Zero Sum

by Barry Eisler

  “And you’re mixed up with this man?” He managed to sound only mildly disapproving. But I sensed he was at least equally intrigued.

  “Well, ‘mixed up’ might be a strong way to put it.”

  “Indeed. And how would you put it?”

  I took another sip of beer to give myself time to think. I realized I should have gamed this out better before seeing him. Winging it with Tatsu was a dangerous strategy.

  “He’s . . . put me in a difficult position.”

  Tatsu said nothing. I knew he was using the silence to draw me out, and I had to resist the urge to just keep talking.

  “Let me ask you this,” I said. “If Victor were to take, say, early retirement, would you have a problem with that?”

  He shrugged. “I think the world would be fine without Victor. On the other hand, there’s always another one like him.”

  It almost slid right by me, but for some reason I didn’t quite buy it. Tatsu was as coldly rational an operator as I’d ever known, but he was still Japanese, a people intrinsically suspicious of, even hostile to, foreign interference. They closed the country for 250 years during the Tokugawa shogunate, opening it only when Admiral Perry’s black ships arrived and left no choice. So even someone as levelheaded as Tatsu was unlikely to be blasé about a guy like Victor Karkov in Tokyo.

  I took another sip of beer, deliberately casual. “If you say so. I mean, a foreigner waltzing into Tokyo and pushing out the local gangsters. Just seems . . . embarrassing. But okay.”

  There was a long pause. If he thought the silence was going to draw me out any more, he was mistaken. McGraw had been as good at that shit as anyone, and he’d trained me.

  “Well,” he said after a long moment. “I wouldn’t call it embarrassing. But . . . a foreign criminal organization does present certain intelligence challenges. And cultural ones. The yakuza has always been an unfortunate part of Japanese society, but a part nonetheless. There are many unspoken rules. With Victor, many of these rules seem not to apply.”

  It was a subtle concession, but still a concession. There was room here for joint action. I just didn’t know how much.

  “What rules are we talking about?” I said.

  “Rules about public violence. Leaving the mangled bodies of enemies in the street as a message, for example. The yakuza shy away from such tactics out of respect for public harmony. For Victor, violation of public harmony is itself a weapon.”

  The word he used for public harmony was wa, a concept integral to Japanese culture. Wa implies an elevation of the needs of society over the needs of the individual, the primacy of peaceful unity and conformity. To violate wa is to invite some form of correction—possibly quite strict correction. I wondered if, in his reference to wa, Tatsu was also hinting at the need for that kind of reaction.

  “I’d like to learn more about him,” I said.

  “For example?”

  “Well, whatever you know.”

  He looked at me with an Is that the best you can do? expression.

  Yeah, he wasn’t going to reveal what he knew until I revealed what I wanted. I couldn’t blame him. I would have done the same.

  “I want to be frank with you,” I said. “But I need to know the parameters.”

  “One parameter would be limiting yourself to Victor. No other early retirements, is that correct?”

  He was telling me no civilians. No mistakes. I said, “What if someone else in his organization were to retire, too?”

  He nodded with slightly exaggerated gravity. “Well, these things happen, I suppose. Changing personnel. Simultaneous departures. Who do you think might also retire?”

  “You know his guy Oleg?”

  “Oleg Taktarov.”

  “Okay, you know him.”

  “He is former Spetsnaz, like Victor himself. Both of them took part in the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan three years ago. Operation Storm-333, I believe it was called. Several hundred Soviet Special Forces soldiers, dressed in Afghan army uniforms, stormed the palace, killed the president and his two hundred personal guards, and then installed a handpicked successor. A very impressive operation.”

  “Hasn’t been going so smoothly since then.”

  “True, but I don’t think the larger geopolitical problems Russia faces in Afghanistan are the fault of men like Victor and Oleg. Any more than the outcome in America’s war in Vietnam was the fault of men like you.”

  I nodded at the fair point. “What are they doing in Japan?”

  “I was very much hoping you might be able to tell me that.”

  “You don’t know?”

  He took a sip of beer. “These Russians aren’t like our yakuza. They don’t keep regular office hours. They don’t have business cards. They conduct themselves more like the black-ops soldiers they were than like the criminals they’ve become. That said, I have some information. Most of it obvious.”

  “They seem to have cornered the assassination business.”

  He looked at me. A beat went by, and I thought he was going to ask how I would know that. But all he said was, “That would be the obvious part.”

  When Tatsu was disappointed I wasn’t keeping up, he wasn’t shy about showing it.

  “Okay, right. But why? Was it just an opportunity for a hostile takeover? And where are they getting their intel?”

  He nodded. “Those would be the nonobvious parts.”

  “You don’t know, then.”

  “No.”

  “My understanding is, when they got here, they faced a certain amount of opposition. Which they wiped out more or less as smoothly as it sounds like they took the presidential palace in Kabul. Okay, fine, they’re experienced and ruthless. But still, an operation like that means pinpoint intel.”

  “Of course.”

  “Shit. I was really hoping you might know.”

  “I’ve been able to find out some things about the beginning. And some things about the present. But the connective tissue so far has eluded me.”

  “You wouldn’t happen to know how big his organization is, would you?”

