The Gentleman from Japan

by James Church

  “True.” This was one of those “think fast” moments when thinking is the worst thing to do. Either your instincts are up to the task, or you’re dead before you can open your mouth. “But you’ve had visitors.”

  The barrel of the gun dropped slightly. I could see that José was thinking about this.

  “All sorts of visitors,” I pressed ahead, “and your workers, though they weren’t supposed to be paying attention, watched each one. You see, we know a lot. We do not do business in the dark, my friend. After you partitioned off the factory so that the different parts wouldn’t communicate without someone in the front office watching, it became more obvious that something was odd. And when the computer-driven machines started acting up, causing injuries, the workers got scared. Scared people are not the best allies.”

  “But no one has seen you.” The barrel went back up again.

  “If that’s what you think, go ahead and shoot.” This had to be instinct, because there is no way I would have said those words if I’d thought about it.

  Sometimes even a Russian does something right. At that moment, Yuri burst through the door. “Hello!” he shouted. “Did someone call a fucking taxi?”

  José stood up suddenly to see what this was. He turned, and as he did, the gun went off. The bullet went over my left shoulder judging from what it hit, which was one of the dearly departed ancient friends, shot through the aristocratic nose.

  “Yuri, you are the son of a burro. Your mother … to hell with your mother. Get out before the next shot goes into your stupid, wooden head.”

  “A taxi,” Yuri said. “There is a taxi waiting out in front. The driver says he was supposed to pick up a Japanese man he dropped off here hours ago.”

  “Tell him to go away.” José was examining the portrait. “This was the great-great-great-grandfather of my mother’s cousin. A bastard by all accounts. Probably a Jew.”

  “I can’t,” Yuri said sullenly.

  José whirled around and moved toward the oak table. “Yes, you can. You can because if you don’t you’re through here. You can pack up and go back to your pathetic country.”

  Yuri shook his head, like a dog shaking off water. “No, I can’t tell him. Because—”

  “Because I’m right here.” The taxi driver stepped inside. “And either I need to take this man back to the airport, or I want my fare.”

  José focused on the driver. “Do I know you? You look familiar. And how did you get into my house?”

  “Well, I didn’t climb over the fence, if that’s what you’re thinking. The guard at the first gate let me in, the guard at the second gate asked about my family, and here I am.”

  “Ah, that’s it! You used to work here. Your uncle did, too, before he got sloppy.”

  I had my eye on José’s pistol. He was holding it behind his back.

  “My uncle was a craftsman, he was never sloppy. Your factory is cursed, and that’s why people are leaving. Too many accidents, too many unexplained failures, too many—”

  José turned to me. “Don’t listen to this man.”

  “I owe him the round-trip fare.”

  Just then Yuri, who it turns out was neither drunk nor ponderous, moved like a panther. In one swift motion he leaped over the table and knocked José to the floor. There was a muffled gunshot. José gave a groan, half rose on his elbow, and then fell back. It seemed to me he was dead, something Yuri quickly confirmed on failing to find a pulse.

  The taxi driver looked at José’s body and shook his head. “Now what?”

  Yuri didn’t hesitate. “We get rid of the stiff, clean up this room, and then everyone goes about his business.” He turned to me. “What is your business, by the way?”

  “I’m here to check on a contract. You obviously aren’t a bodyguard. What’s your business?”

  “I’m here to check on a contract, too. The world moves in mysterious ways, huh? You’re Japanese?”

  The taxi driver closed his eyes and leaned against the wall. “Does anyone mind if I’m sick?”

  My mind had settled into a crouch, ready to deal with Yuri, who I had the feeling was going to be a big problem over the next several minutes. “I don’t have a lot of use for dumplings, if that’s what you’re getting at.”

  “I don’t care fuck about dumplings.” Yuri rolled the body in the rug in front of the fireplace. “Someone is going to have to dump him.” He turned to the taxi driver. “You. Where’s a good place for a body around here?”

