by Barry Eisler
We came to grips, and I attacked with what at the time were my favorite combinations—kouchi-gari to ouchi-gari to osoto-gari; ouchi-gari to uchi-mata; tai-otoshi to a sneaky little standing strangle and back to tai-otoshi. I couldn’t make any of it work. He was strong, and that was part of the problem, but it was more than that. I sensed he was using his greater experience to anticipate my combinations, and was subtly adjusting his stance and his grip to shut down my throws in the instant before I launched them. Occasionally, he would chuckle derisively at my futile efforts. I started to get angry, and therefore sloppy.
We circled counterclockwise, each of us right foot forward. I shot my right arm out, looking for a high grip, but Pig Eyes intercepted me, snaking his left arm inside mine and reaching around for a sleeve grip just above my elbow. I didn’t like the grip he had taken and tried to jerk back, and as soon as I did, he punched his right hand forward, grabbed me high around the collar, and exploded into the air off his left foot. His right leg smashed down between my shoulder and neck as his head dropped back, and before I even knew what he was doing, his weight had dragged me down and I was crouching over him, my right arm and head trapped between his scissored legs, his back against the tatami as he looked up at me, bridging his hips, his ugly face twisting into a smile. I strained backward, my line of sight passing the stands as I did so, and I saw one of the guys who had jumped me in Ueno, the one who’d run off with the bag, leaning over the railing, watching us intently. He was smiling, too.
Before I could process any of it, Pig Eyes was pulling my right arm across his body and yanking me forward and down with his legs. I felt his left leg slide forward to figure-four his right ankle—sankaku-jime, a triangle strangle. My neck felt like it was caught in a vise, which effectively it was. I tried pulling his right knee down and circling counterclockwise to ease the pressure, but the strangle was too tight. I heard a dull roar in my ears like the crash of waves on the beach, and knew my brain wasn’t getting oxygen—in seconds, I would pass out. I tapped his shoulder with my free hand, the traditional judo signal of surrender.
Many judo techniques, especially joint locks, are so dangerous that judoka develop a conditioned reflex to the feel of a tap, instantly releasing a submitting opponent rather than risk breaking an arm or separating a shoulder. The reflex can be so strong that judoka interested in judo for combat applications, and not just for sport, should take measures to guard against its accidental triggering in a real-world setting.
But not only did Pig Eyes not release his strangle in response to my tap, he actually tightened it, smiling while he did so.
Fear shot through me. I couldn’t speak, but I tapped again with my free hand, harder this time. Pig Eyes looked at me, his smile intent, sadistic, and in that instant, understanding shot through me. The nature of the connection with the guy in the stands, how they’d found me, how they planned to get away after leaving me on the tatami…none of it mattered then and I gave it not one second’s consideration. What mattered was that he was there to kill me, and that suddenly I was fighting for my life.
Which meant he was now fighting for his life, too. The difference was, he didn’t know it. I did.
I stepped back with my left leg, creating precious space between our bodies, the world going gray at the edges now, the roaring in my ears the only thing I could hear. I groped with my left hand for his testicles. He understood at once and shifted right and left, but he had to trade mobility for the tightness of the strangle, and he could dodge only so much. I got hold of his package through the pants of his gi, but he bucked out of my grasp. The grayness crept in closer, the edges of my vision now speckled in black. Again I acquired my target and again he shook free. The gray was all I could see now, eclipsing everything, the roar in my ears fading, muffled, muted. With one last effort, I shot my hand forward and this time crowded my body in behind it, jacking him up onto his shoulders, raising his crotch higher. I felt the contours of a single testicle between my shaking fingertips. I put all my weight on him, pinning him in place. The world was melting and I felt myself dissolving into nothing, nothing…nothing but a small bulge that was somehow caught between my fingers, and the need, the final, desperate distress call sent by a dying brain, to crush that bulge into pulp.
And suddenly I could hear again, the echoing sounds of the great hall, and points of light crept into my vision, and I could feel something, a man under me, struggling, coughing, gagging as though on the verge of being sick. Through my confusion and vertigo, I managed to keep my weight on him, staying with him as he tried to twist away from me, taking his back, wrapping my legs around his, riding him, rolling him so that we were both facing the ceiling, buying myself time to return to my senses.
