Hard Rain

1

ONCE YOU GET past the overall irony of the situation, you realize that killing a guy in the middle of his own health club has a lot to recommend it.

The target was a yakuza, an iron freak named Ishihara who worked out every day in a gym he owned in Roppongi, one of Tokyo ’s entertainment districts. Tatsu had told me the hit had to look like natural causes, like they always do, so I was glad to be working in a venue where it was far from unthinkable that someone might keel over from a fatal aneurysm induced by exertion, or suffer an unlucky fall onto a steel bar, or undergo some other tragic mishap while using one of the complicated exercise machines.

One of these eventualities might even be immortalized in the warnings corporate lawyers would insist on placing on the next generation of exercise equipment, to notify the public of yet another unnatural use for which the machine was not intended and for which the manufacturer would have to remain blameless. Over the years, my work has made me the anonymous recipient of at least two such legal encomia-one on a bridge traversing the polluted waters of the Sumida River, in which a certain politician drowned in 1982 (“Warning-Do Not Climb On These Bars”); another, a decade later, following the aquatic electrocution of an unusually diligent banker, on the packaging of hair dryers (“Warning-Do Not Use While Bathing”).

The health club was also convenient because I wouldn’t have to worry about fingerprints. In Japan, where costumes are a national pastime, a weightlifter wouldn’t pump iron without wearing stylish padded gloves any more than a politician would take a bribe in his underwear. It was a warm early spring for Tokyo, portending, they said, a fine cherry blossom season, and where else but at a gym could a man in gloves have gone unnoticed?

In my business, going unnoticed is half the game. People put out signals-body language, gait, clothes, facial expression, posture, attitude, speech, mannerisms-that can tell you where they’re from, what they do, who they are. Most importantly, do they fit in. Because if you don’t fit in, the target will spot you, and after that you won’t be able to get close enough to do it right. Or the rare uncorrupt cop will spot you, and you’ll have some explaining to do. Or a counter-surveillance team will spot you, and then-congratulations!-the target will be you.

But if you’re attentive, you begin to understand that the identifying signals are a science, not an art. You watch, you imitate, you acquire. Eventually, you can shadow different targets through different societal ecosystems, remaining anonymous in all of them.

Anonymity wasn’t easy for me in Japan when my parentage was a matter of public record and schoolyard taunts. But today, you wouldn’t spot the Caucasian in my face unless someone tipped you off that it was there to be found. My American mother wouldn’t have minded that. She had always wanted me to fit in in Japan, and was glad that my father’s Japanese features had prevailed in that initial genetic struggle for dominance. And the plastic surgery I had undergone when I returned to Japan after my fling with U.S. Special Forces in Vietnam largely completed the job that chance and nature had begun.

The story my signals would tell the yakuza was simple. He’d only begun seeing me at his gym recently, but I was already obviously in shape. So I wasn’t some middle-aged guy who’d decided to take up weight lifting to try and regain a lost college-era physique. The more likely explanation would be that I worked for a company that had transferred me to Tokyo, and, if they had sprung for digs near Roppongi, maybe in Minami-Aoyama or Azabu, I must be someone reasonably important and well compensated. That I was apparently into bodybuilding at all at this stage in my life probably meant affairs with young women, for whom a youthful physique might ameliorate the unavoidable emotional consequences of sleeping with an older man in what at root would be little more than an exchange of sex and the illusion of immortality for Ferragamo handbags and the other implicit currencies of such arrangements. All of which the yakuza would understand, and even respect.

In fact, my recent appearance at the yakuza’s gym had nothing to do with a company transfer-it was more like a business trip. After all, I was in Tokyo just to do a job. When the job was finished, I would leave. I’d done some things to generate animosity when I’d been living here, and the relevant parties might still be looking for me, even after I’d been away for a year, so a short stay was all I could sensibly afford.

Tatsu had given me a dossier on the yakuza a month earlier, when he’d found me and persuaded me to take the job. From the contents, I would have concluded that the target was just mob muscle, but I knew he must be more than that if Tatsu wanted him eliminated. I hadn’t asked. I only wanted the particulars that would help me get close. The rest was irrelevant.

The dossier had included the yakuza’s cell phone number. I had fed it to Harry, who, compulsive hacker that he was, had long since penetrated the cellular network control centers of Japan ’s three telco providers. Harry’s computers were monitoring the movements of the yakuza’s cell phone within the network. Any time the phone got picked up by the tower that covered the area around the yakuza’s health club, Harry paged me.

Tonight, the page had come at just after eight o’clock, while I was reading in my room at the New Otani hotel in Akasaka-Mitsuke. The club closed at eight, I knew, so if the yakuza was working out there after hours there was a good possibility he’d be alone. What I’d been waiting for.

My workout gear was already in a bag, and I was out the door within minutes. I caught a cab a slight distance from the hotel, not wanting a doorman to hear or remember where I might be going, and five minutes later I exited at the corner of Roppongi-dori and Gaienhigashi-dori in Roppongi. I hated to use such a direct route because doing so afforded me limited opportunity to ensure that I wasn’t being followed, but I had only a little time to pull this off the way I’d planned, and I decided it was worth the risk.

I had been watching the yakuza for over a month now, and knew his routines. I’d learned that he liked to vary the times of his workouts, sometimes arriving at the gym early in the morning, sometimes at night. Probably he assumed the resulting unpredictability would make him hard to get to.

He was half right. Unpredictability is the key to being a hard target, but the concept applies to both time and place. Half-measures like this guy’s will protect you from some of the people some of the time, but they won’t save you for long from someone like me.

Strange, how people can take adequate, even strong security measures in some respects, while leaving themselves vulnerable in others. Like double-locking the front door and leaving the windows wide open.

Sometimes the phenomenon is caused by fear. Fear not so much of the requirements, but rather the consequences of life as a hard target. Seriously protecting yourself calls for the annihilation of ties with society, ties that most people need the way they need oxygen. You give up friends, family, romance. You walk through the world like a ghost, detached from the living around you. If you were to die in, say, a bus accident, you’d wind up buried in an obscure municipal graveyard, just another John Doe, no flowers, no mourners, hell, no mourning. It’s natural, probably even desirable, to be afraid of all this.

Other times there’s a form of denial at work. Circuitous routes, extensive security checks, an ongoing internal dialogue consisting of If I were trying to get to me, how would I do it? all require a deep acceptance of the notion that there are people out there who have both the motive and the means to cut short your time on Earth. This notion is innately uncomfortable for the human psyche, so much so that it produces enormous stress even for soldiers in battle. A lot of guys, the first time they come under close-range fire, they’re shocked. “Why’s he trying to kill me?” they’re asking themselves. “What did I ever do to him?”

Think about it. Ever look in a closet or under the bed, when you’re alone in the house, to ensure that an intruder isn’t hiding there? Now, if you really believed that the Man in the Black Ski Mask was lurking in those places, would you behave the same way? Of course not. But it’s more comfortable to believe the danger only in the abstract, and to act on it only half-heartedly. That’s denial.

Finally, and most obviously, there is laziness. Who has the time or energy to inspect the family car for improvised explosive devices before every drive? Who can afford a two-hour, roundabout route to get to a place that could have been reached directly in ten minutes? Who wants to pass up a restaurant or bar just because the only seats available face the wall, not the entrance?

Rhetorical questions, but I know how Crazy Jake would have answered. The living, he would have said. And the ones who intend to go on that way.

Which leads to an easy rationalization, one that I’m sure is common to people who have taken lives the way I have. If he’d really wanted to live, the rationalization goes, I wouldn’t have been able to get to him. He wouldn’t have permitted himself that weakness, the one that did him in.

The yakuza’s weakness was his addiction to weights. Who knows what fueled it-a history of childhood bullying that made him want to appear visibly strong afterward, an attempt to overcome a feeling of inadequacy born of being naturally slighter of build than Caucasians, some suppressed homoeroticism like the one that drove Mishima. Maybe some of the same impulses that had led him to become a gangster to begin with.

His obsession had nothing to do with health, of course. In fact, the guy was an obvious steroid abuser. His neck was so thick it looked as though he could slide a tie up over his head without having to loosen the knot, and he sported acne so severe that the club’s stark incandescent lighting, designed to show off to maximum effect the rips and cuts its members had developed in their bodies, cast small shadows over the pocked landscape of his face. His testicles were probably the size of raisins, his blood pressure likely rampaging through an overworked heart.

I’d also seen him explode into the kind of abrupt, unprovoked violence that is another symptom of steroid abuse. One night, someone I hadn’t seen before, no doubt one of the club’s civilian members who liked the location and thought that rubbing elbows with reputed gangsters made them tougher by osmosis, started removing some of the numerous iron plates that were weighing down the bar the yakuza had been using to bench-press. The yakuza had walked away from the station, probably to take a break, and the new guy must have mistakenly assumed this meant he was through. The guy was pretty sizable himself, his colorful Spandex sleeveless top showing off a weightlifter’s chest and arms.

Someone probably should have warned him. But the club’s membership consisted primarily of chinpira-low-level young yakuza and wanna-be punks-not exactly good Samaritan types who were interested in helping their fellow man. Anyway, you have to be at least mildly stupid to start disassembling a bar like the one the yakuza was using without looking around for permission first. There were probably a hundred and fifty kilos on it, maybe more.

Someone nudged the yakuza and pointed. The yakuza, who had been squatting, reared up and bellowed, “Orya!” loud enough to vibrate the plate glass in the front of the rectangular room. What the fuck!

Everyone looked up, as startled as if there had been an explosion-even the new guy who had been so clueless just an instant earlier. Still bellowing expletives, the yakuza strode directly to the bench-press station, doing a good job of using his voice, either by instinct or design, to disorient his victim.

Everything about the yakuza-his words, his tone, his movement and posture-screamed Attack! But the man was too frozen, either by fear or denial, to move off the line of assault. And although he was holding a ten-kilo iron plate with edges considerably harder than the yakuza’s cranium, the man did nothing but drop his mouth open, perhaps in surprise, perhaps in inchoate and certainly futile apology.

The yakuza blasted into him like a rhino, his shoulder driving into the man’s stomach. I saw the man try to brace for the impact, but again he failed to move off the line of attack and his attempt was largely useless. The yakuza drove him backward into the wall, then unleashed a flurry of crude punches to his head and neck. The man, in shock now and running on autopilot, dropped the plate and managed to raise his arms to ward off a few of the blows, but the yakuza, still bellowing, slapped the attempted blocks out of the way and kept on punching. I saw one of his shots connect to the left side of the man’s neck, to the real estate over the carotid sinus, and the man began to crumble as his nervous system overcompensated from the shock of the blow by reducing blood pressure to the brain. The yakuza, feet planted widely as though he had an ax and was splitting logs, continued to hammer at the top of his victim’s head and neck. The man fell to the floor, but retained enough consciousness to curl up and protect himself to some extent from the hail of kicks that followed.

Huffing and swearing, the yakuza bent and caught the prostrate man’s right ankle between an enormous biceps and forearm. For a moment, I thought he was going to apply a jujitsu leglock and try to break something. Instead, he straightened and proceeded to drag the man’s prone form to the club’s entrance and out into the street.

He returned a moment later, alone, and, after taking a moment to catch his breath, resumed his rightful place on the bench without looking at anyone else in the room. Everyone returned to what they were doing: his affiliates, because they didn’t care; the civilians, because they were unnerved. It was as though nothing had happened, although the silence in the club indicated that indeed something had.

A part of my mind that’s always running in the background logged what I saw as the yakuza’s assets: raw strength, experience with violence, familiarity with principles of continuous attack. Under weaknesses, I placed lack of self-control, shortness of breath after a brief and one-sided fight, relatively minimal damage caused despite ferocity of assault.

Unless he was a borderline sociopath, which was statistically unlikely, I knew the yakuza would now be feeling slightly uneasy about what people must have made of his outburst. I took the opportunity to stroll over to the bench-press station and ask him if he needed a spot.

“Warui na,” he thanked me, grateful, I knew, for the comfort this simple interaction afforded him.

“Iya,” I replied. It’s nothing. I stood over him and helped him get the bar in the air. I noted that he was moving a hundred and fifty-five kilos. He managed two repetitions, with some assistance from me on the second. He would still be fully adrenalized from his recent altercation, and I made a mental note of the limits of his strength at this exercise.

I helped him guide the bar back onto the uprights, then whistled quietly through my teeth in slightly theatrical deference to his power. I moved to the foot of the bench as he sat up and told him that if he needed another spot, he should just ask me. He nodded his head in gruff thanks and I began to turn away.

I paused as though considering whether to add something, then turned back to him. “That guy should have checked to see if you were done with this station,” I said in Japanese. “Some people have no manners. You taught him a lesson.”

He nodded again, pleased at my astute assessment of the important social service he had provided in pulverizing some harmless idiot, and I knew that he would be comfortable calling on me, his new friend, from time to time when he needed a spot.

Like tonight, I hoped. I moved quickly down Gaienhigashi-dori, easing past pedestrians on the crowded sidewalk, ignoring the cacophony of traffic and sound trucks and touts, using the chrome and glass around me to gauge whether there was anyone to my rear trying to keep up. I turned right just before the Roi Roppongi Building, then right again onto the club’s street, where I paused behind a thicket of parked bicycles, my back to the incongruous pink exterior of a Starbucks coffee shop, waiting to see who might be trailing in my wake. A few groups of young partygoers drifted by, caught up in the urgent business of entertaining themselves and failing to notice the man standing quietly in the shadows. No one set off my radar. After a few minutes, I made my way to the club.

The facility occupied the ground floor of a gray commercial building hemmed in by rusting fire escapes and choked with high-tension wires that clung to the structure’s façade like rotting vegetation. Across from it was a parking lot crowded by Mercedeses with darkened windows and high-performance tires, the status symbols of the country’s elite and of its criminals, each aping the other, comfortably sharing the pleasures of the night in Roppongi’s tawdry demimonde. The street itself was illuminated only by the indifferent glow of a single arched lamplight, its base festooned with flyers advertising the area’s innumerable sexual services, in the shadows of its own luminescence looking like the elongated neck of some antediluvian bird shedding diseased and curling feathers.

The shades were drawn behind the club’s plate-glass windows, but I spotted the yakuza’s anodized aluminum Harley-Davidson V-Rod parked in front, surrounded by commuter bicycles like a shark amidst pilot fish. Just past the windows was the entrance to the building. I tried the door, but it was locked.

I backed up a few steps to the club windows and tapped on the glass. A moment later the lights went off inside. Nice, I thought. He had cut the lights so he could peek through the shades without being seen from outside. I waited, knowing he was watching me and checking the street.

The lights went back on, and a moment later the yakuza appeared in the entranceway to the building. He was wearing gray sweatpants and a black cutaway A-shirt, along with the obligatory weightlifting gloves. Obviously in the middle of a workout.

He opened the door, his eyes searching the street for danger, failing to spot it right there in front of him.

“Shimatterun da yo,” he told me. Club’s closed.

“I know,” I said in Japanese, my hands up, palms forward in a placating gesture. “I was hoping someone might be here. I was going to come by earlier but got held up. You think I could squeeze in a quick one? Just while you’re here, no longer than that.”

He hesitated, then shrugged and turned to go back inside. I followed him in.

“How much longer have you got to go?” I asked, dropping my gear bag and changing out of my unobtrusive khakis, blue oxford-cloth shirt, and navy blazer. I had already slipped on the gloves, as I always did before coming to the club, but the yakuza hadn’t noticed this detail. “So I can time my workout.”

He walked over to the squat station. “Forty-five minutes, maybe an hour,” he said, getting into position under the weight.

Squats. What he usually did when he was finished bench pressing. Shit.

I slipped into shorts and a sweatshirt, then warmed up with some push-ups and other calisthenics while he did his sets of squats. The warm-up might actually be useful, I realized, depending on the extent of his struggles. A small advantage, but I don’t give anything away for free.

When he was through, I asked, “Already done benching?”

“Aa.” Yeah.

“How much you put up tonight?”

He shrugged, but I detected a slight puffing of his chest that told me his vanity had been kindled.

“Not so much. Hundred and forty kilos. Could have done more, but with that much weight, it’s better to have someone spot you.”

Perfect. “Hey, I’ll spot you.”

“Nah, I’m already done.”

“C’mon, do another set. It inspires me. What are you putting up, twice your body weight?” My underestimate was deliberate.

“More.”

“Shit, more than twice your body weight? That’s what I’m talking about, I’m not even close to that. Do me a favor, do one more set, it’ll motivate me. I’ll spot you, fair enough?”

He hesitated, then shrugged and started walking over to the bench-press station.

The bar was already set up with the hundred and forty kilos he’d been using earlier. “Think you can handle a hundred and sixty?” I asked, my tone doubtful.

He looked at me, and I could tell from his eyes that his ego had engaged. “I can handle it.”

“Okay, this I’ve got to see,” I said, pulling two ten-kilo plates off the weight tree and sliding them onto the ends of the bar. I stood behind the bench and gripped the bar about shoulder-width with both hands. “Let me know when you’re ready.”

He sat at the foot of the bench, his shoulders hunched forward, and rotated his neck from side to side. He swung his arms back and forth and I heard a series of short, forceful exhalations. Then he lay back and took hold of the bar.

“Give me a lift on three,” he said.

I nodded.

There were several additional sharp exhalations. Then: “One… two… three!”

I helped him get the bar into the air and steady it over his chest. He was staring at the bar as though enraged by it, his chin sunk into his neck in preparation for the effort.

Then he let it drop, controlling its descent but allowing enough momentum to ensure a good bounce off his massive chest. Two thirds of the way up, the bar almost stopped, suspended between the drag of gravity and the power of his steroid-fueled muscles, but it continued its shaky ascent until his elbows were straightened. His arms were trembling from the effort. There was no way he had another one in him.

“One more, one more,” I urged. “C’mon, you can do it.”

There was a pause, and I prepared to try some fresh exhortations. But he was only mentally preparing for the effort. He took three quick breaths, then dropped the bar to his chest. It rose a few centimeters from the impact, then a few more from the northward shove that followed, but a second later it stopped and began to move inexorably downward.

“Tetsudatte kure,” he grunted. Help. But calmly, expecting my immediate assistance.

The bar continued downward and settled against his chest. “Oi, tanomu,” he said again, more sharply this time.

I pushed downward instead.

His eyes popped open, searching for mine.

Between the weight of the bar and plates and the pressure I was delivering, he was now struggling with almost two hundred kilos.

I focused on the bar and his torso, but in my peripheral vision I saw his eyes bulging in confusion, then fear. He made no sound. I continued to concentrate on the clinical downward pressure.

With his teeth clenched shut, his chin almost buried in his neck, he threw everything he had into moving the bar. In extremis he was actually able to get the weight off his chest. I hooked a foot under the horizontal supports at the bottom of the bench and used the leverage to add additional pressure to the bar, and again it settled against his chest.

I felt a tremor in the weights as his arms began to shake with exertion. Again the bar moved slightly north.

Suddenly I was struck by the reek of feces. His sympathetic nervous system, in desperation, was shutting down nonessential bodily activities, including sphincter control, and diverting all available energy to his muscles.

The rally lasted only another moment. Then his arms began to shake more violently, and I felt the bar moving downward, more deeply into his chest. There was a slight hissing as his breath was driven out through his nostrils and pursed lips. I felt his eyes on my face but kept my attention on his torso and the bar. Still he made no sound.

Seconds went by, then more. His position didn’t change. I waited. His skin began to blue. I waited longer.

Finally, I eased off the pressure I had been putting on the bar and released my grip.

His eyes were still on me, but they no longer perceived. I stepped back, out of their sightless ambit, and paused to observe the scene. It looked like what it almost was: a weightlifting addict, alone and late at night, tries to handle more than he can, gets caught under the bar, suffocates and dies there. A bizarre accident.

I changed back into my street clothes. Picked up my bag, moved to the door. A series of cracks rang out behind me, like the snaps of dried tinder. I turned to look one last time, realizing as I did that the sound was of his ribs giving way. No question, he was done. Only his convulsive grip on the bar remained, as though the fingers refused to believe what the body had already accepted.

I stepped into the dark hallway and waited until the street was clear. Then I eased out onto the sidewalk and into the shadows around me.

2

I SLIPPED AWAY from the area on foot along a series of secondary streets in Roppongi and Akasaka, cutting across narrow alleyways in a manner which, to the uninitiated, would have looked like a series of simple shortcuts to wherever I was going, but which were in fact designed to force a follower or team of followers to reveal themselves in an effort to keep up. With a few deliberate exceptions, all my surveillance detection moves are accomplished under the guise of seemingly normal pedestrian behavior. If I’m being followed because some organization has taken an interest but hasn’t yet managed to confirm who I am, I’m not going to give the game away by acting like anything other than John Q. Citizen.

After about a half-hour I was confident that I wasn’t being tailed, and my pace began to slow in accompaniment to my mood. I found myself moving in a long, counterclockwise semicircle that I only half acknowledged was taking me in the direction of Aoyama Bochi, the enormous cemetery laid out like a triangular green bandage at the center of the city’s fashionable western districts.

On the north side of Roppongi-dori, I passed a small colony of cardboard shelters, the way stations of wandering homeless men whose lives were, in a sense, as detached and anonymous as my own. I set down the gym bag I was carrying, knowing that the bag and its contents of workout clothes and weightlifting gloves would quickly be distributed and assimilated among the gaunt and trackless wraiths nearby. Within days, perhaps hours, the discarded remnants of this last job would have been bleached of any trace of their origins, each just another nameless, colorless item among nameless, colorless souls, the flotsam and jetsam of loneliness and despair that fall from time to time into Tokyo’s collective blind spot and from there into oblivion.

Freed of the burden I had been carrying, I moved on, this time circling east. Under an overpass at Nogizaka, north of Roppongi-dori, I saw a half-dozen chinpira, gaudy in sleek racing leathers, squatting in a tight semicircle, their low-slung metal motorcycles parked on the footpath alongside them. Fragments of their conversation skipped off the side of the concrete wall to my right, the words unintelligible but the notes tuned as tight as the tricked-out exhaust pipes of their machines. They were probably jacked on kakuseizai, the methamphetamine that has been the Japanese drug of choice since the government distributed it to soldiers and workers during World War II, and of which these chinpira were doubtless both purveyors and consumers. They were waiting for the drug-induced hum in their muscles and brains to hit the right pitch, for the hour to grow suitably late and the night more seductively dark, before emerging from their concrete lair and answering the neon call of Roppongi.

I saw them take notice of me, a solitary figure approaching from the southern end of what was in effect a narrow tunnel. I considered crossing the street, but a metal divider made that maneuver unfeasible. I might simply have backed up and taken a different route. My failure to do so made it more difficult for me to deny that I was indeed heading toward the cemetery.

When I was three or four meters away one of them stood up. The others continued to squat, watching, alert for whatever distraction was promised.

I had already noted the absence of any of the security cameras that were growing more pervasive in the streets and subways with every passing year. Sometimes I have to fight the feeling that those cameras are looking specifically for me.

“Oi,” the one who had stood called out. Hey.

I stole a quick glance behind me to ensure that we were alone. It wouldn’t pay to have anyone see what I would do if these idiots got in my way.

Without altering my pace or direction, I looked into the chinpira’s eyes, my expression obsidian flat. I let him know with this look that I was neither afraid nor looking for trouble, that I’d done this kind of thing many times before, that if he was in search of some excitement tonight the smart thing would be to find it elsewhere.

Most people, especially those even loosely acquainted with violence, understand these signals, and can be relied on to respond in ways that increase their survival prospects. But apparently this guy was too stupid, or too jacked on kakuseizai. Or he might have misinterpreted my initial backward glance as a sign of fear. Regardless, he ignored the warning I had given him and started edging into my path.

I recognized the procedure: I was being interviewed for my suitability as a victim. Would I allow myself to be forced out into the street and the oncoming traffic? Would I cringe and flinch in the process? If so, he would know I was a safe target, and he would then escalate, probably to real violence.

But I prefer my violence sudden. Keeping him to my right, I stepped past him with my left leg, shooting my right leg through on the same side immediately afterward and then sweeping it backward to reap his legs out from under him in osoto-gari, one of the most basic and powerful judo throws. Simultaneously I twisted counterclockwise and blasted my right arm into his neck, taking his upper body in the opposite direction of his legs. For a split instant he was suspended horizontally over the spot where he had been standing. Then I drilled him into the sidewalk, jerking upward on his collar at the last instant so the back of his head wouldn’t take excessive impact. I didn’t want a fatality. Too much attention.

