by Barry Eisler
I ducked down a particularly narrow alley, and was rewarded with a place called Hotel Apex. Devoid of cupids, fountains, or even neon, it was obviously a no-frills place serving the lower end of the market. Just what I was looking for. I ducked inside the privacy wall and went through the front door. Inside was a tiny lobby—not much more than a vestibule—with a reception window to the left and an elevator the width of a coffin straight ahead. I stepped over to the reception window, and was surprised to see a very pretty girl sitting on the other side of the glass. I had been expecting an oba-san—the standard receptionist in this type of establishment being an old woman.
The girl glanced up at me, her expression neutral. It looked like she had been reading something, though I couldn’t see what. There was a tape recorder on the desk to her left, playing some kind of jazz. I loved Bill Evans—I’d first heard Sunday at the Village Vanguard when I was sixteen—but didn’t know much beyond that, and didn’t recognize what she was listening to.
“Rest or stay?” she asked, meaning did I want a room by the hour, or for the whole night. Her tone indicated supreme lack of interest, and pretty as she was, there was something tough in her demeanor, though I couldn’t put my finger on what. She had long hair, at the moment pulled into a ponytail. Her skin was beautiful, I couldn’t help but notice, and—in contrast to that of the professional girls outside—unembellished by makeup. Nor was she dressed to impress: a navy sweatshirt with New York City stitched across the front in faded gray letters; no earrings; no adornments. I wouldn’t say I was particularly subtle or sophisticated at the time, but I got the message she was trying to convey: I’m not trying to look good for you, so leave me the fuck alone.
“Uh, a stay, I guess,” I said.
She looked at me for a moment, probably wondering how someone could be so dumb that he wandered into a love hotel not knowing if he wanted a room for an hour or for the whole night. The fact that I was alone wasn’t itself remarkable—plenty of men checked in to love hotels by themselves and then phoned for takeout. But they probably had a clue about how long they wanted the room.
Still, all she said was, “Four thousand yen.”
I fished the money out of a pocket and pushed it through a hole in the glass. She scooped it into a drawer and slid a key in the other direction. “Three-oh-two,” she said. “Left as you come out of the elevator.”
I took the key and thanked her. She nodded and looked down again, to whatever I guessed she was reading in her lap. I wanted to say something more, but couldn’t think of what, or even why. If she noticed my hesitation, she gave no sign.
After a moment, I turned and went to the elevator. I didn’t want to think about my situation, or what I was going to do about it. All I cared about right then was the thought of the hottest bath I could stand, then my bento dinner, then sleep. I’d worry about tomorrow once it arrived.
chapter
five
I headed out early the next morning, wanting to get to a public phone and see if there was news from McGraw. I took the stairs, not liking that coffin-sized elevator, and as I reached the bottom, I heard a man’s voice, slurred and aggressive, shouting in Japanese. “I already told you, I just want a rest!”
I opened the stairwell door and emerged into the tiny lobby. A Japanese man in a rumpled suit and holding a cheap battered briefcase was standing in front of the reception window. I could smell the sake from ten feet away. A salaryman, I guessed, who’d stayed out too late and now just wanted a place to sleep it off for a few hours before going back to the office.
“I understand, sir,” came a soft female voice from the other side of the glass. “A rest is two thousand yen.”
I recognized the voice. The same girl who’d checked me in the night before.
“I told you, I only have a thousand. I’ll get you the rest later, when the banks are open. When the banks are open I’ll even give you an extra thousand for your trouble. All right?” He shoved a crumbled bill under the glass.
The girl pushed the bill back. “I’m sorry, sir. Full payment in advance. No exceptions. Company policy.”
“Fuck your policy!” the man shouted.
On a whim, I dug a thousand-yen note out of my pocket and walked over to the window. I put the bill down in front of the glass. “I’ll pay the difference,” I said.
The girl looked at me like I was crazy. The money just sat there.
The guy turned to me. “Who the fuck are you?”
