Girl in a Box

by Sujata Massey

  “You know,” I said loudly into Michael’s ear, “we could talk about our business and nobody would hear anything.”

  “Including me,” he shouted back, hitting my ear with a light shower of sugar. “But I’m glad you’re in the mood to work. I brought some reading for you. Maybe it’ll take your mind off the discomfort.”

  Michael reached into his briefcase and drew out a thick folder, which I took reluctantly. So much for the John le Carré novel I’d hoped to spend my time reading.

  The first page said “secret,” and I felt a slight thrill to realize that I was authorized to turn the page. “Secret” didn’t carry as much weight as “top secret,” but still, for somebody as new to spying as I was, this binder had a lot of spiritual, as well as physical, significance. My government trusted me with this material. And I knew that once I turned the page, I would be venturing into a world as foreign as Japan had been for me, so many years ago.

  Michael’s face disappeared behind a copy of Foreign Affairs, which was shielding something completely different that he was reading, so I started in on the binder. Section one was a description of a complaint that Treasury had received from one Warren Kravitz, a senior partner at the Asian headquarters of Winston Brothers, an American investment banking firm. A copy of a letter from Warren Kravitz outlined his theory that there was no reason for Mitsutan to be worth more than its competitors, based on a numbing array of facts and figures, most of which were buried in fine print in fifty pages of attached material.

  “What is Warren Kravitz’s problem? Does he want to be a PI or something?” I asked Michael.

  “There’s no problem. He just made a complaint. It’s every citizen’s right to do that.” Michael said right into my ear, “From this point on, no real names spoken in public, please.”

  “The last time I complained to Treasury about anything, I was nine years old. They didn’t make my dad raise my allowance.”

  Michael cracked a small smile, but put his finger to his lips. Apparently, as loud as the background noise was on the plane, the topic was still too classified for discussion. I turned with more interest to a second set of documents: a history of retailing in Japan. I learned that although Mitsutan had formally opened for business as a department store in 1911, it actually had a much longer history. Its founders had opened a kimono shop in Tokyo in the late 1700s, during the prosperous Edo period. Mitsutan’s elegant silk robes for men, women, and children had been popular enough to bring the shop owners considerable fame and the capital needed, in the early twentieth century, for the expansion into the store that I knew. Mitsutan was not the first depaato on the Ginza; it was built on the heels of Mitsukoshi, Matsuya, Isetan, and Matsuzakaya, all famous kimono makers who were blazing new trails. Japanese women were starting to wear yofuku—Western dress—and retailers were developing ambitions eight stories high.

  Business dropped off during the war. Mitsutan and its neighbors went into sleep mode and then emerged in the postwar reconstruction, selling the luxuries for which people longed after having spent years in near-starvation. But the original department stores faced competition from a new group: upstart department stores started by companies that owned railway lines. These transportation conglomerates were tight with the new Japanese government and managed to get the zoning to build massive stores next to busy train stations throughout Tokyo, Osaka, Nagoya, and other major cities. The new stores—which included Parco, Tokyu, and Seiyu—were full of luxury goods, sometimes at cheaper prices. In my family’s opinion they lacked the centuries-old knowledge of customer sales and ritual.

  Both types of store—kimono-descended and railway-descended—flourished as Japan rebuilt itself, especially during the prosperous 1980s. But in the 1990s, the ever-stretching bubble burst. The economy tanked and Japanese consumers stopped shopping. Instead, they funneled most of their yen into savings accounts at the Japanese post office.

  There followed several pages of graphs illustrating profit-and-loss statements for Japan’s twelve major department store chains. Mitsutan followed the same highs and lows as everyone else—until 2003. Then, its numbers started tracking upward. The store’s reported inventory holdings, cash reserves in its private bank, and reported profits were huge. And unlike many other department stores, Mitsutan paid out generously to its stockholders. It seemed like a glorious situation for all.

