Graveyard of Memories

by Barry Eisler

  I parked, walked up the stone path, and began pacing among the trees and ancient markers. It was cooler in the cemetery, the leaves providing some shade and the lack of asphalt offering less material to radiate the sun’s heat. It was quiet, too, the surrounding neighborhood genteel and the traffic distant. A little ways off stood a monk, head shaven, robes black, chanting and lighting incense before one of the graves. The breeze carried the smoke to where I walked, and the pungent smell brought me back to my childhood in this city, as it always did, as I suspected it always would. I thought of my father, buried in another Tokyo cemetery not far from here, the memory of whom was becoming increasingly remote for me, detached, improbable. I would think of him, and wonder whether I was remembering the man, or instead remembering mere memories, my recollections themselves simulacra. And of my mother, a much fresher wound, interred in a faraway continent as her grief-stricken parents had pleaded and as I, reluctantly, had acceded, believing—perhaps foolishly—that our first duty is to the living and that the dead, infinitely patient, will always understand.

  One thing that was on my mind was Sayaka, wondering if I was married. It was almost funny on one level, but on another it made me feel deeply uneasy. Because there were things about me I knew I could never tell her, things she would never understand or accept, things I would never want her to know regardless. Things I had done not only in war, but in this very city, just days earlier…some of them on the very afternoon of the night we’d first made love.

  But you told her there were things you couldn’t talk about, right?

  Yes, I had, and I had told myself that was a kind of honesty. But was it really? On the surface, yes, but one level deeper it seemed like the worst kind of lie—the kind shaped like the truth for the benefit of one person, and in order to more effectively deceive another.

  I didn’t know what to do. Just run off with her? I had the ten thousand dollars from what I’d done for Miyamoto…would that be enough to get us established in America? And even if it were, what would I do then? I’d still be the same cast-aside former soldier with no education, no prospects, and no skills useful for anything I could ever explain to Sayaka or anyone else.

  I shook my head. What would she think, if I told her I was contemplating running away with her? Would she even want that? She’d probably think I was a love-struck kid with a crush.

  Or maybe she wouldn’t. I didn’t know. I felt like we’d already passed the point where it might have been possible to just slow things down or make them go backward. I hadn’t seen it coming and didn’t see it when it went by, either, but it felt like we were falling in love. Which meant Sayaka was falling in love with someone who, if she knew what he really was…I didn’t know what she’d think. I didn’t want to consider what that knowledge would do to her, after the way she had trusted me and opened up to me.

  Maybe the best thing, the only thing, was to just finish the situation with the yakuza and then find a way out. Never tell her any of it, or anyone else, either. And as months became years and years became decades, the things I had done here this week, and in the war before that, would lose more and more of their potency and feel farther and farther away, until finally they would be just distant memories, like stars in a faraway galaxy whose light took millennia to reach earth, and even then could be seen only dimly, if at all. I could do that. I could keep it all separate. I’d been lucky so far, hadn’t I?

  Luck again. Why was my good luck bothering me? I mean, if the timing hadn’t been so good outside Fukumoto’s house…

  I stopped and thought about that. The timing had been good, hadn’t it? I mean, almost miraculously good. I thought getting in would be hard, but in the end, it had been easy.

  On the one hand, of course, the whole thing hadn’t been easy at all. It had turned out there were four people in that room, two of them armed and who nearly got the drop on me. And the wife coming home just as I was leaving, that certainly didn’t feel like good luck. No, I suddenly realized, what had been rubbing me the wrong way was how perfectly timed my arrival felt. The very moment I showed up to recon the house was the very moment the mistress happened to be leaving it. The mistress, who was driving a convertible, who had an automatic garage door opener, who drove a short distance and then parked her car with the garage door opener accessible inside it.

  And what about that interior garage door? The house was obviously designed, and presumably purchased, with security in mind. Leaving an interior door unlocked like that seemed awfully sloppy under the circumstances. And the wife…when she’d gone in, I’d heard her turn the key and then grunt under her breath, then turn the key again. Now I thought I understood what had happened: she expected the door to be locked, and thought she was unlocking it. She was perplexed when she realized she was mistaken. And why would she have been perplexed, unless that door was typically locked? And if it was typically locked, why had it been left unlocked at the exact moment of my arrival?

