by Barry Eisler
All right, a good lesson. But what had it cost me to learn it? Maybe…not too much. With luck, the one I took down with the suplay would be all right. But even if I’d killed him—and I knew from the sound his skull had made when it smashed into the pavement that I might have—how could anyone connect it with me? It was a random encounter in a random place. Even if the police were interested in investigating the death of some street hood, and they probably wouldn’t be, witnesses wouldn’t be much help. The only thing they got from me was the bag, which was presumably as anonymous and widespread a model as the Agency had been able to procure. Maybe my fingerprints were on it. But would the punk who fled with it share it with the police? More likely he had already ditched it. And even if he did share it with the police, and even if they could get a print, would they be able to match the print to me? No. They wouldn’t. I was all right.
But the bag. Something about it was nagging at me. And then I realized.
There were three bags, all identical. The procedure was, I would pick up a full bag from McGraw and hand him an empty. I would then repeat the operation in reverse with Miyamoto. Someone always had an empty bag to exchange for a full one. So I had to have a bag for my next exchange with McGraw.
All right. Not such a big deal. I could just tell McGraw I had lost the empty bag.
But no, that wouldn’t work. If I’d been careless enough to lose the bag while it was empty, I might be careless enough to lose it when it was full. I didn’t want to seem like a screw-up, even though—or actually, because—right then the description felt pretty damn accurate. I liked the job and I needed the money. What else was I going to do? In those days, there was no contractor industry for spec op veterans. I’d just been run out of the military and knew there was some kind of cloud hanging over my head. By luck, I’d landed a plum job, one of the few of them, and I didn’t want to risk it.
All right, then, I could just buy a new bag. No one would know the difference.
I suddenly realized I couldn’t recall quite what the bag looked like. It was black, and made of leather…or was it vinyl? I hadn’t really taken that close a look. It was about two inches wide, it had a zipper top…a brass zipper. Or brass color, anyway.
Shit. I headed back into the station and checked in several stores. There were numerous models like the one we used for the exchange, but I didn’t see one I was sure was an exact fit.
I went out again, frustrated and angry at myself. I’d learned in the jungle to pay obsessive attention to my environment. Sounds and smells. Shapes and shadows. A broken branch, a displacement in the elephant grass. Birdsong, or its absence. It all meant something, and often what it meant was the difference between living and dying. And you had to learn to see the patterns in advance because when a silent foe is trying to kill you, you don’t ordinarily get a second chance.
I suddenly understood this was all equally true in urban environments, and that I’d just been too stupid to realize it. Cities had their own rhythms, their own patterns, their own details that counted. I had to learn to pay attention. I had to educate myself.
All right, another good lesson. But what to do about the situation at hand?
I saw only two choices. I could buy a bag and, if McGraw noticed a discrepancy, just tell him it was the bag Miyamoto gave me—and then hope he didn’t have a good way to check with Miyamoto. I could even buy three bags and swap them in one at a time until all the bags we were using were once again identical.
But if McGraw noticed anything amiss, I’d look like worse than a screw-up. I’d look dishonest, too. They might cut me loose for screwing up. But if they caught me lying to try to conceal it, I didn’t know what would happen. What I did know was, getting cut loose might be the least of it.
That left only one real choice. Get in touch with McGraw and come clean. It wasn’t such a big deal, was it? I hadn’t really done anything wrong. At least, nothing I’d have to own up to. I mean, what were they going to do, kill me?
chapter
two
I contacted McGraw, who told me to meet him that night at a bar called Kamiya in Asakusa, one of the oldest districts in the city. I was curious about the choice of venue. Asakusa was in eastern Tokyo, and, apart from the Sensō-ji Temple complex and some related tourist attractions, presented a somewhat out-of-the-way district for foreigners and anyone else who favored the more cosmopolitan airs of the city’s west.
