Rainfall

PART ONE

Who is the third who walks always beside you?

When I count, there are only you and I together

But when I look ahead up the white road

There is always another one walking beside you

Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded

I do not know whether a man or a woman

— But who is that on the other side of you?

— T. S. ELIOT, The Waste Land

1

HARRY CUT THROUGH the morning rush-hour crowd like a shark fin through water. I was following from twenty meters back on the opposite side of the street, sweating with everyone else in the unseasonable October Tokyo heat, and I couldn’t help admiring how well the kid had learned what I’d taught him. He was like liquid the way he slipped through a space just before it closed, or drifted to the left to avoid an emerging bottleneck. The changes in Harry’s cadence were accomplished so smoothly that no one would recognize he had altered his pace to narrow the gap on our target, who was now moving almost conspicuously quickly down Dogenzaka toward Shibuya Station.

The target’s name was Yasuhiro Kawamura. He was a career bureaucrat connected with the Liberal Democratic Party, or LDP, the political coalition that has been running Japan almost without a break since the war. His current position was vice minister of land and infrastructure at the Kokudokotsusho, the successor to the old Construction Ministry and Transport Ministry, where he had obviously done something to seriously offend someone because serious offense is the only reason I ever get a call from a client.

I heard Harry’s voice in my ear: “He’s going into the Higashimura fruit store. I’ll set up ahead.” We were each sporting a Danish-made, microprocessor-controlled receiver small enough to nestle in the ear canal, where you’d need a flashlight to find it. A voice transmitter about the same size goes under the jacket lapel. The transmissions are burst UHF, which makes them very hard to pick up if you don’t know exactly what you’re looking for, and they’re scrambled in case you do. The equipment freed us from having to maintain constant visual contact, and allowed us to keep moving for a while if the target stopped or changed direction. So even though I was too far back to see it, I knew where Kawamura had exited, and I could continue walking for some time before having to stop to keep my position behind him. Solo surveillance is difficult, and I was glad I had Harry with me.

About twenty meters from the Higashimura, I turned off into a drugstore, one of the dozens of open-façade structures that line Dogenzaka, catering to the Japanese obsession with health nostrums and germ fighting. Shibuya is home to many different buzoku, or tribes, and members of several were represented here this morning, united by a common need for one of the popular bottled energy tonics in which the drugstores specialize, tonics claiming to be bolstered with ginseng and other exotic ingredients but delivering instead with a more prosaic jolt of ordinary caffeine. Waiting in front of the register were several gray-suited sarariman — “salary man,” corporate rank and file — their faces set, cheap briefcases dangling from tired hands, fortifying themselves for another interchangeable day in the maw of the corporate machine. Behind them, two empty-faced teenage girls, their hair reduced to steel-wool brittleness by the dyes they used to turn it orange, noses pierced with oversized rings, their costumes meant to proclaim rejection of the traditional route chosen by the sarariman in front of them but offering no understanding of what they had chosen instead. And a gray-haired retiree, his skin sagging but his face oddly bright, probably in Shibuya to avail himself of one of the area’s well-known sexual services, which he would pay for out of a pension account that he kept hidden from his wife, not realizing that she knew what he was up to and simply didn’t care.

I wanted to give Kawamura about three minutes to get his fruit before I came out, so I examined a selection of bandages that gave me a view of the street. The way he had ducked into the store looked like a move calculated to flush surveillance, and I didn’t like it. If we hadn’t been hooked up the way we were, Harry would have had to stop abruptly to maintain his position behind the target. He might have had to do something ridiculous, like tie his shoe or stop to read a street sign, and Kawamura, probably peering out of the entranceway of the store, could have made him. Instead, I knew Harry would continue past the fruit store; he would stop about twenty meters ahead, give me his location, and fall in behind when I told him the parade was moving again.

The fruit store was a good spot to turn off, all right — too good for someone who knew the route to have chosen it by accident. But Harry and I weren’t going to be flushed out by amateur moves out of some government antiterrorist primer. I’ve had that training, so I know how useful it is.

I left the drugstore and continued down Dogenzaka, more slowly than before because I had to give Kawamura time to come out of the store. Shorthand thoughts shot through my mind: Are there enough people between us to obscure his vision if he turns when he comes out? What shops am I passing if I need to duck off suddenly? Is anyone looking up the street at the people heading toward the station, maybe helping Kawamura spot surveillance? If I had already drawn any counter surveillance attention, they might notice me now, because before I was hurrying to keep up with the target and now I was taking my time, and people on their way to work don’t change their pace that way. But Harry had been the one walking point, the more conspicuous position, and I hadn’t done anything to arouse attention before stopping in the drugstore.

I heard Harry again: “I’m at one-oh-nine.” Meaning he had turned into the landmark 109 Department Store, famous for its collection of 109 restaurants and trendy boutiques.

“No good,” I told him. “The first floor is lingerie. You going to blend in with fifty teenage girls in blue sailor school uniforms picking out padded bras?”

“I was planning to wait outside,” he replied, and I could imagine him blushing.

The front of 109 is a popular meeting place, typically crowded with a polyglot collection of pedestrians. “Sorry, I thought you were going for the lingerie,” I said, suppressing the urge to smile. “Just hang back and wait for my signal as we go past.”

“Right.”

The fruit store was only ten meters ahead, and still no sign of Kawamura. I was going to have to slow down. I was on the opposite side of the street, outside Kawamura’s probable range of concern, so I could take a chance on just stopping, maybe to fiddle with a cell phone. Still, if he looked, he would spot me standing there, even though, with my father’s Japanese features, I don’t have a problem blending into the crowds. Harry, a pet name for Haruyoshi, being born of two Japanese parents, has never had to worry about sticking out.

When I returned to Tokyo in the early eighties, my brown hair, a legacy from my mother, worked for me the way a fluorescent vest does for a hunter, and I had to dye it black to develop the anonymity that protects me now. But in the last few years the country has gone mad for chappatsu, or tea-color dyed hair, and I don’t have to be so vigilant about the dye anymore. I like to tell Harry he’s going to have to go chappatsu if he wants to fit in, but Harry’s too much of an otaku, a geek, to give much thought to issues like personal appearance. I guess he doesn’t have that much to work with, anyway: an awkward smile that always looks like it’s offered in anticipation of a blow, a tendency to blink rapidly when he’s excited, a face that’s never lost its baby fat, its pudginess accentuated by a shock of thick black hair that on bad days seems almost to float above it. But the same qualities that keep him off magazine covers confer the unobtrusiveness that makes for effective surveillance.

I had reached the point where I was sure I was going to have to stop when Kawamura popped out of the fruit store and reentered the flow. I hung back as much as possible to increase the space between us, watching his head bobbing as he moved down the street. He was tall for a Japanese and that helped, but he was wearing a dark suit like ninety percent of the other people in this crowd — including Harry and me, naturally, so I couldn’t drop back too far.

Just as I’d redeveloped the right distance, he stopped and turned to light a cigarette. I continued moving slowly behind and to the right of the group of people that separated us, knowing he wouldn’t be able to make me moving with the crowd. I kept my attention focused on the backs of the suits in front of me, just a bored morning commuter. After a moment he turned and started moving again.

I allowed myself the trace of a satisfied smile. Japanese don’t stop to light cigarettes; if they did, they’d lose weeks over the course of their adult lives. Nor was there any reason, such as a strong headwind threatening to blow out a match, for him to turn and face the crowd behind him. Kawamura’s obvious attempt at counter surveillance simply confirmed his guilt.

Guilt of what I don’t know, and in fact I never ask. I insist on only a few questions. Is the target a man? I don’t work against women or children. Have you retained anyone else to solve this problem? I don’t want my operation getting tripped up by someone’s idea of a B-team, and if you retain me, it’s an exclusive. Is the target a principal? I solve problems directly, like the soldier I once was, not by sending messages through uninvolved third parties like a terrorist. The concerns behind the last question are why I like to see independent evidence of guilt: It confirms that the target is indeed the principal and not a clueless innocent.

Twice in eighteen years the absence of that evidence has stayed my hand. Once I was sent against the brother of a newspaper editor who was publishing stories on corruption in a certain politician’s home district. The other time it was against the father of a bank reformer who showed excessive zeal in investigating the size and nature of his institution’s bad debts. I would have been willing to act directly against the editor and the reformer, had I been retained to do so, but apparently the clients in question had reason to pursue a more circuitous route that involved misleading me. They are no longer clients, of course. Not at all.

I’m not a mercenary, although I was nothing more than that once upon a time. And although I do in a sense live a life of service, I am no longer samurai, either. The essence of samurai is not just service, but loyalty to his master, to a cause greater than himself. There was a time when I burned with loyalty, a time when, suffused with the samurai ethic I had absorbed from escapist novels and comics as a boy in Japan, I was prepared to die in the service of my adopted liege lord, the United States. But loves as uncritical and unrequited as that one can never last, and usually come to a dramatic end, as mine did. I am a realist now.

As I came to the 109 building I said, “Passing.” Not into my lapel or anything stupid like that; the transmitters are sensitive enough so that you don’t need to make any subtle movements that are like billboards for a trained counter surveillance team. Not that one was out there, but you always assume the worst. Harry would know I was passing his position and would fall in after a moment.

Actually, the popularity of cell phones with earpieces makes this kind of work easier than it once was. It used to be that someone walking alone and talking under his breath was either demented or an intelligence or security agent. Today you see this sort of behavior all the time among Japan’s keitai, or cell phone, generation.

The light at the bottom of Dogenzaka was red, and the crowd congealed as we approached the five-street intersection in front of the train station. Garish neon signs and massive video monitors flashed frantically on the buildings around us. A diesel-powered truck ground its gears as it slogged through the intersection, laborious as a barge in a muddy river, its bullhorns blaring distorted right-wing patriotic songs that momentarily drowned out the bells commuters on bicycles were ringing to warn pedestrians out of the way. A street hawker angled a pushcart through the crowds, sweat running down the sides of his face, the smell of steamed fish and rice following in his zigzagging wake. An ageless homeless man, probably a former sarariman who had lost his job and his moorings when the bubble burst in the late eighties, slept propped against the base of a streetlight, inured by alcohol or despair to the tempest around him.