  Yes, I’d been lucky in various ways since this whole thing had started. Ozawa in the sentō, and Mori outside his club…the recon required to get the timing of that sort of thing right could take days, even weeks. But still, most people are creatures of habit. Ozawa had to bathe more or less every evening, especially during Japan’s hot and humid summer. Mori liked to party at his club. Those felt like things that, one way or the other, were going to be mostly a matter of time, and it didn’t take all that much luck for the necessary time to be minimal. And even if those first two hadn’t gone as smoothly as they did, it was mostly just a question of waiting and assessing a little longer. It wouldn’t have been that hard. But Fukumoto…that timing had been perfect. If I hadn’t seen the mistress leaving the house right then, I had no idea when or how another opportunity would have presented itself.

  I blew out a long breath and kept pacing. I hadn’t wanted to face it; that’s why I hadn’t thought it through. But my unconscious had been trying to tell me anyway. I’d been an idiot to try to ignore that feeling in my gut. Another thing I knew not to do in the jungle, and had to relearn in the city.

  All right. Assume it was staged. How?

  Well, let’s say…someone cued the mistress that I was coming and it was time for her to pull out. Maybe someone parked on the street, communicating with a radio. I couldn’t really know—there had been a number of parked cars, and I hadn’t checked them at all closely. Another lesson, I realized: I’d approached Fukumoto’s house oblivious to how I would defend the terrain if I were the one waiting for me. I’d done it differently to some degree at the New Otani just a little while earlier, and I wondered now whether that hadn’t been my unconscious, trying to signal me that I needed to sharpen up. Regardless, I hadn’t adequately placed myself in the enemy’s shoes in Fukumoto’s neighborhood, hadn’t examined myself through the eyes of potential opposition. I’d been lucky to live to enjoy that lesson, and I would make damn sure to apply it going forward.

  All right, how wouldn’t be all that hard. But then who?

  McGraw was the obvious answer. Who else could it be? He was the one who’d given me the file. I’d shown him I was impatient, hadn’t I? I’d wanted those yakuza files first. And he’d noticed the bag I was carrying, too, first at the Chinese restaurant where we’d met, and then at other places as well. He was sharp—he’d know the bag meant I was on the run, and therefore feeling pressed, and therefore eager to resolve this as quickly as I could. He’d know I would head to Fukumoto’s house as soon as I had the file with the location.

  But…why?

  Had he wanted me to walk into Fukumoto’s house to be ambushed? But that didn’t make sense. If they’d had a spotter outside alerting the mistress, they could as easily have alerted the yakuza security inside. They could have been waiting on the far side of the garage and gunned me down the instant the door closed. They wouldn’t even have gotten my blood on Fukumoto’s nice carpeting. Instead, I was the one who had surprised them.

  It felt like someone had greased the skid
s for me. Whoever it was had wanted Fukumoto dead. But that didn’t make sense. I was the one who wanted Fukumoto dead. I’d proposed the hit to McGraw as a solution to my problem with the yakuza. It was my idea, not his. There had been the thing in Ueno with the chinpira, which had been a total coincidence, and then…

  I shook my head. It was crazy. Once I started questioning one thing, it called into question everything.

  Then maybe you’re just being paranoid. A few coincidences, that’s all it was. It happens.

  No. That felt like denial to me, like a narcotic. Of course I didn’t want to question everything—it was too much effort, too disorienting, too frightening. But dying would be worse, wouldn’t it? It wasn’t a question of how it all made me feel. I had to set that aside. What mattered was the truth.

  All right. What do you know? Not what you think you know, but what you know for sure. Start with that.

  Really just one thing: that McGraw had wanted Ozawa dead. That file had been pretty complete, and it had gotten me to the house and then to the sentō. And McGraw had proposed the whole thing as a quid pro quo for helping me out with Fukumoto. I looked at it from every angle I could imagine, and I couldn’t find a way around it: the one fact I had so far was that McGraw wanted Ozawa dead.

