Hard Rain

by Barry Eisler

  The facility occupied the ground floor of a gray commercial building hemmed in by rusting fire escapes and choked with high-tension wires that clung to the structure’s façade like rotting vegetation. Across from it was a parking lot crowded by Mercedeses with darkened windows and high-performance tires, the status symbols of the country’s elite and of its criminals, each aping the other, comfortably sharing the pleasures of the night in Roppongi’s tawdry demimonde. The street itself was illuminated only by the indifferent glow of a single arched lamplight, its base festooned with flyers advertising the area’s innumerable sexual services, in the shadows of its own luminescence looking like the elongated neck of some antediluvian bird shedding diseased and curling feathers.

  The shades were drawn behind the club’s plate-glass windows, but I spotted the yakuza’s anodized aluminum Harley-Davidson V-Rod parked in front, surrounded by commuter bicycles like a shark amidst pilot fish. Just past the windows was the entrance to the building. I tried the door, but it was locked.

  I backed up a few steps to the club windows and tapped on the glass. A moment later the lights went off inside. Nice, I thought. He had cut the lights so he could peek through the shades without being seen from outside. I waited, knowing he was watching me and checking the street.

  The lights went back on, and a moment later the yakuza appeared in the entranceway to the building. He was wearing gray sweatpants and a black cutaway A-shirt, along with the obligatory weightlifting gloves. Obviously in the middle of a workout.

  He opened the door, his eyes searching the street for danger, failing to spot it right there in front of him.

  “Shimatterun da yo,” he told me. Club’s closed.

  “I know,” I said in Japanese, my hands up, palms forward in a placating gesture. “I was hoping someone might be here. I was going to come by earlier but got held up. You think I could squeeze in a quick one? Just while you’re here, no longer than that.”

  He hesitated, then shrugged and turned to go back inside. I followed him in.

  “How much longer have you got to go?” I asked, dropping my gear bag and changing out of my unobtrusive khakis, blue oxford-cloth shirt, and navy blazer. I had already slipped on the gloves, as I always did before coming to the club, but the yakuza hadn’t noticed this detail. “So I can time my workout.”

  He walked over to the squat station. “Forty-five minutes, maybe an hour,” he said, getting into position under the weight.

  Squats. What he usually did when he was finished bench pressing. Shit.

  I slipped into shorts and a sweatshirt, then warmed up with some push-ups and other calisthenics while he did his sets of squats. The warm-up might actually be useful, I realized, depending on the extent of his struggles. A small advantage, but I don’t give anything away for free.

  When he was through, I asked, “Already done benching?”

  “Aa.” Yeah.

  “How much you put up tonight?”

  He shrugged, but I detected a slight puffing of his chest that told me his vanity had been kindled.

  “Not so much. Hundred and forty kilos. Could have done more, but with that much weight, it’s better to have someone spot you.”

  Perfect. “Hey, I’ll spot you.”

  “Nah, I’m already done.”

  “C’mon, do another set. It inspires me. What are you putting up, twice your body weight?” My underestimate was deliberate.

  “More.”

  “Shit, more than twice your body weight? That’s what I’m talking about, I’m not even close to that. Do me a favor, do one more set, it’ll motivate me. I’ll spot you, fair enough?”

  He hesitated, then shrugged and started walking over to the bench-press station.

  The bar was already set up with the hundred and forty kilos he’d been using earlier. “Think you can handle a hundred and sixty?” I asked, my tone doubtful.

  He looked at me, and I could tell from his eyes that his ego had engaged. “I can handle it.”

  “Okay, this I’ve got to see,” I said, pulling two ten-kilo plates off the weight tree and sliding them onto the ends of the bar. I stood behind the bench and gripped the bar about shoulder-width with both hands. “Let me know when you’re ready.”

  He sat at the foot of the bench, his shoulders hunched forward, and rotated his neck from side to side. He swung his arms back and forth and I heard a series of short, forceful exhalations. Then he lay back and took hold of the bar.

  “Give me a lift on three,” he said.

  I nodded.

