by Barry Eisler
I looked at the door and thought, Walk away. Just walk away.
But instead: “Listen to me, Midori. All I have to do is walk out that door. You’re the one who won’t be able to sleep in her own apartment, who’s afraid to go to the police, who can’t go back to her life. So you figure out a way to work with me on this, or you can damn well figure it all out on your own.”
A long time, maybe a full minute, passed. Then she said, “Bulfinch told me my father was supposed to deliver something to him on the morning he died, but that Bulfinch never got it. He wanted to know if I had it, or if I knew where it was.”
“What was it?”
“A computer disk. That’s all he would tell me. He told me if he said more it would put me in danger.”
“He had already compromised you just by talking to you. He was being followed outside of Alfie.” I pressed my fingers to my eyes. “Do you know anything about this disk?”
“No.”
I looked at her, trying to judge. “I don’t think I have to tell you, the people who want it aren’t particularly restrained about the methods they’ll use to get it.”
“I understand that.”
“Okay, let’s put together what we have. Everyone thinks your father told you something, or gave you something. Did he? Did he tell you anything, or give you some documents, maybe, anything that he said was important?”
“No. Nothing I remember.”
“Try. A safe-deposit key? A locker key? Did he tell you that he had hidden something, or that he had important papers somewhere? Anything like that?”
“No,” she said, after a moment. “Nothing.”
She might be holding back, I knew. She certainly had reason not to trust me.
“But you know something,” I said. “Otherwise, you’d go to the police.”
She folded her arms across her chest and looked at me.
“For Christ’s sake, Midori, tell me. Let me help you.”
“It’s not what you’re hoping for,” she said.
“I’m not hoping for anything. Just what pieces you can give me.”
There was a long pause. Then she said, “I told you my father and I were . . . estranged for a long time. It started when I was a teenager, when I started to understand Japan’s political system, and my father’s place in it.”
She got up and began to pace around the room, not looking at me. “He was part of the Liberal Democratic Party machine, working his way up the ladder in the old Kensetsusho, the Ministry of Construction. When the Kensetsusho became the Kokudokotsusho, he was made vice minister of land and infrastructure — of public works. Do you know what that means in Japan?”
“I know a little. The public-works program channels money from the politicians and construction firms to the yakuza.”
“And the yakuza provide ‘protection,’ dispute resolution, and lobbying for the construction industry. The construction companies and yakuza are like twins separated at birth. Did you know that construction outfits in Japan are called gumi?”
Gumi means “gang,” or “organization” — the same moniker the yakuza gangs use for themselves. The original gumi were groups of men displaced by World War II who worked for a gang boss doing whatever dirty jobs they could to survive. Eventually these gangs morphed into today’s yakuza and construction outfits.
“I know,” I said.
“Then you know that, after the war, there were battles between construction companies that were so big the police were afraid to intervene. A bid-rigging system was established to stop these fights. The system still exists. My father ran it.”
She laughed. “Remember in 1994 when Kansai International Airport was built in Osaka? The airport cost fourteen billion dollars, and everyone wanted a piece of it. Remember how Takumi Masaru, the Yamaguchi Gumi yakuza boss, was murdered that year? It was for not sharing enough of the profits from the airport construction. My father ordered his death to appease the other gang bosses.”
“Christ, Midori,” I said quietly. “Your father told you these things?”
“When he learned he was terminal. He needed to confess.”
I waited for her to go on.
“The yakuza with tattoos and sunglasses, the ones you see in the bad sections of Shinjuku, they’re just tools for people like my father,” she said, continuing her slow pacing. “These people are part of a system. The politicians vote for useless public works that feed the construction companies. The construction companies allow politicians to use company staff as ‘volunteers’ during election campaigns. Construction Ministry bureaucrats are given postretirement ‘advisor’ jobs at construction companies — just a car and driver and other perks, but no work. Every year during budget season, officials from the Ministry of Finance and the Construction Ministry meet with politicians loyal to the industry to decide how to divvy up the pie.”
She stopped pacing and looked at me. “Do you know that Japan has four percent of the land area and half the population of America, but spends a third more on public works? Some people think that in the last ten years ten trillion yen of government money have been paid to the yakuza through public works.”
Ten trillion? I thought. That’s maybe a hundred billion dollars. Bastards have been holding out on you.
“I know about some of this, sure,” I told her. “Your father was going to blow the whistle?”
“Yes. When he was diagnosed, he called me. It was the first time we had talked in over a year. He told me he had to talk to me about something important, and he came over to my apartment. We hadn’t talked in so long, I was thinking it was something about his health, about his heart. He looked older when I saw him and I knew I was right, or almost right.
“I made us tea, and we sat across from each other at the small table in my kitchen. I told him about the music I was working on, but of course I could never ask him about his work, and there was almost nothing for us to talk about. Finally I said, ‘Papa, what is it?’