The Dogenzaka intersection is like this night and day, and at rush hour, when the light turns green, over three hundred people step off the curb at the same instant, with another twenty-five thousand waiting in the crush. From here on, it was going to be shoulder to shoulder, chest to back. I would keep close to Kawamura now, no more than five meters, which would put about two hundred people between us. I knew he had a commuter pass and wouldn’t need to go to the ticket machine. Harry and I had purchased our tickets in advance so we would be able to follow him right through the wickets. Not that the attendant would notice one way or the other. At rush hour, they’re practically numbed by the hordes; you could flash anything, a baseball card, probably, and in you’d go.

The light changed, and the crowds swept into one another like a battle scene from some medieval epic. An invisible radar I’m convinced is possessed only by Tokyoites prevented a mass of collisions in the middle of the street. I watched Kawamura as he cut diagonally across to the station, and maneuvered in behind him as he passed. There were five people between us as we surged past the attendant’s booth. I had to stay close now. It would be chaos when the train pulled in: five thousand people pouring out, five thousand people stacked fifteen deep waiting to get on, everyone jockeying for position. Foreigners who think of Japan as a polite society have never ridden the Yamanote at rush hour.

The river of people flowed up the stairs and onto the platform, and the sounds and smells of the station seemed to arouse an extra sense of urgency in the crowd. We were swimming upstream against the people who had just gotten off the train, and as we reached the platform the doors were already closing on handbags and the odd protruding elbow. By the time we had passed the kiosk midway down the platform, the last car had passed us and a moment later it was gone. The next train would arrive in two minutes.

Kawamura shuffled down the middle of the platform. I stayed behind him but hung back from the tracks, avoiding his wake. He was looking up and down the platform, but even if he had spotted Harry or me earlier, seeing us waiting for the train wasn’t going to unnerve him. Half the people waiting had just walked down Dogenzaka.

I felt the rumble of the next train as Harry walked past me like a fighter jet buzzing a carrier control tower, the slightest nod of his head indicating that the rest was with me. I had told him I only needed his help until Kawamura was on the train, which is where he had always gone during our previous surveillance. Harry had done his usual good work in helping me get close to the target, and, per our script, he was now exiting the scene. I would contact him later, when I was done with the solo aspects of the job.

Harry thinks I’m a private investigator and that all I do is follow these people around collecting information. To avoid the suspicious appearance of a too-high mortality rate for the subjects we track, I often have him follow people in whom I have no interest, who of course then provide some measure of cover by continuing to live their happy and oblivious lives. Also, where possible, I avoid sharing the subject’s name with Harry to minimize the chances that he’ll come across too many coincidental obituaries. Still, some of our subjects do have a habit of dying at the end of surveillance, and I know Harry has a curious mind. So far he hasn’t asked, which is good. I like Harry as an asset and wouldn’t want him to become a liability.

I moved up close behind Kawamura, just another commuter trying to get a good position for boarding the train. This was the most delicate part of the operation. If I flubbed it, he would make me and it would be difficult to get sufficiently close to him for a second try.

My right hand dipped into my pants pocket and touched a microprocessor-controlled magnet, about the size and weight of a quarter. On one side the magnet was covered with blue worsted cloth, like that of the suit Kawamura was wearing. Had it been necessary, I could have stripped away the blue to expose a layer of gray, which was the other color Kawamura favored. On the opposite side of the magnet was an adhesive backing.

I withdrew the magnet from my pocket and protected it from view by cupping it in my hands. I would have to wait for the right moment, when Kawamura’s attention was distracted. Mildly distracted would be enough. Maybe as we were boarding the train. I peeled off the wax paper covering the adhesive and crumbled it into my left pants pocket.

The train emerged at the end of the platform and hurtled toward us. Kawamura pulled a cell phone out of his breast pocket. Started to input a number.

Okay, do it now. I brushed past him, placing the magnet on his suit jacket just below the left shoulder blade, and moved several paces down the platform.

Kawamura spoke into the phone for only a few seconds, too softly for me to hear over the screeching brakes of the train slowing to a halt in front of us, and then slipped the phone back in his left breast pocket. I wondered whom he had called. It didn’t matter. Two stations ahead, three at the most, and it would be done.

The train stopped and its doors opened, releasing a gush of human effluent. When the outflow slowed to a trickle, the lines waiting on either side of the doors collapsed inward and poured inside, as though someone had hit the reverse switch on a giant vacuum. People kept jamming themselves in despite the warnings that “The doors are closing,” and the mass of commuters grew more swollen until we were all held firmly in place, with no need to grip the overhead handles because there was nowhere to fall. The doors shut, the car lurched forward, and we moved off.

I exhaled slowly and rotated my head from side to side, hearing the bones crack in my neck, feeling the last remnants of nervousness drain away as we reached the final moments. It has always been this way for me. When I was a teenager, I lived for a while near a town that had a network of gorges cutting through it, and at some of them you could jump from the cliffs into deep swimming holes. You could see the older kids doing it all the time — it didn’t look so far up. The first time I climbed to the top and looked down, though, I couldn’t believe how high I was, and I froze. But the other kids were watching. And right then, I knew that no matter how afraid I was, no matter what might happen, I was going to jump, and some instinctive part of me shut down my awareness of everything except the simple, muscular action of running forward. I had no other perceptions, no awareness of any future beyond the taking of those brisk steps. I remember thinking that it didn’t even matter if I died.

Kawamura was standing in front of the door at one end of the car, about a meter from where I was positioned, his right hand holding one of the overhead bars. I needed to stay close now.

The word I had gotten was that this had to look natural: my specialty, and the reason my services are always in demand. Harry had obtained Kawamura’s medical records from Jikei University Hospital, which showed that he had a condition called complete heart block and owed his continuing existence to a pacemaker installed five years earlier.

I twisted so that my back was to the doors — a slight breach of Tokyo’s minimal train etiquette, but I didn’t want anyone who might speak English to see the kinds of prompts that were going to appear on the screen of the PDA computer I was carrying. I had downloaded a cardiac interrogation program into it, the kind a doctor uses to adjust a patient’s pacemaker. And I had rigged it so that the PDA fed infrared commands to the control magnet. The only difference between my setup and a cardiologist’s was that mine was miniaturized and wireless. That, and I hadn’t taken the Hippocratic oath.

The PDA was already turned on and in sleep mode, so it powered up instantly. I glanced down at the screen. It was flashing “pacing parameters.” I hit the Enter key and the screen changed, giving me an option of “threshold testing” and “sensing testing.” I selected the former and was offered a range of parameters: rate, pulse width, amplitude. I chose rate and quickly set the pacemaker at its lowest rate limit of forty beats per minute, then returned to the previous screen and selected pulse width. The screen indicated that the pacemaker was set to deliver current at durations of .48 milliseconds. I decreased the pulse width as far as it would go, then changed to amplitude. The unit was preset at 8.5 volts, and I started dropping it a half volt at a time. When I had taken it down two full volts, the screen flashed, “You have now decreased unit amplitude by two volts. Are you sure you want to continue to decrease unit amplitude?” I entered, “Yes” and went on, repeating the sequence every time I took it down two volts.

When the train pulled into Yoyogi Station, Kawamura stepped off. Was he getting off here? That would be a problem: the unit’s infrared had limited range, and it would be a challenge to operate it and follow him closely at the same time. Damn, just a few more seconds, I thought, bracing to follow him out. But he was only allowing the people behind him to leave the train, and stopped outside the doors. When the Yoyogi passengers had exited he got back on, followed closely by several people who had been waiting on the platform. The doors closed, and we moved off again.

At two volts, the screen warned me that I was nearing minimum output values and it would be dangerous to further decrease output. I overrode the warning and took the unit down another half volt, glancing up at Kawamura as I did so. He hadn’t changed his position.

When I reached a single volt and tried to go further, the screen flashed, “Your command will set the unit at minimum output values. Are you certain that you wish to enter this command?” I entered “Yes.” It prompted me one more time anyway: “You have programmed the unit to minimum output values. Please confirm.” Again I entered, “Yes.” There was a one-second delay, then the screen started flashing bold-faced letters: Unacceptable output values. Unacceptable output values.

I closed the cover, but left the PDA on. It would reset automatically. There was always the chance that the sequence hadn’t worked the first time around, and I wanted to be able to try again if I had to.

There wasn’t any need. As the train pulled into Shinjuku Station and jerked to a stop, Kawamura stumbled against the woman next to him. The doors opened and the other passengers flowed out, but Kawamura remained, gripping one of the upright bars next to the door with his right hand and clutching his package of fruit with his left, commuters shoving past him. I watched him rotate counterclockwise until his back hit the wall next to the door. His mouth was open; he looked slightly surprised. Then slowly, almost gently, he slid to the floor. I saw one of the passengers who had gotten on at Yoyogi stoop down to assist him. The man, a mid-forties Westerner, tall and thin enough to make me think of a javelin, somehow aristocratic in his wireless glasses, shook Kawamura’s shoulders, but Kawamura was past noticing the stranger’s efforts at succor.

“Daijoubu desu ka?” I asked, my left hand moving to support Kawamura’s back, feeling for the magnet. Is he all right? I used Japanese because it was likely that the Westerner wouldn’t understand it and our interaction would be kept to a minimum.

“Wakaranai,” the stranger muttered. I don’t know. He patted Kawamura’s increasingly bluish cheeks and shook him again — a bit roughly, I thought. So he did speak some Japanese. It didn’t matter. I pinched the edge of the magnet and pulled it free. Kawamura was done.

