And to the right, at the far end of the space, looking bizarrely like a giant who had blundered onto the edge of the scene, was Grimble. He was staring through a jeweler’s lamp, intent on something he was working on—a figurine, Rain thought, though he was too far away to be sure.
The surface of the scene was about four feet off the floor. And while there was enough space along each side for two people to pass, the interior would have been impossible to reach without portals accessible from underneath. Larison was squatting, no doubt after having the same thought, to confirm no one was lurking underneath, however unlikely that might be.
Larison stood, and the movement must have registered in Grimble’s ambient vision. He pushed away the jeweler’s lamp and looked up at them through an enormous pair of wireless eyeglasses, each lens half the size of a scuba mask. His thinning brown hair was held back in a ponytail, and his cheeks were so chubby they extended past his ears. There was no alarm in his expression, only curiosity.
“Who let you in?” he said.
“Larry,” Rain said. “The guard.” He started walking toward Grimble, the Glock low along his thigh, Livia and Larison following.
Grimble blinked. “He’s not supposed to do that. What do you want?”
Evie had been right—the man was looking in their direction, but his gaze was off to the side. The effect was of talking to a sightless person relying only on sound to gauge their position.
“We need your help,” Rain said.
Grimble blinked again, his eyes magnified in the giant lenses, and looked at the ceiling. He was wearing a white turtleneck, Rain saw, and what looked like a red, pleated robe.
“Are you with a startup?” Grimble said. “You can’t just come to my house. There’s a whole investing team; they handle that kind of thing.”
Rain kept walking. “We had to talk to you directly.”
“Directly, directly, directly. Everybody always says directly. It’s not fair to interrupt me. To intrude on my privacy.”
Rain stopped about ten feet away and holstered the Glock. Grimble must have seen it, at least in his peripheral vision, but the fact that Rain was armed seemed to mean nothing to him. Maybe he was used to having armed guards. Maybe he didn’t understand guns the way people who used them did.
“If that’s the Fuji River,” Rain said, pointing, “I’m guessing that figurine you’re working on is Fukushima Masanori.”
Grimble looked out the window.
“I’ve always had him holding his sword in his right hand,” Grimble said. “But recently, some of my people alerted me to scholarship suggesting Masanori was left-handed. One of my first pieces, and it was wrong, wrong, wrong. Is that a gun you have?”
Rain acted as though he hadn’t heard. He looked at the area in front of Grimble. “Then that must be Shimazu Yoshihiro. Who refused Ishida’s order to reinforce Ishida’s right flank.”
Grimble glanced at the scene before him. “How do you know so much about Sekigahara?”
“The books I used to read,” Rain said. “When I was a boy. I wanted to be Musashi. But I wound up something else.”
Grimble glanced past Rain at Larison and Livia, then at the wall behind Rain, then at the figurine he was holding. “I . . . Who are you?”
“We’re almost out of time,” Livia said.
Rain knew exactly how much time they had before Schrader’s dead-man switch released a tranche of videos, and for a moment he understood how his own micromanaging might grate.
“Andrew Schrader was helping us,” Rain said. “And some people killed him for it.”
Grimble blinked. “People killed him? Killed, killed, killed him? What people?”