The Gentleman from Japan

by James Church

  Tomás shrugged and put the pistol down. “Yes, the uncle. Perhaps it was a lame story, but then again, we never thought it would have to hold up to much scrutiny. It only had to do what it had to do. Actually, to his credit, Luis didn’t like it. He said you would never buy such a tale.”

  “I didn’t.”

  Tomás smiled. “But he also said it wouldn’t matter. These are only details. Like it or not, the fact is you went to Barcelona, and you got into a factory.”

  “No thanks to you that I got out again. I’m too old for those sorts of beatings. Besides which, I don’t know anything about nuclear weapons. By the way”—I reached in my pocket for the page that I’d taken from the notebook hanging on the machine—“you might like this.” I put it on the table. “Maybe it says something about building nuclear bombs.”

  “Nuclear bombs?” The man’s tone was exceedingly casual; he sat back too casually, with every muscle in his face held to a mask of unconcern. “Why would I be interested in such a thing?” He didn’t wait for me to answer. “And who told you that’s what the machine was for?”

  It was suddenly clear that I wasn’t supposed to know what I knew. They had wanted me blindfolded, spun around, and then pushed toward the target. They figured I’d do what I had to do, that I was enough of a machine to go in the direction they pointed me without asking why. The game had suddenly become more interesting. Still irritating, slightly more dangerous, but much more interesting.

  “Yuri and I became fast friends,” I said.

  “Yuri, eh? If I were you, I wouldn’t believe anything Yuri said. Did he give you a crash course on making warheads?” He smiled, but I knew he didn’t expect a smile in return. “Never mind. It’s better for you if you don’t know.” He paused. “I take it you saw the dumpling machine.” He looked quickly at the paper and then pushed it aside. “This is worthless.”

  “Maybe, maybe not. I saw something in three parts. Your boy Yuri said it was a flow-forming machine, and it was in a test facility, a tunnel built into a hillside. Something about humidity.”

  Tomás sat up. “What about humidity?”

  “How should I know?”

  Tomás picked up the pistol. It wasn’t pointed at me this time, but it wasn’t too far off either. “What else did Yuri say to you? The fool always talked too much, more than he listened. Did he mention where the dumpling machine was going?”

  I weighed my words carefully. “Not much beyond what I just told you. I had the feeling he didn’t know for sure, though he seemed to think he did, or wanted me to have that impression. Anyway, we were a little busy trying to figure out how to save our skins for a lot of discussion.”

  “You saved yours, obviously. Yuri didn’t, from what I hear.”

  “Apparently not. The big man told me Yuri was dead. Hard to believe, tough guy like that.” Either they didn’t know exactly what had happened to him, or they didn’t care. “If he’s gone, what does that leave of your operation? It looks to me to be in pieces, a lot more than three.”

  “No, it’s fine, Inspector. It’s perfect if we look at it in the right light. Sometimes it’s better to trim a tree than cut it down.” Tomás smiled at me, and this time he waited for my reaction. “It’s the sort of thing your grandfather might have said, don’t you think?”

  3

  Before I could reply, there was a knock at the door to the library. Tomás looked at his watch, swung the pistol toward the door, and motioned for me to move to one side.

  “Come in,” he said.

  “I’m going to open the door slowly.” It was a woman’s voice. I recognized it immediately as the bellhop’s, the one who had led me to my room, only when she walked into the library she wasn’t wearing a hotel uniform anymore. She had on something of brown linen, with broad shoulders and a wide white belt. She looked taller than I remembered until I realized she was wearing spike heels—tan with deep red on the toes. They made it look like she had dipped her shoes in a pool of blood.

  “There’s a car outside, waiting,” she said, “for him.” She didn’t look in my direction, as if the word was more than sufficient to indicate whom she meant. “They’re in a hurry. The motor is running. Our man is fidgeting in the rear seat, and I’d say he isn’t too happy.” She talked as if she frequently entered rooms where people were pointing weapons at her. It was something about the way she stood; nothing aggressive, just self-assured.

