by Barry Eisler
I slept, but the pain in my back kept the sleep fitful, and in those moments where consciousness briefly crested I would have doubted everything that had happened if she hadn’t been lying next to me. Then I would slide down into sleep again, there to struggle with ghosts even more personal, more terrible, than those of which I could tell Midori.
PART TWO
When your sword meets that of your enemy, you can never waver, but must instead attack with the complete resolution of your whole body . . .
— MIYAMOTO MUSASHI,
A Book of Five Rings
14
THE NEXT MORNING I was sitting with my back to the wall at my favorite vantage point in Las Chicas, waiting for Franklin Bulfinch to show himself.
It was a crisp, sunny morning, and between the bright light streaming through the windows and the overall hip atmosphere on which Las Chicas prides itself, I felt comfortable in my light-disguise knockoff Oakley shades, which I had picked up en route.
Midori was safely ensconced in the music section of the nearby Spiral Building on Aoyama-dori, close enough to meet Bulfinch quickly if necessary but far enough to be safe if things got hairy. She had called Bulfinch less than an hour earlier to arrange things. Most likely he was a legitimate reporter and would come to the meeting alone, but I saw no advantage in giving him time to deploy additional forces if I was mistaken.
Bulfinch was easy to spot as he approached the restaurant, the same tall, thin guy in wireless glasses I had seen on the train. He had a long stride and an erect, confident posture, and again struck me as having an aristocratic air. He was wearing jeans and tennis shoes, dressed up with a blue blazer. He crossed the patio and stepped inside the restaurant proper, pausing to look right, then left, searching for Midori. His eyes passed over me without recognition.
He wandered back in the direction of the rest room, presumably checking the separate dining space in the back of the building. I knew he’d be back in a moment, and used the time to watch the street a little longer. He’d been followed at Alfie, and it was possible that he was being followed now.
The street was still empty when Bulfinch returned to the front of the restaurant a minute later. His eyes swept the space again. When they were pointed in my direction, I said quietly, “Mr. Bulfinch.”
He looked at me for a second before saying, “Do I know you?”
“I’m a friend of Midori Kawamura. She asked me to come in her stead.”
“Where is she?”
“She’s in some danger right now. She needs to take care in her movements.”
“Is she coming here?”
“That depends.”
“On what?”
“On whether I decide that it’s safe.”
“Who are you?”
“As I said, a friend, interested in the same thing you are.”
“Which is?”
I looked at him through my shades. “The disk.”
He paused before saying, “I don’t know about a disk.”
Right. “You were expecting Midori’s father to deliver you a disk when he died on the Yamanote three weeks ago. He didn’t have it with him, so you followed up with Midori after her performance at Alfie the following Friday. You met her in the Starbucks on Gaienhigashi-dori, near Almond in Roppongi. That’s where you told her about the disk, because you hoped she might have it. You wouldn’t tell her what’s on the disk because you were afraid doing so would compromise her. Although you had already compromised her by showing up at Alfie, because you were followed. All of which will be sufficient, I hope, to establish my bona fides.”
He made no move to sit. “You could have learned most of that without Midori telling you, and filled in the gaps by educated guessing — especially if you were the one following me.”
I shrugged. “And then I imitated her voice and called you an hour ago?”
He hesitated, then walked over and sat, his back straight and his hands on the table. “All right. What can you tell me?”
“I was going to ask you the same question.”
“Look, I’m a reporter. I write stories. Do you have information for me?”
“I need to know what’s on that disk.”
“You keep talking about a disk.”
“Mr. Bulfinch,” I said, focusing for an instant on the street, which was still empty, “the people who want that disk think that Midori has it, and they are more than willing to kill her to retrieve it. Your meeting her at Alfie while you were being watched is probably what put her in the danger she’s in. So let’s stop fucking around, okay?”
He took off his glasses and sighed. “Assuming for a moment there is a disk, I don’t see how knowledge of what’s on it would help Midori.”
“You’re a reporter. I assume you would be interested in publishing the hypothetical disk’s contents?”
“You could assume that, yes.”
“And I would also assume that certain people would want to prevent that publication?”
“That would also be a safe assumption.”
“Okay, then. It’s the threat of publication that’s making these people target Midori. Once the contents of the disk are published, Midori would no longer be a threat, is that right?”
“What you’re saying makes sense.”
“Then it seems we want the same thing. We both want the contents of the disk published.”
He shifted in his seat. “I see your point. But I’m not going to be comfortable talking about this unless I see Midori.”
I considered for a moment. “Are you carrying a cell phone?”
“Yes.”
“Show it to me.”
He reached into the left side of the blazer and withdrew a small flip-top unit.
“That’s fine,” I said. “Go ahead and put it back in your pocket.” As he did so, I pulled out a pen and small sheet of paper from my own jacket pocket and started jotting down instructions. My gut told me he wasn’t wired, but no one’s gut is infallible.