“ ‘Taishita koto jaa nai,’ he told me. ‘Nothing big.’ Then he looked at me and smiled, his eyes warm but sad, and for a second he looked to me the way he had when I was a little girl. ‘I found out this week that I don’t have very long to live,’ he said to me, ‘not very long at all. A month, maybe two. Longer if I choose to suffer from radiation and drugs, which I don’t wish to do. The strange thing is that when I heard this news it didn’t bother me, or even surprise me very much.’ Then his eyes filled up, which I had never seen before. He said, ‘What bothered me wasn’t losing my life, but knowing that I had already lost my daughter.’ ”
With a quick, economical movement she raised her right hand and wiped the edge of one eye, then the other. “He told me about all the things he had been involved in, all the things he had done. He told me he wanted to do something to make it right, that he would have done something much sooner but he had been a coward, knowing he would be killed if he tried. He also said that he was afraid for me, that the people he was involved with wouldn’t hesitate to attack someone’s family to send a message. He was planning to do something now, something that would make things right, he told me, but if he did it I might be in danger.”
“What was he going to do?”
“I don’t know. But I told him I couldn’t accept being a hostage to a corrupt system, that if we were going to reconcile he would have to act without regard to me.”
I considered. “That was brave of you.”
She looked at me, in full control again. “Not really. Don’t forget, I’m a radical.”
“Well, we know he was talking to that reporter, Bulfinch, that he was supposed to deliver a disk. We need to figure out what was supposed to be on it.”
“How?”
“I think by contacting Bulfinch directly.”
“And telling him what?”
“I haven’t figured that part out yet.”
We were quiet for a minute, and I started to feel exhaustion setting in.
“Why don’t we get some sle
ep,” I said. “I’ll take the couch, all right? And we can talk more tomorrow. Things will seem clearer then.”
I knew they couldn’t become more murky.
12
I GOT UP early the next morning and went straight to Shibuya Station, telling Midori that I would call her later on her cell phone, after I picked up some things that I needed. I had a few items hidden in my place in Sengoku, among them an alias passport, which I’d want if I had to leave the country suddenly. I told her to go out only when she really had to, knowing that she would need to buy food and a change of clothes, and not to use plastic for any purchases. I also told her that, in case anyone had her cell phone number, we needed to keep our conversations brief, and that she should assume someone was listening to anything we said.
I took the Yamanote line to Ikebukuro, a crowded, anonymous commercial and entertainment center in the northwest of the city, then got off and flagged down a cab outside the station. I took the cab to Haku-san, a residential neighborhood about a ten-minute walk from my apartment, where I got out and dialed the voice-mail account that’s attached to the phone in my apartment.
The phone has a few special features. I can call in anytime from a remote location and silently activate the unit’s speakerphone, essentially turning it into a transmitter. The unit is also sound activated: if there’s a noise in the room, a human voice, for example, the unit’s speakerphone feature is silently activated and it dials a voice-mail account that I keep in the States, where telco competition keeps the price of such things reasonable. Before I go home, I always call the voice-mail number. If someone has been in my apartment in my absence, I’ll know.
The truth is, the phone is probably unnecessary. Not only has no one ever been in my apartment unannounced; no one even knows where I really live. I pay for a six-mat flat in Ochanomizu, but I never go there. The place in Sengoku is leased under a corporate name with no connection to me. If you’re in this line of work, you’d better have an additional identity or two.
I looked up and down the street, listening to the beeps as the call snaked its way under the Pacific. When the connection went through, I punched in my code.
Every time I’ve done this, except for when I periodically test the system, I’ve listened to a mechanical woman’s voice say, “You have no calls.” I was expecting the same today.
Instead the message was “You have one call.”
Son of a bitch. I was so startled I couldn’t remember what button to press to hear the message, but the mechanical voice prompted me. Barely breathing, I pressed the “one” key.
I heard a man’s voice, speaking Japanese. “Small place. Hard to catch him by surprise when he comes in.”
Another man’s voice, also in Japanese: “Wait here, on the side of the genkan. When he arrives, use the pepper spray.”
I knew that voice, but it took me a minute to place it — I was used to hearing it in English.
Benny.
“What if he doesn’t want to talk?”
“He’ll talk.”
I was gripping the phone hard. That piece of shit Benny. How did he track me down?
When did this message get recorded? What was that special-functions button . . . Goddamnit, I should have run through this a few more times for practice before it really mattered. I’d gotten complacent. I hit six. That speeded up the message. Shit. I tried five. The mechanical woman informed me that this message was made by an outside caller at 2:00 P.M. That was California time, which meant that they entered my apartment at about 7:00 this morning, maybe an hour ago.
Okay, change of plan. I saved the message, hung up, and called Midori on her cell phone. I told her I had found out something important and would tell her about it when I got back, that she should wait for me even if I was late. Then I backtracked to Sugamo, once notorious as the site of a SCAP prison for Japanese war criminals, now better known for its red-light district and accompanying love hotels.
I picked the hotel that was closest to Sengoku. The room they gave me was dank. I didn’t care. I just wanted a landline, so I wouldn’t have to worry about my cell phone battery dying, and a place to wait.
I dialed the phone in my apartment. It didn’t ring, but I could hear when the connection had gone through. I sat and waited, listening, but after a half hour there still wasn’t any sound and I started to wonder if they’d left. Then I heard a chair sliding against the wood floor, footsteps, and the unmistakable sound of a man urinating in the toilet. They were still there.
