The Gentleman from Japan

by James Church

  On the other hand, I thought I could see the thinnest of silver linings here. At least if Mike was behind the murders, it meant I didn’t have to worry about terrorists. Mike was old-fashioned; he didn’t like terrorists. They were too unpredictable, something Mike detested. He was convinced that if terrorists were in the vicinity, it rattled his clients. I know this because for a while we had a useful tap on his phone. We heard him get furious once when he learned that a group of jihadists were hanging around the Muslim Hotel in Yanji, casing buildings for what we never found out.

  “Tell them to get the fuck out of here,” he had shouted into the phone, “and tell them if they aren’t gone in twenty-four hours, they’ll leave in boxes. This is my territory. I don’t want their long noses anywhere near here.”

  The group had slipped back to Beijing the next day and hadn’t returned. I’d sent a message to Headquarters, but I never learned if Beijing rounded them up or if they had moved on to cause problems somewhere else.

  For a while after that, Mike and I had an unspoken truce. He kept things orderly on his end and avoided anything that might have to come to Beijing’s attention. I kept track of him but didn’t make a move. Then, as happens, there was a leadership shuffle in Beijing, at which point things that Headquarters had previously considered only local background noise became a matter of high policy. The ministry launched a hard strike in Yanji, with Mike in the bull’s-eye. He left town barely a step ahead of the excitement, and he stayed away, doing what I didn’t know. The message traffic on his activities was reduced to one short item every few months. Old sources that used to know his whereabouts clammed up. So when Uncle O said Mike was back in town, I knew there would be trouble. Mike’s was still an open file in Beijing, and the Ministry would want to close it. That meant a special squad would be sent up to my office, a lot of nasty questions about procedures asked, well-established routines disrupted, and the one or two effective operations we’d established trashed—all because the slick boys from Beijing thought they knew better than anyone on the spot.

  The biggest problem was I couldn’t tell Beijing where I got my information about Mike’s return. My uncle still had his sources, of course, and they were all good. But they were his sources, not mine. Soon after he had first arrived, we reached a strict understanding—we would never share sources. Information sometimes, sources never. Some of his sources came from the private detective agency he ran on the side, but those were dwindling because he didn’t like taking on clients. Clients meant getting paid, and he thought working for money was corrupting. We did manage to take in some money from the bookcases he built. Locals had taken a liking to his skills in woodworking, which I had to admit were considerable when he put his mind to it. We agreed that half of what he earned he could keep for expensive lumber, which he said was absolutely necessary because he detested working with pine. The other half of the bookcase profits went toward food. The problem was, though he turned out a steady supply of bookcases, most of them were what he called “proof of concept.” That meant they were odd shapes, basically unusable and largely unsalable. So a lender might say (and did whenever I looked for a loan) we had enough money, but not much of a cushion. We might have had more, but as everyone seemed to know, my ex-wife had taken everything when she ran away with a Japanese pastry chef several years ago.

  Every time Uncle O did take on a case for his detective agency, I helped discreetly, hoping that he might build up a regular paying clientele. In turn, he helped me from time to time with my cases, or so he thought. Help, in his view, took the form of a running criticism of my investigative techniques.

  For that reason, Uncle O’s unsolicited offer of information about Mike, even the little he had shared, was a surprise. It wasn’t much, but he knew it was all I needed to get started. As it happened, it was all I had. There was nothing about Mike in the message traffic recently. Anything on Mike was considered “Class A” in our sector, and reports with that stamp were always flagged for me to see right away. That meant they weren’t supposed to sit around in someone else’s in-box for more than a couple of hours. The local police hadn’t heard anything, I was sure of that. The chief knew that if he had information on Mike and failed to mention it to me at our dinner, I’d make his life more miserable than it already was. If he had heard something—anything, no matter how small—he would have shared.