Seconds passed, and I remembered where I was and what had happened. I realized the precision squeeze I’d applied to one of his testicles had caused him more damage than I’d incurred from the moments I’d gone without oxygen. He was still flailing and retching, unable to prevent me from sliding my right hand under his chin, all the way across and around his throat, until my thumb was under his left ear, the knuckle over his carotid. I got my left arm under his left, took hold of his left lapel, and fed it into my right hand. Despite his debilitation, he recognized I was going for okuri-eri-jime—he tried to turtle his head in, and managed to get a hand to his own lapel to contest my grip. But too late. I crossed my left hand over and took hold of his right lapel, dragged it down, and ratcheted my right arm back, turning the collar of his gi into a guillotine. Soundlessly, he thrashed left, then right, but he was secure within my legs and there was nowhere for him to go. I arched back and cranked on his collar so hard I might have decapitated him. In extremis, he started frantically tapping my thigh, as though I was going to release him after what he’d tried to do to me. He clawed at my hands for a moment and then began to convulse. I realized he was vomiting, but with the strangle, the vomit couldn’t pass. He was choking on it.
I looked up into the stands. Pig Eyes’s buddy was there, gripping the railing, his face frozen in shock. I smiled at him, the smile no more than a grimace from the exertion I was putting into the strangle. He was watching his friend die in my hands and I was glad. I wanted him to see what I would be coming to do to him.
Then his paralysis broke, and he turned and ran. I saw no resolution in his expression or his posture, only panic, and I understood he wasn’t coming to the aid of his friend, only trying to save himself. I had to choose—finish Pig Eyes, or pursue the one I sensed was the principal?
And suddenly I realized it was no choice at all. I couldn’t kill this guy, not right in the great hall of the Kodokan in front of two hundred witnesses. Of course I’d be able to claim it was an accident, but a successful prosecution wasn’t even my main concern. It was the investigation itself, the inevitable attention, that I couldn’t afford. I’d seen dozens of people choked out on the tatami, two concussions, and one horrifically broken leg. Judo is a contact sport and accidents happen. But a death? That would be headline news.
Hating that I had to do it, I released the strangle and shoved Pig Eyes off me. His back heaved and a remarkable quantity of pressurized puke shot from his mouth and nose. I supposed that meant he would live. I scrambled to my feet and ran for the stairs. The great hall tilted in my vision and I threw an arm out to balance myself, still unsteady from the effects of lack of oxygen. People were watching me, maybe wondering if I was going to be sick and trying to get clear of the tatami before doing so. I blasted through the exit doors and took the stairs to the stands three at a time, one hand on the bannister because I didn’t trust my balance yet. I yanked open the doors, but the chinpira was gone. There were two sets of stairs—he must have taken the other.
Maybe there was still a chance. I turned and bolted down the stairs, bursting into the lobby at the bottom and looking wildly right and left. No one, just the wrinkled oba-san behind the concession stand. “Did someone just run out of here?” I said. “From down the steps?”
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She didn’t answer, instead simply raising her eyebrows and tilting her head toward the main doors. I dashed out to the sidewalk and looked left and right. A few passersby, mostly salaryman types in suits heading home after a long day at the office, glancing in curiosity at a sweating judoka standing barefoot and wild-eyed on the sidewalk. There was no sign of the chinpira.
Damn. But maybe I could learn something from the other guy. I headed back inside and raced up the stairs. I paused outside the doors to the daidōjō, and saw a small crowd gathered around Pig Eyes. They were helping him to his feet, while giving wide berth to the area on the tatami newly decorated with his vomit. This wasn’t going to work. I had to go.