I sat like that all day, listening in on nothing. The only consolation was that they must have been as bored as I was. I hoped they were as hungry.
At around 6:30, while I was doing some judo stretches to keep limber, I heard a phone ring on the other end of the line. Sounded like a cellular. Benny answered, grunted a few times, then said, “I have something to attend to in Shibakoen — shouldn’t take more than a few hours.”
I heard his buddy answer, “Hai,” but I wasn’t really listening anymore. If Benny was going to Shibakoen, he’d take the Mita line subway south from Sengoku Station. He wouldn’t have driven; public transportation is lower profile, and there’s nowhere for nonresidents to park in Sengoku anyway. From my apartment to the station, he could choose more or less randomly from a half dozen parallel and perpendicular streets — one of the reasons I had originally chosen the place. The station was too crowded; I couldn’t intercept him there. Besides, I didn’t know what he looked like. I had to catch him leaving the apartment or I was going to lose him.
I bolted out of the room and flew down the stairs. When I hit the sidewalk I cut straight across Hakusan-dori, then made a left on the artery that would take me to my street. I was running as fast as I could while trying to hug the buildings I passed — if I timed this wrong and Benny emerged at the wrong moment, he was going to see me coming. He knew where I lived, and I couldn’t be certain any longer that he wouldn’t know my face.
When I was about fifteen meters from my street I slowed to a walk, staying close to the exterior wall of an enclosed house, controlling my breathing. At the corner I crouched low and eased my head out, looking to the right. No sign of Benny. No more than four minutes had passed since I’d hung up the phone. I was pretty sure I hadn’t missed him.
There was a streetlight directly overhead, but I had to wait where I was. I didn’t know whether he’d make a right or left leaving the building, and I had to be able to see him when he exited. Once I’d gotten my hands on him, I could drag him into the shadows.
My breathing had slowed to normal when I heard the external door to the building slam shut. I smiled. The residents know the door slams and are careful to let it close slowly.
I crouched down again and peered past the edge of the wall. A pudgy Japanese was walking briskly in my direction. The same guy I had seen with the attaché case in the subway station at Jinbocho. Benny. I should have known.
I stood up and waited, listening to his footsteps getting louder. When he sounded like he was about a meter away, I stepped out into the intersection.
He pulled up short, his eyes bulging. He knew my face, all right. Before he could say anything I stepped in close, pumping two uppercuts into his abdomen. He dropped to the ground with a grunt. I stepped behind him, grabbed his right hand, and twisted his wrist in a pain-compliance hold. I gave it a sharp jerk and he yelped.
“On your feet, Benny. Move fast, or I’ll break your arm.” I gave his wrist another hard jerk to emphasize the point. He wheezed and hauled himself up, making sucking noises.
I shoved him around the corner, put him facefirst against the wall, and quickly patted him down. In his overcoat pocket I found a cell phone, which I took, but that was all.
I gave a last jerk on his arm, then spun him around and slammed him up against the wall. He grunted but still hadn’t recovered enough wind to do more. I pinched his windpipe with the fingers of one hand and took an undergrip on his balls with the other.
“Benny. Listen very
carefully.” He started to struggle, and I pinched his windpipe harder. He got the message. “I want to know what’s going on. I want names, and they better be names I know.”
I relaxed both grips a little, and he sucked in his breath. “I can’t tell you this stuff, you know that,” he wheezed.
I took up the grip on his throat again. “Benny, I’m not going to hurt you if you tell me what I want to know. But if you don’t tell me, I’ve got to blame you, understand? Tell me quick, no one’s going to know.” Again, a little more pressure on the throat — this time, cutting off all his oxygen for a few seconds. I told him to nod if he understood, and after a second or two with no air, he did. I waited another second anyway, and when the nodding got vigorous, I eased off the pressure.
“Holtzer, Holtzer,” he rasped. “Bill Holtzer.”
It was an effort, but I revealed no surprise at the sound of the name. “Who’s Holtzer?”
He looked at me, his eyes wide. “You know him! From Vietnam, that’s what he told me.”
“What’s he doing in Tokyo?”
“He’s CIA. Tokyo chief of station.”
Chief of station? Unbelievable. He obviously still knew just which asses to kiss.
“You’re a damn CIA asset, Benny? You?”
“They pay me,” he said, breathing hard. “I needed the money.”
“Why is he coming after me?” I asked, searching his eyes. Holtzer and I had tangled when we were in Vietnam, but he’d come out on top in the end. I couldn’t see how he’d still be carrying a grudge, even if I still carried mine.
“He said you know where to find a disk. I’m supposed to get it back.”
“What disk?”
“I don’t know. All I know is that in the wrong hands it would be detrimental to the national security of the United States.”
“Try not to sound like the Stepford bureaucrat, Benny. Tell me what’s on the disk.”
“I don’t know! Holtzer didn’t tell me. It’s need-to-know — you know that, why would he have told me? I’m just an asset, no one tells me these things.”