Girl in a Box

by Sujata Massey

  So many things to remember! I pushed them to the back of my mind as Michael turned into the airport parking lot and started cruising to find a spot.

  “Why don’t you drop me on the sidewalk outside the terminal? It’ll save time.” I was jumpy, because the flight departure time was an hour and a half away, and who knew if the checkin people would pull rank on me for not being on the scene two hours before my international flight? Stranger things had happened to me in airports.

  “Okay.” Michael said reluctantly. “I’ll say good-bye to you now, and good luck, but I’ll meet you at the departure gate.”

  “But you don’t have a boarding pass. They won’t let you through.” I looked at him, utterly confused.

  “My name is on a list of people allowed access to the airport, at all times.”

  “How convenient.” I stepped out of the passenger seat and around to the car’s trunk. He came out to join me. I’d started to lift the suitcase, but he took it right out of my hands.

  “Thanks for the help,” I said. “But really, I don’t get it. I’m undercover now. I can’t be seen hanging around with you. I mean, there’s a very slight chance there would be someone on the plane who could notice and might tell the wrong people in Japan—”

  “I won’t talk to you at the gate,” Michael said tightly. “I just want to see for myself that you get out in a safe and timely fashion.”

  “But why would they let you through, without a ticket?”

  “I have a special pass issued by TSA. It works in all the American airports.”

  “How nice for you. But really, there are better uses for your time,” I said, starting to wheel my suitcase away.

  I passed through security easily, and made it to the gate with an hour to spare. As I sat there, restless, I felt a slight pang of guilt. Michael had done so much for me, over the last month, and the last words I’d said to him had been snippy. I regretted them, just as I regretted not having the chance to look into his ice-blue eyes one last time and say a proper good-bye.

  Michael had urged me to use a taxi from Narita Airport, but the fact was that I’d been too rushed to remember to get some yen before my departure, and at the late hour we arrived, the currency exchange window was closed. Most Japanese taxis didn’t take Visa. I was hesitant to take Friendly Limousine, a round-the-city hotel bus that would be likely to stop at more than two dozen places before getting to Hiroo.

  My only option was the train. The Keisei Flyer was a bit of a misnomer, because it took over an hour to get from Narita to Ueno-Okamachi Station, from which point I’d have to travel forty minutes on the Hibiya line to wind up at Hiroo, where I would disembark and follow the handwritten map Michael had given me to find the apartment. He’d stayed there before; many other operatives had as well. But it had been waiting vacant for me the last two months.

  Usually, I didn’t mind getting into a train after a trans-Pacific flight—I was always so excited to be back in Japan, among Japanese people. But this flight had been eight hours longer than the route I typically took from San Francisco, and we’d had to wait on the runway for almost two hours before taking off.

  Good going, Rei, I said to myself. I’d been sick, my suitcase was heavy, and I was heading not toward the bosom of my real Japanese family, but to an unknown apartment belonging to my fake family on a street I could only hope to find.

  On the train, there were plenty of seats, given the late hour. I sank into a bench and let the silence surround me. People were busy with their cell phones, clicking them to send text messages. It was impolite to speak on your cell phone on the train, let alone to allow it to ring. Signs all over the train instructed passengers to switch their phones to mana modo, an expression that translated literally to “manner mode,” what Americans simply called “ringer off.”

  Feeling chastened by the quiet text-messagers, I retrieved my Au phone out of the Japanese carry-on bag. I pushed it into silent mode and scrolled through the menu to check for messages. There was one, from Ms. Aoki, who, owing to scheduling changes, had shifted our interview time to Thursday at five.

  Thursday at five? That was hours ago, I thought with panic. I’d missed the interview, but it was too late to cry. Too late to do anything but lug my suitcase up the gargantuan staircase at Ueno past the drunken salarymen, the gravely quiet homeless, and pretty office ladies laughing too loud to the other section of the station, where I took a train to the main Ueno Station, where I caught the subway to Hiroo. And then, up another steep flight of stairs, past a closed bakery and, after the Mitsubishi bank, the next left to a little street where a small stucco apartment house called Ambassador House stood.

