by Barry Eisler
The trick is to use hot water at the spigots where you sit, filling the sento-supplied low plastic pail with increasingly painful bucketfuls and pouring them over your head and body. If you bathe using only tepid water, the soaking tub will be unbearable when you first try to enter it.
Tatsu completed his cleaning cycle with characteristic brusqueness and got in the bath ahead of me. I took a bit longer. When I was ready, I eased in beside him. Immediately I felt my muscles trying to shrink back from the heat, and knew that in a moment they would give up their fruitless struggle and surrender to delirious relaxation.
“Yappari, kore ga saiko da na?” I said to him, feeling myself begin to unwind. This is great, isn’t it?
He nodded. “An unusual place for a meeting. But a good one.”
I settled deeper into the water. “You’ve been drinking all that tea, so I figured you’d appreciate a place that’s good for your health.”
“Ah, you were being considerate. I thought that perhaps this was your way of showing me you had nothing to hide.”
I laughed. I briefed him on the dojo and the underground fights, and on Murakami’s connection with both. I gave him my assessment of Murakami’s strengths and weaknesses: deadly, on the one hand; unable to blend, on the other.
“You say the promoters of these fights are losing money,” he said when I was done.
I watched the mural, my eyes half-closed. “Based on what Murakami told me, yes. At three fights in a night with two-million-yen payouts to the winners, plus expenses, they’ve got to be in the red. Even on those nights where they have two or even one, they can’t be doing more than breaking even.”
“What does that tell you?”
I closed my eyes. “That they’re not doing it for the money.”
“Yes. The question, then, is why are they doing it? What is the benefit they derive?”
I pictured the bridged, predatory smile. “Some of these people, like Murakami, are pretty sick. I think they enjoy it.”
“I’m sure they do. But I doubt that entertainment alone would be sufficient motive to create and sustain this kind of enterprise.”
“What do you think, then?”
“When you were with Special Forces,” he asked, his tone musing and thoughtful, “how did you treat personnel who performed a vital function for the unit?”
I opened my eyes and glanced at him. “Redundancy. A backup. Like an extra kidney.”
“Yes. Now put yourself in Yamaoto’s shoes. With you, he could quietly eliminate anyone who proved uninterested in his rewards, or invulnerable to his blackmail, or who otherwise presented a threat to the machine he has established. You served a vital function. Following your loss, Yamaoto would have learned not to allow such reliance on a single person. He would seek to build redundancy into the system.”
“Even if Murakami had been a total replacement.”
“Which you say he is not.”
“So the dojo Murakami is running, the fights . . .”
“It seems they constitute a training course of sorts.”
“A training course . . . ,” I said, shaking my head. I saw him looking at me, waiting, one step ahead as usual.
Then I saw it. “Assassins?” I asked.
He raised his eyebrows, as if to say You tell me.
“The dojo is the course introduction,” I said, nodding. “And with the kind of training they do there, they’ve already selected for individuals predisposed to violence. Exposure every day, sometimes twice a day, to that regimen desensitizes the individual further. Being a spectator at actual death matches is the next step.”
“And the fights themselves . . .”
“The fights complete the process. Sure, the whole thing is just a form of basic training. Better, in fact, because only a relatively few soldiers who pass through basic training experience combat and killing afterward. Here, killing is part of the curriculum. And the cadre you create is composed only of the ones who survive, who are the most proficient at what they’ve learned.”
It made sense. A resort to assassins wasn’t even original. In past centuries, the shogun and daimyo employed ninja in their own internecine struggles. I remembered Yamaoto from our run-in a year earlier and knew he would probably be flattered by the comparison.
“Do you see how this development fits in with Yamaoto’s longer-range plans?” he asked.
I shook my head. It was hard to think through the penetrating heat.
He looked at me the way you might look at a slow but still likable child. “What are Japan’s overall prospects for the future?” he asked.
“How do you mean?”
“As a nation. Where will we be in ten, twenty years?”
I considered. “Not so well off, I suppose. There are a lot of problems—deflation, energy, unemployment, the environment, the banking mess—and no one seems to be able to do anything about it.”
“Yes. And you are correct in distinguishing Japan’s problems, which all countries have, from our powerlessness to solve those problems, in which respect we are unique among industrialized nations.”
He was looking at me, and I knew what he was thinking. Until recently, I had been one of the causes of that powerlessness.
“All that consensus-building takes time,” I said.
“Often it takes forever. But a cultural predisposition to consensus-building is not the real problem.” I saw a trace of a smile. “Even you were not the real problem. The real problem is the nature of our corruption.”
“Quite a few scandals lately,” I said, nodding. “Cars, nuclear, the food industry . . . I mean, if you can’t trust Mr. Donut, who can you trust?”
He grimaced. “What was happening at the TEPCO nuclear facilities was worse than a disgrace. The managers should be executed.”
“Are you asking me for another ‘favor’?”