  “Not precise numbers. Victor and Oleg, of course, but only a few local soldiers under them. Their strength is military experience, ruthlessness, and of course highly accurate intelligence.”

  I nodded. “That tracks with my assessment.”

  He frowned. “Tell me, how did you get mixed up with these people, or however you would prefer to put it?”

  I supposed it was too much to hope that he wasn’t going to push on that.

  I took a sip of beer. “They’re insisting I do a job for them. With the implicit promise that, if I don’t do it, they’ll kill me.”

  “And this is what brought you back to Japan? Where have you even been?”

  “It’s a long story and it doesn’t really matter now. I went back to war. I got tired of it. I came back hoping for something better. An old friend introduced me to Victor, and from there it went straight to shit.”

  He nodded as though considering all that. “What do you propose to do?”

  “What do you think I’m going to do?”

  “Eliminate the source of the trouble.”

  “Am I really that obvious?”

  He grunted. “You can get to him?”

  “Not easily. Not now. But if I open up a flank . . .”

  “Oleg.”

  “Exactly.”

  “If something happens to Oleg, and Victor just met you, he’ll come at you. I don’t think you want that kind of fight.”

  “Yeah, I already thought of that. And agreed, I’d prefer the kind of fight where I come at Victor from a blind spot. You know, no fight at all.”

  “This is no soft target. We’re talking about a former Spetsnaz soldier. How are you going to do this?”

  “That depends on the intel, I guess. All I know right now is absent a hell of a lucky break, my best bet is to peel a layer off Victor’s defense. And then get inside.”

  “Take out the colonel’s best
soldier.”

  “Yes, and in doing so, force the colonel to take the field himself.”

  He took a sip of beer. “I imagine I can get you operational information about Oleg. But this plan of yours . . . wouldn’t it make more sense to just walk away? Leave Tokyo. You have before.”

  It probably should have concerned me more that first Miyamoto and now Tatsu—both smart, savvy players, both older and more experienced than I—were telling me the same thing.

  “It’s a little more complicated than that,” I said.

  “Why not tell me how?”

  “I . . . have an acquaintance in the picture who would probably bear the brunt of Victor’s retaliation if I were to skip town.”

  “The person who introduced you, I imagine.”

  I looked at him, not for the first time appalled by the keenness of his instincts. “Why do you say that?”

  “Well, you don’t have many friends.”

  “Thanks.”

  “And if it were me, you would tell me.”

  I nodded. “You can count on that. Always.”

  He grunted an acknowledgement. “And the last time we met, you mentioned you were dating someone. But I don’t imagine she’s still in your life.”

  He was talking about Sayaka. I had to work for a moment to keep the box closed.

  I didn’t want to ask, but I did. “Why do you say that?”

  “It’s not inconceivable you came back here for her. But . . . ten years is a long time.”

  “She’s not here anymore.”

  Whatever he saw in my eyes or heard in my voice must have made him understand not to push any further on that.

  “So,” he said. “Just a process of elimination. And proximity. Someone introduced you to Victor. Presumably, someone you know well enough to care about. And Victor is treating that person like the surety on a loan.”

  I nodded, a little chagrined at how easily he was able to see through something I thought would be opaque. “That’s about it.”

  We were quiet for a moment, just sipping our beers. I tried to imagine what he was thinking. How much more he might extract from me. How far he’d go to help.

  “What else do you know about Victor?” I said.

  He set down his mug and rubbed his chin. “The enemy of my enemy is my friend. Quite a number of yakuza are willing to share what they know of Victor with the authorities, in the hope that in doing so, they will enable us to help with their problem. Some of this information has enabled me to confirm other details. Beyond those details, I am forced to speculate.”

  “I’ll take whatever you have.”

  “All right. I believe Victor was born of a Japanese mother, and that he spent his childhood in Japan.”

  “Yeah, he looks like a blend. Is there more?”

  “Of course. First, he speaks Japanese.”

  “His Japanese is Russian-accented. Not native.”

  “I’m quite certain Victor has no interest in being a native. Perhaps he once did, but if so, that hope was beaten out of him.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He was abandoned as a child, and raised by strangers. Bullied for being a half-breed. Not so hard to imagine he would be eager to separate himself from that trauma. To create a new, Russian self, and distance himself from the hated part of his heritage.”

  The word he used for half-breed was ainoko. He obviously intended it in a neutral sense, just quoting what the bullies would have called Victor. But even all these years later, I hated the sound of it. It’s what they had always called me.

  “How much do you know about his childhood?”

  “If I am correct about who he is, he was left outside a Tokyo orphanage when he was five. He was holding a note. The orphanage still has it.”

  “What was the note?”

  “A handwritten explanation, in Japanese, from an anguished mother who could no longer care for her child.”

  “She just . . . left him there?”

  “Apparently so. The boy claimed she was coming right back, that she had told him to wait there with the note while she went to the store to buy food. He continued to believe this until he was a teenager. That something must have happened to his mother—she had gotten lost or waylaid, but would come back for him. The head of the orphanage is quite old and has long since retired, but I spoke with her. She told me the boy would stare out the window at the street where his mother left him. Every day. Whenever he was unsupervised, he would go to the window, press his hands against the glass, and stare out.”