I stepped past them onto the platform and the inflow immediately began surging onto the train behind me. Glancing through the window nearest the door as I walked past, I was stunned to see the stranger going through Kawamura’s pockets. My first thought was that Kawamura was being robbed. I moved closer to the window for a better look, but the growing crush of passengers obscured my view.

I had an urge to get back on, but that would have been stupid. Anyway, it was too late. The doors were already sliding shut. I saw them close and catch on something, maybe a handbag or a foot. They opened slightly and closed again. It was an apple, falling to the tracks as the train pulled away.

2

FROM SHINJUKU I took the Maranouchi subway line to Ogikubo, the extreme west of the city and outside metropolitan Tokyo. I wanted to do a last SDR — surveillance detection run — before contacting my client to report the results of the Kawamura operation, and heading west took me against the incoming rush-hour train traffic, making the job of watching my back easier.

An SDR is just what it sounds like: a route designed to force anyone who’s following you to show himself. Harry and I had of course taken full precautions en route to Shibuya and Kawamura that morning, but I never assume that because I was clean earlier I must be clean now. In Shinjuku, the crowds are so thick that you could have ten people following you and you’d never make a single one of them. By contrast, following someone unobtrusively across a long, deserted train platform with multiple entrances and exits is nearly impossible, and the trip to Ogikubo offered the kind of peace of mind I’ve come to require.

It used to be that, when an intelligence agent wanted to communicate with an asset so sensitive that a meeting was impossible, they had to use a dead drop. The asset would drop microfiche in the hollow of a tree, or hide it in an obscure book in the public library, and later, the spy would come by and retrieve it. You could never put the two people together in the same place at the same time.

It’s easier with the Internet, and more secure. The client posts an encrypted message on a bulletin board, the electronic equivalent of a tree hollow. I download it from an anonymous pay phone and decrypt it at my leisure. And vice versa.

The message traffic is pretty simple. A name, a photograph, personal and work contact information. A bank account number, transfer instructions. A reminder of my three no’s: no women or children, no acts against nonprincipals, no other parties retained to solve the problem at hand. The phone is used only for the innocuous aftermath, which was the reason for my side trip to Ogikubo.

I used one of the pay phones on the station platform to call my contact within the Liberal Democratic Party — an LDP flunky I know only as Benny, maybe short for Benihana or something. Benny’s English is fluent, so I know he’s spent some time abroad. He prefers to use English with me, I think because it has a harder sound in some contexts and Benny fancies himself a hard guy. Probably he learned the lingo from a too-steady diet of Hollywood gangster movies.

We’d never met, of course, but talking to Benny on the phone had been enough for me to develop an antipathy. I had a vivid image of him as just another government seat-warmer, a guy who would try to manage a weight problem by jogging a few ten-minute miles three times a week on a treadmill in an overpriced chrome-and-mirrors gym, where the air-conditioning and soothing sounds of the television would prevent any unnecessary discomfort. He’d splurge on items like designer hair gel for a comb over because the little things only cost a few bucks anyway, and would save money by wearing no-iron shirts and ties with labels proclaiming “Genuine Italian Silk!” that he’d selected with care on a trip abroad from a sale bin at some discount department store, congratulating himself on the bargains for which he acquired such quality goods. He’d sport a few Western extravagances like a Montblanc fountain pen, talismans to reassure himself that he was certainly more cosmopolitan than the people who gave him orders. Yeah, I knew this guy. He was a little order taker, a go-between, a cutout who’d never gotten his hands dirty in his life, who couldn’t tell the difference between a real smile and the amused rictuses of the hostesses who relieved him of his yen for watered-down Suntory scotch while he bored them with hints about the Big Things he was involved in but of course couldn’t really discuss.

After the usual exchange of innocuous, preestablished codes to establish our bona fides, I told him, “It’s done.”

“Glad to hear it,” he said in his terse, false tough-guy way. “Any problems?”

“Nothing worth mentioning,” I responded after a pause, thinking of the guy on the train.

“Nothing? You sure?”

I knew I wouldn’t get anything this way. Better to say nothing, which I did.

“Okay,” he said, breaking the silence. “You know to reach out to me if you need anything. Anything at all, okay?”

Benny tries to run me like an intelligence asset. Once he even suggested a face-to-face meeting. I told him if we met face-to-face I’d be there to kill him, so maybe we should skip it. He laughed, but we never did have that meeting.

“There’s only one thing I need,” I said, reminding him of the money.

“By tomorrow, like always.”

“Good enough.” I hung up, automatically wiping down the receiver and keys on the remote possibility that they had traced the call and would send someone to try for prints. If they had access to Vietnam-era military records, and I assumed they did, they would get a match for John Rain, and I didn’t want them to know that the same guy they had known over twenty years ago when I first came back to Japan was now their mystery freelancer.

I was working with the CIA at the time, a legacy of my Vietnam contacts, making sure the agency’s “support funds” were reaching the right recipients in the governing party, which even back then was the LDP. The agency was running a secret program to support conservative political elements, part of the U.S. government’s anti-Communist policies and a natural extension of relationships that had developed during the postwar occupation, and the LDP was more than happy to play the role in exchange for the cash.

I was really just a bagman, but I had a nice rapport with one of the recipients of Uncle Sam’s largesse, a fellow named Miyamoto. One of Miyamoto’s associates, miffed at what he felt was a too-small share of the money, threatened to blow the whistle if he didn’t receive more. Miyamoto was exasperated; the associate had used this tactic before and had gotten a bump-up as a result. Now he was just being greedy. Miyamoto asked me if I could do anything about this guy, for $50,000, “no questions asked.”

The offer interested me, but I wanted to make sure I was protected. I told Miyamoto I couldn’t do anything myself, but I could put him in touch with someone who might be able to help.

That someone became my alter ego, and over time, I took steps to erase the footprints of the real John Rain. Among other things, I no longer use my birth name or anything connected with it, and I’ve had surgery to give my somewhat stunted epicanthic folds a more complete Japanese appearance. I wear my hair longer now, as well, in contrast to the brush cut I favored back then. And wire-rim glasses, a concession to age and its consequences, give me a bookish air that is entirely unlike the intense soldier’s countenance of my past. Today I look more like a Japanese academic than the half-breed warrior I once was. I haven’t seen any of my contacts from my bagman days in over twenty years, and I steer scrupulously clear of the agency. After the number they did on me and Crazy Jake in Bu Dop, I was more than happy to shake them out of my life.

Miyamoto had put me in touch with Benny, who worked with people in the LDP who had problems like Miyamoto’s, problems that I could solve. For a while I worked for both of them, but Miyamoto retired about ten years ago and died peacefully in his bed not long thereafter. Since then Benny’s been my best client. I do three or four jobs a year for him and whoever in the LDP he fronts for, charging the yen equivalent of about $100k per. Sounds like a lot, I know, but there’s overhead: equipment, multiple residences, a real but perpetually money-losing consulting operation that provides me with tax records and other means of legitimacy.

Benny. I wondered whether he knew anything about what had happened on the train. The image of the stranger rifling through the slumped Kawamura’s pockets was as distracting as a small seed caught in my teeth, and I returned to it again and again, hoping for some insight. A coincidence? Maybe the guy had been looking for identification. Not the most productive treatment for someone who is going blue from lack of oxygen, but people without training don’t always act rationally under stress, and the first time you see someone dying right in front of you it is stressful. Or he could have been Kawamura’s contact, on the train for some kind of exchange. Maybe that was their arrangement, a moving exchange on a crowded train. Kawamura calls the contact from Shibuya just before boarding the train, says, “I’m in the third-to-last car, leaving the station now,” and the contact knows where to board as the train pulls into Yoyogi Station. Sure, maybe.

Actually, the little coincidences happen frequently in my line of work. They start automatically when you become a student of human behavior — when you start following the average person as he goes about his average day, listening to his conversations, learning his habits. The smooth shapes you take for granted from a distance can look unconnected and bizarre under close scrutiny, like the fibers of cloth observed under a microscope.

Some of the targets I take on are involved in subterranean dealings, and the coincidence factor is especially high. I’ve followed subjects who turned out to be under simultaneous police surveillance: one of the reasons that my counter surveillance skills have to be as dead subtle as they are. Mistresses are a frequent theme, and sometimes even second families. One subject I was preparing to take out as I followed him down the subway platform surprised the hell out of me by throwing himself in front of the train, saving me the trouble. The client was delighted, and mystified at how I was able to get it to look like a suicide on a crowded train platform.

It felt like Benny knew something, though, and that feeling made it hard to put this little coincidence aside. If I had some way of confirming that he’d broken one of my three rules by putting a B-team on Kawamura, I’d find him and he would pay the price. But there was no obvious way to acquire that confirmation. I’d have to put this one aside, maybe mentally label it “pending” to make myself feel better.

The money appeared the next day, as Benny had promised, and the next nine days were quiet.

On the tenth day, I got a call from Harry. He told me it was my friend Koichiro, he was going to be at Galerie Coupe Chou in Shinjuku on Tuesday at eight with some friends, I should come by if I had time. I told him that sounded great and would try to make it. I knew to count back five listings in the restaurants section of the Tokyo City Source yellow pages, making our meeting place Las Chicas, and to subtract five days from the date and five hours from the time.

I like Las Chicas for meetings because almost everyone approaches it from Aoyama-dori, making the people coming from the other direction the ones to watch, and because people have to show themselves coming across a little patio before reaching the entrance. The place is surrounded by twisting alleys that snake off in a dozen different directions, offering no choke points where someone could set up and wait. I know those alleys well, as I make it my business to know the layout of any area where I spend a lot of time. I was confident that anyone unwanted would have a hard time getting close to me there.

The food and the ambience are good, too. Both the menu and the people represent a fusion of East and West: Indian jeera rice and Belgian chocolate, a raven-haired beauty of high-cheeked Mongolian ancestry next to a blonde straight out of the fjords, a polyglot of languages and accents. Somehow Las Chicas manages to be eternally hip and entirely comfortable with itself, both at the same time.

