by Barry Eisler
He grunted, and I realized that I was enjoying the sight of him struggling with what for him was a moral dilemma. “What about the reformers Kanezaki’s been meeting with?” I asked. “If he gets exposed, they’ll be at risk.”
“Several of them may be.”
“An acceptably small number?”
He looked at me, knowing where I was going. I said it anyway. “What would you do if there had been five? Or ten?”
He scowled. “These are decisions that can only be made case by case.”
“Yamaoto doesn’t make these decisions case by case,” I said, still pushing. “He knows what needs to be done and he does it. That’s what you’re up against. You sure you’re equal to the task?”
His eyes narrowed slightly. “Do you think I seek to be this man’s ‘equal’? Yamaoto would not account for the fact that these politicians are themselves to blame for their current predicament. Or for the fact that Kanezaki’s motives are essentially good. Or for the fact that this young man presumably has a mother and father who would be ruined by his loss.”
I bowed my head, acknowledging his point and the conviction behind it. “Those men are finished, then?” I asked.
He nodded. “I have to assume that Yamaoto owns them now, and warn the others.”
“What about Kanezaki?”
“I’ll brief him on our meetings with Biddle and Tanaka.”
“Tell him his boss tried to put a contract out on him?”
He shrugged. “Why not? The young man already feels indebted to me. This sentiment might prove useful in the future. No harm in reinforcing it now.”
“What about Murakami?”
“As I said, we will continue to question the man we took in. He may provide us with something useful.”
“Contact me as soon as you have something. I want to be there when it happens.”
“So do I,” he said.
20
I CHECKED THE Imperial voice mail account from a pay phone. A mechanical female voice told me that I had one message.
I tried not to hope, but the attempt felt pretty thin. The female voice instructed me to press the “one” key if I wanted to hear the message. I did.
“Hi, Jun, it’s me,” I heard Midori say. There was a pause, then, “I don’t know if you’re still really staying at the hotel, so I don’t know if you’ll even get this message.” Another pause. “I’d like to see you tonight. I’ll be at Body and Soul at eight o’clock. I hope you’ll come. Bye.”
The female voice told me the message had been left at 2:28 P.M., that I should press the “one” key if I wanted to repeat it. I pressed it. And again.
There was something so disarmingly natural about the way she called me Jun, short for Junichi. No one calls me Jun anymore. No one knows the name. I had been using Junichi, my real name, selectively even before leaving Tokyo, and had discarded it entirely afterward.
Hi, Jun, it’s me. Such an ordinary message. Most people probably get ones like it all the time.
It felt as though the ground beneath me had borrowed some extra gravity from somewhere.
The part of my brain that has served me well for so long spoke up: Place and time. Could be a setup.
Not from her. I didn’t buy that.
Who else might have heard that message, though?
I considered. To intercept the message, someone would have to know where I was staying and under what fictitious name, and they’d have to be able to hack the hotel voice mail system. Outside of Tatsu, who wasn’t a current threat, there wasn’t much chance of that.
A chance, though.
My response to that was, The hell with it.
I went to see her.
I took a long, meandering route, moving mostly on foot, watching as the city gradually grew dark around me. There’s something so alive about Tokyo at night, something so imbued with possibilities. Certainly the daytime, with its zigzagging schools of pedestrians and thundering trains and hustle and noise and traffic, is the more upbeat of the city’s melodies. But the city also seems burdened by the quotidian clamor, and almost relieved, every evening, to be able to ease out into the twilight and set aside the weight of the day. Night strips away the superfluity and the distractions. You move through Tokyo at night and you feel that you’re on the verge of that thing you’ve always longed for. At night, you can hear the city breathe.
I stopped at an Internet café to check the Body & Soul website and see who was playing. It was Toku, a young vocalist and flugelhorn player who had already developed a reputation for a soulful sound that belied his twenty-nine years. I had two of his CDs but hadn’t seen him perform.
It was possible that Yamaoto had learned that Midori was in Tokyo from the investigative firm she had retained. If so, there was a chance she was being watched, perhaps by Murakami himself. I did a thorough check of the likely spots around the club. They were all clear.
I went in at about eight thirty. The place was full, but the doorman let me in when I told him I was a friend of Kawamura Midori, who was here for Toku’s performance. “Oh yes,” he told me. “Kawamura-san mentioned that someone might come. Please.”
She was sitting at the end of one of the two long tables that parallel Body & Soul’s walls and overlook the floor, where the musicians were set up. I scanned the room but didn’t spot any likely threats. In fact, the evening’s demographic was young, female, and obviously there to see Toku, who, with his quintet, was now captivating them with his elegiac “Autumn Winds.”
I smiled at what the band was wearing: T-shirts, jeans, and sneakers. They all had long hair, died chapatsu brown. Their contemporaries would think it was cool. To me they looked young.
I made my way to where Midori was sitting. She watched my approach but made no move to greet me.