The sequence had taken less than two seconds. I straightened and continued on my way as before, my eyes forward but my ears trained behind me for sounds of pursuit.

There were none, and as the distance widened I indulged a small smile. I don’t like bullies-they formed too large a portion of my childhood on both sides of the Pacific-and I had a feeling it would be a long time before these chinpira worked up a fresh appetite to dispute someone’s passage along that sidewalk.

I continued along, cutting left east of the cemetery, then right on Gaiennishi-dori, taking advantage of the turn as I always automatically do to monitor the area to my rear while ostensible checking for traffic. The cemetery was now to my right, but there was no sidewalk on that side of the street, so I stayed on the left until I was opposite a long riser of stone steps, a byway between the green piazza of the dead and the living city without. I stood looking at those steps for a long time. Finally I decided that the urge to which I had almost succumbed was ridiculous, as I had decided so many times in the past. I turned and moved slowly down the street, back the way I had come.

As always after finishing a job, I was aware of the need to be among other people, to find some comfort in the illusion that I am part of the society through which I move. A few meters down the street I ducked into the Monsoon Restaurant, where I could enjoy the Southeast Asian-derived cuisine and the anodyne sounds of other people’s conversation.

I chose a seat set slightly back from the restaurant’s open-air façade, facing the street and the entrance, and ordered a simple meal of rice noodles with vegetables. Although it was late for dinner, the tables were mostly occupied. To my left were the remnants of a small office party: a few young men with loosened ties and identical navy suits, two women with them, pretty and more stylishly dressed than their companions, at ease with the traditional Japanese female role of serving food, pouring drinks, and fostering conversation. Behind them, a solitary couple, high school or college kids, leaning toward each other and holding hands across the table, the boy talking with his eyebrows raised as though suggesting something, the girl laughing and shaking her head no. To the other side, a group of older American men, dressed more casually than the other patrons, their voices appropriately low, their skin shining slightly in the light of the table lamps.

It was almost surreal, finding myself back in a restaurant or bar after finishing a job, my mind starting to drift, relief settling in after the adrenaline rush had ended. The sensations weren’t new, but the context rendered them strange, like the feel of a familiar business suit donned to attend a funeral.

I had thought I was out of all this after finishing things with Holtzer, the late chief of the CIA’s Tokyo Station. My cover had been blown, and it was time to reinvent myself, not for the first time. I had thought about the States, maybe the west coast, San Francisco, someplace with a large Asian population. But establishing a new identity in America, without the sort of groundwork that I had long since prepared in Japan, would have been difficult. Besides, if the CIA had been looking for payback for Holtzer, they might have had an easier time coming after me on their home turf. Staying in Japan left Tatsu to contend with, of course, but Tatsu’s interest in me had nothing to do with revenge, so I had judged him the lesser of the risks.

I had to smile at that. I had learned that the danger Tatsu posed to me, while certainly less acute than the straightforward possibility of getting put to sleep by some lucky CIA contractor, was far more insidious.

He had tracked me down in Osaka, Japan’s second largest metropolis, where I had gone after disappearing from Tokyo. I had moved into a highrise community called Belfa in Miyakojima, the northwest of the city. Belfa was inhabited by sufficient numbers of corporate transferees so that a recent arrival wouldn’t provoke undue attention. It was also home primarily to families with small children, the kind of people who stay aware of the composition of their neighborhood, whose presence makes it difficult to mount effective surveillance or a successful ambush.

At first I had missed Tokyo, where I had lived for two decades, and was disappointed to find myself in a city that the average Tokyoite would reflexively dismiss as a backwater in every category save brute geographical sprawl. But Osaka had grown on me. Its atmosphere, though arguably less sophisticated and cosmopolitan than Tokyo’s, is also lacking in pretense. Unlike Tokyo, whose financial, cultural, and political center of gravity is so strong that at times the city can feel self-satisfied, even solipsistic, Osaka compares itself ceaselessly to other places, its cousin to the northeast chief among them, emerging victorious, of course, in matters of cuisine, financial acumen, and general human goodness. I found something endearing in this scrappy, self-declared contest for supremacy. Maybe we don’t have the refined-read effete-manners, or the most powerful-read corrupt-political establishment, Osaka seems to declare to a Tokyo that isn’t even listening, but we’ve got a bigger heart. Over time, I began to wonder if the city didn’t have a point.

I had spotted Tatsu behind me one night as I was making my way to Overseas, a jazz club in Honmachi that I had come to like. Although I gave no sign, I had recognized him immediately. Tatsu has a squat build and a way of rolling his shoulders from side to side when he walks that makes him hard to miss. If the tail had been someone else, I would have doubled back and questioned him, if possible. Eliminated him, if not.

But since Tatsu himself was the one behind me, I knew I was in no immediate danger. As a department head with the Keisatsucho, Japan’s FBI, he could easily have had me picked up already, if that’s what he had wanted. The hell with it, I had decided. Akiko Grace, a young pianist who had electrified Japan’s jazz world with her debut CD From New York, was appearing that night, and I wanted to see her play. If Tatsu was inclined to join me, he could.

He had arrived midway through the second set. Grace was doing “That Morning,” a melancholy piece from Manhattan Story, her second CD. I watched him pause just inside the entrance, his eyes scanning the tables in back. I would have signaled him, but he knew where to look.

He made his way to my table and squeezed in next to me as though it was the most natural thing in the world that he should be meeting me here. As usual, he was wearing a dark suit that fit him like an afterthought. He nodded a greeting. I returned the gesture, then went back to watching Grace play.

She was facing away from us, wearing a shoulderless gold-sequined gown that shimmered under the cool blue spotlights like heat lightning in the night. Watching her made me think of Midori, although as much by contrast as by association. Grace’s attitude was funkier, with more swaying, more sideways approaches to the piano, and her style was generally softer, more contemplative. But when she got going, on numbers like “Pulse Fiction” and “Delancey Street Blues,” she had that same air of having been possessed by the instrument, as though the piano was a demon and she its exhilarated amanuensis.

I remembered watching Midori play, standing in the shadows of New York’s Village Vanguard, knowing it would be the last time. I’d seen other pianists perform since then. It was always a sad pleasure, like making love to a beautiful woman, but not to the woman you love.

The set ended and Grace and her trio left the stage. But the audience wouldn’t stop applauding until they had returned, with an encore of Thelonious Monk’s “Bemsha Swing.” Tatsu was probably frustrated. He wasn’t there to enjoy the jazz.

After the encore, Grace moved to the bar. People began to get up to thank her, perhaps to have her sign the CDs they had brought, then to move on to whatever else the night had in store for them.

When the people next to us had departed, Tatsu turned to me. “Retirement doesn’t suit you, Rain-san,” he said in his dry way. “It’s making you soft. When you were active, I couldn’t have tracked you down like this.”

Tatsu rarely wastes time on formalities. He knows better, but can’t help himself. It’s one of the things I’ve always liked about him.

“I thought you wanted me to retire,” I said.

“From your relationship with Yamaoto and his organization, yes. But I thought we might then have the opportunity to work together. You understand my work.”

He was talking about his never-ending battle with Japanese corruption, behind much of which was his nemesis Yamaoto Toshi, politician and puppet master, the man who had suborned Holtzer, who for a time had been my unseen employer as well.

“I’m sorry, Tatsu. With Yamaoto and maybe the CIA after me, things were too hot. I wouldn’t have been much good to you even if I’d wanted to be.”

“You told me you would contact me.”

“I thought better of it.”

He nodded, then said, “Did you know that, just a few days after the last time we saw each other, William Holtzer died of a heart attack in the parking garage of a hotel in suburban Virginia?”

I remembered how Holtzer had mouthed the words I was the mole… I was the mole… when he thought I was going to die. How he had set me against my blood brother, Crazy Jake, in Vietnam, and gloated about it afterward.

“Why do you ask?” I said, my tone casual.

“Apparently, his death came as a surprise to people who knew him in the intelligence community,” he went on, ignoring my question, “because Holtzer was only in his early fifties and also kept physically fit.”

Not physically fit enough for three hundred and sixty joules from a modified defibrillator, I thought.

“It just goes to show you, you can’t be too careful,” I said, taking a sip of the twelve-year-old Dalmore I was drinking. “I take a baby aspirin myself, once a day. There was an article about it in the Asahi Shimbun a few years ago. Supposed to dramatically reduce the chances of heart problems.”

He was silent for a moment, then shrugged and said, “He was not a good man.”

Was this his way of telling me he knew I did Holtzer but didn’t care? If so, what was he going to ask in return?

“How did you hear about all this?” I asked.

He looked down at the table, then back at me. “Some of Mr. Holtzer’s associates from the CIA’s station in Tokyo contacted the Metropolitan Police Force. They were less concerned about the fact of his death than they were about the manner of it. They seem to believe you killed him.”

I said nothing.

“They wanted the assistance of the Metropolitan Police Force in locating you,” he went on. “My superiors informed me that I was to offer full cooperation.”

“Why are they coming to you for help?”

“I suspect that the Agency has been tasked with trying to eliminate some of the corruption that is paralyzing Japan’s economy. The United States is concerned that if the situation worsens, Japan’s finances could collapse. A ripple effect, and certainly a global recession, would follow.”

I understood Uncle Sam’s interest. Everyone knew the politicians were focused more on ensuring that they got their share of graft from rigged public works and yakuza payoffs than they were on resuscitating a dying economy. You could smell the rot from afar.

I took another sip of the Dalmore. “Why do you suppose they’d be interested in me?”

He shrugged. “Perhaps revenge. Perhaps as part of some anticorruption effort. After all, we know Holtzer was issuing intelligence reports identifying you as the ‘natural causes’ assassin behind the deaths of so many Japanese whistle-blowers and reformers. Perhaps both.”

Just like Holtzer, I thought. Getting credit for the intelligence reports while using the subject for his own ends. I remembered how he had looked when I left him slumped and lifeless in his rent-a-car in that suburban Virginia parking garage, and I smiled.

“You don’t seem terribly concerned,” Tatsu said.

I shrugged. “Of course I’m concerned. What did you tell them?”

“That, so far as I knew, you were dead.”

Here it comes, then. “That was good of you.”

He smiled slightly, and I saw a bit of the wily, subversive bastard I had liked so much in Vietnam, where we had met when he was seconded there by one of the precursors of the Keisatsucho.

“Not so good, really. We’re old friends, after all. Friends should help each other from time to time, don’t you agree?”

He knew I owed him. I owed him just for letting me go after I’d ambushed Holtzer outside the naval base at Yokosuka, despite all the years he’d spent trying to ferret me out previously. Now he was putting the Agency off my scent, and I owed him for that, too.

The debts were only part of it, of course. There was also an implicit threat. But Tatsu had a soft spot for me that kept him from being too direct. Otherwise, he would have dispensed with all the win-win, we’re old pals bullshit and would have just told me that if I didn’t cooperate he’d share my current name and address with my old friends at Christians In Action. Which he could very easily do.

“I thought you wanted me to retire,” I said again, knowing I’d already lost.

He reached into his breast pocket and took out a manila envelope. Placed it on the table between us.

“This is a very important job, Rain-san,” he said. “I wouldn’t ask for this favor if it weren’t.”

I knew what I would find in the envelope. A name. A photograph. Locations of work and residence. Known vulnerabilities. The insistence on the appearance of “natural causes” would be implicit, or delivered orally.

I made no move to touch the envelope. “There’s one thing I need from you before I can agree to any of this,” I told him.

He nodded. “You want to know how I found you.”

“Correct.”

He sighed. “If I share that information with you, what would stop you from disappearing again, even more effectively this time?”

“Probably nothing. On the other hand, if you don’t tell me, there’s no possibility that I would be willing to work with you on whatever you’ve got in that envelope. It’s up to you.”

He took his time, as though pondering the pros and cons, but Tatsu always thinks several moves ahead and I knew he would have anticipated this. The hesitation was theater, designed to convince me afterward that I had won something valuable.

“Customs Authority records,” he said finally.

I wasn’t particularly surprised. I had known there was some risk that Tatsu would learn of Holtzer’s death and assume I had been behind it, that if he did so he would be able to fix my movements between the time he last saw me in Tokyo and the day Holtzer died outside of D.C., less than a week apart. But killing Holtzer had been important to me, and I had been prepared to pay a price for the indulgence. Tatsu was simply presenting me with the bill.

I was silent, and after a moment he continued. “An individual traveling under the name and passport of Fujiwara Junichi left Tokyo for San Francisco last October thirtieth. There is no record of his having returned to Japan. The logical assumption is that he stayed in the United States.”

In a sense, he did. Fujiwara Junichi is my Japanese birth name. When I learned that Holtzer and the CIA had discovered where I was living in Tokyo, I knew the name was blown and no longer usable. I had traveled to the States to kill Holtzer under the Fujiwara passport and then retired it, returning to Japan under a different identity that I had previously established for such a contingency. I had hoped that anyone looking for me might be diverted by this false clue and conclude that I had relocated to the States. Most people would have. But not Tatsu.

“Somehow, I could not see you living in the States,” he went on. “You seemed… comfortable in Japan. I did not believe you were ready to leave.”

“I suppose you might have been on to something there.”

He shrugged. “I asked myself, if my old friend hadn’t really left Japan, but only wanted me to believe that he had, what would he have done? He would have reentered the country under a new name. He would have then relocated to a new city, because he had become too well known in Tokyo.”

He paused, and I recognized the employment of a fortune-teller’s trick, in which the party ostensibly charged with supplying information instead cleverly elicits it, probing under the guise of informing. So far, Tatsu had offered only suggestions and generalities, and I wasn’t going to fill in the blanks for him by confirming or denying any of it.

“Perhaps he would have used the same new name to reenter the country, and then to relocate within it,” he said, after a moment.

But I hadn’t used the same new name when I had relocated. Doing so would have presented too obvious a nexus for a determined tracker to follow. Tatsu must not have been sure of that, and, as I suspected, was hoping to learn more by getting me to react. If I were to slip and confirm that I had used the same name, he would tell me that it was by this that he had managed to find me, thereby avoiding the need to reveal how he had really done it, and leaving the vulnerability intact, perhaps to be exploited again later.

So I said nothing, affecting a slightly bored expression instead.

He looked at me, the corners of his mouth creeping upward into the barest hint of a smile. It was his way of acknowledging that I knew what he was up to, meaning it was useless for him to keep at it, and that he would now get to the point.

“Fukuoka was too small,” he said. “Sapporo, too remote. Nagoya was too close to Tokyo. Hiroshima was possible because the atmosphere is good, but I thought the Kansai region more likely because it’s less distant from Tokyo, to which I guessed you might want to maintain some proximity. That meant Kyoto, possibly Kobe. But more likely Osaka.”

“Because…”

He shrugged. “Because Osaka is bigger, more bustling, so there is more room to hide. And it has a larger transient population, so a new arrival draws less attention. Also I know how you love jazz, and Osaka is known for its clubs.”

I might have known that Tatsu would key on the clubs. During the Taisho Period, from 1912 to 1926, jazz migrated from Shanghai to Kansai, the western region of Honshu, Japan’s main island, where Osaka is located. A host of dance halls and live houses were built in the Soemoncho and Dotonbori entertainment districts, and jazz took off in cafés everywhere. The legacy lives on today in establishments like Mr. Kelly’s, Overseas, Royal Horse, and, of course, the Osaka Blue Note, and I couldn’t deny that the presence of these places had been a factor in my thinking.

I had even recognized, for the very reasons Tatsu had just articulated, that Osaka might be a somewhat predictable choice. But I had also found that I was reluctant to forgo the lifestyle advantages that the city would afford me. When I was younger, I would have reflexively forgone any such comforts in favor of the imperative of personal security. But I found my priorities were changing with age, and this, as much as anything else, was a clear sign that it was time for me to get out of the game.

So sure, knowing me as he did, it wouldn’t be too difficult for Tatsu to assume Osaka. But that wouldn’t have been enough for him to pinpoint me the way he ultimately had.

“Impressive,” I told him. “But you haven’t explained how you were then able to pick me up in a city of almost nine million.”

He raised his head slightly and looked at me directly. “Rain-san,” he said, “I understand your desire to know. And I will tell you. But it is important that the information goes no further, or the crime-fighting effectiveness of the Metropolitan Police Force will be curtailed. Can I trust you with this information?”

The question, and the revelations that might follow it, were intended to show that I could trust him, as well. “You know you can,” I told him.

He nodded. “Over the last decade or so, the major prefectural and ward governments have been independently installing security cameras in various public places, such as subway stations and major pedestrian thoroughfares. There is substantial evidence, much of it gathered from the experience of the United Kingdom, that such cameras deter crime.”

“I’ve seen the cameras.”

“You can see some of them. Not all. In any event, the cameras themselves are not really the issue. What is behind them is what matters. After the events of September eleventh in the United States, the Metropolitan Police Force undertook a major initiative to link up these informal networks of cameras with a central database that runs advanced facial recognition software. The software reads characteristics that are difficult or impossible to obscure-the distance between the eyes, for example, or the precise angles of the triangle formed by the corners of the eyes and the center of the mouth. Now, when a camera gets a match for a photograph from the database, an alert is automatically sent to the appropriate authorities. What had been primarily a psychological deterrent is now a potent anticrime and investigative tool.”

I knew of the existence of the software Tatsu was describing, of course. It was being tested in certain airports and stadiums, particularly in the United States, as a way of spotting and preempting known terrorists. But from what I’d read, the early tests had been disappointing. Or perhaps that was just disinformation. In any event, I hadn’t known Japan was so far ahead in deployment.

“The cameras are tied to Juki Net?” I asked.

“Possibly,” he answered in his dry way.

Juki Net, a vast data snooping and centralization program, went live in August 2002, perhaps inspired by the U.S. Defense Department’s Total Information Awareness Initiative. Juki Net assigns every Japanese citizen an eleven-digit identification number, and links that number to the person’s name, sex, address, and date of birth. The government maintains that no other information will be compiled. Few people believe that, and there have already been abuses.

I considered. As Tatsu noted, if word got out, the efficacy of the camera network would be compromised. But there was more.

“Weren’t there protests about Juki Net’s introduction?” I asked.

He nodded. “Yes. As you may know, the government introduced Juki Net without passing an accompanying privacy bill. Attempts to do so belatedly have been less than convincing. In Suginami-ku there is a boycott. Nonresidents are now seeking to establish an address in that ward to escape the system’s dominion.”

Now I understood why the government would take such care to maintain the secrecy of Juki Net’s connection to the network of security cameras. After all, even if you know it’s there, avoiding video surveillance is hell, so the danger of inadvertently tipping off criminals would be a marginal problem. The real issue, no doubt, was the government’s fear of the protests that would surely result if the public were to learn that the announced scope of the system was really only the tip of the iceberg. If the security cameras were tied together with Juki Net, people would rightly think they had a serious Big Brother situation on their hands.

“You can’t blame people for not trusting the government on this,” I said. “I read somewhere that, last spring, the defense ministry got caught creating a database on people who had requested materials under the new Freedom of Information law, including information on their political views.”

He smiled his sad smile. “When the news broke, someone tried to delete the evidence.”

“I read about that. Didn’t the LDP try to suppress a forty-page report on what had happened?”

This time his smile was wry. “The Liberal Democratic Party officials involved in the attempted cover-up were punished, of course. They had their pay docked.”

“Now there’s a deterrent to future abuses,” I said, laughing. “Especially when you know they were greased with twice what got docked.”

He shrugged. “As a cop, I welcome Juki Net and the camera networks as a crime-fighting tool. As a citizen, I find it all appalling.”

“So why swear me to secrecy on this? Sounds like a few leaks would be just the thing.”

He cocked his head to the side, as though marveling at how my thinking could be so crude. “If such leaks were timed incorrectly,” he said, “they would be as useless as a powerful but misplaced explosive charge.”

He was telling me he was up to something. He was also telling me not to ask.

“So you used this network to find me,” I said.

“Yes. I kept the mug shots that were taken of you at Metropolitan Police Headquarters when you were detained after the incident outside of Yokosuka naval base. I had these photographs fed into the computer so that the network could look for you. I instructed the technicians to focus their initial efforts on Osaka. Still, because the system turns up so many false positives, the problem took a long time and significant human resources to solve. I have been looking for you for almost a year, Rain-san.”

I realized from what he was telling me that the relentless advance of technology was going to force me to return to the nomadic existence I had adopted between Vietnam and my return to Japan, when I had wandered the earth without an identity, drifting from one mercenary conflict to another. There was no pleasure in the thought. I had done my penance for Crazy Jake and didn’t wish to repeat the experience.

“The system is not perfect,” he went on. “There are numerous gaps in coverage, for example, and, as I mentioned, too many false positives. Still, over time, we were able to identify certain commonalities in your movements. A high incidence of sightings in Miyakojima, for example. From there, it was simple enough to check the records of the local ward office for new resident registrations, weed out false leads, and uncover your address. Eventually, we were able to track you sufficiently closely so that I could travel to Osaka and follow you here tonight.”

“Why didn’t you just come to my apartment?”

He smiled. “Where you live is always where you are most vulnerable because it represents a possible choke point for an ambush. And I would not wish to surprise a man like you where he felt most vulnerable. Safer, I judged, to approach you on neutral ground, where you might even see me coming, ne?”

I nodded, acknowledging his point. If you’re a likely target for a kidnapping or assassination attempt, or for any other kind of ambush, the bad guys can only get to you where they know you’re going to be. Meaning outside your home, most likely, or the place where you work. Or at some point in between where they can rely on you to show up-maybe the only bridge crossing between your home and office, something like that. These choke points are where you need to be the most sensitive to signs of danger.

“Well?” he asked, raising his eyebrows slightly. “Did you see me?”

I shrugged. “Yes.”

He smiled again. “I knew you would.”

“Or you could have called.”

“In which case, you might have disappeared again after hearing my voice.”

“That’s true.”

“All in all, I think this was the best approach.”

“The way you went about this,” I said, “a lot of people were involved. People in your organization, maybe people with the CIA.”

He might have said something to intimate that any such lack of security was my fault, for having failed to contact him as I had suggested I would. But that wouldn’t have been Tatsu’s style. He had his interests in this matter, as I had mine, and he wouldn’t have blamed me for disappearing any more than he expected me to blame him for tracking me down.

“There has been no mention of your name in any of this,” he told me. “Only a photograph. And the technicians tasked with checking for the matches the system spits out have no knowledge regarding the basis of my interest. To them, you are simply one of many criminals that the Metropolitan Police Force is tracking. And I have taken other steps to ensure security, such as coming alone tonight and informing no one of my movements.”

This was a dangerous thing for Tatsu to admit. If it were true, I could solve pretty much all my problems just by taking out this one man. Again, he was showing me that he trusted me, that I could trust him in return.

“You’re taking a lot of chances,” I said, looking at him.

“Always,” he said, returning my gaze.

There was a long silence. Then I said, “No women. No children. It has to be a man.”

“It is.”

“You can’t have involved anyone else in this. You work with me, it’s an exclusive.”

“Yes.”

“And the target has to be a principal. Taking him out can’t just be to send a message to someone. It has to accomplish something concrete.”

“It will.”

Having established my three rules, it was now time to apprise him of the consequences for breaking them.

“You know, Tatsu, outside of professional reasons-meaning combat or a contract-there’s only one thing that has ever moved me to kill.”

“Betrayal,” he said, to show me that he clearly understood.

“Yes.”

“Betrayal is not in my nature.”

I laughed, because this was the first time I had ever heard Tatsu say something naïve. “It’s in everyone’s nature,” I told him.

We had worked out a system by which we could communicate securely, including simple codes and access to a secure electronic bulletin board that I continued to maintain for sensitive communications. I had told him I would contact him afterward, but now I wondered whether that would really be necessary. Tatsu would learn of the yakuza’s accident from independent sources and know that I had held up my end. Besides, the less contact with Tatsu, the better. Sure, we had a history. Respect. Even affection. But it was hard to believe that the alignment of our interests would last, and, in the end, that alignment, or its lack, would be all that mattered. A sad thought, in certain respects. There aren’t many people in my life, and, now that things had turned out all right, I realized I had on some level enjoyed this latest encounter with my old friend and nemesis.