I got to the restaurant two hours early and waited, sipping one of the chai lattes for which the restaurant is justifiably celebrated. You never want to be the last one to arrive at a meeting. It’s impolite. And it decreases your chances of being the one to leave.

At a little before three I spotted Harry coming up the street. He didn’t see me until he was inside.

“Always sitting with your back to the wall,” he said, walking over.

“I like the view,” I answered, deadpan. Most people pay zero attention to these things, but I’d taught him that it’s something to be aware of when you walk into a place. The people with their backs to the door are the civilians; the ones in the strategic seats could be people with some street sense or some training, people who might deserve a little more attention.

I had met Harry about five years earlier in Roppongi, where he’d found himself in a jam with a few drunken off-duty American Marines in a bar where I happened to be killing time before an appointment. Harry can come off as a bit of an oddball: sometimes his clothes are so ill fitting you might wonder if he stole them from a random clothesline, and he has a habit of staring unselfconsciously at anything that interests him. It was the staring that drew the attention of the jarheads, one of whom loudly threatened to stick those thick glasses up Harry’s Jap ass if he didn’t find somewhere else to look. Harry had immediately complied, but this apparent sign of weakness served only to encourage the Marines. When they followed Harry out, and I realized he hadn’t even noticed what was going to happen, I left too. I have a problem with bullies — a legacy from my childhood.

Anyway, the jarheads got to mess with me instead of with Harry, and it didn’t turn out the way they had planned. Harry was grateful.

It turned out that he had some useful skills. He was born in the United States of Japanese parents and grew up bilingual, spending summers with his grandparents outside of Tokyo. He went to college and graduate school in the States, earning a degree in applied mathematics and cryptography. In graduate school he got in trouble for hacking into school files that one of his cryptography professors had bragged he had hack-proofed. There was also some unpleasantness with the FBI, which had managed to trace probes of the nation’s Savings & Loan Administration and other financial institutions back to Harry. Some of the honorable men from deep within America’s National Security Agency learned of these hijinks and arranged for Harry to work at Fort Meade in exchange for purging his growing record of computer offenses.

Harry stayed with the NSA for a few years, getting his new employer into secure government and corporate computer systems all over the world and learning the blackest of the NSA’s computer black arts along the way. He came back to Japan in the mid-nineties, where he took a job as a computer security consultant with one of the big global consulting outfits. Of course they did a thorough background check, but his clean record and the magic of an NSA top-secret security clearance blinded Harry’s new corporate sponsors to what was most fundamental about the shy, boyish-looking thirtysomething they had just hired.

Which was that Harry was an inveterate hacker. He had grown bored at the NSA because, despite the technical challenges of the work, it was all sanctioned by the government. In his corporate position, by contrast, there were rules, standards of ethics, which he was supposed to follow. Harry never did security work on a system without leaving a back door that he could use whenever the mood arose. He hacked his own firm’s files to uncover the vulnerabilities of its clients, which he then exploited. Harry had the skills of a locksmith and the heart of a burglar.

Since we met I’ve been teaching him the relatively aboveboard aspects of my craft. He’s enough of a misfit to be in awe of the fact that I’ve befriended him, and has a bit of a crush on me as a result. The resulting loyalty is useful.

“What’s going on?” I asked him after he had sat down.

“Two things. One I think you’ll know about; the other, I’m not sure.”

“I’m listening.”

“First, it seems Kawamura had a fatal heart attack the same morning we were tailing him.”

I took a sip of my chai latte. “I know. It happened right in front of me on the train. Hell of a thing.”

Was he watching my face more closely than usual? “I saw the obituary in the Daily Yomiuri,” he said. “A surviving daughter placed it. The funeral was yesterday.”

“Aren’t you a little young to be reading the obituaries, Harry?” I asked, eyeing him over the edge of the mug.

He shrugged. “I read everything, you know that. It’s part of what you pay me for.”

That much was true. Harry kept his finger on the pulse, and had a knack for identifying patterns in chaos.

“What’s the second thing?”

“During the funeral, someone broke into his apartment. I figured it might have been you, but wanted to tell you just in case.”

I kept my face expressionless. “How did you find out about that?” I asked.

He took a folded piece of paper from his pants pocket and slid it toward me. “I hacked the Keisatsucho report.” The Keisatsucho is Japan’s National Police Agency, the Japanese FBI.

“Christ, Harry, what can’t you get at? You’re unbelievable.”

He waved his hand as though it were nothing. “This is just the Sosa, the investigative section. Their security is pathetic.”

I felt no particular urge to tell him that I agreed with his assessment of Sosa security — that in fact I had been an avid reader of their files for many years.

I unfolded the piece of paper and started to scan its contents. The first thing I noticed was the name of the person who had prepared the report: Ishikura Tatsuhiko. Tatsu. Somehow I wasn’t surprised.

I had known Tatsu in Vietnam, where he was attached to Japan’s Public Safety and Investigative Board, one of the precursors of the Keisatsucho. Hobbled by the restrictions placed on its military by Article Nine of the postwar constitution and unable to do more than send a few people on a “listen-and-learn” basis, the government sent Tatsu to Vietnam for six months to make wiring diagrams of the routes of KGB assistance to the Vietcong. Because I spoke Japanese, I was assigned to help him learn his way around.

Tatsu was a short man with the kind of stout build that rounds out with age, and a gentle face that masked an intensity beneath — an intensity that was revealed by a habit of jutting his torso and head forward in a way that made it look as though he was being restrained by an invisible leash. He was frustrated in postwar, neutered Japan, and admired the warrior’s path I had taken. For my part, I was intrigued by a secret sorrow I saw in his eyes, a sorrow that, strangely, became more pronounced when he smiled and especially when he laughed. He spoke little of his family, of two young daughters in Japan, but when he did his pride was evident. Years later I learned from a mutual acquaintance that there had also been a son, the youngest, who had died in circumstances of which Tatsu would never speak, and I understood from whence that sorrowful countenance had come.

When I came back to Japan we spent some time together, but I had distanced myself since getting involved with Miyamoto and then Benny. I hadn’t seen Tatsu since changing my appearance and moving underground.

Which was fortunate, because I knew from the reports I hacked that Tatsu had a pet theory: the LDP had an assassin on the payroll. In the late eighties Tatsu came to believe that too many key witnesses in corruption cases, too many financial reformers, too many young crusaders against the political status quo were dying of “natural causes.” In his assessment there was a pattern here, and he profiled the shadowy shape at the center of it as having skills very much like mine.

Tatsu’s colleagues thought the shape he saw was a ghost in his imagination, and his dogged insistence on investigating a conspiracy that others claimed was a mirage had done nothing to advance his career. On the other hand, that doggedness did afford him some protection from the powers he hoped to threaten, because no one wanted to lend credence to his theories by having him die suddenly of natural causes. On the contrary: I imagined that many of Tatsu’s enemies hoped he would live a long and uneventful life. I also knew this attitude would change instantly if Tatsu ever got too close to the truth.

So far he hadn’t. But I knew Tatsu. In Vietnam he had understood the fundamentals of counterintelligence at a time when even Agency higher-ups couldn’t put together a simple wiring diagram of a typical V.C. unit. He had developed operational leads despite his “listen-and-learn-only” purview. He had refused the usual attaché’s cushy life of writing reports from a villa, insisting instead on operating in the field.

His superiors had been horrified at his effectiveness, he had once told me bitterly over substantial quantities of sake, and they had studiously ignored the intelligence he had produced. In the end his persistence and courage had been wasted. I wish he could have learned from the experience.

But I supposed that was impossible. Tatsu was true samurai, and would continue serving the same master no matter how many times that master ignored or even abused him. Devoted service was the highest end he knew.

It was unusual for the Keisatsucho to be investigating a simple break-in. Something about Kawamura’s death, and what he was doing before it, must have attracted Tatsu’s attention. It wouldn’t be the first time I had felt my old comrade in arms watching me as though through a one-way mirror, seeing a shape behind the glass but not knowing whose, and I was glad that I’d decided to drop off his radar so many years earlier.

“You don’t have to tell me whether you knew about this,” Harry said, interrupting my musings. “I know the rules.”

I considered how much I should reveal. If I wanted to learn more, his skills would be helpful. On the other hand, I didn’t like the idea of his getting any closer to the true nature of my work. He was getting uncomfortably close already. Tatsu’s name on that report, for example. I had to assume that Harry would follow it like a link on the Internet, that he would tap into Tatsu’s conspiracy theories, that he would sense a connection with me. Hardly proof beyond a reasonable doubt, of course, but between them Harry and Tatsu would have a significant number of puzzle pieces.

Sitting there in Las Chicas, sipping my chai latte, I had to admit that Harry could become a problem. The realization depressed me. Christ, I thought, you’re getting sentimental.

Maybe it was time to get out of this shit. Maybe this time it really was.

“I didn’t know about it,” I said after a moment. “This is an unusual case.” I saw no harm in telling him about the stranger on the train, and did so.

“If we were in New York, I’d tell you it was a pickpocket,” he said when I was done.

“I thought the same thing when I first saw it. But pickpocket would be a piss-poor career choice for a white boy in Tokyo. You have to blend.”

“Target of opportunity?”

I shook my head. “Not too many people are that shameless and cold-blooded. I doubt one of them just happened to be standing next to Kawamura that morning. I think the guy was a Kawamura contact, there for some kind of exchange.”

“Why do you suppose the Keisatsucho is investigating a simple break-in in a Tokyo apartment?” he asked.

“That I don’t know,” I said, although Tatsu’s involvement made me wonder. “Maybe Kawamura’s position in the government, the recency of his death, something like that. That’s the theory I’d go on.”

He looked at me. “Are you asking me to dig?”

I should have let it go. But I’ve been used before. The feeling that it had happened again would keep me awake at night. Had Benny put a B-team on Kawamura? I figured I might as well let Harry provide some clues.

“You will anyway, right?” I asked.

He blinked. “Can’t help myself, I guess.”

