Rain Fall

by Barry Eisler

  We walked out and immediately flagged a cab heading in the direction of Shibuya. I could see Bulfinch, still walking in the other direction, as we got in and drove away.

  We got out and separated at Shibuya JR Station. Midori headed back to the hotel while I made my way up Dogenzaka — where Harry and I had followed Kawamura that morning that now seemed like so long ago, where, if my hunch was right, Kawamura had ditched the disk the morning he died.

  I was thinking about Kawamura, about his behavior that morning, about what must have been going on in his mind.

  More than anything else he’s scared. Today’s the day; he’s got the disk that’s going to flush all the rats out in the open. It’s right there in his pocket. It’s small and almost weightless, of course, but he’s intensely aware of its presence, this object that he knows will cost him his few remaining days if he’s caught with it. In less than an hour he’ll meet Bulfinch and unload the damn thing, and thank God for that.

  What if I’m being followed right now? he would think. What if they find me with the disk? He starts looking over his shoulder. Stops to light a cigarette, turns and scans the street.

  Someone behind him looks suspicious. Why not? When you’re hopped up on fear, the whole world is transformed. A tree looks like an NVA regular down to the details — the dark uniform, the Kalishnikov. Every guy in a suit looks like the government assassin who’s going to reach into your pocket, take out the disk, and smile as he raises the gun to your forehead.

  Get rid of the damn thing, and let Bulfinch retrieve it himself. Anywhere, anywhere at all . . . there, the Higashimura fruit store, that’ll do.

  I stopped outside the store’s small door and looked at the sign over it. This was where he had ducked into that morning. If it wasn’t here, it could be anywhere. But if he had unloaded it on his way to see Bulfinch, this was the place.

  I walked in. The proprietor, a short man with defeated-looking eyes and skin the hue of a lifetime of tobacco, looked up and acknowledged me with a tired “irrashaimase,” then went back to reading his manga. The store was small and rectangular, and the proprietor had a view of the whole place. Kawamura would have been able to hide the disk only in places where a patron could acceptably put his hands. He would be moving quickly, too. As far as he was concerned, it would only need to stay hidden for an hour or so, anyway, so he didn’t have to find an incredibly secure spot.

  Which meant it was probably already gone, I realized. It wouldn’t still be here. But I had nothing else to go on. It was worth a try.

  Apples. I had seen an apple rolling out of the train car as the doors had closed.

  There was a selection of Fujis, polished and beautiful in their netted Styrofoam half blankets, at the farthest corner of the store. I imagined Kawamura strolling over, examining the apples, slipping the disk under them as he did so.

  I walked over and looked. The bin was only a few apples deep, and it was easy for me to search for the disk simply by moving around the apples, as though I was trying to select just the right one.

  No disk. Shit.

  I repeated the drill with the adjacent pears, then the tangerines. Nothing.

  Damn it. It had felt right. I had been so sure.

  I was going to have to buy something to complete the charade. I was obviously a discriminating buyer, looking for something special.

  “Could you put together a small selection as a gift?” I asked the owner. “Maybe a half dozen pieces of fruit, including a small musk melon.”

  “Kashikomarimashita,” he answered with a wan attempt at a smile. Right away.

  As he went about carefully assembling the gift, I continued my search. In the five minutes during which the proprietor was preoccupied with my request, I was able to check every place to which Kawamura would have had access that morning. It was useless.

  The proprietor was just about finished. He pulled out a green moiré ribbon and wrapped it twice around the box he had used, finishing it in a simple bow. It was actually a nice gift. Maybe Midori would enjoy it.

  I took out some bills and handed them over. What were you hoping for, anyway? I thought. Kawamura wouldn’t have had time to hide it well. Even if he tried to ditch it in here, someone would have found it by now.

  Someone would have found it.

  He was counting out my change with the same slow approach that he had employed in creating the fruit basket. Definitely a careful man. Methodical.

