate from one place over the horizon. They spread over the head, while in the distance, beneath them, clouds form, and the sun looks milky, and a halo the colour of ashes surrounds it, so that it begins to look like an eye.
'In time, the sun is put out by the clouds, and it begins to go gloomy; quick dark clouds fill the middle air while on the horizon a wall of cloud starts to engulf the sky. It is the colour of copper at first. As it comes closer and grows higher, it darkens, through brown to black, and half the sky is covered by it. It is like an impossibly tall wave of darkness, tall like the night; the winds around you are still slight and uncertain, but the surf is hammering the beach like thunder, slow and heavy, like the beat of a cruel god's mighty heart.
'The dark wave falls, the winds land like hammer blows; rain like an ocean falling from the sky; waves like walls.
'When you think — if you are still alive to think — it can grow no worse, the sea retreats, sucked back into the darkness, leaving the coast far below the lowest low tidemark draining away into a violent night. Then the ocean returns, in a wave that dwarfs all previous waves; a cliff; a black mountain spilling over the land like the end of the world.
'Perhaps you have seen satellite photographs of a hurricane; from space, the eye looks tiny and black in the centre of the white featheriness of the storm. It looks too small and too perfectly round and black to be natural; you think it is something lying on the film. The hurricanes look very like galaxies, which I hear also have black holes in their centres. The eye is maybe thirty kilometres across. The air pressure can be so low sailors have said blood comes to the mouth and the eardrums ache. The water at the bottom of the eye is sucked up three metres above the rest of the ocean. Seen from a ship which has survived the winds, it is like being in a cauldron; the walls of blackness swirl round about, but in the eye the air is calm, humid, and appallingly hot. The circling storm moans from all around. The waves on the water froth and jostle and leap up, coming crashing in from every direction, colliding and bursting their spray into the boiling calm air. More often than not, raggedy, exhausted birds fly aimlessly inside the eye, those not killed by it; confused and beaten, they fill up the moaning air with their cries. A circle of clear sky overhead looks like Earth seen from space; blue and far away and unreal; sun and stars shine as though through gauze, removed and unreal. Then the screaming winds and the blackness and the drowning rain starts again.
'You ever been in a hurricane, Mandamus? Broekman asked.
'Merciful heavens, no, Mandamus shook his big head heavily. 'But I have read about it.
Hisako listened to the sound of the aguacero howling outside, and thought Mr Mandamus was very likely the sort of person who talked about air crashes during a bumpy flight, attempting to reassure nervous passengers with the thought that they wouldn't feel a thing, possibly. She decided not to correct him on 'imanate'.
The storm passed quickly, as aguaceros always did. Behind the drawn curtains of the stuffy lounge, it looked like a pleasant day.
Gordon Janney had slept badly, and his speech was slurred. Mrs Bleveans was changing the dressing on his head. Her husband was still sound asleep on the floor. There were two and sometimes three venceristas behind the bar at any particular moment. One was reading a Spanish-language Superman comic.
Then the venceristas took one of the cooks away; some time later he returned with a trolley of burgers, potatoes and salad. The gunmen watched them eat and passed out bottles of water and Coke.
Mrs Bleveans persuaded Sucre she should be allowed to collect some toothpaste, a few toothbrushes and a bottle of antiseptic. Before she went she checked with Marie and Hisako, to find out if either of them needed any sanitary protection; neither did.
'Christ, I suppose that could be it, Broekman said, rubbing his lips with one hand. Philippe, Endo and Hisako had told him of the theory that the venceristas had come to shoot down the plane. The noise of Mr Mandamus snoring as he slept off his meal covered any sounds short of a shout they were likely to make.
'Is just a thought, Philippe said.
'Flight today, Endo confirmed.
'Crazy bastards; what're they trying to do?
'Maybe we're being paranoid, Hisako said. 'We'll know soon anyway.
'If the flight is today, Broekman said. 'On the news yesterday there was talk of some last-minute hitch; might be a delay.
'There was? Hisako looked at Philippe and Endo. Nobody else had heard this.
'On the World Service, just before our friends arrived.
Philippe looked worried. 'Captain Bleveans; he said the venceristas became… upset? Upset, when they hear something on the radio. Last evening.
'Shit, Broekman said. 'Sounds uncomfortably neat, doesn't it? He rubbed one bristly cheek. 'I didn't think the venceristas were that crazy.
'I think we must get to the radio, Philippe said.
'How do we do that? Broekman said, patting his overalls pockets for cigars that weren't there. 'Rushing the guy at the bar would be suicide, and all we get's a gun or two and a couple of grenades, plus we alert the others. If we had the time and a screwdriver maybe we could unscrew the windows, he nodded slightly towards the curtains, 'if they aren't rusted up. But we'd have to distract them for ten minutes or more. There's no outside access from the toilets; no access anywhere. The alternative is, one of us can try to get out on some sort of excuse and aim to overpower whoever they send with us. That's probably our best bet. And they probably know that.