May 1 is Labor Day everywhere on the planet Earth except the United States of America. Why? Well, in 1877, there was a great strike among railway workers that became a general strike for awhile. Where? In these same United States of America. It is not a subject covered very well in officially approved American History textbooks, and, of course, most Americans, in our world and in Usagi’s, do have to learn American History and, so, don’t.
The best parades in the world used to be in Moscow on May Day. There were still parades there in 2010, but they were pretty humdrum, about as riveting as a parade in, say, Boise Idaho. More marchers, fewer floats, smaller bands but better music. Russians take their music seriously, no matter what their politics are.
Fidel Castro wheezed for less than three hours that May Day, making so little sense that the state newspapers did not print the complete text of his speech the next day. During his musings, one of the veterans of the revolution of 1959 died on the reviewing stand behind Castro. His companions held him up until the speech was finished and the cameras could move away.
The Lady Eagles soccer team massacred Antioch 7-0, but the boys lost 1-2. Meanwhile the Owl Girls and boys each beat their opponents from Concord by one point.
Before the games ended, as Friday afternoon became evening in California, Roland Descartes found Michiru and Haruka waiting for him when he arrived home in the wee hours of May 2 in Paris, France. It turned out to be more than a scene about his adventures which sometimes involved beds of other women.
In Singapore, it was a half-day of School (as in Japan.) Mimi and Lily were struggling through a test in Mandarin.
In Japan, it was second period in most schools. Makoto went shopping with Haruna, theoretically for baby needs but actually to have an excuse to visit Fruit Parlor Crown and gossip with the Ayakashi sisters for awhile, at least until the older children returned from school.
Our man, the one we mentioned just a little while back, was not in Tokyo yet. He had finished his double portion (on the same plate) almost a week before May 2. An hour before noon, he was still on his train. His laptop was being used to type memos, read and write e-mails, make notes, check stocks, commodity prices and interest rates and to listen to Eighties music.
The Usual, except for the special disks like Makoto’s.
So, which scene should we show first? Which scenes should we show at all?
I think you all will want to know what could be troubling Haruka and Michiru more than the father of (most) of their children philandering.
While Roland Descartes’ unpleasant homecoming in Paris was beginning, Friday high-school soccer in California was being played in California, Saturday-morning school was being taught in Singapore, and Makoto’s half-morning of relative freedom (remember the twins) was coming to a close, the bullet train from Kobe pulled into a station in Tokyo and discharged, among passengers, Our Man. All these happened at the same absolute time, but at different times and even days as reckoned in various places on Earth. However, to continue our narrative, we must step back in absolute time just a little bit.
The day before the wee hour Roland arrived at home much too late was May Day, May 1, Labor Day, a legal holiday in Paris. No French government would dream of changing that, not even if the Monarchy or the Empire were restored. Being a legal holiday, the schools were closed, even the private ones because, of course, all of them had unionized staffs and would have had to pay them holiday wages. Roland Descartes was far from the only Francophone who was careful with his money.
At around eleven that morning, when Sarah had long since gone after her morning (Paris)/late night (California) visit, after she was finished with her violin practice, but her mother and Zita weren’t, after she got thoroughly annoyed at the babies who got into everything she started—and humiliated because Anne Marie had laughed at her complaint, and Haruka-papa, too—Nereid lay on her bed pouting. It was raining outside, so she couldn’t go out in the courtyard. Adrienne was in England with her father, and Titania, too. Nereid had to ask to use the telephone, so she didn’t because she didn’t want to talk to Haruka or to Anne-Mare. They had laughed at her! And they thought everything Amphritrite and Hecate did was wonderful, and they had forgotten all about Nereid.
Nereid went to her shelves, opened the lock, and took down her favorite doll, Clarisse de Chartres. Clarisse had to be kept from the babies. She had a porcelain head and hands, beautiful but easy to break. Clarisse was very special, a gift from Kayama Mika, made by her own hand, and worth a lot of money (Roland had said to her mother and she had overheard and remembered.)
Auntie Mika had a baby now. Tiny, cute, adorable. She hadn’t sent anything to Nereid since Christmas.