  I closed the folder. Still, I was wondering why a complaint from an American banker had received such serious attention from the U.S. government in the first place. Michael had said it was because of suspected malfeasance on the part of the store, but I just didn’t buy that a successful exception to a retail trend mattered.

  Would Michael keep a secret from me? I glanced at him. He was bent over his own folder, which was marked “top secret.”

  Of course he knew things he wouldn’t tell me. But I hoped to God he wasn’t withholding something of vital importance, something that might lead to my making a monumental mistake that would send me to the same place Tyler Farraday had gone.

  4

  Arlington in late winter was chilly, but it was less windy than Monterey.

  This became the mantra I silently repeated to myself as I hustled the seven blocks to work early each morning, the Persian lamb collar pulled up around my ears. Everywhere there was ice, the remnants of past snowstorms. And on my arrival, it snowed again, though as Michael had said, with my apartment’s proximity to the OCI office, there was no reason to take a snow day. The federal government closed for two days, but Michael steadfastly went in, leaving me no choice but to join him.

  The fact was that I liked going to work, because I hadn’t experienced being in an office routine for so long. I arrived at eight; Michael was already there, with my double skim latte and his triple-sugar espresso, carried out from a nearby Starbucks. The first hour was spent reading—briefs that had come in, by e-mail or fax, from various intelligence agencies, as well as the U.S. embassy in Japan, and the State Department a few miles away in Foggy Bottom. We also reviewed the daily newspapers. Michael brought the New York Times, and the Asian and American versions of the Wall Street Journal. I picked up the Post, USA Today, and once a month the Washingtonian, because I always had my eye on the party page, looking for a face I would be better off forgetting. It was all a matter of strategy; if I could pretend that this was a normal office, with a normal colleague, I could almost forget that the next step in the process might result in death.

  Throughout the day, Michael met with visitors whom I’d learned not to ask about—special informants, like myself, who delved into the mysteries of Japan and other parts of the Pacific Rim for OCI. They always talked with Michael in a back room; and even if I strained my ears to hear what was going on, I couldn’t catch a word—the place was annoyingly soundproof. At some time during the day, I worked in another private back room, or I went over to the Pentagon for tutorials with various technicians who were training me in the nuts and bolts of bugging.

  Quickly, I found out that it wasn’t very hard to drill a listening device into a table. The challenge was that the drill itself was often concealed as something else, such as a fountain pen, and pulling the pen apart to put a working drill together was sometimes more of a challenge than installing the bug. And bug sweepers—devices that were designed to ascertain whether my own environment and telephone were secure from listeners—were harder to operate than even the most confusing TV remote.

  But computer hacking was the hardest task of all. Because I’d gotten my first laptop eight years after the rest of the world, I found it very difficult to install spyware, let alone cover my tracks. I had no idea what I was doing on the computer even if all the commands and codes were available to me in English—so I could imagine how impenetrable things would seem in Japanese.

  “There’s a story about Supermart in today’s Journal that I want you to read,” Michael said, interrupting me from my attempts to hack into a dummy account one of the agency trainers had set up on my com
puter. It was late morning, and I’d finished with my newspapers, so I figured I should try to accomplish by myself what I had been able to do with intense guidance the previous afternoon.

  “Supermart? But that’s an American store.”

  “American as Wal-Mart and Target, but there are rumors that its founder, Jimmy DeLone, wants to buy a Japanese department store. His acquisitions manager is said to be considering Mitsukoshi, Wako, and Mitsutan.”

  “No kidding!” I swung myself out of the chair and came over to the couch, Michael’s preferred reading spot. I settled in cozily next to him and took the paper. Jimmy DeLone, a sixty-six-year-old discount tycoon who’d transformed Supermart from a small chain in Oklahoma into 310 discount warehouses, had “gone ahunting” in my favorite city. DeLone credited high anime video sales at Supermart outlets with bringing his attention to the potentially profitable interface between Japanese and American retail.

  I shook my head after reading all this. “Department stores aren’t where kids go to buy anime. Something’s off in this commentary.”