  Tomás grunted. “If he did a better job pulling things together, he might be happier. Tell him we’ll be five more minutes.”

  “I’ll tell him,” she said, “but he won’t like waiting. You of all people should know that by now.” At last she acknowledged my presence. “See you in Barcelona, Inspector.” She did a quick turn. “Like this better than the bellhop outfit?”

  After she left, Tomás pocketed his pistol, smoothed his hair, and stood up. “Yes, you are going to Barcelona. So is she. See? I told you it would be more pleasant this time.”

  “We’ll see,” I said. What was she going for? To keep an eye on me? I didn’t need a minder, and I don’t like people tagging along. A little help might be nice, but it didn’t immediately come to mind how she could do that.

  “One word of caution. She’s Vincente’s girl.”

  “And so she shall remain. I’m too old for that sort of thing.”

  “Not from what it says in your file, Inspector.”

  “So the file does have pictures after all? I asked the big man already, but he said there were none.”

  “She’s smarter than she looks. By which I mean, she’s very smart.” He looked sharply at me. “And very crucial to this whole effort. That’s why she’s part of it, and that’s why she’s traveling with you. Understand?”

  I didn’t, but he wasn’t going to tell me any more, so I nodded.

  “Oh, nearly forgot. I do have something of yours after all.” He reached into his coat pocket. “Your wallet. You left it in the car from the airport.” He threw it on the table.

  I picked it up and quickly went through the contents. There was considerably more money in it than I recalled. Also, anything with identification on it—all of it false anyway—had been taken out and new pieces put in, nicely aged, all with a Japanese name, Tamada Hiroyuki.

  “You were born in Kobe two months after the war ended.” Tomás didn’t bother to refer to notes. “Your family moved there from Tokyo after the firebombings in 1945. All the records were lost in the inferno. Your father was in the Imperial Army, a communications specialist as it happens, and died on Okinawa. Your mother died of TB when you were three. No siblings. No relatives at all. Uncles and aunts were all killed in the war, either fighting abroad or minding their business at home. When you were fourteen, let’s see, that would be 1959 or 1960, you fell in with a gang.”

  “I’m not chopping off a finger, not even my little one if that’s what you’re thinking. And, no, definitely not, I will not pretend to be Japanese.”

  “Don’t worry, you’re not pretending. Pretending is bad, it gets discovered. For the next few days, maybe a week, you are Japanese, top to bottom, inside out. And you get to keep your fingers.” Tomás looked at his watch. “Time’s up, we need to get rolling. Who was head of your gang family?”

  “How should I know?”

  “Good, exactly what we want you to say. You never learned his name. He was a shadowy figure who operated out of a restaurant in Osaka. There were rumors that he was Korean, but no one knew for sure.”

  “Don’t tell me, it was a dumpling restaurant.”

  “Very good, Inspector.” Tomás smiled broadly as he opened the door for me. “You can remember what I just told you? Nothing too complicated for Mr. Tamada.”

  “Do I have a passport? One of the details, you know.”

  “I thought you already had one of your own—phony, which is all the better. Keep using it. By now it has all the stamps you need to travel around, and you’re comfortable explaining its oddities to any immigration officials w
ho examine it more closely. Even the ones who aren’t old classmates of Luis.”

  I frowned and shook my head.

  “Now what is it?” Tomás was getting impatient. He looked at his watch for the third or fourth time.

  “First of all, all you’ve done is dance around the main point. What is this operation about? I got beat up pretty bad last time I was at the factory, so I get to ask that sort of thing.”

  “You know what it is about.”

  “It’s one thing to know, it’s another thing to get a briefing that lays out where I fit, how I fit, and why I fit.”

  “OK, that’s first of all. What’s second of all?”

  “How many times do I have to tell you people that I don’t like pretending to be Japanese? I can’t do it anymore. I won’t. We’re not interchangeable toys for Westerners’ convenience. We don’t look alike. We don’t think alike. We have different moral compasses. No. Forget it.”

  “Yes, well, you did fine a few days ago. Just stick with it a while longer. You can mentally hold your nose if you want. Sort of a self-loathing thing, eh? It might be very effective, given the circumstances.”

