Tokyo Vice

by Jake Adelstein

  “What do you know about Endo?”

  I told him everything I knew. Sekiguchi offered me another cigarette, and we both lit up again.

  “What should I call you? I’m sure as hell not going to call you Aderusutain every time.”

  “Jake works.”

  “Jake-san? Jake-kun?”

  “Just Jake is fine.”

  “Okay. Well, it’s getting late. So I’ll tell you what I know, with a caveat.”

  “Name it.”

  “A lot of this information is ground level. If you take it and run it past the guys at the top, they won’t know it since they don’t have it yet, but they’ll be puzzled that you have it and they’ll go down the food chain looking for the leak. If you don’t know this already, you should. You have to wait for information to go all the way up to the top before double-checking it. Otherwise, you burn your sources. Do you understand that?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “Good. I’ll tell you what I know, but how you handle the information will be a litmus test of your reliability. Got that?”

  “Got it.”

  “There’s no question that Sekine killed Endo, and it’s our strongest case. I think we should bust him on charges of murder right from the start; no fucking around. He’ll break quickly. I know that. Obviously, since I’m not a member of the killer-catcher elite, no one is listening to me, but they will eventually.

  “From the investigation so far, I would say that Sekine has killed eight people. The murder of Endo is the one with the strongest circumstantial evidence and hearsay. We have witnesses who can testify, after a fashion, that Endo met Sekine right before he vanished and that on that day Sekine ‘injured’ him. I won’t elaborate.” Sekiguchi was full of confidence.

  I asked how a dog breeder like Sekine had become so well entrenched with the yakuza.

  “Before Sekine came to Konan, he got in big trouble with the Yamaguchi-gumi over money. He himself used to be in another yakuza group, the Kyokuto-kai. When he got here, a customer introduced him to the Takada-gumi, who put him under its wing. As a gesture of thanks, he gave Takada, the boss, an incredibly expensive dog. That was the beginning of his connections with the Inagawa-kai crime group. He proceeded to become the exotic pet supplier to the yakuza, selling vicious dogs and wild beasts to any yakuza who had the money. They love that kind of crap. It heightens their image as tough guys. He sold a lion—a goddamn lion—to one group. It’s still alive. But this Kennel guy, which everybody calls him, doesn’t like animals; he admires them, sort of, and he uses them.

  “I’ll give you an example. A couple months ago, Kennel and this customer were arguing over the price of a dog. The negotiations were going nowhere. So picture this: They are standing there in Kennel’s store. At their feet, tongue hanging from its mouth, is a pure-bred Alaskan malamute. The customer won’t budge. He tells Sekine he’s not going to pay the one and a half million yen the breeder wants; he asks once more to have a half million yen taken off the price.

  “‘You want a five hundred thousand yen discount?’ Sekine mutters, smiling as he strokes the dog in front of him. Then he picks up a pair of grooming scissors from his desk, cuts off the dog’s left ear in one snip, and tosses it at the feet of the customer. ‘Okay,’ he says, ‘you win. I’ve taken it off.’ The guy paid the price and took the dog and left. Because I’m sure he was thinking, The next ear lying at my feet might not be the dog’s.

  “Is that something a normal person would do? Kennel has this thing for animals because he thinks they have no conscience and they act purely on instinct. He wants to be an animal like that.”

  The evening having had its share of startling revelations, Sekiguchi walked me to the door. As I was preparing to leave, he put a firm hand on my shoulder, stopping me. I turned around. Had I made some kind of terrible faux pas?

  He looked me in the eyes and pointed down at my feet. “Your socks don’t match; do you know that?” he asked.

  I got back to Saitama around midnight. Yamamoto was waiting for me.

  “How’d it go?” he asked.

  “It went all right,” I replied. “He was really tight-lipped, didn’t say anything other than that he was working on the case. But I did get in the house.”

  “Excellent,” said Yamamoto.

  I hadn’t told Yamamoto the truth because even though I trusted him I didn’t trust The Cobra. I’d taken Sekiguchi’s warning seriously: I didn’t want my notes being pulled up the food chain too soon and Sekiguchi having to pay for it. This was the first time I realized that to protect your sources, you sometimes have to keep things from the people you work with. Later, I’d learn that sometimes you have to keep things from the people you love as well.

