by Barry Eisler
I saw the flat-nosed guy go inside as we moved away from the scene, I assumed to help his fallen comrades.
If they had been planning to take her somewhere, they would have had a car. I looked around, but there were too many vehicles parked in the area for me to be able to pinpoint theirs.
“Did they say where they were going to take you?” I asked. “Who they were with?”
“No,” she said. “I told you, they only said they were with the police.”
“Okay, I understand.” Where was their car? There might have been more of them. All right, go, just keep on walking, they’ll have to show themselves if they want to take you.
We cut across the dark parking lot of the building across from hers, emerging onto Omotesando-dori, where we caught a cab. I told the driver to take us to the Seibu Department Store in Shibuya. I checked the side views as we drove. There were few cars on the road, and none seemed to be tailing us.
What I had in mind was a love hotel. The love hotel is a Japanese institution, born of the country’s housing shortage. With families, sometimes extended ones, jammed into small apartments, Mom and Dad need to have somewhere to go to be alone. Hence the rabu hoteru—places with rates for either a “rest” or a “stay,” famously discreet front desks, no credit card required for registration, and fake names the norm. Some of them are completely over the top, with theme rooms sporting Roman baths and Americana kitsch, the offspring of the Disney Epcot Center and a bordello.
Beyond Japan’s housing shortage, the hotels arose because inviting a stranger into your home tends to be a much more intimate act in Japan than it is in the States. There are plenty of Japanese women who will allow a man into their bodies before permitting him to enter their apartments, and the hotels serve this aspect of the market, as well.
The people we were up against weren’t stupid, of course. They might guess a love hotel would make an expedient safe house. That would be my guess, if the tables were turned. But with about ten thousand rabu hoteru in Tokyo, it would still take them a while to track us down.
We got out of the cab and walked to Shibuya 2-chome, which is choked with small love hotels. I chose one at random. We told the old woman at the front desk we wanted a room with a bath, for a yasumi—a stay, not just a rest. I put cash on the counter and she pulled out a key.
We took the elevator to the fifth floor and found our room at the end of a short hallway. I unlocked the door and Midori went in first. I followed her in, locking the door behind me. We left our shoes in the entranceway. There was only one bed—twins in a love hotel would be as out of place as a Bible—but there was a decent-sized couch I could curl up on.
Midori sat on the edge of the bed and faced me. “Here’s where we are,” she said, her voice even. “Tonight three men were waiting for me in my apartment. They claimed to be police, but obviously weren’t—or if they were police, they were on some kind of private mission. I’d think you were with them, but I saw how badly you hurt them. You asked me to go somewhere safe with you so you could explain. I’m listening.”
I nodded, trying to find the right words to begin. “You know this has to do with your father.”
“Those men told me he had something they wanted.”
“Yes, and they think you have it now.”
“I don’t know why they would think that.”
I looked at her. “I think you do.”
“Think what you want.”
“You know what’s wrong with this picture, Midori? Three men are waiting for you in your apartment, they rough you up a little, I appear out of nowhere and rough them up a lot, none of this exactly an average day in the life of a jazz pianist, and the whole time you’ve never once suggested you want to go to the police.”
She didn’t answer.
“Do you want to? You can, you know.”
She sat facing me, her nostrils flaring slightly, her fingers drumming along the edge of the bed. Goddamn it, I thought, what does she know that she hasn’t been telling?
“Tell me about your father, Midori. I can’t help you if you don’t.”
She leaped off the bed and faced me squarely. “Tell you?” she spat. “No, you tell me! Tell me who the fuck you are, or I swear I will go to the police and I don’t care what happens after that!”
Progress, of a sort. “What do you want to know?”
“Everything!”
“Okay.”
“Starting with who were those men in my apartment?”
“I don’t know who they are.”
“But you knew they were there?”
She was going to pull hard at that loose thread until the entire fabric unraveled. I didn’t know how to get around it. “Yes.”
“How?”
“Because your apartment is bugged.”
“Because my apartment is bugged… are you with those men?”
“No.”
“Would you please stop giving me one-word answers? Okay, my apartment is bugged, by who, by you?”
There it was. “Yes.”
She looked at me for a long beat, then sat back down on the bed. “Who do you work for?” she asked, her voice flat.
“It doesn’t matter.”
Another long beat, and the same flat tone: “Then tell me what you want.”
I looked at her, wanting her to see my eyes. “I want to make sure you don’t get hurt.”
Her face was expressionless. “And you’re going to do that by…”
“These people are coming after you because they think you have something that could harm them. I don’t know what. But as long as they think you have it, you’re not going to be safe.”
“But if I were to just give whatever it is to you…”
“Without knowing what the thing is, I don’t even know if giving it to me would help. I told you, I’m not here for whatever it is. I’m here for you.”
“Can’t you see what this looks like from my perspective? ‘Just hand it over so I can help you.’”