  But someone had wanted Fukumoto dead, too. Someone who’d made sure I was able to get inside his house. Who else could it have been but McGraw? But if he had wanted Fukumoto dead, what was it, just a crazy coincidence that I had proposed it to him?

  No. Coincidences like that don’t happen.

  I paced among the markers, frustrated, sweat trickling down my back. I could sense the shape, the contours, but I couldn’t see the details.

  Okay, how about this. McGraw knew where you’d be meeting Miyamoto to hand off the cash that morning in Ueno. He sent those chinpira to provoke you. How many times has he told you he knows about your temper? He knew you’d do what you did, that you’d have a problem with the yakuza as a result, that you’d propose killing them as a solution. He’d let you think it was your idea, but that would be just a manipulation.

  It didn’t feel quite right. Almost, but not quite. Knowing I would kill one of the chinpira…it was just too uncertain. McGraw was good, I’d seen that, but he wasn’t psychic. It had to be something else.

  All right, what if they had just robbed you? What if the plan had been to get to you before the exchange, beat you up, take the bag, and run? You’d be fifty grand in hock to the CIA. You’d be desperate, trying to get McGraw to believe you hadn’t just stolen the money yourself. At which point, he would have proposed a way for you to pay off your debt: kill these people for me.

  Jesus. What happened instead…he’d just been improvising. Things hadn’t turned out the way he’d been expecting, so he adapted, created a plan B, achieved the same result.

  But what about Pig Eyes, at the Kodokan? He was trying to kill you, no question. If he’d succeeded, how would you have carried out McGraw’s hits?

  I kept pacing, examining the pieces from different angles, weighing them, rearranging them, seeing which I could get to cohere.

  Pig Eyes…that would have been part of the original fuck-up. I wasn’t supposed to kill anyone in Ueno; it was supposed to be an easy ambush and robbery. But I did kill someone. And then Mad Dog, who doesn’t know McGraw’s full plans or whose pride is so wounded he doesn’t care, gets his crew and tracks me down on his own. McGraw doesn’t know about it…doesn’t even want it, because it would mess up his plans. Yes, that’s why he had looked surprised when I’d first told him about what happened at the Kodokan. The thing about the yakuza putting a contract out on me had been bullshit, intended to manipulate me, and then I responded, “Yeah, I know, they just tried to kill me.” It had thrown him, albeit only for a moment. And then he was back on his game. Christ, he was good.

  All right, but what about the Fukumoto file? It wasn’t very complete. If McGraw had really wanted Fukumoto dead, why didn’t he give me an actionable file, like the one he gave me for Ozawa?

  Because from McGraw’s perspective, Fukumoto was supposed to be random. Not something he’d been preparing for. If he’d handed you a detailed, actionable file, you might have been suspicious. All he needed was to get you to the house, and the girl would get you inside. You followed those cues like a pigeon pecking a lever.

  Why, though? What was McGraw up to? What was the game? I didn’t know. But whatever it was, it involved taking out Ozawa, the head of the LDP Executive Council; Fukumoto, the head of the Gokumatsu-gumi, Tokyo’s biggest yakuza family; and Fukumoto’s son Mad Dog, presumably the father’s heir.

  I paused. Why was I assuming McGraw wanted Mad Dog dead? If Mad Dog were in fact the heir, might it not be the case that killing the father was intended to pave the way for the son?

  But then why manipulate me into proposing to kill Mad Dog, too?

  Remember, he was improvising. Maybe that wasn’t part of the original plan. McGraw was controlling the order of the files he gave you, remember? First Ozawa. Then Fukumoto Senior. Then Fukumoto Junior. He was saving Junior for last because unlike the first two, he doesn’t want Mad Dog killed at all. Remember, at Inokashira he tried to talk you out of going after the son.

  I still didn’t quite see it. Because, in the end, McGraw did get me the file. I’d just retrieved and memorized it the day before. Was it filled with bullshit? A wild goose chase, intended just to placate and distract me?

  Or maybe it’s intended to fix you in time and place. Then they can easily clip the guy who did Ozawa and Fukumoto. No loose ends.

