by Barry Eisler
I walked to the back of the room and into the bathroom. I was already so juiced from adrenaline that I couldn’t have pissed if I had to, but that wasn’t what I had come to do.
I was looking for a weapon of convenience. I would call Tatsu after I found it. Maybe some powdered soap that I could toss into someone’s eyes, or a mop handle that I could break off into a nightstick. Anything that would improve the currently ugly odds.
My eyes swept the room but there was nothing. The soap was liquid. If there was a mop, they kept it elsewhere.
You should have done this before it mattered. Stupid. Stupid.
One thing. There was a brass doorstop screwed into the wall just above the floor and behind the door. I knelt and tried to turn it. It was too close to the floor for me to get a hand around. And it was coated in probably ten layers of paint and looked as old as the building. It wouldn’t budge.
“Fuck,” I breathed. I could have tried stomping on it with my heel, but that might have broken off the point that was screwed into the wall.
Instead I tried pressing one way with my palm, then the other. Up, down. Left, right. I jiggled it but felt no new play. Damn it, this is taking too long.
I squeezed it between the thumbs and forefingers of both hands as hard as I could and rotated it counterclockwise. For a second I thought my fingers had slipped, but then I realized that it had turned.
I unscrewed it the rest of the way and stood just as the bathroom door opened. It was one of the bodyguards.
He looked at me. “Everything okay?” he asked, holding the door open.
I palmed the doorstop. “Just washing my hands. Be right with you.”
He nodded and left. The door closed behind him and I shoved the doorstop into my right front pocket.
Of course, I didn’t know for certain that they were on to me. Murakami might have just been there to talk about whatever it was he had in mind at Damask Rose. But that didn’t matter. The important thing is to accept the facts early. Most people don’t want to believe the crime or the ambush or whatever the violence is going to be is really going to happen. At some level they know better, but they keep themselves in denial until the proof really comes in. At which point, of course, it’s too late to do anything about it.
If I have to err, it’s on the side of assuming the worst. This way, if I’m wrong, I can always apologize. Or send flowers. You err on the other side, the flowers will be coming to you.
I pulled out the cell phone and pressed the speed dial key as I walked out. The first thing I noticed was that the gym was empty. It was just Murakami and his two goons, standing between me and the door. They’d set my bag down near the front entrance. I didn’t see the gun, so it seemed that they hadn’t thought to open the bag during my brief absence.
“What’s going on?” I asked, but casually, as though I was too stupid to realize anything was seriously amiss and was counting on Murakami for a straight answer.
“Everything’s fine,” he said, and they began to move toward me. “We just asked the others to wait outside so we could have some privacy.”
“Oh, okay,” I said. I held up the cell phone. “Just got to make a quick phone call.”
“Later,” he said.
I hoped Tatsu and his men were close by. They’d have to be right around the corner if they were going to be of any use to me.
“You sure?” I asked, looking at him, giving the call time to go through. “It’ll only take a minute.”
“Later,” he said again. The bodyguards had fanned out to his flanks.
I glanced down and saw that the call had connected. “Okay,” I said with a shrug. I put my hands in my pockets—putting the phone away with my left, palming the doorstop with my right. I would wait until they were in striking distance.
But they stopped just outside that range. I watched them with a quizzical, sheepish look, as if to say, Hey, guys, what’s all this about?
Murakami eyeballed me for a long moment. When he spoke his voice was a low growl. “We’ve got a problem,” he said.
“A problem?”
“Yeah. A problem as in, your name isn’t Arai. It’s Rain.”
I let my eyes move fearfully from face to face, to the exit, then back again. I wanted them to think I might bolt. Which I sure as shit would if I could.
“Hold him,” Murakami said.
The man to my left lunged. I was ready for it. My hands had already popped free of my pockets and I extended my left arm as though to block him. He took the bait, grabbing my forearm with both hands to immobilize it while his partner moved in from the right. I snaked the hand he was trying to hold over his left wrist, trapping it, and used the grip to yank myself toward him. He was braced for me to try to pull in the opposite direction and couldn’t react in time to stop me from closing the distance. The doorstop was already out, palmed in my fist with the screw point jutting out between my middle and forefinger like the world’s nastiest signet ring.
I popped a quick jab over his trapped left arm and up into his neck, aiming for just under the jaw line. It wasn’t a power shot but it didn’t need to be; what it needed was accuracy, and that it had. The tip plunged in like a corkscrew hypodermic, and before he could pull away I twisted downward and ripped back. He yelped and leaped away, instinctively clapping his hand over the resultant tear. Blood jetted out from between his fingers, and I knew I’d hit the carotid.
He made a horrified gurgling noise and clapped his other hand over the spot, but blood continued to pour out. I swung back to my right. His friend had pulled up short, unsure of what had just happened, shocked by all the blood. I slipped the doorstop between my thumb and forefinger as though it was a knife and brandished it at him Hollywood style, my arm extended and the weapon way too far from my body.
