The Finder Read online

  Advance Praise for

  THE FINDER

  “Ferguson’s trademark wit abounds in this exuberant, entertaining, and unconventional novel.”

  SHARI LAPENA, New York Times bestselling author of Someone We Know

  “So much fun. Filled with memorable characters and exotic locations, Will Ferguson’s new book should be enjoyed by thriller fans, travel aficionados, and those who like a story where you have no idea where it’s going to take you. It’s an interesting and rewarding universe that Ferguson’s mind occupies. I want a cottage there.”

  DREW HAYDEN TAYLOR, author of Chasing Painted Horses

  Praise for

  THE SHOE ON THE ROOF

  INSTANT NATIONAL BESTSELLER

  A GLOBE AND MAIL BOOK OF THE YEAR

  “Ferguson is a skillful and original writer, and overall, the novel is full of life.… The Shoe on the Roof’s lasting strength is in such sly jabs at the ‘alternative facts’ and deep divisions we’re now reckoning with, making it a tale for the times.”

  The Globe and Mail

  “Often laugh-out-loud funny despite its serious and tragic underpinnings. But it’s also thought-provoking, occasionally violent, and will likely stay with readers long after the last page is read.”

  Calgary Herald

  “Absurdly funny.”

  Quill & Quire

  “Another gem from this Giller Prize–winning author.”

  Canadian Living

  Praise for

  WILL FERGUSON

  WINNER OF THE SCOTIABANK GILLER PRIZE

  “He bears comparison with North America’s leading satirists. But where Joseph Heller is heavy, Tom Wolfe is dark, and Carl Hiaasen is strident, Ferguson is light, bright, and very funny.”

  Daily Mail

  “Frequently and savagely ironic, he is also not afraid to declare his feelings—which means you trust both his humour and his insights.”

  The Guardian

  “A very gifted writer.”

  BILL BRYSON, bestselling author

  “Sometimes touching, sometimes amusing, and always true.”

  Boston Globe

  “Sharp-eyed and irreverent.”

  Washington Post

  Praise for

  419

  WINNER OF THE SCOTIABANK GILLER PRIZE

  “Ferguson, who swings so deftly from humor to thriller, is a writer who can genuinely surprise.”

  Toronto Star

  “A deeply ironic, thoroughly engaged politico-philosophical thriller from a comic writer best known for winning a trio of Leacock Awards.… You won’t sleep until you finish, and then rest won’t come easily. Riveting. Provocative.”

  The Globe and Mail

  “Ferguson is a keen observer of landscapes and cityscapes, and has a brilliant ear for dialogue and accent.… You will never see those creative 419 emails in your inbox in quite the same way.”

  The Gazette (Montreal)

  “Tautly paced and vividly drawn, 419 captures the reader in a net of desire and deceit drawn tight by the interconnections of humanity in the twenty-first century.”

  VINCENT LAM, Scotiabank Giller Prize–winning author of Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures

  “A powerful read.… Ferguson is a heavy-weight now.”

  Now (Toronto)

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  It is only in fairy tales that coins glint clearly enough to be found.

  —Heinrich Böll, The Clown

  IN THE LAND OF THE Blind, the one-eyed man is not king, he is dangerous and possibly mad, and needs to be contained. Case in point:

  On February 2, 1959, a small four-seater airplane crashed into a cornfield in Iowa in the middle of a snowstorm. On board were three legends of rock and roll: Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and the Big Bopper. They’d been touring the Midwest in a bus with a broken heater. Shivering, tired, and miserable, Buddy Holly and the Big Bopper decided to hire a plane and fly to the next town, with Valens winning a coin toss for the last seat. It would go down in history as the day the music died.

  Items retrieved from the crash site were tagged and stored as evidence. Among these were the Big Bopper’s wristwatch, smashed at the exact time of the plane crash; a set of dice they had used to kill time on the road; and Buddy Holly’s iconic horn-rimmed glasses. After the inquest, these same items were filed and forgotten.

