by Barry Eisler
Yukiko walked over, and I saw her mouth stretch into a feline grin at the sight of Murakami. Naomi followed a moment later. She was wearing another elegant black cocktail dress, this one of silk, fitted at the waist but loose above it. The diamond bracelet glittered on her left wrist as before.
She saw me, and her expression started to break into a smile that aborted itself when her eyes shifted from my face to Murakami’s. She must have known him, and, based on the story I had told her, obviously didn’t expect to see us together. She was trying to process the incongruity, certainly. But the suddenness of her change of expression told me there was more. She was scared.
Yukiko sat next to Murakami and across from me. She looked at me for a long moment, then briefly at Murakami, then back at me. Her lips moved in the barest hint of a cool smile. Murakami stared at her as though waiting for more, but she ignored him. I felt a tension building and thought, Don’t play with this guy. He could go off. Then she turned her eyes to him again and permitted him a smile that said, I was only teasing you, darling. Don’t be such a child.
The tension dropped away. I thought that if anyone had a measure of control over the creature sitting next to me, it was probably this woman.
Naomi took the remaining seat. “Hisashiburi desu ne,” I said to her. It’s been a while.
“Un, so desu ne,” she replied, her expression now neutral. Yes, it has. She might have thought it odd that I was now using Japanese when the other night I had insisted on English. But perhaps I was only deferring to our other companions.
“You know each other,” Murakami interjected in Japanese. “Good. Arai-san, this is Yukiko.”
Naomi gave no indication of having noticed that I had a new name.
“Hajimemashite,” Yukiko said. She continued in Japanese, “I remember seeing you here a few weeks ago.”
I bowed my head slightly and returned her salutation. “And I remember you. You’re a wonderful dancer.”
She cocked her head to the side. “You look different, somehow.”
My American and Japanese personalities are distinct, and I carry myself differently depending on which language I’m using and which mode I’m in. Probably it was this, as much as his nervousness in Murakami’s presence, that had caused Mr. Ruddy not to remember me. Yukiko was responding to the difference but unsure of what to make of it.
I ran my fingers through my hair as though to straighten it. “I just came from a workout,” I said.
Murakami chuckled. “You sure did.”
A waitress came over. She set down four oshibori, hot washcloths with which we would wipe our hands and perhaps our faces to refresh ourselves, and a variety of small snacks. The arrangement completed, she looked at Murakami and, apparently knowing his preferences, asked, “Bombay Sapphire?” He nodded curtly and indicated that Yukiko would have the same.
The waitress looked at me. “Okyakusama?” she asked.
I turned to Naomi. “The Springbank?” I asked. She nodded and I ordered two.
The vibrant half-Latina that had emerged the other night had retracted like a turtle into its shell. What would she be thinking? New name, new Japanese persona, new yakuza pal. All fodder for conversation, but she was saying nothing.
Why? If I’d run into her in the street, the first thing she would have said would have been, “What are you doing back in Tokyo?” If I had used a different name, surely she would have commented on that. And if she heard me speaking in unaccented, native Japanese, of course she would have said, “I thought you said you were more comfortable with English?”
So her reticence was situation-specific. I thought of the fear I had detected when her eyes had first alighted on Murakami. It was him. She was afraid of saying or doing something that would draw his attention.
The last time I had seen her, I had the sense that she knew more than she was willing to say. Her reaction to Murakami confirmed that suspicion. And if she were inclined to give me away, she already would have done it. That she had failed to do so made her complicit, created a shared secret. Something I could exploit.
Yukiko picked up an oshibori and used it to wipe Murakami’s hands, cool as an animal handler grooming a lion. Naomi handed me mine.
“Arai-san is a friend of mine,” Murakami said, looking at me and then at the girls and smiling his bridged smile. “Please be good to him.”
Yukiko smiled deeply into my eyes as if to say If we were alone, I would take suuuch good care of you. In my peripheral vision I saw Murakami catch the look and frown.
