by Barry Eisler
Rio de Janeiro, which offered culture, climate, and a significant transient population consisting largely of tourists, would be ideal. The city is far from the world’s intelligence, terrorism, and Interpol focal points, so I would have relatively few worries about accidental sightings, security camera networks, and the other natural enemies of the fugitive. I would even be able to return to judo, or at least one of its cousins: the Brazilian Gracie family had taken one of judo’s forebears, jujitsu, carried into the country by arriving Japanese, and developed it into arguably the most sophisticated ground fighting system the world has ever seen. It’s practiced fanatically in Brazil, and has become popular all over the world, including Japan.
Along with the right location, I had an ice-cold alternate identity, something I’d been nurturing for a long time in preparation for a day when I might have to drop off the map more completely than I ever had before. About a decade earlier, as I was surveilling and preparing to eliminate a certain bureaucrat, I was struck by the degree to which the man superficially resembled me—the age, height, build, even the face wasn’t too far off. The subject also had a wonderful name: Taro Yamada, the Japanese equivalent of John Smith. I had done some digging, and learned that Yamada-san lacked a close family. There seemed to be no one who would miss him enough to go looking for him if he happened to disappear.
Now, a lot of books will tell you that you can build a new identity using the name of someone deceased, but that’s only true if no one filed a death certificate. If the authorities were involved in any way—say, the person died in a hospice or hospital, or gets buried or cremated, which, if you think about it, applies to pretty much everyone, or if someone files a missing person report—a certificate will be filed. Or if a relative wants to get his or her hands on any aspect of the decedent’s estate—in which case you’re talking about the transfer of title to real and personal property and probably probate—again, a certificate will be filed. And if you decide to proceed anyway, then even if you do manage to get some additional new identification based on the dead person’s particulars, the new ID will always be fatally flawed, and, eventually, when you apply for a driver’s license, or for credit, or when you try to get pretty much any job, or file a tax return, or when you try to cross a border—in short, when you try to do any one of the innumerable things for which you needed your new identity in the first place—a “what’s wrong with this picture” alert will pop up on someone’s screen, and you will be promptly and thoroughly screwed.
So what about the identity of someone who’s still living? This works fine for short-term scams, known colloquially as “identity theft,” although perhaps better understood as “identity borrowing,” but is infeasible for anything long-term. After all, who’s going to be responsible for those new credit cards? And where do the bills get sent? Okay, then what about using someone who’s, say, disappeared for some reason, assuming you even know of such a person? Well, what about it? Did the person have debts? Was he a drug dealer? Because if he had anyone looking for him before, now they’ll be looking for you. And anyway, what do you do if Mr. Missing Person suddenly resurfaces?
Of course, if you know of someone who’s dead because you happen to have killed him, that’s a little different. True, you’d have to dispose of the body—in a manner that ensures it will never be found—a risky and often grisly chore that isn’t for everyone. But if you’ve come this far, and if you know that no one is going to report the person dead, or even missing, you’ve got something potentially valuable on your hands. If you also know that he’s got a good credit history, because you’ve gone on paying bills incurred in his name, you might just have landed yourself a winner.
So yes, I did carry out the contract on the unfortunate Mr. Yamada, but I didn’t tell the client that. Instead, the subject seemed to have gone “underground,” I reported, unable to resist the pun. Perhaps he had somehow gotten wind of the fact that a contract had been put out on his life? The client hired a PI, who confirmed the presence of all the indicia of sudden flight: a closed bank account and other personal matters efficiently tied up; mail forwarded to a foreign drop; missing clothes and other personal items from the apartment. I, of course, had been taking care of all of this. The client let me know that, for his purposes, disappearance was as good as death, and that I needn’t trouble myself tracking Yamada down to complete the contract. I was paid for my efforts anyway—no one wants someone like me to feel that he may have been treated unfairly—and that was that. The client himself has long since come to his own unfortunate end, and enough time has elapsed for me to have resurrected Yamada-san, opening up a small consulting operation in his unobtrusive name, paying taxes, securing an appropriate postal address, incurring debt and paying it off—all the little things that, taken together, add up to existence as a thoroughly unremarkable, thoroughly legitimate, member of society.
All I had to do now was slip into the Yamada identity and begin my new life. But first, Taro Yamada had to do some of the things that any guy in his position would do after deciding to give up on his failed consulting business and move to Brazil to teach third-generation Japanese their now forgotten language. He needed a visa, a legitimate bank account—as opposed to the illegitimate, pseudonymous ones I maintain offshore—assistance with housing, an office. He would be nominally based in São Paulo, where almost half of Brazil’s ethnic Japanese are concentrated, which would make him even more difficult to track to Rio. It would have been easier to take care of much of this with the assistance of the Japanese consulate in Brasilia, of course, but Mr. Yamada preferred less formal, less traceable means.
