Country of Origin

by Don Lee

  At the shrine, they tossed money into the offertory box, bowed twice, clapped two times to summon the gods, and bowed once more in prayer. They moved to one of the stalls on the side and bought fortunes from a shrine maiden in a white kimono. From a canister, they shook out a bamboo stick with a number, gave it to the maiden, and were handed a paper fortune that corresponded to the number.

  “You first,” Keiko said.

  Kenzo unrolled the paper and read that his general fate would include shokichi—small good fortune—which was a neutral prognostication, nothing ventured or gained.

  “Okay, your turn,” he said to Keiko, who held her breath as she unrolled her fortune. She looked at the paper and began weeping. “Daikyo,” she cried. Great bad fortune.

  Kenzo put his arm around her shoulders. “It’s okay,” he said, laughing. “It’s meaningless.”

  “Don’t laugh,” she said. “It’s terrible.”

  “I think the woman gave you the wrong fortune,” he told Keiko. “I think she made a mistake and gave you the wrong number. She gave you someone else’s fortune.”

  “You think so?” she sniffed.

  “Come on,” he said. Together, they folded the fortune into a long strip and tied it to a branch. The trees around the shrine were brightly leaved with a hundred other bad prophesies, fluttering in the hopes of averting disaster.

  IT WAS a fluke of luck, a small dispensation of good fortune, that led Kenzo back to the case. On January 20, he received a call from an Inspector at Meguro Police Station, asking for his assistance. They had a burglary suspect in custody who claimed Kenzo could attest to his character.

  “Please tell them this is just a big misunderstanding,” Teiji Takagi pleaded when Kenzo walked into the interrogation room at the station. A woman in Takagi’s gaijin house in Meguro had been ripped off, divested of all her cash and jewelry, and she had accused Takagi of being the culprit. It turned out it wasn’t the first such accusation from a gaijin tenant. Takagi had a criminal record, something Kenzo had neglected to check. He had been convicted of fencing stolen property. A search of the locked closets and storage rooms in his buildings had revealed a cache of clothes and linens and personal appliances—electric shavers, tape players, cameras, blow dryers.

  “I didn’t steal anything,” Takagi said. “You saw me return all of Lisa Countryman’s belongings. These gaijin ditch out on me all the time, you wouldn’t believe the stuff they leave behind, but I keep it all for them for at least a year, I put everything nice and neat in boxes and label them and keep them in storage in case they come back. After a year, well, what’s so wrong with making a little extra for my trouble? Can you answer me that?”

  “You did it,” Kenzo said.

  “Did what?”

  “You killed her.”

  “Who?”

  “Lisa Countryman.”

  “What?”

  “You killed her for her money.”

  “No, now wait a minute.”

  “She must have had wads of cash in her apartment,” Kenzo said. “And gifts. Like her Mikimoto necklace. I’m sure that caught your eye. You killed her.” In fact, Kenzo thought no such thing, but he had a feeling, an intuition, that Takagi knew more than he was saying, and Kenzo was playing dumb, the worst kind of dumb, crazy-dumb with prosecutorial powers, to extract the truth from him.

  “This is insane,” Takagi said. “I would never kill anyone.”

  “What did you do with her body?” Kenzo said, standing and yelling into his ear.

  “You’ve got this all wrong.”

  “Did you bury her in the countryside somewhere?”

  “No no no.”

  “Where, then?”

  “I didn’t do it!”

  “You think the judges will believe a thief like you? You know how the system works. If I think you’re guilty, you will be convicted. I don’t need evidence.”

  “Please. I’m—”

  “No one called you on June 18th, did they?”

  “She did. I swear she did.”

  “You didn’t find the apartment ransacked.”

  “I did!”

  “You’re lying,” Kenzo said.

  “No.”

  “You cleared the place out yourself.”

  “That’s not true.”

  “Don’t lie to me.”

  “I’m not!”

  “You wanted to make it look like she split.”

  “It wasn’t me!”

  “You think I’m a fool?”

  “It was the goon!”

  “What?”

  “The guy I caught in her apartment.”