I wouldn’t want to be on the wrong end of this bastard’s jealousy, I thought, imagining Harry.
The waitress came and put the drinks on the table. Murakami drained his in a single draught. Yukiko followed suit.
“Ii yo,” Murakami growled. Good. Yukiko set her glass down with practiced delicacy. Murakami looked at her. She returned the look, something almost theatrically nonchalant in her expression. The look went on for a long moment. Then he grinned and grabbed her hand.
“Okawari,” he called to the waitress. Two more drinks. He pulled Yukiko to her feet and away from the table. I watched him lead her to a room to the side of one of the dance stages.
“What was that?” I asked Naomi in Japanese.
She was looking at me. Warily, I thought.
“A lap dance,” she said.
“They seem to know each other well.”
“Yes.”
I looked around. The adjacent tables were filled with parties of Japanese men in standard sarariman attire. Even with the ambient noise, they were too close to permit a private conversation.
I leaned closer to Naomi. “I didn’t expect to be back here,” I said softly.
She winced. “I’m glad you came.”
I didn’t know what to make of the inconsistency between her reaction and her words. “You must have a lot of questions,” I said.
She shook her head. “I just want to make sure you enjoy yourself tonight.”
“I think I know why you’re acting this way,” I started to say.
She cut me off with a suddenly raised hand. “How about that lap dance?” she asked. Her tone was inviting, but her eyes were somewhere between serious and angry.
I looked at her, trying to gauge what she was up to, then said, “Sure.”
We walked to the same room that Murakami and Yukiko had gone to a few minutes earlier. Another Nigerian was waiting just inside the entrance. He bowed and pulled aside a high-backed, semicircular sofa. A matching unit was positioned on the other side of it. We stepped inside and the Nigerian pushed the front half closed behind us. We were now enclosed in a circular, upholstered compartment.
Naomi gestured to the cushioned sofa seat. I lowered myself onto it, watching her face.
She stepped back, her eyes on mine. Her hands went to her back and I heard the sound of a zipper. Then her right hand moved to the left strap of her dress and began to ease it over the smooth skin of her shoulder.
There was a sudden buzz in my pocket.
Son of a bitch. Harry’s bug detector.
Continuous, intermittent, continuous. Meaning both audio and video.
I was careful not to look around or do anything else that might have seemed suspicious. I opened my mouth to say something to her, something any other excited beneficiary of an incipient lap dance might utter. But she made a face—half scowl, half exasperation—that stopped me. She raised a subtle index finger from the strap of her dress to the ceiling. Then she cocked her head slightly and shifted her finger to her ear.
I got the message. People were listening, and watching.
Not just here. At the table, too. That’s why her responses had been so odd. She couldn’t warn me there.
And why she had looked angry tonight, I realized. Was I just the American accountant I had claimed to be, or at least a neutral party? If so, silence would be her safest course. Was I involved with Murakami, who frightened her? If so, silence, and certainly a warning like the one s
he had just given me, would be dangerous. I had inadvertently forced her to choose.
But the detector hadn’t buzzed at the table. Then I realized: Murakami. If the tables were monitored, they knew to turn off the equipment when the boss was around. Those would be the rules, and I imagined that no one would want a guy like Murakami finding out that they weren’t being adhered to. And the last time I’d been here, the device hadn’t been charged yet. That’s why it hadn’t warned me then.
I reached into my pocket to switch off the unit, nodding to indicate I understood.
She finished moving the strap away and slipped her arm through it, then slowly performed the identical action on the opposite side. She crossed her arms. Her nostrils were flaring slightly with her breathing. She paused for a moment. Then, still scowling, her body rigid, she moved her arms to her sides. The dress slid down, past her breasts, past her belly, gathering in black ripples at her waist.
“You can touch with your hands,” she said. “Only above the waist.”