Sad also because it forced me to admit something I had been avoiding. I was going to have to leave Japan. I’d been preparing for such a contingency, but it was sobering to acknowledge that the time might be at hand. If Tatsu knew where to find me, and came to believe that I’d gotten back in the game in a way that was inhibiting his life’s work of fighting corruption in Japan, it would be too easy for him to have me picked up. Conversely, if I agreed to play by his rules, it would be too easy for him to drop in periodically and ask for a “favor.” Either way, he’d be running me, and I’ve lived that life already. I didn’t want to do it again.

My pager buzzed. I checked it, saw a five-digit sequence that told me it was Harry, that he wanted me to call him.

I finished eating and motioned to the waiter that I was ready for the check. I looked around the restaurant one last time. The office party had broken up. The Americans remained, the white noise of their conversation warm and enthusiastic. The couple was still there, the young man’s posture steadfastly earnest, the girl continuing to parry with quiet laughter.

It felt good to be back in Tokyo. I didn’t want to leave.

I walked out of the restaurant, pausing to enjoy the feel of Nishi-Azabu’s cool evening air, my eyes reflexively sweeping the street. A few cars passed, but otherwise it was as quiet as the Aoyama cemetery, brooding and dark, silently beckoning, across from where I stood.

I looked again at the stone steps and imagined myself traversing them. Then I turned left and continued the counterclockwise semicircle I had started earlier that evening.

3

I CALLED HARRY from a public phone on Aoyama-dori. “Are you on a secure line?” he asked, recognizing my voice.

“Reasonably secure. Public phone. Out-of-the-way location.” The location mattered, because governments monitor certain public phones-the ones near embassies and police stations, for example, and those in the lobbies of higher-end hotels, to which the nearby lazy can be counted on to repair for their “private” conversations.

“You’re still in Tokyo,” he said. “Calling from a Minami-Aoyama pay phone.”

“How do you know?”

“I’ve got things rigged so that I can see the originating number and location of calls that come in to my apartment. It’s what nine-one-one uses in the States. You can’t block it.”

Harry, I thought, smiling. Despite his SuperNerd clothes and constant case of bedhead, despite being at heart an oversized kid for whom hacking was just a video game, only better, Harry could be dangerous. The random favor I’d done him so many years earlier, when I’d saved his ass from a bunch of drunken marines who were looking for a suitable Japanese victim, had paid a hell of a dividend.

And yet, despite my efforts, he could also be astonishingly naïve. I would never tell anyone the kind of thing he had just told me. You don’t give away an advantage like that.

“The NSA should never have let you go, Harry,” I told him. “You’re a privacy nut’s worst nightmare.”

He laughed, but a little uncertainly. Harry has a hard time knowing when I’m teasing him. “Their loss,” he said. “They had too many rules, anyway. It’s much more fun working for a big-five consulting firm. They’ve got so many other problems, they don’t even bother trying to monitor what I’m up to anymore.”

That was smart of them. They couldn’t have kept up with him, anyway. “What’s going on?” I asked.

“Nothing really. Just wanted to catch up with you while I could. I had a feeling that, if your business here was done, you might leave soon.”

“I guess you were right.”

“Is it… done?”

Harry has long since figured out what I do, although he also understands that it would be taboo to actually ask. And he must have known what it meant when he had contacted me earlier that evening, at my specific request, to tell me precisely where and when I could find the yakuza.

“It’s done,” I told him.

“Does that mean you won’t be around much longer?”

I smiled, absurdly touched by his hangdog tone. “Not much longer, no. I was going to call you before I left.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.” I looked at my watch. “In fact, what are you doing right now?”

“Just getting up, actually.”

“Christ, Harry, it’s ten at night.”

“I’ve been keeping some strange hours lately.”

“I believe it. Tell you what. Why don’t we meet for a drink. For you, it can be breakfast.”

“What have you got in mind?”

“Hang on a minute.” I grabbed a copy of the Tokyo Yellow Pages from under the phone, and flipped through the restaurant section until I found the place I was looking for. Then I counted ahead five listings, per our usual code, knowing that Harry would count five backward from whatever I told him. Not that anyone was listening-hell, I couldn’t imagine who could listen, if Harry didn’t want them to-but you don’t take chances. I’d taught him to always use a layered defense. To never assume.

“How about Tip-Top, in Takamatsu-cho,” I said.

“Sure,” he said, and I knew he understood. “Great place.”

“I’ll see you when you get there,” I told him.

I hung up, then pulled a handkerchief out of a pants pocket and wiped down the receiver and the buttons. Old habits die hard.

The place I had in mind was called These Library Lounge, pronounced “Teize” by the locals, a small bar with the feel of a speakeasy nestled on the second floor of an unremarkable building in Nishi-Azabu. Although it inhabits the city’s geographical and psychological center, Teize is suffused by a dreamy sense of detachment, as though the bar is an island secretly pleased to find itself lost in the vast ocean of Tokyo around it. Teize has the kind of atmosphere that quickly seduces talk into murmurs and weariness into languor, peeling away the transient concerns of the day until you might find yourself listening to a poignant Johnny Hodges number like “Just a Memory” the way you listened to it the first time, without filters or preconceptions or the notion that it was something you already knew; or taking a saltwater and iodine sip of one of the Islay malts and realizing that this, this exactly, is the taste for which the distiller must have mouthed a silent prayer as he committed the amber liquid to an oak cask thirty years before; or glancing over at a group of elegantly dressed women seated in one of the bar’s quietly lit alcoves, their faces glowing, not yet lined, their faith that havens like this one exist as if by right reflected in the innocent timbre of their laughter and the carefree cadences of their conversation, and remembering without bitterness what it felt like to think that maybe you could be part of such a world.

It took me less than ten minutes to walk the short distance to the bar. I paused outside, before the exterior stairs leading to the second floor, imagining, as I always do before entering a building, where I might wait if I hoped to ambush someone coming out. The exterior of Teize offered two promising positions, one of which, the entryway of an adjacent building, I especially liked because it was set back from the bar’s entrance in such a way that you wouldn’t see someone lurking there until after you’d reached the bottom of the stairs, when it might be too late for you to do anything about it. Unless, of course, before descending, you took the trouble to lean out over the bar’s front balcony in appreciation of the quiet street scene below, as I had now reminded myself to do.

Satisfied with the security layout outside, I took the stairs to the second floor and walked in. I hadn’t been there in a long time, but the proprietors hadn’t seen fit to change anything, thank God. The lighting was still soft, mostly sconces, floor lamps, and candles. A wooden table that had begun its life as a door before being elevated to its current, considerably higher, purpose. Muted Persian rugs and dark, heavy drapes. The white marble bar, confident but not dominating at the center of the main room, shining quietly beneath an overhead set of track lights. Everywhere there were books: mostly works on design, architecture, and art, but also seemingly whimsical selections such as The Adventures of Two Dutch Dolls and Uncle Santa.

“Nanmeisama?” the bartender asked me. How many? I held up two fingers. He looked around the room, confirming what I had already noticed, that no tables were available.

“That’s fine,” I told him in Japanese. “I think we’ll just sit at the bar.” Which, in addition to its other advantages, offered a tactical view of the entranceway.

Harry arrived an hour later, as I was beginning my second single malt of the evening, a sixteen-year-old Lagavulin. He saw me as he came in, and smiled.

“John-san, hisashiburi desu ne,” he said. It’s been a long time. Then he switched to English, which would afford us marginally better privacy in these surroundings. “It’s good to see you.”

I stood up and we shook hands. Despite the lack of formality of the occasion, I also offered him a slight bow. I’ve always liked the respect of a bow and the warmth of a handshake, and Harry merited both.

“Have a seat,” I said, motioning to the bar stool to my left. “I hope you’ll forgive me for starting without you.”

“If you’ll forgive me for avoiding what you’re having and ordering some food instead.”

“Suit yourself,” I said. “Anyway, Scotch is a grownup’s drink.”

He smiled, knowing I was ribbing him, and ordered an herb salad with tofu and mozzarella and a plain orange juice. Harry’s never been a drinker.

“You do a good SDR?” I asked him while we waited for the food to arrive. An SDR, or surveillance detection run, is a route designed to flush a follower or team of followers out into the open where they can be seen. I’d taught the subject to Harry and he’d proven himself an able student.

“You ask me that every time,” he replied in a slightly exasperated tone, like a teenager remonstrating with a parent. “And every time I give you the same answer.”

“So you did one.”

He rolled his eyes. “Of course.”

“And you were clean?”

He looked at me. “I wouldn’t be here if I weren’t. You know that.”

I patted him on the back. “Can’t help asking. Thanks again for the nice work with that yakuza’s cell phone. Led me straight to him.”

He beamed. “Hey, I’ve got something for you,” he said.

“Yeah?”

He nodded and reached into a jacket pocket. He fished around for a second, then pulled out a metal object about the dimensions of a dozen stacked credit cards. “Check this out,” he said.

I took it. It was heavy for something of its size. There must have been a lot of circuitry packed in it. “Just what I’ve always wanted,” I said. “A faux-silver paperweight.”

He moved as though to take it back. “Well, if you’re not going to appreciate it…”

“No, no, I do appreciate it. I just don’t know what the hell it is.” Actually I had a good idea, but I prefer to be underestimated. Besides, I didn’t want to deny Harry the pleasure of educating me.

“It’s a bug and video detector,” he said, pronouncing the words slowly as though I might otherwise fail to comprehend them. “If you come within shooting distance of radio frequency or infrared, it’ll let you know.”

“In a sexy female voice, I hope?”

He laughed. “If someone’s trying to record you, you might not want them to know that you know. So no sexy voice. Just a vibration mode. Intermittent for video, continuous for audio. Alternating for both. And only in ten-second bursts, to conserve battery power.”

“How does it work?”

He beamed. “Wide-range circuitry that detects transmitters operating on frequencies from fifty megahertz to three gigahertz. Plus it’s got an internal antenna that picks up the horizontal oscillator frequency radiated by video cameras. I’ve optimized it for the PAL standard, which is what you’re most likely to encounter, but I can change it to NTSC or SECAM if you want. Reception isn’t great because it’s so small, so you won’t be able to tell where the bug or camera is, only that one is there. And the big security closed-circuit TV units you sometimes see in train stations and parks will usually be out of the unit’s range.”

Too bad about the CCTV units. If I had a reliable, portable way to detect those, I’d have a shot at getting my privacy back from Tatsu and whomever else.

“Any chance you can make the reception a little better?” I asked.

He looked a little hurt, and I realized I should have praised him before asking that. “Not for something this small,” he said. “You’d need something with a much bigger antenna.”

Oh well. Even with its limitations, the unit would be useful. I hefted it in my hand. I was familiar with functionally similar commercial models, of course, but I hadn’t seen one this small. It was an impressive piece of work.

“Rechargeable battery?” I asked.

“Of course. Lithium ion. Just like a cell phone.” He reached into a jacket pocket and pulled out what looked like an ordinary cell phone charger. “I ran it down testing it, so you’ll need to charge it when you get home. And don’t forget to juice it up every day. There’s no low battery indicator or anything else like that. I built this thing for speed, not looks.”

I took the charger and put it on the table next to me. Then I pulled out my wallet and slid the unit into it. It was a nice, snug fit. I would examine it back at the hotel, of course, to confirm that it was a bug detector and not some sort of bug. Not that I don’t trust Harry. I just like to satisfy myself about these things.

I put my wallet back in my pants and nodded appreciatively. “Nice work,” I said. “Thank you.”

He smiled. “I know you’re a professional paranoid, so I figured it was either this or a lifetime supply of Valium.”

I laughed. “Now, tell me, what’s with the vampire hours?”

“Oh, you know,” he said, looking away, “just lifestyle stuff.”

Lifestyle stuff? As far as I knew, Harry had no lifestyle. In my imagination he was always huddled in his apartment, worming his way into remote networks, creating backdoors to exploit later, mediating the world through the safety of a computer screen.

I noticed he was blushing. Christ, the kid was so transparent. “Harry, are you going to tell me you’ve got a girlfriend?” I asked.

The blush deepened, and I laughed. “I’ll be damned,” I said. “Good for you.”

He looked at me, checking to see whether I was going to tease him. “She’s not exactly my girlfriend.”

“Well, never mind the taxonomy. How did you meet her?”

“Work.”

I picked up my glass. “You going to give me details, or do I have to force-feed you two or three of these to loosen your tongue?”

He made a face of exaggerated disgust. “One of the firm’s clients, one of the big trading houses, was happy with some security work I did for them.”

“Guess they didn’t know about the backdoors you left for yourself in the process.”

He smiled. “They never do.”

“So the client is happy…”

“And my boss took me out to celebrate, to a hostess club.”

Most westerners have a hard time grasping the concept of the Japanese “hostess club,” where the women are paid only for conversation. The west accepts the notion that sex can be commodified, but rebels at the idea that other forms of human interaction might be subject to purchase, as well. For hostesses are not prostitutes, although, like the geisha from whom they’re descended, they might strike up an after-hours relationship with the right customer, after a suitable courtship. Rather, patrons at such establishments pay for the simple pleasure of the girls’ company, and for their ability to smooth out the rough edges of business meetings, as well as for the hope that, eventually, something more might develop. If it were simple sex that the hostesses’ clients were after, they could buy it for much less elsewhere.

“What club?” I asked him.

“A place called Damask Rose.”

“Haven’t heard of it.”

“They don’t advertise.”

“Sounds upscale.”

“It is. It’s a pretty refined place, in fact. In Nogizaka, on Gaienhigashi-dori. They probably wouldn’t let you in.”

I laughed. I love when Harry shows some spirit. “Okay, so the boss takes you to Damask Rose…”

“Yeah, and he had a lot to drink and was telling everyone that I’m a computer genius. One of the hostesses asked me some questions about how to configure a firewall because she just bought a new computer.”

“Pretty?”

The blush reappeared. “I guess. Her computer was a Macintosh, so I liked her right off the bat.”

I raised my eyebrows. “I didn’t know that kind of thing could form the basis for love at first sight.”

“So I answered a few of her questions,” he said, ignoring me. “At the end of the night, she asked if I would give her my phone number, in case she had any more questions.”

I laughed. “Thank God she didn’t just give you her number. She would have died of old age waiting for you to call.”

He smiled, knowing that this was probably true.

“So she called you…,” I said.

“And I wound up going over to her apartment and configuring her whole system.”

“Harry, you ‘configured her whole system’?” I asked, my eyes mock-wide.

He looked down, but I saw the smile. “You know what I mean.”

“You’re not going to… penetrate her security, are you?” I asked, unable to resist.

“No, I wouldn’t do that to her. She’s nice.”

Christ, he was so smitten that he couldn’t even spot the sophomoric double entendre. “I’ll be damned,” I said again. “I’m happy for you, Harry.”

He looked at me, saw that my expression was genuine. “Thanks,” he said.

I raised my glass to my nose, took a deep breath, held it for a moment, and let it go. “So she’s got you keeping odd hours?” I asked.

“Well, the club is open until three A.M. and she works every day. So, by the time she gets home…”

“I get the picture,” I said. Although in fact, it was a little hard to imagine Harry with an attachment that didn’t have an Ethernet cable and a mouse. He was an introverted, socially stunted guy, with no contacts that I knew of outside of his day job, which he kept at arm’s length in any event, and me. Conditions that had always made him useful.

I tried to picture him with a high-end hostess, and couldn’t see it. It didn’t feel right.

Don’t be a prick, I thought. Just because you can’t have someone in your life, don’t begrudge Harry.

“What’s her name?” I asked.

He smiled. “Yukiko.”

“Yukiko” means “snow child.” “Pretty name,” I said.

He nodded, his expression slightly dopey. “I like it.”

“How much does she know about you?” I asked, taking a sip of the Lagavulin. My tone was innocent, but I was concerned that, in the delirium of what I assumed was first love, Harry would be unnecessarily open with this girl.

“Well, she knows about the consultant work, of course. But not about the… hobbies.”

About his extreme proclivity for hacking, he meant. A hobby that could land him in jail if the authorities caught wind of it. In the ground, if someone else did.

“Hard to keep that sort of thing secret,” I opined, testing.

“I don’t see why it would have to come up,” he said, looking at me.

A waitress appeared from behind a curtain and set Harry’s order on the bar in front of him. He thanked her, showing a deep appreciation for this newly wonderful class of being, women who work in restaurants and bars, and I smiled.

I realized at some level that if Harry was going to start living more like a civilian, he would be less useful, and possibly even dangerous, to me. His increasing transparency to the wider world might offer an enemy a window into my otherwise hidden existence. Of course, if someone connected Harry to me, they might come after him, too. And despite what I’d tried to teach him over the years, I knew that, out in the open, Harry wouldn’t have the means to protect himself.

“Is she your first girlfriend?” I asked, my tone gentle.

“I told you, she’s not really my girlfriend,” he answered, ducking the question.

“If she’s occupying enough of your attention to keep you in bed until the sun sets, I feel safe using the word as shorthand.”

He looked at me, cornered.

“Is she?” I asked again.

He looked away. “I guess so.”

I hadn’t meant to embarrass him. “Harry, I only ask because, when you’re young, you sometimes think you can have it both ways. If you’re just having fun, you don’t need to tell her anything. You shouldn’t tell her anything. But if the attachment gets deeper, you’ll need to do some hard thinking. About how close you want to get with her, about how important your hobbies are. Because you can’t live with one foot in daylight and the other in shadows. Believe me on this. It can’t be done. Not long-term.”

“You don’t have to worry,” he said. “I’m not stupid, you know.”

“Everybody in love is stupid,” I told him. “It’s part of the condition.”

I saw him blush again, at my use of the word and the assumption behind it. But I didn’t care how he referred to these new feelings in his own mind. I know what it’s like to live walled off, isolated, and then suddenly, unbelievably, to have that pretty girl you’d longed for returning the feeling. It changes your priorities. Hell, it changes your damn values.

I smiled bitterly, thinking of Midori.

Then, as if reading my mind, he said, “There’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you. But I wanted to do it in person.”

“Sounds serious.”

“A few months ago I got a letter. From Midori.”

I finished off the Lagavulin before answering. If the letter had arrived that long ago, a few moments more for me to figure out how I wanted to respond weren’t going to make a difference.

“She knew where to reach you…,” I started, although I had already figured it out.

He shrugged. “She knew because we brought her over to my apartment to handle the musical aspects of that lattice encryption.”

I noticed that, even now, Harry felt compelled to carve out Midori’s precise role in that operation to clarify that he had been fully capable of handling the encryption itself. He was sensitive about these things. “Right,” I said.

“She didn’t know my last name. The envelope was only addressed to Haruyoshi. Thank God, otherwise I would have had to move, and what a pain in the ass that would have been.”

Harry, like anyone else who values privacy, takes extreme pains to ensure that there is no connection anywhere-not on utility bills, not on cable TV subscriptions, not even on lease documents-between his name and the place where he lives. This kind of disassociation requires some labor, involving the establishment of revocable trusts, LLCs, and other blind legal entities, and it can all be blown in a heartbeat if your Aunt Keiko visits you at your home, notes your address, and decides to send you, say, flowers to thank you. The flower shop puts your name and address into its database, which it then sells to marketing outfits, which in turn sell the information to everyone else, and your true residence is now available to anyone with even rudimentary hacking or social engineering skills. The only way to regain your privacy is to move again and repeat the exercise.

If what was sent to you was just an ordinary letter, of course, the only person who might make the connection is the postman. It’s up to the individual to decide whether that would be an acceptable risk. For me, it wouldn’t be. Probably not for Harry, either. But if only his first name had appeared on the envelope, he would be all right.

“Where was the letter from?” I asked him.

“New York. She’s living there, I guess.”

New York. Where Tatsu had sent her, after telling her I was dead, to protect her from suspicion that she might still have the computer disk her father had stolen from Yamaoto, a disk containing enough evidence of Japan’s vast network of corruption to bring down the government. The move made sense for her, I supposed. Her career in America was taking off. I knew because I was watching.

He reached into a back pants pocket and pulled out a folded piece of paper. “Here,” he said, handing it to me.

I took it and paused for a moment before unfolding it, not caring what he would make of my hesitation. When I looked, I saw that it was written in confident, graceful longhand Japanese, an echo, perhaps, of girlhood calligraphy lessons, and a reflection of the personality behind the pen.

Haruyoshi-san,

It is still cold in New York, and I am counting the days to Spring. I imagine that soon enough, the cherry blossoms will be blooming in Tokyo and I am sure they will be beautiful.

I trust that you, too, have heard the sad news that our mutual friend Fujiwara-san has passed away. I have been given to understand that Fujiwara-san’s body had been returned to the United States for burial. I have hoped to visit the gravesite to present an offering for his spirit, but, regrettably, I have been unable to discover where he has been laid to rest. If you have any information that would be helpful to me in this matter, I would sincerely appreciate your assistance. You can reach me at the above address.

I humbly pray for your health and well-being. Thank you for your solicitude.

Yours,

Kawamura Midori

I read it again, slowly, then a third time. Then I folded it back up and extended it to Harry.

“No, no,” he said, his hands raised, palms forward. “You keep it.”

I didn’t want him to see that I wanted it. But I nodded and slipped it into an inside pocket of the blazer I was wearing.

I signaled the bartender that it was time for another Lagavulin. “Did you answer this?” I asked.

“I did. I wrote back, and told her that I had heard exactly what she had, that I didn’t have any other information.”

“Did you hear from her after that?”

“Just a thank-you. She asked me to let her know if I heard anything, and told me she would do the same.”

“That’s all?”

“Yeah.”

I wondered if she had bought the story. If she hadn’t thanked Harry for his response, I would have known she hadn’t bought it, because she was classy and it wouldn’t have been like her not to respond. But the thank-you might have been automatic, sent even in the presence of continued suspicions. It could even have been duplicitous, intended to lull Harry into thinking she was satisfied when in fact the opposite was true.

That’s bullshit, some part of me spoke up. She’s not like that.

Then a bitter smile: Not like you, you mean.

There was nothing duplicitous about Midori, and knowing it opened up a little ache. The environment I’ve inhabited for so long has conditioned me to assume the worst. At least I still occasionally remember to resist the urge.

It didn’t matter. There were too many oddities surrounding the disk’s disposition and my disappearance, and she was too smart to miss them. I’d spent a lot of time thinking about it over the last year or so, and I knew the way she would see it.

After what had happened between us, the doubts would have started small. But there would have been nothing to check their growth. After all, she would think, the contents of the disk were never published. That was Tatsu’s doing, not mine, but she would have no way of knowing that. All she would know was that her father’s last wishes were never carried out, that his death was ultimately futile. She would wonder again how I had known where to find that disk in Shibuya, go over my previous explanations, find them wanting. That would have led her to start thinking about the timing of my appearance, so soon after her father’s death.

And she knew I was part of something subterranean, although she never knew exactly what. The CIA? One of the Japanese political factions? Regardless, an organization that had the resources to fake a death and backstop it reasonably effectively.

Yeah, with all these loose threads, and without me there to reassure her that what happened between us had been real, I knew that, eventually, she would conclude that she had been used. That’s how I would see it, in her shoes. Maybe the sex was just opportunistic for him, she would think. Sure, why not, might as well have a little fun while I’m using her to get the disk. And then I’ll just disappear afterward, after I’ve tricked her into cooperating. She wouldn’t want to believe all this, but she wouldn’t be able to shake the feeling. And she wouldn’t want to believe that I might actually have been involved in some way in her father’s death, but she wouldn’t be able to let that suspicion go, either.

“Did I handle it right?” Harry asked.

I shrugged. “You couldn’t have handled it any better than you did. But she’s still not buying it.”

“You think she’ll let it go?”

That was the question I was always left with. I hadn’t managed to answer it. “I don’t know,” I told him.

And there was something else I didn’t know, something I wouldn’t share with Harry. I didn’t know if I wanted her to let it go.

What had I just told him? You can’t live with one foot in daylight and the other in shadows. I needed to take my own damn advice.

4

I SAW HARRY off around one. The subways were already closed and he caught a cab. He told me he was going home to wait for Yukiko.

I tried to picture a beautiful young hostess, pulling down the yen equivalent of a thousand dollars a night in tips in one of Tokyo’s exclusive establishments, with her pick of wealthy businessmen and politicians for paramours, hurrying home to Harry’s apartment after work. I just couldn’t see it.

