He stopped arguing and said he would.
At the back of the pharmacy Elena reviewed the messages. The photograph's file details were gone; it might have been taken yesterday or ten years earlier. Yet the station clock in the background displayed a date from the current week. She enlarged the image and found a distinctive repair on the leather handle of the satchel, two dark stitches crossing a patch of tan leather. At fourteen she had made those stitches herself, badly, after the handle split while her father was returning from a trip to Tokyo.
She called Aiko.
'Thank you for calling,' Aiko said before Elena spoke. 'I was not certain you would.'
'The note said they were going to delete something. Who are they?'
'We don't know. The legal archive associated with the draft was scheduled for routine retention cleanup at midnight. That is unusual during an active transaction.'
'Who authorized it?'
'The request bears a credential assigned to a contractor that no longer exists.'
'Which contractor?'
Aiko hesitated. 'Oriole Translation Partners.'
Elena sat down on a plastic chair beside a blood-pressure machine. A customer wandered past carrying laundry detergent. Life continued within arm's reach, indifferent to the name that had changed hers.
'Is this some sort of trap?' she asked.
'I can see why you would think so. I have no reason to ask you to trust me. But I would like you to know that my uncle once worked with your father.'
'What was his name?'
'Kenji Tanaka. He died in an industrial accident in Yokohama five years ago.'
Elena remembered the case. A warehouse battery test had failed, igniting a fire that killed two workers and injured seven. The original report had placed responsibility on a Japanese subcontractor. Her father later claimed the translated safety protocol had been altered, but his objections had never entered the final record.
'Your uncle was one of the people who died,' she said.
'Yes. And your father was the only independent expert who said the report was wrong.'
In the silence that followed, Elena heard the pharmacy refrigerators humming.