  I stepped into the empty vestibule and glanced around. No doorman, just an elevator with a keypad next to it. I pressed in the code Michael had taught me, and the doors parted and I rode up to the third floor. The apartment, which looked as if it had been furnished within the last year, was nothing special. But it was clean, and the central heat was on. I made a quick sweep of a bedroom with a double mattress resting on a low teak platform; a study with a fax machine with a short stack of papers lying in the tray before it, and a kitchenette. The fridge held milk, bread, juice, jam, and peanut butter. The thought flashed through me that this might have been Tyler Farraday’s food, if he had lived here before. The milk had not been opened; I sniffed it, came away with nothing odious, and decided it was worth risking a good, long drink.

  I crawled into bed just as the telephone on the nightstand started ringing. Briefly, I entertained a fantasy of yanking it out of the wall, but reason won out and I picked up, saying a weary moshi-moshi.

  “You’re there.” A male voice speaking English, as clear and crisp as if he were in the next building. Michael had to be on the landline at the office, the one that was supposed to be “secured,” however secure anything really could be.

  “Yes, Brooks.” I was never supposed to use Michael’s name over the phone with him or anyone else, so I’d created a fitting, private code name—Brooks, as in Brooks Brothers. He’d laughed when I’d christened him, and he’d decided that I would be “Sis.” I suspected that he’d chosen this name because he regarded me as either a little sibling or a girlish coward—neither of which was particularly flattering.

  “Why didn’t you call me right away? I’ve been waiting.”

  “We came in very late. And then my trip by train took two hours.” I yawned, to emphasize my exhaustion.

  “I know you took off late. I’d read all of Le Figaro by the time your plane took off, and that’s really saying something, because French is not an easy language for me—”

  I interrupted. “You mean you were inside the airport?”

  “Yes, the next gate over. I wanted to make sure your flight took off okay. Remember, I told you what I was going to do.”

  But I’d never seen him. I’d made a thorough visual inspection, and noticed only an elderly man with glasses and a ratty black beret reading a newspaper at the next gate. Now I realized that this had to have been Michael, working in deep disguise.

  “Michael, you’re amazing,” I said. “Now, can you tell me something? Did the infamous Tyler Farraday live in this apartment? It’s got strange vibes.”

  “Briefly. He wound up moving to a place in Shibuya that he told us would help him maintain cover.”

  “The fridge still has food in it.”

  “Stocked earlier in the day by one of our people. Relax, it’s all new stuff for you.”

  Feeling relieved that I was not living in the land of the dead, I went on to tell Michael about the text message Aoki-san had sent, telling me to come for my interview a whole day earlier.

  “A slight derailment,” Michael said, after a pause. “But you’ll still go to the personnel department on Friday.”

  “How can I show up if the appointment was changed? She’s probably got somebody else slotted in for that time—or for all I know, they’ll be done with their hiring decisions.”

  “I suggest
that you play—unaware,” he said, and I suspected he’d been about to say “dumb,” but changed his word. “The personnel director already knows that your phone has some problems, so you could conceivably not have received the message. If you’re there in person, dressed to the nines and speaking politely, you’ll get the chance to talk to someone.”

  “I guess it’s my only option.”

  “There’s never just one option,” Michael said. “An operative always has a plan B, C, and D and even E. If there’s anything you take away from this mission, I want it to be this. Let it become so ingrained that you never permit yourself to be defeated.”

  “Right, Brooks,” I said, trying to sound more enthusiastic than I felt.

  9

  My journey had been long and hard enough that I broke with my usual tradition of awakening many hours too early. Instead, my eyes fluttered open at seven, when it was light beyond the blinds, and I could hear the gentle sounds of morning traffic beneath my window. I stretched, feeling unusually refreshed as I lay in the comfortable though unfamiliar bed—the resting spot of so many agents before me, including Michael. Today, as my bare toes touched the polished wood floor, I knew I had big shoes to fill. But I already had large feet: size eight and a half narrow. It was fortunate that I’d bought my new Celine pumps in the United States, because I was almost certain that size wouldn’t have been available in Japan.