Don’t be so cynical, I thought.

But my gut wasn’t buying it, and I’ve learned to trust my gut.

It’s still early. Just take a look. It’s practically on the way to the hotel.

If Harry had changed his mind about going home and had gone to Damask Rose instead, though, he’d know I was checking up on him. He might not be surprised, but he wouldn’t like it, either.

But the chances that Harry would stop by there on his own dime, when Yukiko was due to come to his place in just a few hours anyway, were slim. The risk was worth taking.

And Nogizaka was only a few kilometers away. What the hell.

I tried directory assistance from a public phone, but there was no listing for a Damask Rose. Well, Harry had said they didn’t advertise.

Still, I could just go and have a look.

I walked the short distance to Nogizaka, then strolled up and down Gaienhigashi-dori until I found the club. It took a while, but I finally spotted it. There was no sign, only a small red rose on a black awning.

The entrance was flanked by two black men, each of sufficient bulk to have been at home in the sumo pit. Their suits were well tailored and, given the size of the men wearing them, must have been custom-made. Nigerians, I assumed, whose size, managerial acumen, and relative facility with the language had made them a rare foreign success story, in this case as both middle management and muscle for many of the area’s entertainment establishments. The mizu shobai, or “water trade” of entertainment and pleasure, is one of the few areas in which Japan can legitimately claim a degree of internationalization.

They bowed and opened the club’s double glass doors for me, each issuing a baritone irasshaimase as they did so. Welcome. One of them murmured something into a microphone set discreetly into his lapel.

I walked down a short flight of stairs. A ruddy-faced, prosperous-looking Japanese man whom I put at about forty greeted me in a small foyer. Interchangeable J-Pop techno music was playing from the room beyond.

“Nanmeisama desho ka?” Mr. Ruddy asked. How many?

“Just one,” I said in English, holding up a finger.

“Kashikomarimashita.” Of course. He motioned that I should follow him.

The room was rectangular, flanked by dance stages on either end. The stages were simple, distinguished only by mirrored walls behind them and identical brass fire poles at their centers. One stage was occupied by a tall, long-haired blonde wearing high heels and a green G-string and nothing more. She was dancing somewhat desultorily, I thought, but seemed to have the attention of the majority of the club’s clientele regardless. Russian, I guessed. Large-boned and large-breasted. A delicacy in Japan.

Harry hadn’t mentioned floor shows. Probably he was embarrassed. My sense that something was amiss deepened.

On the other stage I saw a girl who looked like a mix of Japanese and something Mediterranean or Latin. A good mix. She had that silky, almost shimmering black hair that so many modern Japanese women like to ruin with chapatsu dye, worn short and swept over from the side. The shape of the eyes was also Japanese, and she was on the petite side. But her skin, a smooth gold like melted caramel, seemed like something else, maybe African or mulatto. Her breasts and hips, too, appealingly full and slightly incongruous on her Japanese-sized frame, seemed to suggest some foreign origin. She was using the pole skillfully, grabbing it high, posing with her body held rigid and parallel to the floor, then spiraling down in time to the music. There was real vitality in her moves and she didn’t seem to mind that most of the patrons were focused on the blonde.

Mr. Ruddy held out a chair for me at an empty table in the center of the room. After a routine glance to ensure that the seat afforded a proper view of the entrance, I sat. I wasn’t displeased to see that I also had a good view of the stage where the dark-haired girl was dancing.

“Wow,” I said in English, looking at her.

“Yes, she is beautiful,” he replied, also in English. “Would you like to meet her?”

I watched her for another moment before answering. I didn’t want to wind up with one of the Japanese girls here. I would have a better chance of creating rapport, and therefore of eliciting information, by chatting with a foreigner while playing the role of foreigner.

I nodded.

“I will let her know.” He handed me a drinks menu, bowed, and slipped away from the table.

The menu was written on a single page of thick, cream-colored parchment in double columns of elegant Japanese, the club’s signature red rose placed discreetly at the bottom. I was surprised to see that it included an imaginative selection of single malts. A twenty-five-year-old Springbank, which I’d been looking for. And a Talisker of the same age. I might have to stay for a while.

A waitress came by and I ordered the Springbank. Ten thousand yen the measure. But life is short.

There were a dozen girls working the floor. About half were Japanese; the others looked indeterminately European. All were attractive and tastefully dressed. Most were engaging customers, but a few were free. None approached my table. Mr. Ruddy must have passed the word that I’d requested someone. Efficient operation.

At the table next to me was a Japanese man surrounded by three fawning hostesses. He looked superficially youthful, with radiant white teeth and black hair swept back from a tanned face free of fissures. But I looked more closely and saw that the appearance was ersatz. The hair was dyed, the tan courtesy of a sunlamp, the unseamed face likely the product of Botox and surgery, the teeth porcelain caps. The chemicals and the knife, even the retinue of attractive young women with paid-for adoring smiles, all simply tools to prop up a shaky wall of denial about the inevitable indignities of aging and death.

The techno beat faded out and the dark-haired girl gyrated slowly to the floor, her legs scissoring the pole, her back arched, her head tilted back toward the room. The blonde was also finishing, albeit in less spectacular fashion. The audience applauded.

The waitress brought my Springbank, shimmering amber in a crystal tumbler. I raised the glass to my nose, closed my eyes for a moment, and inhaled a breath of clean, sherried sea air. I took a sip. Salt and brine, yes, but somewhere a hint of fruit, as well. The finish was long and dry. I smiled. Not bad for a twenty-five-year-old.

I took another sip and looked around. I didn’t pick up any danger vibes. The place could be legit, I thought. Doubtless it would be hooked up with organized crime, but that was par for the course in the mizu shobai, not just for Japan but for the world. Maybe Harry had just gotten lucky.

Maybe.

A few minutes later, the dark-haired girl appeared from behind the stage. She moved down a short riser of steps and walked over to my table.

She had changed into a strapless black cocktail dress. A thin diamond bracelet encircled her left wrist. A gift from an admirer, I thought. I expected she would have many.

“May I join you?” she asked. Her Japanese was lightly accented with something warm, maybe Spanish or Portuguese.

“Please,” I responded in English, standing and pulling back a chair for her. “Is English all right?”

“Of course,” she said, switching over. “I just thought… you’re American?”

I nodded. “My parents are Japanese, but I grew up in America. I’m more comfortable in English.”

I eased the chair in behind her. The cocktail dress laced up the back. Smooth skin glowed in the interstices.

I sat down next to her. “I enjoyed watching you dance,” I said.

I knew she would have heard that a thousand times before, and her smile confirmed it. The smile said Of course you did.

That was fine. I wanted her to feel in control, to let her guard down. We’d have a few drinks, relax, get to know each other before I began to probe for what really interested me.

“What brings you to Tokyo?” she asked.

“Business. I’m an accountant. Once a year I have to come to Japan for some of the firm’s local clients.” It was a good cover story. No one ever asks follow-up questions when you tell them you’re an accountant. They’re afraid you might answer.

“I’m John, by the way,” I added.

She held out her hand. “Naomi.”

Her fingers were small in my hand but her grip was firm. I tried to place her age. Late twenties, maybe thirty. She looked young, but her dress and mannerisms were sophisticated.

“Can I get you something to drink, Naomi?”

“What’s that you’re having?”

“Something special, if you like single malts.”

“I love single malts. Especially the old Islay whiskeys. They say age removes the fire but leaves the warmth. I like that.”

You’re good, I thought, looking at her. Her mouth was beautiful: full lips; pink gums that almost glowed; even, white teeth. Her eyes were green. A small network of freckles fanned out on and around her nose, barely perceptible amidst the background of caramel skin.

“What I’m drinking isn’t from Islay,” I said, “but it’s got some island character. Smoke and peat. A Springbank.”

She raised her eyebrows. “The twenty-five?”

“You know the menu,” I said, nodding. “Would you like one?”

“After a night of watered-down Suntory? I’d love one.”

Of course she’d love one. Her pay would include a cut of her customers’ tabs. A few ten-thousand-yen shots and she could call it an evening.

I ordered another Springbank. She asked me questions: how I knew so much about single malt whiskey, where I lived in the States, how many times I’d been to Tokyo. She was comfortable in her role and I let her play it.

When our glasses were empty I asked her if she’d like another drink.

She smiled. “You’re thinking about the Talisker.”

“You’re a mind reader.”

“I just know the menu. And good taste. I’d love another.”

I ordered two Taliskers. They were excellent: huge and peppery, with a finish that lasted forever. We drank and chatted some more.

When the second round was nearly done, I began to change tack.

“Where are you from?” I asked her. “You’re not Japanese.” This last I said with some hesitation, as though inexperienced in such matters and therefore unsure.

“My mother was Japanese. I’m from Brazil.”

I’ll be damned, I thought. I was planning a trip to Brazil. A long trip.

“Brazil, where?”

“Bahia.”

Bahia is one of the country’s coastal states. “Salvador?” I asked, to determine the city.

“Yes!” she exclaimed, with the first genuine smile of the evening. “How do you know Brazil so well?”

“I’ve been there a few times. My firm has clients all over the world. Um pae brasileiro e uma mae Japonêsa-é uma combinação bonita,” I said in the Portuguese I had been studying with cassettes. A Brazilian father and a Japanese mother-it’s a beautiful combination.

Her eyes lit up and her mouth parted in a perfect O. “Obrigado!” she exclaimed. Thank you! Then: “Você fala português?” You speak Portuguese?

It was as though the real person had suddenly decided to reinhabit the hostess’s body. Her eyes, her expression, her posture had all come alive, and again I felt that vital energy that had animated her dancing.

“Only a little,” I said, switching back to English. “I’m good with languages and I try to pick up a bit from wherever I travel.”

She was shaking her head slowly and looking at me as though it was the first time she had seen me. She took a swallow of her drink, finishing it.

“One more?” I asked.

“Sim!” she answered immediately in Portuguese. Yes!

I ordered two more Taliskers, then turned to her. “Tell me about Brazil,” I said.

“What do you want to hear?”

“About your family.”

She leaned back and crossed her legs. “My father is a Brazilian blue blood, from one of the old families. My mother was second-generation Japanese.”

Brazil’s melting pot population includes some two million ethnic Japanese, the result of immigration that began in 1908, when Brazil needed laborers and Imperial Japan was looking to establish her people in different parts of the world.

“So you learned Japanese from her?”

She nodded. “Japanese from my mother, Portuguese from my father. My mother died when I was a child, and my father hired an English nanny so I could learn English, too.”

“How long have you been in Japan?”

“Three years.”

“The whole time at this club?”

She shook her head. “Only a year at the club. Before that I was teaching English and Portuguese here in Tokyo through the JET program.”

JET, or Japan Exchange and Teaching, is a government-sponsored program that brings foreigners to Japan primarily to teach their native languages. Judging from the average Japanese’s facility with English, the program could use some work.

“You learned to dance like that teaching language classes?” I asked.

She laughed. “I learned to dance by dancing. When I got here a year ago I was so shy I could barely move on the stage.”

I smiled. “That’s hard to imagine.”

“It’s true. I was raised in a very proper house. I never could have conceived of this kind of thing growing up.”

The waitress walked over and set down two crystal tumblers, each with a measure of Talisker, and two glasses of water. Naomi expertly tipped a drop of the water into the whiskey, swirled it once, and raised the tumbler to her nose. Had she still been in hostess mode she would have waited, taking her cue to drink from the customer. We were making progress.

“Mmmm,” she purred.

We touched glasses and drank.

She closed her eyes. “Oh,” she said. “That’s so good.”

I smiled. “How did you wind up here at world-famous Damask Rose?”

She shrugged. “My first two years in Japan, my salary was about three million yen. I was tutoring in the evening to make a little extra. One of my students told me he knew some people who were opening a club where I could make a lot more than I was making then. I checked it out. And here I am.”

Three million yen a year-maybe twenty-five thousand dollars. “This certainly looks like an improvement,” I said, looking around.

“It’s a good place. We make most of our money with private lap dances. Just dancing, no touching. If you’d like, I can do one for you. But no pressure.”

Lap dancing would be her economic bread and butter. That she had treated it as an afterthought was another good sign.

I looked at her. She really was lovely. But I was here for something else.

“Maybe later,” I said. “I’m enjoying talking with you.”

She smiled, perhaps flattered. Given her looks, my demurral must have been refreshing. Good.

I smiled back. “Tell me more about your family.”

She took another sip of the Talisker. “I have two older brothers. They’re both married and work in the family business.”

“Which is?”

“Agriculture. It’s a family tradition that the men go into the business.”

The reference to agriculture felt deliberately vague. From what I knew about Brazil, it could have meant coffee, tobacco, sugar, or some combination. It could also have meant real estate. I gathered that her family was wealthy but that she was discreet about it.

“What do the women do?” I asked.

She laughed. “The women study something trivial in college, so they have a proper education and can be good conversationalists at parties, then they get married into the right families.”

“I gather you decided to do something different.”

“I did the college part-art history. But my father and brothers expected me to get married after that and I just wasn’t ready.”

“Why Japan, then?”

She glanced upward and pursed her lips. “It’s silly, but whenever I hear Japanese it sounds like my mother to me. And I was starting to lose the Japanese I had acquired from her as a child, which was like losing part of her.”

For an instant I saw an image of my own mother’s face. She had died at home while I was in Vietnam.

“That’s not silly at all,” I said.

We were each quiet. Now, I thought.

“So, how do you like working here?” I asked.

She shrugged. “It’s okay. The hours are crazy, but the money is good.”

“Management treats you well?”

She shrugged again. “They’re okay. No one tries to make you do anything you don’t want to.”

“What do you mean?”

“You know. When you do lap dances, some customers want more. If the customers are happy, they come back and spend big money. So, in places like this, sometimes management can pressure the girls to make the customers happy. And to do other things.”

My expression was appropriately concerned. “Other things?”

She waved a hand. “Nothing,” she said.

Change tack. “What about the other girls?” I asked, looking around. “Where do they come from?”

“Oh, all over the world.” She pointed to a tall, auburn-haired beauty in a red-sequined dress who was charming Botox Boy. “That’s Elsa. She’s from Sweden. And that’s Julie next to her, from Canada. The girl who was dancing opposite me is Valentina, from Russia.”

“What about the girls from Japan?”

“That’s Mariko and Taeka,” she said, pointing to a petite pair at a corner table who had just said or done something to elicit gales of laughter from their two obviously inebriated, American-looking customers. She turned her head one way, then the other, then back to me. “I don’t see Emi or Yukiko. They must be getting ready to dance.”

“Seems like a good mix,” I said. “Do you all get along?”

She shrugged. “It’s like anywhere else. Some of your coworkers are your friends. Others you’re not so crazy about.”

I smiled as though preparing to enjoy a bit of gossip. “Who do you like, and who do you not like?”

“Oh, I get along all right with pretty much everyone.” It was a safe answer to a slightly different question. I admired her poise.

The house music faded out and was replaced by another round of J-Pop techno. Simultaneously, two Japanese girls, topless and high-heeled, appeared on the dance stages.

“Ah, that’s Emi,” Naomi said, indicating the pretty, appealing zaftig girl on the far stage. She turned and nodded her head at the stage closer to us. “And that’s Yukiko.”

Yukiko. At last we meet.

I watched her, a tall girl with long hair so black that under the stage lighting it coruscated like moonlit liquid. It cascaded in waves around the smooth contours of her shoulders, past the alluvial shadows of her waist, around the upturned curve of her ass. She was tall and fine-boned, with delicate white skin, high cheekbones, and small, high breasts. Put the hair up, add a little couture, and you’d have the world’s classiest courtesan.

This girl with Harry? I thought. No way.

“She’s beautiful,” I said, feeling that her striking looks demanded some commentary.

“A lot of people say so,” Naomi replied.

There was something lurking in her deliberately noncommittal reply. “You don’t think so?” I asked.

She shrugged. “Not my type.”

“I get the feeling you don’t care for her.”

“Let’s just say that she’s comfortable doing things that I’m not.”

With Harry? “I’d be lying if I told you I wasn’t curious.”

She shook her head, and I knew I’d hit another dead end, even after three whiskeys.

Snow Child, indeed. There was something cold, even calculating, about the girl’s beauty. Something was wrong here, although how the hell could I tell Harry that? I imagined the conversation: Harry, I went to Damask Rose to check up on you. Trust me, my friend, this girl is way out of your league. Plus, I had a bad feeling about her generally. Steer clear.

I knew where his mind was right now: she would feel like the best thing that ever happened to him, and anything or anyone that threatened that comfortable sense would be rationalized away or ignored. A heads-up from a friend would be useless. Or worse.

I wasn’t going to get any more out of Naomi. I’d do a little more digging when I got back to Osaka. Harry was a friend and I owed him that much. But finding out what this girl was up to wasn’t really the problem. Getting Harry to acknowledge it, I knew, would be.

“Do you want to watch her?” Naomi asked.

I shook my head. “Sorry. I was thinking of something else.”

We talked more about Brazil. She spoke of the country’s ethnic and cultural variety, a mélange of Europeans, Indians, Japanese, and West Africans; its atmosphere of exuberance, music, and sport; its extremes of wealth and poverty; most of all, of its beauty, with thousands of miles of spectacular coast, the vast pampas of the south, the trackless green basin of the Amazon. Much of it I knew already, but I enjoyed listening to her, and looking at her while she spoke.

I thought of what she had said about Yukiko: Let’s just say that she’s comfortable doing things that I’m not.

But that only meant Yukiko had been in the game longer. Innocence is a fragile thing.

I might have asked for her number. I could have told her my visit had been extended, something like that. She was too young, but I liked the way she made me feel. She provoked a confusing mix of emotions: affinity based on the shared experiences of mixed blood and childhood bereavement; a paternalistic urge to protect her from the mistakes she was going to make; a sad sexual longing that was like an elegy for Midori.

It was getting late. “Will you forgive me if I forgo the lap dance?” I asked her.

She smiled. “That’s fine.”

I stood to go. She got up with me.

“Wait,” she said. She took out a pen. “Give me your hand.”

I held out my left hand. She held it and began to write on my palm. She wrote slowly. Her fingers were warm.

“This is my private e-mail address,” she said when she was done. “It’s not something I give customers, so please don’t share it. Next time you have a trip to Salvador, let me know. I’ll tell you the best places to go.” She smiled. “And I wouldn’t mind hearing from you if you find yourself back in Tokyo, either.”

I smiled into her green eyes. The smile felt strangely sad to me. Maybe she didn’t notice.

“You never know,” I said.

I settled the bill at the door, in cash as always. I took a card, then walked up the stairs without looking back.

The early morning air of Nogizaka was cool and slightly damp. Light from streetlamps lay in weak yellow pools. The pavement was slick with urban dew. Tokyo slumbered around me, dreamless and indifferent.

Goodbye to all that, I thought, and began walking toward the hotel.

5

I WENT STRAIGHT to bed, but I couldn’t sleep. I kept thinking of Harry, of Harry with Yukiko. I knew something was wrong there. What would this girl, or whoever she worked for, want with a guy like Harry?

I supposed he might have made an enemy with one of his hacking stunts. Even if he had, though, tracing the problem back to him would be a bitch. And what would be the point of setting him up with the girl?

Harry had told me his boss had taken him to Damask Rose to “celebrate” the night Harry had met Yukiko. If the girl had been a setup, Harry’s boss must have been complicit. I chewed on that.

I thought about going to the guy. I could find out his name, where he lived, brace him one morning on his way to the office.

Tempting, but even if I got the information I wanted, the incident would cause problems for Harry, possibly severe ones. No go.

Okay, try something else. Maybe someone was interested in Harry only as a conduit to me.

But nobody knows about Harry, I thought. Not even Tatsu.

There was Midori, of course. She knew where he lived. She’d sent him that letter.

Nah, I don’t see it.

I got up and paced the room. Midori had connections in the entertainment world. Use those connections, have someone get close to Harry as a way of finding me?

I remembered that last night with her at the Imperial Hotel, how we’d been standing, my arms around her from behind, her fingers intertwined with mine, the way her hair smelled, the way she tasted. I pushed the memory away.

I realized that, for the moment, there was no way of knowing who was behind Harry’s improbable romance. So I put aside Midori and concentrated on what, not who.

What makes me a hard target is that I have no fixed points in my life-no workplace, no address, no known associates-that someone can hook into and use to get to me. If someone had established a connection from Harry to me, he’d have that fixed point. He could be expected to exploit it.

That meant people would be watching Harry. Not just through Yukiko. They’d have to tail him, as often as possible.

But he’d been clean when I’d seen him at Teize. He’d told me as much, and I knew for sure that I’d been clean afterward.

I decided to conduct an experiment. It was a little bit risky, but not as risky as leveling with Harry about his situation, given his current state of mind. I’d need another night in Tokyo to do it right. No problem with that. While closing in on the weightlifter, I’d been staying in appropriately anonymous city hotels for one week at a time-not wishing to attract attention with longer stays-and the New Otani reservation was good for another three nights anyway.

I looked at the digital clock on the bedstand. It was past four in the morning. Christ, I was keeping the same hours as my lovesick friend.

I’d call him in the evening, when we’d both be awake. More importantly, when Yukiko would be at Damask Rose, and Harry, presumably, would be alone. Then, based on the outcome of my little experiment, I’d decide how much to tell him.

I got back in bed. The last thing I thought of before drifting off to sleep was Midori, and how she had said in her letter that she wanted to present an offering for my spirit.

I woke up the next day feeling refreshed.

Later I would call Harry and arrange a meeting for that night. But first, I wanted to map out an SDR that I’d ask him to use beforehand.

Putting together the route took most of the afternoon. Every element had to be done right or the route itself would be a failure. It had to move through areas with which Harry was already familiar because he wasn’t going to have an opportunity to practice. Also, at several junctures, timing would be important, and I had to walk the entirety of both Harry’s route and mine to ensure that our paths would cross only as planned. I took detailed notes as I went along, using some typing paper I picked up at a stationery store.

When I was done, I stopped at a coffee shop and created a map with notations on a single sheet of paper. Then I made my way to Shin-Okubo, north of Shinjuku and a bastion of the Korean mob, where, among the unlicensed doctors and unadvertised shops hidden in crumbling apartment buildings, I was able to purchase a cloned cell phone for cash, with no ID.

Next stop was Harry’s neighborhood in Iikura, just south of Roppongi, where I found a suitable Lawson’s convenience store not far from his apartment. I browsed in the reading section, folding the map into one of the magazines there.

I called him from a pay phone at seven that evening. “Wake up, sleepyhead,” I told him.

“Hey, what’s going on?” he asked. “I didn’t expect to hear from you for a while.”

He didn’t sound groggy. Maybe he’d gotten up to see Yukiko off to the office.

“I missed you,” I said. “You alone?”

“Yeah.”

“I need a favor.”

“Name it.”

“Are you free right now?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay. I need you to go outside and call me from a pay phone. There’s one near the Lawson’s at Azabu Iikura Katamachi, to the left as you’re facing the store. Use it. I’ll give you my number.”

“This line is okay, you know that.”

“Just in case. This is sensitive.” I used our usual code to give him my cell phone number.

Ten minutes later the unit rang. “Okay, what’s so sensitive?” he asked.

“I think someone might be following you.”

There was a short silence. “Are you serious?”

“Stop looking over your shoulder. If they’re there right now I don’t want you to tip them off. You wouldn’t see them that way anyway.”

Another silence. Then: “I don’t get it. I’m awfully careful.”

“I know you are.”

“Why do you think this?”

“Not over the phone.”

“You want to meet?”

“Yes. But I want you to pick something up first. I’ve inserted a note behind the back cover of the second-to-the-back issue of this week’s TV Taro in the Lawson’s you’re next to. Go inside and retrieve the note. Make sure you make it look natural, in case somebody’s close. Pick up a carton of milk, some prepared food, like you’re just grabbing something quick and easy for dinner to take back to your apartment. Take it all home, wait a half-hour, then go out and call me again from a different phone. Be ready for a two-hour walk.”

“Will do.”

A half-hour passed. The cell phone rang again.

“You retrieve it?” I asked.

“Yeah. I see what you’re up to.”

“Good. Just follow the route. Start at eight thirty sharp. When you’re done, wait for me at the place I’ve indicated on the note. You know how to interpret the place I’ve indicated.”

