Rain Fall

by Barry Eisler

  A pudgy Japanese was moving quickly down the corridor, about ten meters away. I flashed his eyes as he approached but he ignored me, looking straight ahead. He was wearing a pinstriped suit and a striped shirt. Must have heard somewhere that stripes make you look taller.

  I glanced down and saw why I hadn’t heard him coming: cheap shoes with rubber soles. But he was carrying an expensive-looking black attaché case, a lid-over model, maybe an old Swain Adeney. A businessman who knew good attachés but assumed no one would notice his shoes? Maybe. But this wasn’t really the place for business — Kasumigaseki or Akasaka would be more likely. I knew the shoes would make for comfortable attire on a long walk — if following someone were part of the likely itinerary, for example.

  Aside from the attaché, his hands were empty, but I tensed anyway as we passed each other. Something about him bothered me. I slowed down a little as we passed each other, looked back over my shoulder, marked the way he walked. Faces are easy to disguise, clothes you can change in a minute, but not too many people can conceal their gait. It’s something I look for. I watched this guy’s walk — short stride, bit of an exaggerated, self-important arm swing, slight side-to-side swaying action of the head — until he turned the corner.

  I cut back the other way, checking behind me before I left the station. Probably it was nothing, but I’d remember his face and gait, watch my back as always, see if he showed up again.

  Principles of Strangles was in excellent condition, as promised, with a price to match, but I knew that I would greatly enjoy the slim volume. Although I was eager to depart, I waited patiently while the proprietor carefully, almost ceremoniously, wrapped the book in heavy brown paper and string. He knew it wasn’t a gift, but this was his way of showing his appreciation for the sale and it would have been rude for me to hurry him. Finally, he proffered the package with extended arms and a deep bow, and I accepted it from a similar posture, bowing again as I left.

  I headed back to the Mita line. If I had really been concerned that someone was tailing me I would have caught a cab, but I wanted to see if I could spot Attaché Man again. I waited on the platform while two trains pulled in and departed. Anyone trying to follow me would have had to stay on the platform, also — incongruous behavior that makes a person stand out in sharp relief. But the platform was deserted, and Attaché Man was gone. Probably it had been nothing.

  I thought of Midori again. It was her second night at the Blue Note, and she’d be starting her first set in about an hour. I wondered what she would think when I didn’t show for the second time. She was human; she would probably assume that I hadn’t been interested, that maybe she had been a little too forward in inviting me. It was unlikely that I would ever see her again, or if we did by chance bump into each other, it would be slightly awkward but polite, two people who met and started an acquaintanceship that somehow didn’t take off, certainly nothing out of the ordinary. She might ask Mama about me at some point, but all Mama knows is that I pop into Alfie from time to time without warning.

  I wondered what it would have been like if we’d met under other circumstances. It could have been good, I thought again.

  I almost laughed at the absurdity. There was no room for anything like that in my life, and I knew it.

  Crazy Jake again: There’s no home for us, John. Not after what we’ve done.

  That was about the truest advice I’d ever been given. Forget about her, I thought. You know you have to.

  My pager buzzed. I found a pay phone and dialed the number.

  It was Benny. After the usual exchange of bona fides, he said, “There’s another job for you, if you want it.”

  “Why are you contacting me this way?” I asked, meaning why not the bulletin board.

  “Time-sensitive matter. You interested?”

  “I’m not known for turning away work.”

  “You’d have to bend one of your rules on this one. If you do, there’s a bonus.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “We’re talking about a woman. Jazz musician.”

  Long pause.

  “You there?” he said.

  “Still listening.”

  “You want the details, you know where to find them.”

  “What’s the name?”

  “Not over the phone.”

  Another pause.

  He cleared his throat. “All right. Same name as a recent job. Related matter. Is that important?”

  “Not really.”

  “You want this?”

  “Probably not.”

  “Significant bonus if you want it.”

  “What’s significant?”