She was wearing a black, form-fitting sleeveless turtleneck that looked like lightweight cashmere, her face and her arms luminous in contrast. She leaned back in her chair, and I saw a pair of leather pants, soft with age and use, and high-heeled boots. Other than a pair of diamond stud earrings, she’d left things unadorned. I’d always liked that she didn’t overdo the jewelry or makeup. She didn’t need to.
“I didn’t really expect you,” she said.
I leaned in so she could hear me over the music. “You didn’t think I’d get your message?”
She cocked an eyebrow. “I didn’t think you’d show up if I proposed the time and place.”
She caught on fast. I shrugged. “Here I am.”
There were no seats open, so she got up and we leaned against the wall, our shoulders not quite touching. She took her drink with her.
“What’s that you’re having?” I asked.
“Ardbeg. You introduced me to it, remember? It tastes like you now.”
“I’m surprised you enjoy it, then.”
She glanced at me, sidelong. “It’s a bittersweet flavor,” she said.
A waitress came by and I ordered an Ardbeg. We listened to Toku sing about sorrow and loneliness and regret. The crowd loved him.
When the set was over and the noise of the ensuing applause had died down, Midori turned to me. I was surprised to see concern on her face, even sympathy. Then I realized why.
“Did you . . . you must have heard about Harry,” she said.
I nodded.
“I’m sorry.”
I waited a second, then said, “He was killed, you know. Those PIs you put on him got word to the wrong people.”
Her mouth dropped open. “You know . . . they told me it was an accident.”
“That’s bullshit.”
“How do you know?”
“Circumstances. At one point they thought they had me, so they figured they didn’t need him. Besides, his stomach was full of alcohol. But Harry didn’t drink.”
“Oh my God,” she said, her hand over her mouth.
I looked at her. “Next time, hire a firm that takes its confidentiality obligations a little more seriously.”
; She shook her head, her hand still over her mouth.
“I’m sorry,” I said, looking down. “That wasn’t fair. This was nobody’s fault but the people who did it. And Harry’s, for not having known better.” I told her a sanitized version of how they had set him up, and how he had refused to listen to me.
“I liked him,” she said when I was done. “I wondered whether he was lying to me when he told me you were dead. That’s why I hired those people to watch him. But he seemed like a good person. He was cute and shy and I could tell he looked up to you.”
I smiled wanly. Harry’s eulogy.
“If I were you,” I said, “I’d be careful in Tokyo. They lost me, but they’ll be looking for me again. If they know you’re here, they might take an interest. Like they did with Harry.”
There was a long pause. Then she said, “I’m going back to New York tomorrow anyway.”
I nodded slowly, knowing what was coming.
“I won’t see you after this,” she said.
I went for a smile. It came out mostly wistful. “I know.”
“I figured out what I want from you,” she said.
“Yeah?”
She nodded. “At first what I thought I wanted was revenge. I kept thinking of how to hurt you, how to cause you pain, like the pain you caused me.”
I wasn’t surprised.
“And I resented you for that,” she went on, “because I’ve always believed that hate is such an unworthy emotion. So weak and ultimately pointless.”
I marveled briefly at how innocent a life someone would have to have led for such a philosophy to emerge credible and intact, and for a second I loved her for it.
She took a sip of her Ardbeg. “But seeing you the other day changed that. Part of it was realizing that you really did try to get that disk back and finish what my father had started. Part of it was knowing that you were trying to protect me from the other people who were trying to find the disk.”
“But what was it really?”
She looked away, over to where the band had been playing, then back to me. “Understanding what you are. You’re not part of the real world. Not my real world, at least. You’re like a ghost, some creature forced to live in the shadows. And I realized that someone like that isn’t worthy of hatred.”
Whether I was worthy of hatred and whether she hated me weren’t the same thing. I wondered if she knew that. “Pity, instead?” I asked.
She nodded. “Maybe.”
“I think I might have preferred having you hate me,” I said. I was trying for light, but she didn’t laugh.
She looked at me. “So all we have left is tonight.”
I almost said no. I almost told her it would hurt too much.
Then I decided I would deal with the hurt afterward. The way it’s always been.
We went to the Park Hyatt in Shinjuku. She was staying at the Okura but going back there together would have been too dangerous.
We took a cab to the hotel. We looked at each other on the way but neither of us spoke. I checked us in, and when we got to the room, we left the lights off. It seemed natural that we should walk over to the enormous windows, where we watched the urban mass of Shinjuku twinkling in the violet light around us.
I looked out at the city from my lofty perch and thought of all the events that had led to this precise instant, this moment that I had imagined and ridiculously longed for so many times and that I was now trying to savor even as I felt it slipping irrevocably away.
At some point I felt her looking at me. I turned and reached out, tracing the outline of her face and neck with the back of my fingers, trying to burn all the details into my mind, wanting to have them with me later when she would be gone. I found myself saying her name, quietly, over and over, the way I say it when I’m alone and I’m thinking of her. Then she stepped in close and put her arms around me and pulled us together with surprising strength.
