Remember Tokyo

by Nick Wilkshire

  “Look Rob, I’m here to help.” He tried a different tack. “I know you’re in trouble …”

  “You don’t know shit, Charlie.”

  “So enlighten me.”

  “And you can stop fucking around and playing the innocent. You told me you lost that postcard, so I know you found something.”

  “What is it you think I found, Rob? It’s a blank postcard that you mailed to yourself. So maybe you should start —”

  “You don’t seem to understand.” Lepage took a step closer, shortening the distance between the end of the gun and Charlie’s head. “I’m not who you think I am, and if you don’t tell me whatever you know, you’re not going to be leaving this room.”

  Charlie put up a defensive hand. “So, maybe you’re not the clean-cut securities trader that I thought you were. But you’re not a killer, Rob.”

  “Oh no?”

  “Look, I know you’re in trouble. I know Kimura’s connected to the yakuza,” he added, thinking he detected slight surprise in Lepage’s expression. “And that they want something from you. But shooting me isn’t going to help.”

  “You’re wrong about that. It might buy me some time.” Lepage still had the gun trained on him.

  “I’m not the only one that knows there’s something funny going on,” Charlie continued. “With you, with Seger’s murder.”

  “Bullshit,” Lepage shot back. “You told me yourself the Tokyo Police aren’t even investigating that.”

  “Well, they are.”

  “I know you’re pretty cozy with that cop, but I think you’re lying.”

  “I can help you, Rob. Maybe Kobayashi can, too. Just put the gun away, will you?” He started to get up again, his hand held out as he slowly rose.

  “Don’t think I won’t do it, Charlie.”

  “I didn’t come here to see you.” Charlie kept his hand up. “You’re right about that. I came to see if I could get to the bottom of whatever’s going on. I’ll figure it out sooner or later, and it will be sooner if we work together. I can protect you.”

  Lepage laughed, but took a step back in response to Charlie’s slow advance. “You can’t do shit, and you know it. These people can do whatever they want. They’re everywhere.”

  “And yet we’re both still here, which means they think one of us has something they want really badly.”

  “You don’t know who you’re dealing with …”

  “I think I do, and I think you’re better off with my help than without it. Now put the gun down and let’s figure this thing out.”

  Lepage was shaking his head as Charlie took another step forward. “Stay where you are, damn it.”

  “Rob, I’m your only friend here and you know it. When you were lying in that hospital bed, I’m the only one that came to see you, looked out for you — other than Kimura, and we both know she doesn’t give a shit about you.” He took another step forward, his hand was inches from the gun now. “In fact, did you know your brakes had been tampered with?” Lepage’s eyes widened slightly at the news, and Charlie saw the chance to press on. “I know you’ve been lying to me and Yamaguchi about your memory loss, and maybe you still don’t remember some things before the accident, but whatever you were then, you’re not a killer now. Put down the gun.”

  Lepage stared at him for a moment, then raised the gun slightly, as Charlie’s heart quickened.

  “What the fuck am I going to do?” he finally said, dropping the gun to his side and slumping into the chair by the door.

  CHAPTER 32

  “What is it they want? What’s the big secret?” Charlie was sitting at Lepage’s kitchen table, and whatever he had planned before, it was clear that Lepage had made up his mind to take his chances with Charlie now, though he still appeared to be struggling with the prospect of a confession. He sighed and put his head in his hands.

  “It’s an account number.”

  “An account … like a bank account?”

  Lepage nodded.

  “So why don’t you just give it to them, be done with it?”

  He gave an irritated laugh. “It’s not that simple, Charlie. I couldn’t give it to them even if I wanted to.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I can’t … I can’t fucking remember it.”

  “You mean because of the memory loss. I thought you were faking that.”

  He shook his head. “Not about that. Some stuff I faked, yeah. But I still have gaps, real gaps.”

  “So, tell me about this account.”

  “This is so fucked up.” Lepage shook his head, then looked across the table. “You should just leave, get out while you can. You have no idea what you’re getting yourself into.”