  The taxi driver went another shade of pale. “I’m not dumping anyone. I don’t want to be mixed up in this.” He stood up straight and walked past Yuri to the door. “You can forget the one-way fare,” he said as he went out the door.

  Yuri watched him go and then turned to me. “OK, it’s just you and me, Mr. Moto. Grab your end of the rug. We’ll dump him in one of the machine shops and then figure out what’s next.”

  “I didn’t shoot him,” I said. “He’s not my problem.”

  “He’s not my problem either. He shot himself. But having to explain a corpse will be a complication I don’t need. Do you?”

  “No, not really.” I picked up one end of the rug, Yuri picked up the other, and we marched out of the house to the closest factory building, which from the looks of it was built into the side of a small hill. We passed two guards along the way. They watched as we went by, lugging the rolled-up rug with the bulge in the middle, but neither of them said anything.

  “This is the calibration shop,” Yuri announced when we reached the doorway. He set his end down and fished in his pocket, finally producing a key ring with five or six odd-shaped, variously colored keys on it. “One of these fits.”

  It better, I said to myself. The second guard we passed had turned around and was coming back our way. “Get a move on or we’ll have to deal with that guard, who has just unbuttoned his holster.”

  “Never mind him,” Yuri said. “Just look unconcerned. Let me do the talking.”

  The guard stopped about a meter away and surveyed the scene. He looked at Yuri, at me, at the rug, and then back at Yuri. “What’s the deal? You have authorization to go in there?”

  “The boss wanted us to put this mock-up in the freezer.”

  The guard looked puzzled. “There’s a freezer in there?”

  Yuri pulled a cigarette from his shirt pocket, struck a match against the doorjamb, and then blew it out. “Almost forgot,” he said. “No smoking in the facilities.”

  “Yeah,” said the guard. “No smoking. And no bringing in food from the outside either. I heard the machinery is sensitive to breadcrumbs.”

  Yuri started to toss the cigarette away, but then stopped and offered it to the guard. “Here, it’s Turkish. Very mild. Be my guest.”

  The guard hesitated for a moment. “You’re the butler, aren’t you? But who is this guy? Why doesn’t he have a pass to be out here in the shops? This is a special zone. He needs a blue badge. I don’t see one.”

  This was the sort of question that usually deteriorates into the sort of confrontation that the training manuals told us over and over to avoid. I started to say something, but Yuri interrupted. “Never mind that.” He drew himself up to his full height, which was impressive enough under the circumstances. “This gentleman is with me. I am following the orders of the boss. And you? You are who? A guard? And you are guarding what? If I tell the boss that you got in our way, he will say you are a burro, and he will kick your ass something good. So get moving.”

  The guard looked annoyed, and then confused, and then very uncomfortable. “Just checking, that’s all.” He motioned toward the door. “Use the green one on your key chain. One turn left, one turn right. Once it clicks, you turn it gently a little more to the right. The lock needs oiling or something, so don’t turn the key too hard or you’ll break it.”

  Yuri nodded, selected the green key, and gently turned it until the lock gave way. “Very good,” he said. Ignoring the guard, he nodded to me while he nudged the doo
r open with his foot. “Pick up your end, and let’s get this where it belongs. We’ll find some graphite for that lock later. There must be some around here somewhere.”

  “Can I help?” The guard reached for the carpet. “It looks heavy.”

  “Leave it be! It’s heavy and it’s very, very intricate. Lots of little pieces. If you pick it up the wrong way and shake something loose, the boss will break your neck. Just get the hell back to doing whatever you get paid to do.” Yuri waited until we heard the guard mutter a Spanish curse under his breath and walk away. “A genuine мудак.” He shook his head. “Well, let’s get this thing stowed away and then we’ll have a little chat. I need to know who you are, more exactly. In fact, very exactly.”