  That left two places for me to check. First were taxis that had been at the train station on Tuesday. The mayor had his fingers into the taxi companies, and he would know it as soon as we started questioning drivers. He’d order them not to talk to us, and we would be seeing doors slam in our faces for weeks. We could try roughing up a few of the drivers to get the rest to talk, but the next time we needed their cooperation on something else—and there was always some reason to need assistance from the taxi drivers—they would be sullen and drag their feet. I could give the job of dealing with the taxis to my new deputy; let him run up against the mayor and see what it was like.

  The other angle was more risky but might pay off faster—ask the few sources that I personally ran what they knew. It was still before noon, and most sources didn’t like to meet during the day. They were all annoying characters, always in need of psychological stroking. I’d never met one who didn’t have personality quirks that grated on me.

  As a matter of preference, I met rarely with my agents, and in a few cases had never actually met them at all. Messages and information were passed through an elaborate ritual of feints and signals. Some of what I learned was useful; most of it was not. In this case, I knew I needed to check with one source in particular, and it had to be a face-to-face meeting. Sources can embellish, they can distort, they can even outright lie on paper. They can do all of those things in person, too, but I could cut the chances in half if I could watch their eyes. If Mike had been in town, even for a couple of days, I wanted to confirm that right away before Beijing got wind of it. Even if Mike hadn’t ruined dinner for seven people—maybe eight—this particular source had probably heard something that would give me some clue as to why this plague rat was being visited on me again.

  There hadn’t been much from this source in the ten months or so I’d been running him, but whatever information he had passed had been good, and most important, all of it had been timely. Even the rumors the source passed on had turned out to be solid. In another situation, I might be suspicious of so much good information, but paranoia could wait. I called the duty officer and told him I wouldn’t be in until around noon.

  3

  The morning was cool and the sky surprisingly clear, a nice day for a stroll. About a kilometer from my house was a small park. I headed straight there. Three people trailed behind. The second and third were my security detail—a young woman who was very good at what she did, and an older man who managed to be invisible. The first person in line was nobody I knew. By the time I got to the park, no one was following me, which meant the young woman and her companion had done their job.

  The park was arranged in an imperfect square, with a couple of ragged benches on each side. There were nondescript, rarely trimmed bushes growing randomly behind all but one of the benches, which sat by itself under an old, bent tree that had always struck me as lonely and out of place. I wouldn’t have known what the tree was, except my uncle had pointed it out one afternoon when we were on a rare outing together.

  “You see that tree?” he’d said, walking up to the tree and patting the trunk.

  “I do.”

  “You know what it is?”

  “Other than wood, you mean?”

  “Listen to me, nephew. It’s a red pine, quite old, and, if you look closely you’ll see it has a self-assured air. Don’t let its leaning posture fool you. My grandfather would have walked over and spoken to it quietly for a few minutes. He thought red pines were noble in their own way, very different from normal pine trees, which he considered trash.” Uncle O had given me a sideways glance. “If I were you, I wouldn’t l
et anyone cut this tree down.”

  “I don’t control tree cutting in this town, uncle. That’s up to the mayor, or anyone who offers him the right combination of money and flesh.”

  He sighed. “If it’s cut down, get me the lumber, then. We can use it; we’re running low, and it will save me from dealing with those crooks at the lumberyard in Harbin. Do you know how much they would charge for red pine?”

  “Obviously too much.”

  This introduction to a tree had not meant anything to me at the time, but a couple of months later, Beijing had sent a highly unusual split transmission message assigning a special source to the office, with explicit instructions that I was to handle things personally and with utmost discretion, nothing documented, nothing traceable, payments, if there were to be any, strictly unrecorded. The code name for the source was “Red Pine.”

  Officially, Red Pine and I were never to meet, except in a crashing emergency. Instead, according to the Headquarters instructions, we were to pass messages twice a month, every other month, on random days, at random times. There were three places in the city where we did that. One of them was the park. I thought this was bad, and potentially fatal, operational practice. If someone was watching, it wouldn’t take them long to figure out where I went twice a month. Even my security detail couldn’t succeed every time in walking a tail off in the wrong direction. And when whoever was interested put those places under constant watch, they’d find Red Pine. I figured it would take six months at the most before the source was compromised, or worse. We were in month five.