“Until I say otherwise, under no circumstances do I want to see you reaching for that phone,” my note read. “We’ll walk out of the restaurant together. When we step outside, stop so I can pat you down for weapons. After that, go where I motion you to go. At some point I’ll let you know that I want you to start walking ahead, and at some point I’ll tell you where we’re going. If you have questions now, write them down. If you don’t, just hand back this note. Starting now, do not say a word unless I speak first.”
I extended the note to him. He took it with one hand while slipping on his glasses with the other. When he was done reading, he pushed it across the table to me and nodded.
I folded the note up and put it back in my jacket pocket, followed by the pen. Then I placed a thousand-yen note on the table to cover the coffee I had been drinking and motioned him to leave.
We got up and walked outside. I patted him down and was unsurprised to find that he was clean. As we moved down the street I was careful to keep him slightly in front of me and to the side, a human shield if it came to that. I knew every good spot in the area for surveillance or an ambush, and my head swept back and forth, looking for someone out of place, someone who might have followed Bulfinch to the restaurant and then set up to wait outside it.
As we walked I called out “left” or “right” from behind him by way of directions, and we made our way to the Spiral Building. We walked through the glass doors and into the music section, where Midori was waiting.
“Kawamura-san,” he said, bowing, when he saw her. “Thank you for your call.”
“Thank you for coming to meet me,” Midori replied. “I’m afraid I wasn’t completely candid with you when we met for coffee. I’m not as ignorant of my father’s affiliations as I led you to believe. But I don’t know anything about the disk you mentioned. No more than you told me, anyway.”
“I’m not sure what I can do for you, then,” he said.
“Tell us what’s on the disk,” I replied.
�
�I don’t see how that would help you.”
“I don’t see how it could hurt us,” I answered. “Right now we’re running blind. If we put our heads together, we’ve got a much better chance of retrieving the disk than we do if we work separately.”
“Please, Mr. Bulfinch,” Midori said. “I barely escaped being killed a few days ago by whoever is trying to find that disk. I need your help.”
Bulfinch grimaced and looked at Midori and then at me, his eyes sweeping back and forth several times. “All right,” he said after a moment. “Two months ago your father contacted me. He told me he read my column for Forbes. He told me who he was and said he wanted to help. A classic whistle-blower.”
Midori turned to me. “That was about the time he was diagnosed.”
“I’m sorry?” Bulfinch asked.
“Lung cancer. He had just learned that he had little time to live,” Midori said.
Bulfinch nodded, understanding. “I see. I didn’t know that. I’m sorry.”
Midori bowed her head briefly, accepting his solicitude. “Please, go on.”
“Over the course of the next month I had several clandestine meetings with your father, during which he briefed me extensively on corruption in the Construction Ministry and its role as broker between the Liberal Democratic Party and the yakuza. These briefings provided me with invaluable insight into the nature and extent of corruption in Japanese society. But I needed corroboration.”
“What corroboration?” I asked. “Can’t you just print it and attribute it to ‘a senior source in the Construction Ministry’?”
“Ordinarily, yes,” Bulfinch replied. “But there were two problems here. First, Kawamura’s position in the Ministry gave him unique access to the information he was providing me. If we had published the information, we might as well have used his name in the by-line.”
“And the second problem?” Midori asked.
“Impact,” Bulfinch answered. “We’ve already run a half dozen exposés on the kind of corruption Kawamura was involved in. The Japanese press resolutely refuses to pick them up. Why? Because the politicians and bureaucrats pass and interpret laws that can make or break domestic corporations. And the corporations provide over half the media’s advertising revenues. So if, for example, a newspaper runs an article that offends a politician, the politician calls his contacts at the relevant corporations, who pull their advertising from the newspaper and transfer it to a rival publication, and the offending paper goes bankrupt. You see?
“If you have a reporter investigate a story from outside the government-sponsored kisha news clubs, you get shut down. If you play ball, the money keeps rolling in, licit and illicit. No one here takes chances; everyone treats the truth like a contagious disease. Christ, Japan’s press is the most docile in the world.”
“But with proof . . . ?” I asked.
“Hard proof would change everything. The papers would be forced to cover the story or else reveal that they are nothing but tools of the government. And flushing the corrupt kingpins out into the open would weaken them and embolden the press. We could start a virtuous cycle that would lead to a change in Japanese politics the likes of which the country hasn’t seen since the Meiji restoration.”
“I think you may be overestimating the zeal of domestic media,” Midori said.
Bulfinch shook his head. “Not at all. I know some of these people well. They’re good reporters, they want to publish. But they’re realists, too.”
“The proof,” I said. “What was it?”
Bulfinch looked at me over the tops of his wireless glasses. “I don’t know exactly. Only that it’s hard evidence. Incontrovertible.”
“It sounds like that disk should go to the Keisatsucho, not the press,” Midori said, referring to Tatsu’s investigative organization.
“Your father wouldn’t have lasted a day if he’d handed that information over to the feds,” I said, saving Bulfinch the trouble.
“That’s right,” Bulfinch said. “Your father wasn’t the first person to try to blow the whistle on corruption. Ever hear of Honma Tadayo?”
Ah, yes, Honma-san. A sad story.
Midori shook her head.