I headed down to the locker room, quickly changed into my street clothes, and packed up my gear. No time to shower. I didn’t want to answer any questions and I didn’t want to linger another minute now that these people, whoever they were, knew they could find me here. I had to go. I didn’t realize it at that moment—and couldn’t have comprehended it, even if I had—but I was about to begin a decade of life as a fugitive.
chapter
four
I rode Thanatos to Nishi Nippori, the northeast of the city. Nishi Nippori was boring, blue collar, and unremarkable in every way—the kind of place no one who didn’t live there ever bothered to visit. I had taken an apartment there because it was about the cheapest place I could find that still offered a station on the Yamanote loop line. Between the train and Thanatos, there was nowhere in the city center I couldn’t reach in under a half hour. Something in a slightly more upscale neighborhood wouldn’t have offended me, and better proximity to the Kodokan would have been nice. But even back then, there was something that made me want to stand aloof from the society around me. The war was a significant part of it, but not all. I’d been told in a hundred ways while growing up in Tokyo that I wasn’t welcome, that I didn’t really belong. Maybe keeping the city at a distance was my way of saying, Fine, I don’t want you, either.
Feeling a little paranoid, I circled the block before arriving at my building, a squat wooden structure surrounded by weeds and skeletal bushes. It offered a view, to use that term loosely, of the Yamanote train tracks below, which were in the process of being expanded to handle Tokyo’s ever-burgeoning population. I parked Thanatos in front and looked down. The tableau, bleached to harsh white by overhead klieg lights, was a forbidding mass of concrete blocks, giant transformers, and steel rails. Beyond it all, more gray buildings and a sky the color of ashes against the neon glow of the city beneath.
I realized it was lucky I’d taken this place, and not something on the main street among the various shops and restaurants surrounding the station. The decision had been driven entirely by the better rent—everything closer to the station had been more expensive—but now I saw there were tactical advantages here, too. If anyone knew where I lived—and after the Kodokan anything might be possible—it would be much easier for them to ambush me amid the tumult surrounding the train station. Here, they’d have no concealment. I’d have to remember that next time I chose a place.
I went inside, climbed the stairs to the third floor, and unlocked the door of the six-mat room. Tatami mats are a standard unit of measurement in Japan, and six of them come to about nine feet by twelve. I pushed the door open wide, and flipped on the light switch before going inside. I couldn’t imagine anyone would be waiting for me, but not long ago I couldn’t have imagined anyone tracking me to the Kodokan, either. The room was hot, still, and empty—just a futon in one corner, a desk and chair in another, and a bureau in a third. A kitchen that was really no more than a stove; a bathroom as spacious as what you get on a commercial airliner; a tiny genkan with a worn cabinet for storing shoes. More a bivouac than an apartment, but at the moment I wasn’t sorry I didn’t have much to my name. I hurriedly packed a bag: some clothes; my passport; a toothbrush. A handful of mementos from my childhood—letters from my parents, a few fading photographs, that kind of thing. Tokens and talismans of the past. I don’t know why I grabbed anything that wasn’t strictly practical. Maybe a desire to prevent anyone who searched the place later from uncovering something personal. Maybe a superstitious sense that the past was a kind of anchor that would keep me from drifting over a horizon I was still afraid to cross.
I headed out, pausing on each riser on the way down to check the stairs below me, sweat trickling down my back. I was used to moving with extreme care in the jungle—pause, look, listen, move; pause, look, listen, move—and there was something incongruous about doing the same thing now on a wooden stairwell. I told myself the precautions were temporary. The war in Vietnam didn’t last forever; this one wouldn’t, either.
Outside, I slung the bag across my neck and shoulder, got on Thanatos, and started up the engine. I paused to gaze once more at the industrial wasteland below me. It was ugly, and I had always ignored it before. But suddenly it felt like some comforting thing that was about to be torn away from me. I knew I couldn’t come back until I figured out what the hell was going on. And, whatever it was, resolved it. But when would that be? And how?
I rode off, Thanatos’s engine whining, wanting only to put some distance between myself and the apartment or anywhere else someone might lay an ambush. It started to rain but I didn’t care; I was soaked with sweat already. The city went by me in a wet, gray blur, windshield wipers and umbrellas and dripping overpasses and eaves, droplets fine as mist suspended in Thanatos’s headlight.