  But Charlie was having none of that. “I’m already involved, Rob, and I’m not going to just walk out the door, so you’d better start telling me the truth.” He paused, then leaned forward across the table. “Start at the beginning. What really brought you to Tokyo?”

  Lepage let out a breath of air that was part laugh, part sigh. “I was working in Montreal, for a brokerage firm. I was making good money and everything was going well.”

  “This is when you were with Advantage Securities?”

  “How’d you know that?”

  “We’ll get to that. Go on.”

  Lepage’s puzzled frown remained in place for a few seconds before he continued. “Anyway, that’s when I first met Seger. He was on some kind of consulting contract with Advantage, at least that’s what I was led to believe.”

  Charlie nodded, and chose not to add that he knew Seger’s employer, APP, as well.

  “Did you know Seger before … I mean, before you worked with him in Montreal?”

  Lepage shook his head. “That stuff about us growing up together was bullshit. He made that up — I guess he thought it would get him in to see me in the hospital.”

  “Did you recognize him when he visited you?”

  “Not at first. I really didn’t know who he was, until we started talking and he told me I had some really important information locked away in my head.”

  “Did he threaten you?”

  “Not in so many words, but he said a lot of people were counting on me getting my memory back … soon.” Lepage looked down at his hands. “He talked about what we’d done in Montreal, places we’d had dinner, going to a Habs game — that sort of thing. When he left the hospital that night, I lay in bed and it started to come back to me. It was just, like, an outline first, but then things sharpened into focus. And then I knew …”

  Charlie looked at him in the silence that followed. “You knew what?”

  “I knew that I wasn’t who I thought I was.” He looked up and Charlie could see he was struggling with the words. “I knew I was … bad.”

  Charlie considered it for a moment, the thought of coming out of a coma with a bunch of strangers around you telling you what your life was, and then coming to the realization that they were wrong — that you were actually a criminal. It had obviously made quite an impression.

  “That remains to be seen.” Charlie patted him on the arm and coaxed him on. “Let’s go back to Montreal. You were doing legitimate work until Seger came along?”

  “As far as I knew, yeah. I was working on this program on the side, a sort of trading algorithm. I guess I was naive — I mentioned it to someone at work and the next day Seger turns up. I could tell within five minutes of meeting him that he wasn’t interested in my sales, or the clients I’d landed. It was the algorithm that interested him. He said he knew a company in Hong Kong that was looking for just that kind of product, and if we could give it to them, they’d be willing to pay a fortune.”

  “So, how’d you end up in Tokyo?”

  Lepage frowned. “After a couple of weeks, I’d given him the nuts and bolts of the program. How it worked. Mike said he wanted to run it by his people in Hong Kong first, so he went off and did that. A couple of weeks later, he’s back and he tells me we’re on. Next thing I know,
my boss is telling me I’m going to Tokyo.”

  “Did your boss know what was going on?”

  Lepage shook his head. “I don’t think so. Actually, he was kind of pissed. It was like he didn’t have a choice. Like someone over his head had made the call.”

  “So you come to Tokyo,” Charlie prompted.

  Lepage nodded. “I come here, and I start putting together the program at Nippon Kasuga. Then I meet Aiko, and pretty soon she’s asking me to make some tweaks to the algorithm. And that’s when I knew for sure.”

  “Knew what?”

  Lepage looked at him with raised eyebrows. “Come on, Charlie, how hard are you going to make this? I knew what I was doing was illegal.”

  “Why, what did Kimura ask you to do?”

  “The algorithm I designed in Canada was based on publicly available data about the contributors — completely legal. She wanted to adjust it to mine for more sensitive infor­mation.”

  “The kind that’s illegal to collect?”

  Lepage nodded. “Plus, I learned later that the plan was to only report about 75 percent of the profits. The other 25 perent was going into an offshore account in Nippon Kasuga’s name.”