  Kenzo took a seat at the table and nodded. “Tell me.”

  Takagi got the call from the girl—some gaijin girl, he didn’t know who—on June 18, as he had said, but he had lied about going to Lisa’s apartment the next day. By chance, he had gone there that afternoon, before receiving the call, to tend to the running toilet that Lisa had been harassing him to fix, and he had walked in on a man packing her suitcases. He was Japanese, maybe forty, big, with a mustache. He had said he was a friend of Lisa’s, that she’d asked him to pick up her things, which didn’t seem entirely implausible, since he had her keys. He told Takagi that Lisa would call him later to explain. In the meantime, he said, he would appreciate Takagi’s discretion. The situation was delicate, he said, implying he was married and that he and Lisa were having an affair. Takagi was skeptical. The man was a goon. Cheap black suit, white gloves, probably a chauffeur. Yet half a million yen and a pick of Lisa’s things had swayed him into keeping his mouth shut.

  “You never talked to him again?” Kenzo asked.

  “No.”

  “That’s surprising,” Kenzo said. “An enterprising fellow such as yourself. I’m surprised you didn’t try to milk him dry.”

  “I’m an honest man.”

  “An honest man who’s going to be charged with accessory to kidnapping and murder.”

  “What?”

  “Obstruction of an investigation.”

  “Hey.”

  “Making false statements to a police officer.”

  “I took down his license plate, okay?” Takagi said. He slumped in his chair. “I thought it might be useful. I was just waiting for you to find a body.”

  IT CAME together quickly. The license plate belonged to a black Toyota Crown that was an official government car, assigned to Mokichi Shiokawa, the Minister of Posts and Telecommunications, a longtime Diet member of the LDP.

  Kenzo showed a file photo of the minister to Emi Fukuda, and she confirmed that he was the customer who had referred to himself as Mojo. Kenzo was surprised she hadn’t recognized Shiokawa. He had been in the news quite a bit lately during the final Nippon Telegraph and Telephone negotiations.

  Kenzo also got a copy of the license photo for the minister’s driver—a beefy man with a handlebar mustache—and Teiji Takagi told him yes, that was the goon in Lisa’s apartment. The driver’s name was Eiji Tanaguchi. He had no record, no known criminal associations. He lived in an apartment near Korakuen Stadium, a two-room hovel in which Kenzo found him Tuesday night, washing undershirts in his sink.

  Kenzo transported him in a patrol car to Azabu Police Station, and he spent the night with him, interrogating Tanaguchi until dawn, wearing him down with threats and suppositions, cajoling one minute, berating the next, repeating the same questions again and again. Eventually he got what he needed from the driver, and by the morning chorei, he was able to lay out the case for Kunichi and the other detectives and assert that, for the first time, he had a viable suspect.

  “The driver took Minister Shiokawa to the Hotel New Otani on June 17, where he had dinner with Lisa Countryman in the Rainbow Lounge, which the maître d’ verifies,” Kenzo said. “At approximately ten p.m., he dropped Shiokawa and the girl off at his mansion in Denen-Chofu and returned the car to the ministry garage. The girl, he said, seemed quite out of it, as if she had been drugged. Early the next morning, he received
a call from Shiokawa, who told him he was sick and wouldn’t be going into the office that day and not to bother coming to pick him up. Yet he summoned him later in the afternoon to the mansion. He said Shiokawa appeared extremely agitated and nervous, but not ill. The minister gave him the girl’s keys and asked him to go to her apartment and get her suitcases, passport, clothes, anything that seemed at all personal. The minister said the girl was going on a long trip out of the country, and to make absolutely sure no one saw him. The driver did what he was told, but he was confused why the girl wasn’t going with him to get her things. He didn’t see her in the mansion then, nor later when he brought in the suitcases. When Shiokawa asked if anyone had seen him, he lied about Takagi catching him and said no.