After the evening’s training at the Kodokan, I rode east on my motorcycle, a 1972 Suzuki GT380J in Roman Red and Egret White I couldn’t afford but had gone ahead and bought anyway. I loved that bike, loved everything about it—the way it cornered, the growl of the engine, even the temperamental gear shifts. I called it Thanatos. Heavy-handed in retrospect, but it felt appropriate after what I’d done during the war.
It was near dark as I rode past Asakusa Station, the western sky holding some last lines of pink, the wind a welcome counterpoint to the heat still radiating from the pavement. I looked around, not sure exactly where the place was, and immediately saw a dense-looking concrete building, at the top of which KAMIYA BAR was emblazoned in impossible-to-miss red neon.
I parked the bike, crossed the street, and headed into a bright, spacious room with a half-dozen large communal tables and seating for maybe seventy-five people. Most of the vinyl-covered wooden chairs were taken, and the clientele seemed exclusively composed of blue-collar edokko, the salt-of-the-earth sons and daughters of old Tokyo, mostly middle-aged and older. The moist air seemed composed of equal parts oxygen, cigarette smoke, and the smell of draft beer, and the walls and low ceiling reverberated with laughter and boisterous conversation.
It took me a minute to spot McGraw. He was sitting with his back to the wall at a smaller table in a kind of alcove to my left, the one location in the otherwise open room that offered a modicum of privacy. He was the only non-Japanese in the place—a tall, meaty Scots-Irish, mid-forties, auburn hair going to gray. Not exactly inconspicuous in Tokyo, especially back then, when there were fewer foreigners, and I assumed he chose the out-of-the-way local place to lower the chances of anyone who mattered observing us together. He was already looking at me when I saw him, and waved me over.
I took the chair across from him. Even then, I wasn’t comfortable sitting with my back to anything but a wall, but he hadn’t left me a choice.
“Been here long?” I asked.
He shrugged. “Don’t like to keep people waiting.”
McGraw struck me as someone who would keep the pope waiting without particularly giving a shit, and I wondered about his response. I noticed wet ring marks on the wooden tabletop—too many and too thick to have been made by the nearly empty single glass set before him now. Had he been here long enough to drink several beers? I sensed he had. And was immediately pleased that I had noticed the revealing detail. It was exactly the kind of thing I knew I needed to improve at—and maybe I was already doing so. But why arrive so early? Getting the tactical seat, I decided. And ambush prevention generally. If someone is setting up for you, you preempt him. The same principle for the city as for the jungle.
Unless, of course, you’re the one doing the setup. That would require an early arrival, too. But I was confident McGraw’s tactics were primarily defensive, not offensive. I hadn’t yet developed the paranoia, or call it wisdom, of experience.
“Beer?” he said.
“Sure.”
He signaled the waitress for two, then looked at me. “What happened to your face? Looks worse than usual.”
I’d learned to ignore McGraw’s gibes—or at least to try to—by reminding myself it didn’t matter if he liked me as long I got paid. The substantive part of his question was about my left eye, which was partially closed from one of the punches thrown in Ueno, the area around it purplish and swollen. Not quite a classic black eye, but in the neighborhood. I could have passed it off as a judo injury, but there was no point in lying—I was here to tell him the truth. Mostly.
“I
got jumped in Ueno today,” I said. “After the exchange. That’s why I called.”
This was the first time I had contacted him to set up a meeting. Ordinarily, it was the other way around. We used payphones and a preset code to keep our connection secure.
He studied my face, frowning. “What do you mean, ‘jumped’?”
I told him what had happened. He listened carefully, asking for a detail here, a clarification there. The waitress brought our beers, but I didn’t touch mine, wanting to get the story out first. From his patient demeanor and probing questions, I sensed McGraw would be a good interrogator, and I was glad I wasn’t trying to lie. Though I was downplaying the way I’d gotten in the chinpira’s face.
When I was done, he looked away for a moment, drumming his fingers on the table as though contemplating something. “You’re sure this was a coincidence?” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“When I hand it over to you, that bag has a lot of cash in it. Don’t tell me you’ve never peeked.”
Better to neither confirm nor deny. I said, “It happened after the exchange.”
