“I was thinking it might help me, you know … trigger some memories or something. If you don’t mind giving it back?”
“Of course. I’ll find it over the weekend and get it to you.”
“Thanks.”
The two sat in silence for a moment, each sipping their beer.
“That reminds me,” Lepage said suddenly. “Don’t you still have a key to this place? I don’t think I ever got it back from you.”
Charlie slowly swallowed the mouthful of beer before nodding. “Yeah, I think you’re right. It must be back at the office, as well. I’ll drop it over with the postcard.”
“Great.”
“I could check here first.” Lepage started to get up, gesturing to the hallway and his study beyond. “Make sure it’s not in my desk drawer or somewhere like that.” Charlie tried not to display any sign of the panic inside him as Lepage gave a little laugh. “You know, my memory isn’t so great.”
Charlie waved a hand. “I’m pretty sure I still have it.”
Lepage paused, then nodded and relaxed in his chair.
“I should be going and leave you in peace.” Charlie checked his watch.
“You just got here,” Lepage protested, but Charlie was already up and headed to the door. “Well, thanks for dropping by,” he said as they stood together at the door.
“No problem.”
“Oh, and Charlie,” Lepage added, his hand on the half-open door, blocking Charlie’s exit.
“Yeah?”
“Don’t forget to have a look for that key. I’d hate to think it was lost and someone could just come in here … whenever they wanted.”
Charlie averted his gaze and nodded, pushing his way out into the hall. “I’ll get it to you tomorrow, for sure.”
“Good night, Charlie.”
CHAPTER 24
Charlie sat at his dining room table — big enough to seat eight but which had only needed to handle him so far — with a half-empty beer next to his laptop as he scanned the search results on the yakuza’s activities in Japan. Not surprisingly, there was a lot of online information about the various organizations that fell into the collective category. They liked to call themselves ninkyō dantai, which loosely translated as “chivalrous organizations,” but there was no question about their real nature, given their main business lines were the same as organized crime groups everywhere, from the U.S. to Russia: protection, gambling, prostitution, and drugs. They were apparently involved in the illegal weapons trade in Asia, as well.
But the segment he was focused on now dealt with their growing involvement in white collar crime. He was surprised to learn that one of the yakuza groups, the Yamaguchi-gumi — he remembered Kobayashi mentioning that it was the largest group, and pausing at the incongruity of the name being shared with Lepage’s very proper neurologist — were thought to have been the largest equity investor in the country in the early nineties, when the real estate bubble burst. The fallout had been bad for everyone, the yakuza included. While the authorities had seemed prepared to turn a largely blind eye to their activities before, the public backlash from the knowledge that the yakuza had a lot to do with the bad debt bloating the marketplace meant they were scrambling for cover in the midnineties, as the authorities cracked down. Charlie was just finishing the article when the phone rang and he glanced at the computer clock, which read nine forty-five p.m. He didn’t recognize the number displayed on his phone as he hit the receive button.
“Charlie Hillier.”
“Charlie, I must apologize for calling you so late.”
Charlie smiled at the sound of Kobayashi’s voice, and the familiar refrain of yet another apology. Would she ever stop?
“It’s fine. I was just doing some reading,” he said, suddenly aware of how sad that sounded; a single man in his forties sitting home alone on a Friday night in a bustling city like Tokyo.
“I learned some information that I think you will be interested to hear,” she continued, snapping him back to reality. Something in her tone suggested a guardedness that he found slightly unfamiliar.
“About the case?”
She ignored the redundancy of the question and continued in the same hesitant tone. “I’d rather discuss it with you … in person,” she said, adding quickly: “You mentioned wanting to visit the Tsukiji Market, and I thought if we met there in the morning, we could discuss the case and I could also show you the best parts of the market … if you would like.”
“The fish market? Yeah, that sounds great.”
“It is quite busy, but as long as we’re not too late …”
“Early’s fine with me. Name a time and a place.”
“Nine o’clock, at the Tsukijishijō Station entrance.”
“I’ll be there.”
“I’ll leave you to your reading then,” she said, her tone back to normal. “Good night, Charlie.”
“Good night.”
He ended the call and stared at the phone. Was she just being nice to a hapless foreigner, or was the nervousness in the air every time they met indicative of more than just his own attraction to her? Don’t overthink it, he told himself. He was meeting her in a quasi-social setting that she had arranged — something that could only be described as shockingly forward in this society. He clicked the search engine window shut and downed the beer. He was still thinking about the tone in her voice when she had suggested the meeting when his phone went off again. For a split second he thought it might be her, calling to cancel the whole thing, but the area code of the incoming call was 613 — Ottawa. He hit the receive button and put the phone on speaker, setting it down on the table as a male voice on a distant sounding line echoed through the speaker.
“Is this Charlie Hillier?”
“Yes, it is.”
“This is Sergeant Bill Dixon, with the RCMP.”
“Oh, hi. I was hoping to get in touch with you, to discuss your report.”
“I realize it’s late there, but can you get to a secure line now?”
“Give me your number and I’ll call you back in ten minutes,” he said, then took down the number, hung up the phone, and hurried over to the embassy to make the call.