  In March 1994, fumigators sealed off the Mason City Courthouse and bombed the interior with pesticides. Soon after, coincidentally it would seem, Buddy Holly’s glasses appeared at an auction house, still tagged as evidence. They might have gone missing at any time during the previous forty years, perhaps retrieved by a grieving relative or a courthouse employee. Whatever tortuous route they took, when the glasses re-emerged, they sold for $670,000 and now sit in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, Ohio. And that’s where the story ends, we’re told.

  One person was not convinced, however.

  Gaddy Rhodes, a senior investigator with Interpol’s International Crimes Agency, the ICA as it is known, had recently flagged this forgotten news story, noting the name of the company that had performed the fumigation: TLT Pest Control. When she checked up on this, Gaddy discovered that TLT had long since vanished. That in itself was not suspicious; companies come and go all the time. But this one had appeared and disappeared on a single breath of air, it seemed, incorporating and dissolving all within a week. As far as she could tell, TLT had only ever performed that single on-site fumigation. The contract workers the company had hired remembered a small man in a mask and protective coveralls entering the building amid the fumes, but it was so long ago, who could say who the man was or whether he was even there? Memory so easily turns into myth.

  A security cam image, dated two weeks earlier, now lay on the desk in front of her: a blur, barely there. Less a man than a shadow, a silhouette captured in front of a Japanese tomb. She was convinced, without any direct evidence, that this was the same person who had walked into the poisonous fumes of the Mason City Courthouse. Was Gaddy Rhodes deluded? Deceived? A one-eyed figure in the Land of the Blind? These were questions not easily answered.

  She closed her laptop under the dim light of a swaying lamp. Considered whether she should leave a letter behind. Probably. But she couldn’t think of anyone to write to, so instead left only a brief note and inventory for her supervising officer in lieu of any final goodbye message:

  To the attention of Lieutenant Addario, ICA:

  Dear Andrea, if anything happens to me, anything at all, please ensure that the following items, recently recovered, are returned to their rightful owners: one (1) terracotta Buddha’s head, three (3) shards of funeral pottery, one (1) Icelandic chess piece (walrus tusk ivory, circa. 12th century).

  Yours,

  Agent G. Rhodes

  The Buddha’s head, no bigger than her fist, along with the shards of funeral pottery, were sealed in plastic like pieces of a puzzle that didn’t quite fit together. Wearing cotton gloves to protect the patina, Gaddy held up the chess piece, examined it closely. A scowling bishop, crudely carved with bone tools, rescued from a forgotten drawer in Reykjavík, it was one of the missing pieces of the medieval Lewis chessmen, worth thousands on its own. The complete set? Tens of thousands. Millions, even. But without this missing bishop, the complete chessmen would never be assembled. She smiled. Looked to the photograph of the security-cam silhouette that was ly
ing on her desk. Want it? Come and get it. I dare you.

  She imagined a vast and infinite chessboard stretching out in front of her, invisible lines of attack radiating down endless avenues, an ever-expanding horizon of possibilities, and somewhere out there, the opponent she conjured into existence quietly waiting, silent and faceless, perhaps planning a countermove of his own. They strike at an angle, bishops. They come at you from the side. You might manage to catch sight of them from the corner of your eye, but by then it was too late. Was Rhodes the bishop or the pawn? That, too, was a difficult question to answer.

  The floor lifted beneath her, hung in midair, then dropped down on a stomach soar of vertigo. A rap on the door, sharp and metallic. Rounded corners and rivets. Battleship gray. A voice on the other side: “Agent Rhodes? Onegai shimasu.”

  Another swell, another sudden drop. Her cabin began to list.

  The voice on the other side: “We are waiting. Everyone is waiting.”

  She put the scowling bishop away, carefully peeled off the cotton gloves, tucked her handwritten note under the corner of the chessboard, and then stepped outside onto the deck of a Tsugaru-class patrol vessel, into the clear blue of the Okinawan seas.

  A Japanese naval officer led her across to where the midrange search-and-rescue helicopter was tethered and waiting. Gaddy Rhodes, hair as insubstantial as corn silk, blowing every which way. Gaddy Rhodes, empty and awake.