  There were several additional sharp exhalations. Then: “One . . . two . . . three!”

  I helped him get the bar into the air and steady it over his chest. He was staring at the bar as though enraged by it, his chin sunk into his neck in preparation for the effort.

  Then he let it drop, controlling its descent but allowing enough momentum to ensure a good bounce off his massive chest. Two thirds of the way up, the bar almost stopped, suspended between the drag of gravity and the power of his steroid-fueled muscles, but it continued its shaky ascent until his elbows were straightened. His arms were trembling from the effort. There was no way he had another one in him.

  “One more, one more,” I urged. “C’mon, you can do it.”

  There was a pause, and I prepared to try some fresh exhortations. But he was only mentally preparing for the effort. He took three quick breaths, then dropped the bar to his chest. It rose a few centimeters from the impact, then a few more from the northward shove that followed, but a second later it stopped and began to move inexorably downward.

  “Tetsudatte kure,” he grunted. Help. But calmly, expecting my immediate assistance.

  The bar continued downward and settled against his chest. “Oi, tanomu,” he said again, more sharply this time.

  I pushed downward instead.

  His eyes popped open, searching for mine.

  Between the weight of the bar and plates and the pressure I was delivering, he was now struggling with almost two hundred kilos.

  I focused on the bar and his torso, but in my peripheral vision I saw his eyes bulging in confusion, then fear. He made no sound. I continued to concentrate on the clinical downward pressure.

  With his teeth clenched shut, his chin almost buried in his neck, he threw everything he had into moving the bar. In extremis he was actually able to get the weight off his chest. I hooked a foot under the horizontal supports at the bottom of the bench and used the leverage to add additional pressure to the bar, and again it settled against his chest.

  I felt a tremor in the weights as his arms began to shake with exertion. Again the bar moved slightly north.

  Suddenly I was struck by the reek of feces. His sympathetic nervous system, in desperation, was shutting down nonessential bodily activities, including sphincter control, and diverting all available energy to his muscles.

  The rally lasted only another moment. Then his arms began to shake more violently, and I felt the bar moving downward, more deeply into his chest. There was a slight hissing as his breath was driven out through his nostrils and pursed lips. I felt his eyes on my face but kept my attention on his torso and the bar. Still he made no sound.

  Seconds went by, then more. His position didn’t change. I waited. His skin began to blue. I waited longer.

  Finally, I eased off the pressure I had been putting on the bar and released my grip.

  His eyes were still on me, but they no longer perceived. I stepped back, out of their sightless ambit, and paused to observe the scene. It looked like what it almost was: a weightlifting addict, alone and late at night, tries to handle more than he can, gets caught under the bar, suffocates and dies there. A bizarre accident.

  I changed back into my street clothes. Picked up my bag, moved to the door. A series of cracks rang out behind me, like the snaps of dried tinder. I turned to look one last time, realizing as I did that the sound was of his ribs giving way. No question, he was done. Only his convulsive grip on the bar r
emained, as though the fingers refused to believe what the body had already accepted.

  I stepped into the dark hallway and waited until the street was clear. Then I eased out onto the sidewalk and into the shadows around me.

  2

  I SLIPPED AWAY from the area on foot along a series of secondary streets in Roppongi and Akasaka, cutting across narrow alleyways in a manner which, to the uninitiated, would have looked like a series of simple shortcuts to wherever I was going, but which were in fact designed to force a follower or team of followers to reveal themselves in an effort to keep up. With a few deliberate exceptions, all my surveillance detection moves are accomplished under the guise of seemingly normal pedestrian behavior. If I’m being followed because some organization has taken an interest but hasn’t yet managed to confirm who I am, I’m not going to give the game away by acting like anything other than John Q. Citizen.

  After about a half-hour I was confident that I wasn’t being tailed, and my pace began to slow in accompaniment to my mood. I found myself moving in a long, counterclockwise semicircle that I only half acknowledged was taking me in the direction of Aoyama Bochi, the enormous cemetery laid out like a triangular green bandage at the center of the city’s fashionable western districts.