He smiled. “I must take care in my phraseology when I’m talking to you.”
“Anyway,” I said, “didn’t the responsible TEPCO managers resign?”
“Yes, they resigned. While the regulators remained—the same regulators who get a cut from the funds allocated to the building and maintenance of nuclear plants, who only just publicized dangers they had known about for years.”
He pulled himself up and sat on the edge of the tub to take a break from the heat. “You know, Rain-san,” he said, “societies are like organisms, and no organism is invulnerable to disease. What matters is whether an organism can mount an effective defense when it finds itself under attack. In Japan, the virus of corruption has attacked the immune system itself, like a societal form of AIDS. Consequently, the body has lost its ability to defend itself. This is what I mean when I say that all countries have problems, but only Japan has problems it has lost the ability to solve. The TEPCO managers resign, but the men charged with regulating their activities for all those years remain? Only in Japan.”
He looked pretty down in the mouth, and I wished for a moment that he wouldn’t take this shit so seriously. If he kept it up, he’d have an ulcer the size of an asteroid. I sat down next to him.
“I know it’s bad, Tatsu,” I said, trying to give him a little perspective, “but Japan is hardly unique when it comes to corruption. Maybe it’s a little worse here, but in America, you’ve got Enron, Tyco, WorldCom, analysts pumping their clients’ stock to get their kids into the right preschools . . .”
“Yes, but look at the outrage those revelations have induced in America’s regulatory system,” he said. “Open hearings are conducted. New legislation is passed. Heads of corporations go to jail. But in Japan, outrage is considered outrageous. Our culture seems strongly disposed toward acquiescence, ne?”
I smiled and in response offered one of the most common phrases in the language. “Shoganai,” I said. Literally, There is no way of doing it.
“Yes,” he said, nodding. “Elsewhere they have ‘C’est la vie,’ or ‘That’s life.’ Where the focus is on circumstances. Only in Japan do we focus on o
ur own inability to change those circumstances.”
He wiped his brow. “So. Consider this state of affairs from Yamaoto’s perspective. He understands that, with the immune system suppressed, there must eventually be a catastrophic failure of the host. There have been so many near-misses—financial, ecological, nuclear—it is only a matter of time before a true cataclysm occurs. Perhaps a nuclear accident that irradiates an entire city. Or a countrywide run on banks and loss of deposits. Whatever it is, it will finally be of sufficient magnitude to shake Japan’s voters from their apathy. Yamaoto knows that violent disgust with an existing regime historically tends to cause an extremist backlash. This was true in Weimar Germany and czarist Russia, to list only two examples.”
“People would finally vote for change.”
“Yes. The question is, a change to what?”
“You think Yamaoto is trying to position himself to surf that coming wave of outrage?”
“Of course. Look at Murakami’s training course for assassins. This will augment Yamaoto’s ability to silence and intimidate. Such an ability is one of the historical prerequisites of all fascist movements. I’ve told you before, Yamaoto is at heart a rightist.”
I thought of some of the good news from the provinces I’d been reading, how some of the politicians there were standing up to the bureaucrats and other corrupt interests, opening up the books, eschewing the public works projects that have all but buried the country under poured concrete.
“And you’re working with untainted politicians to make sure that Yamaoto isn’t the outraged voters’ only choice?” I asked.
“I do what I can,” he said.
Translation: I’ve told you as much as you need to know.
But I knew the disk, practically a who’s who of Yamaoto’s network of corruption, would have provided by negative implication an invaluable road map to who was absent from that network. I imagined Tatsu working with the good guys, warning them, trying to protect them. Positioning them like stones on a go board.
I told him about Damask Rose and Murakami’s apparent connection to the place.
“Those women are being used to set up and suborn Yamaoto’s enemies,” he said when I was done.
“Not all of them,” I said, thinking of Naomi.
“No, not all. Some of them might not even know what is happening, although I imagine they would at least suspect. Yamaoto prefers to run such establishments as legitimate enterprises. Doing so makes them difficult to ferret out and dislodge. Ishihara, the weightlifter, was instrumental in that capacity. It’s good that he is gone.”
He wiped his forehead again. “I find it interesting that Murakami seems to have an important function with regard to that end of Yamaoto’s means of control, as well. He may be even more vital to Yamaoto’s power than I had first suspected. No wonder Yamaoto is attempting to diversify. He needs to reduce his dependence on this man.”
“Tatsu,” I said.
He looked at me, and I sensed he knew what was coming.
“I’m not going to take him out.”
There was a long pause. His face was expressionless.
“I see,” he said, his voice quiet.
“It’s too dangerous. It was dangerous before, and now they’ve got my picture on Damask Rose home video. If the wrong person sees that picture, they’ll know who I am.”
“Their interest is in politicians and bureaucrats and the like. The chance of that video making its way to Yamaoto, or to one of the very few other people in his organization who might recognize your face, seems remote.”