I stood, keeping my eyes on hers. I leaned forward and put my mouth to her ear. “Thanks for the warning,” I whispered.
“Don’t thank me,” she whispered back. “It’s not as though you left me any choice.”
“I’m not with these people.”
“No? You were fighting tonight, weren’t you?”
“Why do you say that?”
“Your face is scratched. And I understood Murakami’s joke about your ‘workout.” ’
Adonis must have dented me a little. I hadn’t even noticed.
“You know about those fights?” I asked.
“Everyone knows about them. The fighters come in here afterward and brag. Sometimes they act like we’re deaf.”
“I wasn’t there voluntarily. I work out at a dojo, some people invited me to a fight. I didn’t know what it was all about. Turned out I wasn’t there to eat. I was supposed to be the main course.”
“Too bad for you,” she whispered.
“If you think I’m with these people,” I said, “why are you talking to me now? Why did you warn me about the listening devices?”
“Because I’m as stupid as you are.” She took a step back and looked at me, her hands on her hips, her chin high. She raised her eyebrows and smiled. “Are you afraid to touch me?”
I watched her face. What I wanted was information, not a damn lap dance.
“You’re afraid even to look?” she asked, her smile taunting.
I held her eyes for another moment, then let my gaze go south.
“You like what you see?” she asked.
“It’s okay,” I said after a moment, although in fact it was much better than that.
She turned around and pushed back against me, leaning forward slightly as she did so, molding the back of her body to the front of mine.
I realized suddenly that this was a game I could only lose.
She put her hands on her knees and moved her hips from side to side. The friction from her ass assumed a prominent place in my consciousness.
“You like that?” she asked, looking over her shoulder.
“It’s okay,” I said again, my voice lower this time, and she laughed.
“It feels like you like it better than ‘okay,’ no?”
“I want to talk to you,” I said. I noticed I had put my hands on her hips. I removed them.
“So talk,” she said, pressing into me harder. “Say anything you like.”
She was trying to divert me. She didn’t want to talk and I didn’t know how to make her.
She arched her back and pushed her ass higher. A shadow formed like a dark pool in the cleft of her lower spine.
“Anything you like,” she said again.
The shadow waxed and waned in time to her movements.
“Cut it out, damn it,” I whispered. My hands were on her hips again.
“But you like it,” she cooed. “I like it, too.”
Disengage, I thought. But my hands stayed put. They were moving now. I watched them as though from afar. The sound of fabric against flesh was loud in the enclosure.
She’s playing you, I thought.
Then: The hell with it. You’re supposed to be acting like an ordinary customer, anyway.
I dropped to one knee, sliding my hands down to the backs of her thighs as I did so, then stood again, my hands sweeping the dress upward en route. She was wearing a black thong. The dress dangled slightly above it, gathered at her lower back. I gripped the dress in one hand like a bridle and took hold of her ass with the other.
“Only above the waist,” she said, smiling over her shoulder, her cool voice in counterpoint to the heat in my head and gut. “Or I have to call the doorman.”
I felt a surge of anger. Let it go, I thought. Just get out of here. Like you should have before this bullshit began.
I removed my hand from her ass and took a step back, but my anger got the better of me. Still gripping the dress with one hand, I swiveled my hips in and delivered a hard spank to her exposed right cheek. There was a loud slap! and she yelped, jerking away from me as though from an electric shock.
She spun and faced me, one hand on her wounded posterior. Her eyes were wide, her nostrils flared with shock and anger. In my peripheral vision I saw her weight shift to her back leg, and thought she was going to try for a ball shot with her forward foot.
Instead, she stepped back. Her arms slipped to her sides and she drew up her shoulders and chin, the picture of suppressed regal rage. She looked at me.
“Mo owari, okyakusama?” she asked, as contemptuously as she could. Are we finished, honorable customer?
“Was that against the rules?” I asked, smiling into her eyes.
