John Rain 08: Graveyard of Memories by Barry Eisler Page B

how to handle Ozawa dissipating from my mind. I’ve always loved the sentō , and this one was beautiful. I forgot about Ozawa for the moment and let myself be mindful, as Miyamoto had advised with regard to the drinking of tea. This was an old and noble building, used for a ritual that went back millennia, and I was here and I was connected to all of it, and that was good. That was enough.
    A wrinkled oyaji walked slowly over, gripped the railing with fingers gnarled from arthritis, and eased himself into one of the mineral baths. I figured the minerals must help with the arthritis. I thought if I were lucky, I might get that old someday. But I didn’t really expect it. I watched as a few clusters of people arrived and departed. No Ozawa.
    When I had soaked for as long as I could stand and was about to hit the plunge pool to cool down, a man came in. I squinted through the steam. Ozawa? He’d been clothed in all the file photos, obviously, and it was throwing me to try to make the match with him naked. But there—the limp from that war injury. He came closer, pulled up a stool, and sat in front of one of the spigots. His back was to me but I could see him clearly in the mirror he was facing. It was him.
    I hit the plunge pool, the shock of cold finishing off what the sight of Ozawa had already done to my reverie. Then I sat on the side for a few moments, cooling down, watching unobtrusively. A few people greeted Ozawa, and he exchanged brief pleasantries here and there, but this area was for serious bathing. Most real conversation would take place on the couches in the waiting area outside.
    When he was done washing, Ozawa stood with some effort and headed over to the baths. The limp was quite pronounced. I watched as, eschewing the main bath, he eased himself into the available mineral tub. I supposed that, like the arthritic oyaji , Ozawa found the superheated mineral water eased the discomfort of his wartime injury.
    I paused, that phrase mineral water repeating itself in my mind for no good reason. Unlike the other two baths, the mineral baths were one-person affairs, each not much more than a large tub. They were enclosed. They were small. And of course, they were filled with minerals. Salt, mostly. So salt water.
    Salt water, which is especially conductive of electricity.
    I was suddenly excited, and had to concentrate on maintaining my casual posture. Could I do this? Would it work?
    The oyaji pulled himself up and went to rinse off. I got back into the hot bath. This time, I barely felt it. I waited and watched unobtrusively. After about ten minutes, Ozawa leaned forward, gripped the faucet of the tub, and pulled himself out.
    The way he’d gripped that faucet…was that a habit? Things were more primitive in those days, ergonomics not yet a science, and the baths at Daikoku-yu were devoid of railings and handholds and steps. For anyone physically challenged—like the oyaji , like Ozawa—the most natural handhold to use when it was time to leave the bath was the faucet.
    The metal faucet. The grounded metal faucet.
    I got out of the bath again, letting one hand dip unobtrusively into the mineral bath on the way. I tasted a finger. Salty, as I had hoped. In the corner of the room, immediately to the left of the mineral-water baths and sharing a common wall with them, there was a door marked SERVICE . To its left, along the adjoining wall, was a spigot and stool—the last washing station along a row of ten. If I could get that station, I’d be not much more than an arm’s length from the closer of the two mineral baths. Unless someone was at the station right next to me, I thought I might have the necessary freedom of movement to carry out what I was beginning to see in my imagination.
    The problem was, I saw no electrical outlets. This wasn’t completely surprising. Electrical codes were a lot less stringent in those days, and items such as ground fault circuit interrupters were not at all widespread. It