“It doesn’t seem remote to me. Anyway, this guy is a hard target, very hard. To take out someone like that and make it look natural, it’s almost impossible.”
He looked at me. “Make it look unnatural, then. The stakes are high enough to take that chance.”
“I might do that. But I’m no good with a sniper rifle, and I’m not going to use a bomb because bystanders would get blown up, too. And short of those two options, putting this guy down and getting away clean is too much of a long shot.”
I realized that I’d allowed myself to start arguing with him on practical grounds. I should have just told him no and shut my mouth.
Another long pause. Then he said, “What does he make of you, do you think?”
I took a deep breath of the moist air and let it out. “I don’t know. On the one hand, he’s seen what I can do. On the other hand, I don’t send out danger vibes the way he does. He can’t control that sort of thing, so it wouldn’t occur to him that someone else could.”
“He underestimates you, then.”
“Maybe. But not by much. People like Murakami don’t underestimate.”
“You’ve proven that you can get close to him. I could get you a gun.”
“I told you, he’s always with at least two bodyguards.”
The second I said it I wished I hadn’t. Now we were negotiating. This was stupid.
“Line them up right,” he said. “Take out all three.”
“Tatsu, you don’t understand this guy’s instincts. He doesn’t let anyone line up anything. When we got out of the Benz in front of his club, I saw him scoping rooftops for snipers. He knew where to look, too. He’d feel me lining him up from a mile away. Just like I’d feel him. Forget it.”
He frowned. “How can I convince you?”
“You can’t. Look, this was a risky proposition to begin with, but I was willing to undertake the risk in return for what you can do for me. I’ve learned that the risk is now greater than I had originally thought. The reward is the same. So the equation has changed. It’s no more complicated than that.”
Neither of us said anything for a long time. Finally, he sighed and said, “What will you do, retire?”
“Maybe.”
“You can’t retire.”
I paused. When I spoke, my voice was quiet, not much more than a whisper. “I hope you’re not saying that you might interfere.”
He didn’t flinch. “There would be no need for me to interfere,” he said. “You don’t have retirement in you. I wish you could recognize that. What will you do, find an island somewhere, spend time on the beach catching up on all the books you’ve been missing? Join a go club? Anesthetize yourself with whiskey when your restless memories refuse to permit sleep?”
But for the jellifying effects of the heat, I might have gotten upset at that.
“Maybe therapy,” he went on. “Yes, therapy is popular these days. It could help you come to terms with all the lives you have taken. Perhaps even with the one you have decided to waste.”
I looked at him. “You’re trying to goad me, Tatsu,” I said softly.
“You need goading.”
“Not from you.”
He frowned. “You say you might retire. I understand that. But what I’m doing is important and right. This is our country.”
I snorted. “It’s not ‘our’ country. I’m just a visitor.”
“Who told you that?”
“Everyone who mattered.”
“They would be glad to know that you listened.”
“Enough. I owed you. I paid. I’m done.”
I got up and rinsed with cold water at one of the spigots. He did the same. We changed and walked down the stairs.
Just outside the entranceway, he turned to me. “Rain-san,” he said. “Will I see you again?”
I looked at him. “Are you a threat to me?” I asked.
“Not if you are really going to retire, no.”
“Then we might see each other. But not for a while.”
“Then we needn’t say sayonara.”
“We needn’t say it.”
He smiled his sad smile. “I have a request.”
I smiled back. “With you, Tatsu, it would be a little dangerous to agree to anything up front.”
He nodded, accepting the point. “Ask yourself what you hope to get out of retirement. And whether retirement will achieve it.”
I said, “Th
at I can do.”
“Thank you.”
He extended his hand and I shook it.
“De wa,” I said, by way of goodbye. Well, then.
He nodded again. “Ki o tsukete,” he said, a farewell that can be intended as an innocuous Take care or as a more literal Be careful.
The ambiguity felt deliberate.
13
I WAITED UNTIL after seven that evening, when I knew Yukiko would have left for the club, then called Harry. I was going to tell him what he needed to hear. I owed him that much. What he decided to do with the information would then be his problem, not mine.
We set up a meeting at a coffee shop in Nippori. I told him to take his time getting there. He understood the translation: With the Agency snooping around, do a damn thorough SDR.
I got there early per my usual practice and passed the time sipping an espresso and leafing through a magazine someone had left on the table. After about an hour Harry showed up.
“Hey, kid,” I said when I saw him. I noticed he was wearing a stylish lambskin jacket, and wool trousers instead of the usual jeans. He’d gotten a haircut, too. He looked nearly presentable. I realized there was no way he was going to listen to me, and almost decided not to bother telling him.
But that wouldn’t be right. I would give him the information, and it would be his responsibility to use it. Or not.
He sat down and, before I could open my mouth, said, “Don’t worry. There’s no way I was followed.”
“Doesn’t that go without saying?”