“The bank, apparently.”
He glanced at the thousand-yen note, then back to me, his eyes narrowing. “Why would you pay for me?”
I glanced at the girl and shrugged. “A thousand yen seems like not very much to get you to leave her alone.”
He leered at me. “What are you expecting, you pay for the room, you’re going to follow me up there so I can suck your dick? That what you’re thinking?”
All he was looking for, I should have recognized, was the opportunity to save a modicum of face. That, or it was some weird kind of projection or trial balloon, and he was hoping I really did want him to suck my dick. Either way, all I had to do at that point was calmly say something like, Do you want the money or not? It was clear he would have taken it.
But I was still young, and stupid, and prone to take things personally. I said, “I’m expecting you to take the money, while it’s still on the counter. It’ll be a lot easier to retrieve from there than it will be after I shove it up your ass.”
His eyes widened and he flushed. His mouth twitched, but whatever he saw in my eyes got the twitching under control before it turned into words. He pushed the note under the glass. The girl took it and slid him a key. He picked it up and headed toward the elevator. As he got inside, he spat, “Baka yaro!” Asshole!
When he was gone, I turned to the girl. She was dressed as she had been when I’d arrived—obviously, she’d been there through the night. I was struck again by how pretty she was, and by how deliberately she seemed to be doing nothing to accentuate it. “You okay?” I said.
“Why would I not be okay?”
I was surprised. I realized I was expecting something more along the lines of a thank-you.
“I don’t know…I just wanted to make sure. That guy was pretty belligerent.”
“You don’t think I deal with assholes like that about five times a week on average?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, I do. Without anyone’s help.”
“I…guess I don’t know much about hotels,” I stammered.
“Yeah, well this one’s not known for its high-class clientele. You want that, try the Imperial.”
Why was I arguing? I had more important things on my mind. I shook it off and said, “I didn’t mean to suggest you couldn’t handle it yourself. I’m glad you’re okay.”
I moved off, out the exit door, past the privacy wall, into the narrow street. I was about to turn the corner when I heard the door open behind me. A voice called out, “Hey.”
I turned. It was her. But it took me a second to process—what was she doing sitting?
No, not sitting. She was in a wheelchair.
She pushed the wheels to propel herself forward a few feet, closer to where I stood. Then she stopped and regarded me.
“Thank you,” she said. But before I could overcome my surprise and come up with something in response, she had spun around and disappeared inside.
chapter
six
I checked in with the answering service I used. There were two messages. One from McGraw: I should meet him that night at a place called Taihō Chinese Cuisine in Minami Azabu. Okay, that was good. I didn’t have to worry about the pros and cons of what he might make of my not calling him about what had happened at the Kodokan. I could hear what he said, and play the rest by ear.
The other message was from a good friend, maybe my only friend, who I’d been avoiding since getting mixed up with McGraw. His name was Tatsuhiko Ishikura—Tatsu—and we’d kno
wn each other in Vietnam, where the Keisatsucho, Japan’s National Police Force, had seconded him to learn counterterror strategies. We’d gotten close there, being the only two Japanese speakers for thousands of miles, and had seen each other a few times since I’d arrived back in Tokyo. He was a good man—smarter than the people he worked for; stout as a bulldog and twice as tenacious; and funny as hell when he’d had too much sake and was venting about his “superiors.” I missed him. With my mother gone, my father no more than the increasingly remote memory of a child, and no siblings or other close relatives, I felt worse than orphaned. I felt marooned, unmoored, capable of anything because no one knew me anymore, no one was watching. I needed a connection to someone, or something—even at twenty I understood that. But Tatsu was a cop, and working for McGraw and hanging out with a cop just didn’t strike me as a particularly tenable set of simultaneous relationships. I felt sad about it, but there wasn’t much to be done. If I didn’t call back, maybe he’d stop trying. And that would probably be for the best.
