“Seems like Hatanaka got to the reception around nine. He musta come straight from his sister, you know, the Japan Society. After that all we got is pieces. Martinez and a couple more guys spoke to Hatanaka. But nobody noticed anything strange.”
“Do we know when he left?”
“No one saw him go. But that doesn’t mean much. Those things, who notices? Hundreds of people coming and going. The duty guard says he thinks maybe Hatanaka left late.”
“That’s something.”
“That’s nothing. The guy’s covering his butt. If we find out Hatanaka left early, he’ll say he told me he wasn’t sure. If we find Hatanaka left late, the guard’s gonna say, sure, he already told me that. Covered both ways.”
We move on down the aisle. Mike pauses to inspect the contents of an open crate.
“What about the security tapes from Monday night?” I ask. “Did you get any more out of the maintenance guys?”
“Another winner.” He reaches into the crate and pokes around. “I’ve been through it ten times with the maintenance guys, the ones who were working on the camera gear that night. They don’t see they did anything wrong. Scheduled work, they just did their jobs. And get this. I ask their boss—Blaveski? Blatski?—I ask him if he thinks it’s smart doing maintenance a day before the opening. As if he hadn’t had months to straighten it out. You know what he said? He said that’s how it was on the works schedule. The fucking works schedule. Like it’s set in stone, the goddamn eleventh commandment. I’m telling you. Brains?” Mike lifts his head from the crate.
We move on, stopping to peer through an open side door into the Kwok brothers’ garage-sized warehouse. Sacks are piled high on pallets, dust particles drift through the air; a shaft of sunlight slants down through a broken roof tile overhead. Half a dozen pine crates in one corner. And the floor, bare concrete, is cracked.
“This look to you like a million bucks’ worth?” I ask.
Mike agrees that it doesn’t. Not remotely. Then, as we turn down the next aisle, I break the news to him that I have been holding back all this while.
“I saw Patrick. I told him about the bugs at Hatanaka’s apartment.”
Mike looks at me sideways.
“And the intruder at my place,” I say.
“Jesus, you had to?”
“He’s my boss.”
“He’s fucked us around. Right from the start of this thing.” Mike broods awhile before speaking again. “So how’d he take it?”
“Mad as hell. He wanted to pull me off the investigation.”
“Figures.” Mike ponders a moment. “And now it figures too why he was so worked up when he came down to see me.”
“This morning?”
“Sure. Barged right in when I was interviewing Rachel.”
“My Rachel?”
“I told you, she came in with the Martinez kid. She was with him for a while at the NGO thing Monday.” Mike dismisses it with a toss of the hand; then, as we approach the counter, he concludes with a few choice remarks on Patrick. “Guy’s an asshole,” he decides.
At the checkout, those two elderly women are emptying their baskets. They call out back and an old man shuffles out, blinking like some nocturnal creature surprised by the harsh glare of daylight. I lean toward Mike.
“Kwok?”
Mike takes in the old man at a glance. “Go take a look at the theater across the street,” he tells me. “This guy ain’t gonna talk to two of us, I can tell you that for nothing.”
I don’t argue. This is cop business, something Mike would know.
A minute later I’m studying the posters plastered to either side of the Jade Moon Theater entrance. The week’s big features. Stripped to the waist, the next generation of Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan wanna-bes bare their teeth, frozen in athletic poses amid fantastic scenes of slaughter. When I go in, more of the same posters are displayed in glass cases, lit by a pale light that shines out from the ticket stall. The stall appears to be unmanned, so I take the opportunity to have a look around. The carpet is threadbare. There is no obvious sign of any recent one-million-dollar renovation.
When a chorus of rough laughter erupts from behind the theater doors, I turn. Then I move slowly up to the swinging doors, push the left one open a few inches, and peer into the darkened room. Up onscreen a bearded villain-type is being impaled on a spear. Another gale of laughter from the audience. Once my eyes adjust to the dark, I can see there are no more than twenty rows of seats. The place is surprisingly small, certainly nothing like the scale necessary to earn Po Lin a reasonable return on a million-dollar investment. I am wondering about that when the right-hand door swings back and I am suddenly face-to-face with what can only be Kwok number two. Apart from the clothes—a neatly pressed white shirt and black pants—he is a dead ringer for his brother across the street.