  I waited for him to finish, then said in Japanese, “Excuse me. I know it’s not likely, but a friend of mine lost a CD in here a week or so ago and asked me to check to see if anyone had found it. It’s so unlikely that I hesitated to bring it up, but . . .”

  “Un,” he grunted, kneeling down behind the counter. He stood up a moment later, a generic plastic jewel box in his hand. “I wondered whether anyone would claim this.” He wiped it off with a few listless strokes of his apron and handed it to me.

  “Thank you,” I said, not a little bit surprised. “My friend will be happy.”

  “Good for him,” he said, and his eyes filmed over again.

  15

  AT FIRST LIGHT the whole of Shibuya feels like a giant sleeping off a hangover. You can still sense the merriment, the heedless laughter of the night before, you can hear it echoed in the strange silences and deserted spaces of the area’s twisting backstreets. The drunken voices of karaoke revelers, the unctuous pitches of the club touts, the secret whispers of lovers walking arm in arm, all are departed, but somehow, for just a few evanescent hours in the quiet of early morning, their shadows linger, like ghosts who refuse to believe that the night has ended, that there are no more parties to attend.

  I walked, in the company of those ghosts, following a series of alleys that more or less paralleled Meiji-dori, the main artery connecting Shibuya and Aoyama. I had gotten up early, easing out of the bed as quietly as I could to let Midori sleep. She had awakened anyway.

  I had taken the disk to Akihabara, Tokyo’s electronics Mecca, where I tried to play it on a PC in one of the enormous, anonymous computer stores. No dice. It was encrypted.

  Which meant that I needed Harry’s help. The realization wasn’t comfortable: given Bulfinch’s description of the disk’s contents — that it contained evidence of an assassin or assassins specializing in natural causes — I knew that what was on the disk could implicate me.

  I called Harry from a pay phone in Nogizaka. He sounded groggy and I figured he’d been sleeping, but I could feel him become alert when I mentioned the construction work going on in Kokaigijidomae — our signal for an immediate, emergency meeting. I used our usual code to tell him that I wanted to meet at the Doutor coffee shop on Imoarai-zaka in Roppongi. It was near his apartment, so he would be able to get there fast.

  He was already waiting when I arrived twenty minutes later, sitting at a table in back, reading a paper. His hair was matted down on one side of his head and he looked pale. “Sorry to get you up,” I said, sitting across from him.

  He shook his head. “What happened to your face?”

  “Hey, you should see the other guy. Let’s order some breakfast.”

  “I think I’ll just have coffee.”

  “You don’t want eggs or something?”

  “No, just coffee is good.”

  “Sounds like it was a rough night,” I said, imagining what that would consist of for Harry.

  He looked at me. “You’re scaring me with the small talk. I know you wouldn’t have used the code unless it was something serious.”

  “You wouldn’t forgive me for getting you up otherwise,” I said.

  We ordered coffee and breakfast and I filled him in on everything that had happened since the last time I saw him, beginning with how I met Midori, through the attack outside her apartment and then mine, the meeting with Bulfinch, the disk. I didn’t tell him about the previous night. I just told him we were using a love hotel as a safe house.

  Looking at him there, feeling his concern, I reali
zed I trusted him. Not just because I knew that, operationally, he had no way to hurt me, which was my usual reason for extending some minimal measure of trust, but because he was worthy of trust. And because I wanted to trust him.

  “I’m in a bit of a tight spot here,” I told him. “I could use your help. But . . . you’re going to need to know some fairly deep background first. If that’s not comfortable for you, all you need to do is say so.”

  He reddened slightly, and I knew that it would mean a lot to him that I would ask for his help, that I needed him. “It’s comfortable,” he said.

  I told him about Holtzer and Benny, the apparent CIA connection.

  “I wish you’d told me earlier,” he said when I was done. “I might have been able to do more to help.”

  I shrugged. “The less you know, the less I have to worry about you.”

  He nodded. “Typical CIA outlook.”

  “Takes one to know one.”

