“Should we bring him to the hospital?” Joyce asked.
Michiko shook her head. “It wasn’t a heart attack, only an arrhythmia. The pills are enough. He’ll be fine, we just have to give it some time.”
“Are you sure?” Gabriel asked.
“Of course,” Michiko said, dabbing Noboru’s forehead with the wet cloth. “I’m a doctor.”
It didn’t take long for Noboru to come around, but when Gabriel asked if he was feeling better, he was too embarrassed to talk about it. Michiko cleaned Noboru’s wounds while he lay on the couch, rebandaging the slash on his arm and dabbing ointment on the bruises and cuts on his face. By the time she was finished, he had slipped back into a deep sleep, untroubled even by the snores Gabriel remembered from their night in the hallway of Merpati’s house.
Michiko tended to Joyce’s bruises next, while Joyce sat in a chair and chewed her thumbnail anxiously. Something was going on behind her eyes, but Gabriel still couldn’t quite figure it out. When Michiko finished, Joyce asked if she could use her phone. Michiko sent her back to the kitchen, where a cordless unit was sitting on the counter. Then she turned to Gabriel. “You’re next.”
“You don’t have to worry about me,” Gabriel said. “I’m fine.”
Michiko gave him a stare that said she was not in a mood to argue. “You look like you got it the worst of everyone. Sit.” Gabriel sighed and sat in the chair. She examined the cuts on his face, chest and abdomen, and shook her head. “My god, what did they do to you?” Gabriel winced as she dabbed alcohol on the wounds to sterilize them. Michiko nodded. “Someone cuts you to ribbons, but it’s the alcohol that hurts. I’ll never, ever understand men. At least you’re lucky: the cuts aren’t deep. You won’t need more stitches.”
“The man who did it was going for pain, not lasting damage,” Gabriel said.
As she cleaned his wounds, he turned to watch Joyce in the kitchen. She was leaning against the refrigerator with her back to them. She spoke into the phone so quietly he couldn’t hear what she was saying.
“I don’t know what I would do without her,” Noboru said. Gabriel turned to the couch and saw Noboru’s eyes were open again. “Michiko, I mean.” His voice was weak and raspy, but he looked less pale than he had before, less clammy. He seemed to be regaining a bit of his strength.
Michiko glared at her husband. “I don’t know what I’d do without you either, you stupid old man. You’re not a boy anymore. You have a daughter, you have a family. I can’t have you running around, fighting, not when your heart keeps warning you not to. One of these days it’ll be a heart attack again, and then what? It’s bad enough you still smoke when you think I’m not looking.” She shook her head. “You have to think about your health—and if that’s not a good enough reason, think about me. In the morning, I want you to call Michael Hunt and tell him you’re resigning. I don’t want you doing any more work for the Hunt Foundation unless it’s stuffing envelopes.”
Noboru laced his fingers behind his head. “I’ll think about it.”
Annoyed, Michiko turned back to Gabriel and jabbed the alcohol-soaked cotton ball against one of his cuts so hard that he winced again. “He’ll think about it, he says.” She practically punched him with the bandage she applied over the cut. “This is all your fault. You and your brother. Don’t you care what happens to other people?”
“Stop it,” Noboru said. “If it weren’t for Gabriel, I wouldn’t be here right now.”
“If it weren’t for Gabriel, you wouldn’t have been in danger in the first place.” She glared at Gabriel and he looked away. He couldn’t say she was wrong.
She picked up a double handful of used cotton balls and leftover bits of gauze, got up and carried it into the kitchen to throw away.
Noboru groaned and rubbed his chest as he watched her go. “Michiko has saved my life more times and in more ways than I can count. She’s a good woman. The best. You need to find a woman like that, Gabriel. Someone who’ll take care of you. Or have you found one already?”
Gabriel shook his head. “I’m not the type to…” He trailed off, unsure how to finish that sentence. He wasn’t the type to what? Let someone take care of him? Stick around long enough to find out? Both were true, he supposed. He’d lost more than a few good women over the years, women he’d cared about and cared for, who claimed they couldn’t compete with what ever it was that kept pulling him back to the forests and jungles, mountains and deserts half a world away. On top of that was an uneasy feeling that came over him whenever he got too close to someone, a fear that she’d be in danger because of him—or, maybe worse, that he’d be forced to give up being in danger for her. The way Michiko wanted Noboru to give it up.
“That’s too bad,” Noboru said. “You’ve saved so many people, Gabriel. When will you let someone save you?”
Gabriel leaned on the wooden banister that ran around the deck behind Noboru’s house, sipping warm tea out of a ceramic cup. A small backyard sloped gently downward away from the house until the lawn ended and the land dropped off in a steep incline. Beyond it he could see the waters of the Makassar Strait glistening in the twilight, and the lights of the oil refineries on the far shore twinkling like stars.
He took the Death’s Head Key from around his neck and looked at it. When Edgar Grissom surprised them in the jungle, he’d already known about it—he’d recognized Gabriel and known that Julian had taken the key from him. That was understandable. Gabriel was a public figure; a lot of people knew what he looked like from his appearances on television and the articles written about him. And of course Julian would have told his father what had happened at the Discoverers League. But—Grissom had recognized Joyce, too. And that was troubling. Why would Grissom know the name of a random graduate student on a research trip to Borneo?
That wasn’t the end of what was nagging at Gabriel. There was also the matter of how Julian had known Gabriel had come back from the Amazon with the Death’s Head Key, and where to find him. There was only one possible answer. Grissom was being fed information. Someone must have told him about Gabriel finding the Death’s Head Key, someone must have told him that Joyce was in possession of the Star of Arnuwanda.
Someone had sold them out. The only question was who.
“You’ve got that look on your face again,” Noboru said. He was stretched out on a lounge chair by the sliding glass door of the house, a cup of tea resting on the small table by his hand. “That ‘something’s not right’ look.”
“You’ve known me for how long? A few days?”
“I’ve seen it plenty. I’m guessing you wear it a lot.”
Gabriel smiled. “It’s nothing.” He didn’t want to worry Noboru.
Noboru raised a doubtful eyebrow and sipped his tea.
Gabriel looked through the glass door as Joyce finally came out of the kitchen. She’d been on the phone for nearly an hour. Michiko, sitting at a small breakfast table reading hospital reports, pointed toward the tea kettle on the range and Joyce poured herself a cup. Gabriel watched her walk toward them, holding the cup between her palms, blowing on the tea and taking a tentative sip. The bruise around her eye had grown darker, but Michiko’s treatment had kept it from swelling too badly. Joyce slid the door open, stepped out onto the deck and slid it closed again behind her.
She joined Gabriel by the banister and put her cup down next to his.
“Who were you talking to?” he asked.
She stared out at the water. The sky grew darker, the first stars appearing in the sky. “That was Uncle Daniel. He’s still working at the dig site in Turkey and wants me to come there. I think it’s a good idea. I can’t stay in Borneo—it’s too dangerous now. And besides, we don’t know how much Grissom was able to work out before we got the Star back. For all we know, he’s already on his way to finding the second gemstone. I can’t let that happen.”