Op-Center

CHAPTER TEN

The pachinko parlor was a smaller version of the ones made famous in the Ginza district of Tokyo. Long and narrow, the building was nearly the length of ten railroad boxcars laid end to end. The air was thick with cigarette smoke and the clattering of ball bearings as men played the games that lined the walls on both sides.

Each game was comprised of a circular, upright playing surface a yard high, nearly two feet wide, and a half-foot deep. Under a glass cover, bumpers and metal flippers jutted out from a colorful background; when the player inserted a coin, small metal balls dropped from the top, banging pinball-like against the arms and falling this way and that. The player spun a knob in the lower right in an effort to see that each ball reached the bottom; the more balls that were collected in the slot, the more tickets the player won. When the player collected enough tickets, he took them to the front of the parlor where he was given his choice of stuffed animals.

Though gambling was illegal in Japan, it was not against the law for a player to sell the animal he'd won. This was done in a small room in the back, small bears earning twenty thousand yen, large rabbits fetching twice that, and stuffed tigers selling for sixty thousand yen.

The average player spent five thousand yen a night here, and there were typically two hundred players at the parlor's sixty machines. While they enjoyed winning, few men came here to turn a profit. There was something addictive about the way the balls poured through the irregular maze, about the suspense of luck going for you or against you. It was really the player against fate, determining where he stood in the eyes of the gods. There was a widespread belief that if one could change their luck here, it would change in the real world as well. No one could explain why this was, but more often than not it seemed to work.

The parlors were scattered throughout the Japanese islands. Some were run by legitimate families, whose ownership went back centuries. Others were the property of criminal organizations, principally the Yakuza and the Sanzoku— one a league of gangsters, the other an ancient clan of bandits.

The parlor in Nagato on the west coast of Honshu belonged to the independent Tsuburaya family, which had run it and its predecessors for over two centuries. The criminal groups made regular, respectful overtures to buy the parlor, but the Tsuburayas had no interest in selling. They used their earnings to set up businesses in North Korea, potentially lucrative toeholds that they hoped to expand whenever unification became a reality.

Twice a week, on Tuesdays and Fridays, Eiji Tsuburaya sent millions of yen to North Korea through two trusted couriers based in the South. Both men arrived on the late afternoon ferry, carrying two empty, nondescript suitcases, walked directly to the back room of the parlor, left with full ones, and were back on the ferry before it turned about and left for the 150-mile trip to Pusan. From there, the money was smuggled north by members of PUK— Patriots for a Unified Korea, a group comprised of people from both the North and the South, everyone from businessmen to customs agents to street cleaners. It was their belief that profit for entrepreneurs and greater prosperity for the North Korean public in general would force the Communist leaders to accept an open market and, ultimately, reunification.

As always, the men left the parlor, climbed into the waiting cab, and sat quietly for the ten-minute ride to the ferry. Unlike other days, however, this time they were followed.