“Thanks for getting back to me,” Charlie said when Dixon answered.
“No worries. Any progress in the investigation into Seger’s death?”
“Not really, in part because the Japanese aren’t sure whether to launch a homicide investigation. I was hoping I could use your report to try to convince them.”
There was a slight pause on the other end of the line before Dixon spoke again. “I’d have to check, but it’s probably okay. I’m pretty sure we have a reciprocal agreement with Japan for this kind of stuff. I’ll confirm and get back to you. Why are they so reluctant to consider to it a homicide?”
“Seger was found in a part of town where foreigners are often victims of scams — the kind of thing where the victim wakes up in a cab back to his hotel with his wallet missing, you know? They’re not saying that a crime wasn’t involved, but they think that the death might have been accidental. It’s still a wrongful death, but I guess they treat it differently. Then there’s the fact that he’s a foreigner, which complicates things.”
“Understood.”
“I think if they felt Seger was mixed up in organized crime back in Canada,” Charlie continued, “that might be worth some further digging here, and that’s the other thing I wanted to ask you. The report kind of hints that he might have been involved, but doesn’t really say it in so many words, and I was interested in your thoughts.”
Dixon gave a little laugh at the other end of the line. “If you’re asking for my opinion off the record, Seger was dirty, for sure. The only reason I couldn’t say so is he’d done such a good job of covering his tracks. No criminal record, no direct link ever made between him and illegal activity, but it’s just beneath the surface, believe me.” Dixon paused before continuing. “A guy like that, with his sort of pedigree, his family connections
to known OC associates, it’d be a one in a million for him not to be involved somehow. Then there’s his travel pattern over the past few years. In the Caymans a couple of times the year before last, then in and out of Hong Kong regularly, more so in the past eighteen months. Then you look at his line of work.”
“You mean banking?”
“I guess you’d call it that.”
Charlie wasn’t sure what he was getting at, and needed to cut through the double-talk. “What do you mean?”
There was a short sigh on the other end of the line. “We’re in the middle of a big investigation into online securities fraud, and I’m pretty sure we’re gonna find he was involved somehow. It’s an international thing, covering North America, Eastern Europe, and Asia.”
“And his travel patterns fit with him being involved.”
“That and the work he was doing, the people he was meeting … it all fits. If he hadn’t ended up dead, he probably would have landed in jail in the next couple of years — although he was a slippery fuck, I’ll give him that.”
“Not slippery enough, I guess.”
“They say crime doesn’t pay,” Dixon said with a laugh. “There’s something else, that’s not in the report. I just found out yesterday that there might be a connection between Seger and one of the Canadian companies allegedly involved in the securities fraud.”
“Oh yeah?”
“I’m still sifting through it, but it seems that Seger was employed by a firm called APP, which had a contract with the one we’ve been looking at, based in Montreal.”
“What’s the name of that one?” Charlie asked.
“Advantage Securities,” he said, going on to explain that the connection was still being investigated. But Charlie had stopped listening after hearing the name — a name he was sure he had seen on Rob Lepage’s immigration forms. He tried to stay focused on Dixon’s comments on his report over the next ten minutes, but rather than Mike Seger, all he could think of was the increasingly disturbing connections being made to Rob Lepage. It occurred to him that Seger had told him Lepage worked for a company based in Toronto, not Montreal. Then there was the fact that Lepage’s first words when he came out of his coma had been French.
“Well, thanks for getting back to me with this,” Charlie said after Dixon had wrapped up. “It’s been very … enlightening.”
“I’ll shoot you an email tomorrow to confirm that you can share the report. Like I said, it shouldn’t be a problem, but I want to run it by my boss, to be sure.”
“Always a good idea. Thanks.”
Charlie hung up the phone and sat in the quiet of the room for a few moments before riding the elevator back to the fourth floor, getting off into the dimness of the after-hours lighting, walking past one empty office after another until he reached his own. He flicked on his desk lamp, preferring it to the harsh light of the overhead fluorescent, and slid the top drawer of his desk open. He plucked out the postcard he had offered as an aide-mémoire to Lepage. In his frustrated phase — just after coming out of the coma — Lepage had rejected it, but now he suddenly wanted it back.
Charlie reached into his front pocket and retrieved the key card for Lepage’s apartment, which had been burning a hole in his pants as he had sat there in Lepage’s kitchen after almost being caught breaking into the place. He closed his eyes and replayed Lepage’s words and his facial expression when they had parted ways by his front door. He had guessed something funny was going on, but had he known Charlie was in his apartment just seconds before he had stepped off the elevator? It occurred to him that he might have left something out of place in his hasty search, though he thought he had been careful. Then again, the presence of the gun had freaked him out, to the point that he might have been less cautious than he thought. And maybe Lepage had left a piece of string in the door or something.… This is getting ridiculous, he told himself, tossing the card onto the desk. If Lepage had figured it out, there was nothing he could do about it now. He should be more focused on possible reasons why Lepage would have a gun in his desk drawer. For protection, most probably. But from whom? He frowned as he realized the obvious flaw in that explanation, namely that if he got the gun for protection, why hadn’t he been carrying it when he was out? What if he got the gun for offensive, rather than defensive, purposes?