My reference to “interpretation” was a reminder that he wasn’t to take our meeting place literally, but was instead to use the Tokyo Yellow Pages per our usual code to divine my true intent. If people were following Harry and they moved on him right now, presumably they’d pick up the note, see the location of the meet, and go to the wrong place to ambush me.

“Understood,” he said.

“Be cool. You’ve got nothing to worry about. I’ll explain everything when I see you. And don’t worry if I’m a little late.”

“No worries. I’ll see you later.”

I hung up.

Harry had been clean when we’d gotten together at Teize, but that didn’t mean he’d been clean beforehand. I’d taught him to start out his SDRs unobtrusively, acting like any other civilian so that anyone who might be watching him would be lulled into believing he was no more than that. But the low-level stuff was only for the outset. As the route progresses, it becomes increasingly aggressive, less concerned with lulling potential followers and more concerned with forcing them into the open. You get off a subway car and wait until the platform is completely empty, then get back on a train going in the opposite direction. You turn corners, stop, and wait to see who rushes around just behind you. You use a lot of elevators, which forces followers to snuggle up with you shoulder-to-shoulder or let you go. Et cetera. The idea is that it’s better to get caught acting like a spy than it is to lead the bad guys to the source you’re trying to protect in the first place.

Harry would have observed the protocol on his way to Teize when we met there. And, as his counter-surveillance moves became more aggressive, his followers would have had to choose between being spotted, on the one hand, and giving up the quarry so as not to alert him and trying again another day, on the other. If they’d chosen door number 2, Harry would have shown up at the meeting clean, never knowing that he’d been followed a little while earlier.

And, having seen him engage in blatant counter-surveillance tactics, his followers would then assume that he had something to hide, perhaps the very thing they were looking for. They would intensify coverage as a result.

Tonight’s exercise was intended to determine whether all this was indeed the case. The route I’d devised was designed to take whoever might be following Harry in a circle through the Ebisu Garden Palace, a multistoried outdoor shopping arcade that would afford me several opportunities to unobtrusively watch him and whatever might be trailing in his wake. It was aggressive enough to enable me to spot a tail, but not so aggressive as to scare the tail off. Except at the end, when Harry would pull away in front and I would close in from behind.

At eight o’clock I made my way to the Rue Favart restaurant on the corner of Ebisu 4-chome, across from the Sapporo Building. I wanted to get there early to ensure that I would get one of the three window seats on the restaurant’s third floor, which would give me a direct view of the sidewalk that Harry would shortly be using. If the tables were taken, I would have time to wait. I was hungry, too, and the Rue, with its eclectic collection of pastas and sandwiches, would be a good spot to fuel up. I had enjoyed the place from time to time while living in Tokyo and was looking forward to being back.

I followed a waitress up the wooden stairs to the third floor, taking in the zany décor on the way-lime green walls with enormous flower murals, helter-skelter chairs and tables of wood and metal and molded plastic. The window seats were indeed all occupied when I arrived, but I told the waitress not to worry, I would be happy to wait for the privilege of such a splendid view. I sat on a small sofa, enjoying an iced coffee and the hallucinatory ceiling murals of beetles and moths and dragonflies. After a half-hour, the two office ladies at one of the window seats departed, and I took their table.

I ordered the shiitake mushroom risotto and a minestrone soup, asking if they could bring it in a hurry because I was hoping to catch a nine thirty movie. I would need to leave immediately after Harry passed by, and had to time things right.

I thought about what I would do if my experiment were successful-that is, if I confirmed that Harry was indeed being followed. The answer, I supposed, depended largely on who they were, and why they were interested. My main concern was that nothing should interfere with my preparations for departure, which, now that I had finished the “favor” for Tatsu, I was going to have to accelerate. I had to protect my plans, even if it meant leaving Harry on his own.

The risotto was good, and I would have liked more time to enjoy it at my leisure. Instead, I ate quickly, watching the street below. When I was done, I checked my watch. Just enough time for one of the Rue’s celebrated hot cocoas, dense concoctions crafted with pure cocoa and dollops of whipped cream, of which the Rue serves no more than twenty a day. I ordered one and savored it while I waited and watched.

I saw Harry at a little after nine, moving clockwise from Ebisu station toward Kusunoki-dori. He was moving quickly, as I’d instructed him. At this time of the evening, Ebisu comprises mostly pleasure-seekers attracted to the swank restaurants and bars of the Garden Court complex. The pace of the area is accordingly relaxed. Anyone attempting to match Harry’s speed would find himself out of sync with the area’s rhythms, and therefore conspicuous.

I spotted the first likely candidate as Harry turned right onto Kusunoki-dori at the Ebisu 4-chome police box. A young Japanese in a navy suit, slight of build, with gelled hair and wire-rimmed glasses. He was following about ten meters behind Harry on the opposite side of the street-sound technique, as most people are aware, if at all, only of what is transpiring directly behind them. I couldn’t yet be sure, of course, but from his position and his manner, and his pace, I had a feeling.

Harry continued to move away from my position. Two groups of young Japanese now appeared farther back in his wake, but I dismissed them as unlikely. Their manner was too relaxed, and they were too young.

Next was a Caucasian, a big guy, the sack drape of his dark suit and confident cadences of his gait both American, moving quickly down the sidewalk. Could be a businessman, staying at the nearby Westin Hotel, in a hurry for an appointment. Or not. I filed him as a possible.

Harry disappeared, obscured by the branches of one of the kusunoki trees for which the street is named. So did the young Japanese guy. I turned my attention to the American. I saw him stop, as though he had developed a sudden interest in one of the Most Wanted posters on the side of the police box.

Gotcha.

A moment later Harry reappeared, retracing his steps, now on the south side of the street. He paused to examine the illuminated map on the corner in front of the Sapporo Building, diagonally across from the police box where the American, suddenly no longer in a hurry for his appointment, indulged his newfound interest in Japan’s Most Wanted.

Harry’s U-turn had been moderately aggressive, but not so provocative, I thought, as to cause his pursuers to let him go for the night. They wouldn’t feel that he had made them. Not yet.

But let’s see.

Harry moved right onto Platanus Avenue. The American held his position. A moment later the Japanese appeared from beyond my field of vision. When he, too, had turned right onto Platanus, the American fell in behind him.

I waited another minute to see whether anyone else tickled my radar, but no one did.

I got up and took the stairs to the first floor, where I paid and thanked the proprietor for an excellent meal. Then I cut across the Garden Court complex and took the stairs to the second floor of the outdoor promenade. I leaned against the waist-high stone wall in front of the Garden Court Tower office complex like a sentry on a castle keep, watching the foot traffic moving through the esplanade below.

I knew that Harry had taken one of the underground passages to the esplanade and was pausing for a bit of window-shopping en route to give me time to get in position. After a few minutes, I saw him emerge from below me and begin walking diagonally across the esplanade, away from where I was standing. Had I wanted to, I could have set up at the other end of the promenade, where I would have been able to watch him and any followers as they approached me, but I was now ninety percent certain that I’d spotted the tails and didn’t need to risk giving them an opportunity to spot me.

There they were, fanned out behind him like two points at the base of a moving scalene triangle. I noticed that the Japanese was looking around now at the windows of the esplanade’s stores and restaurants and at the people looking down from the promenade above. I saw his head start to swivel to check his rear and, although I was likely to remain anonymous among the other onlookers around me, I moved back a few steps to ensure that I would remain unseen.

The Japanese was showing decent, but in this case futile, counter-surveillance awareness. He had obviously noted that Harry was leading him in a circle, a classic counter-surveillance tactic that gives a static team multiple opportunities to try to spot a tail. I had anticipated such a reaction, though, and from here on, the route would be comfortingly straightforward, right up until the moment that Harry would exit the scene and I would make a surprise appearance.

I waited ten seconds, then eased forward again. Harry had just reached the top of the incline that would take him out of the esplanade and toward the skywalk of Ebisu station. The Japanese and American kept their positions behind him. I watched until all three of them had moved out of my field of vision, then waited to ascertain whether there might be more of them. I was unsurprised to discover no one of interest. If their numbers had been greater, they would have switched positions to avoid potential counter-surveillance when they sensed they were being moved in a circle. That they hadn’t was a strong indication that this was only a two-person team.

I checked my watch. Fifteen minutes to go.

I took the underground passage to the Westin, where I caught a cab to nearby Hiro. Harry and his two admirers were now walking to the same place; taking the cab ensured that I would be there early to greet them.

I had the cab let me off on Meiji-dori, where I ducked into a Starbucks.

“What can I get you?” the counter girl asked me in Japanese.

“Just a coffee,” I said. “Grande. And can you make it extra hot?”

“Sorry, the coffee drips at precisely ninety-eight degrees centigrade and is served at eighty-five degrees. I can’t change it.”

Christ, they really train these people, I marveled. “I see. I’ve got this cold, though, I could use something really hot for the vapors. What about tea?”

“Oh, the tea is very hot. There’s no dripping, so it’s made and served at ninety-eight degrees.”

“Wonderful. I’ll have a grande Earl Grey.”

She made the tea and set it on the counter next to the register. I paid for it and picked it up.

“Wait,” she said. She handed me an extra cup. “This will keep it hot.”

I smiled at her thoughtfulness. “Thank you,” I said.

The detour had taken about four minutes. I moved a few hundred meters farther up the right side of the street to a small playground, where I sat on a corner bench. I set down the tea and used the cloned cell phone to confirm that the taxi I had ordered was waiting. It was indeed, and I told the dispatcher that the passenger would be there in just a few minutes.

Five minutes later I saw Harry heading in my direction. He made a left on a nameless street that would take him into a rather dark and quiet residential area. Not the kind of place where you could catch a cab. Luckily, Harry knew there would be one waiting for him. His two friends, of course, were going to be shit out of luck.

There they were, one on each side of the street. The American was now in the lead, on my side. He cut across and followed Harry into the neighborhood. Ten seconds later the Japanese followed. I picked up the tea and moved in behind them.

Fifty meters left, fifty meters right, fifty meters left again. These streets were exceptionally narrow, flanked by white concrete walls. Almost a labyrinth. I walked slowly. I couldn’t see them from this far back, but I knew where they were going.

Three minutes later a cab pulled out from in front of me and headed in my direction. I glanced at the back window and saw Harry. I was glad to see that this part had gone smoothly. Had there been a problem, Harry would have turned around and just kept walking and I would have improvised. What I wanted, though, was that this sudden and somewhat theatrical loss of their quarry would cause his pursuers to come together for a consultation. I would have an easier time of it if I could surprise them simultaneously.

Neither Harry nor I gave any sign of acknowledgment as the cab passed my position. I continued ahead, making a right onto the street from which the cab had just emerged.

The street was about thirty meters long, turning ninety degrees to the right at the end. No sign of Tweedledee and Tweedledum. No problem. The place Harry had led them to was a dead end.

I reached the end of the street and turned right. There they were, about twelve meters away. The Japanese guy had his left side to me. He was talking to the American. The American was facing me, an unlit cigarette in his mouth. He was holding a lighter at waist level, flicking it, trying to get it going.

I forced myself to keep my pace casual, just another pedestrian. My heart began to beat harder. I could feel it pounding in my chest, behind my ears.

Ten meters. I popped the plastic lid off the paper cup with my thumb. I felt it tumble past the back of my hand.

Seven meters. Adrenaline was slowing down my perception of the scene. The Japanese guy glanced in my direction. He looked at my face. His eyes began to widen.

Five meters. The Japanese guy reached out for the American, the gesture urgent even through my adrenalized slow-motion vision. He grabbed the American’s arm and started pulling on it.

Three meters. The American looked up and saw me. The cigarette dangled from his lips. There was no recognition in his eyes.

Two meters. I stepped in and flung the cup forward. Its contents of ninety-eight degrees centigrade Earl Grey tea exited and caught the American directly in the face and neck. His hands flew up and he shrieked.

I turned to the Japanese. His eyes were popped all the way open, his head rotating back and forth in the universal gestures of negation. He started to raise his hands as though to ward me off.

I grabbed his shoulders and shoved him into the wall. Using the same forward momentum, I stepped in and kneed him squarely in the balls. He grunted and doubled over.

I turned back to the American. He was bent forward, staggering, his hands clutching at his face. I grabbed the collar of his jacket and the back of his trousers and accelerated him headfirst into the wall like a matador with a bull. His body shuddered from the impact and he dropped to the ground.

The Japanese guy was lying on his side, clutching his crotch, gasping. I hauled him up by the lapels and shoved his back against the wall. I looked left, then right. It was just the three of us.

“Tell me who you are,” I said in Japanese.

He made retching noises. I could see he was going to need a minute.

Keeping my left hand pressed against his throat, I patted him down to confirm that he didn’t have a weapon, then checked his ears and jacket to ensure that he wasn’t wired for sound. He was clean. I reached into the inside pocket of his suit jacket and pulled out a wallet. I flipped it open. The ID was right in front, in a slip-in laminated protector.

Tomohisa Kanezaki. Second Secretary, Consular Affairs, U.S. Embassy. The bald eagle logo of the U.S. Department of State showed blue and yellow in the background.

So these characters were with the CIA. I slipped the wallet into one of my pants pockets so I could examine its contents later at my leisure.

“Pull yourself together, Kanezaki-san,” I said, switching to English. “Or this time I’ll hurt you for real.”

“Chotto matte, chotto matte,” he panted, holding up one of his hands for emphasis. Wait a minute, wait a minute. “Setsumei suru to yakusoku shimasu kara.. .” I promise I’ll explain everything, but…

His Japanese was American-accented. “Use English,” I told him. “I don’t have time to give you a language lesson.”

“Okay, all right,” he said. The panting had slowed a little. “My name is Tomohisa Kanezaki. I’m with the U.S. Embassy here in Tokyo.”

“I know who you are. I just looked at your wallet. What were you doing following that man?”

He took a deep breath and grimaced. His eyes were watering from the ball shot. “We were trying to find you. You’re John Rain.”

“You were trying to find me, why?”

“I don’t know. The parameters I was given…”

I shoved hard against his throat and got in his face. “I’m not interested in your parameters. Ignorance is not going to be bliss for you. Not tonight. Understand?”

He tried to push me away. “Just let me fucking talk for a minute, okay? If you keep choking me, I’m not going to be able to tell you anything!”

I was taken aback by his gumption. He sounded more petulant than afraid. I realized this kid didn’t understand the kind of trouble he was in. If he didn’t tell me what I wanted to know I would have to adjust his attitude.

I shot a quick glance at his prone friend, then back at him. “Talk fast,” I told him.

“I was only supposed to locate you. I was explicitly told not to make contact.”

“What was supposed to happen after you located me?”

“My superiors would take it up from there.”

“But you know who I am.”

“I told you, yes.”

I nodded. “Then you know what I’m going to do to you if I find any of your answers unsatisfactory.”

He blanched. I seemed to be getting through to him.

“Who’s he?” I asked, gesturing with my head to the prone American.

“Diplomatic security. The parameters… I was told that under no circumstances was I to take a chance on encountering you alone.”

A bodyguard. Sounded possible. The guy hadn’t recognized me, I’d seen that. He was probably here just for protection and surveillance tag team.

Or he could have been the triggerman. The Agency relies on contractor cutouts for its wetwork, people like me. He might have been one of them.

“You’re not supposed to encounter me alone because…,” I said.

“Because you’re dangerous. We have a dossier on you.”

The one Holtzer would have put together. Right.

“The man you were following,” I said. “Tell me about that.”

He nodded. “His name is Haruyoshi Fukasawa. He’s your only known associate. We were following him to get to you.”

“That’s not enough.”

He gave me a cold stare, looking like he was prepared to tough things out. “That’s all I know.”

His partner groaned and started to pull himself up onto his knees. Kanezaki glanced at him, and I knew what he was thinking: If his partner recovered, I would have a hard time controlling the two of them.

“You’re not telling me what you know, Kanezaki,” I said. “Let me show you something.”

I took a step over to his partner, who was now facing us on all fours, grunting something unintelligible. I bent down, took hold of his chin with one hand and the side of his head with the other, and gave a sudden, decisive twist. His neck snapped with a loud crack and he flopped to the ground.

I let go of his head and stepped back to Kanezaki. His eyes were bulging, shifting from me to the corpse and back again. “Oh my fucking God!” he spluttered. “Oh my God!”

“First time you’ve seen something like that?” I asked, my tone deliberately casual. “It gets easier as you go along. Of course, in your case, the next time you see it, it’s going to be happening to you.”

His face was white and getting whiter, and I wondered for a moment if there was some danger that he might faint. I needed to help him focus.

“Kanezaki. You were telling me about Haruyoshi Fukasawa. About how you knew that he’s an associate of mine. Keep going, please.”

He took a deep breath and closed his eyes. “We knew… we knew he was connected to you because we intercepted a letter.”

“A letter?”

His eyes opened. “From him to Midori Kawamura, in New York. Mentioning you.”

Goddamn it, I thought, at the mention of her name. I just couldn’t get clear of these people. They were like cancer. You think you’ve cut it out, it always comes back.

And spreads, to the people around you.

“Keep going,” I said, scowling.

“Jesus Christ, I’m telling you that’s all I know!”

If he panicked completely, I wouldn’t get anything useful. The trick was to keep him scared, but not so scared that he began to make things up just to please me.

“All right,” I told him. “That’s all you know about how. But you still haven’t told me about why. Why you were trying to find me.”

“Look, you know I can’t talk about…”

I seized his throat hard. His eyes bulged. He snaked one arm between mine and tried to lever my grip open. It looked like something he might have picked up in one of the Agency’s weekend personal security courses. Kudos to him for remembering it under pressure. Too bad it didn’t work.

“Kanezaki,” I said, loosening the grip enough so he could breathe, “in one minute you will either go on living or someone will find you next to your friend there. Which it is depends entirely on what you say to me in that minute. Now start talking.”

I felt him swallow beneath the pressure from my hand.

“All right, all right,” he said. He was talking fast now. “For ten years the USG has been pressuring Japan to reform its banks and get its finances in order. For ten years things have only gotten worse. The economy is beginning to collapse now. If the collapse continues, Japan will be the first domino to fall. Southeast Asia, Europe, and America will be next. The country has to reform. But the vested interests are so deeply entrenched that reform is impossible.”

I looked at him. “You’ve got about forty seconds left. You’re not doing well.”

“Okay, okay! Tokyo Station has been tasked with an action program of furthering reform and removing impediments to reform. The program is called Crepuscular. We know what you’ve been doing freelance. I think… I think what my superiors want to ask you for is your assistance.”

“For what purpose?” I asked.

“For removing impediments.”

“But you aren’t sure of that?”

“Look, I’ve been with the Agency for three years. There’s a lot they don’t tell me. But anyone who knows your history and knows about Crepuscular can put two and two together.”

I looked at him, considering my options, Kill him? His superiors wouldn’t know what had happened. But they’d assume I’d been behind it, of course. And although they wouldn’t be able to get to me, they had a good fix on Harry and Midori.

No, killing this kid wasn’t going to get the Agency out of my life. Or out of Harry’s or Midori’s.

“I’ll think about your proposal,” I told him. “You can tell your superiors I said so.”

“I didn’t propose anything. I was only speculating. If I tell my superiors what we just talked about, I’ll be sent back to Langley for a desk job.”

“Tell them anything you want. If I’m interested, I’ll get in touch with you. You personally. If I’m not interested, I’ll expect you to understand that my silence means no. I’ll also expect you to stop trying to find me, especially through other people. If I learn that you aren’t respecting these wishes, I’ll hold you responsible. You, personally. Do you understand?”

He started to say something, then gagged. I saw what was coming and stepped out of the way. He leaned over and vomited.

I took it as a yes.

I walked back to Ebisu and caught a Yamanote train to Shibuya. I took the Miyamasuzaka exit to Shibuya 1-chome, then walked the short distance to the Hatou coffee shop. Windowless Hatou, with its dark wood floors and tables and long hinoki counter, its hundreds of delicate porcelain cups and saucers, and its exquisitely prepared brews, had been one of my regular haunts while I lived in Tokyo, or at least as regular as I allowed any one place to become. I missed it.

I walked in the street-level door. The counterman issued a low irasshaimase but didn’t look up. Instead, he continued pouring steaming water from a silver pot into a filter perched over a blue porcelain demitasse. He was leaning to the side so that he was eye level with the pot, his arm describing small circles in the air to ensure that the water dripped uniformly through the grounds in the filter. He looked like he was painting, or conducting a miniature orchestra. It was a pleasure to behold such practiced devotion and I couldn’t help pausing to watch.

When he was done he bowed and welcomed me again. I returned the gesture and made my way to the back. I turned left at the end of the L-shaped room and saw Harry sitting at one of the three back tables.

“Hey,” he said, standing up and offering his hand.

I shook it. “Glad to see you found the place okay.”

He nodded. “Your directions were good.”

I looked at the table, empty but for a glass of ice water. “No coffee?”

“I didn’t know when you were going to get here, so I ordered two old-bean demitasses. Something called the Nire Blend. It takes a half-hour to prepare. I figured you’d like it-the waitress says it’s ‘exceptionally intense.” ’

I smiled again. “It is. I’m not sure it’ll be to your taste.”

He shrugged. “I like to try new things.”

Yukiko, I thought.

We sat down. “Well? How did it turn out?” he asked.

I took out Kanezaki’s wallet and slid it across the table to him. “You were being followed,” I said.

He opened it and looked at the ID inside. “Oh, shit,” he said softly. “CIA?”

I nodded.

“But how? Why?”

I briefed him on my conversation with Kanezaki.

“So it looks like they were interested in me only because they’re interested in you,” he said when I was done.

I nodded slowly. “It looks that way.”

“I wonder if they know who I am, other than that I’m somehow connected to you.”

“Impossible to say. They might have cross-checked with other agencies, in which case they would know you were once with the NSA. But they’re not always so thorough.”

“They did a nice job of tracking me from that letter, though. Stupid of me to send it.”

“There’s more than meets the eye there. The letter alone doesn’t sound like enough. But I didn’t have time to ask.”

We were quiet for a minute. Then he said, “It might have been enough. I only signed it with my first name, but my parents chose three kanji, not the usual two.” On his hand he traced the characters for “spring,” “giving,” and “ambition,” an unusual spelling for a common name.

“They must have been watching Midori, too,” I said.

He nodded. “Yeah. She was a known point of contact. They might have been doing spot surveillance and mail checks, hoping she’d hear from you. Instead they got me.”

“I’ll buy that,” I said.

“And I mailed that letter near the main Chuo-ku post office, not so far from where I work. There would have been a postmark. They could have used it to work outward in concentric circles. That was dumb. I should have mailed it from somewhere out of the way.”

“You can’t be too careful,” I said, looking at him.

He sighed. “I’m going to have to move again. Can’t have them knowing where I live.”

“Don’t forget, they also know where you work.”

“I don’t care about that. A lot of what I do now, I do remotely. On the days where I have to go to and from the office, I’ll run an extra-careful SDR.”

“You haven’t been doing that already?”

“Sorry. Not as much as I should be. But believe me, I’m careful when I go to see you.”

This was an unavoidable problem. Inside computer networks, Harry was pure stealth. But in the real world, he was mostly a civilian. A weak spot in my armor.

I shrugged. “If you weren’t, those guys would have gotten to me by now. Maybe at Teize, maybe another time. Your moves shook them off.”

He brightened a little at that, then said, “You don’t think I’m in any danger, do you?”

I thought about it. I hadn’t mentioned that Kanezaki’s partner hadn’t survived our meeting. I told him now.

“Shit,” he said. “That’s what I’m talking about. What if they want payback?”

“I don’t think they’d look to extract it from you. If this were a yakuza thing, it might be a different story, they might come after my friends just to hurt me. But here, if they’ve got a beef, it’s with me. You’re no threat to them. Besides, they don’t have much in-house muscle. Congress wouldn’t like it. That’s why they need people like me.”

“What about the police? A taxi picked me up at the same spot where someone is going to find a body.”

“Kanezaki will make a few calls and that body will be gone before anyone stumbles across it. And even if the cops were to get involved, what do they have? Even if they found a way to contact the cabdriver, all he’s got is a fake name and an average-looking guy he barely saw in the dark, right?”

“I guess that’s true.”

“But you still have to be cautious,” I said. “This girl you’re involved with, Yukiko, you trust her?”

He looked at me. After a moment, he nodded.