  * Sports newspapers in Japan, available at all kiosks in train stations, are barely short of being supermarket tabloids. Their emphasis is on sports, so there’s a semblance of truth telling, but their mainstream news coverage is drawn to the gory, the disgusting, and the merely gossipy. Sports newspapers are also distinguished by their “pink pages”—daringly salacious photos and drawings, erotic fiction, information on sex clubs and massage parlors, and ads for those establishments. On occasion, apparently, they report on crime.

  The Saitama Dog Lover Serial Disappearances, Part Two:

  Out of Bed, Yakuza Are Worthless Leeches

  After many months on the case, I began thinking back to recruiting day and how the presenter had said a story can take up to a year to build. Back then I’d thought that that would be excellent; now I was in terrible need of a break and at the end of my rope.

  I mentioned to Sekiguchi that I was taking a week off.

  “It’s not going to happen,” he laughed.

  He was right; I was back within four days. A member of the Takada-gumi, a chinpira named Shimizu, had cornered Sekine at his African Kennel shop and slashed him up, and Sekiguchi was in charge of interrogating the suspect.

  I was having Häagen-Dazs with the girls when the good interrogator got home, took off his shoes, and sat down at the table with us. It was uncanny; it seemed the most natural thing in the world to be sitting there.

  Sekiguchi asked his wife for coffee.

  “Does Shimizu think Sekine killed Endo?” I blurted out without hesitation. The kids were there, but they were paying us no attention.

  “He does. He does. He admitted to taking a box cutter to Sekine’s face but not to anything else. So after we were done writing out his confession and he signed it, I took him aside and said to him, ‘I’m done questioning you and I’m not rewriting your statement, but tell me straight: Did you do this because Takada ordered you to?’ And Shimizu said no. Completely denied it.”

  Sekiguchi continued, “I wanted to hear about this from the man himself, so I went and paid Takada a visit, as I do every so often, sort of to keep things under control. I asked him directly if he’d put that idiot up to it. Takada didn’t bat an eye. ‘If I told the punk to snuff him and he came back without seriously injuring the jerk,’ he said, ‘I would’ve strung him up. Shimizu is a total fuckup. He’s no yakuza. If he was going to do it, he should’ve buried the knife in the dog man’s gut.”

  At that point, Sekiguchi decided to give me a little background. “A lot of yakuza don’t even like to call themselves yakuza. Forget about the official word boryokudan [literally, “violent groups”]. They call themselves gokudo. You know that, right?” He wrote the Chinese characters down on a napkin. “Goku means ‘ultimate, the far end, the extreme,’ and do means ‘the path.’ A gokudo goes all the way, he doesn’t hold back, he finishes the job. These young guys today, they don’t deserve to call themselves gokudo. They’re just chinpira, going through the motions of being a man.

  “My job is to make sure it looks as if we’re doing everything we can to keep Sekine alive, to make Takada’s boys believe that if something happens to Sekine, the law’s going to come down heavy on them. Crazy, but I do all this so that Takada doesn’t lose face and decide to knock off Sekin
e himself.”

  Sekiguchi was walking a tightrope. Yet in many ways he was holding the entire investigation together. When Endo had first disappeared, everyone whispered that Kennel had done it, but Takada had refused to listen. He couldn’t believe that a civilian, no matter how much out of control, would take out a yakuza. It was unheard of. However, since Sekiguchi had been assigned to the case, Takada, it seems, was slowly rethinking his position. He wasn’t sure why; all he knew was that he wasn’t happy about the way things were beginning to stack up.

  Takada would call Sekiguchi off and on and say casually, “I think I’m going to blow some holes in Kennel. This case is a waste of your talents. I’ll put an end to it for you. You’ll be working better cases in no time.” Sekiguchi would then politely ask him to refrain from killing the main suspect. It was kind of a two-man comedy routine after a while.

  No one knew how or where Endo had been taken out. But Sekiguchi had been able to trace his last night up to his disappearance. At 9 P.M., after some illegal gambling recreation, Endo had called Yumi-chan. The call was short and to the point: “I’m going to be a little late.”

