taller than his younger brother. He played center field on his junior high school baseball team, and wrestled as a middleweight on the high school judo team. He graduated from university ranked 201st in a class of 402.
Kawamura married the girl of his parents' choice at the age of twenty-eight years, six months. He and his wife now have exactly two children and, to keep things in balance, they are of each sex. Kawamura would rather spend his days sitting in a rowboat fishing than anything he could possibly imagine. He has seven years and ninety-two days to go until retirement at age fifty-five.
An awesome talent has dogged Tim Kawamura since his junior high school days. His special skill first displayed itself, to his own amazement, in contests in and around his native island of Kyushu. As word of his abilities spread to the main island of Honshu, Kawamura was soon packed off to appear in similar but broader contests throughout the country. Once, in 1960, he even appeared on national television. The prestige and acclaim he brought to his family and teachers was incalculable, and it led to a very tangible job offer and subsequent career in which his unique abilities are employed even today.
During the pre-Olympic months in 1964, the Olympic organizers, in coordination with the Japanese government, conducted a massive campaign to prepare the local citizenry for anticipated encounters with international visitors. People like Kawamura were in great demand.
Just out of school, he was brought to Tokyo, housed in a special dormitory, and outfitted in red slacks and a white blazer with a red sun on the breast pocket. Kawamura was one of hundreds of young men and women outfitted in red slacks and white blazers with red suns on the breast pockets. Performing well during rehearsals—that old talent again— he was given a prestigious assignment. He was christened by authorities with the name Tim (it being well-known that all foreigners called people by their given names) and entrusted with the responsibility of "Liaison Official" to the visiting United States Olympic team, specifically the javelin throwers.
When, after the Games, it was determined that Kawamura had acquitted himself particularly well—especially during a potentially disastrous misunderstanding involving the javelin throwers and their javelins, the young maidens from the International School of the Sacred Heart in Tokyo, their Mother Superior, the stunned proprietor of a beer hall in the Ginza, and a local policeman on patrol in the neighborhood—he was approached by the Police Department with an offer of permanent employment. His assistance had been deemed to be significant, and his career was guaranteed. He was now a captain and his talent was still a special and relatively rare gift.
Tim Kawamura, in public or in private, before great crowds or small, while drunk or plain sober, was able to open his mouth and make sounds emerge in a torrent. And those sounds, apparently shaped by alien forces lurking deep in the brain's chemistry, were in mysterious but apparently well-understood. . . English!
Captain Kawamura was assigned to handle whatever it was that had happened among the foreigners at the Tokyo American Club.
* * * *
"Stand back everyone. Stand back."
J.B. Culhane III had been president of the Tokyo American Club for seven weeks. The mantle of authority rested uncertainly on his beefy shoulders—his most significant action as president had been his acceptance speech, in which he announced that jackets and ties would be henceforth required for entry to the mixed grill. It had been necessary for him the following week, however, to clarify by letter to all members that the pronouncement did not apply to women. "Women should wear, er, just nice things," he later explained to the Board of Governors.
Several dozen people had rushed down to the pool area after Gordy Sparks' spectacular revelation of things amiss in the water. Another three hundred or so remained in the building, crowding for space at the windows outside the ballroom, or descending to lower floors for a better view. None of the people in the pool area gave the slightest indication of doing anything but standing back.
"Stand back," J.B. roared, "wait for the police."
J.B. Culhane III was on, by his own admission, something resembling the "fast track" in his corporation. He had worked in three of four different areas of his head office, and these assignments had been interspersed with several postings to overseas corporate hot spots. "Jack," as he was known to his close friends, was both nimble and quick, and the relative frequency of his assignments allowed him to leap over the candlesticks which had burned several of his successors.
His rise in the hierarchy of the club was nothing short of phenomenal—the timing of transfers, job-changes, and expanding career responsibilities created a vacuum at the top which J.B. rose to from his former position of house committee chairman. "It will be good for business," J.B. told his head-office supervisors after his election, "and I get to write a column in the monthly club newspaper." What he did not mention, or even notice at first, was the headache of trying to satisfy thirty-five hundred members, not counting spouses and children, from forty-four different countries.
"Let's at least get the head out," said the Frenchman at J.B.'s elbow. "We can use the pool skimmer, I think."
In a way, it was amazing that the first question on everyone's lips was who the victim was, not what happened or why. The head was covered with white hair that floated silkily in the murky water, but the face remained resolutely down and out of sight.
"Or let's just poke it over to see," continued the Frenchman.
J.B. walked to the other end of the pool, telling people hovering against the bushes in the background to stand back, and looked at the torso. Unfortunately, tuxedos have a uniformity about them, making identification without living gestures, or heads, impossible. A large area of water around the body was clouded by the reddish-brown fluid issuing from the neck, and columns of the stuff were already twisting and sinking to the bottom of the pool.
Small red and blue tubes floated like strings from the neck of the torso, and their movement in the softly rippling water gave an appearance of life that was, under the circumstances, grotesque. Feeling a sudden revulsion that must have similarly affected poor Gordy Sparks upstairs, J.B. stepped back, took a deep breath, and looked up at the people staring down from the windows in the main building. The first sounds of a siren could be heard wailing in the distance.
"O.K.," said J.B. Culhane III to the Frenchman standing at the shallow end, "take the pole and nudge it over." Jack had made his second decision as club president. "Stand back everyone," he added for good measure.
J.B. watched the Frenchman gingerly prod the submerged head. It took several attempts to catch the end of the pole in the area around the ear. When the pole did catch, the nudge was too sharp. The head spun completely around, white hair revolving in a trail. A lady standing near the shallow end screamed, and her escort caught her as she fell in a faint.
J.B. wiped his forehead with his handkerchief and turned toward the white wall of the recreation building. People on the fast track, he reminded himself, should avoid swooning at all costs. A babble of concerned conversation arose behind him, mingling with the "mon Dieus" from the Frenchman.
"Excuse, please," said a voice so startlingly close that J.B. dropped his handkerchief. "My name is Tim Kawamura and I am at your service. And," he added, almost as an afterthought, "I am with the Azabu Police Department."
He and J.B. exchanged business cards and bowed to each other ever so slightly. J.B. picked up his handkerchief.
"Is something wrong here?" asked Tim Kawamura. His eyes were flicking back and forth along the length of the twenty-five meter pool. His gaze rested fractionally longer at the deep end.