Charlie got up and glanced at the clock. It was past ten, and he felt exhausted. He put the key card back in his pocket and was about to do the same with the postcard, when he flipped it over and examined it under the lamplight to confirm that there really was nothing written on it. A blank postcard featuring a picture of a snow-capped Mount Fuji. Why was it suddenly of interest to Lepage, when it had obviously triggered nothing whatsoever when he first laid eyes on it in the hospital? He leaned the postcard against the base of his monitor, flicked off the lamp, and left his office. He would have to return the key card tomorrow, but he was going to hang on to the postcard for a little while longer.
CHAPTER 25
Charlie had no doubt about whether he had gotten off at the right stop when the smell of saltwater and fish overwhelmed him as he came up out of Tsukijishijō Station. It wasn’t yet nine on Saturday morning and already the station was busy. As he arrived at street level, he noticed the sky had cleared and the sun was shining. He found his way to the southern exit and was barely there a minute when he saw Kobayashi coming up the steps. She was wearing capris and a light jacket over a striped shirt, with her hair tied back in a ponytail. He did a double-take at this new casual, sporty version of the normally formal Kobayashi. She gave him a tentative smile, apparently recognizing his appraising eye.
“You look so … different,” he said with a broad smile. “It really suits you.”
“Thank you.” She glanced at her shoes. “You look very nice also,” she said, making him feel better about the outfit he had managed to cobble together from the remnants of his clean clothes. He was going to have to do some laundry soon. “Shall I show you around?”
He gave her an enthusiastic nod. “Lead the way.”
They walked out of the station and joined a stream of pedestrians walking down the crowded street. Charlie had read that the sprawling market occupied over fifty acres, and as they approached the entrance, Charlie saw that it was laid out like an enormous outdoor warehouse, with little loaders buzzing from stall to stall, depositing containers of fresh seafood. The air was filled with the sound of vendors shouting out their wares, competing with the beeping of reversing loaders. As they passed the last little side street on the way to the main entrance, Charlie noticed a crowd gathered outside the window of a tiny store. From the expectant look on everyone’s face, they were clearly waiting for something momentous.
“What’s going on over there?”
Kobayashi followed his gaze and nodded. “Maguro … tuna,” she said, pushing her way politely but with an effective determination through the edge of the crowd, getting as close as a few rows back. She said something in Japanese to an elderly woman with a string bag on her arm, then turned to Charlie.
“They’re about to carve a tuna,” she said, just as two men in blue smocks emerged from the store carrying a massive, silvery, finned creature that looked more like a shark than any tuna Charlie had ever seen.
“It’s massive,” he remarked, as the crowd oohed and awed to the delight of one of the smock-clad men.
“Probably fifty kilos,” Kobayashi said as the first man deposited his end on the raised carving table and began shouting out to the crowd, waving a large knife that looked like a machete in overhead arcs like a samurai preparing for battle. With a fluid motion, he began to slice at the head of the massive fish, his partner grabbing the handle at the other end of what Charlie realized was a saw. A few seconds later they were through, and the first man raised the head up high and displayed it theatrically, to shouts of great approval from the crowd. Setting the head at the end of the large table, they went to work on the fins and the tail, then the main carver sliced a thi
n wedge of flesh from the side of the tuna and held it up. The crowd went wild, arms extending to get the first piece, which went to the old woman with the string bag. Charlie and Kobayashi stood and watched as the two men continued to carve up the massive fish, then she motioned toward the market.
“I prefer to get my tuna at another stall. Less crowded,” she said, and it was Charlie’s turn to gently push his way back out to the main street, with Kobayashi following close behind as the crowd closed in around them. Entering the covered part of the market, Charlie was overwhelmed by the sights and sounds around him, and he followed Kobayashi as she led him from stall to stall, pointing out the vast array of fish and seafood, from the mundane to the most exotic, not to mention expensive.
“Is that right?” he said, pointing at a sign over a particularly nasty-looking fish with a dizzying number of zeros after the yen sign.
“Blowfish,” she said with a nod. “Very expensive. Not my favourite, personally.”
A few stalls farther on, an old man in a stained smock hurried out from behind a table with bins of various seafood arranged on beds of crushed ice. They chattered in Japanese as they enthusiastically bowed. She introduced Charlie, who bowed and did his best not to mangle a standard greeting too badly. The old man seemed pleased with his effort, and responded in kind, bowing again several times as he gestured to the table and resumed his rapid-fire chatter with Kobayashi.
“He has the best tuna in the market,” she said, translating for the old man, whose toothless face beamed at the compliment. He waved her over excitedly and put several thinly-sliced pieces into a little container and covered it with ice before sealing it.
“Look at those crabs,” Charlie remarked. They were larger than any he’d seen before. Before Kobayashi could translate, the old man was loading up a bag of the plumpest ones. “I guess I’m getting some,” he said, eliciting a little grin from Kobayashi. “As long as it’s not the same price as the blowfish.”
Remember Tokyo Page 20