He looked at me for a long moment as though wondering how I could be so dumb. “Maybe these three geniuses didn’t know you’d made an exchange. The bags are identical, remember?”
I hadn’t thought of that. I said nothing.
He took a swallow of beer. “You’re being as discreet for the exchanges with Miyamoto as I am for the exchanges with you, right? Turn a corner, stand next to him on a train, nice and casual, bam and you’re done, right?”
I decided his characterization was close enough for government work. “Right.”
“Then maybe they were following you, they missed your discreet exchange, so they thought you still had the original bag. You said the third guy ran off with it.”
“He did, but…it felt like he was just grabbing at me to pull me off his friend.”
“Why’d he run off with it, then?”
I had trouble articulating it, but I tried. “In fights…people repeat things. Whether it’s working or not. When they grab something, they hold on. They don’t think to drop it. Even if it’s useless to them. That’s what this felt like to me.” Although, I had to admit to myself, it could also have been what McGraw was describing.
He nodded slowly, looking at me as though he could see right through me. “You do a good SDR after the exchange?”
SDR was Agency-speak for Surveillance Detection Run. A route designed to force any surveillance to either reveal itself or lose you.
“Of course,” I said automatically.
But the truth was, I hadn’t. I’d done the exchange with Miyamoto, and yet not only did I not do anything afterward to make sure I hadn’t been picked up by anyone who might have been following Miyamoto, I didn’t even leave the scene. I didn’t game out whatever vulnerabilities the exchange might have created; I took no steps to mitigate; I just assumed I was done for the day and could wander among the Ueno street stalls as clueless and carefree as a civilian. It was sloppy, it was stupid, and it was nothing I was going to admit to McGraw. I’d learned my lesson. He didn’t need to know how.
He took a long swallow of beer and belched. “Tell me again…what did you say to this guy?”
I shrugged. “It was all in Japanese.”
“Translate for me.”
“More or less, ‘You’re being annoying and you should watch where you’re going yourself.’”
He laughed. “That’s the literal translation?”
I took a sip of beer. “Pretty much.”
“Son, don’t bullshit a bullshitter. I’m not asking what you said, I want to know what it meant.”
The first time he’d called me “son,” I made the mistake of telling him to knock it off. Maybe it was just what he called everyone younger than, say, forty, but I didn’t like it. In response, naturally, he’d made a habit of it. As I had made a habit of suppressing the urge to punch him in the throat in response.
“Maybe…‘Go fuck yourself, asshole,’” I said quietly, imagining I was saying it to McGraw.
He laughed again. “You do realize that ‘Go fuck yourself, asshole’ does not constitute de-escalation, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Then why’d you do it?”
“I wasn’t thinking.”
“Is it going to happen again?”
I didn’t like being talked to like I was a stupid child, even if in fact I had behaved like one. But I needed the damn job. And getting irritated at him now, I realized, would be the most elegant demonstration possible that it would happen again, or at least that it was likely. What I needed to demonstrate was the opposite.
“No,” I said evenly. “It was stupid mistake, I shouldn’t have let it happen, it won’t happen again.”
He nodded and took a swallow of beer. “Look, I don’t want to make too big a deal of it. It sounds like no harm, no foul. Though we better hope you didn’t kill that one guy, and that there’s not a serious investigation if you did. But I can monitor all that. The more important thing is whether I can trust you. You have a little bit of a reputation, did you know that?”
I looked at him, tamping down the anger. First, talking to me like an adult chastising a child. And now, bringing up this shit. I reminded myself again that he might have been testing me—trying to get a reaction, or to determine whether I had sufficient self-control to prevent one.
I sipped my beer, deliberately casual. “I know there are people who might want you to think that, sure.”
He smiled, seemingly pleased at the response. “Yes, there are. But why?”