  I didn’t have any idea what he meant by the circumstances. “Why Barcelona again?” I asked, though I already knew the answer. They wanted me back in the factory. The minor details of why and what I was supposed to do apparently were not mine to inquire about. To hell with that. I was going to find out, or I wasn’t going to Barcelona.

  Tomás indicated I should walk out the door ahead of him. “Why Barcelona again? That’s someone else’s job to explain on the way to the airport. I wish you good luck, Tamada-san.” He pointed down the hall in one direction, waited a moment, and then walked the other way toward the bar.

  4

  The car was waiting out in front with the motor running. It was not the same car the man called Vincente had arrived in the first time I saw him, at the cliff. This car was smaller, also white but respectably dirty. I climbed in the back, as the doorman indicated I should. Vincente leaned over and shook my hand.

  “Ah,” he said, “Mr. Tamada, I presume.”

  Vincente’s girl was driving. She looked in the mirror and smiled. “Off we go,” she said. “The regular driver took sick while we were waiting for you. Something about his girlfriend’s cooking, he said.” She winked at me. “We made a quick switch.”

  Vincente leaned forward and patted her shoulder. “You drive,” he said. “I’ll explain things to Hiro. Can you do something about that perfume?”

  “Too much?” She waved her hand in front of her face and laughed. “Vincente is nervous when I drive. He thinks it isn’t ladylike.”

  “She takes turns too fast,” Vincente said. “Especially when she’s not paying attention.”

  “There’s not much traffic. We’ll be at the airport in under an hour.” The woman turned onto the main road at a high rate of speed. “Hold on to your hats.”

  Vincente shook his head. “She was supposed to do the briefing, but she can’t do both.”

  “Sure I can,” the woman said.

  “No, I’ll do it. I may be a little rusty at this sort of thing, but since it’s my operation, I know the details as well as anyone. You just concentrate on the road.” He turned to me. “Tomás filled you in on part one. I’ll give you part two.”

  “Tomás doesn’t know part two?”

  “No one knows part two, not all the details, anyway, except me, Rosalina, and, by the time we get to the airport, you.”

  I looked at the driver. It had a pretty ring to it, but Rosalina couldn’t be her real name. Tomás hadn’t made much clear, but he’d left no doubt that she and Vincente were more than colleagues. More than that, he’d underlined that she was crucial to the operation. In case Tomás hadn’t already made that clear, now Vincente had confirmed it. The woman was going to Barcelona with me, but to do what? Maybe that was part three, if there was one. It was worth asking.

  “Is there a part three?”

  The big man laughed, a soft laugh, but it had something bitter on the edge of it, like it was kept too long in a dark place and had spoiled. “Rosalina—you recognize the name, Hiro?”

  “Shakespeare,” I said. “And don’t call me Hiro.”

  The driver gave a tiny beep on the horn. “Score.”

  Vincente sat back. “My, my, I wouldn’t have thought…”

  “Could be Romeo and Juliet to be specific, but I read it a long time ago. Surprised?”

  “No, I meant I didn’t think you’d be so negative about a Japanese identity. We hoped you’d find it ironic. As for Shakespeare, Tomás no doubt mentioned that we know a lot about you. Actually, based on what we know, nothing about you would surprise me.”

  “Don’t be too sure,” I said. “Sometimes I surprise myself.”

  Rosalina tapped on the horn. “Score.”

  “All right, let’s hear part two,” I said. “After that, you can go on to parts three and four, if there is a part four. I assume you had to do some fast reshuffling to the plans now that Yuri is dead. Maybe part five?”

  Vincente sat back and rolled down his window slightly. “Rosalina, why is the AC not working in this damned car?” He watched as she fiddled with the controls. “Never mind! Keep your eyes on the road.” He rolled his window down the rest of the way and closed his eyes as the wind blew in over his face.

  “He gets carsick, poor baby,” Rosalina said. “Can you believe it?” She looked in the mirror. “Chew some gum or something.”