While I went about setting Yamada up in Brazil, I read about a string of corruption scandals and wondered how they figured in Tatsu’s shadow war with Yamaoto. Universal Studios Japan, it turned out, had been serving food that was nine months past its due date and falsifying labels to hide it, while operating a drinking fountain that was pumping out untreated industrial water. Mister Donut was in the habit of fortifying its wares with meat dumplings containing banned additives. Snow Brand Food liked to save a few yen by recycling old milk and failing to clean factory pipes. Couldn’t cover that one up—fifteen thousand people were poisoned. Mitsubishi Motors and Bridgestone got nailed hard, concealing defects in cars and tires to avoid safety recalls. The worst, shocking even by Japanese standards, was the news that TEPCO, Tokyo Electric Power, had been caught submitting falsified nuclear safety reports that went back twenty years. The reports failed to list serious problems at eight different reactors, including cracks in concrete containment shrouds.
The amazing thing wasn’t the scandals, though. It was how little people seemed to care. It must have been frustrating for Tatsu, and I wondered what drove him. In other countries, revelations like these would have precipitated a revolution. But despite the scandals, despite the economy, the Japanese just went right on reelecting the same usual Liberal Democratic Party suspects. Christ, half the problem Tatsu was fighting comprised his nominal superiors, the people to whom, in a sense, he had to salute. How do you keep going, in the face of such determined ignorance and relentless hypocrisy? Why did he bother?
I read the news and tried to imagine how Tatsu would interpret it, how, indeed, he might even be trying to shape it. Not all of it was bad, I supposed. In fact, there were some developments in the provinces that must have encouraged him. Kitagawa Masayasu beat the bureaucrats in Mie by simply deciding against a proposed nuclear power plant. In Chiba, Domoto Akiko, a sixty-eight-year-old former television reporter, prevailed against candidates backed by business, trade unions, and the various political parties. In Nagano, Governor Tanaka Yasuo stopped all dam building despite pressure from the country’s powerful construction interests. In Tottori, Governor Yoshihiro Katayama opened the prefecture’s books to anyone who wanted to see them, setting a precedent that must have caused his counterparts in Tokyo nearly to soil themselves.
I also spent time checking computer records on Yukiko and Damask Ro
se. Compared to Harry I’m a hacking primitive, but I couldn’t ask for his help on this one without revealing that I’d been checking up on him.
Getting into the club’s tax information gave me Yukiko’s last name: Nohara. From there, I was able to learn a reasonable amount. She was twenty-seven years old, born in Fukuoka, educated at Waseda University. She lived in an apartment building on Kotto-dori in Minami-Aoyama. No arrests. No debt. Nothing remarkable.
The club was more interesting, and more opaque. It was owned by a succession of offshore corporations. If there were any individual names tied to its ownership, they existed only on certificates of incorporation in someone’s vault, not on computers, where I might have gotten to them. Whoever owned the club didn’t want the world to know of the association. In itself, this wasn’t damning. Cash businesses are always mobbed up.
Harry could almost certainly have found more on both subjects. It was too bad that I couldn’t ask him. I’d just have to give him a heads-up and recommend that he do a little checking himself. It was frustrating, but I didn’t see what else I could do. He might take it badly, but I wouldn’t be around for much longer, anyway. And who knows? I thought. Maybe you’re wrong. Maybe he’ll find nothing.
Naomi checked out, too. Naomi Nascimento, Brazilian national, arrived in Japan August 24, 2000, courtesy of the JET program. I used the e-mail address she had given me to work backward to where she lived—the Lion’s Gate Building, an apartment complex in Azabu Juban 3-chome. No other information.
As my preparations for departure approached completion, I made a point of visiting some of the places near Osaka that I knew I would never see again. Some were as I remembered them from childhood trips. There was Asuka, birthplace of Yamato Japan, with its long-vacant burial mounds, surfaces carved with supernatural images of beasts and semi-humans, their makers and their meaning lost in the timeless swaying of the rice paddies around them; Koya-san, the holy mountain, reputedly the resting place of Kobo Daishi, Japan’s great saint, who is said to linger near the mountain’s vast necropolis not dead but meditating, his vigil marked by the mantras of monks that drone among the nearby markers of the dead as ancient and eternal as summer insects in primordial groves; and Nara, for a moment some thirteen centuries ago the new nation’s capital, where, if the morning is young enough and the tourist floodwaters have not yet risen in their quotidian banks, you might find yourself passing a lone octogenarian, his shoulders bent with the weight of age, his slippers shuffling along the cobblestones, his passage as timeless and resolute as the ancient city itself.
I supposed it was strange to feel the urge to say goodbye to any of this. After all, none of it had ever been mine. I had understood even as a child that to be half Japanese is to be half something else, and to be half something else is to be . . . chigatte. Chigatte, meaning “different,” but equally meaning “wrong.” The language, like the culture, makes no distinction.
I also went to Kyoto. I had found no occasion to visit the city in over twenty years, and was struck to find that the graceful, vital metropolis I remembered was nearly extinct, disappearing like an unloved garden given over to vapid, industrious weeds. Where was the fulgent peak of Higashi Honganji Temple, sweeping upward among the surrounding tiled roofs like the upturned chin of a princess among her retainers? That magnificent view, which had once greeted travelers to the city, was now blotted out by the new train station, an abomination that sprawled along a half-mile length of tracks like a massive turd that had plummeted from space and come to rest there, too gargantuan to be carted away.