  Slowly, the blades began to turn.

  PART ONE HERE BE DRAGONS: THE LONG BICYCLE RIDE OF OFFICER SHIMADA

  A STEM FROM THE TEA leaves was floating in his cup, standing perfectly on end like a small omen.

  “That’s good luck,” he said, leaning across the cluttered kitchen table to show his wife. She didn’t bother looking up from her magazine. She knew what a stem looked like.

  “Mm,” she said.

  He fished it out, gently, the way one might with an eyelash, flicked it to one side, drank down the rest of his morning ocha in a single, decisive swallow.

  A tea stem, suspended like that? It foretold an auspicious day.

  Police Inspector Atsushi Shimada, senior officer, Hateruma Island Substation, Okinawa Division, Japanese National Police Force, pushed himself up from the kitchen table with renewed purpose. “Well,” he said. “I suppose I had better go check on that foreigner.”

  He spoke with resolve, as becoming his status. He was, after all, representing the entire precinct. Decorum was in order. As the sole officer assigned to a small island—a village, really, perched on a jagged bit of coral at the farthest reach of Japan—Officer Shimada was the Hateruma Police Department.

  “Your shirt,” his wife said. “It’s not tucked in properly.”

  Shimada’s wife, as portly as he was thin, didn’t bother looking up from her magazine for this, either. She didn’t need to; his shirt was always loose around the hips. As surely as her police officer husband was dressed in his uniform, she was dressed in hers: the standard-issue apron and headscarf of the Japanese Housewife. If she could keep her uniform in order, why couldn’t he? Mrs. Shimada unwrapped a sembei rice cracker on a crinkle of plastic, studied the glossy celebrity photo-spread in front of her. “Can’t believe she’s wearing that.”

  Shimada shoved in his shirt, tightened his belt.

  “Arrived yesterday,” he said. “Came in on the last ferry. A foreigner.” He wasn’t sure why he was using the formal gaikokujin instead of the more usual gaijin.

  Tamura-san from the ferry port had stopped by earlier that morning, had stood at the front desk waiting patiently for Police Inspector Shimada, senior officer, Hateruma Island Substation, Okinawa Division, to appear.

  Officer Shimada’s cement-walled home was attached to this police station by a single sliding door. Shimada stepped through and up to the counter, Tamura-san smiling his apology for having interrupted Shimada’s breakfast.

  The two men exchanged nods.

  “A foreigner, you say?”

  “That’s right. On the last ferry.”

  Foreigners came to Hateruma Island now and then, it wasn’t unheard of, and for much the same reason as Japanese: for the quiet beaches and flying fish and white sand, but mainly to stand, fist on hips, looking into the wind above the coral cliffs at Cape Takana so they could say, with a satisfied frown, “This is me at the end of Japan.” After that, there was nothing much to do but turn around and begin the long plod homeward, island-hopping by boat, ferry, and plane back to Naha City, back to the mainland of Japan, away. What made this foreigner any different?

  “He was strange.”

  “Foreigners are always strange.”

  “Not strange. Agitated. Was alone, all by himself, not part of any tour group.”

  “So… a backpacker. How is that strange?”

  “Wasn’t a backpacker. Was lugging this really heavy, awkward duffel bag, wouldn’t let anyone carry it for him. Came all the way from Ishigaki Island, but had nowhere to stay when he got here, hadn’t called ahead or anything. We were tying up for the night when he approached us, all agitated-like. Kept saying ‘Firefly, firefly.’ ”

  “Firefly?”

  “He was trying to say ‘hotel.’ Took us a while to figure that out. The way he said it, sounded like ho-ta-ru. Firefly.”

  “There are no fireflies on Hateruma. Not this time of year.”

  “He wasn’t saying firefly, he was saying— Anyway. We pointed him to the guesthouse by the dock. You know the one, the widow’s place.”

  How sad, thought Shimada. She was once a name, a wife, a person, was now was simply “the widow.” There were other widows on the island, but none so young. When her husband was swept away from that boat, he took her name with him.

