by Barry Eisler
“So I went back to the rest of the unit to talk this over. They were guarding the villagers. I told them what I had just heard. For most of the guys, it had the same effect it had on me—it cooled them down, scared them. But some of them it excited. ‘No fucking way,’ they were saying. ‘They’re telling us to waste ’em? Far out.’ Still, everyone was hesitating.
“I had a friend, Jimmy Calhoun, who everyone called Crazy Jake. He hadn’t been contributing much to the conversation. All of a sudden he says, ‘Fucking pussies. Waste ’em means waste ’em.’ He starts yelling at the villagers in Vietnamese. ‘Get down, everybody on the ground! Num suyn!’ And the villagers complied. We were watching like we were hypnotized, wondering what he was going to do. Jimmy doesn’t even slow down, he just steps back, shoulders his rifle, then ka-pop! ka-pop! he starts shooting them. It was weird, no one tried to run away. Then one of the other guys yells ‘Crazy fuckin’ Jake!’ and shoulders his rifle, too. The next thing I knew we were all unloading our magazines into these people, just blowing them apart. Magazine runs out, press, slide, click, you put in a new one and fire some more.”
My voice was still steady, my eyes fixed straight ahead, remembering. “If I could go back in time, I would try to stop it. I really would. I wouldn’t participate. And the memories dog me. I’ve been running for twenty-five years, but in the end, it’s like trying to lose a shadow.”
There was a protracted silence, and I imagined her thinking, I slept with a monster.
“I wish you hadn’t told me,” she said, confirming my suspicions.
I shrugged, feeling empty. “Maybe it’s better you know.”
She shook her head. “That’s not what I meant. It’s an upsetting story. Upsetting to hear what you’ve been through. I never thought of war as so… personal.”
“Oh, it was personal. On both sides. There were special medals for NVA soldiers who killed an American. A severed head was the proof. If it was a SOG man you killed, you’d get an extra ten thousand piastres—several months’ pay.”
She touched my face again, and I saw a deep sympathy in her eyes. “You were right. You’ve been through horrors. I didn’t know.”
I took her hands and gently moved them away. “Hey, I didn’t even tell you the best part. The intel on the village being a VC stronghold? Bogus. No tunnel networks, no rice or weapons caches.”
She blanched. “You mean—but John, you didn’t know.”
I shrugged. “Not even any telltale tire tracks, which, Come on, we could have taken a second to check for before we started slaughtering people.”
“But you were so young. You must have been out of your minds with fear, with anger.”
I could feel her looking at me. It was okay. After all this time, the words sounded dead to me, just sounds without content.
“Is that what you meant that first night?” she asked. “About not being a forgiving person?”
I remembered saying it to her, remembered her looking like she was going to ask me about it, then seeming to decide not to. “It’s not what I meant, actually. I was thinking of other people, not of myself. But I guess it applies to me, also.”
She nodded slowly, then said, “I have a friend from Chiba named Mika. When I was in New York, she had a car accident. She hit a little girl who was playing in the street. Mika was driving at forty-five kilometers an hour, the speed limit, and the little girl rode her bicycle right in front of the car. There was nothing she could do. It was bad luck. It would have happened to anyone who was driving the car right there and right then.”
On a certain level, I understood what she was getting at. I’d known it all along, even before the psych evaluation they made me take to see how I was handling the special stresses of SOG. The shrink had said the same thing: How can you blame yourself for circumstances that were beyond your control?
I remember that conversation. I remember listening to his bullshit, half angry, half amused at his attempts to draw me out. Finally, I just said to him, “Have you ever killed anyone, Doc?” When he didn’t answer, I walked out. I don’t know what kind of evaluation he gave me. But they didn’t turn me loose from SOG. That came later.
“Do you still work with these people?” she asked.
“There are…connections,” I responded.
“Why?” she asked, after a moment. “Why stay attached to things that give you nightmares?”