  “So Nippon Kasuga knew about the skimming?” Charlie asked, still unclear as to who knew what.

  “They knew all right, though it wasn’t as though they had any choice.”

  “You mean because it was the yakuza pulling the strings.” Lepage didn’t respond, but his silence was as clear an answer as anything he could have said. “Did you know they were behind it?” Charlie asked.

  Lepage shrugged. “I knew Aiko wasn’t hooked up with the Salvation Army, if you know what I mean. A guy came by her place one night when I was there — to make a point.”

  “You mean to threaten you?”

  “It was more subtle than that. He didn’t have to say a word. I knew the minute he walked through the door what he was, and what I was into.”

  “And you never considered going to the police?”

  Lepage laughed. “These people have pretty good connections with the police, from what I’m told. For all I know, Kobayashi’s working for them.” Charlie’s eyebrows shot up. “I’m just saying.”

  They sat in silence for a while, Lepage recovering from the act of unburdening himself, Charlie trying to process the information into a scenario that made sense to him.

  “But you say the work you were doing in Montreal was legal?” he finally asked.

  Another shrug from Lepage. “As far as I knew, yeah. I was too busy making money to ask questions. When the Tokyo thing came up, I should have known something was wrong. They threw a big bonus at me, set me up here with this place.” He looked around them, and Charlie figured the apartment was probably worth ten thousand dollars a month. “And the car, and a base salary that would make your head spin.” Lepage paused and thought for a moment. “You said you think someone messed with the car?”

  Charlie nodded. “Kobayashi said the brakes could have been tampered with.”

  “Why is this the first time I’m hearing about it?”

  “She doesn’t know why it didn’t make it into the police report, but I think it’s obvious.”

  Lepage’s eyes flashed. “You see? They’re everywhere. I’m telling you, Charlie, this isn’t Canada. Things work differently here.”

  “If you’re going to try to convince me Kobayashi is yakuza, then forget it.” Charlie shook his head. “I’ll never believe it.”

  “What about her boss?”

  Charlie was caught off guard by the remark, which rang disturbingly true in light of the apparent suppression of the mechanical assessment of Lepage’s car, not to mention the decision not to investigate Seger’s murder. He considered Lepage’s warning about Kobayashi for an uncomfortable moment. If she had been paid to get close to Charlie.… He dismissed the thought as quickly as it appeared. Some things he just knew in his heart, like the certainty that Lepage wouldn’t have shot him in cold blood twenty minutes ago.

  “So you were drawn into something you didn’t understand,” he finally said, after they had both sat in silence for a while. “You wouldn’t be the first. Maybe there’s still a way out for you.”

  “Come on, Charlie, I’m fucked and we both know it. I took the money, and I’d still be taking it if I hadn’t forgotten where it is.”

  “So you lost the account number …”

  “The second account,” Lepage corrected. “The one with all the skim in it. I set it up without telling anyone, as an extra layer of security.”

  “And what kind of money are we talking about?”

  Lepage shrugged. “The last time I checked it — at least that I can remember — it was almost five million.”

  “Dollars?” Charlie’s eyes widened.

  Lepage nodded. “Which is why Kimura and her people are not going to just let it go. I’m pretty sure they’re starting to think I’m holding out on them.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  Lepage sighed. “Let’s just say I’m on a short leash. If I haven’t given them the coordinates to the money in the next couple of days, I think I’m done.” He paused and looked down at his hands. “You have even less time.”

  “Me?”

  He nodded. “They wanted to take you out a couple of days ago, but I stalled them.”

  Charlie’s initial alarm switched to incomprehension. “But why do they want to get rid of me?”

  “They think you know something, and they’re concerned that you’re egging Kobayashi on, or vice versa.”

  “Is she in danger, too?” Charlie’s alarm took priority.

  “Like I said,” Lepage replied, with a sigh, “they have people everywhere. No one’s safe, not even Kobayashi.”

  Another silence descended over the kitchen, then Charlie pulled his phone out of his pocket.