  “No, no. Remember, I worked at the Puzzle Palace. It’s the Agency types who turn paranoia into a point of pride. Anyway, why would I want to hurt you?”

  “Just being careful, kid,” I said. “It’s nothing personal.”

  “You saved my butt that time in Roppongi, remember? You think I’d forget that?”

  “You’d be surprised what people forget.”

  “Not me. Anyway, has it occurred to you how much I’m trusting you by letting you share this information with me, letting you make me a potential point of vulnerability? I know how careful you are, and I know what you’re capable of.”

  “I’m not sure I understand what you mean,” I said.

  He looked at me for a long time before he responded. “I’ve kept your secrets for a long time. I’ll continue to keep them. Fair enough?”

  Never underestimate Harry, I thought, nodding.

  “Fair enough?” he asked again.

  “Yes,” I said, not having anywhere else to go. “Now, enough of the I’m-okay-you’re-okay routine. Let’s work the problem. Start with Holtzer.”

  “Tell me more about how you know him.”

  “Not right after I’ve eaten.”

  “That bad, huh?”

  I shrugged. “I knew him in Vietnam. He was with the Agency then, attached to SOG, a joint CIA-military Special Operations Group. He’s got balls, I’ll give him credit for that. He wasn’t afraid to go into the field, unlike some of the other bean counters I worked with out there. I liked that about him when I first met him. But even then he was nothing but a careerist. The first time we locked horns was after an ARVN — Army of the Republic of Vietnam, the South’s army — operation in Military Region Three. The ARVN had mortared the shit out of a suspected Vietcong base in Tay Ninh, based on intelligence from a source that Holtzer had developed. So we were involved in the body count, as a way of verifying the intelligence.

  “The ARVN had really pounded the place, and it was hard to identify the bodies — there were pieces everywhere. But there were no weapons. I told Holtzer this didn’t look like Vietcong activity to me. He says, What are you talking about? This is Tay Ninh, everyone here is Vietcong. I say, Come on, there aren’t any weapons, your source was jerking you off. There was a mistake. He says no mistake, there must be two dozen enemy dead. But he’s counting every blown-off limb as a separate body.

  “Back at base, he writes up his report and asks me to verify it. I told him to fuck off. There were a couple officers nearby, out of earshot but close enough to see us. It got heated, and I wound up laying him out. The officers saw it, which is exactly what Holtzer had wanted, although I don’t think he bargained for the rhinoplasty he needed afterward. Ordinarily that kind of thing wouldn’t have aroused much attention, but at the time there was some sensitivity to the way Special Forces and the CIA were cooperating in the field, and Holtzer knew how to work the bureaucracy. He made it sound like I wouldn’t verify his report because I had a personal problem with him. I wonder how many subsequent S&D operations were based on intelligence from his so-called fucking source.”

  I took a swallow of coffee. “He caused a lot of problems for me after that. He’s the kind of guy who knows just which ears to whisper in, and I’ve never been good at that game. When I got back from the war I had some kind of black cloud over me, and I always knew he was the one behind it, even if I couldn’t catch him pulling the strings.”

  “You never told me about what happened in the States after the war,” Harry said after a moment. “Is that why you left?”

  “Part of it.” The terseness of my reply was meant to indicate that I didn’t want to go there, and Harry understood.

  “What about Benny?” he asked.

  “All I know about him is that he was connected to the LDP — an errand boy, but trusted with some important errands. And that apparently he was also a mole for the CIA.”

  The word mole felt unpleasant in my mouth. It is still one of the foulest epithets I know.

  For six years, SOG’s operations in Laos, Cambodia, and North Vietnam were compromised by a mole. Time and again, a team would be inserted successfully, only to be picked up within minutes by North Vietnamese patrols. Some of these missions had been death traps, with entire SOG platoons wiped out. But others were successful, which meant that the mole had limited access. If an investigator could have compared dates and access, we could have quickly narrowed down the list of suspects.