I glanced over at the window. The moon had moved higher in the sky, its light slowly ebbing from the room. “It’s a hard thing to explain,” I said slowly. I watched her hair glistening in the pale light, like a vertical sheet of dark water. I ran my fingers through it, gathered it in my hand and let it fall free. “Some of what I was part of in Vietnam didn’t sit well with me when I got back to the States. Some things belong only in a war zone, but then they want to follow you when you leave. After the war, I found I couldn’t go back to the life I’d left behind. I wanted to come back to Asia, because Asia was where my ghosts were least restless, but it was more than just geography. All the things I’d done made sense in war, they were justified by war, I couldn’t live with them outside of war. So I needed to stay at war.”
Her eyes were pools of darkness. “But you can’t stay at war forever, John.”
I gave her a wan smile. “A shark can’t stop swimming, or it dies.”
“You’re not a shark.”
“I don’t know what I am.” I rubbed my temples, trying to work through the images, past and present, colliding in my brain. “I don’t know.”
We were quiet for a while, and I felt a pleasant drowsiness descend. I was going to regret all this. Some lucid part of my mind saw that clearly. But sleep seemed so much more urgent, and anyway what was done was already done.
I slept, but the pain in my back kept the sleep fitful, and in those moments where consciousness briefly crested, I would have doubted everything that had happened if she hadn’t been lying next to me. Then I would slide down into sleep again, there to struggle with ghosts even more personal, more terrible, than those of which I could tell Midori.
PART II
When your sword meets that of your enemy, you can never waver, but must instead attack with the complete resolution of your whole body…
—Miyamoto Musashi, A Book of Five Rings
CHAPTER 14
The next morning I was sitting with my back to the wall at my favorite vantage point in Las Chicas, waiting for Franklin Bulfinch to show himself.
It was a crisp, sunny morning, and between the bright light streaming through the windows and the overall hip atmosphere on which Las Chicas prides itself, I felt comfortable in my light disguise of knockoff Oakley shades, which I’d picked up en route.
Midori was safely ensconced in the music section of the nearby Spiral Building on Aoyama-dori, close enough to meet Bulfinch quickly if necessary but far enough to be safe if things got hairy. She had called Bulfinch less than an hour earlier to arrange things. Most likely he was a legitimate reporter and would come to the meeting alone, but I saw no advantage in giving him time to deploy additional forces if I was mistaken.
Bulfinch was easy to spot as he approached the restaurant, the same tall, thin guy in wireless glasses I had seen on the train. He had a long stride and an erect, confident posture, and again struck me as somehow aristocratic. He was wearing jeans and tennis shoes, dressed up with a blue blazer. He crossed the patio and stepped inside the restaurant proper, pausing to look right, then left, searching for Midori. His eyes passed over me without recognition.
He wandered back in the direction of the restroom, presumably checking the separate dining space in the back of the building. I knew he’d be back in a moment, and used the time to watch the street a little longer. He’d been followed at Alfie, and it was possible he was being followed now.
The street was still empty when Bulfinch returned to the front of the restaurant a minute later. His eyes swept the space again. When they were pointed in my direction, I said quietly,
“Mr. Bulfinch.”
He looked at me for a second before saying, “Do I know you?”
“I’m a friend of Midori Kawamura. She asked me to come on her behalf.”
“Where is she?”
“She’s in danger right now. She needs to be careful.”
“Is she coming?”
“That depends.”
“On what?”
“On whether I decide it’s safe.”
“Who are you?”
“As I said, a friend, interested in the same thing you are.”
“Which is?”
I looked at him through my shades. “The disk.”
He paused before saying, “I don’t know about a disk.”
Right. “You were expecting Midori’s father to deliver you a disk when he died on the Yamanote line three weeks ago. He didn’t have it with him, so you followed up with Midori after her performance at Alfie the following Friday. You met her in the Starbucks on Gaienhigashi-dori, near Almond in Roppongi. That’s where you told her about the disk, because you hoped she might have it. You wouldn’t tell her what’s on the disk because you were afraid doing so would compromise her. Though you had already compromised her by showing up at Alfie, because you were followed. All of which will be sufficient, I hope, to establish my bona fides.”