She smelled the way I remembered, clean, with a trace of perfume that remains a mystery to me, and I thought of wine, the kind you wait and wait to decant and then hesitate to drink because afterward it’ll be gone.
We kissed for a long time, gently, not hurrying, standing there in front of the window, and at some point I really did forget what had brought us here together and why we would have to depart alone.
We pulled off each other’s clothes the way we had that first time, fast, almost angrily. I removed the baton from where it was taped to my forearm and set it down. She knew better than to ask about it. When we were naked, still kissing, she pressed against me so that I had to move backward toward the king-sized bed. My legs bumped against it and I sat down on its edge. She leaned forward, one hand on the bed, the other on my chest, and pushed me down onto my back. She knelt astride me, one hand still on my chest, and reached down for me with the other. She squeezed for a second, hard enough to make it hurt. Then, looking at me with her dark eyes but still saying nothing, she guided me in.
We moved slowly at first, tentatively, like two people unsure of each other’s motives. My hands roamed the landscape of her body, now moving on, now lingering somewhere in response to the pace of her breathing or the pitch of her voice. She put her hands on my shoulders, pinning me with her weight, and began to ride me harder. I watched her face, silhouetted by the reflected light of the windows, and felt some intangible thing like heat or current surging between our bodies. I brought my feet up to the bed and from the slightly altered angle of our bodies I felt myself moving more deeply inside her. Her breathing shortened and quickened. I tried to hold back, not wanting to let go before she did, but she moved faster, more urgently, and I started to go over the edge. A sound, part growl, part whimper, came from her throat, and she leaned forward so that her face was almost touching mine and she looked in my eyes and as I felt her coming and as I came too she whispered, “I hate you,” and I saw that she was crying.
Afterward she straightened but kept her hands on my shoulders. She dipped her head forward so that shadows obscured her face. She made no sound but I felt her tears falling onto my chest and neck.
I didn’t know what to say, or even whether to touch her, and we remained that way for a long time. Then she eased off me and walked silently to the bathroom. I sat up and waited. After a few minutes she came out, wearing one of the hotel’s white terrycloth robes. She looked at me but didn’t say anything.
“You want me to go?” I asked.
She closed her eyes and nodded.
“Okay.” I got up and started pulling on my clothes. When I was done I faced her.
“I know you’re doing well in New York,” I said. “Ganbatte.” Keep it up.
She looked at me. “What are you going to do?”
I shrugged. “You know how it is with us creatures of the night. Gotta find a rock to crawl under before the sun comes up.”
She forced a smile. “After that.”
I nodded, thinking. “I’m not sure.”
There was a pause.
“You should work with your friend,” she said. “It’s the only thing for you.”
“Funny, he’s always saying that, too. Good thing I don’t believe in conspiracies.”
The smile reappeared, a little less forced this time. “His motives are probably selfish. Mine aren’t.”
I looked at her. “I’m not sure whether I can trust your motives, after what you just said to me.”
She looked down. “I’m sorry.”
“No, it’s okay. You were being honest. Although I don’t think anyone has ever been honest with me in quite that way. At least not at that moment.”
Another smile. It was sad, but at least it looked genuine. “I’m being honest now.”
I needed to get it over with. I moved in close, close enough to smell her hair and feel the warmth of her skin. I paused there for a moment, my eyes closed. Took a deep breath. Slowly let it out.
I used English to avoid the unambiguous finality of sayonara. “Goodbye, Midori,” I said.
I walked to the door and, habitual as always, checked through the peephole. The corridor was empty. I moved into it without looking back.
The hallway was hard. The elevator was a little easier. By the time I got to the street I knew the worst was over.
A voice spoke up inside me, quiet but insistent. So is the best, it said.
21
I MADE MY way through the backstreets of Shinjuku, heading east, deciding where I wanted to stay for the night and what I would do when I awoke the following morning. I tried not to think about anything else.
It was late, but there were small clusters of people about, moving like dim constellations in the surrounding emptiness of space: vagrants and beggars; hustlers and pimps; the disheartened, the disenfranchised, the dispossessed.
I hurt, and I couldn’t think of a way to make the pain go away.
My pager buzzed.
Of course I thought, Midori.
But I knew it wasn’t her. She didn’t have the number. Even if she did, she wasn’t going to use it.
I looked at the display, but didn’t recognize the caller.
I found a pay phone and dialed the number. It rang once, then a woman answered in English. She said, “Hey.”
It was Naomi.
“Hey,” I said. “I almost forgot I’d given you this number.”
“You don’t mind my using it, I hope.”
“Not at all. Just a little surprised.” I was surprised. My alertness had bumped up a notch.
There was a pause. “Well, things were slow tonight at the club and I got off a little early. I wondered if you might want to come by.”
It was hard to imagine a slow night at Damask Rose, but maybe it was true. Even so, I would have expected her to want to go someplace first—a late dinner, a drink. Not just a standard tryst at her apartment. My alertness edged up further.
“Sure,” I said. “If you’re not too tired.”