  “Smoke and mirrors,” Michael said, taking the paper from me over to his desk, where he picked up scissors and began cutting it out. This was a serious sign, I thought—anything that Michael cut out he photocopied for each of us, and the facts were generally supposed to be committed to memory.

  “Well, let’s say the comment about anime is meaningless, and he just wants, for some reason, to buy up Japanese stores. I can understand his wanting to buy Tokyu or Seiyu—he knows about that kind of middle-class mass-market selling—but I can’t imagine how Supermart could handle a classy Ginza department store. And what could they take from Japan to sell at a profit here? They certainly couldn’t carry Mitsutan clothing in their stores—nobody would be small enough to wear it! And as for other consumer goods, anything they’d bring over to sell in the United States would be five times more expensive than if it was manufactured in China.”

  Michael shrugged. “Mitsutan certainly would add glamour to their holdings. Supermart owns a lot more than just its own stores.”

  “Yes, the article was talking about DeLone’s owning the Seaways motel chain, Ryan Beer, and…what was the last thing?”

  “Power companies in six states. He’s nicely diversified,” Michael said, dropping the newspaper scraps into the office’s paper shredder.

  “Well, if he’s smart, he’d want to buy a distressed store that could be turned around, not one with such high stock values that it would cost him a lot,” I said, turning over the situation in my mind.

  “Econ 101.” Michael started up the photocopier. One of the things I liked about Michael was that he never asked me to do his photocopying—something that, as my employer, in an office with no secretary, he probably had the right to do.

  “When we take into account the Treasury Department’s interest in Mitsutan—you know I think it’s strange,” I added when Michael shot me an annoyed look. “If we pull together the information showing that Mitsutan is worth less than they say they are—well, that would be helpful for Jimmy DeLone, when he finally pulls out his checkbook.”

  Michael wasn’t facing me, because he was placing the clipping on the photocopier’s glass plate, but I could see his shoulders stiffen under the striped oxford shirt he was wearing.

  “Rei, who do you work for?”

  “You?” Was this a trick question?

  “No, you don’t work for me.” Michael sounded exasperated. “Yes, I’m your supervisor, but you work for a greater entity: OCI, and beyond that, the CIA. I don’t believe anyone would think that you sound like a loyal employee at the moment.” Michael picked up the photocopied papers and slapped them both down on my desk.

  “Just because I asked a question?” I wrinkled my nose at Michael. “Come on, you’ve got to have some of these questions in the back of your mind, too.”

  “Agreed,” Michael said evenly. “Every good officer should ask questions. But I can tell you that our government is not in the habit of using tightly stretched funds to help a billionaire retail magnate get a better shopping deal. For some reason, we’ve been ordered to investigate Mitsutan. It’s our job to collect data for analysis, not to answer riddles.”

  “But how about a lightbulb joke, like how many spies does it take to figure out we have a trade deficit in lightbulbs?” I shot back. “Obviously, this country would be better off if Americans were making the cheapest lightbulbs in the world rather than buying them from suppliers in Asia.”

  “Econ 200,” Michael said, his tight expression finally relaxing into a smile. “What exactly did you learn in Monterey?”

  I laughed. “You’ll never know.”

  “Just like today, I’ll never know what you and Mrs. Taki will do, exactly. But I’m really looking forward to seeing the results of your appearance modification.”

  “That nonsense is happening today? Why didn’t you warn me?” I was annoyed. Mrs. Taki, the sixty-something, very bossy translator who worked with us, was the Defense Department’s self-proclaimed expert on Japanese appearance. She had taken me on a shopping trip that had lasted three days: a hunt for the perfect suit, shoes, and bag for the interview at Mitsutan. After we’d finally found the right things at Escada, she’d made me buy a second suit from Jil Sander, just in case there was a second interview. German designers in Japan! I didn’t quite understand her enthusiasm for German couture, but then again, I was a bit younger, and not native-born.

  “Remember, we talked about it before? She called when I came in this morning to make sure you were free to go over. It seems the salon finally has a four-hour block available for you.”