Nereid locked Clarisse de Chartres away again behind the babyproof lock. <For normal babies, but not Heka-chan. Her magic can do anything.> thought Nereid.
Nereid picked out some manga and flopped back down on her bed. She began to thumb the pages. She could speak perfect Japanese, but she could not read kanji yet, so she looked at the pictures, seldom stopping to figure out a caption. They were all magic-girl manga: Wedding Peach (her favorite) and Magical Girl Sammi and Ranma and even Sailor Moon. While some of the magical girls (and the few boys like Ranma and Tenchi) were real enough, their adventures in manga and anime were made up, or mostly made-up. Nereid thought the real Ranma was a dweeb after meeting him and her. Princess Sasami was kind of boring, spending all her time talking to Auntie Makoto about cooking. Maybe there was a real Mamoko somewhere . . .
But all of the other magical girls, real or made up, were more interesting than Nereid, or at least cuter. She’d gotten her powers early, but Lily-chan had gotten hers even earlier, and Heka-chan before she could crawl! Nereid was smart, but all of Auntie Naru’s children were smarter (except maybe Alcyone) and Meti-chan, Auntie Ami’s daughter, made Nereid look stupid, and she wasn’t even seven yet.
Nereid was good enough at sports to beat the boys at her school. So they stopped playing with her, and started making even more fun of her. But she would never be able to play baseball or tennis like Titania, or do martial arts like Zoe or Ishtar,
Nereid could play violin well—but never like Titania or maman, or even Zita, the girl maman had adopted. Nereid could play piano well, but would never play like Descartes-san, or Haruka-papa, or even otousan . . .
She put down the manga, rolled on her back, and brought forth her Rose, turquoise-petaled, her sign that she, too, was a Daughter of Earth. But what was so special about that? She couldn’t even throw it yet.
Nereid had a lovely voice—but Mimi had an angelic voice, and she was smaller and cuter.
All Nereid could do was hear better. That’s all.
She began to eavesdrop on the neighborhood. There were a lot of arguments going on. Husbands usually at work were at home, and wives were finding reasons to get them to do something. Nereid heard fourteen arguments like this, in four languages besides French, before she grew bored and ignored the rest.
The Bouchers next door, the old widow and the very old widow, were watching the parades on television and wondered aloud why their famous neighbor was not here showing solidarity with the workers instead of being in England playing for the decadent Lords for money. The Widows Bouchet were Communists, born into the Party, and had a bit of rag under glass in their town house which they told everyone was part of a banner carried by the Communards of 1870. Meanwhile their Chinese-Vietnamese maids, who had grown up under real Communism, chatted in a southern Yunnanese dialect about the two old ladies who had never had to work a single day in their long lives.
Bouchet and Bouche—the younger was 73 and the elder nearing 100—continued on the subject of that disgraceful man living next door in the second-best house on the street (theirs was the first.) The elder Bouchet was almost deaf, so the conversation wasn’t very hard at all for Nereid to follow—in fact, anyone might have caught snatches of it. But Nereid could year more, and was checking to see if other people besides the Bouchet maids had noticed the shouted dialogue.
"Turn the volume down."
Someone had. And that someone had said those words in English. But who? From where? It was not a voice Nereid remembered, and she had a wonderful memory for voices. Nereid could not pinpoint sounds on land—even underwater, her echo location was never going to be as good as a dolphin’s, as several had told her—but she did have some idea. Probably someone in a car or a van from the echoing. No further away than the Rue de Jerry Lewis, because the traffic sounds from there made a benchmark she had learned.
She waited to hear the voice again. It had been an American. What was an American doing here? No tourists came here; Descartes-san was always saying that was one of the nice things about this neighborhood. No Americans lived closer than the old man with a younger French wife on the other side of the Rue de Jerry Lewis, and he hardly ever spoke English anyway.
After what seemed a very long wait, the strange American voice spoke again:
"Anything?"
The rain had gotten lighter, and there was not as much traffic noise spilling from the Rue de Jerry Lewis. The voice—probably a man’s but Nereid wasn’t sure—was coming from inside something with less glass than a car, more metal. The voice wasn’t loud this time; it was how the man—or the woman—would sound normally. The voice was coming from not much further than the other side of the Bouchet house.