Away from the apartment, I started to relax a little and think. My gut told me the run-in with the three chinpira in Ueno had been a coincidence. If they were still after me, it was likely follow-up—revenge for the outcome of the initial encounter. But then how had they known where to find me?
I considered. They’d seen how confidently and crisply I’d dropped the lead guy with that suplay. Maybe they hadn’t recognized the move specifically, but I was clearly some kind of grappler, and one whose skills were pretty sharp. If you were looking for a grappler in Tokyo, where would you start? It wouldn’t be a sure thing, of course, but with nothing more to go on, you might want to check out judo dojos. And the one you’d probably begin with, because it’s the biggest and best known, would be the Kodokan.
I chewed on that, and couldn’t find anything wrong with it. Yeah, it made sense. A little imagination, a little diligence, and a little luck, and there I was. They’d probably been thinking it would be a long shot. They must have been thrilled when the bet paid out.
Well, it hadn’t paid out quite the way they’d been hoping. But damn, it had been a near thing. That guy in the daidōjō had been intent to kill me—I had seen it in his pig eyes. So who were these people? They had enough time and manpower to start casing judo dojos in Tokyo on a long-shot bet. They were motivated enough by revenge to invest that time and manpower. And they had at least one guy on the payroll who was willing to kill someone, in a public venue in front of two hundred witnesses, just because they told him to.
The only thing that made sense was, the three in Ueno hadn’t been just punks. They were more connected than I’d guessed. Maybe one or more of them was a made member of one of the yakuza clans. Maybe I’d pissed off the wrong people.
The really wrong ones.
I nodded as I bombed along on Thanatos, pleased with myself for coming up with what felt like the right explanation. It was only later that I came to learn how dangerous it is to allow yourself to be seduced by that first attractive theory. If you don’t keep testing for alternatives, you might wind up satisfying yourself with, and proceeding on, what’s no more than a partial truth. And a partial truth, I would understand soon enough, can be more dangerous than a lie.
If the problem was yakuza, what would be the solution? McGraw might be helpful. At a minimum, he would have access to information I didn’t. But if he knew I had this much heat on me, I didn’t know what he might do. Probably just cut me loose. Damn it, I didn’t want to take that chance. Better to just sit tig
ht and wait to hear from him—he’d said he would be in touch as soon as he learned anything about what had happened in Ueno.
But shit, if I waited to tell him about the latest problem, he’d conclude—correctly—that I was holding out on him. He wouldn’t like it.
It wasn’t an easy decision, but I decided not to call him. Better to seek forgiveness than ask permission. I’d give him another day, anyway, and give myself a night to sleep on it.
Sleep. Where the hell was that going to happen? A hotel, I supposed. But not one of the big ones—I couldn’t afford the rates, for one thing, and didn’t want to deal with a front desk or other forms of scrutiny, for another.
I looked up at a passing road sign and saw I was heading toward Uguisudani—Nightingale Valley, though if nightingales had ever been prevalent there, they had long since departed for more salubrious climes. The area was known, even notorious, for streetwalkers, many of them of the “mature” variety, and for its profusion of love hotels. These were smaller establishments catering, as the nomenclature implies, to amorous couples looking for a place they could use for an hour or at most a night. Love hotels were numerous, they were discreet, and they were everywhere. Tens of thousands of people rotated through them every day, sometimes every hour. Finding someone hopping from one to another one night at a time would be a shell game not even the yakuza could win.
I parked Thanatos in a lot overflowing with bicycles and motor scooters, and walked along the road paralleling the train tracks. The night was still warm and it had stopped raining, but my clothes were wet, and I was cold to the point of shivering. I picked up a bento dinner from a vendor, and turned in to a labyrinth of twisting alleys lit in the gaudiest neon, the signs advertising places with names like Pussy Cat and Aladdin’s Cave and Casanova, some with plaster cupid statues in front of them, others with illuminated fountains, each more garish than the next. Hookers dressed to cater to every fantasy—demure schoolgirl, brazen slut, leather-clad dominatrix—trawled the area, sizing me up, trying for eye contact, forgetting me the moment they failed to achieve it.