“Dig away, then. Let me know what else you find. And watch your back, hotshot. Don’t get sloppy.”

The warning was for both of us.

3

TELLING HARRY TO watch his back made me think of Jimmy Calhoun, my best friend in high school, of who Jimmy was before he became Crazy Jake.

Jimmy and I joined the Army together when we were barely seventeen years old. I remember the recruiter telling us we would need parental permission to join. “See that woman outside?” he had asked us. “Give her this twenty, ask her if she’ll sign as your mother.” She did. Later, I realized this woman was making her living this way.

Jimmy and I had met, in a sense, through his younger sister, Deirdre. She was a beautiful, black-haired Irish rose, and one of the few people who was nice to the awkward, out-of-place kid I was in Dryden. Some idiot told Jimmy I liked her, which was true, of course, and Jimmy decided he didn’t like a guy with slanty eyes hitting on his sister. He was bigger than I was, but I fought him to a standstill. After that, he respected me, and became my ally against the Dryden bullies, my first real friend. Deirdre and I started dating, and woe to anyone who gave Jimmy a hard time about it.

I told Deirdre before we left that I was going to marry her when I got back. She told me she’d be waiting. “Watch out for Jimmy, okay?” she asked me. “He’s got too much to prove.”

Jimmy and I had told the recruiter we wanted to serve together, and the guy said he would make it happen. I don’t know if the recruiter had anything to do with it, in fact he was probably lying, but it worked out the way we asked. Jimmy and I did Special Forces training together at Fort Bragg, then wound up in the same unit, in a joint military-CIA program called the Studies and Observation Group, or SOG. The Studies and Observation moniker was a joke, some idiot bureaucrat’s attempt to give the organization a low profile. You might as well name a pit bull Pansy.

SOG’s mission was clandestine reconnaissance and sabotage missions into Cambodia and Laos, sometimes even into North Vietnam. The teams were composed of LURRPs, an acronym for men specializing in long-range reconnaissance patrols. Three Americans and nine Civilian Irregular Defense Group personnel, or CIDGs. The CIDGs were usually Khmer mercenaries recruited by the CIA, sometimes Montagnards. Three men would go into the bush for one, two, three weeks at a time, living off the land, no contact with MACV, the U.S. Military Assistance Command, Vietnam.

We were the elite of the elite, small and mobile, slipping like silent ghosts through the jungle. All the moving parts on the weapons were taped down for noise suppression. We operated so much at night that we could see in the dark. We didn’t even use bug repellent because the V.C. could smell it. We were that serious.

We were operating in Cambodia at the same time Nixon was publicly pledging respect for Cambodia’s neutrality. If our activities got out, Nixon would have had to admit that he’d been lying not just to the public, but to Congress as well. So our activities weren’t just clandestine, they were outright denied, all the way to the top. For some of our missions we had to travel stripped, with no U.S.-issued weapons or other matériel. Other times we couldn’t even get air support for fear that a pilot would be shot down and captured. When we lost a man, his family would get a telegram saying he had been killed “west of Dak To” or “near the border” or some other vague description like that.

We started out all right. Before we went, we talked about what we would and wouldn’t do. We’d heard the stories. Everyone knew about My Lai. We were going to keep cool heads, stay professional. Keep our innocence, really. I can almost laugh, when I think about it now.

Jimmy became known as “Crazy Jake” because he fell asleep in the middle of our first firefight. Tracer rounds were coming at us from beyond the tree line, everyone was hunkered down, firing back at people we couldn’t even see, and it went on for hours because we couldn’t call in air support due to our illegal location. Jimmy said “fuck it” in the middle of things and took a nap. Everyone thought that was pretty cool. While they were saying, “you’re crazy, man, you’re crazy,” Jimmy said, “well I knew everything was jake.” So after that he was Crazy Jake. Outside the two of us, I don’t think anyone ever knew his real name.

Jimmy didn’t just act crazy; he looked it. A teenage motorcycle accident had almost cost him an eye. The doctors got it back in, but couldn’t get it to focus in line with his good eye, so Jimmy always looked as though he was watching something off to the side while he was talking to you. “Omnidirectional,” he liked to say, with a smile, when he caught someone trying to steal a glance at it.

Jimmy had been social enough in high school but got quiet in Vietnam, training constantly, serious about his work. He wasn’t a big guy, but people were afraid of him. Once, an MP with a German shepherd confronted Jimmy about some unruly behavior in a bar. Jimmy didn’t look at him, acted like he wasn’t even there. Instead, he stared at the dog. Something passed between them, some animal thing, and the dog whimpered and backed away. The MP got spooked and wisely decided to let the whole thing go, and the incident became part of the growing legend of Crazy Jake, that even guard dogs were afraid of him.

But there was nobody better in the woods. He was like an animal you could talk to. He made people uncomfortable with his omnidirectional eye, his long silences. But when the sound of the insert helicopters receded into the distance, everyone wanted him there.

Memories, crowding me like a battalion of suddenly reanimated corpses.

Waste ’em means waste ’em. Num suyn!

There’s no home for us, John. Not after what we’ve done.

Let that shit go, I told myself, the refrain white noise familiar. What’s done is done.

I needed a break, and decided to take in a jazz performance at Club Alfie. Jazz has been my haven from the world since I was sixteen and heard my first Bill Evans record, and a haven sounded good at the moment.

Alfie is what’s called a raibu hausu, or live house — a small club hosting jazz trios and quartets and catering to Tokyo’s jazz aficionados. Alfie is the real deal: dark, cramped, with a low ceiling and accidentally excellent acoustics, accommodating only twenty-five people or so and specializing in young artists on the cusp of really being discovered. The place is always packed and you need a reservation, a little luxury my life in the shadows doesn’t permit. But I knew Alfie’s mama-san, a roly-poly old woman with thick little fingers and a waddle that had probably once been a swish. She was past the age of flirting but flirted with me anyway, and loved me for flirting back. Alfie would be crowded, but that wouldn’t mean much to Mama if she wanted to make a space for one more person.

That night I took the subway to Roppongi, Alfie’s home, running a medium-security SDR on the way. As always I waited until the station platform had cleared before exiting. No one was following me, and I walked up the stairs into the Roppongi evening.

Roppongi is a cocktail composed of Tokyo’s brashest foreign and domestic elements, with sex and money giving the concoction its punch. It’s full of Western hostesses who came to Japan thinking they were going to be models but who found themselves trapped in something else, selling risqué conversation and often more to their sarariman customers, striding along in self-consciously stylish clothes and high heels that accentuate their height, their haughtiness meant to signify success and status but often indicating something closer to desperation; stunning Japanese girls, their skin perfectly salon-tanned, streaked hair worn long and straight down their backs, like the folded wings of some hungry bird of prey, on the make for rich boyfriends who for the promise of sex or simply for the opportunity to be seen with such prizes in public will give them Chanel suits and Vuitton bags and the other objects that they crave; swarthy foreigners selling controlled substances that might or might not be what they claim; preposterously elderly female pimps tugging at the elbows of passersby, trying to get them to choose a “companion” from a photo album; people walking fast, as though they’re going somewhere important, or posing nonchalantly, as though they’re waiting to meet a celebrity; everybody hungry and on the make, a universe of well-adorned predators and prey.

Alfie was to the left of the station, but I made a right as I hit the street, figuring I’d circle around behind it. The party animals were already out, pushing their leaflets in front of me, trying to get my attention. I ignored them and made a right down Gaienhigashi-dori, just in front of the Almond Cafe, then another right down an alley that took me parallel to Roppongi-dori and deposited me behind Alfie. A red Ferrari growled by, a relic of the bubble years, when trophy hunters gobbled up million-dollar impressionist originals of which they knew nothing and faraway properties like Pebble Beach that they had heard of but never seen; when it was said that the land under Tokyo was worth more than that of the continental United States; when the newly minted rich celebrated their status in Ginza hostess bars by ordering thousand-dollar magnum after magnum of the best champagne, to be ruined with sugar cubes and consumed in flutes sprinkled with flakes of fourteen-karat gold.

I cut right on the street and took the elevator to the fifth floor, doing a last 180-degree sweep with my eyes before the doors closed.

Predictably, there was a crowd of people outside the club’s door, which was papered over with posters, some new, some faded, advertising the acts that had appeared here over the years. There was a young guy in a cheap European-cut suit with his hair slicked back standing at the door and checking reservations. “ Onamae wa?” he asked me, as I made my way forward across the short distance from the elevator. Your name? I told him I didn’t have a reservation, and he looked pained. To spare him the anguish of explaining that I wouldn’t be able to see the performance, I told him I was an old friend of Mama’s and needed to see her, could he just get her? He bowed, stepped inside, and disappeared behind a curtain. Two seconds later Mama came out. Her posture was businesslike, no doubt in preparation for making an excruciatingly polite but firm Japanese apology, but when she saw me her eyes crinkled up in a smile.

“Jun-chan! Hisashiburi ne!” she greeted me, smoothing her skirt with her hands. Jun is Mama’s pet name for Junichi, my Japanese first name, bastardized to John in English. I bowed to her formally but returned her welcoming smile. I explained that I just happened to be in the neighborhood and hadn’t had a chance to make a reservation. I could see that they were crowded and didn’t want to be a bother . . .

“Tonde mo nai!” she interrupted me. Don’t be ridiculous! She hustled me inside, dashed behind the bar, and whisked the bottle of Cao Lila I kept there off a shelf. Snatching a glass, she returned to where I was standing and motioned me to a seat at a table in the corner of the room.

She sat with me for a moment, poured me a drink, and asked me if I was with someone — I don’t always come to Alfie alone. I told her it was just me, and she smiled. “Un ga yokatta ne!” she said. My good luck! Seeing Mama made me feel good. I hadn’t been there in months, but she knew exactly where my bottle was; she still had her tricks.

My table was close to the small stage. The room was shadowy, but a light hanging from the ceiling illuminated a piano and the area just to the right of it. Not a great view of the entrance, but you can’t have everything.