I started to answer, then stopped myself. I didn’t have to answer his questions; he was just making me feel like I had to. Probably deliberately. I had the sudden and uncomfortable sense that as deadly as I had proven myself in combat, in other contexts I was naïve. And part of my naïveté lay in my assumption that the people I was dealing with were no more cunning or sophisticated than I was. A mistake I never would have made in the jungle.
So instead of answering, I said, “Why don’t you tell me?”
This time, he didn’t smile. “Don’t be coy with me. Your Agency contact with SOG. William Holtzer. You had a problem with him and you broke his nose. Don’t tell me it didn’t happen—two army officers saw the whole thing and filed a report. And don’t tell me the guy was an asshole and deserved it. I’m sure he was and I’m sure he did. That’s not the point, any more than it was the point with these punks you fucked up, or maybe even killed, earlier today.”
I’d had enough of his condescension. Who did he think he was talking to? I imagined myself grabbing him by the hair, dragging him out of his chair, putting fear into him and maybe leaving some bruises to make sure the lesson took. But I willed the image away, knowing if I didn’t, it would come to the surface.
He looked at me. “So what is the point, son? Why are we having this conversation?”
It’s a test. Don’t let it be personal. Don’t let him push your buttons.
It wasn’t easy, but I managed. I said, “The point is, I have to use better judgment and better self-control.” I paused and looked at him. “Even when I’m dealing with assholes.”
He threw back his head and laughed. “Yes. That is the point, exactly.” He extended his glass. Reluctantly, I picked up mine. We toasted and drank.
He set down his empty glass heavily and wiped his mouth with the back of a hand. “Well, the good news is, from what you’ve told me, it sounds like it was just one of those things. I’ll monitor the police reaction to make sure and let you know.”
I nodded. “Thanks. And…I guess we’ll need a new bag.”
He stood and threw some yen on the table. “I’ll get you a new bag, hotshot. But don’t lose another one.”
chapter
three
The following night, I trained at the Kodokan as usual. I was in a good mood. There had been no word from McGraw that day, which I took to mean I was probab
ly safe. Whatever had happened to the guy I’d dropped, however much the police might be looking into it, none of it was being connected with me.
The daidōjō, where free practice was held, was massive—four tournament-size mats, high ceilings, stands for spectators, room for a hundred or more randori sparring matches. There was no air-conditioning, and in the summer the great hall was thick with the smell of decades of sweat and exertion. The kangeiko—ten consecutive days of hard training in the winter—was held early in the morning, when the air in the daidōjō was cold enough to fog the breath, and the tatami were as forgiving as cement. The summer equivalent was held in the afternoon, when Tokyo’s scorching days were at their hottest. Making things harder as a way of fostering gaman—perseverance, endurance, fortitude—was a Japanese fetish, and I loved it. I rotated through a variety of partners, my gi soaked with sweat, the hall around me alive with grunts and shouts and the impact of bodies hitting the tatami.
I was taking a break on the sidelines when a tough-looking black belt—about my age and height, though at least ten kilos heavier—nodded his head at me and gestured to the mat where he was standing. He had thick lips, eyes too small for his face, and patches of dark stubble on his cheeks. There was something about him I instantly disliked. Maybe it was the curt way he’d gestured, as though he was summoning me and I was bound to obey. I wondered what he wanted. It was a rare black belt who would invite a white belt to spar with him—most likely it would be boring, and what glory was there in beating a beginner anyway? I looked back for a long moment, thinking of him as Pig Eyes and doing nothing to prevent the thought from surfacing in my expression, then walked over. He offered the faintest of bows and started circling to my right.
We came to grips, and I attacked with what at the time were my favorite combinations—kouchi-gari to ouchi-gari to osoto-gari; ouchi-gari to uchi-mata; tai-otoshi to a sneaky little standing strangle and back to tai-otoshi. I couldn’t make any of it work. He was strong, and that was part of the problem, but it was more than that. I sensed he was using his greater experience to anticipate my combinations, and was subtly adjusting his stance and his grip to shut down my throws in the instant before I launched them. Occasionally, he would chuckle derisively at my futile efforts. I started to get angry, and therefore sloppy.