When he realized that I wasn’t holding a machete, he tried to grab my juicy target of an arm. I let him get my wrist, then made as though I was trying to yank free. He braced against the pressure, straightening his forward knee, his eyes and all his focus on the weapon. Using our counterbalanced pulling to brace myself, I raised my right foot off the floor and shot it into his forward knee. At the last instant he saw it coming and tried to twist away, but he had too much weight on the leg. The kick blew through his knee and he crumbled to the floor with a shriek.
Murakami was still standing between me and the door. He looked calmly at the two fallen men, one screaming and writhing on his back, the other sitting and clutching his hands tightly to his spurting neck in a gesture of burlesque mortification. Then he looked back at me. He smiled, revealing the bridge.
“You’re good,” he said. “You don’t look like much, but you’re good.”
“Your friend needs a doctor,” I said, breathing hard. “If he doesn’t get proper attention he’s going to bleed out inside five minutes, maybe less.”
He shrugged. “You think I want him as a bodyguard after this? If he wasn’t going to die, I’d kill him myself.”
The fallen man was drenched with blood and staring at Murakami blankly. His mouth opened and closed but no sound emerged. After a moment he slumped soundlessly to his side.
Murakami looked down at him, then back to me. He shrugged again.
“Looks like you saved me the trouble,” he said.
C’mon, Tatsu, where the fuck are you?
He unzipped his jacket and took a respectful step backward before shrugging it off. If he’d stayed just a little closer I would have moved on him as soon as it was down around his elbows, and he knew it.
He looked at the doorstop, my hand bloody around it. “We’re going to do this armed?” he asked, his tone dead-man flat. “Okay.”
He reached into a back pocket and pulled out a folded knife. He flicked a thumb stud on the handle and the blade snapped out and into position. From the instant, semiauto opening, I knew it was a Kershaw model, essentially a quality, street-legal switchblade. The cutting edge was black, coated with titanium nitride, about nine centimeters. Shit.
In my unpleasant experience, unarmed against a knife, you’ve basically got four options. Your best bet is to run like hell, if you can. Next best is to do something immediately that prevents the attack from getting started. Third is to create distance so you can deploy a longer-range weapon. Fourth is to go beserk and hope not to get fatally cut going through and over your attacker.
I don’t care how much training you’ve had, these are your only realistic options, and none of them is particularly good except maybe the first. Unarmed techniques against the knife are a fantasy. The only people who teach them have never faced a determined attacker with a live blade.
My macho years are at least two decades behind me, and I would have been thrilled to turn and run if I could have. But in the enclosed space of the dojo, with a younger, and probably faster, enemy standing between me and the exit, running wasn’t really an option, and I realized that the ordinarily depressing odds of emerging unhurt against a knife looked downright desolate.
I glanced over at the bag. It was about ten meters away, and my chances of getting to it and accessing the gun before Murakami put that blade in me were not good.
He smiled, the bridge a predatory rictus. “Throw away yours, and I’ll throw away mine,” he said.
He really was deranged. I had no interest in fighting him, only in killing him now or running away to wait for a more opportune moment. But maybe I could play this out.
“You going to tell me what this is about?” I asked.
“Throw away yours, and I’ll throw away mine,” he said again.
So much for that. I knew there was a set of weights in back. I might be able to reach them before he got to me. If there were loose plates, I could use them like missiles, wear him down, create an opening that would give me time to deploy the gun. Not a happy prospect against a guy with the reflexes to fight dogs, but I was running out of ideas.
“You first,” I said.
“All right, armed,” he said, and started coming toward me. But slowly, taking his time.
I tensed to go for the weights.
A commanding series of knocks ran out from the front door, and I heard the words “Keisatsu da!” Police! bellowed through a bullhorn.
Murakami’s head swiveled in that direction, but his eyes didn’t leave me. I saw from the reflex that the knocking had startled him, that he wasn’t expecting anyone.
It came again, a fist banging on metal. Then “Keisatsu da! Akero!” Police! Open up!
Tatsu, I thought.
We looked at each other for a long second, but I already knew what he was going to do. He might have been crazy, but he was a survivor. A survivor reassesses odds continually and doesn’t disrespect them.
He gestured at me with the knife. “Another time,” he said. Then he bolted for the back.
I dashed to the gym bag. But by the time I reached it, he’d already made it inside the locker room and had slammed the door behind him. Following him in alone would be dangerous. Better to have Tatsu as backup.
I sprinted to the entranceway. The door was secured with horizontal, spring-loaded bars, and it took me a few seconds to figure out how to work the mechanism. There was a gear in the center that wouldn’t give. There, that latch—press that first. I pressed and turned, and the bars pulled in.
I shouldered the door open. Tatsu and another man were on the other side of it, both with their guns drawn. “Inside,” I said, gesturing with my head. “There’s a back door he might use. He’s got a knife.”
“I’ve already sent a man around back,” Tatsu said. He nodded to his partner and the two of them moved inside. I followed them in.
They noted the two men on the floor but could see that they weren’t going anywhere. We made our way to the back of the dojo. I saw Tatsu’s man move toward the bathroom. “Not there,” I said. “There. The locker room. There’s a back door inside, but he might still be in there.”