“I understand that.”
“I’m not sure you do.”
“Doesn’t matter. Tell me about your father.”
There was a long pause. I knew what she was going to say, and she said it: “This is why you were asking all those questions before. You came to Alfie, and, God, everything… you’ve just been using me from the beginning.”
“Some of what you’re saying is true. Not all of it. Now tell me about your father.”
“No.”
I felt a flush of anger in my neck. Easy, John. “The reporter was asking, too, wasn’t he? Bulfinch? What did you tell him?”
She looked at me, trying to gauge just how much I knew. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
I looked at the door and thought, Walk away. Just walk away.
But instead: “Listen to me, Midori. All I have to do is walk out that door. You’re the one who won’t be able to sleep in her own apartment, who’s afraid to go to the police, who can’t go back to her life. So you figure out a way to work with me on this, or you can damn well figure it all out on your own.”
Half a minute passed. Then she said, “Bulfinch told me my father was supposed to deliver something to him on the morning he died, but that Bulfinch never got it. He wanted to know if I had it, or if I knew where it was.”
“What was it?”
“A computer disk. That’s all he would tell me. He told me if he said more it would put me in danger.”
“He had already compromised you just by talking to you. He was being followed outside of Alfie.” I pressed my fingers to my eyes. “Do you know anything about this disk?”
“No.”
I looked at her, trying to judge. “I don’t think I have to tell you, the people who want it aren’t particularly restrained about their methods.”
“I understand that.”
“Okay, let’s put together what we have. Everyone thinks your father told you something, or gave you something. Did he? Did he tell you anything,
or give you some documents, maybe, anything he said was important?”
“No. Nothing I remember.”
“Try. A safe-deposit key? A locker key? Did he tell you he had hidden something, or that he had important papers somewhere? Anything like that?”
“No,” she said, after a moment. “Nothing.”
She might be holding back, I knew. She certainly had reason not to trust me.
“But you know something,” I said. “Otherwise, you’d go to the police.”
She folded her arms across her chest and looked at me.
“For Christ’s sake, Midori, tell me. Let me help you.”
“It’s not what you’re hoping for,” she said.
“I’m not hoping for anything. Just whatever pieces you can give me.”
There was a long pause. Then she said, “I told you my father and I were… estranged for a long time. It started when I was a teenager, when I started to understand Japan’s political system, and my father’s place in it.”
She got up and began to pace around the room, not looking at me. “He was part of the Liberal Democratic Party machine, working his way up the ladder in the old Kensetsusho, the Ministry of Construction. When the Kensetsusho became the Kokudokotsusho, he was made Vice Minister of Land and Infrastructure—of public works. Do you know what that means?”
“Some. The public-works program channels money from the politicians and construction firms to the yakuza.”
“And the yakuza provide ‘protection,’ ‘dispute resolution,’ and lobbying for the construction industry. The construction companies and yakuza are like twins separated at birth. Did you know construction outfits in Japan are called gumi?
Gumi means “gang” or “organization”—the same moniker the yakuza gangs use for themselves. The original gumi were groups of men displaced by World War II who worked for a gang boss doing whatever dirty jobs they could to survive. Eventually these gangs morphed into today’s yakuza and construction outfits.
“I know,” I said.
“Then you know that, after the war, there were battles between construction companies so big the police were afraid to intervene. A bid-rigging system was established to stop these fights. The system still exists. My father ran it.”
She laughed. “Remember in 1994 when Kansai International Airport was built in Osaka? The airport cost fourteen billion dollars, and everyone wanted a piece of it. Remember how Takumi Masaru, the Yamaguchi Gumi yakuza boss, was murdered that year? It was for not sharing enough of the profits from the airport construction. My father ordered his death to appease the other gang bosses.”
“Christ, Midori,” I said quietly. “Your father told you these things?”
“When he learned he was terminal. He needed to confess.”
I waited for her to go on.
“The yakuza with tattoos and sunglasses, the ones you see in the bad sections of Shinjuku, they’re just tools for people like my father,” she said, continuing her slow pacing. “These people are part of a system. The politicians vote for useless public works that feed the construction companies. The construction companies allow politicians to use company staff as ‘volunteers’ during election campaigns. Construction Ministry bureaucrats are given postretirement ‘advisor’ jobs at construction companies—just a car and driver and other perks, but no work. Every year during budget season, officials from the Ministry of Finance and the Construction Ministry meet with politicians loyal to the industry to decide how to divvy up the pie.”
She stopped pacing and looked at me. “Do you know Japan has four percent of the land area and half the population of America, but spends a third more on public works? Some people think in the last ten years ten trillion yen of government money has been paid to the yakuza through public works.”
Ten trillion? I thought. That’s maybe a hundred billion dollars. Bastards have been holding out on you.
“I know about some of this, sure,” I told her. “Your father was going to blow the whistle?”
