The phone was on Pif’s desk, warbling away in its turn-of-the-century monotone. Pif closed the door and leaned back against it, while Petrovitch stalked over and regarded the handset with suspicion.

“Just pick it up,” she said.

Petrovitch curled his fingers around the phone and lifted it to his head. The silence rang louder than the noise.

“Petrovitch,” he said, and waited.

“Shinkansen ha mata hashirou.”

He opened his mouth, then slowly closed it again. He motioned for a pen. “Can you repeat that for me?”

“Shinkansen ha mata hashirou,” said the voice in a perfectly measured tone. Exactly as before.

Petrovitch bit the pen lid off and scribbled what he thought he heard on the nearest piece of paper. “How do I contact you?” he asked, staring at his writing, trying to make sense of it.

He heard the burr of the dial tone, and the handset slipped from his fingers. It bounced on its coiled cord off the edge of the desk, then dangled there until Pif picked it up and put it back.

“Who was it?” she asked.

“This,” he said, “this word here. I recognize it. And the only time I’ve heard it before is from a man who’s supposed to be dead.”

20

They’d gone out onto the campus and hunted down a native Japanese speaker, pinning the startled student against a wall and shouting badly accented words at him until he confessed: the bullet train will run again.

“It could be a rallying cry,” said Pif.

“It’s not a very good one: not up there with Viva la revolucion! or For the motherland! What’s wrong with Banzai?”

“Because the Emperor is dead and Japan has gone forever?”

“Oshicora used these exact same words: the shinkansen will run again. It might have been something he told everyone. So now it’s being used by the Oshicora loyalists as a code word that they can recognize each other by. If that’s true, I can use that.” Petrovitch worried at the piece of paper he’d written on. It was crumpled and creased and dog-eared. “I need to make a call.”

“Is that code too? Code for please leave?”

“Yeah. But more for your benefit than mine.” Petrovitch wheeled his chair around his desk and across the floor. “I’m smart, right? Everyone says so.”

“Smart and wise are two different things, Sam.” She pushed the phone toward him.

“And so are safe and honorable.” He picked up the handset and listened. No Japanese this time. “If it was you, stuck in that tower, your mother long dead, your father freshly murdered, no way out: wouldn’t you want someone to help you?”

“Of course,” said Pif, “although you have to admit you’d want that someone to be… I don’t know.”

“Not me, you mean.”