“Because, if you’re spending the night with this girl, she knows where you live. That’s a weakness in your defenses right there.”

“Yeah, but she’s not involved with these people…”

“You never know, Harry. You never really know.”

There was a long pause, then he said, “I can’t live that way. The way you do.”

A thought flashed in my mind: Maybe you should have figured that out before you got involved in my world.

But that wasn’t fair. Or particularly useful.

The waitress brought two demitasses of the Nire Blend and set them down with exquisite care, as though they were priceless artifacts. She bowed and moved away.

We drank the coffee. Harry said positive things about his, but there was some obvious effort behind this. It used to be that he would delight in mocking my gustatory recommendations. I couldn’t help noticing the contrast, and I didn’t care for it.

We made small talk. When the coffee was done, we said good night, and I left him to make my circuitous way back to the hotel.

I wondered if I really believed that the Agency posed little danger to Harry. I supposed that mostly I did. Whether they posed a danger to me was another story. They might have wanted me for help, as Kanezaki had said. Or they might have been looking for payback for Holtzer. I had no way to be sure. Regardless, eliminating Kanezaki’s escort earlier wasn’t exactly going to engender endearment.

And there was Yukiko. She still didn’t feel right to me, and I had no way of knowing whether she was hooked up with the Agency or with someone else.

Back at the hotel, I lay in bed and stared at the ceiling, again unable to sleep.

So it wasn’t Midori, after all, I thought.

The Agency instead of Midori. Talk about a fucking consolation prize.

Enough. Let it go.

I was suddenly less certain than I had been the night before that this would be my last in Tokyo. I stared at the ceiling for a long time before descending into sleep.

6

THE NEXT MORNING I took the bullet train back to Osaka. Arriving early in the afternoon at bustling Shin-Osaka station, I was surprised to find that it felt good to be back. Maybe I’d gotten tired of living in hotels. Or maybe it was something about knowing that I was going to have to leave again, this time permanently.

I knew I’d been clean when I left Tokyo, but the two-and-a-half-hour train ride had afforded me no new opportunities to check my back. That’s a long time for me, especially given my recent run-in with Kanezaki and company, and to ease my discomfort I took an appropriately circuitous route before catching a Tanimachi line train to Miyakojima, where I took the stairs of the A4 exit to the street.

For no particular reason I made a left around the police box at the Miyakojima Hon-dori intersection, maneuvering around the hundreds of commuter bicycles jammed in all directions around the exit. I could as easily have made a right, past the local high school and toward the Okawa River. One of the things that had attracted me to the high-rise in Belfa is that the complex is approachable from all directions.

I took a left at Miyakojima Kita-dori, then a right against traffic down a one-way street, then another left. The move against traffic would impede anyone’s attempts at vehicular surveillance. And each turn gave me an opportunity to unobtrusively glance behind me while putting me on a narrower, quieter road than the last. Anyone hoping to follow me on foot would have to stay close or lose me. There were dozens of high-rises in the area, too, and the fact that I might have been going to any one of them was another factor that would have rendered ineffective anything other than close-range surveillance.

In some ways the neighborhood was the poster child for bad zoning. There were shiny glass-and-steel condominiums across from corrugated and I-beam parking garages. Single-family homes perched alongside recycling plants and foundries. A new multistory school turned its proud granite façade away from its neighbor, a dilapidated relic of a car repair shop, like an ungrateful child ashamed of an ailing parent.

On the other hand, the residents didn’t seem to mind the shambles. On the contrary: everywhere were small signs of the pride the locals took in their dwellings. The monotonous macadam and corrugated metal were relieved by small riots of potted bamboo, lavender, and sunflowers. Here was a carefully arranged cairn of volcanic rocks, there, a display of dried coral. One house had concealed what would have been an ugly ferroconcrete wall with a lovingly tended garden of angel’s trumpet, sage, and lavender.

I lived on the thirty-sixth floor of one of the twin high-rises in the Belfa complex, in a three-bedroom corner apartment. The place was larger than I needed and most of the rooms went unused, but I liked living on the top floor, with a view of the city, above it all. Also, at the time I’d rented it, I thought it would be to my advantage to take a place that didn’t fit the profile of what a lone man, recently disappeared and with minimal needs, would take for an apartment. In the end, of course, it hadn’t mattered.

I tell myself that I like to live in places like Belfa because parents are inherently watchful of strangers, and once they decide you belong they can form an unconscious but effective obstacle to an ambush. But I know there’s more to it than that. I don’t have a family and never will, and I’m probably drawn to such environments not just for operational security but for some other, more vicarious form of security, as well. There was a time when I didn’t seem to need such things, when I would have been amused and perhaps even vaguely disgusted at the notion of living like some sort of psychic vampire, a lingering revenant pressed up against one-way glass, looking with forlorn and futile eyes at the ordinary life that fate had denied him.

It changes your priorities. Hell, it changes your damn values.

I used a pay phone to access a voice-mail account attached to a special phone in my apartment, a sound-activated unit with a sensitive speakerphone that functions like a transmitter. The unit silently dials a voice-mail account if someone enters the apartment without knowing the code that disengages the phone, letting me know in advance and from a safe distance whether I’ve had any unexpected visitors. An identical setup had saved me in Tokyo from a Holtzer-inspired ambush, and I tend to stick with what works. I’d been checking the account daily from Tokyo without incident, and the mailbox was empty this time as well, so I knew my apartment had gone unmolested during my absence.

From the pay phone, I walked the short distance to the Belfa complex. A softball game was under way on the field to my right. Some children were playing kickball by a granite sculpture garden in front of the building. An old man swerved past me on a bicycle, a laughing grandchild perched on the handles.

I used the front entrance, taking care as always to approach in such a way that the security camera facing the building would get a picture only of my back. Such precautions are part of my routine, but, as Tatsu had pointed out, the cameras are everywhere and you can’t hope to spot them all.

I took the elevator to the thirty-sixth floor and walked down the corridor to my apartment. I checked the small piece of translucent tape I had left at the bottom of the door and found it intact, still attached to the jamb. As I’d told Harry so many times, a good defense has to be layered.

I unlocked the door and went inside. Everything was as I’d left it. Which wasn’t saying much. Beyond the futon and nightstand in one of the bedrooms, there was an olive leather couch, new but not new-looking, set against the wall facing the west of the city, where I sometimes sat to watch the sun set. A sprawling Gabeh rug covering an expanse of polished wooden floor, its strata of greens and blues interspersed with a dozen whimsical splotches of cream that were probably intended to denote goats in a pastoral setting, its weave dense and soft enough to have once served as a mattress for the nomads who made it. A massive double-bank writing desk that had made its way to Japan from England, its surface dominated by a black leather insert appropriately worn by more than a century of pressure from the pen points that moved over its surface to transact business across the oceans, conveying news that might be weeks old by the time it reached relatives abroad, announcing births and deaths, offering congratulations, felicitations, condolences, and regrets. One of those fantastically complicated but astonishingly comfortable Herman Miller Aeron desk chairs that I’d picked up on a whim from a recently demised technology start-up in Shibuya’s Bit Valley. Atop the desk, a Macintosh G4 computer and a gorgeous, 23-inch flat panel monitor, about which I’d said nothing to Harry because he was under the impression that I was a computer primitive and I saw no advantage in letting him know that I have my own knack for getting behind the odd firewall when the need arises.

Opposite the couch was a Bang & Olufsen home theater with a six-CD changer. Next to it, a bookshelf containing an extensive collection of CDs, most of them jazz, and my modest library. The library includes a number of books on the bugei, or warrior arts, some of them quite old and obscure, containing information on combat techniques thought to be too dangerous for modern judo-spine locks, neck cranks, and the like-techniques that are, consequently, largely lost to the art. There are also some well-thumbed works of philosophy-Mishima, Musashi, Nietzsche. And there are a number of slim volumes that I order from time to time from some unusual publishers in the States, volumes that are illegal in Japan and in other countries lacking America’s perhaps overly strong devotion to freedom of speech, but which I manage to acquire nonetheless through techniques garnered from some of the volumes themselves. There are works on the latest surveillance methods and technologies; police investigative techniques and forensic science; acquiring forged identity; setting up offshore accounts and mail drops; methods of disguise and evasion; lock-picking and breaking and entry; and related topics. Of course, over the years I have developed my own substantial expertise in all these areas, but I have no plan to write a how-to account of my experiences. Instead, I read these books to learn what the opposition knows, to understand how the people I might be up against think, to predict where they might come after me, to take the appropriate countermeasures.

The only conspicuous item in the apartment was a wooden wing-chun training dummy, about the dimensions of a large man, which I had placed in the center of the apartment’s lone tatami room. Had the apartment been occupied by a family, this might have been the location of the kotatsu, a low table with a heavy quilted skirt draping to the floor and an electric brazier underneath, around which the family would nestle in the winter, their shoeless feet warmed by the brazier, their legs tucked comfortably under the quilted skirt, as they gossiped about the neighbors, examined the household bills, perhaps planned for the children’s future.

But the wooden dummy represented a better use for me. I’d been training in judo for almost the quarter century I’d been in Japan, and loved the art’s emphasis on throws and ground fighting. But once Holtzer and the Agency had connected me to the Kodokan judo center in Tokyo, I knew joining the Osaka branch would have been too obvious a move, like a recent entrant to the federal witness protection program resubscribing to the same obscure magazines he’d always enjoyed before moving underground. For now, I felt safer training alone. The dummy kept my reflexes sharp and the striking surfaces of my hands callused and hard, and allowed me to practice some of the strikes and blocks I’d neglected to some degree while training in judo. It would have made an interesting conversation piece, if anyone ever visited my apartment.

During the days that followed, I busied myself with my preparations for leaving Osaka. Moving hastily would be a mistake: the transitions are where you’re most vulnerable, and someone who couldn’t track me now might very well find himself able to do so if I dove suddenly into a less securely backstopped life. And Tatsu might be expecting me to move quickly; if so, he would be prepared to follow me. Conversely, if I stayed put, he might be lulled, giving me the opportunity to lose him entirely when the timing and preparations were right. He had no reason to come after me for the moment, so the lesser risk was to take the appropriate time to set things up correctly.

I had decided on Brazil, and it was for this that I’d been studying the Portuguese that had been so useful with Naomi. Hong Kong, Singapore, or some other Asian destination, or perhaps somewhere in the States, might have been a more obvious choice, but that was of course one of the things that Brazil had going for it. And even if someone thought to look for me there, they would have a hell of a time: Brazil’s multitudes of ethnic Japanese have branched out into all areas of the country’s life, and one more transplant wasn’t going to arouse any attention at all.

Rio de Janeiro, which offered culture, climate, and a significant transient population consisting largely of tourists, would be ideal. The city is far from the world’s intelligence, terrorism, and Interpol focal points, so I would have relatively few worries about accidental sightings, security camera networks, and the other natural enemies of the fugitive. I would even be able to return to judo, or at least one of its cousins: the Brazilian Gracie family had taken one of judo’s forebears, jujitsu, carried into the country by arriving Japanese, and developed it into arguably the most sophisticated ground fighting system the world has ever seen. It’s practiced fanatically in Brazil, and has become popular all over the world, including Japan.

Along with the right location, I had an ice-cold alternate identity, something I’d been nurturing for a long time in preparation for a day when I might have to drop off the map more completely than I ever had before. About a decade earlier, as I was surveilling and preparing to eliminate a certain bureaucrat, I was struck by the degree to which the man superficially resembled me-the age, height, build, even the face wasn’t too far off. The subject also had a wonderful name: Taro Yamada, the Japanese equivalent of John Smith. I had done some digging, and learned that Yamada-san lacked a close family. There seemed to be no one who would miss him enough to go looking for him if he happened to disappear.

Now, a lot of books will tell you that you can build a new identity using the name of someone deceased, but that’s only true if no one filed a death certificate. If the authorities were involved in any way-say, the person died in a hospice or hospital, or gets buried or cremated, which, if you think about it, applies to pretty much everyone, or if someone files a missing person report-a certificate will be filed. Or if a relative wants to get his or her hands on any aspect of the decedent’s estate-in which case you’re talking about the transfer of title to real and personal property and probably probate-again, a certificate will be filed. And if you decide to proceed anyway, then even if you do manage to get some additional new identification based on the dead person’s particulars, the new ID will always be fatally flawed, and, eventually, when you apply for a driver’s license, or for credit, or when you try to get pretty much any job, or file a tax return, or when you try to cross a border-in short, when you try to do any one of the innumerable things for which you needed your new identity in the first place-a “what’s wrong with this picture” alert will pop up on someone’s screen, and you will be promptly and thoroughly screwed.

So what about the identity of someone who’s still living? This works fine for short-term scams, known colloquially as “identity theft,” although perhaps better understood as “identity borrowing,” but is infeasible for anything long-term. After all, who’s going to be responsible for those new credit cards? And where do the bills get sent? Okay, then what about using someone who’s, say, disappeared for some reason, assuming you even know of such a person? Well, what about it? Did the person have debts? Was he a drug dealer? Because if he had anyone looking for him before, now they’ll be looking for you. And anyway, what do you do if Mr. Missing Person suddenly resurfaces?

Of course, if you know of someone who’s dead because you happen to have killed him, that’s a little different. True, you’d have to dispose of the body-in a manner that ensures it will never be found-a risky and often grisly chore that isn’t for everyone. But if you’ve come this far, and if you know that no one is going to report the person dead, or even missing, you’ve got something potentially valuable on your hands. If you also know that he’s got a good credit history, because you’ve gone on paying bills incurred in his name, you might just have landed yourself a winner.

So yes, I did carry out the contract on the unfortunate Mr. Yamada, but I didn’t tell the client that. Instead, the subject seemed to have gone “underground,” I reported, unable to resist the pun. Perhaps he had somehow gotten wind of the fact that a contract had been put out on his life? The client hired a PI, who confirmed the presence of all the indicia of sudden flight: a closed bank account and other personal matters efficiently tied up; mail forwarded to a foreign drop; missing clothes and other personal items from the apartment. I, of course, had been taking care of all of this. The client let me know that, for his purposes, disappearance was as good as death, and that I needn’t trouble myself tracking Yamada down to complete the contract. I was paid for my efforts anyway-no one wants someone like me to feel that he may have been treated unfairly-and that was that. The client himself has long since come to his own unfortunate end, and enough time has elapsed for me to have resurrected Yamada-san, opening up a small consulting operation in his unobtrusive name, paying taxes, securing an appropriate postal address, incurring debt and paying it off-all the little things that, taken together, add up to existence as a thoroughly unremarkable, thoroughly legitimate, member of society.

All I had to do now was slip into the Yamada identity and begin my new life. But first, Taro Yamada had to do some of the things that any guy in his position would do after deciding to give up on his failed consulting business and move to Brazil to teach third-generation Japanese their now forgotten language. He needed a visa, a legitimate bank account-as opposed to the illegitimate, pseudonymous ones I maintain offshore-assistance with housing, an office. He would be nominally based in São Paulo, where almost half of Brazil’s ethnic Japanese are concentrated, which would make him even more difficult to track to Rio. It would have been easier to take care of much of this with the assistance of the Japanese consulate in Brasilia, of course, but Mr. Yamada preferred less formal, less traceable means.

While I went about setting Yamada up in Brazil, I read about a string of corruption scandals and wondered how they figured in Tatsu’s shadow war with Yamaoto. Universal Studios Japan, it turned out, had been serving food that was nine months past its due date and falsifying labels to hide it, while operating a drinking fountain that was pumping out untreated industrial water. Mister Donut was in the habit of fortifying its wares with meat dumplings containing banned additives. Snow Brand Food liked to save a few yen by recycling old milk and failing to clean factory pipes. Couldn’t cover that one up-fifteen thousand people were poisoned. Mitsubishi Motors and Bridgestone got nailed hard, concealing defects in cars and tires to avoid safety recalls. The worst, shocking even by Japanese standards, was the news that TEPCO, Tokyo Electric Power, had been caught submitting falsified nuclear safety reports that went back twenty years. The reports failed to list serious problems at eight different reactors, including cracks in concrete containment shrouds.

The amazing thing wasn’t the scandals, though. It was how little people seemed to care. It must have been frustrating for Tatsu, and I wondered what drove him. In other countries, revelations like these would have precipitated a revolution. But despite the scandals, despite the economy, the Japanese just went right on reelecting the same usual Liberal Democratic Party suspects. Christ, half the problem Tatsu was fighting comprised his nominal superiors, the people to whom, in a sense, he had to salute. How do you keep going, in the face of such determined ignorance and relentless hypocrisy? Why did he bother?

I read the news and tried to imagine how Tatsu would interpret it, how, indeed, he might even be trying to shape it. Not all of it was bad, I supposed. In fact, there were some developments in the provinces that must have encouraged him. Kitagawa Masayasu beat the bureaucrats in Mie by simply deciding against a proposed nuclear power plant. In Chiba, Domoto Akiko, a sixty-eight-year-old former television reporter, prevailed against candidates backed by business, trade unions, and the various political parties. In Nagano, Governor Tanaka Yasuo stopped all dam building despite pressure from the country’s powerful construction interests. In Tottori, Governor Yoshihiro Katayama opened the prefecture’s books to anyone who wanted to see them, setting a precedent that must have caused his counterparts in Tokyo nearly to soil themselves.

I also spent time checking computer records on Yukiko and Damask Rose. Compared to Harry I’m a hacking primitive, but I couldn’t ask for his help on this one without revealing that I’d been checking up on him.

Getting into the club’s tax information gave me Yukiko’s last name: Nohara. From there, I was able to learn a reasonable amount. She was twenty-seven years old, born in Fukuoka, educated at Waseda University. She lived in an apartment building on Kotto-dori in Minami-Aoyama. No arrests. No debt. Nothing remarkable.

The club was more interesting, and more opaque. It was owned by a succession of offshore corporations. If there were any individual names tied to its ownership, they existed only on certificates of incorporation in someone’s vault, not on computers, where I might have gotten to them. Whoever owned the club didn’t want the world to know of the association. In itself, this wasn’t damning. Cash businesses are always mobbed up.

Harry could almost certainly have found more on both subjects. It was too bad that I couldn’t ask him. I’d just have to give him a heads-up and recommend that he do a little checking himself. It was frustrating, but I didn’t see what else I could do. He might take it badly, but I wouldn’t be around for much longer, anyway. And who knows? I thought. Maybe you’re wrong. Maybe he’ll find nothing.

Naomi checked out, too. Naomi Nascimento, Brazilian national, arrived in Japan August 24, 2000, courtesy of the JET program. I used the e-mail address she had given me to work backward to where she lived-the Lion’s Gate Building, an apartment complex in Azabu Juban 3-chome. No other information.

As my preparations for departure approached completion, I made a point of visiting some of the places near Osaka that I knew I would never see again. Some were as I remembered them from childhood trips. There was Asuka, birthplace of Yamato Japan, with its long-vacant burial mounds, surfaces carved with supernatural images of beasts and semi-humans, their makers and their meaning lost in the timeless swaying of the rice paddies around them; Koya-san, the holy mountain, reputedly the resting place of Kobo Daishi, Japan’s great saint, who is said to linger near the mountain’s vast necropolis not dead but meditating, his vigil marked by the mantras of monks that drone among the nearby markers of the dead as ancient and eternal as summer insects in primordial groves; and Nara, for a moment some thirteen centuries ago the new nation’s capital, where, if the morning is young enough and the tourist floodwaters have not yet risen in their quotidian banks, you might find yourself passing a lone octogenarian, his shoulders bent with the weight of age, his slippers shuffling along the cobblestones, his passage as timeless and resolute as the ancient city itself.

I supposed it was strange to feel the urge to say goodbye to any of this. After all, none of it had ever been mine. I had understood even as a child that to be half Japanese is to be half something else, and to be half something else is to be… chigatte. Chigatte, meaning “different,” but equally meaning “wrong.” The language, like the culture, makes no distinction.

I also went to Kyoto. I had found no occasion to visit the city in over twenty years, and was struck to find that the graceful, vital metropolis I remembered was nearly extinct, disappearing like an unloved garden given over to vapid, industrious weeds. Where was the fulgent peak of Higashi Honganji Temple, sweeping upward among the surrounding tiled roofs like the upturned chin of a princess among her retainers? That magnificent view, which had once greeted travelers to the city, was now blotted out by the new train station, an abomination that sprawled along a half-mile length of tracks like a massive turd that had plummeted from space and come to rest there, too gargantuan to be carted away.

I walked for hours, marveling at the extent of the destruction. Cars drove through Daitokuji Temple. Mount Hiei, the birthplace of Japanese Buddhism, had been turned into a parking lot, with an entertainment emporium on its summit. Streets that had once been lined with ancient wooden houses accented with bamboo trellises were now tawdry with plastic and aluminum and neon, the wooden houses dismantled and gone. Everywhere were metastasizing telephone lines, riots of electric wires, laundry hanging from prefabricated apartment windows like tears from idiot eyes.

On my way back to Osaka, I entered the Grand Hotel, more or less the geographic center of the city. I took the elevator to the top floor, where, with the exception of the Toji Pagoda and a sliver of the Honganji Temple roof, I was confronted in all directions by nothing but interchangeable urban blight. The city’s living beauty had been beaten back into clusters of cowering refugees, like the results of some inexplicable experiment in cultural apartheid.

I thought of the poem by Basho, the wandering bard, which had moved me when my mother had first related it, on my earliest visit to the city. She had taken my hand as we stood upon the towering scaffold of Kiyomizu Temple, looking out upon the still city before us, and, surprising me with her accented Japanese, had said:

Kyou nite mo kyou natsukashiya… Though in Kyoto, I long for Kyoto…

But the meaning of the poem, once a paean to ineffable, unfulfillable longing, had changed. Like the city itself, it was now sadly ironic.

I smiled without mirth, thinking that, if any of this had been mine, I would have taken better care of it. This is what you get if you put your trust in the government, I thought. People ought to know better.

I felt my pager buzz. I unclipped it and saw the code Tatsu and I had established to identify ourselves, along with a phone number. I’d been half expecting something like this, but not quite so soon. Shit, I thought. Things are so close.

I took the elevator down to the lobby, and walked out into the street. When I had found a pay phone in a suitable innocuous location, I inserted a phone card and punched in Tatsu’s number. I could have just ignored him, but it was hard to predict what he might do in response to that. Better to know what he wanted, while maintaining the appearance of cooperation.

There was a single ring, then I heard his voice. “Moshi moshi,” he said, without identifying himself.

“Hello,” I replied.

“Are you still in the same place?”

“Why would I want to leave?” I asked, letting him hear the sarcasm.

“I thought that, after our last meeting, you might choose to… travel again.”

“I might. Haven’t gotten around to it yet. I thought you’d know that.”

“I am trying to respect your privacy.”

Bastard. Even when he was busily ruining my life, he could always coax a smile out of me. “I appreciate that,” I told him.

“I would like to see you again, if you wouldn’t mind.”

I hesitated. He already knew where I lived. He didn’t have to arrange a meeting elsewhere, if he’d wanted to get to me. “Social visit?” I asked.

“That is up to you.”

“Social visit.”

“All right.”

“When?”

“I’ll be in town tonight. Same place as last time?”

I hesitated again, then said, “Don’t know if we’ll be able to get in. There’s a hotel very near there, though, with a good bar. My kind of place. You know what I’m talking about?”

I was referring to the bar at the Osaka Ritz-Carlton.

“I imagine I can find it.”

“I’ll meet you at the bar at the same time we met last time.”

“Yes. I will look forward to seeing you then.” A pause. Then: “Thank you.”

I hung up.

7

I TOOK THE Hankyu train back to Osaka and went straight to the Ritz. I wanted to be sure I was in position at least a few hours early, in case there was anything I would want to see coming. I ordered a fruit and cheese plate and drank Darjeeling tea while I waited.

Tatsu was punctual, as always. He was courteous, too, moving slowly and letting me see him to show he didn’t intend any surprises. He sat down across from me in one of the upholstered chairs. He looked around, taking in the light wood paneling, the wall sconces and chandeliers.

“I need your assistance again,” he said, after a moment.

Predictable. And right to the point, as always. But I’d make him wait before responding. “You want a whiskey?” I asked. “They’ve got a nice twelve-year-old Cragganmore.”

He shook his head. “I’d like to join you, but my doctor advises me to refrain from such indulgences.”

“I didn’t know you listened to your doctor.”