“I’ve missed you, Mama,” I told her in Japanese, feeling myself unwind. “Tell me who’s on tonight.”

She patted my hand. “A young pianist. Kawamura Midori. She’s going to be a star, she’s already got a gig at the Blue Note this weekend, but you can say you saw her at Alfie in the early days.”

Kawamura is a common Japanese name, and I didn’t think anything of the coincidence. “I’ve heard of her, I think, but don’t know her music. What’s she like?”

“Wonderful — she plays like an angry Thelonious Monk. And completely professional, not like some of the young acts we book here. She lost her father only a week and a half ago, poor thing, but she kept her engagement tonight.”

That’s when the name struck me. “I’m sorry to hear that,” I said slowly. “What happened?”

“Heart attack on Tuesday morning, right on the Yamanote. Kawamura-san told me it wasn’t a complete surprise — her father had a heart condition. We have to be grateful for every moment we’re given, ne? Oh, here she comes.” She patted me on the hand again and slipped away.

I turned and saw Midori and her trio walking briskly, expressionless, toward the stage. I shook my head, trying to take it all in. I had come to Alfie to get away from Kawamura and everything associated with him, and instead here was his ghost. I would have gotten up and left, but that would have been conspicuous.

And at the same time there was an element of curiosity, as though I was driving back past the results of a car accident I had caused, unable to avert my eyes.

I watched Midori’s face as she took up her post at the piano. She looked to be in her mid-thirties and had straight, shoulder-length hair so black it seemed to glisten in the overhead light. She was wearing a short-sleeved pullover, as black as her hair, the smooth white skin of her arms and neck appearing almost to float beside it. I tried to see her eyes but could catch only a glimpse in the shadows cast by the overhead light. She had framed them in eyeliner, I saw, but other than that she was unadorned. Confident enough not to trouble herself. Not that she needed to. She looked good and must have been aware of it.

I could feel a tension in the audience, a leaning forward. Midori raised her fingers over the keyboard, levitating them there for a second. Her voice came, quiet: “One, two, one two three four,” and then her hands descended and brought the room to life.

It was “My Man’s Gone,” an old Bill Evans number, not one of her own. I like the piece and I liked the way she played it. She brought a vibrancy to it that made me want to watch as well as listen, but I found myself looking away.

I lost my own father just after I turned eight. He was killed by a rightist in the street demonstrations that rocked Tokyo when the Kishi administration ratified the 1960 U.S./Japan Security Pact. My father had always approached me as if from a great distance when he was alive, and I sensed that I was the source of some strain between him and my mother. But my understanding of all that came later. Meanwhile, I cried a small boy’s nightly tears for a long time after he was gone.

My mother didn’t make it easy for me afterward, although I believe she tried her best. She had been a State Department staff lawyer in Occupation Tokyo with MacArthur’s Supreme Command of Allied Powers, part of the team MacArthur charged with drafting a new constitution to guide postwar Japan into the coming American Century. My father was part of Prime Minister Yoshida’s staff, responsible for translating and negotiating the document on terms favorable to Japan.

Their romance, which became public shortly after the new constitution was signed into law in May 1947, scandalized both camps, each of which was convinced that its representative must have made concessions on the pillow that could never have been achieved at the negotiating table. My mother’s future with the State Department was effectively ended, and she remained in Japan as my father’s wife.

Her parents broke with her over the cross-cultural, cross-racial marriage, which she entered into against their command, and so my mother, in reaction to her de facto orphanage, adopted Japan, learning Japanese well enough to speak it at home with my father and with me. When she lost him, she lost her moorings to the new life she had built.

Had Midori been close with her father? Perhaps not. Perhaps there had been awkwardness, even fights, over what to him might have seemed a frivolous career choice. And if there had been fights, and painful silences, and struggling attempts at mutual comprehension, had they had a chance to reconcile? Or was she left with so many things she wished she could have told him?

What the hell is with you? I thought. You’ve got nothing to do with her or her father. She’s attractive, it’s getting to you. Okay. But drop it.

I looked around the room, and all the people seemed to be in pairs or larger groups.

I wanted to get out, to find a place that held no memories.

But where would that place be?

So I listened to the music. I felt the notes zigzagging playfully away from me, and I grabbed on and let them pull me from the mood that was rising around me like black waters. I hung on to the music, the taste of Cao Lila in my throat, the melody in my ears, until Midori’s hands seemed to blur, until her profile was lost in her hair, until the heads I saw around me in the semidarkness and cigarette haze were rocking and hands were tapping tables and glasses, until her hands blurred faster and then stopped, leaving a moment of perfect silence to be filled with a burst of applause.

A moment later Midori and her trio made their way to a small table that was left open for them, and the room was filled with a low murmur of conversation and muffled laughter. Mama joined them. I knew I couldn’t slip away without paying my respects to Mama, but didn’t want to stop at Midori’s table. Besides, an early departure would look odd no matter what. I realized I was going to have to stay put.

Admit it, I thought to myself. You want to hear the second set. And it was true. Midori’s music had settled my roiled emotions, as jazz always does. I wasn’t upset at the prospect of staying for more. I would enjoy the second set, leave quietly, and remember this as a bizarre evening that somehow had turned out all right.

That’s fine. Just no more of that shit about her father, okay?

Out of the corner of my eye I saw Mama walking in my direction. I looked up and smiled as she sat down next to me.

“Well? What do you think?” she asked.

I picked up my bottle, which was considerably less full than it had been when I arrived, and poured us each a glass. “An angry Thelonious Monk, just like you said. You’re right, she’s going to be a star.”

Her eyes twinkled. “Would you like to meet her?”

“That’s nice, Mama, but I think I’m in more of a listening mood than a talking mood tonight.”

“So? She can talk, and you can listen. Women like men who listen. They’re such rare birds, ne?”

“I don’t think she’d like me, Mama.”

She leaned forward. “She asked about you.”

Shit. “What did you tell her?”

“That if I were a little younger, I wouldn’t tell her anything.” She clapped a hand over her mouth and shook with silent laughter. “But since I’m too old, I told her that you are a jazz enthusiast and a big fan of hers, and that you came here tonight especially to hear her.”

“That was good of you,” I said, realizing that I was losing control of the situation, and not sure how to regain it.

She leaned back in her chair and smiled. “Well? Don’t you think you should introduce yourself? She told me she wants to meet you.”

“Mama, you’re setting me up. She didn’t say anything like that.”

“No? She’s expecting you — look.” She turned and waved to Midori, who looked over and waved back.

“Mama, don’t do this,” I said, knowing that it was already over.

She leaned forward abruptly, the laugh disappearing like the sun behind a cloud. “Now don’t embarrass me. Go say hello.”

The hell with it. I had to take a leak anyway.

I got up and walked over to Midori’s table. I sensed that she was aware of my approach, but she gave no sign until I was directly in front of her. Then she looked up from her seat, and I was struck by her eyes. Unreadable, even looking right at me, but not distant, and not cold. Instead they seemed to radiate a controlled heat, something that touched you but that you couldn’t touch back.

I knew instantly that I had been right about Mama setting me up. Midori didn’t have a clue who I was.

“Thank you for your music,” I said to her, trying to think of something else to say. “It rescued me from something.”

The bass player, super-cool in his head-to-toe black threads, long sideburns, and rectangular Euro glasses, snorted audibly, and I wondered whether there was anything between them. Midori conceded a small smile that said she’d heard it all before, and simply said, “Domo arigato,” the politeness of her thanks a form of dismissal.

“No,” I told her, “I mean it. Your music is honest, it’s the perfect antidote for lies.”

I wondered for a moment what the hell I was saying.

The bass player shook his head, as though disgusted. “We don’t play to rescue people. We play because it pleases us to play.”

Midori glanced at him, her eyes detached and registering the slightest disappointment, and I knew that these two were dancing steps they knew well, steps that had never led to the bass player’s satisfaction.

But fuck him anyway. “But jazz is like sex, isn’t it?” I said to him. “It takes two to really enjoy it.”

I saw his eyes flare open as Midori pursed her lips in what might have been a tightly suppressed smile.

“We’re happy to go on rescuing you, if that’s what we’ve been doing,” she said in a tone as even as a flat-lined EKG. “Thank you.”

I held her gaze for a moment, trying unsuccessfully to read it, then excused myself. I ducked into Alfie’s washroom, which has about the same square footage as a telephone pole, where I reflected on the notion that I had survived some of the most brutal fighting in Southeast Asia, some of the world’s worst mercenary conflicts, but still couldn’t beat one of Mama’s ambushes.

I emerged from the washroom, acknowledging Mama’s satisfied grin as I did so, then returned to my seat. A moment later I heard the club’s door open behind me and casually glanced back to see who would be walking through it. My head automatically returned to the front less than a second later, guided by years of training — the same training that prevented the attendant surprise from revealing itself in my expression.

It was the stranger from the train. The one I had seen searching Kawamura.

4

I KEEP A number of unusual items on my key chain, including several rudimentary lock picks that the uninitiated would mistake for toothpicks and a sawed-off dental mirror. The mirror can be held up to the eye unobtrusively, particularly if the user is leaning forward on an elbow and supporting his head with his hand.

From this posture I was able to watch the stranger arguing with a scowling Mama as the second set began. No doubt she was telling him he wouldn’t be able to stay, that there weren’t any more seats and the room was already overcrowded. I saw him reach into his jacket pocket and produce a wallet, which he then opened, revealing some aspect of its contents for Mama’s inspection. She looked closely, then smiled and gestured magnanimously to the far wall. The stranger walked in the proffered direction and found a place to stand.

What could he have used to trump Mama? ID from Tokyo’s liquor-licensing authority? A police badge? I watched him throughout the second set, but he gave no indication, leaning expressionless against the wall.