  “Michael, you said to me that I’m not going over with an assumed identity. If I’m going back to Japan as Rei Shimura—why would I want to change the way I look?”

  “You’re trying to be hired at a very glamorous department store. In order for you to accomplish that, you need to resemble an ideal Japanese twenty-three-year-old woman. Consider this.” Michael picked up a copy of An-an that had been lying on my desk.

  “I’d need multiple surgeries to look like that.” I looked down at the indescribably lovely girl—poreless skin, eyebrows as delicate as birds’ wings headed upward for flight, and limpid dark brown eyes that opened innocently under rose-tinted eyelids.

  “Mrs. Taki says that the salon owner used to do theatrical makeup, so she knows how to create the illusion of an epicanthic eyelid. I believe it’s possible, given that I myself have passed for Korean in the past.” Michael narrowed his eyes at me in a way that he must have thought mysterious but that made me laugh out loud.

  “Sometime I’ll show you pictures.” Michael laughed, too. “Anyway, I’d like to take an earlier lunch, so I can get out while you’re still here. Okay?”

  “Sure. I’ve got some e-mail to answer.” Another part of our work routine was that we both exercised at lunch, taking turns, because we were the only regulars in the place, full time, and the office phone needed to be answered at all times, just in case Michael’s boss called in. Typically, Michael would change into his old Naval Academy sweats in the office’s small, full bathroom and run over to Virginia Highlands Park, returning sweaty but holding a bag of Vietnamese summer rolls, or pad thai, or something else delicious from the numerous Asian restaurants that dotted the neighborhood. I was happy to chip in for an Asian take-out lunch every day, but the only thing I remained militantly against was his favorite Korean cuisine. I’d found, after two experiences, that I could not concentrate on much during the afternoon if the taste of kimchi lingered in my mouth.

  Despite what Michael had said about my being a runner, I’d decided that I preferred to spin the wheels of a stationary bicycle and lift weights at Bally rather than test my luck on the icy sidewalks of Pentagon City. Today, as I worked my triceps to the point of exhaustion, my thoughts turned to the Japanese makeover Michael wanted me to undergo. If Michael didn’t want people to know that I ran, weight lifting might be a problem as well. Japanes
e girls were slim, but very few had muscular arms.

  I thought about asking Michael whether my strength training was a risk, then shook myself. No way would it matter, when Mitsutan’s uniform was a slim, long-sleeved black jacket and matching straight-leg pants. Nothing of my body would show; I could even have carried a weapon, except for the fact nobody in OCI was allowed to carry weapons, concealed or otherwise. I was in favor of gun control, so this fact should have relieved me; but every time I thought of Tyler Farraday, I felt sick. How I wished I’d studied a martial art for years instead of dabbling at the gym. The best I could do was learn to kick-box, but that class was already filled.

  Mrs. Taki honked the horn of her black BMW outside the office at eleven-thirty, and I hurried down, slipping into my coat as I went.

  “Rei-chan, ikaga desu ka?” She asked me how I was doing in Japanese, as she always did. During our private meetings, Mrs. Taki spoke to me only in Japanese; and because she’d left Japan thirty years ago, she seemed to be missing a lot of the lingo.

  “I’m fine, Taki-san,” I answered in Japanese. “You’re very kind to try to help me out with my appearance. I worry that I won’t live up to your expectations.”

  “Don’t worry, Rei-chan. It’s actually a Korean place on Wilson Boulevard. Very pleasant, good prices. I have my hair done there.” Mrs. Taki proudly touched her Doris Day–style bubble, dyed the typical purplish-black of older Japanese women.

  “But—I’m supposed to look Japanese.”

  “This isn’t California, Rei-chan. Unfortunately, there’s no Japanese-owned beauty salon in this area. But her place is quite good. They have all the Japanese things: hair straightening, special skin creams and waxes. Her sister has a salon in Tokyo. They used to do makeup for Takarazuka Revue, the girl actresses who perform as boys. They are good at changing identity, I think.”