He made no move to sit. “You could have learned most of that without Midori telling you, and filled in the gaps by educated guessing—especially if you were the one following me.”
I shrugged. “And then I imitated her voice and called you an hour ago?”
He hesitated, then walked over and sat, his back straight and his hands on the table. “All right. What can you tell me?”
“I was going to ask you the same question.”
“Look, I’m a journalist. Do you have information for me?”
“I need to know what’s on that disk.”
“You keep talking about a disk.”
“Mr. Bulfinch,” I said, focusing for an instant on the street, which was still empty, “the people who want that disk think Midori has it, and they’re more than willing to kill her to retrieve it. Your meeting her at Alfie while you were being watched is very likely what put her in danger. So let’s stop fucking around, okay?”
He took off his glasses and sighed. “Assuming for a moment there is a disk, I don’t see how knowledge of what’s on it would help Midori.”
“You say you’re a journalist. I assume you’d be interested in publishing the hypothetical disk’s contents?”
“You could assume that, yes.”
“And I would also assume certain people would want to prevent that publication?”
“That would also be a safe assumption.”
“Okay, then. It’s the threat of publication that’s making these people target Midori. Once the contents of the disk are published, Midori would no longer be a threat, is that right?”
“What you’re saying makes sense.”
“Then it seems we want the same thing. We both want the contents of the disk published.”
He shifted in his seat. “I see your point. But I’m not going to be comfortable talking about this unless I see Midori.”
I considered for a moment. “Are you carrying a mobile phone?”
“Yes.”
“Show it to me.”
He reached into the left side of the blazer and pulled out a phone.
“That’s fine,” I said. “Go ahead and put it back in your pocket.” As he did so, I took a pen and small sheet of paper from my own jacket pocket and started jotting down instructions. My gut told me he wasn’t wired, but no one’s gut is infallible.
“Until I say otherwise, under no circumstances do I want to see you reaching for that phone,” my note read. “We’ll walk out of the restaurant together. After we step outside, I’ll pat you down for weapons. After that, go where I motion you to go. At some point, I’ll let you know I want you to start walking ahead, and at some point I’ll tell you where we’re going. If you have questions now, write them down. If you don’t, just hand back this note. Starting now, do not say a word unless I tell you to.”
I extended the note to him. He took it with one hand while slipping on his glasses with the other. After a moment, he pushed it across the table to me and nodded.
I folded the note up and put it back in my jacket pocket, followed by the pen. Then I placed a thousand-yen note on the table to cover the coffee I’d been drinking and motioned him to leave.
Once outside, I patted him down and was unsurprised to find he was clean. As we moved down the street, I was careful to keep him slightly in front of me and to the side, a human shield if it came to that. I knew every good spot in the area for surveillance or an ambush, and my head swept back and forth, looking for someone out of place, someone who might have followed Bulfinch to the restaurant and then set up to wait.
Periodically, I tapped his shoulder to indicate “left” or “right,” and we made our way to the Spiral Building. As we walked through the glass doors, I told him it was okay to talk. Midori was waiting in the music section.
“Kawamura-san,” he said, bowing, when he saw her. “Thank you for your call.”
Midori returned the bow. “Thank you for coming to meet me. I’m afraid I wasn’t completely candid with you when we met for coffee. I’m not as ignorant of my father’s affiliations as I led you to believe. But I don’t know anything about the disk you mentioned. No more than you told me, anyway.”
“I’m not sure what I can do for you, then,” he said.
“Tell us what’s on the disk,” I replied.
“I don’t see how that would help you.”
“I don’t see how it could hurt us,” I answered. “Right now we’re running blind. If we put our heads together, we’ve got a much better chance of retrieving the disk than we do if we work separately.”