When the set ended, I had a decision to make. On the one hand, I assumed he was here for Midori, and wanted to watch him to confirm and to see what else I could learn. On the other hand, if he was connected with Kawamura, he might know that the heart attack had been induced, and he might recognize me from the train, where we had spoken briefly over Kawamura’s prone form. The risk was small, but, as Crazy Jake once liked to put it, the penalty for missing was high. Someone could learn of my current appearance, and the cocoon of anonymity I had been so careful to build would be ruptured.

Also, if I did stay to watch his interaction with Midori, I wouldn’t be able to follow him when he left. I’d have to share Alfie’s five-person elevator with him for that, or hope but probably fail to beat him by using the stairs, and he’d make me. And if he got to the street first, by the time I caught up he would already have been carried away by the tides of pedestrians sweeping across Roppongi-dori.

Although it was frustrating, I had to leave first. When the applause for the second set had ended, I watched the stranger shove off in the direction of the stage. Several patrons stood and began milling about, and I placed them between us as I headed for the exit.

Keeping my back to the stage, I stopped to return the remnants of my Cao Lila. I thanked Mama again for letting me in without a reservation.

“I saw you talk to Kawamura-san,” she said. “Was that so hard?”

I smiled. “No, Mama, it was fine.”

“Why are you leaving so early? You don’t come by nearly enough.”

“I’ll have to remedy that. But tonight I have other plans.”

She shrugged, perhaps disappointed that her machinations had come to so little.

“By the way,” I said to her, “who was that gaijin who came in during the second set? I saw you arguing with him.”

“He’s a reporter,” she said, wiping a glass. “He’s writing an article on Midori, so I let him stay.”

“A reporter? That’s great. With what publication?”

“Some Western magazine. I don’t remember.”

“Good for Midori. She really is going to be a star.” I patted her on the hand. “Good night, Mama. See you again.”

I took the stairs down to the street, then crossed Roppongi-dori and waited in the Meidi-ya supermarket across the street, pretending to examine their champagne selection. Ah, an ’88 Moët — good, but hardly a bargain at 35,000 yen. I examined the label and watched the elevator to Alfie through the window.

Out of habit I scanned the other spots that would make sense as setup points if you were waiting for someone to emerge from Alfie. Cars parked along the street, maybe, but you could never count on getting a space, so low probability there. The phone booth just down from the Meidi-ya, where a crew-cut Japanese in a black leather jacket and wraparound shades had been on the phone as I emerged from the stairwell. He was still there, I could see, facing the entrance to Alfie.

The stranger emerged after about fifteen minutes and made a right on Roppongi-dori. I stayed put for a moment, waiting for Telephone Man’s reaction, and sure enough he hung up and started off down the street in the same direction.

I left the Meidi-ya and turned left onto the sidewalk. Telephone Man was already crossing to the stranger’s side, not even waiting until he got to the crosswalk. His surveillance moves were blatant: hanging up the phone the instant the stranger had emerged, the constant visual contact with the exit before that, the sudden move across the street. He was following too closely, too, a mistake because it allowed me to fall in behind him. For a second I wondered if he might be working with the stranger, maybe as a bodyguard or something, but he wasn’t close enough to have been effective in that capacity.

They turned right onto Gaienhigashi-dori in front of the Almond Cafe, Telephone Man following by less than ten paces. I crossed the street to follow, hurrying because the light had already changed.

This is stupid, I thought. You are in the middle of someone else’s surveillance. If there’s more than one and they’re using film, you could get your picture taken.

I imagined Benny, putting a B-team on Kawamura, playing me for a fool, and I knew I would take the risk.

I followed them for several blocks, noting that neither exhibited any concern about what was going on behind him. From the stranger I saw no surveillance-detection behavior — no turns or stops that, however innocent seeming, would have forced a follower to reveal his position.

At the fringes of mad Roppongi, where the crowds began to thin, the stranger turned into one of the Starbucks that are exterminating the traditional kissaten, the neighborhood coffee shops. Telephone Man, constant as the North Star, found a public booth a few meters farther on. I crossed the street and entered a place called the Freshness Burger, where I ordered their eponymous entrée and took a seat at the window. I watched the stranger order something inside Starbucks and then sit down at a table.

My guess was that Telephone Man was alone. If he had been part of a team, it would have made sense for him to peel off and change places at some point to avoid detection. Also, my periodic checks as we progressed down the street hadn’t identified anyone behind me. If he had been with a team and they were as clueless as he appeared to be, I would have made them easily as we moved along.

I sat quietly, monitoring the street, watching the stranger sipping his Starbucks beverage and checking his watch. Either he was waiting for someone to meet him there, or he was killing time before a meeting somewhere else.

Turned out it was door number one. After about half an hour had gone by, I was surprised to see Midori heading down the street in our direction. She was checking storefronts as she walked, finally seeing the Starbucks sign and heading in.

Telephone Man pulled out a cell phone, pressed a key, and held the unit to his ear. Nice move for a guy standing in a public phone booth. He hadn’t needed to input the whole number, I noted, so whomever he was calling was a speed dial, someone he would call frequently.

The stranger stood when he saw Midori approaching his table and bowed formally. The bow was good, and I knew this was someone who had been in Japan for some time, who would be comfortable with the language and culture. Midori returned his bow but at a lesser angle, uncertainty in her stance. I sensed that they were not well acquainted. My guess was that Alfie had been their first meeting.

I glanced over at Telephone Man and saw him put away his cell phone. He stayed where he was.

The stranger gestured for Midori to sit; she accepted, and he followed suit. He gestured to the counter, but Midori shook her head. She wasn’t ready to break bread with this man.

I watched them for about ten minutes. As their conversation progressed, the stranger’s gestures took on an air of entreaty, while Midori’s posture grew increasingly rigid. Finally she stood up, bowed quickly, and began to back away. The stranger returned her bow, but much more deeply, and somehow awkwardly.

Which one to follow now? I decided to leave the decision to Telephone Man.

As Midori exited the Starbucks and headed back in the direction of Roppongi, Telephone Man watched her go but held his position. So it was the stranger he wanted, or wanted more.

The stranger left shortly after Midori, returning to Hibiya Station on Roppongi-dori. Telephone Man and I followed, maintaining our previous positions. I stayed with them down to the tracks, waiting a full car’s length down from both until an Ebisu-bound train arrived and we all boarded. I kept my back to them, watching in the reflection of the glass, until the train stopped in Ebisu and I saw them exit.

I stepped off a moment later, hoping the stranger would be heading away, but he was coming toward me. Shit. I slowed my pace, then stopped in front of a station map, examining it at such an angle that neither would be able to see my face as he passed.

It was late, and there were only a half dozen people leaving the station with us. I kept a full riser of stairs between us as we left the bowels of the station, then let them pull a good twenty meters ahead before emerging from the station entrance to follow.

At the edge of Daikanyama, an upscale Tokyo suburb, the stranger turned into a large apartment complex. I watched him insert a key in the entrance door, which opened electronically and then closed behind him. Telephone Man also took obvious note, then continued for about twenty paces past the entrance, where he stopped, pulled out his cell phone, pressed a key, and spoke briefly. Then he pulled out a pack of cigarettes, lit one, and sat down on the curb.

No, this guy wasn’t on the stranger’s team, as I had briefly wondered. He was tailing him.

I moved into the shadows at the back of a small commercial parking lot and waited. Fifteen minutes later a scarlet racing-style motorcycle, its exhaust modified to produce the maximum Godzillalike rumble, roared onto the street. The driver, in matching scarlet racing leathers and full helmet, pulled up in front of Telephone Man. Telephone Man gestured to the stranger’s building and got on the back of the bike, and they blasted off into the night.

A safe bet that the stranger lived here, but the building housed hundreds of units and I had no way of telling which was his or of checking for a name. There would be at least two points of egress, as well, so waiting would be useless. I stayed until the sound of the motorcycle had disappeared before getting up and checking the address. Then I headed back toward Ebisu Station.

5

FROM EBISU I took the Hibiya line to Hibiya Station, where I would change to the Mita line and home. I never change trains directly, though, and I emerged from the station first to run an SDR.

I stopped in a Tsutaya music shop and made my way past the teenyboppers in their grunge costumes listening to the latest Japanese pop sounds on the headphones the store provides, bobbing their heads to the music. Strolling to the back of the store, I paused now and then to look at CDs on shelves that faced the door, glancing up to see who might be coming in behind me.

I browsed for a bit in the classical section, then moved on to jazz. On impulse I checked to see whether Midori had a CD. She did: Another Time. The cover showed her standing under a streetlamp in what looked like one of the seedier parts of Shinjuku, her arms folded in front of her, her profile in shadows. I didn’t recognize the label — something still small-time. She wasn’t there yet, but I believed Mama was right, that she would be.

I started to return it to its place on the shelf, then thought, Christ, it’s just music. If you like it, buy it. Still, a clerk might remember. So I also picked up a collection of someone else’s jazz instrumentals and some Bach concertos on the way to the registers. Chose a long line, harassed-looking clerk. Paid cash. All the guy would remember was that someone bought a few CDs, maybe classical, maybe jazz. Not that anyone was going to ask him.

I finished the SDR and took the CDs back to my apartment in Sengoku. Sengoku is in the northeast of the city, near the remnants of old Tokyo, what the natives call Shitamachi, the downtown. The area is antique, much of it having survived both the Great Kanto quake of 1923 and the firebombing that came during the war. The neighborhood has no nightlife beyond the local nomiya, or watering holes, and no commercial district, so there aren’t many transients. Most of its people are Edoko, the real Tokyoites, who live and work in its mom-and-pop shops and its tiny restaurants and bars. “Sengoku” means “the thousand stones.” I don’t know the origin of the name, but I’ve always liked it.

It’s not home, but it’s as close as anything I’ve ever had. After my father died, my mother took me back to the States. In the face of her loss and the accompanying upheavals in her life, I think my mother wanted to be close to her parents, who seemed equally eager for a reconciliation. We settled in a town called Dryden in upstate New York, where she took a job as a Japanese instructor at nearby Cornell University and I enrolled in public school.