  “You know where to find the details.”

  “I’ll take a look.”

  “I need an answer within forty-eight hours, okay? This needs to be taken care of.”

  “Don’t they all,” I said, and hung up.

  I stood there for a moment afterwards, looking around the station, watching people bustling back and forth.

  Fucking Benny, telling me, “This needs to be taken care of,” letting me know that someone else would be doing it if I didn’t.

  Why Midori? A connection with Bulfinch, the reporter. He had sought her out, I saw that at Alfie, along with Telephone Man. So whoever Telephone Man worked for would assume that Midori had learned something she wasn’t supposed to, or maybe that her father had given her something, something Bulfinch was after. Something not worth taking any chances over.

  You could do it, I thought. If you don’t, someone else will. You’d at least do it right, do it fast. She wouldn’t feel anything.

  But they were just words. I wanted to feel that way but couldn’t. What I felt like instead was that her world should never have collided with mine.

  A Mita-sen train pulled in, heading in the direction of Otemachi, the transfer point to Omotesando and the Blue Note. An omen, I thought, and got on it.

  10

  IF YOU WANT to survive as long as I have in the world I inhabit, you’ve got to think like the opposition. I learned that from the gangs that pursued me when I was a kid, and refined the lesson with SOG in Cambodia. You’ve got to ask: If I were trying to get at me, how would I go about it?

  Predictability is the key, geographical and chronological. You need to know where a person will be and at what time. You learn this by surveillance, analyzing the routes to work, the times the target comes and goes, until you’ve identified a pattern, and choke points through which the target can almost always be counted on to pass at a certain time. You choose the most vulnerable of these, and that’s where you lay the ambush.

  And if that’s what you’re doing, you’d better not forget that all the time someone is running the same kind of operation on you. Thinking like this is what divides the hard targets from the soft ones.

  The same principle works for crime prevention. If you wanted to grab some quick cash, where would you wait? Near an ATM, probably, and probably at night. You’d scout around for the right location, too, someplace with enough pedestrian traffic to save you a long wait, but not so much of a crowd that you’d be impeded from acting when you identified a good target. You’d look for a dark spot far enough from the machine so the target wouldn’t notice you, but close enough so that you could move right in once the cash transaction was completed. Police stations close by would make you nervous, and you’d probably hunt for a better place. Etc. If you think this way, you’ll know exactly where to look to spot someone lurking, and you’ll know where you’re vulnerable, where more alertness is required.

  With Midori, extensive surveillance wasn’t even necessary. Her schedule was publicly available. Presumably that was how Bulfinch knew to find her at Alfie. And that would be the easiest way for Benny’s people to find her now.

  From Otemachi I rode the Chiyoda-sen subway seven stops to Omotesando, where I exited and took the stairs to the street. I walked the short distance to the Yahoo Café, a coffee shop with Internet terminals. I went in, paid the f
ee, and logged on to one of the terminals. With the café’s T1 line, it took just a few seconds to access the file Benny had posted. It included a few scanned publicity photos, Midori’s home address, a concert schedule with tonight’s appearance at the Blue Note, and parameters indicating that the job had to look natural. They were offering the yen equivalent of about $150,000 — a substantial premium over our usual arrangement.

  The reference to tonight’s appearance at the Blue Note, first set at 7:00, was ominous. Predictability, time and place. If they wanted to take her out soon, tonight would be almost too good to pass up. On the other hand, Benny had told me I had forty-eight hours to get back to him, which would indicate that she would be safe for at least that long.

  But even if she had that much time, I didn’t see how I could parlay it into a reasonable life span. Warn her that someone had just put a contract out on her? I could try, but she had no reason to believe me. And even if she did, what then? Teach her how to improve her personal security? Sell her on the benefits of an anonymous life in the shadows?

  Ludicrous. There was really only one thing I could do. Use the forty-eight hours to figure out why Benny’s people had decided Midori was a liability and to eliminate the reasons behind that view.