  We hauled the body into a dark, narrow factory shop, maybe four meters wide and twenty or twenty-five meters long. The place had a peculiar odor, very unpleasant. There were small emergency lights along one of the walls every two meters or so. They must have been on a motion sensor, because the row of them blinked on a fraction of a second after we entered and then off again. Yuri found a switch that turned on three overhead bulbs in glass fixtures, each filled with dead bugs. The bulbs were low wattage and gave just enough light to cast shadows into the darkness. The ceiling was low, half rounded. I’ve never been crazy about confined spaces, and I couldn’t imagine working in a place like this.

  “Odd place,” I said, dropping my end of the carpet.

  “By design.” Yuri dragged the carpet to the base of one of the machines. “It’s supposed to replicate an underground factory so they can test how the machines stand up to humidity, how they function sitting so close to one another, vibrations, noise, that sort of thing.”

  “You know all of this?”

  Yuri shrugged. “A good butler knows lots of things.”

  “Undoubtedly. Like where to hide the body of his employer.”

  “You have a deeply suspicious mind,” he said. “What if I told you I am not a butler?”

  “What if I told you I was the man in the moon?”

  Yuri held up his hand. “Shhh.” He took a rather large pistol out of his pocket and motioned for me to get down on the floor. There was a good chance he would shoot me in the head as I lay there, but the odds weren’t much better if I rushed him. On the other hand, if I rushed him he would certainly shoot me and tell the guards I had attacked. If I stayed on the floor, however, there was at least some chance he had something else in mind. All of this went through my brain, but it wouldn’t have made any difference if I’d decided differently because by the time I finished the thought, I was already on the concrete floor, once again cursing Luis. It was a bad way to go, I thought to myself. After all of these years of life, now I was in the dark, in a city I had no wish to visit, on a continent that was not mine. Mournful thoughts about bookcases I’d left behind filled my mind such that I didn’t feel it the first time Yuri nudged my elbow with his foot. The second time he was more emphatic.

  “Roll over behind that machine,” he hissed. “Do it now.” He disappeared in the half-light. At that moment I heard a key in the lock and then the sound of metal snapping. From outside, there was a muffled shout.

  Yuri appeared again, smiling. “That’s one for us. The guard snapped the key. They won’t be able to get someone to drill the lock until tomorrow morning.”

  “Perfect,” I said. “We sit here in the dark and cold with a corpse rolled up in the carpet and then what? Yawn and stroll out like a band of monkeys when they open the door again? We’re trapped. Who the hell are you, anyway?”

  “I didn’t think you’d be one to give up so easily, Inspector.” He watched me closely. “You see, I already know who you are. I’m just not convinced you’re here for the reason I was told to expect you. And you were getting to be trouble. Too many people around here were getting suspicious, and we wouldn’t have wanted them to put the final pieces of the puzzle together, would we? It would have blown the whole operation. Luckily the Spaniard fell on his own pistol. It saved me from having to do it.”

  No one had told me somebody was already on the inside. Of course, no one had told me very much at all. This Russian might be an ally. He might be a snake. It could be fatal to agree with him too quickly. “First of all, I don’t know what you’re talking about.” I stood up and brushed off my clothes. “I’m here on business.”

  Yuri leaned against one of the machines. “Yeah, I suppose you could put it that way. Look, we’re on the same side. I’m here to figure out how to slip something small but very destructive into one of the dumpling machines. That won’t be easy now.” He pointed at the bundle of carpet. “Or actually maybe it will be easier. With the boss disappeared, the third in command will take over.”

  “What about the second in command? The man with the gray suit?”

  “He’ll be in the hospital for a while. The guard and I had a serious talk with him when he insisted on leaving his office.”

  “What makes you think he won’t tell the police what happened?”

  “He’s not saying anything to anybody for a while, not until they teach him to talk again through a hole in his throat.” Yuri began pressing his hands against the ceiling at intervals. “Ah,” he said at last, “here it is.” He jiggled a ceiling panel loose, took it down, and unlatched a trapdoor. “Perfect,” he said, and lifted himself into the space.