  I took a long, luxurious shower and went to look at the clothes in my suitcase. I hadn’t unpacked the night before, so the Escada suit had some deep creases. But I found an electric iron in the bathroom and a mini-ironing board in a drawer, which also contained a variety of oddments that included false eyelashes, mustaches, eyeglasses with non-prescription lenses, spirit gum, pancake makeup, and toupees. The drawer gave me the feeling that most of the agents who’d come before me were men; still, I was glad for the resources. I added my own stash of makeup to the drawer. It had been a few days since I’d done the full Asian eyelid maquillage, but I had a diagram, and it wasn’t that hard to duplicate—almost as good as Dora’s work, I decided. I was going to test it this morning, just to see what happened.

  By ten, I was out the door. Even though there was food in the fridge, I was tempted by the memory of something I’d glimpsed the night before: an Italian cappuccino bar. It made sense that a well-off girl of twenty-three who wasn’t an office lady would have the time for a cappuccino or latte in the morning; and spending some time near a window, gazing outward, would give me a chance to get my bearings in my new neighborhood.

  Hiroo was a mystery to me. I had lived all over the city, from Minami-Senju in the northeast to the central Shitamachi neighborhood of Yanaka and in the southwest in Roppongi. Hiroo was close to Roppongi but was more staid: a land of fur coats and Volvo wagons, art galleries and patisserie shops—perfect for bankers and foreigners on expense accounts who wanted to send their children to the neighborhood’s English-medium private schools. Even if I could have afforded it, it wasn’t my speed.

  I stopped first at a nearby Citibank cash machine to withdraw some yen, then made my way into Giulia’s, a beautiful little shop with an interior of what looked like aged wood and small, marble-topped tables.

  The first sip of delicious coffee mixed with perfectly frothy milk jolted me into the present. Hiroo wasn’t half bad if I could have this every morning. I would save my receipts, mindful that I could spend up to $200 a day, not including my rent-free apartment. When I found and purchased a new pair of Asics running shoes at the sports emporium near the station, I was still happily under budget. I was beginning to enjoy the perks of spying, although there was a lot of hard work ahead—starting with my attempt to get the job interview.

  I laid my cell phone on the table in front of me, thinking about how it was supposed to be my excuse. This was all so pathetic—like saying that the dog had eaten my homework. But I had an idea. Michael had mentioned that he’d wanted me to change cell phones as we went along, for our security. Maybe I should get a new one sooner than later.

  I rode the subway seven minutes to Roppongi, my old stomping ground, because I remembered that the last time around, I had seen a lot of cell phone shops there. As I began to browse around Roppongi Crossing, I was overwhelmed with options: private companies like Au and DoCoMo, where you took a phone and paid the bill later; or prepaid phones that could actually be discarded after they were used up. The second idea seemed somehow wasteful, but I liked the anonymity of it. After getting a guarantee in writing that the phone was capable of making overseas calls, I bought a pale pink one for 10,000 yen—about $100. I’d noticed, while at the coffee shop, that most young women had little hang-tag things dangling from their phones, so on my way back to the subway, I bought a cell phone charm from a kiosk that I liked: a tiny replica of Tokyo Tower, which itself was a copy of the Eiffel Tower—just as I was a copy of a Japanese woman, down to the cell phone charm.

  It was one-thirty, high time for lunch; but having gotten up so late, I wasn’t hungry enough for a restaurant meal. A woman was roasting sweet potatoes in a little brazier set up on a truck on Gaien Higashi-dori, the street that was a main artery in and out of Roppongi. For 100 yen, I sank my teeth into the soft, sweet yakiimo. The vendor looked at me anxiously when a tender chunk dropped on the lapel of my blue interview suit; I accepted a paper napkin with gratitude and cleaned myself up.