  Sekiguchi had scored one other key piece of information: a local veterinarian had sold Sekine a large amount of strychnine nitrate—so he could put sick animals to sleep.

  • • •

  I had been doing my own looking into Endo’s final hours, and before long I found myself at Sekiguchi’s house every other day, crosschecking information that I’d dug up. This was probably pushing the limits of professional courtesy, but, oddly, Sekiguchi didn’t seem to mind. In the meantime, Mrs. Sekiguchi even started asking me to babysit the girls while she ran errands; I ended up helping them with their English homework.

  Sekiguchi eventually tracked down Yumi-chan. She was not in high school but working as a bar hostess, so Yoshihara and I headed over to the bar the next evening. We were greeted by the mama-san, who, after Yoshihara requested Yumi-chan’s company, sat us down at a table.

  The place was a typical hostess club: a chandelier, a few sofas for intimate chat, a karaoke machine, a big guy behind the bar. The upholstery was purple velvet, the light in the place so dim that the candles on the tables seemed like spotlights, and the guy behind the bar, who gave me the once-over, had no neck, a short haircut, and a bad suit that was too tight—yakuza alert.

  Yumi, on the other hand, was gorgeous. She had a longish face and perky little lips, and she seemed to be a little shorter than me but not by much. I imagined I could see some lace showing from under her miniskirt, but I couldn’t be sure. She sat herself down next to Yoshihara, while her colleague, introduced as Kimiko, squeezed in next to me.

  As Yoshihara sipped the whiskey and water that Yumi had poured for him, he quietly explained who we were and why we were there. She was immediately alarmed, and for a second I worried she’d tell the bartender to throw our sorry asses out of the club. But after the initial nervousness she seemed to respond to Yoshihara’s direct approach.

  Sighing, she said, “I’ll tell you what I can, but not for free. This is a bar; this is where I work. If you’re a customer, you can ask whatever you want. But I expect you to behave like a good customer. Like the kind that buys a girl a bottle of champagne.”

  Yoshihara and I looked at each other. Could we afford this? Besides the issue of not being able to expense it, buying information outright was verboten. This came pretty close to the line.

  Impulse intervened. “I think that would be fine,” I said. “But one thing you should know is I’m Jewish, and we have a two-thousand-year tradition of being very cheap. I would hate to dishonor tradition. How about a cheap bottle of champagne?”

  Yumi laughed gamely, but she didn’t relent. “You’re in Japan now. Time to learn Japanese tradition.”

  We ordered a bottle of good champagne. As the bubbly flowed, so did information. Endo had been a regular at the club and he’d been a real gentleman. He was older, but he’d wined and dined her and bought her lavish gifts, and he had a certain animal magnetism. She’d slept with him out of curiosity, then found out he was good in bed.

  The last she’d heard from him was that final phone call. She had no idea who he was going to meet; in fact, she rarely discussed work with him. Now that he was gone, she missed him, but she’d never been in love with him. One bad thing about him was that he was covered in tattoos, and that made his skin cold. “Sometimes it felt like I was sleeping with a snake. Good in summer, not in winter.”

  My attention was beginning to wander. Kimiko wasn’t as attractive as Yumi, but she had lovely eyes—penetrating would be the word. She smiled a lot and had wide, shapely hips. She filled my champagne glass and asked me if I wanted a cigarette. I said sure, and she removed a slender cigarette from her pack, put it between her lips, lit it, inhaled, and then gently inserted the cigarette between my lips—eyes on me the whole time. I couldn’t stop looking at her fingernails; they were jet black. Wow.

  “Would you like to ask me anything?” she said. “Your friend seems to be asking all the questions.”

  “Did you know Endo?” I said agreeably, coming to my senses.

  “Oh, I knew Endo. Not as well as Yumi, of course. I like yakuza. They know how to please a woman in bed. Out of bed, yakuza are worthless leeches.”

  “Have you dated a lot of yakuza?”

  “I was the mistress of a yakuza before I moved here.”

  “And why aren’t you his mistress anymore?”