I spent the day reading in a variety of parks and coffee shops, feeling like a homeless man. I was used to having time on my hands, but this was different. It was knowing I shouldn’t go to the usual places. My apartment was out, obviously, and so was training at the Kodokan. Even the Tokyo Metropolitan Library, where I’d whiled away many an afternoon with a book, felt suddenly dangerous and uncertain. All I could do was drift from place to place on Thanatos, my bag slung across my back, feeling disconnected, in between, a rōnin—a masterless samurai, literally “a floater on the waves”—with nothing to look forward to but a single scheduled meeting, and nothing to do but wait.
I arrived in Minami Azabu on Thanatos at seven, and found a small storefront with a plain, unpretentious sign advertising TAIHŌ CHUUKA RYŌRI, a few pink, vinyl-covered stools and a wraparound counter just visible below the noren curtains hung across the frontage. I ducked under the curtains, and was struck by the tangy smell of fried rice and pork and spices. A man in a black tee shirt and jeans and white apron, who I understood immediately by his demeanor was the maastaa, or master, stood behind the counter, studiously attending to the stove before him, the sounds of frying meat loud even amid the conversation of the small restaurant’s dozen or so patrons. A woman alongside him who I sensed was his wife looked up and greeted me with a smiling “Irasshaimase.”
I returned her greeting with a nod and glanced to my right—the one blind spot from where I was standing—and was unsurprised to see McGraw. Once again, he was the only white face in evidence; once again, he had a beer in front of him that I sensed wasn’t his first. He was watching me as though wondering how long it would be before I finally noticed him.
I stepped over to his table and sat. He glanced at the bag I was carrying, but didn’t comment, instead saying only, “You hungry?”
I hadn’t been, but the delicious smell of the cooking had already changed that. “I could eat.”
He called out to the woman behind the counter in passable Japanese that we would have two orders of gyoza, two of fried rice, and two Asahi beers. He seemed entirely at home. I wondered how he found these places, and whether he favored them more operationally or more for the food. Maybe both.
A pretty girl appeared from the back carrying a tray laden with beer. She looked like the woman behind the counter—the daughter, then, a family operation. She placed two bottles and a glass for me on the table, collected McGraw’s empty, and went on to service other customers. McGraw picked up the fresh bottle and tended to his own glass. In Japan, failing to at least offer to fill your companion’s glass is markedly rude. Maybe he didn’t know, but I doubted that. Nor did he offer to toast, instead immediately taking a long swallow. Whatever. I followed suit, resisting the urge to say anything, reminding myself of my theory that McGraw used silence to draw people out.
He glanced down at my glass, from which I had taken only a small sip. “You might want to finish that,” he said, his voice loud enough for me to hear but not loud enough to carry over the hubbub of conversation around us. “And maybe another, before I brief you.”
Was that supposed to rattle me? It did, but I wasn’t going to show it. “Up to you,” I said.
“All right. Don’t say I didn’t offer.” He took another swallow. “I have bad news. And worse news.”
“Aren’t you supposed to ask me which I want first?” I was proud of my apparent sangfroid. In fact, I was getting increasingly worried.
“You think this is funny?”
“I don’t know. You haven’t told me what it is yet.”
He looked at me for a long moment, so much disgust in his expression I sensed he was actually relishing what he was about to tell me. “That kid you tuned up in Ueno,” he said. “You killed him.”
“Is that the bad news, or the worse news?”
“That’s the bad news. The worse news is, he was the nephew of Hideki Fukumoto. Name ring a bell?”
“Should it?”
“If you know anything about the yakuza, it should. Fukumoto is the head of the Gokumatsu-gumi. The biggest yakuza syndicate in Tokyo, and therefore the biggest in Japan. You get it now? You fucked up. You killed a yakuza prince. A punk, sure, but a prince. And the two who got away? One was a nobody, relatively speaking. He’s in the hospital, where they’re not sure if he’ll recover his vision. What did you do, stick your thumbs in his eyes?”
“Something like that.”