She pulled up the dress and slipped her arms through the straps. Her face was still red with anger, and I couldn’t help admiring her composure in controlling it. She managed the zipper without assistance, then said, “That was three songs, so thirty thousand yen. And you should tip the doorman ten percent. Ken?”
Ken must have been the Nigerian, because a second later the semicircular sofa was pulled aside and there he was. I took out my billfold and paid each of them.
“Thank you,” I said to Naomi. I beamed like a well-satisfied customer. “That was . . . special.”
She smiled back in a way that made me glad she didn’t have a weapon. “Kochira koso,” she replied. The pleasure was mine.
She escorted me back to my seat. I switched the unit back on en route. Murakami and Yukiko were waiting for us.
“Yokatta ka?” Murakami asked me, showing me the false teeth. Good?
“Maa na,” I told him. Good enough.
He took Yukiko’s hand and started moving away. “We’ll discuss our business another time,” he said.
“When?”
“Soon. I’ll find you at the dojo.”
He didn’t like to make appointments any more than I did. “Morning? Evening?” I asked.
“Morning. Soon.” He turned to Naomi. “Naomi, shikkari mendo mite yare yo.” Take good care of him, Naomi. Naomi bowed her head to show that she most certainly would.
Murakami and Yukiko left. A minute later the detector started buzzing—continuous, so audio only. I’d been right about the house rules.
Naomi and I made small talk for a few minutes for the benefit of the microphones. Her tone was cool and correct. I knew our little encounter hadn’t turned out quite the way she had planned, but she had managed to distract me from my questions, which was what she had really been after. Probably she was telling herself that the fight had been a draw, that she could settle for that.
What she didn’t know was that it had only been round one.
I told her I was bushed and had to go. “Come back anytime,” she said with a sarcastic smile.
“For another one of those lap dances?” I asked, returning the smile. “Absolutely.”
I walked up the stairs and out onto Gaienhigashi-dori. When I got to the street a horn tooted. I saw Yukiko d
riving by in a white BMW M3, Murakami in the passenger seat. She waved, then disappeared onto Aoyama-dori.
It was just past one in the morning. The club closed at three. Naomi would be heading home at some point thereafter.
I’d done the computer check. I knew where home was. The Lion’s Gate Building, Azabu Juban 3-chome.
The trains had already stopped running. I doubted that she’d have a car: keeping one in the city is too expensive and the trains go everywhere, anyway. Getting home would mean a taxi.
I took a cab to Azabu Juban subway station, then walked around 3-chome until I found her building. Standard upscale apartment manshon, tan ferroconcrete, new and spiffy-looking. Straightforward front entrance with double glass doors, electronically controlled. Security camera mounted on the ceiling just inside the glass.
The building was on the corner of a one-way street. I moved to the back, where I found a secondary entrance—smaller, more discreet than the first, something that only residents would use. This one had no camera.
The second access point complicated things. If I waited at the wrong entrance, I would miss her entirely.
I considered. All these streets were one-way, one of Azabu Juban’s trademarks. If she were coming from Damask Rose, the cab would have to pass the second entrance first. Most likely she would get out there. Even if the cab continued around to the front, though, I’d have time to dash around behind it and get to her before she went inside.
Okay. I looked around for the right place. Ordinarily, when I’m setting someone up, I try for maximum concealment and surprise. But that’s prior to a fatal encounter. Here, I was hoping just to talk. If I scared her too much, made her feel too vulnerable, she would just run inside and that would be the end of it.
There was a perpendicular side street that led to where I was standing, dead-ending just to the side of the second entrance to her building. I walked down it. I noticed an awning on the side of the building to my left, under the shadow of which were stacked several large plastic garbage bins. I could wait in those shadows quietly, and even someone walking right past me would be unlikely to notice.
I checked my watch. Almost two. I killed time walking around the neighborhood. I passed no more than a half-dozen people. By three the area would be almost completely deserted.