Dryden was a predominantly white, working-class town, and my Asian features and nonnative English made me a favorite with the local bullies. I received my first practical lessons in guerilla warfare from the Dryden indigenous population: they hunted me in packs, and I struck back at them on my own terms when they were alone and vulnerable. I understood the guerrilla mentality years before I landed at Da Nang.

My mother was distraught over my constant bruises and scraped knuckles, but was too distracted with her new position at the university and with trying to mend fences with her parents to intervene. I spent most of those years homesick for Japan.

So I grew up sticking out, only afterwards learning the art of anonymity. In this sense, Sengoku is an anomaly for me. I chose the area before anonymity was an issue, and I stayed by rationalizing that the damage was already done. It’s the kind of place where everyone knows your name, thinks they know your business. At first it made me uncomfortable, everyone recognizing me, pinpointing me. I thought about moving to the west of the city. The west feels exactly like Tokyo and nothing like Japan. It’s brash and fast and new, swirling with caffeineated crowds, alienating and anonymous. I could go there, blend in, disappear.

But the old downtown has a magic to it, and it’s hard for me to imagine leaving. I like the walk from the subway to my apartment in the evening, up the little merchant’s street painted green and red so that it always feels festive, even in the early darkness of winter. There’s the middle-aged couple that owns the corner five-and-dime, who greet me “Okaeri nasai!” — Welcome home! — when they see me at night, rather than the usual “Kon ban wa,” or good evening. There’s the plump, laughing old woman who runs the video store with the big yellow sign out front and the windows plastered with posters of recent Hollywood releases, whose door is always left open when the weather is cool. She stocks everything from Disney to the most outrageous pornography, and from noon to ten at night, she sits like a jolly Buddha in her little store, watching her own wares on a TV next to the cash register. And there’s the Octopus Woman, who sells takoyaki — fried octopus — from a streetside window in her ancient house, whose face, weary with the accumulated years and boredom of her labors, has come to resemble the creatures that go into her food. Every night she shuffles around her stove, pouring her potions in unconscious, repetitive motions, and sometimes when I walk by, I see giggling children running past, whispering, “Tako onna! Ki o tsukete!” The Octopus Woman! Be careful! And there’s the house of Yamada, the piano teacher, from which, on summer evenings, when darkness comes late, soft notes drift lazily down the street, mingling with the shuffling slippers of bathers returning from the sento, the local public bath.

I listened to Midori’s music a lot that weekend. I’d get home from my office, boil water for a dinner of ramen noodles, then sit with the lights down and the music playing, unwinding, following the notes. Listening to the music, looking out the balcony window onto the quiet, narrow streets of Sengoku, I sensed the presence of the past but felt that I was safe from it.

The neighborhood’s rhythms and rituals, too subtle to appreciate at first, have steeped quietly over the years. They’ve grown on me, infected me, become part of me. Somehow a small step out of the shadows doesn’t seem such a high price to pay for such indulgences. Besides, sticking out is a disadvantage in some ways, an asset in others. Sengoku doesn’t have anonymous places where a stranger can sit and wait for a target to arrive. And until Mom and Pop pull their wares back into their shops at night and roll down the corrugated doors, they’re always out there, watching over the street. If you don’t belong in Sengoku people will notice, wonder what you’re doing there. If you do belong — well, you get noticed in a different way.

I guess I can live with that.

6

THE FOLLOWING WEEK I arranged a lunch meeting with Harry at the Issan sobaya. I wasn’t going to be able to let go of this little mystery, and I knew I would need his help to solve it.

Issan is in an old wooden house in Meguro, about fifty meters off Meguro-dori and a five-minute walk from Meguro Station. Utterly unpretentious, it serves some of the best soba noodles in Tokyo. I like Issan not just for the quality of its soba, but for its air of whimsy, too: there’s a little lost-and-found cabinet by the front entrance, the contents of which haven’t changed in the decade since I discovered the place. I sometimes wonder what the proprietors would say if a customer were to come in and exclaim, “At last! My tortoiseshell shoehorn — I’ve been looking for it for years!”

One of the restaurant’s petite waitresses escorted me to a low table in a small tatami room, then knelt to take my order. I selected the day’s umeboshi, pickled plums, to crunch on while I waited for Harry.

He rolled in about ten minutes later, led by the same waitress who had seated me. “I guess it was too much to hope that you would pick Las Chicas again,” he said, looking around at the ancient walls and faded signs.

“I’ve decided it’s time for you to experience more of traditional Japan,” I told him. “I think you’re spending too much time in the electronics stores in Akihabara. Why don’t you try something classic? I recommend the yuzukiri.” Yuzukiri are soba noodles flavored with the juice of a delicate Japanese citrus fruit called the yuzu, and an Issan house specialty.

The waitress came back and took our order: two yuzukiri. Harry told me he hadn’t managed to unearth anything particularly revealing about Kawamura, just general biographical details.

“He was a Liberal Democratic Party lifer,” Harry explained. “Graduated from the University of Tokyo in 1960, political science major, went straight to the government along with the rest of the cream of the crop.”

“The States could learn something from this. There, the government gets the college rejects. Like sowing the smallest seeds of corn.”

“I’ve worked with some of them,” Harry said. “Anyway, Kawamura started out crafting administrative guidance for the Japanese consumer electronics industry at the Ministry of International Trade and Industry. MITI was working with companies like Panasonic and Sony to enhance Japan’s position in the world economy, and Kawamura had a lot of power for a guy in his twenties. Steady promotions up the bureaucratic ladder, successful but not spectacular. High marks for architecting strategic domestic semiconductor guidance in the eighties.”

“That’s all discredited now,” I said absently.

Harry shrugged. “He took the credit when he could. After MITI he was transferred to the Kensetsusho, the old Construction Ministry, and stayed with it as vice minister of land and infrastructure when Construction was merged into the Kokudokotsusho.”

He paused and ran his fingers through his unruly hair, doing nothing to improve its appearance. “Look, mostly what I can tell you is basic bio stuff. I need to have a better idea of what I’m looking for, or I might not even recognize it if I see it.”

“Harry, don’t be so hard on yourself. Let’s just keep working the problem, okay?” I paused, recognizing that this would be dangerous, knowing that, if I wanted to solve this mystery, I would take the risk.

I told him what I had seen at Alfie and afterward, of following the stranger to the apartment in Daikanyama.

He shook his head. “What are the chances that you would run into Kawamura’s daughter like that? Unbelievable.”

I looked at him closely, not sure that he believed me. “Seken wa semai yo,” I said. It’s a small world.

“Or it could be karma,” he said, his face unreadable.

Christ, how much does this kid know? “I didn’t know you believed in karma, Harry.”

He shrugged. “You think there’s a connection with the break-in at Kawamura’s apartment?”

“Could be. The guy on the train was looking for something on Kawamura. Couldn’t find it. So he breaks into Kawamura’s apartment. Still can’t find it. Now he thinks the daughter has it, I guess because she would have her father’s things.”

The waitress brought us the two yuzukiri. Without a sound she knelt on the tatami, placed each dish on the table, slightly repositioned them in accordance with some strict mental framework, stood, bowed, and departed.

When we were done eating, Harry leaned back against the wall and belched long and low. “It was good,” he admitted.

“I know.”

“I want to ask you a question,” he said. “You don’t have to answer if you don’t want to.”

“Okay.”

“What’s your angle on this? Why are you looking so hard? It’s not like you.”

I thought about telling him that I was doing it for a client, but I knew he wouldn’t buy that.

“Some of what’s been happening doesn’t jibe with what the client told me,” I said. “That makes me uncomfortable.”

“This uncomfortable?”

I could see he was in a relentless mood today. “It reminds me of something that happened to me a long time ago,” I said, telling him the truth. “Something I want to make sure never happens again. Let’s leave it at that for now.”

He held up his hands for a moment, palms forward in a gesture of supplication, then leaned forward and put his elbows on the table. “Okay, the guy you followed, we can assume he lives in the apartment building. A good number of foreigners live in Daikanyama, but I can’t imagine there are more than a dozen or so in that one building. So we’re already in decent shape.”

“Good.”

“The mama-san said he told her he was a reporter?”

“She did, but that doesn’t mean much. I think he showed her a card, but it could have been fake.”

“Maybe, but it’s a start. I’ll try to cross-check the foreigners I find at that apartment address against the declarations kept at the Nyukan, see if any of the people I identify are with the media.” The Nyukan, or Nyukokukanrikyoku, is Japan’s immigration bureau, part of the Ministry of Justice.

“Do that. And while you’re at it, see if you can get me the girl’s home address. I tried one-zero-four, but it’s unlisted.”

He scratched his cheek and looked down, as though trying to hide a smile.

“What,” I said.

He looked up. “You like her.”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake, Harry . . .”

“You thought she was going to open up for you, and instead she blew you off. Now it’s a challenge. You want another chance.”

“Harry, you’re dreaming.”

“Is she pretty? Just tell me that.”

“I’m not going to give you the satisfaction.”

“So she’s pretty. You like her.”

“You’ve been reading too many manga,” I said, referring to the thick, often lascivious pulp comic books that are so popular in Japan.

“Okay, sure,” he said, and I thought, Christ, he really does read that shit. I’ve hurt his feelings.

“C’mon, Harry, I need your help to get to the bottom of this. That guy on the train was expecting Kawamura to be carrying something, which is why he patted him down. He didn’t find it, though — otherwise, he wouldn’t have been asking Midori questions. Now you tell me: Who currently has possession of all of Kawamura’s belongings, including the clothes he was wearing and personal effects he was carrying when he died?”

“Midori, most likely,” he allowed with a small shrug.

“Right. She’s still the best lead we’ve got. Get me the information, and we’ll go from there.”

We talked about other matters for the duration of our lunch. I didn’t tell him about the CD. He’d already leaped to enough conclusions.