“Something like that. Jesus. Well, the other was the dead nephew’s cousin. You know what that makes him?”
“Fukumoto’s son, I’m guessing.”
“Well, listen to Albert Einstein here. I guess you’re not as dumb as you act. And the best part is, the two cousins were close. Close as brothers. You want to know Fukumoto Junior’s nickname?”
“I don’t know. Do I?”
“Mad Dog. So you, genius, just killed the cousin of a yakuza named Mad Dog. Proud of yourself?”
I didn’t say anything. I was suddenly scared, and I felt like McGraw could see right through my bravado.
The waitress returned with our food. But I had no appetite. I picked up a gyoza with my chopsticks, dipped it in sauce, and chewed it, barely noticing the taste. “What does this mean?”
“Mean? It means you need to get your candy ass out of Japan. And not come back, ever.”
I shook my head. “I can’t just…”
I stopped. I didn’t even know what I was trying to say. What was it I couldn’t do? Go back to the States, which felt like an alien planet when I’d briefly returned after the war? Admit I wasn’t reliable even to carry a bribery bag for a bunch of corrupt politicians and businessmen? Accept that I’d lost my temper, and fucked up, and blown everything?
McGraw must have seen my distress. Uncharacteristically, his face softened. “I’m sorry, son. You’re no good to me now. You’re too hot. Word is, they already have a contract out on you.”
“Yeah, I got that feeling. They already made a run at me at the Kodokan.”
“What?”
I wasn’t sure why he was so surprised. What did he think a yakuza contract entailed? I told him what had happened.
“Well, it’s good you didn’t kill the guy,” he said, when I was done. “Bad enough you have the yakuza on your ass, you don’t need the police, too. Now look, I’ll make sure you get a ticket home. But that’s all I can do.”
I don’t have a home, I thought. No, not thought. Realized. What the hell was I going to do?
He inhaled several gyoza, then tucked into the fried rice. I forced down a few more bites, thinking hard, looking for a way out.
After a few minutes, I said, “What if I don’t want to go?”
He took an enormous swallow of beer and belched. “You stick around, the Agency will put out a burn notice on you. They don’t want the attention, you understand? Or worse, they’ll drop a dime. Not to the police. To Fukumoto, or to Mad Dog, or to whoever. A lot of people would be happy to have guys like that in thei
r debt.”
“Why don’t you?”
He looked at me, his skin puffy, gin blossoms under his eyes and across his nose. But somehow, for an instant, I could see the formidable young man he must have once been.
“Because I’m not gutless. Because I believe in karma. Because if you get your shit together and learn to control your temper, you have your whole life ahead of you, and I don’t want to be the one who cuts it short.”
We sat in silence again, eating, McGraw with gusto, I with considerably less enthusiasm. My mind was racing, rebelling. Things had been okay. After some of the places I’d been, okay was worth a lot. And now this. It was a mistake. It didn’t have to happen. I didn’t want to go.
Something came to me. A long shot, but I didn’t see a lot of options. “Who’s my problem here?” I asked.
McGraw looked at me suspiciously. He chewed and swallowed. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, who’s motivated to come after me?”
“I told you, Fukumoto and his son.”
“Because I killed Fukumoto’s nephew. The son’s cousin.”
“Is that so hard to understand?”
“But you said the nephew was a punk. A prince, but a punk. What did you mean by that?”
McGraw waved a hand dismissively. “The kid had a reputation. Trouble with the police. Multiple fuck-ups. High profile, low profits. He and Mad Dog were peas in a pod, and equally close.”
“So this…problem I have. It’s being driven just by, what, family honor?”
“‘Just’ family honor? Do you know anything at all about the yakuza? You think a guy named Mad Dog is going to turn the other cheek when someone kills the cousin who was like a brother to him? And Fukumoto Senior can’t let this go. He’d look weak. He’d lose face. His enemies would move in. If he wants to prevent all that—and I promise you, he does—he needs to kill you, simple as that.”