  “He denies knowing anything about the phone call later to Takagi or to the club. He swears he doesn’t know what happened to the girl. He identified Curly as Ichiro Kimoto, a bigwig at NTT, but he doesn’t think he was involved in the girl’s disappearance. He thinks the other man, David Saito, was—if indirectly. He drove him and Lisa to a kaiseki restaurant in Kagurazaka one night, and he saw them kissing. He didn’t say anything to the minister—he told me if the minister wanted to make a fool of himself over that ‘gaijin tramp,’ that was his business—but I think we can assume the minister somehow found out about them. It looks to be the classic love triangle. Lisa had been playing the minister for cash and gifts while sleeping with Saito. She kept spurning the minister’s advances, and when he finally uncovered the truth, he killed her in a fit of jealous rage.”

  “How do you know the driver wasn’t in on it?” Kunichi asked.

  “I don’t. He very well might have been. He doesn’t have an alibi. That’s why we should continue holding him while we question the minister.”

  The idea of it—questioning a top-ranking LDP official about the murder of a foreign hostess—silenced the detectives. It was a far bigger case than any of them had ever handled.

  “You’re not questioning him alone,” Kunichi said.

  “No, I didn’t expect I would,” Kenzo said, pleased and surprised. He had been certain Kunichi would impede him again, just as he had prevented Kenzo from interrogating Midori Atsuta any further, just as he had released Harper Boyd without cause. Perhaps there was too much evidence to ignore now.

  “I have to be there,” Kunichi said.

  “Yes, of course. I understand completely,” Kenzo said.

  “It could be a total fabrication. The driver could be trying to frame him.”

  “Yes, I see your point. That’s very possible.” He had learned a thing or two from Midori Atsuta about the art of negotiation.

  “And this other man, Saito. You still don’t know who he is. It could have been that the girl left the minister’s house that night and met up with Saito and told him she had slept with Shiokawa, and Saito could have been the one who became enraged.”

  “That’s true.”

  “There are so many holes in your theory,” Kunichi said. “For instance, you said Shiokawa never drove himself anymore because one eye’s going bad. How did he get rid of the body, then?”

  “I’ve been wondering that myself.”

  “He must’ve had help, an old man like that.”

  “I think you’re right. I agree with you completely.”

  Kunichi chewed on his pen. “But I suppose we must question the minister, since it appears he might have been the last person to see this girl alive.”

  “Yes, I suppose.”

  “We’ll call his secretary and make an appointment. We’ll talk to him at his office at his convenience—you and me, Ota. Does that seem reasonable?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Kunichi called Shiokawa’s office and asked his secretary if they could possibly see the minister sometime that day. He was put on hold, then was asked what they wanted to speak to the minister about. A woman he might have met named Lisa Countryman, Kunichi said. He was put on hold again, then was asked if it could wait until the end of the week. The minister was very busy, with still so many things to attend to after the long holiday. Plus, his driver had disappeared all of a sudden, the secretary said. He was sorry, he was afraid it couldn’t wait, Kunichi said. He was put on hold a third time, then was asked to come to the office at seven p.m.

  It was the longest day of Kenzo’s life. He hadn’t gotten any sleep the previous night, grilling the driver at the police station, and he was being carried by adrenaline and euphoria. Not only would he regain his seat at a center desk, he thought, he might be promoted.

  But once they entered the austere building of the Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications, once they were sitting in the minister’s waiting room, Kenzo began to doubt himself. What if he was wrong? What if he had made another one of his far-flung assumptions? He would face a worse fate than the window tribe. He would be busted down to Patrolman and transferred to a koban in the hinterlands. He would be utterly disgraced. Wedged in the upholstered chair in the waiting room, he felt his skin begin to itch and goose.

  Kunichi was fidgeting, too. “Will he be much longer?” he asked the secretary.

  She had phoned the minister upon their arrival, and it had been twenty minutes now. “He should be with you shortly,” she said.

  Kunichi flipped through a newspaper, and Kenzo read the headlines: A Nagoya coed had been kidnapped. Eight people had been killed in a snowslide in Niigata. The dollar had fallen to 198 yen.

  The minister would simply deny everything, Kenzo decided. He would admit that Lisa Countryman had come to his house, but he would claim that she had left sometime during the night unharmed and he never saw her again. With his position of authority and influence, they wouldn’t be able to press the investigation any further. It would all be deflected to the driver.