  Whether Beijing would consider news that Mike had showed up again enough of an emergency for a direct meeting with Red Pine, I didn’t care. It was enough for me. I sent the agreed-upon emergency signal for a meeting within the hour, waited around the house for thirty minutes, and then set off to see if anyone would show up.

  The park was deserted when I turned the corner onto the path that led to the first bench. A minute later, I noticed someone standing some distance back, nearly hidden behind one of the bushes. Whoever it was wore a long coat and a cap. It could be anyone, maybe a pensioner looking for firewood. I sat down on the nearest bench and waited. I’d never seen a pensioner in this park before. The figure behind the bush didn’t move. I glanced around to see if there was anyone else nearby, maybe someone in position on the walkway on the other side of the bushes. No one. I looked away to check the street entrance to the park, and when I turned back, beside me sat a young woman. She took off the cap and shook her black hair so it fell onto her shoulders.

  “Neat trick,” I said. “How did you do that, move so softly?” I had to get rid of her in a hurry or she’d ruin the rendezvous.

  The woman looked at me coolly. “I can move in many ways, Major, so many that you can’t even imagine.”

  I nearly fell off the bench. My heart stopped. My breathing ceased. My vision clouded. “Tuya.” It was the only word that came to mind.

  “Surprised to see me?”

  Tuya was Mongolian. I’d met her in Ulan Bator two years back. She was the assistant to the chief of the Mongolian special police, a nice enough man who after a briskly efficient interrogation had ordered me out of the country on twenty-four hours’ notice, but not before I’d fallen in love with Tuya. I hadn’t seen her, not in the flesh anyway, since then. She was gorgeous, long-limbed, with eyes that held the flames of a thousand fires of a thousand years of nights on endless plains, and a way of serving tea that could make a man faint with delight or horror, depending on your point of view. I still felt queasy when I remembered how she could put her legs behind her neck.

  “How?” I was slowly regaining my power of speech but was temporarily stuck on interrogatives. “What? When?”

  “It’s been a couple of years, Major. I wasn’t sure you’d remember me. You almost didn’t.”

  “Remember?” I took a deep breath. “Are you kidding? You startled me, that’s all. Have I thought of anything else? I waited. I tried calling.”

  “So that was you?”

  “I was in Urumchi for a few days on business. The place is swarming with Mongolians; I couldn’t stand it anymore. I called your office from my hotel. A man answered. Maybe it was what’s-his-name. The big guy.”

  “Bazar.”

  “Yeah, Bazar. The connection wasn’t good. We got cut off.”

  “So you missed me?” It was posed as an interrogation question, no emotion in it.

  Just then, I saw a car pull over to the curb in the street at the edge of the park. No one got out.

  “What are you doing here?” I filed away the description of the car—black, a two-door, European, heavy-duty bumpers. “It’s not a good place for you to be right now.”

  “I thought you called for this meeting.”

  This was like having a building fall on me. “You?”

  She nodded.

  “Hell,” I said. “That’s impossible.”

  “Look.” She moved away from me to her edge of the bench. “If you don’t want to tell me why you called an emergency meeting, I’m leaving. We’re never supposed to meet face-to-face. Those were my orders. I assume they were yours as well.”

  “Wait, don’t leave. When can I see you again?”

  “Bad operational practice, isn’t it? Two meetings so close together.” She paused a moment. “Who cares? How about dinner? I heard there’s a nice noodle restaurant in town.”

  “No restaurants.”

  “Where, then? Your place?”

  “My place?” I had to laugh.

  “Something funny?”

  “No, just the image of Uncle O walking in on us. Give me an hour or so. I’ll figure something out. Can I call you? I have a sterile phone.”

  “Right, your uncle, how could I forget? He’s well?” She pulled a card from her pocket. “Call this number. Ask if the shipment of blue purses has come in yet. They’ll connect you.” It was straight business, not a hint of anything else.