He pursed his lips as though in preparation for a painful admission. “My wife, too, has become strict about such matters.”

I looked at him and smiled, faintly surprised at the image of this tough, resourceful guy deferring sheepishly to a wife.

“What is it?” he asked.

I told him the truth. “It’s always good to see you, you bastard.”

He smiled back, a network of creases appearing around his eyes. “Kochira koso.” The same here.

He gestured to the waitress and ordered chamomile tea. Because he wasn’t drinking, I stayed away from the Cragganmore. A small pity.

Then he turned to me. “As I was saying, I need your assistance again.”

I drummed my fingers along my glass. “I thought you said this would be a social visit.”

He nodded. “I was lying.”

I had already known that, and he knew that I knew. Still: “I thought you said I could trust you.”

“On the important things, certainly. Anyway, a social visit doesn’t preclude a request for a favor.”

“Is that what you’re asking for? A favor?”

He shrugged. “You are no longer obligated to me.”

“I used to get paid a lot of money when I did favors for people.”

“I am pleased to hear you say ‘used to.” ’

“I was able to say it pretty accurately, until just recently.”

“May I continue?”

“As long as we’re clear from the outset that there’s no obligation here.”

He nodded again. “As I have said.” He paused to withdraw a tin of mints from inside his coat pocket. He opened the tin and extended it toward me. I shook my head. He withdrew a mint and placed it in his mouth without dipping his head or stopping to look at what he was doing. It wasn’t Tatsu’s way to take his eyes off what was going on around him, and it showed in the little things as well as the more significant.

“The weightlifter was a front man,” he said. “It is true that he looked like a Neanderthal but in fact he was part of the new generation of organized crime in Japan. His specialty, in which he had proven himself unusually adept, was the establishment of legitmate, sustainable businesses, behind which his less progressive cohorts could then hide.”

I nodded, knowing the phenomenon. The new generation, recognizing that tattoos, loud suits, and an aggressive manner offered them only limited upside in the society, was casting off its criminal persona and foraying into legitimate businesses like real estate and entertainment. The older generation, still wedded to drugs, prostitution, and control of the construction industry, was coming to rely on these upstarts for money laundering, tax avoidance, and other services. And, at the same time, the newcomers went to their forebears whenever the competitive pressures of business might be eased by the timely application of some of the traditional tools of the trade-bribery, extortion, murder-in which the older generation continued to specialize. It was a symbiotic division of labor that would have made a classical economist flush with pride.

“The weightlifter had established an efficient system,” he continued. “All the traditional gumi were using his services. The legitimacy this system afforded the gumi was making them less vulnerable to prosecution, and more influential in politics and the boardroom. More influential in society generally, in fact. Our mutual acquaintance, Yamaoto Toshi, had grown particularly dependent on the weightlifter’s operation.”

Gumi means “group” or “gang.” In the yakuza context, the word refers to organized crime families, the Japanese equivalent of the Gambinos or the fictional Corleones.

“I don’t see how his absence is going to make a difference,” I said. “Won’t someone just take his place?”

“In the long run, yes. Where there is enough demand, eventually someone will offer a supply. But in the meantime, the supply is disrupted. The weightlifter was critical to the smooth maintenance of his organization. He groomed no successors, fearing, as strongmen do, that the presence of a successor would make a succession more likely. There will be a struggle in his organization now that he is gone. Deceit and betrayal will be part of that struggle. Assets and connections that are now hidden will be exposed. Criminal influence on legitimate enterprises will be lessened.”

“For a time,” I said.

“For a time.”

I thought of what Kanezaki had told me about Crepuscular.

“I had a run-in with someone from the CIA recently,” I said. “He mentioned something you might want to know about.”

“Yes?”

“His name is Tomohisa Kanezaki. He’s American, ethnic Japanese. He mentioned a CIA program for ‘furthering reform and removing impediments to reform.’ Something called Crepuscular. Sounds like your bailiwick.”

He nodded slowly for a moment, then said, “Tell me about this program.”

I started to tell him the little I’d heard. Then I realized. “You know this guy,” I said.

He shrugged. “He was one of the people who came to the Metropolitan Police Force requesting assistance in locating you.”

Marvelous. “Who was the other?”

“Holtzer’s successor as the CIA’s chief of Tokyo Station. James Biddle.”

“Haven’t heard of him.”

“He’s young for the position. About forty. Perhaps part of a new generation at the CIA.”

I told him how I had met up with Kanezaki and his escort, fudging the details to conceal Harry’s involvement.

“How did they manage to find you?” he asked. “It took me an entire year, even with local resources and access to Juki Net and the cameras.”

“A flaw in my security,” I told him. “It’s been corrected.”

“And Crepuscular?” he asked.

“Just what I told you. I didn’t get details.”

He drummed his fingers on the table. “It doesn’t matter. I doubt that Kanezaki-san could have told you more than I already know.”

I looked at him, as always impressed with the breadth of his information. “What do you know?”

“The U.S. government is funneling money to various Japanese reformers. This is the same kind of program the CIA ran after the war, when it was supporting the Liberal Democratic Party as a bulwark against communism. Only the recipients have changed.”

“What about the ‘removing impediments’ part?”

He shrugged. “I imagine that, as Kanezaki-san suggested, they might want you to help with that.”

I laughed. “Sometimes these guys are so presumptuous that a certain grandeur creeps into it.”

He nodded. “Or they could be under the misapprehension that you had something to do with William Holtzer’s demise. Either way, you should stay away from them. I think we know that they are not to be trusted.”

I smiled at his use, probably deliberate, of “we” and “they,” as though Tatsu and I were partners.

“All right,” I said. “Tell me about the favor you want.”

He paused, then said, “Another key Yamaoto asset. And also a man whose primitive appearance masks a more sophisticated set of skills.”

“Who is he?”

He looked at me. “Someone you should understand quite well. A killer.”

“Really,” I said, affecting nonchalance.

The waitress brought his tea and set it down before him. He extended the cup in my direction in a silent toast, then took a sip.

“He is a strange man,” he said, watching me. “From his background, you might conclude that he is only a brute. There was a history of child abuse. Fights in school, and early evidence of sadistic tendencies. He dropped out of high school to train in sumo, but couldn’t develop the necessary bulk. Then he took up Thai boxing, where he had a short but unspectacular professional career. About five years ago he became involved in a so-called no-holds-barred sport, something called ‘Pride.’ Do you know of it?”

“Sure,” I said. The Pride Fighting Championship is a mixed martial arts sport, based in Japan, with televised bouts held every two months or so. The idea behind so-called mixed martial arts, or MMA, is to pit against each other a combination of traditional martial disciplines: boxing, jujitsu, judo, karate, kempo, kung fu, Muay Thai, sambo, wrestling. Audiences for Pride competitions have been growing steadily since the sport was founded, along with interest in related events, like King of the Cage in the U.K. and the Ultimate Fighting Championship in the States. The sport has had some difficulty with regulators, who seem more comfortable with a boxer being beaten unconscious than with an MMA guy tapping out to a submission hold.

“What is your impression?” he asked.

I shrugged. “The competitors are strong. Good skills, good conditioning. A lot of heart, too. Some of what I’ve seen is as close to a real fight as you can get while still calling it a sport. But the ‘no-holds-barred’ stuff is just marketing. Until they decide to allow biting, eye-gouging, and ball shots, and until they start leaving weapons of convenience lying around the ring for the contestants to pick up, it’ll have its shortcomings.”

“It’s interesting that you say that. Because the individual in question seemed to have the same concerns. He left the sport for the world of bare-knuckled underground fighting, where there really are no holds barred. Where as often as not the fight truly is to the finish.”

I had heard about these fights. Had once even met someone who participated in them, an American named Tom, who was practicing judo, for a time, at the Kodokan. He was a tough-looking but surprisingly articulate guy who shared some interesting and valuable unarmed combat philosophy with me. I had defeated him in judo, but wasn’t sure how things would have turned out in a less formal setting.

“Apparently this individual was highly successful in these underground contests,” Tatsu said. “Not just against other men. Also in bouts against animals. Dogs.”

“Dogs?” I asked, surprised.

He nodded, his expression grim. “These events are run by the yakuza. It was inevitable that our man’s skills, and his cruel proclivities, would come to the attention of the organizers, that they would then recognize that he had a higher calling than killing for prize money in the ring.”

I nodded. “He could kill in the wider world.”

“Indeed. And, for the last year, that is precisely what he has been doing.”

“You said he had a more sophisticated set of skills.”

“Yes. I believe he has developed capabilities that I once thought were your provenance only.”

I said nothing.

“In the last six months,” he went on, “there have been two deaths, apparently by suicide. The victims were both high-level banking executives in soon-to-be merged institutions. Each seems to have leaped to his death from the roof of a building.”

I shrugged. “From what I’ve been reading about the condition of the banks’ balance sheets, I’m surprised that only two have jumped. I would have expected more like fifty.”

“Perhaps twenty years ago, or even ten, that would have been the case. But atonement by suicide now exists in Japan more as an ideal than as a practice.” He took a sip of his tea. “An American-style apology is now preferred.”

“ ‘I regret that mistakes were made,” ’ I said, smiling.

“Sometimes not even ‘I regret.’ Rather, ‘It is regrettable.” ’

“At least they’re not claiming that taking bribes is a disease, that they just need treatment to be cured.”

He grimaced. “No, not yet.”

He took another sip of tea. “Neither of the jumpers left a note. And I have learned that each was concerned that the actual size of the nonperforming loans of the other party was significantly higher than advertised.”

“So? Everyone knows the problem loans are much bigger than the banks or the government admits.”

“True. But these men threatened to reveal the problem data as a way of blocking a merger that had no sound business rationale, but which was nonetheless favored by certain elements of the government.”

“Apparently not a very smart move.”

“Let me ask you something,” he said, looking at me. “Hypothetically. Would it be possible, realistically, to throw someone off a building and make it look like suicide?”

I happened to know with certainty that it was possible, but I decided to accept Tatsu’s invitation to keep things on a “hypothetical” level.

“Depends on how thorough a pathological exam would be conducted afterward,” I said.

“Assume very thorough.”

“With very thorough, it would be tough. Still possible, though. Your biggest problem would be getting the victim up to the roof with no one seeing it. Unless you had some way of tricking him into meeting you on a rooftop or otherwise knowing in advance that he was going to be there, you’d have to transport him yourself. If he were conscious for that journey, he’d be making a hell of a racket. Also, if he were fighting you, there would be evidence of a struggle. Your skin under his nails. Maybe a clump of your hair in his stiff fingers. Other items incommensurate with a voluntary act. And he’d be fighting with no regard for his own safety, no regard to pain, so there would be evidence of a struggle all over you, as well. You have no idea the way a man will fight when he understands he’s fighting for his life.”

“Tie him up first?”

“You tie someone up, it leaves marks. Even if he doesn’t struggle.”

“And he would be struggling.”

“Wouldn’t you?”

“Kill him first?”

“Maybe. But that’s risky. Changes to the body set in quickly after death. The blood pools. Temperature drops. And the results of impact to a dead body aren’t the same as the results to a live one. The examiner could spot the discrepancies. Besides, you’d still have to worry about evidence of the actual cause of death.”

“What if he were unconscious?”

“That’s the way I would go. If he were unconscious, though, you’d have to carry him like a body. And maneuvering seventy or a hundred kilos of dead weight isn’t easy. Plus, if you used a drug to knock him out, most likely it would still be in his bloodstream after death.”

“What about alcohol?”

“If he’d drunk enough to pass out, you’d be in good shape. A lot of suicides drink before pulling the trigger, so nothing suspicious there. But how are you going to get the guy to drink himself under the table to begin with?”

He nodded. “The two jumpers in question had blood alcohol levels high enough to have induced unconsciousness.”

“Could be what you think. Or not. That’s the beauty of it.”

“An injection?”

“Possibly. But to get enough alcohol in to do the job, you’d have to leave a detectable puncture mark at the spot where you injected it. Plus there’s alcohol in his bloodstream, but no residue of, say, Asahi Super Dry in his stomach? Not good.”

“Maybe a setup. A woman, someone strengthening his drinks, getting him to drink more than he can handle.”

“That could work.”

“How would you do it?”

“Hypothetically?”

He looked at me. “Of course,” he said.

“Hypothetically, I would try to get to the target late at night, when there would be the fewest people around. Maybe in his apartment, if I were sufficiently confident that he’d be there alone and that I had a reliable means of undetectable access. I’d dress like a janitor, because no one ever notices janitors, hit him with a stun gun, and put him in an industrial-size laundry cart, or a large rolling refuse container, whatever would be in keeping with the surroundings. I’d line it with something soft to make sure he didn’t suffer any contusions that would be incommensurate with his fall. You’d have to zap him every fifteen seconds or so with the stun gun to make sure he stayed quiet, but with no people around that wouldn’t be too difficult. Get him up to the roof, roll him over to the edge, and dump him. That’s how I would do it. Hypothetically.”

“What would you think if you found a small strip of plastic caught in the band of the victim’s wristwatch?”

“What kind of plastic?”

“Sheet plastic. Thick. The kind that comes in rolls, for protecting furniture and other large valuables.”

I was familiar with some of the uses for that kind of plastic, and I thought for a moment. “Your killer could have gotten the victim drunk. Let’s leave aside how for the moment. Then he rolls him in the plastic to prevent contamination from handling. Take him to the edge of the roof, grip one end of the plastic, and give a hard shove. The victim rolls out of the plastic and into the air. Very neat.”

“Unless, somehow, the victim’s watch snagged on the plastic.”

“Not impossible. But if that’s all you’ve got to go on, you haven’t got much.”

“There was also an eyewitness. A bellhop, working late in the hotel where one of the victims died. At three in the morning, the same time the coroner fixed the time of death, he got a good look at a janitor with a large cart going up in one of the elevators. Exactly the scene you just depicted.”

“He described your man?”

“To the details. A crushed left cheek, from his Muay Thai days. Unusual scarring on the opposite side of his face, under the eye. These are healed dog bites. ‘A frightening face,’ he said. Entirely accurately.”

“No such janitor employed in that building?”

“Correct.”

“What happened to the bellhop?”

“Disappeared.”

“Dead?”

“Probably.”

“That’s all you’ve got?”

He shrugged. “And two similar deaths, outside of Tokyo. Each to a family member of a key player in parliament.” His jaw clenched, then released. “One to a child.”

“A child?”

Clench, release. “Yes. One with no history of emotional or other problems in school. No evidence of precursors for suicide.”

I had once heard that Tatsu had lost an infant son. I wanted to ask him, but didn’t.

“If those deaths were intended to send messages to the principals,” I said, “they were being pretty subtle. If the principal thinks it was suicide, there’s no impact on his behavior.”

He nodded. “I had the opportunity to interview each of the principals. Each denied that there had been any contact from anyone claiming that the deaths were other than suicide. Each was lying.”

Tatsu had a nose for that sort of thing, and I trusted his judgment. “I’m surprised you didn’t suspect I was involved in some of this,” I said.

He paused for a moment before answering. “I might have. But, although I don’t pretend to understand how you do what you do, I know you. You could not kill a child. Not that way.”

“I’ve told you as much,” I said.

“I am not talking about what you told me. I am talking about what I know.”

I felt bizarrely appreciative of his confidence.

“In any event,” he continued, “some of your movements, as recorded on the Osaka security camera network, provided you with an alibi.”

I raised my eyebrows. “Your cameras are good enough to track me, but not good enough to spot someone wrapping people in plastic and dumping them off roofs?”

“As I have told you, the networks are far from perfect. I do not have control over their operation.” He looked at me. “And I am not the only one with access.”

I took a last sip of tea and asked a waitress for some more hot water. We sat in silence until it had arrived.

I picked up the delicate china cup and looked at him. “Tell me something, Tatsu.”

“Yes.”

“These questions. You already know the answers.”

“Of course.”

“Then why are you asking me?”

He shrugged. “I believe this man we are dealing with is a sociopath. That he is capable of killing under any set of circumstances. I am trying to understand how such a creature operates.”

“Through me?”

He nodded his head once in acknowledgment.

“I thought you just said I’m not the right model.” My tone was more forceful than I had intended.

“You are as close to such a creature as I have known. Which makes you ideally suited to hunt him.”

“What do you mean, ‘hunt him’?”

“He is careful in his movements. Not an easy man to track. I have leads, but they would need to be followed.”

I took another sip of tea, considering. “I don’t know, Tatsu.”

“Yes?”

“The first guy, with the business fronts, okay, he was strategic. I understand. But this guy, the dog fighter, he’s just muscle. Why aren’t you going after Yamaoto and the other kingpins?”

“The ‘kingpins,’ as you put it, are difficult to get to. Too many bodyguards, too much security, too much visibility. Yamaoto in particular has hardened his defenses, I believe out of fear that you may be hunting him, and is now as inaccessible as the Prime Minister. And even if they could be gotten to, there are many like them in the various factions, waiting to take their places. They are like shark’s teeth. Knock one out, and there are ten rows waiting to fill in the gap. After all, to be a kingpin is not so hard. What does it take? Some political acumen. A capacity for rationalization. And greed. Not a particularly rare profile.”

He took a sip of his tea. “Besides, this man is no ordinary foot soldier. He is ruthless, he is capable, he is feared. An unusual individual, whose loss would not be a trivial blow to his masters.”

“All right,” I said. “What are you offering me? Given that I’m under no obligation.”

“I have no money to offer you. Even if I did, I doubt that I could match what Yamaoto and the Agency were paying you previously.”

He might have been trying to get a rise out of me with that. I ignored it.

“I’m sorry to be so blunt, old friend, but you’re asking me to take a hell of a risk. Just spending time in Tokyo entails risks for me, you know that.”

He looked at me. When he spoke, his tone was measured, confident. “It would not be like you to assume that your risk from Yamaoto and the CIA is confined only to Tokyo,” he said.

I wasn’t sure where he was going with that. “It’s where the risk is most pronounced,” I said.

“I’ve told you, Yamaoto has felt compelled to live a much more heavily defended existence since the last time you saw him. He has curtailed his political appearances, he no longer trains at the Kodokan, he travels only surrounded by bodyguards. My understanding is that he does not enjoy these new restrictions. My understanding, in fact, is that he resents them. Most of all, he resents the cause of them.”

“You don’t have to tell me Yamaoto has a motive,” I said. “I know what he’d like to do to me. And it’s not just business, either. He’s the kind of man who would feel humiliated, enraged by how I helped steal that disk from him. He’s not going to forget that.”

“Yes? And none of this keeps you awake at night?”

“If I let that kind of shit keep me awake at night, I’d have bags under my eyes the size of Sado Island. Besides, he can have all the motive he wants. I’m not going to give him the opportunity.”

He nodded. “I’m certain that you wouldn’t. At least not deliberately. But, as I have mentioned, I am not the only one with access to Juki Net.”

I looked at him, wondering whether there was a threat hidden in there. Tatsu is always subtle.

“What are you saying, Tatsu?”

“Only that if I could find you, Yamaoto will be able to, also. And he is not alone in his efforts. The CIA, as you know, is also eager to make your reacquaintance.”

He took a sip of his tea. “Putting myself in your shoes, I see two possible courses. One is that you stay in Japan, but not in Tokyo, and try to return to your old ways. This is perhaps the easier course, but the less safe one.”

He sipped again. “Two is that you leave the country and start over somewhere. This is the harder course, but would perhaps afford you greater security. The problem, in either case, is that you will have left things unfinished with certain parties who wish you ill, parties with global reach and long memories, and that you will have no allies against them.”

“I don’t need allies,” I said, but the rejoinder sounded weak even to me.

“If you plan to leave Japan, we can part as friends,” he said. “But if I cannot count on your help today, it will be difficult for me to help you tomorrow, when you may need that help.”

That was about as direct as Tatsu ever got. I thought about it, wondering what to do. Drop everything and disappear to Brazil, even though my preparations weren’t complete? Maybe. But I hated the thought of leaving a loose end, something someone could grab on to and use to track me. Because, despite his obvious self-interest in emphasizing the dangers of Yamaoto and the CIA, Tatsu’s assessment was not so far off from my own.

The other possibility would be to do this last job and keep him off my back, keep him off balance while I finished my preparations. What he was offering me in return wasn’t trivial, either. Tatsu has access to people and places that even Harry can’t hack. No matter what I did next, he would be a damn useful contact.

I thought it through for another minute. Then I said, “Something tells me you’re carrying an envelope.”

He nodded.

“Give it to me,” I said.

8

I TOOK THE envelope to my apartment and perused it there. I sat at my desk and spread out the papers. I highlighted passages. I scribbled thoughts in the margins. Parts I read in order. Other times I skipped around. I tried to get the pattern, the gist.

The subject’s name was Murakami Ryu. The dossier was impressive on background, on much of which Tatsu had already briefed me, but light on the sorts of current detail that I need to get close to a subject. Where did he live? Where did he work? What were his habits, his haunts, his routines? With whom did he associate? All blanks, or too vague to be immediately useful.

He wasn’t a ghost, but he was no civilian, either. Civilians have addresses, places of employment, tax records, registered cars, medical files. The lack of such details surrounding Murakami was itself a form of information. Which provided a frame, but I still didn’t have a picture.

That’s okay. Start with the frame.

No information meant a careful man. Serious. A realist. A man who didn’t take chances, who was careful in his movements, who could be expected to make few mistakes.

I shuffled papers. Even his known organized crime associates were from multiple families. He didn’t exclusively patronize any of the known yakuza gumi. He was a freelancer, a straddler, connected to many worlds but a part of none.

Like me.

He liked hostess bars, it seemed. He had been spotted in several, typically high-end, where he would spend the yen equivalent of twenty thousand dollars in a night.

Not like me.

High rollers get remembered. In my business, careful means not being remembered. Evidence of impulsiveness? Lack of discipline? Maybe. Still, there was no pattern to the behavior, only its existence. No trail for me to follow.

But there was something there, something in those periodic splurges. I tagged that thought for reexamination, then closed my eyes and tried to let the bigger picture cohere.

The fighting. That was a common theme. But Tatsu’s information on where the underground bouts occurred, when, and under whose auspices, was sketchy.

The police had broken up several, always in different locations. That the police were breaking up the fights at all meant they weren’t being paid not to. Meaning in turn that the organizers were willing to purchase overall secrecy at the price of a few random interruptions. Which showed good judgment, and perhaps some greed.

Too bad, from my perspective. If there had been payoffs, there would have been leaks, leaks that Tatsu would have uncovered.

Stay with the fights, I thought, trying to get a visual. The fights. Not work for this guy. He’s a killer. For him, it’s fun.

What would the purses be? How much do you have to pay two men to step into the ring when each knows that only one might walk away afterward?

How many spectators? How much would they pay to see two men fight to the death? How much would they bet? How much would the house collect?

They’d have to keep the crowds small. Otherwise word gets out and the police intrude.

Enthusiasts. Devotees. Maybe fifty men. Charge them a hundred, two hundred thousand yen each for admission. Betting is free. A lot of money would change hands.

I leaned back in the Aeron chair, my fingers laced behind my head, my eyes closed. Pay the winner the yen equivalent of twenty thousand dollars. The loser gets a couple thousand for his efforts, if he lives. The couple thousand goes to the crew that disposes of the body if he doesn’t. Minimal overhead. The house pockets close to eighty grand. Not bad for an evening.

Murakami liked to fight. Hell, Pride wasn’t enough for him. He needed more. And it wasn’t the money. Pride, with promotions and pay-per-view, would pay a lot more, to the winners and losers.

No. It wasn’t the money for this guy. It was the excitement. The proximity to death. The high you can only get from killing a man who’s simultaneously doing everything in his power to kill you.

I know the sensation. It both fascinates and repulses me. And, in a very few men, most of whom can live out their lives and be true to their natures only as the hardest of hard-core mercenaries, it becomes an addiction.

These men live to kill. Killing is the only thing for them that’s real.

I had known one of them. My blood brother, Crazy Jake.

I remembered how Jake would cut loose after returning from a mission. He’d be flushed, not just his mood but his whole metabolism jacked up and humming. You could see heat shimmers coming off his body. Those were the only times he would be talkative. He’d relate how the mission had gone, his eyes bloodshot, his mouth working a maniac grin.

He would show trophies. Scalps and ears. The trophies said: They’re dead! I’m alive!