"Anything? Anything at all? (Yawn.)"
"Michiru is still practicing. Descartes’ missus and the nanny are playing with the little kids. The two old ladies are going on about how disappointing it has been since Descartes moved in and Mitterand died. I think he slept with both of them."
"Descartes?"
"No, Mitterand."
"Who’s Mitterand?"
"Imbecile!" a third voice muttered in French.
"He was the bloody President of France for twelve years. You ever read anything besides the bloody trade papers?"
The man who said "bloody"—Nereid was sure he was a man—had an English voice, a man’s voice from England. Not one of the Lords or Ladies she had met, but like a Bobby, or the man who came to fix the pipes once at the hotel, or that unfortunate man who had tried to pick Haruka-papa’s inside-jacket pocket on her first trip to London.
Nereid could also hear faint voices—the same voices, at the same time, as in the Bouchet’s house. And the same as in her own.
This wasn’t a game any more. Nereid ran downstairs to tell maman that men were listening to them from outside. She spoke in the old tongue without even thinking, so the eavesdroppers never knew what she said.
Just who was in that van surveilling Michiru en famille? That is a question Michuru asked Haruka. Haruka’s suggestion was to rip off the doors off the van and rip off other things until the occupants informed them. Michiru had different advice. Wait. Think. Learn.
Besides the van, and whoever had
sent it, they would have to manage Roland.
"I noticed it because I’ve never seen that van here before," Haruka dissembled, "so I decided to watch it."
"Didn’t you think to just ask the driver?"
"There was no one in front," said Michiru. That part of their tale was true. "When we checked, Nereid said she could hear men inside, and the voices of the other children and Anne Marie. And the Bouchers. They were listening to them, too."
Roland believed them. Nereid had ears like no other. "Could they be police?"
"No," said Michiru. "One was an American, one English. One of them was a French speaker, but he spoke English with the others."
"When did they leave?"
"Not long after we knocked on their van."
"Did you see any of them?"
"The van was parked facing away from our house," said Michiru. "We had already returned when it drove off. No one got out before it drove away that I saw; I was watching." Again, true, as far as it went.
Haruka did not mention that she had grabbed a camera and followed the van, first on her motorcycle, and then in the air as traffic and weather worsened. She got pictures of two of the occupants, clear enough after "Big Al" Umino and about a million dollars worth of hardware and software processed the images, but neither face was familiar. The registration was false, belonging to a vehicle wrecked months before. But they didn’t know that yet in the first hours of May 2 in Paris, France.
After swallowing four cans of coke at the half time of the boys game in Orinda, Dexter asked Pleione Umino, "Can I sleep over with you this weekend?"
Pleione sprayed approximately 13.6 milliliters of Dr. Pepper through her nose. Before she could recover, Dexter had his Owl head back on and the second quarter was starting.
Eventually, Pleione divined that it was not her that the eleven-years-old Romeo pined for, but Sarah. He hadn’t said anything about her since the game with the Eagles.
Since it was the first time he had asked a major favor, and since turning him down would be like stomping on a puppy with spiked boots, and since Pleione was sure it would drive Sarah absolutely crazy, she brought him home with her after the game.
What are best friends for?
The girls in Singapore spent a drear morning before Grandma and Grandpa came to pick them up. Mimi put a one-hour curse on a snotty girl, making her smell, but that was the only fun they had before noon.
Makoto did have a brief bad moment, as always, on her first trip to the rest rooms at Fruit Parlor Crown, the place where Hasakawa Toshiro had offered to help sell herself to his business friends. How thoughtful of Toshiro, and in front of her children, too. Much had happened since, but she had not forgotten that moment, or the memories brought up by that encounter.
But it was only a moment. Soraya and Zeus were walking and beginning to talk, but potty training was still well in their future. Makoto made five visits to the restrooms before she left Fruit Parlor Crown, just a few minutes before our man, the one who possessed videos and indelible memories of Makoto before she had ever met Hasakawa Toshiro, got off the express train from Kobe.