“Please, Mr. Bulfinch,” Midori said. “I barely escaped being killed a few days ago by whoever is trying to find that disk. I need your help.”
Bulfinch grimaced and looked at Midori and then at me, his eyes sweeping back and forth several times. “All right,” he said after a moment. “Two months ago your father contacted me. He told me he read my column for Forbes. He told me who he was and said he wanted to help. A classic whistle-blower.”
Midori turned to me. “That was about the time he was diagnosed.”
“I’m sorry?” Bulfinch asked.
“Lung cancer,” Midori said. “He had just learned he was going to die.”
Bulfinch nodded. “I didn’t know that. I’m sorry.”
Midori bowed her head briefly, accepting his solicitude. “Please, go on.”
“Over the course of the next month I had several clandestine meetings with your father, during which he briefed me extensively on corruption in the Construction Ministry and its role as broker between the Liberal Democratic Party and the yakuza. These briefings provided me with invaluable insight into the nature and extent of corruption in Japanese society. But I needed corroboration.”
“What corroboration?” I asked. “Can’t you just print it and attribute it to ‘a senior source in the Construction Ministry?’”
“Ordinarily, yes,” Bulfinch replied. “But there were two problems here. First, Kawamura’s position in the Ministry gave him unique access to the information he was providing me. If we had published the information, we might as well have used his name in the byline.”
“And the second problem?” Midori asked.
“Impact,” Bulfinch answered. “We’ve already run a half-dozen exposés on the kind of corruption Kawamura was involved in. The Japanese press resolutely refuses to pick them up. Why? Because the politicians and bureaucrats pass and interpret laws that can make or break domestic corporations. And the corporations provide over half the media’s advertising revenues. So if, for example, a newspaper runs an article that offends a politician, the politician calls his contacts at the relevant corporations, who in turn pull thei
r advertising from the newspaper and transfer it to a rival publication, and the offending paper goes bankrupt. You see? If you have a reporter investigate a story from outside the government-sponsored kisha news clubs, you get shut down. If you play ball, the money keeps rolling in, licit and illicit. No one here takes chances; everyone treats the truth like a contagious disease. That’s why Japan’s press is the most docile in the world.”
“But with proof…?” I asked.
“Hard proof would change everything. The papers would be forced to cover the story or else reveal they’re nothing but tools of the government. And flushing the corrupt kingpins out into the open would weaken them and embolden the press. We could start a virtuous cycle that would lead to a change in Japanese politics the likes of which the country hasn’t seen since the Meiji Restoration.”
“I think you may be overestimating the zeal of domestic media,” Midori said.
Bulfinch shook his head. “Not at all. I know some of these people well. They’re good journalists and they want to publish. But they’re realists, too.”
“The proof,” I said. “What was it?”
Bulfinch looked at me over the tops of his wireless glasses. “I don’t know exactly. Only that it’s hard evidence. Incontrovertible.”
“It sounds like that disk should go the Keisatsucho, not the press,” Midori said, referring to Tatsu’s investigative organization.
“Your father wouldn’t have lasted a day if he’d handed that information over to the police,” I said, saving Bulfinch the trouble.
“That’s right,” Bulfinch said. “Your father wasn’t the first person to try to blow the whistle on corruption. Ever hear of Honma Tadayo?”
Ah, yes, Honma-san. A sad story.
Midori shook her head.
“When Nippon Credit Bank went bankrupt in 1998,” Bulfinch went on, “at least thirty-six billion, and probably much more, of its hundred-and-thirty-three-billion-dollar loan portfolio had gone bad. The bad loans were linked to the underworld, even to illegal payments to North Korea. To clean up the mess, a consortium of rescuers hired Honma Tadayo, the respected former director of the Bank of Japan. Honma-san became president of NCB in early September and started working through the bank’s books, trying to bring to light the full extent of its bad debts and understand where and why they had been extended in the first place.”