His head goes back in surprise, and I have just sufficient presence of mind to launch into my patter.
“I’m from the Bureau of Small Business,” I say, but that is as far as I get. Kwok makes a guttural sound in his throat, shouting toward the ticket booth as he steps by me. The theater doors flicker closed. Trailing after him, I reprise my limp story, pointing out that the Bureau of Small Business might be able to render some assistance to his commercial endeavor. I ask him if he might be interested in helping us with a survey.
“Uh?” he barks. Then, from behind the ticket counter, a head appears. The surprised young man, Chinese, of course, looks half asleep. He rubs his eyes. And Kwok goes off the deep end. The kid cringes as Kwok leans over the counter, shouting; it is some while before Kwok returns his attention to me.
“Wha you want?” he snaps, facing me.
“We’re doing a survey in this area—”
“No, no.” He waves both hands at me. “Go. Finish.”
“Could I speak to the owner?”
“Speak to nobody. I am the owner.”
“Your investors?”
He blinks vigorously behind his eyeglasses, then shoots a mouthful of Chinese to the youth behind the counter. The young man stands up straight now, alert, and looks me over. The kid is small, but I have the impression that beneath the counter his hands are reaching for some hidden weapon. He has a chance to redeem himself. Whitey, I sense, is about to be thrown out on his ear.
“Go,” Kwok says to me. Not polite, and not a request.
Then I hear a metallic clang beneath the counter. The kid looks down to his hidden hands, then back up to me. His eyes are glazed. I realize that he is tripping, that this probably is a very wise moment for me to make my exit. So, sidling past the ticket booth, I dip my head at Kwok, then depart quickly.
“Yo!” Mike shouts as I hit the street. He beckons me from the corner. “Anything?” he asks when I join him.
“The place is a fleabag. If Po Lin sunk a million bucks into it, he’s lost his dough.” I dab at my face with a handkerchief. “Oh, yeah, and did I mention I nearly got my head kicked in?”
“Like that.”
“Yeah. Like that.”
When I tell him about Theater Kwok’s unduly aggressive response to my mere presence and few queries, Mike turns thoughtful.
“Dry Goods Kwok wasn’t much better,” he tells me.
“You got nothing?”
“Zip.”
We look at each other. We have wasted almost two hours on this excursion.
“You go on back,” Mike says at last. “I’ll be along in a while.”
Mike gazes back down the street toward the Kwok brothers’ establishments; he has a certain glint in his eye. The last time I saw that glint he was removing a doped-up protester from the UN North Lawn. The protester was wielding a bottle. Mike’s hand had to be stitched up later, but the protester was hospitalized for a week.
“Mike.” He faces me, and I say, “Don’t give Patrick any reason to take your balls off.” When he smiles, I touch his lapel. “Or mine.”
He nods and backs away from me down the sidewalk. As
he turns in to the passing stream of pedestrians, I hear him whistling the first plaintive bars of “Blue Moon.”
19
“DID SHE SAY WHAT SHE WANTED?” “Just that she wanted to see you,” Elizabeth, my secretary, replies, taking another bite from her pastry and chewing as she speaks. “Some guard brought her upstairs. He said she was Toshio’s sister.” She shrugs; she wants me to know that she is not to blame for this deviation from regular security procedure. A Brit, at least fifty pounds overweight, groomed like a bag lady, Elizabeth is, at forty-three years of age, resentfully unmarried. This could be her personal motto. I am not to blame.
Now I lean through the door to look down the hall to where Moriko Hatanaka is standing outside Toshio’s locked office. She has a large scroll that looks like a map tucked beneath her arm, and she appears to be reading the keep-out message that has been taped to her brother’s office door.
“How long’s she been waiting?”