  I could have walked the kilometer or so to the Blue Note, but I wanted to do a drive-by first. I caught a cab and told the driver to take me down Koto-dori, then left to the Blue Note. I was counting on traffic to make the ride slow enough so that I could do a quick sneak-and-peek at some of the spots where I would wait if I were setting up surveillance outside.

  Traffic was heavy as I had hoped, and I had a good chance to scope the area as we crawled past. In fact, the Blue Note isn’t that easy a place to wait around unobtrusively. It’s surrounded mostly by stores that were now closed. The Caffe Idee restaurant across the street, with its outdoor balcony, would offer a clear-enough view, but the Idee has a long, narrow external staircase that would afford access sufficiently slow as to make the restaurant an unacceptable place to wait.

  On the other hand, you wouldn’t have to linger long. You can time the end of a Blue Note set to within about five minutes. The second set hadn’t yet begun, so if anyone was planning on visiting Midori after the show tonight, they probably hadn’t even arrived yet.

  Or they could already be inside, just another appreciative audience member.

  I had the cab stop before reaching Omotesando-dori, then got out and walked the four blocks back to the Blue Note. I was careful to scope the likely places, but things looked clear.

  There was already a long line waiting for the second set. I walked up to the ticket window, where I was told that the second set was sold out unless I had a reservation.

  Damn, I hadn’t thought about that. But Midori would have, if she really had wanted me to come. “I’m a friend of Kawamura Midori’s,” I said. “Fujiwara Junichi . . . ?”

  “Of course,” the clerk responded immediately. “Kawamura-san told me you might be coming tonight. Please wait here — the second set will start in fifteen minutes, and we want to make certain that you have a good seat.”

  I nodded and stepped off to the side. As promised, the crowd from the first set started filing out five minutes later, and as soon as they were clear I was taken inside, down a wide, steep staircase, and shown to a table right in front of the still-empty stage.

  No one would ever confuse the Blue Note with Alfie. First, the Blue Note has a high ceiling that conveys a feeling of spaciousness totally unlike Alfie’s almost cave-like intimacy. Also, the whole feel is higher-end: good carpeting, expensive-looking wood paneling, even some flat panel monitors in an antechamber for obsessive-compulsives who need to check their e-mail between sets. And the crowd is different at the Blue Note, too: first, because you can’t even fit a crowd into Alfie, and second, because the people at Alfie are there only for the music, whereas, at the Blue Note, people also come to be seen.

  I looked around the room as the second-set crowd flowed in, but nothing set off my radar.

  If you wanted to get to her, and you had a choice of seats, where would you go? You’d stay close to one of the entrances to this floor. That would give you an escape route, if you needed one, and it would keep the entire room in front of you, so you could watch everyone else from behind, instead of the reverse.

  I swiveled and looked behind me as though searching for an acquaintance. There was a Japanese man, mid-forties, sitting all the way in the left rear, near one of the exits. The people sitting next to him were all talking to one another; he was obviously alone. He was wearing a rumpled suit, dark blue or gray, which fit him like an afterthought. His expression was bland, too bland for my taste. This was a crowd composed of enthusiasts, sitting in twos and threes, waiting eagerly for the performance. Mr. Bland felt like he was deliberately trying to be unobtrusive. I filed him as a strong possible.

  I swiveled in the other direction. Same seat, right rear. Three young women who looked like office ladies on a night out. No apparent problem there.

  Mr. Bland would be able to watch me throughout the performance, and I needed to avoid the mistake of conspicuous aloneness that he had made. I told the people around me that I was a friend of Midori’s and was here at her invitation; they started asking me questions, and pretty soon we were shooting the shit like old friends.

  A waitress came by and I ordered a twelve-year-old Cragganmore. The people around me all followed suit. I was a friend of Kawamura Midori’s, so whatever I had ordered, it must be cool. They probably didn’t know whether they had just ordered scotch, vodka, or a new kind of beer.