  On the north side of Roppongi-dori, I passed a small colony of cardboard shelters, the way stations of wandering homeless men whose lives were, in a sense, as detached and anonymous as my own. I set down the gym bag I was carrying, knowing that the bag and its contents of workout clothes and weightlifting gloves would quickly be distributed and assimilated among the gaunt and trackless wraiths nearby. Within days, perhaps hours, the discarded remnants of this last job would have been bleached of any trace of their origins, each just another nameless, colorless item among nameless, colorless souls, the flotsam and jetsam of loneliness and despair that fall from time to time into Tokyo’s collective blind spot and from there into oblivion.

  Freed of the burden I had been carrying, I moved on, this time circling east. Under an overpass at Nogizaka, north of Roppongi-dori, I saw a half-dozen chinpira, gaudy in sleek racing leathers, squatting in a tight semicircle, their low-slung metal motorcycles parked on the footpath alongside them. Fragments of their conversation skipped off the side of the concrete wall to my right, the words unintelligible but the notes tuned as tight as the tricked-out exhaust pipes of their machines. They were probably jacked on kakuseizai, the methamphetamine that has been the Japanese drug of choice since the government distributed it to soldiers and workers during World War II, and of which these chinpira were doubtless both purveyors and consumers. They were waiting for the drug-induced hum in their muscles and brains to hit the right pitch, for the hour to grow suitably late and the night more seductively dark, before emerging from their concrete lair and answering the neon call of Roppongi.

  I saw them take notice of me, a solitary figure approaching from the southern end of what was in effect a narrow tunnel. I considered crossing the street, but a metal divider made that maneuver unfeasible. I might simply have backed up and taken a different route. My failure to do so made it more difficult for me to deny that I was indeed heading toward the cemetery.

  When I was three or four meters away one of them stood up. The others continued to squat, watching, alert for whatever distraction was promised.

  I had already noted the absence of any of the security cameras that were growing more pervasive in the streets and subways with every passing year. Sometimes I have to fight the feeling that those cameras are looking specifically for me.

  “Oi,” the one who had stood called out. Hey.

  I stole a quick glance behind me to ensure that we were alone. It wouldn’t pay to have anyone see what I would do if these idiots got in my way.

  Without altering my pace or direction, I looked into the chinpira’s eyes, my expression obsidian flat. I let him know with this look that I was neither afraid nor looking for trouble, that I’d done this kind of thing many times before, that if he was in search of some excitement tonight the smart thing would be to find it elsewhere.

  Most people, especially those even loosely acquainted with violence, understand these signals, and can be relied on to respond in ways that increase their survival prospects. But apparently this guy was too stupid, or too jacked on kakuseizai. Or he might have misinterpreted my initial backward glance as a sign of fear. Regardless, he ignored the warning I had given him and started edging into my path.

  I recognized the procedure: I was being interviewed for my suitability as a victim. Would I allow myself to be forced out into the street and the oncoming traffic? Would I cringe and flinch in the process? If so, he would know I was a safe target, and he would then escalate, probably to real violence.

  But I prefer my violence sudden. Keeping him to my right, I stepped past him with my left leg, shooting my right leg through on the same side immediately afterward and then sweeping it backward to reap his legs out from under him in osoto-gari, one of the most basic and powerful judo throws. Simultaneously I twisted counterclockwise and blasted my right arm into his neck, taking his upper body in the opposite direction of his legs. For a split instant he was suspended horizontally over the spot where he had been standing. Then I drilled him into the sidewalk, jerking upward on his collar at the last instant so the back of his head wouldn’t take excessive impact. I didn’t want a fatality. Too much attention.

  The sequence had taken less than two seconds. I straightened and continued on my way as before, my eyes forward but my ears trained behind me for sounds of pursuit.

  There were none, and as the distance widened I indulged a small smile. I don’t like bullies—they formed too large a portion of my childhood on both sides of the Pacific—and I had a feeling it would be a long time before these chinpira worked up a fresh appetite to dispute someone’s passage along that sidewalk.