  “Who are you calling?” Lepage asked.

  “I have to warn her, Rob, and it’s not negotiable,” he added. He saw resistance in Lepage’s eyes, but it quickly faded and he said nothing as Charlie put the phone to his ear.

  “Voicemail. Shit!” He left a message and then put the phone on the kitchen table.

  “What are we going to do, Charlie?”

  “We’re going to start with why I came here this evening in the first place.”

  Lepage looked puzzled. “What do you mean?”

  “Does Elizabeth know about any of this?”

  “Elizabeth? Why were you coming to see her?”

  “Does she know?”

  Lepage gave another sigh. “She’s not going to be able to help us locate the account number, if that’s what you mean.”

  “I meant does she know you’re involved in something illegal. And we don’t have time to beat around the bush here, Rob. You need to start telling me everything if I’m going to have any chance of helping you.”

  He shook his head. “She doesn’t know, but I think she does suspect something. One of the reasons I cut things off with her — romantically — was that I didn’t want to drag her into anything.”

  Charlie nodded. “You see, Rob,” he said, getting up and patting him on the shoulder, “you are a good person deep down. Come on, let’s go.”

  They were almost at Lepage’s front door when Charlie’s phone rang. He breathed a sigh of relief at seeing Kobayashi’s number.

  “I need you to meet me at Rob’s apartment in half an hour.” He looked at Lepage as he listened to her response. “I’ll explain everything when you get here. Just be careful and don’t tell anyone where you’re going.”

  CHAPTER 33

  Elizabeth Farnsworth opened the door and stood back to let Charlie in.

  “I was beginning to wonder if you’d gotten lost on your way …” She trailed off when Lepage came into view, standing next to Charlie.

  “I bumped into Rob, and we decided it would be best if we both had a word with you, if that’s all right.”

  “I’m sorry to bother you, Elizabeth,”
Lepage said, as they made their way inside and she shut the door behind them, “but it looks like I’ve gotten myself into a bit of a jam.”

  She stood there for a moment, then nodded. “I was afraid of that.” She touched his arm, then set off for the kitchen, waving for them to follow. “Come in and tell me all about it, and we’ll see if there’s anything I can do to help.”

  “We’re looking for an account number,” Charlie began, when they were all seated around the table. “An offshore account number, or anything that might lead us to it.”

  “You’ve lost an account number …?”

  “Forgot it, actually,” Lepage interjected. “I’ve still got some gaps in my memory, from the accident. I can remember where I put my running shoes, but not the number of an offshore account that’s turned out to be pretty important.”

  Farnsworth nodded slowly. “I assume it involves the people like the gentleman we ran into that night?” she asked Lepage, who nodded and turned to Charlie.

  “We were at dinner,” Lepage gestured to Farnsworth, “and one of Kimura’s associates stopped by our table for a friendly hello. He was yakuza, for sure.”

  “Now you tell me.” Farnsworth paled a little.

  “I didn’t know for sure at the time, but I … I guess I did, but I didn’t want to admit it to myself — that I was getting in over my head.” Charlie watched the two as they assessed each other, feeling somewhat like a marriage counsellor.

  “Is that why you ended things?” she asked.

  Lepage was looking down at his hands. “I didn’t want you getting hurt. We shouldn’t even be here now,” he said, starting to get up.

  “You’re not going anywhere.” Farnsworth put an authoritative hand on his forearm. “And here I thought I’d been thrown over for that little tart, Kako.”

  Lepage laughed. “It’s Aiko, and believe me, it was only ever business with her. I liked to think of her as my own personal praying mantis.”

  Charlie frowned at the use of the past tense. “Except that she’s still out there, along with all of her friends.”

  Farnsworth looked to Charlie, then Lepage. “So, what can I do to help?”

  “Did I say anything before the accident,” Lepage asked her, “or give you anything for safekeeping? We’re looking for anything that might have been a clue to that damn account number.”