  I remembered my eight-year-old self, sobbing night after night for months, drowning in an ocean of pain and confusion and grief after my father had died.

  “That’s . . . terrible,” I said.

  “Indeed.”

  “The father?”

  “Unknown. Victor claimed he was a Russian general, who he also fervently believed would come to the orphanage and claim him.”

  “A Russian general? Does that make any sense?”

  “No. If he is who I think he is, Victor was born around 1940. Relations between Imperial Japan and the Soviet Union were hostile in that period. We had fought an undeclared border war in Manchuria just a few years earlier—a war in which Japan was decisively beaten back. There were no Soviet generals in Japan.”

  “Could the mother have gone abroad?”

  He shrugged. “I think the chances that a Japanese woman, so destitute that she had to give up her own child, had traveled to the Soviet Union, become pregnant by a Soviet general, and returned to Japan are so unlikely that they’re barely worth considering.”

  “What, then? Just a story she told him? He’s got Slavic in his face, that’s for sure.”

  He leaned forward. “What is he like? Your personal assessment.”

  I blew out a long breath. “He’s . . . a bit of a force of nature.” I told him about Kobayashi.

  By the time I was done, his expression had grown dark. “Recently, a body was recovered from the Sumida River. The face was traumatized beyond recognition, and there were multiple stab wounds.”

  “That sounds like Kobayashi.”

  “Masahiru Kobayashi is a foot soldier with the Gokumatsu-gumi. You’re telling me he was working for Victor?”

  “Victor said there was some kind of fuckup with the Gokumatsu-gumi, and Victor was giving him another chance. You make anything of that?”

  “This is the first I’ve heard of it.”

  That wasn’t exactly responsive to my question, but we were both being careful about what we revealed.

  “Well,” I said, “if you have dental records for Kobayashi, I’m guessing you can get a positive ID on that body you fished out of the river. Victor’s work.”

  “I imagine it would be useless to ask you to testify as an eyewitness in a homicide? The Keisatsuchō could protect you, and—”

  I shook my head. “Not going to happen, Tatsu. We need another plan.”

  He nodded. “All right. I had to try, of course.”

  “Of course.”

  We were quiet again for a moment. I said, “Go back. He’s got Slavic in his face. Or something, anyway. You think the thing about a Russian general was just a fantasy?”

  He sipped his beer. “It could have been. But my guess is, it was based on something his mother told him.”

  “That his father was a great general.”

  “Yes. To give him something to be proud of. Rather than the awful truth.”

  “That his father was a nobody?”

  “Perhaps. But why a Russian general? Why not a doctor, a scientist, a musician? Any one of those, or many other vocations, would be enough to give the child some pride in his paternal lineage. And all would have been more plausible than what the boy was given to believe.”

  I tried to follow, but couldn’t. “So what’s your theory?”

  He gave me one of his trademark Why do I need to spell out every last aspect looks. “Sometimes people fabricate. But more often, they exaggerate. The
y take pieces of truth and construct lies on top of them.”

  “So . . . a Russian soldier, but not a general?”

  “Perhaps.”

  “But you said there were no Russian soldiers in Japan back then.”

  “I said no Russian generals.”

  “There were Russian soldiers? During World War Two?”

  “As it turns out, there were.”

  I leaned back in my seat, impressed as always. “You’ve looked into this.”

  “Of course. There were several significant battles on the Manchurian border in 1938 and 1939. Our Imperial forces captured numerous Russian soldiers. Some of these prisoners were taken back to the home islands. Most of them did not survive the journey. Several did. One of them escaped.”

  There was a pause. I said, “Victor’s father?”

  “I believe so. Many records were destroyed during the war. But there is a record of a captured Soviet infantryman, Alexei Gavrikov, taken to Japan and then unaccounted for.”

  “‘Unaccounted for’?”

  “A euphemism, I believe, for ‘escaped.’”

  “And he meets Victor’s mother, and . . . ?”

  “And rapes her.”

  “Damn. But . . . I don’t know, Tatsu. The guy escapes, okay, but then he’s going to have a hell of a time staying that way, don’t you think? A white guy, running around wartime Japan? Where does he hide? What does he eat?”

  “The camp he was sent to was in Aichi Prefecture. In the vicinity of many small farms. Gavrikov escaped in the summer, when the weather was favorable. With a little luck, moving only at night, he might have managed to stay hidden. And found enough to eat.”

  I tried to picture it. “He sneaks into an outlying building on a farm. Or something. And while he’s in there, looking for food, or a place to bunk down for the night . . .”

  “Is startled by a farm girl. Grabs her. Perhaps thinks to kill her, but sees she’s too petrified to sound any alarm. And so forces himself on her instead. Men do such things in war. And worse.”

  “Not just in war.”

  “Indeed. Perhaps she tells her parents right away. Perhaps not. Either way, she learns she is pregnant. For whatever reason, she is unable or unwilling to terminate the pregnancy. Her parents don’t believe her story. They turn her out. She might have made her way to Tokyo, doing whatever work she could to survive and feed her infant son.”