  Then she squeezed my hand and disappeared. A moment later, the black car pulled away from the curb. It needed a tune-up.

  4

  I sat on the bench for a couple of minutes. I wanted to see if the black car nosed back down the street. I also wanted to let my heart rate go back down before I headed home. My uncle has special radars. He would sense in a microsecond that something out of the ordinary happened at the park. By the time I opened the front door, I thought for sure my face wasn’t flushed. My pulse felt normal. As soon as he saw me, Uncle O pretended not to notice, but I could tell he knew something was up.

  “Enjoyed the park?” he asked casually.

  “Always enjoy parks, you know that. You’ve put me onto trees, uncle. I owe you a debt of gratitude.”

  “You won’t be here for dinner, I suppose.”

  “A lot of paperwork at the office.” I patted my pockets, looking for a notebook.

  “Enjoy your evening,” he said. “I found a new chisel in the alley. Hardly used. I think I’ll spend the evening putting it through its paces. You can’t be too sure of something like this. A headstrong chisel is a menace. There must be a reason someone threw it away.”

  5

  “Let’s get to the point, shall we? We’re not supposed to meet like this.” Tuya was edgy, which was good. One of us had to be aware of what the training manuals call the “operational environment,” and it wasn’t going to be me. We were back in the same park. I figured no one would expect us to meet there again the same day; just in case, I’d made sure no one had followed me, not even my security team. It was a crazy assumption, but then, the whole thing was crazy. Anyway, it was eleven o’clock at night, and the mayor had siphoned off the money that was supposed to pay for lighting in the parks, so from a distance no one could be sure who we were, unless they had a pair of night-vision goggles. No one in Yanji, not even the mayor, not even someone in that black car, was liable to possess night-vision goggles. My office couldn’t even get them, which didn’t matter because I didn’t need
them at the moment. I was close enough to see Tuya’s face in the moonlight. “We’re here, in plain sight,” she said. “Evidente.” Her eyes gave nothing away. She pulled her legs onto the bench and twisted herself into a puzzle as if she were a piece of string.

  “You did that the first time I saw you,” I said. “You served me tea like that, tea and those little cheese stones.”

  She smiled up at me, though from that angle I couldn’t tell what sort of smile it was. “I told you I could move in many ways. I still can. Do you think the body is supposed to be just the way you see it all the time, legs down, head up, arms hanging at your side? You define my face in relation to my shoulders, don’t you, but why? Why not in relation to my thighs?”

  I exhaled slowly. Well, why not? “Fascinating,” I said. “Let’s leave that for another time and twist ourselves in a new direction. What are you doing here? I mean, what are you doing working for us?”

  She pulled herself back up to the shoulders-and-face variety and smiled again, this time with more warmth. “The truth is, I was moping after you left. Batbayaar—you remember, my boss—said it was affecting my efficiency. I asked around. When an undercover assignment opened up, I took it. There are more Mongolians traveling here and there. There’s some worry about them.” She shrugged. “And I needed a change.”

  “But you’re working for us, me.”

  She shrugged again. “Yes and no.”

  “Who vetted you? Did they know you had met me before?”

  She put her fingers to my lips. “I don’t know what you mean.” Suddenly her body stiffened, but her expression didn’t change. “Off to the left, someone’s watching. Kiss me. Tosto.”

  “I don’t see anything.” I didn’t take my eyes off her face.

  When she was young, Tuya had answered an ad in a Mongolian newspaper for a waitress in Rome. Once she got there, she found that the owner of the restaurant had other ideas. Some bigwigs he worked with thought she was just what they needed at their parties. She didn’t agree, and left to join a small circus, where she learned acrobatics and fought off a greasy Romanian trapeze artist for a year before going home. Her Italian was rudimentary, but I knew none, so I had to guess from context. The meaning of tosto was not immediately apparent. I’d look it up when I had a spare moment.