by Barry Eisler
“That’s all discredited now,” I said absently.
Harry shrugged. “He took the credit when he could. After MITI he was transferred to the Kensetsusho, the old Construction Ministry, and stayed with it as vice minister of land and infrastructure when Construction was merged into the Kokudokotsusho.”
He paused and ran his fingers through his unruly hair, doing nothing to improve its appearance. “Look, mostly what I can tell you is basic bio stuff. I need to have a better idea of what I’m looking for, or I might not even recognize it if I see it.”
“Harry, don’t be so hard on yourself. Let’s just keep working the problem, okay?” I paused, recognizing that this would be dangerous, knowing that, if I wanted to solve this mystery, I would take the risk.
I told him what I had seen at Alfie and afterward, of following the stranger to the apartment in Daikanyama.
He shook his head. “What are the chances that you would run into Kawamura’s daughter like that? Unbelievable.”
I looked at him closely, not sure that he believed me. “Seken wa semai yo,” I said. It’s a small world.
“Or it could be karma,” he said, his face unreadable.
Christ, how much does this kid know? “I didn’t know you believed in karma, Harry.”
He shrugged. “You think there’s a connection with the break-in at Kawamura’s apartment?”
“Could be. The guy on the train was looking for something on Kawamura. Couldn’t find it. So he breaks into Kawamura’s apartment. Still can’t find it. Now he thinks the daughter has it, I guess because she would have her father’s things.”
The waitress brought us the two yuzukiri. Without a sound she knelt on the tatami, placed each dish on the table, slightly repositioned them in accordance with some strict mental framework, stood, bowed, and departed.
When we were done eating, Harry leaned back against the wall and belched long and low. “It was good,” he admitted.
“I know.”
“I want to ask you a question,” he said. “You don’t have to answer if you don’t want to.”
“Okay.”
“What’s your angle on this? Why are you looking so hard? It’s not like you.”
I thought about telling him that I was doing it for a client, but I knew he wouldn’t buy that.
“Some of what’s been happening doesn’t jibe with what the client told me,” I said. “That makes me uncomfortable.”
“This uncomfortable?”
I could see he was in a relentless mood today. “It reminds me of something that happened to me a long time ago,” I said, telling him the truth. “Something I want to make sure never happens again. Let’s leave it at that for now.”
He held up his hands for a moment, palms forward in a gesture of supplication, then leaned forward and put his elbows on the table. “Okay, the guy you followed, we can assume he lives in the apartment building. A good number of foreigners live in Daikanyama, but I can’t imagine there are more than a dozen or so in that one building. So we’re already in decent shape.”
“Good.”
“The mama-san said he told her he was a reporter?”
“She did, but that doesn’t mean much. I think he showed her a card, but it could have been fake.”
“Maybe, but it’s a start. I’ll try to cross-check the foreigners I find at that apartment address against the declarations kept at the Nyukan, see if any of the people I identify are with the media.” The Nyukan, or Nyukokukanrikyoku, is Japan’s immigration bureau, part of the Ministry of Justice.
“Do that. And while you’re at it, see if you can get me the girl’s home address. I tried one-zero-four, but it’s unlisted.”
He scratched his cheek and looked down, as though trying to hide a smile.
“What,” I said.
He looked up. “You like her.”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake, Harry . . .”
“You thought she was going to open up for you, and instead she blew you off. Now it’s a challenge. You want another chance.”
“Harry, you’re dreaming.”
“Is she pretty? Just tell me that.”
“I’m not going to give you the satisfaction.”
“So she’s pretty. You like her.”
“You’ve been reading too many manga,” I said, referring to the thick, often lascivious pulp comic books that are so popular in Japan.
“Okay, sure,” he said, and I thought, Christ, he really does read that shit. I’ve hurt his feelings.
“C’mon, Harry, I need your help to get to the bottom of this. That guy on the train was expecting Kawamura to be carrying something, which is why he patted him down. He didn’t find it, though — otherwise, he wouldn’t have been asking Midori questions. Now you tell me: Who currently has possession of all of Kawamura’s belongings, including the clothes he was wearing and personal effects he was carrying when he died?”
“Midori, most likely,” he allowed with a small shrug.
“Right. She’s still the best lead we’ve got. Get me the information, and we’ll go from there.”
We talked about other matters for the duration of our lunch. I didn’t tell him about the CD. He’d already leaped to enough conclusions.
7
THE NEXT DAY I got a page from Harry, who used a preset numeric code to tell me that he had uploaded something to a bulletin board we use. I figured it was Midori’s address, and Harry didn’t disappoint.
She lived in a small apartment complex called Harajuku Badento Haitsu — Harajuku Verdent Heights — in the shadow of the graceful arches of Tange Kenzo’s 1964 Tokyo Olympic Stadium. Cool Harajuku is the borderland that traverses the long silences and solemn cryptomeria trees of Yoyogi Park and its Meiji shrine; the frenetic, shopping-addled teen madness of Takeshita-dori; and the elegant boutiques and bistros of Omotesando.