  She lit a cigarette for herself. “He died.”

  “Natural causes?”

  “Definitely natural causes,” she said, then laughed hysterically. “We were fucking when he kicked the bucket.” She wasn’t kidding. They’d been going at it heatedly, and in the middle of the act he’d had a heart attack. She’d managed to push him off her while he was still breathing, but he was dead before the ambulance arrived. Dead at forty-five. He’d been abusive and possessive, convincing her to get a dragon tattoo on her back. He had one himself. It was like branding her, but she didn’t mind. She was eighteen, and she thought she loved him. He was married, of course. Before the ambulance arrived, she had the presence of mind to remove his bank card from his wallet. The next morning she cleaned out his account.

  When at age twenty-two she moved to Saitama, she had a tidy little nest egg.

  We could afford only so much conversation, and before long Yoshihara made motions that it was time to leave. I thanked Kimiko for her company. Yumi and Kimiko waved good-bye at the door after we settled our bill—30,000 yen (around $300).

  Out on the sidewalk, I bid Yoshihara good night, telling him I’d find my own way home. Yoshihara hailed a taxi, and as soon as the car was out of sight, I turned around and immediately reentered the bar and continued my conversation with Kimiko. I’d never known a yakuza woman before, and I wasn’t about to pass up the opportunity.

  I never made it back to the offices that night.

  I suppose it would reflect better upon the man in me if I said I talked her into our spending the night together, but she was in charge all the way. And in bed she was ferocious, aggressive, definitely more experienced than me. In addition to the tattoo of a dragon on her back, she had one of the Kanon Bosatsu (the female Buddha of compassion), which seemed to jump out of her skin when we were having sex.

  And so began what I can only describe as a several-months-long three-way affair. Not the three-way you’re thinking of: Kimiko gave me information about the gokudo world, which I then shared with Sekiguchi, who was keeping tabs on the Takada-gumi, about which he fed bits and pieces to me.

  On one afternoon, as Kimiko and I were in her apartment having stand-up sex, she endearingly ran her fingernails down my back and asked me if I wanted to know a secret.

  “Sure,” I said, “tell me a secret.”

  “Guess where Sekine is right now?”

  “Working hard at his kennel, I assume.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Okay, give me the scoop.�
��

  “First you have to earn it.”

  So I did. And, my part of the bargain fulfilled, she fulfilled hers: “Takada has him. They’re probably interrogating him right now.”

  “What the fuck?”

  “Oh, they’ll get the truth out of him.”

  “How do you know about this?”

  “One of Takada’s boys was in the bar last night, bragging about it. He said they were going to get Sekine, cut him up, and feed him to his own dogs. Something about his own medicine.”

  “I need your phone.”

  “Who are you going to call?”

  “Just give me the phone.”

  I rang Sekiguchi, who listened, thanked me, didn’t ask questions, and hung up immediately.

  I didn’t speak to him again until four days later. In the meantime, thanks to Kimiko, I managed to track down one of Endo’s non-yakuza friends and get more information on Endo. Apparently, he had been blackmailing Sekine and planning to strip him of all his assets—land, house, kennel, everything.

  Sekiguchi was happy to see me.

  “Jake, thanks for the call the other day. Your information was very good.”

  “What happened?”

  “About ten minutes after I got off the phone with you, Takada called me, acting coy, trying to surprise me. I didn’t give him a chance. I asked him what the hell he was doing with Sekine—Sekine was supposed to be hands-off. Takada was very impressed that I already knew. He told me, ‘Yeah, I’ve got the motherfucker. I’m going to ask him a few questions, and you’re welcome to sit on the sidelines and listen.’ Tempting offer, but I declined. I told him he better not kill the guy and he had to let me know what he learned.”

  “You didn’t rush in to rescue him?”

  “No. Takada gave me his word.”

  “And you believed him?”

  “You have to have faith in people sometimes, Jake. Sometimes you have to trust people who are untrustworthy. By trusting them, you make them trustworthy. I trusted Takada to honor his word when he gave it. If he hadn’t given me his word, I would have called up the Gyoda cops and had them come bail Sekine out. As it was, I decided to leave him with Takada for a while.”