  When Midori and her trio walked down the side of the room, everyone started clapping. Another thing about Alfie: There, when the musicians first appear, the room fills with reverential silence.

  Midori took her place at the piano. She was wearing faded blue jeans and a black velvet blouse, low cut and clinging, her skin dazzling white next to it. She tilted her head forward and touched her fingers to the keys, and the audience grew silent, expectant. She spent a long moment frozen that way, staring at the piano, and then began.

  She started slowly, with a coy rendering of Thelonious Monk’s “Brilliant Corners,” but overall she played harder than she had at Alfie, with more abandon, her notes sometimes struggling with the bass and the drums, but finding a harmony in the opposition. Her riffs were angry and she rode them longer, and when she came back the notes were sweet but you could still sense a frustration, a pacing beneath the surface.

  The set lasted for ninety minutes, and the music alternated between a smoky, melodic sound, then elegiac sadness, then a giddy, laughing exuberance that shook the sadness away. Midori finished in a mad, exhilarated riff, and when it was over the applause was unrestrained. Midori stood to acknowledge it, bowing her head. The drummer and bass guitarist were laughing and wiping dripping sweat from their faces with handkerchiefs, and the applause went on and on. What Midori felt when she played, the place her music took her, she had taken the audience there, and the clapping was filled with real gratitude. When it finally faded, Midori and her trio left the stage, and people started to get up and move about.

  A few minutes later she reappeared and squeezed in next to me. Her face was still flushed from the performance. “I thought I saw you here,” she said, giving me a mild check with her shoulder. “Thank you for coming.”

  “Thank you for inviting me. They were expecting me at the ticket window.”

  She smiled. “If I hadn’t told them, you wouldn’t have gotten in, and you can’t hear the music very well from the street, can you?”

  “No, the reception is certainly better from where I’m sitting,” I said, looking around as though taking in the grandeur of the Blue Note, but in fact scoping for Mr. Bland.

  “Do you want to get something to eat?” she asked. “I’m going to grab something with the band.”

  I hesitated. I wasn’t going to have a chance to probe for information with other people around, a
nd I wasn’t eager to broaden my always-small circle of acquaintances.

  “Hey, this is your big night, your first gig at the Blue Note,” I said. “You probably want to just enjoy it yourselves.”

  “No, no,” she said, giving me another shoulder check. “I’d like you to come. And don’t you want to meet the rest of the band? They were great tonight, weren’t they?”

  On the other hand, depending on how the evening progressed, you might have a chance to talk to her alone a bit later. “They really were. The audience loved you.”

  “We were thinking the Living Bar. Do you know it?”

  Good choice, I thought. The Living Bar is an atmospheric place in Omotesando, absurdly named as only the Japanese can name them. It was close by, but we’d have to turn at least five corners to walk there, which would allow me to check our backs and see if Mr. Bland was following.

  “Sure. It’s a chain, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, but the one in Omotesando is nicer than all the others. They serve lots of interesting little dishes, and the bar is good, too. Good selection of single malts. Mama says you’re a connoisseur.”

  “Mama flatters me,” I said, thinking that if I weren’t careful, Mama would put together a damn dossier and start handing it out. “Let me just pay for the drinks.”

  She smiled. “They’re already paid for. Let’s go.”

  “You paid for me?”

  “I told the manager that the person sitting front center was my special guest.” She switched to English: “So everything is on the house, ne?” She smiled, pleased at the chance to use the idiom.

  “Okay, then,” I said. “Thank you.”

  “Can you wait for just a few minutes? I’ve got a few things to take care of backstage first.”

  Getting to her backstage would be too difficult to bother trying. If they were going to make a move, they’d make it outside. “Sure,” I said, getting up and shifting so that my back was to the stage and I could see the room. Too many people were now up and milling about, though, and I couldn’t spot Mr. Bland. “Where do you want to meet?”