In Saigon, he’d buy everyone’s beer. He’d buy whores. He threw parties. He needed a group to celebrate with him. I’m alive! They’re dead and I’m fucking alive!

I sat forward in the seat and pressed my palms on the surface of the desk. I opened my eyes.

The bar tabs.

You’ve just killed and survived. You want to celebrate. They paid you in cash. Celebrate you can.

It felt right. The first glimmers of knowing this guy from afar, of beginning to grasp the threads of what I’d need to get close to him.

He loved the fights. He was addicted to the high. But a serious man. A professional.

Work backward. He would train. And not at some monthly dues neighborhood dojo alongside the weekend warriors. Not even at one of the more serious places, like the Kodokan, where the police judoka kept their skills sharp. He’d need something, he’d find something, more intense.

Find that place, and you find him.

I took a walk along the Okawa River. Hulking garbage scows slumbered senseless and stagnant on the green water. Bats dive-bombed me, chasing insects. A couple of kids dangled fishing poles from a concrete retaining wall, hoping to pull God knows what from the murky liquid below.

I came to a pay phone and used the number Tatsu had given me.

He picked up on the first ring. “Okay to talk?” I asked him.

“Yes.”

“Our man trains for his fights. Not a regular dojo.”

“I expect that is correct.”

“Do you have information about where?”

“Nothing beyond what is in the envelope.”

“Okay. Here’s what we’re looking for. A small place. Three hundred square meters, something like that. Not in an upscale neighborhood, but not too far downscale, either. Discreet. No advertising. Tough clientele. Organized crime, biker types, enforcers. People with police records. Histories of violence. You ever hear of a place like that?”

“I haven’t. But I know where to check.”

“How long?”

“A day. Maybe less.”

“Put whatever you find on the bulletin board. Page me when it’s done.”

“I will.”

I hung up.

The page came the next morning. I went to an Internet café in Umeda to check the bulletin board. Tatsu’s message consisted of three pieces of information. The first was an address: Asakusa 2-chome, number 14. The second was that a man matching Murakami’s memorable description had been spotted there. The third was that the weightlifter had been one of the backers of whatever dojo was being run there. The first piece of information told me where to go. The second told me it would be worthwhile to do so. The third gave me an idea of how I could get inside.

I composed a message to Harry, asking whether he could check to see if my former weightlifting partner had ever made or received calls on his cell phone that were handled by the tower closest to the Asakusa address. Based on Tatsu’s information, I expected that the answer would be yes. If so, it would confirm that the weightlifter had spent time at the dojo and would be known there, in which case I would use his name as an introduction. I also asked if Harry had heard from any U.S. government employees of late. I uploaded the message to our bulletin board, then paged him to let him know it was there.

An hour later he paged me back. I checked the bulletin board and got his message. No visits from the IRS, with a little smiley face next to the news. And a record of calls the weightlifter had made that were handled by the Asakusa 2-chrome tower. We were in business.

I uploaded a message to Tatsu telling him that I was going to check the place out and would let him know what I found. I told him I needed him to backstop Arai Katsuhiko, the identity I’d been using at the weightlifter’s club. Arai-san would have to be from the provinces, thus explaining his lack of local contacts. Some prison time in said provinces for, say, assault, would be a plus. Employment records with a local company-something menial, but not directly under mob control-would be ideal. Anyone who decided to check me out, and I was confident that, if things went as I hoped, someone would, would find the simple story of a man looking to leave behind a failed past, someone who had come to the big city to escape painful memories, perhaps to try for a fresh start.

I caught a late bullet train and arrived at Tokyo station near midnight. This time I stayed at the Imperial Hotel in Hibiya, another centrally located place that lacks the amenities and flair of, say, the Seiyu Ginza or the Chinzanso or Marunouchi Four Seasons, but that compensates with size, anonymity, and multiple entrances and exits. The Imperial was also the last place I had been with Midori, but I chose it for security, not for sentiment.

The next morning I checked the bulletin board. Tatsu had given me the identity I wanted, along with the location of a bank of coin lockers in Tokyo station, from under one of which I could retrieve the relevant ID. I read the electronic message until it was memorized, then deleted it.

I did an SDR that encompassed Tokyo station, where I retrieved the papers I might need, and that ended at Toranomon station on the Ginza line, the oldest subway line in the city. From there I caught a train to Asakusa. Asakusa, in the northeast of the city, is part of what’s left of shitamachi, the downtown, the low city of old Tokyo.

Asakusa 2-chome was northwest of the station, so I approached it through the Sensoji, the Asakusa Temple complex. I entered through Kaminarimon, the Thunder Gate, said to protect Kannon, the goddess of mercy, to whose worship the temple complex is dedicated. My parents had taken me here when I was five, and the site of the gate’s ten-foot red paper lantern is one of my earliest memories. My mother insisted on waiting in line to buy kaminari okoshi, Asakusa’s signature snack, at the Tokiwado shop, whose crackers are reputed to be the best. My father complained at having to wait for such touristy nonsense but she ignored him. The crackers seemed wonderful to me-crunchy and sweet-and my mother laughed as we ate them, urging me, “Oichi, ne? Oichi, ne?” Aren’t they yummy? Aren’t they yummy?, until my father broke down and partook.

I paused before the Sensoji Temple and looked back at the compound. Around me whirled the general din of excited tourists, of hawkers exhorting potential customers “Hai, irasshiae! Hai, dozo!,” of squealing schoolchildren being mobbed by the legions of pigeons that make the complex their home. Someone was shaking an omikuji fortune-telling can, full of hundred-yen coins deposited in the hope of good tidings. Incense from the giant brass okoro wafted past me, simultaneously sweet and acrid on the cool air. Clusters of people stood around the censer, pulling the smoke onto those parts of their bodies they hoped to cure with its supposed magical properties. One old man in a fishing cap gathered great heaps of it onto his groin, laughing with gusto as he did so. A tour guide tried to arrange for a group photo, but waves of passersby continually obliterated the shot. The giant Hozomon Gate herself stood silent through it all, brooding, dignified, inured by the decades to the clamor of tourists, the frantic photographers, the guano amassed on her eaves like wax from immolated candles.

I headed west. The din receded, to be replaced by an odd, depressing silence that hung over the area like smoke. Outside the tourist-fueled activity of Sensoji, it seemed, Asakusa had been hit hard by Japan’s decade-long decline.

I walked, my head swiveling left and right, logging my surroundings. Hanayashiki amusement park sulked to my right, its empty Ferris wheel rotating senselessly against the ashen sky above. The esplanade beyond was given over mostly to a few pigeons that had wandered there from the nearby temple complex, the occasional flapping of their wings echoing in the surrounding silence. Here and there were small clusters of homeless men smoking secondhand cigarettes. A mailman removed a few envelopes from the back of a postal box and hurried on, as though vaguely afraid he might catch whatever disease had decimated the area’s population. The owner of a coffee shop sat diminished in the back of his deserted establishment, waiting for patronage that had long since vanished. Even the pachinko parlors were empty, the artificially gay music piping out of their entranceways bizarre and ironic.

I turned the corner at the end of the street I was looking for. A heavily built Japanese kid with a shaved head, his eyes hidden behind sunglasses, was leaning against the wall. I made him as a sentry. Sure enough, at the other end of the street, there was his twin.

I walked past the first guy. After a few steps I turned my head casually to look back at him. He was watching me, speaking into a radio. This was a quiet street and I didn’t look like one of the pensioners who lived in the neighborhood. The call felt routine: somebody’s coming, I don’t know who.

I walked on and found the address-an unremarkable two-story building with a cement façade. The door was old and constructed of thick metal. Three rows of large bolts ran across it horizontally, probably attached to reinforcing bars on the other side. The bolts said Visitors Not Welcome.

I looked around. Across from me was a blue corrugated shed, ramshackle, its windows caved inward like the sunken eyes of a corpse. To the right was a tiny coin laundry, its three washers and three dryers arranged facing each other in neat rows as though set out to be taken away and discarded. The walls were yellowed, decorated with peeling posters. Spilled laundry powder and cigarette butts littered the floor. A vending machine hung tilted from the wall, advertising laundry soap at fifty yen a packet to customers who might as well have been ghosts.

There was a small black button recessed in the mud-colored brick to the right of the building’s door. I pressed it and waited.

A slat opened at head level. A pair of eyes regarded me through wire mesh from the other side. The eyes were slightly bloodshot. They watched me, silent.

“I’m here to train,” I said in curt Japanese.

A moment passed. “No training here,” was the reply.

“I’m judo fourth dan. Your place was recommended by a friend of mine.” I said the dead weightlifter’s name.

The eyes behind the slat narrowed. The slat closed. I waited. A minute went by, then another five. The slat opened again.

“When did Ishihara-san recommend this club?” the owner of a new pair of eyes asked.

“About a month ago.”

“It took you a long time to arrive.”

I shrugged. “I’ve been out of town.”

The eyes watched me. “How is Ishihara-san?”

“Last I saw him, he was fine.”

“Which was when?”

“About a month ago.”

“And your name is?”

“Arai Katsuhiko.”

The eyes didn’t blink. “Ishihara-san never mentioned your name.”

“Was he supposed to?”

Still no blink. “Our club has a custom. If a member mentions the club to a nonmember, he also mentions the nonmember to the club.”

No blink from me, either. “I don’t know your customs. Ishihara-san told me this would be the right kind of place for me. Can I train here or not?”

The eyes dropped down to the gym bag I was carrying. “You want to train now?”

“That’s what I’m here for.”

The slat closed again. A moment later the door opened.

There was a small antechamber behind it. Cinder-block construction. Peeling gray paint. The owner of the eyes was giving me the once-over. He didn’t seem impressed. They never do.

“You can train,” he said. He was barefoot, wearing shorts and a T-shirt. I placed him at five-feet-nine and eighty kilos. Tending toward the burly side. Salt-and-pepper crew cut, age about sixty. Past what I sensed had been a formidable prime, but still a hard-looking guy with no bullshit, no posturing.

“Sore wa yokatta,” I replied. Good. Behind the burly guy and to his right was a smaller, wiry specimen, dark-complected for a Japanese, his head shaved to black stubble. I recognized the bloodshot eyes-the same pair that had initially regarded me through the mesh. Though slighter than the first guy, this one radiated something intense and unpredictable.

The smaller guys can be dangerous. Never having been able to rely on their size for intimidation, they have to learn to fight instead. I know because, before filling out in the army, I had been one of them.

The antechamber was adjacent to a rectangular room, about twenty feet by thirty. It smelled of old sweat. The room was dominated by a judo tatami mat. A half-dozen muscular specimens were using it for some kind of randori, or live training. They wore shorts and T-shirts, like the guy who had opened the door, no judogi. On a corner of the mat, someone was practicing elbow and knee drops on a prone, man-shaped dummy. The dummy’s head, neck, and chest were practically mummified with duct tape reinforcements.

In another corner, two heavy bags dangled on thick chains from exposed rafters. Large bags, seventy kilos or more. Man-sized. A couple of thick-necked guys with yakuza-style punch perms were working them, no gloves, no tape, their blows not quick but solid, the whap! whap! of knuckles on leather reverberating in the enclosed space.

The lack of wrist and finger tape interested me. Boxers wear tape to protect their hands. But you get dependent on the tape, and then you don’t know how to hit someone without it. Even Mike Tyson once broke a hand when he hit another fighter bare-handed in a late night brawl. In a real fight, you break your hand, you just lose the fight. If you were fighting for your life, you just lost that, too.

And no judogi. That was also interesting, especially in tradition-loving Japan. Purists will tell you that training with the judogi is more realistic than without, because after all, people rarely fight naked. But modern attire-a T-shirt, for example-is often more like naked than it is like the reinforced, belted gi. Training exclusively in the gi, therefore, while traditional, is not necessarily the height of realism.

All signs that these were serious people.

“You can change in the locker room,” the salt-and-pepper guy told me. “Warm up and you can do some randori. We’ll see why Ishihara-san thought this would be a good place for you.”

I nodded and headed to the locker room. It was a dank space with a floor of dirty gray carpet. Its half-dozen battered metal lockers were positioned on either side of a solid-looking exterior door, secured with a combination lock. I changed into cotton judo pants and a T-shirt, but left the jacket in the bag. Best to blend.

I returned to the main room and stretched. No one seemed to take particular notice of me-except for the dark-complected guy, who watched me while I warmed up.

After about fifteen minutes he walked over to me. “Randori?” he asked, in a tone that was more a challenge than an invitation.

I nodded, averting my eyes from his hard stare. In my mind, our contest was already under way, and I prefer my opponents to underestimate me.

I followed him to the center of the mat, slightly meek, slightly intimidated.

We circled around each other, each looking for an opening. In my peripheral vision I saw that the other men had paused in their workouts and were watching.

I snagged his right arm with my left and dropped under it for a duck-under, a simple and effective entry from my high school wrestling days in America. But he was quick: he dropped his arm, crouched, and cut clockwise, away from my entry. I immediately switched my attack to his left side, but he parried nicely there as well. No problem. I was feinting, feeling for his defenses, not yet showing him what I could do.

I withdrew from attack mode and started to straighten. As I did so, I saw his hips swivel in, caught a blur off the right side of my head. Left hook. Whoa. I shot my right hand into the gap and ducked my head forward. The blow snapped across the back of my head, then instantly retracted.

I took a quick step back. “Kore ga randori nanoka? Bokushingu janaika?” I asked him. Are we doing randori, or boxing? I looked more concerned than I actually was. I’ve done some boxing. Not all of it with gloves.

“This is the way we do randori around here,” he answered, sneering.

“With no rules?” I asked, mock-concerned. “I’m not sure I like that.”

“You don’t like it, don’t train here, judoyaro,” he said, and I heard someone laugh.

I looked around as though unsure of myself, but it was really just a routine check of my surroundings. Adrenaline causes tunnel vision. Experience and a desire to survive ameliorate it. The faces around the tatami radiated amusement, not danger.

“I’m not really used to this kind of thing,” I said.

“Then get off the fucking tatami,” he spat.

I looked around again. It didn’t feel like a setup. If it were, they wouldn’t have been dancing with me one at a time.

“Okay,” I said, scowling to look like a soft guy trying to look like a hard guy. Playing the victim of idiot pride. “We’ll do it your way.”

We squared off again. I logged his feints. He liked to lead with his right foot. His timing was regular-a weakness for which his quickness had probably always compensated.

He liked low kicks. Right foot forward plant, left roundhouse kick, return to defensive stance. I took two such shots to my right thigh. They stung. They didn’t matter.

The right foot came forward again. When it was a few millimeters above the tatami and he was fully committed to planting it, I shot straight in, my right hand hooking his neck from behind, my left hand darting in just behind his right ankle. I used his neck to support my weight, dragging his head down and ruining his balance. I drove through him, my elbow leading the way at his chest. His ankle was blocked and his body had nowhere to go but backward to the tatami.

I kept the ankle as he fell, jerking it northward and spinning clockwise so that I landed facing the same direction he was in. I was straddling his leg and holding the ankle in front of me. In one smooth motion I caught it in my right biceps, wrapped the fingers of my left hand around his toes, and clamped down in opposing directions. His ankle broke with a snap like the sound of a mallet on hard wood. Freed of its moorings, the foot arced savagely to the right. Tendons and ligaments tore loose.

He let out a high scream and tried to use his other leg to kick me away. But the kicks were feeble. His nervous system was overloaded with pain.

I stood up and turned to face him. His face was I’m-going-to-puke green and beaded in oily sweat. He was holding the knee of his ruined leg and looking bug-eyed at the dangling foot at the end of it. He hitched a breath in, then deeper, then let out a long wail.

Ankle injuries hurt. I know. I’ve seen feet lost to land mines.

He sucked in another breath and screamed again. If we’d been alone, I would have broken his neck just to shut him up. I looked around the room, wondering if I was going to have trouble from any of his comrades.

One of them, a tall, long-legged guy with an Adonis physique and peroxide-dyed, close-cropped hair, yelled out, “Oi!” and started to come toward me. Hey!

The salt-and-pepper guy cut in front of him. “Ii kara, ii kara,” he said, pushing Adonis back. That’s enough.

Adonis backed off, but continued to fix me with a hostile stare.

Salt and Pepper turned and walked over to where I was standing. He bore an expression of mild amusement that was not quite a smile.

“Next time, use a little more control when you put in a joint lock,” he said, his tone matter-of-fact.

The dark-complected guy writhed. Adonis and a couple of the others went to help him.

I shrugged. “I would have. But he told me ‘no rules.” ’

“That’s true. He’ll probably be the last guy who suggests that to you.”

I looked at him. “I like this place. You guys seem serious.”

“We are.”

“It’s all right for me to train here?”

“Between four and eight every evening. Most mornings, too, you can work out from eight to noon. There are dues, but we can talk about that another time.”

“You manage the place?”

He smiled. “Something like that.”

“I’m Arai,” I said, with a slight bow.

Someone brought a stretcher. The dark-complected guy was gritting his teeth and whimpering. Someone admonished him, “Urusei na! Gaman shiro!” Shut up! Take the pain!

“Washio,” he said, returning the bow. “And by the way, did you know that Ishihara-san died recently?”

I looked at him. “No, I didn’t.”

He nodded. “An accident at his gym.”

“I’m sorry to hear that. Is the gym still open?”

“Some of his associates are running it now.”

“Good. Although I have a feeling that, from now on, I’ll be spending more time here, anyway.”

He grinned. “Yoroshiku.” Looking forward to it.

“Yoroshiku.”

I stuck around for another two hours. Adonis glared at me from time to time but otherwise kept his distance. Murakami never showed.

Washio’s questions about Ishihara’s death were neither surprising nor particularly unnerving. The weightlifter’s death looked like an accident. Even if they wondered whether the truth might be otherwise, they had no more reason to suspect my involvement than they did anyone else who had worked out there.

Of course, if I received further inquiries on that subject, particularly any pointed ones, I might change my assessment.

I came the next day, and the day after that, but still no sign. That was fine with me. It felt good to be back in Tokyo and I thought I could afford a few days there if I continued to be careful. Besides, getting in a workout on the job is great. Not quite the wholesome life of an aerobics instructor, but it beats sitting in a van all night on surveillance, drinking cold coffee and pissing in a plastic jug.

On the fourth day, I dropped by in the evening. Three sequential occasions in the same place at the same time was as much as my paranoid nervous system will allow. I was surprised to see many of the same faces. Some of these characters worked out twice a day. I wondered what they did for a living. Crime, probably. Be your own boss. Flexible hours.

I exchanged greetings with Washio and some of the others whom I had gotten to know, then changed in the locker room. One of the heavy bags was open, and I started working it with knee and elbow combinations. Drills of one-minute attack, thirty-second rest. I used a small clock on the wall to time myself.

My speed and strength were still good. Endurance likewise. Recovery times aren’t what they once were, but a steady diet of liquid amino acids for the muscles, glucosamine for the joints, and Cognamine for the reflexes all seem to help.

During one of the rest periods, I felt people pause in their workouts, felt their attention shift. The atmosphere in the room changed.

I looked over and saw someone in a poorly fitting double-breasted navy suit. It had wide lapels and overly padded shoulders. The kind of suit that’s supposed to impart a swagger even when you’re standing still. He was flanked by two burly specimens, more casually dressed, with yakuza punch perms. From their size and deportment I assumed they were bodyguards.

They must have just come in. The guy in the suit was talking to Washio, who was paying close and somehow uncomfortable attention.

I watched, and noticed other people doing the same. The newcomer couldn’t have been more than five-feet-eight, but his neck was massive and I put him at about eighty-five, ninety kilos. His ears were deformed masses of protruding scar tissue that would stand out even in Japan, where such scarification is not uncommon among judoka and kendoka.

Washio was gesturing to various men who were training. The newcomer was nodding. It felt like a briefing.

The thirty-second rest was up. I returned my attention to the bag. Left elbow. Right uppercut. Left knee. Again.

When the one-minute sequence was done I looked over. Washio and the newcomer were walking toward me. The bodyguards remained by the door.

“Oi, Arai,” Washio called out when they were a couple meters away. “Chotto mate.” Hold up for a minute.

I picked up a towel from the floor and wiped my face. They came closer and Washio gestured to the man next to him. “I want to introduce you to someone,” he said. “One of the backers of this dojo.”

I already knew who he was. Per Tatsu’s briefing, the left cheek was flattened, with the opposite side exhibiting what looked like a golf-ball-sized fissure pocked with jagged edges. I imagined a dog getting hold of him there and hanging on even as he shoved the animal away.

Something told me the dog had come out the worse.

I felt the hairs on the back of my neck pop up, a fresh surge of adrenaline dump into my veins. My fight-or-flight reaction is finely honed, and this guy’s presence was making it sing.

“Arai desu,” I said, bowing slightly.

“Murakami da,” he said with a nod, his voice not much more than a growl. “Washio tells me you’re good.” He looked doubtful.

I shrugged.

“There’s a fight tomorrow night,” he went on. “We put them on from time to time. Most people pay a hundred thousand yen to attend, but members of the dojo get in free. You interested?”

A hundred thousand yen-I’d been in the right neighborhood about the economics of these things. And if this guy was comfortable issuing the invitation, someone must have checked me out. I was glad that I’d had Tatsu backstop the Arai identity.

I shrugged again and said, “Sure.”

He looked at me, his eyes flat, as though focused somewhere behind and through me. “The fight starts at ten o’clock sharp. People get there a little early for betting. We’re doing this one in Higashi Shinagawa, five-chome. Just across the canal from Tennozu Island.”

“The harbor district?” I asked. The area is part of Tokyo but wasn’t a place I ever frequented while living in the city. It’s in Tokyo’s southeast, the home of meat processing plants and sewage disposal, of steam power facilities and wholesale warehouses, all of it fed and fattened by Tokyo’s great port. I supposed the attraction was that it would be deserted at night.

“That’s right. The address is Eight-twenty-five. A warehouse with the character for ‘transport’ painted in a big circle on the door. Across from the Lady Crystal Yacht Club. On your right as you walk from the monorail. Should be easy to find.”

“It’s important that you not tell anyone about this,” Washio added. “Only people who are invited get in anyway, and we don’t want trouble from the police.”

Murakami nodded once, acknowledging Washio’s point as though it had been barely worth mentioning. I gathered that Murakami didn’t particularly care who showed up at these things, as long as there was a fight. Washio, on the other hand, was probably responsible for logistics and would be accountable if there were problems.

“Are you fighting?” I asked, looking at Murakami.

For the first time he smiled. The front teeth were overlarge and too even, and I realized he was wearing a cheap dental bridge.

“Sometimes I fight. But not tomorrow,” he said.

I waited to see whether there would be more. There wasn’t.

I briefly considered whether it could be a setup. If they were on to me, though, this was already a pretty perfect venue. They didn’t have to convince me to go somewhere else.

“I’ll be there,” I told him.

Murakami looked at me for a moment longer, the smile lingering, the eyes still flat, then walked away. Washio followed.

I let out a long breath and looked at the clock. When the second hand was at the twelve I attacked the bag again, working off the excess adrenaline Murakami’s presence had provoked.

He was a scary one, no doubt about it. And not just the ruined face. Even without the scarring, I would have recognized him. He exuded the same deadly air I had known, and respected, in Crazy Jake. The external scars were the least of what marked him for what he was.

I wouldn’t want to try to take this guy out with anything less than a scoped rifle. Which is something that’s hard to confuse with expiration by natural causes.

The hell with it, I thought. Risks are one thing. This looks like suicide. If Tatsu wanted him dead that much, I’d recommend a six-man squad and firearms. Much as I would have liked to do something to buy Tatsu’s continued goodwill, this one wasn’t worth it.

I wondered if my old friend would threaten me. I didn’t think so. And if he did, I’d just step up my Rio plans. The preparations weren’t entirely complete, but moving hastily wasn’t a bad option if I found myself caught between a likely suicide mission on the one hand and pressure from Tatsu’s Keisatsucho on the other.

But I’d go to the fight tomorrow and collect whatever intelligence I could. I’d feed it to Tatsu as a consolation prize for my bowing out.

The clock’s second hand swept past the twelve. I unloaded a final flurry of elbow strikes and stepped back. The adrenaline dump was largely depleted, but I still felt tense. Usually a workout helps with that. Not this time.

I found a partner and drilled leg attacks for another hour. After that I stretched and headed for the shower. I was glad this was going to be over soon.