  “You going to leave me here?” I crawled over to see what he was doing.

  “No, it’s where I left some things I figured I’d need.” He pulled a small bag down and unzipped it. From there he pulled out another pistol, two blocks of what I assumed was a type of explosive, a couple of fuses, a small box of ammunition, and a flashlight. “Planning.” He grinned at me.

  “Things you’ll need. What about me? Naturally there is nothing to eat,” I said.

  “We’ll eat when we get out of here. Meanwhile, hold this flashlight on the door lock and be quiet for a couple of minutes. I have to think.”

  “I don’t know who you are, and I don’t take orders from you. Hold the flashlight yourself.”

  Yuri shook his head. “No, I don’t think so. I think you’re going to hold it because we need to cooperate for at least a couple of hours if both of us are going to get out of here in one piece. They will kill us both and chop us up for seafood chowder if they can. They do not play by any rules in this place except their own.”

  “And what would those be?”

  “You already had a taste of them when you first got here.” On reflection, I was glad I hadn’t tried the soup. Yuri continued, “They are engaged in a dangerous business, high risk, high reward. They don’t want anything to spoil it.”

  I looked down at the carpet, which had unrolled slightly to reveal an arm. “Does that count as spoiling it?”

  “Only for him, and he was expendable.”

  “At your hands?”

  “No, that wasn’t part of my assignment. It doesn’t help at all that he’s dead, of course, but they won’t worry about it too much.”

  “They, who is they?”

  “I thought that was why you were here. To pull on that thread.”

  “Let’s just say that this is not a well-briefed operation.”

  “Portuguese?”

  “Never mind whose.” Actually, I didn’t know whose this operation was. Poor Luis—momentarily I sympathized with him—didn’t know either. The fact that the conversation on the bench beneath the castle walls took place in Lisbon, I was suddenly convinced, was an accident of geography. They, whoever they were, needed to do it someplace close to Spain, and it had to be where Spanish intelligence felt comfortable.

  “And never mind what I was supposed to do,” I said. What I was supposed to do was something that had been left unspoken. Unspoken was good for operational security, but not so good for operational effectiveness. Dropping into the middle of something without knowing why I was there, what I was supposed to accomplish, and most important, how I was supposed to extricate myself�
��none of this was the normal way I had been trained to do business. I was used to darkness and fog, but this was already over the limit. It exceeded normal “need to know” requirements. As far as I could tell, what I lacked in terms of detail belonged in the “vital to know” column.

  “Then what good are you?” Yuri mused over the question. “It turns out you’re just an anchor, and I don’t like to drag anchors.”

  “Listen,” I said, “you want to get out of here. You won’t be able to do it without me. They think I’m here to finalize a very big contract. They won’t touch a hair on my head until they realize that’s not true.”

  Yuri shook his head. “No good. They already know that.” He nudged the rolled-up carpet with his foot. “He already knew that.”

  “Maybe so, but who is he going to tell? And you said you’ve taken care of the man in the gray suit. Who is he?”

  “His name is Perez. He only got here a few months ago. I think the organization wanted to tighten things up here, and Perez was supposed to see that was done.”

  In other words, Perez almost certainly knew from the start I wasn’t who I said I was. Big hole in the planning by Luis’s friends. “OK,” I said, “so at this point all we have to do is get past the guards, who are, you will pardon me, a group of stupid Slavs.”

  “I wouldn’t underestimate them.”

  “Or you, apparently. Are we working together or aren’t we?”

  “I have my doubts all of a sudden. What do you think?”

  I do not like it when people answer a question with a question. It means they have something to hide, or are at least acting like an octopus and squirting ink to cover their escape. Luis would tell me octopus sautéed with olive oil and a bit of garlic is delicious. I was in no mood for recipes. I was also in no mood to think charitable thoughts about Luis.