  I continued along, cutting left east of the cemetery, then right on Gaiennishi-dori, taking advantage of the turn as I always automatically do to monitor the area to my rear while ostensible checking for traffic. The cemetery was now to my right, but there was no sidewalk on that side of the street, so I stayed on the left until I was opposite a long riser of stone steps, a byway between the green piazza of the dead and the living city without. I stood looking at those steps for a long time. Finally I decided that the urge to which I had almost succumbed was ridiculous, as I had decided so many times in the past. I turned and moved slowly down the street, back the way I had come.

  As always after finishing a job, I was aware of the need to be among other people, to find some comfort in the illusion that I am part of the society through which I move. A few meters down the street I ducked into the Monsoon Restaurant, where I could enjoy the Southeast Asian–derived cuisine and the anodyne sounds of other people’s conversation.

  I chose a seat set slightly back from the restaurant’s open-air façade, facing the street and the entrance, and ordered a simple meal of rice noodles with vegetables. Although it was late for dinner, the tables were mostly occupied. To my left were the remnants of a small office party: a few young men with loosened ties and identical navy suits, two women with them, pretty and more stylishly dressed than their companions, at ease with the traditional Japanese female role of serving food, pouring drinks, and fostering conversation. Behind them, a solitary couple, high school or college kids, leaning toward each other and holding hands across the table, the boy talking with his eyebrows raised as though suggesting something, the girl laughing and shaking her head no. To the other side, a group of older American men, dressed more casually than the other patrons, their voices appropriately low, their skin shining slightly in the light of the table lamps.

  It was almost surreal, finding myself back in a restaurant or bar after finishing a job, my mind starting to drift, relief settling in after the adrenaline rush had ended. The sensations weren’t new, but the context rendered them strange, like the feel of a familiar business suit donned to attend a funera
l.

  I had thought I was out of all this after finishing things with Holtzer, the late chief of the CIA’s Tokyo Station. My cover had been blown, and it was time to reinvent myself, not for the first time. I had thought about the States, maybe the west coast, San Francisco, someplace with a large Asian population. But establishing a new identity in America, without the sort of groundwork that I had long since prepared in Japan, would have been difficult. Besides, if the CIA had been looking for payback for Holtzer, they might have had an easier time coming after me on their home turf. Staying in Japan left Tatsu to contend with, of course, but Tatsu’s interest in me had nothing to do with revenge, so I had judged him the lesser of the risks.

  I had to smile at that. I had learned that the danger Tatsu posed to me, while certainly less acute than the straightforward possibility of getting put to sleep by some lucky CIA contractor, was far more insidious.

  He had tracked me down in Osaka, Japan’s second largest metropolis, where I had gone after disappearing from Tokyo. I had moved into a highrise community called Belfa in Miyakojima, the northwest of the city. Belfa was inhabited by sufficient numbers of corporate transferees so that a recent arrival wouldn’t provoke undue attention. It was also home primarily to families with small children, the kind of people who stay aware of the composition of their neighborhood, whose presence makes it difficult to mount effective surveillance or a successful ambush.

  At first I had missed Tokyo, where I had lived for two decades, and was disappointed to find myself in a city that the average Tokyoite would reflexively dismiss as a backwater in every category save brute geographical sprawl. But Osaka had grown on me. Its atmosphere, though arguably less sophisticated and cosmopolitan than Tokyo’s, is also lacking in pretense. Unlike Tokyo, whose financial, cultural, and political center of gravity is so strong that at times the city can feel self-satisfied, even solipsistic, Osaka compares itself ceaselessly to other places, its cousin to the northeast chief among them, emerging victorious, of course, in matters of cuisine, financial acumen, and general human goodness. I found something endearing in this scrappy, self-declared contest for supremacy. Maybe we don’t have the refined—read effete—manners, or the most powerful—read corrupt—political establishment, Osaka seems to declare to a Tokyo that isn’t even listening, but we’ve got a bigger heart. Over time, I began to wonder if the city didn’t have a point.