“Few minutes.” Elizabeth goes on to inform me around a mouthful of pastry that I have had two calls from Jennifer Dale; apparently I have been expected over at USUN for an hour. “And this one’s been calling too,” she says, holding up her notepad for me to read. J. Martinez. Juan. I instruct Elizabeth to call Jennifer, let her know I have been delayed, then I gather myself a moment before stepping out into the hall.
Moriko smiles sadly as she takes my hand. An awkward moment, I’m not quite sure what to say to her. But then, recalling just how much I grew to dislike the endlessly repeated assurances of sympathy after Sarah’s death, I simply return Moriko’s sad smile and guide her into my office.
“Can I get you something? Coffee?”
“This won’t take that long. I know you are busy.”
She is, I am relieved to see, in control of herself. Her makeup has been meticulously applied, her gray skirt and jacket are both crisply pressed. Only her eyes give any hint of the depth of her sorrow. All other outward signs of grief have been temporarily erased. A gutsy lady.
“I want to make the arrangements,” she tells me, “for Toshio’s body.”
Propping myself against the desk, I fold my arms. “You don’t have to deal with that immediately. Give it a few days.”
“Toshio wanted his body returned to Japan.”
I nod. I tell her that shouldn’t be a problem.
She offers to bring me a copy of Toshio’s will to prove that this was Toshio’s wish, but I wave the offer aside. If Moriko says that’s what Toshio wanted, I believe her; besides, she is next of kin. And in truth I am not really surprised by this last wish of Toshio’s. For all his internationalist credentials, Toshio remained at the core very deeply Japanese. Falling leaves return to their roots. The old saw.
“It’ll take us a few days to arrange.” Reaching for a pad and pen, I inquire if she has anyone lined up to handle things at the Japanese end.
“There is a funeral parlor.”
Pen poised, I ask for the name. When Moriko hesitates, I look up. “Are you really sure you want to do this now?”
She smiles. “I was just going to say that the Japanese consulate has offered to do all this for me.”
“At the Japanese end.”
“Here too. Everything.”
I take a moment with that. “The consulate offered to fly Toshio’s body to Japan? To make all the arrangements?”
“When they called, they said that would be easiest. I came here only to see when you could let them take Toshio.” She looks down. “His body.”
When they called. They said. “They approached you?”
She nods again.
“When did they call?”
“This morning.” Moriko looks at me askance now, suddenly aware that something is going on that she has missed. Is still missing. “I agreed to let them arrange everything. Won’t that be all right?”
“And they asked you to come up here.”
“Yes.”
“To hurry up the release of the body.”
“They said it would help.”
I drop my gaze. These goddamn people. The Japanese Foreign Ministry. Asahaki. Whoever else is behind this cheap and tactless ploy. Even grief, the loss of a dearly loved brother, has not put Moriko off limits. They want Toshio’s body removed from UNHQ, my investigation closed; and though Moriko does not know it, they have attempted to use her as the emotional lever to prize her brother loose. At last I raise my eyes.
“I’ll make sure the body’s released to the Japanese consulate as soon as that’s possible, Moriko. But despite what they may have led you to believe, that’s unlikely to happen before the weekend. More likely sometime next week.”
“Not sooner?”
“I can’t.”
She is clearly disappointed, but she knows I would not be refusing her request without good reason. In the end she makes no objection, simply bows her head in acceptance. And then she seems to remember the scroll that she has been holding all this time. She takes it from under her arm.
“This is something Toshio did,” she tells me, tugging at the red ribbon, unrolling the thing. “He did it Monday night. I thought there would be somewhere here at the UN to hang it. As a memory.”
“A picture?”
“Calligraphy.”
A hobby, as I now recall, of Toshio’s. Four vertical lines of kanji in thick black ink trail down the fibrous handmade-paper scroll. When I glance at Moriko, she gives me an impromptu translation.
“‘Just like the grass in the wind, the same now are the hopes and plans of the ancient generals.’”
“Bashō” I say.
Moriko turns to me in amazement. And I am more than a little surprised myself. Crossing to the shelf behind my desk, I pull down a thin volume. The Narrow Road to the Deep North. By Bashō. Rejoining Moriko, I search for the page.