They took up positions on either side of the door, crouching to reduce their profile. Each held his gun close in and at waist level in the so-called third eye position, which demonstrated some tactical acumen. Tatsu nodded, and his man, who was on the knob side of the door, reached out and pushed the door inward while Tatsu sighted down the funnel. As the door swung in, Tatsu tracked it with his eyes and his weapon.
Another nod and they went in, Tatsu in the lead. The room was empty. The exterior door was closed, but its bolt was pulled back and the lock I had seen previously was gone.
“There,” I said. “He went through there.” I thought of Tatsu’s other man, the one who had gone around back. He and Murakami would have been on a collision course.
They took up their positions again and went through. I followed them. Behind the building was a tiny courtyard, choked with refuse containers, empty boxes, and abandoned construction materials. A rusting HVAC unit lay disconnected and inert to one side. Opposite, the carcass of a refrigerator leaned sideways against a corrugated wall, its door gone, two of its interior shelves hanging out like innards from a gutted animal.
The courtyard fed into an alley. In the alley we found Tatsu’s man.
He was on his back, his eyes open, one hand still clutching the gun that had been useless to him. Murakami had opened him up and left him. The ground around him was soaked in blood.
“Chikusho,” I heard Tatsu breathe. Fuck. He knelt to confirm that the man was dead, then pulled out his cell phone and spoke into it while his remaining man scanned the alley.
I noted the absence of defensive wounds on the corpse—no slash marks on the hands or wrists. He hadn’t even gotten his arms up to protect himself, let alone managed to fire his weapon. The poor bastard. The gun might have made him feel overconfident. A common error. In some conditions, and a narrow alley can be one of them, a blade will beat a bullet.
Tatsu stood up and looked at me. His tone was calm but I could see quiet rage in his eyes.
“Murakami?” he asked.
I nodded.
“Those men inside, they’re his?”
I nodded again.
“There is a large Mercedes parked in front of the building. I am guessing he arrived in it, and was planning to leave in it. Now he will be forced to rely on taxis or public transportation. He could not have done that”—he gestured to the downed man—“without getting a substantial amount of blood on him. We will have men here shortly to search the area. We may be able to track him.”
“I don’t think so,” I said.
His nostrils flared. “One of the two men I saw inside looked well enough to interrogate,” he said. “That will also be useful.”
“Was there anyone out front when you arrived?” I asked. “Murakami cleared the place out just before you got here.”
“There were several men outside,” he said. “They scattered when they saw us. They won’t be of immediate use.”
“I’m sorry about your man,” I told him, not knowing what else to say.
He nodded slowly, and for a moment his features seemed to sag. “His name was Fujimori. He was a good man, capable and idealistic. Later today I will have to tell these things to his widow.”
He straightened, as though collecting himself. “Brief me now on what happened, then go, before the other officers arrive.”
I told him. He listened without a word. When I was done, he looked at me and said, “Meet me at Christie tea shop in Harajuku tonight at seven o’clock. Don’t disappear. Don’t make me have to find you.”
I knew Christie, having been there many times while living in Tokyo. “I’ll be there,” I said.
“Where is the gun?”
“Inside. In a gym bag, by the front entrance. I’d like to keep it.”
He shook his head. “I was asked about it today. I need to account for it or there will be trouble. I may be able to get you another.”
“Do that,” I said, thinking of the confident way Murakami had unsheathed his Kershaw.
He nodded, then looked at his fallen comrade. His ja
w clenched, then released. “When I catch him,” he said, “that’s what I am going to do to him.”
17
I WALKED OUT to Kototoi-dori and found a cab. Although their functioning was temporarily disrupted by what had just gone down at the dojo, I knew now that Murakami’s people were aware I was in Asakusa, and the subway station would have been too likely a spot for an ambush.
The meeting Tatsu had demanded was over six hours away, and the bizarre, floating feeling of having nowhere to go and nothing to do was getting to me. I felt a rush of what someone ought to name post-traumatic-extreme-horniness disorder, and thought about calling Naomi. She’d be home right now, maybe just waking up. But with Murakami on to me, I didn’t want to go anywhere where there was even a small chance that I might be anticipated.
My pager buzzed. I checked it, saw a number I didn’t recognize.
I dialed the number from a pay phone. The other party picked up on the first ring.
“Can you tell who this is?” a male voice asked in English.
I recognized the voice. Kanezaki, my latest friend from the CIA.
“Please, just listen to what I have to say,” he went on. “Don’t hang up.”
“How did you get this number?” I asked.
“Phone records—calls made from pay phones near your friend’s apartment. But I had nothing to do with what happened to him. I just found out about it. That’s why I’m calling you.”
I thought about that. If Kanezaki had a way of accessing a record of calls made from those pay phones, he might have managed to zero in on my pager number. Harry’s practice had been to use various local pay phones to page me, after which he would return to his apartment and wait for my call. With access to the records, you might spot a pattern—the same number being called from various pay phones in the neighborhood. If there were several hits, and I imagined there would be, you just call them all and eliminate the false positives by trial and error. I supposed this was a possibility Harry and I should have considered, but it didn’t really matter. Even if someone managed to intercept my number, as Kanezaki seemed to have done, they’d learn nothing more than a pager address.