But the music. It seemed to be coming through the walls.
The walls. They all looked to be rice paper. He clambered up and headed for the fusuma with the double-ax logo. He tested it and realized that the paper was actually painted steel. And it was locked. The room was secure as a vault.
But across, opposite the tokonoma, was another set of sliding doors. As he turned to walk over, he noticed he was wearing tabi, light cotton stockings split at the toe, and he was clad in a blue-patterned yukata robe, cinched at the waist. He'd been stripped and re-dressed.
This door was real, and he shoved it open. A suite of rooms lay beyond, and there on a second futon, still in a drugged sleep, lay Eva. He moved across, bent down, and shook her. She jerked away, her dreaming disrupted, and turned over, but she didn't come out of it.
"Wake up." He shook her again. "The party just got moved. Wait'll you get a load of the decor."
"What . . ." She rolled back and cracked open her bloodshot eyes. Then she rose on one elbow and gazed around the room. It was appointed identically to his, with only the hanging scroll in the tokonoma different, hers being an angular, three-level landscape. "My God."
"Welcome to the wonderful world of Tanzan Mino. I don't know where the hell we are, but it's definitely not Kansas, or London."
"My head feels like I was at ground zero when the bomb hit. My whole body aches." She groaned and plopped back down on the futon. "What time do you think it is?"
"Haven't a clue. How about starting with what day?" He felt for his watch and realized it was gone. "What does it matter anyway? Nobody has clocks in never-never land."
Satisfied she was okay, he stood up and surveyed the room. Then he saw what he'd expected. There in the center of the ceiling, integrated into the pattern of light-colored woods, was the glass eye of a video camera.