  “No children,” said Shimada, more to himself than to Tamura-san.

  Shimada’s own children had long slipped free of Hateruma, one to college in Naha, another to Nagasaki. The outer islands were shedding young people like fireflies.

  Tamura-san nodded. No children. A tragedy. “Anyway. I just thought, you know, I should tell you in case you wanted to check in, make sure she’s okay, the widow.”

  After Tamura-san left, Senior Police Inspector Shimada had gone back to the kitchen table to finish his breakfast: miso soup, now cold in the bowl; a papyrus square of nori; yesterday’s rice. A cup of green tea with a single stem suspended. He made his decision.

  “I’m going down to the dock.”

  Why didn’t he say where he was really going, to the widow’s house? Was it because the other wives didn’t approve of her? Didn’t approve of her taking in guests so soon after her husband’s death? At night, people passing by had heard her singing to the radio, had spied her, framed by her kitchen window, dancing—swaying, really—not proper for someone in mourning. When Shimada heard these stories, he thought, Not dancing, just sad. Was that where his interest in this came from, not a foreigner alone and acting peculiar, but simply as pretext, an excuse to see the widow, to be asked inside? Or were there darker currents at play, ones that Shimada himself could barely articulate, a vague, ill-defined sense that this was a day heavy with portents, one that would end badly, perhaps; strangely, at the very least.

  He cleared his throat. There was no reason to hide where he was really going. “Not the dock,” he said. “The guesthouse.”

  “The widow?”

  “That’s right. Thought I’d check in, make sure everyone is safe. The foreigner, I mean. He might be lost. Could be stranded.” Was he still speaking about the foreigner? Shimada stared at his wife, nested at their kitchen table, a plump daughter of the islands. Theirs had been an arranged marriage, and a happy one—or near enough. And yet, every year, he seemed to grow thinner and thinner. He could see it in the morning mirror, a gauntness that had perhaps always been there, waiting to come out.

  Their kitchen, like the rest of the house, looked as though it had recently been stirred by a large wooden spoon. Lost objects were constantly emerging and then disappearing in the Shimada househ
old. “Not lost,” his wife would scold. “Misplaced.”

  Officer Shimada was a file in a folder in a cabinet in the corner of an office in a building half-forgotten. He knew that, had long come to accept his fate: to be overlooked. Police officers were regularly shuffled among posts, but Shimada had settled, or rather been abandoned, on Hateruma Island like an exile waiting for the war to end because no one had thought to call him home.

  He sat at the kitchen table trying to remember who he was going to be.

  Years ago, Police Inspector Shimada had been rotated out to Ishigaki, the unofficial “capital” of this particular cluster of islands, and he had reveled in the hubbub. Ishigaki had traffic lights and hotels and rhinestone pachinko parlors and black pearl beaches, but his wife missed her little isle, and he had dutifully applied for a return to exile. He’d felt partly relieved, partly resigned, partly defeated, like a prisoner returning from a day pass. He wondered if prisoners ever missed the prison.

  And now this: Abrasive Tokyo accents, filling their messy home. Feigned laughter, cries of “Uso!” and “Subarashiiii!” One of NHK’s morning talk shows, bright and relentlessly sunny, had taken over: bits of news and titterings of gossip with large dollops of banter in between.

  “Shhh,” his wife said. “My show.”

  The small TV in the kitchen, perched beside the rice cooker, next to the dish rack, in front of the toaster oven, on top of the oven mitts, was frantic with banter. He could set his watch by his wife’s viewing habits: talk shows in the morning, variety programs in the afternoon, detective dramas after dark. Those last ones were particularly engrossing: dark tales of distant cities, of plucky female sleuths and world-weary pros, the complex machinations of housewives and hapless salarymen broiling in blackmail and infidelity, beamed in like distress signals from that semi-mythical realm known as “the rest of Japan.” Staged laughter in the morning, staged dramas at night, followed monthly by feigned passions in the bedroom after the lights were doused. He could set his calendar by that as well.