“When Nippon Credit Bank went bankrupt in 1998,” Bulfinch went on, “at least thirty-six billion dollars, and probably much more, of its one-hundred-thirty-three-billion-dollar loan portfolio had gone bad. The bad loans were linked to the underworld, even to illegal payments to North Korea. To clean up the mess, a consortium of rescuers hired Honma Tadayo, the respected former director of the Bank of Japan. Honma-san became president of NCB in early September and started working through the bank’s books, trying to bring to light the full extent of its bad debts and understand where and why they had been extended in the first place.
“Honma lasted two weeks. He was found hanged in an Osaka hotel room, with notes addressed to his family, company, and others nearby. His body was quickly cremated, without an autopsy, and the Osaka police ruled the death a suicide without even conducting an investigation.
“And Honma wasn’t an isolated event. His death was the seventh ‘suicide’ among ranking Japanese either investigating financial irregularities or due to testify about irregularities since 1997, when the depth of bad loans affecting banks like Nippon Credit first started coming to light. There was also a member of parliament who was about to talk about irregular fund-raising activities, another Bank of Japan director who oversaw small financial institutions, an investigator at the Financial Supervision Agency, and the head of the small and medium financial institutions division at the Ministry of Finance. Not one of these seven cases resulted in so much as a homicide investigation. The powers that be in this country don’t allow it.”
I thought of Tatsu and his conspiracy theories, my eyes unblinking behind my shades.
“There are rumors of a special outfit within the yakuza,” Bulfinch said, taking off his glasses and wiping the lenses on his shirt, “specialists in ‘natural causes,’ who visit victims at night in hotel rooms, force them to write wills at gunpoint, inject them with sedatives, then strangle them in a way that makes it appear that the victim committed suicide by hanging.”
“Have you found any substance to the rumors?” I asked.
“Not yet. But where there’s smoke, there’s fire.”
He held his glasses up above his head and examined them, then returned them to his face. “And I’ll tell you something else. As bad as the problems are in the banks, the Construction Ministry is worse. Construction is the biggest employer in Japan — it puts the rice on one out of every six Japanese tables. The industry is by far the biggest contributor to the LDP. If you want to dig this country’s corruption out by the roots, construction is the place to start. Your father was a brave man, Midori.”
“I know,” she said.
I wondered if she still assumed the heart attack had been from natural causes. The building was starting to feel warm.
“I’ve told you what I know,” Bulfinch said. “Now it’s your turn.”
I looked at him through the shades. “Can you think of any reason that Kawamura would have gone to meet you that morning but not brought the disk?”
Bulfinch paused before saying “No.”
“The plan that morning was definitely to do the handoff?”
“Yes. As I said, we’d had a number of previous deep background meetings. This was the morning Kawamura was going to deliver the goods.”
“Maybe he couldn’t get access to the disk, couldn’t download whatever he was going to download that day, and that’s why he was coming up empty-handed.”
“No. He told me over the phone the day before that he had it. All he had to do was hand it over.”
I felt a flash of insight. I turned to Midori. “Midori, where did your father live?” Of course I already knew, but couldn’t let her know that.
“Shibuya.”
“Which chome?” Chome are small subdivisions within Tokyo’s various wards.
&nb
sp; “San-chome.”
“Top of Dogenzaka, then? Above the station?”
“Yes.”
I turned to Bulfinch. “Where was Kawamura getting on the train that morning?”
“Shibuya JR Station.”
“I’ve got a hunch I’m going to follow up on. I’ll call you if it pans out.”
“Wait just a minute . . . ,” he started to say.
“I know this isn’t comfortable for you,” I said, “but you’re going to have to trust me. I think I can find that disk.”
“How?”
“As I said, I’ve got a hunch.” I started to move toward the door.
“Wait,” he said again. “I’ll go with you.”
I shook my head. “I work alone.”
He took me by the arm and said again, “I’ll go with you.”
I looked at his hand on my arm. After a moment it drifted back to his side.
“I want you to walk out of here,” I told him. “Head in the direction of Omotesando-dori. I’m going to get Midori someplace safe and follow up on my hunch. I’ll be in touch.”
He looked at Midori, clearly at a loss.
“It’s all right,” she said. “We want the same thing you do.”
“I don’t suppose I have much choice,” he said, looking at me with a glare that was meant to convey resentment. But I saw what he was really thinking.
“Mr. Bulfinch,” I said, my voice low, “don’t try to follow me. I would spot you if you did. I would not react as a friend.”
“For Christ’s sake, tell me what you’re thinking. I might be able to help.”
“Remember,” I said, gesturing to the street, “the direction of Omotesando-dori. I’ll be in touch soon.”
“You’d better be,” he said. He took a step closer and looked through the shades and into my eyes, and I had to admire his balls. “You just better.” He gave a nod to Midori and walked through the glass doors of the Spiral Building and out onto the street.
Midori looked at me and asked, “What’s your hunch?”
“Later,” I said, watching him through the glass. “We need to move now, before he gets a chance to double back and follow one of us. Let’s go.”