I walked for hours, marveling at the extent of the destruction. Cars drove through Daitokuji Temple. Mount Hiei, the birthplace of Japanese Buddhism, had been turned into a parking lot, with an entertainment emporium on its summit. Streets that had once been lined with ancient wooden houses accented with bamboo trellises were now tawdry with plastic and aluminum and neon, the wooden houses dismantled and gone. Everywhere were metastasizing telephone lines, riots of electric wires, laundry hanging from prefabricated apartment windows like tears from idiot eyes.
On my way back to Osaka, I entered the Grand Hotel, more or less the geographic center of the city. I took the elevator to the top floor, where, with the exception of the Toji Pagoda and a sliver of the Honganji Temple roof, I was confronted in all directions by nothing but interchangeable urban blight. The city’s living beauty had been beaten back into clusters of cowering refugees, like the results of some inexplicable experiment in cultural apartheid.
I thought of the poem by Basho, the wandering bard, which had moved me when my mother had first related it, on my earliest visit to the city. She had taken my hand as we stood upon the towering scaffold of Kiyomizu Temple, looking out upon the still city before us, and, surprising me with her accented Japanese, had said:
Kyou nite mo kyou natsukashiya . . . Though in Kyoto, I long for Kyoto . . .
But the meaning of the poem, once a paean to ineffable, unfulfillable longing, had changed. Like the city itself, it was now sadly ironic.
I smiled without mirth, thinking that, if any of this had been mine, I would have taken better care of it. This is what you get if you put your trust in the government, I thought. People ought to know better.
I felt my pager buzz. I unclipped it and saw the code Tatsu and I had established to identify ourselves, along with a phone number. I’d been half expecting something like this, but not quite so soon. Shit, I thought. Things are so close.
I took the elevator down to the lobby, and walked out into the street. When I had found a pay phone in a suitable innocuous location, I inserted a phone card and punched in Tatsu’s number. I could have just ignored him, but it was hard to predict what he might do in response to that. Better to know what he wanted, while maintaining the appearance of cooperation.
There was a single ring, then I heard his voice. “Moshi moshi,” he said, without identifying himself.
“Hello,” I replied.
“Are you still in the same place?”
“Why would I want to leave?” I asked, letting him hear the sarcasm.
“I thought that, after our last meeting, you might choose to . . . travel again.”
“I might. Haven’t gotten around to it yet. I thought you’d know that.”
“I am trying to respect your privacy.”
Bastard. Even when he was busily ruining my life, he could always coax a smile out of me. “I appreciate that,” I told him.
“I would like to see you again, if you wouldn’t mind.”
I hesitated. He already knew where I lived. He didn’t have to arrange a meeting elsewhere, if he’d wanted to get to me. “Social visit?” I asked.
“That is up to you.”
“Social visit.”
“All right.”
“When?”
“I’ll be in town tonight. Same place as last time?”
I hesitated again, then said, “Don’t know if we’ll be able to get in. There’s a hotel very near there, though, with a good bar. My kind of place. You know what I’m talking about?”
I was referring to the bar at the Osaka Ritz-Carlton.
“I imagine I can find it.”
“I’ll meet you at the bar at the same time we met last time.”
“Yes. I will look forward to seeing you then.” A pause. Then: “Thank you.”
I hung up.
7
I TOOK THE Hankyu train back to Osaka and went straight to the Ritz. I wanted to be sure I was in position at least a few hours early, in case there was anything I would want to see coming. I ordered a fruit and cheese plate and drank Darjeeling tea while I waited.
Tatsu was punctual, as always. He was courteous, too, moving slowly and letting me see him to show he didn’t intend any surprises. He sat down across from me in one of the upholstered chairs. He looked around, taking in the light wood paneling, the wall sconces and chandeliers.
“I need your assistance again,” he said, after a moment.
Predictable. And right to the point, as always. But I’d make him wait before responding. “You want a whiskey?” I asked. “They’ve got a nice twelve-year-old Cragganmore.”
He shook his head. “I’d like to join you, but my doctor advises me to refrain from such indulgences.”
“I didn’t know you listened to your doctor.”
He pursed his lips as though in preparation for a painful admission. “My wife, too, has become strict about such matters.”
I looked at him and smiled, faintly surprised at the image of this tough, resourceful guy deferring sheepishly to a wife.
“What is it?” he asked.
I told him the truth. “It’s always good to see you, you bastard.”
He smiled back, a network of creases appearing around his eyes. “Kochira koso.” The same here.
He gestured to the waitress and ordered chamomile tea. Because he wasn’t drinking, I stayed away from the Cragganmore. A small pity.
Then he turned to me. “As I was saying, I need your assistance again.”
I drummed my fingers along my glass. “I thought you said this would be a social visit.”
He nodded. “I was lying.”
I had already known that, and he knew that I knew. Still: “I thought you said I could trust you.”
“On the important things, certainly. Anyway, a social visit doesn’t preclude a request for a favor.”
“Is that what you’re asking for? A favor?”
He shrugged. “You are no longer obligated to me.”
“I used to get paid a lot of money when I did favors for people.”