  The big man was silent for a couple of minutes. Then he took a deep breath and sat up again. “Let’s just say that at this point Yuri was no longer going to be central to the operation. Eventually we would have had to get rid of him anyway. You were right, he wasn’t totally on our side. He thought we didn’t know it, and so he had convinced himself that he was using us.”

  “I take it he wasn’t. I also take it he didn’t know anything that could compromise things.”

  “You mean, pose a danger to you? Not likely.”

  “Not likely. Easy for you to say.”

  “As it happens, we could have used his bulk a little longer, given how things have developed, but we can make do without it. You’ll just have to substitute wile for bulk. You can do that, I’m sure.”

  “Do that for what? First you tell me you had a double agent in your midst, then you dodge the question of whether I’m stepping into a trap, and now you want me to be wily. Before we get to the airport, I need clarification. Believe it or not, some people work better when they know what they’re doing and why.”

  Vincente looked bored. “You are one of those?” He searched his pockets.

  “I am. In fact, I don’t get on a plane unless I do know what I’m doing and why. You may think I’m bluffing, but page fifty-six in your file will probably make clear that I don’t bluff.” Putting together what I’d heard from Yuri and then from Tomás, I already had a pretty good picture of the why, but I wanted to hear the details straight from Vincente.

  Rosalina beeped the horn again. “Two to nothing so far, Vincente.”

  “Three,” I said. “That’s three.”

  “We’ll take the why first. The what flows from that.” He put a piece of gum in his mouth and chewed it furiously for a moment. “OK, don’t ask questions until I’m done. It all fits like a Persian glove.”

  5

  By the time we arrived at the airport, I knew a few more things than I did before. I knew what my mission was, more or less. I knew I had been right that someone didn’t want the dumpling machine to reach its destination, and that I was the one who was supposed to stop it. But I also knew there were still a couple of key details they were keeping from me. They had kept Yuri in the dark, too. That hadn’t turned out so well as far as I could see. Although maybe it had, if he had a foot in both camps, whatever the camps were. On reflection, it made sense that they were keeping a few things from me for the same reason—they couldn’t be absolutely sure of my reliability, file or
no file. That was their problem. Mine was staying alive. There were plenty of minor questions that occurred to me as well, but we were already approaching the passenger terminal.

  When Rosalina pulled up to the curb, Vincente took a small piece of paper from his jacket pocket. “These are the numbers to call if you run into trouble. They all reach Rosalina. Memorize them and then get rid of the paper. It dissolves in your mouth; don’t throw it away.” He reached into his other pocket. “And here is the number of the bank account you give them if things reach the point where there is a final transaction. They know they’re not going to get full payment until the merchandise reaches the buyer, but there’s a thirty-seven percent down payment when it’s shipped from the factory.”

  “Thirty-seven percent?”

  “Odd number. They figure only someone in the deal would know it. You give them the account number, they transfer the funds, then you get out. The funds won’t actually transfer, but their account will think they have. Some computer magic or something. That’s not your concern. What you need to do, if you have the opportunity, is to put this chip in the machine.” He handed over a tiny plastic bag, not as big as the tip of my thumb. “Put it somewhere you won’t lose it and they won’t find it if they search you.”

  “I can only think of a few places.”

  “Yeah, well, it’s up to you. We thought Yuri might do it. Actually, it was a test to see where he stood.”

  “I suppose it’s the same for me.”

  “Not really. If the machine is already broken down into several parts for shipping, you might not have a chance. In that case, the key becomes finding out the transport route. That’s critical. We’ll do the rest. Clear?”

  “How do I find out the transport route? Why wouldn’t we already know it?”

  “Because they are very secretive bastards. You’ll find out how secretive. That’s why we picked you, because we knew you could do work in that atmosphere.”

  “Don’t fuck with me.”

  The big man smiled. “There’s a transportation specialist in the factory. We don’t know his name, but we know he’s there. He arrived only a day or two ago. Listen, if we knew everything already, we wouldn’t be here right now, we’d be having a nice dinner. You have a reservation on the eight o’clock plane. All you have to do is show your passport at the checkpoint.”