  But MACV — the U.S. Military Assistance Command, Vietnam — refused to investigate due to sensitivities about “counterpart relationships” — that is, they were afraid of insulting the South Vietnamese government by suggesting that a South Vietnamese national attached to MACV might have been less than reliable. Worse, SOG was ordered to continue to share its data with the ARVN. We tried to get around the command by issuing false insert coordinates to our Vietnamese counterparts, but MACV found out and there was hell to pay.

  In 1972, a traitorous ARVN corporal was uncovered, but this single, low-level agent couldn’t possibly have been the only source of damage for all those years. The real mole was never discovered.

  I took Benny’s and the kendoka’s cell phones from my jacket pocket and handed them to Harry. “I need two things from you. Check out the numbers that have been called. They should be stored in the phones.” I showed him which unit had belonged to the kendoka, and which to Benny. “See if there are any numbers speed-dial programmed, too, and try chasing them all down with a reverse directory. I want to know who these guys were talking to, how they were connected to each other and to the Agency.”

  “No problem,” he said. “I’ll get you something by the end of the day.”

  “Good. Now the second thing.” I took out the disk and put it on the table. “What everybody is after is on this disk. Bulfinch says it’s an exposé on corruption in the LDP and the Construction Ministry that could bring down the government.”

  He picked it up and held it up to the light.

  “Why a disk?” he said.

  “I was going to ask you the same question.”

  “Don’t know. It would have been easier to move whatever’s on here over the Net. Maybe a copy management program prevented that. I’ll check it out.” He slipped it inside his jacket.

  “Could that be how they knew we were on to Kawamura?” I asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “How they found out that he’d made the disk.”

  “Could be. There are copy management programs that will tell you if a copy has been made.”

  “It’s encrypted, too. I tried to run it but couldn’t. Why would Kawamura have encrypted it?”

  “I doubt that he did. He probably wasn’t supposed to have access. Someone else would have encrypted it, whoever he took it from.”

  That made sense. I still didn’t understand why Benny had put me on Kawamura weeks earlier, though. They must have had some other way of knowing that he had been talking to Bulfinch. Maybe telephone taps, something like that.

  “Okay,” I said. “P
age me when you’re done. We’ll meet back here — just input a time that’s good for you. Use the usual code.”

  He nodded and got up to leave. “Harry,” I said. “Don’t be cocky now. There are people who, if they knew you had that disk, would kill you to get it back.”

  He nodded. “I’ll be careful.”

  “Careful’s not good enough. Be paranoid. You don’t trust anyone.”

  “Almost anyone,” he said with a slightly exasperated pursing of the lips that might have been a grin.

  “No one,” I said, thinking of Crazy Jake.

  After he’d left I called Midori from a pay phone. We had switched to a new hotel that morning. She answered on the first ring.

  “Just wanted to check in,” I told her.

  “Can your friend help us?” she asked. I had told her to watch what she said over the phone, and she was choosing her words carefully.

  “Too early to tell. He’s going to try.”

  “When are you coming?”

  “I’m on my way now.”

  “Do me a favor, get me something to read. A novel, some magazines. I should have thought of it when I went out for something to eat before. There’s nothing to do in this room and I’m going crazy.”

  “I’ll stop someplace on the way. See you in a little bit.”

  Her tone was less strained than it had been when I first told her I had found the disk. She had wanted to know how, and I wouldn’t tell her. Obviously couldn’t.

  “I was retained by a party that wanted it,” I finally said. “I didn’t know what was on it at the time. I obviously didn’t know the lengths they would go to in trying to get it.”

  “Who was the party?” she had insisted.

  “Doesn’t matter” was my response. “All you need to know is that I’m trying to be part of the solution now, okay? Look, if I wanted to give it to the party that paid me to find it, I wouldn’t be here with it right now, discussing it with you. That’s all I’m going to say.”

  Not knowing my world, she had no reason to doubt that Kawamura’s heart attack had been due to something other than natural causes. If it had been anything other than that — a bullet, even a fall from a building — I knew I would be suspect.