“We went to Toshio’s apartment Tuesday morning. This book was on his bedside table.” Locating the page, I open it out next to the scroll. “It’s the same poem he’s marked here, isn’t it?”
Moriko inspects the page in the book. After a second she nods. “But that is not Toshio’s writing.” She indicates the purple ink jottings in the book.
I flip back to the flyleaf and show her the kanji there. She translates again.
“‘Two men may disagree yet not be enemies.’” She points. “And there is a date. July this year. It is a gift to Toshio.”
“Who from?”
Her finger slides down the kanji. “Bunzo Asahaki.”
My head rises. A gift from Bunzo Asahaki to Toshio. I do not get this at all.
“And it was Ambassador Asahaki who asked Toshio to write this,” Moriko remarks, puzzled, touching the calligraphy on the scroll.
I look at her. “Monday night?”
She nods. No big thing.
“Monday night where?” I ask her.
“At the Society,” she says. The Japan Society. “The ambassador was our guest of honor. He opened the Kurosawa festival for us.”
Oh, God. How in the world did we miss this? Taking the note from my pocket—I will see you tonight—I hold it up by the kanji in the flyleaf. She squints; she remembers the unsigned note I showed her yesterday. And I do not even have to ask her my question.
“The same handwriting,” she says. “The note is from Ambassador Asahaki.”
Taking the scroll from Moriko, I lay it by the Bashō on my desk. Then I clasp her shoulders and ease her into a chair. “Monday night. Whatever you can remember. Anything you heard Toshio and Asahaki say to each other. Anything they did. This could be a huge help to us, Moriko.”
Perplexed by my intensity, she frowns. “If I knew it was so important—”
“Just remember now. Whatever you can.”
She thinks a moment. “Ambassador Asahaki was late,” she says. “He didn’t stay long. He spoke with Toshio five minutes, not more.”
“Did they argue?”
She drops her gaze, trying to recall. “No. They were just talking. I remember I was
annoyed at Toshio. We needed the ambassador to make the opening speech for the festival. Instead, he was talking with my brother.”
“You didn’t overhear anything?”
When she shakes her head apologetically, I gesture to the scroll. I ask her what that was all about.
“After the ambassador opened the festival, I asked Toshio to do some calligraphy. To hang in the lobby during the festival. Toshio was always happy to do that, he liked to make a show. When Toshio asked everyone what he should write, the ambassador made a suggestion.”
“That poem?”
She nods. I fetch the book and open it at the flyleaf. Two men may disagree yet not be enemies. I speak the words aloud.
“Does that mean anything to you, Moriko?” I gesture to the scroll. “Any of this?”
“Ambassador Asahaki’s family is well known in Japan. An old military family. Toshio did not like these kind of people. The Japanese military. Never.” Not news by now. Not after the campaign Toshio was running against the Japanese seat. Moriko looks down at the kanji on the flyleaf. “Here I think the ambassador was asking Toshio for less hate. Disagreement, yes. But not enemies.”
Back in July, I think. When they were already at loggerheads over the Japanese seat on the Council, when Toshio knew about the Special Committee fraud but before he had conclusively pinned it on Asahaki.
“And on Monday night?” I ask, nodding to the scroll.
“You must see,” says Moriko, evidently surprised by my failure to connect the dots.
But frankly I do not see. While she has made the deduction instinctively, to me the barrier of an alien culture remains impenetrable. Two grown men exchanging poems is not a social act with which I can claim any acquaintance. At last Moriko spells it out for me.
“On Monday night Toshio wrote out this poem the ambassador suggested to him. The same poem from that book.”
She sees that I am still lost, still floundering.
“On Monday night,” she says, “Toshio accepted what Ambassador Asahaki wrote in July. ‘Two men may disagree yet not be enemies.’” She lays a hand on the scroll. “On Monday night,” Moriko tells me, choosing her words carefully, “Toshio and Ambassador Asahaki became ‘not enemies.’”
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