Bonita Avenue by Peter Buwalda Read Free Book Online Page B

seated to his left at the Formica table where the eleven-man group of scholars is eating. Every Saturday evening following their afternoon session at Jiaotong University they meet at this table in this restaurant on Huaihai Zhong Lu, it’s a long-standing tradition. And usually he enjoys it, just as he enjoys these junkets to Shanghai, because that’s what they are, of course, pleasure trips. Hismembership in the Asian Internet Society goes back long before he became
rector magnificus
, and one of the conditions of his appointment was that this “valuable Asian connection” would remain intact. Of the utmost importance to the position of Tubantia University, he had argued, and so forth. Why of course, they agreed, absolutely, it goes without saying. As he wished. Complete bullshit is what it was, but even then he knew he’d be needing them, his jaunts to Shanghai. Just to get away from the campus for a bit, away from the glasshouse.
    “To be honest,” he says, “I found the puzzles a bit … how shall I put it … a bit boring.”
    Obayashi, Professor of Information Technology at the University of Tokyo, opens his eyes wide; his skin stretches like a mayonnaise-yellow mask over his broad skull.
    “But maybe I’m not the right person to judge them.” Sigerius wipes his mouth on his napkin and, in an attempt to avoid Obayashi, looks around the room. Like every other decent restaurant in China, this one is ugly as sin. The lighting is merciless, certainly now that someone has thrown a blanket over Shanghai, the decor is haphazard: no two tables have the same shape or height; even the flickering and humming fluorescent lights, which radiate X-rays down on steaming dishes of—it must be said—fantastic food were made in different state-run factories and date from different decades. At the next table, a boisterous group of Chinese men are gorging themselves. Businessmen, undoubtedly: shirtsleeves with sweaty armpits, loosened neckties, lip-smacking, belching, bones tossed aside, loud, throaty shouts.
    Obayashi nods. He lays his chopsticks on the table and stares silently into his plastic bowl of rice.
    “What I mean,” Sigerius says, more tactfully, “is that otherDutch people, and therefore Europeans, might think they’re really good puzzles.”
    Obayashi raises his close-cropped head, looks across the table where John Tyronne is in conversation with Ping. “But maybe you know of a publisher?” he drawls. “Siem, just put me in touch with a publisher. I’ve got high hopes.”
    At the last meeting of the Asian Internet Society, in 1999, this same man took him aside to discuss what he termed a “private matter.” Obayashi’s son-in-law was the commercial director of Nippon Fun, a Japanese enterprise that marketed a successful puzzle book in Japan. One of the games, Number Place, was all the rage in New Zealand, where someone had developed a computer program capable of mass-producing the puzzles, as for a daily newspaper. Unfortunately he hadn’t any with him, but Obayashi wanted Sigerius’s opinion on the Number Place game and promised to send him a few copies. He was convinced, even more than his son-in-law, that the world was ready for Number Place. A little while later, an envelope from Tokyo landed on his Enschede doormat: two Japanese booklets, each with sixty puzzles and an accompanying letter explaining in toy-English that the one with the five chili peppers was called “kamikaze,” he’d see why soon enough.
    Only during the flight to Shanghai, when he’d driven himself crazy with all his theorizing and brooding, did he take the puzzle books from his carry-on and give them a closer look. Like so many number puzzles, he saw directly, they were derived from Euler’s Latin Squares. They comprised a nine-by-nine matrix of cells, a few cells already filled in with a whole number from 1 to 9. The challenge was to complete the remaining cells so that in each row and each column, the numbers 1