“Yes. When he was diagnosed, he called me. It was the first time we had talked in over a year. He told me he had to talk to me about something important, and he came over to my apartment. We hadn’t talked in so long, I was thinking it was something about his health, about his heart. He looked older when I saw him and I knew I was right, or almost right.”
She started pacing again. “I made us tea, and we sat across from each other at the small table in my kitchen. I told him about the music I was working on, but of course I could never ask him about his work, and there was almost nothing for us to talk about. Finally I said, ‘Papa, what is it?’
“He smiled, and for some reason it reminded me of the way he used to look at me when I was a little girl. ‘I found out this week I don’t have very long to live,’ he said to me, ‘not very long at all. A month, maybe two. Longer if I choose to suffer from radiation and drugs, which I don’t wish to do. The strange thing is, when I heard this news it didn’t bother me, or even surprise me very much.’ Then his eyes filled up, which I had never seen before. He said, ‘What bothered me wasn’t losing my life, but knowing I had already lost my daughter.’”
She stopped, and with a quick, economical movement, wiped the edge of one eye, then the other. “He told me about all the things he had been involved in, all the things he had done. He told me he wanted to do something to make it right, that he would have done something much sooner but he had been a coward, knowing he would be killed if he tried. He also said he was afraid for me, that the people he was involved with wouldn’t hesitate to attack someone’s family to send a message. He was planning to do something now, something that would make things right, he told me, but if he did it I might be in danger.”
“What was he going to do?”
“I don’t know. But I told him I couldn’t accept being a hostage to a corrupt system, that if we were going to reconcile he would have to act without regard to me.”
I considered. “That was brave of you.”
She looked at me, in full control again. “Not really. Don’t forget, I’m a radical.”
“Well, we know he was talking to that reporter, Bulfinch, that he was supposed to deliver a disk. We need to figure out what was supposed to be on it.”
“How?”
“I think by contacting Bulfinch directly.”
“And telling him what?”
“I haven’t figured that part out yet.”
We were quiet for a minute, and I started to feel exhaustion setting in.
“Why don’t we get some sleep,” I said. “I’ll take the couch, all right? And we can talk more tomorrow. Things will seem clearer then.”
I knew they couldn’t get any murkier.
CHAPTER 12
I got up early the next morning and went straight to Shibuya Station. I had a few items hidden in my place in Sengoku, among them false passports, which I’d want if I had to leave the country suddenly. I told Midori to go out only when she really had to, knowing she would need to buy food and a change of clothes, and not to use plastic for any purchases. I also told her to keep her mobile phone off unless she really needed it, and to keep moving if she did.
I took the Yamanote line to Ikebukuro, a crowded, anonymous commercial and entertainment center in the northwest of the city. From there, I caught a cab to Hakusan, a residential neighborhood about a ten-minute walk from my apartment, where I got out and dialed the voicemail account that’s attached to the phone in my apartment.
The phone has a few special features. I can call in anytime from a remote location and silently activate the unit’s speakerphone, essentially turning it into a transmitter. The unit is also sound activated: if there’s a noise in the room, a human voice, for example, the unit’s speakerphone feature is silently activated and it dials a voicemail account I keep in the States, where telco competition keeps the price of such things reasonable. Before I go home, I always call the voicemail number. If someone has been in my apartment in my absence, I’ll know.
The truth is, the phone is probably unnecessary. Not only has no one ever been in my apartment unannounced; no one even knows where I really live. I pay for a six-mat flat in Ochanomizu, but I never go there. The place in Sengoku is leased under a corporate name with no connection to me. If you’re in this line of work, you’d better have an additional identity or two.
I looked up and down the street, listening to the beeps as the call snaked its way under the Pacific. When the connection went through, I punched in my code.
Every time I’ve done this, except for when I periodically test the system, I’ve listened to a mechanical woman’s voice say, “You have no calls.” I was expecting the same today.
Instead the message was, “You have one call.”
Son of a bitch. I was so startled I couldn’t remember what button to press to hear the message, but the mechanical voice prompted me. Barely breathing, I pressed the “one” key.
I heard a man’s voice, speaking Japanese. “Small place. Hard to catch him by surprise when he comes in.”
Another man’s voice, also in Japanese: “Wait here, on the side of the genkan. When he arrives, spray him.”
Pepper spray, presumably. I knew the voice, but it took me a minute to place it—I was used to hearing it in English.
Benny.
“What if he doesn’t want to talk?”
“He’ll talk.”
I was gripping the phone hard. You piece of shit, Benny, how did you track me down?
When did this message get recorded? What was that special functions button… goddamn it, I should have run through this a few more times for practice before it really mattered. I’d gotten complacent. I hit six. That speeded up the message. Shit. I tried five. The mechanical woman informed me this message was made by an outside caller at 2:00 P.M. That was California time, which meant they had entered my apartment at about seven o’clock this morning, maybe an hour ago.