  But the problem with Mad Dog’s file was that it wasn’t specific enough. The same generality, the same surfeit of nexuses that would prevent me from fixing Mad Dog would prevent anyone from properly fixing me. Plus, if the idea was to get me to go after Mad Dog so I would fix myself in time and place for an ambush, why had McGraw tried to talk me out of going after Mad Dog entirely?

  I chewed that one over. I decided it was just as McGraw said: he’d been looking at me as nothing more than a bagman, a useful idiot, someone expendable. That is: manipulate me into taking out Ozawa and Fukumoto Senior. If there’s a problem, I take a fall; if it goes smoothly, McGraw takes me out. In the first instance, he denies the connection; in the second, he severs it. And then he had second thoughts. Why? Because I’d done better than he’d been expecting. Much better. He’d realized maybe I could be more useful to him and his program, whatever it was, alive than dead. And when I’d resisted, he’d decided, Okay, so be it, we’ll stick with plan A.

  Which was?

  Manipulate you into clipping Ozawa and Fukumoto Senior. After which, the one who gets clipped is you.

  But if that was the case, why not do me himself? We’d met just the day before, at Inokashira. He knew I was coming. For that matter, he knew I was going to be at the New Otani just an hour ago. Neither would have been that hard.

  Maybe he was going to at Inokashira, and then he’d changed his mind because he thought you’d be more useful alive, like you said. Or, more likely, he just doesn’t want to do it himself. That’s not his style. He manipulates other people into getting their hands dirty on his behalf. He doesn’t take those kinds of risks himself.

  Not unless he absolutely has to, anyway.

  One thing was clear. I had to up my game. I’d been looking at the world as though down deep it was no more than what its surface indicated. But there were levels I hadn’t sensed, connections I hadn’t considered. There was a world beneath the world—the real world. And I needed to start living in it, or I was going to die there.

  All right. What’s your next move?

  My next move was that every time McGraw wanted to meet me, or otherwise did something that could fix me in time and place, I had to assume it was an ambush, and adopt appropriate countermeasures. I’d been hellishly lucky he hadn’t dropped me already. What was that Churchill saying? “Nothing in life is so exhilarating as to be shot at without result.” That’s what
this felt like. Now the trick was to stop making myself an easy target.

  I asked myself if I wasn’t being paranoid. In the last several days, I’d killed six people. What I was feeling now…could it be just the product of a stunted conscience, disturbed in its slumber?

  All right, look at it this way: any downside to approaching McGraw as if your concerns are legitimate?

  I couldn’t think of any.

  And any downside to approaching McGraw as though he’s been telling you nothing but the truth?

  Hmm. Just an ambush and my own violent death, I supposed.

  Good. Not such a hard decision, then.

  If I was right, McGraw was going to make some kind of move soon. I’d done what he wanted. From here on out, all I would represent to him was a liability. How had he put it at Taihō, the night I’d first proposed—or he’d manipulated me into proposing—that I kill Fukumoto Senior and his Mad Dog son? This is a business relationship. You provide some benefit, and you represent a cost. Well, the benefit was done; now would be the time for cost-cutting. I’d have to be careful as hell, but I realized that for the moment I had an advantage: he thought I was dumb. And maybe I had been, but I was getting smarter now. I’d seen something and he didn’t know I’d seen it.

  You know, the thing about ambushes is, they can work both ways.

  That was true. McGraw could propose a meeting, think he was laying a trap…and I could walk up behind him and blow his face off through the back of his head. I didn’t need a rock for this one. I had that yakuza’s Hi Power.

  The problem was, I wasn’t sure. Was I sure enough to completely revise my view of what was going on, and take appropriate security measures? Hell yes. But was I sure enough to drop my CIA case officer without even knowing what he’d been up to or what he’d mixed me up in?

  No. I wasn’t. That one sounded like out of the frying pan, into the fire. If the frying pan got unbearable, I’d jump wherever I had to. But I wasn’t there yet. I needed to keep cool. Be smart. And remain patient. McGraw was going to make a move. I could feel it. I just didn’t know what it was going to be. But I would soon enough.