Harry had confirmed that Midori did not have an automobile registered with the Tokyo Motor Vehicles Authority, which meant that she would rely on trains: either the JR, which she would pick up at Harajuku Station, or one of the subway lines, which she would access at Meijijingu-mae or Omotesando.
The problem was that the JR and subway stations were in opposite directions, and she was as likely to use one as the other. With no single chokepoint leading to both sets of stations, I had no basis for choosing either one. I would just have to find the best possible venue for waiting and watching and base my decision on that.
Omotesando-dori, where the subway stations were located, fit the bill. Known as the “Champs Elysées of Tokyo,” albeit mostly among people who have never been to Paris, Omotesando-dori is a long shopping boulevard lined with elm trees whose narrow leaves provide first a crown and then a carpet of yellow for a few days every autumn. Its many bistros and coffee shops were designed with Paris-style people-watching in mind, and I would be able to spend an hour or two watching the street from various establishments without attracting attention.
Even so, absent a lot of luck, I would have been in for a very boring few days of waiting and watching. But Harry had an innovation that saved me: a way of remotely turning a phone into a microphone.
The trick only works with digital phones with a speakerphone feature, where a line can be established even though the handset is in the cradle. The reception is muffled, but you can hear. Anticipating my next move, Harry had tested Midori’s line for me and had let me know that we were good to go.
At ten o’clock the following Saturday morning, I arrived at the Aoyama Blue Mountain coffee shop on Omotesando-dori, equipped with a small unit that would activate Midori’s phone and a cell phone for listening in on whatever I connected to. I took a seat at one of the small tables facing the street, where I ordered an espresso from a bored-looking waitress. Watching the meager morning crowds drift past, I flipped the switch on the unit and heard a slight hiss in the earpiece that told me the connection had been established. Other than that, there was silence. Nothing to do but wait.
A constructi
on crew had set up a few meters down from the Blue Mountain’s entrance, where they were repairing potholes in the road. Four workers busied themselves mixing the gravel and measuring out the right amounts — about two more men than were needed, but the yakuza, the Japanese mob, works closely with the construction industry and insists that workers be provided with work. The government, pleased at this additional avenue of job creation, is complicit. Unemployment is kept at socially tolerable levels. The machine rolls on.
As vice minister at the Kokudokotsusho, Midori’s father would have been in charge of construction and most of the major public-works projects undertaken throughout Japan. He would have been hip deep in a lot of this. Not such a surprise that someone wanted him to come to an untimely end.
Two middle-aged men in black suits and ties, modern Japanese funeral attire, left the coffee shop, and the aroma of hot gravel wafted over to my table. The smell reminded me of my childhood in Japan, of the late summers when my mother would walk me to school for the first day of the new term. The roads always seemed to be in the process of being repaved at that time of year, and to me this kind of construction still smells like a portent of a fresh round of bullying and ostracism.
Sometimes I feel as though my life has been divided into segments. I would call these chapters, but the pieces are divided so abruptly that the whole lacks the kind of continuity that chapters would impart. The first segment ends when my father was killed, an event that shattered a world of predictability and security, replacing it with vulnerability and fear. There is another break when I receive the brief military telegram telling me that my mother has died, offering stateside leave for the funeral. Along with my mother I lost an emotional center of gravity, a faraway psychic governor on my behavior, and was left suffused with a new and awful sense of freedom. Cambodia was a further rupture, a deeper step into darkness.
Strangely, the time when my mother took me to the United States from our home in Japan does not represent a dividing line, then or now. I was an outsider in both places, and the move merely confirmed that status. Nor are any of my subsequent geographic ramblings particularly distinct. For a decade after Crazy Jake’s funeral I wandered the earth a mercenary, daring the gods to kill me but surviving because part of me was already dead.
I was fighting alongside Lebanese Christians in Beirut when the CIA recruited me to train the Mujahideen guerrillas battling the Soviets in Afghanistan. I was perfect: combat experience, and a mercenary history that made possible maximum governmental deniability.
For me, there has always been a war, and the time before feels unreal, dreamlike. War is the basis from which I approach everything else. War is all I really know. You know the Buddhist parable? “A monk awoke from a dream that he was a butterfly, then wondered whether he was a butterfly dreaming that he was a man.”
At a little after eleven, I heard sounds of movement within Midori’s apartment. Footsteps, then running water, which I took to be a shower. She worked at night, I realized; of course she would be a late riser. Then, shortly before noon, I heard a closing exterior door and the mechanical click of a lock, and I knew she was finally on the move.
I paid for the two espressos I had drunk and walked out onto Omotesando-dori, where I began to amble in the direction of JR Harajuku station. I wanted to get to the pedestrian overpass at Harajuku. This would give me a panoramic view, but it would also leave me exposed, so I wouldn’t be able to linger.
The timing was good. I only had to wait on the overpass for a minute before I caught sight of her. She was approaching from the direction of her apartment building and made a right onto Omotesando-dori when she reached it. It was easy for me to follow her from there.
Her hair was tied back in a ponytail, her dark eyes concealed by sunglasses. She was wearing snug black pants and a black V-necked sweater, and walked confidently, with purpose. I had to admit she looked good.