  Another half-hour went by. “Excuse me,” Kunichi said to the secretary, chuckling nervously. “He hasn’t forgotten about us, has he?”

  The secretary, who had been typing memos, glanced at him irritably. She looked at the clock on the wall, then stood and straightened her skirt. She knocked on the door to the minister’s office, walked in, and closed the door behind her. After a few seconds, she came back out.

  “I’m afraid the minister has stepped out,” she said.

  “I’m sorry?” Kunichi said.

  “I—” the secretary said, disconcerted. “I’m not sure . . .”

  Kenzo and Kunichi stared at her.

  “There’s a back door, you see,” she said.

  “He left?” Kunichi asked.

  “Apparently,” she said.

  “Oh.”

  “Would you like to make another appointment?”

  Outside the building, Kunichi said, “That was very strange.”

  “I don’t understand,” Kenzo said.

  “Very unusual.”

  “Should we try his house?”

  “No, that would be inappropriate. We’ll give him another chance in the morning.”

  Kunichi asked if he wanted a ride back to the station, but Kenzo said he would just hop on the Chiyoda Line subway.

  As he walked to Kasumigaseki Station, he stopped for a few minutes outside the windows of the MITI building and watched a news report on a bank of TVs in the lobby. The day before, the American hostages had been released after 444 days of captivity in Iran. Their plane had left Tehran minutes after the new US President, Ronald Reagan, had been sworn into office. The TV news kept replaying the video of the hostages arriving at Rhein-Main Air Base in Frankfurt. The fifty men and two women were running off the plane onto the tarmac, waving, embracing, exultant, free at last.

  Kenzo descended the stairs to the subway station, bought a ticket, and waited for the train to Meiji Jingu-mae. As he heard the rumbling clack of the approaching train, he turned and looked down the platform, and he spotted the minister just as Shiokawa jumped in front of the subway cars that were screaming into the station.

  NINETEEN

  LISA WAS in the American Citizens Services
office of the US Embassy again, this time talking to a Japanese clerk about the procedures for replacing her passport.

  She had fallen asleep on the subway home from the club, and her knapsack had been stolen. She had been astonished, always thinking Tokyo was so safe. The knapsack had contained her adoption papers, a little notebook with annotations on the sex industry, one of her hostess dresses, makeup, high heels, her subway pass, cash, keys, her camera, and her passport. She had had to call Takagi to let her into her apartment, and he had taken his sweet time getting over to Nishi-Azabu, grumbling about the late hour. He gave her another telegram from Susan and scolded her for not apprising people of her new address, then had demanded a ten-thousand-yen “key duplication fee” from Lisa.

  Replacing the passport was going to take a little more work. The embassy clerk told her she would need proof of identity and citizenship, a police report, two passport photos, Affidavit Form DSP-64, and Application Form DSP-11. She left the office with the forms and loitered in the lobby, wondering if she should ask at the main reception desk to see Vincent Kitamura, if that was indeed his real name.

  Ako Abe had followed David Saito from the Stockholm Farm Lounge to his apartment in the Homat Royal in Hiroo. Ako had spoken to the apartment security guard, who had said the nisei man’s name was Bob Sasaki, not David Saito. He worked for the Air Force, and his office was in Hardy Barracks near Nogizaka. His wife’s name was Julia Tinsley, and she taught at the International School of the Arts. The next day, Ako went to the ISA, and the dean’s secretary told her Julia Tinsley’s husband’s name was Vincent Kitamura, not Bob Sasaki, and he worked at the US Embassy, not Hardy Barracks.

  Did the deception end there? Lisa wondered. Was there yet another alias or cover? But in the embassy lobby, she decided the mystery of Vincent Kitamura could wait. She had to go see Tomiko Higa. By now Lisa had become familiar with almost everything there was to know about the woman. She had scrolled through microfilm of newspapers and magazines at the Metropolitan Central Library, bought cassettes of all her albums. She had even gone to NHK’s video vault and watched tapes of her performances on past Kohaku uta gassen broadcasts.