  The truth was, I thought as I went belowground to the subway to catch the Hibiya line to Ginza Station, I didn’t love the suit that Mrs. Taki had insisted that I buy. We’d bought it in a hurry, finding it in the overwhelmingly characterless Tyson’s II Mall, filled with endless boutiques and salesgirls who’d ignored us. Maybe they’d thought that we couldn’t speak English or that, because I’d come in dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, I wasn’t going to be a big spender. I was accustomed to such reactions, all the time, in America.

  The suit was a mixture of silk and wool, in a color called French blue—a slightly brighter, prettier color than navy, but still dark enough to mean business. The cut was close to the body, though, and the jacket had an asymmetrical closure that was fashionable. Still, I regretted that the skirt hung a few inches below my knees, because it was a standard size 4; no petite had been available.

  Mrs. Taki had warned me in advance that my trademark fishnet stockings, even in a conservative color like nude, would appear shockingly risqué in Japan, so I wore regular sheer pantyhose, in which I felt mightily uncomfortable, with the Celine pumps that had a cute strap across the front and a two-inch heel. I was carrying a matching purse, another Japanese touch. To jazz things up a bit—after all, most girls here changed their handbags as often as their cell phones, and right now the trend for phones and handbags was pink and beige—I’d tied a red-and-pink Hermès scarf of 1980s vintage onto the strap. I’d already made sure my new cell phone was on manner mode, though I didn’t expect anyone to know the number yet and call me. The phone was going to be a key prop in my excuse.

  When I got out at Ginza Station, I studied the complicated map, looking for the best way to Mitsutan. The customary way to reach one of the department stores was to trek along an underground tunnel that in turn led to a specific exit with a short flight of steps into the store’s basement. Entering a store through a basement—even a basement packed with mouthwatering food displays—did not strike me as the proper way to begin my adventure. So I took another exit, which brought me up a short flight of stairs to the great outdoors.

  It was ironic that Ginza-dori had been named using the kanji character meaning silver or money, because the street itself was plain gray: a respectable, businesslike gray that was a reflection on the weather, the constant flow of traffic, and time. I stood on the sidewalk, surveying the great temples of retail that I’d read so much about and now was seeing through different eyes. Matsuya, Matsuzakaya, and Mitsukoshi were as big as the largest department stores in New York City. This made sense, given the prewar timing of their construction. And while most of the build
ings had redesigned their facades to look up to the minute, one hadn’t.

  Right on the corner, across from Mitsutan, was Wako, half the height and width of its competitors, but architecturally charming. Wako was one of the Japanese department stores that Supermart was contemplating buying. I couldn’t imagine it, I thought as I gazed upward at its historic clock tower, which looked like a bigger version of the diamond-circled face of a Wako watch. What would Jimmy DeLone suggest replacing it with, Timex or Swatch?

  Right now it was two-thirty, Wako time: for me, it was eleven-thirty at night. I rubbed my eyes, then regretted the action. Now I’d have to check my makeup. To be on the safe side, I went into Matsuya, not Mitsutan—up to the young women’s floor, past a delicious display of beribboned Tocca spring dresses and into the ladies’ room, where I decided to freshen not only the eye makeup but the blush and lip color. During my short sprint through the store, I’d been impressed by the exquisite appearance of the dozens of salesgirls in blue-skirted uniforms who had bowed toward me, breathing a gentle irasshaimase, or welcome.

  I was not on par with these girls; if they were so perfect at Matsuya, I could only imagine how they’d be at Mitsutan. Ms. Aoki could probably handpick Miss Japan runners-up to sell makeup or handbags or evening dresses. It was that kind of store.

  I went down to the first floor, where a giant midsection of the store—the exhibition hall—had been set up for a “World Chocolate Fair.” Forty specialty chocolatiers from Switzerland, France, Belgium, and Germany were selling their wares in special boxed sets for the Japanese Valentine’s Day. The average going rate seemed to be 3,100 yen for twelve chocolates; but there were cut-up chocolates at each counter available for sampling. I picked up a tiny sixth of a bonbon from Jean-Paul Hevin, relishing the tiny jolt of sweetness and energy.