Enough of that, I told myself. How she looks has nothing to do with this.
She was carrying a shopping bag that I recognized from the distinctive maple color came from Mulberry, the English leather goods manufacturer. They had a store in Minami Aoyama, and I wondered if she was on her way to return something.
Midway to Aoyama-dori she turned into Paul Stuart. I could have followed her in, tried for our chance meeting there, but I was curious about where else she was going, and decided to wait. I set up in the Fouchet Gallery across the street, where I admired several paintings that afforded me a view of the street until she emerged, a Paul Stuart shopping bag in hand, twenty minutes later.
Her next stop was at Nicole Farhi London. This time I waited for her in the Aoyama Flower Market, on the ground floor of the La Mia building. From there, she continued onto a series of nameless Omotesando backstreets, periodically stopping to browse in one of the area’s boutiques, until she emerged onto Koto-dori, where she made a right. I followed her, staying back and on the opposite side of the street, until I saw her duck into Le Ciel Bleu.
I turned into the Tokyo J. M. Weston shop, admiring the handmade shoes in the windows at an angle that afforded me a view of Le Ciel Bleu. I considered. Her taste was mostly European, it seemed. She eschewed the large stores, even the upscale ones. She seemed to be completing a circle that would take her back in the direction of her apartment. And she was carrying that Mulberry bag.
If she was indeed on her way to return something, I had a chance to be there first. It was a risk because if I set up there and she went the other way, I would lose her. But if I could anticipate her and be waiting at her next stop before she got there, the encounter would seem more like chance and less like the result of being followed.
I left the Weston store and moved quickly up Koto-dori, window-shopping as I walked so that my face was turned away from Midori’s position. Once I was clear of Le Ciel Bleu, I cut across the street and ducked into Mulberry. I strolled over to the men’s section, where I told the proprietess that I was just looking, and began to examine some of the briefcases on display.
Five minutes later she entered the store as I had hoped, removing her sunglasses and acknowledging the welcoming irrashaimase of the proprietress with a slight bow of her head. Keeping her at the limits of my peripheral vision, I picked up one of the briefcases, as though examining its heft. From this angle, I felt her gaze stop on me and linger longer than would have been warranted by a casual glance around the store. I gave the briefcase a last once-over, then set it down on its shelf and looked up. She was still watching me, her head cocked slightly to the right.
I blinked once, as though in surprise, and approached her. “Kawamura-san,” I said in Japanese. “This is a nice surprise. I just saw you at Club Alfie last Friday. You were tremendous.”
She evaluated me silently for a long moment before responding, and I was glad my gamble had worked. I sensed that this intelligent woman would be cynical about coincidences, and might have suspected, had I come in after her, that she had been followed.
“Yes, I remember,” she said finally. “You’re the one who thinks jazz is like sex.” Before I could come up with a suitable response, she continued: “You didn’t have to say that, you know. You could try to be more forgiving.”
For the first time, I was in a position to notice her body. She was slender and long limbed, perhaps a legacy from her father, whose height had made him easy to follow down Dogenzaka. Her shoulders were broad, a lovely counterpart to a long and graceful neck. Her breasts were small, and, I couldn’t help but notice, shapely beneath her sweater. The skin on the exposed portion of her chest was beautiful: smooth and white, framed by the contrast of the black V-neck.
I looked into her dark eyes, and felt my usual urge to spar dissipate. “You’re right,” I told her. “I’m sorry.”
She closed her eyes briefly and shook her head. “You enjoyed the performance?”
“Immensely. I have your CD, and have been meaning to catch you and your trio for the longest time. I travel a lot, though, and this was my fir
st chance.”
“Where do you travel?”
“Mostly America and Europe. I’m a consultant,” I said in a tone indicating that my work would be a boring topic for me. “Nothing as exciting as being a jazz pianist.”
She smiled. “You think being a jazz pianist is exciting?”
She had a natural interrogator’s habit of reflecting back the last thing the other party had said, encouraging the speaker to share more. It doesn’t work with me. “Well, let me put it this way,” I said. “I can’t remember someone ever suggesting to me that consulting is like sex.”
She threw back her head and laughed then, not bothering to cover her open mouth with her hand in the typical Japanese woman’s unnecessarily dainty gesture, and again I was struck by the unusual confidence with which she carried herself.
“That’s good,” she said after a moment, folding her arms across her chest and conceding a small, lingering smile.
I smiled back. “What’s today? A bit of shopping?”
“A bit. And you?”
“The same. It’s past time for a new briefcase. We consultants have to maintain appearances, you know.” I glanced down at the shopping bag she was carrying. “I see you’re a fan of Paul Stuart. That was going to be my next stop.”
“It’s a good store. I know it from New York, and was glad when they opened a Tokyo branch.”
I raised my eyebrows slightly. “Have you spent much time in New York?”
“Some,” she said with a faint smile, looking into my eyes.
Damn, she’s tough, I thought. Challenge her. “How’s your English?” I asked, switching from Japanese.
“I get by,” she said, without missing a beat.
“You want to get a cup of cawfee?” I asked, staying with English and using my best Brooklyn accent.
